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I'd add, terrifying as Fukushima was, the actual damage seems far far smaller than the outcry. Actual death toll seems dominated by people evacuated through excess caution.

See this link for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di... there is one confirmed fatality due to radiation, 2k or so due to evacuation, and an upper bound on future cancers in the 100s due to prolonged low-level radiation.

The earthquake's and tsunami's death toll is 20k.

So dangerous as it is to do statistics on human lives, it's a bit if a rounding error.

> terrifying as Fukushima was

As Fukushima was made to appear.

> actual damage seems far far smaller than the outcry.

Yes.

> Actual death toll seems dominated by people evacuated through excess caution.

Yes. Fear of nuclear is far more dangerous than nuclear.

> one confirmed fatality due to radiation,

I thought so, too. But apparently this was a worker at the reactor plant whose cancer death was classified as work-related, but not actually linked to the accident.

> it's a bit if a rounding error.

Exactly.

> For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).

Surely there is no reason to believe that couldn't happen again.

The reactors in Fukushima and their protection against flooding and cooling failure would have never passed German safety standards.

Japan’s nuclear safety standards were way too lenient before the Fukushima accident happened.

All the changes that were implemented in Japan after the disaster have been standard in Germany for decades such as hydrogen recombiners, bunkered emergency generators and a filtered containment depression system.

If any German nuclear reactor had been standing in Fukushima, there would have been no accident!

It's quite amazing how many accidents happen on a daily basis that could have been prevented. How come we don't live in this platonic world?

If I am not wrong, Volkswagen came to light in Germany not too long ago.

Volkswagens diesels illegally spewing excess particulates have killed vastly more people than Japan's nuclear meltdown. Estimates are about 40 people.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b05190

Parent commentor's assertion that German standards would have prevented the disaster magically.

Germany or Japan Human nature doesn't change fundamentally.

Humans being humans will always be a thing, but if we let that be the showstopper then we can't do anything period.

If nuclear power requires more vigilance or competence from the people running it to avert disaster then that's a real demerit.

It doesn't.

Fukushima clearly demonstrated this.

1. The reactor was an old design, not really considered safe

2. Known deficiencies were not fixed

3. Despite the regulations saying they needed to be fixed

4. Regulations that were also found to be insufficient

So really colossal screwups piled on top of each other.

And so an accident happened. Explosions happened. Without the containment of more modern plants.

And yet, the actual effect was minimal. (The panic, on the other hand...)

You clearly prove his point, more vigilance and/or competence is needed.

I think his point is that even with the current levels of vigilance and competence (which unarguably can and should be improved) the actualized impact was "minimal".

In other words, the expected scale of "disaster" here matters when assessing risk vs current operational fitness.

It's a bit strange to describe a total cost of $100+ billion as "minimal".

I am talking about actual effects, not effects due to overreaction.

If you count effects due to overreaction, you can also count Germany's Atomausstieg, which almost certainly materially contributed to Putin's decision to invade Ukraine...

Well put, thank you!

If you mean that more vigilance and/or competence is always desirable: Absolutely!

If you mean that more vigilance and/or competence is required to operate nuclear power: I clearly showed the opposite.

I was under the assumption we were taking about what was required to operate a nuclear power plant while trying to prevent accidents. If accidents are no issue then I agree that the vigilance/competence bar needn't be very high to operate a plant. I don't see how you would sell that to the general public though and I'm not sure I get your point in that case? It's technically right but not really applicable to running a nuclear power plant in society. Society wants a safely operated plant without serious accidents.

> operate a nuclear power plant

No. I was talking about whether countries/societies operate nuclear power.

Very different.

For example, the Bhopal disaster at a chemical plant killed several thousand people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Germany did not get out of chemicals production afterward, or after Seveso or Flixborough, even though the case for that was a lot stronger than for getting out of nuclear.

But of course this does not imply it is fine to run a chemical plant this way.

Separate issues.

> trying to prevent accidents

Key word is trying. You will never be able to prevent all accidents and being 100% certain to prevent all accidents cannot be the standard, and it is not a standard applied anywhere else.

And Fukushima showed that a lot of idiocy has to be stacked on top of each other in order to get to an accident, and even then the actual effects of the accident are fairly benign.

