[HN Gopher] The lessons of Fukushima - Nuclear power must be wel...
___________________________________________________________________
The lessons of Fukushima - Nuclear power must be well regulated,
not ditched
Author : mpweiher
Score : 231 points
Date : 2021-03-04 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.fo/SLoqm
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Nuclear power, when done right, is good and safe. But right now
| it's much too financially and politically risky when compared to
| the alternatives.
|
| Look at Finland for example. They're building two new power
| plants:
|
| Olkiluoto Unit 3: Under construction since 2005, commercial
| operation delayed by at least 13 years now and the initial
| delivery price of EUR3 billion is estimated to end up at EUR8.5
| billion.
|
| Hanhikivi: Won't be operational until at earliest 2028 and is
| expected to cost EUR6.7 billion. 34% of the plant is/will be
| owned by the Russian state coorporation Rosatom, because all the
| alternative suppliers were too expensive. If the plant eventually
| becomes operational then Rosatom will supply 3% of Finland's
| total electricity production.
|
| Would it not have been much more reasonable to spend this money
| on developing and investing in renewable energy sources?
| StillBored wrote:
| Can you give hard reasons for the delay? As in this concrete
| needed to be poured 6" thicker than originally speced and what
| the upgrade provides?
|
| The couple times I've actually seen these changes described,
| they are changes enacted to stall the development, not because
| of a hard technical reason in the design.
| fsflover wrote:
| Nuclear power would be more competitive if the CO2 tax was
| implemented.
| alexashka wrote:
| Maybe science, engineering and social planning should be left to
| people who actually specialize and work in those fields?
|
| Just introduce decapitation for people who turn out to be
| incompetent idiots.
|
| I don't understand what this fear mongering or 'discussion' of
| science and technology at the level of idiot journalists
| accomplishes, besides making idiot readers think they can have an
| opinion on just about anything because they're now 'informed'.
|
| If there was a time when idiots knew they were idiots and stayed
| in their lane, I'd like to go back to it, if not, I'd love for it
| to be introduced. Otherwise, we'll have populist idiots promising
| to go to the moon to harvest it for cheese and idiots debating
| whether we should harvest the moon for cheese or invest in an
| eternal life elixir.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Every time I get into an argument with someone pro-nuclear and
| bring up the costs, they always blame hippies hamstringing
| nuclear power with regulations. Around and around the argument
| goes, meanwhile solar and wind costs keep on dropping, and
| baseload concerns keep on fading away.
| SCAQTony wrote:
| Perhaps centralized nuclear plants are the biggest existential
| threat whereas micro-nuclear plants, staggered some miles miles
| away from each other would produce more energy and smaller scale
| accidents if one was to occur?
| HPsquared wrote:
| I read your comment as "more and smaller scale accidents"
|
| Hopefully fewer accidents as well! Small reactors do tend to
| have better passive safety...
| nickdothutton wrote:
| The message is don't use 1940s physics understanding, 1950s
| design, 1960s construction to build a reactor that is then run
| for about 50 years and and expect to continue to avoid problems
| with it.
| croes wrote:
| They will say similar in 50 years about today's technology.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| That's the point, because right now 50 years from now they
| will still be talking about 100 year old technology because
| we haven't allowed ourselves to advance.
| quasirandom wrote:
| Some problems that Fukushima had: 1950s vintage design, active
| cooling system, backup power at sea level in a seismically active
| area. This kind of failure was not just predictable, it was
| predicted.
|
| People travel to Japan from around the world to learn how to
| build earthquake resistant structures. Their nuclear engineers
| are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the
| talent.
|
| In short, the problems were human not technical. People get
| complacent and greedy. They use every procedural tool they have
| to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement. I think that is
| at the core of most nuclear skepticism. Does anyone honestly
| think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely
| manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Or will they neglect
| basic maintenance and upgrades?
| NoOneNew wrote:
| I can't find the article for the life of me. From what I can
| remember, it was soon after the disaster, something came out
| about another plant that was "hit" by high waters as well. The
| difference was, their seawall was stupid high. One of the civic
| engineers during development fought tooth and nail to build the
| excessively high wall compared to what the gov building code
| was. If I remember correctly, it ended up being only a two or
| so meters taller than the tsunami that hit them. The engineer
| had a really baller statement in the article about how
| bureaucrats are useless and shouldn't have an opinion when it
| comes to life safety. I wish I could find it.
| samizdis wrote:
| This one, maybe?
|
| https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wa.
| ..
| NoOneNew wrote:
| How the hell did you find it so quick?
|
| I'm surprised I remembered it relatively well. Though, 1
| meter buffer between the tsunami and seawall and the
| politician quote is better in his words:
|
| >"Matsunaga-san hated bureaucrats," Oshima said. "He said
| they are like human trash. In your country, too, there are
| probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final
| responsibility.
| samizdis wrote:
| Divination via DuckDuckGo :-)
|
| From words in your comment, I used this search string:
| japan nuclear plant saved engineer battle high sea wall
|
| The result was third in the returned list. (Settings -
| safe search off, global region selected.)
|
| Edit to amend: words and concepts in your comment. Also,
| I'm chuffed to have been able to be of use.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| You... you're beautiful. Thank you. You may have just
| made me a convert to DDG.
| samizdis wrote:
| Aw! The beautiful person in this effort was Karen Sparck
| Jones [1], who gave us tf-idf [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_document_frequency
|
| But thank you.
| andrewla wrote:
| The reason why I find this logic faulty is that none of the
| "known defects" were sufficient to shut down the plant. It's
| not a question of bureaucracy -- rather, the bureaucrats are on
| the other side. To cover their asses, they issue constant
| statements of imminent danger, and since those dangers never
| manifest, nobody believes them anymore.
|
| If anyone took the warnings seriously the plant would have been
| shut down ages ago. And that's the problem with tail disasters
| -- they happen so infrequently that the system is assumed to be
| redundant to all of them, so even a "failure" as predicted
| would be met by a failsafe.
|
| That's why I personally have turned against nuclear power. It's
| too complicated and the risks live out on the tail, and they
| are large (though not "fat" in the Taleb sense -- they're still
| bounded geographically).
| philipkglass wrote:
| I think that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is world-
| leading. They identify problems proactively and require
| operators to phase in safety upgrades even for plants built 50
| years ago. I live near an operating nuclear reactor and I
| prefer it over any form of fossil plant. Power reactors
| operating in the United States are reliable, safe, and have
| extremely low life cycle emissions of greenhouse gases.
|
| Unfortunately, one of the most common refrains from nuclear
| boosters is that nuclear power is over-regulated. I don't want
| American nuclear plants held to the same lax
| safety/environmental standards as fossil plants. If we used
| taxes to internalize the costs of pollution from fossil-fired
| plants, low cost natural gas plants probably wouldn't be
| pushing reactors into early retirement. But leveling the
| playing field by slashing nuclear safety/inspection down to the
| low standard expected of fossil plants is the wrong way to go.
|
| I am open to _specific_ proposals for reducing regulations in
| the nuclear sector if there are regulations that impose
| additional process overhead, don 't actually serve a purpose,
| and survive only from inertia. I wouldn't be surprised to hear
| that there are some of these. But I've been discussing nuclear
| power for 20+ years, starting back on Usenet, and specific
| proposals are much less common than generic "get rid of red
| tape" bluster.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Sorry but I don't trust any nuclear plant in the US to put
| safety over profits over the long term, especially after all
| the illogical deregulation done the last 4 years.
|
| There's also already some questions on safety in regards to
| current plants. They're constantly loosening tolerances and
| changing the way tests are performed to make otherwise failed
| tests fall within acceptable limits. Plus the plants are
| already operating 2x their engineered lifespan. Yeah, no
| thank you.
| [deleted]
| philipkglass wrote:
| The Union of Concerned Scientists has posted a great blog
| series "Role of Regulation in Nuclear Plant Safety." It's
| written by Dave Lochbaum, a degreed nuclear engineer who
| worked at American nuclear plants for 17 years. I think
| it's a better overview of NRC action and plant safety than
| any one incident. I've collected all the links here.
|
| Series introduction:
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/role-of-nuclear-
| regul...
|
| Flooding at Nine Mile Point: Regulation and Nuclear Power
| Safety #1 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/flooding-
| at-nine-mile...
|
| Three Mile Island Intruder: #2
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/three-mile-island-
| int...
|
| Empty Pipe Dreams at Palo Verde: #3
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/empty-pipe-dreams-
| at-...
|
| Yankee Rowe and Reactor Vessel Safety: #4
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/yankee-rowe-and-
| react...
|
| Flooding at a Florida Nuclear Plant: #5
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/flooding-at-a-
| florida...
|
| Containment Design Flaw at DC Cook Nuclear Plant: #6
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/containment-flaw-
| at-d...
|
| Pipe Rupture at Surry Nuclear Plant Kills Four Workers: #7
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/pipe-rupture-at-
| surry
|
| Anticipated Transient Without Scram: #8
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/anticipated-
| transient...
|
| Naughty and Nice Nuclear Nappers: #9
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/naughty-and-nice-
| nucl...
|
| Breaking Containment at Crystal River 3: #10
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/breaking-
| containment-...
|
| Fatal Accident at Arkansas Nuclear One: #11
| https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/fatal-accident-at-
| ark...
| gbrown_ wrote:
| How much are loosening regulations a concern for nuclear in
| the US?
|
| Obviously recently general utilities haven't fared well as
| of late (Texas) or nuclear in the past (e.g. Rocky Flats).
| But as a foreigner who thinks as far as nuclear power is
| concerned, the DOE seems to being an OK job as of late.
| Could you share the specifics of the tests you are
| referring to?
| hanniabu wrote:
| This first link makes me absolutely furious. There's too
| much to quote from here, but this succicnt excerpt
| touches on the water test. It goes into more detail in
| another part of the article. The post has numerous
| example of very concerning issues.
|
| > When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed -- up to
| 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused
| radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier
| test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet
| standards.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859
|
| > The proposal comes as most of the nation's nuclear
| power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s
| or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to
| 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have
| sought licenses to extend the operating life of their
| plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have
| warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns
| about safety.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-
| inspe...
|
| > The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut
| down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to
| police themselves. The NRC "is listening" to this advice,
| the Associated Press reported last month. "Annie Caputo,
| a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of
| four board members appointed or reappointed by President
| Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she
| was 'open to self-assessments' by nuclear plant
| operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by
| operators take the place of some NRC inspections."
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-
| tru...
| gbrown_ wrote:
| Thank you for the detailed and insightful reply!
| credit_guy wrote:
| Here, I'll come up with a proposal. If Congress is serious
| about climate change, then they can ask (and allocate the
| budget) the Department of Energy to procure and operate a
| bunch of naval nuclear reactors. With whatever internal
| regulations they have, the US Navy has not had a single
| incident in their entire history of operating nuclear
| reactors. They are also quite cost effective, for example the
| cost of the 2 reactors A1B [1] that power a Gerald Ford
| carrier is about $1 BN. That comes to about $2BN/GW, which is
| about a tenth of what a civilian reactor costs. The US Navy
| builds about 1 carrier every 4 years so that comes to 1
| reactor every other year. If the DoE gets the Congressional
| mandate to procure a few reactors per year, the cost is going
| to surely come down. Also these reactors don't need refueling
| for about 2 decades, while civilian reactors are refueled
| every 1.5 years.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Thats a great idea. I'm trying and failing to find gotchas.
| credit_guy wrote:
| There is a potential gotcha: proliferation potential. The
| naval reactors use highly enriched uranium; if it falls
| in the wrong hands, you can end up with someone being
| able to build a bomb. That's why I said such a program
| needs to be run by the Department of Energy, the same
| department that has to maintain the nukes. I don't have a
| personal objection to this, but a lot of people would be
| unhappy with an essentially military program to be
| established for a problem that is not military in nature.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The US stockpile of HEU would be depleted a lot faster this
| way, but enrichment could start again. I don't see major
| downsides to this proposal. Thanks for providing a specific
| and plausible idea!
| [deleted]
| DennisP wrote:
| I'm fine with rational regulation and good safety
| inspections. Here's an example of a regulatory framework that
| needed reform:
|
| Several years ago I got to attend a meeting between a bunch
| of people from advanced nuclear startups, and a former head
| of the NRC. The startup people said their biggest problem was
| that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they
| would even look at the design. Then they would give a flat
| yes or no. If yes then you still had just a paper reactor,
| and if no then you were out of business.
|
| Getting to that point required several hundred million
| dollars. That's a pretty difficult environment for investors.
| They said just a more phased process would help a lot. The
| NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to
| help develop new nuclear technology, and was uninterested in
| climate change.
|
| Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and
| things seem to be improving.
| [deleted]
| dtwest wrote:
| I live near one too, I'm not sure if I should be impressed
| that disaster was averted in 2002 or if I should be concerned
| how close things got:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po.
| ..
