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It's basically a 'black swan' problem. Even if the average risk of catastrophic failure is low, the consequences are very high, particularly if the plant is ne

It's basically a 'black swan' problem. Even if the average risk of catastrophic failure is low, the consequences are very high, particularly if the plant is near a populated area that might be converted into a 50-mile radius 'exclusion zone'. Imagine, for example, if Indian Point nuclear power plants suffered a catastrophic failure and forced evacuation of Manhattan? Practically this means costs of nuclear power plants are very high, as you have to over-engineer them relative to other power sources. Natural gas and coal plant accidents are relatively common, for example; similarly oil refineries suffer fires on a regular basis. However, Texas City (site of a major BP disaster in 2005) is not currently a 100-year no-go-zone. Here's a 5-minute video on how that played out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM Point being, there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks, and that's a major reason why nuclear isn't going to replace fossil fuels on a global scale (along with the uranium ore to fuel rod to waste pile supply chain issues,decommissioning costs, etc.) There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid, and that's one of several reasons why nuclear will remain little more than a niche provider.

a9h74j 4y ago
> There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid Not to start the usual HN debate, but specifically in terms of the word 'catastrophe' being used. ... [Given current lack of storage] if there is lack of wind for two weeks and people are freezing in the UK, that could be a kind of high-severity catastrophe. A weather-system-related wind failure is a kind of common mode failure mechanism in that it can affect many nominally independent generators at once. I agree regional damage from worst-case nuclear could be a different level of severity. Caveats about "well that's why long-distance transmission" granted.
- ajross 4y ago
  > Not to start the usual HN debate Then maybe don't throw up a giant strawman? No one is advocating for an exclusively wind-based power grid, so why pretend they are? Real systems won't have the failure mode you posit. In fact real grids (c.f. the Republic of Texas, or for that matter most of the developing world) are operating today with genuinely terrible reliability without the kind of "high-severity catastrophe" you are analogizing to a nuclear meltdown.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity, and does not censor lesser-severity events as outside its scope. AFAIK the whole meaning of the discipline is to not brush things off. No one is advocating for any of our current status-quo systems, but that is what we have, for now.
    - ajross 4y ago
      > AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity That sounds to me like exactly the opposite point to the one your were making upthread? Yes, that's true. The possibility of generation shortfall due to weather in a wind or solar-dominated grid environment is, for sure, a problem to be solved. Yet it is nonetheless at a "different level of severity" than a nuclear meltdown. Saying that is not "censoring" discussion of anything, it's literally engaging in the discussion.
      - a9h74j 4y ago
        I was attempting to be generous in advance to multiple views and did not wordsmith or use qualifying words well enough.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - Georgelemental 4y ago
    Uh, plenty of politicians and people in the media advocate for making wind and solar a majority of the grid.
    - ajross 4y ago
      This simply isn't true, or at least not in the way you're imagining (which makes it, I guess, an unintentional strawman). First "Wind and Solar" doesn't have a single failure mode. You're now looking for failures of multiple days with minimal wind and high cloud cover if you want to invoke a "catastrophe" per the upthread phrasing. And that's much harder to do, statistically. It also discounts that "majority of the grid" doesn't mean "without backup/storage solutions". Those gas plants aren't going away, they're just going to end up mothballed as (to be fair, very expensive) peaker plants. People are working hard on storage solutions like batteries and pumped hydro, wider grid connectivity for cross-continent buffering, etc... It's totally a solvable problem (quite frankly it's significantly more solvable than "nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive", which is the real thing holding reactors back). There will be no "catastrophes" in a renewable-driven grid, there just won't. So please stop with the FUD, and stop reading sources that are feeding it to you. Nuclear has a place in the world, but it has to get its act together and compete in the market. You can't just argue that its competitors won't work, because it's wrong.
- Baloo 4y ago
  France's energy supply is 70% derived from nuclear power, exporting huge amounts of electricity to the UK. Their system is under immense pressure currently due to heatwaves, causing rivers to dry up and heating the water that is required for cooling. There are other problems being discovered, as the article mentions: >...the recent discovery of stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units. A dozen reactors have been shut down, and no one knows how long it will take to fix them. It may take years. Meanwhile, the heat wave and drought in Europe this summer have forced other units to go offline, since river water flow no longer suffices as an adequate coolant. Altogether, French nuclear capacity has been effectively cut in half.
