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This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear. Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harn

This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear. Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
This has always been my fear about nuclear. We don't think on the timescales to make it work well, nor with the engineering consistency and quality to keep it maintained. However, abandoned oil refineries and other chemical plants are also toxic nasty messes for potentially hundreds of years, too.
revscat 5y ago
This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore. > we’re not capable of I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the techno-futurists on this site with swift downvotes, though, so is not a popular one to espouse here. Nevertheless I believe it to be true based on the evidence at hand: humanity is too short-sighted to prevent its own doom. I believe nuclear power is essential to the survival of humanity. I also think you are likely correct: humanity cannot be trusted with nuclear power. If true, this is yet another data point against our survival.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough I do not see why nuclear power would have any upside left except maybe for when traveling outside the solar system. Regarding survivability of humanity I have similar fear but my current hope is that while weapons will continue to be more attainable their relevance might diminish. Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need? But warlords create a problem of their own because they seem to exist to attain superiority for its own sake.
  - revscat 5y ago
    > I do not see why One word serves to explain why what you imagine won’t happen in time: profit. More specifically: oil profits.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough If you're thinking of big Tesla Powerwall-style batteries, that just kicks the problem ahead by a few years or decades. The materials needed to make those batteries are finite. They will become "the new oil" in N years. Energy storage is going to be a big part of any sane energy future, but it's going to have to make heavy usage of non-battery means: giant flywheels? Pumping water? I don't know.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      You're right that the current state of battery tech is woefully inefficient for any kind of grid-level storage. But energy can be stored by pumping heated water to deep wells in the bedrock for example or you can use excess power to generate hydrogen and feed it back to the grid via fuel cells when needed. All of this is doable, but also slow to build and currently expensive.
    - ciphol 5y ago
      The materials in those batteries can be recycled into new batteries indefinitely.
      - mdoms 5y ago
        And when we need to create additional batteries...?
    - jliptzin 5y ago
      What element in a battery is destroyed during its lifetime that cannot be recycled?
      - JohnBooty 5y ago
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Yeah. Across the universe, what percentage of advanced species managed to harness nuclear power and not end themselves by nuclear energy, directly or indirectly? It can't be a very large percentage. I would like to be wrong.
- isomel 5y ago
  > Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    No, the positive impacts will most likely outweigh the negative impacts.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    Potentially, yes. There are the typical threats (which assume society remains more or less stable) such as ecosystem collapse leading to food shortages etc. Then the non-typical threats. It is hard to predict what an unstable society will do, and some of those choices could be civilization ending. We've built an extremely fragile massively interdependent system. It is conceivable that the US power grid could go down, and due to supply chain issues could not be restored in < 5 years. Unlikely, yes, impossible, hardly. Is that enough to end civilization? How would we distribute food, assuming we have it?
  - PoignardAzur 5y ago
    Note that a reactor meltdown isn't "civilization-ending" either. The world carried on fine after two of those.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Yes, of course, if we take a look to the history and cities marooned after a several years dry spell lead to war and migration. Plenty of cases of lost civilizations in America, Asia and Africa linked with desertification and climate going unstable
- randomsearch 5y ago
  Not saying you’re wrong, but espousing the idea that “humanity is too short sighted” is just as daft as saying “we are definitely going to colonise the universe”. It’s not particularly helpful, you’re reasoning more on emotion than fact (we’ve gotten this far) and most of all you’re talking as if this is something you or I cannot change. I think that’s why you get downvoted. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable opinion you hold, but it’s not a very constructive outlook. And HN is full of people who want to make things better, not sit on the sidelines pronouncing doom. If you see a problem, work to fix it. People can and do change the direction of humanity.
