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Comment by chroma | Hacker News Reader

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations.

Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started, the federal government added new rules about containment vessels being resilient to passenger aircraft impact. The NRC applied these rules retroactively, causing the containment vessel to be redesigned and construction to be halted.[1] The companies working with the NRC are reluctant to criticize regulators, as they fear retaliation from the NRC. The NRC supervises and approves each step of nuclear reactor construction, making it very difficult to schedule work with contractors and suppliers. Honestly, it's amazing this plant was built at all.

1. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...

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The NRC was established just about when the first nuclear buildout collapsed under the weight of its own foolishness. Massive cost overruns did nuclear no favors whatsoever, clearly inadequate safety (especially on those first generation BWRs; hello Fukushima), and (most devastatingly) the deregulation of the US electricity grid, with PURPA (in 1978) and later steps opening grids to non-utility providers. Nuclear projects that would make sense for a monopoly utility (hey, let's boost the capital spending to increase our regulated earnings) no longer made any sense in a competitive market.

Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don't forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people!

If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.

It shows that the people who considered the location and plant to be safe enough to be wrong.

If your standard for “safe enough” is that no one will directly die or be injured, ever, then the only feasible solution is no electricity at all.

People often fail to compare the opportunity cost of alternative methods to nuclear power. At that time the alternative to nuclear was coal power plants. Radioactive carbon isotopes have harmed many times more people than Nuclear.

Coal dust, sans radioactive stuff, and coal burning emissions also exact a terrible toll on respiratory health. A lot of people have died, or had much worse lives, thanks to the widespread use of coal.

Don’t leave out the coal miners. The history of oppressive companies, grueling work conditions, constant possibility of death through any number of horrible circumstances, and the lifelong damage of unprotected mining on the lungs has harmed generations of families should never be forgotten.

Meanwhile as a population they’re voting for people who want more coal mining. They are 6 figure jobs in a depressed economic area.

And yet, what if that labor went into nuclear construction instead? How many 6 figure construction jobs is many multi-billion $ nuclear plants?

What percent of coal miners do you think could make that transition?

Most of them; deisel mechanics, electricians, explosives techs, train drivers, riggers, machine operators, etc.

What, tell me you don't think coal miners have pick axes and chip coal out of tunnel walls into sacks.

Coal miners are human too, they can adapt, people can pick up new skills.

It seems like you're implying that many of them cannot make the transition. Why do you think they cannot?

Well for one there have been gov efforts before under Obama but it didn’t result in a big shift (for whatever reason). But also I think it’s very elitist and with a lot of hubris to suggest an entire population should easily be able to shift from one thing they’ve done for decades with all of the structural support in a community of it, to something else. Most people are not so fluid, both in capability but also receptive to change. Throughout history change gets resisted.

Coal contains no significant radioactive carbon. All the radioisotopes of carbon have half life many orders of magnitude smaller than the age of coal deposits.

Coal contains other radioactive elements, though. However, the quantity of these is still usually less than the quantity that needs to be mined to power a light water reactor.

Yes but the nuclear fuel is carefully contained during and after use. Not so much for coal.

The decay products of uranium are not well contained at uranium mines. They are in massive tailing piles, just as the radioactive elements in coal end up in ash.

Less gets said about these mine-related radioactive elements because they are typically in other countries, often countries where the people have darker skins.

Yes the radioactive decay products of the naturally occurring ore already in the ground naturally are still in the tailings. But they were there already before. With the removal of the uranium the net radioactive material left would be lower the the initial levels though no?

The daughter products will eventually decay away, but it will take a very long time. In particular, radium has a half life of 1600 years.

In any case, these are exactly the same daughters as from the decay of uranium in coal, so the argument you are making there is equivalent to an argument that could be made about coal ash.

but in coal they are burning those decay products and putting them into the air to spread around not so with the uranium ore where those decay products go back to the same ground they were dug out of

Almost all the radioactive elements in coal go into ash, which is not emitted into the air. Do you have some vision of old coal plants where emissions were not controlled?

