6 ms·

Nuclear regulation should be more like pipe safety regulation during World War 2

33 points by ericdanielski 5y ago

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
> Our civilization would be better off if it had dramatically more, cheaper, cleaner energy. To achieve this, we should allow nuclear power to become dramatically cheaper and more common, and the main barrier to this is over-the-top safety regulation. It would seem easier to just remove all the subsidies for fossil fuel. Nuclear would instantly become more competitive. Demand for electricity would go up as people wouldn't get away with polluting without paying by using fossil fuels instead.
smokey_circles 5y ago
This is not a convincing argument. If things go wrong for nuclear stations, the consequences are incredibly high. I'm not sure there are many fields that can make the same claim. And oil is absolutely not one of them (bit of a weird attempt at trying to be authoritative). Also, aside from neatly skirting around Fukushima and Chernobyl, not one mention to the fact that most world leaders are brain dead and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the awesome power of nuclear energy. Can we, humans, manage to pull this off? Absolutely, didn't need convincing about that. The author has failed to convince me that we, the humans alive today, are anywhere near competent to pull this off at scale. Or even that this shared competency is a challenge to overcome. "But the US has had nuclear power without incident for so long now" yeah and when the chips were down at the start of convincing they committed acts of piracy to secure PPE. I'm sure it will totally be different in the face of nuclear emergency. [0] www.bbc.com/news/world-52161995
PaulHoule 5y ago
"Overregulation is the problem" is one of those stopped-clock answers, just like anything you hear from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Not tenable since Fukushima and certainly not an explanation as to why the AP1000 is late everywhere. (the real answer is that factories in China took a while to figure out how to make AP1000 parts) Speaking of stopped clocks, people still compare nuclear power economics to coal as a "gold standard" despite the fact that coal hasn't been economically competitive in North America since 1980. Not because of sulfur dioxide or that other acid gas carbon dioxide, but because gas turbines are an order of magnitude smaller than steam turbines. If we had a liquid metal or liquid salt reactor that ran at high temperatures and a closed-cycle gas turbine powerset, the CCGT powerset would fit inside the employee break room of the turbine house of the LWR. The cost of the turbine is one thing, but the PWR also has huge heat exchangers that have to live inside the confinement structure. Even if the heat was free the power conversion system of an LWR would have a hard time being competitive if everything went right. We need something like https://www.moltexenergy.com/ https://www.moltexenergy.com/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor if nuclear energy is going to be economically viable in the future.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  If you follow one of the links, here is an excellent anecdote about the regulations: > A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained. >The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial. Also about one of the primary testing groups effectively failing workers for radiation gathered on their shoes from radon in rain water. There are very great reasons that LNT and ALARA radiation risk models are very flawed. So, stopped clock? Ok. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can fix here. Make them entirely wrong not even right twice a day and I’ll be interested in ideas past the over-regulation. Until then, we have evidence that the industry is being made artificially expensive. And that it isn’t actually comparable to other options.