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Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

Policy will is one obstacle, but high costs are the main factor. Compared to new gas plants, new nuclear plants are extremely expensive. Look at the debacle in South Carolina and you can clearly see: new nuclear is not working (outside China). Old nuclear is still a huge portion of the carbon-free electric grid in parts of the USA and Europe, especially in other countries like France. I do believe that if carbon were taxed based on its negative effects, nuclear would get the much-needed economic re-conception that allows it to proliferate. It can and should be a climate solution, alongside batteries and renewables.

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I think one of major reasons why new nuclear is so hard is NIMBYism and irrational fear of "radiation". People discount known risks and exaggerate new ones, so risks from coal are ignored (even if statistically they are more serious) and risks from very rare nuclear issues may lead whole countries to just ban nuclear energetics altogether. Unfortunately, I don't see a good solution to it - with more environmentally-conscious countries swearing off nuclear, all living nuclear stations remain in less environmentally-conscious ones, which will increase the number of issues, which will reinforce the idea that nuclear energy is too dangerous.

Where does spent fuel go? Right next to the reactor, in pools, where it is stored indefinitely because there is no other place for it to go and the proposed mines to store it forever never get built and used.

But modern reactor designs could also use up 99% of fuel 'waste' until the waste products are either so unradioactive that they pose no danger or so quickly deteriorate that even a simple metal drum could contain it for the necessary 100 years if it was somewhere dry. But since we don't have/use modern reactor designs and are sitting on 60 year old designs we don't have anywhere to use that 'waste' fuel yet.

The risks are real (as we have seen) and I think they should be insured accordingly.

Real, but much lower than coal. Coal causes on the order of 1000 times more deaths per kilowatt of power produced than nuclear power. This is counting nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even if our nuclear track record were much worse, nuclear power would still be safer than coal.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

i think the major risk for nuclear energy isn't about human death but rather economical consequences of having an entire region destroyed for 40 thousands years.

This surprised me too, but apparently it's not as bad as that. Containment and cleanup is dangerous and expensive, but not impossible.

Chernobyl is maybe starting to be re-inhabited? http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Most_Chernobyl_towns_fi...

Here's ground zero at Hiroshima. Open 24/7, in the middle of the city. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hiroshima+Atomic+Bomb+Hypo...

EDIT: And see the nearby Peace Memorial Park. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hiroshima+Peace+Memorial+P...

Yep, I've been to Hiroshima myself and there was no concern about radiation at all... It's been washed away after 73 years

Of course, it's because both Hiroshima and Nagasaki got bit by first generation atomic bomb, and are right next to the sea. A salted nuclear explosion in a deep desert or inside a cave might make a seemingly-forever radioactive fallout. But that's not a concern in nuclear power I'd say.

The risks are real, but vastly overestimated, especially compared to (also real) risks of coal.

The risks also have Engineering and Process controls that //modern// designs use. The non-energy products from nuclear reactors are also extremely useful in medicine and other science fields.

Additionally a lot of the current "waste" from older reactors is exactly that, wasted energy that different designs can do a better job of using up and converting to more precisely filtered waste streams (separating out the stuff not useful from reactors, but still quite hot, from the stuff that'll decay so slowly it can be handled differently).

Though I do agree that the cost of cleanup (and also insurance against disasters / errors-omissions) should be assumed to be something paid for and collected as taxes.

There's almost no reason to think this is accurate. The problem is not that people vote down nuclear proposals or protest them so aggressively that they cause delays. There isn't enough money in it and very few funds are willing to invest in 50 year terms for power plants.

This is, in fact, 100% accurate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/11/nuclear-...

It's not that radiation can't ever be harmful, it's that the safeguards and regulations, when followed, make it way less harmful to either neighbors or the environment than coal, which is disgusting and incredibly unhealthy.

> one of major reasons why new nuclear is so hard is NIMBYism and irrational fear of "radiation"

Consider that nuke plants cost 50% more than coal fired plants and that argument quickly falls apart.

>and irrational fear of "radiation"

Radiation is very harmful, and very real. You don't get nuclear power without it. Nothing irrational about the fear of radiation.

It isn't irrational to fear radiation, but what is irrational is the level of fear, and also the fear in context with other dangers that we face that nuclear helps to solve.

I don't think that I'm out of line in suggesting that Global Climate Change is a much larger threat than even several Chernobyl incidents. The constant coverage, even to this day, about the Chernobyl incident has caused an availability heuristic in the collective psyche of man, and exacerbates the largest issues that we actually face.

The fear is a real and large issue that leads to a lack of reasonable discourse when evaluating pros and cons of nuclear against other sources in terms of funding advanced technologies and building current designs. But the fear is not necessarily what drives a cumbersome regulatory infrastructure that hampers new construction and the poor management by Westinghouse of the recent projects that led to massive cost overruns.

