[HN Gopher] Nuclear power helped prevent ~2M deaths in the last ...
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Nuclear power helped prevent ~2M deaths in the last 50 years
Author : torts
Score : 284 points
Date : 2022-04-07 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
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| HstryrsrBttn wrote:
| plesiv wrote:
| Nuclear weapons likely prevented >100M deaths in the last 50
| years. Mutually Assured Destruction is the only reason we didn't
| have another hot world war since 1945.
|
| If there were no nuclear weapons now, you'd have a full scale
| NATO/Russia war today and a US/China war in a few months.
|
| Very ironically, Mahnattan Project heads should receive a few
| Nobel Peace prizes posthoumously.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| True, but has nothing to do with the article/tweet's topic?
| [deleted]
| runarberg wrote:
| You might be asking the wrong question. An equally valid
| question would be: If Russia _didn't_ have nukes, would it have
| so haphazardly invaded Ukraine?
|
| In fact we have a comparative case study. In 1990 Saddam
| Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq at the time didn't have nukes. The
| USA and other responded by promptly invading Iraq.
|
| Now with this history in mind. Why wouldn't NATO respond to
| Russian hostilities by sending their military to protect
| Ukrainian sovereignty if Russia _didn't_ have nukes. And with
| that in mind would Russia have engaged in this horror if it was
| sure of its futility. All this horrors could have been
| prevented if we had eliminated these weapons of terror while we
| had a chance.
|
| NOTE: My main point with this exercise is to provide an
| alternate hypothetical situation which leads to the opposite
| results. This is to prove a point that you cannot for certain
| speculate that MAD has saved lives. An equally valid
| hypothetical can speculate that MAD actually costs lives.
| cycomanic wrote:
| You mean it has prevented a hot war between the US and Russia,
| instead we had lots of substitute wars were mostly only brown
| people died (sarcasm!). Essentially nuclear weapons meant that
| all nuclear powers could act with impunity toward non-nuclear
| powers who were not directly aligned with any of the blocks. I
| mean Ukraine is like a prime exhibition, Putin would have
| likely never invaded if he didn't have nuclear weapons, and the
| west would have likely reacted much earlier.
|
| The arguments are definitely not as straight-forward.
| testplzignore wrote:
| Imagine if the US had developed them one year earlier. Would we
| have used them against Germany rather than lose 100k people in
| a land invasion? Would the indiscriminate use of nuclear
| weapons become the norm? There are worse nations and leaders
| throughout history who would have destroyed the world if they
| had the same tech. Of course I'm speaking from an American
| bias.
|
| I should add that I personally find the use of nuclear weapons
| against Japan unnecessary and immoral.
| [deleted]
| hedora wrote:
| The US probably would have done something similar a year
| earlier. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a tech demo for the
| benefit of the Russians. It was certainly immoral (and
| racist) but saved many more foreign lives than it cost.
|
| As bad as Hitler was, the Russians killed orders of magnitude
| more civilians in that war, and were ready to launch into the
| rest of Europe after Berlin fell.
|
| Unless they changed tactics, they would have run scorched
| earth campaigns in Western Europe, and Hitler's concentration
| camps would just be a footnote in most history texts.
|
| Edit: Also, if you haven't seen it, watch Grave of the
| Fireflies. The US did far worse things to Japan than nuking
| it. There's a reason the Japanese surrendered well before the
| nukes.
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| ??? Japan surrendered after the nukes.
| kongolongo wrote:
| I think it's kind of a reach to say that nuclear weapons saving
| lives through the deterrence of MAD can also be included in
| nuclear power saving lives. I think they can be relatively
| distinct.
|
| For example there have been many instances where countries have
| specifically stopped at nuclear power, but not begin research
| or further refinement into creating nuclear weapons (because of
| possible sanctions, international backlash, etc). IIRC there
| are roughly 20ish countries that have nuclear power, but no
| nuclear weapons.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| People in general do not understand how nuclear strategy works.
| Almost everyone just goes "nuclear weapons bad remove them pls"
| (especially in Germany). The ignorance and misunderstanding is
| almost comical.
| gxqoz wrote:
| Perhaps you might want to read Command and Control, a book
| about the terrifying history of near misses in terms of
| nuclear weapons. It may well be true that nuclear weapons
| have reduced hot wars. But it can be equally true that had a
| few small things gone a different way, the world could have
| been subjected to an even more horrible nuclear war. And this
| is still very much the situation.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-
| Ill...
| DennisP wrote:
| Also worth reading: Daniel Ellsberg's book _The Doomsday
| Machine_.
|
| Ellsberg's job was nuclear strategy, and most of the
| classified documents he snuck out of his office were
| related to that. He published the Pentagon Papers first
| because he felt that if he started with the nuclear papers,
| nobody would even care about the Vietnam stuff.
|
| He gave the nuclear papers to his brother, who hid them in
| a garbage bag on the edge of the town dump. Then a storm
| washed away that whole corner of the dump. They spent a
| year trying to find them and finally gave up. Ellsberg
| wrote that his wife considered that a miracle from God,
| because he got a pass on the Vietnam leak but would have
| certainly spent the rest of his life in prison for the
| rest.
|
| Until recently he didn't talk about this stuff because he
| couldn't substantiate it, but now, enough has been
| declassified that he could back up his claims, which are
| horrific. US nuclear strategy in the '50s and '60s included
| the destruction of every city over 25K people in Russia and
| China in response to surprisingly minor conventional
| provocation, and acceptance of the death by radiation of
| everyone in Europe.
|
| An especially startling point was that the authority to
| launch nukes was not just at the top. Theater commanders
| could do it on their own. According to Ellsberg that is
| still the case today.
| [deleted]
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| After WW2 Europe learned its lesson: another war would destroy
| the entire region, even with conventional arms. But nuclear
| weapons did not prevent this war.
|
| The manner which the weapons were used certainly precludes them
| from a peace prize IMO
| simonh wrote:
| I don't understand how you can think that logic would work in
| Europe, but didn't work in the many parts of the world that
| went on to have full on wars WW2 style. Vietnam, Iran/Iraq,
| Many Arab/Israeli conflicts, etc, etc. What's special about
| Europe that would have made it immune?
|
| The answer is profuse nuclear weapons that made any direct
| conflict in Europe unthinkable for either side. Ukraine
| demonstrates clearly that when conventional war is thinkable,
| it only takes one side to feel they have the upper hand to
| make it happen. Nukes are the only reason Russian tanks
| aren't already dipping their treads in the sea along the
| coast of the Baltic States, or at least trying to.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| In Europe, the threat of the USSR did bring the West
| together but quite apart from that the big powers,
| especially France and Germany decided very consciously that
| they could not go on having more and more destructive wars
| every generation or so (remember that for France and
| Germany WWII is actually no. 3 since the first was the
| Franco-Prussian War of 1870).
|
| So this is a specific context in Europe and specific
| "paradigm shift" born from that specific context. Indeed,
| Europe 'learned' that they could not continue to slaughter
| each others and that led to the EU today (so not just fear
| of nuclear weapons but decision to bury the hatchet and
| cooperate on friendly terms instead).
|
| I don't think that there is a similar history anywhere else
| in the world.
| simonh wrote:
| I suspect the existence of nuclear weapons and e.g.
| France having them actually had a significant impact on
| them forming that realisation.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Not really. France got its first nukes in 1960 and what
| had happened in both world wars was enough to change
| everyone's perception nukes or no nukes: The same would
| had happened if nukes had not even existed.
|
| Nukes are a guarantee against invasion and in the context
| for France and the Cold War especially aimed against the
| USSR. But they don't mean you need to be friendly and
| cooperate. France and Germany (and others in Europe)
| really made a decision quite irrespective of the
| existence of nukes to stop European self-destruction and
| to work peacefully together from then on.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Nuclear weapons aren't protecting baltic states, they are
| protecting Russia's imperial ambitions. It's army
| performanc is so abysmall european powers alone could
| steamroll all of it's offensibe force without US getting
| involved
|
| If the recent conflict has shown us anything, is that
| Russian military is overhyped, complacent and corrupt, and
| performs terribly in confrontation with much smaller,
| poorly eqipped, and also somehwat corrupt military.
| progre wrote:
| Russians have always had trouble with their offensives.
| But I doubt anyone thinks a pan european army can just
| roll into russia. The country is big. Supply lines breaks
| down. The winter is terrible. The russians are tough as
| hell and fierce when defending.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _But I doubt anyone thinks a pan european army can just
| roll into russia_
|
| Actually, that's quite easy as history demonstrates
| though you can indeed also easily become overstretched.
| One reason the Russians have stockpiled nuclear weapons
| is that they do not want this to happen _again_! They do
| like to act tough but they know that without nukes they
| are at a huge disadvantage against the West.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Oh yeah U am not advocating invasion of Russia, the
| logistics and moral situation will totally flip.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| Why do you think the conflicts in Asia, the middle-east
| etc. happened? Because the nuclear superpowers are fighting
| their wars there. One could very well argue that nuclear
| powers have created such an imbalance that the nuclear
| powers could act towards other powers like they did,
| because they knew the others would never directly intervene
| because of the danger of a nuclear war.
| simonh wrote:
| Did the fact they were nuclear powers have any effect on
| their sponsorship of foreign conflicts? I don't see how
| it's relevant, they'd have done it anyway. Also the
| nuclear powers often did intervene directly, as China and
| the USA did in Korea, and the USA did in Vietnam and
| Iraq, and Russia and later the USA did in Afghanistan.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The Korean war would not have happened if China had been
| a nuclear power with significant perceived military
| power.
| plesiv wrote:
| > After WW2 Europe learned its lesson...
|
| From what I gather, there were no lessons learned in Europe.
| Huge majority of current European leaders seem to be itching
| to enhance the current conflict _even with nuclear weapons
| being a thing_.
|
| We didn't evolve since WW2. I have no doubts that we're still
| as partisan, as greedy, as vengeful, as self-righteous as our
| predecessors of the 20th century.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >From what I gather, there were no lessons learned in
| Europe.
|
| The 14 years - since Georgia 2008 - of trying to appease a
| tyrant is the best proof that no one learned anything from
| Chamberlain debacle.
| anonporridge wrote:
| The problem I see is that war is a very natural element of
| civilization that regularly relives population stress. It's
| been a part of human society likely before we even left the
| trees.
|
| It's simply not natural to go for many generations without
| a significant culling of your male population.
|
| I think it's not so much that humans haven't evolved since
| WWII, but that society hasn't evolved any kind of new
| pressure release valve.
| ncmncm wrote:
| This is often said, but the data shows it is false. Even
| WWII's millions had hardly any effect on the population
| curve.
| BoardsOfCanada wrote:
| Mutually assured destruction is analogue to the martingale
| betting strategy. You can raise your chances of winning a small
| amount as close to 100% as you can afford by just risking
| everything if you lose.
| godelski wrote:
| Nuclear energy is also the best way to perform nuclear de-
| proliferation and has been by far the most successful means to
| date.[0]
|
| > A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU
| (equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in
| Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched
| uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear
| power plants. The program was the largest and most successful
| nuclear non-proliferation program to date.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
| ganzuul wrote:
| At the cost of our ability to imagine a future, giving rise to
| the poverty called "postmodernism".
