How safe are nuclear power plants? | Hacker News Reader

How safe are nuclear power plants?

newyorker.com

57 pointsfortran77134 comments

From Nate Silver: “This article is full of terrible statistical logic. Yes, it's hard to exactly quantify the risk of a highly deadly nuclear accident. By nature, tail events are rare. There is intrinsically some guesswork. But empirically the chances are very low.

The author also blatantly cheats by counting Fukushima as 3 separate accidents, as though they occurred independently from one another and didn't have a common cause like oh I dunno a magnitude 9 earthquake.“

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1558530091860336640...

Also zero people died in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, and one employee sadly eventually died years later of a cancer that's being attributed to it after receiving an annual dose of radiation in the incident. Counting it as anything other than an indication of how safe these plants have gotten is pretty disingenuous.

The data is clear, it's the safest form of energy in deaths per TWh generated. [1]

Anyways while we fitter around and argue, China is building 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, as much as the entire world has built in the last 35. To go with their massive solar deployment. Now that's an energy grid getting cleaned up neatly. [2]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

It's almost nutty to me that the number of workers who've fallen to their deaths from wind turbines per GWh is more than the number of people killed by nuclear power accidents and maintenance per GWh.

Doesn't surprise me at all really. And it doesn't even necessarily mean it's irrational to prefer living near a wind turbine farm than a nuke plant, given most people aren't turbine engineers. I also imagine it's a statistic that will change considerably with time as we build out wind farms, especially if doing so can largely be automated. At any rate, we need both (given the current state of affairs). I doubt the choice to build one or other is going to come down to deaths-per-GWh.

The number will go up as more wind is deployed. It has to be maintained, serviced and replaced on a periodic basis.

But yes, we need both.

> how safe these plants have gotten

Consider that Fukushima was designed in the 1960s and that virtually no reactors with designs that date more recently than that have been built, and we have an absolute quorum that this is the safest form of base load energy you can procure.

It’s saddening to me the green movement ruined our chances of clean energy and averted climate crisis in my lifetime.

I've never understood why there has been such a strong anti-nuke sentiment among many environmental groups, but you're really stretching it to say that's what's "ruined our chances". The blatant sponsorship of AGW denialism and buying out of politicians by vested interests deserves the bulk of the credit on that front. That and weak and backward looking political leadership in general.

AGW advocacy would enjoy a significant improvement of reception if every solution other than me suffering a lower quality of life wasn’t neatly boxed out of our set of choices.

Meanwhile the politicians and celebrities who wish I would eat crickets (literally) fly on private jets to spend time on yachts that burn 500 gallons of diesel a day, and complain that my work truck doesn’t run on lithium and cobalt batteries powered by solar panel.

It’s really ridiculous to say that nuclear is the safest form of energy, when deaths at Chernobyl and Fukushima were prevented only by enormous cleanup efforts that will probably easily exceed $100 billion each. That doesn’t include the lost economic value of the exclusion zone, higher energy prices, etc.

Meanwhile, there has been a worldwide effort to spend billions of dollars upgrading existing reactors with enhanced safety equipment after Fukushima, which suggests that many nuclear operators had not been accurately calculating risk factors up to that point.

The more accurate statement would be to say that humans are capable of overcoming the inherent danger of nuclear energy, with enough money, will, and sacrifice.

"It's ridiculous to say nuclear is the safest form of energy when it costs so much money" is a ridiculous argument.

The cost of nuclear may be a fair argument against it, and should definitely be considered when determing our energy policy. That doesn't mean it somehow kills more people.

Every form of energy has an inherent danger that humans can use money, will, and sacrifice to overcome.

If we’ve spent more money evacuating populations from irradiated areas than on training wind turbine technicians to use harnesses properly, does that mean nuclear energy is safer than wind power?

Yes? As even after that training, fewer people have died due to nuclear energy. Cost and safety are two separate points, both need to be considered but you can't just say something is unsafe because it's costly.

Imagine someone says "you have to either pay $10 to play Russian roulette with a five chamber gun or $100 to play with a six chamber gun." Which is safer?

> It’s really ridiculous to say that nuclear is the safest form of energy, when deaths at Chernobyl and Fukushima were prevented only by enormous cleanup efforts

Do you not understand how superlatives work?

It's the safest form of energy. It's not entirely safe, alright. But pointing that out in the absolute is completely pointless anyway. We need/want energy, there's a price for it. In terms of safety, nuclear is the best. Superlative. It's better than all alternatives.

This article is so flawed in so many ways. The most obvious issue is failing to show the actual safety statistics! I mean, at least start with the obvious starting point: that nuclear energy's record is that it is one of the safest forms of energy. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

There could be a disaster tomorrow 1000x worse than all previous nuclear energy disasters combined and it would still have been net-safer than coal (and this is excluding climate change effects, if you choose to include those.

I mean, if you want to then say "we got really lucky over the last 60+ years" I guess you can do that. In 1970, sure there were a lot more unknown risks. That was 52 years ago.

