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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but this concern should not be seen as an argument against building nuclear power plants - the same way no reasonable people considered Challenger as an argument against human space flight in general. Challenger was about learning the lessons, and doing better the next time. In case of nuclear power, it's also worth pondering the disastrous consequences of failing to switch away from fossil fuel power generation.

And as a side note: we have to somehow learn to deal with "inevitable human error and conflict of interest" in events where failure near population centers might be catastrophic. We either have to, or give up on a lot of progress. Quite a lot of interesting technologies and research areas involve managing higher and higher energies.

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Isn't the scale of potential damage far different between the two? A failed nuclear power plant can cause harm that will last longer than any human civilization has managed to last. The harm caused by launching Challenger is equal to something much smaller, such as a single day of car accidents.

There is also a false dichotomy presented here, because the alternative to nuclear is not limited to just fossil fuel. There are numerous forms of clean energy that doesn't have the failure possibility of nuclear.

> There is also a false dichotomy presented here, because the alternative to nuclear is not limited to just fossil fuel. There are numerous forms of clean energy that doesn't have the failure possibility of nuclear.

On the other hand, if you look at actual fatality statistics, you can make a fairly strong case for wind and solar being far deadlier than nuclear (hydro is pretty close though). Just because solar and wind often involve installing things high up and people fall.

First comment I've seen from you I don't agree with. Not at all comparable. A Challenger disaster causes very little collateral damage. (Except fiscal.) A lot of people's lack of objection hinges on, dare I say, on the attitude "let them launch their over sized fire crackers into the sky, I don't care as long as it doesn't fall down on my head".

Nuclear has the potential to create a whole no-go area around it. And I have very little faith in us humans as a wider group to learn to deal with conflict of interest. I believe mitigation is better. Widespread solar and other distributed tech like that might not hold the raw promise of nuclear but I hope it will give us a more robust energy system in the world, harder to disrupt either by malice, conflict of interest or by accident.

Personally I am in love with things like nuclear fission powered rockets (nuclear engines could be started from bases in high orbit to avoid spewing dirty stuff into the atmosphere), submarine derived nuclear mini electric generator stations towed to coastal cities, fusion research and all that. I hope humanity in the long run will make use of such things...

Fossil fuels also create a no-go area - the Earth. Solar and wind are simple, safe, and democratizing technologies, but they aren't without environmental impact either (you need a lot of land area), and they aren't yet ready to meet the world's energy needs. Nuclear is here now (was here 50 years ago in fact) and, absent an avoidable Chernobyl-type disaster, is the cleanest available energy source.

Worth noting that 17 Chernobyl-style RBMK reactors were built and have largely operated without incident. Lithuania was entirely powered by two such reactors until they were shut down in the 2000s, to be replaced by fossil fuels, on the grounds that they lack containment buildings. The EU ponied up nearly a billion Euros for the decommissioning, which I can't help but notice is almost as much as the new Chernobyl sarcophagus. Might it have been cheaper and better to just... build a containment building? Perhaps. But there would never have been the political will for that.

The fear of nuclear is doing more damage than nuclear ever did.

> The EU ponied up nearly a billion Euros for the decommissioning, which I can't help but notice is almost as much as the new Chernobyl sarcophagus.

It's less than 2/3rds (<1bn vs. 1.56bn) and the new sarcophagus is the (hopefully) last of a series of developments for confinement for a century (ie. there were costs before) while the decommissioning reduces these two reactors to mostly nothing, where the remaining troublesome radioactive material can be long-term stored together with any spent fuel (once there's a proper solution for that which we need, decommissioning or not).

To be sure I played a little fast and loose with "almost as much", but to be fair, 1) the decommissioning is unfinished, overbudget, and behind schedule, and 2) building a containment building around a reactor that hasn't already exploded is sure to be much, much cheaper.

I sort of agree with you, and it might appear like circular reasoning (although it's not really) but what you said just ties into the larger picture - people are not rational.

I say, play to our strengths. Massive roll out of solar now - keep nuclear on the table (it's good tech), but don't rely on it to solve a substantial part of short to medium term future energy need. I also think we should plan for the event of "Global Thermonuclear War". Solar deployments and other renewables will fare much better. You can count on any centralized structures being targeted. That means (large) nuclear power plants and large hydro installations.

Your stance is just pro fossil fuels though. Advocating for solar without an realistic solution for energy storage is just advocating for burning coal and gas for steady state power.

You’re accepting a real threat (global warming) to sustain an imaginary one (nuclear meltdowns of modern plants).

>You’re accepting a real threat (global warming) to sustain an imaginary one (nuclear meltdowns of modern plants).

This deserves a lot of upvotes

I am not trying to sustain anything. I may just have a much more pessimistic outlook on humanity. We can argue pro or con nuclear however much we wan't. A build out large enough to affect global warning, is just not going to happen. I see a combination of battery banks, pumped hydro, but most of all, a movement to a smart grid, where base load just isn't as important as before. Where consumers and producers of electricity can be turned on and off in a way unheard of today.

Lithuania much like France exchanged a lot of electricity with other countries. Nobody has gotten a country close to 100% nuclear becase it’s way to expensive.

