For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel power plants have killed exponentially more people through pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined – it's just not something that happens all at once so it doesn't seem like a big deal to most people.
We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.
> Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this comparison – it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the 'dirtiest' forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas.
Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage.
However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone? I know that mining/drilling are incredibly damaging to the environment, but theoretically work is done to mitigate/restore the areas. Of course, they're essentially turning the entire planet (or large, currently-inhabited swaths of it anyway) into an exclusion zone, but unfortunately there is another cognitive bias humans have where we under-rate long-term risks.
I've been a nuclear skeptic, but gradually I'm coming around to it. At this point the main questions I have are whether it can be done cheap enough. It seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point, so maybe green policies should focus on subsidizing storage and nuclear instead?
I'm all for nuclear but the safety record talk always seems disingenuous or at least obtuse to me when the stats focus on day to day operations but the fears are about worst case scenarios.
I also feel like the industry would do better if it rallied behind specific new technologies so politicians could rally behind molten salt reactors (or what have you) and placate fears about "old nuclear" designs.
I wish nuclear advocates would stop selectively quoting to try to hide things. Almost no one wants to continue with fossil fuels, and instead the competition is renewable. "This comparison" mentioned in that quote doesn't include renewables (it was from 2007) but from the very same page, in the very next section:
> Modern renewables are about as safe as nuclear energy
The problem with nuclear isn't whether you can build a safe plant, you can.
The problem with nuclear is all the assumptions under which a perfectly safe plant is actually perfectly safe (proper maintenance, training, etc.).
I don't believe those assumptions always hold in practice. At the end of the day, these plants are operated by people, and private companies, who have many interests beyond keeping the plant "perfectly safe" (like making money) and also operate under constraints that prevent them from actually keeping the plant "perfectly safe" even if they wanted to (like lack of money).
The problem with nuclear isn't technological, but social. It allows a relatively small bunch of shitty people and companies to cause tremendous amounts of devastation.
Remove people from the "nuclear energy safety equation" and I'm all in with nuclear. Telling me that new plants are perfectly safe as long as people and private companies don't do shit, reads like these plants aren't safe at all to me.
---
And this is without taking into account all the unknown unknowns, like all the natural disasters we can't even predict or imagine, which all plant designs just assume cannot happen.
Just claiming that modern nuclear plants are safe, for all potential world states is BS, because nobody can imagine, much less know, what all those potential world states are.
Sure coal kills people, but what makes many think its safer than nuclear is that we understand how that happens, we understand where coal goes.
> We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.
I hope not. Current nuclear technologies are outrageously expensive. It made sense in the 50's-70's only because it was being effectively subsidized by the defense industry who needed the excess breeder capacity for bombs.
It's safe. It's fine. It's good that the democrats have dropped what was always effectively a luddite plank from their platform. But it's not going to save us absent some really disruptive new technology.
Right now we should be putting our electricity investment into straightforward, cheap and easily scaled renewables. That is what is going to replace coal and gas in the short term.
Long term? Fine. If nuclear can make the balance sheet work then let's do that. If not, meh.
> For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much
> safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel
> power plants have killed exponentially more people through
> pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined
I think that nuclear waste will be the next big problem with nuclear energy, with storing it safely for the thousands of years required just being a problem we're kicking down the road. It only needs to leak into the water supplies and suddenly you have a disaster on a scale never seen before (human & animal consumption, contaminated crops and land, etc).
To be honest, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro are really the way forwards. I would favour solar and wind though, as a failure to invest in infrastructure just means they break - whilst a failure to invest in hydro has some very serious consequences (dam collapse, etc).
In the next 10 years or so I want to see solar panels being recycled if they really are to play a large put of our future energy production. Otherwise there is always the method of pointing mirror arrays at a single spot to heat water.
Nuclear power is not safe and never will be. This ship sailed with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
They are repeating that nuclear plants are safe now. "Safe" of course if some conditions meet. If your car is a parking your probability of dying in a car crash is really low, this is obvious. What really counts is their behaviour in hard times. "If all go well, and we have luck, and everybody behaves, nuclear is safe" is not enough.
A natural disaster, a war, terrorism, another lunatic, sadistic, mentally ill or a psycho reaching power (look around)... and your rainbow-safe-dream will explode into a thousand pieces. And then, what?
Talk me about what is your plan B in THAT conditions.
Hide under the rug and deny all as in the last 50 years?