It's funny that hydro gets left off these charts, and when it's put on, it's super contentious. The worst hydro accident in history, the Bangqiao Dam failure killed ~200,000 people in one fell swoop. Wiped settlements off the face of the earth. [1]

Brown coal kills 100 people per TWh generated, coal on average about 25. [2]

Chernobyl killed 4000 (31 immediately, the rest were computed over the full course of time including forward looking estimates and counting the people who committed suicide because they feared they were 'contaminated'), Fukushima killed 0, Three Mile Island killed 0.

The US generates about 960TWh from coal per year, or 24,000 deaths. The US' coal consumption alone is equivalent to 6 Chernobyl's per year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

About Banqiao: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436

I agree but one could say the exact same thing about the Soviet Union running tests at 2 in the morning at Chernobyl. So if you're willing to discount one it's only fair to discount the other no?

The Banqiao dam suffered from major flaws then from decades of a fair amount of diverse very adverse conditions and absence of proper maintenance... and it kept up. Then it took a typhoon to finally destroy it. The grotesquely bad handling continued during the crisis which followed.

A few hours of improper use were sufficient to trigger a disaster at the Chernobyl's reactor, then the authorities' reaction (evacuation, liquidators...), albeit imperfect, was way better than at Banqiao.

Chernobyl was of a flawed design with a very serious bug which was known (but classified), and it took a terrible very poorly coordinated drill to cause it to actually meltdown.

A more accurate comparison would be Fukushima, where the design was wrong (backup generators in the basement, in a flood prone zone) that survived a 9 on the Richter scale earthquake and was only damaged by the resulting tsunami (but only because the operator had ignored all the warnings about the placement and protection of backup power).

The design flaw (every equipment has some...) did not condemn it: this Chernobyl's reactor was a RBMK, many RBMKs ran for decades after the disaster, and some do run right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors

Fukushima was designed to survive to earthquakes (all most things are in Japan). The mishap at this nuclear plant had, indeed, a very simple cause (a wall wasn't high enough) and it caused 2203 deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... then a very expensive cleanup (which is considered as far from perfect) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup

The Onagawa plant, more exposed, survived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

A non-maintained flawed huge dam copes with decades of major problems then a typhoon breaks it, while a nuclear plant missing a few bricks exposed to a huge tide breaks havoc in a few hours.

The flaws in the RBMKs which were known before Chernobyl were fixed afterwards (with changes that had been proposed before Chernobyl) in the other reactors that were kept running, though. Not claiming that the RBMKs were flawless after the fact, but the specific flaw that led to the disaster was fixed.

> The flaws in the RBMKs which were known before Chernobyl were fixed afterwards

Indeed, and it shows that the design wasn't flawed to the point of condemning it: a fix was possible. Implication: even a non-major flaw can trigger a disaster.

> (with changes that had been proposed before Chernobyl)

Indeed, and it shows that even detected problems sometimes aren't fixed. This is not reserved to the USSR: Fukushima also showed it (it was well-known that the seawall/levee wasn't high enough, as recalled in my previous post here the nearby Onagawa plant had an adequate levee).

There were 2203 deaths in the evacuation. Nobody died of radiation. If you had an oil plant with an inadequate levee you’d have had to evacuate too. This is at best tangential.

Officially: 2202 deaths (attributed to the nuclear disaster) from evacuation, and 1 death from radiation.

Technically: determining the health impact of radiation is difficult and the methods are disputed. Moreover every specialist agrees that waiting at least 15 years is necessary because most induced ailments have a non-neglectable latency. Solid cancers, for example, develop in up to 15 years.

> Technically: determining the health impact of radiation is difficult and the methods are disputed. Moreover every specialist agrees that waiting at least 15 years is necessary because most induced ailments have a non-neglectable latency. Solid cancers, for example, develop in up to 15 years.

This is hand-waving and scaremongering. We have models. The models we use are the most pessimistic (linear no-threshold). The dispute is about whether we should use the more optimistic models (threshold). There's a whole debate, but rest assured, we're incredibly pessimistic.

You can of course say the same thing about cancer caused by particulate emissions, etc. You know what's radioactive and blown around everywhere? Coal fly ash. It's full of uranium and thorium. The question I have for you is over the life of Fukushima, how many people were saved as a result of not burning coal or oil?

Let's run the numbers. Nameplate capacity 5300MW for 32 years (1979 to 2011). That's a grand total of almost 1500TWh. Remember, coal kills 25 people per TWh, so it saved 37,500 people. Sorry, 37,499.

In my opinion, the deaths from the evacuation are attributable to the tsunami, not to the power plant. But even if you factor them in, that's still 35,298 folks alive today because of Fukushima Daiichi.

Even at 2202 deaths is 1.4 deaths per TWh, which is 1.4% as many as a brown coal plant would have killed, ~5% as many as a coal or oil plant would have killed, 35% as many as a natural gas plant would have killed - and exactly as many as a hydroelectric plant would have killed. Only 3X as many as rooftop solar. Even Fukushima alone makes nuclear one of the safest forms of energy on the planet. The second-worst nuclear disaster in history - in isolation - is still one of the safest power plants we have.

