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I am going to make a completely unscientific argument now that I know the HN readership will look down upon, but I think it captures why we can't build nuclear

by nikster 16y ago

I am going to make a completely unscientific argument now that I know the HN readership will look down upon, but I think it captures why we can't build nuclear plants. First, nuclear power started out as a cold war thing; they built nuclear plants because of one very interesting side-product required to build nuclear bombs. These days in those countries that already have nuclear weapons, that's a secondary concern - but this is where it came from. And for countries that don't yet have nuclear weapons, that's the reason they want to build them. Second, the accident in Chernobyl. Hold your statistics and studies. Just pause for a moment. Think about this accident. All children all over Europe were told to stay inside for a few days. And take Iodine. Any technology that is able to cause that is not fit to generate power. In fact the only man made processes that can cause such an event are nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. Fail safe plants unfortunately don't exist - they're not fail safe, as evident in Fukushima. Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously. I am not a worrier - but when you're playing with forces that cannot be controlled with the technology we have, you have to do the smart thing and skip them for now. There's plenty of alternatives - I think the nuclear thing is a distraction from them, and kept alive by a very active lobby. I am happy to change my opinion if you come up with a new process that's actually fail-safe, that's actually guaranteed to not leak radiation, and that doesn't produce nuclear waste.

code_duck 16y ago
I mostly agree with you here, but I do think the technology has advanced since the Fukishima (or certainly Chernobyl) were built. Those plants are fairly ancient. Newer facilities have much safer designs. What we need to do with both nuclear and conventional power facilities is close everything from pre-1985 or so. The pollution coming from the dirty, grandfathered-in (to higher pollution) coal plants in the South, for example, are very likely to kill and sicken a lot more people than nuclear power.
- papaf 16y ago
  I mostly agree with you here, but I do think the technology has advanced since the Fukishima (or certainly Chernobyl) were built. Those plants are fairly ancient. Newer facilities have much safer designs. I don't like commenting on things I know only a little about, however, one thing is getting overlooked when people make this argument. The newer designs are usually PWRs which are stable by design as loss of water or power slows down the reaction. Unfortunately, they are expensive to build (billions of dollars) and have a limited life due to the challenges of containing pressure with metals exposed to radiation. This makes them barely economic over their lifetime at todays energy prices. The UK has allowed the planning and building of new PWRs. Unfortunately, the companies involved are reluctant to go ahead without some sort of subsidy or carbon tax. If any of the above is wrong, I'd like to be corrected. However, I feel this is a valid point that is rarely made.
  - code_duck 16y ago
    Sure, I'm totally with you there.
jbri 16y ago
What alternatives can you offer? Solar and wind energy are not reliable enough to provide base-load coverage, hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology, and really the only other option is fossil fuels. At this point, the options literally are nuclear, or fossil fuels. And burning more and more coal for power (which puts out more radiation and kills more people than a nuclear plant, FYI) because anything less than perfection is not suitable just seems like a really, really shortsighted idea. An alternative energy source does not need to be perfect to be worth switching to. It just needs to be better than the status quo. And nuclear power, currently, is very much better than coal.
- cperciva 16y ago
  hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology... ... and isn't any safer than nuclear power. Four people died when the Japan earthquake caused a dam to fail -- that's more deaths than the Fukushima NPP has caused, but oddly enough nobody is calling for a worldwide halt to dam construction.
Someone 16y ago
All children all over Europe were told to stay inside for a few days. And take Iodine. [citation needed] I live in (western) Europe, and remember neither of these; neither does Wikipedia. Some milk and vegetables were destroyed as precautionary measures, but that is about it.
cperciva 16y ago
Fail safe plants unfortunately don't exist - they're not fail safe, as evident in Fukushima. The Fukushima NPP is very old. Reactor 1 was already scheduled to be decommissioned at the end of March, in fact. Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously. At the Fukushima NPP, the chain reactions in reactors 1, 2, and 3 stopped about 5 seconds after the earthquake hit, due to the automatic SCRAM triggered by the detection of abnormal ground acceleration. In the case the (very old) reactor design used at Fukushima, this was an active insertion; modern power plants use passive SCRAM (usually relying only on gravity) so that even if everything fails the chain reaction will still be shut down.
DennisP 16y ago
I lived in Germany when Chernobyl blew. I'm pretty aware of nuclear risks. But...should we get rid of hydroelectric as well? Banqiao Dam killed 26,000 people, immediately instead of years later, and there weren't any little pills they could take to prevent it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam There have been a lot of other dam failures that killed people, too. And don't get me started on coal. I've seen estimates that pollution from coal kills 24,000 people every year in the U.S. alone. That's not even from accidents, it's just normal operation. So I'm not too concerned about the relative risk of nuclear plants. All modern plants are far safer than Chernobyl. But people are working on ideas that would meet your specs. The liquid thorium reactor, for example, produces orders of magnitude less waste, which is only dangerous for a few centuries. The fuel is liquid, and if it starts to overheat, a plug melts and drains it into a wide basin to cool off. The reactor can also dispose of our existing nuclear wsste.
- lispm 16y ago
  There are a lot of reactors which are much more dangerous than the one in Chernobyl. The ones using Plutonium, the breeders, the ones with large storage sites full of spent fuel, etc. The Thorium reactor has a lot of problems. Engineering problems that are not solved. Remember the German Thorium reactor, the HTR 300. It died with a whimper. What we really don't need is giving nuclear engineers more money to create huge nightmares. The first thing before ANY nuclear engineer could come back with another idea is to provide us with a safe storage technology and clean up failed attempts like in Asse II. Believing that the next hundred billions on new nuclear technology will be better spend than the last ones, is just naive. Especially given that the basic question of storing the waste is totally unsolved. The US abandoned now Yucca. Germany has also no storage site. Instead the waste is piling up in totally inadequate places - spent fuel is stored in pools near reactors and in dry storage near reactors.
  - JanezStupar 16y ago
    We don't need storage sites. If we unstuck our heads from our asses we can just burn most of the waste. And you're talking like nuclear engineers are some sort of freaks just waiting to unleash the next horror upon the world. The fact is that if we want to realize UN millennium goals we need more energy. If we want to help poor asians and africans, we need more energy. If we want everybody to own a Xbox, a car and a week of vacation per year - we need more energy. Basically only obstacle in our path of increased welfare and general well being (peace also!) on the world is access to more, cheaper energy. And newsflash - hydro, solar and wind won't cut it. They might if we build a world supergrid. But that won't happen for at least 40 years (If we had necessary tech today - it would take 20-40 years to get it built). So what are you proposing? Or are you just washing your hands and laying off the burden from your soul?