I do not know the current data, but previously the catastrophy rate was by design below 1 in 10000 years. But this is per plant, we have about 400 plants, so 1 catastrophy per 25 years on average; this values agrees with experiment.
About your statistics: that it is safer was pure luck. In the fukushima incident there were depending on the season two prevalent wind direction either towards the ocean or towards Tokyo. So with a high chance in the range around 50% Tokyo would have been to be evacuated. If anybody has better numbers let me know.
To me not counting this in, is like crossing the street with eye closed and arguing it if not hit so far so good with dismissing close encounters.
> Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this comparison – it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the 'dirtiest' forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas.
If I look at the graph to the right and do the division, the numbers don't come out the same as what is quoted. This may have to do with the abominable "x times fewer than y" that makes no sense and likely has a different meaning for every reader.
It most definitely is. But the pace of nuclear development in India slowed to a crawl (no new projects) ever since it started an insurance pool with corporate liability.
By far the safest, if you rely on articles written by the nuclear industry; specifically references 31 and 32 which estimate the fatalities from nuclear energy, in the linked articles primary source, https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/full....
Look, I'm a stan for LFTR and thorium reactors, but the nuclear energy industry is full of old PWR reactors on life support that are dangerous and meltdown prone.
But Fukushima happened, and unfortunately the management attitudes in TEPCO are not unique to that company.
The fact is that solar/wind is currently running away from everything else. I believe new natural gas plants can't compete with solar/wind, and that means installed gas plants are in their crosshairs just like coal plants.
Notice your article leaves out solar/wind.
"We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power."
We have Hyman G. Rickover, Admiral in the US Navy to thank for steering nuclear energy research away from thorium to uranium.
He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles.
If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along.
Seems rather important to not ignore the violence monopoly. Quit paying it too much serious attention for too long and it gets chippy.
Let’s hope this is PTSD from a generation that was forced to go through hell, often for no reason, and it can normalize out. So long as we live long enough to test that hypothesis.
On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.
> We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.
I wish we could discuss such topics without the much-abused climate scare argument. Most debatable, technology-related issues have many other implications worth taking into account. Like grid stability, cost of energy etc. in this case.
With a failure rate of 1% for commercial reactors, calling something 'safe' is - frankly - ridiculous.
You wouldn't fly planes if they had that failure rate.
It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers!
What we do have is: Uninhabitable regions, radioactive boars decades after Chernobyl roaming Bavaria (google it), countless cases of cancer, highly radioactive waste we don't know what to do with, billions and billions of tax payer dollars spent on clean-ups, not just for accidents, but for decommissioning plants, plants on fault lines that are ticking time bombs.
Nuclear power plants rank first in the amount of economic damage done.
And you are seriously calling for mass adoption?
The engineers and scientists who built Fukushima and Chernobyl thought: Yup, perfectly safe and clean.
It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents.
We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap.
All it would take is the political will to do so.
The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.
First endorsement in 48 years? I'm pretty sure this qualifies as an endorsement:
> As detailed in the Climate Action Plan, President Obama is committed to using every appropriate tool to combat climate change. Nuclear power, which in 2014 generated about 60 percent of carbon-free electricity in the United States, continues to play a major role in efforts to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector. As America leads the global transition to a low-carbon economy, the continued development of new and advanced nuclear technologies along with support for currently operating nuclear power plants is an important component of our clean energy strategy. Investing in the safe and secure development of nuclear power also helps advance other vital policy objectives in the national interest, such as maintaining economic competitiveness and job creation, as well as enhancing nuclear nonproliferation efforts, nuclear safety and security, and energy security.
>
> The President’s FY 2016 Budget includes more than $900 million for the Department of Energy (DOE) to support the U.S. civilian nuclear energy sector by leading federal research, development, and demonstration efforts in nuclear energy technologies, ranging from power generation, safety, hybrid energy systems, and security technologies, among other things. DOE also supports the deployment of these technologies with $12.5 billion in remaining loan guarantee authority for advanced nuclear projects through Title 17. DOE’s investments in nuclear energy help secure the three strategic objectives that are foundational to our nation’s energy system: energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental responsibility.
First endorsement in the official party platform, which is a specific document released by the parties every 4 years (except this year for Republicans who re-adopted their 2016 platform with no changes...).
I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster.
Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $100s of billions for cleanup), environmental damage, and health impacts are still less than wind or solar, I’m all for it, but pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”
> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe.
