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Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

167 points by lukeqsee 16y ago

TGJ 16y ago
While the safest, the waste will be with the Earth for a long time to come. Longer than any corporation will be around, or government agency. There has to be a clear cut plan to deal with the waste of nuclear power that accounts for it's life span, and possible natural disasters. Currently all waste is stored at the power plants and the only current plan is to encase the waste in concrete. But where to go with that concrete? How to label the concrete to make sure future generations know that it is dangerous? How to ensure constant security and safety of the waste? We cannot move forward with nuclear energy until the problem of its waste is dealt with.
- lukeqsee 16y ago
  That consideration is the biggest. Nuclear power is safe, intrinsically. Nuclear waste is devastation waiting to happen (if not now, in the future).
  - waterlesscloud 16y ago
    It's a bit much to say that a system that requires multiple elaborate systems of safeguards is "intrinsically" safe.
    - lukeqsee 16y ago
      "Intrinsically safer" was probably the better term.
  - asharp 16y ago
    Not really. If you take the waste out of a thorium cycle reactor (ie. no fission products with half lifes > 100 hears), burn it down until there is basically nothing left then turn it into glass and stick it underneath solid granite in the middle of the worlds most geologically stable tectonic plate then no. It's not exactly devistation.
- wewyor 16y ago
  The current storage facilities for nuclear waste proposed or otherwise are quite unreal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...
- VladRussian 16y ago
  that waste can be burned in another types of reactors. Unfortunately, because of extremely high entry barrier, there isn't much chances for these or some other new types of reactors to be developed and put into production. Ie. we stuck with almost 60 year old technology [pretty much the first generation with some slight modifications] of nuclear energy production. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
  - natnat 16y ago
    Doesn't burning nuclear waste just turn it into a gas or a pile of ash with the same radioactive elements? Burning is a chemical reaction, so the actual nuclei of the atoms shouldn't be changed at all.
    - VladRussian 16y ago
      it is nuclear "burning". The point is to have designs which produce less dangerous waste [ideally the chain of nuclear reactions should end with non-radioactive elements, yet the reality is far from ideal] or use the existing waste to produce energy from it - the "waste" of existing reactors is still extremely potent nuclear fuel as the existing, very primitive and dating back to Manhattan Project, designs are just skimming the top, easiest, portion of energy. My favorite is mixed design - nuclear fusion core which itself may be even a bit net energy negative (and thus much more realistic in the near future) and which main purpose is to generate neutrons to burn pretty much anything "heavy" and cheap. Turn the power to the core off - the thing just stops.
- niels_olson 16y ago
  Yukka mountain, anyone? Oh that's right, the shrill keep blocking it out of shear, willful ignorance of the either the local or global realities.
jbm 16y ago
Great. I can't drink milk, had to avoid water for a day or two, having problem finding relatively uncontaminated meat, 20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable and so on. I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima. Mod me down all you want. I will be happy to pay attention when someone purchases land at a fair price near Fukushima #2 and raises his children there. Until then, you are handwaving for industry or for some vision of "environmentally friendly power". Put money on the table, or frankly, your opinion is worthless. We need nuclear power. Unfortunately, the culture of misinformation and understating danger around nuclear power means it is going to be impossible for it to supply the majority of our power. What this means in terms of loss of quality of life is not lost on me.
- owls 16y ago
  Nuclear power is cleaner than coal or oil. We just need to build stronger and safer reactors. Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought. I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physicist and he explained to me why I was wrong.
  - jbm 16y ago
    Buy Fukushiman land. Raise your kids there. Feed them local produce. To thy own self be true. I am not defending coal or solar or whatever. I am referring to the closed attitude of the nuclear industry. There is a huge problem with nuclear defenders in Japan who don't eat their own dogfood. You'd think they would be happy to do so since the reward is huge (improved confidence) and the risk is only 20 or more years down the line (if ever)
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. Nobody who points out the relative safety of nuclear power wants us to build more Mark I BWR's. My interest is in Travelling Wave Reactors and Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. But the problem is, when people freak out about Fukushima, they don't say "Hey! Mark I BWR's aren't safe! We should shut down those designs!" They go after Nuclear with a wide brush, and instead we're stuck with more gas and coal dependance.
mashmac2 16y ago
Seth Godin made the same point last week--with a neat graphic: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-... (He got his image from here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976 http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visuali...)
euromix 16y ago
I dont believe the numbers presented in this paper. First as nuclear technology comes from military projects, there is a long history of hiding evidences and wrong informations. 2 examples in france: - The nuclear lobby had regulation change, only for nuclear workers among all other workers, work related desease must be declare within 10 years. - The most dangerous jobs are done by subcontractors and the work related deseases or death among those people are not counted as "nuclear industry related" in the official statistics.
euromix 16y ago
by the way, the plutonium has a half life of 24000 years and 0,001 gramme is the lethal dose for human. there is 300 kg in the reactors in japan. that is 300 000 000 lethal doses active for the next 24000 years. I dont think there is anything comparable in coal / gaz / oil industry
kscaldef 16y ago
"Nuclear power is the safest way to make electricity"... so long as you pretend the only other option is fossil fuels.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  At scale, right now, those are the only two options.
  - kscaldef 16y ago
    Well, for that matter, we don't have enough nuclear power production capacity to meet our needs either, so I don't entirely see your point. Reducing the amount of power we're producing with fossil fuels will mean needing to increase our production from other sources, but it doesn't mandate that we have to increase it from a particular source.
    - jedsmith 16y ago
      My point is that fossil fuels and nuclear power are the only two types that scale efficiently with current technology. Everything else doesn't scale as well. Not sure how else to word that, and that's exactly what I meant up there. It has nothing to do with current capacity. Nuclear has lost a lot to debates much like this one; however, if we wanted the capacity, nuclear would step up and fill it in at a reasonable price. The same amount of power generated by the alternatives would be astronomically expensive. That's one of the problems that plague the alternatives you've named: either they are far too expensive to use at any kind of large scale, or suitable locations are in thin supply, or power output fluctuates unsuitably with a change in weather, and so on. They just can't compete. The current research into nuclear is making it even cheaper and safer (thorium, etc); the current research into the alternatives is making them cheap enough to be possible with significant demand.
      - eliasmacpherson 16y ago
        The reasonable price you talk about doesn't include the cost of disposal. Whatever about providing electricity to be consumed at scale, dealing with radioactive waste has not been successful at small scale, why would it work at large scale? A lot of people display hubris about the merits of the on paper research reactors, what about their unknown unknowns?
phlux 16y ago
What is difficult to reconcile is that we all know that nuclear meltdowns are catastrophic events, that the resultant fallout/radioactive contamination is utterly horrible. Yet it seems that we dont build reactors with the types of failsafe systems that truly are needed should meltdown occur. Obviously this reactor is old, and was not built during a time when we really knew what a meltdown looked like in real life. After Chernobyl, and now Fukishima, I think we really really really need to look at what the failsafe systems, containment, backup cooling and other system requirements really need to be. Should we build reactors only in D.U.M.B. like facilities? Should we build them in old open-pit mines, such that they could be entombed properly. Have we put enough research into containment facilities such that their structures will not melt? I know that these faciliies have multiple backups, but clearly even then we can have situations where they dont work. Yes, this was a trifecta of incredibly fantastic circumstance, but it still happened and we are now dealing with a shitstorm. Watching the documentary last night about how the earthquake dropped the coastline of japan upto 1 meter in elevation resulting in the sea-walls being 1 meter less than the tsunami - and the fact that clearly we know that tsunamis would occur there - placing a 6 reactor facility ON THE COAST LINE seems pretty damn stupid at this point. It's like "Nuclear energy is the safest energy there is, until its not!" I am all for nuclear -- but its current incarnation is rife with the traditional corrupt bullshit that plagues all other human endeavors; politics. Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy? If we had an organization whose sole charter was to produce energy, and was funded based on the economies of all the worlds countries - and energy was metered out to all countries in a responsible way -- we could be much further along to becoming a unified space-faring race.... /rant
- philwelch 16y ago
  Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy? Large parts of the world actually tried this, not just for their energy needs but for all other goods and services, too. It doesn't actually work that way in reality.
  - phlux 16y ago
marze 16y ago
When I see a story like this, it reminds me that the events in Japan represent the biggest PR challenge the nuclear industry has faced in many years. Fifty billion dollars of nuclear reactor US taxpayer-backed loan guarantees hang in the balance. The industry has been working for the past few decades to rehabilitate the image of nuclear power after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and now they have to contend with videos of a 1/2 mile tall mushroom cloud over a Japanese reactor and the continuing press coverage. Talk about challenging. I think the HN community may have difficulty appreciating the challenges of nuclear reactor design because it is so different from software. In software, you have known bugs and unknown bugs. Once you've got the known bugs down to a low enough level and aren't finding too many new ones, you might release. The consequences of a bug is generally not too bad, certainly not on the order of making 800 square miles of real estate worthless, for example. In engineering a nuclear plant, you have 90 tons of nuclear fuel generating 3,000,000,000 J of heat every second. The only reason it doesn't immediately turn into a big bubbling blob of molten uranium is that pumps the size of SUVs are pumping water over the fuel and removing all that heat. Every nuclear plant in the world is one minute from 90 tons of fuel melting into the basement if the water flow stops and fall-back systems fail. Fortunately, the engineering on these plants is done extremely carefully, with multiple independent systems in place to prevent exactly this by halting the nuclear chain reactions with neutron absorbing rods as well as by ensuring the flow of cooling water. However, the events in Japan exposed an "unknown bug" in the design, that if you flood the basements of the plants with water you can lose backup power and coolant flow. While this particular "bug" is relatively easy to correct, it is a reminder that other unknown bugs may exist waiting to be exposed by other unexpected sets of circumstances. It is good to remember Richard Feynman's quote about the space shuttle Challenger disaster, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
