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Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

269 points by erentz 6y ago

mhh__ 6y ago
For a bit of perspective, it's worth considering that the Boeing 737-Max problems have killed more people than possibly all western and Japanese nuclear disasters combined (depends on how you count it). Nuclear power is not without its dangers, but so is almost any other type of project of this scale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano-Shushenskaya_power... (Even with Solar Power the risks are in the factories and mines that made the panel)
frabbit 6y ago
Radiation is good. Without it we would not have mutation and then there would be nothing for natural selection to operate on. Ergo, if you are against radiation you are against evolution. QED. Also, I have shares in companies that can build nuclear power stations in your neighborhood. Also, because I want to keep driving and heating my uninsulated suburban single-family house while I eat beef 3 times a week and I am starting to realize that this might cause the climate destruction that those econuts warble about I might need to get my power from somewhere else. Next question?
- raffraffraff 6y ago
  And flying. Don't forget the flying. What the planet needs is more nuclear and more covid.
- ktal 6y ago
  Right, let's keep burning coal and gas for electricity, instead of getting clean and immensely plentiful electricity from nuclear.
  - frabbit 6y ago
    Exactly. The only thing we can keep doing is consuming more and more energy. And who wants to get that from bombing and subverting nations around the world? Not you... you're nice. Not me... I am woke. So, the only thing to do is to build nuclear power stations everywhere. What could go wrong? Nothing else ever has!
- tengbretson 6y ago
  In general, due to their more recent construction, suburban homes tend to be better than average at insulation when compared to other single family dwellings. That said, given the levels of snark I'm reading I would guess things like "single family dwelling", "family", or even property ownership itself would probably be pretty hot topics for you.
  - three_legs 6y ago
    I was actually very ignorant to the not very new ideas that Leftists hold about "abolishing the family", even as far back as Marx (maybe even further). Very disturbing
    - three_legs 6y ago
      So is it true that Leftists want to abolish the family, or do users here simply think I'm exaggerating?
  - frabbit 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. More single home dwellings coupled with nuclear power and a complete absence of "snark". That's the ticket! Have you heard about the growth mindset?
raffraffraff 6y ago
Without even reading it, "yes".
dv_dt 6y ago
The attitude on risks of radiation have little to do with the economic and technological failures of nuclear power. With multiple schedule and cost failures it seems like fission nuclear is an exercise in what is possible, but not really practical compared to what is accessible via renewables + storage and it's far less constrained financial and technological foundations.
- coredog64 6y ago
  Nuclear opponents: File lawsuits and generally propose BANANA policy Also nuclear opponents: Gee, look how long it takes to build a nuclear plant.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Except failures were more due to insider problems. No one forced Westinghouse to screw up on Summer or Vogtle. No one forced the welds to be botched on Flamanville 3.
  - dv_dt 6y ago
    There were also cost and schedule overruns in other nations like China and France, besides the ones in the US and UK.
  - hwillis 6y ago
    Absolute nonsense. Owners of nuclear plants are far more likely to open suits, and the suits against plants are over quickly and very rarely successful: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1901/ML19010A148.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1901/ML19010A148.pdf Take SCANA as an example. They apply to the NRC in March 2008, are granted a price increase three days later, and are granted project approval 5 months after that. 4 months after that the construction plan is approved. 10 months from filing to green light, with first construction in 3 years and completion in 10 years. Projected cost is 9.8 billion for two AP1000 units- $5.4 million per MW capacity (inflation adjusted). Far more expensive than gas or renewable energy: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p... Before even starting, they need to redesign. NRC approves. First new US reactor in 30 years. Construction begins in 2013. In 2014, they suddenly need an extra year and 1.2 billion more. By 2016 they have hiked rates NINE times. In 2017 Westinghouse goes bankrupt trying to build these reactors. Estimates put the total cost to finish at 23 BILLION USD. The parent company votes to abandon the project. https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-nuclear-project-timeline/ https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-... That has absolutely nothing to do with lawsuits or policy. The legislature gave them absolutely everything they wanted, and they had a wide open door to build reactors. They couldn't do it. It's a simple as that.
Reedx 6y ago
Yes, too anxious about nuclear energy generally. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Spooky23 6y ago
After you ionize the straw man to death, ask the engineers wtf are we going to do with hazardous waste byproducts for which the current plan is to let sit and rot on site at various plant sites. When you look at the inevitable destruction that will be wrought on the Columbia river ecosystem by the Hanford site, perhaps it’s worth considering what will happen in the coming years as uneconomical nuclear plants are shut down.
- coredog64 6y ago
  It’s not like this hasn’t been solved in several ways: France recycles not only their own waste, but waste for other countries. Yucca Mountain was built to store what couldn’t be recycled, but certain people (cough Harry Reid cough) decided that it couldn’t be used after being specifically built for the purpose.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    So ... there's still no solution in the US. Gotcha.
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    La'Hague in France focuses on reprocessing fuel rods. It produces more contaminated waste, pumps radioactive pollution into the ocean and the air. "reprocessing" is not "recycling".
bad_user 6y ago
> "we know that things like bad diet, inactivity, obesity and alcohol can also cause cancer" No, we actually don't know that. I would say that correlation isn't causation, but for at least 3 of those factors I'm pretty sure we don't even have the correlation. This sentence here spoiled the entire article for me, as this is IMO an unacceptable mistake for a science journalist.
- Ovah 6y ago
  Correlation is indeed not causation. However all four statements hold true for correlation. And at least alcohol can cause cancer. - Bad diet: for example red meat increases risk of colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698595/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698595/ - physical activity reduces the risk of many cancers. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/obesity/physical-activity-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o... - overweight people have a higher risk of cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/obesity/obesity-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o... - alcohol increases risk of head and neck, oesophageal, liver, breast, colorectal caner and many others . https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
  - bad_user 6y ago
    > - physical activity reduces the risk of many cancers Logical fallacy.
    - Ovah 6y ago
      I'm interested in what way this could be a logical fallacy. Would you care to expand?
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
I think it's definitely true people are overly anxious about radiation, and irrationally so. For example, it's easy to find people who get anxious about xrays but not about flying even though it gives you roughly the same amount of exposure. I know I was pretty anxious when I had a chest xray as a kid. It's just the invisible nature of radiation. Coupled with the real and brutal effects of extreme doses, it just lends itself to horrifying media portrayals.
- hwillis 6y ago
  > For example, it's easy to find people who get anxious about xrays but not about flying even though it gives you roughly the same amount of exposure. A 7 hour flight gives you 1/5th (.02 mSv- 2000x daily background exposure) as much as a chest xray and 1/350th as much as a chest CT. They're only similar if you fly relatively often, and if you get any kind of CT you need to fly a LOT to make them comparable. Your example also under-rates the danger of xrays compared to flying under models that are suspected to be more realistic than current linear threshold. If acute doses are worse than spread out doses, the xray is even worse than the plane. As a child, you would have gotten even less radiation from a flight. An xray exposes you to roughly the same dose, since the image is confined to a specific spot on your body. Everybody gets the dose delivered to a roughly 1'x1' area, yadda yadda. On a flight, every part of your body receives more radiation- so a 50 lb child will get 1/4th as much radiation as a 200 lb adult. If they get an xray, a smaller area needs to be exposed... but not 1/4 the size. It's actually related to the square-cube law, since the image is cross-sectional but dose delivery depends on volume. https://www.xrayrisk.com/faq.php https://www.xrayrisk.com/faq.php
  - drivebycomment 6y ago
    https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017SW001639@10.1002/(ISSN)2333-5084.SCISOC1 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201... says: During times of calm space weather, travelers on flights from say, Chicago to Beijing, over the north pole get the equivalent radiation dose of a chest X‐ray (~0.1 mSv) [e.g., Meier et al., 2009; Bennett et al., 2012, 2013; Joyce et al., 2016; Tobiska et al., 2016].
jhayward 6y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines always applies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
LatteLazy 6y ago