Nuclear power is relatively safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Rooftop solar actually has a surprisingly high fatality rate from installers falling off of roofs! Fossil fuels release horrible byproducts into the atmosphere, hydro sometimes causes floods...everything has drawbacks.
> Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events
Quite right. Analysis of all power options should take into account black swan events (eg, a hydro dam failure taking out a city), but they should also do the reverse, and take into account the normal risks of operations. A coal power plant is subject to any particularly terrible catastrophic failure modes, but every day it operates it spews out a lot of carcinogens.
Imagine a system that kills 5k people once every 20 years, versus a system that kills 1 person a day. You end up with scary headlines about the first one, but the second one kills significantly more people over time.
> pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”
The pro-nuclear arguments I have seen are much more conservative than that. They point out, correctly, that even counting Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear energy is relatively safe. If the future ends up safer than the past that would be a bonus, but the past has been shockingly safe.
Coal kills around 13k people every single year in the US alone. How many people have died due to nuclear power in the US in the entire history of nuclear energy?
Yes, do that. And you'll find that the meltdown and evacuations killed fewer people than did shutting down all of Japan's nuclear plants afterward (PDF: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf). In other words, nuclear power comes out ahead even if you assume there will be a Fukushima-class disaster every 10 years, which is absurdly pessimistic.
Yes, and even when you consider those costs, it pales in comparison to the lives lost and negative externalities of coal, oil, and gas usage. These include climate change, particulate pollution, environmental release of mercury, devastation of vast swaths of the environment worldwide, and other factors that may be hard to quantify but negatively impactful.
No one likes to talk about it however the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented with current technology but it was cheaper in the short term not to. Even IF you could have a super safe design a huge part of the problem was the lack of maintenance and actually implementing the safety designs they had. [1]
Why would anyone trust these companies to actually do what is right at the cost of the bottom line?
Oh jeezs, let's bury our heads in sand and never get out of our houses. How safe is air travel? Taking a car? Fact is, we take calculated risks every day - some smaller, some larger.
Unless you build the plant next to an ocean with on-going seismic activity, you should be pretty safe unless an asteroid hits straight to the vicinity of the plant. Counting out the crazy scientists who decide to do experiments in the middle of the night of course. I think we are past that stage.
And I'm tired of anti-nuclear arguments pretending that wind, solar and hydro energy will miraculously satisfy all our energy needs in the near future. If we phase out fossil fuels and switch to using electric cars and such, we need a lot more energy. Using uranium, otherwise quite useless mineral, we can produce some portion of that energy (as proven). Especially because it doesn't depend on natural conditions so it produces stable output all year around.
I would too prefer having all-green energy sources, but I'm pragmatist and in general not afraid of taking calculated risks in life. Maybe I'm too trusting of my nuclear engineers but then again, I still take planes and ride cars.
> Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster.
For Fukushima, it seems that the panicked response of the local authorities (evacuating the whole area ...) was what caused the most problems.
I've been reading "Normal Accidents" by Perrow. I started reading the book expecting an even-keeled explanation of risk, but I was pretty shocked by how prejudiced against Nuclear the tone was.
It was also a reminder of how TERRIBLE the industrial design (aka UX) of reactor monitoring and controls were at the time the book was written (1984).
So many of the things he seems to have felt were insurmountable could be solved by better design, something the book goes a long way toward dismissing.
Anti-nuclear sentiment seems to be one of those things that became widely fashionable, and Pro-nuclear became demonized.
I have preached until I was red in the face that nuclear is the only solution we have currently that will get us to zero emissions on a proper time scale when it comes to global warming. I am all for wind and solar, but you have to be practical as well. We don't have anything that is even close to being able to provide stable 24 hour power like nuclear. Obviously we want a mix, but there are safe nuclear designs out there. And the feds will just have to overrule the NIMBYs on an official site or three for properly controlling the waste.
Renewable energy sources have zero fuel costs. Their potential for life-threatening disasters - on the scale of Fukushima, Chernobyl, coal ash floods, etc. - is zero.
Just as with coal mines, uranium mines and oilfields, there's a large upfront cost ... but a much lower cost to the environment.
Furthermore, anyone can create solar-powered electricity, anywhere. There will be no wars over access to sunlight. Sunlight is a democratic power source, which cannot be monopolized by special interests. Nomads in Mongolia make their own electricity. Anyone living near a creek can make their own hydro ... thousands do.
