Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh.
Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear.
Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it?
The debate about nuclear is never ending, and yet at the same time, seemingly never focused on anything relevant. How many times do we need to go through the same cycle? "But what about Chernobyl?" "But what about deaths due to coal?"
Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the site back to “normal” decades later isn’t put up in escrow from the start: that’s all captured in the price.
If we did that for fossil (and other) fuels, you’d bet they would cost more too.
Correct. The right questions to ask is not 'But what about Chernobyl' (which is unlikely in most countries) but instead:
What about decommissioning costs?
Fukushima is a good example of costs from a normal accident we can expect from time to time. Costs are at 200b USD and rising, and they still don't have the reactor site under control.
Even normal decommissioning is incredibly expensive and usually covered by governments and ignored in the costs of electricity.
Nuclear fusion (if we ever get to commercial production), will make nuclear much more attractive again though and cut decommissioning costs a bit (though there is still the question of how to deal with reactor parts).
Well well. My girlfriends oldest brother died in what was a wave of cancer infant deaths that strangely coincides with the fallout of Chernobyl's radioactive cloud.
Her other brother came to the world deformed, which again happened to more mothers than hers. In my school class (~30 kids) alone there were 4 kids who had deformations or other mutations that affected their life's negatively (for those who still live: to this day). All of them were born in the years after the fallout.
In my region you are still adviced not to eat certain mushrooms or the meat of boars.
Not to speak that one death and one deformed child that needs life long attention does something to the families tho whom such things happen.
Of course all of it is incredibly hard to attribute this to Chernobyl, but the region which got the brink of the radioactive rain (southern Bavaria, southern Austria) had the most of such cases to such a degree that the doctors noticed it.
That being said: of course a lot improved after Chernobyl in terms of reactor safety. But nuclear is still a business, where a (not insignificant) part of the costs linked to waste and potential catastrophes aren't carried by those who earn the money.
So whether nuclear really is affordable depends on how you do the accounting — how much you get the public, the environment and by future generations to carry for free.
E.g. how much does it cost to store 1 kg of nuclear waste safely for 10 000 years? Is that cost prized into the cost of the produced electricity or do we expect future generations to carry it even after all uranium has been burned?
Please convince me that nuclear isn't a Ponzi-scheme on the future generations.
> Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it?
Compete against fossil fuels? No, but neither can solar and wind. Nuclear power also loses out against solar and wind in the very short term, and depending on the geography. Solar is cheap until you saturate the energy market during peak generation hours. Adding storage into the mix creates costs an order of magnitude larger than nuclear. We don't have a plan to decarbonize the electricity sector with solar and wind that doesn't involve a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
The reality is that the only proven ways of powering nations with carbon-free energy are either geographically dependent (hydroelectricity and geothermal power) and nuclear. Nuclear also provides additional benefits in the form of things like desalination with the waste heat - which is going to be highly in demand as climate change ramps up- and thermochemical hydrogen production, which is likely our best method of decarbonizing shipping.
>Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost.
Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time.
For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ years already.
solar/wind + batteries is now cheaper than coal and nuclear. And it can be brought online faster with virtually no safety issues.
Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissioning some disaster decades from now.
Nuclear companies generally aren't prepared to assume full liability for nuclear accidents [1]. This makes me pretty skeptical that nuclear power is really that safe.
Nuclear energy is regularly significantly (usually more than an order of magnitude, from what I've seen) cheaper for electricity than any other source in comparable countries (e.g. nuclear electricity in Toronto >10x cheaper than coal/solar electricity in Berlin)
Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime.
The main issue is the time it takes to get a plant built, and the heavy upfront investment. Both of these extend painfully the time before investors reach nonnegative ROI, which is (imo) part of why despite the actual profitability being much better human investors with inherently limited lifetimes opt for, for example, natural gas or solar installations.
+ Also of course, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than other sources of energy, which leads to good things like reduced accident deaths, but also heavily increases cost and time to build.
Most of the cost of a MWh of nuclear comes from the cost of capital (interests). [1] Put differently, if capital is backed by the state, that the $/MWh could be a _lot_ less than it is.
Note that cost would also include getting rid of the nuclear waste, which AFAIK is still not a solved problem.
E.g. you could send the waste via rockets to thes sun, but that would be very costly ;-) The problem with the statistics is also that we cannot rely on averages here. E.g. one big accident might cause huge environmental issues. Estimating accurately how likely that is seems difficult to impossible
This is the first time I have seen nuclear described as more expensive. My understanding was that it was several times cheaper than coal. I could be totally wrong of course.
> Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh.
That statement is true, but you are overlooking that fact that the reason nuclear power kills so few people is because we focus so much on the risks.
Why are containment and cost frequently seen as constants while the solar + battery solutions are frequently argued as the only practical solution as long as we keep funding the tech?
I have seen very few comments (if any) on HN that are critical of nuclear and offer thoughtful solutions on how to bring the cost down.
This death per TWh calculation is naive. In reality modeling and averages are not enough here.
If can tell a coal plant kills X people per year, then I can pretty safely deduce it will kill somewhere between 0.9X and 1.1X people next year. (Made up numbers, but the point holds)
For nuclear, we can easily estimate with the same models the damage. One miscalculation, or one disastrous outcome can cause 50000 deaths, or turn the entirety of New York City to radiated ground that has to be avoided for decades.
As long as the extrapolations for nuclear are prone to extreme outcomes, nuclear is more unpredictable and therefore has more danger potential. This is why small nuclear reactors which fail independently are the way to turn nuclear plants into common energy source. They can reduce our fragility to extreme Chernobyl like outcomes.
Even if we completely put aside the discussion about safety, storage of the nuclear waste etc., the killer argument is the price. There are no current designs available that would allow nuclear compete with renewables. On top of that, nuclear power plants are rather slow to switch output levels, so are not a good companion to the renewable producers. Instead we should use gas for filling the gaps in the renewable production. Gas plants are rather quick to change power output and as long as we drill for oil, gas often gets even burned on site as there is not enough demand. And of course we should grow renewable sources strongly.
Exactly, its a bit like discussing systemd in that way. I suspect small modular nuclear reactors will find their niche for islands etc., but renewables + batteries will win due to cost reasons.
To me the bummer of nuclear power is how much advocates try to underestimate the cost of handling the waste for decades and the potential risks.
I think if you really think we need to go full speed ahead with nuclear power you need to ask how close a waste deposit to your home are you comfortable with? Often times these things just get transported to supposedly remote places which just mean a more vulnerable community may be exposed to the long term risks.
The power grid is a complex beast. In Europe, as an example, the power grid is the subject to the regulations, political ambitions, restrictions and technological legacy of around 30 countries, the European Union, Commonwealth of Independent States, NATO, CSTO and probably a bunch of others as well. Getting everyone to play along amidst power-play, public opinion, financial concerns and so forth is a nightmare, and yet that is BEFORE the expected major impact from any major changes introduced in order to fight climate change.
So, in order to be able to do a large roll-out of nuclear power, you need to:
1) Find a location where building a plant is viable and from where you will be able to transmit the produced energy to it's indended destination.
2) Convince the public that the plant won't render their home uninhabitable.
3) Convince the public that the plant won't result in more environtal damage in their back yard compared to someone else's back yard.
4) Convince the authorities to give you a permits for new plants.
5) Convince the authorities that you're the right one to build it, because they WILL have an issue if you involve people seen as political opponents, say a business from another power block.
5) Convince someone that it's OK if you dig down depleted fuel in their back yard for 100,000 years.
6) Convince the authorities that that it's OK to dig down that depleted fuel in someones back yard for 100,000 years.
Now, if you fail any of those things, then your new shiny plant will most likely never be constructed. Even if you do make it, you still need to compete with solar/wind/storage to make ends meet, while a semi-monopoly sold by the state to private investors in the 90's is still sitting on the huge dam built in the 20's, and can churn out base power from it considerably cheaper.
After all, it's not their problem if your local power grid is to weak to handle all that energy being sent through the entire country through one single line built in the 50's. You should have thought of that beforce you decided to replace your coal plant with a nuclear one!
End result: the owner of the local grid gets the blame and everyone switches to solar because the government is trying to stimulate the market and no matter how inefficient and insufficient it may or may not be compared to your nuclear plant, a solar panel on the roof is preferable to a nuclear power plant for many, many people.
I'm sure there will be new nuclear plants built in the future too. Not many though -- the situation's too messed up for that.
I worked in energy for 5 years. Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. The goal was zero. We did not reach that goal, but nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.
> Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it?
We are still using basically 1960 tech, that's why its expensive. As Elon Musk pointed out often, what matters is pace of innovation.
Nuclear has a pace of innovation that is almost inperceptable. The reasons are that its almost impossible for a startup to do anything, without 10s of millions or better 100s you don't even have to start. The existing reactors last for 60-100 years, so if the country built some in the 1970-1980, it might be enough for multible generations.
