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Comment by epups | Hacker News Reader

If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically. Since it exists for long and people formed an emotional reaction to incidents that were not that serious, while dying constantly from things they cannot see (like air pollution from coal), we are in this weird scenario where otherwise educated people say absolutely stupid things and refuse to see the evidence.

Yes, nuclear is way too safe. Regulations keep piling on, adding costs and construction time, with no measurable benefit other than political expediency.

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Regulations are also hitting coal hard, at least in Europe. UK got rid of coal.

The article is making it sound like coal plants can do whatever they want, while nuclear have it worse. I don't think the way is to lower the safety for nukes, but to raise the safety requirements of coal. This article sounds like someone claiming that airbags are barely used, and removing them is a good way to get cheaper cars for all at the low cost of a few thousand deaths.

Friendly reminder that half french nukes are plagued with leaks since the last year, and we would never know how serious they are or how close we were to a disaster. With current safety standards.

> UK got rid of coal.

Consult this graph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png

And then reflect on the fact that it probably wasn't regulation that resulted in them ceasing to use coal in the 2010s. It was predictable from the 60s by anyone equipped with a ruler.

UK was explicit in this: they regulated the National Grid to be carbon neutral by 2030 or so. That target effectively shutsdown coal generation, harder than any regulation that affects nuclear or any other energy source. Unless a coal plant discovers a magic way to produce while being carbon neutral, coal is gone.

Nuclear power at least can keep going in the UK. It's not getting bigger, but is not falling either. Imagine they say today "National Grid targets being Nuclear free by 2040", like in Germany: it would hit harder than any safety regulation you could write, not just halting new plants, but shuting down existing ones.

> UK got rid of coal

Not quite

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-56023895

Please:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Electric...

I guess while there's a guy in UK doing a barbeque with coal, I can't say "UK got rid of coal" here.

Your point is what, exactly? Because "please" show me how >0 coal is okay, and where the current UK Govt has met its pledges regarding coal.

It's effectively impossible to raise the safety standards for coal to anything like nuclear safety standards.

What I would like to see is an across-the-board change to safety regulation: A technology is deemed safe enough if it's 50% better than the closest *meaningful* competitor. Let's evaluate nuclear by that standard and see what we get:

The closest meaningful competitor is natural gas. (Although you could make an argument for considering gas-backed renewables a source. I have never seen safety numbers for such combos.) Natural gas has a death rate of 2.82/Twh--by my proposal nuke would be deemed adequate at 1.41/Twh even if better were possible. Reality: 0.03/Twh. 47x as safe as needed. (And note that the natural gas numbers do not include any global warming related deaths, the real picture is even more out of whack.)

(As for coal--it's 6.5x as bad as natural gas, and more global warming to boot.)

This is one of these cases where lowering safety standards would actually save lives by making the safer option more attractive. It's why the FAA accepts lap infants on airplanes--they know that a lap infant will fare considerably worse than someone properly strapped in if there's trouble, but said infant is still safer as a lap infant in an airplane than properly strapped in in a car. The lap infant rules shift some people on the edge from driving to flying.

The density is astonishing too. A 2000MW plant is small compared to the equiv solar/wind. Not saying not have solar/wind(the opposite) but when a city needs a lot of energy, nuclear is often a really good source. The build times are almost all red tape too and that is something governments have chose to do.

If there is such good evidence it shouldn't be hard to get nuclear plants insured. Insurance companies usually don't decide based on ´emotional reactions to incidents that were not that serious´ but look at the facts.

As long as the cleanup cost is externalized and paid for by my tax dollars you're damn right I'm reacting emotional. Wouldn't you, if they set up the plant in your backyard (think Europe's population density)?

The sun gives us 10,000 times earths energy demand, so maybe we stop discussing nuclear industry marketing blogs and shift focus on energy storage technology.

Insurance companies work typically by sharing risk between insurers. Against risks that are relatively common in aggregate, so that you can calculate a reasonable price for the risk.