|
| There is a whole world of thought surrounding the nuclear
| shadow that needs to be the context of any discussion on
| hypersonic weapons. ABM against those is automated warfare and
| the rise of the machines.
|
| The situation on Earth is called Einstein's Prison, which is
| why antigravity is a matter of life or death for we who are
| stuck in this oubliette.
| cinntaile wrote:
| As others have pointed out, what does this even mean? What kind
| of metric is this? What was it compared against? Where is the
| data? It doesn't exactly instill confidence that the director
| general of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes claims
| like these, this is marketing fluff.
| dham wrote:
| I think it's the main tragedy of the human race is not staying
| with nuclear and going all in. Unfortunately the fad of being
| afraid of nuclear will probably be the downfall of the human
| race. We would have had energy solved by the 80's. Almost
| sickening to think about.
| timeon wrote:
| The fad of being afraid of nuclear was not real issue as it was
| already pointed here - electricity generation is not only
| issue. But even if we are talking about electricity generation
| - there are countries that had loads of coal so they stayed
| with coal-fired power stations. Why there is no nuclear power
| plant in Poland? Because of people being afraid of nuclear?
| That seems bit naive.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Until the local government cuts funding to the nuclear plant.
| Then maintenance goes undone, and eventually you're leaking
| radioactive waste into the local environment.
|
| If you build a wind farm in the desert, and in 40 years it's
| abandoned, it's not really a big deal. I guess you're unlucky,
| one of the turbines might fall on someone, but you're not going
| to have dangerous nuclear waste to dispose of.
|
| >How antiquated, you ask? In Washington, there is a pipe break
| every day. And according to EPA data, thousands of water and
| sewer systems across the country may be too old to function
| properly -- so old, in fact, that some were built during the
| Civil War.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/despite-civil-war-era-pipes-am...
|
| Assume that anything you build today, may be abandoned in a few
| generations.
| cycomanic wrote:
| What would it have meant to go all in? The reasons for not
| going all in, were certainly not because of the environmental
| movements.
|
| Also if we extrapolate from the nuclear accidents that we had,
| with the current number of power plants we had a major incident
| every 20-30 years or so. If we would have wanted to supply all
| our power from nuclear it would have meant at least a tripling
| of reactors (more like 5 times or so, given the developing
| world), so given the rate of incidents we would have a major
| incident every 10 years at least. Considering that they tend to
| render large areas completely uninhabitable in 50 years
| significant areas on all continents would be uninhabitable.
|
| The shame is that we haven't gone all in on renewables and
| storage much earlier.
| DennisP wrote:
| We've had three major incidents that come to everyone's mind:
|
| - Chernobyl, involving a reactor that didn't even have a
| containment dome, and in which the reaction rate sped up as
| the fuel got hotter. (The opposite is true of all modern
| reactors.)
|
| - Fukushima, which failed due to a major earthquake and
| tsunami that killed thousands of people, while the radiation
| release didn't kill anyone. The exclusion zone there is only
| 20 square kilometers. And this was with a reactor design from
| the 1970s; a nearby plant ten years newer faced the same
| challenges and did fine.
|
| - Three Mile Island, in which containment worked very well
| and radiation never went above background levels.
|
| Aside from Chernobyl that seems like a pretty decent safety
| record to me. By comparison, nobody worries about hydropower,
| despite hydro having the worst accident of any power plant
| ever: Banqaio Dam, which killed 26,000 people immediately and
| another 150,000 or so in the aftermath.
|
| The reason we didn't go all in on renewables earlier was that
| they were too expensive in the 20th century. Nuclear was not,
| as proven by France, which converted to 80% nuclear over the
| course of a couple decades.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 3MI vented a huge amount of radioactive krypton gas, which
| is never, ever counted. That stuff runs downhill like
| fluffy water, and hugged the shores of the river all the
| way to the ocean.
| DennisP wrote:
| From a quick google, the krypton was vented on purpose
| over the course of weeks, to keep radiation at safe
| levels. Government regulators were involved.
|
| All of us are immersed in background radiation all the
| time. Raising the level slightly, but still within normal
| background levels, is not a significant safety concern.
| It's certainly far less concerning than climate change,
| or even the direct pollution from fossil plants.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The krypton gas release was treated as if it dissolved in
| the atmosphere, not (as happened) ran downhill and gassed
| neighborhoods along the river.
| cycomanic wrote:
| So yes three accidents in the last 60 years (I counted
| nuclear power to really start in the 1960s) that's an
| accident every 20 years like I wrote. Considering that
| chernobyl and fukushima rendered large areas of land
| uninhabitable I don't consider that a good track record.
| The lucky thing so far was that none of the incidents
| happened to a plant close to a large city. If a fukushima
| would have happened at Krummel for example, Hamburg a city
| of 2M would have had to be evacuated.
| simonh wrote:
| I don't know, early reactor designs were pretty unsafe and I'm
| not sure a lot more of them would have been better. Sometimes
| taking time to mature a technology, even one that's hugely
| beneficial in the long term, works better than just piling in
| quickly and risking finding that you invested in a
| developmental dead end. Having said that now nuclear does seem
| to be a mature technology with significant benefits.
| ganzuul wrote:
| The airborne reactor was our ticket to the future but it
| didn't produce plutonium.
| twofornone wrote:
| >I don't know, early reactor designs were pretty unsafe and
| I'm not sure a lot more of them would have been better
|
| There have been what, 5 events in the last 50 years that
| released a significant amount of radiation, only one
| catastrophic meltdown (Chernobyl), out of thousands of plants
| running continuously for decades? Seems pretty safe to me...
| Krasnol wrote:
| So every 10 years a major accident.
|
| How does that sound safe to you? We've been lucky that none
| of those was in densely populated areas somewhere in Europe
| for example.
| twofornone wrote:
| Chernobyl was the only "major" accident, perhaps you
| could put Fukishima into that category, but again you're
| disregarding the denominator, thousands of plants
| operating for decades without issue. That sounds very
| safe to me, especially when weighted against emissions
| reduction.
| simonh wrote:
| I agree the impact of and response to accidents is often
| exaggerated out of proportion. Except for Chernobyl. That
| one was a monster.
|
| However if you take the long term impact and costs of those
| accidents and add them to the cost of nuclear power
| overall, it's not a pretty picture. I would not have
| supported significantly more nuclear 40 years ago, some but
| not massive. I do support it now though. We've learned a
| lot.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Those who campaigned against it, ostensibly on behalf of the
| environment, irreversibly damaged the reputation of
| environmentalists by letting themselves be duped. Now people
| think that putting the atmosphere on the free market through
| CO2 scrubbers is a good idea, although the market's
| intelligence can never replicate what a billion years of
| genetic evolution has produced. We will suffocate ourselves in
| the race to the bottom.
|
| I'd gladly wallow in the shame of global despot if it meant we
| could reverse this madness of irresponsibility. :p
| akamaka wrote:
| Not really true, because electricity generation is only a
| fraction of energy usage. Most of our greenhouse gas emissions
| come from other sources like transportation, industrial
| processes, and agriculture, so there are actually a quite a
| wide range of technological problems that need to be solved
| beyond just deploying more nuclear.
| lkbm wrote:
| In the 1970s, the US had plans to build 1,000 nuclear power
| plants. If they were the average size, I believe would come
| to double our current electrical generation capacity. Where
| would we be with cheap, plentiful, carbon-neutral
| electricity?
|
| "Electricity and heat" has been the dominant source of
| emissions in the US since at least 1990[0]. Even if most of
| that is the "heat" part, we can heat _much_ more efficiency
| with electricity than with gas nearly the entire year in all
| our climates, and in the rare cases where that 's not true,
| resistance heating can cover the offset. The only reason we
| use gas is because it was cheaper.
|
| Second on the list is transportation, much of which is
| finally hitting viability for electrification right now.
| Again, if we'd had cheap, plentiful electricity, that would
| have spurred on development and implementation much earlier.
| Maybe not the 1980, but a decade or two sooner definitely
| seems believable.
|
| There are likely some industrial processes that we can't
| easily switch over, but I think given a cost incentive, we'd
| find a way for most things.
|
| I am kind of assuming the switchover would mean "cheap"
| electricity. Maybe we'd have plentiful expensive electricity,
| but I'd expect market forces to push the price down.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#annual-
| greenh...
| akamaka wrote:
| Heating and electric vehicles are in fact the perfect
| example of the phenomenon I'm describing.
|
| Already today, it would be more efficient to heat your home
| with a heat pump powered by a natural gas generation
| station, than to burn that same gas for heat directly.
|
| Already today, it's more efficient to convert fossil fuel
| into electricity and charge an electric car, than to burn
| that fuel in the engine.
|
| There are high barriers of technology, scalability, and
| economics to overcome to make this transition happen, and
| if we had built a lot more nuclear in the 80s and 90s those
| barriers would still be nearly as high.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Sure, but more solutions are feasible if power is cheap and
| plentiful.
| godelski wrote:
| But energy is still a major factor in climate change. Imagine
| if the US's energy production looked like France's[0].
| Potentially this would have also affected total global
| emissions as other countries typically follow US
| technologically. But that is speculation. But either way it
| would have reduced the climate problem in a significant way,
| making our current path forward easier (though yeah, it
| wouldn't have avoided the catastrophe. But let's recognize
| that this is extremely multifaceted).
|
| [0] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
| [deleted]
| nestorD wrote:
| But, we now how to convert most of those process to electric.
| The engineering challenges have been solved.
|
| It is just not cost effective at the moment because you would
| have to update manufacturing process for all the things you
| want to change and that takes money. But with cheap
| electricity, oil/gas becoming more expensive and political
| incentives...
| herschel113 wrote:
| As always numbers as that are quite fuzzy. To estimate the risk,
| I like to look at physical modifications of our environment that
| _may_ prove dangerous, until we can prove their'e not. And if we
| look at the matter our earth and atmosphere is composed of,
| nuclear energy will likely do a much more distinct impact in the
| long term than any other man-made energy production efforts so
| far. While we are just causing turmoil in the carbon and mineral
| dust distribution of our planet, this is also done by animals and
| plants in the long term and by vulcans in the short term. But
| messing with the isotope and elemental composition is quite
| unique and happens far slower on a natural pace, and in other
| bodies like stars of course.
|
| So tl;dr: We modify our planet in a _maybe_ destructive way for
| hundred thousands of years to come, by nuclear power generation.
| We don't know for sure if and how risky it is, but on other
| things (think of terrorism) we are taking vast efforts to keep
| risk at pace. So we should do with the elemental and isotope
| composition of our environment - by nuclear power!
| jthrowsitaway wrote:
| > And if we look at the matter our earth and atmosphere is
| composed of, nuclear energy will likely do a much more distinct
| impact in the long term than any other man-made energy
| production efforts so far.
|
| Citation is very much needed. Comparing nuclear energy with the
| dirty business of the fossil fuel chain is a no-brainer in my
| mind. Nuclear energy isn't perfect, but it's a lot more
| contained than fossil fuels.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| The linked tweet doesn't provide a citation or context for the
| "helped prevent ~2M deaths" claim. But there is work in this area
| which suggests that "~2M lives saved" in the last 50 years
| underestimates the benefits of nuclear power by a lot.
