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Comment by Nodraak | Hacker News Reader

> one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material

Please share numbers demonstration health hazards. For ex, bananas are radioactive. Should we outlaw bananas?

> rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly

That's wrong. In 2022, the power output had to be reduced by 0.18% (not a typo) (https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1645696906327388160). In addition, Nuclear plants can work even in the desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

> nuclear plants are very unreliable

That's also wrong. Please share numbers. Nuclear has a load factor of 95% and its down time can be scheduled (maintenance). Wind has a load factor of 30-40% (and output is unpredictable), solar has a load factor of 20%, hydro requires mountains.

> the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants

When controls are too tight, nuclear is too slow ; when controls are too loose, nuclear is dangerous. Face je gagne, pile tu perds.

The goal is less CO2, and for that any low carbon energy source is good.

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By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that couldn't be scheduled).

Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans. As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them. As soon as you say "ok, build them reactors if they are so perfect", nuclear advocates want the state to jump in and asume the costs, the consumers to pay an extra price, the safety regulations back to 1960 and the future people to deal with the residues.

> the consumers to pay an extra price

The (botched) green energy transformation has given the country I live in top 3 highest electricity prices in the world and it's not even particularly green at all. Literally cannot get worse. And it seems to me that one half doesn't understand how incredibly bad high energy prices are both for people and industry, while the other half cheers at the prices because it causes deindustrialization and pushes towards degrowth - mainstream talking points of the current generation of climate activists here.

Germany?

Could be Denmark too.

If you talk about Germany than this has nothing to do with nuclear.

No, this has everything to do with nuclear(and energy politics in general). Since at least the 80s, nuclear power has carried a huge political risk in Northern Europe including Germany. Reactors have been shut down prematurely - instead coal and oil power plants have been kept operational.

Do you have a source for these claims? A peer-reviewed study would be best? All statistics of the last years indicate that Germany has replaced reactor capacity with renewables. And at the same time, it has cut back on coal. The current negative development has to do with the war and the gas supply stop and not with the dismantling of nuclear power plants.

If you are going to ask for a source, would you mind providing sources for your assertions as well? As an outsider, I would be interested in seeing numbers/evidence for both view points. (Although looking at the parent comment, I'm not exactly sure what you would like a peer-reviewed study of.)

Also, would you please not copy-and-paste the same response multiple times as you've done in the thread? It comes across less as thoughtful discussion and more as spam. (I'm not trying to be rude, but that's how it came across to me.)

I will agree with the sibling comment -- as an anecdotal opinion I guess. It has everything to do with nuclear.

Since a few days ago, Germany's policy to reduce or keep energy prices and meet demand depends inextricably to France's building more nuclear reactors. (I am talking about the last industrial nuclear reactors going offline, and the future energy budget planning related to that.)

Do you have a source for these claims? A peer-reviewed study would be best? All statistics of the last years show that Germany has replaced reactor capacity with renewables. And at the same time it has cut back on coal. The current negative development has to do with the war and the gas supply stop and not with the dismantling of nuclear power plants.

> By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that couldn't be scheduled).

That's not quite correct. France deferred maintenance during COVID and scheduled the downtime in advance. The inspections then found potential problems, so other reactors did additional maintenance and checks.

They could have been deferred further if needed, but politicians were not willing to make the call.

> Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans.

Nuclear energy is the one that is actually proven to work and be reliable enough to completely displace fossil generation. Nothing else is coming close to that, including solar and wind.

> As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them.

Russia is busy exporting nuclear power plants. A nuclear reactor can be built within 6 years, two reactors within ~9 years (they're built in parallel).

Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at least not the installed capacity. Some are technically capable but load-following seems to be quite taxing on the equipment due to pressure and temperature cycling.

However it is very suitable for base load generation, there's a reason why oil and coal companies lost their marbles in the 50s and astroturfed anti-nuclear into existence.

I'm not sure if that's their most-effective campaign ever or if it's a tie with BP's popularization of the carbon footprint, which atomizes responsibility for climate change and has successfully delayed systematic action for decades. And even managed to get greens and climate change activists to do their work for them. Just like with nuclear. It's actually, genuinely incredible.

> Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at least not the installed capacity.

That's not quite the case. You can load-follow with nuclear, but it requires reactors to be designed for that. France does this, for example.

You also can simply keep reactors working at a constant level and just dump excess power into their cooling system. This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy.

Most nuclear power plants do not do this because they don't need to do it.

>This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy.