- WalterBright 16y ago
  There are a lot of parallels with airliner design. From reading articles about the nuke plant design, I think they could learn a lot from aviation engineers about how to build safe systems.
  - 16y ago
dcosson 16y ago
I saw this graphic the other day that puts into perspective various sources of radiation exposure (from xkcd, but it's not a joke...) I didn't realize that the lowest levels clearly linked to increased risk of cancer were so high. http://xkcd.com/radiation/ http://xkcd.com/radiation/
danenania 16y ago
"History suggests that nuclear power rarely kills and causes little illness. That’s also the conclusion engineers reach when they model scenarios for thousands of potential accidents." Auditing nuclear power's extremely short history is not a valid method of assessing risk. In poker they call this 'results oriented thinking'. Especially when discussing black swan events, history is almost by definition not a very useful basis for predictions.
- cturner 16y ago
  The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for decades. If fact, history inflates the risk by bringing into consideration known weaknesses of earlier reactor designs.
  - danenania 16y ago
    "The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for decades." In the context of highly unlikely events and the mathematics of probability, a period of decades is an extremely small sample. Consider that some of the types of events we are discussing may only happen once in a century. Clearly in this case several decades is not enough to fully gauge what the true risks of nuclear are to humans in the long term. One worst case scenario disaster would tip the scales quite heavily.
thekevan 16y ago
Yes but is it like saying wolves are safer than dogs because statistically your are less likely to be harmed by a wolf than a dog? It ignores the fact that if you do run afoul of a wolf, you are done.
- nitrogen 16y ago
  Not quite, because those who actually calculate statistics can account for differences in exposure. For example, the correct statistic to use with wolves and dogs would be something like, "survival rate after pissing off the animal in a similar environment," not just "total number of casualties." With nuclear vs. fossil fuel, the relevant statistic is deaths per terawatt-hour of energy produced, not deaths in total.
  - varjag 16y ago
    IAEA and WHO are notorious for counting only directly attributable deaths. If someone dies from radiation-induced cancer 10 years after in the ripe age of 30-something, it doesn't get in the stats. Then the stats get perpetuated endlessly by nuclear fanboys.
    - veidr 16y ago
      Yeah, that is the most frustrating thing about the arguments from Chernobyl revisionists. There was no possibility to do all the science that would ideally have been done, everywhere it should have been done. So the anecdotal evidence is often the only evidence--and it is discounted. That is where you get idiotic statements like 'only 28 people died as a result of Chernobyl'. Also, there are many other things that happened to people short of death that nevertheless really sucked, e.g. getting nonfatal thyroid cancer. There's definitely merit to having a compendium of only rigorous scientific results, of course, but it doesn't help advance the debate (or the species) when such work is mischaracterized and used to promulgate bogus conclusions (much less weird fanboy ideologies).
veidr 16y ago
I looooves me some electricity. So, even though I'm presently suffering some annoyances in my daily life here in Tokyo (sporadically contaminated drinking water, suspect milk and other foodstuffs, not enough electricity to maintain our previous standard of living, Internet outages forfuckssake), and even though I bristle any time anybody (this article's author included) ignorantly implies that we know all the bad things that were (or will be) caused by the meltdown at Chernobyl, I am totally 'pro-nuke' in the sense that I want more nuke plants to be built and maintained to produce electricity for us to use. And, the premise that nuke power is the safest power we've come up with (among power sources that actually have produced a significant fraction of the power we use), is incontrovertibly true. This article is only one of dozens making that point. However, people take this idea a bit too far, by not putting it into the right time context. A truly bad nuke disaster is forever (not literally, but for all intents and purposes). And we've never really had one yet. The thinking that Chernobyl is as bad as it can get is totally, obviously wrong--but it is implicit in a lot of the discussion. Maybe Fukushima won't get to the level of Chernobyl--and that's still a maybe btw, as it is still getting worse--but it's easy and plausible to conceive of how it could have been much worse. A couple more serial failures, the epicenter of the quake being closer, whatever--this ancient, obsolete plant could very well have had all six reactors achieve full meltdown. The woeful, pathetic--even funny, it's so bad--disaster preparedness that we now know TEPCO had implemented confirms a basic thing a lot of us have suspected: collectively, as a society (or separately, as a bunch of disparate societies), we just might not be mature enough in our thinking to strike the right balance of precaution and preparedness to handle nuclear power as safely as it should be handled. Technologically, I think nuke power is awesome. Societally, our ability to responsibly deal with the dangers it presents is very suspect, IMO. Unfortunately, I think that is a much harder problem to address. Probably some societies are better than others at this. Much like some seven year olds are responsible enough to handle a pocket knife and others totally aren't. What we've seen (and are still seeing) in Japan has been much more pathetic, unprepared, and technologically primitive than a lot of us would have expected. Much more like my dumbshit little nephew who cut off the tip of his little finger and then sat there crying about it than like the one who taught himself to whittle sticks into Indian figurines. Because the response to Fukushima has been so haphazard, reactive, and incompetent, I think many normal people now have this gut-reaction urge to reevaluate nuclear power, and that urge is basically correct. Of course, there is a lot of hysteria and empirically incorrect thinking flying around, but that happens any time a large number of humans discuss just about anything. Still, the takeaway from this disaster shouldn't be 'nuclear power is teh awesome! no problem, bro!! nukes ftw!!' It should be that nuclear power is indeed awesome, but our human systems that govern the deployment, administration, safeguarding, and--perhaps most importantly--sunsetting of nuclear power plants needs to be significantly reworked and dramatically improved. I don't see why we should build even one more plant without the safety planning and preventive measures being an order of magnitude better than they have been so far. OTOH, I hope we can get it together to demand that work be done, and then do it, so that we can build more power plants, so that we can get our electricity back and I can turn on my lights and air conditioner here without feeling like an asshole.
ChuckMcM 16y ago
When ever I see this I realize its not really helpful. Sure all the facts are true but as I've said before you can't argue with people who are scared. In other news a hole developed in a SWA 737 jet flying to Sacremento and did an emergency descent from 32000 to 12000 feet. Will it cause people to stop flying? Some, perhaps, but for the most part no. When you read that someone on the freeway died driving a '72 Buick that only had lap belts and no air bags you say "gee, its great we have them now, we've just had fewer highway deaths than have ever been recorded since 1949. The same is certainly true with nuclear power plants, if we were rational we would say, "fine" lets relicense "older" reactors on the provision they are dismantled and replaced. Have we learned a lot about building reactors? Sure, could we get rid of the older ones faster if we built new safe ones more quickly? Absolutely. But we have to either learn not to be afraid (respectful yes, afraid no) of nuclear power and radiation. Perhaps we should learn about it in school, perhaps we should provide low cost detectors for folks. I think its part of growing up as a species.
justatdotin 16y ago
hmmm, the entire article excludes the words 'weapons' and 'waste'. all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future. Here in Australia, we've come up with a state-of-the-art answer to our own burden of nuclear waste (arising from 30 years of experimentation and research reactors) - we're building a road out to a remote desert location, building a shed and dumping the unwanted problem on the tribal lands of a disempowered, de-funded indigenous community. Real reassuring, huh? As for weapons, although the old cold-war powers continue to slowly reduce the huge numbers of conventional nuclear weapons they hold, they're also building new ones. And at the same time as the total number of nuclear warheads in the world is slowly decreasing, the total number of actors holding those weapons is greater than ever, with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies spreading despite all rhetoric and pantomime surrounding the NPT. As Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: "For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ... then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale." finally, to the question of renewables : I totally reject the repeated assertions that renewables can't provide scalable or baseload power. Here in sunny Australia, we're following the lead of nations like Spain and building a few large grid connected solar-thermal and solar-hybrid plants, that compare well with the capacities of old fossil and hydro plants. Already, large remote communities in my part of the country are powered entirely by solar concentrator arrays. So I say, stick your nuclear power reactors where the sun doesn't shine.
- henrikschroder 16y ago
  > all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future. That's just flat-out wrong. The "waste" from current nuclear reactors is perfectly fine as fuel in newer reactor designs, you can burn the fuel again to get more energy out of it, and reduce the half-life of it significantly. I'm confident that that process can be repeated again, and again, and again, so that at the end we won't have any waste left that needs to be stored. Yet the public at large is still convinced that what was true in the 70's has to be true today, despite decades of research and technological innovation...
BasDirks 16y ago
You guys know about the problem of nuclear waste right? You've read plenty about it right? Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favor of nuclear power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about nuclear power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.
- jbri 16y ago
  You guys know about the problem of climate change, right? You've read plenty about it, right? Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favour of every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.
  - danenania 16y ago
    Perhaps attempting to solve a major problem with something that also causes major problems isn't much of a solution.
- icarus_drowning 16y ago
