Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched

economist.com

396 pointsmpweiher463 comments

Some problems that Fukushima had: 1950s vintage design, active cooling system, backup power at sea level in a seismically active area. This kind of failure was not just predictable, it was predicted.

People travel to Japan from around the world to learn how to build earthquake resistant structures. Their nuclear engineers are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent.

In short, the problems were human not technical. People get complacent and greedy. They use every procedural tool they have to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement. I think that is at the core of most nuclear skepticism. Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Or will they neglect basic maintenance and upgrades?

> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Or will they neglect basic maintenance and upgrades?

Objectively, yes. There hasn't been a major nuclear reactor leak in the ~75 years the nuclear industry has existed in the USA. Even Three Mile Island, the worst disaster the US ever saw, was fully contained due to regulator-forced safeguards.

I'm not sure why you're downvoted.

After 50+ years of routine operation generating a nontrivial proportion of energy, we can look back at a decent amount of data. And what we see is that nuclear has been remarkably safe. Up here in Canada, coal mine disasters alone have killed far more people. When you start adding in air pollution and other such nasties, it's an enormously vast gulf in lethality.

A cynical take. Estimate how many people would have died from air pollution due to a coal power plant generating the same amount of electrical energy as the reactor at Chernobyl that blew up. Estimate how many died from Chernobyl. The reasonable estimates of the high end of the former, and low end of the latter, are overlapping. It's not entirely preposterous to suggest that replacing unscrubbed coal plants with shoddy reactors that simply explode after 20 years of operation could actually save lives in net.

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

We got super super lucky. And there's some debate about how bad the accident was with regards to NRCs monitoring.

Frankly, the whole plant was a disaster in the making. There was tons of warning lights and other systems but they were essentially useless because they constantly flashed and for poorly understood reasons.

3mile island is an excellent engineering study of what not to do with monitoring. We got very VERY lucky it was as small as it was.

Sure, all of which are problems which we've since fixed. But the core point is that there wasn't a major release of radiation like Chernobyl, and the reason why is because there were a regulator-imposed safeguard in place: the containment building.

There were a lot of things that went wrong in 3MI. Many of the lessons learned from that were incorporated into future designs. But one thing that went very right was that there was defense in depth, so that a N different things would have to go wrong to create a nuclear disaster. And in this case the number of failures was less than N. That's an engineering and regulatory success story.

"Wasn't a major release" meaning what?

A large amount of radioactive krypton gas was "vented", meaning it was released to spill down to the river and gas anyone who lived nearby. There was no tracking, so we don't know who or how many were exposed, or how much.

We can certainly ballpark estimate how much gas was vented--we knew the pressures and duration of the vent.

But this is a night-and-day comparison with, say, Chernobyl where the core was exposed and burning unmitigated for nine days. Many more orders of magnitude more release of radiation.

Everybody agrees Chernobyl was the worst. But that doesn't mean the others were picnics. A common thread is systematically discounting harm to people exposed. With such pervasive dishonesty throughout the industry, rigorous oversight has proved impossible, in practice.

The nuke navy is always cited as having no incidents, but that doesn't pass the smell test. Military failures are easily classified and buried.

There was no luck about it. It was a meltdown, and the pressure vessel was compromised. Secondary containment saved the day. Three Mile Island didn't become a Chernobyl not because of luck, but because the US didn't cheap out and skip building concrete condom over the reactor like the Soviets did.

Even if Chernobyl would have had a containment vessel, what would have been the best case scenario? I'm not an expert but the blast threw the multi-ton slab of steel and concrete lid into the night sky, surely the containment vessel would have had a giant hole in it, albeit saving some of the radiation from the atmosphere of course but not all of it. One reason I think Three Mile Island wasn't as bad is because nobody in the west was crazy enough to build an RBMK.

The whole point of the containment building is to contain a pressure vessel failure. American containment buildings are built to withstand impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner. That's why the containment vessels are reinforced concrete more than a meter thick.

If Chernobyl had secondary containment, the burning fuel rods would not have been exposed directly to atmosphere. Basically, if you have a fire emitting toxic soot it's a lot better to have this fire happen in a concrete dome versus totally exposed.

False, see my SSFL links elsewhere in the thread. Direct link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348051

> Their nuclear engineers are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent.

This.

All of the articles I've read about the disaster, all continually scapegoated the engineers as the reason for the failure, allowing the politicians and government to get a free pass. I'm not sure why this was the case considering Japanese engineers are some of the best, but the vilification of them never sat well with me because then it cast a negative cloud over every Japanese engineer unfairly.

TEPCO dropped the ball pretty massively too, although IMO it should be the government's responsibility to assume that power operators are going to and not allow them to.

It's not only that, but also nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line.

/edit: it's funny that here many are calling for tougher regulation, while in other post many who are pro nuclear complain about toomuch red Tape and top much security.

> run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line

as though government bureaucrats and congressmen don't like coming in under budget, future consequences be damned.

Comming in under budget seems like a rare problem with building nuclear plants.

While in operation, i think congressman and bureaucrats don't even know about the real costs.

> nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line

How does that explain the inept handling of Chernobyl?

Cutting corners was appreciated to meet arbitrary plans and quotas. The failure mode wasn't that different.

From what i know about this accident, the profit in this case was not to loose face for the higher ups running the plant.

Did “profit” just get redefined?

I know nobody likes the wiseass but

Profit = to gain an advantage from something: profit from sth/doing sth I profited enormously from working with her.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/prof...

Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.

> Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.

I know you're beeing sarcastic, but you just have to run it by the book. No need to be a saint.

What I'm saying is a proper organization takes advantage of peoples' base motives, instead of trying to defy them.

Free markets work so well for that reason.

I don't think this works in any savety relevant industry or there are not many proper organizations. Most regulations are a response to accidents.

Lawsuits and loss of reputation has halved the value of Boeing from the 737MAX mistakes.

Yet, no one personally responsible has suffered in the slightest.

I think one of the test pilots was brought up on charges for lying to the FAA. There may be others. I haven't followed that aspect that closely.

All who owned stock in the company had that cut in half. Lots more lost their bonuses. The CEO lost his job.

Golden parachute. Millionaires losing bonuses or equity never need to tighten their belts. Almost everybody who lost equity had no say.

The test pilot would be covering for a person actually responsible. Charges were probably to force fingering that person. But if that person wasn't charged, then it is all just business expense.

The losses are borne by pension funds.

The handling, as in, the reaction once the top officials actually understood the magnitude of the situation, was nothing short of spectacular.

No expence was spared cleaning up the mess, removing top layer of soil at a massive scale and enclosing the failed reactor in sarcofagus. This expence and reputation damage contributed considerably to bringing the end of USSR.

You've got to keep in mind how little was known about lethality and handling of radiation back then, compared to today. In fact good chunk of today's knowledge comes from Chernobyl.

While we learned a lot from Chernobly, the culture back then was already very fearful of nuclear.

I mean more like having tools and equipment to handle the situation that previously simply didn't exist.

From hazmat suits to robots, what was avaliable was extremely basic.

Personal profit, zealotry, career seeking, incompetence, design flaws, political agenda. This also includes the design phase. The RBMK reactor was an irresponsible design from the onset, even without the unknowns.

Graphite moderated reactors are prone to graphite cracking, as also evidenced by UK's AGR reactor fleet. Maybe pebble bed reactors are safer, because new pebbles are continuosly fed in and the spent ones are extracted for reprocessing. We'll se how the HTR-10 and the HTR-PM fare.

It's not a universal rule that all for profit companies will "cut corners." Airplanes are vastly safer than other forms of transportation. When the public found out that Boeing cut corners with their design of the 737 max, their share price dramatically plummeted, signaling that this was the wrong decision.

Also, cutting corners isn't necessarily worse for nuclear than other energy sources. More people die from wind turbine accidents than nuclear power.

Considering NASA recommends that nuclear power be "significantly expanded" despite its drawbacks, I think they are sound enough. The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when it comes to nuclear safety and storage protocols.

Also, the current status quo of "look we built all this renewable energy! just ignore all those gas peaking plants propping them up!" has to end.

Nuclear is green. Renewables + gas is not renewable, not sustainable and not green.

>The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when it comes to nuclear safety and storage protocols.

One single nuclear site is consuming 10% of the DoE's budget, and its still leaking. https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article228...

while the comment you're replying to didn't make a distinction, i'll make the distinction that that was a nuclear weapons production facility (run by the federal government). further, some of it was constructed during WWII for the manhattan project.

so... not great handling, true. strong evidence about how nuclear power plants will be operated in the future? no.

The NRC does not regulate defense nuclear facilities.

The Hanford site is a WWII era nuclear weapons facility and is not at all comparable with nuclear reactors for power generation.

Allow me to introduce you to the relatively unknown Santa Susanna Field Laboratory meltdown/explosion, due to extensive cover ups over decades:

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

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

Still not fully cleaned up.

The challenge is ownership at core, and we don't do well in having organizations not trend toward bureaucracy. As much as people hate bureaucracy, they love the order and predictability they produce.

It's probably why nuclear power has a ways to go, and it isn't the tech that needs upgrade; it's the people and the philosophy.

Yeah, it is always some human who fails but in the case of this tech, the failure becomes a catastrophe.

So we either take out the human factor or the technology out of the equation. Right now we can only do that with the tech.

No, even with the biggest failures, nuclear is still vastly more safe than the alternatives.

What is catastrophic is the news reporting, particularly in Germany.

For example, Fukushima was caused by a Tsunami.

Death Toll

   Tsunami:    15,899
   Fukushima:       1



  —> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!!!  <—

If you looked at the press coverage, you would think it was the other way around, that there was this Tsunami but it wasn't a big deal and there was the huge "catastrophe" of Fukushima. And many people do believe, fervently, that this is the case, that it was the other way around.

But it wasn't.

In fact, in Germany Fukushima is considered a "Super-GAU", with a GAU being the "Größter Anzunehmender Unfall", the largest potential accident. So "GAU" itself is already the superlative, but no, we have to rhetorically top the superlative, make it the superest largerest.

And that's for an accident that has caused a single death (a worker recently passed and it is considered likely it was an effect, before the death toll from the accident was zero).

The only thing that's a Super-GAU is the hyperbole of the hyperventilating press coverage.

How is it that you consider only the immediate deaths from the event and neither the follow up casualties, the evacuation measures and everything else which hangs on this? Do your really think your opposite is so stupid? And yes, I did look at the press coverage a lot since I was in Tokyo at that time. But I also looked at it later on and no, I did not think it was the other way around however I'm also not that blind to ignore all the other consequences this catastrophe had for the region and the people who lived/live there.

Because I also only considered the immediate deaths from the Tsunami. And actually, the 1 death is a follow-up casualty, it wasn't immediate. So if we really only count immediate deaths, that number is 0. Zero.

--> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!! <--

What the long-term death rate is going to be is very unclear.

Now to the evacuation.

"Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part"

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

The same happens to be true for Chernobyl, where the health-effects due to the evacuation far exceed the health-effects due to radiation. Whereas for example the wildlife in both exclusion zones is doing just swimmingly.

So:

Fear of nuclear is killing more people than nuclear.

This is generally true, because the use of nuclear energy has saved over a million people from premature death and will (or would) save millions more:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

But somewhat surprisingly, it is also true when nuclear goes wrong, when there are accidents. Check out the decennial Chernobyl reports by the WHO, they are absolutely fascinating. Spoiler alert: with each report, so every ten years, they massively reduced their estimate of how many people would die as a result, usually by an order of magnitude.

Now that doesn't mean that there should not have been any evacuation, but it in both cases it was both to widespread and way too long.

You completely missed the message here. I wonder if it was intentional. Let me repeat it again:

It's not only deaths if it comes to say what a "safe" technology is. A technology to leads to whole regions being evacuated including every economical, social and environmental fallouts resulting from that, IS NOT SAFE.

Hmm...you appear to have missed: "caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part"

What leads to whole regions being evacuated is the exact irrational fear and panic-mongering you promulgate.

Once again: irrational fear of nuclear kills way more people than nuclear.

I did not miss that.

I just don't consider some nuclear fanbois after the fact one sentence opinion a viable argument. Especially not if it's main aim is to derail and/or cloud the actual facts.

You missed the fact that "caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part" was a direct quote from the respective Wikipedia page, backed up by the data (see the WHO reports on Chernobyl etc.).

Of course, you believe that all data that contradicts your irrational beliefs must be just opinions by "fanbois", because to actually check up on the facts would mean risk shattering your strongly held but weakly backed belief system.

Neither you nor this paper considers the fact, that if the disaster would have become worse, people would complain: why didn't you evacuate. Saying AFTER THE FACT that it was unnecessary is completely useless and ignorant. It's not like it won't happen again with the next disaster.

This is like saying that the airbag or the safety belts in my last car were unnecessary since I didn't have an accident which would justify them.

That's not a "fact". That's a counterfactual which you hypothesise, without any reason or evidence whatsoever, will have horrible consequences. And an analogy that doesn't work. As we say in German: "Nicht alles was hinkt ist auch ein Vergleich".

Your seatbelt analogy, apart from being pulled out of thin air, has absolutely nothing to do with what happened. The seatbelts are preventative measures before an accident happens. These were measures after the accident happened that were way over the top. A better analogy is a doctor seeing a bruise on an arm and deciding to amputate the arm, just to be safe. And then amputating both legs as well, because "better safe than sorry".

The "cure" is far worse than the disease.

With Chernobyl there was the excuse that they didn't know better, they only found out in the decades after the accident that their initial estimates for the harm caused by the radiation were way too high, as in several orders of magnitude off. I really recommend reading the WHO reports[1], they were an actual eye opener for me, because they contradicted what I "knew" to be the case.

Again, they were not off in terms of the scale of the accident, they were off on the effects of an accident of a particular scale. Not like your seat-belt analogy at all.

Now a good question to ask is why they were off by so much. It looks like the Linear Non Threshold Model of radiation damage is simply wrong[2]. As far as I can tell, this model was never actually validated by data, it was just assumed to be the case, and if you look at the "pro" voices, they also provide no evidence for, just that they think the lack of evidence means it should be viewed as true, which is...odd.

With Fukushima, there is less of an excuse, as they could and should have known. See also J-value assessment of relocation measures following the nuclear power plant accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi [3]. Money quote:

"•Relocation was unjustified for 75% of the 335,000 people relocated after Chernobyl.

• Relocation was unjustified for the 160,000 people relocated after Fukushima."

Mandatory evacuation of residents during the Fukushima nuclear disaster: an ethical analysis[4]:

"We examine the measures from an ethical perspective and argue that if the government's aim was to avoid health risks posed by radiation exposure, then ordering compulsory expulsion of all residents cannot be ethically justified. We assert that the government may not have ordered the mandatory evacuation solely based on health risks, but rather to maintain public order."

[1] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9241594179

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Cont...

[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017...

[4] https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/34/3/348/1557028

> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades?

if US institutions can't manage nuclear power, what else can't they manage?

Capitol security?

Of course nuclear plants would not be safe if “the president” ordered citizens to attack them.

That is an interesting idea. What would happen in a civil war? Would the engineers stay at their post safely shutting down the reactors?

Nuclear energy demands a level of civilization that we simply cannot guarantee.

- a global pandemic

- a war that lasts longer than 1 month

- media legitimacy

- global financial system

I think that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is world-leading. They identify problems proactively and require operators to phase in safety upgrades even for plants built 50 years ago. I live near an operating nuclear reactor and I prefer it over any form of fossil plant. Power reactors operating in the United States are reliable, safe, and have extremely low life cycle emissions of greenhouse gases.

Unfortunately, one of the most common refrains from nuclear boosters is that nuclear power is over-regulated. I don't want American nuclear plants held to the same lax safety/environmental standards as fossil plants. If we used taxes to internalize the costs of pollution from fossil-fired plants, low cost natural gas plants probably wouldn't be pushing reactors into early retirement. But leveling the playing field by slashing nuclear safety/inspection down to the low standard expected of fossil plants is the wrong way to go.

I am open to specific proposals for reducing regulations in the nuclear sector if there are regulations that impose additional process overhead, don't actually serve a purpose, and survive only from inertia. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are some of these. But I've been discussing nuclear power for 20+ years, starting back on Usenet, and specific proposals are much less common than generic "get rid of red tape" bluster.

Sorry but I don't trust any nuclear plant in the US to put safety over profits over the long term, especially after all the illogical deregulation done the last 4 years.

There's also already some questions on safety in regards to current plants. They're constantly loosening tolerances and changing the way tests are performed to make otherwise failed tests fall within acceptable limits. Plus the plants are already operating 2x their engineered lifespan. Yeah, no thank you.

How much are loosening regulations a concern for nuclear in the US?

Obviously recently general utilities haven't fared well as of late (Texas) or nuclear in the past (e.g. Rocky Flats). But as a foreigner who thinks as far as nuclear power is concerned, the DOE seems to being an OK job as of late. Could you share the specifics of the tests you are referring to?

This first link makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but this succicnt excerpt touches on the water test. It goes into more detail in another part of the article. The post has numerous example of very concerning issues.

> When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859

> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...

> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...

Thank you for the detailed and insightful reply!

The Union of Concerned Scientists has posted a great blog series "Role of Regulation in Nuclear Plant Safety." It's written by Dave Lochbaum, a degreed nuclear engineer who worked at American nuclear plants for 17 years. I think it's a better overview of NRC action and plant safety than any one incident. I've collected all the links here.

Series introduction: https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/role-of-nuclear-regul...

Flooding at Nine Mile Point: Regulation and Nuclear Power Safety #1 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/flooding-at-nine-mile...

Three Mile Island Intruder: #2 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/three-mile-island-int...

Empty Pipe Dreams at Palo Verde: #3 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/empty-pipe-dreams-at-...

Yankee Rowe and Reactor Vessel Safety: #4 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/yankee-rowe-and-react...

Flooding at a Florida Nuclear Plant: #5 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/flooding-at-a-florida...

Containment Design Flaw at DC Cook Nuclear Plant: #6 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/containment-flaw-at-d...

Pipe Rupture at Surry Nuclear Plant Kills Four Workers: #7 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/pipe-rupture-at-surry

Anticipated Transient Without Scram: #8 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/anticipated-transient...

Naughty and Nice Nuclear Nappers: #9 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/naughty-and-nice-nucl...

Breaking Containment at Crystal River 3: #10 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/breaking-containment-...

Fatal Accident at Arkansas Nuclear One: #11 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/fatal-accident-at-ark...

I live near one too, I'm not sure if I should be impressed that disaster was averted in 2002 or if I should be concerned how close things got:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...

It would be nice to hear from someone who is more knowledgeable on the subject than myself.

If an accident almost happened in 2002, then the probability only increases as time goes on.

I personally wouldn’t feel safe, in the long run, buying a house or living near an aging nuclear power plant.

Here, I'll come up with a proposal. If Congress is serious about climate change, then they can ask (and allocate the budget) the Department of Energy to procure and operate a bunch of naval nuclear reactors. With whatever internal regulations they have, the US Navy has not had a single incident in their entire history of operating nuclear reactors. They are also quite cost effective, for example the cost of the 2 reactors A1B [1] that power a Gerald Ford carrier is about $1 BN. That comes to about $2BN/GW, which is about a tenth of what a civilian reactor costs. The US Navy builds about 1 carrier every 4 years so that comes to 1 reactor every other year. If the DoE gets the Congressional mandate to procure a few reactors per year, the cost is going to surely come down. Also these reactors don't need refueling for about 2 decades, while civilian reactors are refueled every 1.5 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor

Thats a great idea. I'm trying and failing to find gotchas.