- throwaway9278 5y ago
  Are you so sure you're not yourself trapped in an irrational thinking loop? Global warming is not a civilization-ending threat. Even nuclear war is not a civilization-ending threat, outside a few places in the Northern hemisphere. I could be wrong about both of these claims. But you could be as well, and you're taking an extremely pessimistic view based on what you know, which is not the whole picture.
  - sabas123 5y ago
    How are these things not a civilization ending threat? Nukes can literally kill everything and global warming, if unchecked, will probably do the same long term.
    - ed_balls 5y ago
      Even if all nukes would go off (spread evenly) they would not kill everybody. The worst case scenario of global worming would not kill everybody. People living north of 40o will survive.
      - mdoms 5y ago
        In what realistic scenario would all nukes go off "spread evenly"?
        ed_balls 5y ago
        There isn't one. Maximal theoretical damage (not practical) would not end civilisation.
      - Zoadian 5y ago
        it's not the nukes itself that would kill. it's the nuklear winter. with highly reduced sunlight this planet will become a freezing hell. no plants -> no food
        hollerith 5y ago
csee 5y ago
This is an old power plant. Do your concerns hold true for newer designs?
- RikNieu 5y ago
  Can newer plants be bombed? Can they be abandoned?
  - csee 5y ago
    See molten salt reactors. There are automatic mechanisms that are supposed to prevent worst case situations.
    - nl 5y ago
      Molten salt reactors are designed to avoid meltdowns. But most of the harm at Chernobyl was from the explosion. There is nothing in a molten salt reactor that makes them any safer than Chernobyl if the reactor containment is breached. Massive amounts of highly radioactive particles will be ejected into the atmosphere in exactly the same way as happened at Chernobyl. Molten salt advocates will say "yes, but what could possibly breach the reactor if there is no meltdown". Well we almost saw the answer to that today.
      - leeoniya 5y ago
        > A steam explosion is what happened to the Chernobyl reactor in 1986. Although this lead to a serious disaster, it is much less destructive than an actual nuclear explosion (Wilkins, 2011). Due to the nature of molten salt reactors, the risk of either a steam explosion, a hydrogen explosion or a meltdown is effectively eliminated. https://www.thmsr.com/en/safe/ https://www.thmsr.com/en/safe/
        nl 5y ago
        > Due to the nature of molten salt reactors, the risk of either a steam explosion, a hydrogen explosion or a meltdown is effectively eliminated. Do they somehow stop the risk of artillery? Because to be absolutely clear: that's what the risk here was.
colechristensen 5y ago
Humanity is fine, just some parts are quite far ahead of others. We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism. There will be some slides backwards as people in difficult situations value their opinions and risk aversion more than others’ freedoms, and there are plenty of places where people are just fine with their autocrats continuing to rule. Progress, for the most part, can’t be given. It is hopeful that Ukraine is having some real success fighting back and for the most part without an external force coming in and trying to do it for them.
- TheSoftwareGuy 5y ago
  > We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism As if it were so easy!
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    A centuries long project which has, without doubt, seen much success.
  - alex_sf 5y ago
    It's not easy, but we've made massive progress throughout human history.
- awb 5y ago
  > We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism And why not criminals while we’re at it? Sounds like utopia. The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level.
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    >The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level. I think we confuse the direction of causality a bit here. People in power tends to be those that want power. To get a powerful person you only really need one person who wants power. I think it's a false conclusion to think that people in general seek power.
stickfigure 5y ago
Humanity has weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people at a time. Nation-states deliberately using a power plant to kill "mere" thousands seems pretty low on the fear list.
eru 5y ago
This is bad, but nuclear isn't uniquely dangerous here: just imagine the same kind of shelling around a large dam.
- ornornor 5y ago
  > a large dam It would be catastrophic but much more localized. Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time (not to mention the rest of the biomass)
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana. The dam breaks killed and hurt magnitudes more people.
    - numlock86 5y ago
      > Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time [...] > Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana. Born 1986 in Germany and I got a rare metabolism illness that only ~2000 more people have, all born around June/July/August in 1986 in Western and Middle Europe with some exceptions distributed around as late as born in September and October. But the Spring of 1986 was probably just a famous year for pregnant women eating exceptionally many bananas I guess? At least I agree that dams killed more people than that specific event. But wait till you see the numbers for fossil fuels ...