The occurrence of nuclear accidents is so rare and the potential cost so high that a typical insurance company business model can't accommodate that risk.

You could try develop some kind of insurance bond scheme where nuclear power plant needs to raise a capital buffer to protect against accidents, and in case of an accident, bond investors lose their money. But even this kind of a scheme would be pretty difficult to pull off in a scale that would cover all potential losses, and someone (government) would need to take the tail risk.

And just to be clear, even now, nuclear plants do not go completely uninsured.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

The problem is that the cost of an accident is also not driven by facts but by politics and emotion.

And that makes the cost of an accident not just much higher, but also essentially incalculable. "How irrational are the public and the pandering politicians going to be this decade?" is a difficult variable to price into your models.

And since the costs are, in fact, largely driven by the politics and irrational public fears, it actually makes sense to have the public bear those costs...in a weird way.

The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come. It's not just politics and emotion, it's transforming a large area of a country into a completely unproductive land, for centuries, where no one can live or work at...

How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large? And I'm an advocate for nuclear power, I believe we should've invested in it decades ago to avoid the worst of climate change to come, I just can't agree that the whole issue is "politics and emotion", that's just shoving the real problems with nukes under the rug. Cost of maintenance, cost of decommissioning, baseline factors required for safe operation (including the socioeconomic and political environment of the country a reactor is at), sourcing of fissile material, permanent deposits for nuclear waste, etc.

> The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come.

No it's not. For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation. Another example: the fishermen of the Fukushima prefecture are suffering. But not because there's anything wrong with the fish, it's that people are afraid.

Fear of nuclear kills far more people than nuclear does.

Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".

Again, you are speaking from emotion, not fact.

> It's not just politics and emotion

Not just, but mostly.

> How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large?

Because the potential damage is not actually "so large", as has been amply demonstrated by now, see in particularly Fukushima, but even Chernobyl. Never mind non-events like Three Mile Island.

And fear is never a good reaction, because it leads exactly to the distortions of perception that you are demonstrating.

> For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation.

Can you provide sources for this claim?

> Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".

There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ [0]. You have an opinion but we still haven't figured out how damaging the radiation there is for animals or not. I'd rather not have humans living around a potentially dangerous poisoned area until the effects are understood.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X1...

The basis of the cleanup and evacuation requirements is the Linear No Threshold model, which assumes that even the tiniest amount of radiation has adverse health effects. There is no empirical basis for the LNT model at very low doses, so it's essentially made up.

And in fact, the LNT model greatly overestimated the casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There's tons of references for this on the web, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...

Also from there:

"It is believed that the health effects of the radioactivity release are primarily psychological rather than physical effects. [..] However, people who have been evacuated have suffered from depression and other mental health effects."

The same was true in Chernobyl, check the WHO reports that came out every decade. Each subsequent report reduced the estimated number of casualties linked to radiation by an order of magnitude, while the psychological impact increased.

> There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ

While there is no scientific consensus on the details, there is consensus that the red zone is not the poisonous wasteland you claimed. The wildlife has absolutely thrived.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/chernobyl-animals

https://www.wired.com/story/chernobyl-exclusion-zone-rewildi...

Wildlife has thrived due to a lack of humans, not because radiation isn't dangerous. There are mutations abound in animals from the CEZ.

A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?

> Wildlife has thrived due to a lack of humans

...and due to it not being a poisonous wasteland where life cannot thrive. As evidenced by it thriving.

> not because radiation isn't dangerous.

Somehow you slipped in the assumption that the radiation is definitely dangerous. Why? What is the evidence? The fact that wildlife is thriving?

And of course I never claimed the wildlife thrived because of the radiation.

Though of course there is evidence for the therapeutic effects of low-level radiation, for example:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14673618/

> A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?

Straw-man.

"This is not my preferred place to live" ≠ "This is place is uninhabitable".

For example, there are tons of places in my city where I wouldn't want to live. And yet tons of people do live there.

