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Comment by shaqbert | Hacker News Reader

This is not really about micro reactors, but about making the monolith power plant more like a microservice modular thing. So that you can potentially prevent decomissioning after 40 to 60 years and keep it operating much longer.

The downside of nuclear power still remains though: - still high upfront costs (maybe lower that monolith plants, but still freaking high) - poisonous and radioactive fission products that are hard to deal with - perverse incentives between economic efficiency and safety (did I mention that a couple of those babies [1] here would have prevented the fukushima disaster)

[1]: http://us.areva.com/EN/home-1495/new-challenges-proven-solut...

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To be fair, the byproducts are not something we're unaware of how to manage, we're just socially and politically unwilling to do it. Likewise, we know how to design and maintain much safer and more efficient reactors than anything we currently have running, but we lack the social and political will to make the change.

Besides, we like to pretend that burning coal isn't killing millions of us around the world, decade in, decade out. Focusing on the real human cost of when nuclear goes wrong, vs. when coal goes right makes it an easy choice.

Per kilowatt, nuclear energy is by far the safest. People fall off wind and solar installations all the time. Hydro fails catastrophically.

How can you say that without being cynic when it made big parts of Japan uninhabitable for centuries if not thousands of years?

Do you have quantitative information about that? I was always wondering how big is Fukushima's nuclear incident zone (in km^2) today. How much bigger is it compared to coal waste ponds / landfills, or hydroelectric dam which provides the same amount of power?

The problem with coal as well, is that the effect of its pollution is known to contribute to many deaths a year, especially in the elderly, people with compromised cardiopulmonary systems, and of course, the asthmatic. It's not like a nuclear disaster though, where someone comes in "radioactive" with coal. The best we can do is explain the statistical link.

When nuclear goes wrong, it's much less lethal, but so much more easy to recognize and very dramatic. Then again, we live in a world of people obsessed with shark attacks and winning the lottery, but who drive around in cars all day.

The exclusion zone is 20km, so the area will be around 600 km^2. Compare that to Lake Mead, which is 640 km^2 and runs a power station with half the installed capacity of Fukushima Daiichi.

A circle of 20km is 1200 km^2.

In this case, only half the circle was over land, but the evacuation zone also extended about 40km downwind, based on the amount of radiation, so the original exclusion zone was also about 1200 km^2.

Since then, part of the exclusion has been lifted: I think in this map, the green areas are places which are no longer restricted. The yellow areas can be visited with a permit, but you are not allowed to live in them or stay over night. The pink area is the "difficult to return" zone, I think the government treats this as a total loss and reimburses house owners for the full value of their property.

http://userdisk.webry.biglobe.ne.jp/001/285/53/N000/000/009/...

From counting pixels in the picture, it seems the yellow+pink area is 670 km^2, and the pink area is 330 km^2.

The failure of the Banqiao Dam in China in 1975 killed 171,000 people; 11,000,000 people lost their homes. This is many orders of magnitude higher than the casualties and damages directly attributed to the failure of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Furthermore, Fukushima Daiichi was an old design (more than a decade older than Chernobyl nº4 reactor) whereas modern designs are much more safe.

Fukushima Daiichi was also subjected to a historically significant natural disaster, it wasn't exactly an "everyday" or even "every century" event.

And the area around the reactor isn't uninhabitable, it's just illegal to live there at the moment.

Yes. What is funny is that some of my countrymen, who lived in Japan as expats, left the area because of radiation, and came back home, where the natural background radiation is higher than in the evacuated Fukushima area.

From what I can tell, Banqiao Dam was dual-purpose: it was intended for flood control as well as power generation. If China had sourced power from a nuclear plant, the dam would likely still have failed and killed hundreds of thousands of people, we just wouldn't be able to attribute those deaths to hydroelectric power.

Furthermore, modern nuclear power plants may be safe but they aren't exactly economically viable, which is why nuclear operators are so keen on extending the operation of existing plants of the same design as Fukushima Daiichi. Also, I'm pretty sure the official position on Fukushima was that it was safe, right up until it wasn't.

The fact remains that hydro power requires storing the potential energy of a very large amount of water. This is inherently a danger for the population living downstream. I certainly would prefer to live in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant rather than in the floodpath of a large dam.

Not to mention that if something goes wrong with a plant, you'll probably have time to evacuate. If a dam fails catastrophically, you'll probably first know when you feel the ground shaking, and that will be too late for you.

I don't know about Solar and wind being inherently less safe, in fact I'd disagree with that. The issue though, is that we still can't rely on them to power our entire grid. Hydro though, even without failure, seems to have a pretty undesirable environmental impact. Nuclear has to go catastrophically wrong for that to be the case.

> Hydro though, even without failure, seems to have a pretty undesirable environmental impact. Nuclear has to go catastrophically wrong for that to be the case.

