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Comment by klooney | Hacker News Reader

You can't. The problem with nuclear is that it needs to be properly maintained forever. If you get an irresponsible government or power company that cheaps out in 30 years, oopsies, you're going to irradiate the local area.

It's a lot like trusting your private data to a company. Sure, Google in 2007 is pretty great, but maybe you have some doubts about their integrity in 2025. Too late, they have what they have, forever.

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You can build systems to fail safe, so that lack of proper maintenance leads to the plant becoming safely inoperable, and only grossly-improper maintenance would cause a fallout incident.

Is this guaranteed to work? The Chernobyl disaster was caused by grossly-improper maintenance, so… :shrug:. No matter how many physical safety mechanisms you have, a determined mechanic could remove them – but at that point, it becomes deliberate sabotage, which is rare, detectable, and not unique to nuclear power plants. (You could probably kill more people by destroying the right dam in the middle of the night.)

> grossly-improper maintenance would cause a fallout incident.

At scale, in the long run, you will get grossly improper maintenance. I feel comfortable asserting that without feeling like a total cynic.

It's not just nuclear either, this is also a problem with dams.

... and with every other energy source. The only difference is that some spread the damage out enough to the point where people stop caring vs. (somewhat) larger but incredibly rare incidents that make headlines.

And that's before you take into account second order risks like people dying because they can't afford to heat properly during winter.

The damage from Fukushima has been so small that it wouldn't make it past regional headlines if it didn't involve the scary word "nuclear".

Solar panels fail pretty safe. I guess there's fire risk? Wind turbines are generally located in areas where rapid unscheduled disassembly would be harmless.

There's also electrocution risk with solar panels. Wind turbines, you can disconnect the generator: solar panels you can't.

Nuclear power plants don't need to be built at scale. I reckon we could get away with a few thousand in the entire world. And by "grossly improper", I mean things that are more expensive than correct maintenance, and make the power plant work less well: I can't rule out that anyone would want to do that, but you'd need a bona fide conspiracy (or some kind of purge of all available experts) to even attempt it.

> If you get an irresponsible government or power company that cheaps out in 30 years, oopsies, you're going to irradiate the local area.

How many times did this happen in 80 years? according to [1] not many times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...

And this is including very early technology and government (e.g. the Russian one) that I wouldn't trust with anything.

Sure, but this is HN, and we get a lot of The Case For Nuclear Power articles coming through, and startups building micro reactors that everyone thinks are very cool- me too, honestly- but I think that the case against gets given short shrift, or can turned into a strawman.

The consequences of a nuclear incident are very high, and can be more or less permanent for an area. It's a lot to ask for a technology to be absolutely resilient to mismanagement or even sabotage.

> The consequences of a nuclear incident are very high, and can be more or less permanent for an area. It's a lot to ask for a technology to be absolutely resilient to mismanagement or even sabotage.

Now apply this logic to many other power sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Water-cooled reactors are the ones that are vulnerable to meltdown, but they're not the only way to do Nuclear.

>If you get an irresponsible government or power company that cheaps out in 30 years

One solution is to house government officials and their families close-by so they're incentivized to never cheap out.

There should be international agreements for nuclear energy where neighboring countries can come and inspect each others power plants, or one org on the continent level.

You're describing the IAEA, founded in 1957 and in activity since: https://www.iaea.org/topics/verification-and-other-safeguard...

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