> If accidents are no issue

No. Accidents are issues. But the response to those issues has to be appropriate and proportionate.

> Society wants a safely operated plant without serious accidents.

Society also wants and needs energy, and nuclear energy is one of the safest/cleanest forms of energy we have, and the safest/cleanest form of reliable energy we have. Not having reliable energy would be a far greater disaster than any nuclear accident to date. In fact, the net effect is highly, highly positive even for fossil fuels.

Chemical plants serve a different purpose than a nuclear power plant. You can produce electricity in a lot of different ways, you usually can't produce chemicals in a lot of different ways. They're a prerequisite to produce other chemicals or products so not producing them damages your supply chain. Sometimes you can subsitute them for another chemical, usually you can't. Chemical accidents such as the ones you mentioned have for that matter resulted in a lot of new safety precautions.

> And Fukushima showed that a lot of idiocy has to be stacked on top of each other in order to get to an accident, and even then the actual effects of the accident are fairly benign.

A lot of accidents are considered unlikely, but it doesn't stop them from happening. Even if we accept that the impact on humans has been limited, we still cannot ignore the $100+ billion in additional costs costs.

> Society also wants and needs energy, and nuclear energy is one of the safest/cleanest forms of energy we have, and the safest/cleanest form of reliable energy we have.

If only it was flexible, that would be something. Unfortunately OpEx is pretty much unchanged when you vary the output.

I never claimed there were no differences between these accidents...but we could simply ban those chemicals, or ban the industry from making those chemicals in that way. The point is not that this didn't happen because, after careful deliberation, it was found that this wasn't possible.

The point is that it wasn't even considered, despite the very many accidents having vastly more severe consequences. And it's not just this one industry. How about cars? How many people die every year? Do we ban cars? We could. Do we require cars to never go faster than 10 km/h? We could, and in fact that was what Carl Benz wanted. And one of the reasons his company effectively failed and was bought by Daimler. But we do not, because we consider the benefits to outweigh the (substantial) risks.

With nuclear, we don't seem to be capable of making such an informed decision, balancing the risks with the rewards. Instead, we demand that the risk be zero. This is obviously irrational.

The cost of the Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami was $235 billion. Do you also count the cleanup costs of all the other technology that was destroyed by the earthquake and Tsunami against that technology. Or do you do that only with nuclear?

The $100 billion cost you claim against nuclear was caused by the Tsunami, not by nuclear power, and of course the number is massively inflated due to the overreaction to the accident. So thank you for further proving my point of the massive cost of irrational overreaction to nuclear.

Fear of nuclear power has killed more people than nuclear power. And in fact, the number of lives saved by nuclear power is in the many millions.

> The point is not that this didn't happen because, after careful deliberation, it was found that this wasn't possible.

That is indeed the difference between the two that I explained to you. It is why nuclear power generation isn't strictly necessary since there are alternative ways of generating electricity.

> With nuclear, we don't seem to be capable of making such an informed decision, balancing the risks with the rewards. Instead, we demand that the risk be zero. This is obviously irrational.

There are plenty of countries that have nuclear power plants and all countries in the world use nuclear radiation in some way or another for other purposes than electricity production so I don't agree with your assessment.

> Do you also count the cleanup costs of all the other technology that was destroyed by the earthquake and Tsunami against that technology. Or do you do that only with nuclear?

It seems only logical to do that for other dangerous substances as well. If a dangerous chemical was leaked as a result and this needed to be cleaned up then that's on the dangerous chemical. Depending on how it was stored, you could shift the blame more towards the people that made the decision to store it like that or to external factors like an earthquake. Context obviously matters.

> The $100 billion cost you claim against nuclear was caused by the Tsunami, not by nuclear power, and of course the number is massively inflated due to the overreaction to the accident. So thank you for further proving my point of the massive cost of irrational overreaction to nuclear.

Decontamination costs $35 billion, costs for interim storage of radioactive material $14 billion and costs of decommissioning reactors $69 billion and this gives us $118 billion. [0] What exactly is inflated about these numbers? And what about them isn't related to the nuclear power plant? I left out vague costs such as "victim compensation".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup

It's awfully quiet now that I refuted your "irrationality" claims.

