[HN Gopher] Visiting the most expensive nuclear station
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Visiting the most expensive nuclear station
Author : dukeyukey
Score : 25 points
Date : 2024-05-02 10:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.samdumitriu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.samdumitriu.com)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > Nuclear, of course, is the safest form of power generation
| there is.
|
| It's odd that one person would make a claim, then link to data
| that shows it not to be true.
|
| Even odder, I've seen this done repeatedly with the same claim.
| Is it intentional? Some kind of collective mental blindspot?
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| This is the huge astroturfing here and on reddit from "nuclear-
| bros". I've seen several medium pieces and articles that claim
| that less than 100 people died because of Chernobyl and that
| nuclear should be build more because it's the best.
|
| Let's ignore that likely 9000 people will die from cancer
| because of this accident (WHO 2006 study) and make a big green
| sticker on every reactor that it's safe (until it isn't).
|
| Fact is: Renewables are cheaper and can make up a large part of
| the grid when properly integrated. No need for new expensive
| and unpopular nuclear.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Renewables are cheaper and can make up a large part of the
| grid when properly integrated. No need for new expensive and
| unpopular nuclear_
|
| They're also variable, including--as we're now learning--over
| long-ish timescales [1]. Developing all options is smart.
| Other countries seem to be able to deploy APT1000s just fine;
| SMRs should also receive more funding.
|
| [1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/us-wind-power-drop-2023
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Recent sodium battery developments might make renewable
| variability a moot point though. I want to support
| moonshots and "all options," but cost management is also
| important (capital is finite if we're not going to do MMT).
| How do you know when to stop throwing good money after bad?
| When does experimentation turn into pork? Hard to solve for
| imho, but I am curious what people smarter than me think.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248627
| HPsquared wrote:
| Recent reactor developments can make nuclear accidents a
| moot point also. If new tech is allowed..
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yes, but never cheap enough. Until nuclear can beat
| renewables and batteries on cost, _shrug_.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-
| april...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _but never cheap enough_
|
| Sure, if you ignore reliability the less-reliable options
| will look better. Going all in on solar and wind
| basically guarantees fifty years or more for at least one
| fossil fuel, gas in America and Europe and probably coal
| in Asia.
|
| To be clear, I think we should be going full throttle on
| solar and wind. But we should also be building nuclear
| reactors and investing heavily in SMRs; if we can't do
| that due to decades of nuclear fearmongering having
| gutted our industry, we should import them from China.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> this accident_
|
| If you mean Chernobyl, that is not representative of _any_
| reactor at all that any country except the Soviet Union ever
| built or ever will build. Let alone commercial power reactors
| trying to compete in today 's market. Arguments against
| commercial nuclear power based on anything about Chernobyl
| are FUD.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > that less than 100 people died because of ...
|
| Such claims are usually meaningless if the deaths are not
| immediate, because the causes that contribute to a person's
| death are manifold.
|
| If you smoked a single cigarette in your life, this single
| cigarette might change something in a single cell in your
| lunges, which gives you cancer and you die from it a couple
| of years later. You just will never know. It is possible. But
| how likely is it?
|
| If a single beam from a radioactive decaying atom from
| Chernobyl hits a single cell of you, this might give you
| cancer and you die from it a couple of years later. You just
| will never know. It is possible. But how likely is it?
|
| If you smoked a single cigarette in your life and were hit by
| a single beam from a radioactive decaying atom from
| Chernobyl, and die a couple of years later from cancer: what
| killed you? The cigarette, Chernobyl, something else?
|
| Instead of talking about absoluted numbers here, we should
| talk about statistics, in other words: reduced life-
| expectancies. Aside of immediate casualties, this is the
| really reputable number of interest. So the question is: To
| what extent have how many people been exposed (so far and
| into the future) to radioactivity from Chernobyl and by how
| much did (and will) their life expectancy decrease in each
| case (depending on their rate of exposure)?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's funny. I suppose Rank Order is not that useful when the
| top two ranks are very similar. The linked data is Nuclear 0.03
| deaths / Solar 0.02 deaths.
|
| But we shouldn't use the rank order claim then haha. In fact,
| there's not that much utility to it consider 1,2,3 are in one
| class and then 4 is two orders of magnitude higher, and then 7
| and 8 are one more magnitude higher.
| mrtracy wrote:
| Nuclear actually is safe by pure incident metrics, even when
| counting higher casualty estimates for Chernobyl.
|
| The safety, of course, is not intrinsic: nuclear material is
| obviously very dangerous, especially in a running reactor.
|
| The safety record stems from the considerable regulation around
| building and operating these reactors, _and_ the fact that the
| reactor has so little external surface area once running:
|
| * A very small fuel acquisition operation in comparison to
| fossil fuels.
|
| * Likewise, no externally released pollution outside of
| _accidents_ , which is rare.
|
| * sites chosen for construction are picked for their stability,
| and are heavily engineered, meaning you also don't have the
| _installation worksite deaths_ which run up numbers for wind
| and solar.
|
| But again, this is only realized if the operational safety
| onsite is maintained. That said, it's not the only dangerous
| power generation site: dammed hydroelectric can be a
| considerable danger depending on what is downstream.