There is a potential gotcha: proliferation potential. The naval reactors use highly enriched uranium; if it falls in the wrong hands, you can end up with someone being able to build a bomb. That's why I said such a program needs to be run by the Department of Energy, the same department that has to maintain the nukes. I don't have a personal objection to this, but a lot of people would be unhappy with an essentially military program to be established for a problem that is not military in nature.

Hopefully the DOE will continue to be led by a person who didn't previously campaign on disbanding it!

The US stockpile of HEU would be depleted a lot faster this way, but enrichment could start again. I don't see major downsides to this proposal. Thanks for providing a specific and plausible idea!

This is not a very good idea for several reasons. Naval reactors require fuel that is much more enriched than normal reactors. They also produce significantly lower electricity. The Palo Verde facility produces 3GW of electricity and cost $11B in 2019 dollars. Each of the A1B reactors generates 125 MW. Life span of the reactor is not specified, but it's predecessor the A4W had a 23 year life span. By comparison, new nuclear plants are slated to last 50-80 years.

The net cost per GWh of electricity of the naval reactor is significantly worse than commercial plants. This is to be expected, because naval reactors are built to be compact and withstand the rocking of a ship at sea. Commercial reactors can leverage the efficiency of larger scale, and are built to be much more long lasting.

An A1B generates 125 MW electricity, but also 260 MW of additional thermal power used to power the propellers. If you convert the latter one to electricity at a 45% efficiency (typical efficiency for a generation IV nuclear power plant steam turbine), you get 117 MW, for a total of 242 MW. Two reactors could produce then about 0.5 GW. At a $1 BN cost, that's $2 BN / GW.

Palo Verde was brought online more than 30 years ago. If you look at Vogtle 3-4 (to be brought online in the next 2 years... if we are lucky) or Hinkley Point C, you'll see projected costs of respectively $25 BN for 2.5 GW and $32 BN for 3.2 GW. In both cases that comes at $10 BN/ GW. That is 5 times more expensive than the naval reactor.

Now, as you said, the cost of a naval reactor is very likely inflated by the exacting demands of its military usage. It needs to be compact, to work on a rocking ship, presumably it needs to be able to survive a certain amount of abuse that's to be expected if a ship/boat actually participates in combat, and I'm sure there are 100 other things that I'm missing here. All these factors make military devices absurdly expensive compared to the same devices intended for civilian use.

The logical conclusion is that if DoE wants to repurpose naval reactors for civilian use, then it can achieve significant cost savings. What I'm saying is that even not factoring these savings in, you still end up 5 times cheaper than the civilian reactors that are currently being built.

Edit: The lifespan of a Gerald Ford-class carrier is expected to be 50 years. The Nimitz aircraft carrier was launched 49 years ago. They do not replace their reactors. So, a naval reactor is designed to work for at least 50 years.

You also need to build a secondary containment vessel for the reactor, which is a significant expense. Because the cost of this containment is a function of surface area and generating capacity is a function of volume it's better to increase size. You also need to build steam turbines, heat exchangers, transformers, etc. The cost of the reactor is only a portion of the cost of the whole nuclear plant.

> Palo Verde was brought online more than 30 years ago. If you look at Vogtle 3-4 (to be brought online in the next 2 years... if we are lucky) or Hinkley Point C, you'll see projected costs of respectively $25 BN for 2.5 GW and $32 BN for 3.2 GW. In both cases that comes at $10 BN/ GW. That is 5 times more expensive than the naval reactor.

And by comparison you have the Taishan plant built for $7.5B with 3.5 GW generating capacity. If we want to go around cherry-picking examples we can also cherry-pick the cheap plants.

We have already tried using maritime nuclear reactors for grid generation. The first nuclear plants brought online for grid generation were maritime reactors repurposed for grid production. Larger purpose-built reactors won out.

Vogtle and Hinckley aren't cherry picking expensive plants, it's cherry picking middle of the road.

VC Summer is expensive, many billions spent and nothing to come of it ever.

Where do your cost numbers from Taishan come from? How do you come to costs that are believable from massive Chinese construction, or at least a cost that might be transferable at all to the rest of the world?

The history of nuclear is very clear: keep on increasing costs throughout construction, just enough that, taking into account the sunk cost fallacy, it makes sense to soldier on. VC Summer overshot that, and had massive corruption in the auditing of all parts of the project. Somehow Vogtle continues.

We literally do not know how to build nuclear in a cost effective manner any more. We can't structure contracts in the right way, we can't perform engineering to a high enough degree to make constructive plans. At Vogtle they literally poured the wrong concrete, and had to go back and get the design recertified with the NRC, because the original design was impossible to build, and on site they just plowed ahead with what they thought they could build. This is the level of incompetence, ball dropping, and bad contract structure.

Perhaps this sort of thing is fixable, but not on any reasonable timeline. The management is rotten from the top, so there's nobody that we can even order a nuclear reactor from.

Suppose you had $7.5B and wanted 3GW of nuclear at one of the many sites in the US that would welcome nuclear and its jobs. Who do you even bring that money to in order to build it? Rosatom? Are they going to meet NRC standards?

Great by the same logic you should use a commercial reactor over a naval reactor, you should also just use a different power source over nuclear.

What other power source generates carbon-free energy without intermittency or geographic dependency?

So you can build nuclear in a tsunami zone? in a seismic zone? in an area without cooling?

So you can mine and enrich uranium without carbon?

Nuclear does none of the things you fantasize it to do really.

> So you can build nuclear in a tsunami zone? in a seismic zone? in an area without cooling?

Yes, you harden the structure against tsunamis and earthquakes. That's part of why nuclear plants are so expensive.

Atmospheric cooling can indeed be done anywhere. It's typically easier and more efficient to use water cooling. And humans need water to survive, and thus population centers are built near sources of water, water cooling is almost always an option. Also nuclear plants can be cooled with seawater.

This is in stark contrast to hydroelectricity which needs both a river and a valley to be viable. Geothermal power needs magma near enough to the surface to heat water into steam.

> So you can mine and enrich uranium without carbon?

I don't see why not. Use electricity produced by nuclear plants to drive centrifuges. Also use said electricity to power mining equipment.

And you didn't answer my question: What other carbon-free sources provide energy 24/7, besides ones that need very specific geography like hydroelectricity and geothermal power?

Easy, there’s many: 1) Solar + transmission lines. It’s always sunny somewhere

2) wind + transmission lines, always windy somewhere

3) use some energy produced by hydro to manufacture some concrete river beds and reservoirs

4) use some of the energy produced by 1-3 to dig real deep for geothermal everywhere

5) Ocean thermal energy conversion

Don’t get me wrong , I’m not anti nuclear , I’m a huge fan of the big reactor in the sky it produces all we need with perfect reliability there’s no reason to do something as dumb as trying to build terrestrial reactors

> 1) Solar + transmission lines. It’s always sunny somewhere

> 2) wind + transmission lines, always windy somewhere

These don't produce power consistently. That's why one would need to build redundancy. Also it's not always sunny somewhere, unless you build transcontinental transmission lines. And even then, there's a period of time where most sunlight is hitting the pacific ocean.

> 4) use some of the energy produced by 1-3 to dig real deep for geothermal everywhere

> 5) Ocean thermal energy conversion

Both of these are geographically dependent. Might as well has just said hydroelectricity.

> Solar + transmission lines. It’s always sunny somewhere

Unless it is sunny 24/7 in a given country or even group of coutnries (e.g. the EU) this is not viable.

Countries will not give up their energy security and put themselves at the mercy of the other side of the planet (where it is sunny) plus whoeever might want to damage those transmission lines and cripple a country. It is already an issue with oil and gas.

> What other carbon-free sources provide energy 24/7

Wind + solar + biofuels + waste + batteries.

Batteries are primarily for peak usage, and it could be car batteries (V2G).

Biofuels are primary for seasonal usage (e.g. winter).

Nuclear is too expensive if you take into account the risks, which are currently externalized.

There is not enough accessible lithium to provide nearly enough storage [1]. 5 minute with known deposits, and 19 minutes estimated to be accessible with current mining techniques.

Biofuels are low energy density, and don't provide nearly enough power. Not to mention they aren't carbon-free. Burning biofuels releases carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise be trapped.

1. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html

Your source seems to be low by about 2 orders of magnitude on the energy density of lithium. They assume ~100% of a battery is made of lithium. There are only 200-300g of lithium metal per kwh in a lithium ion battery[0,1], or 12-18MJ per kg.

[0] http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/How_Much_Lithium_Pe... [1] https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3A%2F%2Fgreet.es.anl... page 10

Battery: it doesn't have to be lithium (even thought, currently all planned ones use lithium-ion). Sodium-sulphur would be an option as well.

Biofuels are low energy density: this isn't about aviation or transportation, so that's not a concern at all.

Biofuels don't provide enough power: citation needed (are you moving the goalpost again?) - note that most energy will come from wind and the sun, so there is relatively little need for biofuels.

Burning biofuels releases carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise be trapped: No, it would be released anyway (well, unless if you burry it really deep).

The problem with nuclear power is cost, due to high risks. And even then, the insurance (which is really expensive for nuclear plants) doesn't cover all the risks. The biggest risk is externalized: if e.g. a power plant in Switzerland would blow up, almost the whole country would be become un-inhabitable. And there is no insurance company paying for that.

> Battery: it doesn't have to be lithium (even thought, currently all planned ones use lithium-ion). Sodium-sulphur would be an option as well.

Right: we assume some other form of energy that has yet to be commercialized will provide cheap storage. Get back to me when this solution actually demonstrates feasibility.

> Biofuels are low energy density: this isn't about aviation or transportation, so that's not a concern at all. Biofuels don't provide enough power: citation needed (are you moving the goalpost again?) - note that most energy will come from wind and the sun, so there is relatively little need for biofuels.

Biomass provides 1MWh per ton of dry wood [1]. On average, forests have 38 tons per acre [2]. The US consumes 11.5TWh of electricity daily, so this works out to 319,444 acres per day. The US has ~750 million acres of forest. So we have 2,343 days worth of biomass energy. Or about 6 years.

Sure, forests grow, but they take longer than 6 years to grow. Also the figure of energy was in raw BTUs, so the actual electricity generated is only about ~50% of that.

> Burning biofuels releases carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise be trapped: No, it would be released anyway (well, unless if you burry it really deep).

It would be trapped in the form of trees and vegetation. If burning biofuels doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere why are people concerned about deforestation?

> The problem with nuclear power is cost, due to high risks. And even then, the insurance (which is really expensive for nuclear plants) doesn't cover all the risks. The biggest risk is externalized: if e.g. a power plant in Switzerland would blow up, almost the whole country would be become un-inhabitable. And there is no insurance company paying for that.

This is not even remotely true. The plants in Switzerland have secondary containment. Even Chernobyl, which had no secondary containment, created an exclusion zone of 40x40km. "Almost the whole country would become un-inhabitable" is laughable. It really just demonstrates that aversion to nuclear is not based on rational thinking.

1. https://www.nacdnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/AppendixA...

2. https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/fia/maps/nfr/descr/xlivebiohw.asp

> we assume some other form of energy that has yet to be commercialized

Both sodium-sulphur and lithium-ion are commercialized and widely used already (currently pumped storage is a lot more widely used, but it's not possible everywhere). [1]

Biofuels: as I wrote, it is only needed to fill the gaps [3], e.g. in winter, not to power 100%. It is already widely used, for example in Europe [2]. And it's not wood (CO2 is trapped in wood for some time, but not in vegetation). This doesn't displace forests.

> The plants in Switzerland have secondary containment.

So did Fukushima. There were many problems with nuclear plants in Switzerland, e.g. [4]. There is no 100% safety. In Switzerland, most people live in cities... sure, you could still live in the mountains, right.

> It really just demonstrates that aversion to nuclear is not based on rational thinking.

Actually, it is based on rational thinking. As the catastrophic events in Fukushima and Chernobyl, and the near catastrophes elsewhere have shown, nuclear power is dangerous. The population has to bear that risk. The companies would just get bankrupt. The insurance would only cover a small part of the costs.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_station 2. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/?country=UK&fuel=Ene... 3. https://www.iea.org/articles/how-biogas-can-support-intermit... 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BChleberg_Nuclear_Power_P...

Biomass generates ~10% of the electricity from one country in Europe. Biomass is useful in countries like Brazil where extensive farmland means biodiesel is a viable automobile fuel. But for grid generation, the watts per acre is insufficient.

Globally, biomass is used for 0.7% of total energy demand [1]. Almost all of it for fuel, it doesn't even make it on the chart for electricity generation.

> So did Fukushima. There were many problems with nuclear plants in Switzerland, e.g. [4]. There is no 100% safety. In Switzerland, most people live in cities... sure, you could still live in the mountains, right.

And the secondary containment in Fukushima meant that most of the radiation was contained. Fukushima is already being resettled. You harbor this skewed perceptions where nuclear catastrophes render massive swathes of the earth uninhabitable, "almost the whole country [Switzerland] would be become un-inhabitable". No it would not. Even an uncontained meltdown resulted in a 40x40km exclusion zone. An a contained one is much less drastic. Three Mile Island didn't even result in any permanent exclusion zone.

> So you can build nuclear in a tsunami zone? in a seismic zone?

Why not? It worked at Onagawa: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259012302...

It’s also failed. Why not just avoid it? That’s the approach taken according to your link.

The solution to the problems faced at Onagawa were to decommission the plant, and this process would take longer than the duration for which the plant actually ran.

“the 2011 events strongly influenced the decision to decommission the Onagawa Unit 1 early, brought to attention the length of the decommissioning process (which will surpass the operation stage)”

The decision to decommission the plant is political, not technical.

Onagawa was closer to the epicenter than fukushima and suffered no ill effects. It can be done, the main different between Onagawa and Fukushima is that they were owned by different companies and one company took safety seriously.

For more reading, see: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...

and IAEA report: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/actionplan/reports/ona... which the article is based on.

Solar + wind with storage and a grid. The parts are all there, and it's cheaper than nuclear today.

No, the storage part is not there. Hydroelectric storage is expensive, takes a long time to build, and is geographically dependent to boot. Only ~5 minutes of global electricity storage can be provided with batteries using all known lithium deposits. Only 19 minutes worth of storage is available with all the lithium we can mine with today's equipment [1].

This is why plans for a solar and wind grid assume that some silver bullet is going to provide dirt-cheap and nigh-infinitely scalable storage.

1. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html

These are not particularly relevant or helpful comparisons for knowing whether lithium ion is ready to deploy now (it is), or whether storage will be achievable with lithium ion and other chemistries (it will).

This is only looking at currently known reserves, a number which has doubled in only a few years. It also compares it to total energy consumption, a meaningless comparison for the coming decades.

Further, the same industrial capacity for lithium ion batteries also works for sodium chemistries. We have only focused on lithium because the primary applications are in mobile things at the moment: cars and mobile devices, where the weight advantage of lithium is important.

For grid storage, weight and specific energy are not important, and sodium chemistries will be ideal. There are also entire classes of flow chemistries that are in their infancy.

But what is mature and cost effective is lithium ion storage. The only place where we have open data about the feelings of investors, the PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues, storage is being deployed in GW comparable to new natural gas GW. This number alone, the GW and not the GWh, tells us that investors think this new tech is ready and deplorable. And it is falling in cost exponentially. Other battery tech is following and dropping in cost too, but lithium ion is benefitting from having existing markets that can fund massive learning.

> This is only looking at currently known reserves, a number which has doubled in only a few years.

False. It is estimating at the total amount of accessible lithium, not just the known reserves.

> For grid storage, weight and specific energy are not important, and sodium chemistries will be ideal. There are also entire classes of flow chemistries that are in their infancy.

Feel free to cite this as an option once sodium batteries actually become available at scale. Until then this amounts to, "hope some future solution solves storage."

> But what is mature and cost effective is lithium ion storage. The only place where we have open data about the feelings of investors, the PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues, storage is being deployed in GW comparable to new natural gas GW.

This is not even remotely true. We don't even have 1 GWh of battery storage [1]. Sure, we're not deploying "new" natural gas because energy demand is decreasing and we already have existing natural gas plants. But the point is that

> And it is falling in cost exponentially. Other battery tech is following and dropping in cost too, but lithium ion is benefitting from having existing markets that can fund massive learning.

Cost is a function of supply and demand. If you actually try to use lithium ion batteries for grid storage, this will create massive demand and thus increase cost. Again, there is insufficient accessible lithium to provide even half an hour of energy storage.

1. http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts...

False on all counts.

The GitHub estimate is only using known resources and reserves, a number which goes up every year as we discover more. It is not an estimate of total accessible lithium. Lithium resources, the type where we get most of our lithium, increased from 40M tons to 80M tons from 2016 to 2020 estimates, and will continue to increase:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Reserves

> This is not even remotely true. We don't even have 1 GWh of battery storage [1].

I don't know where that number comes from on that page, but it's wrong. More than 2GWh were connected to the US grid in Q4 2020 alone:

https://pvbuzz.com/woodmac-new-battery-storage-systems-q4-20...

And even if your number were right, it doesn't address the core point that battery storage deployment is growing at an absolutely incredible pace. In cost-competitive grids, it's replacing natural gas:

https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

> Cost is a function of supply and demand

This is just bad economics. These all affect each other. As production costs fall for lithium ion batteries, demand is growing, as shown by that RMI document. The cost of batteries is not falling because the demand is falling, the cost of lithium ion battery is primarily determined by manufacturing costs at the moment. The input costs of lithium is not going up because there's not enough lithium. And if supply of lithium does get constrained in the future, then there are alternative chemistries that are not supply limited.

> The GitHub estimate is only using known resources and reserves, a number which goes up every year as we discover more. It is not an estimate of total accessible lithium.

Yes, it is. 5 minutes is the amount provided by known reserves. 19 minutes is what can be provided with all accessible lithium. This is known reserves, plus the amount we expect to find later.

> I don't know where that number comes from on that page, but it's wrong. More than 2GWh were connected to the US grid in Q4 2020 alone:

Which amounts to a whopping... 14 seconds worth of energy storage.

> And even if your number were right, it doesn't address the core point that battery storage deployment is growing at an absolutely incredible pace. In cost-competitive grids, it's replacing natural gas:

17 GW of natural gas was constructed in Texas alone. In fact, not even all of Texas, just the part serviced by ERCOT. Your claim "storage is being deployed in GW comparable to new natural gas GW" is not even remotely true, and your own sources prove it.

> This is just bad economics. These all affect each other. As production costs fall for lithium ion batteries, demand is growing, as shown by that RMI document. The cost of batteries is not falling because the demand is falling, the cost of lithium ion battery is primarily determined by manufacturing costs at the moment. The input costs of lithium is not going up because there's not enough lithium. And if supply of lithium does get constrained in the future, then there are alternative chemistries that are not supply limited.

The assumption that the price of lithium won't go up if we try to use it for grid storage is bad economics. Let me put the staggering mismatch between battery supply and storage demand in perspective:

* The US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity each hour. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity every hour. * The entire world produces ~300 GWh of lithium ion batteries annually [1].

If we actually tried to provision one hour's worth of electricity storage the price of batteries would skyrocket, because there isn't enough supply to meet demand. We could provision one hour's worth of storage even if we bought every single lithium ion battery produced anywhere in the world for a whole year.

And this issue is going to become even worse as we switch from fossil fuels to electricity for heating, transportation, industrial chemical production, and so forth.

1. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

The construction, fuelling and cleanup of a site is far from carbon zero. There is also a geographic dependency, or should be.

