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Besides: nuclear power plants take up very little space. I really can't seriously people pushing solar, wind, and so on while they eschew nuclear power (and inc

Besides: nuclear power plants take up very little space. I really can't seriously people pushing solar, wind, and so on while they eschew nuclear power (and increasingly hydropower too). Fake environmentalists: "We have an existential crisis! We must change our energy strategy to save humanity!" Engineers: "That's quite a problem. Here's a way to solve it. It's called fission. Here are some power plant designs." Fake environmentalists: "Nooo! Not that plan! This existential problem can be solved using only those technologies that agree with my aesthetics!" It gets old after a while. If carbon-induced anthropogenic climate is a problem --- and I think it is --- then we shouldn't disparage good solutions on weak grounds in favor of solutions with serious problems. We don't need to devote swaths of land to solar and wind if we just build nice compact nuclear power stations.

guerrilla 6y ago
> only those technologies that agree with my aesthetics!" This is an exceptionally bad straw-man [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate
brokencode 6y ago
So you think caring about nuclear waste along with CO2 emissions makes someone a fake environmentalist? Nuclear waste is highly toxic and difficult to store and transport safely. Also, have you ever heard of Chernobyl or Fukushima? Nuclear reactors are great in certain ways, but can be catastrophically bad too. Hydro also can cause a significant environmental impact, flooding natural habitat and interrupting water routes for different animals. Solar and wind aren’t perfect either, but the idea is to try to chose a power source that is as clean as possible.
codefreakxff 6y ago
The tone of your post (being simultaneously dismissive and insulting to those who have a different view than you) is very trollish. The problem many people have with nuclear power are things like accidents making areas uninhabitable, radiation making people sick, disposal of waste rods is difficult, some materials can be used to make weapons, and the cost to make a safe plant are staggering and leading to cancellation of projects. Renewable sources don’t have these downsides. Are they ugly? Not any uglier than a concrete dome and cooling systems of a nuclear power plant. You can bet wine country does not want a nuclear plant in their valley either. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to zone land usage appropriately.
- pas 6y ago
  Renewables have externalities too. Just because it's harder to mass hyterise them, they still exist. Eg the cost of mining for battery parts, parts that are needed to manufacture hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, millions of PV panels, inverters, etc. That said, of course it's perfectly reasonable to try to preserve some areas, and to put power generation somewhere out of sight.
- skriticos2 6y ago
  Agree. Compared to renewables - nuclear is a big risk (financial and operational). Also nuclear needs a lot of water, which is getting to be a serious problem. Compared to coal/gas/biomass they look great though in our current terraforming predicament. There is no way we could build enough of them in the near term to matter, so that makes this discussion moot anyway. There is simply not enough expertise and production capacity left. Very few nuclear plants have been completed recently and the institutional knowlege is fading. It takes a lot of time and effort to reinvigorate that, especially since the nuclear industry is so extremely conservative. Also the conversation is not being done on technical merits - but political inertia, an unwillingness to change and special interests by established energy companies (coal, gas). As you say, renewables are still winning (slowly) because of the low risk profile and generally being price competitive. Not that it matters much, we are mostly over the point of no return. It's just a matter of time before this ball is getting very unpleasant, sadly. We are just playing with the dial on how quickly that happens.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  New nuclear power plant designs [1] have many intrinsic safety features that largely obviate the old safety concerns that you mention. Anti-nuclear advocates conspicuously ignore these new designs, instead opposing a vision of the nuclear power system that hasn't been current since the 1960s. Argumentum ad Chernobylum just convinces me that the animus against nuclear power comes from aesthetic considerations and not a sober optimization of human welfare against ecological damage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
- LunaSea 6y ago
  Renewables definitely have those downsides. Especially if you look at the recycling procedures of solar panels and led batteries. cf: Other link on the front page of HN: https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/ https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
imtringued 6y ago
Do you know what? Private industry doesn't care about nuclear. The only way to build nuclear is through government projects which is why there is immense pressure by nuclear companies to publicly dismiss everything that can support itself. Companies set up their own coal plants, natural gas plants, solar farms, wind farms and so on but what they don't do is build their own nuclear plants. Come up with better power plant designs and maybe then private industry will be interested.
- sroussey 6y ago