Well that depends. 57% of the world's uranium is mined with in situ leaching:

> In situ leaching (ISL), also known as solution mining, or in situ recovery (ISR) in North America, involves leaving the ore where it is in the ground, and recovering the minerals from it by dissolving them and pumping the pregnant solution to the surface where the minerals can be recovered. Consequently there is little surface disturbance and no tailings or waste rock generated.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Over 82% of uranium production is outside of Africa, in countries like Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, and Russia...

The quantity of radioactivity mined is of little relevance. It's the quantity of radioactivity emitted to the environment that matters.

The point has always been that coal dumps far more radioative substance out to the environment that nuclear ever has, to tamp down illogical radiation scare information about nuclear power.

And the point I make is that if you don't give uranium mining a free pass, then with current thermal reactors your statement is false.

I'm being a bit pedantic here, but it's the heavy metals contained inside of coal - cadmium, uranium, thorium - that are the main pollution concerns, not the carbon from the coal itself. Coal is definitely one of the dirtiest fuels, though, besides biomass.

How many people have died in coal mines, had black lung, died from coal pollution etc. It's really no comparison. People are just flat out afraid radioactivity from nuclear because of movies and bad information campaigns. It -is- scary, invisible, can give you a death sentence in moment if you get a LOT of the right kind. I think human civilization dying out is a alot scarier to me.

Absolutely agree with this take. Coal power plants are a public health disaster on the scale of leaded petrol and no one talks about it. Even wind turbines have a terrible impact on birdlife. The arguments against nuclear are irrational; future generations will wonder what was wrong with people in the late 20th century.

The number of nuclear plants is so small that any example is statistically anecdotical.

Yes, Fukushima did not kill much. Is it because the nuclear is in itself super safe, or is it because we were lucky? We would need ~100 Fukushima before even having a rough estimation.

I think risk cannot be counted as "number of deaths", but as "capacity of losing control". Cars and cows kill a lot of humans. Yet, their risks are controllable: it is not true that if just few things change or if the circumstances are slightly unlucky, suddenly, they will do 1'000 times more deaths. With this way of thinking, we can understand better why scientists are worried about pandemic rather than common cold, even if before the last pandemic (and maybe during, whatever) common colds was killing more.

And it works with coal too: unpredicted effects of global warming are a way of losing control, and it is why scientists are so adamant about stopping using coal.

I don't think it is true that we have judged the other forms of power generation differently than the way we judge nuclear. We judge the same way: based on our current understanding of how easy it is to keep or lose control.

Sure, coal is dangerous and has unpredicted effects. But the reason it was treated differently is because the capacity of losing control with coal were not at all obvious from the start, while they were written in black and white from the start for nuclear.

Nuclear plants produce 68% of the energy in France. If that’s not statistically relevant, doubling the number wouldn’t be statistically relevant either.

For that matter, even in the USA, nuclear power produces about 10% of all electricity. Multiply that by 10 and that’s the entire population as a sample.

That's not at all the point.

Imagine the following game: you throw three dices. If the three dices are not ending on 1, you win 1 dollar. If they are ending on three 1, you lose 100'000 dollars.

If you throw the dice ten times, you will, with high probability, not have three 1 (the probability of appearing is 0.5% per throw). You will probably need to throw more then 10 times before loosing. But when loosing, you will lose a lot too, which makes the bet intrinsically a bad idea (the win does not justify the risk if unlucky).

France has 56 nuclear plants. 56! It's totally unreasonnable to draw conclusion on intrinsic safety of the nuclear plants on such a small number. The fact that you cover the full population with a small number of plants does not change that: it does not change the fact that you cannot conclude scientifically. The same way it is incorrect to say "I only need 3 throws, so it means that the 1-1-1 bet is intrinsically a good idea".

