7 ms·

Nuclear power is the only surefire way to provide for all of our current and future energy needs, especially if you factor in carbon sequestering. On top of all

Nuclear power is the only surefire way to provide for all of our current and future energy needs, especially if you factor in carbon sequestering. On top of all that, per megawatt produced it is the safest form of energy production. Yeah there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people weren't purposefully kept ignorant of nuclear power and politicians weren't afraid to properly fund and manage it. Fukushima design was made using 50s nuclear technology that's like 15 years past it's first invention. It should have been either decommissioned or rebuilt to modern designs, but of course no one was willing to fund or support such a thing. It's like driving around in a Model-T then being surprised that it doesn't have airbags and seat belts when something goes wrong.

de_watcher 7y ago
The window of opportunity to redesign reliably has closed. We have too much software now.
redis_mlc 7y ago
> there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people You can always spot the nuclear apologist because they gloss over the intractable people issues with managing reactors for literally decades without a single lapse. I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors. The horrible reality we're now facing is that once you build a reactor, political forces force re-certification decades beyond their original design - regardless of the interior condition of the reactor. At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.
- exmadscientist 7y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head here. I think the main mistake advocates of nuclear energy make is to talk about the safety and reliability of the technology. But the technology isn't the problem: we know how to safely build and operate nuclear reactors. The issue is the human factor. It only takes one person in a position of authority to cause one mistake that leads to a nuclear disaster. No one competent would ever have let that mistake happen... but how often do idiots rise to positions of power? Or, put another way, do you trust Congress to make the right rules for operating a nuclear power station?
  - lm28469 7y ago
    Fossil fuel is slowly killing all of us and the planet, every second of every single day. Even Chernobyl and Fukushima combined are a mild inconvenience compared to that. Rejecting nuclear is like taking the car instead of a plane because "planes aren't safe". Yes the fuck ups are more impressive, but if you factor everything nuclear is the lesser evil.
    - todd8 7y ago
      The plane vs car analogy is one I'm going to remember!
  - throwaway92384 7y ago
    Unworthy people get into positions of authority all the time in a soft world. Peace-time generals, etc. People unworthy of power tend to run away from danger, and the worthy are willing to endure it. Force anyone responsible for the running of a plant to live with their family right next to it. Every plant should be headed by such people, or no plant. A bit like Walter Aigner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veresk_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veresk_Bridge .
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  Exactly. The hn crowd is probably especially biased here since it's a lot of geeks with a very idealistic view of the world, where every single individual on this planet is driven by the highest of moral values exclusively. Let me just copy and paste part of a comment I made on the recycling post yesterday: Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get them out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit.
  - mrpopo 7y ago
    I don't have an idealistic view of the world. Rather the opposite. Nuclear power can provide for part of the growing energy needs of the ever-growing human population, while petrol supplies will start declining at some point in this century for geological reasons. It might be hard to swallow, but a few nuclear accidents are worth mitigating the worst consequences of climate change and energy peak. Without adequate access to energy, humans in multi-million cities will not be able to survive. EROI on Solar and Wind power is good, but obviously almost 100% of the energy invested is from fossil fuels. We still spend more energy building solar panels than we receive from it. Which, in a way, is a good sign (it means the solar industry is growing). But no storage technology has been deployed at scale yet (which would reduce the EROI even more). Will it scale enough before a potential energy peak? Will nuclear?
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      Nuclear power plants can be used as weapons. The explosion of Chernobyl could have taken out half of Europe with radioactivity had it not been dealt with. If we elect another Kim jong/Stalin, or a neighbouring country does, they could blow up their own reactors to achieve destructive means. Solar and wind don't have that problem. The nuclear accidents are bad enough. Imagine the fallout from a plant in mexico takes out half of Texas, is that an acceptable risk in the pursuit of cheap electricity? Do you want to place the future of international political stability on the ability to regulate and police an industry? Both america and japan, two trustworthy and competent nations have had problems with nukes. Trading one bad scenario for another is not going to help. Space based solar is a safer bet than nukes.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors. Compared to ? Trusting people to manage coal power plants, mines, off shore platforms, oil tankers, &c. ? > At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates. France - lot of nuclear reactors : 13ct per KWh Germany - shutting down nuclear reactors, still heavily relying on coal : 30ct per KWh