With advances in long distance power transmission, I don't know why theyre not being build on desert coasts. Does anyone know? The Singapore-Australia line is about the se distance as a Western Sahara-UK line would be... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_Link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Powe...
- pvaldes 6y ago
  > I don't know why they're not being build on desert coast If we talk about Western Sahara, those coasts are strategic areas for the economy of the planet and many big companies operate there. My bet is that anybody enough silly to treat the huge fisheries, strategic maritime routes moving oil and raw materials, and the touristic areas adjacent in the Canary Islands, EU just with the purpose to build one nuclear plant would be sued to death and buried in a coffin of law papers. The boycott level would be insane.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I'm guessing you don't just want geological stability, but also political stability where you build nuclear plants. Northern Africa, and occupied territories in general, aren't the greatest of places to put important industry.
- unlaxedneurotic 6y ago
  I believe that it may be partly due to the workforce required to keep the plant running. It will be very difficult for the workers to provide a good life to their families or education to their children in some remote location on a desert coast.
  - rusk 6y ago
    Sure they do this ok the oil rigs - long periods away from family, all that. I presume you could set up a similar arrangement
- ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  I would assume that transmission adds costs, and nuclear is already economically uncompetitive before you add that extra overhead.
simonCGN 6y ago
Is this already the new BBC? The article sounds like propaganda to me.
08-15 6y ago
Good article, until they ask the usual suspects and get this answer: no2nuclearpower says, "there is no such thing as an absolutely safe level of radiation: all exposures no matter how small entail some risk - even background radiation." This is absolute nonsense. If an increase in exposure at these low doses mattered, we'd see a correlation between background exposure and cancer rates, but we don't. More importantly, accidental experiments like the Taiwanese radioactive apartment buildings show, that an increase of exposure at low dose rates is actually beneficial. That BBC quotes antinuclear SIFs uncritically, as if they had any actual expertise or were scientists, in my opinion invalidates the whole article. It's probably "for balance", but really, talking to the village idiot doesn't balance anything.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  This is absolute nonsense No, it’s not. It might not be accurate, but to my knowledge the linear-no-threshold model is still subject to support and opposition from various bodies.
  - 08-15 6y ago
    Yes, regulatory and activist bodies. And calling something that is basically religious dogma a "model", is an insult to models.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  If you want to get right down to it, there might even be a benefit to being exposed to certain levels of ionizing radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > If an increase in exposure at these low doses mattered, we'd see a correlation between background exposure and cancer rates, but we don't. No, because the marginal increase at low doses, as seen in the natural background, under LNT is so low that it's not statistically visible. The evidence we have is even consistent with models in which the effect/dose at low exposures is HIGHER than in LNT (for example, if there are repair mechanisms that are induced at sufficiently high doses.) Advocates of hormesis don't point out that a concave downward curve at low doses that this sort of effect might produce would increase the number of cancers from a nuclear accident, vs. what the LNT would predict.
sto_hristo 6y ago
Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. Being anxious about it is more than justified, especially with idiotic countries in mind. But that doesn't mean we need to abandon it. Nuclear is the future and there is no debate about it - energy density of the fuel is unmatched. It's becoming safer and safer and with the introduction of modular built reactors, the cost and time to market metrics will go down. Whether is fission or fusion - that remains to be seen...
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  > Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. In fact, even Fukushima there were human (stupid) mistakes: - the levee was too low, and the regulator told TEPCO they needed to improve it (which they didn't). Interestingly enough, the exact same issue (too small levee, leading to loss of all power and water supply) happened in France in CPNE du Blayais in 1999, and in this case also the regulator told EDF that their levee was too low, with no reaction… - a valve was automatically closed (which is the standard behavior in case of shutdown) but the Japanese operators weren't aware of this behavior, so they believed the valve was still open. When they realized it, it was too late. Opening this valve would have given several hours more of cooling water to the reactor, which could have been enough to save it because help came only a little too late. Main takeaway: humans are going to do stupid things, which in case of nuclear will eventually lead to a disaster every once in a while. The question raised by the article, is “how much of a disaster is it really” and “do we really need to evacuate a entire region when things like this happen”. If the answer is “yes” (which is what's commonly accepted) then nuclear is probably too risky to be reasonable (for instance, if CPNE de Nogent sur Seine suffered a critical failure, Paris and the entire Île-de-France region, which concentrate most of the French economic power, would need to be evacuated). But if the answer is “no”, and the actual risk from contamination (not irradiation actually…) is actually comparable or even lower than regular air pollution or other pollutants, then maybe nuclear is fine, even if we admit that dramatic events will inevitably occur.
evolve2k 6y ago
The other front page post today makes a strong case for why the horse has already bolted on Nuclear vs Solar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24605191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24605191
jwilliams 6y ago
This article implies radiation is the only objection to nuclear power, which isn’t true. It also fails to mention any alternatives (renewables) at all. Both seem major omissions.. especially from the BBC, which I always found was a bit more balanced on these topics.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. And solar plants only work during the day, to a first approximation (yes, there are storage approaches that sort of work, in some parts of the world.) Overall, most renewables don’t really come all that close to nuclear as far as generation capacity goes...
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    > So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. Why is this a problem? If solar plants can be cheap without being big, that's a feature, not a bug.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      In fact this is one of the biggest reasons why nuclear is failing. Building even just a single power plant is a project that is so large no single company can do it.
      - vbezhenar 6y ago
        Rosatom built many power plants.
        lightgreen 6y ago
        It is government owned.
    - 6y ago
Lazare 6y ago
Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it? The debate about nuclear is never ending, and yet at the same time, seemingly never focused on anything relevant. How many times do we need to go through the same cycle? "But what about Chernobyl?" "But what about deaths due to coal?"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  This is the first time I have seen nuclear described as more expensive. My understanding was that it was several times cheaper than coal. I could be totally wrong of course.
  - jka 6y ago
    A useful term to search the web for related to this is 'LCOE' - an acronym for 'levelized cost of energy'. It's essentially the same notion as 'total cost of ownership' in IT, but in the domain of energy generation.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    You haven't read much from a particular mindset then. They tend to evaluate nuclear waste storage as pretty much an eternal cost.
  - hwillis 6y ago
    That's because its a bit of a bait and switch. When people pull that out, it's about keeping existing plants running- extending them to run for 60+ years. That's pretty cheap, since the cost of fuel is tiny and you just need to pay for the ~1000 people onsite. The issue there is risk- you can't just open up all the valves to check how worn out they are, or if all the computers still have nice transistors and clean relays. You can do some basic stuff like looking for cracks, but the system is ancient. Who knows if that is okay or not. Then, if you talk about new construction, the issue is cost but the conversation is entirely about risk. There's very, very little danger even for many decades. Cost is another matter. The best estimates are that nuclear costs as much as the most expensive other technologies to build, but the actual end figure has just gotten higher and higher over time. Manufacturing is not what it used to be and these huge plants have been outpaced by smaller plants and different technologies.
cwp 6y ago
Clear violation of Betteridge's law.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
I can’t really reconcile people who genuinely, in their heart of hearts, believe we’re on the precipice of doom because of carbon emissions, and are at the same time strongly against nuclear power. Can someone who feels this way chime in and help me understand? I’m genuinely curious how these two ideas fit together.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  The only people fitting both categories at once would have to be in favour of a very very quick de-growth/economic contraction and return to the lifestyle that was ubiquitous a couple centuries ago: no fossil fuels is pretty much a show-stopper for modern civilization. That's a position that can be argued for and defended while being entirely coherent though (although it's not one that I'm particularly thrilled to run towards).
- jhayward 6y ago