Nuclear power puts out more CO2 than solar or wind according to Nature (hydro isn’t mentioned for some reason).

“carbon emissions ranged from 1.4 grammes of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour (gCO2e/kWh) of electricity produced up to 288 gCO2e/kWh. Sovacool believes the mean of 66 gCO2e/kWh to be a reasonable approximation.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/climate.2008.99

Nuclear power plants are thermal power plants and that means they need cooling. The power density of nuclear power plants is so high that most of them can't be placed near rivers because rivers have a variable flow rate.

If the flow rate is too low you risk killing aquatic life in the river ecosystem so instead the nuclear plant is turned off. You can avoid this by placing the nuclear power plant near the ocean. That's what the Japanese did with the Fukushima power plant even though it's a tsunami prone area.

What gives you the idea that nuclear power plants can't be placed near rivers? Almost all that aren't on the coast are near rivers.

And they don't need to use potable water. The Palo Verde plant uses wastewater.

Because humans need water to survive, all population centers are built with access to water. Thus, cooling is available pretty much anywhere one would want to build a nuclear plant.

I'm fine with rational regulation and good safety inspections. Here's an example of a regulatory framework that needed reform:

Several years ago I got to attend a meeting between a bunch of people from advanced nuclear startups, and a former head of the NRC. The startup people said their biggest problem was that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at the design. Then they would give a flat yes or no. If yes then you still had just a paper reactor, and if no then you were out of business.

Getting to that point required several hundred million dollars. That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. They said just a more phased process would help a lot. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop new nuclear technology, and was uninterested in climate change.

Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and things seem to be improving.

> I think that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is world-leading.

Comparisons are irrelevant - Japan's regulations weren't the worst in the world when Fukushima happened => something similar could happen anywhere else (a lot of factors influence a lot of decisions/policies - the past years demonstrated that even the US nowadays isn't the most stable country).

> They identify problems proactively... even for plants built 50 years ago.

Maybe they do "now" (I'm not a "pro" in this area therefore I cannot confirm nor deny that) but in any case there are never guarantees about the future. Additionally that "even for" sounds ugly - that MUST happen as long as such a plant exists.

> I live near an operating nuclear reactor and I prefer it over any form of fossil plant.

It's well-known that fossil plants are the absolute worst => such a change isn't a great improvement from my point of view.

> Power reactors operating in the United States are reliable, safe...

So far, and the terms are flexible - incidents did happen with civilian & military reactors, Wikipedia has a lot of nice-to-read articles with timing summary, analysis etc... .

> ...and have extremely low life cycle emissions of greenhouse gases

Correct - basically almost 0 (don't know, probably the truck that delivers the uranium stabs does generate some gases, maybe as well the mine&plant that create them, but not a lot compared to gas&oil&coal). But then... that's it? No other remark about maybe what is generated and where to put it and how to take care about it for the next 10000 years?

I'm definitely not/never going to approve any measure to deregulate a sector which has a near-infinite potential impact when something breaks and/or something is not properly taken care of.

> I am open to specific proposals for reducing regulations in the nuclear sector if there are regulations that impose additional process overhead, don't actually serve a purpose, and survive only from inertia. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are some of these. But I've been discussing nuclear power for 20+ years, starting back on Usenet, and specific proposals are much less common than generic "get rid of red tape" bluster.

Some specific proposals would be to put a minimum nuclear fuel limit on the existing nuclear power plant regulations and create a new class with loosened containment requirements for active reactor designs that are passively safe by nature. Existing regulations are written around reactor designs that hold thousands or tens of thousands of kilograms of nuclear fuel that they have to moderate and keep in check. This is clearly not a viable option for nuclear long term against natural gas and renewables due to the overwhelming cost of manpower and materials which scales poorly. The regulatory overhead, transportation, and storage costs on that much radioactive fuel alone is prohibitively expensive, so we really need to focus on making progress in powered nuclear fission reactors which are impossible under the current regulatory regime.

Designs like the nuclear lightbulb - studied and tested by UTC under a NASA Mars program contract in the late 60s/early 70s - take tens of kilograms of fuel and heat & compress it till it reaches criticality at hundreds of atm and thousands of degrees. Any failure in the system causes a loss of pressure and the core returns to subcritical; even in a worst case scenario like a conventional bomb exploding in the reactor chamber, it would be a minor incident on the level of Three Mile Island. There are many tweaks that have been theorized but untested that would make the reactor even safer. However, any design like this requires regular maintenance of the reactor and completely different levels of containment that are either prohibitively expensive or impossible right now.

There was a long list of engineering failures at Fukushima. The idea with airplanes is not "design this component so it cannot fail" but "design the system so it can tolerate component failure". Fukushima had a list of failures it could not tolerate.

You mentioned one, the vulnerability of the backup power to the seawall being overtopped. The generators could have been put on a raised platform. There were others:

1. the hydrogen was vented into an enclosed space

2. no way to add water to the cooling system with a gravity fed device

3. critical machinery should not be located in the reactor core building

4. no way to bring in electric power from elsewhere

And it seems likely that with enough operating plant, there always will be engineering failures. Aeroppanes sometimes fail catastrophically too of course.

Do they? I can't really recall an instance of catastrophic airplane failure over the last decade outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture issues

I also think the amount of airplanes that exist is higher than the amount of nuclear reactors we'd need for it to be a strong power source, and I also suspect that airplanes face slightly more volatile conditions

> outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture issues

Well there's one example! Why would you discount it?

It's a key example, and is the same failure mode nuclear power has.

Nuclear power could be engineered to be at least as safe as (most) commercial flight.

But it won't be - and this is absolutely predictable. Because of politics and money.

There is no answer to this, except to fix politics and money and make them as safe as commercial flight.

That's a whole different scale of problem to fixing climate change.

IMO this isn't a utopian fantasy, it's absolutely critical for species survival. But it doesn't look as if we're going to be starting the process any time soon.

Exporting the same problems to Mars or upload space or wherever won't solve them either.

Right, fair question. I read "engineering failures" above, so I want to highlight that this isn't so much an engineering failure as it is a capitalistic failure driven by incestuous relationships in US aerospace.

I do totally agree this is a real risk for any domain, especially energy which has so much money flowing, but I just don't think "engineering" is actually the issue which these things fail under

> it is a capitalistic failure driven by incestuous relationships in US aerospace.

What do you call Chernobyl? A socialistic failure driven by inept bureaucracy and central planning?

Honestly, I’m not well educated on Chernobyl’s mode of failure or political incentive structures. I’d probably agree with your implication that if procedures can’t be followed consistently/successfully than that is exactly an engineering failure, but as I said I do not know this circumstance

Both are institutional failures.

We don't have any technical defense against institutional failure. In some places and times there are cultural defenses, but those are often seen to erode.

The best defense is not to need any. There is much less need to defend against institutional failure in the case of renewables, because the technical failures to guard against have limited impact, well constrained in cost, time and space.

> Aeroppanes sometimes fail catastrophically too of course

It's become extremely rare.

Well sure. But while extremely rare is fine for aeroplanes, it's less clear that it's fine for nuclear reactors. So far we've been lucky that none of the big incidents have affected a major metropolitan area.

I'm not completely anti-nuclear. But it seems clear to me that it should be seen as a stepping-stone technology on the way to a renewables + storage future rather than a long-term solution.

> The idea with airplanes is not "design this component so it cannot fail" but "design the system so it can tolerate component failure".

that's not true. yes a lot of systems on airplanes are redundant but also there are plenty of you die if this breaks so we build it N times stronger than we can imagine it every happening... also, teach pilots not to do things that would bring that to be more possible. on a helicopter they have a single jesus nut that if it breaks the rotor is gone.

In rock climbing as well there is redundancy where there can be but some things are built strong to the point where under most foreseeable conditions the component will not break. (the most common dynamic ropes for lead climbing twins and half ropes aside, belay device, belay loop, belay carabiner, harness are all built for worst case without redundancy.)

> there are plenty of you die if this breaks so we build it N times stronger than we can imagine it every happening

That's simply not true. Every component is redundant. Nothing is built "N" times stronger. The safety factor is 50% stronger than the maximum anticipated load.

(I worked for 3 years at Boeing designing flight critical systems for the 757.)

> are all built for worst case without redundancy

Why I'm not going rock climbing.

Is the main spar counted as a single component?

The main spar structure is redundant.

It's tolerant of random failure of individual components, yes, but the entire spar could fail under an overload condition. For this failure mode, the only way to ensure a suitably low failure rate is by setting an appropriate safety factor.

> but the entire spar could fail under an overload condition.

Each component individually is designed at 150% of the maximum load ever expected.

The spar has redundant components. Any part of the spar can crack all the way through, and it will still fly safely.

Redundancy protects against some failure modes (e.g. unrevealed fatigue cracking) but not overload, which is a common-mode failure that doesn't care about redundancy if the load is high enough. It becomes a matter of "probability of exceedance".

Electrical/mechanical systems are different and can usually be separated/segregated etc, but there is only one structure.

There was a famous crash where the pilot flew through some wake turbulence and caused the tail to fall off by improper rudder inputs. at a certain point there is only one of something.

The rudder structure is redundant as well. That particular accident was caused by unexpectedly high loads on the rudder, not a lack of redundancy.

is the jesus nut redundant? is the jackscrew nut for the elevator redundant?(one famously stripped and caused inverted flight for 30 min to try and save it but eventually crashed into the ocean)... they improved the design from that but it's still one mechanism and one screw. there are simply no completely reliable planes and helicopters without some form of single point reliability being required.

> is the jackscrew nut for the elevator redundant?

Yes. (It's for the stabilizer, not the elevator.) First off, the jackscrew is hollow and has a rod running through the center to keep it together if it cracks through. Secondly, the nut rides on steel balls in grooves. If the nut cracks and all the balls fall out, there are solid ice scrapers attached to the nut at each end that fit in the grooves, but don't contact them under normal operation. The ice scrapers peel any ice off the grooves so it doesn't jam the nut. But the scrapers are also strong enough to hold the nut in place if the balls fall out.

This is on the 757. I don't know the setup on the McDonnell-Douglas bird that crashed due to nut failure, except it's a much older design. I don't know if it had the ice scrapers on it, for example.

BTW, the jackscrew is made by Saginaw Gear. It's made from the finest steel forging money can buy, and Saginaw has been making them for a long time and knows what they're doing.

After the first trim gearbox assembly arrived, Boeing's test group had the job of applying the ultimate load, 150%, to it to see if it would buckle, crack, or bend. The test guys told me they were going to bust it. They put a big old steel I-Beam pinned at one end and my poor little jackscrew gearbox pinned at the other end. A hydraulic ram was applied to the I-beam, and the test guy cranked up the pressure.

The I-beam bent into a bow.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAA I love Saginaw Gear.

> there are simply no completely reliable planes and helicopters without some form of single point reliability being required.

Helicopters, you're right. They won't survive losing a blade. Planes, you're incorrect.

P.S. My very first assignment at Boeing was to determine the size of that jackscrew needed to carry the load. I panicked, and went to my lead engineer. He laughed, and said "you know how to do column buckling calculations, right?" I said yes, and he said go to it.

After 3 years of working on the gearbox I knew everything there was to know about it, including all the failure modes anyone could think of. I was also fortunate to have a couple of Boeing's best engineers mentoring me.

It's redundant.

The problem with fault tolerance is that it allows the normalization of deviance, since something is always failing, but it's okay because there is always a backup (until there isn't).

The bigger issue with nuclear power is that we can trust humans to keep up the level of effort to keep it working without a fault for a few decades, maybe centuries if we're lucky, but there's no way you can operate a plant for a millennia without a catastrophic accident, but accidents take much more than a thousand years to clean up. So it's all totally imbalanced unless you just assume we'll have fusion in fifty years, so nothing matters. But I don't think we can assume that anymore.

> The problem with fault tolerance is that it allows

We do that with airplanes. Think about it - you're flying at 30,000 feet, 500 mph, 50 degrees below zero, no land in sight over the North Atlantic, in a tin balloon loaded to the gills with fuel and two flaming engines.

And yet you're perfectly safe.

How did that come about? Tolerance of failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missing_aircraft#2001–...

Look at how few of them there are, despite millions and millions of flights.

It's an absolutely incredibly good safety record. You're much safer flying across the Atlantic than driving to the airport.

Hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, over that 18-year span.

The machines are designed to tolerate fault, but the FAA is designed to not let you take off unless you do a checklist that proves all the engines are working, not just the one you need for a crippled landing. So the system as a whole requires that the FAA not give in to the pressure from industry to sign off on less fault tolerance. It's a difficult issue for systemantics.

Um, there isn't a backup if the backup isn't operable before you take off.

That's their point. If the FAA didn't mandate it you can be sure budget airlines would be taking off and doing routes with one engine broken :-)

That's not a fault of the airliner design.

> you can be sure

Not likely. Who you gonna get to fly it? Who you gonna get to pay to fly in it?

> Who you gonna get to fly it? Who you gonna get to pay to fly in it?

a. people in less developed countries

b. people in said countries with less money to spend than others

this has happened before (south america in the 70s, etc), which is why the aviation industry has the regulatory system it has today

Really? You know of examples of passenger planes taking off with only one engine turning? Or of any twin engine airplane doing this deliberately (other than a test flight or desperate emergency, like the volcano is gonna blow any moment).

i was lalking about the situation of planes taking off in barely flyable/safe situations that would not be allowed by modern faa regulations, which it think is larger point that was being argued, not debating about the single engine or propeller case

sorry if we ended up talking past eachother

With wing mounted engines on two-engine airliners, there is physically no way to take off on one from other than a dry lake bed. The thrust from the operating engine will introduce more yaw on the airplane than the rudder, nosewheel steering, and wheel brakes can counteract.

Even tail mounted engines (with a shorter coupling arm to the centerline) will typically have a Vmcg (roughly, speed at which lateral control on the ground is lost with one engine inoperative) that will preclude takeoff on one (physically, not by regulations) from available runways.

Not just tolerance of failure. Also strict incident investigations and reporting requirements, including for "near misses"; also a strong safety culture made possible by strong unions and strict seniority-based promotion rules; also...

> a strong safety culture made possible by strong unions and strict seniority-based promotion rules

Pilots can't get ahead by cutting corners, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) it's hard for maintenance people to be pressurised to sign off on unsafe work.

Strict seniority rules means no incentive for doing quality work above the minimum.

Indeed, but also no incentive for bypassing safety checks that are redundant most of the time (which is how you get the normalisation of deviance that eventually leads to catastrophe). Sometimes that's the right tradeoff.

Could nuclear power plant operators be incentivised by using "proactive risk detection" metrics or something along those lines?

I suppose there will then be incentives to exaggerate or "invent" new risks for career advancement, but is that not preferable to the alternative?

All metrics are gameable. I think I once saw a study that suggested that every metric applied to professionals ended up having a net negative effect on actual productivity - by and large people understand their job and want to do it well, and while a metric may incentivise the few that don't, it also ends up distracting the majority.

Airplanes are highly standardized. Dozens and hundreds of essentially the same model are built. A few of them are built specifically to test in various ways and even crash and burn, and make sure they behave reasonably in such situations.

Civilian nuclear reactors are mostly built by a handful, rarely by a dozen. This makes learning from past mistakes and taking preventative measures across the fleet hard.

I think France has partly solved it exactly by having a small number of standardized reactors, and a number of nuclear plants which can be run in a reasonably uniform way.

> Airplanes are highly standardized.

Not really. Every one coming off the line is different. They are constantly being improved. Every part on the airplane is carefully tracked, from manufacturing lot to which airplane each is installed on. Everything is designed by engineers, not custom made on the spot by a mechanic.

Yes, French nuclear powerplants were standardized and built in batches ("séries", in French). This does not magically creates conditions for a perfect design and building process. See for example https://theecologist.org/2016/sep/29/sizewell-b-and-27-other...

Planes aren't perfectly safe (my brother was killed when SR111 crashed in 1998 after failures).

Anyone preferring not being exposed to a plane crash can abstain to travel in planes. Anyone preferring not being exposed to nuclear reactors boo-boos and hot waste has no real way to do so.

The failure points aren't always the aspects engineered by anyone related to airplane manufacture. Swiss Air 111 may have come down due to a fault/failure in wiring for its add-on entertainment system.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/electrical-fire-downed-swissair...

Complex systems should be assumed to run in a partially broken state. Accidents are more things getting broken quicker than failsafes and operators can react to.

That’s not to say I like nuclear power - IMHO opportunity cost is too high. I could build, operate and decommission a renewable solar or wind plant in the time it takes to plan a new nuclear plant.

I think we need to look at what France is doing. They seem to have a good safety culture as a society, 90% of their power is nuclear and has been for decades they’ve never had a serious accident. Other examples, they have also never had a serious high speed train accident. They seem to be able to build these things considerably cheaper than we are able to in Britain and way cheaper than you can in America. They are a first world country with equivalent living conditions to the UK so unlike comparisons with China where many people blame poor working conditions and under regulation for cheapness, you can’t make the same argument against France. By the way I don’t know if that’s true about regulations in China (who does) but it is an argument that many people make that is a lot more easily refuted by just comparing with France instead.

Part of the reason why some fault tolerance measures were neglected was because discussing backup plans was seen as a sign of weakness and were leveraged often by oppositions.

“You sound like you’re looking forward for some disaster coming with those plans” worked in Japan in those times. Still do to some extent.

Not sure about that interpretation - usually "fault tolerance" just means "additional costs"... .

I'm going to need some of evidence of this claim, because it seems quite a bit counter to the timeline I'm familiar with.

Opposition to nuclear's safety did not start until well after construction had started on the US's reactors. And for nearly all US reactors, the utilities had already realized that they had over-ordered nuclear reactors in the 1970s, and that there were far too many construction delays and cost-overruns for nuclear to be cost effective.

This is detailed in a 1985 Forbes cover article, Nuclear Foibles, which is not anti-nuclear, but is withering about the mismanagement of nuclear in the US. Here's the only reprint I have found, which has a weird rant about Gore at the top that can be ignored:

http://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-r...

The idea that designs from the early 1970s refused to plan for failure because of some theoretical opposition, when there was basically no opposition to our greatest period of building nuclear reactors, doesn't make much sense to me.

Sorry I was trying to discuss Japanese climate but my writing wasn’t best. As for the evidences, it’s hard to find a well compiled list but Fukushima did have a number of safety issues unaddressed for reasons other than budgetary causes.

Off-site center for disaster control built 5km(3mi) off site, effectively on-site, all backup generators being at basement levels, and recently discovered issue of emergency vent lines terminating inside the containment building comes to mind.

Also from my understanding the earthquake wasn't really much of an issue for most of Japan. It was the tsunami that we don't yet have good protections against.

Why do humans of the 21st century love building delicate structures on the shoreline at sea level? Historical civilizations generally avoided building on the coast, very likely for good reasons, both for disaster resistance and for military reasons. Most ancient cities of the world are not located on the oceanside, but rather along inland rivers or smaller bodies of water, or at least within some safe distance of the coast.

Recent modern cities seem to love building on the coast -- New York, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Dubai -- all these had relatively little history or at least were nothing more than small towns until the past couple hundred years, and are all terrible places to build a city in terms of tsunami resistance.

Wouldn’t the plant have been located where demand and cooling capacity were co-located?

Moving goods by sea is vastly cheaper than by land: for all those cities, being a port is why they are significant economic engines. And power plants need cooling and can use sea water for that purpose.

Ancient cities needed to drink the freshwater from the rivers.

Now we have man-made reservoirs and aqueducts to deliver drinking water to the coasts.

