10 ms·

We still have not found a place to store the waste. No one wants to live near a reactor so there are not really any place to build them (NIMBY). It also turns o

We still have not found a place to store the waste. No one wants to live near a reactor so there are not really any place to build them (NIMBY). It also turns out that it is quite expensive when considering all costs like dismantling and insurance. Germany also does not mine uranium any more since 2021, so needs to buy them from other countries so you will have again dependencies on other countries. And then there is the historical experience of Chernobyl.

fsflover 5y ago
https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
- croes 5y ago
  https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-leaves-a-bitter-legacy/a-47420382 https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-l...
SEJeff 5y ago
The historical experience of Chernobyl is not remotely relevant to modern reactors that are (by design) unable to melt down. Look at the pebble bed reactors, or the smr reactors from nuscale, or the chinese molten salt reactor designs. These are all using new technology to make meltdown next to or completely impossible. Nuscale is calling their smr reactors "walk away safe" in that you could just abandon them and they're unable to melt down. Saying we shouldn't consider nuclear energy due to Chernobyl is equivalent to saying we shouldn't use airplanes because of the hindenburg. It entirely ignores the massive amount of materials and nuclear science improvements since Chernobyl was built in 1970. I'm ALL FOR solar power (and have 48 x 440W bifacial solar panels aka 21.1kW on my barn), but it is not a holy grail. Safe modern nuclear energy could massively improve Europe's energy situation and end Russian energy dependence.
- croes 5y ago
  What about Fukushima? And modern reactors have to be built first. How long does it take if we look how long the berlin airport took or Stuttgart 21 will take.
  - aaronmdjones 5y ago
    Fukushima is older than Chernobyl; it was commissioned and running before Chernobyl's construction began. Both were managed incompetently.
    - croes 5y ago
      >Both were managed incompetently. That won't change even with modern reactors.
      - aaronmdjones 5y ago
        The difference being that incompetent management of a modern reactor cannot lead to a meltdown.
        rurban 5y ago
        Fukushima
        aaronmdjones 5y ago
        Not a modern reactor; see my comment 4 levels up.
  - SEJeff 5y ago
    > What about Fukushima? All safety protocols and safeguards were utterly ignored for profit. Here is an unbiased source on how spectacularly bad this was: https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p... The Fukushima reactor as it was deployed would have never passed inspection in the US or EU, for literally the reasons that caused the unfortunate event to pass. It is like building an automobile in 2022 with no airbags, antilock-brakes, power steering, and seat belts. It just doesn't make any sense.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  > reactors that are (by design) unable to melt down. I believe part of the problem is that nuclear power proponents were claiming that nuclear power is safe before Chernobyl. Then Chernobyl happened. Then proponents were claiming that that happened due to the way Chernobyl was designed, that the Western designs were entirely different, and that it couldn't happen. Then it did happen in Fukushima. People don't care about "but the Tsunami" when what they heard before was "it cannot happen under any circumstance". (And even though that may not have been what was said I'm pretty sure that's how the claims were perceived). After feeling that they have been lied to twice, it doesn't matter whther the new reactors are actually unable to melt down or not - people are not willing to take the chance that they're being lied to again.
  - aaronmdjones 5y ago
    It's worth pointing out (again) that Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is older than Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. It's not at all surprising that they would both fail in much the same manner, even in the face of promises that newer reactors can't.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      It did not, in fact, fail the same manner, except insofar as it melted down as every failed reactor did.
      - aaronmdjones 5y ago