And I am sure there are tons of people who wouldn't want to live where I live. Even though I think it's pretty nice.

If the place is cheap, green, slightly hilly but not too much, with water nearby and excellent transportation options but no noise: sign me up! Certainly if the radiation is at levels of some of the stuff they're removing from Fukushima Prefecture (less than the background radiation in Denver and many other places).

Most of the exclusion zone is back down to what is considered safe levels--and that by the LNT numbers which almost certainly overstate the risk. (The basic problem is that while we have many data points that suggest LNT is wrong to derive better data requires a *very* large test that would be extremely expensive.)

Don't grow food, take care when messing with the soil. There are areas you certainly don't want to be digging as the orcs found out the hard way last year. It's like asbestos--harmless in place, dangerous if messed with.

Coal has already poisoned the entire world for centuries to come.

Consider the advice about not eating too much in the way of predator fish. That's because of contamination, mostly from coal plants.

Chernobyl is as bad as a nuke plant accident can be. Whether the core actually went prompt critical or destroyed itself just before doing so we will probably never know, but that's the worst that can happen. You simply can't shift the multiplication factor fast enough to make a bigger boom. Chernobyl is a drop in the bucket compared to what coal has been doing for ages. You can't get a China Syndrome accident, a molten mass digging it's way down will change shape as it goes--either going subcritical and quickly running out of heat, or going prompt critical and destroying itself.

Witness Fukushima. The correct answer was to stay put. No food production in the area but the city was fine. All the Fukushima deaths were due to the evacuation.

I don't agree. If it was invented today, you'd have the same fear-mongering, the same lobbying from the coal industry.

In addition, you'd also be lacking the decades of safety data that we can use to turn the tide.

We see again just how fearful and critical the situation is around Ukrainian plant... with climate change conflicts in the world will likely increase. So yeah, call me fearful, we don't need that and could have been long into enough multiple better alternatives. They are no option for most of the world.

> They are no option for most of the world.

It's the crux of the issue for me.

I'm not at all against nuclear reactors as part of the energy mix of some countries but the vast majority of countries do not have the infrastructure (socioeconomic included) to properly maintain dozens of reactors going with a stellar safety record.

It takes a lot of money, low corruption, stability, and properly following procedures to keep nuclear reactors safe. I can't see those conditions being met by a large set of countries over 5-7 decades to consider nuclear reactors as a solution. When you consider that even Japan with Fukushima had issues with designing a safe plant...

You might be surprised by how much of the world uses nuclear power, and has done so for decades: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

Indeed, your argument about stability and infrastructure all applies to other modern amenities too. E.g. air travel. They have all worked fine.

I myself come from a country of high corruption. Yet I trust them to maintain nuclear power plants.

While I do agree there were problems with Fukushima note that despite how badly things went the expected death toll was zero. That is, until the politicians got involved and killed hundreds in their need to be seen to do something (and their going anti-nuke is going to kill even more down the road.) Beware of safety data that assigns those deaths to nuclear. (The correct number is around .02 or .03 per Twh. When you see stuff around .07/Twh you're looking at contaminated data.)

Maybe if it were designed today they wouldn't stop at 'good enough' and actually commercialize a design that is fail safe.

Current reactors around the world only have a limited amount of backup time, days/weeks, before the spent fuel pool boils off and the fuel burns resulting in a massive disaster spreading radioactive ash across wide swaths of land.

Passive “fail safe” designs have been around for quite a while, like the GE ESBWR, which is a Gen III reactor. This[1] data sheet is from 2011.

Newer reactors, like the pool-type, metal-fueled, small modular Sodium Fast Reactor [2] are significantly more efficient, are air-cooled, automatically shutdown without human, electronic or mechanical intervention, and by using electro-metallurgical separation, can recycle up to 96 percent of the fissionable material.

[1] https://nuclear.gepower.com/content/dam/gepower-nuclear/glob...

[2] https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-p...

