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It doesn't surprise me that HN is so pro nuclear but I am very skeptical about reactor safety. I know I will get inundated with comments about how modern reacto

It doesn't surprise me that HN is so pro nuclear but I am very skeptical about reactor safety. I know I will get inundated with comments about how modern reactors are so safe and if everything is done correctly then there is no problem. Things are never done 100% correctly and with as seismically active Japan is, I would approach this very carefully because the worst case when things go wrong is very bad. Fukushima would've been 100x worse if it wasn't for brave people sacrificing themselves.

alephnan 5y ago
What’s the nearest nuclear plant to San Francisco or is it NIMBY?
- colechristensen 5y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:2&tbm=lcl&q=california+nuclear+plants&rflfq=1&num=10#rlfi=hd:;si:;mv:[[39.46267611359436,-113.20118472995898],[32.99135724862753,-126.40675113620898],null,[36.29406869249964,-119.80396793308398],7 https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:2&tbm=lcl&q=cal...] Two not so far away, but it would take an incident worse than Chernobyl to create long term issues for the bay area (one could perhaps debate the threshold of what a long term issue might be)
- renewiltord 5y ago
  The nearest one is 5 hrs south, near Morro Bay: Diablo Canyon. It's being shut down soon. There was a nearer one at Rancho Seco but it was shut down. There's another one in SoCal at San Onofre but that one is shut down too. Oh and I remember that Berkeley is a "Nuclear-free Zone" (you'll see the signs as you enter) but that they once had a research reactor :D
anonporridge 5y ago
The question is not whether nuclear reactors are safe. They are dangerous and cause accidents that cause death and injury. But, that's true of literally every source of energy. You have to look at the danger posed holistically. And the fact is, the actual realized danger posed by old generation nuclear is orders of magnitude less dangerous than every fossil fuel source, even when accounting for major disasters like Chernobyl and Fukishima. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy In light of this data, it seems to me that any decision to avoid nuclear that leads to more fossil fuel burning, which is almost always what happens when we prematurely shut down nuclear plants, is almost criminally the wrong choice.
- hardolaf 5y ago
  Our World in Data included the entire lifecycle and the most pessimistic models for nuclear as part of that analysis, if you use the same methods for every single source, wind and solar are an entire order of magnitude higher. Alternatively, if you use the UN's official estimates of the same thing, nuclear is an entire order of magnitude lower than where it is in Our World in Data's chart. Gotta love when they put bias into how they present the numbers.
  - croes 5y ago
    Are you sure? What about wars?
woodruffw 5y ago
Here's what I'll say: it's perfectly understandable to fear nuclear power. Radiation ticks all of the ultimate boxes for psychological terror: it's deadly, invisible, undetectable with human senses, and abstruse (unlike burning oil or coal). Fear is of these things is natural, but it needs to be moderated. Specifically, it needs to be moderated against the actual danger of nuclear power plants, which is astonishingly small: the number of direct victims of nuclear power accidents is under 100, and the number of indirect victims is similarly small. This is in contrast to coal- and oil-fired power plants, which directly contribute to the deaths of over 100,000 people in India alone[1]. Nuclear power is, on face value, very scary. But it's a lot less scary than just about everything else (modulo wind and solar power) we do to generate electricity, and has far better human and environmental outcomes even in its worst cases (Chernobyl). [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118
- hardolaf 5y ago
  > wind and solar power More people die yearly from wind and solar power during manufacturing and installation than have died directly due to nuclear energy in its entire history as a power source. And yes, those direct numbers for nuclear include the entire supply chain for it if you weren't aware.
  - baby 5y ago
    video with sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnTzsWM_gbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnTzsWM_gbQ
  - croes 5y ago
    But we would build more power plants, this would mean more construction related deaths.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    That's a good point. I hadn't realized the nuclear numbers included the supply chain; I thought it was just operational fatalities. It would be interesting to see whether the number of deaths in wind and solar manufacturing are higher or lower than similar heavy industries and operations (e.g. linemanning, heavy fabrication). In any case, it all pales compared to the death and diminished quality of life that we just accept with coal and oil burning.
sosborn 5y ago
Fukushima might not have had any problems at all had it been built as it was supposed to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Prior_safety_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Pri...
- hardolaf 5y ago
  Fukushima's defect was actually going to be fixed in the next refueling but a tsunami hit it first.
  - aaronmdjones 5y ago
    It had many defects which contributed to the disaster; from the inadequacy of its seawall, to the location of its emergency power switch-gear, to the vulnerability of its seawater pumps. Every single one of these things contributed to the disaster, and you'd have had to fix all of them for it to not have occurred. I highly doubt they would have accomplished all of that in one go. EDIT: And they were already at least 11 years behind on that work at that point.
sigstoat 5y ago
> how modern reactors are so safe and if everything is done correctly then there is no problem nobody is making that claim, because it is clear that people make errors. this isn't some wild revelation to engineers that they've all missed. rather, the claim is that modern reactor designers are safe(r) now _because_ they don't require everything be done right.
