Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer?

That's an important question, but climate change is a far larger bill underwritten by the tax payer (and millions or billions more who can't afford taxes), so I don't think the question is a deal-breaker.

View on HN

Yes it surely is. We need to take everything into the equation on where to go.

- grey energy invested

- full lifetime costs from start of construction until fully recovered land

- inclusive recycling costs

- inclusive environmental impacts

This is one of the great challenges nuclear has to overcome on paper. Most of these costs are based on absurd standards that have consistently been proven wrong. Fukushima's cleanup would be orders of magnitude less if they didn't have to treat nearby soil as waste when its radioactive signature is far lower than the soil found at the ski slopes in CO, and even less than beach sand in Brazil. We treat low level radiation as dangerous, it really isn't. Nobody at Fukushima was exposed to high level radiation, and no one will die early due to the exposures they had. And if everybody moved back to the town and land that was evacuated, they could live their whole lives out and be fine! Why waste money on cleaning up things that are not dangerous, just lied about? Changing the standards to actually reflect science would eliminate so many of these "nebulous" costs and perceived indirect costs of nuclear power.

Why do you think those standards are absurd?

Low level radion is dangerous. http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-...

"However the latest study, (Zablotska et al, 2013) is very large (over 110,000 workers) and succeeded in finding statistically significant leukemia increases, even at the relatively low doses experienced by most of these adult workers (average dose = 92 mSv)."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com