      - eru 5y ago
        Yes, I brought up the dam since hydropower is something that's typically seen as good; but still has the potential for big disasters. (I totally think hydropower is good on balance.) Fossil fuels, and especially coal, have worse impact in total but they are typically more diffuse. So I left them out of the discussion.
    - watwut 5y ago
MandieD 5y ago
And this is part of why a lot of Germans have always been uneasy with nuclear power.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  And that is why Germans are in an uncomfortable situation, being so dependent on Russia for gas.
- isomel 5y ago
  The German are uneasy because of irrational fear and exaggerated risks. Even if the worst happen at that nuclear power plant, it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already have happened in Ukraine the last few weeks (you know: the war)
  - dewey 5y ago
    > "it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already" Maybe I'm missing something regarding this specific reactor but how is a war that will eventually (hopefully) be over worse than a nuclear fallout that would make large areas unlivable for thousands of years and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
    - isomel 5y ago
      > make large areas unlivable for thousands of years I think you are over-estimating the cost of this. I contest the use of 'large'. The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places. > and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people. Because the war has been doing that already, at a even larger scale: thousands of civilians killed, many wounded, millions displaced. That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
      - dewey 5y ago
        > occupied by deserts, ice floe Usually nuclear power plants are located close to cities and populated areas and not in the middle of the desert or uninhabited ice fields. > That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown. In the short term yes, but on a time scale that's longer than a few years I think you'll quickly realize that a meltdown is worse. Will the same war go on in 50 years? Probably not, but the radiation will be...for thousands of years.
JohnBooty 5y ago
It's not that nuclear is easy or perfect. But until we scale up renewable energy by orders of magnitude, or somehow scale down demand, nuclear is the least-bad choice by many measures.
- sdoering 5y ago
  It is a very costly choice. We don't know how to store waste securely. We don't know how to process the waste efficiently and somewhat without it being an ecological disaster. We don't know how to extract and process nuclear 'fuel' without it bei g an ecological disaster as well. Just because the atom doesn't produce smoke at the plant doesn't make it an alternative. Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident and the cost for insurance against it. The cost of building and maintaining a somewhat secure reactor and the later cost of dismantling it and storing the additional waste. Nearly all these costs for externalities were not factored into the price of energy. Calculating in all these costs mskes renewable energy look more than interesting. And also makes the question of storing excessive energy an interesting case. But governments/lobbies argue for cheap (read subsidized) nuclear, while not factoring the same subsidiaries into energy storage for renewables. Investing into the future with a broad renewable energy and storage infrastructure program could ensure not only less dependency on Russia (for oil or gas) but also have a positive impact on the topic of climate change. On the other hand. The German/European dependency on Russian gas and Russias dependency on the money from the sale of said gas was done to reduce the risk of war. The idea being that both sides could loose too much in the case of war and that would act as a deterrent. Even during the height of the Cold War Russian gas flowed towards the western world (aka Europe/Germany).
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident Sure, let's talk about that. - As a species, we've been running hundreds of nuclear reactors (440 currently) for a while now. - Their cumulative track record is (very roughly) "one Chernobyl every 25 years." - The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people. - With plants getting safer and safer, we might reasonably expect the risk to be more like "one Chernobyl every 50 or 100 years" for modern plants. - Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons) That is steep but manageable. Relative to fossil fuels, this is less-bad by orders of magnitude. It is regrettable (to put it laughably mildly) that the Fukushima and Chernobyl regions are no longer inhabitable, but fossil fuels have pushed us to the point where everything near the equator is going to be uninhabitable soon. As for the waste issue, again, compare it to the alternatives. 64,000 cumulative tons of nuclear waste in America's history versus 6,500,000,000 tons of CO2 emissions last year. Obviously a ton of nuclear waste is not directly comparable to a ton of CO2 emission, but at least nuclear waste can be collected and sequestered. It is a local problem, not one that irrevocably poisons the entire planet. Yeah, green energy sources are better than nuclear, for sure, and maybe fusion will save our butts eventually. But we need energy in the meantime. We should use the least-bad thing until we get something great, and nuclear is the least-bad option by such a ridiculous margin that it's not even funny.