- mc32 7y ago
  Lapses happen. That’s human nature. It’s having failsafes and enough of them to mitigate and minimize any negative outcomes.
- nickik 7y ago
  > I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors. Except that its the safest form of energy production in the Western world and the waste majorities of countries have not had a single death from nuclear power. Your statement flat out contradicts all evidence.
- manfredo 7y ago
  This isn't an issue with nuclear power, but rather a symptom of a political system focused on short-term goals when the nuclear industry fundamentally operates on the scale of decades at least. Furthermore the problems with nuclear power you've listed are self-fulfilling. Nuclear plants have to have extended life cycles, because people don't want to build new plants, because nuclear plants are having their life cycles extended. Electricity prices skyrocket after the closure of a nuclear plant because a replacement was no built, because people don't want to build nuclear plants, because they point out that electricity prices skyrocket when plants eventually close.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Nuclear was always high risk; Fukushima begged for disaster. Human errors dogged it from the beginning. The region had experienced multiple large tsumani in the century before it was built. Hello? The site started out as a 33-meter bluff, which was lowered to 7-meters. TEPCO was warned about their emergency generators and did nothing. Pretty damn sure these were not engineering decisions.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
heisenbit 7y ago
The waste storage problem is not solved. And looking at how much the clean up of large scale nuclear processing has and will cost it is not cheap either. Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation. You need 300 to 1000+ windmill to replace a single nuclear power plant. Might be doable in the US but there is no way to do that in France for example. Same for sun, good look replacing a nuclear plant in northern Europe with a solar farm, it's not Nevada. Nuclear is on demand, wind and sun are not. > The waste storage problem is not solved. Renewable energy storage is not solved.
- onreact 7y ago
  Thank you for adding some common sense to that debate. Safe nuclear is like "clean coal".
- cogman10 7y ago
  The ultimate solution to the waste problem is fusion. That's the unfortunate thing about abandoning fission reactors. Fusion is far safer and doesn't produce radioactive waste byproducts.
  - Kirby64 7y ago
    Well obviously if fusion were a thing we could all switch too I don't think anyone would argue. Unfortunately the reality is for the foreseeable future, fission is the only way to generate power. If you're talking about building a reactor in the next 20 years, you build a fission one. If somehow we have a breakthrough in fusion technology to make it energy positive, then I have no doubt we'll see a huge increase in people trying to use it.
  - nickik 7y ago
    Fusion solves nothing you can not solve with fission. With fission you can easily go down to 300 years of storage, this has been known since the 60s but that's often ignored. Waste is only a significant problem if you want to make it a problem.
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
> per megawatt produced it (Nuclear power) is the safest form of energy production. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/25/chernobyl-30-year-anniversary/83220302/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/25/chernoby... Thousands dead, probably more, "up to 1 million under a worst-case scenario study". 5 million people still living on contaminated land, and it's not over.
- manfredo 7y ago
  The figure of 1 million is given by Greenpeace which is not regarded to be even remotely authoritative. Even the figure of 6,000 is disputed. The WHO produced a figure of 4,000 [1]. In particular these estimates were projections about future cancer rates and similar illnesses. Now that we've actually advanced the clock 35 years we can make meaningful examinations of the affected population. As of 2005, less than 50 deaths due to illnesses attributed to radiation pollution from the Chernobyl disaster were recorded. Furthermore, even if the worst-case figures in the ranges of the tens of thousands are taken as fact nuclear is still the safest forms of energy production. 1. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
  - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
    > As of 2005, less than 50 deaths due to illnesses attributed to radiation pollution from the Chernobyl disaster were recorded. The word "recorded" does a huge amount of obscuring work in that sentence. I thoroughly recommend the book "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich. After reading that, a double or triple digit number is simply not credible.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      So an oral history book written by a private author is more credible than the work of health experts?
      - 7y ago

de_watcher 7y ago

The window of opportunity to redesign reliably has closed. We have too much software now.

