12 ms·

Certainly a safer reactor is strictly better. But keep in mind that nuclear power is already one of the safest, and by many metrics the safest forms of power ge

Certainly a safer reactor is strictly better. But keep in mind that nuclear power is already one of the safest, and by many metrics the safest forms of power generation [1] [2]. Like shark attacks, people's attention gravitates towards the exotic ways people meet their ends. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safes...

devoutsalsa 4y ago
One day we're going to learn that the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened because there was a shark in that tsunami who attacked the power plant.
- notart666 4y ago
  Don't give them new idea for a new Sharknado Spinoff Sharknado: The Rising Shark
  - taneq 4y ago
    Sharkzilla.
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    That would be when Sharknado will have truly jumped the shark.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - godelski 4y ago
    Godzilla vs Sharknado!
mkoubaa 4y ago
Very important point. Calling new designs safer is buying into the narrative that older designs are unsafe, which is simply untrue. It's like saying new t-shirts are more wearable.
- hairytrog 4y ago
  IT kind of is true. Sure the death count directly attributable to nuclear reactors is low. But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day. Safety isn't about lives lost or health, it's about financial repurcussions of the accidents - both directly at the site (take a look at Fukushima today) and the effects on the wider industry, shutting down all the surrounding power plants, and forcing Japan to import fossils to compensate.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day No, overreaction to Fukushima caused the shutdowns.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Politicians caused that, not a power plant. >We need to do something, this is something, egro we must do it. You can't fix stupid.
  - ksidudwbw 4y ago
    Fukushima was designed in the 60s. Had they updated the design to next gen the accident wouldnt have happened
    - teamonkey 4y ago
      But they didn’t. Because it cost money. Because the cost of building a new reactor was so large that they decided to take risks and run the old one past it’s lifetime. Fast forward to today, where governments are now facing pressure to extend the life of old existing nuclear plants past their shutdown date to reduce dependence on gas.
latortuga 4y ago
I just listened to a freakonomics podcast episode on this topic where they pointed out that more people die of opioid overdose in the US alone every year than have died from the entire history of nuclear reactor incidents.
- chatterhead 4y ago
  Considering we're in the middle of a raging opioid epidemic where tens of thousands are dying each year from 100% preventable deaths is not a decent metric for what trade offs we should expect with the basics of powering our society. Even in the face of a 75 year history. This kind of logic smacks of something that ends with Logan's Run.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The overwhelming problem with nuclear reactors is not safety, but extreme cost to build and to operate. An inherently safe reactor design might be a little cheaper to operate, but might be even more expensive to build. Or might be a little less. But for any reactor to be worth building today, it would have to cost a lot less. That is unlikely, particularly since the regulations are written for inherently unsafe reactors, and this new safe-ish one would still need to conform to existing regulations, strictly needed or not. Even relaxing regulations, it would still cost much more to operate than alternatives we now have available.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Coal power kills 25 people per TWh vs nuclear's 0.04 (yes that includes the 4000 people who died at Chernobyl and the 1 person who died in Fukushima). [1] The US generates ~22% of its power from coal, about 900TWh. As such, coal kills 22,500 people per year in America - five and a half Chernobyl's per year. [2] Meanwhile the US generates ~19% of its power from nuclear, about 800TWh. This accounts for 32 deaths. [2] The disparity is so huge that even if you include the 2202 people who died evacuating the area around the Fukushima plant (who may well have evacuated anyways due to the tsunami), the nuclear power plant saved significantly more lives than it cost vs. having a coal, oil or natural gas plant there. [edit] For those curious about the math, the Fukushima plant has a nameplate 5306MW capacity and operated from 1979-2011. That means it generated a maximum of ~1500TWh. Based on the numbers in [1]: - A coal plant at Fukushima would have killed 36,900. - An oil plant would have killed 27,600. - A natural gas plant would have killed 4,200. - A biomass plant would have killed 6,900. - Hydro would have killed 1,950. So the second-worst nuclear accident in history was safer than a natural gas power plant even if you count the worst-case metric of everyone in the area who died leaving the area they may have left anyways. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Schroedingersat 4y ago
This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised. That aside, nuclear in its current form remains safe enough (probably still the safest). However, this stops being true the moment we blindly accept it and let chevron build a nuclear reactor with no oversight in brazil. The 'unfounded hysteria' is the only thing keeping the industry to account.
- wyager 4y ago
  > This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised. Only the most rudimentary linear models predict non-negligible diffuse loss of life from these events. More robust models predict minimal impact, or even a net positive impact on health! E.g. radiation hormesis models.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Wow. Radiation and having enough money drained from the public purse for cleanup to shut down every fossil fuel plant in the country is good for you acshuallly. That's a new one. Props on winning the gaslighting olympics there. Additionally 'negligible' in the context you used is still hundreds which is a great deal bigger than 1
