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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear seems all but reliable given all the unplanned downtime.

I guess it is unavoidable given those plants can poison a whole country and their neighbors if not maintained properly.

Oh. And built by the lowest bidder near you where non team players are fired pre-emptivly. There is no way a trust modern corporate management philosophy to build nuclear power plants.

The sudden shift in the nuclear power "public sentiment" is really strange and feels artificial.

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This comment is wrong. Countries relying on nuclear energy (United States, China, France…) certainly don’t struggle with “unplanned downtime”. Nor can a modern reactor, built to modern standards, “poison a whole country and their neighbors”. Chernobyl is the worst radiological accident in history and the only one of its kind. Modern reactors can’t explode and burn like Chernobyl. It’s impossible. And nuclear power plants are not built by the lowest bidder, because the number of corporations that can build nuclear reactors is already vanishingly small. Chernobyl isn’t a good argument against nuclear anymore than the 9/11 attacks are a good argument against skyscrapers.

Here's a link to a map by the EIA documenting current nuclear outages: https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/outages/

Well, France was constantly paraded aroubd HN for their failure to keep their nuclear reactors running. Usually not as an example for nuclear power failing, but rather as examole of the state (who doesn't like neo-liberalism?) and France as a counzry (because who doesn't like dumping on France?) failing.

“ Modern reactors can’t explode and burn like Chernobyl. It’s impossible”

Isn’t the impossibility proof only as strong as the assumptions put in?

Yes? If the assumption is fail safe is better than fail unsafe.

Passive cooling and automatically, gravity controlled control rods to deactivate the reaction are major innovations. Smaller sized reactors that have better neutron economy also reduce waste and have lower total risk

Uhh... We have plenty of nuclear plants being run just fine. Built by the lowest bidder is an easy way to misrepresent how things are actually built. They still have to build it exactly to spec which is like a million pages long and they cant cut corners. So in reality its who can build this exact spec for the lowest amount. Otherwise we'd be overpaying for all of oue public infrastructure. The sudden shift is due to people realizing nuclear really is the way to go and were only fooled in the past by fossil fuel propaganda. Its not artificial, the fear of nuclear however is.

Last time I bothered discussing this on HN, I looked up the numbers (too lazy to do so again): in short, we built 10x renewables per months as we do nuclear. And most the new nuclear capacity replaces NPPs that are shut down. And wind as well as solar are way cheaper than nuclear since Hinkley C got its MWh prices approved.

Nuclear is dead for everything except science, medcine, political or military reasons. All of which are valid ones by the way.

I've been screaming it for years but my real guess is the shift to nuclear power is the result of the destabilization of the global geopolitical situation showing that having an energy dependency on foreign nations that you can't always trust to be friendly or behave is a major national security weakness.

So nuclear starts to look very attractive because of the guarantee of continual high power output with few dependencies as long as you have the uranium, and isn't as unreliable as renewables.

Ye it is quite strange. And the timing of the what I believe is an artificial sentiment shift is very much tied to a specific war.

Anyhow, nuclear power plants are in them self a major national security weakness. Especially with these put small reactor everywhere cracy talk. But then again "national security" is about "security" about as much how the "defense industry" is about "defence".

I sometimes feel that nuclear power is a proxy discussion for something else that is also not very popular among the voters. It kinda makes sense if you just replace "power" with "war".

Overall mined uranium supplies are quite limited. Numbers back in 2013 [1] put the total uranium available (including estimated undiscovered resources) at enough to maintain current operations for 230 years. Bump up usage by an order of magnitude, and you're running out in 23 years. And Western countries (mostly Canada/Australia) only produce about 20% of that total.

So if nuclear ever became a staple, you'd end up needing to resort to salt-water extraction, or developing breeder reactors. Both would send costs skyrocketing. Salt-water extraction is also going to run into environmental issues given you're talking about processing literally trillions of tons of water (uranium's about 3 parts per billion in saltwater). Breeders also substantially up the stakes in terms of complexity and risk.

If you'd indulge my curiosity, what would be your opposition be to something like solar + artificial hydroelectric? It's relatively cheap, infinite (well subject to access to the materials necessary for construction of solar panels), completely safe in any scenario, and things like artificial hydroelectric take care of the biggest issue of day/night production.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

It is reliable and dependable compared to weather dependent renewable energy sources. As about reliability of e.g. wind, Siemens Gamesa has e.g. some stories to tell.

I agree; there has been a sudden shift. It used to be that people were anti-nuclear because they seemed to be scared of it. Now, they just outright dismiss nuclear despite it being more necessary than ever.

I’ve read about so much crime and terrorism these past few years. I don’t want to live near such a dangerous target.

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