88840-8855 5y ago
It's normal to have those thoughts now, they are driven by fear. The situation is developing fast and most people are just sitting here and watching news and blame and get feelings and emotions. Just a waste of time. A few peoples actually go to the borders or the stations to help the refugees arriving. Do that. At least you leave an impact.
Helmut10001 5y ago
Yes. Where are all those who claim nuclear is a sustainable, safe energy source? With humans in the game, it is not and will never be.
thomasahle 5y ago
My thinking has been that we need smaller decentralized nuclear plants, that can fail without it being cathastrofic, instead of huge centralized plants that "can't fail".
- markvdb 5y ago
  That only makes for more, albeit smaller problems. Each of these is a potential dirty bomb.
  - thomasahle 5y ago
    Right. It makes the size of the problem more transparent, by amortizing the accidents over time. We'd actually have some accidents sometimes. Either we'll get good at handling it, or we will give up on nuclear. Better than pooling all the risk, lowering the probability, but keeping the same expected destruction. With the centralized approach it's too easy to act like there's zero risk.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
I can relate. I've been pro nuclear my entire adult life, but in more recent years have added a lot more hesitations and conditions to that. Fukushima put me onto a similar thread of thinking. If there were any society and government you'd expect to have sober thinking and solid engineering around nuclear, it'd be Japan, let the way TEPCO and the Abe administration behaved in the opening stages of the emergency was quite shady. That gave me pause for thought that our governments and institutions just might be up to the task of running something like nuclear. If you understand the physics and engineering, then nuclear done right is a no brainer. I have less faith in us doing it right that I did in the past. Add to that the huge capital costs, and the trendlines in renewables + storage capital costs... it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything nuclear that doesn't fundamentally change the economics. And so far every attempt at that (eg SMR) has failed rather definitively.
- mcv 5y ago
  Just when I was ready to abandon my anti-nuclear stance and ready to accept nuclear power as transitional technology before we can transition to fully sustainable energy.
  - konschubert 5y ago
    Same here.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    And now we can retake this conversation from just 3 months ago with a fresh view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251780
coryrc 5y ago
What do you think is the worse-case outcome here? It's the release of small amounts of radioactive gasses of only concern to the local area. It has a containment dome and is already shutting down. Another Chernobyl is not possible. If Putin wants radiation everywhere, he has thousands of nuclear warheads which can do that.
ksajadi 5y ago
I share your feelings but I also find it “convenient” that we are all reminded of the dangers of nuclear power by a seller of gas and petroleum. Call me cynical…
arc-in-space 5y ago
I have already been very pro-nuclear and this does not change my views. Without nuclear, Russia would have had even more power. And it could have been weaker if we had built more of it. The dangers and costs are systematically overstated.
ed_balls 5y ago
That's why I'm a big believer of modular nuclear reactors, where active cooling is not needed.
pgt 5y ago
I used to be in in favour of nuclear. Nuclear works if you can guarantee political stability for 100+ years, but here in South Africa we can't even keep our coal plants running, nevermind guarantee political stability for 28 years (last year in June we suffered riots). The risk of nuclear fallout is still relatively "localised", however that risk is dwarfed by the cost of disrupting centralised power production. A few nuclear plants are easy targets in the event of a war. Distributed solar and concentrated solar w/molten salt seem like good options.
lm28469 5y ago
They just want control of electricity sources, for that you take control of the plant or you strike the transport infrastructure around it, you don't strike the reactors themselves. The day people start bombing nuclear power plants we'll be deep in ww3 already and we'd be fuck regardless
FranOntanaya 5y ago
Nuclear costs should factor in the need to run a larger military budget to make up for their vulnerability in a conflict.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