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  "The total number of deaths already attributable to Chernobyl or expected in the future over the lifetime of emergency workers and local residents in the most contaminated areas is estimated to be about 4000. This includes some 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome and nine children who died of thyroid cancer, and an estimated total of 3940 deaths [...] lifetime of about 600,000 people under consideration." - WHO https://apps.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index1.html The older Linear-No-Threshold model had predicted that small doses of radiation would have a small chance of causing harm. From watching Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and nuclear accidents, our new models have thresholds below which radiation has no observable effect over the lifetime. Chernobyl was a disaster but its death toll is equivalent to a month of North America's opioid epidemic.
credit_guy 4y ago
> by many metrics the safest forms Safety costs money. Traditional pressurized water reactors have their water under a pressure of 150 atm. A stovetop pressure cooker has a pressure of 2 atm. Sometimes pressure cookers explode, and it's not pretty. Now take that, multiply by 75, and make sure it's safe. There's only one way to do that: very thick steel walls. Walls that can only be made with huge forging presses, like in this eye-popping quote [1] Westinghouse says that the minimum requirement for making the largest AP1000 components is a 15,000 tonne press taking 350 tonne ingots. There's currently no forge of this size in the US. There's one of 15000 t, but it can only take ingots of 175 t, half of what AP1000 needs. This is what keeps the costs sky-high. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/heavy-manufacturing-of-power-plants.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
- richk449 4y ago
  Is it really true that the forging of the pressure vessel is a significant portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build a nuclear power plant? As your link explains, there are plenty of forges capable of pressing the required ingot size - located in the places that have modern steel fabrication capability. The US doesn’t have these presses because the US doesn’t have modern steel plants - not because the presses are super rare.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    And we built steel presses ages ago, I can’t believe we can’t build a new one if we really needed one.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Furthermore, presses of this capacity aren't exactly cutting edge. The US built several on the 1950s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  The vast majority of nuclear power plants were built before three mile island[1] and the accompanying increases in regulation. The point is, even the supposedly "unsafe" nuclear plants are still vastly safer than most energy sources. You're correct about the infrastructure needs to construct pressure vessels. That's a large part of why nuclear plants were cheaper when built at scale during the 1960s and 70s. It's a lot easier for heavy industry to recoup the investment of building a heavy press if they have an order of 40 pressure vessels instead of 4. 1. Which, by the way, resulted in no radiation exposures or lasting exclusion zone.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
It can be a dangerous industry, especially if you started in the early days when less was known about safety standards. My dad started in nuclear at Hanford in the mid 70s and died of some weird cancer when he turned 70.
- coryrc 4y ago
  Hanford was for nuclear weapons, not nuclear power. It's a subtle difference, but very important. The mess created there was unnecessary for and not driven by nuclear power, and is like saying solar photovoltaic is bad because coal power plants also generate electricity.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    They simply tossed used chemicals on the ground out back. It was wartime. There is no comparison to a nuclear power plant or its operating policies.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    The two are deeply connected. See Iran.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Connected in the sense that one can be used as a political cover for the other, sure. But nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons require very different enrichment regimens. Nuclear fuel usually requires 20-30% enriched uranium. By comparison nuclear weapons require plutonium, enriched to near 100%.
      - Archelaos 4y ago
        The cover is not only political. One needs the plutonium for enrichment in the first place. If you fuel a nuclear power plant with uranium-235, you get it is a by-product. I consider nuclear proliferation as one of the largest dangers we are facing, because it increases the risk of conflicts escalating into nuclear wars. So everything that makes it harder to create nuclear weapons is important.
lamontcg 4y ago
Current nuclear power runs the risk of a trillion dollar nuclear meltdown. This is something that solar and wind plants don't need to bother thinking about or mitigating, which makes the engineering vastly simpler. And as we get better at working with molten salt engineering it probably makes more sense to apply it to solving the solar baseload problem and not nuclear: https://phys.org/news/2022-10-molten-salt-corrosive-effect.html https://phys.org/news/2022-10-molten-salt-corrosive-effect.h...
- hackerlight 4y ago
  It doesn't if you build them away from cities, which many countries are capable of doing.
  - teamonkey 4y ago
    Not many countries in Europe though. You also need a water source like a lake or river, which is where towns tend to be.
    - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
      Well there won't be many towns left unless we start to build alot more nuclear thanks to climate change.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        Nuclear is too expensive and slow to deploy to address climate change, it is being used as a distraction in order to slow down the transition from fossil fuels, just like hydrogen was.
        Mrdarknezz 4y ago
