Comment by irchans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by irchans | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree with you. (I was a nuclear engineer for a few years.) The problem seems to be human institutions. There always seems to be corruption and stupidity.

Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions.

Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946

Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up.

Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization.

The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades.

It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.

On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.

Agree. I majored in physics with the plan of working on reactor plants. Not how the cards played out, but I still got the degree and have seen reactor operations up close for years.

My general position is that even if many more people die installing rooftop solar and wind turbines, just falling off roofs and ladders, it's a better plan, politically, than nuclear. Not that nuclear can't be done safely, but that even done safely, the optics of single-point failures, which will happen, are so bad that nuclear becomes political loser. Just build more wind and solar and the distribution infrastructure to move it around.

the people who were just denied damages from a court in Japan aren't "optics". They are real people, harmed, denied justice. Due to nuclear being just too big a fish to catch for an institution like Japans' nuclear industry and too big to admit it by their judicial branch.

So your argument is basically, humanity is to stupid for nuclear. That's pretty depressing.

Be depressed if that is what it takes for the message to penetrate.

The "very big CO2" problem is another argument against nukes: you displace much more CO2, and notably sooner, by spending the money building out renewables instead.

Furthermore, the near-zero opex for renewables frees up more money to build out more renewables and eventually, when needed, storage.

Well, France in 15 years made its grid nearly 100% green. For the last 50+ years France had really low energy prices, high energy reliability, an incredibly green grid, no emissions, almost no money going abroad instead supporting high paid technical jobs domestically.

The cost for that transformation was mostly on the books of the utility and were being paid down despite the low energy prices they were offering.

That a huge success, and any signification technical industrial nation could do the same. France was already going towards that path so if you would replicate it it would likely be 25 years but i that time you could like build 80 much more modern higher utilization reactors.

Germany had a Green transformation that with all the subsidies and everything will have cost 100s of million and they still have lots of coal (and their remaining nuclear) and will not have fully solved the problem for quite a while yet. In the time since French built nuclear the Germans mostly paid higher electricity prices and the most recent subsidy for energy prices will cost Germany 100s of billions. Not to mention the huge cost in terms of health and the environment to operate all the coal plants.

So had the Germany 'Energiewende' been to go from 30% to 100% nuclear, they could likely have done it in 20 years flat. Assuming a start date of 2000, that would be now. They could be 100% nuclear by now with reliable low cost energy prices, a 100% green grid. I don't think there is really any question if this would have been possible. Germany had all the knowlage and skills required. Even assuming some plants are delayed, they by now could easily finish 8 plants at the same time, they would be done within the next couple of years for sure.

This could have been financed easily as well. Assuming they build 50 new reactors (lets say 1.4GWe), assuming a conservative of 5 billion per reactor (prices way lower if you actually mass produce). 250 billion $, that's 6% of their GDP. Germany debt is 60%, and would go to 66%. German 30 year bond yields of 2%.

In return they would get assets that would produce green energy reliably at fixed price for literally the next 80-100 years. And that is assuming they do it with mostly the same tech that France did.

This would have clear been a superior path for Germany in almost any way you look at it. Their citizens would breath clean air now. They would have reliable low energy prices (as most of the French consumers of nuclear plants still enjoy). And they could tell Russia to go fuck themselves.

Likely the would also get contract from the Polish and all over Europe and continue to build them making it a profitable export.

You neglect that they would have to be breeder reactors, or run out of fuel. And, that those would cost many times over what the renewables they could build, instead, cost. And would cost overwhelmingly more to operate than their neighbors' renewables. Those neighbors will be selling power at far below the nukes' base operating cost.

France would then have to choose between mothballing their reactors and buying neighbors' power, or taxing their own citizens to keep the breeders operating at their radically higher cost. The latter would be an unpopular choice.

In summer, of course, the reactors would all need to be shut down in any case, because there is not enough water in the rivers to cool them. France would be buying neighbors' power, then. They could continue, in fall, or spend big bucks to fire up the reactors again.

French tolerance for folly has limits.

Why can we only rely on wind and solar to 70 or 80%? South Australia had more than a week of more than 100% net wind+solar generation without much tranmission or storage or hydro, and they're still building more!

Overbuilding, storage and transmission for sure allows very close to 100% renewable generation. It will not be as _cheap_ as it is today though.

We could. We really could.

We could make a law today that forbids the construction of new fossil fueled plants. We could make a law that said that by 15 years the national grid will not allow the use of fossil fuels to stabilize the grid when demand exceed supply, and that by then people will either have to live with power outage or creating storage that match capacity with demand.

What we can observe in the world is an significant and continued increase in fossil fuel capacity, and energy politics being dependent on fossil fuel costs. Even in country with way over 100% wind capacity like Denmark, they still can only consume about 40% from wind. The remaining 60% comes from other sources like imports that are directly linked to fossil fuels. Getting those 60% to be generated from storage would be a major victory.

> They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake.

Magnitude 9.1, actually.

Thank you! Huge difference! Lack of research on my part. Sorry

Actually, it was a Mw 9.0 according to JMA.

This makes no sense.

Earthquakes in different places can be compared only on a common scale.

Looks like JMA says 9.0, USGS says 9.1. I don't really have enough expertise to know which number is more accurate, and I suspect it doesn't make a huge difference. It's in any case the highest magnitude earthquake ever recorded in Japan.

Japan gets earthquakes every day, and is much more seismically active than the US, so I would favor their expertise more. But yeah, it was the highest ever recorded. According to Wikipedia, it actually moved Honshu (the main island of Japan) by over 2 meters to the east!

The available amount of economically viable geothermal and wave power available in the US is pretty limited. Those sources should certainly be part of the mix, but they aren't scalable and won't replace the long-term need for fission power to deliver the base load.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com