  Many modern reactor designs (Thorium LFTR's being the most prominent) are actually designed to help mitigate the problem of current waste by burning it as fuel. So if its waste that you are worried about, it seems sensible to support limited construction of modern reactors to address this problem.
- asharp 16y ago
  Eh. Fossil fuels will destroy the biosphere. They regularly and fairly brutally destroy rather large swaths of it (see nigeria/etc.). Hydroelectric plants destroy parts of the biosphere. They massively damage aquatic life and fish species and they have the rather nasty fact that if they fail they wash away a good portion of whatever is downstream (read: that city.). Renewables tend to be very energy disperse, require large amounts of energy/land to produce and generally can't provide baseload power except for hydro power. At the end of the day, there isn't any perfect answer, but all the effort directed at stopping nuclear power research seems very short sighted, seeing as it is currently the best answer to baseload power that we have.
lispm 16y ago
Yeah, currently the spent fuel is piling up. You need one a more large reprocessing sites and one or more storage sites. Currently the nuclear industry is running without it.
RuadhanMc 16y ago
What about Wave Power? It's pretty safe and has a very minimal environmental impact, almost constant output and for the most part is hidden from eye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power Just listened to an interesting podcast about it on Late Night Live: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948.htm http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948.... Obviously this wouldn't work for landlocked countries or countries which don't have shores with a constant supply of waves (I'm looking at you Baltic Sea) but for many parts of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Japan, etc, it might just be what we need.
- asharp 16y ago
  It's interesting, but from what i've seen of it (albiet not all that much), it has two major issues. * It has a low power density, hence requiring large arrays of collectors/etc. this makes it costly to build at scale. * It generally either takes up valuable land (land by the sea is costly), or it requires lots of engineering to try and build/maintain these things out to sea. It is very cool tech though.
  - RuadhanMc 16y ago
    The guys on the podcast were saying that the buoy is located 2 km offshore, so not an eyesore as such, though I have not seen one yet, so can't judge. Seems to be a more reliable solution than wind or solar if it can scale and it is designed to withstand monster waves. They say they are 3-4 years from deploying real installations (at the moment they have 3 experimental sites).
    - asharp 16y ago
      Yeah, there are a few different types. One sits on shore and uses wave power to compress air, which then runs turbines. This is probably the most efficient method i've seen. There are a few others though, like the buoy method, etc. Solar is about the most reliable solution you can come across, aside from an RTG mostly because it has no real moving parts and as such has no real way to fail. What will be interesting is if they manage to up the energy density to the point where it is economical to build.
singular 16y ago
A major problem here is that people often conflate nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs - in people's imaginations nuclear power plants could go up like a bomb and are therefore very dangerous. The fact that this is impossible doesn't get in the way of people's general perception, unfortunately. Actually looking at the evidence provides a different story altogether - the XKCD radiation chart [1] being one of the most striking examples of the levels of radiation we're talking about here. It's a pity (though not unexpected) that the media lap up this kind of sentiment despite the fact that hey, our planet is dying, and maybe we need to stop playing around with misconceptions for a second and maybe try and work on fixing this? I guess our grandchildren will be the ones to find out how this one plays out. [1]:http://xkcd.com/radiation/ http://xkcd.com/radiation/
- singular 16y ago
  Hey - why the downvote? I know it sounds silly, but I genuinely believe that is a significant part of the general popular view of nuclear power plants, silly or not.
lispm 16y ago
I'm from Germany and I'm supporting our move to 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier. It will be interesting to see what the US does. Let's say coal and gas are much more dangerous than nuclear and nuclear is the way to go. Let's also say renewables is not a way to go, because many people die from erecting wind mills, bio mass plants and solar panels. Chemicals for solar panel production are dirty and rare earth minerals need to be mined, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation Currently 20% of electricity in the US is generated with nuclear power stations. There are around 100 in operations. Many of them are extremely old and some even sit in dangerous regions with earth quakes. Let's say 20 of them have to be shutdown soon. 68% of the electricity are provided by coal (45%) and gas (23%) power plants. That is 3.4 times more electricity. Now the US is going to replace the dangerous and dirty coal and gas with nuclear. So you need around new 250 nuclear reactors to phase out coal and gas. Maybe less, because newer nuclear reactors generate more electricity. Maybe more, because the electricity demand may rise. Let's say a nuclear power plant and its direct infrastructure will cost around 5 billion a piece, that would be 1.25 trillion $. That sounds much, but given that the US spends a trillion a year on 'defense', it might not be much. May be the price will go down with production of 100 and more reactors. Given that the political parties may want to have small government, the majority of the nuclear reactors will have to be financed and operated by companies. So the tasks are: * find a way to finance one or two trillion dollars * decide and standardize on a new reactor design with inherent safety * build up companies who will plan, build and operate the nuclear reactors * find places for 250 new reactors (in addition to the existing 100) * build, say, three reprocessing plants for those * build, say, three breeder reactors * find, say, three storage sites for nuclear waste * get mining and an fuel enrichment going The result would be about 85% electricity production with nuclear reactors and complete phase out of gas and coal power plants. What is the time scale for this? The full development of a new type of reactor can be done in, say, 10 years. Add dealing with regulations, tests, ... - one may need 20 years. Let's be optimistic and say ten. A new reprocessing plant, would need, say, 10 years. A new storage site, say, 30 years. So in the first ten years no reactor would be ready. That's pessimistic, since there might be reactor designs that can be built earlier - it is optimistic, since a really new design may need more time. Also the US has not built commercial reactors for some time, so there is some time needed to get this going again. * 1st. decade, zero power plants * 2nd. decade, ten power plants + a reprocessing site * 3rd. decade, thirty power plants + another reprocessing site * 4th decade, fifty new power plants + another reprocessing site, plus a new storage site * 5th decade, 100 new power plants + a new storage site * 6th decade, 100 new power plants Result: new 290 nuclear power plants, 3 reprocessing sites, and two long term storage sites. This would also allow to shut down some of the older ones. These are just assumptions. That's basically what France did, now scaled to the US. France has 65 million people and less electricity usage per person. The US is now at 300+ Million people. That's around 4.5 times more. France operates around 50 nuclear power plants. So, 350 in total in the US needed would be a good assumption (given some constraints, like that France is very centralized and many people live around Paris). France also has a shrinking population, where the US is still growing - last I looked.
Tichy 16y ago
Not even one mention of solar power? Maybe the technology is not at its peak yet, but combines with saving a lot of energy, is it not an option? Let's not forget that a lot of money went into perfecting nuclear power, probably a lot more than into solar power. Comparing with coal deaths seems a bit like a strawman. Also I don't trust the way the victims of Chernobyl are calculated. Adding up victims from survivor stories ("all my colleagues are dead by now") seems to easily give more than 26 deaths. Yes, I love electricity, too - especially for computing. But I also think the world could be improved a lot by saving energy at the right places. I'd be much happier if there were less cars, for example. I think I could power my computer with a solar panel, even when not living in the desert. Heating seems to be another big one. Where I live renting is the norm, so home owners don't have much of an incentive to insulate houses properly (renters pay the energy bill). At the very least, please give me an Android phone with a Geiger Counter so that I can check the milk when I go shopping...
- asharp 16y ago
  Strangely enough it takes very little money, nor energy to produce nuclear power. It's very simple at its core. Have a look at the first research reactors and you'll find that you need basically no technology to produce reactors that produce useful amounts of energy. On the other hand solar power, especially photovoltaics is stupidly complex. Photovoltaics requires semiconductor processes, arguably one of the most complex things ever reliably harnessed by man to create. Saying that you want to power your computer from a solar cell seems green, until you think of all the energy that went into building that solar cell. All the waste materials, the toxic waste produced in fabrication, the pollution, etc. Then it seems decidedly less green then, say, plugging it in to the wall socket.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    And yet nature all around us seems to thrive on solar power alone, with zero toxic waste byproduct. I don't think pollution in production is a must, either. You don't have to dump your garbage in the river.
    - 16y ago
ck2 16y ago
By the way, the destroyed nuclear plant, just like the BP disaster, had avoided government regulation via apathy and corruption in the monitoring process. So regardless of the supposed engineered safety of any of these extreme measures, once you take out the oversight that is planned into these studies/reports, everything goes out the window. Everyone needs to state in their claims what will happen when everything fails because no-one bothered to follow up and do what they were supposed to.
Tichy 16y ago
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining: "However, in lesser developed countries and some developing countries, many miners continue to die annually, either through direct accidents in coal mines or through adverse health consequences from working under poor conditions. China, in particular, has the highest number of coal mining related deaths in the world, with official statistics claiming that 6,027 deaths occurred in 2004.[19] To compare, 28 deaths were reported in the U.S. in the same year.[20] Coal production in China is twice that in the U.S." So counting deaths of coal mining from countries were human lives are considered to be expendable resources sounds a bit dishonest. Not that I want to promote coal mining, but I don't trust these PR pieces, sorry. I think that article also counts accidents from people colliding with coal transporting trains? How is Uranium transported, are there never any collisions? Also, abandoned mines seem popular for storing nuclear waste. Were the deaths for creating those mines counted towards the nuclear power toll, too? As for "we don't care about deaths in China", strange enough nuclear power plants tend to be built next to country borders, so that possible pollution has a good chance of blowing into the neighbor's land, not your own. At least that is a story I heard about french nuclear power plants.
- Natsu 16y ago