Therein lies the problem. Capital costs dominate nuclear plant costs and they are high.

If you load followed such that you kept the reactor at an average of, say, 50% nameplate capacity that would lead to a levelized cost per MWh of about 2x$168 = $336.

(LCOE listed here is $168: https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-surge-is-circuit...)

For reference, Bhadla solar park sells a MWh for roughly $30, so even if you charged $300 to store and retrieve it you could still provide cheaper electricity than a load following nuclear power plant running at 50% of nameplate.

I question your estimation of the capital cost. LCOE for most nuclear power plants is way below that: https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/

For the US it's $33 per MWh, so doubling it still gives reasonable cost.

As for wind, it simply can not compete right now for guaranteed capacity. The adequacy rating for most wind power plants is around 10%, so you need 10x overbuild to even compete.

Many of the entries in that table (LTO) are for 20 year life extensiom of existing plants, not new plants.

And so what? Modern nuclear reactors are licensed for 60 years and are expected to last 80-100 years with maintenance (reactor vessel annealing, mainly).

This is exactly a point in favor of nuclear.

So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?"

One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety.

If I had to make long term bets, radioactive materials will continue to be radioactive, green capture, storage and transmission will get cheaper and more reliable.

Speaking of transmission, that's another huge problem. You can't go plopping powerplants just anywhere, and power generation needs to be somewhat close to those consuming it.

Distributed collection and storage helps reduce challenges around transmission infrastructure in low density or hard to travel areas.

Consider Puerto Rico, their investments in solar have skyrocketed, especially with the need to rebuild so much infrastructure. They had nuclear, and they were cleaning up contamination for decades after shutting it down. Also part of the issue with power there is transmission. You don't get the efficiency out of tiny boilers to make them cost effective for these folks.

I think you're pushing a bit hard for a tech that has a lot of problems and while it could play a role in our future, it's unlikely to be a dominant force.

> So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?"

At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades.

> One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety.

So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing.

> Distributed collection and storage helps reduce challenges around transmission infrastructure in low density or hard to travel areas.

If we're talking about Europe, they are facing the problem of Dunkelflaute - long periods of no wind, no sun, and low temperatures in the middle of the winter. A worst-case once-in-century scenario would require around a _month_ of storage.

So far no technology is even close to that.

> At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades.

And if we compared these factories and their environmental impacts we would see a net increase from the production of solar and wind products? That's the point, and you ducked it hard.

> So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing.

Who said that we had to hit 100%? There is a place for burning stuff for fuels in our society for long to come, the point is not having it the default way we power larger systems.

> If we're talking about Europe, they are facing the problem of Dunkelflaute - long periods of no wind, no sun, and low temperatures in the middle of the winter. A worst-case once-in-century scenario would require around a _month_ of storage.

> So far no technology is even close to that.

Okay, that's a great argument to not continue investing in storage solutions, but let's be real, a new nuclear steam turbine isn't coming online _tomorrow_ either.

Let's do both, and not pretend like the more risky one is less dangerous than it is, when things go wrong.

Dunkelflaute can be dealt with by burning hydrogen, not fossil fuels. You need backup turbines, but a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is about 20x as cheap to build as a nuclear power plant, per unit of power output. So backing up the entire grid with these "Dunkelflaute turbines" is not expensive compared to the nuclear solution.

Europe has many petawatt hours of potential hydrogen storage capacity in its salt formations.

France's are struggling to last 60.

Extending their lives to 100 will not only raise maintenance costs even further it will raise the risk of catastrophe quite significantly.

This would be a catastrophe for which e.g. American plants are insured only up to the level of 0.05% of 1 Fukushima level event.

You know that material science has improved a lot since 1970-s when most of French nuclear reactors were designed, right?

In particular, annealing had been developed fairly recently: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurerenewal-by-annea...

If we are trying to determibe the cost of power from new nuclear plants, looking at the marginal cost of upgrading/refurbishing existing plants makes no sense, as that is much cheaper.

It's been proven to work and the only able to displace fossil fuels, yet it's existed for 70 years and not even reduced the amount of fossil fuels used in electricity production. Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.

Displacing? I see increasing use of fossil fuels to backup up renewables.

Check numbers for Germany, Denmark, Scotland, Portugal etc.

Yep, coal goes up.

Maybe you're reading the data upside down. Take care.

Still goes up. Does not matter how much you are trying to gaslight me

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu...