Which especially makes me nervous about all these plans for small reactors.

Harder to supervise for authorities and more "silos" where incompetence could emerge.

Beware fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The new small reactors have safer designs and more fail-safes than the last gen reactors.

> For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.

How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect? Sure it's more compact, but it has other complications regarding transport. They're still going to be reliant on other countries. Solar panels, even if imported, do not require the ongoing importation of fuel.

> For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow

I don't see how nuclear solves this problem. New plants have a very long lead time.

I'm not trying to fearmonger, and I think that had we adopted a lot more nuclear in decades past we could be in a much better position regarding climate change now. But I'm not convinced that the arguments stack up for nuclear right now.

>How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect?

We're already talking about what we will do once major reserves of coal and oil run dry. It's obviously not going to happen any time soon, maybe even not this century, but I'm not aware of similar sentiments being thrown around about nuclear fuel such as uranium and plutonium.

Nuclear power also does not belch out greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere unlike coal and oil. If we want power generation without greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power is one of the answers.

>I don't see how nuclear solves this problem.

Keeping currently active plants active for longer means the immediate need for power is better satisfied and the need for /more/ power in the short-term is delayed.

This plan also calls for new plants which will replace the generation capacity lost from outgoing plants (coal/oil or nuclear) and hopefully satisfy power demands today and tomorrow.

The original argument was that Japan imports all of its energy; nuclear is no different to fossil fuels in this regard. You raise plenty of other interesting issues, but don't address the question of energy sovereignty.

It reduces the amount of import necessary for a given amount of power and shifts geopolitical reliances around (hopefully to more favorable entities).

> How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect? Sure it's more compact, but it has other complications regarding transport. They're still going to be reliant on other countries. Solar panels, even if imported, do not require the ongoing importation of fuel.

Nuclear requires a tiny fraction of the material that any other generation type needs. We’re talking about a factor of one million more energy dense compared to fossil fuels!

Solar and wind do not provide baseload and can therefore not replace any conventional power plant.

There is a reason why Germany just returned 7.3 GW in coal-fired power units to the electricity market:

> https://www.smard.de/home/rueckkehr-von-kohlekraftwerken-an-...

Agree that nuclear fuel is a lot more dense, but still has the same geopolitical problems as any imported fuel, just fewer (and probably more specialized) ships to transport it.

Also agree about the base-load issue, but that's a different argument (and there are some ways to lessen it without always resorting to conventional power-plants; see how Australia has performed over the past decade with crumbling coal infrastructure and no ability for long term planning due to policy paralysis - our base-load has been crumbling but through some clever grid manipulation there have been far fewer blackouts than anyone expected)

The size is an extremely important benefit. It means a country like Japan is able to stockpile a domestic fuel supply sufficient for multiple years of electricity generation.

> Solar and wind do not provide baseload and can therefore not replace any conventional power plant.

Think about a hospital, the ultimate baseload requirement. Would a hospital be OK with just power from a single nuclear reactor? Of course not, it would still have a generator for backup power. Nuclear power plants don't run 24/7/365, they have scheduled maintenance and unexpected downtime.

Baseload power is ensured through diversity and spare dispatchable power.

> Baseload power is ensured through diversity and spare dispatchable power.

Unless I’m missing something, solar and wind are not diverse energy sources though. If one plant is generating less energy because the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing, then all the nearby plants have the same problem. If you take one nuclear plant offline, the others aren’t impacted. Seems like a completely different scenario. You can get some diversity through geographical separation but I’m not sure it’s that much, especially on a small island like Japan. Also, long distance energy transmission has proven expensive and problematic (eg HVDC is not the norm because it remains phenomenally expensive to deploy)

Japan is quite long (North-South). It's comparable to the East coast of Australia, which has a single grid/energy market. Also, wind and solar are often (not always) complementary energy sources.

Is whether the sun is shining in the north sufficiently decoupled from sun shining in the south? Is the wind blowing in the north decoupled from the wind blowing in the south?

I’m suggesting that the distance is not large enough for that to be the case. Which makes it a very different situation to a nuclear plant taken offline for maintenance. Not to mention that afaik they don’t take the entire plant offline. They’ll take offline one reactor and work on it and bring it back online before working on the next reactor.