Japan certainly seems to have cities along its rivers, but it also has a lot of costal cities (presumably because it's a small island nation, unlike, say, European civilizations).

For Fukushima in particular, I was under the impression they were using the ocean water to cool the plant itself. (Under non-meltdown conditions, you can transfer heat without contaminating the water itself...)

Los Angeles was founded pretty far from the coast, and at a decent elevation, roughly 77m / 253feet. It just expanded in every direction. Santa Monica is protected by cliffs as well. Farther south isn't so lucky.

All problems are human and not technical though when it comes to engineering failures.

> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades?

Seeing as they have done so for 70 years, yes. I don't just think it, I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power. All of the plants have run safely, save for Three Mile Island. And even in that case, safety measures worked and the secondary containment prevented large scale contamination.

I don't think it's infallible. But it's aware of its own fallibility and enforces measures like secondary containment.

> I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power.

This is not a correct statement. You cannot assert, for instance, that the pressure vessel head corrosion issue at Davis-Besse[1] was a 'safely managed' power plant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...

I'm not sure I follow. The vessel head corrosion was detected, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had the plant shut down. How does a story of a safety issues being detected, and operations ceased accordingly indicate unsafe management? It demonstrates the opposite.

It's down to luck that the corrosion was detected before a serious incident occurred.

The vessel head had corroded completely through the 6.63" steel pressure head, and the pressure vessel was relying only on the inner cladding to contain pressure. They were just a transient away, for years, from a steam explosion that would completely disassemble the pressure vessel and core and would place maximal stress on the containment building itself.

The issue was only "detected", after being covered up for years by falsified reports, when the engineer doing inspections decided to turn himself in.

There is no way this condition can be regarded as safe operation, and if that is what you are arguing there can be no question that it is flat wrong.

There are many, many of these kinds of situation where, just by the grace of whatever, we dodged a bullet and didn't have the catastrophe. You can't count those situations as adding to a cherry-picked "safe operation record".

There is a huge different between "didn't explode today", and "can't explode ever". We have spent too many days, months, years, in the former, rather than the latter. The so-called safety record is a lie.

> steam explosion that would completely disassemble the pressure vessel and core and would place maximal stress on the containment building itself.

This venturing into the realm of hyperbole, at best. Nothing in your link mentions an explosion that would "completely disassemble the pressure vessel". Stress on the containment building isn't mentioned at all. These statements seem to be of your own invention.

Can you substantiate your claim that a pressure vessel failure stood to compromise the containment building?

> There is a huge different between "didn't explode today", and "can't explode ever"

Again, we set up our safety measures such that the danger is contained even if a meltdown occurs. Even the most scrutinized designs may fail. Humans are never perfect. You're right: no plant can guarantee that it can't fail. That's why safety measures are built to withstand failure.

I know nothing about DOE/NRC inspection requirements, but..

> The issue was only "detected", after being covered up for years by falsified reports, when the engineer doing inspections decided to turn himself in.

Is it really policy that the same inspector can be responsible for successive inspections accumulating to years? That would be stark raving insanity for any critical systems.

Financial businesses have a traditional 2-week enforced vacation for critical systems employees. This is not an aggressive work-life balance effort. :)

The reason why I find this logic faulty is that none of the "known defects" were sufficient to shut down the plant. It's not a question of bureaucracy -- rather, the bureaucrats are on the other side. To cover their asses, they issue constant statements of imminent danger, and since those dangers never manifest, nobody believes them anymore.

If anyone took the warnings seriously the plant would have been shut down ages ago. And that's the problem with tail disasters -- they happen so infrequently that the system is assumed to be redundant to all of them, so even a "failure" as predicted would be met by a failsafe.

That's why I personally have turned against nuclear power. It's too complicated and the risks live out on the tail, and they are large (though not "fat" in the Taleb sense -- they're still bounded geographically).

That's the problem I have with nuclear, it's not the technology, it's that our species is not necessarily well-suited to managing the risks associated with nuclear (with some exceptions, maybe France?).

The French were just a more responsible than the Soviets and don't have to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis as much as the Japanese. The also invested a lot in several nuclear designs, comitted to nuclear power and are therefore quite experienced.

I can't find any specifics about the partial melt down in 1980 at Saint-Laurent, but it seems a serious accident could bankrupt france in an instand.

https://www.businessinsider.com/potential-cost-of-a-nuclear-...

not so sure about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide...

france often hides minor stuff, which often results in these more severe events. well france also has only 3 reactors as far as I know that were built in the 2000s.

btw. it's also my take. as long as they are operated to turn a profit or in a way that somebody might gain something, it will be basically impossible to have "safe" nuclear power. humans are dangerous.

It's worth pointing out that essentially the entire US navy is powered by nuclear reactors that service lives in the 3+ decade range, and it's worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, civilian nuclear power could really work if held to military standards of engineering and maintenance.

Naval reactors are different, their scale is two orders of magnitude lower. One could make other safety guarantees at that scale. They also use enriched uranium which means no refuelling is needed during the service life of the reactor. SMRs can also make some of these safety guarantees.

They do refuel naval reactors [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refueling_and_overhaul].

Given the (relatively) small size of these reactors, why can't they put 100 of them on site at a NPS?

> Given the (relatively) small size of these reactors, why can't they put 100 of them on site at a NPS?

That's what companies developing SMRs aim to do. For instance NuScale has a design using up to 12 modules of 77 MWe each in a separate stainless steel lined concrete pools of water. The modules are quite innovative and incorporates passive safety features such as natural circulation, redundant passive decay heat removal, gravity driven safety systems.

https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features

It's worth pointing out that US civilian nuclear power plants with service lives in the 3+ decade range have worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, military nuclear power could really work if held to the same standards of engineering and maintenance.

> In short, the problems were human not technical.

I disagree. Problems have been in both human and technical realm and, even worse, there is no way to clearly disentangle those two factors. Good arguments are given in Charles Perrow classic work "Normal Accidents" [1]. It is worth citing the tree main conditions which will result in an accident probability of greater than acceptable

1.The system is complex

2.The system is tightly coupled

3.The system has catastrophic potential

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

I agree with the point about technical vs people. On HN people are more familiar with how the applies to software. It may be technically possible to write bug free safety critical code in C. But in the real world we are all human and make mistakes and we don't have any choice about that. The existence of a hypothetical perfect solution is not a good defense.

There is also a human element. Unit 1 had been retrofitted with an Isolation Condenser, which is capable of cooling the core and preventing a meltdown without needing the pumps that couldn't run due to lack of power. This is exactly the type of upgrade people often suggest.

Unfortunately, for reasons that are still murky, this system wasn't activated, and Unit 1 melted down. The problems at Unit 1 also contributed to the problems at other units, causing radiation hazards, diverting personnel and attention, etc.

In fact, a larger version of this system is touted as one of the major safety features of the newer AP1000 plants, because all it requires is that you open a couple of valves, and the reactor can be safely shutdown as long as you add water every couple of days. Unfortunately at Fukushima, they didn't open the valves.

All of that said, the absolute damage from the accidents at Fukushima was tiny in comparison to the other damage from the tsunami, and much less than the damage of operating coal plants with no accidents whatsoever in Japan.

While there are a lot of human faults in this disaster (I think it is hard to deny that generators in the basement were a bad idea) it is also a complicated problem. One factor that isn't frequently brought up is that the Tōhoku earthquake was the 4th largest ever recorded and the largest in Japan (9.1) (second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth). Fukushima wouldn't have happened with an 8.5. A big reason this is important is because it really sets this event apart from that of Chernobyl, which I'd argue was much more dependent upon human error and bureaucracy.

But that means that the problem was both human and technical. What was considered good enough regulation was the issue because it is hard to predict earthquakes and even harder to estimate for earthquakes we've never seen before. No one thought a 9.1 magnitude earthquake would hit Japan and Nuclear safety is typically magnitudes of safety above what is needed (see radiation dosages) and this is a good thing (even though many that are pro nuclear, but never worked in the industry, claim that we're too strict).

But you are right that there is infighting between the scientists/engineers and the bureaucrats. But that's been true for every industry I've been a part of. I'm just trying to say that the story of why Fukushima happened is substantially more complicated than I see in the general discussions here on HN, Reddit, or elsewhere.

I just think that people need to out things into perspective. The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event. I think in our mind we make these events far far more serious than they were. Not that they were not serious but every thing in life is a tradeoff and you need to look what you are trading and what you are getting.

> The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event.

because we still live with the nuclear accident, while the tsunami damages are mostly repaired? Do you want to swim in the water in front of the plant? I probably wouldn't.

No. The tsunami was extremely damaging and the death count was shocking. But it’s over.

The nuclear event had fewer immediate deaths, but the whole area is still unlivable, the sea is still getting more polluted every second, nothing is over, and won’t be for at least hundreds of years if we ever engineer a way to deal with the core of the reactor.

I think what bugs me more is the armchair expertise, or rather the confidence behind this. It is the people whose argument essentially boil down to experts being idiots and not seeing things that are clearly obvious. I don't see these people significantly different from anti-vaxers. Both do real harm to society and make it substantially more difficult to solve the issues at hand because we're distracted by misinformation and often radicalizes others. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that people are researching and learning. I like that people question authority and expertise too. But there is a balance here. You can say things with confidence if you have only read a few wikipedia articles on it, but if someone disagrees with you don't pull out a baseball bat. I find this behavior frequently common on places like HN and Reddit. I often find that the real answers are buried in a thread because they are complicated and nuanced, or non existent. I don't think I'm immune to this behavior either, but I do try to use the Murry Gelman Amnesia affect as a metric to check myself, and I think there are other good strategies that we should utilize and encourage. But I don't think our society encourages honesty over simplicity.

I can't find the article for the life of me. From what I can remember, it was soon after the disaster, something came out about another plant that was "hit" by high waters as well. The difference was, their seawall was stupid high. One of the civic engineers during development fought tooth and nail to build the excessively high wall compared to what the gov building code was. If I remember correctly, it ended up being only a two or so meters taller than the tsunami that hit them. The engineer had a really baller statement in the article about how bureaucrats are useless and shouldn't have an opinion when it comes to life safety. I wish I could find it.

This one, maybe?

https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wa...

How the hell did you find it so quick?

I'm surprised I remembered it relatively well. Though, 1 meter buffer between the tsunami and seawall and the politician quote is better in his words:

>"Matsunaga-san hated bureaucrats," Oshima said. "He said they are like human trash. In your country, too, there are probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final responsibility.

Divination via DuckDuckGo :-)

From words in your comment, I used this search string: japan nuclear plant saved engineer battle high sea wall

The result was third in the returned list. (Settings - safe search off, global region selected.)

Edit to amend: words and concepts in your comment. Also, I'm chuffed to have been able to be of use.

You... you're beautiful. Thank you. You may have just made me a convert to DDG.

Aw! The beautiful person in this effort was Karen Spärck Jones [1], who gave us tf–idf [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones

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

But thank you.

And yet only 1 person was killed when it melted down. But somehow, it gets more attention than the 10's of thousands that were killed in the tsunami.

Only 1, unless you count the rest.

Human death is not the only dimension that matters. The cleanup could easily cost over $500 billion. That is a massive opportunity cost.

> People get complacent and greedy. They use every procedural tool they have to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement.

That is the core argument for a meaningful regulatory regime.

Large-scale base load generators only work from a business sense with predictable, steady demand. The price of that guaranteed demand is a near-fixed, managed return on assets and tight regulatory oversight.

>...Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades?

All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI: "...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show:

• The average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero.

• Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk events that could lead to a reactor-core damage.

• The average number of times safety systems have had to be activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.

• Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and are well below national limits.

• The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52 shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985."

https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweepin...

No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been much safer than all the alternatives that have been available. If only other power sources were as safe:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

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

Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable misperception that it is more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could have let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would the media have covered that if 200 thousand had been evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?

A recent Harvard study shows that pollution from fossil fuels is much worse than previously thought and they estimate that it is responsible for more than 8 million people yearly. We need to move away from burning fossil fuels and we need to use all the tools that are available.

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel...

It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

> the intermittent nature of wind and solar

is kinda dependent on your region.

where I live, wind is pretty unreliable except at a narrow band of latitude.

but solar is -very- reliable. more like regular than intermittent. So we have two kinds of storage requirements: short term buffers for 15 mins of passing cloud cover, and overnight. Because of this manageable profile our economy is swiftly ramping up solar not just for current demand but in pursuit of 10x cheap new power to drive new industry.

It isn't as easy as you are implying. Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.

For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity: >...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...

There is a large variation in daily electrical usage (particularly in summer months). For example in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

Contrary to what advocates claim, people have been looking at grid energy storage for decades and it isn't as simple as they claim. As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.

> It isn't as easy as you are implying.

I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's happening.

>...I'm saying it's happening.

Hopefully someday, but it's not happening yet. Those big battery farms installed by Tesla (et al) are used primarily for grid stabilization. Most current grid storage is pumped hydro and that has limited potential to expand. Like I said, it is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

I'm no power engineer, I'm just assuming that the people pouring literally $billions into huge-scale solar infra in my region know what they're doing.

> the problems were human not technical..

The logical conclusion is that if we are to continue building nuke plants, we need to keep humans out of picture.

We have no technology to ensure that huge institutions handling existentially hazardous technology do not become corrupt and irresponsible. The solution we know of is to avoid handing over such technology to the control of readily corruptible institutions.

Corruption is arguably the chief purpose of almost any past nuclear power initiative. A public works project that involves tens of billions of dollars almost inevitably devolves into a nest of corruption, whether it's a nuke plant, a new urban tunnel (cf. Big Dig, NY 2nd Ave), or US military procurement. There is a reason why small and portable nuke generation has not been able to compete: there is little scope for corruption in small nukes.

Wind and solar power are not subject to such systemic failures, and are also quite a lot cheaper than nukes, and getting cheaper every year. To prevent failures, we just need to shut down the nuke plants and replace them with solar and wind power. The only remaining question around renewables concerns storage of peak power output for dead times. But power storage is low-tech, thus low-risk, with numerous alternatives--gravity, pressurized-air, chemical--vying simply for the title of cheapest.

Bureaucracy destroys - regulation is useful, if applied effectively, however the ever growing bureaucracy, and laziness of average people tends to happen without constant pressure or growth. Working as a programmer in Government has made me realize this.

The US Navy does a really safe nuclear power program, but it costs a lot. If you could combine the organizational fortitude of the Nuclear Navy to manage the plants and the maintenance with a reasonable cost, I think that would be sufficient to ensure safety, as long as the designs are also done well. Personally, I think nuclear power is too risky for commercial use, i would put my money in HVDC links, pumped hydro storage, geothermal, and overbuilding renewables as the best path to reducing emissions, and continue to use natural gas for emergency generators for hospitals and stuff.

This is arguably worse than an engineering failure though... In an engineering failure we can identify a concrete reason for the failure and integrate that into our engineering knowledge. On the other hand, we will never be able to eliminate the human / bureaucratic element.

The key thing to remember is that power sources like coal and other fossil fuels have a very real health cost. A large number of people die every year. However a nuclear accident is much more "exciting" news and sticks in people's mind. People dying of cancer, asthma and other conditions are not as direct or as dramatic.

True, however, solar and wind are proving to be the killer technology in the sense that they are forcing coal plants to actually go extinct at a rapid pace. They are being forced out of the market based on cost. Nuclear never had that power of persuasion because it was too expensive. That's why we have so many coal plants. Nuclear is part of the problem, not the solution. To be part of the solution it will have to be vastly cheaper than it is today. Probably by at least one or two orders of magnitude.

That's an interesting research problem to work on the next decades. By the time that happens or not, there won't be any coal plants remaining and most gas will be on the way out as well (considering that is already barely competitive today).

Nuclear is upfront expensive, but the incredible efficiency wins hugely long term, AFAIK?

What about decomissioning and caring for the nuclear waste? That seems to bei very expensive as the decomissioning of the Greifswald plant in former east Germany is going to cost more than 6 billion €.

This is an extremely complicated matter, to be honest. It isn't difficult to store waste on site. There are also much cheaper technologies out there that we've invented over the last 50 years but one of the major reasons we don't have them in practice is because they are "unproven", as in physically untested at large scale (though they have been through simulations and small scale testings at DoE labs).

Long term storage isn't too bad of an issue either, but there's two camps. One is to do smaller sites where we can just bury local material in the ground. The other is having a large mass site (think Yucca Mountain), which means higher scrutiny because there's more chances of something going wrong (standard failure analysis) and you're packing more material together which increases total radiation levels. Either one will work, but both are bureaucratic nightmares. The result of which has been constantly changing plans, which drives up costs very quickly as you change gears (e.g. spend tons to survey the US for good sites, more to verify Yucca Mountain is good, start digging, cancel because NIMBY, start again, cancel, survey other areas, repeat).

But one factor I want to mention is that by the nature of the physical processes materials can't be both extremely dangerous and long living. The danger literally comes from mass being expelled from the atoms. High level radioactive materials have and always will be stored on site, as this is the safest place for them (where they can be monitored).

There are still technical challenges, don't get me wrong, but the whole process is also a bureaucratic nightmare on top of that and we know what that does to costs.

For some better facts I'll refer you to an article written by a HN user that is a reactor scientist: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

There's actually extremely small amounts of nuclear waste. The entirety of the waste produced by USA's nuclear electricity generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high [1].

The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]. Which is an order of magnitude less than a nuclear plant. And the repository can accommodate the fuel produced by several plants.

In short, waste disposal accounts for a single-digit percentage of nuclear power operating costs.

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

There is far far more to nuclear decommissioning cost than just spent fuel storage. The costs are truly staggering and cannot be breezed past so simply.

Average decommissioning costs are $460-$730 million dollars per GW of capacity [1]. This is about 10% of the construction cost for most power plants in the GW range.

Decommissioning adds $0.80 per MWh of electricity generated, assuming a capacity factor of 90% and a lifetime of 80 years. By comparison, the cost of natural gas power is $40 to $80 per MWh.

You and I seem to have very different ideas of what is a "staggering" cost.

1.https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu....

As far as I know building a long-term repository for the spent nuclear fuel is so simple... not a single nation solved it. The most advanced project (Onkalo, in Finland) may open in 2023.

Decommission costs are low... when planned. When a project at scale starts, however, things are usually less fun. Take a look at the UK. The UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...

£161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...

£234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nucl...

Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and entombing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay and the real cost will be hidden.

US: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup...

Moreover if there is a serious glitch during decommission or at a waste repository site, are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no-one covers major nuke risk (reimbursements have a hard limit).

> As far as I know building a long-term repository for the spent nuclear fuel is so simple... not a single nation solved it. The most advanced project (Onkalo, in Finland) may open in 2023.

Back here in reality, there are several operating nuclear waste facilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Nuc...

> £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...

> £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...

Do you realize that these figures include cleanup from nuclear weapons development?

> Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and entombing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay and the real cost will be hidden. US: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup...

Even if the pessimistic figures pan out and the existing nuclear fleet costs $70 billion to clean up, that's still within the $.4B to $.7B per GW range I provided.

> there are several operating nuclear waste facilities

22 sites.

Theoretically "actives" ones are:

- Olkiluoto which is in fact Onkalo (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... ) which is "expected to be operational in 2023." (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... )

- Loviisa which is AFAIK a site dedicated to the local reactors(?), and only for "low- and intermediate-level operational wastes". Onkalo is the planned site, and is NOT active ( see https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... )

- Wolseon (Korea) is for Low and Intermediate Level waste only (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolseong_Low_and_Intermediate_... ). Its total capacity (800k drums) is far away, as for now it only contains 100k drums (see https://www.korad.or.kr/korad-eng/html.do?menu_idx=37 )

- the "Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" (New Mexico) is, well, a "Pilot Plant" (doesn't come as a surprise). Moreover "The waste is from the research and production of United States nuclear weapons only", and only for 10k years. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant ). In some dream one may deposit powerplant waste there, however back in reality...