|
| It would be nice to hear from someone who is more
| knowledgeable on the subject than myself.
| partingshots wrote:
| If an accident almost happened in 2002, then the
| probability only increases as time goes on.
|
| I personally wouldn't feel safe, in the long run, buying a
| house or living near an aging nuclear power plant.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There was a long list of engineering failures at Fukushima. The
| idea with airplanes is not "design this component so it cannot
| fail" but "design the system so it can tolerate component
| failure". Fukushima had a list of failures it could not
| tolerate.
|
| You mentioned one, the vulnerability of the backup power to the
| seawall being overtopped. The generators could have been put on
| a raised platform. There were others:
|
| 1. the hydrogen was vented into an enclosed space
|
| 2. no way to add water to the cooling system with a gravity fed
| device
|
| 3. critical machinery should not be located in the reactor core
| building
|
| 4. no way to bring in electric power from elsewhere
| numpad0 wrote:
| Part of the reason why some fault tolerance measures were
| neglected was because discussing backup plans was seen as a
| sign of weakness and were leveraged often by oppositions.
|
| "You sound like you're looking forward for some disaster
| coming with those plans" worked in Japan in those times.
| Still do to some extent.
| nicoburns wrote:
| And it seems likely that with enough operating plant, there
| always will be engineering failures. Aeroppanes sometimes
| fail catastrophically too of course.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Aeroppanes sometimes fail catastrophically too of course
|
| It's become extremely rare.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Well sure. But while extremely rare is fine for
| aeroplanes, it's less clear that it's fine for nuclear
| reactors. So far we've been lucky that none of the big
| incidents have affected a major metropolitan area.
|
| I'm not completely anti-nuclear. But it seems clear to me
| that it should be seen as a stepping-stone technology on
| the way to a renewables + storage future rather than a
| long-term solution.
| nawgz wrote:
| Do they? I can't really recall an instance of catastrophic
| airplane failure over the last decade outside of 737 MAX
| certification / regulatory capture issues
|
| I also think the amount of airplanes that exist is higher
| than the amount of nuclear reactors we'd need for it to be
| a strong power source, and I also suspect that airplanes
| face slightly more volatile conditions
| nicoburns wrote:
| > outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture
| issues
|
| Well there's one example! Why would you discount it?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a key example, and is the same failure mode nuclear
| power has.
|
| Nuclear power could be engineered to be at least as safe
| as (most) commercial flight.
|
| But it won't be - and this is absolutely predictable.
| Because of politics and money.
|
| There is no answer to this, except to fix politics and
| money and make _them_ as safe as commercial flight.
|
| That's a whole different scale of problem to fixing
| climate change.
|
| IMO this isn't a utopian fantasy, it's absolutely
| critical for species survival. But it doesn't look as if
| we're going to be starting the process any time soon.
|
| Exporting the same problems to Mars or upload space or
| wherever won't solve them either.
| nawgz wrote:
| Right, fair question. I read "engineering failures"
| above, so I want to highlight that this isn't so much an
| engineering failure as it is a capitalistic failure
| driven by incestuous relationships in US aerospace.
|
| I do totally agree this is a real risk for any domain,
| especially energy which has so much money flowing, but I
| just don't think "engineering" is actually the issue
| which these things fail under
| weaksauce wrote:
| > The idea with airplanes is not "design this component so it
| cannot fail" but "design the system so it can tolerate
| component failure".
|
| that's not true. yes a lot of systems on airplanes are
| redundant but also there are plenty of you die if this breaks
| so we build it N times stronger than we can imagine it every
| happening... also, teach pilots not to do things that would
| bring that to be more possible. on a helicopter they have a
| single jesus nut that if it breaks the rotor is gone.
|
| In rock climbing as well there is redundancy where there can
| be but some things are built strong to the point where under
| most foreseeable conditions the component will not break.
| (the most common dynamic ropes for lead climbing twins and
| half ropes aside, belay device, belay loop, belay carabiner,
| harness are all built for worst case without redundancy.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > there are plenty of you die if this breaks so we build it
| N times stronger than we can imagine it every happening
|
| That's simply not true. Every component is redundant.
| Nothing is built "N" times stronger. The safety factor is
| 50% stronger than the maximum anticipated load.
|
| (I worked for 3 years at Boeing designing flight critical
| systems for the 757.)
|
| > are all built for worst case without redundancy
|
| Why I'm not going rock climbing.
| weaksauce wrote:
| is the jesus nut redundant? is the jackscrew nut for the
| elevator redundant?(one famously stripped and caused
| inverted flight for 30 min to try and save it but
| eventually crashed into the ocean)... they improved the
| design from that but it's still one mechanism and one
| screw. there are simply no completely reliable planes and
| helicopters without some form of single point reliability
| being required.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Is the main spar counted as a single component?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The main spar structure is redundant.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's tolerant of random failure of individual components,
| yes, but the entire spar could fail under an overload
| condition. For this failure mode, the only way to ensure
| a suitably low failure rate is by setting an appropriate
| safety factor.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > but the entire spar could fail under an overload
| condition.
|
| Each component individually is designed at 150% of the
| maximum load ever expected.
|
| The spar has redundant components. Any part of the spar
| can crack all the way through, and it will still fly
| safely.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Redundancy protects against some failure modes (e.g.
| unrevealed fatigue cracking) but not overload, which is a
| common-mode failure that doesn't care about redundancy if
| the load is high enough. It becomes a matter of
| "probability of exceedance".
|
| Electrical/mechanical systems are different and can
| usually be separated/segregated etc, but there is only
| one structure.
| weaksauce wrote:
| There was a famous crash where the pilot flew through
| some wake turbulence and caused the tail to fall off by
| improper rudder inputs. at a certain point there is only
| one of something.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The problem with fault tolerance is that it allows the
| normalization of deviance, since something is always failing,
| but it's okay because there is always a backup (until there
| isn't).
|
| The bigger issue with nuclear power is that we can trust
| humans to keep up the level of effort to keep it working
| without a fault for a few decades, maybe centuries if we're
| lucky, but there's no way you can operate a plant for a
| millennia without a catastrophic accident, but accidents take
| much more than a thousand years to clean up. So it's all
| totally imbalanced unless you just assume we'll have fusion
| in fifty years, so nothing matters. But I don't think we can
| assume that anymore.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The problem with fault tolerance is that it allows
|
| We do that with airplanes. Think about it - you're flying
| at 30,000 feet, 500 mph, 50 degrees below zero, no land in
| sight over the North Atlantic, in a tin balloon loaded to
| the gills with fuel and two flaming engines.
|
| And yet you're perfectly safe.
|
| How did that come about? Tolerance of failure.
| silvestrov wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missing_aircraft#20
| 01-...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Look at how few of them there are, despite millions and
| millions of flights.
|
| It's an absolutely incredibly good safety record. You're
| much safer flying across the Atlantic than driving to the
| airport.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The machines are designed to tolerate fault, but the FAA
| is designed to not let you take off unless you do a
| checklist that proves all the engines are working, not
| just the one you need for a crippled landing. So the
| system as a whole requires that the FAA not give in to
| the pressure from industry to sign off on less fault
| tolerance. It's a difficult issue for systemantics.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Um, there isn't a backup if the backup isn't operable
| before you take off.
| opo wrote:
| >...Does anyone honestly think the United States has
| institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over
| multiple decades?
|
| All indications are that much was learned by industry and the
| NRC after TMI: "...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to
| increased identification, analysis and publication of plant
| performance information, and recognising human performance as
| "a critical component of plant safety". Key indicators of plant
| safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those
| indicators show:
|
| * The average number of significant reactor events over the
| past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero.
|
| * Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk
| events that could lead to a reactor-core damage.
|
| * The average number of times safety systems have had to be
| activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.
|
| * Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily
| decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and
| are well below national limits.
|
| * The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has
| decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52
| shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985."
|
| https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweepin...
|
| No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear
| accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But
| historically nuclear power has been much safer than all the
| alternatives that have been available. If only other power
| sources were as safe:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
|
| Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by
| the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so
| many people have an understandable misperception that it is
| more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people
| had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a
| lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could have let to
| catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains
| stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that
| story? How much would the media have covered that if 200
| thousand had been evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?
|
| A recent Harvard study shows that pollution from fossil fuels
| is much worse than previously thought and they estimate that it
| is responsible for more than 8 million people yearly. We need
| to move away from burning fossil fuels and we need to use all
| the tools that are available.
|
| https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel...
|
| It is possible there will be some major advances in grid
| storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover
| for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case -
| great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are
| facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us
| what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came
| down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you
| prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change
| rather than use nuclear power?
| godelski wrote:
| While there are a lot of human faults in this disaster (I think
| it is hard to deny that generators in the basement were a bad
| idea) it is also a complicated problem. One factor that isn't
| frequently brought up is that the Tohoku earthquake was the 4th
| largest _ever_ recorded and the largest in Japan (9.1) (second
| largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest
| theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not
| linear growth). Fukushima wouldn 't have happened with an 8.5.
| A big reason this is important is because it really sets this
| event apart from that of Chernobyl, which I'd argue was much
| more dependent upon human error and bureaucracy.
|
| But that means that the problem was both human and technical.
| What was considered good enough regulation was the issue
| because it is hard to predict earthquakes and even harder to
| estimate for earthquakes we've never seen before. No one
| thought a 9.1 magnitude earthquake would hit Japan and Nuclear
| safety is typically magnitudes of safety above what is needed
| (see radiation dosages) and this is a good thing (even though
| many that are pro nuclear, but never worked in the industry,
| claim that we're too strict).
|
| But you are right that there is infighting between the
| scientists/engineers and the bureaucrats. But that's been true
| for every industry I've been a part of. I'm just trying to say
| that the story of why Fukushima happened is substantially more
| complicated than I see in the general discussions here on HN,
| Reddit, or elsewhere.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I just think that people need to out things into perspective.
| The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than
| the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the
| nuclear event. I think in our mind we make these events far
| far more serious than they were. Not that they were not
| serious but every thing in life is a tradeoff and you need to
| look what you are trading and what you are getting.
| merb wrote:
| > The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging
| than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember
| the nuclear event.
|
| because we still live with the nuclear accident, while the
| tsunami damages are mostly repaired? Do you want to swim in
| the water in front of the plant? I probably wouldn't.
| hrktb wrote:
| No. The tsunami was extremely damaging and the death count
| was shocking. But it's over.
|
| The nuclear event had fewer immediate deaths, but the whole
| area is still unlivable, the sea is still getting more
| polluted every second, nothing is over, and won't be for at
| least hundreds of years if we ever engineer a way to deal
| with the core of the reactor.
| godelski wrote:
| I think what bugs me more is the armchair expertise, or
| rather the confidence behind this. It is the people whose
| argument essentially boil down to experts being idiots and
| not seeing things that are clearly obvious. I don't see
| these people significantly different from anti-vaxers. Both
| do real harm to society and make it substantially more
| difficult to solve the issues at hand because we're
| distracted by misinformation and often radicalizes others.
| Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that people are researching
| and learning. I like that people question authority and
| expertise too. But there is a balance here. You can say
| things with confidence if you have only read a few
| wikipedia articles on it, but if someone disagrees with you
| don't pull out a baseball bat. I find this behavior
| frequently common on places like HN and Reddit. I often
| find that the real answers are buried in a thread because
| they are complicated and nuanced, or non existent. I don't
| think I'm immune to this behavior either, but I do try to
| use the Murry Gelman Amnesia affect as a metric to check
| myself, and I think there are other good strategies that we
| should utilize and encourage. But I don't think our society
| encourages honesty over simplicity.
| dheera wrote:
| Also from my understanding the earthquake wasn't really much of
| an issue for most of Japan. It was the tsunami that we don't
| yet have good protections against.
|
| Why do humans of the 21st century love building delicate
| structures on the shoreline at sea level? Historical
| civilizations generally avoided building on the coast, very
| likely for good reasons, both for disaster resistance and for
| military reasons. Most ancient cities of the world are not
| located on the oceanside, but rather along inland rivers or
| smaller bodies of water, or at least within some safe distance
| of the coast.
|
| Recent modern cities seem to love building on the coast -- New
| York, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Los Angeles, Vancouver,
| Dubai -- all these had relatively little history or at least
| were nothing more than small towns until the past couple
| hundred years, and are all terrible places to build a city in
| terms of tsunami resistance.
| not2b wrote:
| Moving goods by sea is vastly cheaper than by land: for all
| those cities, being a port is why they are significant
| economic engines. And power plants need cooling and can use
| sea water for that purpose.
| cbhl wrote:
| Ancient cities needed to drink the freshwater from the
| rivers.
|
| Now we have man-made reservoirs and aqueducts to deliver
| drinking water to the coasts.
|
| Japan certainly seems to have cities along its rivers, but it
| also has a lot of costal cities (presumably because it's a
| small island nation, unlike, say, European civilizations).
