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Comment by mech7654 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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