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Comment by stevesimmons | Hacker News Reader

The cost of fossil fuels is equally frightening if you cost cleaning up its emissions in the same way.

Nuclear only looks so bad because we ignore the externalities of the alternatives we currently price based on just extraction cost.

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The alternative today are renewables with minimal environmental problems, and recycling potential.

Framing it as a question of fossil fuels vs nuclear is building a strawman.

Renewables only seem like an alternative if you ignore base load and grid stability issues. There are potential approaches to solving those problems (such as battery storage) but none have been proven to work economically at scale yet.

The "It is impossible until proven possible beyond reasonable doubt" take is backwards and quite uninteresting. One thing is certain, nuclear power is not proven to work economically at scale yet, despite 70 years of subsidies.

This, quite biased, article has an interesting take on the question. Look to flows rather than stocks.

> Rarely mentioned is the fact that renewables have been taking an increasing share of the growth in energy supply, and all of the growth in 2019-21. Moving the focus from stocks to flows moves the conclusion from no change to radical change. Concentrating on the size of the fossil fuel system today is like focusing on the large number of horses in 1900 — it was as good a guide then as it is now.

https://www.theclimatebrink.com/cp/138702709

Seems to work fine for France, with 90% carbon free electricity and low prices

Forgetting to mention the French state having to nationalize and take over €65B debt from EDF, their ailing nuclear power provider, and having to agree to raise nuclear electricity prices.

But I guess it's fine if you pay with your tax bill rather than electricity bill.

Which is still cheaper than coal externalities.

> tax bill

  France is also the world's largest net exporter of nuclear energy, bringing in more than €3 billion per year.

Providing "base load" is often touted as an advantage of nuclear power plants (NPP) here on HN. The reality is actually the opposite. As the International Atomic Energy Agency says[1]:

"Any unexpected sudden disconnect of the NPP from an otherwise stable electric grid could trigger a severe imbalance between power generation and consumption causing a sudden reduction in grid frequency and voltage. This could even cascade into the collapse of the grid if additional power sources are not connected to the grid in time."

Basically NPPs are designed to SCRAM for all sorts of reasons, then the sudden loss of multiple GW really ruins the grid managers' day. The first paragraphs of [1] make it clear that a large, stable, grid is a pre-requisite for NPPs not a result of NPPs.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/gc/gc53inf-3-att5_e...

And yet the grids in areas with a high level of nuclear power generation have been pretty stable in practice. Any type of power plant can have to shut down for emergency maintenance so there's nothing unique about nuclear plants there.

There are a variety of very real problems with nuclear power. But pointing those out does nothing to make renewables viable as a base load source.

Nuclear & fossil fuels both look bad when considering long-term sequestration of their waste.

That said many of these sites are so polluted due to fast & loose early nuclear weapons programs.

Sellafield’s toxicity comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using that as evidence that commercial nuclear energy waste is expensive or complex to handle seems disingenuous.

Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow.

You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks.

But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.

You clearly did not read the second sentence in my tiny comment. Hand wavy nuclear apologia is what's actually incredibly disingenuous.

You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion.

If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think.

We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea.

Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances.

The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.

It’s not poo pooing fears to highlight that the cost is 2bn/year for decommission a weapons reprocessing plant and that in no way provides information about commercial nuclear power. It is economically viable considering it’s still cheaper despite not having any meaningful investment to reduce costs.

The fears I was talking about were around the toxicity and dangers, not the cost. While we're on costs why didn't you highlight the $7B/yr for Fukushima or the $68B to date for Chernobyl? What about the 200% cost overruns and scandals involving Virgil C. Summer & Vogtle in the US that have cost tax/ratepayers tens of billions? $2B/yr doesn't look that bad in comparison.

The point is that while all these costs may seem eye watering & renewables do indeed not have that problem directly (they can have their own set of cost and ecological problems indirectly through requiring storage), they are actually comparatively tiny & it's only because fossil fuels externalize most of their cost that we don't have an easier baseline to compare against. There's varying estimates for how much climate change is costing us but some metrics have it at ~1T/year alone (not including all the healthcare costs associated with pollution from burning fossil fuels as those are even harder to estimate).

As for why I ignore Fukushima or Chernobyl, that's because for the next phase of scaling out nuclear, we shouldn't really be building LWRs. We should be building nuclear designs that fail safe (e.g. nuclear reactors). Even still, LWR designs being built today are much much safer than the designs used for Chernobyl and Fukushima. As for cost overruns and scandals, I can't really comment on them as I don't know any details except to say that cost overruns and scandals are not unique to large scale nuclear projects. Solar has it's own share of problems where grid operators are struggling with rooftop solar (see the political battle in California) & figuring out how to handle the variability of solar plants since we still don't really have scalable storage solutions (arguably maybe we should be mandating that some solar and wind plants have onsite storage to more accurately represent the cost of adding those renewables to the grid & is an externality frequently ignored when discussing the cost of solar/wind).

Don't get me wrong - solar & wind are great. If we can do more of it then great. I just think at a fundamental technological level it can't scale as quickly to replace fossil fuel dependency in the energy grid on any timescale that matters for us addressing global warming.

The cost is not relatively tiny, it's actually quite significant. Nuclear at least allows for better accountability & management of the waste it produces. Unfortunately accountability & management has been rather poor, diminishing the potential.

I am not entirely sure what your point is about reactor design. Did you mean we shouldn't build more BWRs? Agreed. If you mean we should focus on HWR like CANDU or experimental molten salt reactors, those have their downside. Deuterium is expensive & molten salt is corrosive & not commercially proven. If you really want nuclear you go with off the shelf proven designs like AP1000, but even then there are hurdles to build these as these boondoggle projects have shown. Yes every sector has scandal, but massive rate hikes & tens of billions in overruns is atypical & undermines the promise of what nuclear was sold as to those ratepayers.

Nuclear is go big or go home, and we can't socialize losses & liability while privatizing profit. Nuclear is also unattractive to the commercial market due to long-term ROI & project/liability risks. Effectively it needs to be a massive energy independence program funded by the government. I don't see that happening though.

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