You don't have a large industry that can substain itself on building reactors. Industry basically makes money with the fuel dilivery, but those companies have no insentive to innovate on the reactor.
You can not even build a prototype or experimete. A university level research reactor is not enough to validate a real reactor. And the only other thing is a full commercial reactor.
This means companies are forced to develop everything on paper, long before they even get some uranium to play with. That is an insnaly difficult way to build anything, compare that to SpaceX Starship development.
I am a huge fan of nuclear, and we really did have the technology in the 1970 to basically solve climate change as France basically showed. I believe one 'gigafactory' that mass produces small or medium reactors and a appropritae fuel cycle would be by far the cheapest long term solution. Sadly I see no way how we can get to that situation, a single sighting project takes many, many years.
Also, the concept of 'baseload' is dead. If you only produce when renewables are not needed you are in a horrible market situation. Even if you wanted to be dynamic, current tech can't be. This is not an issue with nuclear in general, but the current generation. A load following nuclear reactor is possible, but even that will simply lead to an underutilized resource.
That is why companies like Moltex Energy are designing their reactor more like CSP installation. Where the nuclear reactor has a 'heat-battery' and multible CCGT so that when there is money to be made, you actually triple the output of the reactor for when prices are high. It also leads to the nuclear part of the investment being only like 30% and the rest is known cost, but of course it requries a pretty large scale of project to work.
All in all, I hope the best for nuclear, it would have been the right solution, but its unfortunate history and properties just didn't fit in socity correctly for many reasons. I hope by the end of the decade we have some advanced nuclear, but unfortunatly I now beleive the majority of 'green' energy will have to come from gathering up wind and solar power on massive scale, plus Terrafactories worth of battery production with some gas backup plants.
The problem with nuclear is that people are afraid of it. If we had spent the last 40 years trying to make it cheaper instead of trying to prevent accidents, it wouldn't be so expensive.
"the issue with nuclear is cost" the cost is the problem indeed, but the cost is something that can be lowered with sufficient amount of innovation - see how SpaceX managed to lower cost of sending satellites or people to the space.
Nuclear energy researches were stagnant for many, many years - anything "atomic" was considered to be "non-green", and green movements were fighting nuclear energy vigorously, as a result there were not much research done in this area - working on that was a dangerous career choice, people who did that were treated like Holocaust deniers, people who do researches on differences between races or try to cure homosexuality.
Another "success" of ecologist was that they've managed to scare people. As a result finding location for nuclear plant is very hard, there are protests, people do everything to stop building plants in the area, so there is huge cost associated with paying compensations.
Fun fact: in early '90 there was a plan to build nuclear plant in Poland, obviously it was heavily protested, Greenpeace and friends arrived, do their usual stuff like chaining to to whatever they could, etc. The project was abandoned (first government after fall of communism was reluctant to act heavy-handed), however, believe or not, 30 years later people leaving near the planned location still put on their houses "stop atom" banners. I would not believe that myself I hadn't seen them. So instead of having clean energy Poland keeps emitting CO2 (not that the amount is even comparable to Germany emission or other more developed countries, but still).
Cost is also a matter of scale. France, which relays on nuclear energy a lot, managed to make it feasible with a great effect for both economy and environment.
The first working nuclear reactor was hastily cobbled together in a tennis court. It's literally just a critical mass of inexpensive magic rocks, a control system, and some way to remove the heat.
The only reason it costs so much is precisely because everyone is paranoid, so we demand expensive security systems and protocols. If the regulators got out of the way you could probably put one together for a few million dollars.
Strong disagree. And the brushing off of large scale risks from current technology, fail-deadly nuclear is very irresponsible.
Nuclear has the possibility for point-scale accidents to render large areas permanently uninhabitable. Given the fallibility of human social organizations point scale accidents are guaranteed in all domains. Therefor using nuclear power is conceding areas will be rendered uninhabitable. As we saw with the Chernobyl near miss and since, these areas may be as large as a continent in the case the point scale accident is bad.
Note all of this changes if nuclear technology is fail-safe. Examples include the fusion-seeded fission model, and the candlestick reactor model. Technology here is severely underfunded in interest of fail-deadly technologies more likely to be implemented and yield profit in the short term, even if we’re running huge risks by adopting them.
In the era of Covid where we see how badly our social systems can fail, the hand wavy attitude toward nuclear is simply appalling.