|
| For Fukushima in particular, I was under the impression they
| were using the ocean water to cool the plant itself. (Under
| non-meltdown conditions, you can transfer heat without
| contaminating the water itself...)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Los Angeles was founded pretty far from the coast, and at a
| decent elevation, roughly 77m / 253feet. It just expanded in
| every direction. Santa Monica is protected by cliffs as well.
| Farther south isn't so lucky.
| piannucci wrote:
| Wouldn't the plant have been located where demand and cooling
| capacity were co-located?
| garmaine wrote:
| > Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions
| sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple
| decades? Or will they neglect basic maintenance and upgrades?
|
| Objectively, yes. There hasn't been a major nuclear reactor
| leak in the ~75 years the nuclear industry has existed in the
| USA. Even Three Mile Island, the worst disaster the US ever
| saw, was fully contained due to regulator-forced safeguards.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| False, see my SSFL links elsewhere in the thread. Direct
| link:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348051
| retrac wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're downvoted.
|
| After 50+ years of routine operation generating a nontrivial
| proportion of energy, we can look back at a decent amount of
| data. And what we see is that nuclear has been remarkably
| safe. Up here in Canada, coal mine disasters alone have
| killed far more people. When you start adding in air
| pollution and other such nasties, it's an enormously vast
| gulf in lethality.
|
| A cynical take. Estimate how many people would have died from
| air pollution due to a coal power plant generating the same
| amount of electrical energy as the reactor at Chernobyl that
| blew up. Estimate how many died from Chernobyl. The
| reasonable estimates of the high end of the former, and low
| end of the latter, are overlapping. It's not entirely
| preposterous to suggest that replacing unscrubbed coal plants
| with shoddy reactors that simply explode after 20 years of
| operation could actually save lives in net.
| virtue3 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
|
| We got super super lucky. And there's some debate about how
| bad the accident was with regards to NRCs monitoring.
|
| Frankly, the whole plant was a disaster in the making.
| There was tons of warning lights and other systems but they
| were essentially useless because they constantly flashed
| and for poorly understood reasons.
|
| 3mile island is an excellent engineering study of what not
| to do with monitoring. We got very VERY lucky it was as
| small as it was.
| garmaine wrote:
| Sure, all of which are problems which we've since fixed.
| But the core point is that there wasn't a major release
| of radiation like Chernobyl, and the reason why is
| because there were a regulator-imposed safeguard in
| place: the containment building.
|
| There were a lot of things that went wrong in 3MI. Many
| of the lessons learned from that were incorporated into
| future designs. But one thing that went very right was
| that there was defense in depth, so that a N different
| things would have to go wrong to create a nuclear
| disaster. And in this case the number of failures was
| less than N. That's an engineering and regulatory
| _success_ story.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| There was no luck about it. It was a meltdown, and the
| pressure vessel was compromised. Secondary containment
| saved the day. Three Mile Island didn't become a
| Chernobyl not because of luck, but because the US didn't
| cheap out and skip building concrete condom over the
| reactor like the Soviets did.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent.
|
| It always is though, isn't it?
| sir_bearington wrote:
| > Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions
| sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple
| decades?
|
| Seeing as they have done so for 70 years, yes. I don't just
| think it, I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power.
| All of the plants have run safely, save for Three Mile Island.
| And even in that case, safety measures worked and the secondary
| containment prevented large scale contamination.
|
| I don't think it's infallible. But it's aware of its own
| fallibility and enforces measures like secondary containment.
| jhayward wrote:
| > I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power.
|
| This is not a correct statement. You cannot assert, for
| instance, that the pressure vessel head corrosion issue at
| Davis-Besse[1] was a 'safely managed' power plant.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear
| _Po...
| sir_bearington wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. The vessel head corrosion was
| detected, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had the
| plant shut down. How does a story of a safety issues being
| detected, and operations ceased accordingly indicate unsafe
| management? It demonstrates the opposite.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's down to luck that the corrosion was detected before
| a serious incident occurred.
| jhayward wrote:
| The vessel head had corroded completely through the 6.63"
| steel pressure head, and the pressure vessel was relying
| only on the inner cladding to contain pressure. They were
| just a transient away, for _years_ , from a steam
| explosion that would completely disassemble the pressure
| vessel and core and would place maximal stress on the
| containment building itself.
|
| The issue was only "detected", after being covered up for
| years by falsified reports, when the engineer doing
| inspections decided to turn himself in.
|
| There is no way this condition can be regarded as safe
| operation, and if that is what you are arguing there can
| be no question that it is flat wrong.
|
| There are many, many of these kinds of situation where,
| just by the grace of whatever, we dodged a bullet and
| didn't have the catastrophe. You can't count those
| situations as adding to a cherry-picked "safe operation
| record".
|
| There is a huge different between "didn't explode today",
| and "can't explode ever". We have spent too many days,
| months, years, in the former, rather than the latter. The
| so-called safety record is a lie.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| > steam explosion that would completely disassemble the
| pressure vessel and core and would place maximal stress
| on the containment building itself.
|
| This venturing into the realm of hyperbole, at best.
| Nothing in your link mentions an explosion that would
| "completely disassemble the pressure vessel". Stress on
| the containment building isn't mentioned at all. These
| statements seem to be of your own invention.
|
| Can you substantiate your claim that a pressure vessel
| failure stood to compromise the containment building?
|
| > There is a huge different between "didn't explode
| today", and "can't explode ever"
|
| Again, we set up our safety measures such that the danger
| is contained _even if_ a meltdown occurs. Even the most
| scrutinized designs may fail. Humans are never perfect.
| You 're right: no plant can guarantee that it can't fail.
| That's why safety measures are built to withstand
| failure.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > Their nuclear engineers are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy
| that failed, not the talent.
|
| This.
|
| All of the articles I've read about the disaster, all
| continually scapegoated the engineers as the reason for the
| failure, allowing the politicians and government to get a free
| pass. I'm not sure why this was the case considering Japanese
| engineers are some of the best, but the vilification of them
| never sat well with me because then it cast a negative cloud
| over every Japanese engineer unfairly.
| chungus_khan wrote:
| TEPCO dropped the ball pretty massively too, although IMO it
| should be the government's responsibility to assume that
| power operators are going to and not allow them to.
| [deleted]
| chefkoch wrote:
| It's not only that, but also nuclear plants run by for profit
| organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be
| appreciated to ensure the bottom line.
|
| /edit: it's funny that here many are calling for tougher
| regulation, while in other post many who are pro nuclear
| complain about toomuch red Tape and top much security.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will
| at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line
|
| as though government bureaucrats and congressmen don't like
| coming in under budget, future consequences be damned.
| chefkoch wrote:
| Comming in under budget seems like a rare problem with
| building nuclear plants.
|
| While in operation, i think congressman and bureaucrats
| don't even know about the real costs.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where
| cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure
| the bottom line
|
| How does that explain the inept handling of Chernobyl?
| petre wrote:
| Personal profit, zealotry, career seeking, incompetence,
| design flaws, political agenda. This also includes the
| design phase. The RBMK reactor was an irresponsible design
| from the onset, even without the unknowns.
|
| Graphite moderated reactors are prone to graphite cracking,
| as also evidenced by UK's AGR reactor fleet. Maybe pebble
| bed reactors are safer, because new pebbles are continuosly
| fed in and the spent ones are extracted for reprocessing.
| We'll se how the HTR-10 and the HTR-PM fare.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Cutting corners was appreciated to meet arbitrary plans and
| quotas. The failure mode wasn't that different.
| chefkoch wrote:
| From what i know about this accident, the profit in this
| case was not to loose face for the higher ups running the
| plant.
| nullserver wrote:
| Did "profit" just get redefined?
| chefkoch wrote:
| I know nobody likes the wiseass but
|
| Profit = to gain an advantage from something: profit from
| sth/doing sth I profited enormously from working with
| her.
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/p
| rof...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous
| system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.
| chefkoch wrote:
| > Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous
| system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.
|
| I know you're beeing sarcastic, but you just have to run
| it by the book. No need to be a saint.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What I'm saying is a proper organization takes advantage
| of peoples' base motives, instead of trying to defy them.
|
| Free markets work so well for that reason.
| chefkoch wrote:
| I don't think this works in any savety relevant industry
| or there are not many proper organizations. Most
| regulations are a response to accidents.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Lawsuits and loss of reputation has halved the value of
| Boeing from the 737MAX mistakes.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The handling, as in, the reaction once the top officials
| actually understood the magnitude of the situation, was
| nothing short of spectacular.
|
| No expence was spared cleaning up the mess, removing top
| layer of soil at a massive scale and enclosing the failed
| reactor in sarcofagus. This expence and reputation damage
| contributed considerably to bringing the end of USSR.
|
| You've got to keep in mind how little was known about
| lethality and handling of radiation back then, compared to
| today. In fact good chunk of today's knowledge comes from
| Chernobyl.
| bluGill wrote:
| While we learned a lot from Chernobly, the culture back
| then was already very fearful of nuclear.
| Aunche wrote:
| It's not a universal rule that all for profit companies will
| "cut corners." Airplanes are vastly safer than other forms of
| transportation. When the public found out that Boeing cut
| corners with their design of the 737 max, their share price
| dramatically plummeted, signaling that this was the wrong
| decision.
|
| Also, cutting corners isn't necessarily worse for nuclear
| than other energy sources. More people die from wind turbine
| accidents than nuclear power.
| 0xy wrote:
| Considering NASA recommends that nuclear power be
| "significantly expanded" despite its drawbacks, I think they
| are sound enough. The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when
| it comes to nuclear safety and storage protocols.
|
| Also, the current status quo of "look we built all this
| renewable energy! just ignore all those gas peaking plants
| propping them up!" has to end.
|
| Nuclear is green. Renewables + gas is not renewable, not
| sustainable and not green.
| bob29 wrote:
| >The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when it comes to
| nuclear safety and storage protocols.
|
| One single nuclear site is consuming 10% of the DoE's budget,
| and its still leaking. https://www.tri-
| cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article228...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Allow me to introduce you to the relatively unknown Santa
| Susanna Field Laboratory meltdown/explosion, due to
| extensive cover ups over decades:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
|
| Still not fully cleaned up.
| sigstoat wrote:
| while the comment you're replying to didn't make a
| distinction, i'll make the distinction that that was a
| nuclear weapons production facility (run by the federal
| government). further, some of it was constructed during
| WWII for the manhattan project.
|
| so... not great handling, true. strong evidence about how
| nuclear power plants will be operated in the future? no.
| opo wrote:
| The NRC does not regulate defense nuclear facilities.
| jdsully wrote:
| The Hanford site is a WWII era nuclear weapons facility and
| is not at all comparable with nuclear reactors for power
| generation.
| tryitnow wrote:
| That's the problem I have with nuclear, it's not the
| technology, it's that our species is not necessarily well-
| suited to managing the risks associated with nuclear (with some
| exceptions, maybe France?).
| petre wrote:
| The French were just a more responsible than the Soviets and
| don't have to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis as much as
| the Japanese. The also invested a lot in several nuclear
| designs, comitted to nuclear power and are therefore quite
| experienced.
| chefkoch wrote:
| I can't find any specifics about the partial melt down in
| 1980 at Saint-Laurent, but it seems a serious accident
| could bankrupt france in an instand.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/potential-cost-of-a-
| nuclear-...
| merb wrote:
| not so sure about that:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide.
| ..
|
| france often hides minor stuff, which often results in these
| more severe events. well france also has only 3 reactors as
| far as I know that were built in the 2000s.
|
| btw. it's also my take. as long as they are operated to turn
| a profit or in a way that somebody might gain something, it
| will be basically impossible to have "safe" nuclear power.
| humans are dangerous.
| fallingknife wrote:
| And yet only 1 person was killed when it melted down. But
| somehow, it gets more attention than the 10's of thousands that
| were killed in the tsunami.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| The challenge is ownership at core, and we don't do well in
| having organizations not trend toward bureaucracy. As much as
| people hate bureaucracy, they love the order and predictability
| they produce.
|
| It's probably why nuclear power has a ways to go, and it isn't
| the tech that needs upgrade; it's the people and the
| philosophy.
| titzer wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that essentially the entire US navy is
| powered by nuclear reactors that service lives in the 3+ decade
| range, and it's worked astonishingly well. It's not
| _completely_ without incident, but wow, yeah, civilian nuclear
| power could really work if held to military standards of
| engineering and maintenance.
| petre wrote:
| Naval reactors are different, their scale is two orders of
| magnitude lower. One could make other safety guarantees at
| that scale. They also use enriched uranium which means no
| refuelling is needed during the service life of the reactor.
| SMRs can also make some of these safety guarantees.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that US civilian nuclear power plants
| with service lives in the 3+ decade range have worked
| astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but
| wow, yeah, military nuclear power could really work if held
| to the same standards of engineering and maintenance.
| smartmic wrote:
| > In short, the problems were human not technical.
