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> 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

> 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.
panick21_ 4y ago
The reality where these 'HUGE FAILURES' killed essentially no people? Yeah we are really hiding from that reality.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  The fact that nuclear proponents always need to compare to coal to make it look attractive, and only consider immediate deaths as counting in case of nuclear already says it all. By that measure, nobody has died from pollution from coal power plants either. Where's the hard evidence? All just coincidence and handwavy assumptions! It's from cars! And as said, nobody has suggested replacing nuclear with coal, still most of the replies argue against that straw man.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    No idea what you are talking about, I assume you are one of those people who has some delusional level of assumption about how many people radiation has killed. > Where's the hard evidence? The countless studies done on the topic that shows nuclear is incredibly safe, admits almost no CO2 and has very few other harmful emissions.
wahern 4y ago
> There was nothing learned from these incidents that was surprising, or not known before. You seem to have completely forgotten how events at Fukushima unraveled, or perhaps didn't follow them at the time. Watching CNN and other news outlets it was almost farcical: they'd put on world experts in nuclear engineering (legitimate experts, mind you, not science reporters or policy pundits) who would claim that event X (like a hydrogen leak) was so statistically improbable to the point of impossibility, then some hours later event X happens. Wash, rinse, repeat. It was all the more absurd because they clearly weren't updating their priors, so to speak, regarding the soundness and confidence of engineering analyses as events unfolded. All the nuclear industry's statistical modeling techniques turned out to be crap. The fact it was an ancient BWR is irrelevant as that's what the engineers were modeling--engineer interviewees were basing their opinions on specific analyses of Fukushima and similar, contemporaneous designs. OTOH, it stands to reason that our statistical risk modeling for most other endeavors (maybe excepting some well worn areas, like commercial aviation) is also crap, so nuclear isn't likely exceptional in this regard. And we have about 80 years of solid experience building and running nuclear reactors, with quite a few meltdowns, not to mention many other incidents, and excepting Chernobyl outcomes have fallen well within the range of the risks and outcomes we deal with everyday in many other industries, and far short of the nightmares peddled by nuclear opponents.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Yep and my argument still stands. Those "could never happen" things are now firmly put into the "well that was a one in a million thing, don't need to bother" drawer. Earthquake and tsunami? Pffffft, not over here. Stupid Japan!

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.

panick21_ 4y ago

The reality where these 'HUGE FAILURES' killed essentially no people? Yeah we are really hiding from that reality.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
The fact that nuclear proponents always need to compare to coal to make it look attractive, and only consider immediate deaths as counting in case of nuclear already says it all. By that measure, nobody has died from pollution from coal power plants either. Where's the hard evidence? All just coincidence and handwavy assumptions! It's from cars! And as said, nobody has suggested replacing nuclear with coal, still most of the replies argue against that straw man.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  No idea what you are talking about, I assume you are one of those people who has some delusional level of assumption about how many people radiation has killed. > Where's the hard evidence? The countless studies done on the topic that shows nuclear is incredibly safe, admits almost no CO2 and has very few other harmful emissions.

wahern 4y ago

> There was nothing learned from these incidents that was surprising, or not known before. You seem to have completely forgotten how events at Fukushima unraveled, or perhaps didn't follow them at the time. Watching CNN and other news outlets it was almost farcical: they'd put on world experts in nuclear engineering (legitimate experts, mind you, not science reporters or policy pundits) who would claim that event X (like a hydrogen leak) was so statistically improbable to the point of impossibility, then some hours later event X happens. Wash, rinse, repeat. It was all the more absurd because they clearly weren't updating their priors, so to speak, regarding the soundness and confidence of engineering analyses as events unfolded. All the nuclear industry's statistical modeling techniques turned out to be crap. The fact it was an ancient BWR is irrelevant as that's what the engineers were modeling--engineer interviewees were basing their opinions on specific analyses of Fukushima and similar, contemporaneous designs. OTOH, it stands to reason that our statistical risk modeling for most other endeavors (maybe excepting some well worn areas, like commercial aviation) is also crap, so nuclear isn't likely exceptional in this regard. And we have about 80 years of solid experience building and running nuclear reactors, with quite a few meltdowns, not to mention many other incidents, and excepting Chernobyl outcomes have fallen well within the range of the risks and outcomes we deal with everyday in many other industries, and far short of the nightmares peddled by nuclear opponents.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
Yep and my argument still stands. Those "could never happen" things are now firmly put into the "well that was a one in a million thing, don't need to bother" drawer. Earthquake and tsunami? Pffffft, not over here. Stupid Japan!