Copying another comment of mine since you're making the exact same argument as a sibling comment:
Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.
With nuclear we'd be making faster progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.
This is a grossly naive and over-simplistic way to judge safety and efficacy. Yes, perhaps fewer people die in a major accidents, but then you've left a large swath of land unusable for hundreds or thousands of years. And the cost for managing the disasters is astronomical. In a place like Japan, they lose a not insignificant portion of landmass to an accident. While other forms of energy may overall cause more deaths, it's been distributed across everyone evenly. And apparently this is considered an better outcome, because that is precisely the policy we are taking with Covid. I'd make a bet that by the end of this pandemic, the amount of suffering and death caused by the lockdowns will be more than from Covid itself, when you consider the massive economic failure of small business, children in isolation for so long, depression, overdoses, suicide, domestic abuse, diseases not being diagnosed or treated, civil unrest, etc. It's considered a good policy to share the suffering across everyone to avoid a few directly attributable deaths of compromised individuals.
edit: I'd be curious if anyone was willing to refute my statement rather than downvote it. I strongly believe what I say but am a big supporter of critical thought and would love for someone to challenge my statement and give me a reason to think otherwise.
BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter.
You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time your ready to start selling energy, maybe no one wants to buy it at any price that ever returns a dime to you or the other investors.
Why don't you just go flush your money down the toilet today and save yourself 10 years of your life.
Until nuclear solves that issue... the rest of this just doesn't matter. These were the questions of last decade before solar/wind and batteries scaled up.
2. Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.
3. We'd be making actual progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.
I wanted to check up your reasoning. Actual calculations can be pretty complicated so I relied on a real world example: the largest solar array project under construction in the world, Australia's Sun Cable.
A few numbers: the projected cost is $20 billion. The nameplate capacity is 10GW. The most efficient solar plant in the world (located in Arizona) has an efficiency of about 30%, and I think we can assume similar efficiency for the Australian one, which translates to a 3GW average output, assuming it includes enough giant batteries to stabilize the output. The size of the array, in one of the most favourable places in the world by climatic conditions, is 150Km^2 (more or les the size of Amsterdam). Note that in the Australian desert we can assume the cost of the land to be almost zero.
Always according to WP, the cost of nuclear per GW should be about $6 billion. So a 3GW nuclear power plant should cost about the same as the 3GW (in average output) solar array. The difference is that the power output of a nuclear plant is steady and entirely predictable, it occupies a minimal fraction of the space needed by the solar array, and it can work anywhere in the world- from Australia to the coldest and rainiest regions. Transferring the Sun Cable project from the Australian desert to Germany is simply impossible due to the climate and the cost of land; while it's perfectly possible to build in Germany ten or twenty 3GW nuclear plants.
I think it's definitely true people are overly anxious about radiation, and irrationally so. For example, it's easy to find people who get anxious about xrays but not about flying even though it gives you roughly the same amount of exposure.
I know I was pretty anxious when I had a chest xray as a kid. It's just the invisible nature of radiation. Coupled with the real and brutal effects of extreme doses, it just lends itself to horrifying media portrayals.
I think the most legitimate concern about nuclear safety is, what happens to the plant if you push the "OFF" button and go home?
The current gigawatt-scale plants (AP1000, Hualong One, etc.) can cool without external water for 72 hours, after which a meltdown occurs. NuScale plans to run their reactors at the bottom of a pool, with enough water to passively transition to air cooling over the course of a month. (There are a bunch of proposed reactor designs with similar safety characteristics, but I know more about NuScale because they've been in the news lately.)
I'm not against building plants with a 72-hour buffer for now, due to the pressing need for low-carbon energy, but we should really focus our future resources on passive self-cooling designs that we can safely copy-paste across the planet on a massive scale.
For a bit of perspective, it's worth considering that the Boeing 737-Max problems have killed more people than possibly all western and Japanese nuclear disasters combined (depends on how you count it).
The attitude on risks of radiation have little to do with the economic and technological failures of nuclear power. With multiple schedule and cost failures it seems like fission nuclear is an exercise in what is possible, but not really practical compared to what is accessible via renewables + storage and it's far less constrained financial and technological foundations.
I can’t really reconcile people who genuinely, in their heart of hearts, believe we’re on the precipice of doom because of carbon emissions, and are at the same time strongly against nuclear power.
Can someone who feels this way chime in and help me understand? I’m genuinely curious how these two ideas fit together.
