19 ms·

I remember during my undergraduate physics years at the University of Otago, we had a visiting guest speaker - I think it was Dale Bridenbaugh around 1976 when

I remember during my undergraduate physics years at the University of Otago, we had a visiting guest speaker - I think it was Dale Bridenbaugh around 1976 when he had resigned as a manager in GE's nuclear division worried that their plants were not safe [0]. He had just also toured Australia as a guest speaker toward the anti-uranium effort [1]. At the time, Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister of New Zealand and was pursuing "think big" projects for NZ including a planned nuclear power station. As one of the "GE Three" [2], Bridenbaugh blew the whistle that the quoted price tag of the power plant did not include necessary safety precautions which he eloquently explained would cost at least an order of magnitude more (greater than the GDP of NZ). Of course the whole idea made no sense in a country blessed with hydro and geothermal resources. In the end the project was abandoned for total cost of ownership budget reasons rather than nuclear issues. I wonder what has changed since then? [0] https://www.times.org/nuclear-power-back/2018/3/8/the-long-tragic-trail-of-defective-general-electric-nuclear-reactors-from-hanford-to-fukushima https://www.times.org/nuclear-power-back/2018/3/8/the-long-t... [1] https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82alternatives.html https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82alternatives.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three

yellow_lead 4y ago
The design maybe? This quote from the article may be a part of it > In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.
- peteradio 4y ago
  I wonder what strategies need to be employed to feel confident that you have even surfaced all the problems. Presumably there is a list of unmitigatable problems or worst defended attack vectors. But that is probably the hidden success of our last century, that and tight machine tolerances it's everywhere.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Well, to some extent it is a simple calculation. Depending on the amount and radioactivity of an isotope, you get a certain amount of heating. If you go past some amount, you start requiring active cooling to stop it from increasing faster and faster in temperature and reacting more violently - this may happen in traditional power plants. If instead you limit the reactor to a much smaller amount of fuel, it starts losing more heat to air than it produces from radioactivity, and this problem goes away. Of course, the problem is then to obtain that heating while the reactor is operational, but I understand the solutions are known. This is similar to why fusion reactors are not a risk of becoming nuclear weapons: the system requires external power input just to keep the reaction going. So, in the event of a problem, you'll lose the reaction, instead of it running away uncontrollably. Of course, there are other risks. For example, a fusion plant may suffer a breach of the reaction chamber, and all that energy will violently explode, releasing radioactive tritium and bits of radioactivated materials from the reactor structure around. I would guess MMRs have similar bad-but-not-catastophic failure modes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nightski 4y ago
Cost always comes up around nuclear, and maybe justifiably so, but I think it shouldn't be such a large factor. The U.S. for example could easily afford this. We just passed a $700B bill for clean energy and heavily subsidize oil & gas. What matters more imo is reliability and energy security and in those respects nuclear makes me a lot more confident than renewables such as solar or wind.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know the real costs in hindsight. With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change. With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs. [1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climate-change https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    > long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years. In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem. And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence. > I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic. > So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government. > and the cost of nuclear accidents The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.
aunty_helen 4y ago
To be fair, if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning and potentially could've provided electricity cheap enough in combination with hydro and renewables that would've seen some big industry shift away from burning coal. NZ has a very green power grid but it's not perfect and suffers from reliability issues dependent on snowfall to fill the hydro lakes. Nuclear would have and still could provide a lot more security in that area. I'm hoping NZ sees the light and accepts small nuclear as a decent method of going to 100% green sources (currently it's 85%)
- cormacrelf 4y ago
  I feel like the biggest benefit of small nuclear is that it can be put anywhere and you don’t have to build extremely costly transmission infrastructure. Just dot these things around. It surely isn’t cost-effective enough for the first 85% or whatever of a state’s needs, but for that last mile problem? Sounds good.
  - WatchDog 4y ago
    I don’t think dotting nuclear reactors around everywhere would be politically very acceptable. Each plant will also require some level of staffing, operational and security staff. Seems more likely that small modular reactors would just be deployed in large batches to lower the fixed costs, and accept the transmission losses.
    - petre 4y ago
      The NuScale design requires 3 people on shifts to operate a 12 reactor fleet.
      - anonymousDan 4y ago
        I would be a bit worried about physical security with lots of small plants. What do you think? I suppose in theory there is nothing preventing having similar levels of physical security from today's large plants.
fatcat500 4y ago
Safetyism in regards to nuclear power is nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change. They will lose an excellent source of political capital if climate change is solved, so they will always fearmonger nuclear power. Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0]. [0] https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-effects-of-nuclear-accidents.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-ef...
- namdnay 4y ago
  Ah yes, it’s a sinister plot by the evil “environmental lobby”… No, it’s just that the roots of the green movement are mixed with the nuclear disarmament movement, and the rejection of nuclear unfortunately got carried on to civilian power plants :(
  - spfzero 4y ago
    This is an important point. The green movement agenda is obviously mixed with something other than environmental concerns, or they would embrace nuclear.
- polotics 4y ago
  I wish there were a way to both upvote and downvote your post: The environmental lobby does not exist, but pressure from NatGas producers to "orient" the Greens towards fear of NP did & does. However the idea that climate change is political capital for them is ludicrous: clearly their activism totally failed...
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    >The environmental lobby does not exist, does the renewable industry magically not have the same politico-economic incentives to lobby politicians like every other industry?
    - 4y ago
anonporridge 4y ago
There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it. It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks. Mitigating the acute risks is too expensive, so instead, you accept being the frog boiled alive because long term risks are harder to quantify and more nebulously terrifying. You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning. A nuclear meltdown that kills hundreds or thousands is terrifying, but coal burning that quietly kills millions from air pollution is silent. Other examples... * When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic. * When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable. * When a small group of religious radicals kill 3000 people in a fantastical way, so you set yourself on a trillion dollar war to lose thousands more of your young people to combat deaths and directly and indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners, coming away not practically any safer than the basic changes to airline security policies would have done for a fraction of the dollar and human life costs.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  The key distinction here is that the (low!) long-term risk of nuclear power is well quantified, while COVID represents an unknown long-term risk.
  - sdsaga12 4y ago
    Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens? They are constantly undergoing change. We estimate low probability that mutated viruses or bacteria descended from strains we are familiar with will have dramatically more harmful long-term effects, but we don't actually know for certain that any given year's new strains won't have very different risk profiles until much later. We can make probabilistic models based on historical data, but they are unavoidably vulnerable to underestimating the risk of black swan events. One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.

