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After having read Gates’ latest book on climate change, one metaphor that stuck with me was the one on nuclear energy. It’s as if the Wright brothers invented t

• dijit 6y ago
  It's worse than that. It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous. The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit in air travel. Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obvious that it's killing us and in such numbers as it is. Nuclear is a dramatic killer, when we die from radiation it's clear and obvious and horrific.
  • Haemm0r 6y ago
    The comparison of a happening with basically no longterm consequences to future generations like MH17 to nuclear fallout / necessary waste treatment is quite lame imho. Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.
    • doikor 6y ago
      > Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all And yet we seem to be doing just that here in Finland. The for profit companies operating and building the plants have been trying to get permits to build more (and very likely are going to get another one soon). Even with the "failure" of Olkiluoto 3 they seem to find a way to do it in a profitable enough way that they (2 companies TVO and Fennovoima) want to build more. There are no subsidies for nuclear power at all in Finland. Also our permanent spent fuel storage site is almost finished and should hold around 100 years of spent fuel. Though there have been now some talks to not really use it for most fuel as it makes more sense to build breeder reactors and just burn that fuel into much smaller amount. If that happens it will fit much more then 100 year of spent fuel.
      • pydry 6y ago
        This reactor? >This month, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland was supposed to start producing power. Instead, the plant is at least three and a half years late and more than 50 percent over-budget. Olkiluoto was to be the “poster child” for the new generation of nuclear power plant designs that would drive the “Nuclear Renaissance” and if any nuclear project was going to go well. Instead, it has become an example of all that can go wrong in economic terms with new reactors. The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default. https://web.archive.org/web/20130728115821/http://www.psr.org/safe-energy/the-myth-of-the-european.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130728115821/http://www.psr.or... There does seem to be another reactor being built in Finland, but it's being built by Russia.
        • rhodozelia 6y ago
          What’s your point other than people generally sell large projects with a low up front number and it ends up being higher. Investors don’t get the 3-4x return they wanted and have to settle for 2x. Or it takes longer to pay itself back. Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of power. How can anyone argue against nuclear being part of the solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build? Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China have the skill and the will to make it happen while everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to pump out co2.
        • doikor 6y ago
          > The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default. With the contract TVO signed with Siemens and Areva for the plant they will never end up having to pay all the cost overruns. It was basically a fixed price contract. What ended up happening is Siemens got the fuck out of the deal (it was originally a Siemens and Areva joint project) and French government broke up Areva Group into smaller entities and took a hit on the failed project. From the legal fighting Areva agreed to pay TVO 450 million due to failing to deliver on time with some extra money going one way or another based on if it will deliver in the new revised timelines (ended up Areva having to pay TVO another 450 million). According to TVO at the end of the day the project cost them 5 billion instead of the original 3.2 billion with Areva saying it cost the 8.5 billion so Areva took a huge hit on making a bad contract and/or failing to deliver.
    • nickik 6y ago
      > Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. This is nonsense. We are basically using 60s technology that has some of these problems. A modern reactor facility could be 10-50x smaller for the same output and that makes think like decontamination cheaper as well. Also, these facilities can run 100 years potentially, so the amount of money required for decommissioning is amortized of gigantic amounts of energy. There is nothing inherent in nuclear that make it super expensive or unsustainable.
    • andbberger 6y ago
      [citation needed]
    • torresmo 6y ago
      > Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. FYI, oil & gas industry receives a lot of subsidies (just google it). On top of that, nuclear is extremely regulated compared to oil & gas. For instance, we have to capture and store nuclear waste. That's not the case for oil & gas CO2 waste.
  • jcelerier 6y ago
    > It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous. well, a lot of people simply refuse to air travel because of perceived safety issues
  • belorn 6y ago
    Interesting historical perspective since bomb planes transformed human warfare and was critical in the development of first ww1 and then more so during ww2. While not fully unique, the idea of killing the morale of the citizens rather than confronting the military was an insight many leader found from the bomb planes, and the idea of nuclear bombs are almost impossible without the idea of air travel.
• didibus 6y ago
  Ya, but the challenge, and I say that as a supporter of Nuclear in general, is that you don't sign up for the experiment. If you're in the radius of the plant if it were to fail, you might be wary of it.
  • pitaj 6y ago
    People don't sign up for pollution from fossil fuels either.
