[HN Gopher] Why has nuclear power been a flop?
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Why has nuclear power been a flop?
Author : jasoncrawford
Score : 14 points
Date : 2021-04-16 16:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rootsofprogress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rootsofprogress.org)
| grawprog wrote:
| Power generation when it boils down to it, whatever method used,
| is the conversion of momentum into electricity. Nuclear power,
| while pretty ingenious, seems like an example of extreme
| overengineering to solve a problem.
|
| I know I'm simplifying here, but essentially, nuclear power is
| generated using the heat generated by the decay of radioactive
| material to boil water, to generate steam to spin a turbine.
|
| This creates many challenges and hazards and generally, costs a
| lot of money.
|
| There's a lot less extreme ways to generate motion and capture
| said motion into electricity.
|
| Motion is everywhere. All the time. As we get better at capturing
| and harnessing the natural motion around us, which is the basic
| idea behind actual renewable energy, there's going to be less and
| less need for such extreme things as generating motion through
| radioactive decay.
|
| Again, it's an ingenious idea and provides a lot of power in
| places that would otherwise be powered by fossil fuel, but it's
| still a short sighted solution with long term consequences that
| on the scale of centuries is not sustainable.
| randomopining wrote:
| Yeah I pretty much agree with what you say. Idk why you're
| downvoted.
|
| Essentially we want to make energy capture and efficient,
| clean, and safe as possible. Nuclear is clean until it isn't,
| and safe until it isn't.
|
| It makes sense though, because solar has only recently become
| efficient enough to become the next big move.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Solar doesn't fit your paradigm at all.
| randomopining wrote:
| How not lolz? Motion of the photons from the sun.
| petertodd wrote:
| Think of it this way: the boiling water and spinning turbine
| part is the easy bit.
|
| All the hard engineering and tradeoffs in thermal/mechanical
| power generation, be it coal, natural gas, biofuels, hydro, or
| nuclear, are in dealing with the fuel/moving mass. Enormous
| amounts of engineering go into finding coal, digging it out of
| the ground, and dealing with the resulting combustion gasses
| and ash. The boilers and turbines - while impressive - are just
| one small part of that effort. Natural gas is no different: the
| turbines are pretty simple compared to the huge effort that
| goes into getting it out of the ground. Hydroelectricity again
| uses turbines. And again, they're relatively trivial devices
| compared to the huge engineering challenges of building and
| maintaining the dams themselves. Not to mention the complex
| tradeoffs around when and where to use them.
|
| If reliable high-energy motion really was everywhere, yes, this
| would be easy. But that simply isn't the case. The closest we
| have to that is hydroelectricity, and in most countries dams
| have already been built on most of the available sites.
| ysleepy wrote:
| The article is full of surface-level thinking.
|
| Probably read a propaganda book and is still buzzing with the
| anecdote-based arguments and "why can't we just play around with
| cool reactors??" rethorics.
|
| Afaik reactors are only really built with national backing due to
| risk and externalized costs of decommissioning and long term
| waste disposal.
|
| We stopped dumping nuclear waste into the coastal ocean and now
| it became a lot more expensive.
|
| We can't even deal with fricking plastic in the ocean and
| phtalates in drinking water, I have real trouble taking someone
| seriously who swats away any sort of concern, wishing back thr
| good old 60s way of doing things.
|
| "Cool" anecdotes about strict regulation seeming rediculous,
| superficially mind you.
|
| I really struggle with the nuclear propaganda as of late,
| especially with this anti-renewable stance mixed in.
|
| Meh, even if I like the technology from a nerd-perspective, fuck
| nuclear power. We can't even get mainstream software buffer-
| overflow free. The techno-progress enthusiasm of our grandparents
| era has long lost it's shine.
| barry27 wrote:
| France gets 70% of its power from nuclear - is there any
| discussion of how France approaches risk?
|
| Would funding the NRC from the amount of nuclear energy being
| produced not just be an incentive to relax restrictions? I
| understand that's partly the point. But is there a danger that
| regulation could end up being too lax?
|
| Is there any evidence that the increasing regulatory demands on
| nuclear in the US were a result of lobbying by representatives of
| other energy sources?
| kazinator wrote:
| > _But costs [to build nuclear power infrastructure] in the US
| are around 2-3x that._
|
| That's a bit of an odd turn in a narrative that begins with a
| global perspective, including developing nations. USA-only from
| that point on.
|
| It's well-known that the USA has general problems with
| infrastructure costs, far from limited to nuclear power plants.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > The only deaths from the Fukushima disaster were caused by the
| unnecessary evacuation of 160,000 people, including seniors in
| nursing homes.)
|
| This kind of revisionist statement is why people are suspect of
| people saying "it's bad, but not all that bad". They are usually
| lying about lots of things, when they supposedly have the facts
| on their side.
|
| https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...
| https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
| etc
|
| Many of the barriers are due to simple game theory. If a project
| mischaracterizes or has an unlikely event that results in a leak,
| you cannot take it back. The damage is done and likely is out of
| the project's control, to some degree.
| yongjik wrote:
| I do agree that the sentence is misleading and likely wrong
| (you can't be _certain_ about how many people died of
| radiation, simply because the effect is so low that it 's lost
| in noise).
|
| On the other hand, it's not that far from the truth: Wikipedia
| states one(!) confirmed death from radiation and 2,202 from
| evacuation. In terms of objectivity, it's less terrible than
| anything we get from Greenpeace.
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