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    The case for LNT is weak but there's also a weak case that LNT is wrong. Part of it is that we've been so careful with radiation that, other than the nuclear attacks against Japan in WWII, we don't have statistically significant samples of people who've been exposed to artificial radiation. The results from Japan are just barely statistically significant and contradictory between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When we look at natural radiation there is no connection between health and background radiation. Places in India and Iran which are rich in Thorium have background levels close to the limit of what rad workers are allowed to experience but people in those places don't seem to have any ill effects.
aeternum 5y ago
Even if we decrease regulation, how do you address the terrorism/sabotage risk? Wind turbines or solar panels are likely a better long term solution than nuclear. Decreasing safety margins may actually increase that risk.
baybal2 5y ago
Who is Tom Nysetvold?
- pjc50 5y ago
  > "I’ve lived in Brazil as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" Well, from this article we know he's a Mormon...
stmw 5y ago
Many technology policy lessons can be drawn from that period.
trixie_ 5y ago
Nuclear isn’t safe. Without active management any passive safety system has a time limit before failure. Fail safe deigns are possible. Develop the technology to build those economically and I’ll support nuclear.
- belorn 5y ago
  Will you stop using energy produced by fossil fuels until then? The article kind of describe the lack of urgency that world war 2 provided, and fossil fuels could be the missing trigger. Operate the energy grid we got now without using unsafe fossil fuels that pollute the environment, causing max extinction, floods, famine, displacement and general mayhem on the planet. Forced to be without fossil fuels, maybe nuclear deserve a second look. It is distinctly safer for human and the world in general compared to fossil fuels. You can't really get a more unsafe system than releasing the toxic waste into the air, and even if nuclear plant did that it would still be likely safer than coal. Per energy produced, coal plants create more radioactive waste than nuclear, and they just release it into the air.
  - trixie_ 5y ago
    A coal plant does not require active management to prevent the city it is located near from becoming uninhabitable. A nuclear plant does. It is possible to build failsafe reactors, but it requires R&D and investment. I’ll support that, but not the current antiquated designs.
    - gizmo686 5y ago
      And coal plants do not require an accident to make cities that are located on the other side of the planet uninhabitable.
    - belorn 5y ago
      Coal plants release their radioactive and toxic material in the air, causing cancers and lung issues for people living around them. I call that uninhabitable and would for sure not want to live there. There are people who are desperate, that are too poor to have an alternative, who get forced to live there. Coal power would had been banned a long time ago if it wasn't so cheap and provide energy in such a quick and incremental way. We should strive for safe energy, but that won't happen if we continue to ignore the elephant in the room. Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, the ongoing pollution stopped, and recognition of the the human deaths caused from our use of fossil fuels. At that point we can define what "safe" energy means, and pay the cost and consequences of such regulations. If we however continue with fossil fuel, any such distinction is meaningless because we aren't applying it to the the existing energy grid. The only coal plant following the strict safety requirement of a nuclear plant is one not producing any power.