More radioactive material is emitted/released from coal plants than from nuclear plants, even when adjusted for the difference in power production between those two types of plants. It's not irrational to be wary about radiation, it is irrational to respond to that wariness by going all NIMBY on new nuclear plants.

I'm pro nuclear power, but this is the difference between drinking a glass of water and drowning with your head in a bucket. It's weird to apply averages to situations where nuclear disasters release massive amounts of radiation all at once.

No, it's not weird - that's exactly where the fallacy is. Getting millions of people slowly poisoned by pollution gets less weight than a dozen of people directly hurt by radiation. For example, Three Mile Island incidents had essentially zero casualties (yes, including study of cancer incidence increase, which did not find any significant increase) but everybody has heard about it (and it essentially killed new nuclear development in the US). Try to find out how much morbidity random coal plant is causing, and pretty much nobody knows or cares.

This[1] site claims over 7,500 deaths each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. power plants.

This[2] site claims Coal is responsible for over 800,000 premature deaths per year globally and many millions more serious and minor illnesses. In China alone, around 670,000 people die prematurely per year as a result of coal-related air pollution. The ‘Coal Kills’ report estimates that in India coal contributes to between 80,000 to 115,000 premature deaths annually. In the United States coal kills around 13,000 people annually, and 23,300 in Europe. The economic costs of the health impacts from coal combustion in Europe are valued at about US$70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.

1. http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/

2. https://endcoal.org/health/

Right. So we are comparing (in US) 13000 deaths annually and one major incident with no casualties - and in the coal case, it's "yeah we know it's not ideal, so we are slowly moving away, but really slow because you have to be realistic here" and in the nuclear case it's "OMG OMG OMG radiation no more new stations ever we have to forget the whole thing now, it's too unsafe did I say RADIATION?!".

Oh, right, sorry. Yeah, coming back to this a day later I see that were you wrote "pretty much nobody knows or cares" it was meant in the general sense of stop someone in the street and ask them about coal and their eyes will glaze over vs ask them about nuclear power and radiation-three-eyed-fish-godzilla and they're way more likely to have a seizure right there on the street.

That's true, but what I said factors in all of those historic nuclear disasters. Even with all of those, nuclear power still averages out at releasing less radiation per unit of power generated than coal.

Yeah, and perhaps radiation per unit of power isn't a good metric. Suddenly rendering huge areas uninhabitable is qualitatively different than slightly increasing cancer risk over a long period of time. Anything that conflates the first with the second isn't a very good analysis. It's like how more oil seeps out of the floor of the Atlantic each year than was released during the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Doesn't make it not a disaster.

>Suddenly rendering huge areas uninhabitable

Coal has the that risk as well, it could actually be worse because of the lax regulation. See fly ash spills for reference.

It might not be a good metric, but it's still overly generous to coal, because we're already rushing headlong towards huge areas of coastline being uninhabitable because they'll be underwater.

That's under normal operation, though. As Fukushima has shown us recently, sometimes they break.

...and still kills less people than coal kills during its normal operation.

Also (considering the amount of land that will be submerged underwater by 2100) probably makes less amount of land uninhabitable than coal does.

A lot of technology sometimes break. We still use it. We routinely travel in steel boxes whizzing around at breakneck speeds where any serious mechanical malfunction or error leads to a quick death or very painful long term injury - and millions get hurt this way every year - but we take this risk because the rewards are higher. But with radiation somehow no reward is worth the risk - its radiation, how could you dare to rationally calculate risk/rewards if people can die!!!!11one1oen That's what I call "irrational".

Stop repeating this, it's propaganda.

Which part, and do you have a source arguing otherwise?

The whole thing relies on emission of fly ash which contains a few ppm of thorium and uranium.

However a few things never mentioned.

1. Modern coal fired plants collect fly ash and bury it in landfill. So coal fired power plants since the 1970's don't emit fly ash or it's radio-isotopes.

2. As radio-isotopes go neither thorium or uranium are particularly bio-available or subject to bio-magnification.

3. Common dirt contains a few ppm of thorium and uranium. So contamination with fly ash doesn't change anything radio-logically.

I am not an expert on nuclear energy but my understanding is that some designs (like the Molten Salt reactor) are considerably safer. You still have the risk of local contamination but no one should really care if a tiny area on earth is contaminated as a worst case. But they shouldn't expose a whole region to radiations.

My understanding is that development costs are significant as changing the design requires a lot of engineering and testing. But perhaps it is time for an ambitious programme which scale would justify the investment given the age of the current plants in most major countries.