Fail safe designs have been around for decades, but they never built them. At this point it doesn't matter. We have 400 non-fail-safe reactors out there. Either shut them down, or replace them with fail safe ones.

The fact fail safe designs 'exist' isn't an argument for continuing to operate the ones we have. Or building more of those non-fail-safe designs which is what's currently happening around the world right now.

> Regulations keep piling on, adding costs and construction time, with no measurable benefit other than political expediency.

Read the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and you'll understand why the red tape just grows. Big Energy Co's don't want their profits to decrease, and the people with the oil rights wouldn't own those nuclear plants and there is nothing stopping more companies from making competing systems as tech were to progress. Oil can be owned and protected by force. Thats the key difference.

> If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically.

This is pretty funny because we can look at 'AI' which is being called exactly that kind of breakthrough and it is wall-to-wall emotional reaction to its existence!

> emotional reaction to incidents that were not that serious

You're really making easy for those emotionally impacted by these deaths and whole regions made inhabitable to swallow your argument.

> while dying constantly from things they cannot see (like air pollution from coal)

Air pollution from coal has many problems.

But invisibility is not one of those problems. You can see it.

Not 100% true.

Here is a counter-example.

First, guess what is one of the most abundant element on earth. Uranium. [1] Now consider what is a common pollutant when we mine coal or burn it. Uranium. [2,3, 6]

Saying that we should burn coal because we are afraid of nuclear/radioactive waste is ad absurdum.

And unlike nuclear plants it is questionable if we process the radioactive waste in question [4 & 5 show the contradiction in assuming if the post-processing is done correctly or not]

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-fuel-facts-uranium

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[3] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/langsdorf2/ [4] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po... [5] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta... [6] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/power/references/hvis...

It was a long time since the discussion was coal version nuclear. Today it is sun and wind and different storage solutions versus nuclear. Nuclear is losing due to slow building times and being too expensive. The nuclear industry is unhappy about that and tries to blame it on regulations.

Yes I agree. Was replying to burning coal/lignite.

We need to figure out storage and hopefully that doesn't involve lithium -- too scarce and its mining is destructive.

I support using nuclear too as a) there is a lot of improvements since the 60s - 80s -- e.g. nuclear reactor without the use of any water/steam -- using electromagnetic field deviations via plasma.

And b) it provides an option for a steady power basis -- a necessity in any electrical power grid. But not always available with non-fossil alternatives when the weather patterns and solar exposure of a number of countries do not conform with their power consumption. Europe is relatively lucky here. (Source studies/workshops/projects in undergrad + grad school. Don't think things have moved that much since then unfortunately.)

Another option is ensuring a robust and connected almost continent wide power grids. U.S. and Europe are getting there and has saved us from a lot of issues. Examples here of its usefulness -- UK power issues between Scotland and England, and ... Texas. That will help solar and wind adoption.

> First, guess what is one of the most abundant element on earth. Uranium.

Your source says it's the 48th most abundant element in crustal rocks. Doesn't sound that common to me.

You don't think 48th out of 94 counts as "one of the most abundant"?

Sorry will clarify with the following Wikipedia citation to paint the difference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore

40 times more likely to find than silver. 500 more than gold.

There is this old 1981 article about how to recover uranium from lignite by the Oak Ridge National Labs https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030438...

P.S. (Because I have been digging and reading on all the issues related to how uranium is distributed on Earth’s crust; if someone else is interested) Also a bit random to non-Europeans citation but the concentration of Uranium (in its various forms/compounds) is causing issues when we access deeper aquifers. Perhaps, something to consider also in California https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

> Regulations keep piling on, adding costs and construction time, with no measurable benefit other than political expediency.

Isn't that expected for a technology that can poison a pretty large area of your country for hundreds of years if something go wrong?

As a member of the public I'd rather have strong regulations instead of lax ones until something bad happens and poisons a large swath of land... The potential damage is just too large, something has to imbue responsibilities and expectations on the ones exploiting the technology.

Could you expand on what type of regulation are you complaining about specifically?

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