  We can build a lot more carbon free generation, much quicker, and reduce the carbon load of the atmosphere quicker by never ever building anther nuclear plant and instead use that money for renewables, transmission, and storage. It is simple. There are cheaper and quicker, and lots less risky ways to decarbonize generation.
  - opo 6y ago
    >...use that money for renewables, transmission, and storage. If grid storage was simple or easy, it would have become ubiquitous decades ago. To deal with seasonal variations in power output, would require new massive battery systems that could store power for months and/or a massive over buildup of power generation. Neither of these options would be cheap and it isn’t clear how the cost would compare with building nuclear power plants. More importantly, nobody has yet tried to build such a long term grid storage system. (And no, using natural gas to cover for shortfalls from power sources that are intermittent is not a long term answer.) Many people also ignore how expensive and time-consuming it would be to rebuild the grid so that for example, the southwest could provide solar power for the east coast. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
seanwilson 6y ago
Whenever people bring up "but how do we store the waste!?", how much storage space would the nuclear waste used to power all of America for a year take up? Feels like the amount is an important point, but I never hear it mentioned.
- Aachen 6y ago
  This is not a hard start to find if you're actually curious, especially given that I've seen multiple people in this thread already cite how much waste has been created since the 60s. I'm on mobile and should be sleeping but I remember seeing the per-year at 100% nuclear before, just don't remember what it is, and keep in mind that nobody here is proposing going 100% forever. It's a mix and a quick way to stop producing CO2 for power.
p1mrx 6y ago
I think the most legitimate concern about nuclear safety is, what happens to the plant if you push the "OFF" button and go home? The current gigawatt-scale plants (AP1000, Hualong One, etc.) can cool without external water for 72 hours, after which a meltdown occurs. NuScale plans to run their reactors at the bottom of a pool, with enough water to passively transition to air cooling over the course of a month. (There are a bunch of proposed reactor designs with similar safety characteristics, but I know more about NuScale because they've been in the news lately.) I'm not against building plants with a 72-hour buffer for now, due to the pressing need for low-carbon energy, but we should really focus our future resources on passive self-cooling designs that we can safely copy-paste across the planet on a massive scale.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > I think the most legitimate concern about nuclear safety is, what happens to the plant if you push the "OFF" button and go home? Local peasants get in, take some pretty glowing things back home, apply the stuff as makeup, and die horrible deaths. When the family tries to bury their daughter in the town cemetery, the rest of the town marches in protest. Clearly, the lesson is that we should stop building... hospitals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
- AI_WAIFU 6y ago
  I don't understand who's bright idea it was to use water as the primary coolant for a nuclear reactor. IIRC almost every single major nuclear incident has been caused or dramatically exacerbated by having it boil away or cause a steam explosion or mix with the ground water or chemically react with the fuel rods to produce additional heat and hydrogen gas which also explodes. Like just go through this list and count the number of times water was a good chunk of the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... There are multiple options that don't have this issue. For instance, if you use liquid lead the thing can sit around indefinitely with no active cooling. In fact you have the opposite problem, you need to keep heating the lead to prevent the whole reactor pool from freezing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor
zyxzevn 6y ago
I don't care much about the radiation. And this is always the wrong argument. I care about (1) the pollution with 100,000 years of half-life and (2) corruption and (3) Murphy's law. None of these problems are even closely solved. The only constant is that errors will be made. My previous generation thought that it was OK to put waste into the oceans. Or dump it in Africa. Some Thorium solutions may work, but they need to be researched and improved. There are some scientists working on transforming nuclear waste, and this is the first thing that needs to be done. Don't come back until you have done that.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  What about fusion reactors? ITER is WIP. https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    They are remarkable in that they are likely to be larger, more expensive, more complex, less reliable, and overall less workable than even today's fission power plants.
cm2187 6y ago
We are too anxious about radiation risk. We are too anxious about terrorism. We are too anxious about Covid. We are too anxious about the buzz of a mosquito flying in the room. We are too anxious about completely immaterial risks while ignoring way bigger risks (like damns failing, or common crime, or the health impact of the lockdown and medical treatments, vaccination campaigns being suspended, etc). Our collective reaction to these risks is completely irrational and disproportionate to the actual danger.
ellyagg 6y ago
A rare violation of Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
rgbrenner 6y ago
BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time your ready to start selling energy, maybe no one wants to buy it at any price that ever returns a dime to you or the other investors. Why don't you just go flush your money down the toilet today and save yourself 10 years of your life. Until nuclear solves that issue... the rest of this just doesn't matter. These were the questions of last decade before solar/wind and batteries scaled up.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  There's a significant risk of that price difference expanding to two orders of magnitude. There is a lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively). At a 100x cost differential, things are going to be brutal for investors with sunk investments in legacy power generation. We're talking electricity prices dropping to tenths of a dollar cent per kwh. Considering solar bids are going out for 1.3 cents right now, that could happen relatively quickly. IMHO nuclear could actually work but it will need a much more ambitious agenda than merely matching price levels of already too expensive gas plants. Fusion is the interesting thing to keep an eye on. Perpetually decades out but it at least offers the right orders of magnitude improvements we actually need; on paper.
  - aktenlage 6y ago
    > lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively) Can you back that up? Last time I spoke to a guy working on solar, he said a 1% increase in efficiency is considered a great achievement.
    - jillesvangurp 6y ago
      I'm talking mostly about cost. Technical efficiency is a nice to have but we are not short on square meters generally. In any case, I've read several articles lately that are talking 10-30% efficiencies through in the context of various research projects. Some of those things indeed sound a bit wild/far out but not implausible. Most of this is early research. But generally what we have in the market today is not even close to being the final answer or even close to the theoretical limit of what is possible of stuff people work on in labs right now. I'd call 1% a distinct lack of imagination or ambition. Cost is a whole different matter. Economies of scale and new processes & materials can accomplish a lot. E.g. organic molecules printed on any surface even at a reduced efficiency could end up being so dirt cheap to produce and deploy that it still ends up cheaper per kwh. If somebody produces something half as efficient but 20 times as cheap, we'd still get 10x more energy for my money. You get cost improvements in all parts of the production process, installation, and operation. IMHO the combination of new solar cell types, ways to produce them, and ways to do that with cheaper materials can over time certainly get us to an order of magnitude cost improvement; if not far more.
moneytide1 6y ago
"Just Have A Think" put out a video about geothermal energy today. Iceland and California both have large faults they use for short distance access (3km) to the >200 Celsius available at an average depth of ~40km everywhere else in the world. I'm not sure of the implications of drilling that deep, but since horizontal drilling is required for steam return - could it ever be an avenue down which to deploy drilling assets that were originally used for fracking? If oil prices stay depressed, and California achieves total ban of gasoline vehicles before 2035, then oil demand is going to drop more and it would be good to continue to utilize advanced drilling tech that would ultimately be able to start up a grid anywhere there is lower than average crust depths.
- Manfredo_1 6y ago
  The problem with geothermal power is that it's only feasible in a few areas. California already generates about 5% of its electricity from geothermal power: https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/geothermal/index_cms.php#:~:text=Due%20to%20its%20location%20on,hours%20(GWh)%20of%20electricity https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/geothermal....
  - moneytide1 6y ago
    Yeah because of the fault line bringing mantle temperature closer. I think they have drilled 3km to tap into this heat, whereas the deepest hole ever dug so far is in Russia at a depth of around 10km (small diameter). Drilling was limited at this distance because of increasing heat. If we could figure out how to drill a large enough hole at those ~43km crust lengths, wouldn't tectonic activity shift shafts out of alignment? Metallurgy, abrasives, and durable gearing are to conventional drills (Howard Hughes Sr) as perhaps focused optics would be to future drilling as depicted in lots of sci fi. Either way - tunneling itself is so much the challenge as would be removing the aggregate. How hilarious would it be to have drilled so far deep vertically to access the mantle that you'd have to use rockets to remove the ore. Space elevator/launch concept also has massive material penalty.