These plants save lives. Don't fear the spicy rocks.

> We have models. The models we use are the most pessimistic (linear no-threshold). The dispute is about whether we should use the more optimistic models (threshold).

There are many subjects disputed, to begin with the way assessments are conducted, check for example http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor...

More fundamentally check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

> Coal fly ash. It's full of uranium and thorium

Nobody here advocates coal. Renewables (wind, solar... power) don't emit such stuff.

> In my opinion, the deaths from the evacuation are attributable to the tsunami, not to the power plant

Most of those victims were attributed to the tsunami, the estimation quoted (2202 victims) quoted is only the small fraction of the victims (about 10%) which was attributed to factors (panic, effect on infrastructures of the evacuation...) induced by the nuclear disaster.

Give me a few hours and I guarantee you I can do just as much damage with a dam and I can with a nuclear reactor.

I seriously doubt so.

I mean, Bangqiao wiped out numerous settlements. On the other hand you know the remaining RBMK reactors at Chernobyl continued to operate for years after the incident, the last one closing in 2000, and only after the international community conditioned funding for the New Safe Containment installation on it. There's still a few RBMK reactors operating - after the safety retrofits of course.

> remaining RBMK reactors at Chernobyl continued to operate for years

Many reactors did continue to operate, in many sites. It shows that the design wasn't flawed to the point of condemning it: a fix was possible. Implication: even a non-major flaw can trigger a disaster.

Ok? But the bigger point is that’s not at all unique to nuclear. It’s common to a whole ton of things we do. And they can all have just as big an impact. Planes for instance. We iterate and improve, we don’t run back to the Stone Age.

Also the positive void coefficient was clearly a major flaw lol

The major difference is that for nearly all other causes nearly all victims chose to use the thing. My own brother died during a jetliner crash (SR-111), not surprisingly while he was in the plane after deciding to climb in it. I'm sad about this but I sure cannot say he didn't decide to accept the risk.

This is not true for nuclear energy: even very remote bystanders unwilling to take the risk are majorly exposed. In other words those who build or agree are exposing those who don't (along with many generations to come thanks to plant decommissions and nuclear waste).

Moreover traveling to very distant places by land or sea is way slower, and more difficult/dangerous than by using a jetliner.

This is not true for nuclear energy: we already use other types of equipment (wind turbines, solar panels...) offering the same fundamental service (and we know how to alleviate their intermittency), without any measurable risk of major accident, no long-term dangerous waste, no dependency towards a combustible... Those very equipment, and this should not come as a surprise, are more and more preferred to nuclear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

Iterating/improving does not guarantee constant enhancement, nor a progress on the long-term, as any software development specialist knows. The keyword here is 'side-effects' (discovering a bug, then fixing it... and by doing so inducing a latent and more dangerous bug). Even if it did there is no way to be absolutely sure of our risk assessment because being sure implies to know each and every defect/flaw, therefore the very decision to take (or refuse) the risk would entirely lay on trust towards the specialists, leading to a vast array of major challenges (to begin with: specialists will be both judges and defendants).

No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw. It simply implies that some ways to operate the reactor (letting it gain thermal power after reaching a given low-power stage) is strictly forbidden. Each and every reactor has limitations of this sort, mainly defined as dangerous maneuvers or states duly declared to the operators as forbidden.

This approach (positive void coefficient) is intrinsic to RBMKs, there is no way to operate a RBMK reactor under another principle, and (I repeat) many of such reactors ran for decades after Chernobyl, and some operate right now. Therefore the positive void coefficient isn't a critical flaw (which would imply to immediately quit exploiting all RBMK reactors).

> This is not true for nuclear energy: even very remote bystanders unwilling to take the risk are majorly exposed.

Nah. We're all responsible for the choice. That's how democracy works.

> No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw.

The results speak for themselves.

The data on nuclear speaks for itself. Even Fukushima alone in isolation was one of the safest power plants we have, and it was the second worst nuclear disaster in history.

>> This is not true for nuclear energy: even very remote bystanders unwilling to take the risk are majorly exposed.

> Nah. We're all responsible for the choice. That's how democracy works.

If citizens directly decide upon a given subject then a referendum about nuclear energy is necessary. In nearly all nations there was none. Therefore we aren't all directly responsible.

In practice elected people decide, and in Western democracies they theoretically bar the majority from oppressing any minority ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority ).

However it could not work this way for nuclear energy because dismissing concerns (about safety, about dangerous waste long-term effects...) is sufficient and was easy: at first by declaring that all those reactors are under control, that any real problem is so highly improbable there is no real risk. Nuclear experts convinced many politicians.

This stance was tainted after each mishap (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima...), and the approach mutated into minimizing the effects of mishaps. However less and less politicians were willing to take the risk.

Renewables then began to gain traction, as more and more citizens and politicians see them as adequate and alleviating many challenges (risk, waste, dependency towards uranium...), and renewables quickly gains terrain while nuclear is more and more stuck.