Once renewables are built, apart from maintenance, the cost of the energy and its transport is free, and (apart from recycling costs) pollution-free. It will continue to be free until the generator has to be replaced, some stupid war destroys it, and/or the Sun burns out. Too obvious for some interests.
Attempts to distort these facts, to maintain monopolies and continue to enrich a very few, will persist. It's easy to invent lies and distortions and to spread FUD about renewables. Yep, there's a lot at stake. For a few.
But what's best for the biosphere and its people? For the people of the future, including our kids and grandkids? For all the lifeforms, the water sources, and the atmosphere of the planet? The answer is renewable -- and the technology to support its generation and storage is a superior and long-lasting investment.
292 comments and no one talks about the Democratic candidate that was most vocal about nuclear, specifically thorium?
"Yang is absolutely right to make these points, and he has gotten some well-deserved attention. But it’s surprising that he hasn’t gotten more, given how much we’re hearing about the crisis nature of climate change. Because if you take climate change seriously, you have to take nuclear power seriously"
Folks should parse the article and the platform carefully, it actually reads "existing and advanced nuclear". This could be interpreted as maintaining existing reactors and building advanced (fusion?) reactors and NOT building new fission reactors.
From my perspective this interpretation would be desirable (although probably wishful thinking) given that nuclear energy is too expensive in practise (really only existing plants are competitive with solar), too slow to construct (10 year average construction time in the US?!), centralized and generally poorly managed. The construction of new nuclear fission plants for grid power in the United States isn't going anywhere, since it makes absolutely no economic, environmental or political sense. Yes, most of us on Hacker News know it is better than fossil fuels - but renewable energy is the new competition. Nuclear is going directly against solar with (or without) battery backup and it's been losing for years now - even China has slowed down the pace of construction.
Nuclear grid power advocates should take their arguments to Mars where they will actually have a case. Not much of an atmosphere to spin a turbine, far away from the sun and an environment that makes the Antarctic look like a Garden of Eden should anything go wrong.
I used to be an advocate for nuclear energy but over time I've become it has no future because:
1. Even if it's safer by any objective measure (deaths/kWh for example) the failure modes are much, much worse. A fossil fuel plant just can't make thousands of square miles uninhabitable for decades. This isn't an exaggeration. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is currently 1000mi^2 [1]. This is like how people are afraid to fly but not drive when flying (on.commercial jets at least) is undeniably safer;
2. Processing of fuel creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with (eg UF6);
3. Spent fuel creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with;
4. Decommissioning nuclear power plants creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with;
5. The above three costs seem to be borne by governments. It's still unclear to me if companies who run nuclear power plants are paying the true costs;
5. I just don't trust companies to manage nuclear plants safely long term;
7. I don't trust most governments to manage nuclear plants long term; and
8. Many nuclear power advocates will bring up coal as the counterexample. That's a false dichotomy. Wind and solar costs continue to plummet. Natural gas, while still a fossil fuel, has way less negative externalities than coal.
I have seen 0 proof that mankind can handle the resposability that comes with this type of extreme risk but at low probability technologies. If anything. It is getting worse in that regard.
Not an american here, so it's more of a general comment.
I'm all for investing in and investigating nuclear power -- after all, the humanity needed several decades to make electricity itself safe at all; if we manage to make nuclear safer and indeed manageable, that's a fine thing, scientifically speaking. It's good to have options.
However, we should be keeping an eye on the costs. Nuclear energy is cheap, but disposing of its waste is anything but. In Europe, energy companies have essentially socialised waste disposal so that they can advertise for "cheap" nuclear energy. If the disposal costs had been placed on them, nuclear would be the most expensive energy source by far.
We are probably better off future-wise looking elsewhere for a clean and cheap energy source. Fossil and nuclear are neither.
Funny how everyone is able to talk so much shit about nuclear being amazing and safe and all that, yet we've STILL not cleaned up the monstrous amount of TOXIC trash that has been produced by these plants. We have done nothing to stop creating more waste, and we have done nothing to deal with the toxic waste we have right now. To be honest I don't CARE if you want to call it safer when there is no direct proof of that, only proof of the contrary. There are hundreds of thousands of people still affected by major accidents, and the waste leftover from them worldwide. Trying to keep pushing nuclear for anything is an ignorant shortsighted choice.
How much of the resistance to nuclear power in the US was due to the very unfortunately combination of the Three Mile Island incident and the release of the movie The China Syndrome both happening within two weeks of each other? Add in the nuclear arms race of the time and the emotional aspect for anything nuclear becomes even greater.