  - synotna 4y ago
    Heatwaves caused by other countries burning coal and gas due to people that prefer burning burning coal & gas and causing climate change Countries like here in Germany, where we have problems delivering coal to our coal plants due to low water levels caused by climate change caused by burning coal, poetic justice
    - Baloo 4y ago
      Well it isn't just power plants contributing to global warming, vehicles (which France has plenty of), agriculture etc have a massive impact too.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    > stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units Yes, the term of art "common mode failure" calls attention to failures (and latent contibutions to potential failure) in multiple deployments not being statistically independent.
Spooky23 4y ago
Nuclear is like fossil fuels, the money is in the externalities. Are the taxpayers of 2322 going to be willing to pay to keep Indian Point’s holding ponds operating?
- ch4s3 4y ago
  Then buy the waste in a salt mine or a deep bore hole.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Nobody near a candidate big hole seems willing to go for that.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      If you already have a pool and casks, why not drill the hole? Seems like a failure of imagination, and a lack of civic responsibility.
      - Spooky23 4y ago
        Great idea, let’s put it next to your well.
        ch4s3 4y ago
        A deep borehole is super deep compared to a well.
        ch4s3 4y ago
        Sorry to reply again. The well on my family farm is a few dozen feet deep, and the bore holes are 5k feet deep and capped at a depth of 3k ft. The farm sit on a massive amount of clay, which is actually great for this kind of thing because clay seals itself under pressure. The proposed French sites are all in clay. I'd be happy to host a site there, or a similar facility near where I actually live.
      - 4y ago
avmich 4y ago
Catastrophic accidents with large airplanes can also make airports dangerous places, right? We still have whole cities around them - is it because events like 9/11 are at least as rare as Chernobyl accidents? Why not to build nuclear powerplants away from lands used for other purposes? Aren't we better with both designing safer plants and containing them in case of something bad - except maybe Russia going to war to Zaporizhzhia near the station - happens?
- ajross 4y ago
  > Catastrophic accidents with large airplanes can also make airports dangerous places, right? Um... no? I don't see where you're going here. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a real place that displaced real people. There's never been anything remotely similar in the history of aviation. In fact airplane accidents have never been a significant/measurable risk to urban populations, ever.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant. The Chernobyl accident was the result of an insane government (the Soviet Union) building an insane reactor design (positive void coefficient of reactivity--no other reactor built by any other country has ever done this) and letting its poorly trained operators run uncontrolled experiments on it at high power levels. The obvious way to avoid such an event is not to do all those insane things. It is not valid to treat that insane event as any kind of benchmark of what is possible with commercial nuclear power as run by reasonably sane societies (i.e., every one on the planet except the former Soviet Union--even Communist China isn't stupid enough or ruthless enough to try something like this).
    - avmich 4y ago
      The point was that nuclear power plants are dangerous, and even outside of Soviet Union bad things sometimes happen with them. > Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant. We sort of want to plan for unexpected. To model that unexpected, Chernobyl could be a good approximation.
curious_cat_163 4y ago
What about designs like these: https://youtu.be/cbrT3m89Y3M https://youtu.be/cbrT3m89Y3M My point being that a lot of debate on this issue assumes that nuclear reactor tech is frozen in time when it comes to safety. It isn’t.
cplusplusfellow 4y ago
> there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks This simply isn’t true. A substantial amount of costs are that every single reactor must be approved as if it’s a brand new design. This is after fighting for 10 years or more for the rights to build it.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Indeed, China manages to build new reactors at relatively low cost with no problems these days.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    Honeymoon phase. Russia had theirs also.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      It's not a honeymoon phase. It's scale and preserving experience. The first reactors built in the 1950s we're actually pretty bad on a dollar to power ratio. But experience and economies of scale drove prices down in the 1960s and 1970s. When you contract for a limited run of, say, 4 steam generators [1] it's more expensive than a run of 80 of them. Nuclear plants in this period averaged ~2 billion dollars per gigawatt of capacity (and remember that's at a >90% capacity factor). 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_pow...

