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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

What I learned during the Fukushima disaster and ongoing clean up is that the human race literally has no plan or technology to deal with things when nuclear plants go bad.

I'm not anti-nuclear by any stretch, but it boggles my mind that we just stood around and said "well, shit. We don't have a backup plan, and we're stuck with this for a very, very long time".

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Same here! I argue constantly for wind and solar instead of nuclear not because nuclear is a bad technology, but we are bad as a species at managing it.

EDIT: It takes 10-20 years to get a nuclear generation plant built, starting at $1 billion USD, and I've never seen a wind turbine or solar panel need to be kept cool for days after having moderator rods dropped to prevent fuel rods from melting down and hydrogen gas destroying a pressured containment vessel.

Don't talk to me about thorium, MSRs, breeders, or whatever new fangled reactor is being pushed this year unless you're willing to guarantee with incredibly steep financial penalties that if you start building a reactor today, you will be done on time, and within your budget.

Otherwise, move out of the way while we build out solar, wind, and utility-scale battery storage, all proven to work with existing tech, needing no liability waivers from the government nor permanent spent fuel storage that doesn't (and won't ever) exist.

Manage it, we barely understand it! The Strong and Weak fields are Klingon Poetry next to the scripture that describes Gravity and Electromagnetism.

Big fan of this post

Agreed, the Sun is a massive power we also still don't fully understand, is mostly safe and has all the energy humans will ever need (IMO); we just need to strive at understanding it and how to harness it better.

The Sun, safe? 3000 people die each year from non-melanoma skin cancers. That is way more people than nuclear kills. It's damn near competitive with coal.

that's true, but we can't choose to turn the sun off.

You are doing the wrong maths here. The real sum is: About seven billion of people living because there is a sun, minus those 3000 that died because sun related problems.

The sun is pretty safe to us, yes. No comparison possible.

> is mostly safe

It isn't. Any power generation method that requires human staff will have deaths due to installation and operations accidents.

Solar is right up there in terms of number of deaths because installation is labour intensive compared to the energy output vs. nuclear.

Maybe that would change if we favoured larger plants over rooftop installations, but at the moment if we replaced all nuclear with solar, the number of deaths would increase significantly.

Nobody ever died refuelling the sun.

That's a nice soundbite, but irrelevant given that what matters is total deaths caused.

As far as I know, nobody reasonable prefers a nuclear kwh to a solar kwh. The important question is: should we prefer nuclear kwhs to coal or oil kwhs? The answer to that question is less clear. Coal, in particular, kills thousands of people every year.

People aren't just going to turn the lights and air conditioners off.

> The important question is: should we prefer nuclear kwhs to coal or oil kwhs? The answer to that question is less clear. Coal, in particular, kills thousands of people every year.

I find that answer to be simple. Of course we prefer nuclear over coal, with the caveat that its existing nuclear capacity that will be attritioned out as more renewables come online.

> People aren't just going to turn the lights and air conditioners off.

Agree. Use pricing to incentivize the expedited reduction in fossil fuel generation. Don't allow new coal fired plants to be brought online. Allow natural gas plants, but only for peaking and with strict emissions controls until utility scale battery installations are provisioned.

>Agree. Use pricing to incentivize the expedited reduction in fossil fuel generation.

a.k.a give everyone in the lower middle-class and below a big middle-finger

> a.k.a give everyone in the lower middle-class and below a big middle-finger

Having come from a family of modest means, I can appreciate the cost of power when budgeting on a limited income.

On the other hand, we don't allow "the poor" to drive without emissions controls on their cars because its cheaper and they're poor.

Raising the price of fossil fuel electrical generation and using that to directly subsidize renewable generation gets very close to a net zero increase in power costs, considering that wind and solar are already at grid parity in most states (and those costs will continue to decline).

If you want to be specific, we can significantly curb our fossil fuel subsidies at the federal level, and use those to directly subsidize renewables production (with any deficit made up by the general fund).