My uneducated gut feeling is that the only way nuclear is going to be relevant is if they perfect micro-nuclear reactors.
I remember reading about these 10 years ago [1], and have seen a few more since. Basically they propose small "nuclear batteries" kin of design - this avoids catastrophic scenarios and benefits greatly from economies of scale.
The only issue I see with this approach is political - you would have a lot more nuclear material spread around, spreading this kind of teach where it's easily accessible and hard to protect doesn't sound reasonable with the political situation in the world.
The debate around safety in nuclear power is kind tangential to the larger issue: what do you do with all this radioactive material when you’re done with it?
This is a much trickier issue and is largely why countries like Germany have started to phase out nuclear power plants. But the US treats the whole world as their dumping ground and as long as they are the global imperial power, they can probably just dump radioactive waste in some poor part of the world.
It's quite possible that if most people owned a solar roof with batteries and redundancy across a specified and localized grid, there would be less need for large power plant owners and fewer donations to political parties. In short, it is easier for politicians to get donations from a small group of people than from a large group.
Once I saw a TV show about the challenges of constructing a deposit for nuclear waste that is expected to operate for thousands of years.
In this show, they mentioned that they did not want to use skulls to represent danger, because skulls are not seen as dangerous in some cultures (with "Dia de los muertos" as an specific example).
[+] [-] notRobot|5 years ago|reply
We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.
> Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this comparison – it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the 'dirtiest' forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[+] [-] notJim|5 years ago|reply
However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone? I know that mining/drilling are incredibly damaging to the environment, but theoretically work is done to mitigate/restore the areas. Of course, they're essentially turning the entire planet (or large, currently-inhabited swaths of it anyway) into an exclusion zone, but unfortunately there is another cognitive bias humans have where we under-rate long-term risks.
I've been a nuclear skeptic, but gradually I'm coming around to it. At this point the main questions I have are whether it can be done cheap enough. It seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point, so maybe green policies should focus on subsidizing storage and nuclear instead?
[+] [-] jayd16|5 years ago|reply
I also feel like the industry would do better if it rallied behind specific new technologies so politicians could rally behind molten salt reactors (or what have you) and placate fears about "old nuclear" designs.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
Isn’t this just the triviality that any two points (with different y values) are exponentially related?
[+] [-] nl|5 years ago|reply
> Modern renewables are about as safe as nuclear energy
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#modern-r...
[+] [-] legulere|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.
[+] [-] melling|5 years ago|reply
Cost overruns seem to be a big problem in the industry. The US recently canceled 2 plants, and we’re struggling to finish the other 2.
[+] [-] fluffything|5 years ago|reply
The problem with nuclear is all the assumptions under which a perfectly safe plant is actually perfectly safe (proper maintenance, training, etc.).
I don't believe those assumptions always hold in practice. At the end of the day, these plants are operated by people, and private companies, who have many interests beyond keeping the plant "perfectly safe" (like making money) and also operate under constraints that prevent them from actually keeping the plant "perfectly safe" even if they wanted to (like lack of money).
The problem with nuclear isn't technological, but social. It allows a relatively small bunch of shitty people and companies to cause tremendous amounts of devastation.
Remove people from the "nuclear energy safety equation" and I'm all in with nuclear. Telling me that new plants are perfectly safe as long as people and private companies don't do shit, reads like these plants aren't safe at all to me.
---
And this is without taking into account all the unknown unknowns, like all the natural disasters we can't even predict or imagine, which all plant designs just assume cannot happen.
Just claiming that modern nuclear plants are safe, for all potential world states is BS, because nobody can imagine, much less know, what all those potential world states are.
Sure coal kills people, but what makes many think its safer than nuclear is that we understand how that happens, we understand where coal goes.
See this John Oliver episode about nuclear waste. After 70 years, we haven't even been able to agree in a location to dispose nuclear waste, much less build one, and use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU&list=PLMJ9OaOo9J...
All the assumptions that nuclear was safer than X over the last 70 year assumed that such a location would exist and be used.
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
I hope not. Current nuclear technologies are outrageously expensive. It made sense in the 50's-70's only because it was being effectively subsidized by the defense industry who needed the excess breeder capacity for bombs.
It's safe. It's fine. It's good that the democrats have dropped what was always effectively a luddite plank from their platform. But it's not going to save us absent some really disruptive new technology.
Right now we should be putting our electricity investment into straightforward, cheap and easily scaled renewables. That is what is going to replace coal and gas in the short term.
