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Comment by Llamamoe | Hacker News Reader

Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.

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> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.

Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…

> Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…

It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.

I agree coal power plants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.

And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.

Ironically, nuclear is similar to solar already with old gen2 plants https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Wow, that's really fascinating to me! I am a bit cautious that the distribution of outcomes from nuclear may be skewed, so we've maybe avoided some of the "black swan" events so far simply because we don't have much nuclear deployed. I think the common example is "Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller"; you'll be totally fine until you totally aren't. However, I expect we'd also learn more and improve the safety as we deploy more, so I (somewhat naively) feel this is a good argument in favor of more nuclear.

Fukushima killled a couple of people? More died that day from car crashes.

You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:

> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.

> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...

So a couple of orders of magnitude below the number of deaths caused by things like car crashes in Japan in a single year.

Per UN no deaths are recorded nor will be recorded due to the low dose.

Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine

The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there

Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (which also caused meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident) caused 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, 2,553 missing.

So nuclear radiation impact from Fukushima is minimal in the total loss of life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

This is incorrect and naive.

Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...

To be fair, people will say many of those deaths are due to the evacuation rather than the meltdown, and they’ll say the evacuation was overblown — too _much_ regulation. However, I think you’re right that these can still be attributed to the meltdown, since the evacuations were undertaken to avoid the difficult-to-predict impact of the meltdown. In hindsight, we can see the evacuation wasn’t needed. But the reactor meltdown made an already-bad situation even more brittle, and in a disaster scenario i think we naturally prefer the evacuation, as opposed to the (low) chance of total destruction.

The deaths are due to the evacuation, and the evacuation is due to some combination of [poor judgement] and [reactor meltdown]. If we attribute all the deaths to poor judgement, then we’re asserting we could confidently predict a reactor meltdown would pose no danger. Some people might claim that, but it seems implausible to me.

> For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50”

In 2011 4,612 died in Japan from motor vehicles. And a similar number every year since.

In France after Fukushima nuclear plants that are 500 km inland had to be safeguarded against the risk of a tsunami.

They are in valleys and I think the risk assessment was heavily influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard which has been toned down quite a bit since... But IRSN (now ASNR) studies all kind of risks seriously...

Your 3 examples were all different regulatory regimes.

In Fukushima zero people died from radiation. If we regulated everything to a similar point (cars, planes, fossils), you'll start living like a monk. Fossils aren't just worse but orders of magnitude worse

That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).

In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.

Then why is the insurance for every single reactor public sector based?

Possibly because if there's a big accident, everybody in the region who gets cancer will sue, even if there's no detectable change to cancer rates.

Cancer is the smallest problem when bigger areas become inhabitable, and food inedible.

Yes and we should also shut down the large hadron collider because it might cause a black hole.

you do you

Unfortunately if other people act on irrational fears to the extend that it affects my energy prices I cannot just do me.

Nothing irrational here, already happened

Once, with a horrible reactor design that nobody builds anymore. It had two major problems:

1) It was inherently unstable because when the fuel temperature increased, it made the reaction speed up. Modern reactors do the opposite.

2) It didn't have a containment dome.

how many black holes have been created by particle accelerators in the past?

No,

The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.

Fukushima and Chornobyl happened directly for a lack of paranoia, regulation and lobbing. I hope that we don't commit the same mistake again.

Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it or tightening targets far beyond any useful range. Also, arguably the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have, an example of paranoia as opposed to effective regulation.

(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).

Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.

> the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have

This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".

People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.

The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.

To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.

But now you're using older designs to argue against not building newer ones.

The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.

If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.

Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.

No they didn't. Data was available to jot do rushed forced evacuation and for older people evacuation literally led to death. Even if Fukushima was as bad as Chernobyl (which would be a wild statement considering it has containment), those ppl would have died from age earlier vs cancer. It was absolutely idiotic decision in this regard.

There is a fair argument for the uncertainty at the time affecting that call. And I think we can agree that avoiding what happened at Fukushima is a core part of nuclear safety. My main point, though, is that people often think that nuclear safety people spend most of their time and effort on 'make the reactor not blow up', but actually the regulations and practical reality is that they spend most of that instead on avoiding trivial amounts of radiation exposure to their workers and the public, perhaps to the expense of effort that could be spent on 'not having a massive disaster' or (assuming you somehow fix the other bits of nuclear that are really expensive) 'not having a climate that's too hot'. I'm not arguing that there should be no regulation, I'm arguing that even from the point of view of safety outcomes more regulation is not intrinsically better.

The problem is that if we don't find an exit, climate change will come with its old friend, war. War for the resources. And we didn't even globally agree in a minimum ruleset.

We are being promised about how much safe will be this new plants in a normal context while we do that, this context is vanishing. New possibilities opened and now we must deal with the possibility of a nuclear plant versus 1000 drones that want to destroy it, or that will keep coming for months until destroying it. Each energy plant is now a target, guided by AI.

Too much people in power are plutonium grade unstable, and is just a question of time that at some moment new "smart robot soldiers" will be asked to do unstable things also

So... how can you convince us, and guarantee that this is not just planting bombs under our own bedrooms?

> Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.

What are they?

The physics of nuclear reactors push you towards making them big, and that means that there are correspondingly few of them, and they are all big civil engineering projects that are a little bit different from each other. This is a recipe for expensive and slow construction. The whole reason people are trying to make SMRs a thing is to try and get around this but it's not obvious there's an intersection between what the physics is happy to make efficient enough and a scale where you can actually get some learning rates and economies of 'scale' (which is more economies of unit volume than just in total how big something is).

Lot of health impact of Chernobyl disaster was also because of Soviet's obsession with saving face.

The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.

Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine

The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards

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