"Back here in reality" (uh, uh) there is no active site in any huge nation which nuke-produces power for decades (US, France, Germany, Japan...) It will become more and more difficult for the public to believe that all this is perfectly managed, back here in reality.

> Do you realize that these figures include cleanup from nuclear weapons development?

Do you realize that the civil and military were so intimately tied during those phases that no one (even, in France, the supreme public finance audit authority, namely la 'Cour des comptes') can untangle the mess?

> Even if the pessimistic figures pan out

The UK had less than 20 nuclear powerplants and upon starting serious decommission they think that decommission costs will amount to at least £234b Even if (at best) only ~1/3 (?) will be necessary for purely civil reactors and sites that's ~£78b (~110bUSD)

The US have 58 active nuclear power plants (96 reactors) (see https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-pl... ), approximately 3 times more.

>The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]

If this repository is planed for 100 000 years (in germany it's 1 mio years) that are 8000€ a year. That doesn't sound like a realistic number to me. And it's by no way europes waste repository, it's for the 2 finnish nuclear plants.

Nuclear operating cost is comparable to offshore wind, coal, and combined cycle gas, and around 4X more expensive to operate than onshore wind or solar. (Of course, coal and gas would be more expensive if they had to pay a fair price for their emissions)

Nuclear is also eye-poppingly expensive to decommission.

Finally, note that operating cost doesn't include the sort of re-engineering and upgrades that are routinely required, and have doomed plants like San Onofre.

Most levelized energy costs do include cost of decommissioning and maintenance.

On the other hand, estimates of wind and solar do not include the cost of storage to actually make intermittent sources viable. Which is understandable, because there's really no plan to provision this much storage without a massive breakthrough in storage solutions. Almost all plans for a predominantly wind and solar grid assume that something like hydrogen, synthetic natural gas, or something else will provide massive amounts of cheap storage. Until then, it's fossil fuels to fulfill off-peak demand.

Modern nuclear plants (with 50+ years of safety lessons) for baseload and a mix of other sources (wind, solar, etc) sounds ideal.

Peak energy consumption happens in the evening, when solar isn't producing any energy. And nuclear costs just as much to run at partial capacity as it does to run a full capacity. So if you build enough nuclear plants to support the grid when solar and wind isn't producing, then there's no reason to build any solar and wind. Nuclear makes the intermittent sources redundant.

If nuclear isn't subsidized by military uses its energy negative when you factor in mining, enrichment, and operation.

Nope. Investment has dried up in nuclear exactly because the ROI is garbage compared to the trend lines in renewables + storage + gas turbine plants. A lot of posters here have a sort of smugness about being fans of nuclear power, blaming it's decline purely on "irrational" fears. They blithely ignore that even in authoritarian states where there's no meaningful political opposition to nuclear projects, we see the same declining interest. It just takes too much capital too long vs alternatives now. Absent a global carbon tariff nuclear will likely never again be competitive with gas supplementing renewables.

Gas is on the way out as well. Renewables undercut them routinely. Gas plants are expensive to operate and in a peaker plant role they have to compete with cheap battery which means they are not running most of the time and only when all else has failed. And as we saw in Texas, that's not a good plan either when gas supplies run tight.

E.g. the Australians vastly reduced their need for gas plants just by installing a few hundred MW of battery and saved a lot of cash in the process. ROI on those batteries has been quite high very early on. Not having turn on their peaker plants is a big deal.

Really? China has been building plants quite steadfastly. Fukushima seemed to have put the breaks on that but still, there are plants being built. Yet Western companies, like Areva, seemed to have completely lost their game in making the plants and nobody's willing to buy them from China or Russia. And sure, there's a high capital cost but putting the solar panels or wind turbines to match the capacity of one modern nuclear plant isn't exactly cheap either.

Buying solar or wind gets you about 3x the capacity for the same price in about 6-12 months. It's a lot cheaper and a lot less risk. And that's excluding operational cost. If you want capacity on a budget in a hurry, wind is your best bet right now. Nuclear is for the opposite scenario where you have decades time and are not in a hurry to get capacity online and don't mind paying an order of magnitude more.

The Chinese hedged their bets a few decades ago and wind + solar won there as well. China is breaking records in terms of growth of their renewable capacity and are a key technology supplier in that space and also a big part of why it got so cheap.

Yeah, it's this, combined with how cheap and effective gas turbines are, co2 be damned. It's really hard to argue for several billion dollars on a 10 year min delay until revenue vs renewables plus gas that builds out in under a year and is net positive ROI within a shockingly short time.

Even though I'm generally pro nuclear, I've come to the conclusion that absent some innovation that changes the cost structure, it's an increasingly dead option. I was hopeful NuScale's approach would do that, but it's pretty clear now they're missing their needed numbers.

Not just upfront. Nuclear plants need staffing, security (lots of it) throughout its operational life, waste handling and storage, constant audits (and related bureaucracy) for safety, security, etc. None of that stuff is free. Additionally, nuclear plants work with materials that actually decay when exposed to lots of neutrons which I imagine needs occasional maintenance as well You need trained staff as well and a few propeller heads that actually understand the physics. These people need educations and salaries. None of that stuff is free. That's why nuclear is currently considered the most expensive form of energy in the market.

The problem with renewables (for nuclear) is that it reduces the potential revenue for a nuclear plant over its 6-7 decade lifespan to well below any level where it makes sense to build them. If you budget for 1960s era grid pricing it all looks beautiful. Then fast forward 6 decades and you have solar bids trending towards 0.01$/kwh when most nuclear plants in operation are basically closer to 0.15$/kwh.

That's the whole problem. It's the most expensive option in the market by far. a 10X improvement would make it competitive with current solutions. Except that will take a few decades. So, realistically, you'd need a second order of magnitude improvement at that point. Yes, I believe renewables can do another 10x cost reduction over the next decades; possibly more. Ballpark 0.005$/kwh is probably worth investing in for a plant that comes online around 2045 or so. That's a modest 3x cheaper than the lowest solar/wind bids right now. 25 years is a long time. In any case, last time I checked, such plants are not being planned anywhere and most nuclear bids are 10x or more expensive than that. Out of the gate they are 2-3x more expensive than solutions in the market right now. That's for a plant that has not been built yet and will take decades to get built.

At this point it's gas plants that are forcing coal out of business. Solar/wind don't compete well with coal without extensive storage infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.

It's not coal vs nuclear. Both need to be shut down.

That's not the case at all, nuclear should be how we replace coal. Nuclear is one of the safest way to produce energy today, including the Chernobyl & Fukushima incidents.

Nuclear, because of its energy density, has a big edge against solar and wind as well. AFAIK, building NPPs not only uses less resources and land footprint than wind and solar, they also last longer and are non-intermittent.

In this graph, notice how safe Nuclear is, and also notice that it is cleaner than wind and solar.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> That's not the case at all, nuclear should be how we replace coal.

I'm going to nit pick

> nuclear should be part of how we replace coal.

There's no energy source that is a "one size fits all." Renewables and storage will better replace coal in some areas and nuclear will better in others. The point is that nuclear is not off the table and that experts can use said tool. It is about not tying peoples' hands behind their backs.

Then perhaps we should start funding fusion research above the "fusion never" levels?

Honestly, had we put the stupid amounts of money that we subsidize fossil fuels with (think about how much government funding went into the specialized drilling that became fracking) into fusion research, we'd likely have it by now.

Fusion is multiple decades ahead of us still, even with more funding, but we need to take action this decade if we want to have an impact on global warming.

Fusion is unfortunately not going to help here.

If we had put the money in renewables we almost certainly would have solved the problems by now.

My dad studied physics in the 60ies when fusion was just 20 years away.

Some Dutch engineers did a lot of pioneering work with wind turbines in the 1970s and nobody took it seriously.

There will never be one solitary erg of commercially viable energy from Tokamak fusion. Costs are already known to be sky-high, many many times that of e.g. current nuke, which has always been quite a lot more expensive than all the alternatives.

Current government-funded fusion research is a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. It actually steals all the funding from what could be viable projects.

This is largely due to the abstract nature of fossil fuel deaths. With the exception of an oil spill these take place over large areas and over longer periods of time. Whereas nuclear accidents are localized both geographically and temporally, even if their death rates (or even death per energy rate) is magnitudes below that of other sources.

What I think needs to happen is that these technologies need to be put on even playing fields. Nuclear has most of its costs built in: decommissioning, health, storage, etc. But a carbon tax and environmental health tax would largely put technologies on at least an even playing ground. These issues are essentially a tragedy of the commons issue, where we share resources. There's an economic cost to polluting a lake and if that is not built in to the market then it isn't fair or helpful to the population. We can argue about free markets and stuff, but this makes it more free as certain sectors can't skirt by this and it is unreasonable to expect the population to be well informed (nobody can be an expert in nuclear physics, coal, oil, solar, electrodynamics, mechanical engineering, hydrology, etc, the burden is too high). A major problem is that many sectors are getting major discounts because their costs are much harder to see. It isn't only "first order" costs that matter, especially when second and third order are so expensive (i.e. climate and health). I'm not saying we should reduce scrutiny of nuclear, but rather that the other technologies deserve the same level.

Did a control-F for "kurzgesagt" and saw that it had not been mentioned yet.

I really recommend watching this short video which gives a really excellent overview of the dangers of nuclear power in the context of the alternatives.

The TLDW is even if a very pessimistic estimate of the dangers of nuclear power is still much better than a very optimistic take on the dangers of fossil fuels once you combine the effects of air pollution and climate change. That includes both Chernobyl and Fukushima.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

> A large number of people die every year.

This keeps beeing peddled by the pro-nuclear fraction, but you are comparing apples and oranges: the "large number of people die" is based on "if you burn coal without any filters, in particular if you do it in a little hut in a third world country with no proper chimney, it's really really bad for your health".

Nuclear power plants require modern technology for high safety standards. Coal power plants on anything than a very basic technology level all have filters that scrub the sulphur etc. Outside of third world countries, nobody dies from coal. It's not even a health problem.

The problem with coal and other fossil fuels is that they use up limited resources, and they put back the CO2 into the atmosphere that has been extracted by plans over millions of years, causing global warming.

The problem with nuclear is that when it goes boom (and it has done so about once every 20 years since we have nuclear), it leaves a large area inhabitable for a long time. Which is a big problem in a densely populated country like mine. Also, at least in my country, even though we are using nuclear for about 60 years now, nobody has figured out a safe way to store the nuclear waste - it just gets moved around from one failed attempt to the next.

The "lots of people die from coal" vs. "nobody dies from nuclear" story (which are both distortions, conveniently in different directions to match the ideology of those bringing it up) is a red herring.

> Nuclear power plants require modern technology for high safety standards.

There a thing I note about maintaining a solar plant, you can trust couple of rednecks in a F150 pickup truck to do what's needed.

"Outside of third world countries, nobody dies from coal. It's not even a health problem." is not true, see this DOE report: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/Environm...

This adds about 25 points to the AQI if you live in the red zone, data is from 2016.

Even if it doesn't kill you through cardiac effects, how much asthma and QALYs are you losing from that?

[0]> Estimates vary, but between 7,500 and 52,000 people in the United States meet early deaths because of small particles resulting from power plant emissions.

That is the US. That is just air pollution. It is reasonable to conclude that there are other sources of pollution, such as water (which no matter how you cut it, air is in contact with).

> it [goes boom] about once every 20 years

This keeps beeing peddled by the anti-nuclear fraction, but you are comparing apples and oranges: the "large number of explosions" is based on "if you include 3 Mile Island and use bad statistics because now that number is 26 and ignore that we can't do this type of analysis will small sampling, and naively act like no progress has been made and that the probability isn't dependent on this". I mean seriously... 1st reactor: 1942, 3 Mile (not an explosion and isn't comparable to Chernobyl or Fukushima): 1979, Chernobyl: 1986, Fukushima: 2011. If we drop 3-Mile we get 40 years (39.5) btw. And you think no one is learning from this? That technology hasn't advanced in that time? This argument is ridiculous. It is bad faith. And I don't know how anyone can make this argument with a straight face.

> The "lots of people die from coal" vs. "nobody dies from nuclear" story

It is literally 39k Americans per year (mean of above) to 81[1] EVER (31 Chernobyl immediate, 50 Chernobyl after, 0 3 Mile Island, 0 Fukushima). You might want to retort about cancer and/or future deaths (which is still smaller than the lowest US YEARLY deaths), but we've already recognized that we're not doing that with coal either. If you get cancer from coal and survive you don't get counted, just like our nuclear numbers.

There's better arguments to make but this one is just absurd and is trivial to prove so.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

> According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure.

[2] Side note: the highest estimates use 60k for potential Chernobyl deaths, which is still 8 years at coal's best case scenario. Again, only counting the US for coal and world for nuclear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

The real trouble with the light water reactor is not the nuclear part but the steam turbine it is attached to.

Unfortunately people have a way of driving while looking in the rear view mirror and much of the discussion around nuclear energy revolves around issues of the 1970s.

In the 1970s coal burning power plants were the cost king of power plants. There was some concern about making them cleaner, but by the 1980s gas turbine power plants with 10 times the power density (e.g. 1/10 the capital cost) were becoming widespread and people quit building coal plants.

(A big literature got left behind about how to drive a gas turbine from coal, on paper it would be lower capital cost than a conventional coal plant, but the technology never got developed at full scale.)

Even if the heat was free it would be hard for a steam turbine based power plant to compete with gas turbines.

Now it should be possible to build a nuclear power plant based on the brayton cycle using helium or carbon dioxide or some similar gas as a working fluid. You then need to use helium or sodium or lead as a coolant because the pressure would be too high with water.

Fast reactors are the best developed option, followed by the prismatic HTGR, then the thorium reactors. Pebble-bed HTGR looked pretty good until an expose came out that a German pebble bed reactor had a difficult time... Turns out pebbles that slide past each other just fine in air will get stuck on each other and crack in helium.

When Bill Gates and others go around saying we have to get over the safety issue they are continuing the stigma. Nuclear power is not going to get out of it's funk unless it has a cost story that looks good when everything goes right -- which is not the case with the LWR.

My favourite current design is by Moltex Energy. Its basically, what happens if you take a Sodium reactor design and instead use molten salt.

It basically fixes all the really terrible ideas about sodium reactors and gives you the advantage of molten salt reactors.

The problem is, what we are doing now are all things that could and should have been done in the 70-80s.

No one has successfully contained molten salt, although they have tried.

It's not hard.

There is a good classroom demo where somebody melts a molten salt in a crucible with a bunsen burner and demonstrates that it becomes transparent, conducts electricity, etc.

A molten salt can be used as a coolant, competitive with sodium in fast reactors. It is not so chemically reactive and you can see through it (imaging repairing a reactor you cant see -- a bad problem in the 1970s, not so bad now with ultrasound). It is less heat conductive than sodium though, which hurts the econonics of fast reactors which need a large amount of nuclear fuel to form a critical mass and can get more value out of that critical mass by getting as much heat out as possible.

You can dissolve uranium, thorium and/or plutonium in that salt and that is proven (see MSRE) but needs development.

Most of the dangerous products of the reaction stay in the salt, it works a lot better than you think it would. (when a sodium reactor melted down in the late 50s they never detected radioactive iodine because it reacted with the sodium and the salt dissolved in the coolant, then it decayed in place.)

You still have some noble gases coming out and fine particles of platinum group metals coming out, but that's less of a problem than finding materiald that can survive 30+ years of that treatment.

Hot salt is very corrosive.

For how often it is promoted one would think practical problems containing it were already worked out, but I only find failures.

There are many solutions for this. Corrosion is absolutely a problem you can find engineering solutions to. And Moltex has very elegant one. Other companions like Terrestrial are simply replacing the reactor core after 7 years.

The MSR experiment in the 60s proved it worked. They had some corrosion issues after quite a while in operation, but still operated if for quite a while, and that was in the 60s.

Or are you talking about something else?

> Even if the heat was free it would be hard for a steam turbine based power plant to compete with gas turbines.

This isn't true. People started attaching steam turbines to gas plants precisely because it made economic sense to tap into waste heat for co-generation.

Nobody expects nuclear to compete against fossil fuels. But fossil fuels release carbon. Nuclear is necessary because it's the only consistent form of carbon-free energy production save for geographically dependent solutions like hydroelectricity and geothermal power.

> Nuclear power is not going to get out of it's funk unless it has a cost story that looks good when everything goes right -- which is not the case with the LWR.

True. One solution is to attach a cost to account for the impact of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. Then nuclear will be competitive with fossil fuels. And competitive against intermittent sources since those require fossil fuels as a backup, at least until some feasible form of grid-scale storage is developed.

The "steam turbine attached to the gas plant" as a system benefits from the high power density of the gas turbine. For nuclear to do the same it would need to run at high temps (e.g. sodium, sodium fluoride, ...) and be coupled to a combined cycle powerset and heat recovery system...

Still needs the high temps!

Nuclear competes not just with fossil fuels but with "burn the fossil fuels, capture the carbon, inject the CO2 back into the ground option", which might not be so bad if this gets perfected

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

I think you misunderstand what combined cycle means.

In a gas turbine - without cogeneration - the gas turbine is driven by heating air and the expanded air spins a turbine, which spins a dynamo (as well as the compressor blades). It's like a jet engine, but hooked up to a generator. The exhaust air is hot and we do nothing with that waste heat.

Starting a couple decades ago, people started putting boilers next to the gas turbine exhaust. This boiler is heated by the gas turbine exhaust, and the generated steam drives a turbine. It's combined cycle because there's two heat engines: the jet engine which is driven by hot air, and then the steam turbine driven by steam generated from the jet engine's exhaust. It's tapping into waste heat to generate steam, and that steam drives a turbine. There's two Carnot cycles happening. One in the gas turbine, one in the steam turbine.

There's no such thing as a combined cycle nuclear plant, no matter how much thermal energy it can put out. The plant heats water which drives a turbine. If you have a reactor that generates more heat, then you can generate more steam and drive a larger turbine or additional turbines. But there's still only one heat engine, one cycle.

I guess you could use the heat exchanger as a second steam generator to drive a second turbine. But in order for that to work, the first steam turbine would have to be very inefficient and deliver a lot of waste heat to the second turbine. It'd be better to just drive two turbines in parallel or a larger turbine.

I think the GGP post is trying to suggest building a nuclear plant with high temperature coolant that runs a combined cycle generator. I don’t know whether this is actually cost effective.

In fossil fuel use the gas turbine works by internal combustion -- heat is added by a fire inside the device and the exhaust goes out the back.

There are closed cycle gas turbines that put heat in with a heat exchanger and some have been built for non nuclear use but they haven't been competitive with alternatives (e.g. open cycle gas turbine) since they quit using mercury as the working fluid.

Something like that could heat up steam for a bottoming cycle. It's not a matter if it is possible, its a matter if it is practical.

A nuclear reactor can operate at much higher temperatures using coolants other than water, and it has been done (see the british AGR and the American FFTF) but there are a huge number of details that must be perfected to make it routine.

How can one regulate an endeavour that is so inextricably entwined with the military and government prestige? How do you set up a genuinely independent regulator that has strong enough teeth, one that cannot be leaned on by industry heavyweights lobbying the government?