|
| One commenter here writes
|
| > What is the actual claim here? Nuclear power didn't prevent any
| deaths, after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or
| another. So it must be something like two million people would
| have died earlier without nuclear power, but by how much?
|
| That's a better way to think about the problem: not "lives
| saved," but life-years saved. Calculations of life-years saved
| are necessarily sketchy, but there is at least one promising
| preliminary effort [1]. See especially page 22.
|
| [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/production-
| sitebuilder-v1-0-1...
| DrBazza wrote:
| Nuclear power should be exactly comparable to other types of
| power.
|
| Deaths during construction. Carbon produced in construction.
|
| Deaths caused by mining and transporting fuel. Carbon produced
| by that.
|
| Deaths caused by consuming fuels. Carbon for that as well.
|
| Deaths caused by accidents during the lifetime of the power
| source.
|
| Deaths caused to wildlife and pollution.
|
| Deaths caused by decommissioning and deconstruction. Carbon for
| that too.
|
| Then lifetime for nuclear power station, vs oil, coal, gas,
| wind turbine, solar.
|
| Finally you can do an unbiased comparison of each.
|
| Nuclear power has saved many lives by not requiring dangerous
| coal mining, particulate emissions, and climate change effects.
| jrootabega wrote:
| That's the real trolley problem: they have to be powered by
| SOMETHING.
| hedora wrote:
| The nature of the carbon production is important. Carbon from
| wired electricy is different from embodied carbon from
| battery electric vehicles, and both are different from CO2
| equivalent emissions from the chemistry of the industrial
| process itself.
|
| After all, end game is you use a carbon neutral technology to
| power itself, emissions from energy usage go to zero.
| Similarly, solving carbon emissions for batteries cleans up
| energy storage.
|
| Also, deaths due to climate change dwarf all the other
| sources combined (except, maybe, for deaths from coal
| emissions), so direct deaths are a second order effect that
| can be ignored in practice.
| antattack wrote:
| Now that there are cleaner alternatives we don't need new
| nuclear anymore to save lives.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The only cleaner alternative with fully predictable and
| controllable power delivery is hydro.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Even hydroelectric power isn't entirely predictable:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/06/california-shuts-down-
| major-...
| throw0101a wrote:
| And good luck if a dam fails:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
| belorn wrote:
| If we don't need anything except the cleaner alternatives,
| we should start by banning and issuing laws against burning
| fossil fuel for connecting to the energy grid. This
| naturally include imports, as buying energy generated by
| burning fossil fuel outside the nations borders is just as
| bad as if the burning occurred inside.
|
| At that point people can choose between all the non-fossil
| fuel alternatives and pick what attributes they favor.
| xigoi wrote:
| In Czechia, we don't have enough wind or sun for generating
| much power, and the available space for hydro isn't ideal
| either.
| geph2021 wrote:
| A retrospective analysis of the benefits of nuclear power
| avoids accounting for one of the major consequences: the
| nuclear waste, which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of
| years.
| wiz21c wrote:
| And so is CO2...
| DrBazza wrote:
| Sadly coal miners are exposed to more radioactive material.
|
| Nuclear waste is either or. Either we survive as a species
| and know where it's buried in that 10,000 year container
| deep underground where everyone knows. Or we fail as a
| species and lose the technology to dig that deep ever
| again.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And it doesn't stop after the coal is mined, either. Coal
| ash and tailings are quite toxic.
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| Lead and mercury spewed out by coal plants ends up in the
| ocean and is also deadly for very long. I'd rather have
| poisonous metals in storage than floating around and
| accumulating in the food chain.
| qball wrote:
| >which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years.
|
| Which it has in common with things like acid mine drainage
| and waste from a bunch of other industrial processes.
|
| Of course, solving the former "just" requires employing a
| small army of personnel to make sure that the effluent is
| getting cleared from those mines properly, maintaining
| tailings ponds (and fixing them when they leak), and (since
| this is the perennial hypothetical for nuclear waste
| disposal) understanding that a bunch of people from the
| hypothetical neo-Stone Age civilizations are going to die
| once that goes away because they're necessarily going to be
| incapable of chemical analysis of water downstream.
|
| Perhaps it's unfortunate for most of humanity that storing
| waste in on-site casks is an effective enough solution; if
| the waste was more dangerous, we'd have dealt with it
| already. Instead, we can just leave it sitting there and
| tilt at windmills.
|
| I'd rather have an exploded reactor and evacuated
| surrounding area every 50 years than I would an
| uninhabitable planet. But maybe that's just my obsolete
| 1970s/80s optimism showing through; modern humanity is much
| happier with the historically-compatible "use unreliable
| sources of power and disconnect the poor quarter at night"
| strategy.
| yosito wrote:
| OurWorldInData has a lot of data for these types of
| comparisons: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-
| energy
| godelski wrote:
| The 2M number is referenced here[0]
|
| [0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-
| wavefunctio...
| runarberg wrote:
| This is a strange shift in responsibility. Wouldn't it be
| better to say: "Coal _shortened_ the life of so and so many
| people"? After all If there were neither coal power (or other
| air polluting power) nor nuclear those lives wouldn't have been
| shortened either.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Yes. This is an attempt to boost nukes, but however much
| better it makes nukes look, it makes renewables several times
| moreso.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If it is retrospective, it doesn't really say anything
| about renewables because for most of the last 50 years they
| haven't been [meaningfully] feasible. The debate going
| forward is still entirely valid because nuclear has upsides
| that contrast with renewable. It should be part of the
| discussion.
| runarberg wrote:
| It is still a rather strange shift in perspective. We
| don't count the people _saved_ by taking public transit,
| we count the people _killed_ by cars. Speculating what
| was and wasn't feasible for the past 50 years is even
| stranger.
|
| Usually these comparisons have an implicit _all else
| being equal_ because you can get into some real funky
| speculations with alternative history without it. For
| example, if we had neither coal nor nuclear how different
| would the energy market be today? Would there have been
| more innovations in renewables and the current technology
| would have been reached in the 80s? Or would we have
| implemented our infrastructure to maximize energy
| efficiency? How many lives would that have saved?
|
| You get the point. This practice gets unnecessarily
| complicated really fast. I agree with parent that the
| only reason to say that "nuclear saves lives" over "coal
| destroys lives" is that you have an agenda to promote
| nuclear over alternatives without mentioning those
| alternatives.
| belorn wrote:
| City planners do make estimates on how much traffic is
| reduced by introducing more and new public transit. They
| also make estimates on reduced traffic accidents when
| building news roads and redirect traffic away from more
| dangerous paths and those close to high risk areas like
| schools.
|
| We can also compare similar sized locations and compare
| outcomes. How many lives dies to traffic accidents in
| cities prioritizing bike lanes and mass transit compared
| to same sized cities that prioritize car travel?
|
| We can also count how many people that die to air
| pollution related illness in countries with a lot of coal
| power and compare that to cities with a lot of nuclear
| power. We can also look at countries like Island or
| Norway, through countries that can exclusively depend on
| hydro/geothermal power has a fairly low sample size. With
| coal we can get a fairly massive sample size just looking
| at the scope of a city.
| runarberg wrote:
| Indeed. The logic goes: Vehicular traffic kills so-and-so
| many people. We can significantly lower that number by
| reducing vehicular miles traveled. Options include better
| bike infrastructure, better public transit, mixed zoning,
| lower speed limits, etc.
|
| If a city engineer would invert the logic and start with
| _"Bicycle lanes have saved so-and-so many lives"_. That
| would be rather odd wouldn't it?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's not about "boosting nukes" it's about countering
| nuclear energy FUD (mostly about how dangerous nuclear
| energy is). Renewables would probably be comparable, but
| I'm very skeptical about your "several times better" claim.
| Nuclear energy and renewable energy are both very low
| carbon sources with very few non-pollution-derived deaths
| (rooftop solar exceeds nuclear energy for deaths, even
| including nuclear anomalies like Chernobyl IIRC). So
| there's no way that the carbon gap between fossil fuels and
| nuclear is significantly larger (much less 3x larger) than
| the gap between fossil fuels and renewables.
| ncmncm wrote:
| What stops nuke construction today is that it costs a
| hell of a lot more, and you don't get any kWh out for
| years, if ever. Most usually, lately, you pour in
| $billions for years and get nothing out but a lot of
| scrap concrete.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't know that it costs "a hell of a lot more" for a
| unit of _reliable_ energy, but yeah, you can deploy
| renewable energy in smaller units more quickly (it might
| take you a decade to build out a GW of nuclear capacity
| or a GW of solar capacity, but at least in the case of
| solar you don 't need the full GW to complete before you
| can start selling power). However, to be clear, this is
| the economic argument, not the health argument that the
| OP was debating.
| johnnyb9 wrote:
| The study is from NASA:
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen&
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Nuclear power is clean at the plant but the fuel has a very
| dirty production pipeline. Further, plants are estimated to
| have a carbon impact around the same or worse than natural gas
| because their supply chain is so expensive. Instead of the
| carbon coming from burning the fuel, it comes from the enormous
| amount of work that goes into keeping a nuclear power plant
| running.
|
| HNers love to shout about the environmental impact of
| semiconductor production for solar panels and mining for
| batteries and even permanent magnets used in electric motors.
| But apparently reactor fuel comes out of the ground and is
| refined based on ...wishful thinking?
|
| It's all moot. Nuclear power is not being deployed by utilities
| because it is one of the most expensive forms of energy
| generation. With almost a century of enormous subsidization and
| research, it has only increased in cost. Wind and solar have
| plummeted in cost. Wind is currently the cheapest, with solar
| hot on its tail. Solar continues to fall at around 10% a year.
|
| Last year in the US alone, and _only accounting for grid-scale
| projects_ , wind and solar have replaced nuclear at a 6:1
| ratio. When you account for commercial and residential solar
| and wind, it's an even higher ratio.
|
| Solar cells cost $76 per watt in the seventies and now it costs
| thirty cents per watt. That's a 250 fold reduction.
|
| Wind has gone from 55 cents per kwhr in the eighties, to 5
| cents today.
|
| Nuclear? _More expensive_ than it was in the eighties.
|
| With HVDC transmission technology seeing wider and wider use,
| and well as battery technology plunging in cost: everyone in
| the industry and government sector considers "what energy
| source do we go forward with" as solved.
|
| It's not just cheaper: it doesn't have any of the numerous
| concerns nuclear does. Solar panels can be recycled (or simply
| resold for applications where the 10-20% reduced capacity
| doesn't matter, ie where there's plenty of roof/land available
| relative to energy needs), and the biggest problem with wind
| turbines has been figuring out how to recycle the turbine
| blades when they're EOL, something that is now solved. GE is
| turning blades into concrete, and Vestas has figured out how to
| recycle blades into like-new fiberglass.
|
| Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear
| industry.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| >Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the
| nuclear industry.
|
| This is provably false on many fronts. There is a growing
| recognition that nuclear is the only low carbon source that
| can produce substantial carbon-free power in all weather
| conditions and all latitudes.
|
| "There were over 50 additional nuclear reactors under
| construction in 2020, and hundreds more are planned primarily
| in Asia."