The new approach is to pretend that renewables aren't adequate due to their intermittency, albeit many studies and existing technologies do offer efficient ways to compensate it.

The effect on democratic nations' choices will be clear in 5 to 10 years. However in such a context whatever the result will be pretending that we will all be responsible for it is IMO highly debatable.

>> No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw.

> The results speak for themselves.

I repeat: each and any existing nuclear reactor car suffer a meltdown, this is absolutely not specific/proper to RBMK. Moreover there is no perfect containment, in some configurations they may isolate the reactor for only a few days.

> The data on nuclear speaks for itself

It highly depends upon which data one considers, in other terms which ones are describing reality.

People are way more afraid of "secret silent invisible" killers than they are of "massive wall of water that wipes out everything in its path."

We're not wired correctly when dealing with rare occurrences.

It so happens that hydrocarbon and coal power plant exhaust is a relatively invisible silent killer.

What people are afraid of is what they're told to be afraid of.

Maybe if we linked oil to fuel bombs or other explosives we'd get more headway.

In general, we are not wired correctly to deal with concepts outside of our immediate neighborhood.

You can say with confidence that there are 3 people in a room. Or about 20. Or roughly 100-200-300. Or a lot. A stadium filled with 10,000 people is not different from one filled with 100,000 people - for someone who sees them for the first time.

A million times bigger does not mean anything. What is a hair x 1M? No idea.

I am an ex-physicist and I leaned to just look at the numbers and compare them when needed. 10^-18 is fine for something because I learned that but I cannot imagine it. Same for 10^23.

This is also the reason why homeopathy does not sound bad to people when it is written 100 CH on the bottle. 100 looks good. It is a 10^-100 dilution ratio.

One should be skeptical of the Chernobyl numbers. However even if it was 100x worse it's still a net win for humanity to invest in nukes.

Unless I'm misreading the chart, it seems to compare quite well to coal and oil, and in line with natural gas. Why would that be contentious?

The only quibble I'd have is that dams serve multiple purposes -- they could help prevent flooding and help out with agriculture. So in some sense a dam could be helping to save lives (apart from the obvious benefits of... having electricity). This seems like a unique perk.

The same is true of any bridge past a cliff edge.

Err, I'm not sure I follow sorry, is this an expression?

Edit: Oh -- I mean unique among power sources, not unique in general. Clearly other things exist to save people.

That is a terrible link to use as evidence. You think discussion in 2022 about what the 'safest forms of energy' is should be based on a table from 2012 that doesn't include grid scale solar PV?

Lets look at some slightly more up to date numbers:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

See, nuclear does fine. Basically drawing with the cheaper forms of energy this article is arguing for that are being rolled out in ever greater numbers around the world.

The empirical changes are not very low. Assuming each plant has a uniform probability of failing once every 10,000 years, that comes out to an accident once every ~50 years in one of the ~500 nuclear power plants on Earth.

That is ignoring the scale of an incident.

We had a major radiological incident in a Polish coal plant recently. That not counting a whole power plant block failing, contaminating water and emitting tons of fumes.

It still has not been fixed as the replacement block turned out to not meet new emission standards.

Three mile island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were all extremely severe events. Also, the timing of these events does seem to support the estimated probability of a severe nuclear event somewhere in the world every 30-50 years.

I was expecting something much less throrough than the article turned out to be based on this comment.

It's mostly the official evidence of people covering up incovenient safety facts in the article that I would say qualify as "terrible".

It's basically a 'black swan' problem. Even if the average risk of catastrophic failure is low, the consequences are very high, particularly if the plant is near a populated area that might be converted into a 50-mile radius 'exclusion zone'. Imagine, for example, if Indian Point nuclear power plants suffered a catastrophic failure and forced evacuation of Manhattan?

Practically this means costs of nuclear power plants are very high, as you have to over-engineer them relative to other power sources. Natural gas and coal plant accidents are relatively common, for example; similarly oil refineries suffer fires on a regular basis. However, Texas City (site of a major BP disaster in 2005) is not currently a 100-year no-go-zone. Here's a 5-minute video on how that played out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM

Point being, there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks, and that's a major reason why nuclear isn't going to replace fossil fuels on a global scale (along with the uranium ore to fuel rod to waste pile supply chain issues,decommissioning costs, etc.)

There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid, and that's one of several reasons why nuclear will remain little more than a niche provider.

> There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid

Not to start the usual HN debate, but specifically in terms of the word 'catastrophe' being used. ... [Given current lack of storage] if there is lack of wind for two weeks and people are freezing in the UK, that could be a kind of high-severity catastrophe. A weather-system-related wind failure is a kind of common mode failure mechanism in that it can affect many nominally independent generators at once.

I agree regional damage from worst-case nuclear could be a different level of severity. Caveats about "well that's why long-distance transmission" granted.

> Not to start the usual HN debate

Then maybe don't throw up a giant strawman? No one is advocating for an exclusively wind-based power grid, so why pretend they are? Real systems won't have the failure mode you posit.