        They failed in much the same manner being the incompetence of their management. In Chernobyl's case, it was inadequate training of their staff for a test procedure (including various side effects that this test procedure might cause) and some overrides of safety systems (in gross violation of existing regulations). In Fukushima Daiichi's case, it was management ignoring the very real risk of tsunamis, even in the face of plenty of evidence that the station was vulnerable to such (a handful of other stations around the world had been damaged by tsunamis in the preceding dozen or so years, and only fared much better because of more redundancies in their emergency systems).
- didericis 5y ago
  Jinx -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493173#30493292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493173#30493292
- Maursault 5y ago
  > The historical experience of Chernobyl is not remotely relevant to modern reactors that are (by design) unable to melt down. Look at the pebble bed reactors, or the smr reactors from nuscale, or the chinese molten salt reactor designs. The problem is these modern reactors you mention, the ones that do actually exist in the real world and are not just designs, are not really all that modern. Consider every nuclear power reactor ever brought online, ever. Nearly all of them were built awhile ago and are of the early design where if the plant loses power, yada yada yada, when the batteries run dry, the plant is at risk of meltdown. Towards the end of the nuclear boom, changes in design were implemented, and some plants were built in the US that won't break that way... and this was idk like 50 years ago. The US and UK development of fission power was a very Big Investment, and I think they did a good job because they ferreted out the least expensive method of generating power with a nuclear reaction, which unfortunately for nuclear power, not only because of the relatively recent (last 20 years) much much much much much smaller investments (compared to US&UK investment in developing nuclear power) in renewable energies like solar and wind, electricity generated in the cheapest possible way from a nuclear reaction can not complete any longer in the energy market (and in fact never could, nuclear was always too expensive, but for a while didn't matter [1]), and this is before we take into account the skyrocketing prices of uranium or the cost of long term storage of waste, and this of course is all long before investors ever show up that want to build and run one of the much newer reactor designs that can't melt down and also produce less waste, because those are even more expensive to build than the old designs that make up nearly all of Earth's global fleet of nuclear reactors, which can melt down and btw they are, all of them, at waste storage capacity... for more than 20 years (iow, their "temporary" waste storage is more or less overflowing with nuclear waste, and has been for quite awhile). We need to solve nuclear power, but this isn't rushing to build new plants, it is instead biting the bullet to tie off the loose ends of all the damn messes already made with nuclear power, which are considerable but not impossible to fix and keep fixed. Nuclear power isn't dead. Someone could come up with a damn cheap, safe and much simper design, and when that day comes, we'll all have our own little nuclear reactors, and it will be a great day. [1] The US, for a brief period, needed fuel for nuclear bombs. Someone somewhere vastly overestimated this need, and in this overestimation, there was a lot of money available to build nuclear power plants, and a lot of them... err... all of them... in consideration of how crazy expensive nuclear power just is and always was... that's how and why they got built — and not because some visionaries thought that nuclear power would solve the energy needs of the country. IOW the reason we have the nuclear power plants that we do in the US is because of the vastly mindbogglingly huge overestimation of the need for fuel for nuclear bombs. Many think you can never have enough ammo, but please trust that we have far more than enough now, the nuclear bomb fuel factories aren't doing well, economically speaking, having effectively lost their major client, the US military, who themselves will, btw, continue to build and operate fission nuclear reactors indefinitely, regardless of expense for valid reasons.
ars 5y ago
> We still have not found a place to store the waste. Properly designed reactors don't make any waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing > not mine uranium any more since 2021, so needs to buy them A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor plus the above mentioned technology reduces the need for Uranium by around 98%, so no need to buy any. This is a solved problem, any issues are financial and emotional, not technical.

