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Comment by natnat | Hacker News Reader

What a depressing outcome. This could have powered hundreds of thousands of households, cheaply, without adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.

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Not under LILCO management.[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/28/nyregion/the-end-of-lilco...

https://archive.is/P0JM

...or the evacuation of highly populated Long Island.

Three Mile Island was a * big * deal - if that had happened on Long Island, it would've been unimaginable disaster and permanent stain on NYC.

To many people, "three strikes you're out" - 3MI, Chernobyl and Fukushima was the final straw, reasoning that even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology, so "Homer Simpson" stands no chance.

Meanwhile, even the country's leading experts have no politically viable strategy for disposing of the waste, including the risk of derailments, terrorism, etc.

This isn't the world I want, but it's reality. IRL, people would rather die slowly from CO2 than live with the fear of 3MI/Chernobyl/Fukushima regardless of how rare they are (and they're not).

I'm optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues, but I can understand why voters go full NIMBY.

Funny coincidence, I just read this morning about how the risk of cancer from radiation is massively exaggerated[1]. I'm not convinced that the overall health risk from nuclear power is worse than the health risk from coal plants.

[1]https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-lie-about-radiation/

Coal? You mean that thing that the US has been rapidly phasing out for two decades and currently represents about 10% of US electricity generation?

Whereas wind and solar are around twice that, and skyrocketing?

This reactor was decommissioned in 1994. Since we're discussing the safety of 30-year-old reactors, it seems to me to be appropriate to compare to 30-year-old alternatives.

> You mean that thing that the US has been rapidly phasing out for two decades

Although the US Government is funding 2 new coal power plants.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-moderniz...

You're missing at least three other major events.

Sarov in 1997

Mayak Production Association in 2017 - nobody knows what happened to this day because Russia refuses to release any info about it but it was a huge release - over 100–300 TBq of ruthenium-106.

There's the Nyonoksa explosion in 2019.

Also, we might as well count Hanaford, because of massive amounts of radioactive material released starting in the 40's that continued until the plant was shut down.

Furthermore, the site is costing us $2BN a year and will until roughly 2040. $2BN would be enough to install around 2GW of solar good for roughly 3–6 TWh/year. 450,000–500,000 "homes" worth of additional capacity.

The aggravating factor is that in the event of an incident there’s simply not a feasible means of evacuation.

> three other major events

What is the measure of major? The INES scale? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_and_Radi...

> Sarov in 1997

One person died in the criticality accident in a weapons research lab.

> Mayak Production Association in 2017 ... it was a huge release

https://inis.iaea.org/records/ndb3s-s5507 "In some regions, over 100 mBq/m³ were measured as one-day means. Although resulting exposure was far below radiological concern"

> the Nyonoksa explosion

Nuclear powered cruise missile.

> we might as well count Hanaford

https://madihilly.substack.com/p/hanford-what-a-waste

The waste thing is weird. We're able to dispose of other highly toxic substances. One dangerous thing frequently mentioned about nuclear waste is that it remains dangerous for thousands of years. But many other dangerous substances remain dangerous forever. It seems like having a concrete span of time makes it scarier even though it's objectively better.

Have you ever dealt with radioactive substances?

"We're able to dispose of other highly toxic subst.ances."

With this statement I don't think so, so maybe educate yourself about a topic before making objective statements?

Chemical toxic substances can be processed into non toxic. They do not radiate through the walls, they do not make other materials also toxic by having it in the same room.

Also ... the amount of radioactiv waste matters, it is not just a few barrels we have to handle. Have you at least done a search on how much radioactive waste there is? Spoiler, it is a big number and for some reasons even the most pro nuclear people don't want it buried in their backyard.

There's a single mine (Giant Mine) in Canada that is contaminated with 200k+ tons of arsenic trioxide - which will literally remain poisonous forever since the poison is a stable element not an organic compound. The current plan is to try to keep it frozen because the dust is odorless, tasteless, water soluble, and located just outside of Yellowknife. That's the weight of more than half the amount of nuclear waste ever produced on the planet, in one relatively unremarkable industrial site.

Nuclear waste can be reprocessed to reduce its volume, and the more "spicy" it is, inherently the less long lived it is. We could probably store all the nuclear waste in the world in a geologic repository on the canadian shield somewhere for the cost of actually cleaning up that one old gold mine to make it non toxic.

Most of your post is accurate, but:

> Nuclear waste can be reprocessed to reduce its volume, and the more "spicy" it is, inherently the less long lived it is.

