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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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 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.

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.

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