  There are better power plant designs, but regulations are based on designs from 50+ years ago, and thus no one has built a new safer design since.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  There aren't 6 billion permits, licenses, and regulations to comply with when setting up a solar farm. On top of this, you don't assume much liability when installing a solar panel. You do when creating a nuclear reaction. Pouring the concrete and building the core of a nuclear plant is not inherently more expensive than plenty of other projects that private industry funds. The cost overruns in nuclear come from necessary but burdensome regulatory requirements.
jodrellblank 6y ago
Wind turbines can be offshore. You can buy a wind turbine "off the shelf" and have people without nuclear training plonk it down wherever you want it, approximately as soon as you can stump up the money and get planning approval. The USA has been adding wind turbines at the rate of ~four a day every day for the last fourty years, for a total of some ~60,000. In that same time the USA has started 4 nuclear power plants[1], all in 2013, all unfinished/in progress. The UK has ~11,000 wind turbines. We have 1 nuclear plant started construction in the last 30 years (Hinkley C) and it is two years in, and over budget. UK has five more proposed nuclear plants, and of those two are shelved and one cancelled[3]. It's not proven that the UK or USA still has the ability to build working nuclear reactors, or the ability to organise and approve and fund them - look at this link [2] about the last few years of the UK government changing, making, and cancelling approval and funding plans. Or that the UK will be able to source and transport nuclear fuels and wastes after Brexit. Even putting all that aside, and assuming the world can source enough nuclear fuels for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and assuming we can overcome concerns about terrorism, and about getting a large increase in skilled people to build and maintain them, we can build and install wind turbines today, but if we start building one new nuclear plant a week it will be approximately a Trillion dollars (Hinkley point C in the UK is expected to be £23Bn+, the UK would need ~50 to go entirely nuclear for several Trillion pounds, the USA would need many more) and a decade or two to get a large amount of power generation from them. In two decades, wind and solar could blanket the country if we wanted, solar price drops, lithium ion battery price drops and other storage systems could make significant progress for a fraction of that money. I'm not against nuclear in principle, but the first UK production reactor in 1966 was £30 million which is about £0.5 Billion in today's money. In 2008 the government was estimating £2.5 billion per plant, the chairman of E.ON said it could be £5 billion per plant. By 2012 estimates were up to £7 billion. Hinkley Point C had an actual estimated construction cost of £20 billion. In 2013 Centrica withdrew citing higher than expected costs. By 2015 the UK government agreed to pay double-rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C as a subsidy of about £6 billion on top of the build costs. By 2016 the UK National Audit Office said that subsidy could end up being more like £30 billion all-in. In 2017 they revised that to £50 billion. In 2016 the construction cost exceeded the entire market cap. of EDF the French company supposed to be building it. By 2020 it's two years into construction and construction costs are up another £3 billion to ~£23bn and we're Brexiting. It's been described as the most expensive power station in the world. The UK government has banned the funding model used from being used on future power plants. Realistically, are we going to be 5 years down the line from here, with costs increasing so much the project gets shelved unfinished, or EDF collapsing and unable to finish it? There has to be a non-zero chance of that happening. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#Future_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki... [3]
tehjoker 6y ago
There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to power the world for more than a little bit (iirc 30 years). It can at best be used as a transition source or a supplemental source.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  > There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to power the world for more than a little bit This claim is simply false. The argument in favor of this view involves a very narrow interpretation of proven reserves that excludes discovery. The argument you're making is the same as peak-oil-ism, and we all know how that turned out. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Thanks for the link. I guess I hadn't read enough about this. I still am uneasy about using nuclear power for everything because of the risks and waste. I'm aware that alternate, safer designs exist though they are not commercially proven and often have unsolved problems with either logistics, scaling, or non-proliferation. I feel that changes to lifestyle and solar power sharing across large geographic areas might be a better and more ecological approach, though I can't quantify how everything would work yet. The other aspect to discovery though is that mining ever more hard to recover fuels results in escalating ecological damage. Fracking isn't something we needed to do but is possibly responsible for small earth quakes and various kinds of local destruction and pollution for example. I don't know much about uranium mining, but I suspect that it is a very toxic enterprise filled with radioactive acids and tailings.
dang 6y ago
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253613.

