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I'll keep saying nuclear is one of the best technologies we can use for power generation. In addition to the fact that the falures at Fukushima, TMI, and Cherno
by burnte 11y ago
I'll keep saying nuclear is one of the best technologies we can use for power generation. In addition to the fact that the falures at Fukushima, TMI, and Chernobyl were all caused by HUMANS interfering with engineering plans and systems, or not being trained proeprly (Fukushima designers called for higher seawalls, overrulled; TMI was human error massively compounding a simple mechanical failure which could have been recovered from; Chernobyl had key safety systems disabled). There are several newer, much safer designs that when used with proper training and engineers being listened to, can provide us with very clean power with stability and land use that solar and wind can't match. You combine that with wind/solar/water during the day, and you have yourself an amazingly clean power grid that works 24/7.
I was 1, living in Pittsburgh. My father was called in among many others to help determine how to recover.
- afterburner 11y agoThe human problem will never go away, though. Ultimately, someone is going to want to cheap out on something, and will be unable or unwilling to consider very-low-probability catastrophic events, probably partly because people are so bad at thinking about very-low-probability events.
- redblacktree 11y agoEven relatively high-probability, catastrophic risks are under assessed. Witness all the tailgaters on the highway.
- oroup 11y agoThe problem is we don't even know what it means to deal with waste for 10,000 years. If the Romans had used nuclear power, we'd still be guarding their waste. And they likely would have put it somewhere really out of the way - like London. If some of the technologies that can transmute waste intro shorter lived stuff come to fruition, fantastic. But until then nuclear power is just the worst kind of deficit spending, kicking the unknown and huge costs way into the future.
- saulrh 11y agoCadmium never decays. It isn't dangerous for 10 kiloyears. It's dangerous forever. And I guarantee you that your average barrel of cadmium is worse to deal with than your average nuclear waste flask. Even more than that, a nuke plant generates, amortized, several tons of waste per year. A few flasks. Which can get shoved into a volume the size of your garage. And then you basically forget about it. Unlike, say, a coal plant, which generates a reservoir worth of awful ash a year. Containment isn't even an option there. Even more than that, even if our nuke plants vented directly into the atmosphere every now and then they'd still put out less radioactive waste than coal plants. Seriously, the only reason nuclear waste is dangerous is because it's concentrated. If we held nuclear plants to the same standards we do coal plants, "safe, permanent disposal" would be as simple as dumping it into the ocean and making sure it mixed up.
- cjslep 11y ago> If some of the technologies that can transmute waste intro shorter lived stuff come to fruition, fantastic. Today we could be reducing the volume of HLW if the US deployed pyroprocessing and cadmium distillation. Unfortunately for the USA, those technologies are more mature in Korea.
- gwern 11y agoLondon wasn't out of the way. Londinium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium) was the heart of their administration, the provincial capital, and a commercial center as well, which could merit imperial visits. Romans storing nuclear waste there would make about as much sense as Americans storing nuclear waste in Okinawa or Baghdad or Kabul (that is, none). Somewhere out of the way then would be like the Sahara, which not coincidentally, is still out of the way; and desert regions are also where it's usually proposed to store waste.
- jrochkind1 11y agoI'm actually pretty sure if the U.S. thought it could get away with shipping it's nuclear waste to Kabul, it would do so.
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- zik 11y agoI find it hard to understand why there's still support for nuclear power, particularly given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all. * It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now. * Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic. * The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable. * Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change. There's really not a lot to like about the nuclear power industry. Can anyone explain why we shouldn't just leave this method of power generation behind as a tragic mistake?
- karlshea 11y agoBecause we need to get off of fossil fuels and wind/solar is intermittent, so it can't provide base load power without huge numbers of batteries or other technology that hasn't scaled up yet (e.g. molten salt/flywheels).
- thrownaway2424 11y agoHydro provides base power. No fancy technologies needed.
- chc 11y agoDoesn't hydro require certain preconditions that are not true everywhere?
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoGenerally, yes, very much so. Technically, no. Artificial hydro (more commonly known as pumped storage) means you can essentially store energy in gravity, anywhere. i.e. build a container at an elevated position, pump water into it using intermittent energy (e.g. wind at night, excess solar etc), drop water down through a turbine to generate electricity again to provide a low baseload. The reality is that 1) this is hugely expensive and so generally pumped storage is restricted to exploit existing natural resources with lots of elevated mountains between which one can store ridiculous volumes of water rather than build your own giant water container. So generally hydro is limited to existing water resources (e.g. large rivers), or storage resources (e.g. mountains) which are quite limited.
- idlewords 11y agoCascading failures and human error happen in all kinds of complex systems. You can't really say "that doesn't count" just because the failure was easily avoidable in hindsight.
- 7952 11y agoIt is a little naive considering how many HN reader probably have experience with complex software systems. If someone suggested running oracle on a grid of mainframes using some esoteric programming language we would be naturally sceptical but nuclear power always gets a free ride. Big and complicated is expensive even when it is the best solution on paper.
- curryst 11y agoThat's not an adequate comparison. You're comparing one simple solution to one complex solution. The actual comparison is one complex solution to several thousand simple solutions. What you're comparing is running oracle on a grid of mainframes using some esoteric programming language compared to running about 2,500 MariaDB servers (based on comparisons of modern wind turbines to modern nuclear generators). Oh, and that's just for one site. So you can manage a couple hundred unwieldy Oracle servers, or a quarter million MariaDB servers.