redis_mlc 7y ago

> there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people You can always spot the nuclear apologist because they gloss over the intractable people issues with managing reactors for literally decades without a single lapse. I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors. The horrible reality we're now facing is that once you build a reactor, political forces force re-certification decades beyond their original design - regardless of the interior condition of the reactor. At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.

exmadscientist 7y ago
You've hit the nail on the head here. I think the main mistake advocates of nuclear energy make is to talk about the safety and reliability of the technology. But the technology isn't the problem: we know how to safely build and operate nuclear reactors. The issue is the human factor. It only takes one person in a position of authority to cause one mistake that leads to a nuclear disaster. No one competent would ever have let that mistake happen... but how often do idiots rise to positions of power? Or, put another way, do you trust Congress to make the right rules for operating a nuclear power station?
- lm28469 7y ago
  Fossil fuel is slowly killing all of us and the planet, every second of every single day. Even Chernobyl and Fukushima combined are a mild inconvenience compared to that. Rejecting nuclear is like taking the car instead of a plane because "planes aren't safe". Yes the fuck ups are more impressive, but if you factor everything nuclear is the lesser evil.
  - todd8 7y ago
    The plane vs car analogy is one I'm going to remember!
- throwaway92384 7y ago
  Unworthy people get into positions of authority all the time in a soft world. Peace-time generals, etc. People unworthy of power tend to run away from danger, and the worthy are willing to endure it. Force anyone responsible for the running of a plant to live with their family right next to it. Every plant should be headed by such people, or no plant. A bit like Walter Aigner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veresk_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veresk_Bridge .
iforgotpassword 7y ago
Exactly. The hn crowd is probably especially biased here since it's a lot of geeks with a very idealistic view of the world, where every single individual on this planet is driven by the highest of moral values exclusively. Let me just copy and paste part of a comment I made on the recycling post yesterday: Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get them out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit.
- mrpopo 7y ago
  I don't have an idealistic view of the world. Rather the opposite. Nuclear power can provide for part of the growing energy needs of the ever-growing human population, while petrol supplies will start declining at some point in this century for geological reasons. It might be hard to swallow, but a few nuclear accidents are worth mitigating the worst consequences of climate change and energy peak. Without adequate access to energy, humans in multi-million cities will not be able to survive. EROI on Solar and Wind power is good, but obviously almost 100% of the energy invested is from fossil fuels. We still spend more energy building solar panels than we receive from it. Which, in a way, is a good sign (it means the solar industry is growing). But no storage technology has been deployed at scale yet (which would reduce the EROI even more). Will it scale enough before a potential energy peak? Will nuclear?
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Nuclear power plants can be used as weapons. The explosion of Chernobyl could have taken out half of Europe with radioactivity had it not been dealt with. If we elect another Kim jong/Stalin, or a neighbouring country does, they could blow up their own reactors to achieve destructive means. Solar and wind don't have that problem. The nuclear accidents are bad enough. Imagine the fallout from a plant in mexico takes out half of Texas, is that an acceptable risk in the pursuit of cheap electricity? Do you want to place the future of international political stability on the ability to regulate and police an industry? Both america and japan, two trustworthy and competent nations have had problems with nukes. Trading one bad scenario for another is not going to help. Space based solar is a safer bet than nukes.
lm28469 7y ago
> think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors. Compared to ? Trusting people to manage coal power plants, mines, off shore platforms, oil tankers, &c. ? > At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates. France - lot of nuclear reactors : 13ct per KWh Germany - shutting down nuclear reactors, still heavily relying on coal : 30ct per KWh
mc32 7y ago
Lapses happen. That’s human nature. It’s having failsafes and enough of them to mitigate and minimize any negative outcomes.
nickik 7y ago
> I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors. Except that its the safest form of energy production in the Western world and the waste majorities of countries have not had a single death from nuclear power. Your statement flat out contradicts all evidence.
manfredo 7y ago
This isn't an issue with nuclear power, but rather a symptom of a political system focused on short-term goals when the nuclear industry fundamentally operates on the scale of decades at least. Furthermore the problems with nuclear power you've listed are self-fulfilling. Nuclear plants have to have extended life cycles, because people don't want to build new plants, because nuclear plants are having their life cycles extended. Electricity prices skyrocket after the closure of a nuclear plant because a replacement was no built, because people don't want to build nuclear plants, because they point out that electricity prices skyrocket when plants eventually close.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Nuclear was always high risk; Fukushima begged for disaster. Human errors dogged it from the beginning. The region had experienced multiple large tsumani in the century before it was built. Hello? The site started out as a 33-meter bluff, which was lowered to 7-meters. TEPCO was warned about their emergency generators and did nothing. Pretty damn sure these were not engineering decisions.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