  Those accidents are mining accidents alone. It ignores black lung, for example. For the other thing, if that's the actual reason they're locating plants there, I'm against it, for whatever that's worth.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    What are you trying to say? I just pointed out that the numbers form the pro-nuclear article are to be taken with a grain of salt. You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good. Do the black lung people even die because of it? If not they shouldn't count, just as the cancer patients don't seem to count as long as they don't die in a timely manner.
    - Natsu 16y ago
      > You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good. Yes, that's why I'm trying to make it clear what all the numbers represent. I believe that you're correct, for example, with China's coal miners having about 4x as much accident risk as US miners, but I think that's still limited to accident risk. I don't remember if Wikipedia explained which figures it was comparing very carefully. > Do the black lung people even die because of it? http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html "As dangerous an undertaking as coal mining is, there’s no comparison between the risks of cave-ins or flooding or explosions, and the risks of contracting this deadly disease. In the last decade alone, 10,000 miners have died from black lung, compared with fewer than 400 from mine accidents." See also: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-overview#a0199 http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-overview#a0199 "The ICU mortality rate for patients with coal worker’s pneumoconiosis with their first episode of respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation was 40%, and the in-hospital mortality rate was 43%." Also look at the treatment tab. Basically, the only treatment is preventative: change jobs (at least get away from the dust!), stop smoking, vaccinations for common lung infections, etc. Oh, yeah, you get put on oxygen, too. It doesn't help your dead lungs, though. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment Just a warning, but the pictures in part of that emedicine article are pretty gross.
kgarten 16y ago
Downvote me if you want, yet I'm really sad about Hacker News. This is the 4th or 5th pro-nuclear propaganda article up-voted in a couple of weeks. Personally, I'm always sceptical about superlatives. Yes right ... the safest. Especially, for our children and their children. For everybody who's a proponent of nuclear: If it is so save, why can't you get one insurance company to insure a plant against accidents? And what do we do with the waste? How do we deal it? How do we make it clear for coming civilizations that they are not supposed to dig there etc. as the the waste will stay hazardous for 100,000 years? Please watch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary) Is there any other way to make electricity that puts that high of a burden on coming generations? Maybe I'm totally off, yet can effects from coal/water/wind/sun power plants kill people 100 years after they been shut down?
- asharp 16y ago
  Sure. Global warming can kill people for tens of thousands of years to come. Newer processes produce no fission products with a half life > 100y. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_... Proper reprocessing can dramatically reduce the amount of waste produced, and the toxicity therein. Just generally, but why would you expect insuring a nuclear plant to be any more painful then insuring a pesticide plant/etc? A leaky pesticide plant can easily wipe a town off the map. A leaky dam can wash away a city with ease. I mean if you screw up your shale oil extraction you can end up with oil/natural gas leaking in to groundwater for hundreds of k's. Similarly with a burst dam at a gold mine, or.... There are large numbers of things that can cause massive ecological damage. A good number of them are that bad that they arn't ever really reported: http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-bp-exxon-valdez-catastrophes/ http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-bp-... as they continue on for years. It's just that some of them are easier to use to sell papers then others.
  - kgarten 16y ago
    How's solar and wind power contributing to global warming? Even new, very expensive coal plants are not contributing to global warming :) See: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pumpe_power_station https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pump... Thorium sounds great, can you tell me how many of the current power plants the new ones planed in the US. will use Thorium? Could not find this information. Is there some plan for proper reprocessing? I can just talk for Germany, as I'm unfamiliar with the situation in the US or elsewhere. In G. nuclear power plants are not insured, because no insurance company takes the risk. Pesticide plants however are insured and have to pay a lot for their potential risk. So in G. the nuclear power industry gets the profits whereas the risks are shouldered by the citizens (and their ancestors).
nl 16y ago
Only marginally related, but it has been surprising to me that US media seems to talk about the risk of a "radiation cloud floating over the Pacific" (which is effectively a non-existent risk to health), and yet doesn't talk about the risk to Californian nuclear plants from earthquakes & tsunamis. For example, to quote Wikipedia: Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. It was built directly over a geological fault line, and is located near a second fault... Diablo Canyon was originally designed to withstand a 6.75 magnitude earthquake from four faults, including the nearby San Andreas and Hosgri faults.,[6] but was later upgraded to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake.... In September 1981, PG&E discovered that a single set of blueprints was used for these structural supports; workers were supposed to have reversed the plans when switching to the second reactor, but did not.[11] According to Charles Perrow, the result of the error was that "many parts were needlessly reinforced, while others, which should have been strengthened, were left untouched." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant Or take a look at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is literally built on the beach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_S...
- veidr 16y ago
  Urrgh, I agree, this is so ludicrous and stupid. I wish I could say it was surprising, but it is an example of what I mean when I say 'maybe we (collectively) aren't mature enough to handle <insert awesome technology here>'.
jorangreef 16y ago
I was at a physics lecture about Fukushima given two weeks ago at the University of Cape Town. Here are some facts you may or may not know: 1. The event of a serious nuclear catastrophe is 1 in every 10000 years per nuclear plant. 2. There are between 400-500 nuclear plants in the world. 3. That means we can expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 20 years. 4. When these events happen, the consequences last forever, it takes tens of thousands of years for the land to recover. 5. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays constant (at 500), we would have at least 25 city-sized exclusion zones around the world. 6. These numbers only include nuclear power plants, they don't include nuclear subs, warheads etc. 7. These numbers exclude future advances in nuclear reliability though they may only be asymptotic (Pareto). Most of the advances have likely been made already. 8. If we were to increase our nuclear power output, so as to be less reliant on coal, they reckon we would need to double the number of nuclear power plants. 9. That means we can now expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 10 years. 10. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays constant (at 1000), we would have at least 50 city-sized exclusion zones around the world. 11. When a Chernobyl or worse happens, the fallout covers entire continents, leading to a number of indirectly attributable deaths from thyroid cancer and other cancers. 12. These probabilities are based on pure physics, they do not factor in negligence on the part of humans, tiredness, lack of funding, depreciation of plant, government intervention, mismanagement etc. For instance in South Africa, at the Koeberg nuclear plant, a loose bolt accidentally destroyed a power generator, and last year in September, 91 workers were accidentally exposed to very low doses of radiation (this was not widely reported to the media, and it is not clear that an investigation was ever conducted into the matter). 13. Coal plants and mining plants leak radiation on a daily basis. 14. Our parents teach us not to play with fire. Yet fire, when handled with respect and care, is a powerful technology. 15. Nuclear power, is also a fire, and a powerful technology, but it is an "eternal" fire. When a nuclear disaster occurs, the consequences are forever. 16. It is a question of asymmetric odds. The event of a disaster is remote. It is so remote that the apparatus of our human mind finds it difficult to comprehend. These events do happen, and when they do, they must be amortized over thousands of generations. 17. Only a fool would play Russian roulette at 6-1 odds. Long Term Capital Management included minds of Nobel Prize calibre, yet they played it with better odds and lost. Then they tried again under a different name and lost. That didn't stop them from trying yet a third time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management 18. LTCM played the game of asymmetric odds on behalf of a fund of investors. Are we prepared to play it on behalf of generations? Even thousands of generations yet to be born? Do we have the right? 18. If it were a question of pure physics, then Nuclear power may appear to be safe and controllable. But it is also a question of people, of incentives, business deals, governments, and of consequences over future generations for which we have no right to take responsibility. We need a safe and simple power (or a combination of these). 19. The trouble with Nuclear power (and I say this as someone who was once a naive supporter) is that there are too many variables. There are hundreds of variables within the realm of physics and there are hundreds more outside. We know from other disciplines, that humans (no matter how smart) are simply just not good enough at controlling variables like that. 20. We cannot trust our models to control these things for us. Some models are more useful than others, but ultimately our models fail, whether they be Newtonian physics, or Black Scholes, that is what makes them models, they are approximations of the data that we have at hand. The question is whether we can deal with the situations that arise when our models fail us. A financial meltdown? A plane crash? A destruction of a city for tens of thousands of years?
grammaton 16y ago
It seems to me like Nuclear is the safest form of energy in the short term - very few people die per gigawatt hour, if you will. But in the long term I'm still not entirely convinced - we've only had nuclear power for a few decades, but the waste is going to stick around for a lot longer than that, so calling it "safe" on the basis of a very small amount of data relative to the whole time we'll be affected by them seems...premature. That said, we could solve a lot of the problems - and even get rid of existing waste - by switching to newer reactor designs that are, among other things, much safer. Fat chance of that happening, at least in this country. We're just to firmly wed to what is essentially a generation of outdated reactor designs.
motters 16y ago
Certainly the amount of over-confidence, downplaying and sheer denial over the Fukushima incident has been quite astonishing to witness. Repeatedly, pundits of all kinds lined up to insist that the plant was in a safe condition and that everything was under control and that there was no possibility of contamination spreading beyond the plant perimeter. It may take some time before we know the full extent of the environmental damage. If I was living in the north or Japan I'd be extremely concerned about the health effects over the next few years and decades.