I don't want you to feel gaslighted, but you are objectively very lazy and have an opinion without checking any data. This Reuters article doesn't deal with it, but with a short term situation in the summer. You probably didn't even read past the headline. If you had, you probably would've noticed this quote: "Since Destatis started compiling statistics in 1990, 2022 will likely be the first that Germany will be a net exporter of electricity to France, not the other way round, it said.". Thus it's easy to figure out the uptick in coal in the summer of last year in Germany has very much to do with the fact that half of France's nuclear plants were offline at that point, half of those because of unplanned maintenance. The dirty coal uptick was used to keep the lights on in France. Oops.

Here is the official data for Germany for every year in the past several decades https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...

The bottom three are:

black coal in magenta

nuclear in gray

brown coal in brown

Nuclear shutdowns started in Germany in 2011. It should be easy to see that coal went down significantly since then and is at a historic low. Which brings me back to my original point:

Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.

And then we will look into Germany's CO2 per kWh and it is one of the dirtiest in Europe. That's probably because they have so much renewables. Or so little.

I might be lazy, but you are outright dishonest.

So carbon intensity per kWh of electricity:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

Germany went up last two years, but have otherwise been on a steady decline along with the rest of the continent. In 2011 Germany was at 473 g CO2 per kWh of electricity. In 2022 this was down to 386 g CO2/kWh but went down to 333 g CO2 / kWh in 2020.

I will leave it to you to figure out if there was any world event going on in 2020 which would have made it particularly low (i.e. allowed renewables to take up a greater portion of the electricity production), as well as in 2022 which could make it particularly high.

Your claim was that coal use is going up. Are you finally giving up that claim?

CO2 per kWh is also going down as renewables went up. Also easy to check in the data. You haven't done that either.

Using this news source to claim that coal consumption is going up reminds me of climate deniers who point to one climate graph from one region in Canada and show the temperature was actually cooling down, while not mentioning that the slice they showed was from March 1997 to October 2005, while the whole graph (including parts they hid) was from 1960 to 2020 and showed massive heating.

From your news source:

> "Only in Germany, with 10 gigawatts (GW), is the reversal at a significant scale. This has increased coal power generation in the European Union, which is expected to remain at these higher levels for some time," the IEA's annual coal market report said.

So your news source only mentions Germany, and only during an energy crisis caused be a war. If you only look at this one country, and only from February 2022 to April 2023 you may find coal consumption going up, but if you look over any other period, or include any other European country, you will see the opposite effect.

To be fair the french have had some massive problems with their fleet recently. There were issues discovered where (IIRC) a supplier that made pressure vessels used steel that was not of sufficient quality and covered it up for decades, only to be discovered recently- this required major downtime and expense. Other issues have resulted in lots of nuclear plant downtime in france as well recently.

Stuff like this should yield criminal charges.

In France it does.

I heard almost exactly the same thing about Japanese reactors, are you sure you're remembering right, that it is definitely the French because it seems a bit of a coincidence

Nope, he's got that right. It's been a pretty major recurring story in the news in France through this autumn. I haven't really followed through the details, but the idea was that several reactors were down for a planned overhaul/maintenance for something like this (material defects) through the summer. As the delays ("nuclear projects are never on time") piled up story was "will they make it in time for winter". Pretty nail biting actually, specially if You add up to it the halt on Russian gas

The details: one tube on a safety backup system, so with a 0.1% chance of needing to be used, was shown to have the potential to corrode under strain ("corrosion sous contrainte") this led to all plants using that kind of tube being shut down for months because of extreme care. The irony being that this extreme care is keeping things extremely safe, but somehow in the news it comes out as "nuclear is unsafe". The reality is there are many chemicals plants with much more damaging issues, but much less regulations, and significant accidents over the yeras, often not as bad as Bhopal, but still toxic to neighbours, that somehow don't get to newsworthy...

While I personally share the opinion that the standard that nuclear is held to is higher than it needs to be — on the basis of the old "deaths per TWh" chart — this standard leads to them being both expensive to build and run, and also to it being shut down for months making it unreliable.

I've noticed by trying that one cannot simply win a political argument by waving the banner of utilitarian ethics. (I'm hoping fusion can circumvent this, if anyone can even commercialise it; we shall see). Likewise, best to compare with other power plants rather than other industrial accidents, and not just because what happened in Bohpal (and its less newsworthy cousins) should not have happened.

> share the opinion that the standard that nuclear is held to is higher than it needs to be — on the basis of the old "deaths per TWh" chart

And if you ignore possible deaths from Chernobyl, how about the purely financial cost?