I don't think this middle finger is as big as the many others they're already getting. Maybe we can compensate by taking care of one of those other middle fingers?

Nothing unclear about that. Nuclear may be risky, but coal is downright poison. We need to get rid of all coal power plants as soon as possible, and if that means we need more nuclear plants while we transition to wind and solar, so be it.

I don't like nuclear. In fact, I hate it. Particularly uranium fission. I think it can never be truly safe, and I think it's ultimately unnecessary, as we should be able to get plenty of energy from green sources. But if nuclear will get us off coal and oil sooner, I'm all for it.

Despite how bad we are at dealing with it, more people die from solar (or pretty much any other alternative form of power generation) per unit of energy generated through e.g. installation and maintenance accidents.

You could grind up all the current radioactive waste into particles and pump it into the atmosphere on purpose, and nuclear would still likely cause less harm than most of the alternatives.

The problem with nuclear is fear and politics.

And most of the management "problems" with nuclear is down to exactly that too. We have plants that generate more waste than necessary because of cold war politics. We have storage "problems" because of irrational levels of fear of the risks.

Meanwhile we keep burning coal that continues to shower us in radioactivity and other nastiness sufficient to do as much damage (including deaths) as a Chernobyl sized incident every couple of year or more.

>Despite how bad we are at dealing with it, more people die from solar (or pretty much any other alternative form of power generation) per unit of energy generated through e.g. installation and maintenance accidents.

Citation please.

Also I'd like to know if the numbers are in any way significant compared to overall construction work accidents.

Here is a good summary of the stats from various sources. Death rate per terawatt/hr is 0.04 for Nuclear and 0.44 for Rooftop Solar. Basically Rooftop solar is a full order of magnitude more dangerous. Coal is WAY more nasty at a world average of around 100 deaths per terawatt/hr if you consider heating/cooking/electricity or 60 for just electricity. Those numbers for China are 170 & 90 respectively. If you include the worst hydro accident, Hydro is 1.4 deaths per terawatt/hr, or 0.10 if that is excluded.

Nuclear is the best game in town, even though the accidents are well publicized and the marketing for alternatives have done a really good job of making us scared of the nasty radioactivity, nuclear has the best safety culture and safety record.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

Rooftop solar. Not sure that the problem is the photovoltaics and not the rooftops.

Even crowded Germany manages to set up fields full of solar panels, so I guess the US can do just as well.

Leave rooftop solar installation to those who build new homes or repair the roof, so there's no additional risk from climbing around in high places.

Here [1] is Osha's page on solar safety issues. Here [2] (pdf) is a manual going over solar installation safety issues. You'll note they go well beyond falls, though you have a point that the page in question mentions roof installations.

But also keep in mind that solar also causes mining deaths (sand quarries are not without accidents just because they're not deep mines; but of course nuclear has related mining accidents too) as well as work with hazardous chemicals during production of the cells. There are also related fire risks. Not huge, but they are there, and given sufficiently deployed capacity it adds up.

Also keep in mind that solar is not nearly all photovoltaics. Here's an article about a lethal accident at a concentrating solar power plant in South Africa [3], though generally we will likely see fewer deaths per kwh for large plants. But even fields full of solar panels involves plenty of construction work and electrical work that can kill.

Basically, anything labour intensive, no matter what, will have a death toll. Even hiring a bunch of people to sit around and do nothing all day will have a death toll from accidents one way or another. As such, all else being equal (and of course they never are), the least labour intensive alternative will win out. Similarly, all else beiny equal, the larger / more electrical installations you add the more fires etc. you will have.

Since all things are not equal, it gets complicated, but it doesn't help to pretend that these alternatives does not have risks.

> Leave rooftop solar installation to those who build new homes or repair the roof, so there's no additional risk from climbing around in high places.

They're not immune to death just because they have experience, and there will always be additional risk because it means more time is spent climbing around in high places. There's been plenty of professional installers and construction workers falling to their deaths too. The pages I referenced are targeted at professionals, for a reason.

