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Nuclear power has three big issues: - Costs: In recent years it has become prohibitively expensive in the west to build nuclear reactors. Hinkley point C in th

Nuclear power has three big issues: - Costs: In recent years it has become prohibitively expensive in the west to build nuclear reactors. Hinkley point C in the UK will have higher cost per MWh than wind or even photovoltaics. - Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all. - Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.

antris 10y ago
> Costs Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated. > Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little. You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to compare the data between different solutions. > Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes. Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#45914f7349d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
- Symmetry 10y ago
  Well, the radiation from Fukushima is expected to cause a few hundred cancer cases[1] even if nobody died from acute radiation poisoning. And there likely would have been acute radiation poisoning deaths if there hadn't been an evacuation, though probably far less than the 1600 deaths the evacuation caused. But even with all that the ~1 trillionkWhr Fukushima generated over it's lifetime puts it's death toll well below the Forbes numbers for even a US coal plant at 10,000. On the other hand, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air gives coal mortality at 350 to 60[2] after converting to the same units which is well below Fukushima's death toll. [1]http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd... [2]http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml
  - antris 10y ago
    Yeah, you seem to be closer to the truth. I was assuming old knowledge from this summer, when Wikipedia was still saying that deaths won't be likely to increase: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster&oldid=724589571 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fukushima_Daiichi... >As of March 2012, no cases of radiation-related ailments had been reported. Experts cautioned that data was insufficient to allow conclusions on health impacts. Michiaki Kai, professor of radiation protection at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences, stated, "If the current radiation dose estimates are correct, (cancer-related deaths) likely won't increase." Still, it seems pretty ridiculous to worry about nuclear safety when the actual tsunami killed over 15,000 people and nobody seems to be up in arms why there weren't better safeguards against tsunamis.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    Now compare against an energy technology that is not Coal.
- makomk 10y ago
  > Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. This is the problem with the pro-nuclear approach to nuclear safety. Fukoshima was a massive safety failure. Something that was supposed to never happen did, the cooling failed, the reactors melted down, the containment breached and radioactive isotopes leaked and kept on leaking. At that point, it's not engineering that's protecting people, it's sheer luck and we don't even know the odds of the bet or the stake. We don't know how likely it was for an even bigger containment breach to occur, for things to have gone far worse, because the whole event was outside of the plan. Not only that, it was due to an issue that had already been pointed out by TEPCO's internal planning documents and ignored. (Then there's the huge economic costs of the radiation leaks.) Just ignoring this as a minor incident is inviting further failures which may not be so kind.
  - antris 10y ago
    I agree that it's a major failure, but doesn't that just mean that nuclear is even safer than people expect? Safety systems, backup safety systems, backup-backup safety systems can go down, and yet, the plant kills nobody. Even though the radiator had a meltdown, it was passively contained and the radiation didn't leak out in dangerous quantities. You mention that we don't know how likely a bigger containment was to occur, but I think there's barely a nugget of truth in that. The way the radioactive material was contained is very well understood. The safety systems worked, despite anything TEPCO did.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    And yet not a single person died or are likely to die due to radiation poisoning. This begs the question, if all those fail-safes failed, do we really need them ?
    - sliverstorm 10y ago
      Well, it was certainly still a pain in the butt to clean up.
    - neaden 10y ago
- johmue 10y ago
  > Costs The politicians are not "drafting rules to require more safety" just for fun. Not regulating nuclear energy makes it cheaper but seems rather unsafe. (because humans, you know)
  - antris 10y ago
    I agree that their intentions are good, but you have to draw a line somewhere between cost and safety. Nothing we do is completely risk-free. You can get choked eating food, you can get into a car accident, yet food and transportation industries haven't been regulated to death. Why should nuclear be singled out, when it's already the safest form of energy of all time?
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    Fine, now please apply the same logic to coal plants that kill 7000000 people/year.
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      7 million per year. This seems outright false despite being as pro nuclear as I am. Can you back this up?
      - antris 10y ago
        I think the number is actually the total for global deaths in air pollution: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut... Coal is not the only contributor, but still a major one: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1632163/670000-deaths-year-cost-chinas-reliance-coal http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1632163/670000-deaths... 670,000 reported deaths because of coal annually in China
