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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly dumb. These plants were only designed to run for 40 years. This particular one was extended to 51 years. Restarting it will be very dangerous. Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies. But running old plants many years after their designed for lifespans is especially stupid.

Radiation corrodes metals much faster than usual and in ways that are not predictable. It is dangerous to run these things longer than their designed for lifetimes.

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When I hear "incredibly dumb" the first thing that comes to mind is the following chain of events:

1. Declaring ICE vehicles dead and EVs as the future, and setting hard dates for sunset of ICE (with no legitimate infrastructure plan).

2. Declaring point of use natural gas evil and phasing out natural gas heating and cooking.

3. Declaring all fossil fuel power generation sources (coal, natural gas) as evil and demanding their elimination.

4. Declaring nuclear power as dangerous and unfit (you are here).

5. ???

6. Switchover to green-friendly all-electric architecture complete.

People love to offer criticism but propose no practical solutions. Emphasis on practical.

Renewable energy is a drop in the bucket and cannot possibly serve the steady and sharp increase in load demand.

Unless the US intends to have widespread mandatory rolling blackouts like third world countries, something's gotta give.

No more criticisms without solutions.

Build the crap out of wind and solar where it works and mix in other non carbon generation where you can; preferably distributed resources. Put up long distance DC lines to places that need extra, such as the north in winter. Install storage everywhere. Install smart controls everywhere. Make up for any emergency needs with natural gas plants that are kept operational for that purpose; we can afford a bit of carbon emissions if we eliminate the worst offenders, IMO. Reduce energy use via more efficient devices and laws around efficiency. Help with tax write offs for energy use for low income and tax heavy energy users to pay for it. Take over all utilities nationally and coordinate everything. Reduce shipping by onshoring manufacturing. Pass laws requiring allowing employees to be remote if they choose, for knowledge work. Spend a lot more on transportation infrastructure other than cars. Tax carbon at the source and let the costs trickle down into the worst offenders.

Nuclear is great tech, but isn’t financially viable today in most situations. I would love to see it in the mix above somehow if new designs were cheaper and safer. Also, energy can’t just increase forever. We have to force reductions in use where practical via the means above.

The infrastructure overhaul needed for a full-on changeover to electric would require an investment on the order of the Apollo program and I don't see that happening. Not just from a financial perspective but the engineering as well. Banning petrol cars and gas cookers and praying the rest of the dominoes fall in place isn't going to work.

Yea, I'm not saying it will work, but nuclear isn't going to work either, at this point. This was my ideas for how to do it, and clearly this problem is more complex and harder than just doing it. I figure we'll just continue to drive off the cliff and eventually there will be wars over water and cold climates.

Luckily for us, petrol will get harder to extract in the next decades, and thus more expensive.

> The United States spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars.

vs.

> The US is spending $369bn on subsidies for green technologies under the Inflation Reduction Act

None of these points seem to address the parent’s point which was that restarting a nuclear plant that is much older than its intended lifespan is not safe.

“No more criticisms without solutions” is not a real argument. Obviously criticisms must be considered. And the magnitude of the risks is obviously important.

My response was directed at this comment:

> Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies.

It's unhelpful and doesn't move the discussion forward to unilaterally label something as shite and provide no viable alternative.

It sounds like you are arguing nuclear power is expensive, dangerous, and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies; but we should ignore all of that because we don’t have a viable alternative. I don’t think we should ignore those statements?

> Renewable energy is a drop in the bucket and cannot possibly serve the steady and sharp increase in load demand.

That's a weird way of spelling "is serving the entirety of increase in load demand".

That plus the spent fuel pools need to be be continually filled with cool water at all costs otherwise the spent fuel burns and potentially spreads radioactive ash over an area the size of a small state.

The NRC itself made the report - https://www.science.org/content/article/spent-fuel-fire-us-s...

> NRC has long mulled whether to compel the nuclear industry to move most of the cooled spent fuel now held in densely packed pools to concrete containers called dry casks. Such a move would reduce the consequences and likelihood of a spent fuel pool fire. As recently as 2013, NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies's study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are fivefold greater than NRC has calculated.

Utter insanity. Regulatory capture is a hell of a thing when it comes to nuclear.

This is why I file nuclear power under "nice things" - and we can't have nice things.

That's only needed for a few years as they wind down. After that they can go into regular dry storage.

Good point so even if all the nuclear plants are decommissioned, it will still be a few more years until they are all passively ‘safe’.

Why does radiation corrode metal in ways that are not predictable?

Radiation will send high energy particles that may displace metal atoms from their lattices. This may cause weakening, embitterment etc. Also shooting high energy particles at atoms will cause atoms to get into chemical reactions that they would have never gotten into before. This may cause new and unusual forms of rustlike behavior.

It is not predictable because with radiation you are deep in quantum physics territory, and a lot of things depend on chance. Things may be perfectly fine if only isolated atoms are kicked out of their lattices, but if you are unlucky some atoms along a line get kicked out and you get a crack.

Similarly you are not sure exactly what atom will get energized by some high energy electron and what other atom it will react with. Once you get into high energies, you can get a lot of chemical reactions that seemed impossible otherwise, or that nobody has ever thought of. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. But if you are unlucky you get something that can act as a catalyst for further reactions and spread around like rust.

It's true that it's unpredictable for a single atom, but when you're dealing with a macroscopic object (say, a metal part), it's quite predictable. The law of large numbers helps out quite a bit here (and the number of atoms is very large).

By that logic the sun's rays should be causing buildings to topple randomly. You say a lot of words that sound right but are 100% batshit.

If that were true, we'd all be immune to neutron radiation. It's just there's a lot of stuff between cosmic neutrons and us, and that's where carbon-14 comes from. It's not perfect but at least we're not walking balls of cancer.

> Once you get into high energies, you can get a lot of chemical reactions that seemed impossible otherwise, or that nobody has ever thought of. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. But if you are unlucky you get something that can act as a catalyst for further reactions and spread around like rust.

Interesting. Can you share some examples of this?

> It is dangerous to run these things longer than their designed for lifetimes.

They don't run the plant past their lifetime. $300M is going to be spent to increase the lifetime.

That said, 800 MW doesn't sound much for a nuclear plant.

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