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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

> As a comparison with other non-emission options, BC Hydro’s 1,100 Mwe Site C dam is expected to cost $16 billion.

I get that this is coming from a website whose name contains "investor". As combustible based options go, I think nuclear is the least worse, and a site-C equivalent in Sask is probably not even an option.

I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where indeed nuclear will win

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IMHO the lie is to pretend that hydro is safe or has a low impact when it comes to greenhouse gasses. Dam failures have killed many more people than nuclear even if you throw in the intentional nuclear events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hydro would be almost as good as nuclear when it comes to climate costs if they would clear the reservoir footprint before flooding, but they do not and the decaying plant matter in the flood zone adds a greenhouse gas cost that takes decades for the dam to counter in “clean” energy.

How would you clear the floodzone without releasing the carbon anyway?

Bury the wood is one idea. I've recently heard that salt water is also good for this. This is why mangrove forests are 4 or 5 times better carbon sinks than rainforests.

But with that logic you could bury the wood, not build a hydro plant and then plant new trees.

Yes please.

Unless that means burning more coal/gas/oil...

If too expensive to clear the land currently and so currently it doesn't get done, the economic value could be at least slightly improved by logging the area for the wood if it is mandated to have to clear it first.

The difficult thing is all types of power have their own externalities. Dams flood large areas of land in normal operation and can potentially collapse. Wind power is intermittent and can have 'calm spell', takes up a large area and is generally just really big. Nuclear has difficulties around permanent waste disposal, and possible risks of accident and proliferation.

All of these factors and more (except cost) are on different scales and dimensions, so comparing them requires human value judgements - inevitably people disagree.

Dams are also uniquely vulnerable to climate change, since drought can affect their power output.

And local factors--people just assume that if necessary they can drain the reservoir (or greatly lower the level) to run the turbines to cover for a lack in solar/other output, but in the US as soon as you put in a dam you'll get home owners and property owners around the newly created reservoir fighting tooth and nail to maintain high water year round for aesthetics and recreation.

There are ways to minimize this of course, like building giant storage tanks, but dammed rivers are going to (usually) dwarf man mad retention pools.

Nuclear power also have calm spells. France is enduring one, with over 50% of their nuclear capacity stopped due to manteinance and other issues (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/a-french-nuclear...), and are expecting blackouts in the next winter if neighbors cannot provide.

Yrs, but that is planned maintainance which can be coordinated with industry and neighbouring countries. You cannot plan for when the wind stops blowing, plus the wind is likely to have stopped in neighbouring countries too. Countries which use primarily wind rely heavily on neighbours with hydroand nuclear.

Planned manteinance? Half power installed under manteinance, some of them for cooling corrosion and leaks, at the same time, in the worst moment in maybe 10 years? And fearing blackouts in six months. Worst planning ever.

As soon as storage for intermitent sources is economically competitive with gas (not nuclear, it already is), nuclear as we know it is done.

I can do this too! Let me try:

As soon as we start building more NPPs thereby training a workforce for building NPPs building costs will go down 10x and renewables as we know it is done.

Nah, doesn't work the same if costs are historically rising. But cost of eolic, solar and batteries are steadilly falling.

> I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where indeed nuclear will win

It doesn't emit anything, radioactive waste is captured entirely on the other side. They also don't go boom.

They're in the same category because they're both zero-carbon power. If you want to compare safety, deaths per TWh has nuclear right in the same area as wind and solar - less than rooftop solar.

That’s a good point. Of course installing solar on a rooftop has a small possibility of accident, and the energy produced on a single house is not that big. Multiply and you get … a big number, perhaps? Do you happen to have sources?

Ah sorry of course.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

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

Nuclear does not "emit" solid waste, it returns it in nice sealed containers (in small quantities, over a long period of time). When the goal is to minimize environmental impact, it is absolutely fair to class it as "non-emission".

How much noxious chemical waste, and by volume, is produced in the manufacture of the many thousands of solar panels and wind turbines though for the same power?

You act like there aren't people who do things called "lifecycle analysis" professionally.

There are very uncontroversial answers to your questions, even if you personally don't like them.

I don't think he was acting like there aren't people that analyze it, he was just asking for comparative numbers.

If you have an uncontroversial answer to his question, simply say it.

You seem to have taken personal offense to his question in general.

It seems impossible to get an actual breakdown out of anyone. Every asshole wants to spit out some "number" that makes their favorite solution look good. Nobody wants to give you a breakdown of the environmental cost of various power sources in terms of site prep/construction, continued operation, etc.

Intuition says hydroelectric dam is almost carbon free for a century or more after you build it (not counting watershed disruption). Solar is basically free up front but the panels wear out quick and so the supply chain must run. Nuclear and wind seem to be in the middle with nuclear being closer to the damn and wind being closer to solar. But there is no good way to actually get the numbers and other stuff you need make the comparison.

