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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

> We’ve also gotten very good at operating reactors without incident, increasing our capacity factor, or uptime, to more than 90% (France is only around 75%).

Mandatory nick-picking from a chauvinist French: France is “only” around 70+% because we do use nuclear for much more than just base production, and modulate the production to fit the demand variation, not because Americans operators are somehow better ;).

Also, unsurprisingly from A16Z they put most of the blame on regulation, but the main reason why nuclear is costly today is because there's barely an industry around it and there's no mass production. And unsurprisingly, custom built one-shot stuff cost much more than serial production.

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> they put most of the blame on regulation, but the main reason why nuclear is costly today is because there's barely an industry around it and there's no mass production.

Isn't that because of regulation (which was put in place in part because the population demanded it)?

It was always pretty costly, even 60 years ago and it hasn't come down much, that is why the cost argument is not trivial, especially with other sources being so cheap these days.

And not to forget: some things are freakishly dangerous. For example, spent fuel rods provide deadly amounts of radiation in basically no time to people around them.

> And not to forget: some things are freakishly dangerous. For example, spent fuel rods provide deadly amounts of radiation in basically no time to people around them.

You know what's deadly in a nuclear plant? The industrial machinery, the heavy plates of metal, the rotating devices at high speed, the trucks crossing the plant to ship heavy stuff, the dears crossing in front of the cars of the night shift workers.

All of this kill and maim workers from time to time, like in every factory in the world. But you don't care about them. You just care about fantasies of fluorescent green stuff killing people with deadly invisible radiation, even though it barely ever happened in the real world (and it's not fluorescent green either).

There are lots of work related safety issues in nuclear power plants that are addressed as a matter of course, but heavy machinery isn't necessarily specific to nuclear power.

And, yes, it tends to glow blue, not green.

But you are not seriously alleging that radiation from spent fuel rods isn't deadly, do you?

> And, yes, it tends to glow blue, not green.

No, it doesn't glow at all. Water under irradiation do glow (Cherenkov effect), but the rods themselves don't glow.

> But you are not seriously alleging that radiation from spent fuel rods isn't deadly, do you?

They aren't. They would be very deadly if they were out of water with people around, but it doesn't happen under any circumstances, so the risk you're talking about doesn't exist. It is as nonsensical as saying wind turbines are deadly because “if you got hit by a rotating wing you'd be cut in half”.

Actually, you get Cherenkov radiation and ionization in air, too.

Even when transported after storage in water they do emit copious quantities of radiation, hence the rather cumbersome transport "cases". You might want to familiarize yourself with the dangers during the lifeycle.

Btw., people die from wind turbine blades in accidents (when they break, for example).

Perhaps you might want to work in a reactor for a bit to get more of a feel for the dangers and the many things done to contain radiation related risks (instead of just shouting how it is all a non-issue).

> Actually, you get Cherenkov radiation and ionization in air, too.

True, but it's a thousand time less luminous, and actually it's still not the rod that glows.

> You might want to familiarize yourself with the dangers during the lifeycle.

In fact, I studied nuclear engineering before deciding to do computer science. There I met a bunch of good friend who works a several place of the nuclear supply chain, and also my wife who's now working at the plant 8km away from were we now live. So I'm very, very familiar with nuclear stuff.

> Perhaps you might want to work in a reactor for a bit to get more of a feel for the danger

Fortunately, nobody works “in a reactor”, as it would be indeed by dangerous (300°C and 155bar isn't compatible with human life, without even talking about the radiation levels ;).

Well, depends on the type of reactor to start with (but I was expecting you to go for some sort of sophism there and on the rods glowing. It is also not the water that glows as such btw.).

But I take your point that you never worked in the field.

> Well, depends on the type of reactor to start with

Granted, the pressure and temperature are technology dependent, but it's never human suitable conditions in any case. And that's no sophism, the problem with your reasoning is that you call something “deadly” where it is in fact never in contact of a human in the first place, and could never be.

> It is also not the water that glows as such

What do you think glows? It's literally water molecules that glows from de-exitation.

> take your point that you never worked in the field.

Sure, but neither did you, and your vision of nuclear is much less based on reality than it should to have a discussion on the topic.

Ever seen a research reactor?

And, unlike you, I have worked there.

You might want to look up how Cherenkov radiation works, btw. - it's depolarization.

Anyway, it is good that you are kept away from nuclear technology given your lax and aggressive attitude towards risks there (anyone thinking accidentsare impossible has no place there). Good choice.

> Ever seen a research reactor?

Yes, from afar, at CEA but I don't think anyone was working inside it.

> You might want to look up how Cherenkov radiation works, btw. - it's depolarization.

Would you mind expanding? Because Wikipedia seem to agrees with what I remembered:

    The charged particle excites the molecules in the polarizable medium and on returning to their ground state, the molecules re-emit the energy given to them to achieve excitation as photons.