|
| I disagree. Problems have been in both human and technical
| realm and, even worse, there is no way to clearly disentangle
| those two factors. Good arguments are given in Charles Perrow
| classic work "Normal Accidents" [1]. It is worth citing the
| tree main conditions which will result in an accident
| probability of greater than acceptable
|
| 1.The system is complex
|
| 2.The system is tightly coupled
|
| 3.The system has catastrophic potential
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
| colordrops wrote:
| All problems are human and not technical though when it comes
| to engineering failures.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| > People get complacent and greedy. They use every procedural
| tool they have to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement.
|
| That is the core argument for a meaningful regulatory regime.
|
| Large-scale base load generators only work from a business
| sense with predictable, steady demand. The price of that
| guaranteed demand is a near-fixed, managed return on assets and
| tight regulatory oversight.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Yeah, it is always some human who fails but in the case of this
| tech, the failure becomes a catastrophe.
|
| So we either take out the human factor or the technology out of
| the equation. Right now we can only do that with the tech.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions
| sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple
| decades?
|
| if US institutions can't manage nuclear power, what else can't
| they manage?
| ericb wrote:
| Capitol security?
| bliteben wrote:
| Of course nuclear plants would not be safe if "the
| president" ordered citizens to attack them.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| - a global pandemic
|
| - a war that lasts longer than 1 month
|
| - media legitimacy
|
| - global financial system
| cameldrv wrote:
| There is also a human element. Unit 1 had been retrofitted with
| an Isolation Condenser, which is capable of cooling the core
| and preventing a meltdown without needing the pumps that
| couldn't run due to lack of power. This is exactly the type of
| upgrade people often suggest.
|
| Unfortunately, for reasons that are still murky, this system
| wasn't activated, and Unit 1 melted down. The problems at Unit
| 1 also contributed to the problems at other units, causing
| radiation hazards, diverting personnel and attention, etc.
|
| In fact, a larger version of this system is touted as one of
| the major safety features of the newer AP1000 plants, because
| all it requires is that you open a couple of valves, and the
| reactor can be safely shutdown as long as you add water every
| couple of days. Unfortunately at Fukushima, they didn't open
| the valves.
|
| All of that said, the absolute damage from the accidents at
| Fukushima was tiny in comparison to the other damage from the
| tsunami, and much less than the damage of operating coal plants
| with no accidents whatsoever in Japan.
| nickik wrote:
| The problem if nuclear power is that technology progress has
| slowed to almost 0 and we are still operating with 60s
| technology.
|
| In the 60s we built many, many test reactors and it was clear
| that nuclear power had huge potential to revolutionize the world.
|
| This is still true, the energy density inherent in nuclear power
| can transform lots of industries. But unfortunately the
| regulatory structure built around nuclear material and nuclear
| deployment is almost impossible to manage.
|
| This is partly simply to do with how restrictive the access to
| the material itself. Forms of regulation that make it almost
| impossible to do any kind of iterations, you can't even do a
| small scale test reactor in a practical way.
|
| Look at how SpaceX is building Starship. That's how you get
| revolutionary technology. Not by sitting around for 10-15 years
| to maybe one day directly building a full scale reactor (that you
| then have to scale).
|
| A fundamental shift in how to think about the potential of
| nuclear needs to be done. The regulatory structures have to be
| fundamentally redesigned in pretty much every aspect.
|
| The DoE has admitted some of the issues but trying to rationalise
| the regulation but its like relocating an asteroid.
|
| Good regulation will not suddenly make 60s technology competitive
| today, we need to rethink the process from innovation to
| operation in a new way.
| asddubs wrote:
| and then the conservatives come into power and neuter all
| regulation again
| concordDance wrote:
| People hugely overreacted to Fukishima. It killed no one, unlike
| climate change which will kill tens or hundreds of millions.
| Nuclear is hugely overregulated.
| croes wrote:
| Radiation has long term effects
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Pollution has long term effects. It's funny that now when we
| talk about nuclear we _care_ about the long term effects.
| Let's be honest, it's simply imprinted in our common
| consciousness as scary and that is that.
|
| Besides, most reactors do not affect a large area unless they
| go wrong and the examples are quite far in-between.
| croes wrote:
| But it is not either or, but in addition. The radius of
| effect may be small, but the duration is extreme. Depending
| on the accident, the radius can be quite large. In Germany
| there are still areas where it is dangerous to eat
| mushrooms from the forest because of the radioactivity from
| Chernobyl. And a study from the Max-Planck-Institute
| concludes that an accident is to be expected every 20 to 25
| years.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Regular polution does that too. BPA has been shown to
| have effects that pass down through generations:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6139539/
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > And a study from the Max-Planck-Institute concludes
| that an accident is to be expected every 20 to 25 years.
|
| That is a a small price to pay compared to the
| alternative.
| croes wrote:
| An unnecessary one because of safer alternatives. None of
| our technologies is flawless and on top of that there is
| human greed and incompetence. This means that even if we
| had clean nuclear energy, we would not be able to operate
| it faultlessly worldwide for a long time. Or do you know
| an authority or a company that you would trust with this?
| jtolmar wrote:
| What safer alternatives?
|
| Look up the deaths per kilowatt hour of whatever you
| think is safer than nuclear power, you may be surprised.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The other thing about radiation is it's highly visible /
| detectable, tiny tiny traces of specific isotopes stand out
| clearly in a gamma spectrum from natural background. It's a
| lot more detectable than normal air pollution because the
| background is so low.
| kevincox wrote:
| The key thing to remember is that power sources like coal and
| other fossil fuels have a very real health cost. A large number
| of people die every year. However a nuclear accident is much more
| "exciting" news and sticks in people's mind. People dying of
| cancer, asthma and other conditions are not as direct or as
| dramatic.
| godelski wrote:
| This is largely due to the abstract nature of fossil fuel
| deaths. With the exception of an oil spill these take place
| over large areas and over longer periods of time. Whereas
| nuclear accidents are localized both geographically and
| temporally, even if their death rates (or even death per energy
| rate) is magnitudes below that of other sources.
|
| What I think needs to happen is that these technologies need to
| be put on even playing fields. Nuclear has most of its costs
| built in: decommissioning, health, storage, etc. But a carbon
| tax and environmental health tax would largely put technologies
| on at least an even playing ground. These issues are
| essentially a tragedy of the commons issue, where we share
| resources. There's an economic cost to polluting a lake and if
| that is not built in to the market then it isn't fair or
| helpful to the population. We can argue about free markets and
| stuff, but this makes it more free as certain sectors can't
| skirt by this and it is unreasonable to expect the population
| to be well informed (nobody can be an expert in nuclear
| physics, coal, oil, solar, electrodynamics, mechanical
| engineering, hydrology, etc, the burden is too high). A major
| problem is that many sectors are getting major discounts
| because their costs are much harder to see. It isn't only
| "first order" costs that matter, especially when second and
| third order are so expensive (i.e. climate and health). I'm not
| saying we should reduce scrutiny of nuclear, but rather that
| the other technologies deserve the same level.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| True, however, solar and wind are proving to be the killer
| technology in the sense that they are forcing coal plants to
| actually go extinct at a rapid pace. They are being forced out
| of the market based on cost. Nuclear never had that power of
| persuasion because it was too expensive. That's why we have so
| many coal plants. Nuclear is part of the problem, not the
| solution. To be part of the solution it will have to be vastly
| cheaper than it is today. Probably by at least one or two
| orders of magnitude.
|
| That's an interesting research problem to work on the next
| decades. By the time that happens or not, there won't be any
| coal plants remaining and most gas will be on the way out as
| well (considering that is already barely competitive today).
| floatboth wrote:
| Nuclear is _upfront_ expensive, but the incredible efficiency
| wins hugely long term, AFAIK?
| chefkoch wrote:
| What about decomissioning and caring for the nuclear waste?
| That seems to bei very expensive as the decomissioning of
| the Greifswald plant in former east Germany is going to
| cost more than 6 billion EUR.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| There's actually extremely small amounts of nuclear
| waste. The entirety of the waste produced by USA's
| nuclear electricity generation fits in a volume the
| footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high
| [1].
|
| The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to
| the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste
| repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]. Which
| is an order of magnitude less than a nuclear plant. And
| the repository can accommodate the fuel produced by
| several plants.
|
| In short, waste disposal accounts for a single-digit
| percentage of nuclear power operating costs.
|
| 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
| spent-...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fue
| l_repo...
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| There is far far more to nuclear decommissioning cost
| than just spent fuel storage. The costs are truly
| staggering and cannot be breezed past so simply.
| godelski wrote:
| This is an extremely complicated matter, to be honest. It
| isn't difficult to store waste on site. There are also
| much cheaper technologies out there that we've invented
| over the last 50 years but one of the major reasons we
| don't have them in practice is because they are
| "unproven", as in physically untested at large scale
| (though they have been through simulations and small
| scale testings at DoE labs).
|
| Long term storage isn't too bad of an issue either, but
| there's two camps. One is to do smaller sites where we
| can just bury local material in the ground. The other is
| having a large mass site (think Yucca Mountain), which
| means higher scrutiny because there's more chances of
| something going wrong (standard failure analysis) and
| you're packing more material together which increases
| total radiation levels. Either one will work, but both
| are bureaucratic nightmares. The result of which has been
| constantly changing plans, which drives up costs very
| quickly as you change gears (e.g. spend tons to survey
| the US for good sites, more to verify Yucca Mountain is
| good, start digging, cancel because NIMBY, start again,
| cancel, survey other areas, repeat).
|
| But one factor I want to mention is that by the nature of
| the physical processes materials can't be both extremely
| dangerous and long living. The danger literally comes
| from mass being expelled from the atoms. High level
| radioactive materials have and always will be stored on
| site, as this is the safest place for them (where they
| can be monitored).
|
| There are still technical challenges, don't get me wrong,
| but the whole process is also a bureaucratic nightmare on
| top of that and we know what that does to costs.
|
| For some better facts I'll refer you to an article
| written by a HN user that is a reactor scientist:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Nope. Investment has dried up in nuclear exactly because
| the ROI is garbage compared to the trend lines in
| renewables + storage + gas turbine plants. A lot of posters
| here have a sort of smugness about being fans of nuclear
| power, blaming it's decline purely on "irrational" fears.
| They blithely ignore that even in authoritarian states
| where there's no meaningful political opposition to nuclear
| projects, we see the same declining interest. It just takes
| too much capital too long vs alternatives now. Absent a
| global carbon tariff nuclear will likely never again be
| competitive with gas supplementing renewables.
| bronson wrote:
| Nuclear operating cost is comparable to offshore wind,
| coal, and combined cycle gas, and around 4X more expensive
| to operate than onshore wind or solar. (Of course, coal and
| gas would be more expensive if they had to pay a fair price
| for their emissions)
|
| Nuclear is also eye-poppingly expensive to decommission.
|
| Finally, note that operating cost doesn't include the sort
| of re-engineering and upgrades that are routinely required,
| and have doomed plants like San Onofre.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| Most levelized energy costs do include cost of
| decommissioning and maintenance.
|
| On the other hand, estimates of wind and solar do not
| include the cost of storage to actually make intermittent
| sources viable. Which is understandable, because there's
| really no plan to provision this much storage without a
| massive breakthrough in storage solutions. Almost all
| plans for a predominantly wind and solar grid assume that
| something like hydrogen, synthetic natural gas, or
| something else will provide massive amounts of cheap
| storage. Until then, it's fossil fuels to fulfill off-
| peak demand.
| _nalply wrote:
| It's not coal vs nuclear. Both need to be shut down.
| bsder wrote:
| Then perhaps we should start funding fusion research above
| the "fusion never" levels?
|
| Honestly, had we put the stupid amounts of money that we
| subsidize fossil fuels with (think about how much government
| funding went into the specialized drilling that became
| fracking) into fusion research, we'd likely have it by now.
| kalessin wrote:
| Fusion is multiple decades ahead of us still, even with
| more funding, but we need to take action _this_ decade if
| we want to have an impact on global warming.
|
| Fusion is unfortunately not going to help here.
| chefkoch wrote:
| If we had put the money in renewables we almost certainly
| would have solved the problems by now.
|
| My dad studied physics in the 60ies when fusion was just 20
| years away.
| kalessin wrote:
| That's not the case at all, nuclear should be how we replace
| coal. Nuclear is one of the safest way to produce energy
| today, including the Chernobyl & Fukushima incidents.
|
| Nuclear, because of its energy density, has a big edge
| against solar and wind as well. AFAIK, building NPPs not only
| uses less resources and land footprint than wind and solar,
| they also last longer and are non-intermittent.
|
| In this graph, notice how safe Nuclear is, and also notice
| that it is _cleaner_ than wind and solar.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| godelski wrote:
| > That's not the case at all, nuclear should be how we
| replace coal.
|
| I'm going to nit pick
|
| > nuclear should be _part of_ how we replace coal.
|
| There's no energy source that is a "one size fits all."
| Renewables and storage will better replace coal in some
| areas and nuclear will better in others. The point is that
| nuclear is not off the table and that experts can use said
| tool. It is about not tying peoples' hands behind their
| backs.
| michaelbarton wrote:
| Did a control-F for "kurzgesagt" and saw that it had not been
| mentioned yet.
|
| I really recommend watching this short video which gives a
| really excellent overview of the dangers of nuclear power in
| the context of the alternatives.
|
| The TLDW is even if a very pessimistic estimate of the dangers
| of nuclear power is still much better than a very optimistic
| take on the dangers of fossil fuels once you combine the
| effects of air pollution and climate change. That includes both
| Chernobyl and Fukushima.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM
| [deleted]
| politician wrote:
| paywall
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It worked for me. I have uBlock Origin I wonder if that helps?
