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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

I am very pro nuclear but I am also very pro stringent regulation around nuclear.

I don’t find the argument that nuclear reactors could be regulated as windmills super compelling, but that’s just me.

Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.

>> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks

to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited.

By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. )

One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries.

So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.

To the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2].

1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear...

2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Right. So 11 years. Versus a couple weeks. I think you're proving my point.

Fukushima also produced immensely more electricity. Again, impact per unit of electricity produced is lower.

While I personally think nuclear is overregulated, my point wasn't even that you need to decrease regulation. I was just pointing that if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated, since they both kill more people/MWh generated than nuclear does.

Genuine question - I wasn't aware of this (fatalities per mwh for wind & solar), what would be the best source to find out more?

It's bullshit.

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

Even using sources from a decade ago, pro nuclear sources like world in data couldn't find any credible sources to back that claim.

And solar and wind were just getting started a decade ago.

INteresting that they cite this exact paper in that figure but it has very different numbers (and is the newest of their citations).

[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...

-edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar.

I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects.

In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.

This was the first publication I found from a google scholar search (there are others as well)[0]

Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates.

I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive)

However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events.

[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...

This is as good of a source as any:

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

However, be sure to dig into the methodology.

Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

Note that the deaths for nuclear energy include only radiation related deaths, whereas the accidents for solar and wind include "mundane" accidents like workers falling from heights. Nuclear power plants have their own non-radioactive accidents, though, like this one:

https://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/cfen/CB1011025.html

(5 workers killed at Mihama nuclear power plant due to accidental steam release)

I have not seen any comparison that tries to sum up non-radioactive accidents for nuclear power and incorporate them in the deaths-per-TWh rate for nuclear power. The number will still be lower than anything based on combustion, but at these very low numbers it could make a meaningful difference in the relative rates.

> if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be on a number of fatalities per MWh basis, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated

I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric.

> I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric.

Why not; what would be a better one?

You'd want to include cost in a similar way to medicine and other engineering areas do.

Doing X (new medical procedure, changing a road intersection) would save Y lives for Z cost.

If the cost Z is low you can shift resources to it from areas where cost Z is high per life or QUALY (quality adjusted life year) saved and overall save more lives.

Yes exactly. Nuclear regulation has had diminishing returns on safety for probably 50+ years. Are newer nuclear designs safer than they were in the 80s? Yes. Are they _enough_ safer to justify the increased cost relative those older designs? Almost definitely not. In the same way, we _could_ make wind and solar and coal etc. as safe as nuclear currently is. But it would _dramatically_ increase costs. That was my entire point. Nuclear is only not profitable because it's competing with generation technologies that are not required to meet the same safety standards.

The US nuclear regulatory regime _explicitly_ does not include costs when determining if a new regulatory rule is necessary. Any amount of safety at any cost is always justified. No other generation technology has that mindset.

That doesn't matter. It only matters if there's a good reason to not measure it that way, and why another measure is better.

Small Modular Reactors should make regulation a lot easier vs bespoke behemoth power plants.

Unfortunately they still seem to be all promise and no deliveries.

AFAIK they are all breeder reactors. So they can be rather easy modified to breed Plutonium and the likes.

Good luck, if one of them shows up in the hands of Daesh or other religious-ideologically or political-ideologically disturbed minds.

Edit: Furthermore, small reactors produce more radioactive waste than big ones. Although the study I read was about conventional reactors, IIRC.

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