In fact real grids (c.f. the Republic of Texas, or for that matter most of the developing world) are operating today with genuinely terrible reliability without the kind of "high-severity catastrophe" you are analogizing to a nuclear meltdown.

AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity, and does not censor lesser-severity events as outside its scope. AFAIK the whole meaning of the discipline is to not brush things off.

No one is advocating for any of our current status-quo systems, but that is what we have, for now.

> AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity

That sounds to me like exactly the opposite point to the one your were making upthread? Yes, that's true. The possibility of generation shortfall due to weather in a wind or solar-dominated grid environment is, for sure, a problem to be solved.

Yet it is nonetheless at a "different level of severity" than a nuclear meltdown. Saying that is not "censoring" discussion of anything, it's literally engaging in the discussion.

I was attempting to be generous in advance to multiple views and did not wordsmith or use qualifying words well enough.

Uh, plenty of politicians and people in the media advocate for making wind and solar a majority of the grid.

This simply isn't true, or at least not in the way you're imagining (which makes it, I guess, an unintentional strawman).

First "Wind and Solar" doesn't have a single failure mode. You're now looking for failures of multiple days with minimal wind and high cloud cover if you want to invoke a "catastrophe" per the upthread phrasing. And that's much harder to do, statistically.

It also discounts that "majority of the grid" doesn't mean "without backup/storage solutions". Those gas plants aren't going away, they're just going to end up mothballed as (to be fair, very expensive) peaker plants. People are working hard on storage solutions like batteries and pumped hydro, wider grid connectivity for cross-continent buffering, etc...

It's totally a solvable problem (quite frankly it's significantly more solvable than "nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive", which is the real thing holding reactors back). There will be no "catastrophes" in a renewable-driven grid, there just won't.

So please stop with the FUD, and stop reading sources that are feeding it to you. Nuclear has a place in the world, but it has to get its act together and compete in the market. You can't just argue that its competitors won't work, because it's wrong.

> "Wind and Solar" doesn't have a single failure mode. You're now looking for failures of multiple days with minimal wind and high cloud cover

That happens all the time.

> People are working hard on storage solutions

Glad they are working hard, but that doesn't mean the technology is there yet, or will be anytime soon

> nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive.

Because of all the ridiculous regulations in Western nations. South Korea and China have solved this problem.

France's energy supply is 70% derived from nuclear power, exporting huge amounts of electricity to the UK. Their system is under immense pressure currently due to heatwaves, causing rivers to dry up and heating the water that is required for cooling. There are other problems being discovered, as the article mentions:

>...the recent discovery of stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units. A dozen reactors have been shut down, and no one knows how long it will take to fix them. It may take years. Meanwhile, the heat wave and drought in Europe this summer have forced other units to go offline, since river water flow no longer suffices as an adequate coolant. Altogether, French nuclear capacity has been effectively cut in half.

Heatwaves caused by other countries burning coal and gas due to people that prefer burning burning coal & gas and causing climate change

Countries like here in Germany, where we have problems delivering coal to our coal plants due to low water levels caused by climate change caused by burning coal, poetic justice

Well it isn't just power plants contributing to global warming, vehicles (which France has plenty of), agriculture etc have a massive impact too.

> stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units

Yes, the term of art "common mode failure" calls attention to failures (and latent contibutions to potential failure) in multiple deployments not being statistically independent.

Nuclear is like fossil fuels, the money is in the externalities. Are the taxpayers of 2322 going to be willing to pay to keep Indian Point’s holding ponds operating?

Then buy the waste in a salt mine or a deep bore hole.

Nobody near a candidate big hole seems willing to go for that.

If you already have a pool and casks, why not drill the hole? Seems like a failure of imagination, and a lack of civic responsibility.

Great idea, let’s put it next to your well.

A deep borehole is super deep compared to a well.

Sorry to reply again. The well on my family farm is a few dozen feet deep, and the bore holes are 5k feet deep and capped at a depth of 3k ft. The farm sit on a massive amount of clay, which is actually great for this kind of thing because clay seals itself under pressure. The proposed French sites are all in clay. I'd be happy to host a site there, or a similar facility near where I actually live.

You want geology that is expected to remain stable for eons where the material will be secure from both intentional and unintentional excavation, for eons. And, more immediately, concerns over ground water contamination. Even cities like LA get some of their water supply from wells. And, more rural areas are often served by 100% ground water.

Finding sites to safely and permanently dispose of nuclear waste has been hard. Both because a lot of areas are poorly suited, and also nobody wants a permanent nuclear waste dump in their back yard.

Obviously not ever single place is suitable but it's being done now in Finland and Slovenia. The holes are 5km deep and the bottom 2km are filled before its capped. This is well below the water table in most places. A DOE analysis found that every single state in the US has suitable sites.

Yet, everyone near an oil well/mineral deposit/coal seam is willing to bend over backwards to frack/drill/strip-mine/have an entire generation of people end up with black lung/poison the water of a native population/just outright displace it.

Why do you think that is?

(The answer, of course, is money. Nobody gets rich storing nuclear waste, but extracting mineral resources is a money printer - especially when you aren't saddled with the long-term consequences.)