167 points by lukeqsee 16y ago

TGJ 16y ago

While the safest, the waste will be with the Earth for a long time to come. Longer than any corporation will be around, or government agency. There has to be a clear cut plan to deal with the waste of nuclear power that accounts for it's life span, and possible natural disasters. Currently all waste is stored at the power plants and the only current plan is to encase the waste in concrete. But where to go with that concrete? How to label the concrete to make sure future generations know that it is dangerous? How to ensure constant security and safety of the waste? We cannot move forward with nuclear energy until the problem of its waste is dealt with.

lukeqsee 16y ago
That consideration is the biggest. Nuclear power is safe, intrinsically. Nuclear waste is devastation waiting to happen (if not now, in the future).
- waterlesscloud 16y ago
  It's a bit much to say that a system that requires multiple elaborate systems of safeguards is "intrinsically" safe.
  - lukeqsee 16y ago
    "Intrinsically safer" was probably the better term.
- asharp 16y ago
  Not really. If you take the waste out of a thorium cycle reactor (ie. no fission products with half lifes > 100 hears), burn it down until there is basically nothing left then turn it into glass and stick it underneath solid granite in the middle of the worlds most geologically stable tectonic plate then no. It's not exactly devistation.
wewyor 16y ago
The current storage facilities for nuclear waste proposed or otherwise are quite unreal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...
VladRussian 16y ago
that waste can be burned in another types of reactors. Unfortunately, because of extremely high entry barrier, there isn't much chances for these or some other new types of reactors to be developed and put into production. Ie. we stuck with almost 60 year old technology [pretty much the first generation with some slight modifications] of nuclear energy production. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
- natnat 16y ago
  Doesn't burning nuclear waste just turn it into a gas or a pile of ash with the same radioactive elements? Burning is a chemical reaction, so the actual nuclei of the atoms shouldn't be changed at all.
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    it is nuclear "burning". The point is to have designs which produce less dangerous waste [ideally the chain of nuclear reactions should end with non-radioactive elements, yet the reality is far from ideal] or use the existing waste to produce energy from it - the "waste" of existing reactors is still extremely potent nuclear fuel as the existing, very primitive and dating back to Manhattan Project, designs are just skimming the top, easiest, portion of energy. My favorite is mixed design - nuclear fusion core which itself may be even a bit net energy negative (and thus much more realistic in the near future) and which main purpose is to generate neutrons to burn pretty much anything "heavy" and cheap. Turn the power to the core off - the thing just stops.
niels_olson 16y ago
Yukka mountain, anyone? Oh that's right, the shrill keep blocking it out of shear, willful ignorance of the either the local or global realities.

jbm 16y ago

Great. I can't drink milk, had to avoid water for a day or two, having problem finding relatively uncontaminated meat, 20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable and so on. I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima. Mod me down all you want. I will be happy to pay attention when someone purchases land at a fair price near Fukushima #2 and raises his children there. Until then, you are handwaving for industry or for some vision of "environmentally friendly power". Put money on the table, or frankly, your opinion is worthless. We need nuclear power. Unfortunately, the culture of misinformation and understating danger around nuclear power means it is going to be impossible for it to supply the majority of our power. What this means in terms of loss of quality of life is not lost on me.

owls 16y ago
Nuclear power is cleaner than coal or oil. We just need to build stronger and safer reactors. Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought. I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physicist and he explained to me why I was wrong.
- jbm 16y ago
  Buy Fukushiman land. Raise your kids there. Feed them local produce. To thy own self be true. I am not defending coal or solar or whatever. I am referring to the closed attitude of the nuclear industry. There is a huge problem with nuclear defenders in Japan who don't eat their own dogfood. You'd think they would be happy to do so since the reward is huge (improved confidence) and the risk is only 20 or more years down the line (if ever)
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. Nobody who points out the relative safety of nuclear power wants us to build more Mark I BWR's. My interest is in Travelling Wave Reactors and Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. But the problem is, when people freak out about Fukushima, they don't say "Hey! Mark I BWR's aren't safe! We should shut down those designs!" They go after Nuclear with a wide brush, and instead we're stuck with more gas and coal dependance.

mashmac2 16y ago

Seth Godin made the same point last week--with a neat graphic: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-... (He got his image from here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976 http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visuali...)

euromix 16y ago

I dont believe the numbers presented in this paper. First as nuclear technology comes from military projects, there is a long history of hiding evidences and wrong informations. 2 examples in france: - The nuclear lobby had regulation change, only for nuclear workers among all other workers, work related desease must be declare within 10 years. - The most dangerous jobs are done by subcontractors and the work related deseases or death among those people are not counted as "nuclear industry related" in the official statistics.

euromix 16y ago

by the way, the plutonium has a half life of 24000 years and 0,001 gramme is the lethal dose for human. there is 300 kg in the reactors in japan. that is 300 000 000 lethal doses active for the next 24000 years. I dont think there is anything comparable in coal / gaz / oil industry

kscaldef 16y ago

"Nuclear power is the safest way to make electricity"... so long as you pretend the only other option is fossil fuels.

jedsmith 16y ago
At scale, right now, those are the only two options.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  Well, for that matter, we don't have enough nuclear power production capacity to meet our needs either, so I don't entirely see your point. Reducing the amount of power we're producing with fossil fuels will mean needing to increase our production from other sources, but it doesn't mandate that we have to increase it from a particular source.
  - jedsmith 16y ago
    My point is that fossil fuels and nuclear power are the only two types that scale efficiently with current technology. Everything else doesn't scale as well. Not sure how else to word that, and that's exactly what I meant up there. It has nothing to do with current capacity. Nuclear has lost a lot to debates much like this one; however, if we wanted the capacity, nuclear would step up and fill it in at a reasonable price. The same amount of power generated by the alternatives would be astronomically expensive. That's one of the problems that plague the alternatives you've named: either they are far too expensive to use at any kind of large scale, or suitable locations are in thin supply, or power output fluctuates unsuitably with a change in weather, and so on. They just can't compete. The current research into nuclear is making it even cheaper and safer (thorium, etc); the current research into the alternatives is making them cheap enough to be possible with significant demand.
    - eliasmacpherson 16y ago
      The reasonable price you talk about doesn't include the cost of disposal. Whatever about providing electricity to be consumed at scale, dealing with radioactive waste has not been successful at small scale, why would it work at large scale? A lot of people display hubris about the merits of the on paper research reactors, what about their unknown unknowns?

phlux 16y ago

What is difficult to reconcile is that we all know that nuclear meltdowns are catastrophic events, that the resultant fallout/radioactive contamination is utterly horrible. Yet it seems that we dont build reactors with the types of failsafe systems that truly are needed should meltdown occur. Obviously this reactor is old, and was not built during a time when we really knew what a meltdown looked like in real life. After Chernobyl, and now Fukishima, I think we really really really need to look at what the failsafe systems, containment, backup cooling and other system requirements really need to be. Should we build reactors only in D.U.M.B. like facilities? Should we build them in old open-pit mines, such that they could be entombed properly. Have we put enough research into containment facilities such that their structures will not melt? I know that these faciliies have multiple backups, but clearly even then we can have situations where they dont work. Yes, this was a trifecta of incredibly fantastic circumstance, but it still happened and we are now dealing with a shitstorm. Watching the documentary last night about how the earthquake dropped the coastline of japan upto 1 meter in elevation resulting in the sea-walls being 1 meter less than the tsunami - and the fact that clearly we know that tsunamis would occur there - placing a 6 reactor facility ON THE COAST LINE seems pretty damn stupid at this point. It's like "Nuclear energy is the safest energy there is, until its not!" I am all for nuclear -- but its current incarnation is rife with the traditional corrupt bullshit that plagues all other human endeavors; politics. Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy? If we had an organization whose sole charter was to produce energy, and was funded based on the economies of all the worlds countries - and energy was metered out to all countries in a responsible way -- we could be much further along to becoming a unified space-faring race.... /rant

philwelch 16y ago
Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy? Large parts of the world actually tried this, not just for their energy needs but for all other goods and services, too. It doesn't actually work that way in reality.
- phlux 16y ago

marze 16y ago

When I see a story like this, it reminds me that the events in Japan represent the biggest PR challenge the nuclear industry has faced in many years. Fifty billion dollars of nuclear reactor US taxpayer-backed loan guarantees hang in the balance. The industry has been working for the past few decades to rehabilitate the image of nuclear power after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and now they have to contend with videos of a 1/2 mile tall mushroom cloud over a Japanese reactor and the continuing press coverage. Talk about challenging. I think the HN community may have difficulty appreciating the challenges of nuclear reactor design because it is so different from software. In software, you have known bugs and unknown bugs. Once you've got the known bugs down to a low enough level and aren't finding too many new ones, you might release. The consequences of a bug is generally not too bad, certainly not on the order of making 800 square miles of real estate worthless, for example. In engineering a nuclear plant, you have 90 tons of nuclear fuel generating 3,000,000,000 J of heat every second. The only reason it doesn't immediately turn into a big bubbling blob of molten uranium is that pumps the size of SUVs are pumping water over the fuel and removing all that heat. Every nuclear plant in the world is one minute from 90 tons of fuel melting into the basement if the water flow stops and fall-back systems fail. Fortunately, the engineering on these plants is done extremely carefully, with multiple independent systems in place to prevent exactly this by halting the nuclear chain reactions with neutron absorbing rods as well as by ensuring the flow of cooling water. However, the events in Japan exposed an "unknown bug" in the design, that if you flood the basements of the plants with water you can lose backup power and coolant flow. While this particular "bug" is relatively easy to correct, it is a reminder that other unknown bugs may exist waiting to be exposed by other unexpected sets of circumstances. It is good to remember Richard Feynman's quote about the space shuttle Challenger disaster, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