Mrdarknezz 6y ago
Yes
tiku 6y ago
Time for simple waste heat generators. What is holding us back to use it?
bboygravity 6y ago
Has anybody else noticed that this pro-nuclear "news" seems rather orchestrated throughout Europe/"The West"? These pro-nuclear ideas have recently been in the news and hot in politics in at least 4 European countries that I frequent and where I speak the language. All around the same time. Is this manufacturing consent in action? Who's behind this and why? There are no new arguments or information that I see for or against nuclear in the past few decades. And all of a sudden now "we" (as in: the main stream media) realize that "maybe nuclear isn't so bad". What is this? Disclaimer: I personally think nuclear is the least evil of all energy conversion methods that we can currently use. But I have had this opinion for at least 15 years.
- Aachen 6y ago
  Nope, haven't noticed that at all. I have yet to meet the first European in real life that's neutral, let alone in favor of, nuclear. I live in a border region between Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. They always bring up the (false) safety argument and when they discover that's an airplane vs cars kind of fear, they start about costs, which is not more than the off-shore wind we're already building. (And someone really ought to tell France.) Somehow they aren't convinced by logic in the end and most would rather shut down nuclear plants in their back yard before the coal plant that causes much greater damages.
  - bboygravity 6y ago
    I wasn't referring to actual public opinion. What I referred to was the Western mass media (and politicians) slowly but surely turning pro-nuclear in 2020 after decades of successful (as you point out) anti-nuclear propaganda. I've seen this happening around September 2020 in at least UK, Netherlands and France. I'm in Germany now where I haven't followed the news, but I expect no pro-nuclear propaganda in Germany since they're already set on getting their base load energy production out of Russian gas. I estimate that turning public opinion around again in the EU to be accepting of nuclear will take at least a few months/years. That's just speculation though.
relativitypro 6y ago
Yes. We do many worse things to ourselves, and they have all the potential and realized risks that nuclear promised. The only difference? We’ve been inundated with ads from the coal industry. Deaths from nuclear power, including all the heritable effects from all nuclear accidents, are less than all power sources except hydro.
blocked_again 6y ago
Everyone is pro nuclear energy untill the government decides to set up a plant near your neighborhood.
- Kuinox 6y ago
  Yet I have 3-4 reactor near my neighborhood and I'm not against. It is used for research, and produce Technetium-99m that is used for nuclear medicine for scintigraphy.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- bsagdiyev 6y ago
  Yeah I have no issues with this. Power in California is stupid expensive and we are going back to rolling blackouts to shed load to keep the grid stable.
kavi87 6y ago
Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister (https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--energy-minister/1133707 https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en...). Nuclear energy is great but it is a pain to build, maintain, manage, decommission etc.
- Gravityloss 6y ago
  This nuclear reactor is. There are a lot of different reactors and types. France in the past very succesfully and quickly built a lot of reactors. They massively reduced their CO2 footprint. So it can be done.
- bpizzi 6y ago
  > Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister (https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en...). Your information is very misleading, very. The quote come from the minister of the ecological transition, not 'energy minister', whose official duty is, quoting wikipedia 'responsible for preparing and implementing the French government’s policy in the fields of sustainable development, climate, energy transition, and biodiversity.' This new minister has a political degree (Science Po), no technological background, and is member of the local pro-ecological party since 2000. Of course she's referring to EPR as a mess, which is true in a certain way, but in her mind it's just a political stance she's feeling obligated to say publicly. Of course the EPR is a giant project, maybe too giant, of course it was underestimated in order to get it going, and of course it takes much longer to be built than every one would want. But that's the price of technological advancement, that's how we learn to build better things. And what's the alternative? 1650MWe of wind turbines, where would you put it?
  - Udik 6y ago
    The UK has just finished building the Hornsea Project 1 offshore wind farm. [1] It had a projected cost of $5.2 billion for a nameplate capacity of 1.2GW and an actual average output of 0.46GW. Scaled to the output of the Flamanville mess (1.6GW), it means that a wind farm with equivalent average output would cost about $18 billion. Though I imagine that the average lifetime of a 174-turbines wind farm over an area of 630 sq kms in the middle of the sea might be shorter than that of a nuclear plant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm
justatdotin 6y ago
this year, the veil fell and the usa nuclear fuel working group showed the industry for what it is: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-effect-uranium-imports-national-security-establishment-united-states-nuclear-fuel-working-group/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-e... The nexus with weapons is undeniable. I stand with hibakusha in opposition to nuclearism. https://www.icanw.org/ https://www.icanw.org/
- ENIanDEM 6y ago
  ... What? Trump decided to enact some protectionist uranium policies and this makes the nuclear industry the baddies..? Did you throw out all your cutlery in disgust when he jacked up steel import tariffs? This is cretinous.
  - justatdotin 6y ago
    hey murry, I'm from a pseudo-independant steel (and uranium) producing nation. perhaps this summary is clearer: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/us-uranium-mining-nfwg/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/us-uranium-mining-nfwg... "according to the Department of Energy, the desire to enhance the domestic uranium industry is being driven by a demand for low-enriched uranium that will be used in tritium production for nuclear weapons in the 2040s, as well as highly-enriched uranium needed to fuel Navy nuclear reactors in the 2050s"
moontear 6y ago
Maybe the fear of actual death by radiation is over-proportionate, but what about nuclear waste? It is only mentioned in the very end of the article, but many countries are having problems finding a suitable site for long-term storage of nuclear waste.
natch 6y ago
Solve the radiation problem and we are still left with the problems of massive cost overruns, corruption, and centralized control of energy which takes away individual freedom to choose where to spend energy money, because the cost gets passed down to us as taxes and fees. A better idea is to scale up battery production and use renewables. Nuclear may still be needed but as a last / worst option amongst all non-fossil fuel options.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  It's amazing how HN ignores the problem of centralization vs decentralization of power production.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I love discussions about nuclear power because they do a really good job showing how the HN demographics are no better at being well reasoned and logically consistent than any other demographic.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- stkdump 6y ago
  It's called illusory superiority.
enqk 6y ago
I don't understand the discussion surrounding the cost of nuclear, talking about it being non-competitive.. When the alternative is what? Unleashing series of catastrophic events due to climate change? which will have an unbounded enormous cost on societies at large. We've seen already what harm this type of thinking (cost-effectiveness of health systems, worry about costs of closing travel) is causing thanks to the Covid19 example.
jnxx 6y ago
There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epigenetic+effects+f+ionizing+radiation&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig... Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus. Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion. There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/ http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch&oldid=203461144 https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4mieclus... Some researchers also have found there is a correlation between the proportion of sexes of humans at birth, and radiation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378378215002169 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783... I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions. The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development. Another interesting observation is that in Chernobyl, insects seem more affected by radiation than vertebrates. https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348 https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-art-and-science-life-after-nuclear-fallout-180951231/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-...
ashtonkem 6y ago
If we were rational about even radiation, we’d be freaked out about coal power too for the same reasons, but we’re not. Nuclear power is on the losing side of one of the most effective public persuasion campaigns in the US, much to my frustration.
toddh 6y ago
Perhaps some of us are not concerned about radiation risks, we simply do not want a continuation of old centralized paradigms. The future is energy systems based on decentralization, redundancy, and dispersal.
kujaomega 6y ago
Maybe the key to stop having anxiety is in how to remove or minimize the radiation effects. With my ignorance on the subject, analyzing radiosynthesis of some mushrooms can lead to some promising discoveries https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1
techsin101 6y ago
nuclear reactors are one unusual earth quake away from rendering entire continent uninhabitable.