Long term? Fine. If nuclear can make the balance sheet work then let's do that. If not, meh.
[+] [-] bArray|5 years ago|reply
> safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel
> power plants have killed exponentially more people through
> pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined
I think that nuclear waste will be the next big problem with nuclear energy, with storing it safely for the thousands of years required just being a problem we're kicking down the road. It only needs to leak into the water supplies and suddenly you have a disaster on a scale never seen before (human & animal consumption, contaminated crops and land, etc).
To be honest, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro are really the way forwards. I would favour solar and wind though, as a failure to invest in infrastructure just means they break - whilst a failure to invest in hydro has some very serious consequences (dam collapse, etc).
In the next 10 years or so I want to see solar panels being recycled if they really are to play a large put of our future energy production. Otherwise there is always the method of pointing mirror arrays at a single spot to heat water.
[+] [-] pvaldes|5 years ago|reply
They are repeating that nuclear plants are safe now. "Safe" of course if some conditions meet. If your car is a parking your probability of dying in a car crash is really low, this is obvious. What really counts is their behaviour in hard times. "If all go well, and we have luck, and everybody behaves, nuclear is safe" is not enough.
A natural disaster, a war, terrorism, another lunatic, sadistic, mentally ill or a psycho reaching power (look around)... and your rainbow-safe-dream will explode into a thousand pieces. And then, what?
Talk me about what is your plan B in THAT conditions.
Hide under the rug and deny all as in the last 50 years?
[+] [-] andi999|5 years ago|reply
About your statistics: that it is safer was pure luck. In the fukushima incident there were depending on the season two prevalent wind direction either towards the ocean or towards Tokyo. So with a high chance in the range around 50% Tokyo would have been to be evacuated. If anybody has better numbers let me know.
To me not counting this in, is like crossing the street with eye closed and arguing it if not hit so far so good with dismissing close encounters.
I would like to see numbers including this.
[+] [-] IncRnd|5 years ago|reply
If I look at the graph to the right and do the division, the numbers don't come out the same as what is quoted. This may have to do with the abominable "x times fewer than y" that makes no sense and likely has a different meaning for every reader.
[+] [-] DangitBobby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|5 years ago|reply
Chernobyl came close to be 10 or 100X worse. In which case, nat gas and fission are even up.
[+] [-] zabhi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morsch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob29|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|5 years ago|reply
"They told us that nuclear plants were safe.
Human accident is the danger,
not the nuclear plant itself.
No accidents, no danger. That's
what they told us. What liars!"
[+] [-] cma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
But Fukushima happened, and unfortunately the management attitudes in TEPCO are not unique to that company.
The fact is that solar/wind is currently running away from everything else. I believe new natural gas plants can't compete with solar/wind, and that means installed gas plants are in their crosshairs just like coal plants.
Notice your article leaves out solar/wind.
"We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power."
I disagree.
[+] [-] hymangrickover|5 years ago|reply
He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles.
If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along.
Seems rather important to not ignore the violence monopoly. Quit paying it too much serious attention for too long and it gets chippy.
Let’s hope this is PTSD from a generation that was forced to go through hell, often for no reason, and it can normalize out. So long as we live long enough to test that hypothesis.
On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.
[+] [-] lazyjones|5 years ago|reply
I wish we could discuss such topics without the much-abused climate scare argument. Most debatable, technology-related issues have many other implications worth taking into account. Like grid stability, cost of energy etc. in this case.
But if all you've got is a hammer...
[+] [-] beders|5 years ago|reply
You wouldn't fly planes if they had that failure rate.
It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers!
What we do have is: Uninhabitable regions, radioactive boars decades after Chernobyl roaming Bavaria (google it), countless cases of cancer, highly radioactive waste we don't know what to do with, billions and billions of tax payer dollars spent on clean-ups, not just for accidents, but for decommissioning plants, plants on fault lines that are ticking time bombs. Nuclear power plants rank first in the amount of economic damage done.
And you are seriously calling for mass adoption?
The engineers and scientists who built Fukushima and Chernobyl thought: Yup, perfectly safe and clean. It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents.
We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap. All it would take is the political will to do so.
The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.
