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Comment by Kon5ole | Hacker News Reader

>Nuclear, solar and wind are the cleanest and safest forms of energy. The metric to use is deaths/TWH

This common flawed claim ignores the metric "How much effort is required to keep the number of deaths low?" which is an essential part of it.

Nuclear is not safe. It is just kept from harming us by a large crew of skilled people and billions of dollars' worth of safety measures.

Solar and wind have no such requirements, so the comparison is a bit like saying that the safest tools are a brush, a broom and a gun.

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> billions of dollars' worth of safety measures.

This is of the order of fractions of pennies when we compare to fossil fuel subsidies. Fossil fuels to the tune of $7 trillion/year[1] and cause 10 million deaths/year.

Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...

> large crew of skilled people

If we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, then the energy markets will be fair, nuclear will win (or at least a major play along with solar and wind) and there will be a ton of skilled workforce. We didn't have a skilled javascript workforce 2 decades ago, now we have millions.

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022

>If we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, then the energy markets will be fair, nuclear will win

I can't see nuclear winning, it is at least the second most subsidized energy source we have and already more expensive than solar+storage, which is only getting cheaper while the true costs of nuclear are revealed to be larger than any estimates have indicated.

France recently had to pay a 50 bn downpayment for the fictional cost of nuclear they have operated with for decades, and that's just the beginning. In the US, the government covers a lot of the cost, for example by having the army maintain security for spent fuel.

The latest nuclear reactor in europe, Finlands OL3, had to reduce production earlier this year because the market price of electricity was too low. And that's already now, from a plant that is already in place. How can any project making new nuclear plants ever hope to be profitable if existing plants are already (granted, intermittently) losing money?

> billions of dollars' worth of safety measures

Is this a bad thing? Investing a lot into safety measures to avoid catastrophes seems better than investing significantly less because we assume is safe.

Could you elaborate on why this investment is an argument against nuclear?

I once talked to people that worked at Angra Nuclear Power Plant in Brazil and they said the real danger is actually the spent nuclear fuel. The power plant itself is safe due to many redundant safety measures, continuous tests and monitoring. I don't have a source for this, and don't take my words for absolute truth, I'm not an expert in the subject.

> kept from harming us by a large crew of skilled people

I'm glad to hear people working with nuclear are skilled ;) I assume people working in solar/wind/hydro are also skilled at their craft. And I'm sure you didn't imply that, maybe the phrasing wasn't the best?

>Could you elaborate on why this investment is an argument against nuclear?

It is not an argument against nuclear, it is an argument against the claim that nuclear is safe.

If something requires a large staff of skilled workers and very expensive equipment in order to prevent harmful effects, it is of course not safe - wouldn't you agree?

Solar and wind require skilled people too for sure, but not in order to prevent a catastrophe, which was my point here.

The type of catastrophe that solar and wind need to prevent are "There's no sun/wind for more days than we planned for" which absolutely can be devastating and no amount of skilled people can fix

>The type of catastrophe that solar and wind need to prevent are "There's no sun/wind for more days than we planned for" which absolutely can be devastating

Absolutely, and with renewables that's part of the consideration from the start since everyone is well aware of it.

What you describe is in fact one of the major downsides to nuclear, since they generate so much energy in one point of failure.

Having a (ahem) redundant array of inexpensive devices generating power is much less likely to suffer abrupt and large losses such as the one europe suffered just last week, when their largest reactor went offline for a few days. https://yle.fi/a/74-20061159

> "How much effort is required to keep the number of deaths low?"

The first answer to that is to not build a large chimney on the power plant and release all the waste by releasing it into the air. At that point we are now safer than all fossil fuel power plants and can impose a full ban on all use of fossil fuel plants in the power grid. Releasing toxic waste into the environment and into the air must be made illegal.

The second requirement is to do simple repairs and maintenance of buildings. Here we can look at hydro power and see how they often fail at preventing flooding. The effort must be high enough that it can handle bad weather. Anything less should be illegal and severely punished.

So the level of efforts need to be at least at that minimum. We could demand even more, but I am afraid a majority of people would object if we banned all fossil fuel, all hydro, and all nuclear from the grid.

I for one am worries by China's nuclear reactors, considering the competency crisis and China favouring speed over safety.

the safest form of travel is flying. even though you're strapping people into a pressurized metal tube next to 50 tons of jet fuel and hurtling them at hundreds of miles per hour through the elements, governed by a complex web of thousands of safety-critical systems controlled by a pair of humans. it's rather remarkable.

Flying is still dangerous though, no matter how many passengers land safely.

If flying was inherently safe (in the same way that solar power is safe), the WTC twin towers would still be standing today.

Power is safety critical. People die in the winter and summer without power. Solar and wind cannot deliver reliable power, particularly during critical emergency weather situations.

So comparing solar and nuclear is a bit like saying a broom is safer to the user than a gun, while ignoring the user is in a gunfight.

>So comparing solar and nuclear is a bit like saying a broom is safer to the user than a gun, while ignoring the user is in a gunfight.

I appreciate the simile! My argument was aimed against the claim that nuclear is safe because it hasn't killed many people. It is a common claim and I personally find it annoyingly disingenuous. Nuclear should be argued for without resorting to logical fallacies or falsehoods.

(Separately, I believe that solar+storage is the fastest gun in the west) ;-)

There is no need to worry of nuclear disasters in China, as you will most certainly not hear about it when they happen (even if you live in China). You can’t worry about what you don’t know, and after all everyone eventually dies of cancer…

a major accident would trip geiger counters. that's what happened with Chernobyl. so either you'll detect it, or it won't affect you.

My comment was a bit tongue in cheek… but let’s say you are the weird prepper who (considering the generally poor population) finds money to spare on an actually functioning Geiger counter; what do you think you can really do if it starts beeping?

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