Comment by bhousel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhousel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've done a ridiculous amount of reading the past few days, and I still believe that nuclear power is probably the best source of power that we have available to us.

But I didn't realize that keeping a reactor vessel (and fuel storage pools) cool after the reactor has been scrammed is such a challenge. I also didn't know that hydrogen explosions are a normal byproduct of cooling down a reactor core. Yes, I know that there are third generation reactor technologies available today that don't have all of these issues, and fourth generation technologies in development. I really do believe that we should be investing in these technologies to make nuclear power safer.

Unfortunately now we're stuck with a lot of aging reactors that are operating past their design life, and a public that is unwilling to bear the cost of the upgrades.

Japan is probably about the best prepared place that this incident could happen, and even they are having trouble keeping their scrammed reactors cool. And another earthquake could happen tomorrow, making the situation even more unmanageable.

I have far less confidence in almost any other country being able to handle a crisis like this. Nuclear power is clearly here to stay - Germany may eventually turn it's back on the technology, but there are dozens of third world countries running reactors now (or trying to).

Our focus really should be on making nuclear power as safe as possible, not on preventing it entirely. Perhaps the biggest problem with this current crisis is that it is the first nuclear incident where we can't just explain it away as 'human error'. Everything did work exactly as it was designed to, with the best trained people handling the crisis, and we still can't have complete confidence in the technology to cool itself off without releasing radiation into the environment.

"I really do believe that we should be investing in these technologies to make nuclear power safer."

This is my major beef with nuclear power. We could invest scads of dollars into expensive and fairly mature nuclear technology, or we can put that same amount of money into renewables which have tremendous room for improvement (that and money towards the advanced power grid that would make renewables also more efficient). I think it is a mistake to neglect the opportunity to shift focus.

Nuclear technology has a lot of room for improvement, too. There's some improvement that's relatively straightforward, like bringing capital costs down; China is working on this, with great success, as they can now construct CPR1000 plants cheaper than coal plants of the same size.

Then we have more exotic and longer-range options, like breeder reactors (both uranium and thorium), small modular reactors, Brayton-cycle gas turbines instead of steam turbines, and so on. Nuclear technology seems stagnant, but the reasons for this are political rather than technical, and that's changing now.

Edit: I forgot to mention clever applications that are possible without reactor modifications, like high-temperature hydrogen production, ammonia synthesis, desalination with waste heat, and so on.

You know, even if the opportunities for improvement were equal (and that is far from the case; solar power improvements look to be improving by an order of magnitude in the near term, for example), renewables still enjoy a massive safety advantage. So I say save the money and invest in something less fraught with hidden and/or potentially catastrophic costs.

Fact is, even in this still-not-disastrous scenario, there are people working frantically trying to contain the reactors, risking radiation exposure and harm from explosions. If one hundred windmills had fallen over, or 100 solar panels been cracked, there would be no urgency, and the hardware could be replaced easily when it was safe to do so.

"I've done a ridiculous amount of reading the past few days, and I still believe that nuclear power is probably the best source of power that we have available to us."

The best source of power that we have is to use energy more efficiently.

Efficiency only goes so far. There are billions of people in the world who use very little electricity, and soon they're all going to want huge TVs, electric stoves, washers and dryers, water heaters, air conditioners... for which enough power cannot be provided by simply using less of what we already produce. We will have to increase production.

Thats untrue. In his 2009 Ted Speech Bill Gates shows pretty easy why that idea is not realistic: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Energy efficiency only goes so far when we're pushing to power more transportation off of the electrical grid as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com