[+] [-] namuol|5 years ago|reply
> As detailed in the Climate Action Plan, President Obama is committed to using every appropriate tool to combat climate change. Nuclear power, which in 2014 generated about 60 percent of carbon-free electricity in the United States, continues to play a major role in efforts to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector. As America leads the global transition to a low-carbon economy, the continued development of new and advanced nuclear technologies along with support for currently operating nuclear power plants is an important component of our clean energy strategy. Investing in the safe and secure development of nuclear power also helps advance other vital policy objectives in the national interest, such as maintaining economic competitiveness and job creation, as well as enhancing nuclear nonproliferation efforts, nuclear safety and security, and energy security.
>
> The President’s FY 2016 Budget includes more than $900 million for the Department of Energy (DOE) to support the U.S. civilian nuclear energy sector by leading federal research, development, and demonstration efforts in nuclear energy technologies, ranging from power generation, safety, hybrid energy systems, and security technologies, among other things. DOE also supports the deployment of these technologies with $12.5 billion in remaining loan guarantee authority for advanced nuclear projects through Title 17. DOE’s investments in nuclear energy help secure the three strategic objectives that are foundational to our nation’s energy system: energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental responsibility.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/1...
[+] [-] LeegleechN|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbenst|5 years ago|reply
Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $100s of billions for cleanup), environmental damage, and health impacts are still less than wind or solar, I’m all for it, but pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”
[+] [-] Lazare|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear power is relatively safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Rooftop solar actually has a surprisingly high fatality rate from installers falling off of roofs! Fossil fuels release horrible byproducts into the atmosphere, hydro sometimes causes floods...everything has drawbacks.
> Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events
Quite right. Analysis of all power options should take into account black swan events (eg, a hydro dam failure taking out a city), but they should also do the reverse, and take into account the normal risks of operations. A coal power plant is subject to any particularly terrible catastrophic failure modes, but every day it operates it spews out a lot of carcinogens.
Imagine a system that kills 5k people once every 20 years, versus a system that kills 1 person a day. You end up with scary headlines about the first one, but the second one kills significantly more people over time.
> pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”
The pro-nuclear arguments I have seen are much more conservative than that. They point out, correctly, that even counting Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear energy is relatively safe. If the future ends up safer than the past that would be a bonus, but the past has been shockingly safe.
Coal kills around 13k people every single year in the US alone. How many people have died due to nuclear power in the US in the entire history of nuclear energy?
[+] [-] orangecat|5 years ago|reply
Yes, do that. And you'll find that the meltdown and evacuations killed fewer people than did shutting down all of Japan's nuclear plants afterward (PDF: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf). In other words, nuclear power comes out ahead even if you assume there will be a Fukushima-class disaster every 10 years, which is absurdly pessimistic.
[+] [-] etrautmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnevets|5 years ago|reply
Why would anyone trust these companies to actually do what is right at the cost of the bottom line?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
[+] [-] tekkk|5 years ago|reply
Unless you build the plant next to an ocean with on-going seismic activity, you should be pretty safe unless an asteroid hits straight to the vicinity of the plant. Counting out the crazy scientists who decide to do experiments in the middle of the night of course. I think we are past that stage.
And I'm tired of anti-nuclear arguments pretending that wind, solar and hydro energy will miraculously satisfy all our energy needs in the near future. If we phase out fossil fuels and switch to using electric cars and such, we need a lot more energy. Using uranium, otherwise quite useless mineral, we can produce some portion of that energy (as proven). Especially because it doesn't depend on natural conditions so it produces stable output all year around.
I would too prefer having all-green energy sources, but I'm pragmatist and in general not afraid of taking calculated risks in life. Maybe I'm too trusting of my nuclear engineers but then again, I still take planes and ride cars.
[+] [-] himinlomax|5 years ago|reply
For Fukushima, it seems that the panicked response of the local authorities (evacuating the whole area ...) was what caused the most problems.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|5 years ago|reply
It was also a reminder of how TERRIBLE the industrial design (aka UX) of reactor monitoring and controls were at the time the book was written (1984).
So many of the things he seems to have felt were insurmountable could be solved by better design, something the book goes a long way toward dismissing.
Anti-nuclear sentiment seems to be one of those things that became widely fashionable, and Pro-nuclear became demonized.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|5 years ago|reply
Just as with coal mines, uranium mines and oilfields, there's a large upfront cost ... but a much lower cost to the environment.
Furthermore, anyone can create solar-powered electricity, anywhere. There will be no wars over access to sunlight. Sunlight is a democratic power source, which cannot be monopolized by special interests. Nomads in Mongolia make their own electricity. Anyone living near a creek can make their own hydro ... thousands do.