- Aachen 5y ago
  And because we have hundreds of running reactors, virtually all of them older generations than what we'd build today, and yet by statistics it's still one of the safest energy sources. Safety is just not a reason to reject fission energy.
wins32767 5y ago
Is the full lifecycle of the power plant less, equal, or more risky than alternative forms of power generation? Oil or natural gas require funding terrible regimes, hydro has environmental impacts and is close to being tapped out, and coal emits tons of pollution and radioactivity. It's not enough to say "this is bad", you have to look at what you're going to replace it with.
dont__panic 5y ago
It does surprise me -- HN is a really skeptical audience, or at least has a highly skeptical subset. Think about how bearish HN is on autonomous vehicles: sure, there's a group who worship Elon, and believe that autonomous vehicles are perpetually on the brink of mass adoption. But most autonomous vehicle discussions come with a HUGE grain of salt, with a lot of folks pointing out edge cases that will prevent mass adoption for the forseeable future. I think nuclear is just so complex it's too hard/easy to make viable arguments in either direction, and things just boil down to "danger" and "cost". My skeptical bone points out that implementation is always messy compared to theory, so we should expect building flaws/design compromises/flawed processes to result in failures at some small percent of nuclear facilities. And given how catastrophic those failures can be, it's hard to justify it. But the climate side of the argument is equally scary: if we don't switch away from carbon-based power sources, massive areas of our world are going to become uninhabitable, underwater, or dramatically change in ways that destroy life as we know it. So maybe that small fraction of failures is acceptable? And in all fairness, the major nuclear failures I can think of -- Fukushima, Chernobyl -- came with comparatively few deaths, and a moderate cost of now-uninhabitable land. Perhaps less than climate change will come with over the coming decades.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  we should take comfort in the fact that nuclear power is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario and that is actively regulated in most western countries. The quality of that regulation can be improved but it is far better than the other use case of nuclear technology - weapons. We have no idea how effective or functional the safety systems in place for the world's nuclear arsenal are or how antiquated they are.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    In my lifetime, I have seen the quality of western regulation and institutions consistently decline. Particularly the more money enters into a given industry. It's one of the reasons I'm skeptical of nuclear power.
    - 5y ago
tommiegannert 5y ago
I'm pro-nuclear power, for the time being. What worries me is that we need to have MTBF go down as the number of plants go up, otherwise we're making planet-wide safety worse. And I'm expecting full-system MTBF to be really hard to measure, let alone guarantee improvements on. Hence, I'm going to assume we're on path to making nuclear power riskier by scaling it up. We've only been splitting atoms for a hundred years. It's very unlikely that we've seen the worst-ever accident yet, or the last bomb ever dropped. I have no idea what to do with this feeling, but I am happy my time on Earth is bounded.
kortex 5y ago
> Things are never done 100% correctly Risk is rarely phrased in terms of "100% correct" because risk-management in engineering is well aware of the "swiss cheese model" of failure. More accurately, disaster occurs not when things go less than 100% perfect, but when things start approaching 100% wrong. All of the redundant layers of safety have to fail such that catastrophic failure is the outcome. The real question is how many layers of safety is enough? Chernobyl, clearly insufficient. Fukushima, still flawed, and folks knew so at the time. The high water mark is such that none of the mistakes of Chernobyl or Fukushima would ever be made again, and we have not one, but two generations and 50 years of improved designs since Fukushima.
ashtonkem 5y ago
You should look up how many people are killed per MWh produced by coal and natural gas. People overweight on rare, high impact disasters and underweight things that quietly kill people in a dispersed way. Related fact, roof top solar actually kills more people per MWh than nuclear, and that is entirely due to installation accidents.
stickfigure 5y ago
Any discussion of Fukushima must include the incredibly destructive earthquake and tsunami that precipitated it. 20,000 people died and hundreds of thousands were displaced. The economic consequences, from Wikipedia: Early estimates placed insured losses from the earthquake alone at US$14.5 to $34.6 billion. The Bank of Japan offered ¥15 trillion (US$183 billion) to the banking system on 14 March 2011 in an effort to normalize market conditions. The World Bank's estimated economic cost was US$235 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in history. According to a 2020 study, "the earthquake and its aftermaths resulted in a 0.47 percentage point decline in Japan’s real GDP growth in the year following the disaster." Yes, we can and should make nuclear power safer - but let's not overstate the risk. The reactor failures were a tiny part of an enormous disaster, and not by any means the worst part of it.
fomine3 5y ago
TEPCO, power plant operator for Tokyo area, also operator for the Fukushima 1 plants, is still not worth to trust for safety. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14446242 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14446242 Also the F1 diseaster is due to the gov and TEPCO. This is problem because they still have much amount of stopped nuclear plants like Kashiwazaki. IMO they should give their plants to other better companies. Some other power companies passed regulation and restarted some their nuclear plants.
andbberger 5y ago
HN is not pro nuclear, not even close