  - ekun 10y ago
    It's not that the regulations are ill-intentioned but currently they are preventing safer technologies from being implemented because it costs billions of dollars to get technologies licensed properly.
- mtgx 10y ago
  > Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. I wonder if that's because of things like Fukushima... You can't have it both ways. 1) Nuclear is safe because there are regulations - Fukushima just had bad safety policies implemented. That's all and 2) We can't have too many nuclear regulations - that would make nuclear too expensive! Solar/batteries are the future. They are both going to drop in price by multiples over the next decade, and then some more after that. I also think there are very few companies that wouldn't rather build solar/battery power plants now, even if more expensive to build at first, but much cheaper to maintain later, than deal with the complexities and regulations and uncertainties of nuclear power plants. Nuclear should've "won" 30-40 years ago with the whole "too cheap to meter" thing. It's too late now. There are much better alternatives that are close to being competitively priced, or will be soon enough.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    No, we can't have it both ways, which is why we're explicitly asking to not have it both ways. Let's apply the same level of rational risk tolerance to nuclear power as we do to all other power sources. Nuclear isn't 100.00% safe, but it's already a lot safer than any other source. People die from falling off roofs when installing solar and nobody bats an eye because shit happens and life goes on. Let's accept that nuclear is extremely (if not absolutely) safe, and make sure we learn from mistakes, accidents and near-misses when they do happen -- like we did (and do) with aviation.
    - jschwartzi 10y ago
      I think the difference in attitude comes from how /specific/ a risk factor is. Falling off a roof is very specific to the person doing the installation, and it's easily foreseeable to the installer. This makes it easier to ignore. In contrast, fallout from a reactor failure is very general. You basically draw some distorted circles on a map, and everyone in those circles is affected. It's way more terrifying because you have basically no control over the risk once a reactor is built. Worse, if you lived in the area before the reactor existed you've just gained a new risk factor. If you're a homeowner you can pack up and move, but that's a major undertaking to avoid a risk that someone else created for you. In contrast, the solar installer has direct control over their exposure to the risk. They were aware of it before entering the situation, and they can eliminate the hazard at any time by quitting.
- skybrian 10y ago
  Nobody died from Fukoshima but a large area had to be evacuated. When calculating the cost of nuclear power, you have to include the cost of insurance to cover relocating the surrounding communities in case of an accident. And if anyone did require power companies to have this insurance, it's likely that nobody would invest.
  - nickff 10y ago
    If you require power companies to get all this insurance, you no longer have any reason to regulate them (using the government), as there are no externalities (because the company bears the costs of a failure). This might be a good trade-off, as insurers are likely to be more judicious and less political with their inspections and requirements.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    Similarly, we should also cover the cost of insurance to cover areas contaminated from coal fly ash spills (including waste seepage downstream, not just direct coverage). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... If other power sources had to factor in the full costs of such contamination they would be uneconomical as well. We need to have power if we want to have nice things, it's purely a question of figuring out how to do it in the most responsible way possible. For that matter we should probably also factor in upstream contamination - landscape destruction due to large-scale strip mining for coal [1], or pollution from lithium/neodymium refining and silicon fabrication. These are measures where uranium mining has essentially zero pollution but both coal, solar, and wind all have fairly significant pollution footprints. [1] 1 year's supply of fuel for a 100MW (?) power plant visualized, coal vs nuclear: http://i.imgur.com/Qst8z.gif http://i.imgur.com/Qst8z.gif
  - lmm 10y ago
    > Nobody died from Fukoshima but a large area had to be evacuated. When calculating the cost of nuclear power, you have to include the cost of insurance to cover relocating the surrounding communities in case of an accident. Sure, but again you need to compare like with like. How many people relocated per megawatt? The numbers for the alternatives are worse.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  > ... Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation No one has died of outright first-order radiation poisoning, but it's a specious claim with respect to long term cancer rates since we lack the tools to pinpoint the cause of a cancer death. Workers have received high does of radiation, and some models predict hundreds of future cancer deaths (but some models predict zero). Even if someone in the exposed population were to die, we would be very unlikely be able to say for sure if that death were due to 'natural' cancer or cancer induced by exposure to some substance leaked. That doesn't make the exposure or the technology safe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