by nikster 16y ago

code_duck 16y ago

I mostly agree with you here, but I do think the technology has advanced since the Fukishima (or certainly Chernobyl) were built. Those plants are fairly ancient. Newer facilities have much safer designs. What we need to do with both nuclear and conventional power facilities is close everything from pre-1985 or so. The pollution coming from the dirty, grandfathered-in (to higher pollution) coal plants in the South, for example, are very likely to kill and sicken a lot more people than nuclear power.

papaf 16y ago
I mostly agree with you here, but I do think the technology has advanced since the Fukishima (or certainly Chernobyl) were built. Those plants are fairly ancient. Newer facilities have much safer designs. I don't like commenting on things I know only a little about, however, one thing is getting overlooked when people make this argument. The newer designs are usually PWRs which are stable by design as loss of water or power slows down the reaction. Unfortunately, they are expensive to build (billions of dollars) and have a limited life due to the challenges of containing pressure with metals exposed to radiation. This makes them barely economic over their lifetime at todays energy prices. The UK has allowed the planning and building of new PWRs. Unfortunately, the companies involved are reluctant to go ahead without some sort of subsidy or carbon tax. If any of the above is wrong, I'd like to be corrected. However, I feel this is a valid point that is rarely made.
- code_duck 16y ago
  Sure, I'm totally with you there.