This has always been my fear about nuclear. We don't think on the timescales to make it work well, nor with the engineering consistency and quality to keep it maintained. However, abandoned oil refineries and other chemical plants are also toxic nasty messes for potentially hundreds of years, too.

revscat 5y ago

This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore. > we’re not capable of I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the techno-futurists on this site with swift downvotes, though, so is not a popular one to espouse here. Nevertheless I believe it to be true based on the evidence at hand: humanity is too short-sighted to prevent its own doom. I believe nuclear power is essential to the survival of humanity. I also think you are likely correct: humanity cannot be trusted with nuclear power. If true, this is yet another data point against our survival.

worldsayshi 5y ago
If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough I do not see why nuclear power would have any upside left except maybe for when traveling outside the solar system. Regarding survivability of humanity I have similar fear but my current hope is that while weapons will continue to be more attainable their relevance might diminish. Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need? But warlords create a problem of their own because they seem to exist to attain superiority for its own sake.
- revscat 5y ago
  > I do not see why One word serves to explain why what you imagine won’t happen in time: profit. More specifically: oil profits.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough If you're thinking of big Tesla Powerwall-style batteries, that just kicks the problem ahead by a few years or decades. The materials needed to make those batteries are finite. They will become "the new oil" in N years. Energy storage is going to be a big part of any sane energy future, but it's going to have to make heavy usage of non-battery means: giant flywheels? Pumping water? I don't know.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    You're right that the current state of battery tech is woefully inefficient for any kind of grid-level storage. But energy can be stored by pumping heated water to deep wells in the bedrock for example or you can use excess power to generate hydrogen and feed it back to the grid via fuel cells when needed. All of this is doable, but also slow to build and currently expensive.
  - ciphol 5y ago
    The materials in those batteries can be recycled into new batteries indefinitely.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      And when we need to create additional batteries...?
  - jliptzin 5y ago
    What element in a battery is destroyed during its lifetime that cannot be recycled?
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
JohnBooty 5y ago
Yeah. Across the universe, what percentage of advanced species managed to harness nuclear power and not end themselves by nuclear energy, directly or indirectly? It can't be a very large percentage. I would like to be wrong.
isomel 5y ago
> Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?
- akvadrako 5y ago
  No, the positive impacts will most likely outweigh the negative impacts.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Potentially, yes. There are the typical threats (which assume society remains more or less stable) such as ecosystem collapse leading to food shortages etc. Then the non-typical threats. It is hard to predict what an unstable society will do, and some of those choices could be civilization ending. We've built an extremely fragile massively interdependent system. It is conceivable that the US power grid could go down, and due to supply chain issues could not be restored in < 5 years. Unlikely, yes, impossible, hardly. Is that enough to end civilization? How would we distribute food, assuming we have it?
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  Note that a reactor meltdown isn't "civilization-ending" either. The world carried on fine after two of those.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Yes, of course, if we take a look to the history and cities marooned after a several years dry spell lead to war and migration. Plenty of cases of lost civilizations in America, Asia and Africa linked with desertification and climate going unstable
randomsearch 5y ago
Not saying you’re wrong, but espousing the idea that “humanity is too short sighted” is just as daft as saying “we are definitely going to colonise the universe”. It’s not particularly helpful, you’re reasoning more on emotion than fact (we’ve gotten this far) and most of all you’re talking as if this is something you or I cannot change. I think that’s why you get downvoted. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable opinion you hold, but it’s not a very constructive outlook. And HN is full of people who want to make things better, not sit on the sidelines pronouncing doom. If you see a problem, work to fix it. People can and do change the direction of humanity.
throwaway9278 5y ago
Are you so sure you're not yourself trapped in an irrational thinking loop? Global warming is not a civilization-ending threat. Even nuclear war is not a civilization-ending threat, outside a few places in the Northern hemisphere. I could be wrong about both of these claims. But you could be as well, and you're taking an extremely pessimistic view based on what you know, which is not the whole picture.
- sabas123 5y ago
  How are these things not a civilization ending threat? Nukes can literally kill everything and global warming, if unchecked, will probably do the same long term.
  - ed_balls 5y ago
    Even if all nukes would go off (spread evenly) they would not kill everybody. The worst case scenario of global worming would not kill everybody. People living north of 40o will survive.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      In what realistic scenario would all nukes go off "spread evenly"?
      - ed_balls 5y ago
        There isn't one. Maximal theoretical damage (not practical) would not end civilisation.
    - Zoadian 5y ago
      it's not the nukes itself that would kill. it's the nuklear winter. with highly reduced sunlight this planet will become a freezing hell. no plants -> no food
      - hollerith 5y ago

