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To be fair to the MP, however, he said it’s “like” living by a bomb, it was a metaphor. And there are examples in history of accidents at nuclear power plants t

To be fair to the MP, however, he said it’s “like” living by a bomb, it was a metaphor. And there are examples in history of accidents at nuclear power plants that have caused damage to their surroundings. So his statement may not be indicative of misunderstanding the fundamentals of nuclear power.

ashtonkem 6y ago
It’s an awful metaphor once you actually look into the statistics.
- mpalczewski 6y ago
  Which statistics? Rate of unintended explosions? I believe the "steel man" argument is that living next to a nuclear power plant exposes you to unknown tail risks.
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    These statistics: http://origin.who.int/airpollution/en/ http://origin.who.int/airpollution/en/
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Like statistics on something like 70 years of industrial experience with nuclear plants? How many centuries are required to make a point?
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Living near a coal power plant exposes you to significantly more radiation than a nuclear power plant, let alone other health risks due to non-radioactive pollution.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > Living near a coal power plant exposes you to significantly more radiation than a nuclear power plant, let alone other health risks due to non-radioactive pollution. But who is advocating for coal in lieu of Nuclear, other than say China? This is such a red herring, that no one in their right mind is trying to use coal as alternative, I mean even Texas with a dreadful position on environmental damage (see examples like COVID) and is swimming in oil--they had 99 cent gasoline before the pandemic--is moving towards wind farms. Even the Gulf States see the writing on the wall and are moving on to other investments in Aerospace and mining asteroids in space.
      - loeg 6y ago
        > But who is advocating for coal in lieu of Nuclear, other than say China? Germany, for example, is literally dismantling their nuclear energy program and the slack is taken up with coal. Due to self-named "green" advocacy. Or anyone arguing against nuclear in the developing world, for example. The status quo is coal.
        dispat0r 6y ago
        It gets a lot crazier than that. Germany is also closing coal plants. If not enough power is available we are importing from France(nuclear) or Poland(coal) for a premium of course. Germany's energy policy is a complete fail and should never be praised.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        The US has built just one new coal power plant in the last five years (a tiny one in Alaska). Coal is not the status quo; coal is collapsing here. Neither nuclear nor coal is the way forward.
        loeg 6y ago
        You've taken that statement completely out of context: "in the developing world."
        6y ago
    - mpalczewski 6y ago
      I'm very much in favor of nuclear, but if you want to advocate for it, you should know what the strongest arguments against it are. It's very easy to beat down the strawman of pollution. The risks of living next to a coal plant are rather well understood. The worst case scenario of living next to a coal plant is very different from the worst case scenario of living next to a nuke.
- kevinmchugh 6y ago
  Right, and that's the more compelling rebuttal. The public health effects of fossil fuels are broadly underrated.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Humans have a really hard time balancing consistent, boring risk against low frequency high impact risk.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Right, and that's the more compelling rebuttal. The public health effects of fossil fuels are broadly underrated. I agree, the externalities are seldom felt in real time; in fact some of us were/are addicted to the smell of 103 Octane, it burns sweet. And the cancerous nature of them is often never a big concern, even from someone like myself who worked in a lab diagnosing Leukemia and Lymphoma at one point; but the key difference is that we can undo the green-house emission and carbon footprint through effective infrastructure, optimized utilization and prioritization of it as wel ultimately transitioning to EV. Just look at how much better the air quality is from people WFH, this can be reduced even further if we simultaneously undertook a large enough planting of trees and plants in Urban areas with CO2 requisitioning centric crops, like hemp, to remediate soils and our air. With Nuclear getting it wrong once, be it from Natural causes or Human error, has dire consequences that can't be undone even if its deemed to be 'contained': just look at Chernobyl during the fires this year. We were in no way ready to deal with that issue given a simultaneously dreadful pandemic sweeping the Planet. When it comes to Energy usage, I think we have to move away from solely a short-sighted quick profit based calculus, and look at it more through risk assessment approach. Where rather than think about spending money in some study looking at the affects of near extinct squirrels we see this for what it is: a very volatile planet that is hostile to Man's infrastructure with ever-changing variables. I think that's the biggest underrated opinion of all as it shatters the conveniences of modernity in the West we've all come to expect.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > It’s an awful metaphor once you actually look into the statistics. Have you ever lived near a Ppwer Plant? I have, the worst one in the US actually, and it leaked so much that it had to be shut down after continual incompetence, corruption and violations. I actually think its an apt metaphor, if only due to Human error. Worst yet is that most are built around coastal areas and the infrastructure is such that there is only one way in, and without any connecting freeways around the area for many miles. I was trapped in my car coming back home several times during massive fires with no way to get home other than to stay on that freeway for 7 hours inhaling smoke all the way there, my hair smelled like a bbq pit for a week. In the case of a melt down, as San Onofre is both on the Pacific coast line as well as along the San Andreas fault line so it was just a matter of time, we would all die. Some slower than others, but death was the most likely outcome due to radiation exposure as an evacuation plan would fail. When you see this as soon as you walk out the door, and can't tell why and how to react that is then you can comment on what is an awful metaphor or not, until then you have no real idea what it feels like: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fc1.staticflickr.com%2F4%2F3057%2F2857747757_4c4c7edf41_n.jpg&f=1&nofb=1 https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F... I also know people from Fukushima, they came to our town in 2011 to warn us, and my friends wife is from Fukushima prefecture and was close enough from the plant to be affected by the Tsunami, it wiped away her family business and home, and all of these people feel the same. Statistics are only a cursory form of understanding a subject and hardly comprehensive. Nuclear technology is fine for non-terrestrial purposes, like Mars colonization, we have so many better options on this planet that it baffles me why such short shortsightedness prevails, other than abject greed. Hell, Elon refuses to use it on Mars, and would rather have a football fields worth of solar farms, which may be a mistake due to weather based outages that are likely to occur, but is also a keener insight as to how myopic this technology is in the Hands of Humans from one of the most cunning people on this Planet.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    > Statistics are only a cursory form of understanding a subject and hardly comprehensive. And yet your anecdotal evidence is much better at estimating risk than it?
