Safe Enough?

> Imagine cars makers asking to get rid of ABS, airbags, safety belts...

But cars with all those safety features are still much more risky then nuclear plants. Cars can kill you. Practically speaking nuclear plants cannot. They force people to move. If you are going to complain about preventable deaths, what is your plan to make cars safe? We haven't done all we can do. If we bought the speed limits down to walking pace and banned reversing we'd save a huge number of lives (including small toddlers, it remains a tear jerker every time someone reverses over their own toddler).

Why are you accepting high risks from cars but raising an eyebrow at nuclear plants? It isn't rational. You know people, right now, who will be killed by cars. Why isn't something being done [0]?

> in the page 5 you can see that regulatory costs are minimal

Nuclear is the only technology that gets more expensive the more is built. And I'll give you a hint. That anomaly is 100% caused by the regulatory framework.

The report is obviously misjudging something. They're probably doing something like assuming only things that the regulators explicitly ask for count as regulatory costs. We should see a learning effect in the nuclear industry where technology gets cheaper over time.

[0] That was rhetorical. The answer is because it'd be damn silly and the costs would far outweight the benefits. Everyone can see that because the costs are obvious and felt personally. It is unfortunate the the costs of lacking energy are going to be felt before people accept that there aren't alternatives to building new powerplants.

> Why would you equal-to-coal today? You need to equal wind, solar or at least gas safety.

Some countries are closing nuclear plants and ramping up coal. (Look at Germany)

In a context of rising tides, yes, that's not a smart idea. Like it wasn't smart to do it in the context of middle-age piracy in the Mediterranean, or when the Roman Empire crumbled and cities on plains became indefensible - people moved to hills and mountains, further from the coast.

Sendai was hit by a tsunami and the cost was huge, but if you visit Sendai now, it’s quite nice.

People can understand this kind of risk.

There was a disaster, it got cleaned up. Now, people live there and are happy.

The same is true of many other floods.

So… I’d say we technologically advanced enough to deal with flood waters.

Unlike, literally every nuclear disaster.

Believe what you want to believe dude. No amount of snark, prancing or shaking your fist at the sky about nuclear safety is going to convince people it’s safe.

…until we have technological solutions that more effectively deal with nuclear radiation, radioactive substances and radiation related illness.

Seems to me it's effectively impossible to get evidence of shilling, but if this is indistinguishable from shallow dismissals – which it precisely is – this post should be dealt with in an equivalent way.

That said, the moderators are glad to delete certain kinds of posts (including some of mine, rightly or wrongly), but not this kind. And maybe they are right not to, but I'd like to know why.

Edit: I come to HN because there's a lot of good, informative posts and also descriptions of people's experience. This is really valuable stuff, but it's being drowned out by timewasting fluff and garbage to the point where I'm starting to regret coming here, and I especially regret posting something that tries to be informative when the only response I get for a few subjects (eg. drugs) appears to be co-ordinated, weaponised downvoting. Downvotes are fine, but I need to know why someone disagrees.

> The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy

Maybe. Do you have anything to back that up?

> There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change

That would possibly include me, but that does not allow glossing over their risks and failures, which is exactly what the parent post did. I'm not disagreeing with it, I'm asking it to be backed up with evidence. To repeat, this isn't about nuclear energy but the quality of HN posts about various subjects.

> By wikipedia...

This is exactly what I'm talking about – provide the bloody link so we can actually check your claims.

Provide a link! Don't just tell us, allow us to verify!

Edit: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster

"Initial estimates of costs to Japanese taxpayers were in excess of 12 trillion yen ($100 billion).[299] In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion)"

I am not against nuclear power, but I am deeply worried by people like you who clearly only want to see the upside - and it is that which makes me nervous of nuclear power not the technology itself but the blindness of people around it."Costing over $1 billion" is just plain misleading.

According to Wikipedia, there was less than 200k people evacuated for Chernobyl. Also, if you take a 30km radius, multiplied by the population density of California, you get only 274k people. (And I'm pretty sure that the powerplant are build in area which are less populated than the average).

As we leaned since, 30km radius is probably over-doing it.

That's considering the life of someone being evacuated to be "ruined"

Chernobyl is also not Three Mile Island. Chernobyl is so exceptional that it shouldn't be included in these discussions at all unless you're literally planning to build an RBMK reactor with out a containment building again and graphite tipped control rods.

You're ignoring the fact that humans generally do not think in terms of expected value, nor should they. An improbable outcome of widespread catastrophe (irradiating a million people) is and should be treated as something worse than a more-probable outcome of localized catastrophe (plane crash). You can't just do "loss x probability = cost".

The crucial difference is that people consent to get on a plane.

There are quite a few people who are afraid of flying, so afraid that they refuse to fly. That’s of course their prerogative.

The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody, including the people who didn’t want them to be built, and even people in neighboring countries who didn’t even get a vote on it - depending on which way the wind blows.

So the nuclear power station has to be built as safely as the most fearful person demands.

Had nuclear plants been treated the way airplanes are treated, any fault in one plant would lead to steps to redesign all of them, present and future, to definitively avoid this fault; and frankly, the fact that this is not being done is such a massive fuckup that it's making me more anti-nuclear.

My pro-nuclear position is based on an assumption of baseline competence! This doesn't seem to actually be the case!

You may note the tsunami stones, marking flood levels from the 1930s with inscriptions like, "Do not build any homes below this point (…) Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis." Also, earthquakes, even sever ones (there had been 9 with magnitudes > 8 in the 100 years before), are expected and reoccurring events in Japan. They had been explicit design criteria for the power plant. This was quite literally a 100-year event with similar past events happening in the last 100 years before this. So this is hardly a black swan.

The Indian Ocean one less than ten years prior?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_a...

Following that multiple studies showed that Fukushima could get hit by +15m tsunamis and suggested heightening the sea wall.

Now you are trying to redefine Black Swan to fit your narrative.

Take what the author said about COVID-19.

> According to Taleb, as it was expected with great certainty that a global pandemic would eventually take place, the COVID-19 pandemic is not a black swan, but is considered to be a white swan; such an event has a major effect, but is compatible with statistical properties.

Similarly, there is a great certainty that a +15m tsunami will hit any of the existing nuclear power plants in Japan. Fukushima was not a Black Swan, simply human negligence.

>How many 14-meter tsunamis have there been?

Since 1900 there have been at least 12 megatsunami with a height up to 1/2 a kilometre.