Current $/MWh prices are high enough that, given current LiIon prices (and that LiIon is what we get even if we don't put in any effort to get cheaper alternatives given its widespread usage), I recommend people stop trying to make it happen and put their efforts elsewhere.

But my claim is, if Chernobyl hadn't Chernobyled, the $/MWh price would probably be lower.

I'm not making a specific claim that it would be cheap enough, though; I don't have enough relevant background to guess the magnitude.

You seemed to be saying that the standards nuclear is held to is higher than is necessary. Compared to what? Was my question. I asked about the cost of Chernobyl, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost

$790 billion at 2021 cost

so my point was perhaps it is being held to a higher standard for a very good reason.

(NB. I'm not automatically against nuclear power, but I seriously question their potential cost against their very definite benefits. We had one Chernobyl, I guarantee we'll have another in time. Question is, how hard are we prepared to work to push that possibility, statistically speaking, as far into the future as possible)

Sure, it's a perfectly reasonable question and I ought to have justified it better.

Ok, so, total energy produced to by all nuclear reactors in the world in 2021 was apparently 2,653,344 GWh[0]; if there was a Chernobyl-scale disaster every year, that would add just under $0.30/kWh to the cost of electricity[1]. As reactors didn't have such a poor MTBF even then, I think a decade is a less unreasonable guess for rate of exploding, which is 3¢/kWh.

This may seem too concerned with dollars and not enough with lives, but similar things can be said in favour of lives cost per unit of energy produced, and again that's in favour of a yearly Chrenobly over all the fossil fuels, though not the renewables: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... (I remember an older version that had much worse PV death rate, justified on the grounds installing stuff on rooftops is dangerous).

Like most arguments in favour of nuclear, it's more about the world we used to live in than the one we now live in; if you'd asked me 10-15 years ago, I'd have been all-in on nuclear to save the planet, but now, I think we have better options. But these were my reasons for being pro-nuclear at the time.

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

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24790%20billion%2F2%2C...

A commendable answer, thanks. The issue of lives I skipped as the deaths from chernobyl were counted in wiki as 60 to 60,000. Can't really conclude much from an error bar of 3 orders of magnitude.

> ”Nuclear has a load factor of 95%”

That’s very optimistic. Perhaps an ideal nuclear plant with a perfect operating record might approach 95%, but real-world load factors are lower as most plants end up requiring extended outages for repairs as some point in their lifetime.

France’s lifetime load factors for its nuclear plants are around 77%, but that declined sharply in recent years to 72% in 2020-21 and even lower in 2022 due to many plants being taken offline for repairs. In the UK, load factors are even lower: 67% during 1970-2017.

I didn't realize it went as low as that.

Some wind farms can hit 65%

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/worlds-first-fl...

True but with nuclear you can usually schedule the downtime well in advance. With wind it just stops whenever, whether you’re ready for it or not.

Funny enough, this is why you see wind farms where there is a decent prevailing wind.

The biggest issue is usually our lack of capacity to store/transmit. They shut of some turbines because they over produce for the Network capacity.

You have to fire up the gas generators either way to fill in the gaps.

Scheduled nuclear downtime isnt any greener than the a slow wind day.

But downtime of a turbine only affects one turbine. The rest can carry on as normal and generate power. With nuclear you can lose 1000MW all at once.

That's the same as saying nuclear can hit 95% while the real-world average is more like 80%. For wind that number seems to be around 40% (both land and offshore from a quick search). Guess the jury is out on how more extensive maintenance will affect these projects(?), but down time for wind turbines are probably a lot less than for nuclear plants.

Capacity factors for wind projects surely are highly dependent on location, not just technology. Remains to be seen how many premium locations are suitable?

I don't know in what parallel reality you live, but France is having massive energy problems due to their reliance on nuclear right now. And it's only getting worse with rivers drying up more and more and power plants needing more and more maintance as they age. Building new plants is hugely expensive unless you lower standards, and security is already worse in reality than in the books as of now, you don't want to go lower than that and cut more corners.

You are making good points, however about the leaks, we obviously shouldn't wait for them to be dangerous to worry. It's hard to prove risks, it's also hard to prove the lack of risks if only for the living ecosystem around the plant. The leaks show issues in the alert system, it's not the first time it happened, and an engineer sued the plant for dangerous mismanagement. Doesn't mean we should drop nuclear energy either.

And of course all risks should be weighed against the known risks and downsides of the alternatives.

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