Not everyone. People were picketing the state capitol in New York for like 3 years during the fracking boom and were successful in stopping it.

The folks without mineral rights and with worthless homes with no clean water aren’t so happy either. The company is usually bankrupt so there’s nobody to sue either.

There's a massive site in Olkiluoto in Finland and more than 30,00 people live there. Slovenia's site is also near people. I'd honestly be fine having one near me if it was built like the site in Finland. There's literally nothing to worry about over a span of more than 10k years, at least. Within a few decades all of the nasty stuff has shed enough neutrons to become less dangerous material.

Catastrophic accidents with large airplanes can also make airports dangerous places, right? We still have whole cities around them - is it because events like 9/11 are at least as rare as Chernobyl accidents?

Why not to build nuclear powerplants away from lands used for other purposes? Aren't we better with both designing safer plants and containing them in case of something bad - except maybe Russia going to war to Zaporizhzhia near the station - happens?

> Catastrophic accidents with large airplanes can also make airports dangerous places, right?

Um... no? I don't see where you're going here. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a real place that displaced real people. There's never been anything remotely similar in the history of aviation. In fact airplane accidents have never been a significant/measurable risk to urban populations, ever.

> The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant. The Chernobyl accident was the result of an insane government (the Soviet Union) building an insane reactor design (positive void coefficient of reactivity--no other reactor built by any other country has ever done this) and letting its poorly trained operators run uncontrolled experiments on it at high power levels. The obvious way to avoid such an event is not to do all those insane things. It is not valid to treat that insane event as any kind of benchmark of what is possible with commercial nuclear power as run by reasonably sane societies (i.e., every one on the planet except the former Soviet Union--even Communist China isn't stupid enough or ruthless enough to try something like this).

The point was that nuclear power plants are dangerous, and even outside of Soviet Union bad things sometimes happen with them.

> Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant.

We sort of want to plan for unexpected. To model that unexpected, Chernobyl could be a good approximation.

> The point was that nuclear power plants are dangerous

By this definition of "dangerous", other forms of power plants are much more dangerous. All other energy sources have killed or harmed many more people per unit of energy generated than nuclear has.

> To model that unexpected, Chernobyl could be a good approximation.

No, it isn't. That kind of comparison is like saying that, because bombs can explode, and explosives in bombs are chemically similar to gasoline, we shouldn't use gasoline in cars. It's simply not valid.

> The point was that nuclear power plants are dangerous

Dams are dangerous. To wit, they've killed many times more people than nuclear power plants ever have.

People can and do fall off windmills.

Gas can explode.

Hydrocarbons cause global warming.

PV cells are mostly made in tyrannical China with environmentally dubious sourcing and no independent oversight.

Pick your poison; nuclear is the least of them.

> building an insane reactor design (positive void coefficient of reactivity--no other reactor built by any other country has ever done this)

you may want to speak to the Canadians, as their reactor design also has a positive void coefficient

(admittedly a small one)

Yes, I forgot about CANDU. To fully describe the insanity of the Chernobyl design, we could add no secondary containment, graphite moderator but water coolant, poorly designed shutdown system, bad control rod design, and probably others I've forgotten. CANDU does not share any of those other insane features.

>Why not to build nuclear powerplants away from lands used for other purposes?

Because the longer the transmission lines the more power is lost - so plants are generally close to where they are delivering electricity.

That, and they need water for cooling, so they're built next to rivers. Which is also usually where people like their houses.

The newest designs are not requiring water cooling anymore, which is good since water shortages will become common.

It'll take a while to shake them out in practice, but they look very solid.

What about designs like these:

https://youtu.be/cbrT3m89Y3M

My point being that a lot of debate on this issue assumes that nuclear reactor tech is frozen in time when it comes to safety.

It isn’t.

> there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks

This simply isn’t true. A substantial amount of costs are that every single reactor must be approved as if it’s a brand new design. This is after fighting for 10 years or more for the rights to build it.

Indeed, China manages to build new reactors at relatively low cost with no problems these days.

Honeymoon phase. Russia had theirs also.

It's not a honeymoon phase. It's scale and preserving experience. The first reactors built in the 1950s we're actually pretty bad on a dollar to power ratio. But experience and economies of scale drove prices down in the 1960s and 1970s. When you contract for a limited run of, say, 4 steam generators [1] it's more expensive than a run of 80 of them. Nuclear plants in this period averaged ~2 billion dollars per gigawatt of capacity (and remember that's at a >90% capacity factor).

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_pow...

What annoys me the most about Fukushima is that 19,747 people died in that event. Mostly by drowning. None in the nuclear accident.

And yet that is what is remembered as the big disaster that day.

And an oil tank fire caused by the same tsunami and earthquake killed more people than the nuclear incident and destroyed a whole city.

You also wonder if any sort of cost benefit analysis was done over decisions to mothball nuclear power plants after said event, compared, say, to restricting the building of houses in areas prone to tsunami damage (there's plenty of good reasons we need to stop living so close to shorelines yet it seems as popular as ever).

because the nuclear accident...

is still a problem...

more than a decade later...

because...