That is only true of fission-ready amounts - that is, near-fuel-level radioactive levels that are "hot" with decay particles. Unprompted radioactive decay is the most stable process known to us currently; we base all our best clocks on it.

99.9% of nuclear waste is essentially either "slightly radioactive", or "suspected to be slightly radioactive" - and it won't change for a looong time.

>Have you at least done a search on how much radioactive waste there is?

It's very little even for the US a country that at the behest of it's fossil fuel industry bans the reuse of it's nuclear fuel.

Also if I remember well only a small share of that waste (about 3%) is long lived and veryradioactive.

No, I haven't dealt with radioactive substances beyond what's found in ordinary households. But I'm not a complete ignoramus as you imply. Have you at least done a search on how much non-radioactive waste there is? Spoiler, it is a much, much, much bigger number. I think this is another case where the relatively small number on the nuclear side makes it scarier because it's something you can actually conceive of.

No, I don't want it in my back yard. I'm not arguing that it's harmless. But it's not that big of a deal, compared to mercury, arsenic, PFAS, etc., etc.

My go-to comparison is seafood. Look up the advice on how much to eat, and it'll be, have some, but don't have too much, especially for more vulnerable populations like children and pregnant women. Why? Because pollution of the seas is so prevalent that it's bad for you to eat a lot of it. And while nobody is out there saying this is wonderful and we should pollute more, the response to this is pretty weak, and people mostly shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. At the same time, we had people freaking the fuck out because the most sensitive instruments were able to detect a tiny bit of Fukushima contamination on the US west coast.

I don't mean to completely trivialize nuclear waste, but the concern about it is deeply out of proportion compared to how other waste is viewed. And yes, at least some of that discrepancy should be made up by being more concerned about other waste.

I apologize for my tone.

But I live in a former soviet state area with lots of chemical and radioactive waste (uran mining). Also there once was a radioactive cloud over my childhood playground. And some first and second hand stories from miners, doctors, .. and I engage with the topic since many years.

So yes, I was of the impression that you said radioactive waste is no big deal and I know that is not true.

" But it's not that big of a deal, compared to mercury, arsenic, PFAS, etc., etc."

But here let's agree to disagree. The point is anyway, do we want to produce more of it, knowing how faulty and corrupt humans can be?

Or rather reduce toxic substances where we can?

Less toxic stuff is always good. My point is just that the conversation around nuclear waste is weird and it seems like it's due to flaws in human perception, where "tens of thousands of years" feels worse than "forever," and "a 70ft cube" feels bigger than "makes an entire category of food unsafe to eat in large quantities." It's hard to have a good conversation about what kind of energy is best with this backwards thinking being so prevalent.

Miners underground get exposed to a lot dust particles and radioactive radon gas (even miners in non-uranium mines, like underground coal mining). There is a lot of uranium underground, which over time decays to radon gas.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9940829/

Coal dust and crystalline silica dust from underground mining causes long term damage to lungs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_lung_disease

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis

For uranium mining a lot more stricter radon monitoring and air ventilation has been implemented in recent decades.

Example of part uranium mining: https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/BfS/EN/2023/0915...

Current uranium mining: https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/orano-s-sites-a...

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/fact-sheets/radon-...

the thing that makes nuclear waste scary (the radiation) is also something extremely helpful for public health. You can wave a cheap, widely available scanner over your milk and immediately know if it is contaminated with radioactive iodine. Anyone can do it in their own home if they are concerned. It takes extremely expensive lab equipment to detect PFAS in the same milk, even at concentrations associated with major health impact. How do you know if that dust is contaminated with arsenic trioxide? It definitely isn't as easy as if it has radioactive cobalt.

I can be confident none of the food I ate today had nuclear waste in meaningful quantities, and it is verifiable non-destructively. If something is detected, it will have a characteristic signature that should be traceable within days back to the exact time and place where it was released. Can anyone say the same thing about the thousands of other industrial waste products with similar dose-dependent impacts on human health?

We could also significantly reduce the amount needed to be stored by just tech progress and commercialising breeder reactors

Maybe this is a dumb question but couldn't we ship the waste to another planet (of course once we have rockets capable of doing so but that's not far imo).

We could fly it into the sun, the problem is that until we have a space elevator the only way we have of getting it out of the atmosphere is via rockets and a rocket explosion with a nuclear waste payload would be very bad.

It would also be far cheaper to send that nuclear waste to Mars. It takes 55 times the energy to fly to the Sun than it does to go to Mars:

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/its-surprisingly-hard-to-g...