[1] https://www.osha.gov/dep/greenjobs/solar.html [2] http://www.coshnetwork.org/sites/default/files/OSEIA_Solar_S... [3] http://www.csp-world.com/news/20141104/001395/two-killed-and...

If one technology causes less deaths than another, why is it relevant how either compares with any third number?

Put another way, let's assume the energy death numbers are not at all "significant compared to overall construction work accidents". Is one death by rooftop installation accident less tragic than one death by radiation poisoning? Just because you can lump the first into the big pool of construction work deaths, while the radiation death sticks out by itself?

Death rates do not scale nor change over time equally. You have to account for possible worst case scenarios and their likelihood to happen.

True, but not a counter-argument for what I've said.

It isn't a counter but a correction, in that current deaths alone isn't a good number. It is all about future deaths, which current deaths only have some predicting power of.

>> You could grind up all the current radioactive waste into particles and pump it into the atmosphere on purpose, and nuclear would still likely cause less harm than most of the alternatives.

Maybe we should just do that then? It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than disposing of it safely. Because the problem is that safety is so massively expensive. And that is a huge factor in deciding if new stations can be built.

Not that when I wrote "less harm than most of the alternatives" I was referring to most of the alternative sources of power, not alternative storage methods.

It would still cause lots of deaths if you did that, it's just that other power generation methods causes lots of death anyway, so in comparison the storage problem for nuclear waste is not nearly as bad as it seems.

>It takes 10-20 years to get a nuclear generation plant built, starting at $1 billion USD

This is because of draconian regulations.

Aren't those regulations what makes nuclear power safe?

The main thing I learned from it is that even in modern, high tech countries withe tech to handle it safely, corporations will always cut corners.

It's not just the technology itself that's unsafe, it's the fact that it's handled by profit-driven corporations.

I think nuclear energy may be unavoidable as transitional tech until we can move entirely to cleaner technology, but it very clearly needs very tight regulation, and it's not the end goal. (At least uranium fission isn't; I keep hearing positive stuff about thorium. But even then, wind and solar already works; we need a lot more of that.)

It's really not very dangerous, even in the worst case, compared to the alternatives for baseline power.

Supposing we just ignored the radioactivity and did nothing, compare the number of deaths and environmental damage per kwh to what business as usual for any alternative would cause (coal mining? Oil drilling? Flooding land for hydro-electric? Mining the stuff that solar panels are made of?).

>mining the stuff that solar panels are made of

You mean silicon-oxide a.k.a. sand?

You think nobody dies mining sand?

Of all the things to mine, sand is probably the least dangerous. A gravel quarry has more hazards.

It very well might be one of the least dangerous things to mine, but that doesn't mean people aren't dying while mining sand. Sand and gravel is often extracted at the same quarries, and it appears they're generally treated as one category with respect to accident stats, so breaking that apart is tricky unfortunately.

Actually I was being a bit facetious as well, given that sand is one of the forms of mining where there are quite a few deaths due to organized crime involvement in illegal sand mines [1] [2] [3]. Exactly because it's easy to set up and not much capital lost if you get shut down.

[1] https://www.toovia.com/posts/2015/apr/05/0.13503.61179257842... [2] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/woman-hacke... [3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-17/indian-college-kids...

Environmentalists have been pushing very hard to block sand mining in MN and WI.

Hyman Rickover designed a very clever reactor for nuclear subs. But scaling it up 100x was naive at best. So was doing that with the graphite core design. Maybe there are inherently safe designs.

While even some designs that were thought to be inherently safe turned out to have engineering problems when put into practice, it is probably imperative that we learn how to use new-generation reactors, and build new, safer reactors and new reactor technologies that could solve our current nuclear waste problem. Nuclear needs to be an available tool for bridging humanity out of the oil age.

Hyman Rickover was a power-grabbing, egocentric fool who stymied miniaturization and development of alternatives that didn't enhance his influence.

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/19...

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