|
| In general, I think nuclear would be very popular if natural
| gas and solar were not available; however, the costs to keep it
| safe are too high for it to be economical compared to those two
| sources.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Generally I consider nuclear to be an incredible potential,
| hugely capable.
|
| But civilizationally I don't see us as being able to _keep
| doing the right thing_ with it. If windmills mess up and come
| crashing down in 20 years, there 's negative impact, but
| locally and short term. If nuclear waste of contaminated
| decommissioned sites have a particularly bad day in 300
| years, it could cause massive long term widescale problems
| for potentially centuries.
|
| I want this to be something that governments get behind and
| do, want it to be a high priority that we put beyond the
| whims of the market. I want better realistic views of pricing
| in & maintaining the very very _very_ long lived negative
| externalities. I want intense research in what makes good
| long term sense, what 's sustainable.
|
| Nuclear has so much potential, is so compelling to me. But I
| do not see a species organized or driven enough to meet with
| the very long lived complexities and challenges, do not see
| the appetite to do the job extremely well. We are _very_ safe
| about it, but ultimately our scope is short cheap reactors,
| not doing nuclear in a big lasting fashion, at scale to
| justify figuring out systematically.
|
| Breeder reactors remain this fancy expensive thing we once
| did, but don't do again. Cancellation of Integral Fast
| Reactor & failure to make a PRISM derivative is a really sad
| failure to mature; here we had a much cheaper safer
| proloferation-safe way to care for the whole nuclear
| lifecycle, and we never could muster the try, to see how we
| might do better. What few reactors that are getting built
| tend towards unambitious fuel-inefficient simple designs,
| that saddle us with long term problems.
|
| Edit: -2? What nonsense. Say something! I spent the effort to
| lay out a view & case, have some decency, downvote-squad;
| contribute back.
| ern wrote:
| Article reads as overly dismissive of safety measures as well.
| Seems to be implying that measures to prevent construction
| workplace accidents are driving the cost up, for example.
| gjm11 wrote:
| The thing linked to doesn't show it not to be true. It gives
| point estimates of 0.03 deaths per TWh for nuclear and 0.02
| deaths per TWh for solar (and higher figures for everything
| else) and says "the uncertainties around these values mean they
| are likely to overlap".
|
| So it indeed doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is true,
| and if forced to guess on the basis of the numbers there you'd
| do best to guess that actually it's second-safest after solar,
| but it also doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is false"
| and a more accurate description would be "wind, nuclear and
| solar are all comparable to one another, and all much much much
| safer than any fossil fuels, there probably isn't that much
| difference between them, and we don't really have the data to
| tell what order they should go in".
|
| (Some slightly more concrete numbers: total electricity
| generation of the US is about 4000 TWh, so those figures
| suggest an average of about 120 deaths per year if that were
| all nuclear and about 90 deaths per year if it were all solar.
| For comparison, according to
| https://www.statista.com/chart/6024/causes-of-death-in-the-u...
| these are on the same order of magnitude as "deaths by
| lawnmower" and "deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation".)
|
| It would probably have been better to say something like "the
| safest, along with solar and wind power". But everything we
| know is perfectly compatible with nuclear in fact being the
| safest, or the second safest, or the third safest.
| llsf wrote:
| You are right, th link shows that nuclear is the safest right
| after solar, if you count dead/Terawatt-hour. 0.03 for nuclear
| and 0.02 for solar.
|
| Solar is still very small (and intermittent) when it comes to
| production, for instance, less than 2% for US (source: https://
| flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...). This
| single new UK nuclear power plant alone would account for 7% of
| UK production according to the article.
| nullhole wrote:
| > more than four times more expensive on a pound-for-megawatt
| basis
|
| oh, the units people use today :)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Pounds sterling, Britain's currency.
| nullhole wrote:
| I know, thus the smiley :)
| resolutebat wrote:
| > _To produce as much electricity with solar as Hinkley Point C
| would use a plot of land almost fifty times bigger than Hyde
| Park._
|
| Hyde Park is about 1.4 km2, so that would be 70 km2, which even
| in a dense country like the UK is not _that_ much. It seems like
| a no-brainer to go for solar instead.
| flgb wrote:
| Even China, who nuclear advocates point to as "getting it
| right" look like they realize this now ..
| https://johnmenadue.com/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-the-s...
| pretendgeneer wrote:
| One thing I found out recently found out about nuclear that
| really shuts down home "great" it is as a fix for climate change
| is how limited fuel is for it.
|
| Some numbers
|
| Nuclear currently uses about 60,000 tonnes per year of uranium
| [1] Nuclear is about 10% of electricity, 4% of energy as a whole
| [2] There is about 8,000,000 tonnes of uranium reserves world
| wide [3]
|
| For a 100% of current electricity demand by nuclear that's 13
| years of fuel,
|
| For 100% of energy (e.g. gas heaters replaced by electric powered
| by nuclear) that's 5 years of fuel.
|
| Doesn't look so great when you do the math.
|
| [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-symposium-
| examines...
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
| lazide wrote:
| It's BS. There are far greater uranium reserves, even with
| minimal exploration, and most fuel can actually continue being
| used if desired.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| The equipment for recycling used-up fuel rods is the same for
| creating nuclear weapon payloads. Governments struggle
| stomaching proliferation risk in the name of fuel efficiency.
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