alephnan 5y ago

What’s the nearest nuclear plant to San Francisco or is it NIMBY?

colechristensen 5y ago
https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:2&tbm=lcl&q=california+nuclear+plants&rflfq=1&num=10#rlfi=hd:;si:;mv:[[39.46267611359436,-113.20118472995898],[32.99135724862753,-126.40675113620898],null,[36.29406869249964,-119.80396793308398],7 https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:2&tbm=lcl&q=cal...] Two not so far away, but it would take an incident worse than Chernobyl to create long term issues for the bay area (one could perhaps debate the threshold of what a long term issue might be)
renewiltord 5y ago
The nearest one is 5 hrs south, near Morro Bay: Diablo Canyon. It's being shut down soon. There was a nearer one at Rancho Seco but it was shut down. There's another one in SoCal at San Onofre but that one is shut down too. Oh and I remember that Berkeley is a "Nuclear-free Zone" (you'll see the signs as you enter) but that they once had a research reactor :D

anonporridge 5y ago

The question is not whether nuclear reactors are safe. They are dangerous and cause accidents that cause death and injury. But, that's true of literally every source of energy. You have to look at the danger posed holistically. And the fact is, the actual realized danger posed by old generation nuclear is orders of magnitude less dangerous than every fossil fuel source, even when accounting for major disasters like Chernobyl and Fukishima. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy In light of this data, it seems to me that any decision to avoid nuclear that leads to more fossil fuel burning, which is almost always what happens when we prematurely shut down nuclear plants, is almost criminally the wrong choice.