In addition, even sending it to Mars would be extremely expensive.

Sure but since we're talking about pie in the sky stuff requiring tech we don't yet have to begin with, putting it into the sun is a better permanent solution.

I don't think Elon is ever going to colonize Mars, but other people may someday.

Shower thought: Why send it to Mars when we can send it to uninhabitable Venus? Even gravity might work in our favor.

Gravity does not work in our favor. It takes energy to go towards the sun.

We can just bury it in a cement casket.

There isn't that much of it once it is solidified and it isn't that dangerous.

Potentially, but it is much, much safer to dispose of it here.

What's even better is to recycle it, because 95% of the original energy is still in the "waste". And when you do use all of it, the remainder remains radioactive for a much shorter period of time.

While I think you are accurately describing how people do/would react, the "big deal" you describe killed, injured, or caused adverse health effects for exactly zero people. It is possible that these are inevitable outcomes of human psychology, but a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power, even after all of the events you describe. A Chernobyl level accident every single year would have killed fewer people (by a few OOM) than particulate emissions from coal, and that's completely ignoring any climate effects.

Our societies risk tolerance with nuclear is literally orders of magnitude disconnected from how we treat risk from any other source, and as a result we are all poorer, less healthy, and have injured the environment to a dramatically greater degree relative to a pro-nuclear alternative timeline.

>a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power

Nuclear is not perfect, it has some drawbacks that totally justify not going "full steam ahead". Even if it is the cleanest energy possible and 100% safe guaranteed, it is also very concentrated (at least for now) that makes a plant shutting down for repairment/manteinance a problem, it is expensive to build, it takes forever to increase capacity, it creates dangerous residues, it is not very modulable.

> and have injured the environment to a dramatically greater degree relative to a pro-nuclear alternative timeline.

France is having a problem to install green energy, because their nuclear capacity is so big. The alternative pro-nuclear timeline might be using fossils as the modulable part forever by blocking solar and wind installations.

>and as a result we are all poorer

How? Nuclear is safe, but it is expensive. And it almost naturally lead to monopolies and oligopolies due to their size and complexity, allowing owners to have pricing power. In fact, the economics of building a nuclear plant don't work unless a state subsidizes (i.e. extra costs you won't find in the utility bill, but hidding in your taxes, ask the french) its build and insurance costs.

> it is expensive to build,

Is that because the building materials, engineering, and labor are super expensive or because of environmentalists throwing up legal and monetary roadblocks for decades? ("OK, if you can do a decade-long study on the impact of this plant AND make sure no Native American tribes declare a 100-mile area around your proposed site sacred AND you can design it in such a way that it emits less background radiation than a vacuum cleaner, maybe we can advance your proposal to the review stage, which will last a couple years. Too expensive, huh? Shame!")

> it creates dangerous residues

We have a perfectly good storage site (Yucca Mountain), but of course political and environmental opposition is what keeps it closed.

> France is having a problem to install green energy, because their nuclear capacity is so big. The alternative pro-nuclear timeline might be using fossils as the modulable part forever by blocking solar and wind installations.

I don't see how it reasonably follows that leaning heavily on nuclear power would cause France to decide that fossil fuels are somehow a better choice than renewables for that purpose. Pure speculation based on the common anti-nuclear belief that using nuclear power will retard the usage of renewables for some reason.

You're kind of highlighting what's stalled nuclear energy for decades: demanding absolute, total perfection in the face of reality, which is that nuclear is and has been the _best_ overall option for baseload power generation.

> Nuclear is not perfect, it has some drawbacks that totally justify not going "full steam ahead". Even if it is the cleanest energy possible and 100% safe guaranteed, it is also very concentrated (at least for now) that makes a plant shutting down for repairment/manteinance a problem, it is expensive to build, it takes forever to increase capacity, it creates dangerous residues, it is not very modulable.

I'd imagine a lot of that would be solved if we just kept building them.

Also, solar have zero ability to modulate upwards and need massive energy banks to cover weather/non solar peak.

Nuclear plants are what about 5% per minute ? So you only need 30 minutes worth of capacity vs hours and hours for anything green

> Also, solar have zero ability to modulate upwards

The solution is to overprovision and either disconnect or cover the surplus panels.

> and need massive energy banks to cover weather/non solar peak.

Power banks are useful in themselves (smoothing over demand peaks that would be hard to follow with any technology), and you can fill in with wind as well, as having multiple sources make times of reduced capacity less likely.

