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Comment by Julesman | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power is advocated principally by the current energy industry regime because it maintains their existing distribution model. A model that is disrupted by wind and solar power generated locally or even individually.

I know some people honestly believe that it's a good option. But for every one of them there are three industry lobbyists and social media bots who are working directly for the industry making drastically short sighted arguments.

Don't tell me it's safe when other options will never ever make whole parts of the world a toxic wasteland for the rest of human history.

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I'm a nuclear power advocate. I am on social media making arguments in support of massive expansions of nuclear power to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. I have a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and a professional engineering license in my state. I chose nuclear engineering at age 19 because I wanted to fight climate change, not because I wanted to become an industry lobbyist. There are hundreds of nuclear advocates just like me.

While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous, if you're interested in the numbers of it all in context, I highly recommend this page:

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

The whole wasteland argument falls apart quickly when you take a look at e.g. a worst case scenario like Chernobyl and compare it to the fact that fossil and biofuel cause 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions (according to the WHO) and cause global climate change.

https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...

Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

Counterargument: I am readily employable in other related industries and could likely get a significant raise switching. Every time I make an offer to a software engineer who asks for >$50k more than our peak salary, I'm reminded of this fact.

Again, I chose nuclear specifically to fight climate change, not to make the most money.

This phenomenon cuts both ways. Ralph Nader in the 70s kept telling falsehoods about the health hazards of nuclear power, seemed immune to correction, and had a platform with the press uncritically propagating his claims. (Documented in Petr Beckmann's book at that time.) In retrospect this seems like a hinge point in history leading to our current energy problems.

Someone's incentive towards some point of view is not evidence either way about an object-level claim. It's only useful for questions like attention allocation, or like how someone could be so wrong after you've established they're probably wrong.

How many of the safety assessments take into account the fact that the nuclear waste is almost never buried away and in a dispersed matter and instead it's kept near the nuclear power plant in dry/wet pools because of NIMBY?

This has the effect turning the nuclear power plant into a giant dirty bomb. Almost all the problems at Fukushima were caused exactly by these used fuel pools, and not by the nuclear material in the plant itself.

And then you have Ukraine where dry storage is shelled with artillery.

I chose to be a software developer because I was interested in creating things, but now I am just a cog in a machine trying to generate income. I don't doubt your motives, but what is the situation we are currently in?

Nuclear has failed to make a dent in emissions for 60 years now. Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"? But this question is almost never asked. I honestly believe there is a symbiotic relationship between nuclear and fossil fuel industry. Nuclear cannot survive without the threat of fossil fuels, but it cannot or at least has not for decades prevented fossil fuels dominating electricity production worldwide. So it's a guarantee for keeping the status quo. It's time for something else. Not merely another technology, but another way of thinking.

I remember seeing that question for quite a long time, and the answer was that as long there is cheap access to fossil fuels and the population do not vote for carbon taxes and similar policies, then the answer is no. We will never see alternative technologies unless they can beat fossil fuel on price alone.

The bet that the previous governments in EU made the last decades was to switch generation to wind and solar when weather condition makes it cheaper than natural gas, and then use natural gas (primarily bought from Russia) for everything else. When green hydrogen become cheaper than natural gas (estimated 2050-2080) we can start replace that natural gas with hydrogen. The big event that changed that was the invasion of Ukraine and the climbing prices of natural gas.

The other way of thinking would be to consider other aspect than price. Those could be geopolitical, global warming, or pollution. I am however doubtful, and the events in EU this winter demonstrated how much citizen demanded government subsidizes and intervention when prices of energy went up. Energy prices are also tied to economic stability and growth, which makes changing the way people think difficult.

> Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"?

The reason is because it's been denied a chance by government regulation, due to a mixture of fossil fuel lobbyists and people's irrational fears stoked by propaganda designed to make it seem scary.

The answer to "can it ever make an impact" is yes, it can, using existing technology, right now. We just have to get rid of the regulations designed to destroy it.

>a worst case scenario like Chernobyl

Chernobyl was not a worst-case scenario, it is just the worst scenario that has happened so far. If it hadn't been handled by humans sacrificing their lives to stop the chain of events, it could have been much, much worse. Had the fire continued it could indeed have been a "wasteland" scenario.

The site you recommend makes claims about safety that are logically broken. Things are not safe based on what has happened so far, they are safe or unsafe based on what could happen in the future. Surely you realize this.

