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Comment by Kon5ole | Hacker News Reader

> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

Which energy source has stricter safety and security regulations than nuclear? Surely the strictest security regulations are applied to the least safe and secure operations?

Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated? What other power source has the military guarding its waste?

The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.

> Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years

But they keep costing money for longer than the US has existed after they close.

Surely investing in hydrogen or similar is way better for the future than nuclear.

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> The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.

That's a failure mode common to all large centralized power plants, not exclusive to nuclear. For instance, an unexpected failure (a triple fault on one of the transmission lines coming from the power plant) of a single hydroelectric power plant caused a country-wide power outage in two countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazil_and_Paraguay_black...).

> Which energy source has stricter safety and security regulations than nuclear?

A better question is why nuclear needs that much regulation, it's all just political difficulties. Nuclear technology itself don't need this much.

"Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated?"

I thought the answer was going to be a coal plant until I read the rest

> Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated

Chernobyl is a bad example.

The Soviets knew it was an inherently unsafe design and built it anyway.

When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Fukushima is a better example.

And even then, it took a string of extreme circumstances for Fukushima to happen, and compared to Chernobyl/TMI wasn't nearly as disastrous. A strong earthquake AND a tsunami AND people once again ignoring the safety instructions to shut it down early.

Chernobyl and Fukushima both demonstrate that humans fail over time, and that when they do, nuclear is certainly not clean.

Claiming it is safe and clean when it requires demonstrably superhuman effort to keep it both safe and clean is a weird argument IMO.

It is possible to build reactors that are physically incapable of melting down.

So to throw out the entire nuclear industry just because seems like a weird argument IMO.

Three Mile Island was a relatively safe reactor with a (partial) meltdown, which didn't cost that much, and is going to go back into production decades later. Fukushima, too, was a relatively safe reactor that caused a (partial) meltdown, but a massive financial burden.

It's debatable how much of that cost is truly necessary.

If this would've happened in the fossil fuel world, the cleanup would've been in the low billions instead of >$100B.

I would argue deep horizon was ecological a disaster several orders of magnitude worse than Fukushima, yet it cost several orders of magnitude less in cleanup.

It's almost as if we apply different scales to different energy sectors.

If it's that easy, why didn't Fukushima's plant get the meltdown-proof reactor?

The technology didn't exist yet.

The first one was built in 2021 and went into commercial operation in 2023: https://www.ans.org/news/article-6241/china-pebblebed-reacto...

It was conceptualized in the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

But there were a number of limiting factors that led to people building reactors that could meltdown, but were incredibly unlikely - see Fukushima - it didn't technically meltdown - even in a VERY bad scenario with a good bit of human error.

That's very recent and not tested enough outside of China, so personally I'm going to wait and see what X-Energy does, but it'd be great if it works out.

Meltdowns are also not the only risk. That Wikipedia article says the PBR concept was used in the AVR reactor and still resulted in a non-meltdown accident that contaminated the groundwater with radioactive substances. Again they couldn't attribute deaths to it, but the main article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor makes it look like an expensive mess with many accidents and protocol breaches. 1966 though; hopefully they've learned.

Pebble bed reactors are not safe, they fail for different reasons than other reactor designs but they can still fail.

They don't need fanatical attention to active cooling, but they do instead need fanatical control of the atmosphere near the reactor to prevent fires, for example.

The first prototype was built in Germany in the 60s. It was closed in 1988, had to be bailed out by the German government in 2003 and has of course been a continuous money drain on German taxpayers ever since.

Nice summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

From basic principles one might consider that anything that generates enormous amounts of power in a concentrated area can never be truly safe. All that energy is always a potential disaster.

Power plants that generate less power but are cheaper to make and can be distributed over a large area to ensure redundancy is a better strategy for both safety and reliability.

Earthquakes and tsunamis often go together, and operator mistakes always happen.

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