WalterBright 16y ago
There are a lot of parallels with airliner design. From reading articles about the nuke plant design, I think they could learn a lot from aviation engineers about how to build safe systems.
- 16y ago

dcosson 16y ago

I saw this graphic the other day that puts into perspective various sources of radiation exposure (from xkcd, but it's not a joke...) I didn't realize that the lowest levels clearly linked to increased risk of cancer were so high. http://xkcd.com/radiation/ http://xkcd.com/radiation/

danenania 16y ago

"History suggests that nuclear power rarely kills and causes little illness. That’s also the conclusion engineers reach when they model scenarios for thousands of potential accidents." Auditing nuclear power's extremely short history is not a valid method of assessing risk. In poker they call this 'results oriented thinking'. Especially when discussing black swan events, history is almost by definition not a very useful basis for predictions.

cturner 16y ago
The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for decades. If fact, history inflates the risk by bringing into consideration known weaknesses of earlier reactor designs.
- danenania 16y ago
  "The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for decades." In the context of highly unlikely events and the mathematics of probability, a period of decades is an extremely small sample. Consider that some of the types of events we are discussing may only happen once in a century. Clearly in this case several decades is not enough to fully gauge what the true risks of nuclear are to humans in the long term. One worst case scenario disaster would tip the scales quite heavily.

thekevan 16y ago

Yes but is it like saying wolves are safer than dogs because statistically your are less likely to be harmed by a wolf than a dog? It ignores the fact that if you do run afoul of a wolf, you are done.

nitrogen 16y ago
Not quite, because those who actually calculate statistics can account for differences in exposure. For example, the correct statistic to use with wolves and dogs would be something like, "survival rate after pissing off the animal in a similar environment," not just "total number of casualties." With nuclear vs. fossil fuel, the relevant statistic is deaths per terawatt-hour of energy produced, not deaths in total.
- varjag 16y ago
  IAEA and WHO are notorious for counting only directly attributable deaths. If someone dies from radiation-induced cancer 10 years after in the ripe age of 30-something, it doesn't get in the stats. Then the stats get perpetuated endlessly by nuclear fanboys.
  - veidr 16y ago
    Yeah, that is the most frustrating thing about the arguments from Chernobyl revisionists. There was no possibility to do all the science that would ideally have been done, everywhere it should have been done. So the anecdotal evidence is often the only evidence--and it is discounted. That is where you get idiotic statements like 'only 28 people died as a result of Chernobyl'. Also, there are many other things that happened to people short of death that nevertheless really sucked, e.g. getting nonfatal thyroid cancer. There's definitely merit to having a compendium of only rigorous scientific results, of course, but it doesn't help advance the debate (or the species) when such work is mischaracterized and used to promulgate bogus conclusions (much less weird fanboy ideologies).

veidr 16y ago

I looooves me some electricity. So, even though I'm presently suffering some annoyances in my daily life here in Tokyo (sporadically contaminated drinking water, suspect milk and other foodstuffs, not enough electricity to maintain our previous standard of living, Internet outages forfuckssake), and even though I bristle any time anybody (this article's author included) ignorantly implies that we know all the bad things that were (or will be) caused by the meltdown at Chernobyl, I am totally 'pro-nuke' in the sense that I want more nuke plants to be built and maintained to produce electricity for us to use. And, the premise that nuke power is the safest power we've come up with (among power sources that actually have produced a significant fraction of the power we use), is incontrovertibly true. This article is only one of dozens making that point. However, people take this idea a bit too far, by not putting it into the right time context. A truly bad nuke disaster is forever (not literally, but for all intents and purposes). And we've never really had one yet. The thinking that Chernobyl is as bad as it can get is totally, obviously wrong--but it is implicit in a lot of the discussion. Maybe Fukushima won't get to the level of Chernobyl--and that's still a maybe btw, as it is still getting worse--but it's easy and plausible to conceive of how it could have been much worse. A couple more serial failures, the epicenter of the quake being closer, whatever--this ancient, obsolete plant could very well have had all six reactors achieve full meltdown. The woeful, pathetic--even funny, it's so bad--disaster preparedness that we now know TEPCO had implemented confirms a basic thing a lot of us have suspected: collectively, as a society (or separately, as a bunch of disparate societies), we just might not be mature enough in our thinking to strike the right balance of precaution and preparedness to handle nuclear power as safely as it should be handled. Technologically, I think nuke power is awesome. Societally, our ability to responsibly deal with the dangers it presents is very suspect, IMO. Unfortunately, I think that is a much harder problem to address. Probably some societies are better than others at this. Much like some seven year olds are responsible enough to handle a pocket knife and others totally aren't. What we've seen (and are still seeing) in Japan has been much more pathetic, unprepared, and technologically primitive than a lot of us would have expected. Much more like my dumbshit little nephew who cut off the tip of his little finger and then sat there crying about it than like the one who taught himself to whittle sticks into Indian figurines. Because the response to Fukushima has been so haphazard, reactive, and incompetent, I think many normal people now have this gut-reaction urge to reevaluate nuclear power, and that urge is basically correct. Of course, there is a lot of hysteria and empirically incorrect thinking flying around, but that happens any time a large number of humans discuss just about anything. Still, the takeaway from this disaster shouldn't be 'nuclear power is teh awesome! no problem, bro!! nukes ftw!!' It should be that nuclear power is indeed awesome, but our human systems that govern the deployment, administration, safeguarding, and--perhaps most importantly--sunsetting of nuclear power plants needs to be significantly reworked and dramatically improved. I don't see why we should build even one more plant without the safety planning and preventive measures being an order of magnitude better than they have been so far. OTOH, I hope we can get it together to demand that work be done, and then do it, so that we can build more power plants, so that we can get our electricity back and I can turn on my lights and air conditioner here without feeling like an asshole.

ChuckMcM 16y ago

When ever I see this I realize its not really helpful. Sure all the facts are true but as I've said before you can't argue with people who are scared. In other news a hole developed in a SWA 737 jet flying to Sacremento and did an emergency descent from 32000 to 12000 feet. Will it cause people to stop flying? Some, perhaps, but for the most part no. When you read that someone on the freeway died driving a '72 Buick that only had lap belts and no air bags you say "gee, its great we have them now, we've just had fewer highway deaths than have ever been recorded since 1949. The same is certainly true with nuclear power plants, if we were rational we would say, "fine" lets relicense "older" reactors on the provision they are dismantled and replaced. Have we learned a lot about building reactors? Sure, could we get rid of the older ones faster if we built new safe ones more quickly? Absolutely. But we have to either learn not to be afraid (respectful yes, afraid no) of nuclear power and radiation. Perhaps we should learn about it in school, perhaps we should provide low cost detectors for folks. I think its part of growing up as a species.

justatdotin 16y ago

hmmm, the entire article excludes the words 'weapons' and 'waste'. all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future. Here in Australia, we've come up with a state-of-the-art answer to our own burden of nuclear waste (arising from 30 years of experimentation and research reactors) - we're building a road out to a remote desert location, building a shed and dumping the unwanted problem on the tribal lands of a disempowered, de-funded indigenous community. Real reassuring, huh? As for weapons, although the old cold-war powers continue to slowly reduce the huge numbers of conventional nuclear weapons they hold, they're also building new ones. And at the same time as the total number of nuclear warheads in the world is slowly decreasing, the total number of actors holding those weapons is greater than ever, with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies spreading despite all rhetoric and pantomime surrounding the NPT. As Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: "For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ... then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale." finally, to the question of renewables : I totally reject the repeated assertions that renewables can't provide scalable or baseload power. Here in sunny Australia, we're following the lead of nations like Spain and building a few large grid connected solar-thermal and solar-hybrid plants, that compare well with the capacities of old fossil and hydro plants. Already, large remote communities in my part of the country are powered entirely by solar concentrator arrays. So I say, stick your nuclear power reactors where the sun doesn't shine.

henrikschroder 16y ago
> all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future. That's just flat-out wrong. The "waste" from current nuclear reactors is perfectly fine as fuel in newer reactor designs, you can burn the fuel again to get more energy out of it, and reduce the half-life of it significantly. I'm confident that that process can be repeated again, and again, and again, so that at the end we won't have any waste left that needs to be stored. Yet the public at large is still convinced that what was true in the 70's has to be true today, despite decades of research and technological innovation...