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/energy-nuclear-
| power-...
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/nuclear-power-
| energy-...
|
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/23/tech-billionaires-
| ral...
|
| Nuclear may or may not become the dominant energy source, but
| to say "Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward" is
| simply incorrect.
| hedora wrote:
| It's unclear that battery scaling will happen in time to
| reach sharply negative carbon emissions, or that solar and
| wind will meet future energy demands. Our kids need to put
| all the carbon back in the ground, which means we need to put
| the first 10-20% back ourselves. That would double global
| energy consumption for decades, assuming we started today.
|
| Your supply chain carbon arguments have a fundamental flaw:
| Transportation and the grid need to decarbonize regardless of
| which technology the power plant uses.
|
| Solar panel production is being bootstrapped with coal based
| power plants. That doesn't imply coal plants will be needed
| moving forward, or that industrial (bursty, scheduled
| consumption) electicity will be scarce.
|
| The fact that US nuclear plants are riduculously economically
| inefficient doesn't imply plants in the rest of the world are
| similarly bad, or that the technology is infeasible. The US
| environmental movement intentionally sabotaged the industry
| through the second half of the 20th century. Also, efficient,
| safe nuclear plants have been operated for decades in other
| countries.
|
| Anyway, we're clearly headed to a situation where we have
| effectively infinite clean electricity during the day, thanks
| to solar.
|
| The real questions are whether energy storage devices are
| cheaper than nuclear, and how economical it is to time shift
| energy-intensive industrial processes (basically building
| 2-3x more factory, but idling it at night).
|
| I'm hoping there is some bursty carbon capture technology on
| the horizon, where buying more equipment for a higher burst
| capture rate is cheap, so the electricity produced for the
| quarter of the day where there's a massive surplus isn't
| wasted.
|
| We need to do that anyway, and it would greatly reduce
| nuclear, hydro and energy storage demand.
| 7952 wrote:
| Scaling battery storage does seem easier than scaling
| nuclear. They are mass producible as small modules and can
| utilise less skilled labour in factories. Grid scale
| developments have negligible civil engineering requirments,
| ridiculously quick to build and can work on small or large
| sites. They are easy for investors to understand and
| insure. And the underlying technology can piggy back on the
| cell phone industry and will be required for electric cars.
|
| Also, by the time we get to nuclear scale out it may well
| be competing with hydrogen also.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I don't think people understand the scale of storage
| required to make decarbonization through renewables
| feasible. The USA consumes 500GWh of electricity every
| hour. And electricity is only about a third of total
| energy consumption. 8 GWh is one _minute_ of electricity
| storage, 20 seconds of total energy storage. We 'll need
| and estimated 3 weeks of storage to decarbonize through
| renewables: https://pv-magazine-
| usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
|
| By comparison, the US just needs to build four nuclear
| plants for each one that exists currently. To achieve a
| 100% nuclear electricity grid. A bit less than that for
| decarbonization since we have some hydroelectric power.
| runarberg wrote:
| _Just_ four new nuclear power plants for every existing
| plant is still _a lot_ of plants.
|
| There are 93 active reactors in the USA today. That means
| we need to build between 350 to 400 more reactors. There
| are currently only 2 new reactors under construction and
| 11 more planned (6 of these are NuScale modes with only
| 77 MW Capacity). The last reactor to open was at the
| Watts Bar plant in Tennessee in 2016, and before that
| 1996 in the same plant. Both of these reactors started
| construction in the 1970s.
|
| If we "just" need 350-400 more, it is gonna take us ages
| to get there.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Building nuclear plants at the same rate as we did in the
| 1970s would get us there in 3 decades. You write as
| though this is some Herculean task, but if the US didn't
| reduce the pace of nuclear construction in the 1980s we
| would have had a decarbonized grid by 2000. It's not just
| hypothetically possible, this pace of nuclear
| construction has historical precedent.
|
| By comparison, nobody has any realistic plans to
| decarbonize fully through renewables. The plan is to burn
| gas for ~40% of our electricity when intermittent sources
| aren't producing, and cross our fingers while we hope for
| a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. Plans to
| decarbonize through renewables assumes that hydrogen
| storage, thermal batteries, or something else will
| provide effectively free energy storage.
| runarberg wrote:
| It is not fair to extrapolate the building speed of the
| 1970s to today. Especially not with nuclear reactors. We
| don't build things like in the 70s anymore. There are
| safety and environmental standards which weren't being
| observed back then. And that's a good thing. It is not a
| coincidence that things slowed down in the 80s. The 3
| mile island partial meltdown happened in 1979 and it left
| a mark. If we would still be building and running our
| reactor like we did back then, but had 5 times more
| reactors to maintain, we can assume that the probability
| of a full meltdown and a major nuclear accident would be
| far higher. Chernobyl serves as a reminder of what can
| happen if safety standards are not adequate.
|
| The labor and logistics situation is also completely
| different from today then it was in the 70s. Today's
| megaprojects tend to go way over budget and suffer
| significant delays. Land acquisition is more complicated
| (and again that is a good thing as many building project
| back then tended to displace a lot of minority residents)
| and a much smaller proportion of our labor pool are
| construction engineers. This leads to a longer and more
| expensive building process. As an example the only two
| reactors currently under construction have gone at least
| $10 billion over budget and are 6-7 years behind
| schedule. And these are reactors in the existing Plant
| Vogtle in Georgie. I imagine a whole new power plant
| would suffer even worse logistics problems.
|
| > Plans to decarbonize through renewables assumes that
| hydrogen storage, thermal batteries, or something else
| will provide effectively free energy storage.
|
| This is only partially true. Plans also include a
| significantly more efficient energy usage. People are
| pressuring governments to significantly increase
| investments in green infrastructure. This includes more
| robust energy grid, electrifying railways and ferry
| terminals, increased building standards for efficient
| power usage and retrofitting old buildings to similar
| standards. We don't need to replace carbon power 1:1 if
| we patch up the inefficiencies of our current energy use.
| There are also hopes for better battery technology and
| carbon capture. A carbon capturing gas burning power
| plant is not an unrealistic advancement, nor is solid
| state and molten salt batteries (all of which exist today
| at varying levels of economic feasibility; none less
| feasible then new new nuclear). Meaning that we can
| bridge that ~40% without emitting more greenhouse gasses
| and without new nuclear.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Three mile island was due to a pressure valve failure,
| not a design flaw in the pressure vessel, secondary
| storage, or steam generators - the components of a
| reactor that form most of the cost of construction. And
| the reactor meltdown was contained. The safety standards
| held. I'm not sure how people try and spin this into
| evidence that the reactors were unsafe.
|
| You're correct that the 1970s construction isn't the same
| as modern construction though. During the 1970s, series
| of the same reactor designs were built. As opposed to
| most modern construction, which are typically the only
| reactors of a given kind built in a given country. Serial
| production is much cheaper than one-off production.
|
| Electrifying railways and other transportation is going
| to _increase_ electricity usage, not decrease it. Only
| about a third of total energy consumption is electric,
| and most of the rest needs to be electrified as a
| prerequisite to decarbonization. So assuming that
| electricity consumption is going to decrease is a very
| dubious prospect.
| runarberg wrote:
| I didn't bring up Three Mile Island to argue that
| enhanced safety standards back then would have prevented
| the partial meltdown. I brought it up to demonstrate that
| it caused a shift in policy which resulted in slow-down
| in reactor build-up. Three Mile Island happened despite
| the safety standards at the time. We don't know the
| probability distribution of a nuclear meltdown but we can
| safely assume that it is a function of relevant safety
| standards and a total number of reactors. USA decided to
| mitigate the risk by both limiting the growth of new
| reactors and increasing the standard. This was a logical
| choice. If USA had done neither other accidents would be
| happening now with greater probability then it did in the
| 1970s.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The point I'm making is that the increased cost of
| nuclear wasn't due to greater safety standards. It was
| due to lower rates of construction, losing the economics
| of scale of serial production.
| 7952 wrote:
| But hitting those big numbers is the whole point of
| scalability. It may be easier to build a few hundred giga
| factories than a few hundred nuclear plants. What you get
| is less useful, but politically and technically simpler.
| And work in other industries make storage more viable.
| Those HVDC links that America should build anyway make
| storage more viable. Reducing costs in renewables make
| storage more viable. Even reducing costs in nuclear power
| could make it more viable.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The Tesla giga factory produces 35GWh of batteries per
| year. It would take ~14 years for a giga factory to
| produce just one hour's worth of storage. We need days at
| least, potentially weeks depending on the mix of
| renewables. Again, the scale just isn't there for
| batteries.
|
| This is why renewable evangelists assume something like
| hydrogen storage, or compressed air will deliver nearly-
| free storage. But that's just hope, who knows if these
| approaches will actually be competitive.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Cost for storage is falling even faster than solar or wind
| ever did.
|
| All that is unclear is what will end up cheapest, in any
| particular area. In many places, the poorer round-trip
| efficiency of chemical synthesis (hydrogen, ammonia,
| hydrocarbons) is offset by the massive usefulness of
| synthesizer output after the tanks are full. That is, when
| the tanks have been topped off, the excess output generates
| revenue.
|
| Solar generating capacity has become so cheap that needing
| 2x, 3x, 4x more, for whatever reason, is no blocker.
| HyperRational wrote:
| hedora wrote:
| Even if batteries and solar get another 10x cheaper,
| that's not enough to make it through winter in some
| populated areas.
|
| A whole home backup battery is $10K's, and likely stores
| under 24 hours of normal usage. Buying 90 of those per
| house (for three months of power backup) would cost
| millions per house today.
|
| A bright overcast day in California can easily drop solar
| output by 50-75%. Up north, it's much worse, and those
| days can come in multi-month bursts.
|
| Much of the US south will be uninhabitable according to
| current climate projections, which increases demand up
| north, creating distribution problems that haven't been
| solved. Also 40+ state megastorms are becoming common in
| the US. What happens if the whole continent is cold and
| cloudy at the same time?
|
| I guess you're propsing synthetic natural gas, or
| similar?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Batteries are the _most expensive_ storage medium. No
| utility will use those to keep more than a few minutes or
| hours of backup. Pumped hydro is cheap and reliable, but
| each site has a strict upper limit on how much it can
| store.
|
| Synthetic anhydrous ammonia, and hydrogen, are the
| favored utility-scale media. They can be stored, but more
| importantly they can also be shipped in from the tropics,
| and most importantly can be sold when the tanks are full.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline
|
| Not really. You need very little uranium to operate a plant,
| and a lot of it comes from decommissioned bombs. When we were
| mining it in the US, it caused far fewer problems than coal
| or natural gas.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Life-years saved is a step in the right direction, but still
| the wrong metric to focus on in my opinion.
|
| Healthy life-years is a much better metric to optimize.
|
| If we get people living to 200, but 120 of those years are in a
| miserable and extremely debilitated state, I consider that a
| failure compared to average life span of 100, where only 5
| years are in an extremely debilitated state. i.e. getting 95
| good healthy years + 5 bad ones >>> 80 healthy years and 120
| bad ones.