a9h74j 4y ago

> There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid Not to start the usual HN debate, but specifically in terms of the word 'catastrophe' being used. ... [Given current lack of storage] if there is lack of wind for two weeks and people are freezing in the UK, that could be a kind of high-severity catastrophe. A weather-system-related wind failure is a kind of common mode failure mechanism in that it can affect many nominally independent generators at once. I agree regional damage from worst-case nuclear could be a different level of severity. Caveats about "well that's why long-distance transmission" granted.

ajross 4y ago
> Not to start the usual HN debate Then maybe don't throw up a giant strawman? No one is advocating for an exclusively wind-based power grid, so why pretend they are? Real systems won't have the failure mode you posit. In fact real grids (c.f. the Republic of Texas, or for that matter most of the developing world) are operating today with genuinely terrible reliability without the kind of "high-severity catastrophe" you are analogizing to a nuclear meltdown.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity, and does not censor lesser-severity events as outside its scope. AFAIK the whole meaning of the discipline is to not brush things off. No one is advocating for any of our current status-quo systems, but that is what we have, for now.
  - ajross 4y ago
    > AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity That sounds to me like exactly the opposite point to the one your were making upthread? Yes, that's true. The possibility of generation shortfall due to weather in a wind or solar-dominated grid environment is, for sure, a problem to be solved. Yet it is nonetheless at a "different level of severity" than a nuclear meltdown. Saying that is not "censoring" discussion of anything, it's literally engaging in the discussion.
    - a9h74j 4y ago
      I was attempting to be generous in advance to multiple views and did not wordsmith or use qualifying words well enough.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  Uh, plenty of politicians and people in the media advocate for making wind and solar a majority of the grid.
  - ajross 4y ago
    This simply isn't true, or at least not in the way you're imagining (which makes it, I guess, an unintentional strawman). First "Wind and Solar" doesn't have a single failure mode. You're now looking for failures of multiple days with minimal wind and high cloud cover if you want to invoke a "catastrophe" per the upthread phrasing. And that's much harder to do, statistically. It also discounts that "majority of the grid" doesn't mean "without backup/storage solutions". Those gas plants aren't going away, they're just going to end up mothballed as (to be fair, very expensive) peaker plants. People are working hard on storage solutions like batteries and pumped hydro, wider grid connectivity for cross-continent buffering, etc... It's totally a solvable problem (quite frankly it's significantly more solvable than "nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive", which is the real thing holding reactors back). There will be no "catastrophes" in a renewable-driven grid, there just won't. So please stop with the FUD, and stop reading sources that are feeding it to you. Nuclear has a place in the world, but it has to get its act together and compete in the market. You can't just argue that its competitors won't work, because it's wrong.
Baloo 4y ago
France's energy supply is 70% derived from nuclear power, exporting huge amounts of electricity to the UK. Their system is under immense pressure currently due to heatwaves, causing rivers to dry up and heating the water that is required for cooling. There are other problems being discovered, as the article mentions: >...the recent discovery of stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units. A dozen reactors have been shut down, and no one knows how long it will take to fix them. It may take years. Meanwhile, the heat wave and drought in Europe this summer have forced other units to go offline, since river water flow no longer suffices as an adequate coolant. Altogether, French nuclear capacity has been effectively cut in half.
- synotna 4y ago
  Heatwaves caused by other countries burning coal and gas due to people that prefer burning burning coal & gas and causing climate change Countries like here in Germany, where we have problems delivering coal to our coal plants due to low water levels caused by climate change caused by burning coal, poetic justice
  - Baloo 4y ago
    Well it isn't just power plants contributing to global warming, vehicles (which France has plenty of), agriculture etc have a massive impact too.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  > stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units Yes, the term of art "common mode failure" calls attention to failures (and latent contibutions to potential failure) in multiple deployments not being statistically independent.

