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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

I think many nuke advocates go much too far in the "nuclear power will solve all our problems!"

That said, the strongest arguments for nuclear power has always been as part of a balanced energy diet, not as the off the shelf answer to everything. So, how do we figure out where it's appropriate and where not?

Properly price carbon, and remove all distorting subsidies to all forms of energy, from fossil fuels to solar to wind to nuclear. Then let the market do what it does best: figure out the best way to allocate capital to produce goods.

Nuclear certainly needs proper regulation and safety requirements, but contemporary designs are much lower risk than the Fukushima reactor from the 1970s or the ancient design of Chernobyl: despite that, they're nearly impossible to build. I've heard it wouldn't even be allowed, in the current regulatory regime, to replace those old plants with new ones. Something's broken there.

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Markets can only work, if the prices for something tell the truth about the costs of something. You won't solve that with just cutting subsidies for all energy sources.

And carbon emissions are not everything. The idea to reduce them by trading certificates collapsed in the minute when the total amount of certificates were not lower than the amount of carbon emissions in the past or when it was not adjusted for the solar and wind power which were build over time. If you would cut the amount of certificates in half and auction them off, it might work. Otherwise the market will fail.

To me it seems that taxing unwanted effects is far better than subsidizing good techs. With the taxing scheme you are not endorsing a single technology but are attacking the root cause of your problem.

For example, would coal powered power plants be a problem if they didn't produce greenhouse gases?

Nuclear waste is the problem? Put tax on nuclear waste and raise it until the tech is either abandoned or the problem is solved.

Dear fellow free market enthusiast,

I fear it is not possible to determine a price for the storage of nuclear waste, because it needs to be taken care of so long. If one could estimate a price, I would doubt that any of todays companies companies is yet big enough to pay for it.

If you look at germany for instance: We are using nuclear power since decades, in almost 20 plants. Yet there is no solution for waste storage, so far. And it will be society paying for it, not the companies.

The US had a ban on reprocessing nuclear material and the industry is currently not commercially viable. However, other countries (France and Germany) do recycle their nuclear material. This can help reduce the amount of nuclear waste.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

That's nice and all, but "help reduce" doesn't really equal a "solution for waste storage", and does not change the fact that society, not the companies that built, run and extracted profits from these plants, will have to pay the costs (which we cannot even calculate as long as we don't even have a storage solution, which makes shrugging them off even more criminal -- yeah, maybe it won't be so bad, but we shrug it off because we'll be dead by then, not because we know, and that's rather weak at best, disgusting at worst).

In that wikipedia article you linked, Germany only occurs only once on that page, with a facility that has been out of operation since 1990 - WTF?

That’s kinda beside the point, you know. We already have all that waste. We already have to deal with it somehow. There is no avoiding it. So we might as well add to it.

Ah, the "in for a penny" school of thought.

A very sensible and reasonable approach to something that could affect the future of our entire species!

Don’t be so overdramatic. If we were to use modern technology we would likely no greatly increase the amount of waste, if not decrease it.

The costs are already there. The costs are mostly fixed. The marginal costs are minimal. It’s in for 99 pennies, in for a pound.

Why do some people on this site immediately jump all over the rep button over disagreements?

What's wrong with just having a good old argument?

You think I said something stupid, call me an idiot and tell me why.

I made a mistake about Germany (my info was from an old article) - sorry, about that. I did mentioned that it is not commercially viable (it requires government subsidies). Keep in mind that nuclear power is the backbone of France's energy needs (78.8%). I am sure they create a lot of waste - we should at least look at what they are doing to reduce their waste.

I agree that reprocessing is not a long term solution. However, we do have a lot of nuclear garbage and every little bit counts. Repossessing will slow the growth of nuclear garbage. Look at the amount that is recycled every year (paper, cans, bottles). Now imagine that in added to the current landfills.

Recycling/Reprocessing buys TIME (and so does electric cars, higher MPG, etc). The question is which will kill us first? Nuclear poisoning, climate change, or ourselves.

Coal plants also produce nuclear waste. It either goes with the smoke or is filtered. What do they do with the filters though?

The activity of those filters is so low, that burying it a couple of meters into the ground works well.

I don't know about other countries, but at least in Finland nuclear power companies pay the nation annually a deposit, which is used to take care of the spent fuel and to decommission the power plants. For now there is more than 1.5 billion euros in the fund.[0] Despite this the nuclear power plants there have been an excellent investment.

As money is not a problem for seeking solutions for the final disposal of the waste, Finland is advancing in finding the solution. By now they are planning to begin burying the waste in 2020. More information can be found at: http://www.posiva.fi/en

[0] http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/total_costs_and_fundi...

The idea that nuclear waste needs to be isolated for (pick your arbitrarily large number) of years is a misconception based on the assumption that everything else remains static.

It won't. In particular, we are in the middle (actually, maybe still near the beginning) of a biotechnology revolution every bit as profound as the electronic one that started with the transistor.

What we fear most from radiation is cancer. If it weren't for cancer, nuclear power would be a no-brainer. Its environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels because the volume of fuel mined and transported is so much less. This was shown in a book titled "The Health Risks of Not Going Nuclear", now sadly out of print.

And in fact, radiation is a very weak carcinogen. Frank Von Hippel, a Princeton professor who is no friend of nuclear power, has estimated the total cancer deaths resulting from Fukushima at somewhere near a thousand -- pretty bad for an industrial accident, but hardly the Black Death all over again.

Consider cancer treatment today compared to, say, Ben Franklin's time. Now imagine how much more detailed our understanding of cancer treatment, possibly even prevention, will become in another century or two.

If cancer becomes the kind of non-issue that smallpox is today, a disease which used to kill one child in three before the age of 5 in many parts of the world, our descendants will regard us with the same pitying disbelief that we apply to the self-flagellators of 1348 trying to propitiate an angry G*d.

Consider this slideshow:

   http://www.scribd.com/doc/54904454

entitled "A Rational Environmentalist's Guide to Nuclear Power".

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