... it was a nuclear accident

While the other problem was closed ten years ago

In the US they still have people from Hurricane Katrina on FEMA trailers, natural disasters take a long time to recover from which is contrary to public perception that its solved cause its out of the news cycle

> After the Three Mile Island incident, a Presidential commission, chaired by John Kemeny, the mathematician and president of Dartmouth College, issued a sobering report.

As a random historical note that might be interesting to HN, Kemeny was also the co-inventor of the BASIC language.

Kemeny ruined Dartmouth College and BASIC was far behind the state of the art in programming languages at the time.

It's irrelevant because the purpose of BASIC is to teach principles of computer programming, not to be a useful language in itself:

https://basic256.org/2019/06/27/why-another-basic/

Indeed.

Dartmouth in the 1960s and 1970s, with the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (with a BASIC-driven UI), had

* computer terminals everywhere, including libraries, dorms, offices, and even the medical clinic

* many classes (not just computer science or math) requiring use of the terminals for various tasks

* a widespread culture among students and faculty (again, not just computer science or math) of use of the terminals for work and play (games, email, chat)

* more computer terminals at dozens of off-campus locations, including high schools, other universities, and Dartmouth alumni clubs

It is not an exaggeration to say that Dartmouth c. 1970 had the world's most widely used and widespread computer network, exceeding anything at MIT, Stanford, or UIUC.

Nice network. But Dartmouth BASIC was a primitive language that encouraged unmaintainable spaghetti code. (This was not too bad, if the programs were twenty lines long, I guess.)

Dartmouth BASIC did no such thing. It lacked any concept of structured programming until 1975 (Pascal was introduced in 1970), and for many years its variable names consisted of a single character and a digit. Goto's went to line numbers, not labels. User functions were designated with a single letter. These limitations weren't removed until the mid '70s, and then only by replacing the whole system with a better language informed by Algol 60, which had been around for 15 years at that point.

The result was generations of Dartmouth students who learned how to write unmaintainable spaghetti code and thought they had learned "the principles of computer programming", as you put it. They deserved better.

What a sensationalistic piece of trash. It's time to voraciously naming, shame and SHUN publications who insist on selfishly fear mongering to get clicks.

extremely safe. the US navy has operated old reactor designs with less inherent safety features than modern designs for over 5000 reactor-years with no major incidents. [0]

[0] https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604...

The US Navy utilizes highly enriched uranium reactors that don't have to be refueled every few years, I think it's more like a 20 year lifetime between refueling. Unfortunately this is not an acceptable civilian model as HEU is bomb-grade, i.e. it's very easy to take the fuel rods and turn them into simple Hiroshima-style nuclear weapons.

Also, the US Navy lost two submarines, and the Scorpion case in particular might have been related to a nuclear power plant failure, although there's been no comprehensive report as of yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)

> the US Navy lost two submarines

The Thresher was a subsafe accident (a problem with one of the weld joints that keep the hull from being breached at depth); it had nothing to do with the reactor.

The Scorpion's root cause wasn't a reactor problem; note that "reactor problem" is not one of the hypotheses listed in "theories about the loss" in the Wikipedia article you reference.

Ok. No major incidents except those that we don't want to talk about, like: "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?".

> "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?"

What are you talking about?

If you lose a nuclear submarine it does not matter how it sank, Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere in a place when can't be safely maintained. It was not designed to end its life like that so, of course that this was a major incident, a significant deviation from the master plan!.

Only a fool would think that just because you don't see it, the problem is gone.

But the nuclear evangelists did never learn that lesson. They keep denying, closing their eyes, talking like is still 1950; saying that we can hide under a picnic tablecloth in case of nuclear accident.

> Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere

And as the Wikipedia article referenced in the post I originally responded to makes clear, the Navy doesn't just leave the stuff there; it keeps track of it and monitors the state of the nuclear materials in it. So there are contingency plans in place for incidents like this, even though they are extremely rare (2 of them in all of the decades that the US Navy has been operating nuclear submarines). And no harm has come to any member of the public as a result of either of these incidents. So talking as though this represents a serious danger to the public is not warranted.

Also, these are military reactors, not commercial reactors. Commercial reactors can't get lost this way. So using the Navy examples as though they reflected the risks of commercial reactors is ridiculous.

5000 reactor-years is very little in comparison to the amount which would count up if similar units were somehow economically rolled out for industry. To play any significant part in global energy supply hundreds or moreso thousands of these would need to be operated, each for decades. And by civilians - some liable to fail to match military standards of operation. 5000 reactor-years is really a tiny fraction of what many people are interested in.

the anti-nuclear folks throw around "long tail" and "black swan" a lot, but if you're turning your nose up when met with the hard data of "operated for 5000 years with no incidents" then we're truly doomed.

> civilians couldn't possibly operate reactors safely inane, but ok simply make the navy operate the power grid

That is 1 reactor for 5000 years, or 5000 reactors for 1 year. It really is not much hard data in the context of regulating hundreds or thousands of reactors for decades. 5000 hard drive years, wouldn't even inform a hard drive failure rate.