Spooky23 4y ago

Nuclear is like fossil fuels, the money is in the externalities. Are the taxpayers of 2322 going to be willing to pay to keep Indian Point’s holding ponds operating?

ch4s3 4y ago
Then buy the waste in a salt mine or a deep bore hole.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Nobody near a candidate big hole seems willing to go for that.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    If you already have a pool and casks, why not drill the hole? Seems like a failure of imagination, and a lack of civic responsibility.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      Great idea, let’s put it next to your well.
      - ch4s3 4y ago
        A deep borehole is super deep compared to a well.
      - ch4s3 4y ago
        Sorry to reply again. The well on my family farm is a few dozen feet deep, and the bore holes are 5k feet deep and capped at a depth of 3k ft. The farm sit on a massive amount of clay, which is actually great for this kind of thing because clay seals itself under pressure. The proposed French sites are all in clay. I'd be happy to host a site there, or a similar facility near where I actually live.
    - 4y ago

avmich 4y ago

Catastrophic accidents with large airplanes can also make airports dangerous places, right? We still have whole cities around them - is it because events like 9/11 are at least as rare as Chernobyl accidents? Why not to build nuclear powerplants away from lands used for other purposes? Aren't we better with both designing safer plants and containing them in case of something bad - except maybe Russia going to war to Zaporizhzhia near the station - happens?

ajross 4y ago
> Catastrophic accidents with large airplanes can also make airports dangerous places, right? Um... no? I don't see where you're going here. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a real place that displaced real people. There's never been anything remotely similar in the history of aviation. In fact airplane accidents have never been a significant/measurable risk to urban populations, ever.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant. The Chernobyl accident was the result of an insane government (the Soviet Union) building an insane reactor design (positive void coefficient of reactivity--no other reactor built by any other country has ever done this) and letting its poorly trained operators run uncontrolled experiments on it at high power levels. The obvious way to avoid such an event is not to do all those insane things. It is not valid to treat that insane event as any kind of benchmark of what is possible with commercial nuclear power as run by reasonably sane societies (i.e., every one on the planet except the former Soviet Union--even Communist China isn't stupid enough or ruthless enough to try something like this).
  - avmich 4y ago
    The point was that nuclear power plants are dangerous, and even outside of Soviet Union bad things sometimes happen with them. > Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant. We sort of want to plan for unexpected. To model that unexpected, Chernobyl could be a good approximation.

curious_cat_163 4y ago

What about designs like these: https://youtu.be/cbrT3m89Y3M https://youtu.be/cbrT3m89Y3M My point being that a lot of debate on this issue assumes that nuclear reactor tech is frozen in time when it comes to safety. It isn’t.

cplusplusfellow 4y ago

> there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks This simply isn’t true. A substantial amount of costs are that every single reactor must be approved as if it’s a brand new design. This is after fighting for 10 years or more for the rights to build it.

AstralStorm 4y ago
Indeed, China manages to build new reactors at relatively low cost with no problems these days.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Honeymoon phase. Russia had theirs also.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    It's not a honeymoon phase. It's scale and preserving experience. The first reactors built in the 1950s we're actually pretty bad on a dollar to power ratio. But experience and economies of scale drove prices down in the 1960s and 1970s. When you contract for a limited run of, say, 4 steam generators [1] it's more expensive than a run of 80 of them. Nuclear plants in this period averaged ~2 billion dollars per gigawatt of capacity (and remember that's at a >90% capacity factor). 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_pow...