It stands to reason, that climate change costs should be burdened as taxes on technologies that where suggested as full nuclear replacement.

Three Mile Island was expensive, but nobody was injured. TMI had a big, strong containment vessel. Although they had a meltdown, the containment did its job and held.

Fukushima had too small a containment vessel. It was only slightly larger than the reactor pressure vessel, and it failed to contain the pressures of the meltdown.

Chernobyl had no containment at all.

Instead of all these "modular reactor" excuses for weaker containment vessels, such as NuScale, what's needed is more work on making very large pressure vessels cheaply. There's been progress in robotic welding of thick sections.

> optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues

The obstacles aren't technical. They never really have been. The obstacles are human: political, bureaucratic, and corporate. It's not about "can we build a safe nuclear plant?". It's about "do you trust these bozos to build a safe nuclear plant?", remembering that if said bozos screw up, the damage is basically irreversible.

That's the problem.

LILCO Shoreham, for example, famously couldn't build backup gernerators that worked, until they exploded and had to be completely redesigned and replaced. Does that inspire confidence in the rest of their plant?

Why would you evacuate Long Island?

In Fukushima, there were no radiation deaths, and the long term effects of radiation on the population will be undetectable. The deaths that did occur were due to the unnecessary evacuations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

So due to Radiophobia, not radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-is...

Personal note: the Fukushima accident turned me from a nuclear skeptic to a nuclear supporter. This happened quite a bit. At least for people who actually paid attention.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nu...

And remember that this was all due to a historically unprecedented earthquake and Tsunami that killed 18000 people and caused half a trillion dollars in damage (in 2025 dollars).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tōhoku_earthquake_and_tsu...

During that earthquake, more people died due to breaking dams than of radiation in that natural disaster. Are we dismantling our dams?

There is no 100% safe technology. Nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation we have, although solar and wind are so close that the differences don't really matter.

According to this NASA study, nuclear power saved 1,8 million lives up to 2011, with many millions more lives saved in the future.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html

On the flip-side, the most consequential negative health effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima came from turning off nuclear power plants and not building more.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

If the US and the rest of Europe follow Germany's example they could lose the chance to prevent over 200,000 deaths and 14,000 MtCO2 emissions by 2035.

https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/sites/science...

We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally

And we absolutly know how to deal with the waste, and it's not particularly difficult. In fact, we have multiple ways of disposing of the small amounts of waste. NPPs are very secure against terrorism.

The problem is the technology being dependent on a highly sophisticated industrial environment, which is not allowed to go through phases of economic decline and knowledge loss. Nobody has distrust into the engineering, everyone distrusts the social component. Humans do not make for great material when it comes to forming sturdy, reliable organizations.

> even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology,

Fukushima was a terrible design, where there is no passive failsafe - the reactor is still reacting after scram, and still getting hotter, but the heat no longer powers the cooling systems, which rely on external power that must be operating.

It's not Chernobyl bad, but, if you shouldn't need anything external to the reactor to keep it safe if disconnected from everything outside.

Nuclear is not zero-carbon nor is it "cheap."

It's the most expensive form of power generation. Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest and continue to get cheaper as volume goes up and all the tech around them matures. More and more storage methods are being developed and put into use.

Utilities and grid operators have lined up behind solar, wind, BSS, and HVDC transmission. That's what they are funding, installing, and buying power from. This has been a trend for a number of years now, around the world. That isn't some conspiracy or coincidence.

The only place this is still considered a debated topic, or nuclear is considered preferential, is social media and forums like HN.

> Nuclear is not zero-carbon nor is it "cheap."

1994.

> Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest [...]

1994

The thing is that educated people like HN users see very simple thing: 1 kW nuclear can be safely replaced with 20 kW well distributed renewables. While solar is dirt cheap wind isn’t. Especially offshore wind. And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.

> And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.

If that's the case and the advantages are so sharp and clearly defined, ...

Then why did Australia's latest CSIRO (National Science body) energy options for the nations future report* clearly state that nuclear was not an economically pragmatic choice compared to renewables?

Any chance "Nuclear V. {X}" is a qualified comparison with edge cases and nuance?

* https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2025/july/2024-25-genc...

I heard Australia is pretty sunny country. If that’s right they can go with solar and be alright. Sweden has less options for sure.

There's a bit of a difference between countries with {nuclear weapons, nuclear power reactors, and nuclear enrichment and breeding programs} and countries without any of that.