This article implies radiation is the only objection to nuclear power, which isn’t true. It also fails to mention any alternatives (renewables) at all. Both seem major omissions.. especially from the BBC, which I always found was a bit more balanced on these topics.
I love discussions about nuclear power because they do a really good job showing how the HN demographics are no better at being well reasoned and logically consistent than any other demographic.
Solve the radiation problem and we are still left with the problems of massive cost overruns, corruption, and centralized control of energy which takes away individual freedom to choose where to spend energy money, because the cost gets passed down to us as taxes and fees. A better idea is to scale up battery production and use renewables. Nuclear may still be needed but as a last / worst option amongst all non-fossil fuel options.
I don't understand the discussion surrounding the cost of nuclear, talking about it being non-competitive.. When the alternative is what? Unleashing series of catastrophic events due to climate change? which will have an unbounded enormous cost on societies at large.
We've seen already what harm this type of thinking (cost-effectiveness of health systems, worry about costs of closing travel) is causing thanks to the Covid19 example.
"Just Have A Think" put out a video about geothermal energy today. Iceland and California both have large faults they use for short distance access (3km) to the >200 Celsius available at an average depth of ~40km everywhere else in the world.
I'm not sure of the implications of drilling that deep, but since horizontal drilling is required for steam return - could it ever be an avenue down which to deploy drilling assets that were originally used for fracking? If oil prices stay depressed, and California achieves total ban of gasoline vehicles before 2035, then oil demand is going to drop more and it would be good to continue to utilize advanced drilling tech that would ultimately be able to start up a grid anywhere there is lower than average crust depths.
Maybe the fear of actual death by radiation is over-proportionate, but what about nuclear waste? It is only mentioned in the very end of the article, but many countries are having problems finding a suitable site for long-term storage of nuclear waste.
Whenever people bring up "but how do we store the waste!?", how much storage space would the nuclear waste used to power
all of America for a year take up? Feels like the amount is an important point, but I never hear it mentioned.
Perhaps some of us are not concerned about radiation risks, we simply do not want a continuation of old centralized paradigms. The future is energy systems based on decentralization, redundancy, and dispersal.
[+] [-] Lazare|5 years ago|reply
Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear.
Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it?
The debate about nuclear is never ending, and yet at the same time, seemingly never focused on anything relevant. How many times do we need to go through the same cycle? "But what about Chernobyl?" "But what about deaths due to coal?"
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|5 years ago|reply
If we did that for fossil (and other) fuels, you’d bet they would cost more too.
[+] [-] grey-area|5 years ago|reply
What about decommissioning costs?
Fukushima is a good example of costs from a normal accident we can expect from time to time. Costs are at 200b USD and rising, and they still don't have the reactor site under control.
Even normal decommissioning is incredibly expensive and usually covered by governments and ignored in the costs of electricity.
https://nuclear-news.net/2020/09/24/9-1-2-years-after-meltdo...
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
Nuclear fusion (if we ever get to commercial production), will make nuclear much more attractive again though and cut decommissioning costs a bit (though there is still the question of how to deal with reactor parts).
[+] [-] atoav|5 years ago|reply
Her other brother came to the world deformed, which again happened to more mothers than hers. In my school class (~30 kids) alone there were 4 kids who had deformations or other mutations that affected their life's negatively (for those who still live: to this day). All of them were born in the years after the fallout.
In my region you are still adviced not to eat certain mushrooms or the meat of boars.
Not to speak that one death and one deformed child that needs life long attention does something to the families tho whom such things happen.
Of course all of it is incredibly hard to attribute this to Chernobyl, but the region which got the brink of the radioactive rain (southern Bavaria, southern Austria) had the most of such cases to such a degree that the doctors noticed it.
That being said: of course a lot improved after Chernobyl in terms of reactor safety. But nuclear is still a business, where a (not insignificant) part of the costs linked to waste and potential catastrophes aren't carried by those who earn the money.
So whether nuclear really is affordable depends on how you do the accounting — how much you get the public, the environment and by future generations to carry for free.
E.g. how much does it cost to store 1 kg of nuclear waste safely for 10 000 years? Is that cost prized into the cost of the produced electricity or do we expect future generations to carry it even after all uranium has been burned?
Please convince me that nuclear isn't a Ponzi-scheme on the future generations.
