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I agree with the need to maintain and upgrade nuclear plants. However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ev

I agree with the need to maintain and upgrade nuclear plants. However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed". The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Costs_of_the_cleanup_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks. Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world. Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Storing spent nuclear fuel (etc) is not a "hidden" cost. It's actually included in the cost of nuclear fuel, at least in the US. Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > still didn't kill anyone That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaster-still-affects-32-million-japanese https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste... https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effects_of_fukushima_meltdown https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    "Psychological effect" is not very convincing, especially since much of the psychological effect is due to paranoid over-zealous evacuations. Nuclear being blamed for the psychological problems caused by people (including officials in particular) being irrationally afraid of nuclear. People directly die from natural gas explosions or falling off roofs installing solar panels pretty regularly. There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
  - SCLeo 6y ago
    If we scale up nuclear by 10 times, so that all power generation is handled by nuclear power plants, and we are extremely unlucky that we have 10 Fukushimas every year, and even if you count all the 1700 (non-radiation-related) death/Fukushima, we are still at 17,000 death/year, which is significantly lower than the number of death caused by fossil fuel power generation. (A quick Google search yielded 8.7 million/year). Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation. There are three more things to keep in mind: 1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year. 2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures. 3. Death is much worse than having to relocate. Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
    - kergonath 6y ago
      If I am not mistaken, this is a massive under-estimation of the number of deaths related to fossil fuel, as I do not think it includes things like victims of freak weather events (droughts, hurricanes, heat waves) that are a consequence of burning fossil fuels. AFAIK the 8 million figure includes only deaths from direct pollution.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    This is pointless. Everything we do kills people. The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs. Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment: what are the costs of the alternatives? The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives. All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly. So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
    - Supermancho 6y ago
      > The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs. > Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.
      - kergonath 6y ago
        This is not contradictory. If you want to compare two solutions, you need to have a number for both. So in itself a number you assign to nuclear energy is useless (for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear is either terrible or bad as an energy production source), unless you contrast it with the equivalent for the alternative. Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.
- protastus 6y ago
  The US does not have a permanent storage solution for spent nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
  - roenxi 6y ago
    The US has been using order-of-magnitude the same amount of nuclear power since the 80s. This has been a non-issue for longer than most HN commentators have been alive. If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    What's more likely to kill us, nuclear waste or climate change?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - godelski 6y ago
    WIPP exists[0]. This is just for weapons waste (which is a much higher concern btw). But honestly storing waste material on site isn't that big of a deal. The DOE has also invented significantly better storage systems in the last 50 years but simulations and small scale testing do not count as proven enough for large scale testing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
- swixmix 6y ago
  Nuclear power is only as safe as the people who are involved in it. In this case, the Fukushima power plant wasn't funded like it should have been because people weren't interested in nuclear power. Turns out that's both extremely dangerous and hard to control. Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan. Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated. "That's how safe nuclear is."
  - kergonath 6y ago
    > Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated. And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.
- flor1s 6y ago
  You mean that Fukushima never killed anyone during normal operations? Because people died during the evacuation, a worker died due to lung cancer attributed to the disaster (it's mentioned in the article), and we are not sure if there will be any further deaths due to radiation exposure.
hnuser123456 6y ago
Someone heard they'd need to hire a cleanup contractor and saw nothing but piles of money. No way it will cost anywhere near that much just to make the area safe. Most of the contamination was in water that's already gone to the ocean and raised the ocean's background by an utterly negligible amount.
godelski 6y ago
> However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed". I'd rewrite it as > one of the safest power sources humankind has ever developed[0] because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons? I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste, etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal, nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless you over allocate). To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats. If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and other independent studies) even including future deaths are lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0 Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power. > The order of magnitude of Fukushima ... > Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world. I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5 Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died. As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body). Letting people move back would still likely result in less deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this, I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference? We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve? Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto. The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or) pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting against nuclear because it is costly. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
clusterfish 6y ago
Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster is like seeing a news report of an aircrash and concluding that cars are a safer means to travel. Air pollution kills millions of people and costs trillions of dollars, every single year. Much of it is caused by burning fossils. https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollution.htm https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollut... I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my lungs. Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the construction and operation of long term storage sites for spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry, disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  > Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster Also...how about oil spills? How much money, adjusted for inflation over time, have we dumped into cleaning that shit up over and over? And speaking of costs, what's the cost of entire cities being underwater in a decade or two? Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no? Pound for pound, nuclear seems like the most effective option we have at the moment. If fossil fuels were priced according to how much damage they are actually causing the planet, nuclear would seem pretty cheap too. The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels.
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    >Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. Also production of solar panels is quite far from being "green" as well. Luckily most of solar production is handled by China, a country with quite lax environmental standards, so most of the HN crowd does not feel the environmental impact from it.
    - Maursault 6y ago
WalterBright 6y ago
It might be far cheaper and practical to just make an "exclusion zone" out of the areas around Fukushima rather than trying to clean them up.
llsf 6y ago
France does recycle nuclear waste: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... The resulting waste is vitrified, and much smaller: https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuc...
sir_bearington 6y ago
> The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... Even the oft-cited $200 billion is an exaggeration. Bear in mind these figures from from politicians, nowhere near this amount has actually been spent. As far a figures for the money actually spent, let's go with your own source: > In 2016, University of Oxford researcher and author Peter Wynn Kirby wrote that the government had allocated the equivalent of US$15 billion for the regional cleanup Let's see if we can get more recent sources on spending related to Fukushima. Form a 2020 article [1] > Since fiscal 2014, it has set aside about 35 billion yen annually for the interim storage facilities. The funds come from revenues earmarked for nuclear energy-related projects in the special account. > But expenditures concerning the storage facilities are running a lot higher than initially envisaged. > An estimate released in late 2016 by the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry showed that the project will eventually cost 1.6 trillion yen, compared with an initial projection of 1.1 trillion yen. > The government has allocated an additional 12 billion yen annually for the storage facility project since fiscal 2017. Okay, so the Japanese government is saying that it'll cost 1.6 trillion yen (about $15 billion dollars) total. They're actually spending 35 + 12 = 47 billion yen annually, which is ~$433 million. $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power. 1. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13225190 http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13225190
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power. That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. It has had its share of accidents too. I wouldn’t be betting against more accidents in the next 30 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_inc...
GuB-42 6y ago
> There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks. Is it really that big of a problem? Sure, the cost of dealing with these is not negligible but in the end, it is just a matter of digging a hole in a deserted place and putting things there. It is dangerous stuff and is to be handled with care, but we deal with dangerous stuff all the times: explosives, toxic chemicals, weapons, ... and nuclear waste is not that high on the list. The usual argument is that nuclear waste can stay hot for thousands of years. In fact, while true, the kind of stuff that stays radioactive on these time scales tends to be weak, The most concerning elements are usually those with decades-long half lives. Compare to stable but toxic elements like mercury that last forever. Also worth noting that coal contains long lived radioactive elements that end up in the atmosphere after being burned. So, coal plants also produce nuclear waste, but instead of having it conveniently stored in a specialized facility, it is released in the atmosphere to be stored into your lungs. As I said, long life elements are weak, so it is not that much of a problem, but it is not a reason to do the worst thing that can possibly be done with these. And while we keep talking about waste, this is only waste because we don't use it. Radioactive "waste" is made of rare elements that produce energy, and maybe a treasure for future generations.
- junon 6y ago
  Right. People need to check up on the latest Nuclear advancements. We're getting quite good at refining waste products down to safe enough levels of radioactivity, and then we can even further utilize the remaining waste in other applications. It's not like we've hit a dead end with nuclear research, people have just seen too much Chernobyl stuff and cast a large net on the whole science.
jboog 6y ago
Why leave out the cost of fossil fuel power sources throughout history? And deaths caused by fossil fuel emissions which is in the tens of thousands per year. Fukushima and Chernobyl combined are a tiny fraction of FF emissions/deaths/costs.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  We leave that out because it's irrelevant to whether nuclear or renewables should be used to replace fossil fuels.
  - jboog 6y ago
    it is literally impossible for renewables to replace fossil fuels given current technology and anything on the horizon for at least the next decade, probably much longer. So that leaves...Nuclear. So again, why are you fear-mongering about how "dangerous" nuclear is when it's a tiny tiny fraction of the real danger of fossil fuels? I thought climate change was like an urgent crisis or something....?
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    I think the question is whether renewables should replace nuclear or fossil fuels first. The top level comment isn't talking about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
    - jboog 6y ago
      Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology. We are being told on the one hand that climate change is an existential threat to tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Oh but actually we can just refuse to decarbonize our energy production because maybe someday 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now there's a true "green" renewable energy I guess.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        > Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology. Nonsense. It's clear they can, although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries.
Accujack 6y ago
Addressing your points in order: The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government: https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200 https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200 So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power. Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper. >There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems. The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material. > nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world. This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.