Arguably, the Chernobyl disaster was an environmental boon by forcing humans out of a region and creating a de facto nature preserve.

For residential installs, solar systems go up on roofs, a few kilowatts at a time. The main risk is to the installers (they fall off). Little capacity per roof, every roof different, every fall a potential hazard = higher risk per kilowatt than you might think..

I suppose so, but it's a risk that can be managed with existing technology, and without spending insane amounts of money.

> The main risk is to the installers (they fall off).

Huge NO. The biggest risk is for firefighters if any part of the PV panel or the technology or the roof itself catch fire!

The DC side can easily pack in a couple hundred volts DC with double-digit amperages. And you can't turn it off unless the sun goes dark... not to mention that it's hard for firefighters to fight a fire if the whole roof is PV-panel-filled and something in the roof is burning.

People fall off wind and solar installations all the time.

But our society has always just shrugged its shoulders at this cost, so long as its paid by the working class. (In Texas, it's the lowest very rungs of the working class that get sent up radio towers.) It's different when the damage directly impacts homes, particularly those of white collar workers.

Sounds a bit like a chip on the shoulder when, in this context, you talk about radio towers, which aren't windmills or solar plants (although yes, accidents happen also there).

Also applies to coal miners. There are still a lot of fairly hazardous jobs in our society that our society isn't all that concerned about the workers being fully covered/compensated.

And people don't fall off nuclear installations as well? Death is tragic in all cases, but are death rates of workers in installations worse for solar installations? I can see it in wind installations, but are accidental rates in solar installations worse than those in the installation of nuclear plants?

Or radio masts, cell towers, smokestacks, etc. It's a known risk of working up on a tall structure, but it's also a risk that's understood, and managed with safety equipment and best practices. We don't seem to compose a dirge for every tree that gets trimmed around a utility pole either.

So what is holding back the safer/efficient reactors? Certification funding or proof of concept that leads to industry acceptance and federal funding?

Mostly politics. At every level, there is resistance, and motivation for politicians in congress (especially senators) to take a strong pro-coal, NIBMY to Nuclear stance. Any senator who accepts a disposal site, or new reactor site in their state is putting their career in the line. The kind of people who do that, tend not to become or stay senators.

The end result is that we're just sitting it out, because we've made it prohibitively expensive (in terms of licensing, and in terms of political capital).

Popular support. Legacy of Cold War era anti nuke propaganda and ridiculous portrayal of reactors and nuclear waste in fiction have lead to a skewed public perception on which politicians don't want to get burnt. Fukushima happened. Paperwork gets expensive. Active failsafe systems several layers deep complicate construction of plants. All of this loops back onto corporations and public institutions not wanting to invest into research.

No need for fancy chemical whatsis, all Fukushima needed to avoid disaster was a taller wall, or for the generators to be placed on the roof instead of in the basement.

I think nuclear is a technology that is beyond what the current human society can support - we really are not ready for the technology until we deal with uneducated masses, fundamentalism, techno-literacy etc

"The masses are too uneducated for nuclear" would be a lot more compelling an argument if those who are putatively "the educated" weren't quite against it too. It's not poor uneducated people filing lawsuits against every nuclear reactor every step of the way, and unless you mean "environmental fundamentalist" (which isn't out of the question) it's not any other sort of fundamentalist I can think of either.

Some people play the game of life cooperatively, by trying to help each other and make the world a better place for everyone. But there's also lot of those who play it competitively - who don't mind abusing the system and fucking everyone else over as long as they get what they want for themselves and those close to them. You can see plenty of the latter type among many educated people "filling lawsuits against every nuclear reactor every step of the way", along with many other things. The problem isn't with those on the other side of the issue who are honestly opposing it; the problem is with people on both sides who don't care about subject matter at all, but only about how to profit from it.

In my experience American society is organized around the belief that people can be left to pursue their own goals without everything falling apart. While there will still be corruption and selfishness, the government and culture work together to make sure this problem is, if not much less serious than in other kinds of societies, at least not more serious either.

It sounds like you are saying this isn't good enough, and that you would be against any powerful new technology until we can fix these problems. Until the fabled Eschaton/Utopia/perfect society arrives, basically.

I think this is a terribly misguided attitude. Cheap and plentiful power will save and help a lot more people than those hurt by accidents. Especially taking into account the amazing safety science and engineering that goes into this particular technology, and its amazing safety record apart from Chernobyl (you know, that graphite-moderated reactor with no concept of passive safety).

You misunderstood me; maybe my comment wasn't written clearly enough. Personally, I'm very much pro-nuclear for very much the reasons you articulated. I definitely don't think we need to stop good ideas because of social problems. I merely wanted to point them out - that nuclear energy (and many other things as well) is being blocked not because some people are wrong, but because some people don't care about it at all, but use it as a way to make a profit.

OK it seems like I had your point pretty much backwards, whoops.

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