jbri 16y ago

What alternatives can you offer? Solar and wind energy are not reliable enough to provide base-load coverage, hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology, and really the only other option is fossil fuels. At this point, the options literally are nuclear, or fossil fuels. And burning more and more coal for power (which puts out more radiation and kills more people than a nuclear plant, FYI) because anything less than perfection is not suitable just seems like a really, really shortsighted idea. An alternative energy source does not need to be perfect to be worth switching to. It just needs to be better than the status quo. And nuclear power, currently, is very much better than coal.

cperciva 16y ago
hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology... ... and isn't any safer than nuclear power. Four people died when the Japan earthquake caused a dam to fail -- that's more deaths than the Fukushima NPP has caused, but oddly enough nobody is calling for a worldwide halt to dam construction.

Someone 16y ago

All children all over Europe were told to stay inside for a few days. And take Iodine. [citation needed] I live in (western) Europe, and remember neither of these; neither does Wikipedia. Some milk and vegetables were destroyed as precautionary measures, but that is about it.

cperciva 16y ago

Fail safe plants unfortunately don't exist - they're not fail safe, as evident in Fukushima. The Fukushima NPP is very old. Reactor 1 was already scheduled to be decommissioned at the end of March, in fact. Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously. At the Fukushima NPP, the chain reactions in reactors 1, 2, and 3 stopped about 5 seconds after the earthquake hit, due to the automatic SCRAM triggered by the detection of abnormal ground acceleration. In the case the (very old) reactor design used at Fukushima, this was an active insertion; modern power plants use passive SCRAM (usually relying only on gravity) so that even if everything fails the chain reaction will still be shut down.

DennisP 16y ago

I lived in Germany when Chernobyl blew. I'm pretty aware of nuclear risks. But...should we get rid of hydroelectric as well? Banqiao Dam killed 26,000 people, immediately instead of years later, and there weren't any little pills they could take to prevent it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam There have been a lot of other dam failures that killed people, too. And don't get me started on coal. I've seen estimates that pollution from coal kills 24,000 people every year in the U.S. alone. That's not even from accidents, it's just normal operation. So I'm not too concerned about the relative risk of nuclear plants. All modern plants are far safer than Chernobyl. But people are working on ideas that would meet your specs. The liquid thorium reactor, for example, produces orders of magnitude less waste, which is only dangerous for a few centuries. The fuel is liquid, and if it starts to overheat, a plug melts and drains it into a wide basin to cool off. The reactor can also dispose of our existing nuclear wsste.

lispm 16y ago
There are a lot of reactors which are much more dangerous than the one in Chernobyl. The ones using Plutonium, the breeders, the ones with large storage sites full of spent fuel, etc. The Thorium reactor has a lot of problems. Engineering problems that are not solved. Remember the German Thorium reactor, the HTR 300. It died with a whimper. What we really don't need is giving nuclear engineers more money to create huge nightmares. The first thing before ANY nuclear engineer could come back with another idea is to provide us with a safe storage technology and clean up failed attempts like in Asse II. Believing that the next hundred billions on new nuclear technology will be better spend than the last ones, is just naive. Especially given that the basic question of storing the waste is totally unsolved. The US abandoned now Yucca. Germany has also no storage site. Instead the waste is piling up in totally inadequate places - spent fuel is stored in pools near reactors and in dry storage near reactors.
- JanezStupar 16y ago
  We don't need storage sites. If we unstuck our heads from our asses we can just burn most of the waste. And you're talking like nuclear engineers are some sort of freaks just waiting to unleash the next horror upon the world. The fact is that if we want to realize UN millennium goals we need more energy. If we want to help poor asians and africans, we need more energy. If we want everybody to own a Xbox, a car and a week of vacation per year - we need more energy. Basically only obstacle in our path of increased welfare and general well being (peace also!) on the world is access to more, cheaper energy. And newsflash - hydro, solar and wind won't cut it. They might if we build a world supergrid. But that won't happen for at least 40 years (If we had necessary tech today - it would take 20-40 years to get it built). So what are you proposing? Or are you just washing your hands and laying off the burden from your soul?