|
| I suppose you can make an argument that extending your
| miserable years can help a person survive long enough to
| eventually take advantage of body and mind rejuvenation tech,
| so there is some point where absolute maximization of life-
| years might make sense.
| pydry wrote:
| This is QALYS. It's how the UK allocates health care
| spending.
|
| The UK allocates healthcare in a pretty humane, efficient
| and, ultimately, (whisper it!) communist manner.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > communist manner
|
| I think the word you are looking for is "collectivist".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That doesn't sound very communist to me. Moreover, while
| the British certainly prefer their healthcare system to the
| American system (and I probably agree), I've never heard
| them describe their system as _efficient_ (on the contrary,
| they seem to talk about it as a money pit).
| jfk13 wrote:
| The amazing thing is that despite being a money pit, it
| still manages to deliver better overall value than the US
| "system".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's not really amazing, it's just that not everything is
| in reference to the US system. When Brits comment about
| their system being a money pit, they aren't always
| thinking about the US system as their frame of reference.
| This seems to be a stumbling block for us Americans, or
| at least for Americans who are passionate about
| healthcare reform.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Experts regularly rate it as one of the most efficient
| health systems, so whoever you're talking to is ill
| informed. Probably listened to too much propaganda from
| people who want to adopt the widely hated and less
| efficient American system instead.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Experts regularly rate it as one of the most efficient
| health systems, so whoever you're talking to is ill
| informed.
|
| Maybe.
|
| > Probably listened to too much propaganda from people
| who want to adopt the widely hated and less efficient
| American system instead.
|
| Brits don't have much propaganda for the American system,
| and I doubt the British psyche frames every aspect of
| British life in reference to American life. That said,
| your zeal for the UK system and passionate distain for
| the American system are duly noted.
| pydry wrote:
| >Brits don't have much propaganda for the American
| system, and I doubt the British psyche frames every
| aspect of British life in reference to American life.
|
| The rest of the world actually pays more attention to
| america than america does to it.
|
| A lot of brits have family and friends in america. Theyre
| at least dimly aware of the insane medical bills and
| bankruptcies.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Hm, as a German, I shudder at the thought of potentially
| being dependant on a system that regularly breaks down
| during standard influenza waves in the winter [1] and
| that has fixed-amount budgets for individual sickness
| [2], so your tooth better splits during the first few
| months...
|
| Is the NHS better than the US system? Maybe. But it is by
| far inferior to the French, the Spanish or the German
| healthcare systems.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/24/winter-
| flu-c... [2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dentists-
| run-out-of-cash-...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I was talking specifically about efficiency:
|
| > Despite regular criticism, the National Health Service
| (NHS) is effective when comparing the government spend
| versus the outcomes of human development and lifespan.
| While critics point to Switzerland achieving the lowest
| death rates in Europe, or Germany having a consistently
| quality health care system, they don't compare these to
| the level of expenditure.
|
| > In fact, the UK has a higher life expectancy than
| Germany, with lower health care funding than in other
| large economies. The Swiss spend $3,079 more on health
| care per person than the UK, while Germany spends $1,993
| more per person than the UK. Critics can't ignore these
| massive differences in expenditure when debating the
| outcomes that the NHS provides. If the UK matched Swiss
| expenditure per person, an additional $206 billion would
| be spent on health care annually.
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| The correlation between the lifespan of a whole
| population and the dollar amounts spent by the government
| (which BTW probably shouldn't be compared across
| countries with different costs of living), is presumably
| pretty confounded.
| cinntaile wrote:
| You're comparing apples to oranges by using a different
| metric than the parent is using.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yeah, if people can throw around "deaths due to air pollution"
| it seems pretty legitimate to throw around "lives saved due to
| nuclear".
| runarberg wrote:
| It might seem legitimate but I disagree that it is. It
| needlessly promotes one alternative over unmentioned others,
| giving people the sense that the only mentioned alternative
| is the only sensible one.
|
| Take a version of the trolley problem for example. A trolley
| is heading towards group of people tied to the tracks. You
| have the option to pull a lever and divert the trolley to
| another pair of tracks, but it will hit an engineer working
| on those tracks. You state that pulling the lever saves all
| these lives, but unmentioned is the alternative to derail the
| trolley to a runaway zone which saves everybody.
|
| In this version of the trolley problem you can count the
| deaths due to inaction. Is it right however to shift the
| rhetoric and talk about how many lives saved due to one
| particular action without mentioning there was an
| alternative?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's an understandable impulse to assume that every article
| is framed in reference to the thing you're passionate
| about, but considering renewables weren't generally
| feasible (i.e., hydro and geothermal are older but not
| generally available for obvious reasons) until relatively
| recently (and even still, its feasibility for reliable base
| load generation is dubious), it's a certainty that this
| article is positioning nuclear relative to fossil fuels,
| not renewable energy. Even if renewables were available the
| whole time, it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the
| lives saved by nuclear even if renewables would save a few
| more (and to be very explicit, the renewables-only crowd
| reliably exaggerates the lives saved--some renewable energy
| sources kill more people than nuclear, even when accounting
| for disasters like Chernobyl).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| By the same logic, Hydropower has saved 3 Million lives
| in the last 50 years. Efficiency and insulation probably
| saved even more.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Sure. Did you think this was a counterpoint to my
| comment? Or what's the relevance?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| You said:
|
| > to be very explicit, the renewables-only crowd reliably
| exaggerates the lives saved--some renewable energy
| sources kill more people than nuclear, even when
| accounting for disasters like Chernobyl.
| runarberg wrote:
| One thing that always bugged me about the trolley problem
| is that it omits the question: "Why are all these people
| tied to the tracks? Who is responsible for tying them?
| Why am I responsible for pulling the lever, but not the
| criminal for tying the people? Or even the police for
| failing to stop the criminal?"
|
| This is the same sense that I get when I see people
| promoting nuclear as live saving technology. It is not on
| nuclear plants to save people from pollution, it is on
| the coal industry to stop polluting.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| If people were angels, there would be no need for
| government. Unfortunately, the fossil-fuel industry is
| going to pollute unless they're prevented by regulation.
| The industry selects for people who are willing to put
| profits over moral responsibility, so society can't rely
| on them not to pollute any more than we can rely on
| murderers not to murder.
| ouid wrote:
| The idea that people are simultaneously intelligent enough to
| understand the somewhat nuanced argument that nuclear power is
| safe, but also so stupid that "2 million lives saved" makes
| more sense to them than just a number of QALYs is, I think, an
| abject failure of science journalism. If you explain everything
| like everyone is 5, you reap what you sow.
| danbruc wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with the unit, QALY is quality-adjusted
| life year. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
| deltaonefour wrote:
| This type of logic also justifies the nuclear bomb, as
| development of the nuclear bomb is an inevitable parallel to
| nuclear power.
|
| Not against nuclear power, but as unwise as it is to ignore data,
| it's also unwise to blindly trust it without addressing non-
| quantifiable aspects of it. No other power source can do what it
| did to Chernobyl.
|
| Are we really saying 4 or 5 Chernobyl level melt downs are ok
| every decade or so because the overall lives saved are greater?
| Hard to say, and also hard to say whether new technology can
| adequately reduce the risk of nuclear power.
|
| My stance is that although we must move forward with nuclear if
| fusion doesn't pan out, we should nevertheless proceed with the
| utmost caution. I feel the attitude for nuclear power on HN is a
| little too enthusiastic. Tons of people are all in because of
| some statistical metrics.
|
| Just keep in mind that numerical metrics are an accurate
| viewpoint, but they are just one angle out of multitudes of
| metrics, many of which cannot be quantified.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| wonder how many millions died from cancer from radiation from all
| the nuclear/atomic weapon tests, and the 2 major nuclear power
| plant disasters (that we know of)
|
| curious if its still a numerical net win or a lose when you take
| that side into account
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| It rounds down to 0, counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The largest credible estimates for Chernobyl are in the
| hundreds or in the single-digit thousands. Estimates larger
| than that make significant methodological errors, like failing
| to account for better technologies for diagnosing certain types
| of cancer (especially thyroid cancer).
|
| For Fukushima, most estimates predict zero deaths due to
| radiation exposure besides the plant workers.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Why would you bundle nuclear weapons tests together with civil
| applications?
| almet wrote:
| It's frightening to see how the nuclear power debate is done
| nowadays.
|
| Yes, nuclear energy is generating less CO2 than some other forms
| of energy, but saying it's saving lives seems sketchy at best,
| and to be used as a "hammer argument". Because it's "saving
| lives", it's good.
|
| All energy producing less CO2 than the current mix is "saving
| lives" in a way. So yes, we should aim for less production of
| CO2. There is no question here.
|
| But I believe that in order to have a opinion on the matter we
| need to understand the whole picture.
|
| - *Waste* : we don't really know what to do with them. We pile
| them up and try to protect humans from them, but really we don't
| know what to do more than that.
|
| - *War risk* : if a plant is a military target, it might cause
| big trouble to the population around, and to the nature...
|
| - *Dismantling* : we still don't know how to dismantle a nuclear
| power plant and we don't know the energetic cost of doing so.
| Still, we have many nuclear plants that are coming to their end
| of lives, and we still don't know how to so properly.
|
| - *We don't have sufficient sources of uranium* : it seems that
| we lack some uranium in order to produce enough energy in a
| sustainable way.
|
| - Also, uranium extraction is complex geo-politically and seems
| to creates a geographic context keen to a war on resources,
| especially if we don't have enough.
|
| So, it might "save lives" wrt CO2 emissions, but that doesn't
| necessarily mean that it's a clean energy, nor that's the energy
| of the future, in my opinion.
| jopsen wrote:
| I don't think it's lower CO2 emissions that saves lives. It's
| likely reduced air pollution.
|
| Gas power plants probably have similar properties. (Not that I
| would advocate for gas)
|
| In any case, most the problems around nuclear are lack of
| political will and economies of scale.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > _Waste_ : we don 't really know what to do with them. We pile
| them up and try to protect humans from them, but really we
| don't know what to do more than that.
|
| We know exactly what to do with it: bury it underground, in
| bedrock, like what Finland is doing [1]. For countries like the
| USA that don't reprocess nuclear waste, it represents a future
| source of fuel so burying it is wasteful. There's also an
| incredibly small amount of waste: all nuclear waste from
| electricity generation in the USA fits in a volume the
| footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [2].
|
| > _War risk_ : if a plant is a military target, it might cause
| big trouble to the population around, and to the nature...
|
| The risk posed by nuclear power plants in wartime is
| drastically lower than the actual war itself. The vulnerability
| of power plants are also overstated: reactors are essentially
| inside of bunkers, protected by meters of reinforced concrete.
| The Ukraine war has demonstrated the resilience of nuclear
| plants: none have been breached.
|
| > _We don 't have sufficient sources of uranium_ : it seems
| that we lack some uranium in order to produce enough energy in
| a sustainable way.
|
| Existing terrestrial reserves are more than enough for
| centuries, or longer with reprocessing. Uranium seawater
| extraction affords an effectively unlimited supply [3].