These problems are not unique to nuclear power, of course; Australia seems to have similar problems with coal, and the US with oil.

Is nuclear power particularly an element of Japanese government prestige? I have to say when I think of Japan, nuclear power doesn’t spring to mind. Same goes for the military - is there any evidence that nuclear power is particularly entwined with the Japanese military?

Energy independence is a matter of Japanese government prestige. As Japan being a resource-poor nation pretty much led to WW2, becoming energy independent was a major post-war goal. Nuclear was a very essential part of that (not anymore).

That's true. 1973 oil crisis was another great reason to go nuclear plants.

>> I think of Japan, nuclear power doesn’t spring to mind.

It does for me, but that probably has more to do with Godzilla movies. Japan is also unique in its experience with nuclear energy. I think of Japan as a country that has a mature understanding of nuclear power. I would not lecture them on the subject.

>inextricably entwined with the military and government prestige?

Is that a thing? For some reason when I think of nuclear accidents, I don't often think that "military and government prestige" were the biggest issues. Maybe Chernobyl was?

> How do you set up a genuinely independent regulator that has strong enough teeth, one that cannot be leaned on by industry heavyweights lobbying the government?

Directly elected local environmental assessors, which are required to attend annual meetings at the state and federal level?

The auditors which make up the regulatory panel would then be directly elected by residents throughout the country and would inspect the work of their colleagues.

Solve the waste storage and disposal problem first, then treat it as an emissions problem, and ensure the nuclear industry is investing in technologies which continually recycling or minimizing the total mass of high level waste it is producing in exchange for disposal and storage services.

As an educated voter, I would not want to vote for my nuclear inspector, because their job solely consists of managing tail risk[1], and I have zero ability to evaluate their qualifications, or job performance.

I have no ability to accurately determine whether or not one of five candidates actually knows what they are doing, or if they are just a hustler who knows how to play Buzzword Bingo. I suppose I could spend months of my life trying to get educated on the subject, but I don't have time to do so, and neither do my neighbors.

This is why representative democracies exist. You vote for a representative, and it becomes their job to wrangle domain-specific underlings.

[1] The only feedback signal I can trust is 'Did a one-in-a-thousand-year event occur under their watch?' [2]

[2] And if it did, well shucks, what am I going to do now? Fire them in the next election? The damage is already done.

the flaw in that reasoning is that you’re creating a single point of subvertible power (and failure). that might have made sense 250 years ago before the advent of electricity and telecommunications (and smaller systemic dangers), but not so much anymore. it also doesn’t solve the ‘aww shucks’ issue you mention at all, which really is an incentives issue beyond representation (you could instead, as a wild supposition, make all representatives live within 20 miles of the plant to align incentives).

we should elect 10s if not 100s of such representatives at a time (and those folks can hire further experts as necessary) so that no one rep has inordinate power, because depending on a single person is certain to fail at some point. that also is more likely to provide diversity of thought, which is crucial to effective decision-making. we’re rich enough as a nation to support such a panel without batting an eye.

> you could instead, as a wild supposition, make all representatives live within 20 miles of the plant to align incentives

Isn't it possible this would increase the chance they had financial ties to the nuclear industry? My initial thought was that if you appointed environmental scientists to monitor emissions in areas without nuclear plants, they could also check the work of other assessors in areas with nuclear plants, to make sure their colleagues were honest, when attending board meetings.

So you would get bright people which were otherwise uninvolved to check the work and listen to what was being discussed.

Another option which would not rely on local election, would be to have Congress appoint 50 environmental assessors, one from each state, which were required to be permanent residents of each state they were appointed to represent, rather than employees of a national office. The assessors would then meet once per year to form a national oversight board.

> "Isn't it possible this would increase the chance they had financial ties to the nuclear industry?"

possibly, but i'd guess it's unlikely to be a significantly material effect, since you'd still be aiming to get a diverse group of representatives (many of whom would then have to move to be near one of the many nuclear plants in the state/country). i lived within 20 miles of a nuclear plant for a small part of my life and plenty of people in the area had nothing to do with the plant.

i think the more important bit is having wide and diverse representation and limiting the corruptibility of any individual representative.

> As an educated voter, I would not want to vote for my nuclear inspector

The chief job of local environmental assessors would likely be gathering and aggregate local data sources to monitor and track a wide variety of emissions, including non-radioactive emissions in areas with no nuclear industry.

> I have zero ability to evaluate their qualifications, or job performance

The feedback signal to watch would be whether newspapers and activists say they are compromised by financial ties to local industries, which can be assisted by financial disclosure forms.

> This is why representative democracies exist

Another option which relied more on Congress would be to have the House & Senate appoint one independent environmental assessor from each state, which were required to be permanent residents of each state, to attend an annual meeting once per year, to form an independent board of oversight. The assessors would have to be permanent residents of the state they were appointed to represent and submit financial disclosure forms.

If you need to get elected by, socialize with, and in general get along with the people you are regulating, well, they don't even need to bribe you with money. Local regulation is the easiest to subvert.

In France we have an "Autorité de sûreté nucléaire"[1] which is an independent administration (having its own budget, own lawyers, not connected to governments, etc). France have 25 of such administrations[2].

I can't say it's perfect, but anyone (individuals, parliamentarians, justice) can seize one of them to require its action or explain why it does not act. It's defenitly a "contre-pouvoir".

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_s%C3%BBret%C3... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_administrative_i...

a foreseeable risk Japan’s neutered regulators had failed to foresee

Hogwash. The plant was built on a known tsunami basin. The whole calamity from beginning to end was caused by bureaucratic pigheadedness against warnings based on better knowing.

Not that I see that as much of an argument for this piece's line of argument because we're still just as bad at having the right people make decisions for the right reasons. And if there was a single crumb of contribution towards that in the opinion piece I must have missed it.

Nuclear power, when done right, is good and safe. But right now it's much too financially and politically risky when compared to the alternatives.

Look at Finland for example. They're building two new power plants:

Olkiluoto Unit 3: Under construction since 2005, commercial operation delayed by at least 13 years now and the initial delivery price of €3 billion is estimated to end up at €8.5 billion.

Hanhikivi: Won't be operational until at earliest 2028 and is expected to cost €6.7 billion. 34% of the plant is/will be owned by the Russian state coorporation Rosatom, because all the alternative suppliers were too expensive. If the plant eventually becomes operational then Rosatom will supply 3% of Finland's total electricity production.

Would it not have been much more reasonable to spend this money on developing and investing in renewable energy sources?

Can you give hard reasons for the delay? As in this concrete needed to be poured 6" thicker than originally speced and what the upgrade provides?

The couple times I've actually seen these changes described, they are changes enacted to stall the development, not because of a hard technical reason in the design.

Nuclear power would be more competitive if the CO2 tax was implemented.

But it is in the EU - there's a cap and trade scheme in place.

Over the course of 2018 the price of allowance for 1t of CO2 emissions shot up from ~€8 to €25 and so far hasn't dropped.

Hanhikivi is 1000 MW and will supply 10% of Finland’s energy needs according to Wikipedia.

Olkiluoto is 1600 MW and should therefore supply 16% of Finland’s energy needs. Wikipedia says it will Be online in February 2022.

So for 16 billion euro Finland gets 26% of their energy from a firm source with no carbon Emissions.

British Columbia is spending 16 billion CAD on a 1000 MW hydro dam callers site C, in a system with a peak load of 16,000 MW that is 90% hydro.

16 billion euros for two nuclear plants that will make Up a quarter of the Finnish system doesn’t seem that bad to me? You need something for the cloudy week with no wind.

I’m not saying don’t also pursue renewables, but nuclear is part of the solution. It isn’t an either/or, it’s both.

On a per kWh basis, whoch is the metric that matters, wind and solar got cheaper in 2019 than the latest nuclear projects in the UK. Existing nuclear plants are a stop gap solution, and a very good one, to combat climate change if they were used to close down coal and oil power plants asap. They can be replaced by a later date with renewables, starting with oldest reactors.

I am sure nuclear is just about the most expensive power if we are counting construction, operation, and decommissioning. But also consider that it is a firm source of power not subject to the weather. The value of a kWh is quite high when otherwise there would be none.

I suppose if you add to the the cost of a solar or wind plant the cost of a battery system to make the output 100% constant like a nuclear plant that would be a better $/kWh comparison.

Not really, Nuclear is the only clean non-intermittent energy source that is also fossil free available.

Power plants designed to be only power plants rather than also fast breeders for military doomsday weapons would certainly help. Molten salt reactors and Candu reactors neither one fail the same way as Fukushima and Chernobyl. Fusion plants, once commercially viable, also will not fail the same way. New light water reactors should probably not be built considering the options.

Didn't bill gates fund this traveling wave reactor that has this property? I checked Wikipedia but it doesn't say either way. I don't remember for sure but I think this is a thing now, just nobody wants him to build it because brrr scary nuclear let's rather stop advancement of the field.

Fast breeders are scary.

That Wikipedia page does not mention any breakthrough in passive stability, and unless somebody mentions it, the safe thing to assume is that any fast breeder has none. What means that it can basically blow like the Chernobyl reactor or worse due to failure of equipment.

I'm no physicist, is this traveling wave reactor a "fast breeder" that you're talking about? From what I read, the stability comes from it not being a runaway reaction that needs active brakes. If something fails, the reaction will stop on its own rather than having a meltdown or explosion.

But I'm just parroting what I read in the past (not sure where), I don't do nuclear physics and can't say whether it's snake oil or real.

I'm not an expert. My knowledge of nuclear physics is limited to some liquid model theory at university (what is basically the simplest model you can find and completely useless), and some empiric data. I also just met this design. But I do know some general principles.

The Wiki page claims very briefly this is a fast breeder design where it says it uses fast neutrons, also, it doesn't mention moderation, that is the process that converts fast neutrons into slow ones.

Now, the thing that makes slow neutron reactions safer is that nothing happens unless the neutrons goes into the moderation medium, so if things deviate from the design, the reaction stops. Fast neutron reactions do not have this property, so any stability must be designed into it. That does not mean that you can't get some passive stability built into it, what it does mean is that it must be actively put into the project, and you must correctly account for any possible failure mode.

Thus, a good rule of thumb is that if somebody is talking about fast reactors and doesn't take 90% of the time talking about safety, then that somebody does not have a viable idea.

Fast reactors usually have a strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. This is inherent to the temperature of the fuel and responds instantly. The Integral Fast Reactor, for instance, was designed to tolerate loss of coolant flow without even needing to insert the control rods to shutdown, with no core damage.

https://www.ne.anl.gov/About/hn/logos-winter02-psr.shtml

The main issue I have with fast reactors is the liquid sodium coolants typically used, very hazardous stuff if it was to leak. Molten salts are a nice alternative.

I'm not familiar enough with Gate's investments nor his foundation's investments to say, and "traveling wave reactor" is something I've read once or twice before but not looked much into.

CANDU reactors have an excellent safety record and fail in a much safer way than light water reactors. I've been looking more into those recently. MSRs, and especially molten thorium salt reactors, I've read about and watch documentaries about quite a bit. Still, I'm just an interested layperson in this discussion. I used to date someone who was planning to be a nuclear engineer, but she ultimately ended up in software, too.

The traveling wave reactor concept failed to pan out, and no it was not because of "brrr scary." Gate's project switched to a different design they were going to build in China, but that got caught up in the bluster between Xi and Trump. In any case it's clear his startup has failed to come up with anything novel that significantly changes the cost math with nuclear, which is the actual problem.

That's not what he writes in his book that came out iirc last month, specifically the "we moved to another design because this idea failed" I mean, but I didn't dive into it much further so I could be wrong.

Even when we think things can't go wrong, and we think that we've thought of all the ways they could go wrong if they did, they still manage to go wrong. Everything goes wrong. Why do we need to pick a mind-bogglingly expensive technology where going wrong means catastrophe?

You can set your watch by the regularity at which the nuclear lobbies throw a "for the sake of climate change" article in a respected publication.

Because in practice/empirically it is safer than the alternatives even when things do go wrong.

And they go wrong very rarely.

Statistics won't help you if one of those "every 20 years" disasters hit a highly populated area like Europe. The technology will still look "safe" on paper but you'd have depopulated a huge area and maybe even killed people or keep on killing through cancer.

This is not "statistics" it is simple facts. Japan is highly populated.

"Very rarely" is not enough to justify thousands of years of uninhabitable square kilometres.

Except that doesn't happen.

The former inhabitants of Pripyat and the Fukushima exclusion zone are thrilled to hear that.

That's not really true. Nuclear kills about as many as RE https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

But those numbers are essentially cherry-picked. They include just production of energy, like falling into the furnace? Consider about externalities. Mining, shipping. Then add in environmental erosion resulting in lower lifespans around the globe. Then failure/interruptions that endanger folks during cold snaps/heat waves. That's a big one - petrochemical plants can be down 30% of the time (nuclear < 2%) leaving grids endangered.

And of course its per-terawatt deaths that are interesting, not totals. Other wise you just have (literally) a heat map!

Mining and shipping is required for all forms of energy. Of course it's gonna be per twh because that is the only way to measure that makes any sense.

Kurzgesagt has a great video explaining everything here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

Mining and shipping are very, very different by source - every watt of coal is shipped. Only the machinery for solar is shipped. Nuclear fuel is shipped in pounds not megatons, but they are fantastically dangerous pounds. Etc. Utterly different in effect on risk.

The linked chart seemed to list totals. Did it have per TWHr? I missed that.

If you want to talkt about emissions instead here is a great summary from the Swedish Life cycle analysis by energy source: Nuclear: 6g CO2/kwh Hydro: 9g CO2/kwh Wind: 13g CO2/kwh Solar: 24g CO2/kwh

This includes everything from construction to mining. The data comes from Swedens state run energy company Vattenfall LCA report https://www.vattenfall.se/foretag/miljo/epd/ and here is a an article that summarizes it https://blog.karnfull.se/blog/kaernkraftslogik-1-klimatsmart

But if you change the measure of safety to: square kilometres rendered uninhabitable, or potential to be rendered uninhabitable, for tens of thousands of years then nuclear fission is dead last and always will be.

The message is don’t use 1940s physics understanding, 1950s design, 1960s construction to build a reactor that is then run for about 50 years and and expect to continue to avoid problems with it.

They will say similar in 50 years about today's technology.

That's the point, because right now 50 years from now they will still be talking about 100 year old technology because we haven't allowed ourselves to advance.

The potential for it to go horribly wrong gives me great pause. Sure, if we do everything right, it might be fine. But people make mistakes. People get greedy and lazy. The worst case is pretty "worst" here.

It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

And that's including the worst-case accidents.

We all seem to get that airplanes are safe and that being afraid to fly is something to overcome. We also know how disastrously it can go wrong if the plane crashes into flats (I'm thinking of the Bijlmer disaster, not a terrorist attack): it's not a theoretical risk, it's just exceedingly unlikely to happen to you.

How come this is communicated differently for fission energy? Looking at the data it's a similar situation.

Planes are massively more dangerous too.

How many actual deaths are a result of nuke accidents?

Depending on how you count its possible more people died in a single airplane crashes than have died in all the nuke related energy production incidents, ever.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123

If you want to include ground based deaths 911 was close to 3k people dead.

My father, who used to testify at various hearings (he was a physicist) used to make this argument. I think it kind of misses a key point: People would much rather deal with N deaths a year than deal with a range with an average of N - k, but a much, much higher possible number (thicker tail to the distribution).

Just because math says it's better doesn't mean that is how people experience the risk.

Right, and that's part of it.

However, it doesn't capture all of it, because people vastly overestimate the risk of the bad case. Nuclear is dramatically safer than fossil fuels even if you only count the years with accidents.

Whats the worse case? We end up with a exclusion zone for a hundred years?

I'm beginning to think that is a feature.

The world needs more exclusion zones that can be left to nature. In the last 50 years we have pretty much encroached our shit into every single square inch of the planet. The only areas that aren't shoulder to shoulder humans destroying the environment, are the ones to inhospitable to live in and don't have any obvious natural wealth to exploit.

Maybe we wouldn't be going through one of the largest extinction events in the planets history if we irradiated half the land mass enough to scare people away.

Perhaps being a little radioactive isn’t as bad as the billions that could die from climate change.

In the 90’s I shared a long cab ride between airports with a nuclear engineer who said he specialized in “cleanups”. I asked what he thought about the next generation of plant design. He spent the rest of the ride recounting a half dozen horror stories about how nothing about the hardware or design was easy but human factors could turn perfectly safe processes into accidents.

He said you could never engineer out human error, panic behavior and blindspots.

France is absolutly filled to the brim with Nuclear power and have not had any problems. No one is building RBMK reactors so unless you build a NPP in an area which is at risk of tsunamis any accidents wouldn't really cause any major damage due to modern safety protocols.

The alternative is the continued dependence on Natural gas and that would lead to the extinction of mankind.

Regulation has failed in the face of expediency time and time again. That's the reason I opposite nuclear. Sure, plants CAN be run safely. But WILL they be run safely? Even in 10, 20, 50 or 100 years? Even under the next 100 years worth of social, economic, and political circumstances? No one has managed that so far.

People love coming up with new physics tricks or clever engineering for fission power. But what we actually need is new Political Science or even Political Engineering.

So in 10 years when the next disaster has happened we can start looking for excuses again. ‘How could this have happened? We’ll never let this happen again! This will never happen to us, surely!’

Every time I get into an argument with someone pro-nuclear and bring up the costs, they always blame hippies hamstringing nuclear power with regulations. Around and around the argument goes, meanwhile solar and wind costs keep on dropping, and baseload concerns keep on fading away.

Well-regulated?

The site Fukushima was built on was originally much higher than the water. The region had been struck by several equally huge tsunamis in the previous century. Despite that history, the site was carved down to be much nearer the water before the plant was built.

Regulations aren't the problem. Humans are - and 60+ years of experience has proven that problem to be insoluble. Add to that the costs, and the available timeline, and: exactly how does nuclear become a solution of any kind?

The problem if nuclear power is that technology progress has slowed to almost 0 and we are still operating with 60s technology.

In the 60s we built many, many test reactors and it was clear that nuclear power had huge potential to revolutionize the world.

This is still true, the energy density inherent in nuclear power can transform lots of industries. But unfortunately the regulatory structure built around nuclear material and nuclear deployment is almost impossible to manage.

This is partly simply to do with how restrictive the access to the material itself. Forms of regulation that make it almost impossible to do any kind of iterations, you can't even do a small scale test reactor in a practical way.

Look at how SpaceX is building Starship. That's how you get revolutionary technology. Not by sitting around for 10-15 years to maybe one day directly building a full scale reactor (that you then have to scale).

A fundamental shift in how to think about the potential of nuclear needs to be done. The regulatory structures have to be fundamentally redesigned in pretty much every aspect.

The DoE has admitted some of the issues but trying to rationalise the regulation but its like relocating an asteroid.

Good regulation will not suddenly make 60s technology competitive today, we need to rethink the process from innovation to operation in a new way.

https://archive.fo/SLoqm

There seem to be a series of pro-nuclear submissions here, driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying. That would be an interesting story to dig out.

The resulting discussion points out that the cost of nuclear power plants is very high, the long term risks high, the time taken to build and cost overruns extraordinarily high and so on and on. Meanwhile renewables are cheaper, even when adding the batteries required to smooth lumps, and they can be stood up very quickly. Sure keep the old plants and improve regulation, but investors are not going to get returns from nuclear plants when the competition is low capex, free sunlight and almost zero maintenance.