269 points by erentz 6y ago

For a bit of perspective, it's worth considering that the Boeing 737-Max problems have killed more people than possibly all western and Japanese nuclear disasters combined (depends on how you count it). Nuclear power is not without its dangers, but so is almost any other type of project of this scale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano-Shushenskaya_power... (Even with Solar Power the risks are in the factories and mines that made the panel)

frabbit 6y ago

Radiation is good. Without it we would not have mutation and then there would be nothing for natural selection to operate on. Ergo, if you are against radiation you are against evolution. QED. Also, I have shares in companies that can build nuclear power stations in your neighborhood. Also, because I want to keep driving and heating my uninsulated suburban single-family house while I eat beef 3 times a week and I am starting to realize that this might cause the climate destruction that those econuts warble about I might need to get my power from somewhere else. Next question?

raffraffraff 6y ago
And flying. Don't forget the flying. What the planet needs is more nuclear and more covid.
ktal 6y ago
Right, let's keep burning coal and gas for electricity, instead of getting clean and immensely plentiful electricity from nuclear.
- frabbit 6y ago
  Exactly. The only thing we can keep doing is consuming more and more energy. And who wants to get that from bombing and subverting nations around the world? Not you... you're nice. Not me... I am woke. So, the only thing to do is to build nuclear power stations everywhere. What could go wrong? Nothing else ever has!
tengbretson 6y ago
In general, due to their more recent construction, suburban homes tend to be better than average at insulation when compared to other single family dwellings. That said, given the levels of snark I'm reading I would guess things like "single family dwelling", "family", or even property ownership itself would probably be pretty hot topics for you.
- three_legs 6y ago
  I was actually very ignorant to the not very new ideas that Leftists hold about "abolishing the family", even as far back as Marx (maybe even further). Very disturbing
  - three_legs 6y ago
    So is it true that Leftists want to abolish the family, or do users here simply think I'm exaggerating?
- frabbit 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. More single home dwellings coupled with nuclear power and a complete absence of "snark". That's the ticket! Have you heard about the growth mindset?

raffraffraff 6y ago

Without even reading it, "yes".

dv_dt 6y ago

The attitude on risks of radiation have little to do with the economic and technological failures of nuclear power. With multiple schedule and cost failures it seems like fission nuclear is an exercise in what is possible, but not really practical compared to what is accessible via renewables + storage and it's far less constrained financial and technological foundations.

coredog64 6y ago
Nuclear opponents: File lawsuits and generally propose BANANA policy Also nuclear opponents: Gee, look how long it takes to build a nuclear plant.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Except failures were more due to insider problems. No one forced Westinghouse to screw up on Summer or Vogtle. No one forced the welds to be botched on Flamanville 3.
- dv_dt 6y ago
  There were also cost and schedule overruns in other nations like China and France, besides the ones in the US and UK.
- hwillis 6y ago
  Absolute nonsense. Owners of nuclear plants are far more likely to open suits, and the suits against plants are over quickly and very rarely successful: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1901/ML19010A148.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1901/ML19010A148.pdf Take SCANA as an example. They apply to the NRC in March 2008, are granted a price increase three days later, and are granted project approval 5 months after that. 4 months after that the construction plan is approved. 10 months from filing to green light, with first construction in 3 years and completion in 10 years. Projected cost is 9.8 billion for two AP1000 units- $5.4 million per MW capacity (inflation adjusted). Far more expensive than gas or renewable energy: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p... Before even starting, they need to redesign. NRC approves. First new US reactor in 30 years. Construction begins in 2013. In 2014, they suddenly need an extra year and 1.2 billion more. By 2016 they have hiked rates NINE times. In 2017 Westinghouse goes bankrupt trying to build these reactors. Estimates put the total cost to finish at 23 BILLION USD. The parent company votes to abandon the project. https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-nuclear-project-timeline/ https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-... That has absolutely nothing to do with lawsuits or policy. The legislature gave them absolutely everything they wanted, and they had a wide open door to build reactors. They couldn't do it. It's a simple as that.

Reedx 6y ago

Yes, too anxious about nuclear energy generally. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Spooky23 6y ago

After you ionize the straw man to death, ask the engineers wtf are we going to do with hazardous waste byproducts for which the current plan is to let sit and rot on site at various plant sites. When you look at the inevitable destruction that will be wrought on the Columbia river ecosystem by the Hanford site, perhaps it’s worth considering what will happen in the coming years as uneconomical nuclear plants are shut down.

coredog64 6y ago
It’s not like this hasn’t been solved in several ways: France recycles not only their own waste, but waste for other countries. Yucca Mountain was built to store what couldn’t be recycled, but certain people (cough Harry Reid cough) decided that it couldn’t be used after being specifically built for the purpose.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  So ... there's still no solution in the US. Gotcha.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  La'Hague in France focuses on reprocessing fuel rods. It produces more contaminated waste, pumps radioactive pollution into the ocean and the air. "reprocessing" is not "recycling".

bad_user 6y ago

> "we know that things like bad diet, inactivity, obesity and alcohol can also cause cancer" No, we actually don't know that. I would say that correlation isn't causation, but for at least 3 of those factors I'm pretty sure we don't even have the correlation. This sentence here spoiled the entire article for me, as this is IMO an unacceptable mistake for a science journalist.

Ovah 6y ago
Correlation is indeed not causation. However all four statements hold true for correlation. And at least alcohol can cause cancer. - Bad diet: for example red meat increases risk of colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698595/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698595/ - physical activity reduces the risk of many cancers. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/obesity/physical-activity-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o... - overweight people have a higher risk of cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/obesity/obesity-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o... - alcohol increases risk of head and neck, oesophageal, liver, breast, colorectal caner and many others . https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
- bad_user 6y ago
  > - physical activity reduces the risk of many cancers Logical fallacy.
  - Ovah 6y ago
    I'm interested in what way this could be a logical fallacy. Would you care to expand?

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

I think it's definitely true people are overly anxious about radiation, and irrationally so. For example, it's easy to find people who get anxious about xrays but not about flying even though it gives you roughly the same amount of exposure. I know I was pretty anxious when I had a chest xray as a kid. It's just the invisible nature of radiation. Coupled with the real and brutal effects of extreme doses, it just lends itself to horrifying media portrayals.

hwillis 6y ago
> For example, it's easy to find people who get anxious about xrays but not about flying even though it gives you roughly the same amount of exposure. A 7 hour flight gives you 1/5th (.02 mSv- 2000x daily background exposure) as much as a chest xray and 1/350th as much as a chest CT. They're only similar if you fly relatively often, and if you get any kind of CT you need to fly a LOT to make them comparable. Your example also under-rates the danger of xrays compared to flying under models that are suspected to be more realistic than current linear threshold. If acute doses are worse than spread out doses, the xray is even worse than the plane. As a child, you would have gotten even less radiation from a flight. An xray exposes you to roughly the same dose, since the image is confined to a specific spot on your body. Everybody gets the dose delivered to a roughly 1'x1' area, yadda yadda. On a flight, every part of your body receives more radiation- so a 50 lb child will get 1/4th as much radiation as a 200 lb adult. If they get an xray, a smaller area needs to be exposed... but not 1/4 the size. It's actually related to the square-cube law, since the image is cross-sectional but dose delivery depends on volume. https://www.xrayrisk.com/faq.php https://www.xrayrisk.com/faq.php
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017SW001639@10.1002/(ISSN)2333-5084.SCISOC1 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201... says: During times of calm space weather, travelers on flights from say, Chicago to Beijing, over the north pole get the equivalent radiation dose of a chest X‐ray (~0.1 mSv) [e.g., Meier et al., 2009; Bennett et al., 2012, 2013; Joyce et al., 2016; Tobiska et al., 2016].

jhayward 6y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines always applies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