|
| Nuclear power represents the only non-intermittent source of
| carbon-free energy besides geographically limited sources like
| geothermal or hydroelectric power. For that reason, it's going
| to be the backbone of most countries' decarbonization efforts
| unless a massive breakthrough in storage is made.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
|
| 2. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
| spent-...
|
| 3.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
| hans1729 wrote:
| The fact that your solution for long-term storage isn't even
| operational yet renders the confidence in your line of
| arguments ad absurdum. The fact that you try to defuse the
| GPs concerns with short-sentenced bullet points says it all -
| you're dismissive and strongly opinionated, while the
| concerned are asking very valid questions. That's bad
| intellectual culture, to say the least.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Finland has operated the VLJ repository in Olkiluoto since
| the 1990s [1]. The linked facility is an additional one
| being constructed (also in Olkiluoto) to accommodate future
| waste.
|
| There's also a site in Korea that's operational: https://en
| .m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolseong_Low_and_Intermediat...
|
| These examples are easily obtained via Google:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
|
| The risks posed by nuclear waste is vastly overstated. A
| little known fact: the USSR and the United Kingdom dumped
| most of their nuclear waste into the ocean until the 1990s
| [2]. There were no adverse affects observed due to this
| dumping. Yet we're worried about waste buried in bedrock?
|
| 1. https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/production/nuclearwastemanag
| emen...
|
| 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioa
| ctiv...
| ncmncm wrote:
| No one has ever extracted uranium from seawater. Why not?
| Because it _costs a lot more_. But nukes are already not
| economically competitive. Making the fuel cost more makes
| them even less attractive.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| From the linked article:
|
| > Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of
| the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small
| percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last
| twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10
| and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the
| availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make
| reactor fuel.
|
| > So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to
| below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable
| alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb
| of U3O8, it doesn't add more than a small fraction of a
| cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
|
| And yes, demonstrations of seawater extraction have been
| done. Again, this is covered in the article.
| danbruc wrote:
| What is the actual claim here? Nuclear power didn't prevent any
| deaths, after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or
| another. So it must be something like two million people would
| have died earlier without nuclear power, but by how much? Does it
| mean nuclear power saved the equivalent of two million average
| lifespans? Or would two million people more have died in coal
| mines?
| rob74 wrote:
| Well, he claims that these lives "would have been lost due to
| air pollution". The question is, what was the alternative
| considered for this study? Probably the worst kind of coal
| plant they could imagine, without any kind of filtration
| technology? Because I'm pretty sure that the number of lives
| lost in the last 50 years due to pollution from coal power
| plants in, let's say, Germany (Ok, West Germany before 1990) is
| pretty close to zero.
|
| Ok, there are of course other countries with less strict
| regulations, but then the question is this: would a country
| that is not capable to regulate its coal plant operators so
| that they don't kill people via pollution be capable to
| regulate its nuclear plant operators so that they operate their
| plants safely?
| danbruc wrote:
| The problem is that >>[...] lives that would have been lost
| due to air pollution.<< makes no sense. The closest
| meaningful literal interpretation would be, that the
| additional air pollution would have effect no one except two
| million people and those would have died earlier than without
| the additional air pollution. But that still doesn't tell
| much unless you specify how much earlier they would have
| died.
|
| In reality additional air pollution, on average, shortens
| everyone's life expectancy by a certain amount and that is a
| meaningful measure. So maybe the claim is supposed to mean
| that nuclear power saved about two million times the average
| life expectancy during the last 50 years which is very
| roughly one week for everyone. But it is not even clear if
| the number is supposed to be a global number or for a more
| specific area.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or
| another."
|
| Well then we should let killers out of prison.
| danbruc wrote:
| That's the point, whether the killers are in prison or free,
| everyone will die. But with the killers in freedom, people
| will have a decreased life expectancy and that decrease -
| simply on average or also taking into account the
| distribution - is a meaningful way to measure the impact.
|
| But that analogy is not really good, in case of the killers
| you can pretty much quantify how many people died because of
| them and therefore you could say not releasing the killers
| saved two million lives. [1] In case of some additional air
| pollution you are not able to say who died because of it, you
| can only observe a change in life expectancy.
|
| [1] But even that is only meaningful to a certain extend - if
| all the killers decided to only kill people seconds before
| they died from another reason, that two million lives saved
| really means two million times ten seconds saved.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Obviously when something is said to have "prevented deaths"
| this means early deaths from accidents/illness...
|
| Here, as is explained is the tweet, the claim is based on the
| reduction in air pollution.
| arlort wrote:
| A more interesting metric would maybe be years of life
| expectancy, but that's probably too much of a hassle to
| calculate for a metric which is relatively speaking useless
| danbruc wrote:
| Without further details that is not really helpful. If
| everyone died one week earlier because of additional air
| pollution, would that mean nuclear power saved everyone's
| life? And it certainly makes a difference whether the average
| loss of lifetime is a week or ten years.
| ncmncm wrote:
| If nukes prevented that many deaths, imagine how many solar +
| wind will prevent.
|
| The point here is that each $10B spent on new generating capacity
| displaces some amount of coal generation. If you spend your $10B
| building nukes, it displaces A million tons / year of coal
| output, if you spend $10B building renewables, it instead
| displaces B million tons.
|
| And B is _much larger_ than A, because a GW of solar + storage is
| _much cheaper_ than a GW of nuke.
|
| The corollary is that each $ diverted from renewables to nukes is
| not just harmful, but brings climate disaster nearer. Best, of
| course, would be to stop diverting money to fossils, but all we
| can do about that is build out renewables + storage as fast as we
| can. Renewables will be running at 100% at all times, and each
| kWh produced displaces a kWh of fossil generation.
|
| Displaced fossil generation in most markets is methane gas,
| because methane gas is cheaper and therefore preferred. _But!_
| anywhere coal is being used at all, they will prefer to cut coal
| output because cutting coal saves more money than cutting gas.
|
| A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get
| enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like
| nobody's business. Every last kWh of renewables + storage that
| can be put on the German grid, provided it is steady-enough
| output, displaces exactly that much coal.
|
| The cost of storage is plummeting even faster than of solar or
| wind ever did, so there is some short-term sense in delaying
| storage build-out until it is cheaper, so you can buy more of it.
| But in the big picture, building out storage at any price is
| much, much better than waiting.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| > a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke.
|
| Storage is far from a solved problem. There are many solutions
| for storage but we have yet to see one truly work at scale.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
| nicolaslem wrote:
| You probably misread my comment which was about energy
| storage.
| ncmncm wrote:
| False. Pumped hydro is already working at scale, and being
| built out as fast as capital can be scared up for it.
|
| Pumped hydro can be used in what may be a surprisingly larger
| range of places than usually imagined. First, it does not
| need an existing dam in an existing watershed. It doesn't
| need _any_ watershed, just a hill, ideally with a depression.
| A circular dam can even be built on top of a hill, and that
| is being done, although it is better if you don 't need to
| build all the sides.
|
| Pumped hydro can be used where there is no hill, if a deep
| cavity exists underground. Then, you pump water up and out of
| the cavity to charge it, and let it back in when you need
| power. Deep cavities exist all over the world. You can
| combine a hill reservoir and a deep-cavity reservoir to get
| enormously more energy storage.
|
| Pumped hydro has been demonstrated using a spherical tank
| deep under the ocean. There, you have a pump/turbine at the
| bottom of the tank, and you pump the water out to charge it.
| Amazingly, you don't need a pipe down to the tank, because
| water vapor fills vacated space in the tank. You just need a
| wire. The tank doesn't need to be very big if it is placed
| deep enough; the deeper it is, the more "head" you have.
|
| Liquifying air is extremely mature tech. So, storing
| liquified air is something already done at scale, for
| decades, and can absorb peak renewable power. Power is
| released by letting the gas vaporize through a turbine,
| warmed by ambient air, or even by heat pumped out in the
| first place, if banked. A 100 MW liquified-air storage
| facility is under construction in Chile.
|
| Synthetic ammonia is mature tech. A GW-scale ammonia
| electric-synthesizer plant is under construction in Norway.
| Anhydrous ammonia can be burned in a gas turbine.
|
| Synthetic hydrogen is mature tech, and being built out in
| volume. Efficiency will only ever increase, as better
| catalysts are discovered and put in service. You can store
| hydrogen in the same underground reservoirs where natural gas
| is stored today.
|
| Iron-air batteries are mature enough tech that mega-factories
| to produce iron-air batteries are already under construction,
| to deliver in volume in 2023.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > False. Pumped hydro is already working at scale, and
| being built out as fast as capital can be scared up for it.
|
| But not all countries have a suitable topology to build
| pumped hydro at a meaningful scale. And building everything
| from scratch isn't really feasible.
| EricE wrote:
| Where are you going to get these deep cavities? Where do
| you do pumped hyrdo in Las Vegas or Phoenix? Lots of solar,
| no economical way to store the excess right now.
|
| You list lots of technologies that are "mature" - but
| maturity isn't enough. They have to be economically viable,
| and until they are they will continue to exist mainly in
| posts like yours.
|
| In the meantime it's nuts we keep ignoring nuclear and
| continue to frame discussions around nuclear in the context
| of light water reactors, which are the worst kind of
| nuclear tech we have. There are other reactor designs that
| are far more practical, fail safe (do not require active
| cooling, coast naturally to a stop if interrupted, can
| actually burn what many erroneously refer to as nuclear
| waste, etc.)
|
| We should be doing ALL of the above, not just arguing about
| nuclear vs. some other tech. We need it ALL.
|
| China is charging forward with liquid thorium/molten salt
| reactors. If they establish the tech before we do - watch
| out. The industrial revolution forward saw the greatest
| expansion of wealth and democratization of power for
| humanity - and the bulk of that was unlocked by cheap
| energy! Energy is the greatest force multiplier and we are
| FAR to casual about just how important it is.
|
| Americans are starting to figure that out with the policy
| changes brought in by the recent administration - energy
| pricing affects all aspects of modern society and in pretty
| dramatic ways. Europe is going to find out if they keep
| poking the Russian bear too. Especially Germany after they
| turned off all their nuclear plants. Increase reliance on
| fossil fuels and then antagonize our greatest provider of
| them - bloody brilliant!
| ncmncm wrote:
| We can spend money on nukes, or spend the same money
| building out renewables and storage. The latter produces
| a great deal more power per dollar, and starts delivering
| immediately. Nukes cost a great deal more, and often
| produce exactly 0 kWh, ever; but in any case not for many
| years, and many billions over budget.
| [deleted]
| gregwebs wrote:
| There's still a significant environmental cost to renewables.
| Mining the materials for wind/solar and then to produce them
| (often this is powered by coal). And there's no real plan for
| how we will safely dispose of used solar panels. And there are
| land use issues with solar unless it is done on rooftops, which
| is much more expensive. We need nuclear and solar and wind and
| storage. One is not always better than the others. They all
| have trade offs and a role to play.
| ncmncm wrote:
| This is all false.
|
| Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets
| recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the
| tellurium get recycled.
