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Comment by chroma | Hacker News Reader

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 You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it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.

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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.

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.

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.

"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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?"

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