csee 5y ago

This is an old power plant. Do your concerns hold true for newer designs?

RikNieu 5y ago
Can newer plants be bombed? Can they be abandoned?
- csee 5y ago
  See molten salt reactors. There are automatic mechanisms that are supposed to prevent worst case situations.
  - nl 5y ago
    Molten salt reactors are designed to avoid meltdowns. But most of the harm at Chernobyl was from the explosion. There is nothing in a molten salt reactor that makes them any safer than Chernobyl if the reactor containment is breached. Massive amounts of highly radioactive particles will be ejected into the atmosphere in exactly the same way as happened at Chernobyl. Molten salt advocates will say "yes, but what could possibly breach the reactor if there is no meltdown". Well we almost saw the answer to that today.
    - leeoniya 5y ago
      > A steam explosion is what happened to the Chernobyl reactor in 1986. Although this lead to a serious disaster, it is much less destructive than an actual nuclear explosion (Wilkins, 2011). Due to the nature of molten salt reactors, the risk of either a steam explosion, a hydrogen explosion or a meltdown is effectively eliminated. https://www.thmsr.com/en/safe/ https://www.thmsr.com/en/safe/
      - nl 5y ago
        > Due to the nature of molten salt reactors, the risk of either a steam explosion, a hydrogen explosion or a meltdown is effectively eliminated. Do they somehow stop the risk of artillery? Because to be absolutely clear: that's what the risk here was.

colechristensen 5y ago

Humanity is fine, just some parts are quite far ahead of others. We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism. There will be some slides backwards as people in difficult situations value their opinions and risk aversion more than others’ freedoms, and there are plenty of places where people are just fine with their autocrats continuing to rule. Progress, for the most part, can’t be given. It is hopeful that Ukraine is having some real success fighting back and for the most part without an external force coming in and trying to do it for them.

TheSoftwareGuy 5y ago
> We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism As if it were so easy!
- colechristensen 5y ago
  A centuries long project which has, without doubt, seen much success.
- alex_sf 5y ago
  It's not easy, but we've made massive progress throughout human history.
awb 5y ago
> We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism And why not criminals while we’re at it? Sounds like utopia. The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  >The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level. I think we confuse the direction of causality a bit here. People in power tends to be those that want power. To get a powerful person you only really need one person who wants power. I think it's a false conclusion to think that people in general seek power.

stickfigure 5y ago

Humanity has weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people at a time. Nation-states deliberately using a power plant to kill "mere" thousands seems pretty low on the fear list.

eru 5y ago

This is bad, but nuclear isn't uniquely dangerous here: just imagine the same kind of shelling around a large dam.

ornornor 5y ago
> a large dam It would be catastrophic but much more localized. Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time (not to mention the rest of the biomass)
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana. The dam breaks killed and hurt magnitudes more people.
  - numlock86 5y ago
    > Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time [...] > Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana. Born 1986 in Germany and I got a rare metabolism illness that only ~2000 more people have, all born around June/July/August in 1986 in Western and Middle Europe with some exceptions distributed around as late as born in September and October. But the Spring of 1986 was probably just a famous year for pregnant women eating exceptionally many bananas I guess? At least I agree that dams killed more people than that specific event. But wait till you see the numbers for fossil fuels ...
    - eru 5y ago
      Yes, I brought up the dam since hydropower is something that's typically seen as good; but still has the potential for big disasters. (I totally think hydropower is good on balance.) Fossil fuels, and especially coal, have worse impact in total but they are typically more diffuse. So I left them out of the discussion.
  - watwut 5y ago

MandieD 5y ago

And this is part of why a lot of Germans have always been uneasy with nuclear power.

