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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is fundamentally cheaper than nearly any other energy source. However our laws are backwards: regulators are required to increase safety standards for nuclear so long as it is cheaper, until the costs are brought up to par with other energy sources. As a result, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than anything else, and burdens costs that other energy sources don't have to account for, yet it is perpetually no cheaper than coal or natural gas. It's blatant regulatory capture by fossil fuel in the name of "environmentalism."

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The real issue is the risk profile. When you build a new reactor, it's almost certainly going to be safe. But there is a small risk of a catastrophic outcome, where most of the damage is local or at most regional.

Normally this would be the kind of a situation where insurance is the right solution. But because the potential magnitude of the catastrophe is too great, the insurance sector is incapable of handling it. No one is willing to provide a sufficient insurance policy on a commercial basis.

Because the assets of the company operating the reactor are also insufficient in the worst case, that leaves the government as the ultimate insurer. And as with any insurer, they require you to take various steps to mitigate the risks.

Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer because nuclear incidents have a way bigger economic impact. A gas plant or solar farm blowing up will be in the hundreds of millions of $, but Fukushima is counting in the hundreds of billions of $.

The nuclear industry has a history of creating plants which are "totally safe, really, you can trust me!" and ending up with really expensive accidents. If they can't get their shit together and get basically unlimited insurance for whatever accident might still happen, the government has to enforce safety rules for them so the taxpayers don't end up having to pay for their whoopsies over and over again.

Really expensive accidents that cost money and very few lives. Meanwhile, coal had gotten a pass on hundreds of years of added costs to healthcare and loss of life expectancy.

Very few lives because of the high standards, loads of luck and extraordinary courage of first responders.

Lets not forget the helicopter crews at Chernobyl knew they were flying to a certain, slow, painful death and did so without a complaint. Absent those heroes nuclear's mortality record would be much worse.

Chernobyl-style reactors haven’t been built for decades and the kind of failure that happened with it has long since been addressed. We even have designs where meltdowns are basically impossible.

I agree that the people who stepped up are heroes. I don’t agree that Chernobyl’s failure has any place in the discussion about the safety of modern nuclear plants.

Nuclear power is STILL orders of magnitude safer, even when you include nuclear disasters in that calculation. Things like Fukushima should be a once-and-done, never again accident, as all nuclear plants are retrofitted to prevent this failure mode. However even if you assume that such disasters will continue to happen with the same frequency, nuclear is still safer. By a factor of like 100x.

the nuclear industry has a history of creating the safest power source ever. that is just a fact.

as mentioned, everything fossil fuel related has a massively higher death and injury cost than nuclear.

the california wildfires caused by the criminally negligent failure to maintain power distribution systems killed more people and cost more money that Chernobyl (look it up).

> However our laws are backwards: regulators are required to increase safety standards for nuclear so long as it is cheaper, until the costs are brought up to par with other energy sources.

Any citation for that? It's a convenient villain to blame, but absent any proof regulators are deliberately trying to make nuclear less competitive, it seems much more plausible that regulations are driven by concern over accidents. If a wind turbine fails it doesn't make the entire region uninhabitable for decades.

They made it up. Similarly you frequently see claims on here that nuclear came to a standstill because of all the ignorant beatnicks, when in actual reality raw capitalism is why nuclear stalled: Endless disastrously expensive projects tainted the industry into picking everything but nuclear.

Nuclear is a fantastic base load. It is, done right, clean and safe. The weird pro-nuclear cult that spreads manufactured nonsense is just noise, however.

I did not make it up:

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1610/ML16105A136.pdf

It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just the way some of the nuclear regulations are written. Operators are required to achieve radiation dose as low as reasonably achievable.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html

ALARA/ALARP has been a standard for a long time. I think you could make the argument that “reasonably” has been ignored more recently.

Ultimately, it isn’t the sole reason for nuclear construction issues. All large infrastructure is prone to cost overruns, and in combination with a stringent regulatory environment that makes it even more likely to encounter schedule and budget problems.

> As a result, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than anything else

How exactly is nuclear safer than solar or wind? Solar panels in particular are about as dangerous as an inert rock.

Very few people die in nuclear accidents, but quite a lot of construction workers end up falling off roofs while installing solar panels.

That's an interesting point. I think my view on this is that I think we've been pretty lucky with nuclear accidents thus far, and that we don't have nearly enough to data to conclude that we will continue to operate them as safely as we have thus far. A single bad nuclear accident affecting a major city would turn that statistic entirely on it's head for centuries worth of solar panel installation.

That amount to saying "I'm going to ignore all the evidence because I don't like the conclusion."

It's simply interpreting the data differently. Statistical conclusions always depend on your priors. We may also have a difference in risk tolerance. I'm willing to accept "accidents almost never happen" for something like air travel because the consequences are much less severe even if a worst-case accident does happen. I'm not nearly so willing accept even a small risk of nuclear accident because the consequences are so potentially awful (the worst case is not death IMO, but slow, painful radiation poisoning).

The worst nuclear power accident ever, Chornobyl took: knowingly unsafe design and a lot of very-very bad decisions to kill a few hundred directly and a few thousand indirectly.

The only two others that even come close: Fukushima - one death, TMI - 0 deaths.

So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).

There is plenty of data and the data says it's safe.

> So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).

Sounds about right, but when you factor in current designs and requirements it's 100x better.

LRF (large release frequencies) are required to be less than 1 in 1 000 000 per year of reactor operation [1], so roughly 10 billion reactor hours. The calculation of this considers at least 1 in 10 000 year levels of high winds and earthquakes [2].