guerrilla 6y ago

> only those technologies that agree with my aesthetics!" This is an exceptionally bad straw-man [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate

brokencode 6y ago

So you think caring about nuclear waste along with CO2 emissions makes someone a fake environmentalist? Nuclear waste is highly toxic and difficult to store and transport safely. Also, have you ever heard of Chernobyl or Fukushima? Nuclear reactors are great in certain ways, but can be catastrophically bad too. Hydro also can cause a significant environmental impact, flooding natural habitat and interrupting water routes for different animals. Solar and wind aren’t perfect either, but the idea is to try to chose a power source that is as clean as possible.

codefreakxff 6y ago

The tone of your post (being simultaneously dismissive and insulting to those who have a different view than you) is very trollish. The problem many people have with nuclear power are things like accidents making areas uninhabitable, radiation making people sick, disposal of waste rods is difficult, some materials can be used to make weapons, and the cost to make a safe plant are staggering and leading to cancellation of projects. Renewable sources don’t have these downsides. Are they ugly? Not any uglier than a concrete dome and cooling systems of a nuclear power plant. You can bet wine country does not want a nuclear plant in their valley either. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to zone land usage appropriately.

pas 6y ago
Renewables have externalities too. Just because it's harder to mass hyterise them, they still exist. Eg the cost of mining for battery parts, parts that are needed to manufacture hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, millions of PV panels, inverters, etc. That said, of course it's perfectly reasonable to try to preserve some areas, and to put power generation somewhere out of sight.
skriticos2 6y ago
Agree. Compared to renewables - nuclear is a big risk (financial and operational). Also nuclear needs a lot of water, which is getting to be a serious problem. Compared to coal/gas/biomass they look great though in our current terraforming predicament. There is no way we could build enough of them in the near term to matter, so that makes this discussion moot anyway. There is simply not enough expertise and production capacity left. Very few nuclear plants have been completed recently and the institutional knowlege is fading. It takes a lot of time and effort to reinvigorate that, especially since the nuclear industry is so extremely conservative. Also the conversation is not being done on technical merits - but political inertia, an unwillingness to change and special interests by established energy companies (coal, gas). As you say, renewables are still winning (slowly) because of the low risk profile and generally being price competitive. Not that it matters much, we are mostly over the point of no return. It's just a matter of time before this ball is getting very unpleasant, sadly. We are just playing with the dial on how quickly that happens.
quotemstr 6y ago
New nuclear power plant designs [1] have many intrinsic safety features that largely obviate the old safety concerns that you mention. Anti-nuclear advocates conspicuously ignore these new designs, instead opposing a vision of the nuclear power system that hasn't been current since the 1960s. Argumentum ad Chernobylum just convinces me that the animus against nuclear power comes from aesthetic considerations and not a sober optimization of human welfare against ecological damage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
LunaSea 6y ago
Renewables definitely have those downsides. Especially if you look at the recycling procedures of solar panels and led batteries. cf: Other link on the front page of HN: https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/ https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

imtringued 6y ago

Do you know what? Private industry doesn't care about nuclear. The only way to build nuclear is through government projects which is why there is immense pressure by nuclear companies to publicly dismiss everything that can support itself. Companies set up their own coal plants, natural gas plants, solar farms, wind farms and so on but what they don't do is build their own nuclear plants. Come up with better power plant designs and maybe then private industry will be interested.

sroussey 6y ago
There are better power plant designs, but regulations are based on designs from 50+ years ago, and thus no one has built a new safer design since.
missedthecue 6y ago
There aren't 6 billion permits, licenses, and regulations to comply with when setting up a solar farm. On top of this, you don't assume much liability when installing a solar panel. You do when creating a nuclear reaction. Pouring the concrete and building the core of a nuclear plant is not inherently more expensive than plenty of other projects that private industry funds. The cost overruns in nuclear come from necessary but burdensome regulatory requirements.