[+] [-] manfredo|5 years ago|reply
Compete against fossil fuels? No, but neither can solar and wind. Nuclear power also loses out against solar and wind in the very short term, and depending on the geography. Solar is cheap until you saturate the energy market during peak generation hours. Adding storage into the mix creates costs an order of magnitude larger than nuclear. We don't have a plan to decarbonize the electricity sector with solar and wind that doesn't involve a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
The reality is that the only proven ways of powering nations with carbon-free energy are either geographically dependent (hydroelectricity and geothermal power) and nuclear. Nuclear also provides additional benefits in the form of things like desalination with the waste heat - which is going to be highly in demand as climate change ramps up- and thermochemical hydrogen production, which is likely our best method of decarbonizing shipping.
[+] [-] icedistilled|5 years ago|reply
Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time.
For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ years already.
[+] [-] rgbrenner|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissioning some disaster decades from now.
[+] [-] xiler|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
[+] [-] johnmorrison|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime.
The main issue is the time it takes to get a plant built, and the heavy upfront investment. Both of these extend painfully the time before investors reach nonnegative ROI, which is (imo) part of why despite the actual profitability being much better human investors with inherently limited lifetimes opt for, for example, natural gas or solar installations.
+ Also of course, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than other sources of energy, which leads to good things like reduced accident deaths, but also heavily increases cost and time to build.
[+] [-] steeve|5 years ago|reply
1. https://imgur.com/a/4mAlUbO
[+] [-] kohlerm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timoth3y|5 years ago|reply
That statement is true, but you are overlooking that fact that the reason nuclear power kills so few people is because we focus so much on the risks.
[+] [-] nipponese|5 years ago|reply
I have seen very few comments (if any) on HN that are critical of nuclear and offer thoughtful solutions on how to bring the cost down.
[+] [-] strulovich|5 years ago|reply
If can tell a coal plant kills X people per year, then I can pretty safely deduce it will kill somewhere between 0.9X and 1.1X people next year. (Made up numbers, but the point holds)
For nuclear, we can easily estimate with the same models the damage. One miscalculation, or one disastrous outcome can cause 50000 deaths, or turn the entirety of New York City to radiated ground that has to be avoided for decades.
As long as the extrapolations for nuclear are prone to extreme outcomes, nuclear is more unpredictable and therefore has more danger potential. This is why small nuclear reactors which fail independently are the way to turn nuclear plants into common energy source. They can reduce our fragility to extreme Chernobyl like outcomes.
[+] [-] _ph_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yurlungur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fogihujy|5 years ago|reply
So, in order to be able to do a large roll-out of nuclear power, you need to:
1) Find a location where building a plant is viable and from where you will be able to transmit the produced energy to it's indended destination.
2) Convince the public that the plant won't render their home uninhabitable.
3) Convince the public that the plant won't result in more environtal damage in their back yard compared to someone else's back yard.
4) Convince the authorities to give you a permits for new plants.
5) Convince the authorities that you're the right one to build it, because they WILL have an issue if you involve people seen as political opponents, say a business from another power block.
5) Convince someone that it's OK if you dig down depleted fuel in their back yard for 100,000 years.
6) Convince the authorities that that it's OK to dig down that depleted fuel in someones back yard for 100,000 years.
Now, if you fail any of those things, then your new shiny plant will most likely never be constructed. Even if you do make it, you still need to compete with solar/wind/storage to make ends meet, while a semi-monopoly sold by the state to private investors in the 90's is still sitting on the huge dam built in the 20's, and can churn out base power from it considerably cheaper.
After all, it's not their problem if your local power grid is to weak to handle all that energy being sent through the entire country through one single line built in the 50's. You should have thought of that beforce you decided to replace your coal plant with a nuclear one!
End result: the owner of the local grid gets the blame and everyone switches to solar because the government is trying to stimulate the market and no matter how inefficient and insufficient it may or may not be compared to your nuclear plant, a solar panel on the roof is preferable to a nuclear power plant for many, many people.
I'm sure there will be new nuclear plants built in the future too. Not many though -- the situation's too messed up for that.
[+] [-] codingdave|5 years ago|reply
I worked in energy for 5 years. Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. The goal was zero. We did not reach that goal, but nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
Is it though? It seems countries are quite willing to build new nuclear power plants, but nobody wants them in their backyard.
[+] [-] nickik|5 years ago|reply
We are still using basically 1960 tech, that's why its expensive. As Elon Musk pointed out often, what matters is pace of innovation.