The claim this site makes is equivalent to saying that a gun is safe if it hasn't been used yet. I frankly find it to be a very dishonest argument, it seems designed to mislead rather than enlighten.

The fact that it was:

a) an unstable reactor

b) without a containment structure

c) that was put through a dangerous experiment overriding safety systems

means to me that it's very likely to be the worst commercial nuclear power scenario we'll see.

Compare with Fukushima where a whole area was inundated by a tsunami and a triple meltdown, leading to very few, if any, people receiving more than the minimum dose known to cause measurable harm.

And again keep in mind that we're comparing against fossil and biofuel, which power over 80% of the planet and cause 7 million premature deaths from particulate emissions every single year just operating normally.

I guess the term 'worst case scenario' isn't really useful since there's always someone who can come up with something else, regardless of how unlikely it is. Fair point on that.

Now try get private insurance for a nuclear power plant.

The alternative is not burning things, it is renewables. Stop creating a strawman to argue against.

Try to get private insurance against climate change and air pollution and blackouts.

Fossil and biofuel make 80% of our energy. This is not a straw man argument.

Moving the goalposts...

Primary energy. That will shift dramatically as industries get electrified. No point cooling 70% of the produced energy in a nuclear or coal plant anymore.

Similarly, the question of interest is what to build. Fossil, or nuclear plants barely exist on that list globally.

It is simply too expensive. 5x the CO2 emissions get displaced by building renewables compared to nuclear, with a much shorter time to value.

Investing in nuclear today prolongs the climate crisis.

> Investing in nuclear today prolongs the climate crisis.

This kind of willfully blind thinking continues our reliance on fossil fuels. There is a need for reliable energy that cannot yet be met by renewable energy. For this specific reason, Russia funded German opposition to nuclear power.

Let's fix the +90% that is trivial without storage and work on the last percents when we get there in the 2030s.

The research finds it easily solvable today, but a holistic approach is necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

"Easily solvable" is highly dubious. The guy behind the 100% renewables no nuclear allowed push sued his scientific critics for publishing a critique of his work and was eventually forced to pay their legal fees. [1]

But that aside, just looking at the sheer magnitude of capacity mentioned in his papers, one can see that it's not even remotely easy or trivial. See eye-watering Table 2 in [2]

[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/11/stanford-prof-ordered...

[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USSt...

Now you are assassinating the character of a person I have not mentioned. Is that what is necessary to sell nuclear?

Do you bet against this?

https://i.imgur.com/JYMNAWR.png

Nope, I am pointing out that 100% renewables is far harder than claimed, that criticism has been suppressed, and providing refs to back up my points.

I'm pro anything low carbon. I love wind and solar and hydro and nuclear. These no-nuclear people are trying to get us to tie a hand behind our backs for no reason in the midst of a climate crisis. Energy generation choices are not a zero sum game.

Lots of antinuclear people mistakenly believe that pro-nuclear people are also anti-wind or anti-solar when in fact we are usually just anti-fossil and biofuel.

We can agree that 90% is trivially solvable. That will get deployed shortly.

So you are telling me that a peaking nuclear plant will solve the last 10% when it comes online at earliest 2040? What problem are we even solving at that time other rather than brute forcing nuclear into the solution?

Then try put that nuclear power plant on a marginal price market. What do you expect to happen?

In my opinion the interesting point is c).

Simply put, humans failed and caused a catastrophe. If you have c), a) and b) don't matter. And we will always have c).

Humans are currently failing by waging a war around nuclear power plants. How safe those plants are under normal operation doesn't really matter. Humans fail by performing terrorist attacks too. They fail by building nuclear plants that can't handle a tsunami in a tsunami-prone area.

Nuclear power provides centuries of opportunity for humans to fail in ways that have immense damage potential. This is clearly a very real risk, and makes nuclear power unsafe.

One can still argue for nuclear power, but not by saying it's safe. It simply isn't.

> While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous

That isn't the issue, which is solely economics. Don't waste your time advocating and persuading. Bring the power of your nuclear engineering Ph.D. to bear towards making nuclear power profitable. There is nothing else is stopping nuclear power other than the economics. It's a deal-breaker. But make it profitable, and there is nothing on this Earth that could stop the proliferation of nuclear power plants. They'd literally be everywhere.

My PhD research was focused on reactor economics optimizations.

Nuclear: there are many ways to estimate the amount of victims (long-term, all ailments...), leading to a huge interval of values.