jodrellblank 6y ago

Wind turbines can be offshore. You can buy a wind turbine "off the shelf" and have people without nuclear training plonk it down wherever you want it, approximately as soon as you can stump up the money and get planning approval. The USA has been adding wind turbines at the rate of ~four a day every day for the last fourty years, for a total of some ~60,000. In that same time the USA has started 4 nuclear power plants[1], all in 2013, all unfinished/in progress. The UK has ~11,000 wind turbines. We have 1 nuclear plant started construction in the last 30 years (Hinkley C) and it is two years in, and over budget. UK has five more proposed nuclear plants, and of those two are shelved and one cancelled[3]. It's not proven that the UK or USA still has the ability to build working nuclear reactors, or the ability to organise and approve and fund them - look at this link [2] about the last few years of the UK government changing, making, and cancelling approval and funding plans. Or that the UK will be able to source and transport nuclear fuels and wastes after Brexit. Even putting all that aside, and assuming the world can source enough nuclear fuels for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and assuming we can overcome concerns about terrorism, and about getting a large increase in skilled people to build and maintain them, we can build and install wind turbines today, but if we start building one new nuclear plant a week it will be approximately a Trillion dollars (Hinkley point C in the UK is expected to be £23Bn+, the UK would need ~50 to go entirely nuclear for several Trillion pounds, the USA would need many more) and a decade or two to get a large amount of power generation from them. In two decades, wind and solar could blanket the country if we wanted, solar price drops, lithium ion battery price drops and other storage systems could make significant progress for a fraction of that money. I'm not against nuclear in principle, but the first UK production reactor in 1966 was £30 million which is about £0.5 Billion in today's money. In 2008 the government was estimating £2.5 billion per plant, the chairman of E.ON said it could be £5 billion per plant. By 2012 estimates were up to £7 billion. Hinkley Point C had an actual estimated construction cost of £20 billion. In 2013 Centrica withdrew citing higher than expected costs. By 2015 the UK government agreed to pay double-rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C as a subsidy of about £6 billion on top of the build costs. By 2016 the UK National Audit Office said that subsidy could end up being more like £30 billion all-in. In 2017 they revised that to £50 billion. In 2016 the construction cost exceeded the entire market cap. of EDF the French company supposed to be building it. By 2020 it's two years into construction and construction costs are up another £3 billion to ~£23bn and we're Brexiting. It's been described as the most expensive power station in the world. The UK government has banned the funding model used from being used on future power plants. Realistically, are we going to be 5 years down the line from here, with costs increasing so much the project gets shelved unfinished, or EDF collapsing and unable to finish it? There has to be a non-zero chance of that happening. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#Future_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki... [3]

tehjoker 6y ago

There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to power the world for more than a little bit (iirc 30 years). It can at best be used as a transition source or a supplemental source.

quotemstr 6y ago
> There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to power the world for more than a little bit This claim is simply false. The argument in favor of this view involves a very narrow interpretation of proven reserves that excludes discovery. The argument you're making is the same as peak-oil-ism, and we all know how that turned out. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Thanks for the link. I guess I hadn't read enough about this. I still am uneasy about using nuclear power for everything because of the risks and waste. I'm aware that alternate, safer designs exist though they are not commercially proven and often have unsolved problems with either logistics, scaling, or non-proliferation. I feel that changes to lifestyle and solar power sharing across large geographic areas might be a better and more ecological approach, though I can't quantify how everything would work yet. The other aspect to discovery though is that mining ever more hard to recover fuels results in escalating ecological damage. Fracking isn't something we needed to do but is possibly responsible for small earth quakes and various kinds of local destruction and pollution for example. I don't know much about uranium mining, but I suspect that it is a very toxic enterprise filled with radioactive acids and tailings.

dang 6y ago

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253613.