Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

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Nuclear plants in the USA are closing early specifically because electricity revenue dropped below what was expected (and needed) to pay for operation and maintenance costs. Revenue dropped specifically because fracked natural gas became very cheap and undercut the price in deregulated markets.

The idea that nuclear plants are net energy negative is very inaccurate. A 1 GWe plant runs for 60 years releases roughly 2000 PetaJoules of energy from atomic nuclei. Vastly less energy goes into building and operating the plant. They're massive, massive carbon-free energy sources.

But operation cost is high. There are lots of highly trained operators working 4 shifts. There are complex regulations, and safety upgrades after 9/11 and Fukushima.

As for insurance, if fossil plants had to pay insurance for the global warming they're causing, they'd be far far more uninsurable. Right now, fossil makes 85% of the world's energy. Would it be viable if it was liable for climate change? Not a chance. Also, nuclear energy kills fewer people per Watt*hour generated than almost all other energy sources. So why wouldn't it be insurable compared to the others? [3].

Nuclear subsidies in the USA are 1% of the total energy subsidies [1].

Helen Caldicott is not an authority on nuclear energy. She is the number 1 anti-nuclear activist in the world and has said countlessly many things that are wholly unsupported by even minor scrutiny [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2016_Energy-Related_Tax_P...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-n...

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

> There are lots of highly trained operators working 4 shifts. There are complex regulations, and safety upgrades after 9/11 and Fukushima.

Comment of mine about utility scale solar. Those plants don't require a lot of specialized skills to keep running. And they're fundamentally redundant. There aren't oopies that take them offline for 18 months.

They also don't work for base load unless backed by energy storage tech that doesn't really exist yet.

A lot of base load demand is driven by industrial customers balance sheet economics tho. They use power at night because it's subsidized by peek demand.

For instance my dad managed wind tunnels. They typically ran in the late evening at the whim of the power companies schedule. Because that's when PG&E had the extra capacity. Otherwise there was no technical reason they needed to run at night.

So if the pricing structure for electricity means power is very expensive at night, a lot of current customers will just switch. Which will reduce the demand. In this case economics 101 gives the right answer.

From what I understand, this is still scheduling in blocks of hours. One problem with solar & wind is that their variability happens on the scale of minutes. If you use them for base load, you'll be randomly losing or gaining large amounts of power output - much faster than industrial loads could switch. It would be unrealistic to try and plan around it, and supply/demand won't help here - even if you're selling sudden solar surplus at negative prices, there won't be enough buyers ready. For this to work, we need much more energy storage. Then there're seasonal variation; the industry your dad worked in probably wouldn't be happy if they were told they can't run wind tunnels in winter because there isn't enough power in the grid.

Yeah...well...there might be other reasons too: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-nucle...

"Carbon-free" is a standard industry lie. Uranium mining and processing produces massive amounts of carbon and pollutes the earth with tailings.

The nuclear industry externalizes their costs so that they don't ever hit the balance sheet.

What is "insurance for global warming?" That isn't even a thing. But government insurance for nuclear plants is very much a thing.

> "Carbon-free" is a standard industry lie.

Wrong. Here is an IPCC meta-analysis reference from a consensus of scientists showing that it's very low, 12 gCO2-eq/kWh, on par with wind. Solar is 40. Natural gas is 490 [1]. See Table A.III.2 | Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies.

Think about it. There is 2,000,000x more energy in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal or gas or oil or lithium. A single train car of uranium can power a nuclear reactor for a year, vs. a mile-long traincar per day for a equivalent power coal plant. Energy density is where nuclear shines. And shines it does! That's why it's exciting and useful for a carbon-free future. It's the only large-scale low-carbon energy source we have that runs 24/7 and can be installed in very many geographical locations. It also has a tiny overall footprint. This is why James Hansen and Jim Lovelock and Bill Gates are so excited about it.

Same data in graphical form too, if you prefer [2].

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/IpeULoF.png

You don't get to claim "carbon free" when the uranium cycle uses heavy equipment (dozers, loaders, trucks, trains, etc) that use fossil fuels. So please stop spreading that falsehood.

That's a ridiculous nitpick. GP just quoted you that nuclear has the carbon footprint comparable with wind power, and also most of that is completely incidental. All heavy equipment could be in principle electrified. It isn't because of various reasons, but then the same equipment is used for manufacturing and transporting everything in every other type of power source.

And, as far as deaths go, you can't get numbers for something you didn't count. No real accounting has ever been made of the number of people who got cancer and/or died from nuclear activities, starting with the activities at the Hanford Site on through atmospheric testing and today's nightmares like Fukushima.

The nuclear industry regularly uses this technique of "nothing to see here" to hide the fact that all nuclear plants leak and discharge radiation. All produce waste with an un-fixable lifecycle.

As far as your Wikipedia link, it was uploaded by an individual person. No references there.

Helen Caldicott is widely respected and far more of an authority on the subject that you or I or the journalist at the Guardian whom you cite.

Yeah that's not really true. Incredibly extensive accounting was done for instance on the total number of premature deaths from Chernobyl, and the UN sets the number right around 4000 from all causes -- including people who committed suicide because they thought they were 'contaminated'. The current radiation levels in Pripyat are around the same as being on an airplane [2, 3] and much, much, much lower than getting a CT scan. FWIW, they continued to operate reactors on the site until 2000.

This stuff is incredibly well studied. [4]

The total number of premature deaths from burning fossil fuel is 7.3 million every single year. [1]

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

[3] https://www.livescience.com/65450-weird-chernobyl-facts.html

[4] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/b...

> No real accounting has ever been made of the number of people who got cancer and/or died from nuclear activities,

First of all, nuclear weaponry waste from WW2 and the Cold War are wholly unrelated to activities of civilian nuclear power. While the material is similar in nature, you do not need to melt commercial waste down into radioactive vats of acid to extract pure weapons-grade plutonium in order to make low-carbon commercial nuclear energy. The civilian waste is solid ceramic and sits on parking lots at nuclear sites, where multiple decades of waste can fit nicely on a small area. Again, that's the glory of high energy density.

For Chernobyl and Fukushima, people absolutely count the effects. For example, UNSCEAR's entire mission is to do just that [1]. So far the counts are in, ~60 direct deaths from Chernobyl plus up to 4000 early cancer deaths on top of a few million that would have occurred naturally (small increase). Up to 1 death from Fukushima. As it turns out, more people die from coal plants operating normally every day than have died from nuclear accidents ever.

> As far as your Wikipedia link, it was uploaded by an individual person. No references there.

That'd be Figure 2 from the CBO in [2].

Helen Caldicott is the laughing stock of many respectable scientists. Don't make me dig up some of the ridiculous stuff she's said. She's a true clown.

[1] https://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/09-86753_Report_20...

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/re...

> Helen Caldicott is the laughing stock of many respectable scientists. Don't make me dig up some of the ridiculous stuff she's said. She's a true clown.

Oh please do, she truly is a quack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaptvhky8IQ

This persuaded me to look her up. Wow ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-n...

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