Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

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While the article does contain some interesting details, I fundamentally disapprove of it's anti-nuclear moralizing. It's the constant trickle of articles like this that maintain public paranoia about nuclear power. This matters, because nuclear power allows us to meet today's power demands with today's technology without releasing CO2 into the environment. Alternative power sources are still some ways from meeting humanities power needs on their own, but every megawatt of nuclear power produced keeps carbon in the ground and gives us extra time. Yes, many will point out that several alternative power generation sources could be scaled up to meet all of humanity's demands right now. However, it's not being done because it's economically and technically challenging and would take decades.

Meanwhile, fully operational nuclear power plants are being shut down. After the Fukushima incident, Germany and several other countries caved into irrational public fears and have begun to phase out nuclear power, replacing it with much more immediately dangerous power sources such as coal. (It should be noted that there are relatively few reactors in Germany that are likely to be hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.) That's carbon emission free power that's online right now, being destroyed out of irrational fear and replaced with what is possibly our dirtiest source of power. This is what is going on in the world, but the author has published yet another fear-mongering article anyways. It's downright despicable.

I don't like fear-mongering either. But nuclear only looks cheap because a lot of costs are externalised. Prudent calculation of costs of insurance against accidents and waste storage for centuries make it unprofitable. Improvements in reactor safety often leads to humans behaving more carelessly. It is a penny-wise, pound-foolish technology, especially in densely populated areas.

Many of the existing reactors were designed in the 50s and 60s, and are overly complex; they grew out of designs that were used for production of nuclear material for weapons, and safety features were bolted onto the side (this was an era when seatbelts weren't required on automobiles!). More recent designs are significantly and inherently safer and simply can't get into the same kind of trouble that the older designs can.

Yet we treat all reactors the same. Nuclear = bad for some reason.

I'd much rather be getting rid of coal plants (which are far worse for us than nuclear plants in terms of carbon emissions, pollution and actual emitted radiation) and have a national resolve to build safer, modern nuclear plants. But the fear-mongering and bad politics make this impossible.

Alternate sources of energy can be worse. For instance, when you look at the total cost of solar cells (lots of end-to-end industrial infrastructure involving toxic chemicals and energy-hungry manufacturing) and deaths from installers falling roofs, nuclear starts to look a lot better, even with plants we have today.

But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries.

>But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries.

Agreed. Much as routine, daily road deaths don't typically make the headlines, the guy down the road dying of lung cancer is hardly newsworthy. In my experience most people are totally unaware of the enormous number of deaths attributed to coal burning (estimated at ~1 million per year globally by the WHO in 2008 [0])

I don't know the quality of the research, but in the wake of the Fukishima accident, NASA researchers published the following report, which estimated the number of deaths avoided by the use of nuclear power as a substitute of fossil fuel based power generation:

"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning.

On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces." [1] [2]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coa...

[1] http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/ (summary)

[2] http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2013/2013_Kharecha_Hansen_1.p... (report)

The person you are replying to didn't say anything about Nuclear being bad. They made a point only about cost.

Consider that the cost of coal, solar, wind, hydro is under-estimated because we don't take into account the externalized environmental issues and excess deaths.

If we're going to try to account for externalized costs for nuclear, we need to do it for all the others too, and the results would not be pretty.

Huh? We have a pretty good understanding of the externalised costs for these. There is no mystery for storing waste and there is a very strong understanding of how easy it is to decommission. What externalities are you talking about?

Similarly, coal and other fossil fuels only look cheap because currently nobody is paying for the climate change they cause.

We have to choose between evils. I think nuclear power is better, because nuclear waste is relatively easy to contain until we figure out what to do with it (for example burn it up in breeder reactors), whereas the world's climate is a system we don't fully understand and meddling with it can cause irreparable damage.

The costs of coal are externalized, and, historically, higher than nuclear --- not in the abstract, but in deaths per year. But practically nobody is afraid of coal.

Aside from waste storage there's also the cost of dismantling old reactors. The Wikipedia article on nuclear decommissioning makes for some depressing reading:

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

The tl;dr being "with a few notable exceptions, it's just too damn expensive so we just ignore the problem"

The elephant's foot exists and writing an article about it isn't fear-mongering. Also writing an article about it does not require the author to write another one about the problems of coal. There are lots of articles about the problems of coal written all the time, there's even something being called "Obama's War on Coal", apparently, although the Wall Street Journal doubts it exists http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2014/11/28/why-the-war-on-coal-.... Sounds like an easy war though. The enemy is incapable of movement and burns readily. Incendiaries should work rather well. Those articles probably get pro-coal people grumbling in the comments that it is downright despicable how everyone focuses on coal.

Germany's and other countries' reactors are decades old designs that are fundamentally unsound, often enough built on tectonic faults or (in the case of Japan) at the sea. They are not secured against terrorist attacks or even the crash of a passenger jet. In the case of Germany's reactors, the containment is built to sustain the impact of a Phantom fighter, nothing more.

Reactor operators have constantly proven to be unworthy of trust, be it in Chernobyl, Harrisburg or Fukushima. Both their handling of operations as well as their handling of crisis never was up to standards - and every disaster was an exception to the rule.

Ridiculing the German outphasing of nukes with the argument that it is not a tsunami-prone country is both childish and irrational - irrational because it turns a blind eye to the risks that endanger nuclear power plants here - and the far more severe consequences of an accident. In Germany, the nukes are located straight in the most densely populated areas.

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