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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

    What should make people more comfortable 
    that Germany will be able to safeguard 
    against their known risks?

The safety of nuclear power plants isn't exactly some great unknown.

There are ~450 plants currently operating in the world, with an average age of multiple decades. Plus all the ones that have been retired. That's a lot of data.

You don't really have to take anybody's word for it. They're safe.

They are not zero-risk, because literally nothing is. We also absolutely know the risks of fossil fuels (the planet is burning, and buyers potentially become dependent on hostile countries like Russia) and the current limitations of renewable energy sources.

So, to answer your questions: that is how you judge their potential safety in Germany or anywhere else.

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The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.

We were extremely lucky with Chernobyl that young men sacrificed themselves, else a large chunk of Europe would be uninhabitable.

We were extremely lucky with Fukushima all the radiated water just went into the ocean. When it was going down there was nothing we could do but stand back and watch how bad it got.

Of course on a regular day nuclear is safe, but every now and then things go extremely badly, and sooner or later we’re not going to get so lucky. We will simply have to watch and retreat from death.

> The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.

Not really. If you actually measure it, its not actually that bad.

> We were extremely lucky with Chernobyl that young men sacrificed themselves, else a large chunk of Europe would be uninhabitable.

Often claimed but, the scientific bases for this claim is beyond shake. Maybe at the very worse you could say that radiation that was slightly dangerous would have been measurable all over Europe, but even that is a stretch.

> The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.

Fukushima killed people because of rush unnecessary evacuations. Nobody actually died of radiation, maybe a very small group of people will have a slightly higher likely-hood of getting cancer, but even that will most likely not even be measruable.

The actual earth quake and the water killed far more people. The nuclear event made the news because its a novelty, while we have seen many people killed by earthquake and water.

> sooner or later we’re not going to get so lucky.

Given that safety increases over time, even the chance of a minor incident is increasingly less likely.

And if we actually built modern plants not 1970 design we could make it almost impossible for any significant risk to exist at all. But of course research and progress has essentially been stopped.

Oh sure. The wave of deformed children that I grew up with in the shouthern German, southern Austrian area surely had nothing to do with this, pure coincidence. There are certain mushrooms that are still forbidden to eat.

It is easy to talk for someone who has not experienced the fallout of an nuclear powerplant burning a few countries over. Experiencing such a thing (hopefully understandably) changes how favourable people see the technology.

On top of that the question of safe nuclear waste storage is far from solved in dense Europe. From an ethical standpoint I think an approach of "Lol we need energy now, let's have later generations deal with this and pay for it" highly questionable.

If you produce one kW/h of nuclear energy today, my opinion is that the costs of the potential fallout in the weird rare cataatrophe scenario and the waste storage for the whole lifetime of the waste need to be paid ahead. That, however would make nuclear uneconmical.

    It is easy to talk for someone who has not 
    experienced the fallout of an nuclear 
    powerplant burning a few countries over.

First, I am very sorry. That must have been unimaginably scary.

While it it not the same as experiencing this terror firsthand, my grandparents lived not very far away from you during the Chernobyl incident. It was very frightening.

Also, I live not so far away from Three Mile Island here in the USA. As well as very several currently functioning nuclear plants.

So while it is "easy" for me to talk about nuclear power, it is not purely fantasy for me.

    If you produce one kW/h of nuclear energy today
    my opinion is that the costs of the potential 
    fallout in the weird rare cataatrophe scenario 
    and the waste storage for the whole lifetime of 
    the waste need to be paid ahead. That, however 
    would make nuclear uneconmical.

I mostly agree, but I would also say the same thing about fossil fuels.

I am looking at this from the perspective of global warming, which will have disastrous consequences for many billions of people.

Should we also add the costs of global warming to each kW/h of energy produced by coal or natural gas?

> Should we also add the costs of global warming to each kW/h of energy produced by coal or natural gas?