In Australia that distance is certainly enough for completely different weather. But local geo-climactic conditions in Japan might be completely different; it's probably not the distance as much as prevailing winds, geography, etc.

Interestingly for any type of generation - Japan runs two different grid frequencies, which limits cross-flow from one half to the other half. They do have HVDC interconnects, but are rather limited (they're building more, in no small part as a result of Fukushima)

The solar panels have to be replaced at some too, don't they? And how many of them are being made in China?

Diversification will be key for the future - including nuclear, solar, wind, storage.

France took 10 years to go from very little nuclear to most of the energy coming from nuclear. It can be done if activist don't stop it and put up ever higher requirements to make nuclear less attractive.

Imagine the sheer volume of solar panels needed to supply even a fraction like 1/5th of the energy demand. You don't manufacture and ship that to Germany in a few big orders, that's a decades-long process. By the time that's done, the oldest panels are up for renewal. Any country that is not producing solar panels (and that isn't a place like Norway or Iceland with hydro or geothermal plentiful) is effectively relying on foreign 'fuel' as well. It's almost as though we're going to have to learn to live together on planet A.

I wonder why there isn't geothermal energy in Japan, being on a fault-line.

They have available hydro. The issue is building a hydro plant that resist earthquakes.

Theoretically you can extract much (all?) of the uranium you need from sea water: https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac...

Theoretically you can get anything from sea water, but practically it's not worth it.

> Fukushima was a result of human incompetence

Also Fukushima was hit with BOTH by a record-level quake AND a record-level tsunami. And it still didn't cause a huge death toll.

If the backup generators would've been higher up, most of the whole issue would've been avoided. Now they got flooded by the tsunami and failed.

> Also Fukushima was hit with BOTH by a record-level quake AND a record-level tsunami

Not a coincidence given all of Japan has tons of seismic activity

In fact there is a causal relationship there

> Fukushima was a result of human incompetence

There is always a risk of that. Humans cannot garuntee humans wont fuck up.

> Japan needs power /today/

Not today, at least two years ago. Probably even earlier.

Great answer, I would add that also there could be new solutions to disposing nuclear material that adds more confidence to the full cycle.

The biggest risk in nuclear material disposal is environmental activists blocking the transports en route.

The actual material itself emits less radiation than a store-bought banana when it's been properly stored.

Sea dumping?

space dumping ?

Until they have managed to redesign humans point two remains.

The current generation nuclear power stations need active human operation or the process will shut down automatically.

Chernobyl-style ancient reactors were the complete opposite - and even it failed mostly because of shitty politics and bad leadership culture.

You can educate humans, or redesign technology to get humans out of the loop.

Who can redesign tech to get humans out of the loop? Humans who designed the original non fail-proof tech?

Demanding "fail-proof" is FUD. Even a windmill can fall over and kill someone.

What is good design and planning is "fail-safe" which is to say that any failure mode means the plant shuts down gracefully and with as little damage as possible. In the case of windmills, that means sticking them in fields or on open water where people aren't likely to be around. For nuclear plants, that means the whole thing is self contained and designed to stop reacting without direct human control. Every failure mode ends in the nuclear reaction ending with the radioactive materials contained.

> For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.

Nuclear has a much larger total material requirement than wind and about equal to solar.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...

> For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).

How do you perpetually guard against human nature?

> For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow. Even assuming a transition to non-nuclear forms of power, that will not happen overnight. Using nuclear power is a concern of practical necessity.

This nuclear would come online in 15-20 years, how is that today?

> For fourth: Nuclear fearmongering is patently ridiculous. Nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs, for crying out loud. The same people who cry their hearts out about radiation proceed to fly on airliners and eat bananas. The answer to nuclear fearmongering is not shunning nuclear technology, it's to teach and bring more awareness about what nuclear technology is.

Their risks are subsidized by the governments, and it still on top of that, require enormous subsidies. This move will essentially banish Japan to become an energy starved country in the face of massive renewable build-outs.

The problem with nuclear is that it's very expensive and new nuclear plants take forever to build. Japan has lots of solar and wind power potential, but renewables are not very compatible with nuclear power for economic reasons.