Once renewables are built, apart from maintenance, the cost of the energy and its transport is free, and (apart from recycling costs) pollution-free. It will continue to be free until the generator has to be replaced, some stupid war destroys it, and/or the Sun burns out. Too obvious for some interests.
Attempts to distort these facts, to maintain monopolies and continue to enrich a very few, will persist. It's easy to invent lies and distortions and to spread FUD about renewables. Yep, there's a lot at stake. For a few.
But what's best for the biosphere and its people? For the people of the future, including our kids and grandkids? For all the lifeforms, the water sources, and the atmosphere of the planet? The answer is renewable -- and the technology to support its generation and storage is a superior and long-lasting investment.
[+] [-] fma|5 years ago|reply
"Yang is absolutely right to make these points, and he has gotten some well-deserved attention. But it’s surprising that he hasn’t gotten more, given how much we’re hearing about the crisis nature of climate change. Because if you take climate change seriously, you have to take nuclear power seriously"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/17/2020-democ...
[+] [-] ozborn|5 years ago|reply
From my perspective this interpretation would be desirable (although probably wishful thinking) given that nuclear energy is too expensive in practise (really only existing plants are competitive with solar), too slow to construct (10 year average construction time in the US?!), centralized and generally poorly managed. The construction of new nuclear fission plants for grid power in the United States isn't going anywhere, since it makes absolutely no economic, environmental or political sense. Yes, most of us on Hacker News know it is better than fossil fuels - but renewable energy is the new competition. Nuclear is going directly against solar with (or without) battery backup and it's been losing for years now - even China has slowed down the pace of construction.
Nuclear grid power advocates should take their arguments to Mars where they will actually have a case. Not much of an atmosphere to spin a turbine, far away from the sun and an environment that makes the Antarctic look like a Garden of Eden should anything go wrong.
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
1. Even if it's safer by any objective measure (deaths/kWh for example) the failure modes are much, much worse. A fossil fuel plant just can't make thousands of square miles uninhabitable for decades. This isn't an exaggeration. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is currently 1000mi^2 [1]. This is like how people are afraid to fly but not drive when flying (on.commercial jets at least) is undeniably safer;
2. Processing of fuel creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with (eg UF6);
3. Spent fuel creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with;
4. Decommissioning nuclear power plants creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with;
5. The above three costs seem to be borne by governments. It's still unclear to me if companies who run nuclear power plants are paying the true costs;
5. I just don't trust companies to manage nuclear plants safely long term;
7. I don't trust most governments to manage nuclear plants long term; and
8. Many nuclear power advocates will bring up coal as the counterexample. That's a false dichotomy. Wind and solar costs continue to plummet. Natural gas, while still a fossil fuel, has way less negative externalities than coal.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone
[+] [-] ec109685|5 years ago|reply
That’s not much more than the government spent to counteract the economic effects of cornovirus.
[+] [-] PeterStuer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pronik|5 years ago|reply
I'm all for investing in and investigating nuclear power -- after all, the humanity needed several decades to make electricity itself safe at all; if we manage to make nuclear safer and indeed manageable, that's a fine thing, scientifically speaking. It's good to have options.
However, we should be keeping an eye on the costs. Nuclear energy is cheap, but disposing of its waste is anything but. In Europe, energy companies have essentially socialised waste disposal so that they can advertise for "cheap" nuclear energy. If the disposal costs had been placed on them, nuclear would be the most expensive energy source by far.
We are probably better off future-wise looking elsewhere for a clean and cheap energy source. Fossil and nuclear are neither.
[+] [-] Technetium|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/05/31/new-map-...
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubber_duck|5 years ago|reply
I remember reading about these 10 years ago [1], and have seen a few more since. Basically they propose small "nuclear batteries" kin of design - this avoids catastrophic scenarios and benefits greatly from economies of scale.
The only issue I see with this approach is political - you would have a lot more nuclear material spread around, spreading this kind of teach where it's easily accessible and hard to protect doesn't sound reasonable with the political situation in the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
[+] [-] joejohnson|5 years ago|reply
This is a much trickier issue and is largely why countries like Germany have started to phase out nuclear power plants. But the US treats the whole world as their dumping ground and as long as they are the global imperial power, they can probably just dump radioactive waste in some poor part of the world.
[+] [-] Dahoon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lymeeducator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
In this show, they mentioned that they did not want to use skulls to represent danger, because skulls are not seen as dangerous in some cultures (with "Dia de los muertos" as an specific example).