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  It's a hard comparison to make. Nuclear weapons have caused, and care capable of causing, more damage. But they also have a better safety record, insofar as accidents at nuclear power plants have done more damage to surrounding communities than accidents at places where nuclear weapons are stored. IOW, one could argue that the metaphor is making nuclear power plants out to be safer than they are. It's true that coal is awful, too. But I think that it would be callous to simply dismiss the rather arresting psychological impact of entire communities being rendered uninhabitable at a single stroke. Why what happened to Pripyat or Fukushima is known to basically everyone, while what happened at places like Aberfan and Centralia seem to have become subject matter for Atlas Obscura, I couldn't quite say. Perhaps it's the greater scale of the individual events.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    I recomend looking up "Broken arrow" - many nuclear weapons have been destroyed or lost, often with signifficant local loss of life (generally the bomber crew & often crew of the aicraft the bombrr colided with) as well as local contamination. Also some of the soviet bomb development efforts caused wide scale contamination, sometime even in inhabitted areas.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > But they also have a better safety record, insofar as accidents at nuclear power plants have done more damage to surrounding communities than accidents at places where nuclear weapons are stored. Compared to the sites in the US related to nuclear weapons, like Hanford, and the (literal) fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing? It's also quite likely that accidents related to nuclear weapons are under-reported, especially outside of the US, for all the obvious reasons.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    I think it's probably safe to say that more Americans have been killed by nuclear bomb tests than by nuclear powerplant accidents. It's hard to say for sure, but John Wayne may have been one of those killed by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders
- renewiltord 6y ago
  If the statistics were so great, insurance for the plant would be cheap. Yet no one will insure a nuclear plant. Why is that? No one wants to take free money?
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > If the statistics were so great, insurance for the plant would be cheap. Yet no one will insure a nuclear plant. Why is that? No one wants to take free money? This is a common trope, but that answer is that insurance companies are required to hold enough capital to pay a claim regardless of what the probability is. So if you want someone to carry a hundred billion dollars worth of insurance, even if the probability of the event was one in a trillion, the insurance would still be prohibitively expensive because you'd have to pay the time value of money on the hundred billion dollars the insurance company has to hold in order to cover a potential claim regardless of whether one ever comes. This is why the government insurance thing. The federal government is large enough that it isn't necessary to make them hold that much capital in reserve ahead of time in order to trust their ability to pay a claim, which solves the problem.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      There is $450m nuclear insurance available on the market. Perhaps you could work out proportional reinsurance using that plus the reactor maker insurance guarantee. Price-Anderson already incentivizes nuclear quite a bit by the US Gov acting as a backer. It doesn't help because nuclear is too risky for the benefit. Same as hydro-electric. Too dangerous for the money.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        Reinsurance is a method to pool insurance resources so that a smaller insurance company can assert the ability to cover a hundred billion dollar claim to begin with. It doesn't solve the time value of money issue, it only moves it around. Carrying that amount of insurance is prohibitively expensive independent of the risk. Require the oil companies to carry enough insurance on every well to cover a claim the size of Deepwater Horizon and see how fast it destroys them.
ekianjo 6y ago
Its as useful a metaphor as saying living next to a pond is as dangerous as living next to an ocean. Bad analogies are bad.
skissane 6y ago
A time-traveller from a thousand years in the future abducts you. You are informed that you will be dumped at one of two spacetime coordinates, but you'll be allowed to choose which – right outside Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at 1:22am local time on 26 April 1986, or an equivalent distance from ground zero in Hiroshima at 8:14am local time on 6 August 1945. Which do you pick? Neither choice is good, but the odds of survival are much higher with the first choice than the second. Nuclear power accidents and use of nuclear weapons are not really comparable – as bad as nuclear power accidents are, use of nuclear weapons is far more deadly.
- maverick2007 6y ago
  How accurate was the Chernobyl mini-series wrt damage caused by radiation, specifically to the firefighters? If it was accurate at all I think I might pick Hiroshima, at least it would be over quick.
  - skissane 6y ago
    Firefighters are staying put to fight the fire. If they'd ran away from the disaster as fast as they could, they would have received less radiation exposure, and would have had greater chance of survival.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    MANY victims of Hiroshima died like those firefighters died. Not all were vaporized instantly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Post-attack_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... (I know the premise you were responding to was standing right next to ground zero, where you would have been vaporized, but I think it's worth mentioning that not all of the people killed died like that.)
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      Since it's pedantic HN nuclear day again, actually it was an airburst.
BurningFrog 6y ago
"Causing damage to surroundings" is to "exploding nuclear bomb" as a broken tail light is to 9/11.