Yes. That's what carbon pricing/taxes is all about after all: counting the externalities.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price

Yeah most of this 'deformed children' stuff is also not really true. The reported facts about this are just not correct.

Its basically not statically significant.

There might be a somewhat larger effects on some treatable cancers, but the numbers are still incredibly small compared with the fear mongering and of course compared with other forms of energy used back then.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/children-...

You are like better of with having a nuclear fallout every could decades rather then a coal plant.

> The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad

Deepwater horizon was really bad. Plenty of coal accidents are real bad.

Not having energy is really bad.

Nuclear is the safest form of energy - and catastrophic failures are found in other forms of energy production.

The difference is even when coal or oil goes “worst case scenario” bad, it’s still entirely manageable.

We have tools, equipment and people to put out oil rig fires, clean up oil spills and all that.

Obviously Exxon Valdez was very, very bad. So was deep water horizon. Now imagine they were nuclear plantS that went bad and we didn’t get lucky like in the past. It would be many orders of magnitudes worse, for tens of thousands of years.

Oh, really?

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdgasleck_in_der_Nordsee

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/elgin-gasaustrit...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...

Absolutely those are horrifically bad.

Now imagine humans can't even go within a few hundred meters to clean anything up, and we have no robots that can either.

Also imagine that humans can't live within 500km ever again.

Nuclear is clearly the best option, right up until the point it's the worst possible thing for humans and planet earth, which seems to happen about every 30 years or so. As I said, we've been lucky with it so far.

This is the core problem. In this thread people keep referencing the data of the actual historical track record and you’re bringing up imaginary scenarios that haven’t existed and might never. Of course, the flip side argument is that past performance is not indicative of future results. Still, the track record approach feels like a better way to evaluate because a) non-green alternatives are waaaay worse b) green alternatives have a comparable number of deaths per MWh produced c) nuclear can reasonably ween us off fossil fuels d) if you actually invest in technology and make the regulatory environment sane, over time the cost and risk of nuclear decrease really rapidly.

In other words, on a risk adjusted basis, the data continually shows nuclear is the safest and most economical bet for removing fossil fuels and all their problems from the energy mix. You’d need a a relative fuckton of very very bad accidents where everything went wrong and by all accounts that doesn’t really happen.

With how bad things are climate-wise, I feel like anything below a full-throat defence of nuclear power is in favour of global warming.

The time to start building tons of new nuclear plants was 20 years ago.

Given how little time we have to react, and how long it takes to build a nuclear plant (and how expensive they are), putting our hopes on nuclear this late in the game is foolhardy and will never save us.

We have no choice but to go with what will have a meaningful impact in the immediate future (5 year horizon) - wind, solar, hydro. Many countries are already past 50% renewable, and many are climbing towards 100%.

Thing is I seem to remember people saying "If we were going to build nuclear, the time to start was 15 years ago"... about 15 years ago.

You are thinking too small. With enough 'nukes' we could suck the carbon out of the atmosphere, and use that to make syngas/synfuels for the applications where it would be impractical to replace them. That alone would be almost carbon neutral. Similar for hydrogen production by electrolysis and process heat for many industrial applications.

Oh, and mass production of carbon zeolithes to regenerate the sucked empty agricultural fields, to make them into something like 'terra preta' without having to use too much fertilizer, instead of uselessly sequestrating it somewhere underground.

Terraforming, so to speak. Like the 'atmospheric processors' from Alien II(Aliens).

edit: Instead of thinking all the raw materials for wind,solar&batteries grow on trees, without any externalities, sustainability problems, and no emissions at all. Which is a fucking cargo cult!

> With enough 'nukes' we could

Uh huh. And when exactly will they be online and performing all this work for us?

As well as the time and cost to build the nukes, how much time and money will it take to build the machines to suck the carbon out of the air.

I'm all for solutions, but 30+ years isn't going to cut it. 10 years is a huge risk.

Did it ever occur to you that we actually could revert the atmospheric conditions we produced with those 'nukes' and attached 'atmospheric processors'?