hardolaf 5y ago
Our World in Data included the entire lifecycle and the most pessimistic models for nuclear as part of that analysis, if you use the same methods for every single source, wind and solar are an entire order of magnitude higher. Alternatively, if you use the UN's official estimates of the same thing, nuclear is an entire order of magnitude lower than where it is in Our World in Data's chart. Gotta love when they put bias into how they present the numbers.
- croes 5y ago
  Are you sure? What about wars?

woodruffw 5y ago

Here's what I'll say: it's perfectly understandable to fear nuclear power. Radiation ticks all of the ultimate boxes for psychological terror: it's deadly, invisible, undetectable with human senses, and abstruse (unlike burning oil or coal). Fear is of these things is natural, but it needs to be moderated. Specifically, it needs to be moderated against the actual danger of nuclear power plants, which is astonishingly small: the number of direct victims of nuclear power accidents is under 100, and the number of indirect victims is similarly small. This is in contrast to coal- and oil-fired power plants, which directly contribute to the deaths of over 100,000 people in India alone[1]. Nuclear power is, on face value, very scary. But it's a lot less scary than just about everything else (modulo wind and solar power) we do to generate electricity, and has far better human and environmental outcomes even in its worst cases (Chernobyl). [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118

hardolaf 5y ago
> wind and solar power More people die yearly from wind and solar power during manufacturing and installation than have died directly due to nuclear energy in its entire history as a power source. And yes, those direct numbers for nuclear include the entire supply chain for it if you weren't aware.
- baby 5y ago
  video with sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnTzsWM_gbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnTzsWM_gbQ
- croes 5y ago
  But we would build more power plants, this would mean more construction related deaths.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  That's a good point. I hadn't realized the nuclear numbers included the supply chain; I thought it was just operational fatalities. It would be interesting to see whether the number of deaths in wind and solar manufacturing are higher or lower than similar heavy industries and operations (e.g. linemanning, heavy fabrication). In any case, it all pales compared to the death and diminished quality of life that we just accept with coal and oil burning.

sosborn 5y ago

Fukushima might not have had any problems at all had it been built as it was supposed to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Prior_safety_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Pri...

hardolaf 5y ago
Fukushima's defect was actually going to be fixed in the next refueling but a tsunami hit it first.
- aaronmdjones 5y ago
  It had many defects which contributed to the disaster; from the inadequacy of its seawall, to the location of its emergency power switch-gear, to the vulnerability of its seawater pumps. Every single one of these things contributed to the disaster, and you'd have had to fix all of them for it to not have occurred. I highly doubt they would have accomplished all of that in one go. EDIT: And they were already at least 11 years behind on that work at that point.

sigstoat 5y ago

> how modern reactors are so safe and if everything is done correctly then there is no problem nobody is making that claim, because it is clear that people make errors. this isn't some wild revelation to engineers that they've all missed. rather, the claim is that modern reactor designers are safe(r) now _because_ they don't require everything be done right.

Aachen 5y ago
And because we have hundreds of running reactors, virtually all of them older generations than what we'd build today, and yet by statistics it's still one of the safest energy sources. Safety is just not a reason to reject fission energy.

wins32767 5y ago

Is the full lifecycle of the power plant less, equal, or more risky than alternative forms of power generation? Oil or natural gas require funding terrible regimes, hydro has environmental impacts and is close to being tapped out, and coal emits tons of pollution and radioactivity. It's not enough to say "this is bad", you have to look at what you're going to replace it with.