I don’t think we currently have the battery technology to carry the base load for the United States.

I think there are far more effective venues for lobbying that posting pro-nuclear links to HN.

More likely, it's educated users who don't want to see the world melt by 2100.

>driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying

Or because people are waking up and realizing that climate change is gonna screw us faster than we can build the tech to prevent that and people are defecting toward nuclear which is relatively shovel ready compared to grid scale solar/wind and the storage they necessitate.

That doesn't make sense. If you feel pressure by time, nuclear is and never was your solution. It takes too long to construct. By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will jump several development steps.

That's fantastic but unfortunately there is no viable grid storage close to being capable of actually utilizing renewables for the majority of power all over the world.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-t...

Are we really going to risk human civilization on the immediate invention and mass fabrication of new storage technologies orders of magnitude more efficient then what we have?

Well, let’s get to 30-40% solar/wind before we start worrrying about grids that cannot accept majority renewable.

And guess what, at that point maybe some of the newer, safer, and cheaper nuclear designs would have been proven so the nuclear plays we build then for the next few decades are better than the ones we would build right now.

Massive energy storage can^W will be built in fraction of time needed to build and then demolish a nuclear power plant.

> By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will jump several development steps.

We can build more than one nuclear reactor at a time, you know.

How does that change something the amount of time it takes to build each of them?

If you start now, it'll still take you almost a decade (or maybe it even will be a decade. You never know with NPPs because they always take longer and cost more than projected) and in that decade renewables will jump generations of development. In the end you just wasted money which could have been invested into true clean energy which is still improving fast.

> faster than we can build the tech

You're arguing for nuclear on the basis of its build speed? That doesn't seem to be born out in reality. Maybe another X* years when we've got cheap, factory built small modular reactors, but that certainly doesn't describe nuclear today. In which case we're back to waiting for new tech.

* X being some number of years that increments by 1 year, every year.

We can hope that all countries will find the space for all the solar panels, wind turbines, have some convenient height differences for hydro power and pumped energy storage, money for li-ion storage for the night or windless days, grid upgrades to get it from where it's produced to where it's needed...

or we could apt remove coal_plant && apt install fission_plant on the same surface area and be certain that we'll be done in the 15 years that this takes to build.

I'm very much afraid the former isn't going to cut it. I also know solar is cheaper if you compare kWh produced by panels on roofs to kWh produced by nuclear plants, but we need to increase our energy production nearly tenfold and renewables only won't make it easy to get there. We need to continue on both fronts, we can't rule out nuclear if we want to avoid this disaster. Best case the money is wasted. Currently, the best case is that we'll succeed and the average case a disaster.

Large parts of build speed issue with nuclear is regulation. If we could just get a permit to build done in a reasonable amount of time and then not stop progress again and again it would make a big difference.

Given the price tag for Fukushima is at $187 billion and rising, arguing for deregulation _should_ be a hard sell.

The axiom 'safe, cheap, fast; choose any 2' doesn't even apply to nuclear. It's more like choose 0. You might be able to argue for some version of 'safe' by talking about actual fatalities from nuclear energy being low, but I think the 5000ish square kilometers of exclusion zones from Chrenobyl/Fukushima should be part of the conversation about 'safety'. Safe for people perhaps, safe for property, apparently not. So maybe choose 0.5?

> You're arguing for nuclear on the basis of its build speed? That doesn't seem to be born out in reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...

https://apnews.com/article/2fef5c6a978b4fd5a79596020f0bac8a

The plant was fully capable of continuing operation, but they're restricted in how much they can increase the temperature of the river used for cooling. There has been no demonstrated impact of reactor cooling on fish populations, so this is really just the government shutting down the nuclear plant just for the sake of it.

Hmm I wonder if there’s a link between the fish in the river being fine and the regulators preventing the reactor from boiling it in the summer ?

I'm not sure what your point is by linking to just that graph without context.

No one denies that nuclear makes up the majority of France's generating capacity. It's more debatable as to whether or not France is capable of building them out at competitive prices compared to renewables. It's worth looking at the ongoing cost disaster that is Flamanville unit 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

Short version: supposed to be 54 months to build at €3.3 billion, is currently now targeting 180 months of total construction time at €19.1 billion. Not a good look.

The point is that nuclear is indeed capable of being built rapidly. Over the span of 15 years France went from 10% nuclear power to 80%. You claim that nuclear can't be built at speed, and that this isn't borne out by reality. This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true: it was borne out by reality.

You're making a sharp pivot here, away from construction time to cost. Yes, nuclear is much cheaper when the same design is built repeatedly instead of first-of-a-kind reactors. This is already well known.

Solar and wind are cheaper in terms of raw generation costs, but don't actually offer a path to decarbonization because of their intermittency. Solar and wind are cheap when they supplement fossil fuels. But they need to be paired with storage to be used as a primary source of power, and we don't have a feasible plan to provide that much storage let alone how much it'd cost.

> Over the span of 15 years France went from 10% nuclear power to 80%.

Ok, that's much more fair. Thanks for pointing out the fallacy.

> we don't have a feasible plan to provide that much storage let alone how much it'd cost.

I think part of the idea behind smart grid initiatives is to use electric vehicles as part of the storage mix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid

Not sure if you're writing that off as unfeasible, but clearly there are solutions being thought about, and there are companies in the market today selling storage with costs going down every single year. It's not unreasonable to think that the 'feasible' plan for storage is to, well, simply buy/install it; which becomes cheaper every single year.

Also, solar thermal plants (no storage required) are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

> Not sure if you're writing that off as unfeasible, but clearly there are solutions being thought about, and there are companies in the market today selling storage with costs going down every single year. It's not unreasonable to think that the 'feasible' plan for storage is to, well, simply buy/install it; which becomes cheaper every single year.

Yes, it is. There's enough known lithium deposits to produce 5 minutes worth of storage. With current mining techniques, there's an estimated 20 minutes worth of storage. [1]

> Also, solar thermal plants (no storage required) are a thing:

Solar thermal is more expensive than nuclear.

1. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html

Nuclear, shovel ready? How many economically viable nuclear designs are shovel ready with a reasonable time to generation?

We regulated the industry so much that we made nuclear plants almost entirely economically unviable.

Some of the regulations are good, some are bad - and a lot were born out of irrational fears about an immature industry that we didn't fully understand at the time.

There is no reason a nuclear plant cannot be economically viable. They're all over Europe, Japan, Russia, China and I'm sure other countries as well.

NuScale/Fluor claim they can bring the UAMPS project in Idaho online by 2027 at an amortized average energy cost of about $55/MWh.

https://www.powermag.com/nuscale-uamps-kick-off-idaho-smr-nu...

That would make it more expensive than onshore wind($45/MWh) and solar yet($48/MWh) cheaper than all other sources of energy including natural gas($59/MWh). Double the final cost of energy to $110/MWh and it would still be in theory cheaper than the average for coal($115/MWh). Granted I'm pulling these numbers from Wikipedia so it's not that simple but the numbers aren't unrealistic.

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

South Korea builds nuclear plants in < 5 years. Japan < 4 years. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2016/10/123_215869...

You do realize this is a 75 year old industry with dozens of approved reactor designs?

The lobby tries everything to paint themselves as a clean energy source and alternative to renewable energy. Striking aggressively left and right. Sometimes even by the same lobbyist:

https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-...

https://www.facebook.com/shellenbergerMD/videos/my-interview...

I have the feeling that the gained pace now that nuclear is on the retreat in democratic countries.

https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...

that we have so many pro nuclear articles here on HN is remarkable to me, too. However, I come from Germany where the general sentiment is negative. I'd guess in the US (where probably most of HN users come from?!) the sentiment is more positive? I can't explain it any other way (well, lobbyism, astroturfing... okay, but I wouldn't go that far without evidence). What I miss in all these energy discussions is arguments about reducing the load or better managing the load (with flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be very data driven which should align well with the HN crowd. And those discussions should come before we start even thinking about nuclear. Same argument as with recycling: the best garbage [energy] is the one which never was (reduce > recycle).

I've never had a negative sentiment against nuclear energy, even though most of the people from my country seem to be or at least were so in the past.

And I feel many of the measures the Dutch government is taking these days to reduce CO2 seem borderline crazy. For example burning trees for energy (biomass), wood that is imported from the USA and Canada and shipped in huge container ships to The Netherlands [0]. And let's not forget that trees actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Or the fact that the Dutch government wants the whole country cut off from gas for heating, while neighbouring countries (like Germany) are trying to get people to use gas for heating. In The Netherlands every house if connected to the gas network, but soon everybody will need to switch to waterpumps for heating.

Or the fact that the whole country will be covered with wind turbines which ruin the view, produce a lot of noise, need a lot of space and kill many birds.

---

[0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...

Light water reactors are not the only option for nuclear power. CANDU reactors have a wonderful safety record. MSRs are on the brink of becoming commercially viable and have been for a long time, but funding is currently insufficient. Funding is insufficient largely because light water and heavy water (like CANDU and derivatives) plants are already researched on the one hand and light water reactors have created negative sentiment for all things nuclear on the other.

Would I like nuclear power that fails safe and doesn't produce bomb material? Absolutely. Would I live next door to a molten thorium salt reactor? I'd love to. Do I want to see new light water reactors built anywhere in the world? No.

HN hates data on energy discussions. The HN vibe is strongly in favor of EVs, for example, despite the fact that EVs are the slowest and most expensive way to reduce transport greenhouse gas emissions. Fission is, likewise, the slowest and most expensive way to add electrical generation today. Fission is the only power source where the costs increased in the last 10 years. PV is now five times cheaper than fission. Onshore wind costs the same as PV. Batteries are easy to mass-produce. The substantive debate is over.

"Batteries are easy to mass-produce."

There's people here saying the battery tech isn't ready yet for large scale grid storage of solar/wind. Is that untrue?

California has 250MW of battery facilities online right now. If you can do 250MW, you can do 50GW. The CAISO roadmap for energy storage does not list any technological risks.

Not saying it can't be done, but is it cheaper than nuclear?

BTW, nuclear energy will be cheaper with massive power storage, because nuclear power can be accumulated at night then.

Take a look at my reply to him to see some unfortunately grim stats on this issue. I would argue nuclear is currently our only choice.

> HN hates data on energy discussions.

>PV is now five times cheaper than fission. Onshore wind costs the same as PV. Batteries are easy to mass-produce.

This is an odd contrast of statements considering you gave no data to support your argument. I take issue with dismissing the massive problem of intermittancy and storage with "Battaries are easy to mass-produce".

"A cost-optimal wind-solar mix with storage reaches cost-competitiveness with a nuclear fission plant providing baseload electricity at a cost of $0.075/kWh27 at an energy storage capacity cost of $10-20/kWh. To reach cost-competitiveness with a peaker natural gas plant at $0.077/kWh, energy storage capacity costs must instead fall below $5/kWh."

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9

"The largest announced storage system, comprising more than 18,000 Li-ion batteries, is being built in Long Beach for Southern California Edison by AES Corp. When it’s completed, in 2021, it will be capable of running at 100 megawatts for 4 hours. But that energy total of 400 megawatt-hours is still two orders of magnitude lower than what a large Asian city would need if deprived of its intermittent supply. For example, just 2 GW for two days comes to 96 gigawatt-hours.

We have to scale up storage, but how? Sodium-sulfur batteries have higher energy density than Li-ion ones, but hot liquid metal is a most inconvenient electrolyte. Flow batteries, which store energy directly in the electrolyte, are still in an early stage of deployment. Supercapacitors can’t provide electricity over a long enough time. And compressed air and flywheels, the perennial favorites of popular journalism, have made it into only a dozen or so small and midsize installations. We could use solar electricity to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen, but still, a hydrogen-based economy is not imminent.

And so when going big we must still rely on a technology introduced in the 1890s: pumped storage. You build one reservoir high up, link it with pipes to another one lower down and use cheaper, nighttime electricity to pump water uphill so that it can turn turbines during times of peak demand. Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of the world’s storage capacity, but inevitably, it entails energy loss on the order of 25 percent. Many installations have short-term capacities in excess of 1 GW—the largest one is about 3 GW—and more than one would be needed for a megacity completely dependent on solar and wind generation.

But most megacities are nowhere near the steep escarpments or deep-cut mountain valleys you’d need for pumped storage. Many, including Shanghai, Kolkata, and Karachi, are on coastal plains. They could rely on pumped storage only if it were provided through long-distance transmission. The need for more compact, more flexible, larger-scale, less costly electricity storage is self-evident. But the miracle has been slow in coming."

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-t...

"Given the magnitude of the battery material demand growth across all scenarios, global production capacity for Li, Co, and Ni (black lines in Fig. 3) will have to increase drastically (see Supplementary Tables 9 and 10). For Li and Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other battery materials could be supplied without exceeding existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and 10), although supplies may still have to increase to meet demands from other sectors5,9. The known reserves for Li, Ni, and Co (black lines in Fig. 4) could be depleted before 2050 in the SD scenario and for Co also in the STEP scenario. For all other materials known reserves exceed demand from EV batteries until 2050 (Supplementary Table 5). In 2019 around 64% of natural graphite and 64% of Si are produced in China32, which could create vulnerabilities to supply reliability."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-020-00095-x

Nobody cares how bad the lifecycle efficiency is for pumped storage because the input doesn't cost anything.

That is only one of the multiple problems discussed with mass pumped storage. Regardless, the efficiency does matter as if you are attempting to store peak power as %100 of baseline power then your input is no longer free. It is a factor in the energy output of the PV / Turbine over the course of its lifecycle. Lower efficiency means more PVs / Turbines and more massive pumped storage projects.

So storage reaches cost competitiveness with nuclear at $10-$20/kWh.

Do we know what the current cost is today?

~ $300 - $700 /kWh.

that figure could be outdated but its in the ballpark

So nuclear is much much much much cheaper and until the storage costs come way down, we have no other choice (aside from natgas peakers). Correct?

For baseline power the answer is yes. The only two forms of low carbon baseline energy we currently have are nuclear and hydro.

Do you know why California is using batteries instead of cheaper nuclear? Is it just for cynical political reasons?

No one is using batteries at a large scale at this point.

User "jeffbee" said that California has 250MW of battery facilities right now

I assume that's 250MWh, and California consumes 260 TWh per year, so that's 30s of power consumption.

No, it's 250MW of peak power. I'm not sure what the total energy storage capacity is for California, but the typical project has 4 hours of capacity.

For an example please see this PG&E project which is coming online in Summer 2021. These installations have 700MW of power capacity and each has a 4-hour discharge time.

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/adviceletter/ELEC_582...

You're right about the numbers, but still this is tiny at the scale of the grid. 2.8GWh is still only around 5 mins of consumption. You would probably need a few days of storage to run a 100% wind/solar grid, so that's about 1000x more.

I have no idea where you got these numbers, but nuclear energy is good for base load, while batteries are good for handling load peaks. These two types of load are very different.

With big batteries, nuclear energy can be accumulated at night and used at evening, which improve performance of nuclear stations a lot. Try it yourself at simulation: https://www.tennet.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Our_Key_Tasks/In...

Current cost of power storage is below $100 per kWh stored in the newest designs.

It's a near verbatim quote from the Cell article in the post above mine.

Its always fucking baffling to me when people believe everything about nuclear is lobbying. Its a tiny industry that absolutely sucks at lobbying.

> reducing the load or better managing the load (with flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be very data driven which should align well with the HN crowd.

Nobody is against that, but its not a actual solution, its an optimisation that doesn't play into the overall discussion.

At the end of the day you need to generate a lot of energy, no matter how much you want to reduce or recycle.

In my opinion Germany's experience denuclearizing (and replacing it with renewables and lignite coal) has been some of the strongest evidence I've seen in favor of nuclear energy.

Why? It's not like Germany ran out of power or something like that.

The opposite is the case. It has been a frontrunner for renewable energy for years and moved the development for everybody on this planet and now they even have a plan (law) to phase out coal despite it being an important source for jobs in regions struck with unemployment.

>> free sunlight and almost zero maintenance.

Try running a gigawatt's worth of solar panels attached to enough battery capacity to fill a small stadium. There is plenty of maintenance to be done. Nuclear and solar are really apples and oranges. They each have advantages and disadvantages. In a given time/place/need one will always be better than another but neither are superior always.

Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where several provinces use hydro as a primary energy source, but why doesn't make it to the top of the lists more often?

Nearby ecosystem damages, relatively speaking, seem rather low in comparison with nuclear or fuel, and for dealing with future climate change issues in general. While they don't explode, I'm sure they can can cause disasters of their own.

But wind/solar require massive storage capacity to become a primary source and require a lot of space/disruption at these scales. I'm not sure how the affected landmass (in the long term) compares with Hydro, or maintenance costs.

Hydro has this great combination of zero emission and the water being its own battery. Not relying on rare materials and battery production avoids adding competition and could favor the transition to electric vehicles at a global scale.

Like nuclear, initial costs are problematic. Social acceptance is so-so. In some places like the US many "good spots" are taken, but it appears 2/3 of potential in the world is untapped. More numerous but smaller damns seem to be a possibility too.

First, there isn't that much Hydro around, and a lot of that has been tapped already.

Second, it's significantly less safe than nuclear. In fact, IIRC the worst single power-generation disaster was a hydro-dam failure in China.

And the environmental impact outside of accidents is also far from trivial.

I find it amazing that people go "Let's use hydro!" When a single event killed more people than all the nuclear accidents combined. Unreal.

What you propose to use instead of dams in place of flood protection?

Hydro dams and flood dams are different. I really do not understand the point you are making. I want to highlight that the fear around nuclear is not rational since you need to compare the risk profile of the alternatives and it seems some people completely fail to do so.

For the record, I didn't say I fear nuclear. I'd pick Nuclear over coal any day. I'm not for or against any particular technology.

In normal circumstances Hydro seems among the safest [1] for both humans and the environment all things relative. It has served Quebec quite well at least with very low electricity rates and emissions, and environmental impacts are likely long paid off with no radioactive waste to manage. Being in a low populated region (a rare asset..) also helps on the safety side.

Bringing up a single dam incident due to an estimated once-in-2-millenia rainfall/typhoon [2] in a populated region to dismiss an entire renewable energy source.. sounds like that kind of irrational fear you mention.

I think the arguments around possible lack of locations, costs, planning, and water supplies are more relevant -- and affect both hydro and nuclear. Those are also what make wind/solar interesting -agility- as tech improves.

[1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/deaths-nuclear-energy-compare...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure#Gover...

I was not being dismissive to your comment specifically, but the position where people are terrified of nuclear but don't even blink at hydro is just strange to me. Your post was quite reasonable, so I apologize if I worded it too strongly.

> Bringing up a single dam incident due to an estimated once-in-2-millenia rainfall/typhoon [2] in a populated region to dismiss an entire renewable energy source.. sounds like that kind of irrational fear you mention

Yes, this is an excellent example. Similar ish kind of attenuating circumstances at Fukushima. But people don't now go "hydro is unsafe" as they go with nuclear.

I am not against hydro, by all means let's leverage it as much as possible. I am just against coal plants and want to live in a sustainable world and the only path I see right now is nuclear. If we can get there with renewables, great, let's! I just think we can not at the moment and am unwilling to risk our entire species on the tradeoff that we have 2,4,10? nuclear fallout accidents of the scale we had every 50 years.

Besides, I think that if we were to deploy nuclear at scale, most of the problems will go away with time. Scale makes things safer, cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain.

Yep, but hydro dams are used to control floods too, so they save people from floods as part of their operation. An improperly maintained dam can increase risk of flood, of course.