Also, what's emitting the radiation, if not water molecules, in your model?

> Anyway, it is good that you are kept away from nuclear technology given your lax and aggressive attitude towards risks there (anyone thinking accidentsare impossible has no place there). Good choice.

Well, I see you're angry, but that's kind of a funny thing to say to someone who's started this very thread by defending safety regulation in the first place[1].

FYI There's a big difference between having a “lax attitude towards risks ” or “thinking accidents are impossible” and noting that you're completely making up risks that simply don't exist like “spent fuel rods provide deadly amounts of radiation in basically no time to people around them”. If you have people “around” spent fuel rods in the open air, you have a serious organizational problem: what are you trying to do in the first place?! (researchers in many fields are known to be completely oblivious to any kind safety measures, so maybe that's the kind of thing you did in your lab, but in an industrial setting I doubt anyone would have be doing that after at least the 70s).

The special risks with nuclear have nothing to do with the deadliness of things like hot fuel rods, and much more about broad environmental impact with moderate increase in cancer rate spread over a big populations (be them workers in contaminated areas or general population in the wide place around an accident). This is a big topic. But when it comes to immediate death risks on a nuclear plant, the radiations coming from radionuclide simply isn't one of them.

[1]: see also this comment in a sibling thread for another even more explicit example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37935638

No, in France for instance it's because we were done building the first series (it doesn't make sense to build more reactors than what we've built in the 75-2000 era).

In many other countries in Europe it was because of the strong public backlash against nuclear after Chernobyl , and because of the oil glut in the 80s which made fossil fuel affordable again for decades.

Exactly, 100% nuclear is not achievable without storage: nuclear can do baseload but not daily peaks.

70% is the capacity factor of the plants, not the ratio of nuclear-generated electricity in France's grid (though it's also around this value if I record well). Nuclear can do load following: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#N...

Capacity factor of 100% is not feasible because you need maintenance of the plants (probable true for every single form of electricity production).

Regarding whether or not stricly 100% of nuclear in the grid is feasible, I don't now enough about grids to say whether only using load-following nuclear power plants (without hydro/gas turbines) could do the job. We have hydro in France, might as well use it rather than have only NPPs, and dams are great for load-following.

> whether only using load-following nuclear power plants (without hydro/gas turbines) could do the job.

It is feasible, but the problem would be the peak in winter: that would mean having more than twice as many nuclear reactors to be able to deal with a few winter nights with about 100GW of consumption. That'd be very wasteful.

> We have hydro in France, might as well use it rather than have only NPPs, and dams are great for load-following.

Depends on what kind of hydro though: mountain barrages are, but not really Run-of-the-river hydro.

> Exactly, 100% nuclear is not achievable without storage: nuclear can do baseload but not daily peaks.

Fabulous how you get that from my comment. Talk about confirmation bias.

It's literally the opposite, as illustrated by France doing most of its daily load variations from nuclear.

It can do it if you have enough load following and overbuild plants, it's just expensive.

Nuclear could succeed if the plant size (and cost, and time to build) got smaller. I think it's at a disadvantage wrt wind/solar (see my other comment), but I guess the 'tiny reactor' designs have a sporting chance, assuming that they solve the time-to-first-kwh problem and piggyback on the same storage solutions as wind/solar. There are definitely cases where micro-nuclear might be good, the trick is to scale it past those use-cases.

> ... barely an industry around it and there's no mass production.

Said another way: traditional nuclear power generation cannot jump onto the cost learning curve (Wright's Law).

Time will tell if small modular reactors can or will make that leap. Decades from now.

H2 is closer. (Because we've pointed a fire hose of money towards H2 and not nuclear.) So the window for a nuclear revival, in any form, is small and getting smaller.

It's pretty hard to have an industry with the weight of current regulation - not just in terms of how much scrutiny fission receives compared to technologies we _know kill people at an alarming rate_, such as fossil fuel combustion, but also in regulating something that was still relatively new technology the same way that we regulated other energy generation.

At least with smaller reactors it's more feasible to get operating data and be on a path to economies of scale. The US now has a second chance to get it right, and the US can always be counted on to do the right thing, after exhausting every other alternative.

The railway and aeronautics industry have regulation constraints that aren't that far to what nuclear has[1], without preventing the industry to thrive. The worst thing that can ever happen to the nuclear industry would be another catastrophic incident (even one with almost no casualty like Fukushima) so I think taking safety extremely seriously is the only thing that nuclear energy can afford.

[1]: My wife work in nuclear engineering, and I did work for the rail industry for some time. It's not exactly the same, but it's also not that different compared to other regulated industries, like healthcare for instance, where it's full YOLO compare to both of the above.

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