|
| There is absolutely no land-use issue for solar: solar is
| compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also
| with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and
| operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and
| farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress)
| and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a _lot_ of pasture
| and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue
| stream and better yield.
|
| Wind, also, coexists neatly with pasture and farming.
|
| In any case, even were all solar farms single-use, the amount
| used up for that, for all our needs, would be less than is
| devoted to fossil fuel extraction today. So the land-use
| claim is simple FUD.
|
| Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables
| brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of
| renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and
| immediately, not ten or twenty years from now.
| gregwebs wrote:
| > Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of
| renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a
| dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of
| nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now.
|
| It's really odd to see these arguments being made right
| now. Germany is burning mostly fossil fuels now and and in
| an energy crisis because they decided to shut down all
| their nuclear and do renewables.
|
| We can install 50% of our new generation as solar and 10%
| as battery storage, but just as building a nuclear plant
| takes a decade, it would also take decades to replace our
| existing generation with solar and wind. The ability to
| produce solar panels is not going to increase by 10x
| overnight regardless of demand. Building solar and wind
| implies needing other sources of power for when the sun
| isn't shining in the wind is not blowing. If you don't
| build nuclear you build natural gas or keep using coal.
| Energy storage can help a lot, but we are maxing out our
| battery production as is. Maybe pumped hydro is the
| solution, but we aren't really building any changing this
| is going to take a lot of time as well.
|
| > solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots,
| but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts
| evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with
| pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing
| heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a
| lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an
| extra revenue stream and better yield
|
| Most of these scenarios will more than double the cost of a
| solar install compared to a utility solar farm and require
| heavy subsidies. I have seen the stories about mixing solar
| with farming in arid climates, and I am hopeful that can be
| adopted as a practice, but I think you are front-running
| what is just an experiment right now.
|
| > Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets
| recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the
| tellurium get recycled.
|
| Do you have any evidence that this is actually being done
| at scale now? Who do I can call to remove my solar panels
| and recycle them? For example, this article says "In the
| United States, there are only a few businesses specializing
| in the recycling of solar panels, so most panels that are
| submitted for recycling are being warehoused until a
| solution is found for the U.S." [1]
|
| [1] https://solarpowergenie.com/how-to-dispose-of-solar-
| panels-a...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Production of renewables has, in fact, increased by 10x
| several times over, and is still increasing as costs
| continue on down.
|
| Storage will not be in batteries, so it doesn't matter
| what production rate of batteries is. Huge amounts of
| pumped hydro are being built out right now. Bulk storage
| will be in synthetic chemicals, principally anhydrous
| ammonia and hydrogen, which besides being storable, are
| both readily transportable and valuable as industrial
| feedstock.
|
| > _implies needing other sources of power for when the
| sun isn 't shining in the wind is not blowing_
|
| The sun is _always_ shining somewhere, and the wind is
| _always_ blowing somewhere. So, you just need to be
| equipped to transport the energy from somewhere to here.
| That will probably be, most often, via high-voltage
| transmission line, but also via supertanker. Absent
| transmission lines, you only need to stockpile enough to
| hold out until a shipment arrives from the tropics.
|
| Recycling solar panels is not being done at scale because
| very few panels have aged out, yet. There is,
| furthermore, a ready market for panels with degraded
| output. In any case, even if they were just piled up
| somewhere, that is no more a problem than doing the same
| thing with eroded wind turbine blades. There is plenty of
| room to park as much of them as you like. They don't even
| need a roof overhead.
|
| When the CdTe panels finally age out, there will be a
| ready market for the scrap, because Cd and Te are
| valuable.
|
| Building solar over pasture does not, in fact,
| substantially increase installation cost. But it does
| eliminate the need to buy land to use. Siting over
| cropland will be done more for the benefit of the crops,
| while providing revenue year-round.
|
| But in any case there is absolutely no shortage of
| suitable land for solar, even without co-siting. So,
| farmers can take up solar or not, at their option. Many
| will, probably most won't.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| There are some counter arguments to what you said, but I agree
| for the most part.
|
| The exact numbers are below for anyone curious.
|
| The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per
| megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power
| comes in at $29-$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112
| and $189.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
| hedora wrote:
| Those prices don't include storage or over-provisioning for
| cloudy / still days.
|
| Nuclear is still likely cost effective at night, or in the
| rainy season. The only other carbon neutral technologies rely
| on special geographical features (geothermal, hydro).
|
| One way to think about energy moving forward is reducing the
| problem to heating houses with heat pumps during stormy
| weather, or at night.
|
| Solar, wind and batteries basically imply we'll have surplus
| energy in all other scenarios.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes and nuclear power also needs overprovisioning, storage
| etc (nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just
| generate constantly). The question than is would the cost
| for nuclear overprovisioning or solar/wind overprovisioning
| be higher.
|
| BTW there have been several publications that performed
| modelling on large integrated grids that found there would
| be very little overprovisioning needed if we have a Europe
| wide grid (it always blows somewhere). Fortunately, the
| European grid is moving in this direction anyway.
| Vaphell wrote:
| > nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just
| generate constantly
|
| nuh-uh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-
| following_power_plant#Nuc...
|
| Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are
| designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100%
| range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7]
| Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in
| load-following mode and so participate in the primary and
| secondary frequency control.
| raphaelj wrote:
| This is not only about being able to increase capacity.
|
| A nuclear plant is capital expensive, and it requires to
| be used as much as possible to be cost competitive.
| ncmncm wrote:
| If you operate them at 33%, that is equivalent to their
| power output costing 3x as much, because it costs the
| same to build and run, 33% or 100%. But their output is
| already not competitive at 100%. Power offered at more
| than 3x the going rate finds no bidders. Your debt
| service demands revenue from sales of 100% output.
|
| You have to take whatever you can get for the power, even
| if it doesn't cover operating cost, to pay down the
| capital you spent building. When it becomes clear that
| you cannot bring in enough to pay for operations and debt
| service, you have no choice but to declare bankruptcy.
|
| Of course, all this is foreseeable. So, you don't get the
| capital to build at all, because who wants to loan money
| that will predictably be defaulted on?
| raphaelj wrote:
| > BTW there have been several publications that performed
| modelling on large integrated grids that found there
| would be very little overprovisioning needed if we have a
| Europe wide grid (it always blows somewhere).
|
| I tried for a long time to find such publications (for or
| against renewables). Could you like a few of these?
| Thanks.
| HyperRational wrote:
| ncmncm wrote:
| Thing is, solar and wind cost are still trending sharply
| down, with no floor in sight. Nuke cost has gone up. So, no
| matter how badly nukes fare today, they will fare _much
| worse_ in ten years. And, storage cost is falling even
| faster than solar or wind ever did.
|
| So, provisioning 2x, 3x, 5x solar + storage will still be
| cheaper than nukes. Storage in the form of transportable
| liquids, even where round-trip efficiency is low, is very
| attractive because you don't need long-term storage if you
| can import what you need, in a pinch, from the tropics.
| And, whenever the tankage you do have is full, you may sell
| the extra production for industrial use. The world can
| absorb an effectively unlimited amount of hydrogen and
| ammonia overproduction.
| orangecat wrote:
| _A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get
| enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal
| like nobody 's business._
|
| Which follows their insane decision to shut down their nuclear
| plants.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Germany's need for natural gas to fire furnaces in people's
| houses would not be served by power from nuke plants.
| Tagbert wrote:
| But it would be if they were to switch to electric heat
| jopsen wrote:
| In the meantime it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that
| nuclear wasn't such a bad idea.
|
| We should just have doubled down on it 50 years ago.
|
| So much geopolitical trouble would have been avoided if bad
| actors in the middle east and Russia wasn't flushed with cash.
| this_user wrote:
| If nuclear power is such a great idea, then why has it never
| become the dominant technology globally despite many decades
| of lobbying from the nuclear industry? Technologies that are
| strictly superior tend to dominate in the long run. Yet,
| nuclear power has always remained a niche player even in
| countries where there was not a lot of strong, organised
| opposition.
|
| Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that nuclear
| power suffers from a lot of issues that have never properly
| been solved. And despite claims to the contrary, it is
| certainly not completely safe. The fact that dozens of
| Russian soldiers in Ukraine recently suffered radiation
| poisoning after digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion
| zone just highlights how long-lasting the environmental
| impact of nuclear accidents is. Admittedly, they should have
| known better, but how many exclusion zones like that can we
| afford to have globally from future nuclear accidents that
| are virtually guaranteed to happen eventually?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Because the government makes or breaks the commercial power
| industry, and we only have commercial nuclear power
| generation as a byproduct of weapons development, while
| environmental groups have been extremely successful using
| fear to make sure that new reactors are prohibitively
| expensive to build.
|
| I wonder what history will say about our environmental
| priorities. Will we be pilloried for doing more to harm the
| environment in a misguided attempt to save it?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > why has it never become the dominant technology globally
| despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry?
|
| Because the anti-nuclear lobby is more powerful? Also the
| oil/gas lobby has had people in pretty damn high positions
| affecting these things. Belgium had an ex-Gazprom
| consultant as their minister of energy. Who - to no-one's
| surprise - wanted to shut down nuclear plants and move to
| Russian gas while they build up renewables.
|
| Also the incident in Chernobyl was 99% a political problem,
| not a technical one. No-one dared to tell their superiors
| "no" or "I fucked up" or "I have a problem". This compared
| with the lack of notification caused most of the eventual
| deaths. Just telling everyone to take iodine for a few
| weeks and not eat any of the currently growing plants
| would've cut down the amount of cancers in the area by at
| least half.
| opo wrote:
| >...Also the incident in Chernobyl was 99% a political
| problem, not a technical one.
|
| The Chernobyl design was dangerous enough it would have
| been illegal to build in any other country.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Is always other's people fault
| 7952 wrote:
| But humans are irrational and politics does exist.
|
| Poor communication and politics is a bigger challenge
| than engineering or technology. And if you actually want
| to build something then you have to work within the
| constraints of society. Sometimes you have to pick C# or
| Java even though you know that Lisp is the best. Getting
| something built is more important than technical
| idealism.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear
| wasn't such a bad idea.
|
| And just 20.000 years to celebrate that the area will be as
| safe as it was before 1970.
|
| 180 years at least if we feel optimistic.
| cycomanic wrote:
| So who do you think is one of the largest providers of
| uranium in Europe?
|
| The arguments of Germany not being so dependent on Russia if
| they would have left their nuclear power plants running
| longer has been debunked several times. I believe this is
| largely nuclear power lobbyist taken advantage of the current
| situation. The EU is even more dependent on Uranium from
| Russia than gas. 20% of the natural Uranium and 26% of the
| enriched Uranium used in the EU comes from Russia and
| Kazastan [1]
|
| [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-
| eu-...
| kwere wrote:
| its easier to stock decades of energy supplies in uranium
| than in oil/gas
| Maakuth wrote:
| That is only because that's the cheapest source, compared
| to gas which is bought from where the pipelines are coming
| from.
|
| The amount of uranium needed for power plants is fairly
| small, it can be transported from wherever and there's
| plenty available from Canada, Australia and South Africa
| for example. There are potential mines in continental
| Europe too, it is a matter of cost and politics to choose
| where to source it from.