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Wow what a genius conclusion. I agree which is why I'm against
| nuclear. Our society always screws up. When the aviation industry
| fails in its regulations a few hundred people die- a tragedy to
| be sure but recoverable.
| [deleted]
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Nuclear energy is safer than coal, oil, natural gas.
|
| https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106843635-161400902674...
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| You can't really measure safety in terms of deaths. Chernobyl
| only officially killed a handful of people, yet rendered a
| huge chunk of land uninhabitable. When nuclear goes wrong, it
| goes _really_ wrong.
|
| And yes, you can argue that that Chernobyl was an old reactor
| design, Fukushima was complacency, but the reality is that
| technology _always_ goes wrong. I 'd rather have technology
| that catches fire (wind turbines) than technology that gives
| people cancer and forces entire cities to migrate (reactors)
| when it goes wrong.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| What if your preferred solution doesnt curtail the raise in
| temperatures fast enough and renders large parts of earth
| inhabitable for future generations?
|
| there is no perfect solution, i understand the risk
| associated with nuclear power but i think the smartest
| minds thinking deeply about the climate space all basically
| agree that there is no solution to fighting climate change
| that doesnt include nuclear. we should be sinking lots of
| money into reducing the risks and coming up with innovative
| ways to make it ubiquitous
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| We are already past that point. The world is not reducing
| carbon emissions fast enough. I don't see how nuclear
| allows us to reduce them any faster. The bottleneck is
| funding and will of the everyday man.
|
| The world won't become uninhabitable - global warming
| alone is not going to cook us. What will happen is more
| natural disasters, difficulty with natural resources and
| farming, and wars for those resources.
|
| Climate engineering is the best hope to reduce global
| warming. Aerosols sprayed into the atmosphere, that sort
| of thing.
| kalessin wrote:
| There is still hope, but we sure do need a global mindset
| shift when it comes to nuclear (and many other topics for
| sure).
|
| Global warming will make parts of the worlds inhabitable.
| Sea levels will rise, so much heat and humidity in some
| places that your body won't be able to regulate its
| internal temperature...
| thepete2 wrote:
| That's a strange statistic. Saying it is safer by this
| statistic alone is misleading.
| Aachen wrote:
| What other statistic would you use? Deaths per year?
| Injuries per year? Injuries per TWh? Without further
| information we can't have a conversation about what
| wouldn't be misleading (or whether this is misleading in
| the first place - I don't see why).
| [deleted]
| Krasnol wrote:
| Besides the fact that people who argue against nuclear are
| not pro fossil energy, I'm always astonished to see nuclear
| fans argue with dead people only. As if having to evacuate
| cities and regions could be ignored and accepted as some kind
| of "safe".
|
| -----
|
| Since the fans of the atom downvote everything not in their
| frame of reality, I'm now unable to answer anymore so I'll
| just edit my answer to this comment:
|
| @yongjik: I can't drink enough to follow this argument
| twisting. Nothing you said makes my argument go away. Those
| things ARE dangerous. Neither fossil fuel nor cars won't make
| the risk go away or be hidden in a cloud of mad word
| twisting.
|
| Also: nobody who makes an argument against nuclear, makes one
| for fossil fuel. They usually are pro renewable energy. But
| you know that don't you? You just wanted to derail....
|
| @cestith: acutally MOST of the nuclear reactors did not
| became a catastrophe. It doesn't change anything about the
| fact that when it becomes one, it is one.
| lstodd wrote:
| Fukushima evacuation was an idiotic knee-jerk that killed
| more people than the alternative of not doing it.
| yongjik wrote:
| If you prefer, we don't have to evacuate. We can just tell
| people to keep living in Fukushima and the number of deaths
| will be _still_ smaller than fossil fuel plants.
|
| People don't evacuate from fossil fuel, not because it's
| safer, but because you can't, so we just accepted it as
| facts of life. More people die from vehicle exhaust than
| Fukushima: where are you going to go?
| addicted wrote:
| And why are we comparing to fossil fuel plants as opposed
| to other renewable sources which are cheaper, safer, and
| less polluting than nuclear?
|
| The problem for nuclear is that if you are making a
| pollution based safety argument for it, the obvious
| question is why not spend the money you would on nuclear
| in more cost effective and equally green or greener
| alternatives (ones which lack a doomsday scenario as a
| bonus).
|
| In reality, nuclear sucks up a lot of green capital for
| 8-10 years at a minimum, under delivers, if it delivers
| at all, and does so at an extremely high price.
|
| There are new nuclear technologies that have the
| potential to be cost competitive with other renewables,
| but they aren't production ready yet. Why not make these
| arguments when those technologies are ready.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Unfortunately there is no solution on the near horizon
| for large scale grid storage of intermittent renewables.
| I would argue nuclear is our only choice. I made a
| comment here linking sources on the problems facing grid
| storage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348355
| cestith wrote:
| Show me a city evacuated because it was near a CANDU
| reactor. Light water plants are not the beginning and end
| of nuclear power.
| hahahahe wrote:
| Correct me if I am wrong but USSR installed hundreds of nuclear-
| powered light houses across the arctic coast. Many were
| neglected.
|
| Edit: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-
| lighthou...
| RicardoLuis0 wrote:
| While those USSR generators are indeed nuclear-powered, they
| use a completely different method from nuclear plants. They
| simply convert the decay heat of a radioactive material into
| energy, and as such aren't subject to any drastic reactions
| such as meltdowns.
|
| More info:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
| godelski wrote:
| The neglect was largely associated with the fall of the USSR
| and their economy. While this should be a scenario we should be
| concerned about, I don't think it is particularly relevant to
| the conversation and certainly not a coup d'etat
| adamc wrote:
| The potential for it to go horribly wrong gives me great pause.
| Sure, if we do everything right, it might be fine. But people
| make mistakes. People get greedy and lazy. The worst case is
| pretty "worst" here.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Perhaps being a little radioactive isn't as bad as the billions
| that could die from climate change.
|
| In the 90's I shared a long cab ride between airports with a
| nuclear engineer who said he specialized in "cleanups". I asked
| what he thought about the next generation of plant design. He
| spent the rest of the ride recounting a half dozen horror
| stories about how nothing about the hardware or design was easy
| but human factors could turn perfectly safe processes into
| accidents.
|
| He said you could never engineer out human error, panic
| behavior and blindspots.
| mpweiher wrote:
| _It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all
| major energy sources, nuclear is the safest_
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| And that's including the worst-case accidents.
| Aachen wrote:
| We all seem to get that airplanes are safe and that being
| afraid to fly is something to overcome. We also know how
| disastrously it can go wrong if the plane crashes into flats
| (I'm thinking of the Bijlmer disaster, not a terrorist
| attack): it's not a theoretical risk, it's just exceedingly
| unlikely to happen to you.
|
| How come this is communicated differently for fission energy?
| Looking at the data it's a similar situation.
| StillBored wrote:
| Planes are massively more dangerous too.
|
| How many actual deaths are a result of nuke accidents?
|
| Depending on how you count its possible more people died in
| a single airplane crashes than have died in all the nuke
| related energy production incidents, ever.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation
| _...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123
|
| If you want to include ground based deaths 911 was close to
| 3k people dead.
| StillBored wrote:
| Whats the worse case? We end up with a exclusion zone for a
| hundred years?
|
| I'm beginning to think that is a feature.
|
| The world needs more exclusion zones that can be left to
| nature. In the last 50 years we have pretty much encroached our
| shit into every single square inch of the planet. The only
| areas that aren't shoulder to shoulder humans destroying the
| environment, are the ones to inhospitable to live in and don't
| have any obvious natural wealth to exploit.
|
| Maybe we wouldn't be going through one of the largest
| extinction events in the planets history if we irradiated half
| the land mass enough to scare people away.
| polytely wrote:
| There was a really good twitter tread about Fukushima by Dr.
| Malka Older (great sci-fi writer) who wrote a report on the
| disaster for the french nuclear safety agency, it gives you an
| idea about the kinds of problems the engineers working on the
| reactor faced while the crisis unfolded, very interesting read.
|
| https://twitter.com/m_older/status/1366324146901254146?s=19
| grecy wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of nuclear power, but I took away a different
| lesson from Fukushima.
|
| When it all went wrong (and it inevitably will), there was
| _literally_ nothing we could do to stop it. People could not get
| close and we had no robots that could help. All we could do was
| pump as much water in and hope for the best, knowing full well
| that contaminated water was going straight into the ocean.
|
| We literally built a machine capable of immense destruction that
| - given the right series of events - we become unable to control.
|
| It was a HUGE stroke of luck that it didn't go much, much worse.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'm not going to pretend like I know the answer here, but my
| gut tells me that this is sort of like accepting the risk of
| smoking but not accepting the risk of sky-diving.
|
| Smoking will almost certainly kill you in the long-run, but
| there is a rare chance that you might explode into a fine red
| mist moments after you jump if your chute doesn't unravel.
|
| We worry about rare acute disaster, but ignore slow but certain
| disaster.
| Krasnol wrote:
| The difference here is that you're talking about different
| people. People who don't want nuclear usually (always?) don't
| want coal too.
| soperj wrote:
| That's because they're running a 70 year old design. You don't
| need back-up power for a CANDU reactor which are still old, but
| not one of the initial designs. You can't build nuclear weapons
| with a CANDU reactor though, so it's not really in high demand.
| dongobongo wrote:
| I was going to mention CANDU, basically the only exception to
| the above comment about running at too high power density.
| dongobongo wrote:
| This is just the dumb/old kind of nuclear in which the reactors
| are operated at really high power which means they have to be
| actively cooled so that the fuel doesn't melt itself and cause
| release of radiation. The reason they run at really high power,
| is because they think it's cheaper to get more power out of the
| same reactor. But of course they have to build a bunch of
| emergency systems, themselves expensive, to make sure the
| reactor is actively cooled - and these inevitably fail at some
| point.
|
| The alternative, pursued most prominently by new companies like
| (usnc.com) is to operate at much lower power density which
| means the reactor does not have to be cooled to prevent it from
| melting. It can just dissipate the small amount of heat without
| any active measures or expensive equipment. Making the
| economics work is the trick.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's too risk myopic a position for my taste. I like to
| compare it against impacts in other sectors. For example oil
| has a massive problem with leaks. There's on average 2 events
| per year (not including COVID 2020) that spill more than 700
| metric tons. Valdez was 34k metric tons. Deepwater Horizon was
| ~200k, Castillo de Bellver was also in that range.
|
| Burning coal releases ash into the air that is 100x more
| radioactive than nuclear waste (the byproduct of fission)!
|
| By comparison, nuclear energy has had 3 notable accidents in 42
| years with only one actually ending up to have any serious
| consequences. Waste is pretty straightforward to clean up & the
| byproducts can be repurposed into more fuel once the technology
| starts to roll out.
|
| While I agree it's a scary technology because of its history,
| it's comparative safety seems significantly higher. To the
| point where the question is "why are we building _any_ fossil
| fuel plants " (i.e. new plants under construction) but for some
| reason that always to get hijacked to "we should wait for
| renewables". I'd much rather have a nuclear power plant today
| (with all its challenges) coming online rather than anything
| using a comparative amount of fossil fuels & hoping to replace
| it with renewables later. One in the hand is worth two in the
| bush.
| duxup wrote:
| >It was a HUGE stroke of luck that it didn't go much, much
| worse.
|
| My understanding is that with Fukushima, with everything going
| wrong we had the potential for a "China syndrome" type
| situation ... and yet an old style reactor with fewer
| safeguards than modern reactors still managed to hold a melting
| down core.
|
| Fukushima was a disaster, but the result might indicate some of
| the worst concerns (run away super hot melting core escaping
| containment) aren't very likely at all.
| munk-a wrote:
| This isn't an uncommon position to take - many people have this
| sort of knee-jerk reaction to disasters on this scale and it's
| fair to acknowledge that we did get really lucky with how it
| ended up going.