ashtonkem 6y ago

It’s an awful metaphor once you actually look into the statistics.

mpalczewski 6y ago
Which statistics? Rate of unintended explosions? I believe the "steel man" argument is that living next to a nuclear power plant exposes you to unknown tail risks.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  These statistics: http://origin.who.int/airpollution/en/ http://origin.who.int/airpollution/en/
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Like statistics on something like 70 years of industrial experience with nuclear plants? How many centuries are required to make a point?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Living near a coal power plant exposes you to significantly more radiation than a nuclear power plant, let alone other health risks due to non-radioactive pollution.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Living near a coal power plant exposes you to significantly more radiation than a nuclear power plant, let alone other health risks due to non-radioactive pollution. But who is advocating for coal in lieu of Nuclear, other than say China? This is such a red herring, that no one in their right mind is trying to use coal as alternative, I mean even Texas with a dreadful position on environmental damage (see examples like COVID) and is swimming in oil--they had 99 cent gasoline before the pandemic--is moving towards wind farms. Even the Gulf States see the writing on the wall and are moving on to other investments in Aerospace and mining asteroids in space.
    - loeg 6y ago
      > But who is advocating for coal in lieu of Nuclear, other than say China? Germany, for example, is literally dismantling their nuclear energy program and the slack is taken up with coal. Due to self-named "green" advocacy. Or anyone arguing against nuclear in the developing world, for example. The status quo is coal.
      - dispat0r 6y ago
        It gets a lot crazier than that. Germany is also closing coal plants. If not enough power is available we are importing from France(nuclear) or Poland(coal) for a premium of course. Germany's energy policy is a complete fail and should never be praised.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        The US has built just one new coal power plant in the last five years (a tiny one in Alaska). Coal is not the status quo; coal is collapsing here. Neither nuclear nor coal is the way forward.
        loeg 6y ago
        You've taken that statement completely out of context: "in the developing world."
        6y ago
  - mpalczewski 6y ago
    I'm very much in favor of nuclear, but if you want to advocate for it, you should know what the strongest arguments against it are. It's very easy to beat down the strawman of pollution. The risks of living next to a coal plant are rather well understood. The worst case scenario of living next to a coal plant is very different from the worst case scenario of living next to a nuke.
kevinmchugh 6y ago
Right, and that's the more compelling rebuttal. The public health effects of fossil fuels are broadly underrated.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Humans have a really hard time balancing consistent, boring risk against low frequency high impact risk.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > Right, and that's the more compelling rebuttal. The public health effects of fossil fuels are broadly underrated. I agree, the externalities are seldom felt in real time; in fact some of us were/are addicted to the smell of 103 Octane, it burns sweet. And the cancerous nature of them is often never a big concern, even from someone like myself who worked in a lab diagnosing Leukemia and Lymphoma at one point; but the key difference is that we can undo the green-house emission and carbon footprint through effective infrastructure, optimized utilization and prioritization of it as wel ultimately transitioning to EV. Just look at how much better the air quality is from people WFH, this can be reduced even further if we simultaneously undertook a large enough planting of trees and plants in Urban areas with CO2 requisitioning centric crops, like hemp, to remediate soils and our air. With Nuclear getting it wrong once, be it from Natural causes or Human error, has dire consequences that can't be undone even if its deemed to be 'contained': just look at Chernobyl during the fires this year. We were in no way ready to deal with that issue given a simultaneously dreadful pandemic sweeping the Planet. When it comes to Energy usage, I think we have to move away from solely a short-sighted quick profit based calculus, and look at it more through risk assessment approach. Where rather than think about spending money in some study looking at the affects of near extinct squirrels we see this for what it is: a very volatile planet that is hostile to Man's infrastructure with ever-changing variables. I think that's the biggest underrated opinion of all as it shatters the conveniences of modernity in the West we've all come to expect.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> It’s an awful metaphor once you actually look into the statistics. Have you ever lived near a Ppwer Plant? I have, the worst one in the US actually, and it leaked so much that it had to be shut down after continual incompetence, corruption and violations. I actually think its an apt metaphor, if only due to Human error. Worst yet is that most are built around coastal areas and the infrastructure is such that there is only one way in, and without any connecting freeways around the area for many miles. I was trapped in my car coming back home several times during massive fires with no way to get home other than to stay on that freeway for 7 hours inhaling smoke all the way there, my hair smelled like a bbq pit for a week. In the case of a melt down, as San Onofre is both on the Pacific coast line as well as along the San Andreas fault