- 7952 11y agoIt is mitigating 1 million failure modes in one site or a few simple failure modes in 1 million sites. It wouldn't surprise me if wind turbines run SQLite!
- jrochkind1 11y agoSo all we have to do is get rid of the humans?
- wiz21 11y agoInterestingly, that can be solved by using nuclear energy too.
- scarmig 11y agoDoes this amount to: "If you accept the premise that you can trust people not to be idiots, nuclear power is perfectly safe"? I say that as someone positively predisposed toward nuclear. People can also be stupid with other sources of energy, of course, but that kind of stupidity is the kind that kills people slowly and unglamorously.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoExactly. When was the last time solar panels or a wind turbine melted down?
- sjwright 11y agoWorkers occasionally fall off roofs and turbines. Not often, but often enough for them to cause more deaths per kilowatt than nuclear power.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- douche 11y agoBlades occasionally fall off... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R31p1q14SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R31p1q14SU
- ropman76 11y agoA friend's house caught fire because of a short in their rooftop solar panels.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThis always jumps to mind: http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWhich is why you should always bring your escape gear with, no matter how long you intend to be.
- pinaceae 11y agogreat example of a tech that works perfect in theory, but bombs horribly in practice. accidents happen all the time, see the massive blasts in china recently. but, with other tech, the effects are limits to proximity. tchernobyl's fallout cloud swept over europe. no other failure of tech comes close. learning from mistakes in nuclear is very expensive, we might run out of planet until it is perfected.
- walshemj 11y agoAnd a single mining accident can kill hundreds.
- sjwright 11y ago> no other failure of tech comes close Chernobyl killed 56 people directly. The full lifespan of the radioactive leak is statistically estimated to result in shortening the lifespan of roughly 4,000 people through cancer[0]. If you can't think of a more deadly technology failure incident, then you're horribly undereducated. You don't even need to go beyond the scope of electricity production to find incidents that were orders of magnitude more deadly. The Banqiao Dam hydro power station catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
- pinaceae 11y agohow about you quote the whole wiki article? "The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.[5] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[6] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[7] A disputed Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 premature cancer deaths occurred worldwide between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl.[8]" after the dam in china broke, the area became habitable. tchernobyl's surroundings not so much. the nice thing about radiation is the long term effects that make it so hard to measure. genetic issues in newborns are kind of hard to stomach. and right now the waste figures worldwide do not include the reactors and buildings themselves. what exactly are you proposing there? using the nuclear reactor in the center of our solar system seems like a better bet.
- NickHaflinger 11y agoFukushima was caused by the decision to build on top of a known earthquake zone ..
- astrange 11y agoFukushima was caused by the most powerful Japanese earthquake in recorded history, followed by a tsunami that you'd need to build a 10-meter wall around the entire island to avoid. And the only people who died were plant workers trapped in the basement.
- caf 11y agoThere's also still a 20km exclusion zone, apparently to remain in place for 30 years. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/11/radioactive-wreckage-inside-fukushimas-nuclear-exclusion-zone-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/11/...
- alexeckermann 11y agoThat assertion is incorrect. There were other Nuclear Power Plants that were closer to the Tōhoku earthquake epicentre and just as affected by the proceeding tsunami. Of note is the Onagawa NPP which was used as a refuge to house residents (in the site gymnasium) during the event. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...] To say that the plants construction in an earthquake prone environment, solely, would inevitably lead to the incident is false. Just like with most incidents (e.g aircraft) it is a compound of faults but most importantly obtuse human error and/or mishandling.
- teambob 11y agoThe fact is that HUMANS will build the new reactors; interfere with engineering plans and systems; and not be trained properly. If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built. I have talked to people in the coal power industry. There are plenty of cases of accidents. In one case they started up the generator with the oil pumps turned off - the multi-tonne rotor ripped off the bearing then rolled through the hall crushing everything in its path. What if that had been a nuclear power station? A manager without a clue asked for a chute to be opened, the worker tried to explain why that was a bad idea, the manager insisted and a few kilograms of coal dropped down on them. It can take minutes for the mulit-tonne generator to synchronise with the 50Hz supply frequency. There are special electric motors that retard or advance the generator until it is in sync, then keep it in sync. Normally there are resistors to allow the sync to happen slowly. However in one case it was thrown to full power before the sync was complete. There was a momentary blackout through the southern UK while a huge amount of power was used to sync the generator in a fraction of a second. Strangely the fuses didn't blow.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lbenes 11y agoYou're so paralyzed by fear of a nuclear accident you miss the big picture. For example, the fly ash emitted burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.[1] Sure the results of a nuclear meltdown are scary on the local level. But you know what's a lot scarier on the global level? Runaway climate change. It took the worse earthquake in the Japan's recorded history along with several human mistakes on an outdated reactor to cause Fukushima. And we don't more of these designs. Like the article discussed, what we want is the government to be smart about nuclear power. There 7 million deaths annually due to air pollution. How many American lives are lost due to terrorism? And yet we wasted $4 trillion in the Middle East after 911. Imagine if we spent that on new reactor designs and fusion research? Global warming is the biggest threat facing our species. It's time we stopped worrying about our neighborhood and starting thinking about our planet. [1]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short