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Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Pumped storage depends on geography, and it is not viable in most places. Hence, your claim that it is cheaper than nuclear is unreasonable.

> minus its free catastrophe insurance

Many more people have died from dam collapses in the last fifty years than nuclear accidents.

> Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now > is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time > almost everywhere.

We don't have a general-purpose solution to storage. As a result there is waste overproduction of solar and wind at some times, and under-production at other times. Those under-production windows need to be covered by base-load forms of energy production such as gas and nuclear.

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>Pumped storage depends on geography

It does but unlike for dams that geography is extremely common:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potenti...

>We don't have a general-purpose solution to storage

We're already building this general purpose solution at large scale. Snowy 2, fengning, coire glas.

The cheap, safe mass produced nuclear reactor, meanwhile, remains just as vaporware as it was 20 years ago.

> More more people have died from dam collapses in the last fifty years than nuclear accidents.

And vastly more lives have been saved by dams preventing flooding (something nuclear isn't particularly good at) and providing a stable water supply (again, nuclear doesn't do so well here).

People seem to forget that dams aren't just built for electricity generation.

Also, a lot of the dam/flood deaths are horrible corporate mining bund collapsing etc, not high end public power infra. Would be interesting to see the numbers on 1) first world countries and 2) first world countries excluding the US which seems to have such a dysfunctional attitude to public works. I very much doubt scandi countries or Germany are killing many people this way.

No, even with low estimations of the amount of nuclear victims (those published by UN's Word Health Organization) solar/wind/hydro are the safest ones and any new major nuclear disaster may further imbalance: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Hydro is very terrain-dependent, solar and wind can't do baseload, so for baseload nuclear is still best applicable in most parts of the world. Nuclear saves a lot of lives by displacing other, way more dangerous baseload operations. [0]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#contrary...

> solar and wind can't do baseload

Not really, as we know how, at continental scale, adequately use wind and solar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422

The data used by that study is actually based on the pessimistic estimates from the older WHO analysis. If you use the more modern estimates by the UNSCEAR (the United Nations body dealing with effects of radiation), nuclear power is safer than any other kind of power on a per-TWh basis. It's not really honest to say that an already pessimistic estimate (which is now considered by at least some scientists -- including the UN body dealing with the topic -- to be incorrect) might be underestimating total deaths from Chernobyl.

There is no universally accepted way to estimate the amount of victims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

The Wikipedia article you linked to says that work was not peer-reviewed and four academic reviews were published criticising it (with only one positive review which still said it had shortcomings). You can choose to believe that Chernobyl killed just shy of 1 million people but that's at odds with all peer-reviewed research on the topic (which projects it will reach the mid-to-low thousands in total, with the current death toll in the hundreds at most).

Everybody can read about the authors and methods, abut the critics and their answer to it.

> mid-to-low thousands in total, with the current death toll in the hundreds at most

... isn't exactly summarizing the (quite large) spectrum of estimations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...

Chernobyl killed millions or tens of millions of people:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...

Let's say Chernobyl didn't happen, then I would guess around 10% of those fossil fuel deaths would have been prevented.

Quick calculation 8.7mill/year * 10 % * 30 years = 26.1 million.

So, lets say that the pessimistic side of "mainstream" research on number of deaths from Chernobyl is 26000, the "nuclear scare" effect still caused maybe 1000x as many deaths.

Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude, that's still 100x.

I agree that anti-nuclear sentiment has killed millions of people, but the comparison being made here is how different forms of power kill people. In that comparison, including fossil fuel deaths as "deaths caused by Chernobyl" is not reasonable since it obfuscates which source of power is causing the deaths.

Irony can be hard to communicate in text. Sorry for causing a misunderstanding.

My point was that I fully support that nuclear is not only safe, but a technology that saves millions of lives every year, since without it, the world would use coal instead.

Furthermore, if more coal could be replaced by nuclear, it would not only delay global warming, but also potentially save tens of millions of lives.

The extra cost per GWh is more than made up for in health benefits. But if the costs are seen as too high for current powerplant models, it should be possible to bring the costs down a lot if they are mass-produced and some more to gain from slighly relaxing regulations where the price/benefit of regulations is unreasonable.

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