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I legitimately have no idea why there is such antipathy towards nuclear energy lately. It produces very little waste, it can be stored on site, and has almost

I legitimately have no idea why there is such antipathy towards nuclear energy lately. It produces very little waste, it can be stored on site, and has almost no pollution (besides heat waste and the used radioactive materials).

mikece 4y ago
Moreover, the partially spent fuel* can be reprocessed to the point of getting more than 99% of the potential energy out of it, and then chemically processed into a safe and stable state beyond that -- if only such processing was permitted everywhere Uranium is being used to make heat for generating electricity. *calling partially spent fuel "waste" ignores that current policy only allows for 5 to 10% of the energy in a unit of uranium fuel to be extracted and used. It's not "waste" until all of the usable fuel has been extracted through recycling.
- jjk166 4y ago
  Reprocessing is generally expensive, poses a substantial proliferation risk, and necessitates transport of spent fuel to reprocessing plants which is way less safe than on-site storage. While it's fine for a country like France which is already a nuclear weapons state, has the wealth and technological capability to carry out reprocessing, and a strong rule of law to make sure everything is done right; for most of the world reprocessing would not be done in practice, and you wouldn't really want it to be done. Nuclear waste is simply not a problem in need of a solution.
sosborn 4y ago
Right or wrong ,the Fukushima incident was a traumatic event for the world in terms of how nuclear energy is viewed. I think people are finally recovering from that.
codefreeordie 4y ago
There is huge antipathy toward nuclear power because embracing it solves problems for which it is politically inconvenient for there to be solutions
iforgotpassword 4y ago
> I legitimately have no idea why there is such antipathy towards nuclear energy lately. Mismanagement and greed. Again, and again, and again. Fukushima was a good example, so was three mile island. There was nothing learned from these incidents that was surprising, or not known before. The HN crowd is good at looking at things from an idealistic, theoretical angle, ignoring reality.
- pornel 4y ago
  There are a couple hundred nuclear power plants operating right now, and have been operating for decades. It's a stellar track record to have only 3 big incidents in over half a century, of which the only major one was also a really dumb outlier. All the nuclear incidents have harmed fewer people coal power plants do every year. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... The Bhopal disaster was much deadlier than all nuclear incidents, but we've not used it as an argument that production of pesticides can't be done safely.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    The cleanup from Fukushima is going to cost roughly a trillion dollars.. that's a pretty big hiccup. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual cost of cleaning up Chernobyl was in the same order of magnitude. Humans are terrible at measuring the true cost and likelihood of statistically rare events.
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      Maybe we should just treat nuclear like coal where we don't bother to cleanup the radiation.
- jjk166 4y ago
  Mismanagement and greed are everywhere though. Coal plants don't have to dump CO2 and toxic chemicals into the atmosphere in massive quantities, but foregoing scrubbers and carbon capture saves money. Solar panels can be recycled reducing both pollution from manufacturing and disposal, but throwing them in landfills saves money. Falls from great heights maintaining windfarms can be avoided with proper safety equipment and training, but that costs money. Dams can be prevented from bursting with proper inspections, but that costs money. The difference though is where coal kills many tens of thousands per year and a single dam burst typically has a death toll in the hundreds, the worst accident at a nuclear power plant this century has had 1 death attributed to it. More people have died from building collapses in the past 2 years than from nuclear power over its entire history. Nuclear power is just fundamentally a technology where it is really difficult for mismangagement and greed to produce harm. It takes a lot of bad decisions and bad luck to get any substantial quantity of nuclear material anywhere near potential victims, the wider the affected area, the less potent the threat, and simply leaving the area after the accident is an effective defense. Pretty much the only way to get substantial casualties from nuclear power is to deliberately disable safety features, blow up a reactor, prevent people from evacuating or taking other precautions for an extended period of time while actively suppressing information, and forcing hundreds of thousands of poorly trained and equipped people into the still burning reactor building and not letting them out before they've gotten far more than a safe dose. If you live in a place where that level of mismanagement is possible, you probably have bigger problems.
prewett 4y ago