|
| However, Nuclear power is the safest and cleanest option out
| there if done correctly and we've known how to do it much
| better since around the 80s[1] - the issue is that Nuclear
| plants cost an insane amount of money so investors are shy to
| go in on the tech and we're left with a bunch of poorly aging
| dreadnoughts. The existing companies are pulling out all the
| stops to try and keep from being decommissioned for as long as
| possible since, from their perspective, that capital investment
| is a sunk cost and the longer it runs the higher the profits
| will be.
|
| Nuclear power is dangerous if done wrong, it really should be
| largely stewarded by governments and kept out of reach of any
| partial privatization efforts - we also need to kill the stigma
| of Nuclear and realize that replacing those rusted hulks with
| modern reactors will work out better for everyone in the long
| run.
|
| Nuclear power in general is an incredibly good and safe option
| that gets a lot of hate thrown at it because in practice nearly
| all the reactors online were built in the 70s or earlier and
| are near or past their advised EOL for operation. There are
| real problems here but rejecting Nuclear power is not the
| correct solution.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor As an
| example, the Molten Salt Thorium design is configured in a
| manner that makes meltdowns self-defeating and defusing.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > The existing companies are pulling out all the stops to try
| and keep from being decommissioned for as long as possible
| since, from their perspective, that capital investment is a
| sunk cost and the longer it runs the higher the profits will
| be.
|
| perhaps it is an unintended side effect as far as they're
| concerned, but i'd also hate to reach a point where we don't
| have a contingent of engineers/plant operators with
| experience running these plants. nuclear won't be any safer
| if we turn all the plants off for 40 years and then decide
| "oops, yeah turns out we don't have any workable plan besides
| fission" and have to figure out how to run everything again.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Is there any solution for nuclear waste yet?
|
| The newest generation systems seem much better and safer, but the
| half life on the waste is huge. There isn't a guarantee the
| country itself will even be around in that time span.
|
| Even though clearly nuclear energy is the future, it's hard to
| support nuclear energy. More R&D is required IMO. Especially
| considering how efficient humans are at externalizing costs and
| consequences.
| cestith wrote:
| Power plants designed to be only power plants rather than also
| fast breeders for military doomsday weapons would certainly help.
| Molten salt reactors and Candu reactors neither one fail the same
| way as Fukushima and Chernobyl. Fusion plants, once commercially
| viable, also will not fail the same way. New light water reactors
| should probably not be built considering the options.
| Aachen wrote:
| Didn't bill gates fund this traveling wave reactor that has
| this property? I checked Wikipedia but it doesn't say either
| way. I don't remember for sure but I think this is a thing now,
| just nobody wants him to build it because brrr scary nuclear
| let's rather stop advancement of the field.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Fast breeders _are_ scary.
|
| That Wikipedia page does not mention any breakthrough in
| passive stability, and unless somebody mentions it, the safe
| thing to assume is that any fast breeder has none. What means
| that it can basically blow like the Chernobyl reactor or
| worse due to failure of equipment.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Fast reactors usually have a strong negative temperature
| coefficient of reactivity. This is inherent to the
| temperature of the fuel and responds instantly. The
| Integral Fast Reactor, for instance, was designed to
| tolerate loss of coolant flow without even needing to
| insert the control rods to shutdown, with no core damage.
|
| https://www.ne.anl.gov/About/hn/logos-winter02-psr.shtml
|
| The main issue I have with fast reactors is the liquid
| sodium coolants typically used, very hazardous stuff if it
| was to leak. Molten salts are a nice alternative.
| Aachen wrote:
| I'm no physicist, is this traveling wave reactor a "fast
| breeder" that you're talking about? From what I read, the
| stability comes from it not being a runaway reaction that
| needs active brakes. If something fails, the reaction will
| stop on its own rather than having a meltdown or explosion.
|
| But I'm just parroting what I read in the past (not sure
| where), I don't do nuclear physics and can't say whether
| it's snake oil or real.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'm not an expert. My knowledge of nuclear physics is
| limited to some liquid model theory at university (what
| is basically the simplest model you can find and
| completely useless), and some empiric data. I also just
| met this design. But I do know some general principles.
|
| The Wiki page claims very briefly this is a fast breeder
| design where it says it uses fast neutrons, also, it
| doesn't mention moderation, that is the process that
| converts fast neutrons into slow ones.
|
| Now, the thing that makes slow neutron reactions safer is
| that nothing happens unless the neutrons goes into the
| moderation medium, so if things deviate from the design,
| the reaction stops. Fast neutron reactions do not have
| this property, so any stability must be designed into it.
| That does not mean that you can't get some passive
| stability built into it, what it does mean is that it
| must be actively put into the project, and you must
| correctly account for any possible failure mode.
|
| Thus, a good rule of thumb is that if somebody is talking
| about fast reactors and doesn't take 90% of the time
| talking about safety, then that somebody does not have a
| viable idea.
| cestith wrote:
| I'm not familiar enough with Gate's investments nor his
| foundation's investments to say, and "traveling wave reactor"
| is something I've read once or twice before but not looked
| much into.
|
| CANDU reactors have an excellent safety record and fail in a
| much safer way than light water reactors. I've been looking
| more into those recently. MSRs, and especially molten thorium
| salt reactors, I've read about and watch documentaries about
| quite a bit. Still, I'm just an interested layperson in this
| discussion. I used to date someone who was planning to be a
| nuclear engineer, but she ultimately ended up in software,
| too.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| How can one regulate an endeavour that is so inextricably
| entwined with the military and government prestige? How do you
| set up a genuinely independent regulator that has strong enough
| teeth, one that cannot be leaned on by industry heavyweights
| lobbying the government?
|
| These problems are not unique to nuclear power, of course;
| Australia seems to have similar problems with coal, and the US
| with oil.
| bb123 wrote:
| Is nuclear power particularly an element of Japanese government
| prestige? I have to say when I think of Japan, nuclear power
| doesn't spring to mind. Same goes for the military - is there
| any evidence that nuclear power is particularly entwined with
| the Japanese military?
| redis_mlc wrote:
| JAXA is basically a Japanese ICBM program, so start there.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAXA
| garmaine wrote:
| Energy independence is a matter of Japanese government
| prestige. As Japan being a resource-poor nation pretty much
| led to WW2, becoming energy independent was a major post-war
| goal. Nuclear was a very essential part of that (not
| anymore).
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> I think of Japan, nuclear power doesn't spring to mind.
|
| It does for me, but that probably has more to do with
| Godzilla movies. Japan is also unique in its experience with
| nuclear energy. I think of Japan as a country that has a
| mature understanding of nuclear power. I would not lecture
| them on the subject.
| Narann wrote:
| In France we have an "Autorite de surete nucleaire"[1] which is
| an independent administration (having its own budget, own
| lawyers, not connected to governments, etc). France have 25 of
| such administrations[2].
|
| I can't say it's perfect, but anyone (individuals,
| parliamentarians, justice) can seize one of them to require its
| action or explain why it does not act. It's defenitly a
| "contre-pouvoir".
|
| [1]
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_s%C3%BBret%C3...
| [2]
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_administrative_i...
| duxup wrote:
| >inextricably entwined with the military and government
| prestige?
|
| Is that a thing? For some reason when I think of nuclear
| accidents, I don't often think that "military and government
| prestige" were the biggest issues. Maybe Chernobyl was?
| visualradio wrote:
| > How do you set up a genuinely independent regulator that has
| strong enough teeth, one that cannot be leaned on by industry
| heavyweights lobbying the government?
|
| Directly elected local environmental assessors, which are
| required to attend annual meetings at the state and federal
| level?
|
| The auditors which make up the regulatory panel would then be
| directly elected by residents throughout the country and would
| inspect the work of their colleagues.
|
| Solve the waste storage and disposal problem first, then treat
| it as an emissions problem, and ensure the nuclear industry is
| investing in technologies which continually recycling or
| minimizing the total mass of high level waste it is producing
| in exchange for disposal and storage services.
| vkou wrote:
| As an educated voter, I would not want to vote for my nuclear
| inspector, because their job solely consists of managing tail
| risk[1], and I have _zero_ ability to evaluate their
| qualifications, or job performance.
|
| I have no ability to accurately determine whether or not one
| of five candidates actually knows what they are doing, or if
| they are just a hustler who knows how to play Buzzword Bingo.
| I suppose I could spend months of my life trying to get
| educated on the subject, but I don't have time to do so, and
| neither do my neighbors.
|
| This is why representative democracies exist. You vote for a
| representative, and it becomes their job to wrangle domain-
| specific underlings.
|
| [1] The only feedback signal I can trust is 'Did a one-in-a-
| thousand-year event occur under their watch?' [2]
|
| [2] And if it did, well shucks, what am I going to do now?
| Fire them in the next election? The damage is already done.
| clairity wrote:
| the flaw in that reasoning is that you're creating a single
| point of subvertible power (and failure). that might have
| made sense 250 years ago before the advent of electricity
| and telecommunications (and smaller systemic dangers), but
| not so much anymore. it also doesn't solve the 'aww shucks'
| issue you mention at all, which really is an incentives
| issue beyond representation (you could instead, as a wild
| supposition, make all representatives live within 20 miles
| of the plant to align incentives).
|
| we should elect 10s if not 100s of such representatives at
| a time (and those folks can hire further experts as
| necessary) so that no one rep has inordinate power, because
| depending on a single person is certain to fail at some
| point. that also is more likely to provide diversity of
| thought, which is crucial to effective decision-making.
| we're rich enough as a nation to support such a panel
| without batting an eye.
| visualradio wrote:
| > you could instead, as a wild supposition, make all
| representatives live within 20 miles of the plant to
| align incentives
|
| Isn't it possible this would increase the chance they had
| financial ties to the nuclear industry? My initial
| thought was that if you appointed environmental
| scientists to monitor emissions in areas without nuclear
| plants, they could also check the work of other assessors
| in areas with nuclear plants, to make sure their
| colleagues were honest, when attending board meetings.
|
| So you would get bright people which were otherwise
| uninvolved to check the work and listen to what was being
| discussed.
|
| Another option which would not rely on local election,
| would be to have Congress appoint 50 environmental
| assessors, one from each state, which were required to be
| permanent residents of each state they were appointed to
| represent, rather than employees of a national office.
| The assessors would then meet once per year to form a
| national oversight board.
| visualradio wrote:
| > As an educated voter, I would not want to vote for my
| nuclear inspector
|
| The chief job of local environmental assessors would likely
| be gathering and aggregate local data sources to monitor
| and track a wide variety of emissions, including non-
| radioactive emissions in areas with no nuclear industry.
|
| > I have zero ability to evaluate their qualifications, or
| job performance
|
| The feedback signal to watch would be whether newspapers
| and activists say they are compromised by financial ties to
| local industries, which can be assisted by financial
| disclosure forms.
|
| > This is why representative democracies exist
|
| Another option which relied more on Congress would be to
| have the House & Senate appoint one independent
| environmental assessor from each state, which were required
| to be permanent residents of each state, to attend an
| annual meeting once per year, to form an independent board
| of oversight. The assessors would have to be permanent
| residents of the state they were appointed to represent and
| submit financial disclosure forms.
| 0x1DEADCA0 wrote:
| "Lessons from McDonalds-- chemicals and fats must be well
| regulated, not ditched"
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Can you enlighten me with a better currently existing
| alternative to 24/7 baseload power?
| 0x1DEADCA0 wrote:
| Why should the power needs of certain people be put above the
| safety of giant land areas?
|
| I am happy to pay a premium for technologies that are less
| efficient but safer.
|
| When did it become acceptable to say that society needs to
| pursue as much electricity production as possible, all risks
| be damned?
| mpweiher wrote:
| _It goes completely against what most believe, but out of
| all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest_
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-
| energy
| 0x1DEADCA0 wrote:
| In what world can you convince me that nuclear is safe
| when we have Chernobyl and Fukushima? Like are we going
| to compared it to coal or something of the sort?
|
| When nuclear fails, which it will, through accident or
| terrorism, it fails forever, catastrophically
|
| Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you
| have nuclear?
| Hammershaft wrote:
| > When nuclear fails, which it will, through accident or
| terrorism, it fails forever, catastrophically
|
| Not all reactor designs are capable of failling
| catastrophically.
|
| >Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you
| have nuclear?
|
| I wish we could just live off solar and wind, I'm only in
| favor of Nuclear because the evidence suggests we can't.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348355
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you
| have nuclear?
|
| What are you willing to give up? What is your family
| willing to give up? Your parents? Your neigbours?
| mpweiher wrote:
| Hmmm...in the _real world_?
|
| Both TFAs answer that question for you: nuclear is
| _safest_ even including both Fukushima and Chernobyl. Not
| "safe", because there is _no_ power generation technology
| that is 100% safe.
|
| And depending on which data you use, nuclear is even
| safer than solar and wind.
| 0x1DEADCA0 wrote:
| The good news is, if you are right about nuclear being
| safe, then I will benefit from it.
|
| If you are wrong, I will be too busy being dead to
| remember that I was right!