Nuclear has a pace of innovation that is almost inperceptable. The reasons are that its almost impossible for a startup to do anything, without 10s of millions or better 100s you don't even have to start. The existing reactors last for 60-100 years, so if the country built some in the 1970-1980, it might be enough for multible generations.
You don't have a large industry that can substain itself on building reactors. Industry basically makes money with the fuel dilivery, but those companies have no insentive to innovate on the reactor.
You can not even build a prototype or experimete. A university level research reactor is not enough to validate a real reactor. And the only other thing is a full commercial reactor.
This means companies are forced to develop everything on paper, long before they even get some uranium to play with. That is an insnaly difficult way to build anything, compare that to SpaceX Starship development.
I am a huge fan of nuclear, and we really did have the technology in the 1970 to basically solve climate change as France basically showed. I believe one 'gigafactory' that mass produces small or medium reactors and a appropritae fuel cycle would be by far the cheapest long term solution. Sadly I see no way how we can get to that situation, a single sighting project takes many, many years.
Also, the concept of 'baseload' is dead. If you only produce when renewables are not needed you are in a horrible market situation. Even if you wanted to be dynamic, current tech can't be. This is not an issue with nuclear in general, but the current generation. A load following nuclear reactor is possible, but even that will simply lead to an underutilized resource.
That is why companies like Moltex Energy are designing their reactor more like CSP installation. Where the nuclear reactor has a 'heat-battery' and multible CCGT so that when there is money to be made, you actually triple the output of the reactor for when prices are high. It also leads to the nuclear part of the investment being only like 30% and the rest is known cost, but of course it requries a pretty large scale of project to work.
All in all, I hope the best for nuclear, it would have been the right solution, but its unfortunate history and properties just didn't fit in socity correctly for many reasons. I hope by the end of the decade we have some advanced nuclear, but unfortunatly I now beleive the majority of 'green' energy will have to come from gathering up wind and solar power on massive scale, plus Terrafactories worth of battery production with some gas backup plants.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cwp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piokoch|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear energy researches were stagnant for many, many years - anything "atomic" was considered to be "non-green", and green movements were fighting nuclear energy vigorously, as a result there were not much research done in this area - working on that was a dangerous career choice, people who did that were treated like Holocaust deniers, people who do researches on differences between races or try to cure homosexuality.
Another "success" of ecologist was that they've managed to scare people. As a result finding location for nuclear plant is very hard, there are protests, people do everything to stop building plants in the area, so there is huge cost associated with paying compensations.
Fun fact: in early '90 there was a plan to build nuclear plant in Poland, obviously it was heavily protested, Greenpeace and friends arrived, do their usual stuff like chaining to to whatever they could, etc. The project was abandoned (first government after fall of communism was reluctant to act heavy-handed), however, believe or not, 30 years later people leaving near the planned location still put on their houses "stop atom" banners. I would not believe that myself I hadn't seen them. So instead of having clean energy Poland keeps emitting CO2 (not that the amount is even comparable to Germany emission or other more developed countries, but still).
Cost is also a matter of scale. France, which relays on nuclear energy a lot, managed to make it feasible with a great effect for both economy and environment.
[+] [-] AI_WAIFU|5 years ago|reply
The only reason it costs so much is precisely because everyone is paranoid, so we demand expensive security systems and protocols. If the regulators got out of the way you could probably put one together for a few million dollars.
[+] [-] whearyou|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear has the possibility for point-scale accidents to render large areas permanently uninhabitable. Given the fallibility of human social organizations point scale accidents are guaranteed in all domains. Therefor using nuclear power is conceding areas will be rendered uninhabitable. As we saw with the Chernobyl near miss and since, these areas may be as large as a continent in the case the point scale accident is bad.
Note all of this changes if nuclear technology is fail-safe. Examples include the fusion-seeded fission model, and the candlestick reactor model. Technology here is severely underfunded in interest of fail-deadly technologies more likely to be implemented and yield profit in the short term, even if we’re running huge risks by adopting them.
In the era of Covid where we see how badly our social systems can fail, the hand wavy attitude toward nuclear is simply appalling.
[+] [-] Aachen|5 years ago|reply
Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.
With nuclear we'd be making faster progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.