It's great! Except for those used radioactive materials taking hundreds of years to become safe, and a documented failure of modern human society to handle long-term problems, and especially to maintain a culture of safety longer than a few decades. And except for reactor failures rendering large chunks of land uninhabitable for decades. When I started off as a developer, I would routinely forget to check for null pointers, because my underlying assumption was that nobody would pass a null pointer. Years later, and now my underlying assumption is: if it can happen, it will. I assume my functions will be given bad input. Likewise, I assume there will be catastrophic nuclear failures and failures in storing the waste. (For instance, look at the bad incentives that PG&E gets and how they respond, with the result that PG&E equipment starts a lot of fires. Would you want PG&E running nuclear power plants with the current culture?) Am I willing to live with those? Well, it's a hard sell.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  The interesting thing behind nuclear is that everyone is very aware of the dangers it can externalize, while for alternative base load power generation the damages caused by external costs are often downplayed and ignored. Coal ash for example is much more radioactive (around 100x more) that your average nuclear power plant. But we ignore it because it's released in the air and "vanishes", a external cost. CO2 and several other pollutants currently released by non-nuclear base load power generation takes way more that "hundreds of years to become safe" in the amounts and rates that human beings are currently throwing it in the atmosphere. But we ignore it because it's released in the air and "vanishes", a external cost.
amalcon 4y ago
I'm pretty pro nuclear energy, but it's pretty obvious why. Fukushima is still in recent memory. Proliferation concerns are pretty close to the forefront vis-a-vis Iran and North Korea. Solar and wind are quickly getting less expensive, and nuclear is (albeit slowly) becoming more expensive. This is all convincing many people that it just isn't worth the trouble. I don't think those people are correct, but I do acknowledge that pro-nuclear folks have a bit of an uphill climb convincing them.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I don't understand why people don't want more proliferation. It would make world safer. Just imagine if Afganistan and Iraq could have delivered a nuke to USA soil.
- didericis 4y ago
  Nuclear’s expense is almost entirely artificial/regulatory in nature, think simpler and safer modern reactor designs reduce a lot of the expense. The construction and maintenance and integration of nuclear waste storage facilities is also much simpler and more proven than the construction and maintenance and integration of battery farms on the scale needed to meet grid demands.
oceanplexian 4y ago
Two reasons: 1) There are people out there inundated with misinformation, and who's knowledge of nuclear energy otherwise comes from The Simpsons. They think nuclear plants will explode like a bomb and that the waste can't be processed and will poison the Earth for thousands of years. 2) There's a subset politicians who aren't actually looking for solutions to carbon-free energy, but have hijacked the green energy movement to force a "societal transformation". I won't speculate on this particular conspiracy, but everyone from the oil companies, to China and Russia stand to gain if the West is not able to produce enough energy to heat homes, run factories, etc. The gas crisis in Europe is only a preview of the next few decades if we don't come up with real solutions.
dekhn 4y ago
I can tell you why: when I was growing up in the US I was constantly bombarded with the "radiation bad! corrupting your life essence" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone) I think those three things, along with War Games, solidified the idea in multiple generations that nuclear was bad (specifically: causes cancer and disrupts infrastructure). The Day After had an insane impact, I remember everybody coming to school (I was 10) the day after sort of shocked. What can I say, it's a dramatic looking risk that human brains see as much larger than the cumulative damage of living next to a freeway for 10 years.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Because a vote for a GW of new nuclear is a vote against removing 5GW of fossil fuels now and a vote against removing 4-9GW of fossil fuels later. New nuclear -- outside of Chinese built, and if you believe them the plants russia builds to make other countries dependent on them -- is over $10/W. Solar is edging 30c/watt peak. This is <$2/W net in many areas. Nuclear still needs backup power and it's not online for a decade or two. In that time solar will have paid itself back 1-2 times and will still have useful capacity. So you get 5W net now and 5-10W net before opening for 1W net of nuclear. The nuclear will then be not economically viable to keep open at $10-$20/MWh let alone pay itself back. I'd much rather run all the gas peakers 60% of the time now (the shoulders still produce 1x energy when peak is 5x), then switch them all over to green hydrogen or ammonia in ten years (or rather do it gradually) than turn 10% of them off in ten years for 60-90% of the time.