Hydro is great at producing low carbon energy but:

- completely destroys ecosystems and communities around it

- Can create international water disputes that threaten war (look at Ethiopia, Turkey, Tibet)

- Creates a ticking time bomb much worse then nuclear if not properly maintained

That said, situationally I think Hydro is still one of our better options.

Interesting point about water disputes, wasn't aware -- and freshwater supply is not going up in the future.

>>why doesn't make it to the top of the lists more often?

Modern thinking on hydro is changing. It can be good, but many implementations are disturbing. If you wipe out a forest then you aren't carbon neutral. And all those rotting logs under the water release gasses that are worse can CO2. So while it may be a great idea in the American southwest, it might not be a great idea to flood a rain forest in British Columbia.

> perhaps, driven by lobbying

Is there a reason to think this outside seeing something you disagree with?

gah.

I nuclear has a place. Nuclear generates energy and lots of it.

Take a look at this table and check out uranium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#List_of_materia...

The thing is, just like we are developing solar, we have to develop nuclear. We should drive the cost down, and safety up.

Boiling water reactors are very expensive, in the same way solar power was in the Jimmy Carter era:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#/media/File:Price_h...

We should be working on stable reactors, safe ones that don't need active intervention to shut down, and work to make them available.

By all means we should also work on solar and wind, but we should keep nuclear active.

We should be working to have MORE CO2 free power, of different kinds, that will work during a variety of conditions.

The cost of nuclear is high in the short term but when debt is paid off it becomes one of the cheapest sources of baseline energy in the long run. I don't think "big nuclear" is behind these posts, its just that more and more people are looking past a period of nuclear panic and recognizing that this is likely to be the only form of baseload power we can transition to in the face of climate change.

There was a really good twitter tread about Fukushima by Dr. Malka Older (great sci-fi writer) who wrote a report on the disaster for the french nuclear safety agency, it gives you an idea about the kinds of problems the engineers working on the reactor faced while the crisis unfolded, very interesting read.

https://twitter.com/m_older/status/1366324146901254146?s=19

Is there any solution for nuclear waste yet?

The newest generation systems seem much better and safer, but the half life on the waste is huge. There isn't a guarantee the country itself will even be around in that time span.

Even though clearly nuclear energy is the future, it's hard to support nuclear energy. More R&D is required IMO. Especially considering how efficient humans are at externalizing costs and consequences.

I wonder is anyone even allowed to try to do something useful with the waste on a large scale, or is it so regulated ala Schedule 1 natural plants / fungi that research is only able to operate at a snail's pace?

> Is there any solution for nuclear waste yet?

I remember reading about a possible solution: deep core drilling. Drill a 2km-deep hole, dump the waste in it, fill back in. This is different from previous schemes that are at most a few hundred meters deep. At that depth, it can't interact with aquifers or anything on the surface except at geological timescales. It's also safe from unauthorized access, even if the knowledge of the danger of the waste is ever lost. Not sure what the status of the research on this is though.

Nuclear powered steam-engine. That sounds more accurate to what is actually going on with fusion power, I think.

"Lessons from McDonalds-- chemicals and fats must be well regulated, not ditched"

Can you enlighten me with a better currently existing alternative to 24/7 baseload power?

Why should the power needs of certain people be put above the safety of giant land areas?

I am happy to pay a premium for technologies that are less efficient but safer.

When did it become acceptable to say that society needs to pursue as much electricity production as possible, all risks be damned?

It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

In what world can you convince me that nuclear is safe when we have Chernobyl and Fukushima? Like are we going to compared it to coal or something of the sort?

When nuclear fails, which it will, through accident or terrorism, it fails forever, catastrophically

Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you have nuclear?

"Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you have nuclear?"

Is large scale and cost competitive energy storage a solved problem?

Depends on your definition of solved, but yes kinda: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

While I don't think any large scale P2G installations do currently exist, it is all well proven tech that requires little to no additional research.

At least for Germany there exist some studies that suggest that it should be doable (especially financially) on a national scale.

So it all comes down to relative costs then. Has anyone done a comparison between nuclear costs and this?

Hmmm...in the real world?

Both TFAs answer that question for you: nuclear is safest even including both Fukushima and Chernobyl. Not "safe", because there is no power generation technology that is 100% safe.

And depending on which data you use, nuclear is even safer than solar and wind.

The good news is, if you are right about nuclear being safe, then I will benefit from it.

If you are wrong, I will be too busy being dead to remember that I was right!

The "if" here is incorrect: this is not hypothesis, speculation or belief, this is the actual data from the real world.

> Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you have nuclear?

What are you willing to give up? What is your family willing to give up? Your parents? Your neigbours?

Anything that's needed to be given up, how do we estimate it?

> When nuclear fails, which it will, through accident or terrorism, it fails forever, catastrophically

Not all reactor designs are capable of failling catastrophically.

>Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you have nuclear?

I wish we could just live off solar and wind, I'm only in favor of Nuclear because the evidence suggests we can't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348355

have to say, you'd have a lot of health problems if you tried to ditch all fats

"therefore we need everyone to eat more big macs"

...That sounds perfectly reasonable?

I don't want questionable preservatives in my pasta sauce, but they probably have their place in MREs.

one thing that i dont see talked about alot is, what industry players does nuclear favor vs "green" energy

nuclear, like coal/oil requires heavy up-front capital costs and favors already large players in the industry

what i have heard said is that wind, solar, geo etc can be implemented in more decentralized way and with lower up-front costs which encourage competition, entrepreneurship, innovation (materials, distribution, pricing etc) and potentially more resiliance to central failure

personally, im not anti-nuclear (despite having lived through fukushima) but the idea of more competitive, lower capital-costs and decentralized power grids sounds very enticing if its at all possible

Perhaps centralized nuclear plants are the biggest existential threat whereas micro-nuclear plants, staggered some miles miles away from each other would produce more energy and smaller scale accidents if one was to occur?

I read your comment as "more and smaller scale accidents"

Hopefully fewer accidents as well! Small reactors do tend to have better passive safety...

Good luck trying to make most people believe that some Committee will understand it all, and always take all necessary actions in due time. They already see governments playing this pantomime.

Oh for crying out loud, it's precisely because of regulation that it's one of the safest industries in the world!

More regulation won't make it safer, just more regulated!

People hugely overreacted to Fukishima. It killed no one, unlike climate change which will kill tens or hundreds of millions. Nuclear is hugely overregulated.

Radiation has long term effects

Pollution has long term effects. It's funny that now when we talk about nuclear we _care_ about the long term effects. Let's be honest, it's simply imprinted in our common consciousness as scary and that is that.

Besides, most reactors do not affect a large area unless they go wrong and the examples are quite far in-between.

But it is not either or, but in addition. The radius of effect may be small, but the duration is extreme. Depending on the accident, the radius can be quite large. In Germany there are still areas where it is dangerous to eat mushrooms from the forest because of the radioactivity from Chernobyl. And a study from the Max-Planck-Institute concludes that an accident is to be expected every 20 to 25 years.

> And a study from the Max-Planck-Institute concludes that an accident is to be expected every 20 to 25 years.

That is a a small price to pay compared to the alternative.

An unnecessary one because of safer alternatives. None of our technologies is flawless and on top of that there is human greed and incompetence. This means that even if we had clean nuclear energy, we would not be able to operate it faultlessly worldwide for a long time. Or do you know an authority or a company that you would trust with this?

What safer alternatives?

Look up the deaths per kilowatt hour of whatever you think is safer than nuclear power, you may be surprised.

Regular polution does that too. BPA has been shown to have effects that pass down through generations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6139539/

The other thing about radiation is it's highly visible / detectable, tiny tiny traces of specific isotopes stand out clearly in a gamma spectrum from natural background. It's a lot more detectable than normal air pollution because the background is so low.

If I've learned anything from a masters degree in nuclear engineering, it's that the internet comments are always right on this topic.

Correct me if I am wrong but USSR installed hundreds of nuclear-powered light houses across the arctic coast. Many were neglected.

Edit: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-lighthou...

The neglect was largely associated with the fall of the USSR and their economy. While this should be a scenario we should be concerned about, I don't think it is particularly relevant to the conversation and certainly not a coup d'etat

While those USSR generators are indeed nuclear-powered, they use a completely different method from nuclear plants. They simply convert the decay heat of a radioactive material into energy, and as such aren't subject to any drastic reactions such as meltdowns.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

There’s an irony here. The adamantly pro-nuclear crowd tends to be just as vocally anti-regulation. It’s stranfe that proponents of a “trustless society” are willing to put so much faith in corporations and governments ability to do the right thing, plan for the future or even exist in the future.

paywall

It worked for me. I have uBlock Origin I wonder if that helps?

and then the conservatives come into power and neuter all regulation again

Another of those propaganda articles.

I'm a huge fan of nuclear power, but I took away a different lesson from Fukushima.

When it all went wrong (and it inevitably will), there was literally nothing we could do to stop it. People could not get close and we had no robots that could help. All we could do was pump as much water in and hope for the best, knowing full well that contaminated water was going straight into the ocean.

We literally built a machine capable of immense destruction that - given the right series of events - we become unable to control.

It was a HUGE stroke of luck that it didn't go much, much worse.

I'm not going to pretend like I know the answer here, but my gut tells me that this is sort of like accepting the risk of smoking but not accepting the risk of sky-diving.

Smoking will almost certainly kill you in the long-run, but there is a rare chance that you might explode into a fine red mist moments after you jump if your chute doesn't unravel.

We worry about rare acute disaster, but ignore slow but certain disaster.

The difference here is that you're talking about different people. People who don't want nuclear usually (always?) don't want coal too.

That's because they're running a 70 year old design. You don't need back-up power for a CANDU reactor which are still old, but not one of the initial designs. You can't build nuclear weapons with a CANDU reactor though, so it's not really in high demand.

I was going to mention CANDU, basically the only exception to the above comment about running at too high power density.

This is just the dumb/old kind of nuclear in which the reactors are operated at really high power which means they have to be actively cooled so that the fuel doesn't melt itself and cause release of radiation. The reason they run at really high power, is because they think it's cheaper to get more power out of the same reactor. But of course they have to build a bunch of emergency systems, themselves expensive, to make sure the reactor is actively cooled - and these inevitably fail at some point.

The alternative, pursued most prominently by new companies like (usnc.com) is to operate at much lower power density which means the reactor does not have to be cooled to prevent it from melting. It can just dissipate the small amount of heat without any active measures or expensive equipment. Making the economics work is the trick.

That's too risk myopic a position for my taste. I like to compare it against impacts in other sectors. For example oil has a massive problem with leaks. There's on average 2 events per year (not including COVID 2020) that spill more than 700 metric tons. Valdez was 34k metric tons. Deepwater Horizon was ~200k, Castillo de Bellver was also in that range.

Burning coal releases ash into the air that is 100x more radioactive than nuclear waste (the byproduct of fission)!

By comparison, nuclear energy has had 3 notable accidents in 42 years with only one actually ending up to have any serious consequences. Waste is pretty straightforward to clean up & the byproducts can be repurposed into more fuel once the technology starts to roll out.

While I agree it's a scary technology because of its history, it's comparative safety seems significantly higher. To the point where the question is "why are we building any fossil fuel plants" (i.e. new plants under construction) but for some reason that always to get hijacked to "we should wait for renewables". I'd much rather have a nuclear power plant today (with all its challenges) coming online rather than anything using a comparative amount of fossil fuels & hoping to replace it with renewables later. One in the hand is worth two in the bush.

>It was a HUGE stroke of luck that it didn't go much, much worse.

My understanding is that with Fukushima, with everything going wrong we had the potential for a "China syndrome" type situation ... and yet an old style reactor with fewer safeguards than modern reactors still managed to hold a melting down core.

Fukushima was a disaster, but the result might indicate some of the worst concerns (run away super hot melting core escaping containment) aren't very likely at all.

This isn't an uncommon position to take - many people have this sort of knee-jerk reaction to disasters on this scale and it's fair to acknowledge that we did get really lucky with how it ended up going.

However, Nuclear power is the safest and cleanest option out there if done correctly and we've known how to do it much better since around the 80s[1] - the issue is that Nuclear plants cost an insane amount of money so investors are shy to go in on the tech and we're left with a bunch of poorly aging dreadnoughts. The existing companies are pulling out all the stops to try and keep from being decommissioned for as long as possible since, from their perspective, that capital investment is a sunk cost and the longer it runs the higher the profits will be.

Nuclear power is dangerous if done wrong, it really should be largely stewarded by governments and kept out of reach of any partial privatization efforts - we also need to kill the stigma of Nuclear and realize that replacing those rusted hulks with modern reactors will work out better for everyone in the long run.

Nuclear power in general is an incredibly good and safe option that gets a lot of hate thrown at it because in practice nearly all the reactors online were built in the 70s or earlier and are near or past their advised EOL for operation. There are real problems here but rejecting Nuclear power is not the correct solution.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor As an example, the Molten Salt Thorium design is configured in a manner that makes meltdowns self-defeating and defusing.

> The existing companies are pulling out all the stops to try and keep from being decommissioned for as long as possible since, from their perspective, that capital investment is a sunk cost and the longer it runs the higher the profits will be.

perhaps it is an unintended side effect as far as they're concerned, but i'd also hate to reach a point where we don't have a contingent of engineers/plant operators with experience running these plants. nuclear won't be any safer if we turn all the plants off for 40 years and then decide "oops, yeah turns out we don't have any workable plan besides fission" and have to figure out how to run everything again.

Maybe science, engineering and social planning should be left to people who actually specialize and work in those fields?

Just introduce decapitation for people who turn out to be incompetent idiots.

I don't understand what this fear mongering or 'discussion' of science and technology at the level of idiot journalists accomplishes, besides making idiot readers think they can have an opinion on just about anything because they're now 'informed'.

If there was a time when idiots knew they were idiots and stayed in their lane, I'd like to go back to it, if not, I'd love for it to be introduced. Otherwise, we'll have populist idiots promising to go to the moon to harvest it for cheese and idiots debating whether we should harvest the moon for cheese or invest in an eternal life elixir.

Wow what a genius conclusion. I agree which is why I'm against nuclear. Our society always screws up. When the aviation industry fails in its regulations a few hundred people die- a tragedy to be sure but recoverable.

Nuclear energy is safer than coal, oil, natural gas.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106843635-161400902674...

That's a strange statistic. Saying it is safer by this statistic alone is misleading.

What other statistic would you use? Deaths per year? Injuries per year? Injuries per TWh? Without further information we can't have a conversation about what wouldn't be misleading (or whether this is misleading in the first place - I don't see why).

Total deaths over 1000 years after a catastrophic release of nuclear material, for example 10 fully-fueled power plants being hit by missiles during a conflict.

Also, probability of nuclear waste being unearthed in the next 50.000 years multiplied by the estimated death toll of such event.

I mean come on, deaths by pollution and accidents is all you look at to declare it as safe? What about the almost existential risk and the unsolved final repository problem? (the US at least still doesn't have one). Maybe the risk is low and until now nothing serious has happened in the US, but the potential for damage is so devastating that you should factor it in somehow. It's just not as simple as one number is probably what I'm trying to say ...

Besides the fact that people who argue against nuclear are not pro fossil energy, I'm always astonished to see nuclear fans argue with dead people only. As if having to evacuate cities and regions could be ignored and accepted as some kind of "safe".

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Since the fans of the atom downvote everything not in their frame of reality, I'm now unable to answer anymore so I'll just edit my answer to this comment:

@yongjik: I can't drink enough to follow this argument twisting. Nothing you said makes my argument go away. Those things ARE dangerous. Neither fossil fuel nor cars won't make the risk go away or be hidden in a cloud of mad word twisting.

Also: nobody who makes an argument against nuclear, makes one for fossil fuel. They usually are pro renewable energy. But you know that don't you? You just wanted to derail....

@cestith: acutally MOST of the nuclear reactors did not became a catastrophe. It doesn't change anything about the fact that when it becomes one, it is one.

Show me a city evacuated because it was near a CANDU reactor. Light water plants are not the beginning and end of nuclear power.

If you prefer, we don't have to evacuate. We can just tell people to keep living in Fukushima and the number of deaths will be still smaller than fossil fuel plants.

People don't evacuate from fossil fuel, not because it's safer, but because you can't, so we just accepted it as facts of life. More people die from vehicle exhaust than Fukushima: where are you going to go?

And why are we comparing to fossil fuel plants as opposed to other renewable sources which are cheaper, safer, and less polluting than nuclear?

The problem for nuclear is that if you are making a pollution based safety argument for it, the obvious question is why not spend the money you would on nuclear in more cost effective and equally green or greener alternatives (ones which lack a doomsday scenario as a bonus).

In reality, nuclear sucks up a lot of green capital for 8-10 years at a minimum, under delivers, if it delivers at all, and does so at an extremely high price.

There are new nuclear technologies that have the potential to be cost competitive with other renewables, but they aren’t production ready yet. Why not make these arguments when those technologies are ready.

Unfortunately there is no solution on the near horizon for large scale grid storage of intermittent renewables. I would argue nuclear is our only choice. I made a comment here linking sources on the problems facing grid storage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348355

Fukushima evacuation was an idiotic knee-jerk that killed more people than the alternative of not doing it.

Yeah I'm sure you'd have been able to calm the people and tell them to stay around a nuclear reactor which might have become the next Tshernobyl while the earth was still shaking....you people are unbelievable sometimes.

You can't really measure safety in terms of deaths. Chernobyl only officially killed a handful of people, yet rendered a huge chunk of land uninhabitable. When nuclear goes wrong, it goes really wrong.

And yes, you can argue that that Chernobyl was an old reactor design, Fukushima was complacency, but the reality is that technology always goes wrong. I'd rather have technology that catches fire (wind turbines) than technology that gives people cancer and forces entire cities to migrate (reactors) when it goes wrong.

What if your preferred solution doesnt curtail the raise in temperatures fast enough and renders large parts of earth inhabitable for future generations?

there is no perfect solution, i understand the risk associated with nuclear power but i think the smartest minds thinking deeply about the climate space all basically agree that there is no solution to fighting climate change that doesnt include nuclear. we should be sinking lots of money into reducing the risks and coming up with innovative ways to make it ubiquitous

We are already past that point. The world is not reducing carbon emissions fast enough. I don't see how nuclear allows us to reduce them any faster. The bottleneck is funding and will of the everyday man.

The world won't become uninhabitable - global warming alone is not going to cook us. What will happen is more natural disasters, difficulty with natural resources and farming, and wars for those resources.

Climate engineering is the best hope to reduce global warming. Aerosols sprayed into the atmosphere, that sort of thing.

There is still hope, but we sure do need a global mindset shift when it comes to nuclear (and many other topics for sure).

Global warming will make parts of the worlds inhabitable. Sea levels will rise, so much heat and humidity in some places that your body won't be able to regulate its internal temperature...

If this were true, fission plants would be insurable in the private market. Lives lost is not the only measure of safety. Or to put it another way, if something is safe, it does not have an uninsurable liability attached to it.

All kinds of big risky endeavors are insurable. Oil rigs are insured. Other power plants are insured.

Accident liability is not the only liability: Nuclear power plants uniformly cost a multiple of their estimated decommissioning costs. This leads to pressure to keep old plants running, just to put off that particular day of reckoning. And then there is a cost of waste storage.

When there is a normal market for nuclear power, like there is for a gas turbine plant, privately insured, with future costs bonded, then let's build some nukes.

I am optimistic it will happen, but not based on current technology. Nuclear power startups are a very good thing in part because relying on the old liability shifting approach probably will not fly. These have to have really sustainable TCO.

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