  - antris 10y ago
    Yes you are correct. As I mentioned elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725402), I made that statement under old information. I stand corrected. But the larger point still stands about nuclear being the safest form of energy we have. Even the worst case scenario of 600 eventual deaths won't sway the numbers for nuclear very much. My argument isn't that nuclear is 100% safe, I'm just asking for it to be honestly compared to the alternatives.
- lamontcg 10y ago
  > > Costs > Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated. I've read this online in one form or another for the better part of 10 years. I've never seen a single actual study to back it up.
  - antris 10y ago
    Which part of it is questionable to you? That nuclear is more regulated than other forms of energy? That regulation increases building costs?
    - lamontcg 10y ago
      That regulation is the cause of the bulk of the costs and/or that regulation is the cause of nuclear's negative learning curve. There's an assertion here that nuclear would be cheap if only it wasn't regulated so tightly, and I've never seen an actual cost-breakdown to support that.
subtenante 10y ago
> Cost I'm interested in seeing data backing this. It is taking real wind turbines/PV panels lifetime and real production? Nuclear reactors have a lifetime of 60 years, wind turbines/PV panels less than that. > Security Some GenIV reactor designs also should be helping with that.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  It depends... pebble beds were supposed to be the future, then it turned out the fuel spheres were unworkable in a number of ways.
  - subtenante 10y ago
    There are other designs. Molten salts for instances, still promising.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      Sure, or a lead-bismuth eutectic, but there are always more issues to be solved, and the maintenance costs and risks are through the roof.
      - subtenante 10y ago
        Sure, it does not cost much to say that. Cost and risks are a relative thing, and 'through the roof' is subjective. You have to compare with the other possibilities. No energy is clean. With PV, the cost of treatment of wastes (silicon tetrachoride for instance[1]) and the risks associated with their pollution if not treated are also a problem, especially if we want to make PV substantially more used than it is now in proportion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595_2.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03...
        M_Grey 10y ago
        Comparing the nature of industrial waste such as that produced in the production of PV panels, and nuclear waste which is a security, environmental, and political nightmare is unfair and a bit dishonest.
ageofwant 10y ago
And all three those "issues" are FUD: > Cost This follows directly from unfounded fear from the next two reasons. If coal, that causes 7 000 000 deaths/year is appropriately and proportional regulated what would it cost ? > Waste What waste ? The small university library sized cube of waste that simply sits there doing nothing ? Where do you want that, in the air you breathe as waste from coal plants, or under a few meters of topsoil beneath a park somewhere. > Security and safety Zero lives were lost due to radiation poisoning after a level R9 earthquake and resulting tsunami killed 25000 people. All harm from Fukishima will come from people's panic and fear, fuelled by people like you that perpetuate nuclear FUD.
- ljf 10y ago
  The waste is not simply the spent nuclear fuel, but much of the machinery and systems around it, plus the discarded items used daily in the management of a plant (clothes etc). This low level nuclear waste while 'only' dangerous for 100 to 500 years, is huge - vastly bigger than the 76000 metric tons of spent fuel: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Site-Storage-of-Nuclear-Waste http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si... I don't have the tonnage of the low level waste to hand, but it is certainly much larger than the high level waste.
geezerjay 10y ago
> - Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all. In addition, storing nuclear waste costs money. A lot of money. Nuclear proponents exchange 60 years of energy for thousands of year of baby-sitting nuclear waste, which costs a lot.
- Sumaso 10y ago
  Do you have any source for that, or is it just something you know?
  - geezerjay 10y ago
    > Do you have any source for that, or is it just something you know? If you really had any interest in the subject, you would've googled it by now. Open up google and type "radioactive waste storage cost" if you really have any interest in the subject.
helper 10y ago
Waste is a much bigger problem in the US than it is in other countries because fuel reprocessing is prohibited in the US. About 20% of the spent fuel is plutonium created from neutron activation of uranium 238. Another ~65% is stable fission products. The amount of dangerous materials is a lot smaller than what the US currently insists on burying. The US has held the no reprocessing position since 1977 when Jimmy Carter put a stop to it. Carter was worried about nuclear weapons proliferation, and believed that stopping spent fuel processing would help with that by reducing the amount of available plutonium. It seems that he hoped other countries would follow the US' example, but everyone else in the world went on processing and the US now has a big nuclear waste storage problem.
adrianN 10y ago
Waste is a political problem that could be taken care of with breeder reactors. You don't need to bury the stuff when >90% of the fuel is still unused.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
0 people died in Fukushima and 28 in Chernobyl. I think 28 deaths in 70 years is a sign of a pretty safe technology.