Wind/Solar don’t fit the demand curve, but they crush Nuclear from a cost perspective. This is making Nuclear non viable as the gap ends up looking more random which is the worst place for Nuclear power.

Basicly, if wind/Solar is 50% cheaper than Nuclear having a 30% over supply of wind/Solar still costs less. Resulting in the need for zero power most of the time. In large power grids Hydro power can then fill most to all of these gaps. Nuclear is then competing with storage but it’s costs per kWh go up when it’s spending most of it’s time off.

> Nuclear has the potential to create a whole no-go area around it. And I have very little faith in us humans as a wider group to learn to deal with conflict of interest. I believe mitigation is better.

Nuclear is somewhat special because radiation feels like magic (invisible killer), but I'd like to point out that we already deal with lots of comparably dangerous large-scale endeavours like this. Consider hydroelectric plants and large chemical plants. Both create as much danger of a "no-go area" as nuclear plants. Few times, accidents did happen, and people died (in case of hydro, a lot of people), ground became uninhabitable. But mostly, we manage all of them well worldwide.

I don't see how nuclear power plants could create extra in-group conflict of interests beyond what we already know to handle both in nuclear, and other industrial processes. Humans suck, but not that hard.

> Widespread solar and other distributed tech like that might not hold the raw promise of nuclear but I hope it will give us a more robust energy system in the world, harder to disrupt either by malice, conflict of interest or by accident.

That's a good point and I'm sympathetic to it, but my worry now is twofold: long-term, I'm not convinced solar/wind will give us enough energy (note how progress of mankind is mostly tied to commanding more and more energy). I'd love to see fusion working in particular. Short-term, due to unsuitability of solar/wind for base load and current lack of battery technology that would compensate, I'm not convinced solar/wind will be enough.

(Also, I don't understand why it's always nuclear vs. solar/wind, instead of nuclear+solar/wind vs. coal&gas. Ecological activism has weird priorities.)

Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years.

source: from 2011 phys.org - Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs

The amount of available Uranium is disputed of course, but I could not find sources about significant new finds. Canada is still the largest provider.

So "long-term" isn't something nuclear power excels at. Yes, yes, Uranium is found in traces everywhere. But economically extracting it for energy production is a different matter. Demand is higher than production even today.

What really would help us would be a good energy sink to store power produced by water/wind/sun.

David MacKay disagrees; the book estimates[0] that we could double our uranium use and keep it up for 1000 years, and that's without touching the sea water deposits (~200x more than on land), and without using more efficient reactors, both of which together enabling scaling up nuclear by 2 orders of magnitude without running out of fuel this milennium.

The article from phys.org you quote doesn't show its math much; I'll try to track down the proceedings it references, as I'm genuinely surprised by the difference with what's in "Without Hot Air".

[0] - https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml

If we don't recycle the "waste" then 80 years is approximately correct. However if we recycle it there is enough for thousands of years.

You speak like you could quickly educate me on something that would take me quite a bit of time to learn.

Why is it that everyone says the area will be unusable for such a long time when the Nagasaki and Hiroshima areas are usable.

Is there a different half life for those nukes than the ones we have today ?

Well, one is from malfunctioning nuclear reactors, the other thing is a nuclear bomb. Quite different things.

Air burst bombs don't produce as much dangerous fallout as ground bursting ones. Ground bombs causes debris on the ground to be ground up to dust and mutated into radioactive isotopes. Nuclear power plants acquire over time nasty radioactive products in the spent fuel.

What I was alluding to above though, was that in the event of total war, what the enemy (regardless of sides) will target, is large centralized infrastructure. Such as power plants, including nuclear. So if we have to rebuild in the aftermath, the harder it gets, the more we relied beforehand on centralized power plants, like nuclear plants. Since these will have been bombed to craters.

In this scenario, I'm not even considering fallout - just how easily we could get any infrastructure up and running again.

Also depends on the design of the bomb - more recent designs tend to be fission-fusion-fission with most of the energy coming from the final fission stage driven by the neutrons from the secondary where most of the fusion happens. Some weapons (e.g. the US B53) came in "clean" and "dirty" versions depending on whether the cladding for the secondary was U238 (dirty) or something non-fissile (clean).

If you want to be really nasty you can use something like cobalt to blanket your secondary - cobalt having isotopes that are fairly long half lives but still rather potent.

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

Fortunately, nobody has built weapons like this.

> Fortunately, nobody has built weapons like this.

The cynic in me says yet.

Related, there's a concept of using radioisotopes as area denial weapons. You disperse an element with half-life in, say, weeks, over some area, and the enemy will not be able to move through it until the radiation subsides. Don't know if this was ever tested, I've read of it once as theoretical concept (along with a handy list of radioisotopes with half-life ranging from hours to months).

That sounds like the nuclear cruise missile they worked on that was powered by an unshielded reactor and could fly around for weeks spewing radioactive byproducts across the land.

As a species some of us are really fucked up.

SLAM - the "flying crowbar"

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

The sheer audacity and disregard for just about ... anything makes me laugh though I don't want to!

Near as much doesn't change the fact the half life is the same.

From what I was taught anyway.

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