mikece 4y ago

Moreover, the partially spent fuel* can be reprocessed to the point of getting more than 99% of the potential energy out of it, and then chemically processed into a safe and stable state beyond that -- if only such processing was permitted everywhere Uranium is being used to make heat for generating electricity. *calling partially spent fuel "waste" ignores that current policy only allows for 5 to 10% of the energy in a unit of uranium fuel to be extracted and used. It's not "waste" until all of the usable fuel has been extracted through recycling.

jjk166 4y ago
Reprocessing is generally expensive, poses a substantial proliferation risk, and necessitates transport of spent fuel to reprocessing plants which is way less safe than on-site storage. While it's fine for a country like France which is already a nuclear weapons state, has the wealth and technological capability to carry out reprocessing, and a strong rule of law to make sure everything is done right; for most of the world reprocessing would not be done in practice, and you wouldn't really want it to be done. Nuclear waste is simply not a problem in need of a solution.

sosborn 4y ago

Right or wrong ,the Fukushima incident was a traumatic event for the world in terms of how nuclear energy is viewed. I think people are finally recovering from that.

codefreeordie 4y ago

There is huge antipathy toward nuclear power because embracing it solves problems for which it is politically inconvenient for there to be solutions

iforgotpassword 4y ago

> I legitimately have no idea why there is such antipathy towards nuclear energy lately. Mismanagement and greed. Again, and again, and again. Fukushima was a good example, so was three mile island. There was nothing learned from these incidents that was surprising, or not known before. The HN crowd is good at looking at things from an idealistic, theoretical angle, ignoring reality.

pornel 4y ago
There are a couple hundred nuclear power plants operating right now, and have been operating for decades. It's a stellar track record to have only 3 big incidents in over half a century, of which the only major one was also a really dumb outlier. All the nuclear incidents have harmed fewer people coal power plants do every year. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... The Bhopal disaster was much deadlier than all nuclear incidents, but we've not used it as an argument that production of pesticides can't be done safely.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  The cleanup from Fukushima is going to cost roughly a trillion dollars.. that's a pretty big hiccup. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual cost of cleaning up Chernobyl was in the same order of magnitude. Humans are terrible at measuring the true cost and likelihood of statistically rare events.
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    Maybe we should just treat nuclear like coal where we don't bother to cleanup the radiation.
jjk166 4y ago
Mismanagement and greed are everywhere though. Coal plants don't have to dump CO2 and toxic chemicals into the atmosphere in massive quantities, but foregoing scrubbers and carbon capture saves money. Solar panels can be recycled reducing both pollution from manufacturing and disposal, but throwing them in landfills saves money. Falls from great heights maintaining windfarms can be avoided with proper safety equipment and training, but that costs money. Dams can be prevented from bursting with proper inspections, but that costs money. The difference though is where coal kills many tens of thousands per year and a single dam burst typically has a death toll in the hundreds, the worst accident at a nuclear power plant this century has had 1 death attributed to it. More people have died from building collapses in the past 2 years than from nuclear power over its entire history. Nuclear power is just fundamentally a technology where it is really difficult for mismangagement and greed to produce harm. It takes a lot of bad decisions and bad luck to get any substantial quantity of nuclear material anywhere near potential victims, the wider the affected area, the less potent the threat, and simply leaving the area after the accident is an effective defense. Pretty much the only way to get substantial casualties from nuclear power is to deliberately disable safety features, blow up a reactor, prevent people from evacuating or taking other precautions for an extended period of time while actively suppressing information, and forcing hundreds of thousands of poorly trained and equipped people into the still burning reactor building and not letting them out before they've gotten far more than a safe dose. If you live in a place where that level of mismanagement is possible, you probably have bigger problems.

