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Comment by NPC82 | Hacker News Reader

On top of the problems outlined in the article... I don't understand how people in my state of California can sit easy with this concept knowing what happened to Japan/Fukashima just over a decade ago. What is the thinking that we can run a nuclear power plant on a major fault line (eg:Diablo Canyon) any better than the Japanese (corrupt company or not - in commercial energy business I take this as a given - à la ENRON).

We have wasted real estate on top of people's roofs we can safely cover with solar and wasted energy going to empty parking lots (buildings, offices, etc.). Why not work on the workable rather than throwing nuclear at the problems? Is this really the quickest and most logical action to take?

I ask these questions in earnest, I am not being paid by an oil company...

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and what happened there? how many people died bc of disaster? how many bc of radiation? how many bc of tsunami that caused it? dont get me wrong, but compared to coal/gas/others nuclear is the safest, even compared to hydro, if we add chernobyl, a much worse situation, still its the safest and since excess solar/wind is also stored with hydro, nuclear still remains the safest and most reliable. And with nuclear recycling (France, Japan...) its environment footprint is orders of magnitudes lower compared to others

The Fukushima cleanup cost half a trillion dollar and displaced 120000 people. It is simply not sustainable to "price in" the risk.

The Tsunami killed 19,759 people. It is also notable that the nuclear plant was damaged by the Tsunami, not the earthquake. When is the last time California experience a Tsunami?

After Fukushima independent core cooling became a global requirement that was retrofitted on existing plants. While it is easy to blame the tsunami the regulators realized the risk was systemic so I would suggest to not be as dismissive next time.

As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...

Fukushima would have been helped by FCVSs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filtered_Containment_Venting_S...

Fukushima was not a freak accident. The japanese coasts experience huge tsunamis every couple of decades. Yet the engineers completely underestimated the flooding risk when building the reactors. This raises the question which other risks were overlooked elsewhere.

ok, nice, how much it costed when dams accidents happened, where also a lot of people needed to move, a lot more killed? Fossils also caused move of people (climate migration) and how much costs it provoked in healthcare system by making a lot of people sick or in costs provoked in other directions? Again, I understand, nuclear has risks, but we should look in perspective, are those risks(even cost) that orders of magnitude high compared to others when all important factors are considered? I can't say, I'm not a scientist, but I see France that has a LOT of nuclear plants and a reprocessing plant and it does not look that bad there? Or maybe China?

The entire state of California is not on a fault line. Surely there's some seismically-stable places in the state where such plants could be built.

I agree, America has no business building a nuclear plant anywhere near a fault line. But America isn't like Japan: there's tons of safe places within American territory where there's almost no risk of significant earthquakes. The same isn't true in Japan.

I am referencing specifically Diablo canyon since it was mentioned in the article, but a lot of energy plants need huge water sources. This is either for emergency procedures or efficiency which makes them attractive to build pretty much anywhere there's ocean or water - which happens to be where most fault lines are in California.

Ok, but (layman here) my understanding is that nuclear plants don't need water; they can use cooling towers instead. I think America's largest plant, for instance, is in the Arizona desert (Palo Verde).

Cooling towers use water. Nothing compares to the efficiency of evapotranspiration in terms of cooling potential.

"[Palo Verde] evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces." - according to Wiki

Ok, but some treated sewage doesn't seem like it's even close to the volume of water you get in a river. Of course, the Phoenix area is a really big city with 5M people.

Palo Verde was a concern last year because of the massive 1000 year drought causing concern about not having enough water to run. But FYI nearly all power generation is just creating steam through heating water to turn a steam turbine to create power. Same method as a coal plant.

On top of that, looking at supply in CA, it is completely reasonable to finally turn off Diablo Canyon.

https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/supply.html

Also interesting to compare supply of renewables today vs. a year ago.

Nuclear is an unnecessary complication.

Is the plan to replace it with natural gas?

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