Hacker News Reader

Nuclear energy is so insanely safe that of the three worst accidents in its history, only one actually killed people and its on the order of hundreds of people. Hydro dam failures have killed on the order of hundreds of thousands but no one is trying to ban hydro.

Meanwhile, lawnmowers kill over a hundred Americans a year.

Nuclear energy is safe by any reasonable standard. The land around Chernobyl and Fukushima are for the most part usable today. It is only because we cling to the unscientific LNT standard that anyone thinks otherwise. Thankfully the misconduct and fraud that led to this state of affairs is becoming more known thanks to the work of Dr. Edward Calabrese.

Many accidents have happened, most never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents

Hell, Hisashi Ouchi's death could just been handed down by a medieval like Ivan the Terrible.

Someone burned to death atop a wind turbine. Is this a reason why wind turbines should be banned? Of course not. What matters is costs vs benefits and nuclear is just as safe if not safer than wind/solar energy per TWh.

> Nuclear energy is so insanely safe that of the three worst accidents in its history, only one actually killed people and its on the order of hundreds of people

You're leaving out the cancer and birth defects part for generations to come.

Considering how few reactors there are in the world, I'd say the failure rate is unacceptably high. A single failure is enough to contaminate an area for hundreds and thousands of years.

Pls, show me the nrs of ppl with increased cancer risk from these accidents. I'm sure the number should already be calculated

> A single failure is enough to contaminate an area for hundreds and thousands of years.

A single coal seam fire can do that too. A dam failure can even render an area uninhabitable forever.

Nuclear isn't quite as green as many of its advocates claim but its environmental skeletons in the closet aren't born out of plant accidents (which are few, far between, and generally well contained in Western plant designs), they're born out of the chemical horror show that is the rest of the uranium fuel cycle.

> A single coal seam fire

Nobody wants coal anymore, this is about renewables vs. nuclear.

> A dam failure can even render an area uninhabitable forever

Source?

That is complete nonsense. The UN Scientific Commission, Harvard Medical School, Kyiv University found no evidence for increased cancer after Chernobyl.

https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/chernobyl.h...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31454285/

Radiation simply isn't as dangerous as everyone has been led to believe. We live in a radioactive world and the most basic aspects of our biology is designed to deal with it. Even in a hypothetical world with zero radiation, every single one of your cells on average experiences between ten thousand and fifty thousand DNA breaks a day. Because of the Oxygen our cells need to produce energy. You have to be exposed to significant amounts of radiation before you start to even approach the damage from normal wear and tear of life.

The real amount of victims of nuclear accidents is hotly disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Fukushima: more than 2200 victims from the evacuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident

Hydro victims are mostly those of the Banqiao disaster, which is a fluke. In similar conditions anything would go boom with way less latency. It took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when most people were busy with the "revolution" which began in 1966 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure )

A well-placed expert whistle-blowing was totally ignored and even punished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure#Whist...

This Revolution followed the "Great Leap Forward", with famines and millions victims. Moreover all this came after a civil war and violent Japanese invasion, during which dams were bombed, causing "massive flooding in Henan" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henan#Modern_Era )

In such a context an otherwise avoidable catastrophe may happen.

Then a huge typhoon closed the case ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Nina_(1975) )

Predicting and adverting this catastrophe was possible, but given such a context nobody was able to do so. One may imagine what an active nuclear reactor would become/trigger in such a context.

Ah, the infamous NYAS hit job. It wasn't even peer reviewed, yet it was published on behalf of a supposedly scientific community. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Meanwhile, the UN Scientific Commissions and Harvard/Kyiv medical studies have found no increase in cancers due to Chernobyl.

https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/chernobyl.h... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31454285/

The Fukushima evacuation was wholly unnecessary and was only done because of the illogical fear of radiation that is spread by anti nuke orgs. That blood is on the hands of those who uphold and spread these lies.

This book is an analysis of scientific literature, and the authors pedigrees seem convincing to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Most authors of negative critics are authors of reports this book criticized, and other ones are weirdos. The book's authors answered to all critics.

One of the critics is Monty Charles. His own work, done for the UNSCEAR (a pro-nuke UN agency) in 2006, is heavily criticized in the book. He then criticized this book.

Another critic was published by Mona Dreicer, who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (another UN pro-nuke agency) and the book criticized her work.

Another one is M. Balonov, long-time contributor of reports published by UN-agencies, and the book criticizes his work.

