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Comment by givemeethekeys | Hacker News Reader

Yup. The cost of failure is too damn high. Nuclear plants, despite our best efforts so far, don't have a reputation for graceful degradation.

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Even though they do fail badly (when managed badly), they still kill fewer people per installed GW and produced GW-h compared to coal, gas and even solar.

When managed well (i.e. Adm. Rickover's US Navy) nuclear power produces zero health-related incidents over some 14,000 reactor-years. When managed super-badly (i.e. Soviet Navy) you get multiple deadly incidents per facility per decade.

>they still kill fewer people per installed GW and produced GW-h compared to coal, gas and even solar.

By orders of magnitude.

The worst hydroelectic catastrophe killed over 200,000.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Coal has killed magnitudes above that.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

I would say that calling this a "hydroelectric catastrophe" is misleading. The main motivation for building this dam was apparently to control flooding.

That first one might be of no use in a dataset for the US, UK etc. to make such decisions. It is a ridiculous outlier. 20-200k people die and there is a cover up.

Whether the government tries to cover up or not is of little consequence, the people are already dead.

Multiple 100+ fatality dam accidents happened in the US and other Western countries about the same time, lower fatalities owing to lower population density rather than some different level of diligence.

The cover up talks to the culture, which talks to the risk given the era and country involved.

Dams are more dangerous than reactors in general, but really we should be looking at the risk of specific projects given all those factors.

Essentially by not building proper nuclear we're scrimping on human lives.

The solar claim is dubious (due to assuming installation of solar on residential roofs, when large scale solar would involve installation at ground level, a safer process.) But in any case, the cost of putative lives saved for the excess $ spent vs. solar would far exceed the $9 M statistical value of a human life used by the NRC to judge if regulations are cost effective. So, the argument you are making would imply a much higher value per human life, which would imply the NRC is dramatically underregulating nuclear power plants.

even france having a tough time https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/REupdate/2...

Last week EDF was fully renationalized.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-giant...

That's a surprisingly accurate and in-depth article about France's situation.

I was struggling to find English language reporting on that topic, I'll keep it for further use. Thanks!

> English language

Nominally, but I suspect that may have been translated. "Planification"?

Is that not correct in english ?

"Planning" is the word normally used.

Okay. But no complaints about burning huge amounts of coal then.

This is a false dichotomy. Coal is going away, and nuclear is not needed for that to happen.

There are plenty of complaints about burning coal. I don't think I've seen an article arguing for that, and if I did I would imagine people would be very against the idea.

The high cost of nuclear _is the reason_ we still burn coal. If we hadn't over-regulated it 50 years ago there wouldn't be a coal power plant left in the country, and tens of millions of human-years would have been saved over the past several decades. And it's because we completely ignored the safety risks of coal while hyper-focusing on nuclear. There is no mythical "zero risk" power generation. Everything is context dependent. It is potentially true that at this point, cheap energy storage is close enough to make 100% renewable a reality and therefore that it's too late to make the switch to nuclear (although I'm not entirely convinced), but failing to switch fifty years ago is one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.

Bad as coal is, it's a consistent, lower level of bad. In aggregate it's way worse, but it's not the impending doom and enormous clean up that happens when you have a nuclear accident.

An average coal plant produces ~1twh power per year for 40 years of its lifespan. Death directly attributable to emissions from coal plants average around 25 per 1 twh of power. So coal plants just in their operation kill at least 1000 people each, conservatively. So far there has been 1 confirmed radiation death from Fukushima Daiichi, and it operated for almost exactly 40 years. Even Chernobyl killed fewer than 50 people, though it was SUPER expensive to clean up.

The "confirmed" death bit is a dog whistle. The cancers from population radiation exposures are largely statistically undetectable (and would not all have happened yet), but regulators cannot just act as if they do not happen. Radiation is not a defendant that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

I’m not sure what you mean by “dog whistle.”

The best evidence suggests there will be no cancers related to Fukushima due to both the low levels of exposure and the long time horizons of the relevant cancers. The population effected will in all likelihood die of other causes before the cancer would occur.

Chernobyl is obviously harder to parse because of confounding lifestyle issues and poverty in the region, and now the war. But I’m not sure a badly designed and run soviet RBMK should be the basis for western nuclear policy anyway.

What "best evidence"? I find it strange that coal deaths from air pollution predicted by epidemiological considerations is taken for granted while similar predictions for nuclear from uncontrolled emissions are completely rejected by nuclear proponents. Of course numbers are far lower, but I still wonder what level of cognitive dissonance can lead to this being rejected completely.

I also always wonder whether mining deaths are correctly accounted. Even just add the number from a single east German mining company alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(company) should change the picture somewhat.

> while similar predictions for nuclear from uncontrolled emissions are completely rejected by nuclear proponents

This isn't the case at all. The same epidemiological modeling definitely shows that no one exposed to radiation from Fukushima will live long enough to develop cancers associated with exposure.

Right, I don't dispute your figures at all, I'm just saying the general population doesn't get headlines about this for coal plants and it's just "a thing that happens" as a result of running a coal plant. A nuclear incident is something that is an accident. It could have been prevented. There's tons of headlines about it, and it goes from minimal cost to a gigantic cost immediately.

It's just short term thinking.

I think this is a culture/News problem. There have been plenty of coal accidents. A coal dust explosion in the 1940s killed over 1000 people. Mining accidents and deaths are somehow unconnected in the popular imagination.

Plenty complain, and coal is being rapidly paced out.

How could you possibly say there are no complaints about coal?

The logic doesn't follow.

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