Robotbeat 6y ago

Storing spent nuclear fuel (etc) is not a "hidden" cost. It's actually included in the cost of nuclear fuel, at least in the US. Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.

Supermancho 6y ago
> still didn't kill anyone That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaster-still-affects-32-million-japanese https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste... https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effects_of_fukushima_meltdown https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  "Psychological effect" is not very convincing, especially since much of the psychological effect is due to paranoid over-zealous evacuations. Nuclear being blamed for the psychological problems caused by people (including officials in particular) being irrationally afraid of nuclear. People directly die from natural gas explosions or falling off roofs installing solar panels pretty regularly. There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
- SCLeo 6y ago
  If we scale up nuclear by 10 times, so that all power generation is handled by nuclear power plants, and we are extremely unlucky that we have 10 Fukushimas every year, and even if you count all the 1700 (non-radiation-related) death/Fukushima, we are still at 17,000 death/year, which is significantly lower than the number of death caused by fossil fuel power generation. (A quick Google search yielded 8.7 million/year). Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation. There are three more things to keep in mind: 1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year. 2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures. 3. Death is much worse than having to relocate. Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    If I am not mistaken, this is a massive under-estimation of the number of deaths related to fossil fuel, as I do not think it includes things like victims of freak weather events (droughts, hurricanes, heat waves) that are a consequence of burning fossil fuels. AFAIK the 8 million figure includes only deaths from direct pollution.
- kergonath 6y ago
  This is pointless. Everything we do kills people. The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs. Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment: what are the costs of the alternatives? The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives. All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly. So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    > The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs. > Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.
    - kergonath 6y ago
      This is not contradictory. If you want to compare two solutions, you need to have a number for both. So in itself a number you assign to nuclear energy is useless (for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear is either terrible or bad as an energy production source), unless you contrast it with the equivalent for the alternative. Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.
protastus 6y ago
The US does not have a permanent storage solution for spent nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- roenxi 6y ago
  The US has been using order-of-magnitude the same amount of nuclear power since the 80s. This has been a non-issue for longer than most HN commentators have been alive. If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  What's more likely to kill us, nuclear waste or climate change?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- godelski 6y ago
  WIPP exists[0]. This is just for weapons waste (which is a much higher concern btw). But honestly storing waste material on site isn't that big of a deal. The DOE has also invented significantly better storage systems in the last 50 years but simulations and small scale testing do not count as proven enough for large scale testing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
swixmix 6y ago
Nuclear power is only as safe as the people who are involved in it. In this case, the Fukushima power plant wasn't funded like it should have been because people weren't interested in nuclear power. Turns out that's both extremely dangerous and hard to control. Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan. Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated. "That's how safe nuclear is."
- kergonath 6y ago
  > Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated. And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.
flor1s 6y ago
You mean that Fukushima never killed anyone during normal operations? Because people died during the evacuation, a worker died due to lung cancer attributed to the disaster (it's mentioned in the article), and we are not sure if there will be any further deaths due to radiation exposure.

hnuser123456 6y ago

Someone heard they'd need to hire a cleanup contractor and saw nothing but piles of money. No way it will cost anywhere near that much just to make the area safe. Most of the contamination was in water that's already gone to the ocean and raised the ocean's background by an utterly negligible amount.

godelski 6y ago

> However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed". I'd rewrite it as > one of the safest power sources humankind has ever developed[0] because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons? I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste, etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal, nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless you over allocate). To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats. If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and other independent studies) even including future deaths are lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0 Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power. > The order of magnitude of Fukushima ... > Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world. I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5 Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died. As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body). Letting people move back would still likely result in less deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this, I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference? We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve? Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto. The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or) pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting against nuclear because it is costly. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

clusterfish 6y ago

Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster is like seeing a news report of an aircrash and concluding that cars are a safer means to travel. Air pollution kills millions of people and costs trillions of dollars, every single year. Much of it is caused by burning fossils. https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollution.htm https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollut... I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my lungs. Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the construction and operation of long term storage sites for spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry, disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.

orthecreedence 6y ago
> Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster Also...how about oil spills? How much money, adjusted for inflation over time, have we dumped into cleaning that shit up over and over? And speaking of costs, what's the cost of entire cities being underwater in a decade or two? Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no? Pound for pound, nuclear seems like the most effective option we have at the moment. If fossil fuels were priced according to how much damage they are actually causing the planet, nuclear would seem pretty cheap too. The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  >Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. Also production of solar panels is quite far from being "green" as well. Luckily most of solar production is handled by China, a country with quite lax environmental standards, so most of the HN crowd does not feel the environmental impact from it.
  - Maursault 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago

It might be far cheaper and practical to just make an "exclusion zone" out of the areas around Fukushima rather than trying to clean them up.

llsf 6y ago

France does recycle nuclear waste: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... The resulting waste is vitrified, and much smaller: https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuc...

sir_bearington 6y ago

> The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... Even the oft-cited $200 billion is an exaggeration. Bear in mind these figures from from politicians, nowhere near this amount has actually been spent. As far a figures for the money actually spent, let's go with your own source: > In 2016, University of Oxford researcher and author Peter Wynn Kirby wrote that the government had allocated the equivalent of US$15 billion for the regional cleanup Let's see if we can get more recent sources on spending related to Fukushima. Form a 2020 article [1] > Since fiscal 2014, it has set aside about 35 billion yen annually for the interim storage facilities. The funds come from revenues earmarked for nuclear energy-related projects in the special account. > But expenditures concerning the storage facilities are running a lot higher than initially envisaged. > An estimate released in late 2016 by the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry showed that the project will eventually cost 1.6 trillion yen, compared with an initial projection of 1.1 trillion yen. > The government has allocated an additional 12 billion yen annually for the storage facility project since fiscal 2017. Okay, so the Japanese government is saying that it'll cost 1.6 trillion yen (about $15 billion dollars) total. They're actually spending 35 + 12 = 47 billion yen annually, which is ~$433 million. $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power. 1. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13225190 http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13225190

deleted 6y ago
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lostlogin 6y ago
> $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power. That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. It has had its share of accidents too. I wouldn’t be betting against more accidents in the next 30 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_inc...

GuB-42 6y ago

> There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks. Is it really that big of a problem? Sure, the cost of dealing with these is not negligible but in the end, it is just a matter of digging a hole in a deserted place and putting things there. It is dangerous stuff and is to be handled with care, but we deal with dangerous stuff all the times: explosives, toxic chemicals, weapons, ... and nuclear waste is not that high on the list. The usual argument is that nuclear waste can stay hot for thousands of years. In fact, while true, the kind of stuff that stays radioactive on these time scales tends to be weak, The most concerning elements are usually those with decades-long half lives. Compare to stable but toxic elements like mercury that last forever. Also worth noting that coal contains long lived radioactive elements that end up in the atmosphere after being burned. So, coal plants also produce nuclear waste, but instead of having it conveniently stored in a specialized facility, it is released in the atmosphere to be stored into your lungs. As I said, long life elements are weak, so it is not that much of a problem, but it is not a reason to do the worst thing that can possibly be done with these. And while we keep talking about waste, this is only waste because we don't use it. Radioactive "waste" is made of rare elements that produce energy, and maybe a treasure for future generations.

junon 6y ago
Right. People need to check up on the latest Nuclear advancements. We're getting quite good at refining waste products down to safe enough levels of radioactivity, and then we can even further utilize the remaining waste in other applications. It's not like we've hit a dead end with nuclear research, people have just seen too much Chernobyl stuff and cast a large net on the whole science.

jboog 6y ago

Why leave out the cost of fossil fuel power sources throughout history? And deaths caused by fossil fuel emissions which is in the tens of thousands per year. Fukushima and Chernobyl combined are a tiny fraction of FF emissions/deaths/costs.

pfdietz 6y ago
We leave that out because it's irrelevant to whether nuclear or renewables should be used to replace fossil fuels.
- jboog 6y ago
  it is literally impossible for renewables to replace fossil fuels given current technology and anything on the horizon for at least the next decade, probably much longer. So that leaves...Nuclear. So again, why are you fear-mongering about how "dangerous" nuclear is when it's a tiny tiny fraction of the real danger of fossil fuels? I thought climate change was like an urgent crisis or something....?
- Stupulous 6y ago
  I think the question is whether renewables should replace nuclear or fossil fuels first. The top level comment isn't talking about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
  - jboog 6y ago
    Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology. We are being told on the one hand that climate change is an existential threat to tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Oh but actually we can just refuse to decarbonize our energy production because maybe someday 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now there's a true "green" renewable energy I guess.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      > Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology. Nonsense. It's clear they can, although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries.

Accujack 6y ago

Addressing your points in order: The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government: https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200 https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200 So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power. Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper. >There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems. The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material. > nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world. This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.