| hntrader wrote:
| "Why cant we all live off solar and wind? Why must you
| have nuclear?"
|
| Is large scale and cost competitive energy storage a
| solved problem?
| Corazoor wrote:
| Depends on your definition of solved, but yes kinda:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
|
| While I don't think any large scale P2G installations do
| currently exist, it is all well proven tech that requires
| little to no additional research.
|
| At least for Germany there exist some studies that
| suggest that it should be doable (especially financially)
| on a national scale.
| hntrader wrote:
| So it all comes down to relative costs then. Has anyone
| done a comparison between nuclear costs and this?
| ThePadawan wrote:
| ...That sounds perfectly reasonable?
|
| I don't want questionable preservatives in my pasta sauce, but
| they probably have their place in MREs.
| bagacrap wrote:
| have to say, you'd have a lot of health problems if you tried
| to ditch all fats
| 0x1DEADCA0 wrote:
| "therefore we need everyone to eat more big macs"
| spark3k wrote:
| Even when we think things can't go wrong, and we think that we've
| thought of all the ways they could go wrong if they did, they
| still manage to go wrong. Everything goes wrong. Why do we need
| to pick a mind-bogglingly expensive technology where going wrong
| means catastrophe?
|
| You can set your watch by the regularity at which the nuclear
| lobbies throw a "for the sake of climate change" article in a
| respected publication.
| lancewiggs wrote:
| There seem to be a series of pro-nuclear submissions here, driven
| by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying. That would be
| an interesting story to dig out.
|
| The resulting discussion points out that the cost of nuclear
| power plants is very high, the long term risks high, the time
| taken to build and cost overruns extraordinarily high and so on
| and on. Meanwhile renewables are cheaper, even when adding the
| batteries required to smooth lumps, and they can be stood up very
| quickly. Sure keep the old plants and improve regulation, but
| investors are not going to get returns from nuclear plants when
| the competition is low capex, free sunlight and almost zero
| maintenance.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying
|
| Or because people are waking up and realizing that climate
| change is gonna screw us faster than we can build the tech to
| prevent that and people are defecting toward nuclear which is
| relatively shovel ready compared to grid scale solar/wind and
| the storage they necessitate.
| Krasnol wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. If you feel pressure by time,
| nuclear is and never was your solution. It takes too long to
| construct. By the time a single reactor is build, renewables
| will jump several development steps.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| That's fantastic but unfortunately there is no viable grid
| storage close to being capable of actually utilizing
| renewables for the majority of power all over the world.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-
| need-t...
|
| Are we really going to risk human civilization on the
| immediate invention and mass fabrication of new storage
| technologies orders of magnitude more efficient then what
| we have?
| drran wrote:
| Massive energy storage can^W will be built in fraction of
| time needed to build and then demolish a nuclear power
| plant.
| addicted wrote:
| Well, let's get to 30-40% solar/wind before we start
| worrrying about grids that cannot accept majority
| renewable.
|
| And guess what, at that point maybe some of the newer,
| safer, and cheaper nuclear designs would have been proven
| so the nuclear plays we build then for the next few
| decades are better than the ones we would build right
| now.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will
| jump several development steps.
|
| We can build more than one nuclear reactor at a time, you
| know.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > faster than we can build the tech
|
| You're arguing for nuclear on the basis of its build speed?
| That doesn't seem to be born out in reality. Maybe another X*
| years when we've got cheap, factory built small modular
| reactors, but that certainly doesn't describe nuclear today.
| In which case we're back to waiting for new tech.
|
| * X being some number of years that increments by 1 year,
| every year.
| bluGill wrote:
| Large parts of build speed issue with nuclear is
| regulation. If we could just get a permit to build done in
| a reasonable amount of time and then not stop progress
| again and again it would make a big difference.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Given the price tag for Fukushima is at $187 billion and
| rising, arguing for deregulation _should_ be a hard sell.
|
| The axiom 'safe, cheap, fast; choose any 2' doesn't even
| apply to nuclear. It's more like choose 0. You might be
| able to argue for some version of 'safe' by talking about
| actual fatalities from nuclear energy being low, but I
| think the 5000ish square kilometers of exclusion zones
| from Chrenobyl/Fukushima should be part of the
| conversation about 'safety'. Safe for people perhaps,
| safe for property, apparently not. So maybe choose 0.5?
| Aachen wrote:
| We can hope that all countries will find the space for all
| the solar panels, wind turbines, have some convenient
| height differences for hydro power and pumped energy
| storage, money for li-ion storage for the night or windless
| days, grid upgrades to get it from where it's produced to
| where it's needed...
|
| or we could apt remove coal_plant && apt install
| fission_plant on the same surface area and be certain that
| we'll be done in the 15 years that this takes to build.
|
| I'm very much afraid the former isn't going to cut it. I
| also know solar is cheaper if you compare kWh produced by
| panels on roofs to kWh produced by nuclear plants, but we
| need to increase our energy production nearly tenfold and
| renewables only won't make it easy to get there. We need to
| continue on both fronts, we can't rule out nuclear if we
| want to avoid this disaster. Best case the money is wasted.
| Currently, the best case is that we'll succeed and the
| average case a disaster.
| jolux wrote:
| Nuclear, shovel ready? How many economically viable nuclear
| designs are shovel ready with a reasonable time to
| generation?
| Alupis wrote:
| We regulated the industry so much that we made nuclear
| plants almost entirely economically unviable.
|
| Some of the regulations are good, some are bad - and a lot
| were born out of irrational fears about an immature
| industry that we didn't fully understand at the time.
|
| There is no reason a nuclear plant cannot be economically
| viable. They're all over Europe, Japan, Russia, China and
| I'm sure other countries as well.
| gitgreen wrote:
| NuScale/Fluor claim they can bring the UAMPS project in
| Idaho online by 2027 at an amortized average energy cost of
| about $55/MWh.
|
| https://www.powermag.com/nuscale-uamps-kick-off-idaho-smr-
| nu...
|
| That would make it more expensive than onshore
| wind($45/MWh) and solar yet($48/MWh) cheaper than all other
| sources of energy including natural gas($59/MWh). Double
| the final cost of energy to $110/MWh and it would still be
| in theory cheaper than the average for coal($115/MWh).
| Granted I'm pulling these numbers from Wikipedia so it's
| not that simple but the numbers aren't unrealistic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
| garmaine wrote:
| You do realize this is a 75 year old industry with dozens of
| approved reactor designs?
| Krasnol wrote:
| The lobby tries everything to paint themselves as a clean
| energy source and alternative to renewable energy. Striking
| aggressively left and right. Sometimes even by the same
| lobbyist:
|
| https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-...
|
| https://www.facebook.com/shellenbergerMD/videos/my-interview...
|
| I have the feeling that the gained pace now that nuclear is on
| the retreat in democratic countries.
|
| https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
| Tarsul wrote:
| that we have so many pro nuclear articles here on HN is
| remarkable to me, too. However, I come from Germany where the
| general sentiment is negative. I'd guess in the US (where
| probably most of HN users come from?!) the sentiment is more
| positive? I can't explain it any other way (well, lobbyism,
| astroturfing... okay, but I wouldn't go that far without
| evidence). What I miss in all these energy discussions is
| arguments about reducing the load or better managing the load
| (with flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be
| very data driven which should align well with the HN crowd. And
| those discussions should come before we start even thinking
| about nuclear. Same argument as with recycling: the best
| garbage [energy] is the one which never was (reduce > recycle).
| cestith wrote:
| Light water reactors are not the only option for nuclear
| power. CANDU reactors have a wonderful safety record. MSRs
| are on the brink of becoming commercially viable and have
| been for a long time, but funding is currently insufficient.
| Funding is insufficient largely because light water and heavy
| water (like CANDU and derivatives) plants are already
| researched on the one hand and light water reactors have
| created negative sentiment for all things nuclear on the
| other.
|
| Would I like nuclear power that fails safe and doesn't
| produce bomb material? Absolutely. Would I live next door to
| a molten thorium salt reactor? I'd love to. Do I want to see
| new light water reactors built anywhere in the world? No.
| jeffbee wrote:
| HN hates data on energy discussions. The HN vibe is strongly
| in favor of EVs, for example, despite the fact that EVs are
| the slowest and most expensive way to reduce transport
| greenhouse gas emissions. Fission is, likewise, the slowest
| and most expensive way to add electrical generation today.
| Fission is the only power source where the costs increased in
| the last 10 years. PV is now five times cheaper than fission.
| Onshore wind costs the same as PV. Batteries are easy to
| mass-produce. The substantive debate is over.
| hntrader wrote:
| "Batteries are easy to mass-produce."
|
| There's people here saying the battery tech isn't ready yet
| for large scale grid storage of solar/wind. Is that untrue?
| jeffbee wrote:
| California has 250MW of battery facilities online right
| now. If you can do 250MW, you can do 50GW. The CAISO
| roadmap for energy storage does not list any
| technological risks.
| hntrader wrote:
| Not saying it can't be done, but is it cheaper than
| nuclear?
| drran wrote:
| BTW, nuclear energy will be cheaper with massive power
| storage, because nuclear power can be accumulated at
| night then.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Take a look at my reply to him to see some unfortunately
| grim stats on this issue. I would argue nuclear is
| currently our only choice.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| > HN hates data on energy discussions.
|
| >PV is now five times cheaper than fission. Onshore wind
| costs the same as PV. Batteries are easy to mass-produce.
|
| This is an odd contrast of statements considering you gave
| no data to support your argument. I take issue with
| dismissing the massive problem of intermittancy and storage
| with "Battaries are easy to mass-produce".
|
| "A cost-optimal wind-solar mix with storage reaches cost-
| competitiveness with a nuclear fission plant providing
| baseload electricity at a cost of $0.075/kWh27 at an energy
| storage capacity cost of $10-20/kWh. To reach cost-
| competitiveness with a peaker natural gas plant at
| $0.077/kWh, energy storage capacity costs must instead fall
| below $5/kWh."
|
| https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
|
| "The largest announced storage system, comprising more than
| 18,000 Li-ion batteries, is being built in Long Beach for
| Southern California Edison by AES Corp. When it's
| completed, in 2021, it will be capable of running at 100
| megawatts for 4 hours. But that energy total of 400
| megawatt-hours is still two orders of magnitude lower than
| what a large Asian city would need if deprived of its
| intermittent supply. For example, just 2 GW for two days
| comes to 96 gigawatt-hours.
|
| We have to scale up storage, but how? Sodium-sulfur
| batteries have higher energy density than Li-ion ones, but
| hot liquid metal is a most inconvenient electrolyte. Flow
| batteries, which store energy directly in the electrolyte,
| are still in an early stage of deployment. Supercapacitors
| can't provide electricity over a long enough time. And
| compressed air and flywheels, the perennial favorites of
| popular journalism, have made it into only a dozen or so
| small and midsize installations. We could use solar
| electricity to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen,
| but still, a hydrogen-based economy is not imminent.
|
| And so when going big we must still rely on a technology
| introduced in the 1890s: pumped storage. You build one
| reservoir high up, link it with pipes to another one lower
| down and use cheaper, nighttime electricity to pump water
| uphill so that it can turn turbines during times of peak
| demand. Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of
| the world's storage capacity, but inevitably, it entails
| energy loss on the order of 25 percent. Many installations
| have short-term capacities in excess of 1 GW--the largest
| one is about 3 GW--and more than one would be needed for a
| megacity completely dependent on solar and wind generation.
|
| But most megacities are nowhere near the steep escarpments
| or deep-cut mountain valleys you'd need for pumped storage.
| Many, including Shanghai, Kolkata, and Karachi, are on
| coastal plains. They could rely on pumped storage only if
| it were provided through long-distance transmission. The
| need for more compact, more flexible, larger-scale, less
| costly electricity storage is self-evident. But the miracle
| has been slow in coming."