Hell, even just trying to compute the amount of diesel used per kwh over a given timeline (and this should be a really easy thing to quantify in a demonstrably honest way) is basically impossible because you wind up having to sift through reams and reams of material written by people who are just lying with plausible deniability.

I don't care what my power source is. I just want to be informed. And the amount of lying I have to identify and discard on my way to being informed is too damn high.

A bit of an odd response. I neither "like" or "dislike" any "answers" to lifecycle analysis.

What I definitely do not "like" is the dismissal of nuclear by saying "nuclear waste" without considering all the forms of waste associated with other supposedly "greener" solutions.

Solar panels and the stands they are placed are shipped (half way round the world) wrapped in acres of plastic, cardboard and polystyrene for shipping that is then just discarded at worst, and possibly partly recycled at best. Broken wind turbines, which happens frequently, are often just buried, and so on. Digging the raw materials out of the ground and refining them causes waste. Doping chemicals to get the rare earths cause waste. Just because in the West we recycle much of this, doesn't mean that, in the race to the bottom, factories in Asia aren't just dumping this stuff out of sight.

https://weather.com/science/environment/news/baotou-artifici...

Wind turbines are not buried. They are mined for copper and, often, rare-earths.

Unless you are taking about the blades? Sure, they are discarded. It has not been and will not be a problem.

Sure, and we bury spent nuclear fuel and supposedly is a problem according to some groups. If we bury it deep enough, remote enough, and remove access to it, how is it a danger? If the human race loses the ability to read warning signs to stay away, I suspect we've probably lost the ability to tunnel a thousand metres underground as well. It's really not the problem people make it out to be. We have signs around cliffs, electric pylons, and other things with a much higher risk of actual death, and people obey those...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

It's like I said in another post, nuclear is held to some mythical higher standard of scrutiny than other forms of energy generation despite it being better in every way except for up-front cost. All the spent nuclear fuel, ever, takes up less volume than the picture in the bbg article.

Wind turbine blades are, simply, not poison. Neither is Si crystal.

Probably a roughly similar amount to what is created building a nuclear, or any other, power station.

What's your point?

> Probably a roughly similar amount to what is created building a nuclear, or any other, power station.

I'd love to see some figures that prove or disprove that. I'm inclined to disagree and say that more waste is produced making solar panels and wind turbines due to the sheer volume of them that are being mass manufactured.

> What's your point?

My point is that everyone talks about nuclear waste, but no one talks about the toxic chemical waste produced the mass manufacture of hundreds of thousands of solar panels and turbines, versus the one-off construction of a few hundred nuclear power stations, and the extraction of a relatively small-by-weight amount of fuel.

Nuclear power is always under minute scrutiny compared to "green" power.

Your inclination to disagree is called "bias".

The sheer mass of nukes is revealed by their cost. That cost is for concrete and steel, both with well-documented impact. The cost of solar and wind equipment is concentrated in high-grade material refinement involving very small actual mass.

So, your inclination misleads you, and you seek to similarly mislead others.

The effective opposition to nukes is based on thoroughly rational analysis of costs. Simply, by any rational accounting, nukes cost much more than favored alternatives.

I don't see how nuclear is any more dangerous than any other renewable sources of electricity. The law of conversation of energy dictates that the residual waste energy has to go somewhere for any process. Any and all energy production mechanism are going to cause some disturbance in the natural order of things. It just turns out that the emissions due to "renewable" sources isn't something that does widespread ecological or societal damage. A hydroelectricity plant's "emissions" are in the form of riverbed erosion however, we can optimize around that by putting it in places which minimizes ecological and societal damage. For nuclear, we minimize this damage by placing the waste matter in large indestructible concrete bins.

Maybe because of the potential toxicity of the waste product, and the lifetime of this toxicity?

storing it safely is a bit more complex than "large indestructible concrete bins"

nb. I'm not anti-nuke, just pro good risk analysis

Well yes, everything emits something. Solar, wind, bananas; they all emit radiation as well. “Non-emission” is short hand for “non-emission of carbon dioxide” or perhaps more generally “greenhouse gases”.

If you’re concerned about human health, nuclear waste disposal is well studied and so are nuclear reactor safety. In fact, these small reactors are designed to be too small to create any catastrophic event in the astronomically unlikely event of a critical malfunction.

It’s odd to me that we all take planes despite the fact historically many have gone boom, and many a life has been lost. Must be something to do with no other viable alternatives…

If a wind turbine catches fire it emits pollutants too. I think we're defining on the (usually reasonable) assumption all goes well and there isn't catastrophic failure.

It does not render the surrounding region uninhabitable.

Site C should not have been built. It is in a relatively remote area, so the government was able to strong-arm local residents. Hydro has major impacts on the environment, river ecology, eliminates farmland, but this is all greenwashed away.

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