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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power.

Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.

On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.

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> it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.

This is true for any other system of centralized energy production, including, notably, the one we have right now.

Note that we actually have wind and solar right now.

> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

You underestimate the cost and lead times of the big distribution transformers found in grid substations. As an example, a fire two years ago on a substation transformer in the state of Amapá (while another transformer was broken and awaiting maintenance, and IIRC the third transformer of the set was also damaged by the fire) led to most of that state being without power for AFAIK nearly three weeks, until a replacement sent from another substation could be installed (and as a consequence, that other substation ended up without a spare until it could receive weeks later a replacement transformer from yet another substation). Note that building a new transformer instead of shuffling them between the substations wasn't an option, because it would take too long.

Estimates are that when the (technically already overdue) Pacific Northwest earthquake and tsunami rolls in, it will take two years to restore power to most of the coastal and downriver areas.

> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

The most difficult part of the grid is the transmission infrastructure. The most valuable, high-lead-time part probably being the HV transformers that live near power plants.

Good planning would include keeping spares out of harm's way.

One wonders whether famously-protected Finland keeps spares.

Eh, we live in an age when a few dozen well placed missiles can kill millions and destroy entire countries, not just their electrical grid. A few retaliatory strikes later and an entire region is gone, if not the world as a whole.

That doesn't sound like a very useful way to make decisions about anything except maybe missile defense and second strike capabilities. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient violence.

While this is technically true, I think a developed-ish nation might blow up your electric facilities before it would destroy a city.

There are many juicy targets like that, whether it's power plants or airports or dams or bridges or whatever. We don't typically worry about hardening them against smart munitions. If you're in a hot war with an adversary like that you're pretty screwed regardless.

There's just no practical way to harden all of it against attack. And a tiny chance of some hypothetical future war isn't a good reason to choose a technology (combusting fossil fuels) that's gonna kill your own citizens every year, guaranteed. Why do your hypothetical future enemy's job for them?

Attacking a nuclear plant on purpose will be seen as similar to attacking with a nuclear bomb in the eyes of the world.

If all you want to do is to knock out the electrical system of a country, you can use an EMP burst bomb over that country, and the grid will be down for months.

Few? Here is another: mining

“Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...

Good thing renewables don't depend on dangerous mining...

...oh wait, https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complica...

Solar does not depend on rare-earths. Most wind, likewise.

Solar panels and batteries require the damaging mining of all sorts of rare and/or nasty materials. This kills a lot of people, although predominantly in other countries nowadays. It's an argument that could be applied to nearly any mineral resource, and is more of an indictment of unsafe mining practices and capitalist exploitation. If we allowed practical research on breeder reactors, the need for uranium mining would nearly vanish.

Which rare/nasty mined material is required for solar panels? Be specific, and be sure you're talking about silicon, which is 95% of the PV market.

(Spoiler: there is no such material.)

Nuclear plants have containment buildings that can withstand strikes by artillery.

Nothing prevent us to put the grids safely protected under tons of concrete so they can't be destroyed to easily. Plus the bonus of isolate it better from water and flooding damage.

Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years. In the United States, most nuclear waste is stored on site at the plant. This is because there is simply nowhere else to put it. Uranium is a natural material and will eventually run out, much like fossil fuels. In other words, cross nuclear off the list of sustainable energy. Solar energy would be the most obvious sustainable source, we just need better ways of converting the energy.

Large amounts of low radioactive waste that is safe to discard in 1 year.

The highly radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years is actually quite small.

> The U.S. produces as much as 160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters) of radioactive material from its nuclear power plants annually. [1]

> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II. [2]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-let... [2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2022/05/ener...

> 160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters)

Much of which stops being radioactive in the first year,

> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II.

Which is to be expected given that a (tiny) part of the waste is long term.

> Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years.

The article says otherwise. You can remove "large" from your sentence.

Pretty much each statement in your post is incorrect. Nuclear plants produce tiny amount of waste, which we know what to deal with. Amount of fuel if you count thorium is enough for many millennia. And solar can not possibly replace other forms of energy production, not in a state it's in. I don't know why you are spewing misinformation, but you are clearly not going to solve climate crisis with that attitude

Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling. It's against the site guidelines. It also discredits what you're arguing for, and is therefore not in your interest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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