antris 10y ago

> Costs Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated. > Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little. You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to compare the data between different solutions. > Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes. Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#45914f7349d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

Symmetry 10y ago
Well, the radiation from Fukushima is expected to cause a few hundred cancer cases[1] even if nobody died from acute radiation poisoning. And there likely would have been acute radiation poisoning deaths if there hadn't been an evacuation, though probably far less than the 1600 deaths the evacuation caused. But even with all that the ~1 trillionkWhr Fukushima generated over it's lifetime puts it's death toll well below the Forbes numbers for even a US coal plant at 10,000. On the other hand, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air gives coal mortality at 350 to 60[2] after converting to the same units which is well below Fukushima's death toll. [1]http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd... [2]http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml
- antris 10y ago
  Yeah, you seem to be closer to the truth. I was assuming old knowledge from this summer, when Wikipedia was still saying that deaths won't be likely to increase: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster&oldid=724589571 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fukushima_Daiichi... >As of March 2012, no cases of radiation-related ailments had been reported. Experts cautioned that data was insufficient to allow conclusions on health impacts. Michiaki Kai, professor of radiation protection at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences, stated, "If the current radiation dose estimates are correct, (cancer-related deaths) likely won't increase." Still, it seems pretty ridiculous to worry about nuclear safety when the actual tsunami killed over 15,000 people and nobody seems to be up in arms why there weren't better safeguards against tsunamis.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  Now compare against an energy technology that is not Coal.
makomk 10y ago
> Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. This is the problem with the pro-nuclear approach to nuclear safety. Fukoshima was a massive safety failure. Something that was supposed to never happen did, the cooling failed, the reactors melted down, the containment breached and radioactive isotopes leaked and kept on leaking. At that point, it's not engineering that's protecting people, it's sheer luck and we don't even know the odds of the bet or the stake. We don't know how likely it was for an even bigger containment breach to occur, for things to have gone far worse, because the whole event was outside of the plan. Not only that, it was due to an issue that had already been pointed out by TEPCO's internal planning documents and ignored. (Then there's the huge economic costs of the radiation leaks.) Just ignoring this as a minor incident is inviting further failures which may not be so kind.
- antris 10y ago
  I agree that it's a major failure, but doesn't that just mean that nuclear is even safer than people expect? Safety systems, backup safety systems, backup-backup safety systems can go down, and yet, the plant kills nobody. Even though the radiator had a meltdown, it was passively contained and the radiation didn't leak out in dangerous quantities. You mention that we don't know how likely a bigger containment was to occur, but I think there's barely a nugget of truth in that. The way the radioactive material was contained is very well understood. The safety systems worked, despite anything TEPCO did.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  And yet not a single person died or are likely to die due to radiation poisoning. This begs the question, if all those fail-safes failed, do we really need them ?
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    Well, it was certainly still a pain in the butt to clean up.
  - neaden 10y ago
johmue 10y ago
> Costs The politicians are not "drafting rules to require more safety" just for fun. Not regulating nuclear energy makes it cheaper but seems rather unsafe. (because humans, you know)
- antris 10y ago
  I agree that their intentions are good, but you have to draw a line somewhere between cost and safety. Nothing we do is completely risk-free. You can get choked eating food, you can get into a car accident, yet food and transportation industries haven't been regulated to death. Why should nuclear be singled out, when it's already the safest form of energy of all time?
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Fine, now please apply the same logic to coal plants that kill 7000000 people/year.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    7 million per year. This seems outright false despite being as pro nuclear as I am. Can you back this up?
    - antris 10y ago
      I think the number is actually the total for global deaths in air pollution: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut... Coal is not the only contributor, but still a major one: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1632163/670000-deaths-year-cost-chinas-reliance-coal http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1632163/670000-deaths... 670,000 reported deaths because of coal annually in China
- ekun 10y ago
  It's not that the regulations are ill-intentioned but currently they are preventing safer technologies from being implemented because it costs billions of dollars to get technologies licensed properly.
mtgx 10y ago
> Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. I wonder if that's because of things like Fukushima... You can't have it both ways. 1) Nuclear is safe because there are regulations - Fukushima just had bad safety policies implemented. That's all and 2) We can't have too many nuclear regulations - that would make nuclear too expensive! Solar/batteries are the future. They are both going to drop in price by multiples over the next decade, and then some more after that. I also think there are very few companies that wouldn't rather build solar/battery power plants now, even if more expensive to build at first, but much cheaper to maintain later, than deal with the complexities and regulations and uncertainties of nuclear power plants. Nuclear should've "won" 30-40 years ago with the whole "too cheap to meter" thing. It's too late now. There are much better alternatives that are close to being competitively priced, or will be soon enough.
- mseebach 10y ago
  No, we can't have it both ways, which is why we're explicitly asking to not have it both ways. Let's apply the same level of rational risk tolerance to nuclear power as we do to all other power sources. Nuclear isn't 100.00% safe, but it's already a lot safer than any other source. People die from falling off roofs when installing solar and nobody bats an eye because shit happens and life goes on. Let's accept that nuclear is extremely (if not absolutely) safe, and make sure we learn from mistakes, accidents and near-misses when they do happen -- like we did (and do) with aviation.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    I think the difference in attitude comes from how /specific/ a risk factor is. Falling off a roof is very specific to the person doing the installation, and it's easily foreseeable to the installer. This makes it easier to ignore. In contrast, fallout from a reactor failure is very general. You basically draw some distorted circles on a map, and everyone in those circles is affected. It's way more terrifying because you have basically no control over the risk once a reactor is built. Worse, if you lived in the area before the reactor existed you've just gained a new risk factor. If you're a homeowner you can pack up and move, but that's a major undertaking to avoid a risk that someone else created for you. In contrast, the solar installer has direct control over their exposure to the risk. They were aware of it before entering the situation, and they can eliminate the hazard at any time by quitting.
skybrian 10y ago
Nobody died from Fukoshima but a large area had to be evacuated. When calculating the cost of nuclear power, you have to include the cost of insurance to cover relocating the surrounding communities in case of an accident. And if anyone did require power companies to have this insurance, it's likely that nobody would invest.
- nickff 10y ago
  If you require power companies to get all this insurance, you no longer have any reason to regulate them (using the government), as there are no externalities (because the company bears the costs of a failure). This might be a good trade-off, as insurers are likely to be more judicious and less political with their inspections and requirements.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Similarly, we should also cover the cost of insurance to cover areas contaminated from coal fly ash spills (including waste seepage downstream, not just direct coverage). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... If other power sources had to factor in the full costs of such contamination they would be uneconomical as well. We need to have power if we want to have nice things, it's purely a question of figuring out how to do it in the most responsible way possible. For that matter we should probably also factor in upstream contamination - landscape destruction due to large-scale strip mining for coal [1], or pollution from lithium/neodymium refining and silicon fabrication. These are measures where uranium mining has essentially zero pollution but both coal, solar, and wind all have fairly significant pollution footprints. [1] 1 year's supply of fuel for a 100MW (?) power plant visualized, coal vs nuclear: http://i.imgur.com/Qst8z.gif http://i.imgur.com/Qst8z.gif
- lmm 10y ago
  > Nobody died from Fukoshima but a large area had to be evacuated. When calculating the cost of nuclear power, you have to include the cost of insurance to cover relocating the surrounding communities in case of an accident. Sure, but again you need to compare like with like. How many people relocated per megawatt? The numbers for the alternatives are worse.
dv_dt 10y ago
> ... Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation No one has died of outright first-order radiation poisoning, but it's a specious claim with respect to long term cancer rates since we lack the tools to pinpoint the cause of a cancer death. Workers have received high does of radiation, and some models predict hundreds of future cancer deaths (but some models predict zero). Even if someone in the exposed population were to die, we would be very unlikely be able to say for sure if that death were due to 'natural' cancer or cancer induced by exposure to some substance leaked. That doesn't make the exposure or the technology safe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
- antris 10y ago
  Yes you are correct. As I mentioned elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725402), I made that statement under old information. I stand corrected. But the larger point still stands about nuclear being the safest form of energy we have. Even the worst case scenario of 600 eventual deaths won't sway the numbers for nuclear very much. My argument isn't that nuclear is 100% safe, I'm just asking for it to be honestly compared to the alternatives.
lamontcg 10y ago
> > Costs > Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated. I've read this online in one form or another for the better part of 10 years. I've never seen a single actual study to back it up.
- antris 10y ago
  Which part of it is questionable to you? That nuclear is more regulated than other forms of energy? That regulation increases building costs?
  - lamontcg 10y ago
    That regulation is the cause of the bulk of the costs and/or that regulation is the cause of nuclear's negative learning curve. There's an assertion here that nuclear would be cheap if only it wasn't regulated so tightly, and I've never seen an actual cost-breakdown to support that.

