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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Obviously it couldn’t melt through to China but AFAIK the way Czernobyl played out was that they had to somehow stop it from melting down to a flooded basement due to the fear of a long lasting series of hydrogen explosions that could have been truly disastrous for the region, if not Europe. Thus I think that the true worst case has so far never happened: A reactor without any of the modern safeguards (such as boronic sand pits) melting down to groundwater. Though, I guess subcritical core melts would not lead to hydrogen explosions, rather the creation of a lot of steam - it would be interesting to know how likely such a worst case would be and whether any of the world‘s reactors are configured to make this possible. Incredibly, 10 Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors are still in service.

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The sad part is that the whole anti-nuclear politics often prevent building new and way safer reactors, yet they also don't manage to force shutdown all the dangers ones.

Building new reactors costs a massive amount of money, more than pro-nuclear advocates realize or are willing to admit.

Shutting down reactors doesn't save much money; they've already been built. They also weren't built when renewable energy was developed into the very cost-effective solution it is today.

The worst thing about building new reactors using existing technology (which would really no better than the existing ones) is the waste of money compared to alternatives, AND you get all the risk on top of that. Delicious government-subsidized risk.

>Building new reactors costs a massive amount of money, more than pro-nuclear advocates realize or are willing to admit.

Those costs are entirely political. Fear mongers have made it extremely difficult to get a nuclear project to completion (see the whole NRC approval process). Solar panels would be super expensive as well if each one had to go through a giant 30 year planning process that NIMBYs could easily disrupt.

>They also weren't built when renewable energy was developed into the very cost-effective solution it is today.

Renewable isn’t cost effective. That’s a lie told to placate people. In reality, renewable currently has no feasible way to replace enough fossil fuels to matter for global warming. Energy storage solutions to bring it into candidacy for base load are so far off the mark that they aren’t even deployed.

Until we have a storage solution that doesn’t 10x+ the cost of renewables, which there is no promise of, we are signing up wholeheartedly for fossil fuels as our electricity backbone (and that doesn’t even address transportation energy where the picture is even more bleak).

Reminder for anyone thinking renewables are so cost effective, here is the energy source breakdown in the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/images/charts/consumptio...

Well it's certainly not feasible in the US with the current government in power.

> Those costs are entirely political.

This is simply not true. There has been tremendous ongoing incompetence and mismanagement in the reactor construction process in recent years. You may blame regulation -- that's the goto excuse for pronuclear people to avoid coming to unpleasant conclusions -- but the problem is that reactors are complicated things, and reactors with safety systems are even more complicated things (and reactors without regulation are complicated things that will almost certainly fail in unpleasant ways.) Building complicated things is hard, especially if all the institutional knowledge of how to do it, and the supply chains for the parts, have decayed away.

The huge advantage solar/wind have is they are simple and scalable. Installations consist of thousands, or even millions, of replicated parts. Experience builds up rapidly as the same damned thing is built and installed over and over. Nuclear doesn't have that.

> Experience builds up rapidly as the same damned thing is built and installed over and over. Nuclear doesn't have that.

Do you think this is the reason the US Navy doesn’t seem to have major problems getting nuclear power plants built and installed in submarines and aircraft carriers? It’s interesting how civilian power companies have had a bunch of high profile failures in this area but as far as I can tell new warships still seem to be able to get reactors fine.

What's the power output of those I imagine much smaller reactors, compared to ones meant to power entire regions and millions of consumers? What did they cost to build? What risks are there, compared to regular reactors?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Naval_...

The A1B being installed on the newest carriers is a 700 MW unit being installed in a pair, so 1.4 GW total. That number seems comparable to a lot of commercial power generation, e.g. Vermont Yankee is a 620 MW plant.

Yes. There is a book by Serhii Plonkhy called ‘Chrrnobyl’. The lasting impression I have is that every single stage of management, design and construction was broken. One chapter alone makes the whole great book worthwhile - describing the Russian presentation at the European conference in Switzerland after the disaster.

That energy breakdown pic doesn't say anything about the cost effectiveness of any of the sources, it's just a breakdown of current use. Nice try, pro-nuclear activist.

There is nothing sad about it.

It's about time. Especially in countries that do not posses any reasonable ways of discarding the produced waste as well as countries that have other capabilities to generate power.

This tech IS dangerous. There WAS fallout and you can still find 9000Bq wild animals in the middle of Europe. Not even mentioning the cancer rates all over East Europe here.

So please spare us this overhyped new rush for nuclear.

> new and way safer reactors

actually the problem was never the reactor itself. chernobyl never failed because the reactor was totally unsafe. It wasn't the newest, but humans could've prevented anything. fukushima wasn't the unsafest reactor as well. however it got hit by a wave it couldn't stand and after that humans missmanaged everything to safely shut it off.

do you see a common denominator? the problem is that money is always involved even when you can build these things for cheap, however money and humans will make reactors unsafe, not the design of the reactor. at some point somebody wants to save money and most often this money saving practice will then be extremly disastorous.

I'm not saying that nuclear is bad per se, of course the waste is bad, but is it worse than coal? I'm not sure. however as long as humans control or have control over these things they will always be unsafe in a certain way.

That's somewhat my point as well. There's no perfect world, there will be human errors and there will be natural disasters, but the point with newer reactor designs, is that they have design decisions in them that account for such issues, we have learned from the past, so that even a meltdown can be contained relatively well.

well depends, even the safest system can have a bug. especially the more complex a system gets. I mean look at all the software bugs. I wouldn't count on human technology on catastrophic failures and sadly most humans make errors in situations that we can't control.

Part of that problem is that water is actually a decent moderator and neutron reflector, so it helps a lot in keeping a chain reaction with lots of energy output going. Some of the energy also goes into splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then collect in some corner of the building until it reaches an concentration where it explodes rather easily. The explosion can then damage the building, ruining containment and scatter radioactive material around. Moral of the story? Keep your box of boronic sand nice and dry.

> Moral of the story? Keep your box of boronic sand nice and dry.