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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The key problem in my mind is the failure of project management in building reactors.

If they said it was going to take 2 years and 1 billion dollars and it stretched out to 3 years and $1.5 billion that is one thing.

Back in the 1970s it was more like 2 years stretches to 9 years and $15 billion and you could blame union workers who never did nuclear work before, the no nukes, high interest rates, etc.

The industry was supposed to come out with standardized reactor types like the EPR, and we have low interest rates, little active opposition to nuclear power, and projects like Olkiluoto-3 are still 9 years late.

Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule. The fear of Fukushima is just icing on that cake.

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Nuclear plants are also central points of failures, the plant itself needn't even fail, just the electrical distribution from it and you lose 1~6GW.

If they pan out, Small Modular Reactors (30MW~300MW range) seem like they could solve many of the issues with existing "large" nuke plants: the sealed core can be built on largeish assembly lines (similar to airliners in size) then floated, flown or driven to site, more units would mean more opportunities for automation and economies of scale instead the more pharaonic and necessarily more unique existing systems.

This would be further boosted by the inherent flexibility of SMR: they can be kept mobile (for emergencies, temporary setting, interim power, etc…) e.g. Rosatom's Akademik Lomonosov barge, which should have a total capacity of 300MWt/70MWe.

There's a great deal of engineering/economic appeal to factory made modular reactors, but the weak point is you'd need a cultural shift for people to not be freaked out about having lots of small reactors everywhere.

Cultural shifts are funcion of political will.

On the one hand yes, on the other hand you don't need prime estate locations (coastal and riverside) to cool down SMRs and they're way less noticeable than hectares of nuke plants, so to an extent your can put them everywhere yet not in anyone's backyard.

Also political shift is needed. Currently in Finland you need parliament permission for any new nuclear plant. If you are likely to get only one permission every 8 years, you have to go big to have any impact. Which seems to be the reason why Olkiluoto-3 got so big. Which seems to have contributed to the schedule fuck ups from day one.

For example they had the concrete heating too much while curing when casting the floor. This was because the floor slab was lot bigger than engineers we're used to cast. Yes, they should have taken that into account. But the point is it's harder to take all things into account when you are going to unexplored territory.

Absolutely, but don't discount the FUD. Much as people fear an airplane crash more than a car crash, the prospect of nuclear power is far more terrifying to most than just another coal plant. It's not enough that the coal plant is orders of magnitude more deadly, it's the perception. Even the image the NYT used will convey to many a disregard for life, pumping harmful radiation into our environment, rather than merely a large cooling tower releasing water vapor. Fear is a VERY big deal.

And once you get past fear and perception, there's NIMBYism.

I think the big fear of nuclear power is because we don't know how to handle catastrophic risks.

With coal power you will have a few dead mine workers. It's only mine workers that are affected and they have a definite risk in front of their eyes. You can rise the worker protection regulations for making this safer. You have the problem of air pollution through fine particles and sulfur. You can solve this with filters. The CO2 Problem isn't caused by one coal plant alone, so that problem is ignored.

With nuclear on the other hand you have a history of failures that were tried to be covered up, while being told that nuclear is 100% safe. The failures were unforeseen and led to a few catastrophes we weren't prepared to handle. We're more scared of the things we don't know than of the things we do know. And then the effects were very far reaching. The area around Chernobyl still isn't habitable today, more than half of the boars caught in Bavaria still aren't deemed safe for consumption because of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl. Fukushima and Chernobyl had a huge effect on the people living around them and both were in relatively low populated areas, so effects at a catastrophe in a nuclear power plant more near to a big city would be far greater.

I'm not saying that nuclear power is creating more damage than coal power, I just want to show why people fear nuclear power more.

Why is it that Fukushima isn't an argument _for_ nuclear power, considering the plant even closer to the epicenter came through with flying colors?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant

From the article :P

>Following the tsunami two to three hundred homeless residents of the town who lost their homes to the tsunami took refuge in the Onagawa nuclear plant's gymnasium, as the reactor complex was the only safe area in the vicinity to evacuate to, with the reactor operators supplying food and blankets to the needy.

> while being told that nuclear is 100% safe

When were you ever told that?

I've been hearing all my life how risky and scary nuclear power is.

I think the fundamental thing is that it is not a rational fear--nuclear is associated with bombs that flatten cities and radiation is, to many people, a simply scary unknown that they can't touch, smell, or see, but which might kill them. (Many of the people I've met who were against nuclear power didn't really emotionally understand radiation as something you get some of every day anyways--it's a bogeyman that gives you either cancer or superpowers.)

Smoke/smog, in comparison, is something you can see and can expect to interact with daily if you're in a city. Despite the fact that it's much more dangerous, people don't perceive it as such.

You can filter the output of coal plants and that does help a lot. In the US coal only kills 15 people per terawatt-hour compared to 150 in China. But a coal plant generating as much power as Fukushima did will still tend to kill about 20 people even with safer US style plants. If you add up all the coal power in the US that's about 20,000 deaths per year. More or less the same order of magnitude as the damage from Chernobyl. But of course that's normal and doesn't make the news.

> With coal power you will have a few dead mine workers.

Actually, most of the risk of coal power is soot in the air, causing respiratory problems. This has killed far more people than coal mining. But most people don't know that, as your comment illustrates. So part of the problem is that the risks of other power sources are not accurately represented.

(Also, btw, there is radioactivity in coal ash--more than in some types of nuclear waste.)

Do you have sources for radioactivity in coal ash? It's not that I believe you (I do!) I would just like info to share with others.

Unrelated - I'm sorry I downvoted you - stupid tiny hit box on mobile. I meant to upvote.

Here are three quick links, from 2007, 2015, and 1997, respectively:

>http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

>https://nicholas.duke.edu/news/radioactive-contaminants-foun...

>http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

There's this SciAm article, but the title is sensationalized and highly misleading; be sure to read the whole article, including the editor's note at the end.

> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

is this meant to be performance art where you demonstrate how easy it is to appear to know something but really know less than nothing? literally your entire post is devoid of facts and reason.

Let's put it this way, most coal plants release so much nuclear waste that if you could capture the uranium and thorium released you could generate more power with it than the coal it came from.

> Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule.

The lack of predictability comes from lawsuits, not technical problems in construction. Plants that were completed and ready to go online on schedule were stopped at the last minute by lawsuits, and in many cases were never started up.

Yes and no.

Definitely there have been places and times where people opposed to nuclear energy have filed lawsuits against nuclear power plant construction.

On the other hand many times the trouble is between the constructing company, the electric company and maybe regulators and it usually is in the form of a lawsuit because this is how you decide who owes who money in the end.

It is simply not possible. They know that, so they lie.

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