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-
| need-t...
|
| "Given the magnitude of the battery material demand growth
| across all scenarios, global production capacity for Li,
| Co, and Ni (black lines in Fig. 3) will have to increase
| drastically (see Supplementary Tables 9 and 10). For Li and
| Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even
| before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less
| dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume
| as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other
| battery materials could be supplied without exceeding
| existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and
| 10), although supplies may still have to increase to meet
| demands from other sectors5,9. The known reserves for Li,
| Ni, and Co (black lines in Fig. 4) could be depleted before
| 2050 in the SD scenario and for Co also in the STEP
| scenario. For all other materials known reserves exceed
| demand from EV batteries until 2050 (Supplementary Table
| 5). In 2019 around 64% of natural graphite and 64% of Si
| are produced in China32, which could create vulnerabilities
| to supply reliability."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-020-00095-x
| hntrader wrote:
| So storage reaches cost competitiveness with nuclear at
| $10-$20/kWh.
|
| Do we know what the current cost is today?
| drran wrote:
| I have no idea where you got these numbers, but nuclear
| energy is good for base load, while batteries are good
| for handling load peaks. These two types of load are very
| different.
|
| With big batteries, nuclear energy can be accumulated at
| night and used at evening, which improve performance of
| nuclear stations a lot. Try it yourself at simulation: ht
| tps://www.tennet.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Our_Key_Tasks/I
| n...
|
| Current cost of power storage is below $100 per kWh
| stored in the newest designs.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| ~ $300 - $700 /kWh.
|
| that figure could be outdated but its in the ballpark
| hntrader wrote:
| So nuclear is much much much much cheaper and until the
| storage costs come way down, we have no other choice
| (aside from natgas peakers). Correct?
| Hammershaft wrote:
| For baseline power the answer is yes. The only two forms
| of low carbon baseline energy we currently have are
| nuclear and hydro.
| hntrader wrote:
| Do you know why California is using batteries instead of
| cheaper nuclear? Is it just for cynical political
| reasons?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Nobody cares how bad the lifecycle efficiency is for
| pumped storage because the input doesn't cost anything.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| That is only one of the multiple problems discussed with
| mass pumped storage. Regardless, the efficiency does
| matter as if you are attempting to store peak power as
| %100 of baseline power then your input is no longer free.
| It is a factor in the energy output of the PV / Turbine
| over the course of its lifecycle. Lower efficiency means
| more PVs / Turbines and more massive pumped storage
| projects.
| nickik wrote:
| Its always fucking baffling to me when people believe
| everything about nuclear is lobbying. Its a tiny industry
| that absolutely sucks at lobbying.
|
| > reducing the load or better managing the load (with
| flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be very
| data driven which should align well with the HN crowd.
|
| Nobody is against that, but its not a actual solution, its an
| optimisation that doesn't play into the overall discussion.
|
| At the end of the day you need to generate a lot of energy,
| no matter how much you want to reduce or recycle.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| In my opinion Germany's experience denuclearizing (and
| replacing it with renewables and lignite coal) has been some
| of the strongest evidence I've seen in favor of nuclear
| energy.
| wsc981 wrote:
| I've never had a negative sentiment against nuclear energy,
| even though most of the people from my country seem to be or
| at least were so in the past.
|
| And I feel many of the measures the Dutch government is
| taking these days to reduce CO2 seem borderline crazy. For
| example burning trees for energy (biomass), wood that is
| imported from the USA and Canada and shipped in huge
| container ships to The Netherlands [0]. And let's not forget
| that trees actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
|
| Or the fact that the Dutch government wants the whole country
| cut off from gas for heating, while neighbouring countries
| (like Germany) are trying to get people to use gas for
| heating. In The Netherlands every house if connected to the
| gas network, but soon everybody will need to switch to
| waterpumps for heating.
|
| Or the fact that the whole country will be covered with wind
| turbines which ruin the view, produce a lot of noise, need a
| lot of space and kill many birds.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=htt
| ps:/...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> free sunlight and almost zero maintenance.
|
| Try running a gigawatt's worth of solar panels attached to
| enough battery capacity to fill a small stadium. There is
| plenty of maintenance to be done. Nuclear and solar are really
| apples and oranges. They each have advantages and
| disadvantages. In a given time/place/need one will always be
| better than another but neither are superior always.
| mtone wrote:
| Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where several provinces use
| hydro as a primary energy source, but why doesn't make it to
| the top of the lists more often?
|
| Nearby ecosystem damages, relatively speaking, seem rather
| low in comparison with nuclear or fuel, and for dealing with
| future climate change issues in general. While they don't
| explode, I'm sure they can can cause disasters of their own.
|
| But wind/solar require massive storage capacity to become a
| primary source and require a lot of space/disruption at these
| scales. I'm not sure how the affected landmass (in the long
| term) compares with Hydro, or maintenance costs.
|
| Hydro has this great combination of zero emission and the
| water being its own battery. Not relying on rare materials
| and battery production avoids adding competition and could
| favor the transition to electric vehicles at a global scale.
|
| Like nuclear, initial costs are problematic. Social
| acceptance is so-so. In some places like the US many "good
| spots" are taken, but it appears 2/3 of potential in the
| world is untapped. More numerous but smaller damns seem to be
| a possibility too.
| mpweiher wrote:
| First, there isn't that much Hydro around, and a lot of
| that has been tapped already.
|
| Second, it's significantly less safe than nuclear. In fact,
| IIRC the worst single power-generation disaster was a
| hydro-dam failure in China.
|
| And the environmental impact outside of accidents is also
| far from trivial.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I find it amazing that people go "Let's use hydro!" When
| a single event killed more people than all the nuclear
| accidents combined. Unreal.
| drran wrote:
| What you propose to use instead of dams in place of flood
| protection?
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Hydro dams and flood dams are different. I really do not
| understand the point you are making. I want to highlight
| that the fear around nuclear is not rational since you
| need to compare the risk profile of the alternatives and
| it seems some people completely fail to do so.
| mtone wrote:
| For the record, I didn't say I fear nuclear. I'd pick
| Nuclear over coal any day. I'm not for or against any
| particular technology.
|
| In normal circumstances Hydro seems among the safest [1]
| for both humans and the environment all things relative.
| It has served Quebec quite well at least with very low
| electricity rates and emissions, and environmental
| impacts are likely long paid off with no radioactive
| waste to manage. Being in a low populated region (a rare
| asset..) also helps on the safety side.
|
| Bringing up a single dam incident due to an estimated
| once-in-2-millenia rainfall/typhoon [2] in a populated
| region to dismiss an entire renewable energy source..
| sounds like that kind of irrational fear you mention.
|
| I think the arguments around possible lack of locations,
| costs, planning, and water supplies are more relevant --
| and affect both hydro and nuclear. Those are also what
| make wind/solar interesting -agility- as tech improves.
|
| [1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/deaths-nuclear-energy-
| compare...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failur
| e#Gover...
| drran wrote:
| Yep, but hydro dams are used to control floods too, so
| they save people from floods as part of their operation.
| An improperly maintained dam can increase risk of flood,
| of course.
|
| See also: https://energypedia.info/wiki/Using_Hydro_Power
| _Plants_for_F... .
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Hydro is great at producing low carbon energy but:
|
| - completely destroys ecosystems and communities around it
|
| - Can create international water disputes that threaten war
| (look at Ethiopia, Turkey, Tibet)
|
| - Creates a ticking time bomb much worse then nuclear if
| not properly maintained
|
| That said, situationally I think Hydro is still one of our
| better options.
| mtone wrote:
| Interesting point about water disputes, wasn't aware --
| and freshwater supply is not going up in the future.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >>why doesn't make it to the top of the lists more often?
|
| Modern thinking on hydro is changing. It can be good, but
| many implementations are disturbing. If you wipe out a
| forest then you aren't carbon neutral. And all those
| rotting logs under the water release gasses that are worse
| can CO2. So while it may be a great idea in the American
| southwest, it might not be a great idea to flood a rain
| forest in British Columbia.
| m463 wrote:
| gah.
|
| I nuclear has a place. Nuclear generates energy and lots of it.
|
| Take a look at this table and check out uranium:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#List_of_materia...
|
| The thing is, just like we are developing solar, we have to
| develop nuclear. We should drive the cost down, and safety up.
|
| Boiling water reactors _are_ very expensive, in the same way
| solar power was in the Jimmy Carter era:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#/media/File:Price_h...
|
| We should be working on stable reactors, safe ones that don't
| need active intervention to shut down, and work to make them
| available.
|
| By all means we should also work on solar and wind, but we
| should keep nuclear active.
|
| We should be working to have MORE CO2 free power, of different
| kinds, that will work during a variety of conditions.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| > perhaps, driven by lobbying
|
| Is there a reason to think this outside seeing something you
| disagree with?
| Hammershaft wrote:
| The cost of nuclear is high in the short term but when debt is
| paid off it becomes one of the cheapest sources of baseline
| energy in the long run. I don't think "big nuclear" is behind
| these posts, its just that more and more people are looking
| past a period of nuclear panic and recognizing that this is
| likely to be the only form of baseload power we can transition
| to in the face of climate change.
| melling wrote:
| I don't think we currently have the battery technology to carry
| the base load for the United States.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I think there are far more effective venues for lobbying that
| posting pro-nuclear links to HN.
|
| More likely, it's educated users who don't want to see the
| world melt by 2100.
| simonCGN wrote:
| Another of those propaganda articles.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The real trouble with the light water reactor is not the nuclear
| part but the steam turbine it is attached to.
|
| Unfortunately people have a way of driving while looking in the
| rear view mirror and much of the discussion around nuclear energy
| revolves around issues of the 1970s.
|
| In the 1970s coal burning power plants were the cost king of
| power plants. There was some concern about making them cleaner,
| but by the 1980s gas turbine power plants with 10 times the power
| density (e.g. 1/10 the capital cost) were becoming widespread and
| people quit building coal plants.
|
| (A big literature got left behind about how to drive a gas
| turbine from coal, on paper it would be lower capital cost than a
| conventional coal plant, but the technology never got developed
| at full scale.)
|
| Even if the heat was free it would be hard for a steam turbine
| based power plant to compete with gas turbines.
|
| Now it should be possible to build a nuclear power plant based on
| the brayton cycle using helium or carbon dioxide or some similar
| gas as a working fluid. You then need to use helium or sodium or
| lead as a coolant because the pressure would be too high with
| water.
|
| Fast reactors are the best developed option, followed by the
| prismatic HTGR, then the thorium reactors. Pebble-bed HTGR looked
| pretty good until an expose came out that a German pebble bed
| reactor had a difficult time... Turns out pebbles that slide past
| each other just fine in air will get stuck on each other and
| crack in helium.
|
| When Bill Gates and others go around saying we have to get over
| the safety issue they are continuing the stigma. Nuclear power is
| not going to get out of it's funk unless it has a cost story that
| looks good when everything goes right -- which is not the case
| with the LWR.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| > Even if the heat was free it would be hard for a steam
| turbine based power plant to compete with gas turbines.
|
| This isn't true. People started attaching steam turbines to gas
| plants precisely because it made economic sense to tap into
| waste heat for co-generation.
|
| Nobody expects nuclear to compete against fossil fuels. But
| fossil fuels release carbon. Nuclear is necessary because it's
| the only consistent form of carbon-free energy production save
| for geographically dependent solutions like hydroelectricity
| and geothermal power.
|
| > Nuclear power is not going to get out of it's funk unless it
| has a cost story that looks good when everything goes right --
| which is not the case with the LWR.
|
| True. One solution is to attach a cost to account for the
| impact of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. Then
| nuclear will be competitive with fossil fuels. And competitive
| against intermittent sources since those require fossil fuels
| as a backup, at least until some feasible form of grid-scale
| storage is developed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The "steam turbine attached to the gas plant" as a system
| benefits from the high power density of the gas turbine. For
| nuclear to do the same it would need to run at high temps
| (e.g. sodium, sodium fluoride, ...) and be coupled to a
| combined cycle powerset and heat recovery system...
|
| Still needs the high temps!
|
| Nuclear competes not just with fossil fuels but with "burn
| the fossil fuels, capture the carbon, inject the CO2 back
| into the ground option", which might not be so bad if this
| gets perfected
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_looping_combustion
| sir_bearington wrote:
| I think you misunderstand what combined cycle means.
|
| In a gas turbine - without cogeneration - the gas turbine
| is driven by heating air and the expanded air spins a
| turbine, which spins a dynamo (as well as the compressor
| blades). It's like a jet engine, but hooked up to a
| generator. The exhaust air is hot and we do nothing with
| that waste heat.
|
| Starting a couple decades ago, people started putting
| boilers next to the gas turbine exhaust. This boiler is
| heated by the gas turbine exhaust, and the generated steam
| drives a turbine. It's combined cycle because there's two
| heat engines: the jet engine which is driven by hot air,
| and then the steam turbine driven by steam generated from
| the jet engine's exhaust. It's tapping into waste heat to
| generate steam, and that steam drives a turbine. There's
| two Carnot cycles happening. One in the gas turbine, one in
| the steam turbine.
|
| There's no such thing as a combined cycle nuclear plant, no
| matter how much thermal energy it can put out. The plant
| heats water which drives a turbine. If you have a reactor
| that generates more heat, then you can generate more steam
| and drive a larger turbine or additional turbines. But
| there's still only one heat engine, one cycle.
|
| I guess you _could_ use the heat exchanger as a second
| steam generator to drive a second turbine. But in order for
| that to work, the first steam turbine would have to be very
| inefficient and deliver a lot of waste heat to the second
| turbine. It 'd be better to just drive two turbines in
| parallel or a larger turbine.
| nickik wrote:
| My favourite current design is by Moltex Energy. Its basically,
| what happens if you take a Sodium reactor design and instead
| use molten salt.
|
| It basically fixes all the really terrible ideas about sodium
| reactors and gives you the advantage of molten salt reactors.
|
| The problem is, what we are doing now are all things that could
| and should have been done in the 70-80s.
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