33 points by ericdanielski 5y ago

> Our civilization would be better off if it had dramatically more, cheaper, cleaner energy. To achieve this, we should allow nuclear power to become dramatically cheaper and more common, and the main barrier to this is over-the-top safety regulation. It would seem easier to just remove all the subsidies for fossil fuel. Nuclear would instantly become more competitive. Demand for electricity would go up as people wouldn't get away with polluting without paying by using fossil fuels instead.

smokey_circles 5y ago

This is not a convincing argument. If things go wrong for nuclear stations, the consequences are incredibly high. I'm not sure there are many fields that can make the same claim. And oil is absolutely not one of them (bit of a weird attempt at trying to be authoritative). Also, aside from neatly skirting around Fukushima and Chernobyl, not one mention to the fact that most world leaders are brain dead and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the awesome power of nuclear energy. Can we, humans, manage to pull this off? Absolutely, didn't need convincing about that. The author has failed to convince me that we, the humans alive today, are anywhere near competent to pull this off at scale. Or even that this shared competency is a challenge to overcome. "But the US has had nuclear power without incident for so long now" yeah and when the chips were down at the start of convincing they committed acts of piracy to secure PPE. I'm sure it will totally be different in the face of nuclear emergency. [0] www.bbc.com/news/world-52161995

PaulHoule 5y ago

"Overregulation is the problem" is one of those stopped-clock answers, just like anything you hear from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Not tenable since Fukushima and certainly not an explanation as to why the AP1000 is late everywhere. (the real answer is that factories in China took a while to figure out how to make AP1000 parts) Speaking of stopped clocks, people still compare nuclear power economics to coal as a "gold standard" despite the fact that coal hasn't been economically competitive in North America since 1980. Not because of sulfur dioxide or that other acid gas carbon dioxide, but because gas turbines are an order of magnitude smaller than steam turbines. If we had a liquid metal or liquid salt reactor that ran at high temperatures and a closed-cycle gas turbine powerset, the CCGT powerset would fit inside the employee break room of the turbine house of the LWR. The cost of the turbine is one thing, but the PWR also has huge heat exchangers that have to live inside the confinement structure. Even if the heat was free the power conversion system of an LWR would have a hard time being competitive if everything went right. We need something like https://www.moltexenergy.com/ https://www.moltexenergy.com/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor if nuclear energy is going to be economically viable in the future.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
If you follow one of the links, here is an excellent anecdote about the regulations: > A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained. >The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial. Also about one of the primary testing groups effectively failing workers for radiation gathered on their shoes from radon in rain water. There are very great reasons that LNT and ALARA radiation risk models are very flawed. So, stopped clock? Ok. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can fix here. Make them entirely wrong not even right twice a day and I’ll be interested in ideas past the over-regulation. Until then, we have evidence that the industry is being made artificially expensive. And that it isn’t actually comparable to other options.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  The case for LNT is weak but there's also a weak case that LNT is wrong. Part of it is that we've been so careful with radiation that, other than the nuclear attacks against Japan in WWII, we don't have statistically significant samples of people who've been exposed to artificial radiation. The results from Japan are just barely statistically significant and contradictory between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When we look at natural radiation there is no connection between health and background radiation. Places in India and Iran which are rich in Thorium have background levels close to the limit of what rad workers are allowed to experience but people in those places don't seem to have any ill effects.

aeternum 5y ago

Even if we decrease regulation, how do you address the terrorism/sabotage risk? Wind turbines or solar panels are likely a better long term solution than nuclear. Decreasing safety margins may actually increase that risk.

baybal2 5y ago

Who is Tom Nysetvold?

pjc50 5y ago
> "I’ve lived in Brazil as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" Well, from this article we know he's a Mormon...

stmw 5y ago

Many technology policy lessons can be drawn from that period.

trixie_ 5y ago

Nuclear isn’t safe. Without active management any passive safety system has a time limit before failure. Fail safe deigns are possible. Develop the technology to build those economically and I’ll support nuclear.

belorn 5y ago
Will you stop using energy produced by fossil fuels until then? The article kind of describe the lack of urgency that world war 2 provided, and fossil fuels could be the missing trigger. Operate the energy grid we got now without using unsafe fossil fuels that pollute the environment, causing max extinction, floods, famine, displacement and general mayhem on the planet. Forced to be without fossil fuels, maybe nuclear deserve a second look. It is distinctly safer for human and the world in general compared to fossil fuels. You can't really get a more unsafe system than releasing the toxic waste into the air, and even if nuclear plant did that it would still be likely safer than coal. Per energy produced, coal plants create more radioactive waste than nuclear, and they just release it into the air.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  A coal plant does not require active management to prevent the city it is located near from becoming uninhabitable. A nuclear plant does. It is possible to build failsafe reactors, but it requires R&D and investment. I’ll support that, but not the current antiquated designs.
  - gizmo686 5y ago
    And coal plants do not require an accident to make cities that are located on the other side of the planet uninhabitable.
  - belorn 5y ago
    Coal plants release their radioactive and toxic material in the air, causing cancers and lung issues for people living around them. I call that uninhabitable and would for sure not want to live there. There are people who are desperate, that are too poor to have an alternative, who get forced to live there. Coal power would had been banned a long time ago if it wasn't so cheap and provide energy in such a quick and incremental way. We should strive for safe energy, but that won't happen if we continue to ignore the elephant in the room. Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, the ongoing pollution stopped, and recognition of the the human deaths caused from our use of fossil fuels. At that point we can define what "safe" energy means, and pay the cost and consequences of such regulations. If we however continue with fossil fuel, any such distinction is meaningless because we aren't applying it to the the existing energy grid. The only coal plant following the strict safety requirement of a nuclear plant is one not producing any power.