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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how an empirical analysis, such as this purports to be, could get around the fact that "conventional" power generation kills far more people than nuclear ever has.

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I don't understand how people who keep bringing up that conventional power generation kills more people than nuclear ever has (yet!) get around having their nose rubbed in the fact that we haven't experienced a worst case nuclear incident yet and that we keep getting lucky and scraping past worst cases -- at least according to what I read about all those old fuel rods stored at Fukushima. People keep ignoring safety precautions and we keep getting lucky, but luck and hope is not an acceptable strategy when you can irradiate large chunks of countries as a worst case scenario.

@SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.

I didn't dismiss that argument, I simply said it doesn't have an empirical grounding despite the language that was used in the parent comment that made it appear otherwise.

(I don't agree with that argument though; we're going to have to figure safe nuclear out, because we can't keep dumping pollutants into the atmosphere).

What's the worst case nuclear incident in a modern reactor?

Someone steals Nuclear material and releases it over a large area. Or a design failure can lead to something about 20 times the size Of Chernobil and hundreds of times as deadly. Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained.

PS: Granted those are both vary unlikely, but if you want to talk worst case it can get really bad especially when you add in say a large earthquake on an unknown fault or a meter impact etc.

> Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained

And yet, compared to any other design still in use, it had virtually no containment. It had a concrete and steel lid for primary containment, but it's secondary containment was a corrugated tin roof, instead of the typical reinforced concrete that can take a jet impact (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM). On top of that, they disabled the safety systems deliberately because the reactor would normally not have allowed itself to be placed in the extremely unstable state that caused the disaster.

The Chernobyl accident can be compared to taking a car, replacing the crumple zones and roll cage with tin foil, cutting the brake lines, and then driving full speed into a wall in order to test the safety systems. Without using a crash test dummy. And then wondering why someone got hurt.

When people can do something as monumentally stupid and poorly engineered as Chernobyl and still keep most of the radioactive material contained, that really says something.

Which just goes to show if a safety system can be disabled it might be disabled. Brick walls on the other hand are hard to turn off.

That's exactly right, which is why you don't replace your crumple zones and roll cages (primary and secondary containment) with tin foil. That way, even if your brake lines are cut, you still have something protecting you.

Modern reactors are designed so that they will be passively safe. Even if the safety systems get shut down and the reactor core turns into a radioactive puddle of metal, it shouldn't be able to lose containment.

If a meteor hits, you have bigger issues than nuclear fallout, like tsunamis, earthquakes, vaporization of water for an ocean strike that leads to weeks of rain, dust from a land strike cooling the planet, etc.

It's all a question of size. A 1Mt impact outside a city would probably not be that bad unless it hit a nuclear power plant or other nasty target. Probably a 1 in 1+ trillion risk but if all your asking is what's the worst that can happen it's on the list.

In deciding what to build next, you would compare nuclear with the other future options, which do not include coal.

No one argues that solar or wind will kill anyone.

And, the real problem with nuclear is that it isn't cost effective. If the free market was operating, no plants nuclear plants would be built in the US. It is only with govt. subsidies making 90% the up-front cost risk-free there has been even a nibble of interest from free market investors. And even that interest has petered out.

We no longer have a capitalistic free market in the USA, so its kind of irrelevant. Crony capitalism all the way. We just built a govt subsidized coal plant about 30 miles east (thankfully downwind) from my house. Wind plants don't run on wind but on govt subsidies. This kind of massive corruption makes engineering decisions kind of difficult, given that the bean counting numbers are pretty much imaginary.

We've never had a free market. Perhaps we should, but so far it's never existed.

But if the free market was truly operating would we be building any wind and solar plants? When it comes down to it aren't coal plants still the most economical from a market stand-point?

Surprisingly, that's not so right now, wind is more cost effective.

The price of a new coal plant in the US has gone up dramatically due to the increases in energy and metals.

>aren't coal plants still the most economical from a market stand-point

only in the current environment there most of the cost of coal energy (green house gas and other pollutants emissions, environment destruction where coal is mined, etc...) is socialized

In a free market I doubt we'd have nuclear either.

All energy sources other than fossil fuels are the product of huge government R&D investments and huge subsidies.

If you were charged with building a city from scratch (unlikely, I know) and had to power the thing, the question wouldn't be "nuclear or solar/wind?". It would still be "Is this near a good damming location? No? So... do I want nuclear, or do I want to burn something?"

For renewable base load, your options are basically hydro or burning something renewable like ((farmed) wood, trash, or methane from trash). Otherwise, with current technology, you are left with either burning atoms or burning something made of dinosaurs that you claw from the earth.

Solar and Wind might be able to do some limited base-load with massive efficient energy storage schemes, such as pumped-storage hydro, but really I don't see that scaling very far. PSH is about as good as it gets for that, and it is highly dependent on local geography.. Other schemes like storing molten sodium or compressed air don't really operate in the same class as PSH.

Solar and wind do kill people. You can't build a lot of large things without people dying.

No one in the US is building new coal because natural gas is super cheap these days. Market conditions can change, though.

Plus, China.

Two reasons why this is a red-herring argument:

1. False alternative. There are multiple alternatives to nuclear power, and I'm not aware that there are higher levels of death associated with most of them, coal being the notable exception.

2. The risk profile of nuclear power is not well-understood. Humans have hundreds to tens of thousands of years of experience with fire, water, and wind power. We've been toying with atoms for about three-quarters of a century, with commercial electrical generation for only about half of that. In that time large areas of land have been contaminated, and a number of serious plant or reactor accidents have occurred, several of them contaminating large areas of land until at least 2050 (64 years after the accident), possibly longer. The effects of the Fukishima disaster are still being revealed.

3. Few conventional power plants (natural gas plants with significant on-site storage being a potential exception) have catastrophic failure modes with more than a very small affected region. In terms of both longevity of effects and area, acute impacts are limited. By contrast, when things go wrong with a nuke, then tend to go very phenomenally wrong, and it can be unclear, even after a significant period of time, what the full consequences and extent of damage are.

>"conventional" power generation kills far more people than nuclear ever has.

and don't start on how many people cholesterol in burgers is killing

Do burgers kill a lot of vegans? Because coal kills a lot of people who aren't coal miners.

yes, they take society resources that could be spent otherwise on other issues, including whatever issues kill vegans

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Coal does the same thing, but also directly harms innocent bystanders. Burgers harm meat eaters directly and vegans indirectly. Coal harms both, both ways.

Do you even support coal? Your other comments on this thread suggest otherwise.

i just got tired of these trollish arguments like number of terrorist deaths vs. car deaths or nuclear deaths vs. coal - it is such a narrow and artificial dimension of comparing apples and oranges, and with that heavily depending on how numbers are calculated (for example, whether Iraq war deaths are added to the number of 9/11 victims or not we'll have either 3K or 103K victims)

The death toll from coal isn't a "trollish argument"; it's a simple fact. People ignore it, because coal kills people over a much longer period of time.

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