The CSIRO costings include the estimated ten year lead time to build expertise and start education in order to have a sound foundation for a nuclear power industry coupled with the long construction lead times anticipated for first build with no priors.

It's of interest that they also "cost" / anticipate a future of SMRs (small modular reactors from third parties) and conclude that'll take a while and will come with some costs.

All in parallel with Australia also kick starting support for nuclear powered submarines in partnership with both the US and the UK in a random never the same twice plan of a vague but alluring (to some) nature.

Because the nuclear issue in Australia is highly politicized and the report is deeply flawed?

https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/the-flaws-in-c...

https://theconversation.com/known-unknowns-controversy-over-...

Offshore wind is cheaper than coal in China now. Which also makes it much cheaper than nuclear in China.

Onshore wind is only very slightly more expensive than solar in China too, most projects overlapping in cost ranges, both roughly half the cost of coal.

This is reflected in their deployment numbers, which also feeds back into cost reductions.

> Offshore wind is cheaper than coal in China now. Which also makes it much cheaper than nuclear in China.

Citation needed.

China reportedly builds the CAP-1400, a localized and uprated version of the passively safe Westinghouse AP-1000, in 5 years and for around $3.5 billion.

Serial production of a known-good design with a savvy workforce rocks!

If those reported numbers are correct, which I cannot verify, they can profitably sell that electricy at 2 cents/kWh or below.

Having renewables distributed however is the big challenge. We've gone from a world where you have a small amount of large generators in static places to having many generators everywhere. If you don't have the capacity to transfer that energy to where it's being used it doesn't matter how cheap it is.

Except it does because the money saved on generation can be used to pay for extra transmission capacity and storage.

Solar and wind aren't 20% cheaper than nuclear power they're 20% of the price of nuclear power.

An already built nuclear plant is cheaper than building new solar and wind, which is what this article is about. It had already started operational tests at 5% capacity when it was shut down.

And nuclear power doesn't inherently emit CO2 (or equivalents), which is what is meant by zero-carbon in this context.

The low end of costs for new build solar and wind in the US is nearly identical to the average running costs of fully deprecated nuclear plants in the US according to Lazard.

Solar low end $38, Wind low end $37, Nuclear running cost average $34, Nuclear new build low end $141

Normally I'd say that renewables cost is likely to continue to fall over time, but with Trump in charge and putting his thumb on the scale that future is a little cloudy. These are all long term investments and risk causes higher prices.

Either way if a nation is looking to get out of nuclear today then it's not a clear cut case to say that they'd lose money by doing so.

Lazard makes recommendations for investors in different kinds of energy generation.

But the costs for electricity customers depend on the price of the whole electric mix, for US it's a mix of cheap renewables and cheap natural gas, for China it's a mix of cheap renewables and cheap coal, for EU it's a mix of cheap renewables and very expensive natural gas.

I agree, in US new nuclear power build is not competitive with the combination of cheap renewables (especially cheap solar) and cheap natural gas. The Nuclear Renaissance talked in US since about about 2001, was made insignificant in US by the franking gas revolution, starting in about 2008.

"According to the Department of Energy (DOE), by 2013 at least two million oil and gas wells in the US had been hydraulically fractured, and, of new wells being drilled, up to 95% are hydraulically fractured. The output from these wells makes up 43% of the oil production and 67% of the natural gas production in the United States."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_in_the_United_States

> according to Lazard. ... Nuclear new build low end

Here's what Lazard actually says:

“We do not, in this study, try to cost out new nuclear” (2:35)

“We think nuclear will be a big part of the future” (2:47)

“the costs of nuclear should go down “ (12:54)

“next five to 10 years the nuclear bar the one that's most likely to change the most in in terms of cost reduction” (14:06)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16HVh_Fx6LQ

And to claim this is the "low end" is a bald-faced lie.

They used a single nuclear power plant that was the most expensive nuclear power plant ever built in the US and one of the 3 most expensive in the world, ever. Of course, they note that this is the case, and that this is unrepresentative. Alas, all the anti-nuclear activists quoting Lazard are not this honest.

Yeah, with how much focus there is on the capital costs of nuclear power plants it's easy to forget they also have moderate operating costs. With the developments we're seeing, you're right that the LCOE of solar and wind is or will soon be lower than the operating costs of nuclear. That leaves the only remaining upsides of nuclear being production stability and energy diversity, and grid batteries are making the first less and less important every year. Not to mention that the capacity factor will be pushed down from the demand side worsening the costs even more since not all operating costs are proportional to the amount of energy generated.

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