Is anyone else in asshole mode like me where I'd rather see all unsafe plants replaced before breaking new ground? This, let's ignore our ticking time bombs approach doesn't fly with me, lest we forget Fukushima is still a thing.

I am in this camp. I want a "modern" nuclear design that isn't rooted in what the previous regime considered "safe".

I want near 100% fuel consumption so there's no or far far less nuclear waste. LFTR allegedly does this (allegedly can use old solid fuel rod waste too)

I want meltdown-proof design inherent to the reactor. LFTR has a self-moderating design and has a plug leading to a pool that separates the fluid fuel so it no longer is fissile.

I want is scalable in size.

And it has to be economical with solar/wind.

LFTR probably has materials problems, but the chinese are giving one a go. We'll see.

I don't think nuclear will cost competitive without a new round of approaches/designs. I don't think any current design will cut it, economically, safety in operation, safety in waste reduction/no transport, etc.

Even without LFTR, the new liquid metal/salt cooled reactors have a self-moderating design. (LMFR or LMFBR respectively) They could be modified to be multipass reactors too, and already reduce waste a lot. The problem with multipass reactors is that fuel enrichment is the way to explosives...

It took a long time to achieve safety with these liquid metal/salt cooled reactors, as Japanese can tell.

> Fukushima is still a thing

There's an easy way to avoid future Fukushimas that has nothing to do with any change in nuclear reactor design: don't site your backup power switchgear in a place that could get inundated with water. (Note that all of the other reactors at the Fukushima site had this--and none of them had any problems after the earthquake and tsunami.)

"Ticking time bombs" is not a valid description of any commercial nuclear plant. Building newer, safer designs in the future is great, but even without considering any of those designs, nuclear energy is by far the safest form of energy per unit of energy generated. Imagine if we had been smart in the 1970s and 1980s and started building nuclear reactors everywhere to replace coal and oil. We could be in a position now where no fossil fuels needed to be burned anywhere on the planet. To deny ourselves this because "Fukushima!" is foolish.

When building new nuclear plants, a good question to ask is "can you shut it down passively, without adding water?"

I'd much rather live near a nuclear plant with an 'off' button that works.

There are designs that allow that. With liquid salts in which the fuel is in the reactor is said to self-regulate with minimal problems, the problem with this is the trash. Recent studies say that they generate more nuclear waste than "normal" reactors. The reason we mostly have water based Reactors is that an army general responsible for nuclear reactors in submarines was also part of the comitee for the civilian usage of nuclear energy and they had water based reactors because the scientists thought the marine would know water.

If we go around replacing unsafe coal plants with safe nuclear ones, we'll definitely save a ton of lives, good idea.

I keep pointing this out - I'll be more than happy to see nuclear power plants where I live, when the industry is happy to operate in the absence of the Price-Anderson act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Until then, NIMBY.

the fossil fuel lobby probably senses a growing acceptance of nuke power among the younger generations... expect to see more like this article

Interesting point - we have pretty solid evidence of vested interests funding anything that will help their short/medium term bottom line, surely at least some of that might be big coal/gas funding research that "demonstrates" how unsafe nuclear power is?

> federal regulators consistently assured Americans that the risks of a massive accident were “vanishingly small”—even when they knew they had insufficient evidence to prove it

Why is the burden of proof on them? Nuclear should be innocent until proven guilty just like any other technology. Once the principle design has been shown to be sound, it should be the job of those opposing it to prove claims of unsafeness.

Absolutely not. We know what happens in the worst case, so in this regard an abundance of precaution is most certainly appropriate.

As to how far you go to ensure safe designs, that's a question, but I don't think it's appropriate to 'assume the best' in this case, given the huge potential downsides. And I'm someone who's pretty supportive of modern and safe nuclear!

Disagree with this part:

"Nuclear should be innocent until proven guilty..."

Fully agree with this part:

"...just like any other technology"

The assumption of safe until proven dangerous should be flipped wherever it currently prevails. If X wants to add some novel thing into our environment / food supply, the burden should be on X to prove safety, first.

We have sufficient evidence from France and Germany that safe reactor designs are safe.

Aren't France shutting down a large number of plants due to safety issues?

Looked this up, and France is having several nuclear problems at once, including that rivers used for cooling is getting too warm in the summer.

Some of it is indeed security concerns in aging reactors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

Yes, France is shutting down perfectly functional reactors like Fessenheim that could continue working for decades with minimal maitenance. And now electricity prices are projected to dectuple

If only coal and gas were held to the same standard

Puts the claims that the nuclear industry is over-regulated in a different light. Maybe it is, but this article clearly show why it had to evolve that way.

Safer than houses.

Good reporting here, of the kind one can crave for these days. For anyone familiar (or concerned) with saftey-critical work, appears to deserve careful reading.

Not necessarily mentioned (I haven't finished reading), but part of the apparent gist-of-the-concern: Challenger accident and normalization of deviance.

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