Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
Maybe it's because of the 'fraternité' in 'liberté égalité fraternité; they have very strong culture of public solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say Britain or the US.
And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons why France has had major success with no issues. There's nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.
While this has been a real problem and got them into some supply tight spots over winter it definitely speaks for their approach to safety.
(more seriously, the French nuclear industry has avoided major disasters but at the cost of some expensive repairs as the fleet is aging together. At least they didn't skimp on the repairs.)
To me, it appears to be a niche technology with a host of problems (fuel mining, decomissioning and fuel reprocessing are dirty and expensive) that is completely incapable of competing with renewable power on cost already, and current trendlines (plant vs. wind/solar/battery costs) are absolutely NOT favorable.
I encounter this highly (and IMO irrationally) favorable view of nuclear power very frequently on HN and would really like to understand why this is so prevalent...
For example MSR's can operate at very high temperatures, can recycle nuclear waste, don't use fuel-rod's and can be made to be smaller and more economical than the older pressurized water reactors that you're referring too.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/spotlight-on-innovation...
And that makes the economics just wishful thinking-- to back them up, we would need first a finalized, commercial design, then to actually build it in some numbers, and verify cost effectiveness. And this is a point that renewables already reached a decade ago, while still getting cheaper...
Nuclear power in general also suffers from the big problem that it becomes even less attractive the more cheap intermittent power is available, because all the costs are fixed; just turning these on when there is no wind/sun makes the already bad cost efficiency even worse...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-...
They have "dark doldrums" and have to revert to natural gas and diesel power plants (which is why BP and American energy companies push wind and solar). On top of that you can't just cover the entire countryside in massive wind turbines or solar panels. You've got protected species and you've got NIMBY. Why push the endless political pissing matches when you could easily develop nuclear power too? Do both. Let nuclear power handle the doldrums.
According to https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm, current german electricity mix is ~50% renewable since beginning of the year. Used to be 35% in 2018. So the "unreachable" target of 80% in 2050 seems completely trivial; just keep doing things at a similar rate and that target is in reach within a single decade (!!).
Intermittency of renewable sources is a problem that has multiple perfectly viable solutions, namely overprovisioning, storage, grid connectivity and peaker plants. Finding the most cost effective mix of those (and adjusting it over time as technology evolves) is a problem that the free market is perfectly equipped to solve.
Area consumption is not a big issue, neither for solar nor for wind, because roofs and agriculture (and the off-shore option in the case of wind).
Nuclear power is a bad mix with renewables because it's already too expensive and building it for peak loads makes that drastically worse since it's all fixed cost basically. Gas powered plants are super attractive with renewables because of the very same dynamics (cheap installation costs and variable costs that largely depend on actual utilization).
In the extremely unlikely case that battery technology fails completely it would always be possible to use hydrogen as energy storage in combination with refitted gas peaker plants. But that scenario appears unlikely to me.
Also note that renewables have already overtaken nuclear power in the US, too; given recent experiences with the nuclear industry it seems EXTREMELY unlikely to me that this trend would ever reverse.
That is not "extremely unlikely" it is 100%ly inevitable. Luckily hydrogen as energy storage is already happening now.
Batteries that buffer about a week of household electricity (100kwh) are already affordable enough to be installed in cars, and the whole sector is still improving rapidly.
(I think the main problem is purely political in that nations don't want to depend on others for energy, and outside of a few exceptions that would probably be necessary if storage was to be minimized).
The political problem is also not something you can dismiss. It will kill off most of the plans for global connectivity. And in fact this is a good thing as dependency on another country for energy is a bad idea (see Europe's dependency on Russia energy).
So in the end, you really can't get away from hydrogen. It is simply too good of an idea and the alternatives are either impossible or totally unacceptable.
At this point I don't think nuclear is the way; I think it's got too many hurdles and we don't have enough time to figure it out in a safe way, if we ever can get the costs down and improve safety at the same time. But it's undeniably attractive as a nearly carbon-free energy source.
Deciding that anyone with a different opinion than yours on a complex topic must be some kind of shill for big oil is doing yourself a disservice.
Nuclear is base load - it takes days to change power levels - and cannot be a substitute for fast-reacting power sources
If I had a penny for every HNer who opens their mouth to pontificate about how turning off nukes means a less reliable grid or "we'll need fossil fuel plants to make the grid reliable", I'd be a very rich person.
I'm pro-nuclear and share your optimism about small modern reactor designs. But any nuclear proposal that doesn't include safety and transparency as core values that take priority over all other considerations deserves to be rejected. There's a reason that people have grave doubts about the integrity of the nuclear industry, and it's not technical but social. There are way too many nuclear proposals that lead off with happy talk about the benefits, and defer discussion of safety, transparency, cost and so on until those issues are raised as objections. It's a PR strategy and I automatically distrust it, because that 'good vibes only' mindset is likely to embed itself in the subsequent management of the plant and lead to cover-your-ass style decision-making.
tl;dr I like nuclear technology, it's the operators I don't trust.
Of all nuclear accidents, these are easily the least concerning. For one, only two western nuclear submarines have ever been lost and those were well publicized, nobody should be surprised by those. The Soviets/Russians lost quite a few, which I don't think many people would find surprising, but it's really not a big deal anyway from an environmental perspective. Sea water is excellent shielding, the wrecks are now used as habitats for all kinds of sea life which is unfazed by the radiation. As for heavy metal pollution, ocean water already has several billion tons of uranium and other heavy metals dissolved in it, naturally. A few more tons from a few reactor cores is nothing.
Quite frankly, we should view deliberately dropping old nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical method of disposal. In fact, the Soviets and the UK have deliberately done this several times and (the US and Switzerland did too, to a much lesser extent.) There is no evidence that any of this has caused any harm to the environment.
Imagine the optics! If this is a good solution it would most certainly have to be done by governments in secrecy.
Edit: none of these seem to be "missing". I think they meant that there are a number of unrecovered (in some cases even intentionally scuttled) nuclear submarine wrecks.