JohnBooty 5y ago
And that is why Germans are in an uncomfortable situation, being so dependent on Russia for gas.
isomel 5y ago
The German are uneasy because of irrational fear and exaggerated risks. Even if the worst happen at that nuclear power plant, it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already have happened in Ukraine the last few weeks (you know: the war)
- dewey 5y ago
  > "it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already" Maybe I'm missing something regarding this specific reactor but how is a war that will eventually (hopefully) be over worse than a nuclear fallout that would make large areas unlivable for thousands of years and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
  - isomel 5y ago
    > make large areas unlivable for thousands of years I think you are over-estimating the cost of this. I contest the use of 'large'. The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places. > and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people. Because the war has been doing that already, at a even larger scale: thousands of civilians killed, many wounded, millions displaced. That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
    - dewey 5y ago
      > occupied by deserts, ice floe Usually nuclear power plants are located close to cities and populated areas and not in the middle of the desert or uninhabited ice fields. > That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown. In the short term yes, but on a time scale that's longer than a few years I think you'll quickly realize that a meltdown is worse. Will the same war go on in 50 years? Probably not, but the radiation will be...for thousands of years.

JohnBooty 5y ago

It's not that nuclear is easy or perfect. But until we scale up renewable energy by orders of magnitude, or somehow scale down demand, nuclear is the least-bad choice by many measures.

sdoering 5y ago
It is a very costly choice. We don't know how to store waste securely. We don't know how to process the waste efficiently and somewhat without it being an ecological disaster. We don't know how to extract and process nuclear 'fuel' without it bei g an ecological disaster as well. Just because the atom doesn't produce smoke at the plant doesn't make it an alternative. Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident and the cost for insurance against it. The cost of building and maintaining a somewhat secure reactor and the later cost of dismantling it and storing the additional waste. Nearly all these costs for externalities were not factored into the price of energy. Calculating in all these costs mskes renewable energy look more than interesting. And also makes the question of storing excessive energy an interesting case. But governments/lobbies argue for cheap (read subsidized) nuclear, while not factoring the same subsidiaries into energy storage for renewables. Investing into the future with a broad renewable energy and storage infrastructure program could ensure not only less dependency on Russia (for oil or gas) but also have a positive impact on the topic of climate change. On the other hand. The German/European dependency on Russian gas and Russias dependency on the money from the sale of said gas was done to reduce the risk of war. The idea being that both sides could loose too much in the case of war and that would act as a deterrent. Even during the height of the Cold War Russian gas flowed towards the western world (aka Europe/Germany).
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident Sure, let's talk about that. - As a species, we've been running hundreds of nuclear reactors (440 currently) for a while now. - Their cumulative track record is (very roughly) "one Chernobyl every 25 years." - The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people. - With plants getting safer and safer, we might reasonably expect the risk to be more like "one Chernobyl every 50 or 100 years" for modern plants. - Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons) That is steep but manageable. Relative to fossil fuels, this is less-bad by orders of magnitude. It is regrettable (to put it laughably mildly) that the Fukushima and Chernobyl regions are no longer inhabitable, but fossil fuels have pushed us to the point where everything near the equator is going to be uninhabitable soon. As for the waste issue, again, compare it to the alternatives. 64,000 cumulative tons of nuclear waste in America's history versus 6,500,000,000 tons of CO2 emissions last year. Obviously a ton of nuclear waste is not directly comparable to a ton of CO2 emission, but at least nuclear waste can be collected and sequestered. It is a local problem, not one that irrevocably poisons the entire planet. Yeah, green energy sources are better than nuclear, for sure, and maybe fusion will save our butts eventually. But we need energy in the meantime. We should use the least-bad thing until we get something great, and nuclear is the least-bad option by such a ridiculous margin that it's not even funny.