        Nuclear is so far the fastest way to deploy clean energy and has been for decades. I don't see how the most sustainable source of energy is a distraction?
  - 4y ago
legulere 4y ago
It’s weird to me to reduce safety to numbers of deaths. If a kitchen machine chops of a lot of fingers of users I wouldn’t call it safe. I think the risk that you have to evade everyone in a circle of several kilometers has to be taken into account.
- andrepd 4y ago
  Coal causes even more respiratory illnesses than deaths.
woeh 4y ago
I hear people bring up this argument in the Netherlands as well, when talking about the safety of nuclear energy. It does not put me entirely at ease though; the Netherlands is a very tiny and pretty crowded place, you are never far away from a city. And these statistics might very well be based on reactors build in remote areas. Would it still be safe to build one near dense populations, or would a future incident drastically skew the data?
Archelaos 4y ago
These statistics are pure propaganda. The data is not weighted. The one-year time period favours nuclear energy, whose waste has the potential to kill for millions of years. And the most problematic issue is that "mortality rate" can mean anything: If you count only accidents with more or less immediate deaths, you will always get a low number for nuclear; if you estimate prematurely deaths you can dramatically increase the number depending on the limit for "premature" (10 years, 1 year, 1 months, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour, ...?). This is the reason why the numbers for the Chernobyl accident range from 30 direct vitims to 985,000 premature deaths.[1] The estimates (for nuclear ar well as for non-nuclear) also vary widely depending on the underlying models, where a lot of uncertainties about causes and effects are located. Just one example: Cancer develops over decades, because a cell needs to accumulate a certain amount of mutations to turn into a cancer cell. Exposure to radioactivity causes mutations. How does that influences premature deaths? Well, the more reputable studies estimate an average value of lost lifetime. As a statistical average it applies to everyone. Taken individually, this means that everyone has a premature death due to nuclear (as well as to any other risk whatsoever). [1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
- belorn 4y ago
  There is a waste that will have the potential to kill until the end of time and produced at most mines, and exist in every electronics. Heavy metals. Lead is obviously the big one. It has the potential to kill every single person who will ever exist, and it is unearthed when we mine iron and stored as waste. Heavy metal poison also develops over decades and enter the body primarily from the food we eat. Lead ruptures the red blood cells, causes axons of nerve cells to degenerate, and kills the immune system. It is a slow and painful death. As a statistical thing, every item of steel that we own or use, like electricity and the devices that run on it, has statistically produced some amount of lead waste. It causes a half million death per year, it causes almost 10% of intellectual disability of otherwise unknown cause, and every single person who lives has some amount in them. You and me have lead in our bodies.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
oxfordmale 4y ago
I agree nuclear power can be safer, however, those nuclear safety figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt. If these figures would wear a football shirt, it would list the nuclear industry as a major sponsor.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
There are two things I would dissent on the statistics. Actually, three. #1: Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Those numbers will be reliant on industry data, and regulatory agencies that have always wanted to keep the reactors in operation. And can we REALLY get a proper accounting of Chernobyl? #2: Solid fuel rod waste: it needs to be transported, stored, and all the safety on that is reliant on massive amounts of human faith and they can't forecast all the things that could cause solid fuel waste to be spilled, stolen, lost. Transport requires shutting down infrastructure (like the tunnels on the interstate in colorado). #3: Humans are necessary to monitor and maintain the safety systems. If a solid fuel rod starts runaway fissions, and the heat skyrockets, recovering from that is hard. Unlike MSRs which have a plug and a cooling pool that automatically compensates for an out of control reaction, no active systems, no human intervention, solid fuel rods require constant active monitoring. Even if you have the safety systems for real reliable statistics (and how could you know without as good a safety system as the MSR/LFTR plug), solid fuel rod processing, reprocessing transport, safety, lack of scalability will simple never be price competitive with solar/wind/battery. It can't compete with the current prices, and solar/wind/battery is still improving on 5-15% annual improvements. Obviously that won't continue indefinitely, but the point is that there is NO WAY to predict a stable price to even target for a 10-years-out nuclear project for a gigantic dome solid fuel rod reactor (and you HAVE to go big with solid fuel rod, both by design and for any chance of economics). But an MSR is much much much more scalable. This BYU one is closet sized, the original ORNL reactor that got politically axed was closet sized. I guess liquid is more "spillable" than solid rods, so it does have that going against it, but still. Very glad to see MSR research. Now, I'm pretty sure a "scalable" MSR will require as many or more of the headaches of solid rod nuclear waste transport, because I think that you can't compress all the equipment/processes for fission product extraction in a reactor, it would probably require transport to a central processing plant. But it might simply reduce to a "dangerous chemical" problem rather than "dangerous nuclear waste" problem, a distinction that is a political one. It may be that all fission and fusion research these days is a moot point in the shadow of solar/wind/battery economics, but I think it is valuable and I think there's a place for nuclear in the economy.