Sharks are also real. Yet for an average person, living in fear of sharks is completely irrational, especially if that person never goes where sharks could actually harm them. The fear is rational when the probability of harm is substantial, with most nuclear developments it is not, and less than the alternatives.

You don't get X-rays without radiation, either. For that matter, you don't get sunshine without radiation.

The problem with fear of radiation is that all radiation gets dumped under that label, without any nuance as to the amount or kind. A properly-operating nuclear plant will emit radiation, but in amounts that should be less than the background levels. A failing nuclear plant can emit catastrophic amounts. The two really need to be in two different categories in peoples' minds, because they are not similar at all.

>You don't get X-rays without radiation

Yeah which is why you don't get X-rays as part of a routine physical exam. They only use them when necessary, because they know that repeated exposure to radiation is bad.

Well, you still get them as part of a routine dental exam. You never did get them as part of a routine non-dental medical exam that I can recall. (And if I understand correctly, the dosage on a dental X-ray is much lower than it used to be, because the machines have improved a great deal.)

>Well, you still get them as part of a routine dental exam.

Yeah and they put a lead vest on you, and leave the fucking room. I actually have my dentist take X-rays less frequently than the "recommended" time frames (once a year is "recommended" I think) because of this.

I believe most don't actually use film anymore, they use some other capture device that operates electronically.

> Compared to new gas plants, new nuclear plants are extremely expensive.

This was an explicit policy of the enviros to stop nuclear construction back in the 80's and 90's. The NRC had a separate license to build then operate a plant. The enviros could not stop the licensing but tied up the license to operate in endless lawsuits and killed a number of projects. It was the licensing delays, not actual construction costs, that killed nuclear in the USA. Power utility CEOs stopped ordering plants when the path to licensed operation was blocked and could add 100's of millions of unknown costs in delays and lawsuits.

I think the NRC later revised the process to stream-line licensing and minimize the risks but no private utility is willing to go first. The enviros have threatened to sue the NRC if they use the new license process and tie that up in court. There had been talk of the TVA or some other govt utility going first but I have not heard of that lately.

That might make sense as long as "streamlining" doesn't also involve subsidies for things like catastrophe insurance. Would nuclear be cost-effective without subsidies?

I suspect much of the high costs are largely due to the policy factor. We should be able to build plants much more cheaply than 50 years ago.

> We should be able to build plants much more cheaply than 50 years ago.

Negatory- access to heavy industry is far more constrained in the US than it used to be. Nuclear plants require huge forges, which are now nearly unavailable in the US. The ones that still exist[1] are used for aircraft and military purposes. In short the increasing size, popularity and profit in large/high performance (fighter jet spars) aircraft has driven the price of the heaviest industry up much higher in the US.

It's a double whammy because heavy industry abroad is also kind of meh, and the complications of shipping cause month or year delays in construction that are incredibly expensive.

IMO the best way to combat this is with small modular reactors, but advanced nuclear is not that. Still, it is better in a number of ways.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program

How does the Navy acquire nuclear powerplants for their vessels? I assume maritime powerplants are much smaller.

Maritime power plants are tiny, but they typically require much more enriched uranium, which is frowned upon for civilian programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Diff...

Which is another policy decision - we could allow civilian plants with richer fuel.

The closer civilian fuel is to weapons grade, the easier it is to convert civilian fuel into bombs.

I like the current policy.

Why not have a branch of the military / DoE run plants for power production? Or at least provide security at the plants and clearances for working at them?

The current state of nuclear reactors is largely thanks to one man , Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. A quite interesting character who through his work for building up a nuclear powered fleet had to build up the entire supply chain of suppliers from uranium mining, transportation through reactor development,construction , operation and maintenance. Tasks where he had to fight as much for through internal navy policy and the congress as he had to for the technical and scientific challenges.

There's a mash of entities involved, including numerous contractors, the Department of Energy, etc. Bettis Atomic Power Labs for example has been run since 2008 by Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corp., under the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. Westinghouse previously ran it for 50 years until 1998.

https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/missions/powering-navy

There are plenty of presses that can make pressure vessels that small. That's why smaller civilian reactors are such a good idea!

Why don't we build more heavy forges? Seems like there's plenty of demand and limited competition.

Those huge forges are needed for conventional reactors, which operate with at least 90 atmospheres of pressure, and sometimes up to 150 or so.

They're not needed for fast reactors or molten salt reactors, which operate at atmospheric pressure. That's one of many reasons they're expected to be cheaper. The purpose of this law is to support R&D for those types of reactors.

Too be fair the article is discussing 2 separate bills. One is to support R&D for advanced reactors and one is to help subsidize current designs so some of this discussion is a little confusing from the different contexts.