yellow_lead 4y ago

The design maybe? This quote from the article may be a part of it > In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.

peteradio 4y ago
I wonder what strategies need to be employed to feel confident that you have even surfaced all the problems. Presumably there is a list of unmitigatable problems or worst defended attack vectors. But that is probably the hidden success of our last century, that and tight machine tolerances it's everywhere.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Well, to some extent it is a simple calculation. Depending on the amount and radioactivity of an isotope, you get a certain amount of heating. If you go past some amount, you start requiring active cooling to stop it from increasing faster and faster in temperature and reacting more violently - this may happen in traditional power plants. If instead you limit the reactor to a much smaller amount of fuel, it starts losing more heat to air than it produces from radioactivity, and this problem goes away. Of course, the problem is then to obtain that heating while the reactor is operational, but I understand the solutions are known. This is similar to why fusion reactors are not a risk of becoming nuclear weapons: the system requires external power input just to keep the reaction going. So, in the event of a problem, you'll lose the reaction, instead of it running away uncontrollably. Of course, there are other risks. For example, a fusion plant may suffer a breach of the reaction chamber, and all that energy will violently explode, releasing radioactive tritium and bits of radioactivated materials from the reactor structure around. I would guess MMRs have similar bad-but-not-catastophic failure modes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nightski 4y ago