(PS: please do not answer about "loosing 100'000 dollars, but with nuclear disaster, it's not that bad", it's not the point. The point is that statistics is a large number game, and that we just don't have a large number of nuclear power plants to do statistics with them)

Note that powering the world (all uses of energy, not just the grid) with nuclear will require ~6000 3 GW(th) nuclear reactors, to provide the 18 TW of primary energy the world currently consumes. About two orders of magnitude more than France has. At the historical rate of world nuclear accidents this would yield > 1 meltdown a year.

There are hundreds of nuclear power plants that have been in operation for decades. Most operating nuclear power plants run with dramatically higher uptimes than what they were originally conservatively designed to meet. Nuclear power plants are operating in an active war zone right now! Six reactors were the site of a military battle and ended up sustaining damage beyond anything foreseeable by the designers. Every one of them shut down successfully and at no point was there any evidence that there was ever a safety risk to the public unless a malevolent actor wanted to cause such an accident.

This body of evidence strongly supports the view that nuclear is not only safe but incredibly safe. We have incredible knowledge about how to run nuclear plants safely.

Again, you miss my point.

"hundreds of reactor in operation for decades" is NOTHING. These plants have a large number of differences, and are located and operated often very differently. At the end, you have something like "10 plants operated for ~10 years under conditions A", "10 plants operated for ~15 years under conditions B", ...

SIX! Six reactors were the site of a military battle and ended up sustaining damage beyond anything foreseeable by the designers. Six is NOTHING. You cannot say "I trust that nuclear is intrinsically well-design to resist to military conflict" based on SIX cases. The damage may have been lucky. Or even may have been unlucky (I'm not saying that nuclear is unsafe, I'm just saying the stats says you cannot conclude).

The only people who pretend we have incredible knowledge about how to run nuclear plants safely are either people who also demonstrate they don't have any idea of what they need to check to "demonstrate safety", or they are experts that are on the left side of the Gaussian curve: they are as numerous as as-much-qualified experts who pretend nuclear plants are proven very unsafe (in other word: they are cherry-picked experts, and do not represent the consensus which is: nuclear plants are too complex, too diversified, too sensitive to surrounding circumstances and not yet used enough so that we can scientifically conclude)

How do you reconcile this kind of thinking with driving a car?

Are you seriously thinking that someone is incapable to drive a car if they are not incorrectly convinced that an incorrect math computation is correct?

The large majority of things in life is "impossible to statistically prove". I had no proof that I will not burn my toast for breakfast this morning. Yet I had breakfast without problem AND I did not pretend that "since I've used this toaster 5 times and did not burn a toast, it implies that burning a toast will never occur" (this sentence is incorrect: the observations are compatible with the fact that my setting is very good and reduce the risk of burning the toast very low, but also compatible with another realistic hypothesis: my toaster burn a toast about 1 time over 10, and so far I was just "lucky").

But why would I not make a toast or take my car? I just don't know if it will work or not, but I also don't know if it will not work or yes. You cannot say "if you are not sure of X, you should act as if non-X is sure", because if you set Y=non-X, you will say "if you are not sure of Y, you should act as if non-Y is sure", and you end up saying you should both act as if both X and non-X are sure.

Nobody here is saying nuclear is not a solution (I mean: if you think I'm saying that, you are dead wrong). But it is tiring to see pro-nuclear people making pseudo-scientific claims to entertain their own belief (belief that may turn out to be right). If you are so confident in your belief, just say so: "I know we cannot properly tell that nuclear is 'safer' than X or Y, it does not make any sense to do so, but yet I believe it is still a good option. You are free to disagree with me, but you also have no ground to pretend it is 'less safe' than X or Y, so your position is as legitimate as mine".

Global warming is 100% snake eyes when you get down to the bottom line of "why nuclear?"

Human deaths aren't the only measure of safety.

Pollution into the ocean from Fukushima was huge, unfortunately.

Just because it's not as bad as Chernobyl (which was as worst-case as it gets) doesn't mean it's safe.