[+] [-] colordrops|5 years ago|reply
This is a grossly naive and over-simplistic way to judge safety and efficacy. Yes, perhaps fewer people die in a major accidents, but then you've left a large swath of land unusable for hundreds or thousands of years. And the cost for managing the disasters is astronomical. In a place like Japan, they lose a not insignificant portion of landmass to an accident. While other forms of energy may overall cause more deaths, it's been distributed across everyone evenly. And apparently this is considered an better outcome, because that is precisely the policy we are taking with Covid. I'd make a bet that by the end of this pandemic, the amount of suffering and death caused by the lockdowns will be more than from Covid itself, when you consider the massive economic failure of small business, children in isolation for so long, depression, overdoses, suicide, domestic abuse, diseases not being diagnosed or treated, civil unrest, etc. It's considered a good policy to share the suffering across everyone to avoid a few directly attributable deaths of compromised individuals.
edit: I'd be curious if anyone was willing to refute my statement rather than downvote it. I strongly believe what I say but am a big supporter of critical thought and would love for someone to challenge my statement and give me a reason to think otherwise.
[+] [-] rgbrenner|5 years ago|reply
You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time your ready to start selling energy, maybe no one wants to buy it at any price that ever returns a dime to you or the other investors.
Why don't you just go flush your money down the toilet today and save yourself 10 years of your life.
Until nuclear solves that issue... the rest of this just doesn't matter. These were the questions of last decade before solar/wind and batteries scaled up.
[+] [-] Aachen|5 years ago|reply
2. Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.
3. We'd be making actual progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.
[+] [-] Udik|5 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/14/just-a-m...
A few numbers: the projected cost is $20 billion. The nameplate capacity is 10GW. The most efficient solar plant in the world (located in Arizona) has an efficiency of about 30%, and I think we can assume similar efficiency for the Australian one, which translates to a 3GW average output, assuming it includes enough giant batteries to stabilize the output. The size of the array, in one of the most favourable places in the world by climatic conditions, is 150Km^2 (more or les the size of Amsterdam). Note that in the Australian desert we can assume the cost of the land to be almost zero.
Always according to WP, the cost of nuclear per GW should be about $6 billion. So a 3GW nuclear power plant should cost about the same as the 3GW (in average output) solar array. The difference is that the power output of a nuclear plant is steady and entirely predictable, it occupies a minimal fraction of the space needed by the solar array, and it can work anywhere in the world- from Australia to the coldest and rainiest regions. Transferring the Sun Cable project from the Australian desert to Germany is simply impossible due to the climate and the cost of land; while it's perfectly possible to build in Germany ten or twenty 3GW nuclear plants.
[+] [-] read_if_gay_|5 years ago|reply
I know I was pretty anxious when I had a chest xray as a kid. It's just the invisible nature of radiation. Coupled with the real and brutal effects of extreme doses, it just lends itself to horrifying media portrayals.
[+] [-] p1mrx|5 years ago|reply
The current gigawatt-scale plants (AP1000, Hualong One, etc.) can cool without external water for 72 hours, after which a meltdown occurs. NuScale plans to run their reactors at the bottom of a pool, with enough water to passively transition to air cooling over the course of a month. (There are a bunch of proposed reactor designs with similar safety characteristics, but I know more about NuScale because they've been in the news lately.)
I'm not against building plants with a 72-hour buffer for now, due to the pressing need for low-carbon energy, but we should really focus our future resources on passive self-cooling designs that we can safely copy-paste across the planet on a massive scale.
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear power is not without its dangers, but so is almost any other type of project of this scale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano-Shushenskaya_power... (Even with Solar Power the risks are in the factories and mines that made the panel)
[+] [-] dv_dt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kavi87|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear energy is great but it is a pain to build, maintain, manage, decommission etc.
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
Can someone who feels this way chime in and help me understand? I’m genuinely curious how these two ideas fit together.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
The Singapore-Australia line is about the se distance as a Western Sahara-UK line would be...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Powe...
[+] [-] Reedx|5 years ago|reply
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[+] [-] jwilliams|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evolve2k|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24605191
[+] [-] blocked_again|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enqk|5 years ago|reply
We've seen already what harm this type of thinking (cost-effectiveness of health systems, worry about costs of closing travel) is causing thanks to the Covid19 example.
[+] [-] moneytide1|5 years ago|reply
I'm not sure of the implications of drilling that deep, but since horizontal drilling is required for steam return - could it ever be an avenue down which to deploy drilling assets that were originally used for fracking? If oil prices stay depressed, and California achieves total ban of gasoline vehicles before 2035, then oil demand is going to drop more and it would be good to continue to utilize advanced drilling tech that would ultimately be able to start up a grid anywhere there is lower than average crust depths.
[+] [-] moontear|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanwilson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddh|5 years ago|reply