Cost always comes up around nuclear, and maybe justifiably so, but I think it shouldn't be such a large factor. The U.S. for example could easily afford this. We just passed a $700B bill for clean energy and heavily subsidize oil & gas. What matters more imo is reliability and energy security and in those respects nuclear makes me a lot more confident than renewables such as solar or wind.

stevenjgarner 4y ago
The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know the real costs in hindsight. With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change. With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs. [1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climate-change https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years. In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem. And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence. > I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic. > So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government. > and the cost of nuclear accidents The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.

aunty_helen 4y ago

To be fair, if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning and potentially could've provided electricity cheap enough in combination with hydro and renewables that would've seen some big industry shift away from burning coal. NZ has a very green power grid but it's not perfect and suffers from reliability issues dependent on snowfall to fill the hydro lakes. Nuclear would have and still could provide a lot more security in that area. I'm hoping NZ sees the light and accepts small nuclear as a decent method of going to 100% green sources (currently it's 85%)

cormacrelf 4y ago
I feel like the biggest benefit of small nuclear is that it can be put anywhere and you don’t have to build extremely costly transmission infrastructure. Just dot these things around. It surely isn’t cost-effective enough for the first 85% or whatever of a state’s needs, but for that last mile problem? Sounds good.
- WatchDog 4y ago
  I don’t think dotting nuclear reactors around everywhere would be politically very acceptable. Each plant will also require some level of staffing, operational and security staff. Seems more likely that small modular reactors would just be deployed in large batches to lower the fixed costs, and accept the transmission losses.
  - petre 4y ago
    The NuScale design requires 3 people on shifts to operate a 12 reactor fleet.
    - anonymousDan 4y ago
      I would be a bit worried about physical security with lots of small plants. What do you think? I suppose in theory there is nothing preventing having similar levels of physical security from today's large plants.

fatcat500 4y ago

Safetyism in regards to nuclear power is nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change. They will lose an excellent source of political capital if climate change is solved, so they will always fearmonger nuclear power. Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0]. [0] https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-effects-of-nuclear-accidents.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-ef...

namdnay 4y ago
Ah yes, it’s a sinister plot by the evil “environmental lobby”… No, it’s just that the roots of the green movement are mixed with the nuclear disarmament movement, and the rejection of nuclear unfortunately got carried on to civilian power plants :(
- spfzero 4y ago
  This is an important point. The green movement agenda is obviously mixed with something other than environmental concerns, or they would embrace nuclear.
polotics 4y ago
I wish there were a way to both upvote and downvote your post: The environmental lobby does not exist, but pressure from NatGas producers to "orient" the Greens towards fear of NP did & does. However the idea that climate change is political capital for them is ludicrous: clearly their activism totally failed...
- _dain_ 4y ago
  >The environmental lobby does not exist, does the renewable industry magically not have the same politico-economic incentives to lobby politicians like every other industry?
  - 4y ago

anonporridge 4y ago

There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it. It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks. Mitigating the acute risks is too expensive, so instead, you accept being the frog boiled alive because long term risks are harder to quantify and more nebulously terrifying. You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning. A nuclear meltdown that kills hundreds or thousands is terrifying, but coal burning that quietly kills millions from air pollution is silent. Other examples... * When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic. * When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable. * When a small group of religious radicals kill 3000 people in a fantastical way, so you set yourself on a trillion dollar war to lose thousands more of your young people to combat deaths and directly and indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners, coming away not practically any safer than the basic changes to airline security policies would have done for a fraction of the dollar and human life costs.

woodruffw 4y ago
The key distinction here is that the (low!) long-term risk of nuclear power is well quantified, while COVID represents an unknown long-term risk.
- sdsaga12 4y ago
  Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens? They are constantly undergoing change. We estimate low probability that mutated viruses or bacteria descended from strains we are familiar with will have dramatically more harmful long-term effects, but we don't actually know for certain that any given year's new strains won't have very different risk profiles until much later. We can make probabilistic models based on historical data, but they are unavoidably vulnerable to underestimating the risk of black swan events. One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.