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Comment by The_rationalist | Hacker News Reader

This is bullshit. Nuclear is one of the most economical way to create energy, despite current overengineered safety specs. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a...

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...and the over-engineered solutions are over-engineering outdated, inherently unsafe designs.

So why is Hinckley Point C three times as expensive as wind farms?

There is at least one source claiming that the UK potentially has the worst track record in the world for installing cost-effective nuclear plants [0].

I'm not sure what they are doing wrong, but it probably isn't inherent to nuclear power.

[0] http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/sectors/report-claim...

> So why is Hinckley Point C three times as expensive as wind farms?

That's an Apples to Oranges comparison. Nuclear provides stable energy, wind provides volatile energy. You need to factor in the cost of buffering that volatility, which will likely be natural gas, in which case you should be fair and put a price on that CO2 as well.

> despite current overengineered safety specs

Yeah you're right, they should remove all redundancies, ridiculous factor of safeties, and over the top safety measures /s

Coal powerplants kill orders of magnitude more people and nobody cares. What makes safety of thousands of people threathened by nuclear powerplants worth so much more than the safety of millions of people threathened by the coal powerplants?

Because that's what we're doing in practice - assigning vastly different value for lives of people depending whether they live near a nuclear or a coal powerplants. And then complaining that nuclear power cannot compete on cost :)

Oh, BTW, renewables kill more people per MWh generated than nuclear, too :)

    Energy Source               Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)
    Coal – global average         100,000    (41% global electricity)
    Coal – China                         170,000   (75% China’s electricity)
    Coal – U.S.                               10,000    (32% U.S. electricity)
    Oil                                               36,000    (33% of energy, 8% of electricity)
    Natural Gas                                4,000    (22% global electricity)
    Biofuel/Biomass                    24,000    (21% global energy)
    Solar (rooftop)                              440    (< 1% global electricity)
    Wind                                                 150    (2% global electricity)
    Hydro – global average          1,400    (16% global electricity)
    Hydro – U.S.                                     5    (6% U.S. electricity)
    Nuclear – global average              90    (11%  global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)
    Nuclear – U.S.                                0.1    (19% U.S. electricity)

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

It's so frustrating how irrational people can be with good intentions... If you demanded same safety factors from other power sources as from nuclear - they couldn't compete with nuclear on cost. But people killed by radiation are much more important than people killed by falling from their roof while installing a solar panel :)

Okay, so your argument for not making nuclear safe is that coal kills a lot of people? Nice one, that's about as sound of an argument as killing somebody and then saying the military kills more people so what's the big deal.

Misleading analogy. You don't need to murder people, so the alternative to murdering someone is not murdering anyone.

You need baseload power anyway, so you have to choose some way to generate power. Nuclear kills the least number of people per MWh. So not choosing nuclear kills people and choosing nuclear saves people.

Even if you decided to return to the pre-industrial era and not generate power at all - that would kill even more people, so going nuclear is still better.

You need to look at alternative costs when comparing your options, you cannot just look at bad sides of one option and good sides of the other.

Humanity would be saved if political parties had your understanding. In other words, humanity would be saved if politics became a science.

Human cost factors as well as CO^2 are not priced in. If they were then nuclear might make more sense economically.

Overengineering is not a bad thing in real-world engineering, to be clear.

It is when you overengineer safety for 1 technology and ignore it for the alternatives, and then compare the costs ignoring the safety record.

    Energy Source               Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)
    Coal – global average         100,000    (41% global electricity)
    Coal – China                         170,000   (75% China’s electricity)
    Coal – U.S.                               10,000    (32% U.S. electricity)
    Oil                                               36,000    (33% of energy, 8% of electricity)
    Natural Gas                                4,000    (22% global electricity)
    Biofuel/Biomass                    24,000    (21% global energy)
    Solar (rooftop)                              440    (< 1% global electricity)
    Wind                                                 150    (2% global electricity)
    Hydro – global average          1,400    (16% global electricity)
    Hydro – U.S.                                     5    (6% U.S. electricity)
    Nuclear – global average              90    (11%  global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)
    Nuclear – U.S.                                0.1    (19% U.S. electricity)

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

If people wanted solar power to be as safe as nuclear powerplants it would have to be much more expansive than it is now. But apparently deaths are ok as long as it's not from nuclear powerplants :/

So you are going to use the official Soviet figures for deaths due to Chernobyl? That does not lend credibility to your argument. Also keep in mind, that accident could have been much, much worse and nearly was so. It could have rendered much of Europe uninhabitable for centuries.

What do you want to use instead?

If you like you can increase the Chernobyl number by 1,000x. The point still stands; nuclear is measurably, unambiguously and has proven to be safer than coal in every way that effects humans. Except evacuation risk. Which is still tiny vs any reasonable standard.

Plus the modern designs are different from the Soviet designs. They have improved. We have Computer-aided design now.

> It could have rendered much of Europe uninhabitable for centuries.

I've seen this bandied around a bit over the past few months - perhaps something to do with a certain TV show? - but despite trying, I've never found anything that substantiates the claim.

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