fsflover 5y ago

https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

croes 5y ago
https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-leaves-a-bitter-legacy/a-47420382 https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-l...

SEJeff 5y ago

The historical experience of Chernobyl is not remotely relevant to modern reactors that are (by design) unable to melt down. Look at the pebble bed reactors, or the smr reactors from nuscale, or the chinese molten salt reactor designs. These are all using new technology to make meltdown next to or completely impossible. Nuscale is calling their smr reactors "walk away safe" in that you could just abandon them and they're unable to melt down. Saying we shouldn't consider nuclear energy due to Chernobyl is equivalent to saying we shouldn't use airplanes because of the hindenburg. It entirely ignores the massive amount of materials and nuclear science improvements since Chernobyl was built in 1970. I'm ALL FOR solar power (and have 48 x 440W bifacial solar panels aka 21.1kW on my barn), but it is not a holy grail. Safe modern nuclear energy could massively improve Europe's energy situation and end Russian energy dependence.

croes 5y ago
What about Fukushima? And modern reactors have to be built first. How long does it take if we look how long the berlin airport took or Stuttgart 21 will take.
- aaronmdjones 5y ago
  Fukushima is older than Chernobyl; it was commissioned and running before Chernobyl's construction began. Both were managed incompetently.
  - croes 5y ago
    >Both were managed incompetently. That won't change even with modern reactors.
    - aaronmdjones 5y ago
      The difference being that incompetent management of a modern reactor cannot lead to a meltdown.
      - rurban 5y ago
        Fukushima
        aaronmdjones 5y ago
        Not a modern reactor; see my comment 4 levels up.
- SEJeff 5y ago
  > What about Fukushima? All safety protocols and safeguards were utterly ignored for profit. Here is an unbiased source on how spectacularly bad this was: https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p... The Fukushima reactor as it was deployed would have never passed inspection in the US or EU, for literally the reasons that caused the unfortunate event to pass. It is like building an automobile in 2022 with no airbags, antilock-brakes, power steering, and seat belts. It just doesn't make any sense.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> reactors that are (by design) unable to melt down. I believe part of the problem is that nuclear power proponents were claiming that nuclear power is safe before Chernobyl. Then Chernobyl happened. Then proponents were claiming that that happened due to the way Chernobyl was designed, that the Western designs were entirely different, and that it couldn't happen. Then it did happen in Fukushima. People don't care about "but the Tsunami" when what they heard before was "it cannot happen under any circumstance". (And even though that may not have been what was said I'm pretty sure that's how the claims were perceived). After feeling that they have been lied to twice, it doesn't matter whther the new reactors are actually unable to melt down or not - people are not willing to take the chance that they're being lied to again.
- aaronmdjones 5y ago
  It's worth pointing out (again) that Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is older than Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. It's not at all surprising that they would both fail in much the same manner, even in the face of promises that newer reactors can't.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It did not, in fact, fail the same manner, except insofar as it melted down as every failed reactor did.
    - aaronmdjones 5y ago
      They failed in much the same manner being the incompetence of their management. In Chernobyl's case, it was inadequate training of their staff for a test procedure (including various side effects that this test procedure might cause) and some overrides of safety systems (in gross violation of existing regulations). In Fukushima Daiichi's case, it was management ignoring the very real risk of tsunamis, even in the face of plenty of evidence that the station was vulnerable to such (a handful of other stations around the world had been damaged by tsunamis in the preceding dozen or so years, and only fared much better because of more redundancies in their emergency systems).
didericis 5y ago
Jinx -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493173#30493292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493173#30493292
Maursault 5y ago
> The historical experience of Chernobyl is not remotely relevant to modern reactors that are (by design) unable to melt down. Look at the pebble bed reactors, or the smr reactors from nuscale, or the chinese molten salt reactor designs. The problem is these modern reactors you mention, the ones that do actually exist in the real world and are not just designs, are not really all that modern. Consider every nuclear power reactor ever brought online, ever. Nearly all of them were built awhile ago and are of the early design where if the plant loses power, yada yada yada, when the batteries run dry, the plant is at risk of meltdown. Towards the end of the nuclear boom, changes in design were implemented, and some plants were built in the US that won't break that way... and this was idk like 50 years ago. The US and UK development of fission power was a very Big Investment, and I think they did a good job because they ferreted out the least expensive method of generating power with a nuclear reaction, which unfortunately for nuclear power, not only because of the relatively recent (last 20 years) much much much much much smaller investments (compared to US&UK investment in developing nuclear power) in renewable energies like solar and wind, electricity generated in the cheapest possible way from a nuclear reaction can not complete any longer in the energy market (and in fact never could, nuclear was always too expensive, but for a while didn't matter [1]), and this is before we take into account the skyrocketing prices of uranium or the cost of long term storage of waste, and this of course is all long before investors ever show up that want to build and run one of the much newer reactor designs that can't melt down and also produce less waste, because those are even more expensive to build than the old designs that make up nearly all of Earth's global fleet of nuclear reactors, which can melt down and btw they are, all of them, at waste storage capacity... for more than 20 years (iow, their "temporary" waste storage is more or less overflowing with nuclear waste, and has been for quite awhile). We need to solve nuclear power, but this isn't rushing to build new plants, it is instead biting the bullet to tie off the loose ends of all the damn messes already made with nuclear power, which are considerable but not impossible to fix and keep fixed. Nuclear power isn't dead. Someone could come up with a damn cheap, safe and much simper design, and when that day comes, we'll all have our own little nuclear reactors, and it will be a great day. [1] The US, for a brief period, needed fuel for nuclear bombs. Someone somewhere vastly overestimated this need, and in this overestimation, there was a lot of money available to build nuclear power plants, and a lot of them... err... all of them... in consideration of how crazy expensive nuclear power just is and always was... that's how and why they got built — and not because some visionaries thought that nuclear power would solve the energy needs of the country. IOW the reason we have the nuclear power plants that we do in the US is because of the vastly mindbogglingly huge overestimation of the need for fuel for nuclear bombs. Many think you can never have enough ammo, but please trust that we have far more than enough now, the nuclear bomb fuel factories aren't doing well, economically speaking, having effectively lost their major client, the US military, who themselves will, btw, continue to build and operate fission nuclear reactors indefinitely, regardless of expense for valid reasons.

ars 5y ago

> We still have not found a place to store the waste. Properly designed reactors don't make any waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing > not mine uranium any more since 2021, so needs to buy them A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor plus the above mentioned technology reduces the need for Uranium by around 98%, so no need to buy any. This is a solved problem, any issues are financial and emotional, not technical.