dont__panic 5y ago

It does surprise me -- HN is a really skeptical audience, or at least has a highly skeptical subset. Think about how bearish HN is on autonomous vehicles: sure, there's a group who worship Elon, and believe that autonomous vehicles are perpetually on the brink of mass adoption. But most autonomous vehicle discussions come with a HUGE grain of salt, with a lot of folks pointing out edge cases that will prevent mass adoption for the forseeable future. I think nuclear is just so complex it's too hard/easy to make viable arguments in either direction, and things just boil down to "danger" and "cost". My skeptical bone points out that implementation is always messy compared to theory, so we should expect building flaws/design compromises/flawed processes to result in failures at some small percent of nuclear facilities. And given how catastrophic those failures can be, it's hard to justify it. But the climate side of the argument is equally scary: if we don't switch away from carbon-based power sources, massive areas of our world are going to become uninhabitable, underwater, or dramatically change in ways that destroy life as we know it. So maybe that small fraction of failures is acceptable? And in all fairness, the major nuclear failures I can think of -- Fukushima, Chernobyl -- came with comparatively few deaths, and a moderate cost of now-uninhabitable land. Perhaps less than climate change will come with over the coming decades.

eldaisfish 5y ago
we should take comfort in the fact that nuclear power is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario and that is actively regulated in most western countries. The quality of that regulation can be improved but it is far better than the other use case of nuclear technology - weapons. We have no idea how effective or functional the safety systems in place for the world's nuclear arsenal are or how antiquated they are.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  In my lifetime, I have seen the quality of western regulation and institutions consistently decline. Particularly the more money enters into a given industry. It's one of the reasons I'm skeptical of nuclear power.
  - 5y ago

tommiegannert 5y ago

I'm pro-nuclear power, for the time being. What worries me is that we need to have MTBF go down as the number of plants go up, otherwise we're making planet-wide safety worse. And I'm expecting full-system MTBF to be really hard to measure, let alone guarantee improvements on. Hence, I'm going to assume we're on path to making nuclear power riskier by scaling it up. We've only been splitting atoms for a hundred years. It's very unlikely that we've seen the worst-ever accident yet, or the last bomb ever dropped. I have no idea what to do with this feeling, but I am happy my time on Earth is bounded.

kortex 5y ago

> Things are never done 100% correctly Risk is rarely phrased in terms of "100% correct" because risk-management in engineering is well aware of the "swiss cheese model" of failure. More accurately, disaster occurs not when things go less than 100% perfect, but when things start approaching 100% wrong. All of the redundant layers of safety have to fail such that catastrophic failure is the outcome. The real question is how many layers of safety is enough? Chernobyl, clearly insufficient. Fukushima, still flawed, and folks knew so at the time. The high water mark is such that none of the mistakes of Chernobyl or Fukushima would ever be made again, and we have not one, but two generations and 50 years of improved designs since Fukushima.

ashtonkem 5y ago

You should look up how many people are killed per MWh produced by coal and natural gas. People overweight on rare, high impact disasters and underweight things that quietly kill people in a dispersed way. Related fact, roof top solar actually kills more people per MWh than nuclear, and that is entirely due to installation accidents.

stickfigure 5y ago

Any discussion of Fukushima must include the incredibly destructive earthquake and tsunami that precipitated it. 20,000 people died and hundreds of thousands were displaced. The economic consequences, from Wikipedia: Early estimates placed insured losses from the earthquake alone at US$14.5 to $34.6 billion. The Bank of Japan offered ¥15 trillion (US$183 billion) to the banking system on 14 March 2011 in an effort to normalize market conditions. The World Bank's estimated economic cost was US$235 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in history. According to a 2020 study, "the earthquake and its aftermaths resulted in a 0.47 percentage point decline in Japan’s real GDP growth in the year following the disaster." Yes, we can and should make nuclear power safer - but let's not overstate the risk. The reactor failures were a tiny part of an enormous disaster, and not by any means the worst part of it.

fomine3 5y ago

TEPCO, power plant operator for Tokyo area, also operator for the Fukushima 1 plants, is still not worth to trust for safety. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14446242 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14446242 Also the F1 diseaster is due to the gov and TEPCO. This is problem because they still have much amount of stopped nuclear plants like Kashiwazaki. IMO they should give their plants to other better companies. Some other power companies passed regulation and restarted some their nuclear plants.

andbberger 5y ago

HN is not pro nuclear, not even close