LatteLazy 6y ago

With advances in long distance power transmission, I don't know why theyre not being build on desert coasts. Does anyone know? The Singapore-Australia line is about the se distance as a Western Sahara-UK line would be... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_Link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Powe...

pvaldes 6y ago
> I don't know why they're not being build on desert coast If we talk about Western Sahara, those coasts are strategic areas for the economy of the planet and many big companies operate there. My bet is that anybody enough silly to treat the huge fisheries, strategic maritime routes moving oil and raw materials, and the touristic areas adjacent in the Canary Islands, EU just with the purpose to build one nuclear plant would be sued to death and buried in a coffin of law papers. The boycott level would be insane.
luckylion 6y ago
I'm guessing you don't just want geological stability, but also political stability where you build nuclear plants. Northern Africa, and occupied territories in general, aren't the greatest of places to put important industry.
unlaxedneurotic 6y ago
I believe that it may be partly due to the workforce required to keep the plant running. It will be very difficult for the workers to provide a good life to their families or education to their children in some remote location on a desert coast.
- rusk 6y ago
  Sure they do this ok the oil rigs - long periods away from family, all that. I presume you could set up a similar arrangement
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
I would assume that transmission adds costs, and nuclear is already economically uncompetitive before you add that extra overhead.

simonCGN 6y ago

Is this already the new BBC? The article sounds like propaganda to me.

08-15 6y ago

Good article, until they ask the usual suspects and get this answer: no2nuclearpower says, "there is no such thing as an absolutely safe level of radiation: all exposures no matter how small entail some risk - even background radiation." This is absolute nonsense. If an increase in exposure at these low doses mattered, we'd see a correlation between background exposure and cancer rates, but we don't. More importantly, accidental experiments like the Taiwanese radioactive apartment buildings show, that an increase of exposure at low dose rates is actually beneficial. That BBC quotes antinuclear SIFs uncritically, as if they had any actual expertise or were scientists, in my opinion invalidates the whole article. It's probably "for balance", but really, talking to the village idiot doesn't balance anything.

matthewmacleod 6y ago
This is absolute nonsense No, it’s not. It might not be accurate, but to my knowledge the linear-no-threshold model is still subject to support and opposition from various bodies.
- 08-15 6y ago
  Yes, regulatory and activist bodies. And calling something that is basically religious dogma a "model", is an insult to models.
pmiller2 6y ago
If you want to get right down to it, there might even be a benefit to being exposed to certain levels of ionizing radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
pfdietz 6y ago
> If an increase in exposure at these low doses mattered, we'd see a correlation between background exposure and cancer rates, but we don't. No, because the marginal increase at low doses, as seen in the natural background, under LNT is so low that it's not statistically visible. The evidence we have is even consistent with models in which the effect/dose at low exposures is HIGHER than in LNT (for example, if there are repair mechanisms that are induced at sufficiently high doses.) Advocates of hormesis don't point out that a concave downward curve at low doses that this sort of effect might produce would increase the number of cancers from a nuclear accident, vs. what the LNT would predict.

sto_hristo 6y ago

Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. Being anxious about it is more than justified, especially with idiotic countries in mind. But that doesn't mean we need to abandon it. Nuclear is the future and there is no debate about it - energy density of the fuel is unmatched. It's becoming safer and safer and with the introduction of modular built reactors, the cost and time to market metrics will go down. Whether is fission or fusion - that remains to be seen...

littlestymaar 6y ago
> Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. In fact, even Fukushima there were human (stupid) mistakes: - the levee was too low, and the regulator told TEPCO they needed to improve it (which they didn't). Interestingly enough, the exact same issue (too small levee, leading to loss of all power and water supply) happened in France in CPNE du Blayais in 1999, and in this case also the regulator told EDF that their levee was too low, with no reaction… - a valve was automatically closed (which is the standard behavior in case of shutdown) but the Japanese operators weren't aware of this behavior, so they believed the valve was still open. When they realized it, it was too late. Opening this valve would have given several hours more of cooling water to the reactor, which could have been enough to save it because help came only a little too late. Main takeaway: humans are going to do stupid things, which in case of nuclear will eventually lead to a disaster every once in a while. The question raised by the article, is “how much of a disaster is it really” and “do we really need to evacuate a entire region when things like this happen”. If the answer is “yes” (which is what's commonly accepted) then nuclear is probably too risky to be reasonable (for instance, if CPNE de Nogent sur Seine suffered a critical failure, Paris and the entire Île-de-France region, which concentrate most of the French economic power, would need to be evacuated). But if the answer is “no”, and the actual risk from contamination (not irradiation actually…) is actually comparable or even lower than regular air pollution or other pollutants, then maybe nuclear is fine, even if we admit that dramatic events will inevitably occur.

evolve2k 6y ago

The other front page post today makes a strong case for why the horse has already bolted on Nuclear vs Solar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24605191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24605191

jwilliams 6y ago

This article implies radiation is the only objection to nuclear power, which isn’t true. It also fails to mention any alternatives (renewables) at all. Both seem major omissions.. especially from the BBC, which I always found was a bit more balanced on these topics.

tonyarkles 6y ago
So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. And solar plants only work during the day, to a first approximation (yes, there are storage approaches that sort of work, in some parts of the world.) Overall, most renewables don’t really come all that close to nuclear as far as generation capacity goes...
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. Why is this a problem? If solar plants can be cheap without being big, that's a feature, not a bug.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    In fact this is one of the biggest reasons why nuclear is failing. Building even just a single power plant is a project that is so large no single company can do it.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      Rosatom built many power plants.
      - lightgreen 6y ago
        It is government owned.
  - 6y ago

Lazare 6y ago

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it? The debate about nuclear is never ending, and yet at the same time, seemingly never focused on anything relevant. How many times do we need to go through the same cycle? "But what about Chernobyl?" "But what about deaths due to coal?"

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IgorPartola 6y ago
This is the first time I have seen nuclear described as more expensive. My understanding was that it was several times cheaper than coal. I could be totally wrong of course.
- jka 6y ago
  A useful term to search the web for related to this is 'LCOE' - an acronym for 'levelized cost of energy'. It's essentially the same notion as 'total cost of ownership' in IT, but in the domain of energy generation.
- jojobas 6y ago
  You haven't read much from a particular mindset then. They tend to evaluate nuclear waste storage as pretty much an eternal cost.
- hwillis 6y ago
  That's because its a bit of a bait and switch. When people pull that out, it's about keeping existing plants running- extending them to run for 60+ years. That's pretty cheap, since the cost of fuel is tiny and you just need to pay for the ~1000 people onsite. The issue there is risk- you can't just open up all the valves to check how worn out they are, or if all the computers still have nice transistors and clean relays. You can do some basic stuff like looking for cracks, but the system is ancient. Who knows if that is okay or not. Then, if you talk about new construction, the issue is cost but the conversation is entirely about risk. There's very, very little danger even for many decades. Cost is another matter. The best estimates are that nuclear costs as much as the most expensive other technologies to build, but the actual end figure has just gotten higher and higher over time. Manufacturing is not what it used to be and these huge plants have been outpaced by smaller plants and different technologies.

cwp 6y ago

Clear violation of Betteridge's law.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

I can’t really reconcile people who genuinely, in their heart of hearts, believe we’re on the precipice of doom because of carbon emissions, and are at the same time strongly against nuclear power. Can someone who feels this way chime in and help me understand? I’m genuinely curious how these two ideas fit together.

cmehdy 6y ago
The only people fitting both categories at once would have to be in favour of a very very quick de-growth/economic contraction and return to the lifestyle that was ubiquitous a couple centuries ago: no fossil fuels is pretty much a show-stopper for modern civilization. That's a position that can be argued for and defended while being entirely coherent though (although it's not one that I'm particularly thrilled to run towards).
jhayward 6y ago
We can build a lot more carbon free generation, much quicker, and reduce the carbon load of the atmosphere quicker by never ever building anther nuclear plant and instead use that money for renewables, transmission, and storage. It is simple. There are cheaper and quicker, and lots less risky ways to decarbonize generation.
- opo 6y ago
  >...use that money for renewables, transmission, and storage. If grid storage was simple or easy, it would have become ubiquitous decades ago. To deal with seasonal variations in power output, would require new massive battery systems that could store power for months and/or a massive over buildup of power generation. Neither of these options would be cheap and it isn’t clear how the cost would compare with building nuclear power plants. More importantly, nobody has yet tried to build such a long term grid storage system. (And no, using natural gas to cover for shortfalls from power sources that are intermittent is not a long term answer.) Many people also ignore how expensive and time-consuming it would be to rebuild the grid so that for example, the southwest could provide solar power for the east coast. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

seanwilson 6y ago

Whenever people bring up "but how do we store the waste!?", how much storage space would the nuclear waste used to power all of America for a year take up? Feels like the amount is an important point, but I never hear it mentioned.