| ineedasername wrote:
| The current problem for renewables is storage for times when
| solar/wind aren't producing. There's some promising work being
| done there, but nuclear power is existing tech that can fill
| that gap. The fastest path off carbon should have both
| renewable and nuclear investments working in paralll.
|
| Too much NIMBY, too much irrational fear if it, so it's
| unlikely to happen in the US. The current Russian/Ukraine war
| makes me wonder if European countries might reconsider their
| stance on it. It's not too late, for plants scheduled to be
| shutdown 2+ years from now, to make plans to keep them online.
| It also gives them motivation to build new ones, which France
| announced it would do just this past February. Perhaps the
| biggest challenge for countries that haven't built one in a few
| decades is experienced engineers. The US for example may have
| people experienced with operating them, but probably not
| building them at scale. France's original Messmer Plan shows
| it's possibly to ramp up relatively quickly though.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Storage just needs to be built out. It takes time to build
| out.
|
| But _nowhere near_ as much time as it would take to build out
| nukes.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I'm not aware of _good_ storage options that scale to that
| level. Lithium batteries might conceivably do it but we can
| barely make enough to supply the EV market And if the Chevy
| Bolt is any indicator, we need to be extremely careful when
| we build massive novel battery storage systems like this.
| The few sites I 'm aware of that are trying this are still
| only, at maximum charge, able to supply 4-6 hours of power
| for their location, and they're the largest in the world.
|
| If getting off carbon is an existential threat, there's no
| reason that nuclear shouldn't be part of the solution in
| getting us there faster.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Obviously batteries are not right for utility storage.
| Even mentioning batteries in this context means you are
| not seriously engaged. If you really think we don't have
| good storage options that scale, you just haven't been
| paying attention.
|
| Building nukes does not get us there faster, because it
| takes many years to even start displacing fossil fuels,
| and then it costs so much you get only a small fraction
| of the power renewables would produce--provided it ends
| up producing any power at all, which they often do not.
| hans1729 wrote:
| ASK HN: does anyone familiar with the matter have access to
| robust predictive models wrt the impact on health of the expected
| problems with long-term storage of nuclear waste?
|
| For the german/french speaking part of the audience, ARTE
| recently uploaded an insightful documentation on the state of
| nuclear facilities in France (which I found very sobering, to say
| the least): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXrL4tPMoM -- while
| that is surely not ARTEs best piece and you get an idea of the
| redactions opinion through editorialization, it's _definitely_ a
| recommended watch. The link points to the german version.
|
| Bottom lines:
|
| - nuclear power is not as transparent about the existing impact
| on the environment as one would think. for example, rivers even
| in the middle of europe are regularly contaminated with
| "negligible" contaminants, where what is defined as "negligible"
| is _not only intransparent, but not publicly known and censored
| in cases of information-requests, with the given reason being
| raison d'etre of the state (!)_
|
| - the storage-situation is not only not robust (not a single long
| term storage concept actually proved viable, globally), but
| _much_ worse than I 'd have anticipated
|
| [...] those are the points that immediately come to mind.
|
| My point here is: yes, great, we need to reduce the burden on the
| environment as much as possible, and _if_ nuclear is the way to
| go, then please, let's do that. But the unwillingness and lack of
| competence with regards to the long-term potentials for problems
| _will_ bite us, and it will do so in more than one way, and I 'm
| very concerned because of it. If the situation in central europe
| is as questionable as ARTE illuminates, I'm not sure I want to
| know how bad it is in regions with less political transparency.
| Hence the initial questions, primarily: who has access to such
| models?
| Archelaos wrote:
| Such statements like "measure x prevented/caused n deaths" should
| generally be considered highly dubious unless applied to a very
| narrow context (such as a randomized double blind placebo control
| study, etc.).
|
| There is nothing that can really prevent death; everyone will die
| sooner or later. So speaking of "preventing/causing death" is an
| abbreviated way of speaking. It makes most sense when it is about
| "immediate death", but the longer it takes for a cause to develop
| its presumed effect, the less the effect can be solely attributed
| to this particular cause. It then makes no real sense to just
| count the numbers of deaths related to a particular cause, if it
| is only one of an actually unquantifiable number of contributory
| causes.
|
| But analysing the structure of the statement closer, it becomes
| even more dubious, because (after applying some small
| interpretative clarifications) it follows the basic structure:
| "measure x prevented n of d, because it has an effect e that is
| (indirectly!)[1] somehow correlated with d". To evaluate the
| extent to which such a claim could probably be valid would
| require a considerable amount of background information. Just
| presenting it as a statement without any substantial discussion
| is not enlighting at all, but just polarizes the audience: if the
| statement fits into someone's already established belief system
| it is readily accepted at truth, and if it contradicts someone's
| belief system it is instantly rejected. There is no chance to
| learn anything from it.
|
| [1] In the case of hypercapnia, CO2 can directly affect health,
| but I do not think that was the point of the statement.
| jbirer wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| There was 1 confirmed radiation death at Fukushima and more
| people died from the evacuation than the accident. The exposure
| to radiation in the exclusion zone was very low, probably too
| low to cause any excess cancer in the generally elderly
| population there.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| By 2018 more than 3700 people have died in relation to the
| evacuation (there's a technical criterion for this, basically
| death materially brought on by the worsened living conditions
| or issues during evacuation). IIRC there are no increased
| cancer rates among the population. The majority of evacuated
| people have not returned to their homes. The social and
| mental health impact of the evacuation was and is massive.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well, there were no deaths because of the contamination in
| the contaminated area, because the contaminated area was
| evacuated. D'uh...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| People weren't evacuated immediately, which is the whole
| point. Your dismissiveness shows that you aren't very
| familiar with the particulars of the accident. There was a
| projection at the time that there would be a short term
| spike in thyroid cancer among that population, which hasn't
| materialized. In fact radiation levels are so low in the
| area that the wisdom of the evacuation is very much up for
| debate. Of people evacuated 98% were exposed to no more
| than a 5 mSv/yr dose. The current ambient dose rate is 3
| mSv/yr in the area which is slightly less than you'd
| receive visiting Finland. Flying from NY to Fukushima would
| expose you to a 9 mSv/yr dose.
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addition
| mpweiher wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Nuclear power has a lot of connections to the nuclear arms
| industry, and as such is highly secretive. Many nuclear reactors
| were in fact to make bomb fissile material, with power generation
| as a side effect. The disposal problem is often covered in a veil
| of secrecy, eg when it pertains to weapons.
|
| This is why debating these issues, which I've looked at my whole
| life, can be troublesome. We just don't have all the facts!
|
| https://cnduk.org/resources/links-nuclear-power-nuclear-weap...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The VAST majority of reactors ever built were not built to
| generate fissile material for weapons, and the VAST majority of
| nuclear weapons were built using centrifuge facilities which
| are cheaper to build and simpler in some respects to operate.
| Reactors have in fact been used to dispose of material from
| weapons. Civilian disposal plans in the west are all a matter
| of public record and there have been reams of paper generated
| about the topic.
|
| Yes, the weapons part is to some extent secretive, but the
| UNODA oversees disarmament so there is some multinational
| transparency.
| pydry wrote:
| Keeping a nuclear industry around is still a good way to keep
| a lid on nuclear arsenal costs. There are supply chain
| efficiencies, a pipeline of necessary skills, etc.
|
| It's just a ridiculously expensive way to generate green
| energy.
|
| When Iran builds nuclear reactors for "100% peaceful non
| military purposes" suddenly the western media can see through
| the ruse and understands all this.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Keeping a nuclear industry around is still a good way to
| keep a lid on nuclear arsenal costs.
|
| No it isn't. We aren't really building new weapons, we're
| just maintaining the ones we have. There shouldn't be any
| unique supply chain overlap. There's also transparently
| budget under DOD in the US for maintaining the nuclear
| arsenal. The CBO publishes the numbers, $643 billion over
| the next 10 years [1]. As for the skills, the military just
| trains people. A large number of civilian operators were
| trained by the military, not the other way around.
|
| Iran is building centrifuges which it claims are for
| medical isotopes and later some reactors or scientific
| purposes. They've allowed in inspectors at various points
| and the western press generally, but cautiously accepts
| this as the truth. The problem is that they have the
| ability to enrich further to bomb grade material. The whole
| original deal was about getting them to give up enrichment
| and accept material at enrichment level sufficient for
| energy and medicine from France. That fell apart and they
| are enriching material again themselves.
|
| > It's just a ridiculously expensive way to generate green
| energy.
|
| If coal were regulated like nuclear energy it would be far
| more expensive due to fuel costs. If you had to dispose of
| lithium such that it couldn't leak for more than 10k years
| batteries would be far more expensive. If we didn't changes
| the regulations every few years and appoint anti-nuclear
| activists to run the NRC, it would be much cheaper. But
| yes, nuclear is expensive. It's also incredibly safe, 0
| carbon, and produces no air pollution. It also provides
| base load energy which other 0 carbon sources can't do yet.
|
| You're just spreading FUD.
|
| [1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57240#:~:text=If%20carr
| ied%2....
| ncmncm wrote:
| Coal is on its way out, so there is absolutely no point
| in comparing to coal, going forward. The only sensible
| cost comparisons to make today are with natural gas and
| renewables; and tomorrow renewables only.
| pydry wrote:
| >No it isn't. We aren't really building new weapons,
| we're just maintaining the ones we have... $643 billion
| over the next 10 years
|
| It's the opinion of the (pro nuclear) ex energy secretary
| Ernest J Moniz: https://web.archive.org/web/2018063022095
| 7/https://static1.s...
|
| >$643 billion over the next 10 years
|
| You do see how that isn't exactly cheap, right? And how
| it would be a problem if it ballooned over a trillion or
| more?
|
| >If coal were regulated like nuclear energy
|
| The fact you're comparing nuclear to the fastest
| disappearing form of unprofitable dirty energy kind of
| says it all, really.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > It's the opinion of the (pro nuclear) ex energy
| secretary Ernest J Moniz
|
| He's talking about carbon emissions and non-proliferation
| goals which involves decommissioning weapons. There's 1
| paragraph in the whole 38 page document about needing a
| reactor to produce tritium domestically to keep weapons
| functional until universal disarmament. You don't need
| anything more than a research reactor for that, and the
| DOD could probably just build one if they wanted to.
|
| Trying to connect civilian nuclear to weapons is FUD.
|
| > You do see how that isn't exactly cheap, right?
|
| I literally never commented on that. I was refuting your
| claim that it was a hidden, which it demonstrably is not.
| You completely made up that "Keeping a nuclear industry
| around is still a good way to keep a lid on nuclear
| arsenal costs." That is provably false, as demonstrated
| by the CBO publishing the costs.
|
| > The fact you're comparing nuclear to the fastest
| disappearing form of unprofitable dirty energy kind of
| says it all, really.
|
| You could say the same thing about natural gas, nickel
| mining, lithium mining, and on and on. Nuclear mine
| tailings are mitigated to the point that they are less
| radioactive than the background levels of the areas in
| which they are found. If dams had the kind of regulator
| scrutiny that nuclear receives, none would ever be built
| especially near centers of population.
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