line so it was just a matter of time, we would all die. Some slower than others, but death was the most likely outcome due to radiation exposure as an evacuation plan would fail. When you see this as soon as you walk out the door, and can't tell why and how to react that is then you can comment on what is an awful metaphor or not, until then you have no real idea what it feels like: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fc1.staticflickr.com%2F4%2F3057%2F2857747757_4c4c7edf41_n.jpg&f=1&nofb=1 https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F... I also know people from Fukushima, they came to our town in 2011 to warn us, and my friends wife is from Fukushima prefecture and was close enough from the plant to be affected by the Tsunami, it wiped away her family business and home, and all of these people feel the same. Statistics are only a cursory form of understanding a subject and hardly comprehensive. Nuclear technology is fine for non-terrestrial purposes, like Mars colonization, we have so many better options on this planet that it baffles me why such short shortsightedness prevails, other than abject greed. Hell, Elon refuses to use it on Mars, and would rather have a football fields worth of solar farms, which may be a mistake due to weather based outages that are likely to occur, but is also a keener insight as to how myopic this technology is in the Hands of Humans from one of the most cunning people on this Planet.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > Statistics are only a cursory form of understanding a subject and hardly comprehensive. And yet your anecdotal evidence is much better at estimating risk than it?
mumblemumble 6y ago
It's a hard comparison to make. Nuclear weapons have caused, and care capable of causing, more damage. But they also have a better safety record, insofar as accidents at nuclear power plants have done more damage to surrounding communities than accidents at places where nuclear weapons are stored. IOW, one could argue that the metaphor is making nuclear power plants out to be safer than they are. It's true that coal is awful, too. But I think that it would be callous to simply dismiss the rather arresting psychological impact of entire communities being rendered uninhabitable at a single stroke. Why what happened to Pripyat or Fukushima is known to basically everyone, while what happened at places like Aberfan and Centralia seem to have become subject matter for Atlas Obscura, I couldn't quite say. Perhaps it's the greater scale of the individual events.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  I recomend looking up "Broken arrow" - many nuclear weapons have been destroyed or lost, often with signifficant local loss of life (generally the bomber crew & often crew of the aicraft the bombrr colided with) as well as local contamination. Also some of the soviet bomb development efforts caused wide scale contamination, sometime even in inhabitted areas.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > But they also have a better safety record, insofar as accidents at nuclear power plants have done more damage to surrounding communities than accidents at places where nuclear weapons are stored. Compared to the sites in the US related to nuclear weapons, like Hanford, and the (literal) fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing? It's also quite likely that accidents related to nuclear weapons are under-reported, especially outside of the US, for all the obvious reasons.
- catalogia 6y ago
  I think it's probably safe to say that more Americans have been killed by nuclear bomb tests than by nuclear powerplant accidents. It's hard to say for sure, but John Wayne may have been one of those killed by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders
renewiltord 6y ago
If the statistics were so great, insurance for the plant would be cheap. Yet no one will insure a nuclear plant. Why is that? No one wants to take free money?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > If the statistics were so great, insurance for the plant would be cheap. Yet no one will insure a nuclear plant. Why is that? No one wants to take free money? This is a common trope, but that answer is that insurance companies are required to hold enough capital to pay a claim regardless of what the probability is. So if you want someone to carry a hundred billion dollars worth of insurance, even if the probability of the event was one in a trillion, the insurance would still be prohibitively expensive because you'd have to pay the time value of money on the hundred billion dollars the insurance company has to hold in order to cover a potential claim regardless of whether one ever comes. This is why the government insurance thing. The federal government is large enough that it isn't necessary to make them hold that much capital in reserve ahead of time in order to trust their ability to pay a claim, which solves the problem.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    There is $450m nuclear insurance available on the market. Perhaps you could work out proportional reinsurance using that plus the reactor maker insurance guarantee. Price-Anderson already incentivizes nuclear quite a bit by the US Gov acting as a backer. It doesn't help because nuclear is too risky for the benefit. Same as hydro-electric. Too dangerous for the money.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      Reinsurance is a method to pool insurance resources so that a smaller insurance company can assert the ability to cover a hundred billion dollar claim to begin with. It doesn't solve the time value of money issue, it only moves it around. Carrying that amount of insurance is prohibitively expensive independent of the risk. Require the oil companies to carry enough insurance on every well to cover a claim the size of Deepwater Horizon and see how fast it destroys them.