Aachen 6y ago
This is not a hard start to find if you're actually curious, especially given that I've seen multiple people in this thread already cite how much waste has been created since the 60s. I'm on mobile and should be sleeping but I remember seeing the per-year at 100% nuclear before, just don't remember what it is, and keep in mind that nobody here is proposing going 100% forever. It's a mix and a quick way to stop producing CO2 for power.

p1mrx 6y ago

I think the most legitimate concern about nuclear safety is, what happens to the plant if you push the "OFF" button and go home? The current gigawatt-scale plants (AP1000, Hualong One, etc.) can cool without external water for 72 hours, after which a meltdown occurs. NuScale plans to run their reactors at the bottom of a pool, with enough water to passively transition to air cooling over the course of a month. (There are a bunch of proposed reactor designs with similar safety characteristics, but I know more about NuScale because they've been in the news lately.) I'm not against building plants with a 72-hour buffer for now, due to the pressing need for low-carbon energy, but we should really focus our future resources on passive self-cooling designs that we can safely copy-paste across the planet on a massive scale.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> I think the most legitimate concern about nuclear safety is, what happens to the plant if you push the "OFF" button and go home? Local peasants get in, take some pretty glowing things back home, apply the stuff as makeup, and die horrible deaths. When the family tries to bury their daughter in the town cemetery, the rest of the town marches in protest. Clearly, the lesson is that we should stop building... hospitals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
AI_WAIFU 6y ago
I don't understand who's bright idea it was to use water as the primary coolant for a nuclear reactor. IIRC almost every single major nuclear incident has been caused or dramatically exacerbated by having it boil away or cause a steam explosion or mix with the ground water or chemically react with the fuel rods to produce additional heat and hydrogen gas which also explodes. Like just go through this list and count the number of times water was a good chunk of the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... There are multiple options that don't have this issue. For instance, if you use liquid lead the thing can sit around indefinitely with no active cooling. In fact you have the opposite problem, you need to keep heating the lead to prevent the whole reactor pool from freezing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor

zyxzevn 6y ago

I don't care much about the radiation. And this is always the wrong argument. I care about (1) the pollution with 100,000 years of half-life and (2) corruption and (3) Murphy's law. None of these problems are even closely solved. The only constant is that errors will be made. My previous generation thought that it was OK to put waste into the oceans. Or dump it in Africa. Some Thorium solutions may work, but they need to be researched and improved. There are some scientists working on transforming nuclear waste, and this is the first thing that needs to be done. Don't come back until you have done that.

johnisgood 6y ago
What about fusion reactors? ITER is WIP. https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion
- pfdietz 6y ago
  They are remarkable in that they are likely to be larger, more expensive, more complex, less reliable, and overall less workable than even today's fission power plants.

cm2187 6y ago

We are too anxious about radiation risk. We are too anxious about terrorism. We are too anxious about Covid. We are too anxious about the buzz of a mosquito flying in the room. We are too anxious about completely immaterial risks while ignoring way bigger risks (like damns failing, or common crime, or the health impact of the lockdown and medical treatments, vaccination campaigns being suspended, etc). Our collective reaction to these risks is completely irrational and disproportionate to the actual danger.

ellyagg 6y ago

A rare violation of Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

rgbrenner 6y ago

BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time your ready to start selling energy, maybe no one wants to buy it at any price that ever returns a dime to you or the other investors. Why don't you just go flush your money down the toilet today and save yourself 10 years of your life. Until nuclear solves that issue... the rest of this just doesn't matter. These were the questions of last decade before solar/wind and batteries scaled up.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
There's a significant risk of that price difference expanding to two orders of magnitude. There is a lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively). At a 100x cost differential, things are going to be brutal for investors with sunk investments in legacy power generation. We're talking electricity prices dropping to tenths of a dollar cent per kwh. Considering solar bids are going out for 1.3 cents right now, that could happen relatively quickly. IMHO nuclear could actually work but it will need a much more ambitious agenda than merely matching price levels of already too expensive gas plants. Fusion is the interesting thing to keep an eye on. Perpetually decades out but it at least offers the right orders of magnitude improvements we actually need; on paper.
- aktenlage 6y ago
  > lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively) Can you back that up? Last time I spoke to a guy working on solar, he said a 1% increase in efficiency is considered a great achievement.
  - jillesvangurp 6y ago
    I'm talking mostly about cost. Technical efficiency is a nice to have but we are not short on square meters generally. In any case, I've read several articles lately that are talking 10-30% efficiencies through in the context of various research projects. Some of those things indeed sound a bit wild/far out but not implausible. Most of this is early research. But generally what we have in the market today is not even close to being the final answer or even close to the theoretical limit of what is possible of stuff people work on in labs right now. I'd call 1% a distinct lack of imagination or ambition. Cost is a whole different matter. Economies of scale and new processes & materials can accomplish a lot. E.g. organic molecules printed on any surface even at a reduced efficiency could end up being so dirt cheap to produce and deploy that it still ends up cheaper per kwh. If somebody produces something half as efficient but 20 times as cheap, we'd still get 10x more energy for my money. You get cost improvements in all parts of the production process, installation, and operation. IMHO the combination of new solar cell types, ways to produce them, and ways to do that with cheaper materials can over time certainly get us to an order of magnitude cost improvement; if not far more.

moneytide1 6y ago

"Just Have A Think" put out a video about geothermal energy today. Iceland and California both have large faults they use for short distance access (3km) to the >200 Celsius available at an average depth of ~40km everywhere else in the world. I'm not sure of the implications of drilling that deep, but since horizontal drilling is required for steam return - could it ever be an avenue down which to deploy drilling assets that were originally used for fracking? If oil prices stay depressed, and California achieves total ban of gasoline vehicles before 2035, then oil demand is going to drop more and it would be good to continue to utilize advanced drilling tech that would ultimately be able to start up a grid anywhere there is lower than average crust depths.

Manfredo_1 6y ago
The problem with geothermal power is that it's only feasible in a few areas. California already generates about 5% of its electricity from geothermal power: https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/geothermal/index_cms.php#:~:text=Due%20to%20its%20location%20on,hours%20(GWh)%20of%20electricity https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/geothermal....
- moneytide1 6y ago
  Yeah because of the fault line bringing mantle temperature closer. I think they have drilled 3km to tap into this heat, whereas the deepest hole ever dug so far is in Russia at a depth of around 10km (small diameter). Drilling was limited at this distance because of increasing heat. If we could figure out how to drill a large enough hole at those ~43km crust lengths, wouldn't tectonic activity shift shafts out of alignment? Metallurgy, abrasives, and durable gearing are to conventional drills (Howard Hughes Sr) as perhaps focused optics would be to future drilling as depicted in lots of sci fi. Either way - tunneling itself is so much the challenge as would be removing the aggregate. How hilarious would it be to have drilled so far deep vertically to access the mantle that you'd have to use rockets to remove the ore. Space elevator/launch concept also has massive material penalty.