Since the typical reactor is 1GW, so ~8TWh per year, and global energy consumption is ~23 000 TWh per year, we could use roughly 3000 reactors globally to meet most of our needs, which would put an event like this roughly every 100-1000 years.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0909/ML090910608.pdf

[2] https://archive.opg.com/pdf_archive/Nuclear%20Licencing%20Do...

Also if your threat model is a one-in-10000 year freak event, you can have as many reactors as you want and it doesn’t increase the likelihood of a catastrophe.

Note, in comparison, dams have killed several orders of magnitude more people.

Just solar panel installers falling off roofs have killed more people so far.

Banqiao Dam failure alone killed an unknown number of people. The lower estimate is 26 000. The upper estimate is 240 000 people.

For Chernobyl the number is 4,000 deaths as the total number of projected deaths caused by the accident over the long term.

For Fukushima it's one direct death, and 2000 deaths due to evacuation.

Had we approached dams the way we approach nuclear power, not a single dam would be built in the world.

Also, ironically, the amount of greenhouse gases produced by the production of solar panels or wind turbines is quite large. And neither one recycles very well, so that can't be an amortized cost over multiple reuses.

Nuclear has this same issue too, although almost entirely from the concrete poured for the containment building. Small modular reactors should mitigate this.

When I built my system the greenhouse gasses released during manufacturing and transport were offset by 1.9 years worth of production. Out of a lifetime of 20-25 years. In my quite unfavorable latitude of 59. Since then I've seen data being quoted at somewhere between half and one year.

Those numbers seem low. I don’t doubt that’s what was quoted, but I don’t think they were fairly calculated. For example, a lot of times the greenhouse gases used in refining materials used to make panels are not included, on the assumption that they will be recycled. Turns out recycling is not economically worthwhile (mostly because of these externalized costs). But that’s most of the greenhouse gas emissions: turning silicon dioxide into pure silicon using coal.

Regardless it’s apples to oranges. You are comparing your solar output to the mix of fossil fuel power the grid supplies. But a small modular reactor would be a carbon-zero power source.

I don’t get why there is polarization between solar/wind and nuclear? I can’t put an SMR in my basement but I can put solar on the roof. Why not? It’s not even likely that my country will get an SMR.

Nuclear is also a very risky business (not in the sense of safety but in the sense of project delivery/nimby). So solar and wind are derisking weaning off fossil fuels.

Wrong comparison. You are neglecting the systemic risk of nuclear and ignoring that roofing is dangerous and needs to be done regardless of solar panels.

> Solar panels in particular are about as dangerous as an inert rock

just wait until they are abandoned by bankrupt companies and start to break down and all of the highly toxic substances they are made of leech into the ground water.

>Nuclear is fundamentally cheaper than nearly any other energy source.

It is not, the main costs are simply not included in the calculations. Operators are legally protected from most liabilities, and even setting liabilities aside they get bailed out if they fail to be profitable. You have to bail them out, there is no option not to. You can't simply turn off a nuclear power plant and leave it.

France recently had to bail out their nuclear operator to at least 50 bn euros. We reached the point where we're "the future" that had to pay for the energy that our parents got from nuclear. Our children will be the next to pay for it, and so on for centuries.

This means that even in a country that has had no disasters, nuclear power has operated under a cost model that was severely underestimated.

The cold truth is that nuclear power is not cheap even in a best-case scenario, and "not cheap" is the most precise estimate we are able to give.

There's no conspiracy here -- the nuclear safety is just so darn expensive, and for rational reasons.

It is safer, yes, but only once a lot of resources is spent on safety. So nuclear power generation is very inexpensive and expensive at the same time, depending on amount of effort put into its safety (with modern scientific knowledge on fission, I'd say like 90% of a reactor cost is ensuring its safety).

I honestly hoped that NuScale production could reduce some significant fraction of that safety costs by "commoditizing" the production. Kinda like airplanes are very safe in a big part because their production and maintenance processes are streamlined and actively practiced ("economy of scale").

You can read about the NRC's stance on requiring radiation to be "as low as is reasonably achievable" here:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1610/ML16105A136.pdf

ALARA, in practice, has been interpreted by the NRC as to mean "radiation levels as low as can be achievable while still being competitive with alternative energy sources." Which means that the cost of nuclear goes up until it matches or exceeds traditional baseloads (coal, gas, etc.).

It isnt the law making it expensive. It's capital costs.

It would be even more expensive if it didnt get a free ride on insurance - through disaster liability caps set at ~0.05% of the costs of one Fukushima.

But the point is those capital costs are so high because nuclear is required to meet a threshold of safety far, far in excess of any other energy source. There are instances of nuclear plants having to shield radiation to be lower than background levels. Which beyond being absolutely pointless, it adds weight, which adds concrete, which adds capital costs and CO2 emissions.

The only reason it exists at all is because it gets a free ride on insurance through the catastrophe liability cap.

IMHO it's a bit premature to talk about deregulating it without first making sure it shoulders full liability for the damage it would cause by neglecting important safety.

You can easily find the locations of coal power plants by looking at maps of cancer rates.

Nuclear is the only 'energy source' that is required to capture pretty much any of its externalities at all, so arguments that they don't capture all of them are a bit odd.

If it has a catastrophe liability cap how can it possibly be capturing all of its externalities?

Nuclear power never pays for disaster cleanup and still can't compete with renewables.

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