S. Jargin, another author of a negative review, sees flaws in each and every publication criticizing a powerful industry. For example asbestos is in his opinion not a concern and its use unduly prohibited ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321527973_Asbestos_... ) His 'debate' with Rosamund Katz and Janette Sherman is surrealistic. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278732482_Who_Is_Af...

The UN is notoriously pro-nuke, and the UNSCEAR only composed of nuclear-energy related nations (exploiting reactors, extracting uranium...). About the WHO: http://independentwho.org/

> The Fukushima evacuation was wholly unnecessary

During such a disaster very few are able to assess the real risk, in real time, and even less to predict it. Panic ensues. This is intrinsic to the underlying physical and biological phenomenon, and therefore to nuclear.

> illogical fear of radiation

If there is nothing to fear how comes Japan disburses hundred of billions in order to clean up the nuclear mess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup

LNT: the controversy rages over... in each direction.

See for example: https://danielcorcos.substack.com/p/bca

It really doesn't. Even the BEIR radiation safety council has had to admit recently that LNT has no scientific basis. (They refuse to stop using it out of 'an overabundance of caution'). And this is the institution that basically started and promoted the LNT way of thinking.

We know the basic mechanisms of cancer, DNA damage. We also know that on average each cell in the human body experiences around 10,000-50,000 single strand breaks per day due to...

Cellular respiration, ie Oxygen.

This fact alone kills LNT because in order to take LNT at face value you have to assume that radiation damage is cumulative and never repaired. If that were true, we'd all be dead.

Yes, the dose rate (and type of exposure, bioaccumulation of radioisotopes...) is one of (if not the) key parameter. As for its role the document I referenced seems pretty convincing to me.

Your $1T guy just made up a bunch of numbers, added them up, and then decided that he was going to...raise the total cost by 25 percent. Because reasons.

So your counterargument is that it might only be $800 billion in clean up costs?

> but that's OK because years of lobbying will simply shift the downsides of a potential disaster onto the public.

> Don't believe me? It's already happened [2]:

> > The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants

That seems to be some sort of insurace/reinsurance policy of the act.

According to Wikipedia: "Under the Act, the administrators of the fund have the right to further charge plants if it is needed." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

And these are some nice benefits of the act:

> Companies are expressly forbidden to defend any action for damages on the grounds that an incident was not their fault.

> An open-ended time limit is applied, which allows claimants three years to file a claim starting from the time they discover damage.

> Companies are expressly forbidden to defend any action for damages on the grounds that an incident was not their fault.

That's a small price to pay when your corporate liability for an event like Fukushima is limited by law to $450 million.

This Act set up the NRC administered Nuclear Insurance scheme, which is largely self-funded [1], which claims to have a pool available of $13.5 billion through private insurance, industry self-insurance and a surcharge.

Let's go back to the Fukushima cleanup costs. The estimate keeps going up and is rapidly approaching $1 trillion. So far (as of 2022), $82 billion has been spent [2], which is six times the entire nuclear insurance fund. The revenue of the entire industry is listed here [3] as $38.2 billion.

Which brings us to my original point: in the event of this level of disaster, it would be the government footing the bill for the clean up.

Who do you think would pick up the tab in the US for a Fukushima-like disaster? The commercial nuclear power industry

[1]: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

[2]: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193

[3]: https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-repo....

For a $1T cost it's always the government footing the bill (or the bill being left to those who were hit). No insurance company, energy LLC, or even unlimited liability energy company can cover that.

Fukushima Could be argued as a success as the power plant shut itself down correctly when the earthquake hit. It was the tsunami that damaged the pumps and destroyed the cooling.

So far there’s no documented effects of any radiation issues.

Chernobyl Was entirely preventable if they were not fucking around and experimenting.

There was no radiation cloud released (unlike, say, Chernobyl). This is true. But it's left a mess that will take decades and hundreds of billions to clean up. Plus all the secondary effects to this region (eg fishing).

The simple argument against the idea that it's no big deal is: why not just leave it and do nothing? And the answer is "you can't". Why? Because what remains of the plant still requires active cooling, which is why there's over 1000 tanks on site storing millions of gallons of irradiated and contaminated wastewater.

This problem is so large that a lot of money is spent on removing contaminants and radioactivity so the water can be heavily diluted with seawater and released into the ocean. Otherwise the tanks will just keep building up. The wastewater releases started this year (which some still strongly oppose).

And this is just from keeping the core cooled. As for removing the core, this may take 50-100+ years [1] and has so many unsolved technical problems.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/japan-nuclear-fukushima-plant-dec...

Yes, indeed. Humans are tragically bad at underestimating the cost of pumping trillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Also coal power releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere than nuclear ever did.