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Comment by corethree | Hacker News Reader

We shouldn't forget Chernobyl. Yes the statistics say that air pollution is a far worse killer than nuclear power plants but that same statistic applies to nuclear bombs.

I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative and using it to predict something as unpredictable as the stock market. More caution is needed here. Yes, I agree that nuclear is an option here, but it is not an option that is so obviously the best as some people think it is.

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Mentioning Chernobyl at all, at least to me, shows a deep lack of understanding about nuclear power infrastructure and capabilities in the 21st century. It cannot be stressed enough that Chernobyl was a fluke on top of a fluke, with bad design and dangerous elemental choices at its core. It is nothing like the nuclear power tech we would choose to use today. Thorium MSR poses literally near-zero risk of meltdown, and the meltdown potential of Thorium can be compared to Chernobyl in parts per million.

Considering all of this, mentioning the threat of another Chernobyl every time nuclear power is positioned as a viable option is like thinking that the Valdez disaster occurs every time we ship gas overseas.

Nobody knows what the risks are of thorium deployment, because no thorium plant has been deployed. Pretending "unknown = zero" is how we got here.

But it is all moot, because thermal generation of any kind has wholly priced itself out of the market. There is hardly even a place remaining for geothermal.

It's true that no large scale Thorium reactor has been built yet. It's also true that its mathematically, chemically, and physically impossible for Thorium to pose the same radiation threat that Uranium poses under load.

I'm a huge nuclear fan, but Thorium reactors are overhyped. Yes, it is chemically, physically and mathematically impossible for Thorium to pose any danger because Thorium is not fissile. Thorium by itself cannot sustain a chain reaction. Whatever Thorium reactor people envision, inevitably you will have Uranium, and sometimes Plutonium, inside that reactor too. Now, you are free to claim that only a small part of the reactor is going to be Uranium or Plutonium, to which I'm going to say that only a small part of a regular Uranium reactor core is the U-235 type, 95% is the somewhat inert U-238.

Now, can Thorium reactors be good, or great? Sure thing, but for the time being all their purported advantages are on paper only, while the PWR reactors are in wide use.

The issue isn’t the U232-33-35. Its the potential for meltdown, which the MSRE systems fully mitigate in situ

MSR stands for Molten Salt Reactor. It's a type of reactor that can use either Thorium or Uranium or Plutonium. For some reason a lot of people equate it with Thorium.

MSRE specifically refers to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment [1], which was a reactor that burned only Uranium, never Thorium.

By the way, the Department of Energy is collaborating with the private industry on a number of advanced reactor designs [2]. There is only one molten salt reactor and that one uses Uranium or Plutonium, not Thorium (see [3], slide 3).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

[2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac...

[3] https://www.nationalacademies.org/documents/embed/link/LF225...

I am aware that MSR/E can refer to multiple reactor fuel types - since we were talking about thorium, I didn't feel the need to specify which I meant.

The current environment of Nuclear Plant technology does not negate the benefits of MSR Thorium reactors

We shouldn’t forget BP’s Deepwater Horizon. We shouldn’t forget Exxon’s Valdez. We shouldn’t forget the Moningah disaster…I could go on for a while.

So after listing all of these disasters, the conclusion is to let these companies handle technology that has even worse outcomes in the case of disaster?

No, thorium reactor disasters are way more limited in worst-case scenario harm than any of the disasters I mentioned.

> I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative

I really wish nuclear proponents would take a data driven approach. It would essentially stop the conversation right there. Instead we have to deal with ridiculous scenarios talking about the safety of nuclear power immediately followed by "we just need to remove these regulations which make it too expensive to operate" as if one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. The energy sector in the US is ran for profit. If there were a profit to be made off of nuclear power, energy companies would be all for it. Yet instead they just keep putting up more wind farms that they can realize profit from after 12-18 months instead of spending billions of dollars and decades on a project that may never see completion.

Nuclear is has the lowest number of deaths per unit of energy produced [1], except Solar. At the same time it's also the heaviest regulated. These two, are, of course, connected.

Isn't it logical that we shuld search for a middle ground by reducing regulation while taking care the number of deaths per megawatt doesn't exceed the worst current climate change culprits: gas, oil and coal?!

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

I doubt that solar is so low, just the few deaths from the roof installers will go over the figure given there

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