I'm not sure subsidizing our current tech in the US will make a difference, but the amount of money in public and private sectors right now for advanced designs needs to be more collectively focused towards building demostration reactors such as the fast neutron reactor being proposed.

It is also difficult for American companies (despite having designed and built a majority of factors globally) to currently compete against state actors like China or the Russian government. That is another critical reason we should be developing leading technology because we don't necessarily have good reason to trust other countries to design and build these safely globally which could lead to more nuclear disasters. The best example is Chernobyl which was a wildly dangerous avoidable accident that should have never happened.

Actually plants are much more expensive now. I won't go into the different types of plants that are built today vs. the 1960s, but modern safety features and materials have a price.

Aren’t modern safety features a policy decision?

The old plants were already one of the safest forms of energy available - so by making nuclear safer it’s making us all less safe.

Nuclear power is supported by many climate scientists. I think technically it's a fantastic solution. However, I don't think it's a great socio-economic solution and the costs if we fail to deal with climate change may be too high.

Let me explain. Earlier this year a nuclear power plant in Finland had to reduce capacity because the sea waters got too warm.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-fortum-oy...

This is one example where climate change may make it difficult to operate nuclear power plants. Another is that the seas are rising and storms are getting slower which results in more flooding.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/floren...

These together make operating nuclear power plants difficult.

The last threat is that if we reach the tipping point, we will likely be facing a world where nation states start failing, including our own. Nuclear power plants take decades to decommission and the question is, who will maintain and decommission these things when humanity is faced with much more pressing concerns like maintaining organized human life.

The tipping point is a real concern among scientists. The IPCC recommends policy makers take the real possibility of a tipping point into account and I think questions like "How do we deal with nuclear power plants as nation-states fail" should be taken seriously.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/ch2s2-2...

Prominent members in our field like Alan Kay also wrote about tipping points in a report for the NSF Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems

https://www.nsf.gov/ere/ereweb/ac-ere/nsf6895_ere_report_090...

I'm not a pessimist but a realist. I think it's utopian to not address the concerns of climate scientists and really smart people in our field when making policy decisions, and this includes nuclear.

Reducing power due to high sea water temperature is something any power plan, regardless of fuel type, would have to do. The sea water isn't used to cool the reactor, it us used to condense the steam after leaving the turbine. If the cooling water is very warm adequate vacuum in the condenser is not possible to maintain. To alleviate this problem power is reduced to reduce the condensing load and maintain condenser vacuum. The linked article has factual misinformation in it which isn't unusual for technical pieces in newspapers.

Thanks for the thought provoking points!

It must be strange to plan for the end of civilisation as we know it when constructing one of the crowning achievements of mankind. Very sobering.

Yes but the point of this law is to support advanced nuclear R&D, and some of the GenIV designs look very economical; in particular, the simpler molten salt designs. They're really a completely different technology than conventional reactors.

One of the problems is that every time a carbon tax is proposed its a tax on consumers, rather than carbon producers. Any tax should come on those who are pulling the carbon out of the earth and selling it to others, not the end-user. To make matters worse, drillers and other carbon-related corporations are, in many cases, currently receiving tax subsidies (tax holidays on public-land drilling among other things). A good first step would be passing a law that banned subsidies for carbon-producing industries before we propose taxing the end-user, which has a disproportionate impact on those least able to afford it.

Its not just in China that you can build cost effective nuclear. There are other places as well. South Korea for example has shown itself very effective.

The problem in the US is that there is only so few builds, these large projects can only be effective if you 'mass' produce these buildings so people have done it before.

Actually it was looking good for building many new plants in 2007 but sadly it all collapsed because of cheap gas and the financial crisis.

China has scaled back its plans for nuclear plants, in part perhaps because even in China the cost and risk profile of nuclear vs renewables seems to demand a reexamination.

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

They have scaled it back somewhat but it is still a huge program and they are developing many types of reactors and also buy many types of reactors at the same time.

The difference is that china is totally happy with continuing to use massive amount of coal and other things for baseload power.

While it is true that they are investing massively in renewables, specially in the places it makes sense, they also are building nuclear plants and coal plants.

In the west we aim to reduce the number of coal plants, and that is very much harder with renewables.

Factor in CO2 costs, indeed.

Factor in also nuclear waste disposal costs. It is not fair to leave that to the tax payer.

Taking all that into account, nuclear may not be cost effective.

But as the article points out, a lot of that cost is regulation led, having to comply with ever changing regulations in the middle of a project is what creeps up costs, like changing specs in the middle of a weapon program. Give nuclear energy scale and stability of regulation and it may have a chance to be economical.

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