88840-8855 5y ago

It's normal to have those thoughts now, they are driven by fear. The situation is developing fast and most people are just sitting here and watching news and blame and get feelings and emotions. Just a waste of time. A few peoples actually go to the borders or the stations to help the refugees arriving. Do that. At least you leave an impact.

Helmut10001 5y ago

Yes. Where are all those who claim nuclear is a sustainable, safe energy source? With humans in the game, it is not and will never be.

thomasahle 5y ago

My thinking has been that we need smaller decentralized nuclear plants, that can fail without it being cathastrofic, instead of huge centralized plants that "can't fail".

markvdb 5y ago
That only makes for more, albeit smaller problems. Each of these is a potential dirty bomb.
- thomasahle 5y ago
  Right. It makes the size of the problem more transparent, by amortizing the accidents over time. We'd actually have some accidents sometimes. Either we'll get good at handling it, or we will give up on nuclear. Better than pooling all the risk, lowering the probability, but keeping the same expected destruction. With the centralized approach it's too easy to act like there's zero risk.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

I can relate. I've been pro nuclear my entire adult life, but in more recent years have added a lot more hesitations and conditions to that. Fukushima put me onto a similar thread of thinking. If there were any society and government you'd expect to have sober thinking and solid engineering around nuclear, it'd be Japan, let the way TEPCO and the Abe administration behaved in the opening stages of the emergency was quite shady. That gave me pause for thought that our governments and institutions just might be up to the task of running something like nuclear. If you understand the physics and engineering, then nuclear done right is a no brainer. I have less faith in us doing it right that I did in the past. Add to that the huge capital costs, and the trendlines in renewables + storage capital costs... it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything nuclear that doesn't fundamentally change the economics. And so far every attempt at that (eg SMR) has failed rather definitively.

mcv 5y ago
Just when I was ready to abandon my anti-nuclear stance and ready to accept nuclear power as transitional technology before we can transition to fully sustainable energy.
- konschubert 5y ago
  Same here.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  And now we can retake this conversation from just 3 months ago with a fresh view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251780

coryrc 5y ago

What do you think is the worse-case outcome here? It's the release of small amounts of radioactive gasses of only concern to the local area. It has a containment dome and is already shutting down. Another Chernobyl is not possible. If Putin wants radiation everywhere, he has thousands of nuclear warheads which can do that.

ksajadi 5y ago

I share your feelings but I also find it “convenient” that we are all reminded of the dangers of nuclear power by a seller of gas and petroleum. Call me cynical…

arc-in-space 5y ago

I have already been very pro-nuclear and this does not change my views. Without nuclear, Russia would have had even more power. And it could have been weaker if we had built more of it. The dangers and costs are systematically overstated.

ed_balls 5y ago

That's why I'm a big believer of modular nuclear reactors, where active cooling is not needed.

pgt 5y ago

I used to be in in favour of nuclear. Nuclear works if you can guarantee political stability for 100+ years, but here in South Africa we can't even keep our coal plants running, nevermind guarantee political stability for 28 years (last year in June we suffered riots). The risk of nuclear fallout is still relatively "localised", however that risk is dwarfed by the cost of disrupting centralised power production. A few nuclear plants are easy targets in the event of a war. Distributed solar and concentrated solar w/molten salt seem like good options.

lm28469 5y ago

They just want control of electricity sources, for that you take control of the plant or you strike the transport infrastructure around it, you don't strike the reactors themselves. The day people start bombing nuclear power plants we'll be deep in ww3 already and we'd be fuck regardless

FranOntanaya 5y ago

Nuclear costs should factor in the need to run a larger military budget to make up for their vulnerability in a conflict.