"Fossil fuel or nuclear" is obsolete since renewables became pertinent. Moreover our current capacity to deploy useful nuclear reactors isn't convincing.

'Our world in data' retains the Banqiao case. It is somewhat debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492422

The problem with your argument is that renewables aren't readily deployable in all situations and we still haven't solved grid level storgae to even out baseload generation. Instead, the uneducated, anti nuclear sentiment that you and your kind spread activley leads to MORE polution, climate damage and (most ironically) release of radioactive and carcinogenic by-products as governemtns instead need to turn to natural gas and coal generation, both of which have significanlty worse polluting and safety profiles than nuclear.

People don't understand how tightly nuclear is regulated. If we had anywhere near these same regulations in other industries we'd never have a SVB or Lehman failure. We wouldn't have airplanes crash from lack of maintinence. We wouldn't have oil spils from rigs detaching or drilling too agressively.

> Nuclear power is advocated principally by the current energy industry regime because it maintains their existing distribution model.

In what world? Yes, nuclear could cleanly replace existing fossil fuel plants, which is exactly why the fossil fuel industry tries to stop it! In contrast, intermittent solar and wind aren't viable full replacements to fossil fuel electricity, so Exxon-Mobil and co are comfortable investing in it.

As if giant solar and wind farms don't work on the exact same model...

That happens for a really good reason, it's cheaper.

It's less durable than a distributed system but distributed systems don't get the benefit of scale. People choose to not have solar panels on their houses and windmills in their back yards because the power from the power company is often cheaper and comes with out initial investment or personal intervention. All thought is taken out of the process and customers like that. Dollars converted to energy with the least amount of intermediary steps is preferred.

Regulation is the reason that it's not cheaper. In Australia solar on your roof is 40 cents a watt installed because they deregulated the industry.

In reality grid maintenance and transmission costs are 80 to 90% of your electricity bill. Our existing electricity system is a lot like the old world of mainframe computing, rooftop solar and storage is like the introduction of the PC. We all know how that worked out.

Yes...we have these huge installations called Datacenters, that consume 1% of the global electricity and are behind all these internet services people like to boast so much about. Even this website is being hosted in a huge datacenter somewhere. Not on a distributed p2p network, even though those technologies have been around for a long time.

Pretty much everything serious people do online is offloaded to one of these places. You probably don't store your emails or messages on your PC. You store them on the cloud. You also likely don't maintain a movie collection anymore, you use Netflix or Youtube.

Your digital devices are mostly useless without an internet connection and strongly depends on an ecosystem of centralized data services stored and processed in datacenters. An old estimate put the energy consumption of an Iphone as comparable to a fridge once you took the data services into perspective. [1]

Even the actual connectivity infrastructure behind the internet is very centralized. We have a handful of optical fiber cables at the bottom of the seven seas connecting large routing centers that makes the internet tick.

[1] https://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-...

In the early 80s almost all global computing power was centralized in mainframes.

Manufacturers used $/compute power as a core metric to guide their thinking around future product development. They were perplexed when people started buying PCs because they were 10x more expensive on a compute power basis, but they eliminated the friction associated with centralized systems (terminals, queues, the need to be connected, etc.). The value of a PC was invisible to them. Centralized generation of electricity has the same problem, the cost of transmission and distribution of electricity is so high that there is an inevitable crossover point where the cost of localized electricity generation and storage will decline below the cost of grid maintenance. At that point we will live in a new world of distributed power generation with deep implications for society. Can't wait.

Although I have no idea about how computing power is concentrated these days. The reliance on central systems is very much the case, or I would say even worse. Because we know have arguably vital services running online and depending on these datacenters.

Most people use their computers as terminals, that need to be connected to large datacenters, through the internet so they can do the things they want, from watching cat videos, to listening to their favorite songs to shopping or writing office documents on online productivity webapps.

Also renewable energy projections don't really support that view at all. Renewable energy costs are plateauing, as with Li-ion batteries (2022 was the first year that the average cost of batteries haven't dropped since the BNEF started their analysis in 2013). And with the need for more energy storage, more transmission capacity, long term storage, flexible demand systems. The grid is going to be more needed than ever.

I don't think there is much point is continuing this discussion, though, as a PhD materials chemist with an MBA, I could literally write dissertations on the future costs of solar and storage. Instead, I'll leave you with two YouTube videos that outline the future of distributed energy and the fate of centralized generation.

https://youtu.be/6zgwiQ6BoLA https://youtu.be/udJJ7n_Ryjg

Peace

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