Even after a few decades late into the game?

What is so hard to get about the idea that we actually could modulate the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, now that we know that and how they influence our living conditions?

It would even make sense to have something like this in case of the next supervolcano eruption. Call it 'weather control done right', if you like.

Retroactive.

> Did it ever occur to you that we actually could revert the atmospheric conditions we produced with those 'nukes' and attached 'atmospheric processors'?

Yes, of course that is a great hypothetical option for 30-50 years from now.

We and our children don't have time to wait for that.

Next you're going to tell me if I just wait till fusion works we'll all be saved and can power these "atmospheric processors" with those!

> Next you're going to tell me...

Nope, I won't. Because anything except aneutronic fusion will be much dirtier than the 'nukes' we have now. Which is hypothetical right now, and maybe stays so forever.

Which can't be said about 'nukes', neither the ones we have, nor the ones we could have with a little bit of more investment into materials science. (Liquid salt, etc.)

We and our children won't make it with 'renewables' alone, because they emit at least as much greenhouse gasses, or more when you consider all the externalities going into their production. They are not the solution.

Edit: /me mumbling something like 'Look into fucking GESAMTSTOFFMENGENKREISLAUF'

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankey_diagram

Why? Assuming we need more energy over time, doesn’t it make sense to be preparing for 10/20/30 years down the road?

Which has never happened.

It’s fair to bring up hypotheticals, but you have to do it for everything you’re comparing!

It’s especially important to include “never happened” scenarios for brand new, or lightly used, methods of energy extraction!

What are the worst case scenarios for windmills? Solar panels?

Imagine a major Soviet-level accident at a rare earth element mine.

Imagine a large supply of rare earth metals are improperly labeled.

It might not be as bad as a major nuclear accident … then again maybe it would be.

The BP oil spill was immeasurably more disastrous than Fukushima. Oil is dangerous to drill and refine and it pollutes like crazy when converted to energy.

The problem is that nuclear plants only need to fail once to have global catastrophic consequences. Chernobyl was so catastrophic that Gorbachev blamed the Soviet Union's collapse on it. Solar and other renewable energy sources can never even remotely approach this level of environmental risk.

> The problem is that nuclear plants only need to fail once to have global catastrophic consequences.

As opposed to many other reliable generation types which have global catastrophic consequences† while running normally.

And by "reliable" I mean can consistently provide power more that 50% of the time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...

† E.g., climate change.

> And by "reliable" I mean can consistently provide power more that 50% of the time:

Compare it dollar for dollar.

You can get a lot of curtailment, oversupply, and storage for $12/W

Also if you look at France, nuclear's not doing so hot on the availability front.

> Also if you look at France, nuclear's not doing so hot on the availability front.

Meanwhile, in Ontario, Canada, where I live, nuclear+hydro generate base load 24/7 with little issue:

* https://ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

Candu's actually solve most of the problems the PWR constantly lies about. If people were proposing building those (and demonstrating that they weren't even more expensive) I don't see the issue.

They're hardly the super-100%-reliable baseload advertised, or anything approaching 'too cheap to meter' though.

Solar and wind can never even approach a fraction of the baseline power requirements either.

Of course, it takes a significant amount diesel fuel, energy, and mining to make EV related equipment, too.

Problem is that one plant critically failing is enough to devastate large portions of land, especially in tightly packed Europe. And the fault in Fukushima was due to economic reasons, the risk of backup generators being flooded was known. These are realities that you won't ever address fully because it would make energy generation too expensive.

A full life-cycle analysis of nuclear power isn't really favorable. Germany is a net power exporter. Sure, there is more to it since the energy isn't generated in correct place at the right time, the infrastructure has problems and then some.

But in the end nuclear isn't a solution here. Expensive, slow, another resource dependence and nobody knows yet how to get cheap uranium in the future. The developments previously are going in the correct direction and that direction did not include nuclear power in the meantime.

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