Why this is downvoted? Propaganda from Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

Thank you for CCP propaganda

Please don't do this here.

It's huge, but it's dispersed across the massive volume of water in the pacific. Charts like these are scary, until you read the legend and realize that even the bright orange areas indicate concentrations only 0.1% higher than the typical pre-fukushima concentrations of radioactive isotopes: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/science-data/fukus...

Eat a banana and you'll receive a dose larger than anything related to Fukushima.

Maybe, but i think the argument in this thread seems to be that NRC creation basically killed the whole industry. Which is complicated, because you still want safety improvements over Fukushima, but not at the cost of basically halting any new development for decades if not ever.

"If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity."

Yes, of course. I can only imagine the deaths and destruction that tsunami would have caused if it were a wind or solar plant.

/SARCASM you idiot!

I recall seeing some statistics that the death per kilowatt ratio of different means of energy production is higher for all other forms of electricity than nuclear.

No need for name-calling here.

Have you considered the costs to contain and clean up Fukushima? The financial costs and loss of lands for decades is a heavy hit for a country to take.

Japan passed a special tax to pay for the disaster (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa... ).

From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup) >In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion),...

The Soviet Union, in part, collapsed from Chernobyl.

There is a huge fat tail risk on nuclear power. Roughly and a bit sadistically speaking, coal kills people predictably at a "death-from-car-crashes" rate. There is no fat-tail, you just have a high rate of cancer,etc. It is like letting people driving cars and accepting the 40,000/year deaths from accidents as the price.

> maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers

No long term deaths have been recorded yet.

They will never be recorded, because they are lost in an ocean of cancers that normally occur from other causes. That doesn't mean regulators can ignore them. Radiation is not a criminal defendant who must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

I worked with an engineer that came from the Vogtle project and he would talk about the hoops they had to jump through to get anything done. Even the most basic unassuming weld would require tons of paperwork and cooperation from a lot of people.

If the NRC is the problem, then why do we see identical cost overruns and schedule delays for France, Finland, and the UK?

I don't think we can blame the NRC for this. There's something deeper.

Similar regulatory regimes started by the same groups of people, which work in similar ways? AKA think of every possible thing that could go wrong and mandates designs with have engineering margins far in excess of what the a reasonable analysis of the risks/etc would call for.

We could do similar things to renewables by simply mandating that they have carbon free backup sources sufficient to guarantee four of five nines of reliability.

So you think this is a realistic possibility for France, a nation that loves nuclear?

Have any evidence of these regulations? What regulations can we change?

I've looked and looked and never found somebody saying "these regulations are unnecessary" but it's trivial to find examples of management not taking the regulations seriously and then paying for it when they cut corners (basically all the welding for the AP1000s in Georgia and South Carolina).

It's also easy to find management errors that ballon costs and cause massive delays.

I'm completely unconvinced that we can pin this on the NRC.

If you look at the cost overruns in GA quite a number of people have come out and said that no one wants to criticize the NRC, seemingly because they can make your life hell.

And change orders, and the like were listed as one of the reasons for the overruns, how much of that do you think is some engineer who designed the plant waking up one day and deciding something needs to be changed, or is it a case of the NRC nitpicking everything, and just loading the whole process up with so much paperwork that everyone is frozen, and any little mistake in the paperwork ends up costing the project. Sure blame the plant mgmt for not having the correct paperwork and delaying the start by 6 months, but who is asking for that paperwork to begin with? A lot of it sounds like a game of gocha, create a problem so complex that its nearly unsolvable and most of the work isn't even welding pipes but putting a thousand people in the chain, everyone of which can stop the line at any time, largely with no repercussions.

Sure, contractors mess up, but most contracts are written so that its the contractor who pays for it, not the organization hiring the contractor. So, again, contractor messes up, comes up with a workable mitigation/rework plan, but you sit there for 6+ months arguing about whether its allowed.