subtenante 10y ago

> Cost I'm interested in seeing data backing this. It is taking real wind turbines/PV panels lifetime and real production? Nuclear reactors have a lifetime of 60 years, wind turbines/PV panels less than that. > Security Some GenIV reactor designs also should be helping with that.

M_Grey 10y ago
It depends... pebble beds were supposed to be the future, then it turned out the fuel spheres were unworkable in a number of ways.
- subtenante 10y ago
  There are other designs. Molten salts for instances, still promising.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Sure, or a lead-bismuth eutectic, but there are always more issues to be solved, and the maintenance costs and risks are through the roof.
    - subtenante 10y ago
      Sure, it does not cost much to say that. Cost and risks are a relative thing, and 'through the roof' is subjective. You have to compare with the other possibilities. No energy is clean. With PV, the cost of treatment of wastes (silicon tetrachoride for instance[1]) and the risks associated with their pollution if not treated are also a problem, especially if we want to make PV substantially more used than it is now in proportion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595_2.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03...
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        Comparing the nature of industrial waste such as that produced in the production of PV panels, and nuclear waste which is a security, environmental, and political nightmare is unfair and a bit dishonest.

ageofwant 10y ago

And all three those "issues" are FUD: > Cost This follows directly from unfounded fear from the next two reasons. If coal, that causes 7 000 000 deaths/year is appropriately and proportional regulated what would it cost ? > Waste What waste ? The small university library sized cube of waste that simply sits there doing nothing ? Where do you want that, in the air you breathe as waste from coal plants, or under a few meters of topsoil beneath a park somewhere. > Security and safety Zero lives were lost due to radiation poisoning after a level R9 earthquake and resulting tsunami killed 25000 people. All harm from Fukishima will come from people's panic and fear, fuelled by people like you that perpetuate nuclear FUD.

ljf 10y ago
The waste is not simply the spent nuclear fuel, but much of the machinery and systems around it, plus the discarded items used daily in the management of a plant (clothes etc). This low level nuclear waste while 'only' dangerous for 100 to 500 years, is huge - vastly bigger than the 76000 metric tons of spent fuel: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Site-Storage-of-Nuclear-Waste http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si... I don't have the tonnage of the low level waste to hand, but it is certainly much larger than the high level waste.

geezerjay 10y ago

> - Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all. In addition, storing nuclear waste costs money. A lot of money. Nuclear proponents exchange 60 years of energy for thousands of year of baby-sitting nuclear waste, which costs a lot.

Sumaso 10y ago
Do you have any source for that, or is it just something you know?
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > Do you have any source for that, or is it just something you know? If you really had any interest in the subject, you would've googled it by now. Open up google and type "radioactive waste storage cost" if you really have any interest in the subject.

helper 10y ago

Waste is a much bigger problem in the US than it is in other countries because fuel reprocessing is prohibited in the US. About 20% of the spent fuel is plutonium created from neutron activation of uranium 238. Another ~65% is stable fission products. The amount of dangerous materials is a lot smaller than what the US currently insists on burying. The US has held the no reprocessing position since 1977 when Jimmy Carter put a stop to it. Carter was worried about nuclear weapons proliferation, and believed that stopping spent fuel processing would help with that by reducing the amount of available plutonium. It seems that he hoped other countries would follow the US' example, but everyone else in the world went on processing and the US now has a big nuclear waste storage problem.

adrianN 10y ago

Waste is a political problem that could be taken care of with breeder reactors. You don't need to bury the stuff when >90% of the fuel is still unused.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

0 people died in Fukushima and 28 in Chernobyl. I think 28 deaths in 70 years is a sign of a pretty safe technology.