BasDirks 16y ago

You guys know about the problem of nuclear waste right? You've read plenty about it right? Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favor of nuclear power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about nuclear power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.

jbri 16y ago
You guys know about the problem of climate change, right? You've read plenty about it, right? Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favour of every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.
- danenania 16y ago
  Perhaps attempting to solve a major problem with something that also causes major problems isn't much of a solution.
icarus_drowning 16y ago
Many modern reactor designs (Thorium LFTR's being the most prominent) are actually designed to help mitigate the problem of current waste by burning it as fuel. So if its waste that you are worried about, it seems sensible to support limited construction of modern reactors to address this problem.
asharp 16y ago
Eh. Fossil fuels will destroy the biosphere. They regularly and fairly brutally destroy rather large swaths of it (see nigeria/etc.). Hydroelectric plants destroy parts of the biosphere. They massively damage aquatic life and fish species and they have the rather nasty fact that if they fail they wash away a good portion of whatever is downstream (read: that city.). Renewables tend to be very energy disperse, require large amounts of energy/land to produce and generally can't provide baseload power except for hydro power. At the end of the day, there isn't any perfect answer, but all the effort directed at stopping nuclear power research seems very short sighted, seeing as it is currently the best answer to baseload power that we have.

lispm 16y ago

Yeah, currently the spent fuel is piling up. You need one a more large reprocessing sites and one or more storage sites. Currently the nuclear industry is running without it.

RuadhanMc 16y ago

What about Wave Power? It's pretty safe and has a very minimal environmental impact, almost constant output and for the most part is hidden from eye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power Just listened to an interesting podcast about it on Late Night Live: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948.htm http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948.... Obviously this wouldn't work for landlocked countries or countries which don't have shores with a constant supply of waves (I'm looking at you Baltic Sea) but for many parts of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Japan, etc, it might just be what we need.

asharp 16y ago
It's interesting, but from what i've seen of it (albiet not all that much), it has two major issues. * It has a low power density, hence requiring large arrays of collectors/etc. this makes it costly to build at scale. * It generally either takes up valuable land (land by the sea is costly), or it requires lots of engineering to try and build/maintain these things out to sea. It is very cool tech though.
- RuadhanMc 16y ago
  The guys on the podcast were saying that the buoy is located 2 km offshore, so not an eyesore as such, though I have not seen one yet, so can't judge. Seems to be a more reliable solution than wind or solar if it can scale and it is designed to withstand monster waves. They say they are 3-4 years from deploying real installations (at the moment they have 3 experimental sites).
  - asharp 16y ago
    Yeah, there are a few different types. One sits on shore and uses wave power to compress air, which then runs turbines. This is probably the most efficient method i've seen. There are a few others though, like the buoy method, etc. Solar is about the most reliable solution you can come across, aside from an RTG mostly because it has no real moving parts and as such has no real way to fail. What will be interesting is if they manage to up the energy density to the point where it is economical to build.

singular 16y ago

A major problem here is that people often conflate nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs - in people's imaginations nuclear power plants could go up like a bomb and are therefore very dangerous. The fact that this is impossible doesn't get in the way of people's general perception, unfortunately. Actually looking at the evidence provides a different story altogether - the XKCD radiation chart [1] being one of the most striking examples of the levels of radiation we're talking about here. It's a pity (though not unexpected) that the media lap up this kind of sentiment despite the fact that hey, our planet is dying, and maybe we need to stop playing around with misconceptions for a second and maybe try and work on fixing this? I guess our grandchildren will be the ones to find out how this one plays out. [1]:http://xkcd.com/radiation/ http://xkcd.com/radiation/

singular 16y ago
Hey - why the downvote? I know it sounds silly, but I genuinely believe that is a significant part of the general popular view of nuclear power plants, silly or not.

lispm 16y ago

I'm from Germany and I'm supporting our move to 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier. It will be interesting to see what the US does. Let's say coal and gas are much more dangerous than nuclear and nuclear is the way to go. Let's also say renewables is not a way to go, because many people die from erecting wind mills, bio mass plants and solar panels. Chemicals for solar panel production are dirty and rare earth minerals need to be mined, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation Currently 20% of electricity in the US is generated with nuclear power stations. There are around 100 in operations. Many of them are extremely old and some even sit in dangerous regions with earth quakes. Let's say 20 of them have to be shutdown soon. 68% of the electricity are provided by coal (45%) and gas (23%) power plants. That is 3.4 times more electricity. Now the US is going to replace the dangerous and dirty coal and gas with nuclear. So you need around new 250 nuclear reactors to phase out coal and gas. Maybe less, because newer nuclear reactors generate more electricity. Maybe more, because the electricity demand may rise. Let's say a nuclear power plant and its direct infrastructure will cost around 5 billion a piece, that would be 1.25 trillion $. That sounds much, but given that the US spends a trillion a year on 'defense', it might not be much. May be the price will go down with production of 100 and more reactors. Given that the political parties may want to have small government, the majority of the nuclear reactors will have to be financed and operated by companies. So the tasks are: * find a way to finance one or two trillion dollars * decide and standardize on a new reactor design with inherent safety * build up companies who will plan, build and operate the nuclear reactors * find places for 250 new reactors (in addition to the existing 100) * build, say, three reprocessing plants for those * build, say, three breeder reactors * find, say, three storage sites for nuclear waste * get mining and an fuel enrichment going The result would be about 85% electricity production with nuclear reactors and complete phase out of gas and coal power plants. What is the time scale for this? The full development of a new type of reactor can be done in, say, 10 years. Add dealing with regulations, tests, ... - one may need 20 years. Let's be optimistic and say ten. A new reprocessing plant, would need, say, 10 years. A new storage site, say, 30 years. So in the first ten years no reactor would be ready. That's pessimistic, since there might be reactor designs that can be built earlier - it is optimistic, since a really new design may need more time. Also the US has not built commercial reactors for some time, so there is some time needed to get this going again. * 1st. decade, zero power plants * 2nd. decade, ten power plants + a reprocessing site * 3rd. decade, thirty power plants + another reprocessing site * 4th decade, fifty new power plants + another reprocessing site, plus a new storage site * 5th decade, 100 new power plants + a new storage site * 6th decade, 100 new power plants Result: new 290 nuclear power plants, 3 reprocessing sites, and two long term storage sites. This would also allow to shut down some of the older ones. These are just assumptions. That's basically what France did, now scaled to the US. France has 65 million people and less electricity usage per person. The US is now at 300+ Million people. That's around 4.5 times more. France operates around 50 nuclear power plants. So, 350 in total in the US needed would be a good assumption (given some constraints, like that France is very centralized and many people live around Paris). France also has a shrinking population, where the US is still growing - last I looked.

Tichy 16y ago

Not even one mention of solar power? Maybe the technology is not at its peak yet, but combines with saving a lot of energy, is it not an option? Let's not forget that a lot of money went into perfecting nuclear power, probably a lot more than into solar power. Comparing with coal deaths seems a bit like a strawman. Also I don't trust the way the victims of Chernobyl are calculated. Adding up victims from survivor stories ("all my colleagues are dead by now") seems to easily give more than 26 deaths. Yes, I love electricity, too - especially for computing. But I also think the world could be improved a lot by saving energy at the right places. I'd be much happier if there were less cars, for example. I think I could power my computer with a solar panel, even when not living in the desert. Heating seems to be another big one. Where I live renting is the norm, so home owners don't have much of an incentive to insulate houses properly (renters pay the energy bill). At the very least, please give me an Android phone with a Geiger Counter so that I can check the milk when I go shopping...

asharp 16y ago
Strangely enough it takes very little money, nor energy to produce nuclear power. It's very simple at its core. Have a look at the first research reactors and you'll find that you need basically no technology to produce reactors that produce useful amounts of energy. On the other hand solar power, especially photovoltaics is stupidly complex. Photovoltaics requires semiconductor processes, arguably one of the most complex things ever reliably harnessed by man to create. Saying that you want to power your computer from a solar cell seems green, until you think of all the energy that went into building that solar cell. All the waste materials, the toxic waste produced in fabrication, the pollution, etc. Then it seems decidedly less green then, say, plugging it in to the wall socket.
- Tichy 16y ago
  And yet nature all around us seems to thrive on solar power alone, with zero toxic waste byproduct. I don't think pollution in production is a must, either. You don't have to dump your garbage in the river.
  - 16y ago

ck2 16y ago

By the way, the destroyed nuclear plant, just like the BP disaster, had avoided government regulation via apathy and corruption in the monitoring process. So regardless of the supposed engineered safety of any of these extreme measures, once you take out the oversight that is planned into these studies/reports, everything goes out the window. Everyone needs to state in their claims what will happen when everything fails because no-one bothered to follow up and do what they were supposed to.

Tichy 16y ago

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining: "However, in lesser developed countries and some developing countries, many miners continue to die annually, either through direct accidents in coal mines or through adverse health consequences from working under poor conditions. China, in particular, has the highest number of coal mining related deaths in the world, with official statistics claiming that 6,027 deaths occurred in 2004.[19] To compare, 28 deaths were reported in the U.S. in the same year.[20] Coal production in China is twice that in the U.S." So counting deaths of coal mining from countries were human lives are considered to be expendable resources sounds a bit dishonest. Not that I want to promote coal mining, but I don't trust these PR pieces, sorry. I think that article also counts accidents from people colliding with coal transporting trains? How is Uranium transported, are there never any collisions? Also, abandoned mines seem popular for storing nuclear waste. Were the deaths for creating those mines counted towards the nuclear power toll, too? As for "we don't care about deaths in China", strange enough nuclear power plants tend to be built next to country borders, so that possible pollution has a good chance of blowing into the neighbor's land, not your own. At least that is a story I heard about french nuclear power plants.