ekianjo 6y ago

Its as useful a metaphor as saying living next to a pond is as dangerous as living next to an ocean. Bad analogies are bad.

skissane 6y ago

A time-traveller from a thousand years in the future abducts you. You are informed that you will be dumped at one of two spacetime coordinates, but you'll be allowed to choose which – right outside Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at 1:22am local time on 26 April 1986, or an equivalent distance from ground zero in Hiroshima at 8:14am local time on 6 August 1945. Which do you pick? Neither choice is good, but the odds of survival are much higher with the first choice than the second. Nuclear power accidents and use of nuclear weapons are not really comparable – as bad as nuclear power accidents are, use of nuclear weapons is far more deadly.

maverick2007 6y ago
How accurate was the Chernobyl mini-series wrt damage caused by radiation, specifically to the firefighters? If it was accurate at all I think I might pick Hiroshima, at least it would be over quick.
- skissane 6y ago
  Firefighters are staying put to fight the fire. If they'd ran away from the disaster as fast as they could, they would have received less radiation exposure, and would have had greater chance of survival.
- catalogia 6y ago
  MANY victims of Hiroshima died like those firefighters died. Not all were vaporized instantly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Post-attack_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... (I know the premise you were responding to was standing right next to ground zero, where you would have been vaporized, but I think it's worth mentioning that not all of the people killed died like that.)
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Since it's pedantic HN nuclear day again, actually it was an airburst.

BurningFrog 6y ago

"Causing damage to surroundings" is to "exploding nuclear bomb" as a broken tail light is to 9/11.