I've seen first hand the mess of regulation related paperwork it takes to run a normal NG/etc plant, it takes teams to of people to review it every year and assure compliance. Layering the NRC/etc into this is how you end up spending insane amount of capital and producing nothing but paperwork (see nuscale) on a design that isn't particularly ground breaking in the face of existing plants. I can't even imagine how much it would take to certify something like a navy reactor in that kind of environment.

None of the exposed I have seen mention anything about NRC specific regulations. It's just bad management processes dictating sloppy first attempts at design, leading to literally unconstructable designs, followed by even worse management processes for getting feedback and changes, or any sort of streamlining to allow agile response.

Imagine a huge waterfall design, with the architects being part of a completely different company than the implementers, and months long turn around to get clarification on any aspect or to get the designers to sign off on the necessary changes for anything to happen.

People are not afraid to criticize the NRC, it falls out of people's mouth so easily. But if they are actually afraid of the NRC, why are they so willing to provide critique, but unwilling to suggest the exact things that are the problem?

More likely you have a bunch of substandard folks unwilling to take any sort of responsibility for their actions or for management and instead blame a third party.

Suppose that any one of these companies spent a tiny tiny fraction of their money of proposing changes to regulations that would allow them to build effectively? Why don't we see any sort of proposals like that?

As for nuscale, this is a perfect example of using the NRC as a scapegoat and being unwilling to look at the true source of their problems:

https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/report-claims-serious-prob...

I am still waiting for some sort of example of the NRC layering on something unnecessary, after six years of begging people making the claim to produce one shred of evidence.

That's fair. But what about South Korea, China, India, Turkey?

In China you can't probably trust the official cost numbers (I'm not even trying to google for them). But you can't deny the astonishing pace they've built in the last decade: in 2012 they had 12 GW of nuclear capacity, in 2022 this went to 52 GW. 40 GW in one decade. France built 41 GW of capacity between 1980 and 1990, and the US 44 GW between 1970 and 1980, so this is not unprecedented, but it'd darn impressive in post-Fukushima era.

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

Those countries have costs of labor far far below Western countries. There are also huge questions about corruption and actual work performed. For example, Sourh Korea, the least corrupt country there with the highest cost of labor, put executives in jail for their fraud on safety certifications.

My personal hypothesis is that nuclear is only kind of affordable for a very narrow band of technological advancement, where labor is still cheap enough but tech capability has not advanced too much. After your technological capacities advance far enough, labor is better spent on other tech than building massive cathedrals.

As for China, try comparing nuclear builds to a single quarter of solar or storage output. It's a big country, and China's investment in nuclear is proof that even in a country known for excellent skills in managing massive construction projects, it's not really giving renewables a run for their money.

> Those countries have costs of labor far far below Western countries

That could be for some labor, but not all. The US is still in the game when it comes to automobiles. Well, when it comes to Tesla, it looks to me Tesla is eating everyone's lunch. The US is still in the game for other very high tech things, like military hardware. Or industrial trucks (think Caterpillar).

Where the US and other Western nations are a bit hopeless is the costs of megaconstructions, be they nuclear power plant or high speed rail, or simply skyscrapers.

But nuclear power plants could be more like Caterpillar than like "massive cathedrals", as you call them.

It’s brings a lot confidence that a nuclear power was built through a legal loophole.

Because the regulatory environment is inhospitable to new plants?

I mean it makes sense, if the Atomic Energy Commission already licensed the plant site, why shouldnt they be able to reuse it?

Laws have changed a lot since the AEC existed.

without looking up we can easily bet that anti-nuclear activists did their share of lawsuits to try to get those new laws applied to the plant, so there have been reviews.

One very important milestone was the Calvert Cliffs decision in 1971, applying NEPA to nuclear construction. This was while the AEC still existed, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating...

There is no doubt that NRC needs to be completely revamped. Maybe we can use a more productive model like the French have.

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