Natsu 16y ago
Those accidents are mining accidents alone. It ignores black lung, for example. For the other thing, if that's the actual reason they're locating plants there, I'm against it, for whatever that's worth.
- Tichy 16y ago
  What are you trying to say? I just pointed out that the numbers form the pro-nuclear article are to be taken with a grain of salt. You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good. Do the black lung people even die because of it? If not they shouldn't count, just as the cancer patients don't seem to count as long as they don't die in a timely manner.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    > You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good. Yes, that's why I'm trying to make it clear what all the numbers represent. I believe that you're correct, for example, with China's coal miners having about 4x as much accident risk as US miners, but I think that's still limited to accident risk. I don't remember if Wikipedia explained which figures it was comparing very carefully. > Do the black lung people even die because of it? http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html "As dangerous an undertaking as coal mining is, there’s no comparison between the risks of cave-ins or flooding or explosions, and the risks of contracting this deadly disease. In the last decade alone, 10,000 miners have died from black lung, compared with fewer than 400 from mine accidents." See also: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-overview#a0199 http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-overview#a0199 "The ICU mortality rate for patients with coal worker’s pneumoconiosis with their first episode of respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation was 40%, and the in-hospital mortality rate was 43%." Also look at the treatment tab. Basically, the only treatment is preventative: change jobs (at least get away from the dust!), stop smoking, vaccinations for common lung infections, etc. Oh, yeah, you get put on oxygen, too. It doesn't help your dead lungs, though. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment Just a warning, but the pictures in part of that emedicine article are pretty gross.

kgarten 16y ago

Downvote me if you want, yet I'm really sad about Hacker News. This is the 4th or 5th pro-nuclear propaganda article up-voted in a couple of weeks. Personally, I'm always sceptical about superlatives. Yes right ... the safest. Especially, for our children and their children. For everybody who's a proponent of nuclear: If it is so save, why can't you get one insurance company to insure a plant against accidents? And what do we do with the waste? How do we deal it? How do we make it clear for coming civilizations that they are not supposed to dig there etc. as the the waste will stay hazardous for 100,000 years? Please watch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary) Is there any other way to make electricity that puts that high of a burden on coming generations? Maybe I'm totally off, yet can effects from coal/water/wind/sun power plants kill people 100 years after they been shut down?

asharp 16y ago
Sure. Global warming can kill people for tens of thousands of years to come. Newer processes produce no fission products with a half life > 100y. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_... Proper reprocessing can dramatically reduce the amount of waste produced, and the toxicity therein. Just generally, but why would you expect insuring a nuclear plant to be any more painful then insuring a pesticide plant/etc? A leaky pesticide plant can easily wipe a town off the map. A leaky dam can wash away a city with ease. I mean if you screw up your shale oil extraction you can end up with oil/natural gas leaking in to groundwater for hundreds of k's. Similarly with a burst dam at a gold mine, or.... There are large numbers of things that can cause massive ecological damage. A good number of them are that bad that they arn't ever really reported: http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-bp-exxon-valdez-catastrophes/ http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-bp-... as they continue on for years. It's just that some of them are easier to use to sell papers then others.
- kgarten 16y ago
  How's solar and wind power contributing to global warming? Even new, very expensive coal plants are not contributing to global warming :) See: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pumpe_power_station https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pump... Thorium sounds great, can you tell me how many of the current power plants the new ones planed in the US. will use Thorium? Could not find this information. Is there some plan for proper reprocessing? I can just talk for Germany, as I'm unfamiliar with the situation in the US or elsewhere. In G. nuclear power plants are not insured, because no insurance company takes the risk. Pesticide plants however are insured and have to pay a lot for their potential risk. So in G. the nuclear power industry gets the profits whereas the risks are shouldered by the citizens (and their ancestors).

nl 16y ago

Only marginally related, but it has been surprising to me that US media seems to talk about the risk of a "radiation cloud floating over the Pacific" (which is effectively a non-existent risk to health), and yet doesn't talk about the risk to Californian nuclear plants from earthquakes & tsunamis. For example, to quote Wikipedia: Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. It was built directly over a geological fault line, and is located near a second fault... Diablo Canyon was originally designed to withstand a 6.75 magnitude earthquake from four faults, including the nearby San Andreas and Hosgri faults.,[6] but was later upgraded to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake.... In September 1981, PG&E discovered that a single set of blueprints was used for these structural supports; workers were supposed to have reversed the plans when switching to the second reactor, but did not.[11] According to Charles Perrow, the result of the error was that "many parts were needlessly reinforced, while others, which should have been strengthened, were left untouched." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant Or take a look at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is literally built on the beach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_S...

veidr 16y ago
Urrgh, I agree, this is so ludicrous and stupid. I wish I could say it was surprising, but it is an example of what I mean when I say 'maybe we (collectively) aren't mature enough to handle <insert awesome technology here>'.

jorangreef 16y ago

I was at a physics lecture about Fukushima given two weeks ago at the University of Cape Town. Here are some facts you may or may not know: 1. The event of a serious nuclear catastrophe is 1 in every 10000 years per nuclear plant. 2. There are between 400-500 nuclear plants in the world. 3. That means we can expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 20 years. 4. When these events happen, the consequences last forever, it takes tens of thousands of years for the land to recover. 5. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays constant (at 500), we would have at least 25 city-sized exclusion zones around the world. 6. These numbers only include nuclear power plants, they don't include nuclear subs, warheads etc. 7. These numbers exclude future advances in nuclear reliability though they may only be asymptotic (Pareto). Most of the advances have likely been made already. 8. If we were to increase our nuclear power output, so as to be less reliant on coal, they reckon we would need to double the number of nuclear power plants. 9. That means we can now expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 10 years. 10. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays constant (at 1000), we would have at least 50 city-sized exclusion zones around the world. 11. When a Chernobyl or worse happens, the fallout covers entire continents, leading to a number of indirectly attributable deaths from thyroid cancer and other cancers. 12. These probabilities are based on pure physics, they do not factor in negligence on the part of humans, tiredness, lack of funding, depreciation of plant, government intervention, mismanagement etc. For instance in South Africa, at the Koeberg nuclear plant, a loose bolt accidentally destroyed a power generator, and last year in September, 91 workers were accidentally exposed to very low doses of radiation (this was not widely reported to the media, and it is not clear that an investigation was ever conducted into the matter). 13. Coal plants and mining plants leak radiation on a daily basis. 14. Our parents teach us not to play with fire. Yet fire, when handled with respect and care, is a powerful technology. 15. Nuclear power, is also a fire, and a powerful technology, but it is an "eternal" fire. When a nuclear disaster occurs, the consequences are forever. 16. It is a question of asymmetric odds. The event of a disaster is remote. It is so remote that the apparatus of our human mind finds it difficult to comprehend. These events do happen, and when they do, they must be amortized over thousands of generations. 17. Only a fool would play Russian roulette at 6-1 odds. Long Term Capital Management included minds of Nobel Prize calibre, yet they played it with better odds and lost. Then they tried again under a different name and lost. That didn't stop them from trying yet a third time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management 18. LTCM played the game of asymmetric odds on behalf of a fund of investors. Are we prepared to play it on behalf of generations? Even thousands of generations yet to be born? Do we have the right? 18. If it were a question of pure physics, then Nuclear power may appear to be safe and controllable. But it is also a question of people, of incentives, business deals, governments, and of consequences over future generations for which we have no right to take responsibility. We need a safe and simple power (or a combination of these). 19. The trouble with Nuclear power (and I say this as someone who was once a naive supporter) is that there are too many variables. There are hundreds of variables within the realm of physics and there are hundreds more outside. We know from other disciplines, that humans (no matter how smart) are simply just not good enough at controlling variables like that. 20. We cannot trust our models to control these things for us. Some models are more useful than others, but ultimately our models fail, whether they be Newtonian physics, or Black Scholes, that is what makes them models, they are approximations of the data that we have at hand. The question is whether we can deal with the situations that arise when our models fail us. A financial meltdown? A plane crash? A destruction of a city for tens of thousands of years?

grammaton 16y ago

It seems to me like Nuclear is the safest form of energy in the short term - very few people die per gigawatt hour, if you will. But in the long term I'm still not entirely convinced - we've only had nuclear power for a few decades, but the waste is going to stick around for a lot longer than that, so calling it "safe" on the basis of a very small amount of data relative to the whole time we'll be affected by them seems...premature. That said, we could solve a lot of the problems - and even get rid of existing waste - by switching to newer reactor designs that are, among other things, much safer. Fat chance of that happening, at least in this country. We're just to firmly wed to what is essentially a generation of outdated reactor designs.

motters 16y ago

Certainly the amount of over-confidence, downplaying and sheer denial over the Fukushima incident has been quite astonishing to witness. Repeatedly, pundits of all kinds lined up to insist that the plant was in a safe condition and that everything was under control and that there was no possibility of contamination spreading beyond the plant perimeter. It may take some time before we know the full extent of the environmental damage. If I was living in the north or Japan I'd be extremely concerned about the health effects over the next few years and decades.