Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

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.

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.

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