    • kcmastrpc 6y ago
      Yes, they do. If you drive a car, heat your home via gas/electricity, use the internet (to post this) -- you signed up for it.
      • pitaj 6y ago
        Okay then by the same logic people do sign up for nuclear by using the electricity for their homes, the internet, etc
      • oblio 6y ago
        That's not how it works :-) I don't smoke but until they started banning smoking everywhere, plenty of people would sign me up for passive smoking without asking me anything.
      • kergonath 6y ago
        How so? Do the particulates and aerosols avoid me breathing them in because I don’t drive a car and use electric heating? How does it work? Pollution from fossil fuel is unavoidable in quite a lot of places regardless of your life style. Also, much more deadly than anything related to nuclear so far.
    • didibus 6y ago
      It's an emotional response though, like how there are still more people with a parallizing fear of flight that don't have a problem hopping into a car. Like I said, I'm not justifying being against Nuclear, but explaining the challenge with Nuclear's general acceptance, there is a fear response from people, and it'll need to be curbed and addressed. That fear response is due to the grandiose nature of a Nuclear failure which fossil fuel don't have, even if they kill you slowly and might lead to world ending catastrophies.
• tarboreus 6y ago
  I think it really comes down to the A-bomb and how large it loomed in the left politics of the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, I think well-meaning greens have majorly contributed to climate change by opposing nuclear. The mistake is understandable, but we need to be reversing it as fast as possible.
• chpatrick 6y ago
  As far as I know there are also economic problems with nuclear. Nuclear power plants are enormous investments, then take decades to build and eventually decomission. If renewable energy gets efficient enough, nuclear is not worth the effort.
  • pitaj 6y ago
    The economic problems are tied directly to policy problems, like the broken regulatory structure. For instance, as I understand it, a nuclear plant that began construction 10 years ago and is ready to go online by the standards when it began construction has to comply with all regulations created since. This makes creating new plants very expensive.
    • jhgb 6y ago
      > like the broken regulatory structure Doubt it. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-bare-why-nuclear-costs-keep-rising https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-... > It turns out that the main reason for spiraling nuclear plant construction bills is soft costs, the indirect expenses related to activities such as engineering design, purchasing, planning, scheduling and — ironically — estimating and cost control. > These indirect expenses accounted for 72 percent of the increase seen in reactor construction costs between 1976 and 1987, a period in which the amount of money needed for containment buildings rose by almost 118 percent.
  • pydry 6y ago
    This is the real issue. It's 3x as expensive as other renewables. Every dollar of subsidy producing 1 MWh of nuclear could provide 3 MWh of solar or wind. Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins). It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from defense and military.
    • VBprogrammer 6y ago
• natch 6y ago
  I don’t know, cost differences that exemplify the concept of “orders of magnitude” could be one reason.
• brudgers 6y ago
  An interesting analogy considering the evidence of the airplane’s role in regard to observed changes in atmospheric chemistry. But all analogies are like that...they need people to squint so details go fuzzy and merge. The Zeppelin is an equally plausible aircraft analogy. Theoretically it is possible for nothing to go wrong when taking dependencies on a quarter million hand sewn cow intestines.
  • ncmncm 6y ago
    Considering that the Hindenberg was destroyed by a bomb sneaked on board, the analogy is pretty good. The flames seen in the film were kerosene fuel ignited by the bomb. Humans have a way of causing their own disasters, when technical risks fail to deliver. And, more than 2/3 aboard at the time survived. Hard to say where this fits into any proposed analogy.
• makomk 6y ago
  The actual answer is that we did improve on nuclear safety, and that all the regulations required to - for example - make sure that power plant designers didn't route all the redundant monitoring and control wiring down the same cableways and stuff them full of highly flammable foam are part of the reason nuclear power has become increasingly unaffordable. This is not some hypothetical example I'm making up, nuclear power plants in the US really did do that with predictable results and apparently the fire safety regulations really are a major cost. The Trump administration tried to fix this by giving more flexibility to designers, but of course that just made it proportionally harder to show the designs were safe and achieved nothing. Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable again; it has a lot of cost problems.
• lispm 6y ago
  Actually many countries have developed nuclear technology in various forms over decades. The current latest generation of nuclear power plants (like the French EPR) is simply not cost effective. The Russian technology is nothing which would ever have a change to be deployed in a western country, due to its lower technical standards... Russia can't actually clean up its own nuclear installations.