heisenbit 7y ago

The waste storage problem is not solved. And looking at how much the clean up of large scale nuclear processing has and will cost it is not cheap either. Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.

lm28469 7y ago
> Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation. You need 300 to 1000+ windmill to replace a single nuclear power plant. Might be doable in the US but there is no way to do that in France for example. Same for sun, good look replacing a nuclear plant in northern Europe with a solar farm, it's not Nevada. Nuclear is on demand, wind and sun are not. > The waste storage problem is not solved. Renewable energy storage is not solved.
onreact 7y ago
Thank you for adding some common sense to that debate. Safe nuclear is like "clean coal".
cogman10 7y ago
The ultimate solution to the waste problem is fusion. That's the unfortunate thing about abandoning fission reactors. Fusion is far safer and doesn't produce radioactive waste byproducts.
- Kirby64 7y ago
  Well obviously if fusion were a thing we could all switch too I don't think anyone would argue. Unfortunately the reality is for the foreseeable future, fission is the only way to generate power. If you're talking about building a reactor in the next 20 years, you build a fission one. If somehow we have a breakthrough in fusion technology to make it energy positive, then I have no doubt we'll see a huge increase in people trying to use it.
- nickik 7y ago
  Fusion solves nothing you can not solve with fission. With fission you can easily go down to 300 years of storage, this has been known since the 60s but that's often ignored. Waste is only a significant problem if you want to make it a problem.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago

> per megawatt produced it (Nuclear power) is the safest form of energy production. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/25/chernobyl-30-year-anniversary/83220302/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/25/chernoby... Thousands dead, probably more, "up to 1 million under a worst-case scenario study". 5 million people still living on contaminated land, and it's not over.

manfredo 7y ago
The figure of 1 million is given by Greenpeace which is not regarded to be even remotely authoritative. Even the figure of 6,000 is disputed. The WHO produced a figure of 4,000 [1]. In particular these estimates were projections about future cancer rates and similar illnesses. Now that we've actually advanced the clock 35 years we can make meaningful examinations of the affected population. As of 2005, less than 50 deaths due to illnesses attributed to radiation pollution from the Chernobyl disaster were recorded. Furthermore, even if the worst-case figures in the ranges of the tens of thousands are taken as fact nuclear is still the safest forms of energy production. 1. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > As of 2005, less than 50 deaths due to illnesses attributed to radiation pollution from the Chernobyl disaster were recorded. The word "recorded" does a huge amount of obscuring work in that sentence. I thoroughly recommend the book "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich. After reading that, a double or triple digit number is simply not credible.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    So an oral history book written by a private author is more credible than the work of health experts?
    - 7y ago