Mrdarknezz 6y ago

Yes

tiku 6y ago

Time for simple waste heat generators. What is holding us back to use it?

bboygravity 6y ago

Has anybody else noticed that this pro-nuclear "news" seems rather orchestrated throughout Europe/"The West"? These pro-nuclear ideas have recently been in the news and hot in politics in at least 4 European countries that I frequent and where I speak the language. All around the same time. Is this manufacturing consent in action? Who's behind this and why? There are no new arguments or information that I see for or against nuclear in the past few decades. And all of a sudden now "we" (as in: the main stream media) realize that "maybe nuclear isn't so bad". What is this? Disclaimer: I personally think nuclear is the least evil of all energy conversion methods that we can currently use. But I have had this opinion for at least 15 years.

Aachen 6y ago
Nope, haven't noticed that at all. I have yet to meet the first European in real life that's neutral, let alone in favor of, nuclear. I live in a border region between Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. They always bring up the (false) safety argument and when they discover that's an airplane vs cars kind of fear, they start about costs, which is not more than the off-shore wind we're already building. (And someone really ought to tell France.) Somehow they aren't convinced by logic in the end and most would rather shut down nuclear plants in their back yard before the coal plant that causes much greater damages.
- bboygravity 6y ago
  I wasn't referring to actual public opinion. What I referred to was the Western mass media (and politicians) slowly but surely turning pro-nuclear in 2020 after decades of successful (as you point out) anti-nuclear propaganda. I've seen this happening around September 2020 in at least UK, Netherlands and France. I'm in Germany now where I haven't followed the news, but I expect no pro-nuclear propaganda in Germany since they're already set on getting their base load energy production out of Russian gas. I estimate that turning public opinion around again in the EU to be accepting of nuclear will take at least a few months/years. That's just speculation though.

relativitypro 6y ago

Yes. We do many worse things to ourselves, and they have all the potential and realized risks that nuclear promised. The only difference? We’ve been inundated with ads from the coal industry. Deaths from nuclear power, including all the heritable effects from all nuclear accidents, are less than all power sources except hydro.

blocked_again 6y ago

Everyone is pro nuclear energy untill the government decides to set up a plant near your neighborhood.

Kuinox 6y ago
Yet I have 3-4 reactor near my neighborhood and I'm not against. It is used for research, and produce Technetium-99m that is used for nuclear medicine for scintigraphy.
- deleted 6y ago
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bsagdiyev 6y ago
Yeah I have no issues with this. Power in California is stupid expensive and we are going back to rolling blackouts to shed load to keep the grid stable.

kavi87 6y ago

Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister (https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--energy-minister/1133707 https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en...). Nuclear energy is great but it is a pain to build, maintain, manage, decommission etc.

Gravityloss 6y ago
This nuclear reactor is. There are a lot of different reactors and types. France in the past very succesfully and quickly built a lot of reactors. They massively reduced their CO2 footprint. So it can be done.
bpizzi 6y ago
> Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister (https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en...). Your information is very misleading, very. The quote come from the minister of the ecological transition, not 'energy minister', whose official duty is, quoting wikipedia 'responsible for preparing and implementing the French government’s policy in the fields of sustainable development, climate, energy transition, and biodiversity.' This new minister has a political degree (Science Po), no technological background, and is member of the local pro-ecological party since 2000. Of course she's referring to EPR as a mess, which is true in a certain way, but in her mind it's just a political stance she's feeling obligated to say publicly. Of course the EPR is a giant project, maybe too giant, of course it was underestimated in order to get it going, and of course it takes much longer to be built than every one would want. But that's the price of technological advancement, that's how we learn to build better things. And what's the alternative? 1650MWe of wind turbines, where would you put it?
- Udik 6y ago
  The UK has just finished building the Hornsea Project 1 offshore wind farm. [1] It had a projected cost of $5.2 billion for a nameplate capacity of 1.2GW and an actual average output of 0.46GW. Scaled to the output of the Flamanville mess (1.6GW), it means that a wind farm with equivalent average output would cost about $18 billion. Though I imagine that the average lifetime of a 174-turbines wind farm over an area of 630 sq kms in the middle of the sea might be shorter than that of a nuclear plant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm

justatdotin 6y ago

this year, the veil fell and the usa nuclear fuel working group showed the industry for what it is: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-effect-uranium-imports-national-security-establishment-united-states-nuclear-fuel-working-group/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-e... The nexus with weapons is undeniable. I stand with hibakusha in opposition to nuclearism. https://www.icanw.org/ https://www.icanw.org/

ENIanDEM 6y ago
... What? Trump decided to enact some protectionist uranium policies and this makes the nuclear industry the baddies..? Did you throw out all your cutlery in disgust when he jacked up steel import tariffs? This is cretinous.
- justatdotin 6y ago
  hey murry, I'm from a pseudo-independant steel (and uranium) producing nation. perhaps this summary is clearer: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/us-uranium-mining-nfwg/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/us-uranium-mining-nfwg... "according to the Department of Energy, the desire to enhance the domestic uranium industry is being driven by a demand for low-enriched uranium that will be used in tritium production for nuclear weapons in the 2040s, as well as highly-enriched uranium needed to fuel Navy nuclear reactors in the 2050s"

moontear 6y ago

Maybe the fear of actual death by radiation is over-proportionate, but what about nuclear waste? It is only mentioned in the very end of the article, but many countries are having problems finding a suitable site for long-term storage of nuclear waste.

natch 6y ago

Solve the radiation problem and we are still left with the problems of massive cost overruns, corruption, and centralized control of energy which takes away individual freedom to choose where to spend energy money, because the cost gets passed down to us as taxes and fees. A better idea is to scale up battery production and use renewables. Nuclear may still be needed but as a last / worst option amongst all non-fossil fuel options.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
It's amazing how HN ignores the problem of centralization vs decentralization of power production.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

I love discussions about nuclear power because they do a really good job showing how the HN demographics are no better at being well reasoned and logically consistent than any other demographic.

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stkdump 6y ago
It's called illusory superiority.

enqk 6y ago

I don't understand the discussion surrounding the cost of nuclear, talking about it being non-competitive.. When the alternative is what? Unleashing series of catastrophic events due to climate change? which will have an unbounded enormous cost on societies at large. We've seen already what harm this type of thinking (cost-effectiveness of health systems, worry about costs of closing travel) is causing thanks to the Covid19 example.

jnxx 6y ago

There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epigenetic+effects+f+ionizing+radiation&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig... Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus. Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion. There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/ http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch&oldid=203461144 https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4mieclus... Some researchers also have found there is a correlation between the proportion of sexes of humans at birth, and radiation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378378215002169 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783... I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions. The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development. Another interesting observation is that in Chernobyl, insects seem more affected by radiation than vertebrates. https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348 https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-art-and-science-life-after-nuclear-fallout-180951231/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-...

ashtonkem 6y ago

If we were rational about even radiation, we’d be freaked out about coal power too for the same reasons, but we’re not. Nuclear power is on the losing side of one of the most effective public persuasion campaigns in the US, much to my frustration.

toddh 6y ago

Perhaps some of us are not concerned about radiation risks, we simply do not want a continuation of old centralized paradigms. The future is energy systems based on decentralization, redundancy, and dispersal.

kujaomega 6y ago

Maybe the key to stop having anxiety is in how to remove or minimize the radiation effects. With my ignorance on the subject, analyzing radiosynthesis of some mushrooms can lead to some promising discoveries https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1

techsin101 6y ago

nuclear reactors are one unusual earth quake away from rendering entire continent uninhabitable.