prewett 4y ago

It's great! Except for those used radioactive materials taking hundreds of years to become safe, and a documented failure of modern human society to handle long-term problems, and especially to maintain a culture of safety longer than a few decades. And except for reactor failures rendering large chunks of land uninhabitable for decades. When I started off as a developer, I would routinely forget to check for null pointers, because my underlying assumption was that nobody would pass a null pointer. Years later, and now my underlying assumption is: if it can happen, it will. I assume my functions will be given bad input. Likewise, I assume there will be catastrophic nuclear failures and failures in storing the waste. (For instance, look at the bad incentives that PG&E gets and how they respond, with the result that PG&E equipment starts a lot of fires. Would you want PG&E running nuclear power plants with the current culture?) Am I willing to live with those? Well, it's a hard sell.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
The interesting thing behind nuclear is that everyone is very aware of the dangers it can externalize, while for alternative base load power generation the damages caused by external costs are often downplayed and ignored. Coal ash for example is much more radioactive (around 100x more) that your average nuclear power plant. But we ignore it because it's released in the air and "vanishes", a external cost. CO2 and several other pollutants currently released by non-nuclear base load power generation takes way more that "hundreds of years to become safe" in the amounts and rates that human beings are currently throwing it in the atmosphere. But we ignore it because it's released in the air and "vanishes", a external cost.

amalcon 4y ago

I'm pretty pro nuclear energy, but it's pretty obvious why. Fukushima is still in recent memory. Proliferation concerns are pretty close to the forefront vis-a-vis Iran and North Korea. Solar and wind are quickly getting less expensive, and nuclear is (albeit slowly) becoming more expensive. This is all convincing many people that it just isn't worth the trouble. I don't think those people are correct, but I do acknowledge that pro-nuclear folks have a bit of an uphill climb convincing them.

Ekaros 4y ago
I don't understand why people don't want more proliferation. It would make world safer. Just imagine if Afganistan and Iraq could have delivered a nuke to USA soil.
didericis 4y ago
Nuclear’s expense is almost entirely artificial/regulatory in nature, think simpler and safer modern reactor designs reduce a lot of the expense. The construction and maintenance and integration of nuclear waste storage facilities is also much simpler and more proven than the construction and maintenance and integration of battery farms on the scale needed to meet grid demands.

oceanplexian 4y ago

Two reasons: 1) There are people out there inundated with misinformation, and who's knowledge of nuclear energy otherwise comes from The Simpsons. They think nuclear plants will explode like a bomb and that the waste can't be processed and will poison the Earth for thousands of years. 2) There's a subset politicians who aren't actually looking for solutions to carbon-free energy, but have hijacked the green energy movement to force a "societal transformation". I won't speculate on this particular conspiracy, but everyone from the oil companies, to China and Russia stand to gain if the West is not able to produce enough energy to heat homes, run factories, etc. The gas crisis in Europe is only a preview of the next few decades if we don't come up with real solutions.

dekhn 4y ago

I can tell you why: when I was growing up in the US I was constantly bombarded with the "radiation bad! corrupting your life essence" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone) I think those three things, along with War Games, solidified the idea in multiple generations that nuclear was bad (specifically: causes cancer and disrupts infrastructure). The Day After had an insane impact, I remember everybody coming to school (I was 10) the day after sort of shocked. What can I say, it's a dramatic looking risk that human brains see as much larger than the cumulative damage of living next to a freeway for 10 years.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Because a vote for a GW of new nuclear is a vote against removing 5GW of fossil fuels now and a vote against removing 4-9GW of fossil fuels later. New nuclear -- outside of Chinese built, and if you believe them the plants russia builds to make other countries dependent on them -- is over $10/W. Solar is edging 30c/watt peak. This is <$2/W net in many areas. Nuclear still needs backup power and it's not online for a decade or two. In that time solar will have paid itself back 1-2 times and will still have useful capacity. So you get 5W net now and 5-10W net before opening for 1W net of nuclear. The nuclear will then be not economically viable to keep open at $10-$20/MWh let alone pay itself back. I'd much rather run all the gas peakers 60% of the time now (the shoulders still produce 1x energy when peak is 5x), then switch them all over to green hydrogen or ammonia in ten years (or rather do it gradually) than turn 10% of them off in ten years for 60-90% of the time.