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Comment by andbberger | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely right, the "financial engineering" of nuclear energy is not my problem, and the government should definitely nationalize nuclear energy.

The corruption I'm referring to is the oil lobby's interference in policy and public perception.

You're saying: capitalism doesn't work in the context of carbon-free energy production (or in general, but let's leave that aside), and I agree. Controversial opinion in a fundamentally capitalistic forum such as this one, but capitalism is very much the problem here. It has systematically failed to price in externalities, which is why nuclear energy doesn't look so good on the balance sheet.

Allow me to revise my statement: This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, anti-science policy, and a broken economic system that will be the death of all of us.

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"Allow me to revise my statement: This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, anti-science policy, and a broken economic system that will be the death of all of us. "

As someone who was born into the toxic fallout of chernobyl, despite being quite far away, I can understand the reason many people are against nuclear and in favor of renewables. I see no corruption there - and you can argue, that if all of the government subsidies for nuclear would go immediately to renewables for projetcs like Desertec, there would be no need to have this discussion any further.

So I am not Antinuclear, I would like to see some new and small reactors as kind of a backup for the grid, while we change to renewable for good.

Having a hard time tracking down primary sources, but is it not the case that the design flaws of RMBK reactors (positive void coefficient for one) were suppressed?

They were, and RBMK branch of development was in fact buried after that.

As far as Russia is concerned there is only VVER (PWR tech, mostly resembling AP1000 series). And some experiments with fast neutrons at Beloyarsk.

Why anyone still remembers the RBMKs is sorta strange. They've been dead for more than 30 years.

I mean, they're dead in the sense that we're not going to build any more - but not in the sense that they're actually all shut down yet.

People in Europe have long memories of Chernobyl. I live in the UK, which is a huge distance away, and I remember drinking powdered milk for a good while because our dairy pastures got an unhelpful dose of radiation. It probably shouldn't affect future energy policy, but I'm not sure that caution about the safety of the existing RBMK reactor fleet is unwarranted if you live near one.

Here in eastern germany it is still not recommended to eat mushrooms from the forest regulary. And the meat of every wild boar that got hunted, needs to be checked for radiation levels, too - and they do not disclose how much meat has to be thrown away. All as of today - because of a event, that happened 34+ years ago.

> They've been dead for more than 30 years.

That's not true. There are 9 RMBK reactors still in operation today.

The other 3 units at Chernobyl continued to operate after the disaster. One was decommisioned after a fire destroyed it's generators. The last 2 continued to operate until they were shutdown as part of the deal with the Ukraine joining the EU.

If anything it's amazing that people don't realise how successful the RMBK has been despite Chernobyl.

>as part of the deal with the Ukraine joining the EU

Lol, since when Ukraine has joined the EU? If you meant the Union Association agreement, then note that it's REALLY FAR from a country joining EU. Here [0] you can see all other countries which have signed such agreement.

>If anything it's amazing that people don't realise how successful the RMBK has been despite Chernobyl.

Yeah, I agree with you. Only recently Russia has replaced RBMK reactors at the Leningrad nuclear plant with VVER reactors. So even despite the serious design flaw, RBMK reactors are quite reliable if you don't intentionally fuck with them.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Association_Agr...

On this note, reading Vaclav Smil's "Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate" [1] has been sobering. I had a similar presumption that this isn't a technological problem but rather of a policy conflicts (and subsequent perverse mechanisms including corruption).

In fact, it is actually a technologically challenging problem. This book is a decade old but I would assume that nothing has drastically changed over the past decade, and the energy demand has probably only gone up. Highly recommended read, if not already!

[1]: https://www.librarything.com/work/10653100

What does Vaclav Smil get wrong?

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/11/13/what-does-bill-gates-fa...

Thanks for this view! Added to the reading list.

Probably as a cautionary note: Reading a decade old book on fast evolving topics may be a bad idea.

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