devoutsalsa 4y ago

One day we're going to learn that the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened because there was a shark in that tsunami who attacked the power plant.

notart666 4y ago
Don't give them new idea for a new Sharknado Spinoff Sharknado: The Rising Shark
- taneq 4y ago
  Sharkzilla.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  That would be when Sharknado will have truly jumped the shark.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- godelski 4y ago
  Godzilla vs Sharknado!

mkoubaa 4y ago

Very important point. Calling new designs safer is buying into the narrative that older designs are unsafe, which is simply untrue. It's like saying new t-shirts are more wearable.

hairytrog 4y ago
IT kind of is true. Sure the death count directly attributable to nuclear reactors is low. But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day. Safety isn't about lives lost or health, it's about financial repurcussions of the accidents - both directly at the site (take a look at Fukushima today) and the effects on the wider industry, shutting down all the surrounding power plants, and forcing Japan to import fossils to compensate.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day No, overreaction to Fukushima caused the shutdowns.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Politicians caused that, not a power plant. >We need to do something, this is something, egro we must do it. You can't fix stupid.
- ksidudwbw 4y ago
  Fukushima was designed in the 60s. Had they updated the design to next gen the accident wouldnt have happened
  - teamonkey 4y ago
    But they didn’t. Because it cost money. Because the cost of building a new reactor was so large that they decided to take risks and run the old one past it’s lifetime. Fast forward to today, where governments are now facing pressure to extend the life of old existing nuclear plants past their shutdown date to reduce dependence on gas.

latortuga 4y ago

I just listened to a freakonomics podcast episode on this topic where they pointed out that more people die of opioid overdose in the US alone every year than have died from the entire history of nuclear reactor incidents.

chatterhead 4y ago
Considering we're in the middle of a raging opioid epidemic where tens of thousands are dying each year from 100% preventable deaths is not a decent metric for what trade offs we should expect with the basics of powering our society. Even in the face of a 75 year history. This kind of logic smacks of something that ends with Logan's Run.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The overwhelming problem with nuclear reactors is not safety, but extreme cost to build and to operate. An inherently safe reactor design might be a little cheaper to operate, but might be even more expensive to build. Or might be a little less. But for any reactor to be worth building today, it would have to cost a lot less. That is unlikely, particularly since the regulations are written for inherently unsafe reactors, and this new safe-ish one would still need to conform to existing regulations, strictly needed or not. Even relaxing regulations, it would still cost much more to operate than alternatives we now have available.
arcticbull 4y ago
Coal power kills 25 people per TWh vs nuclear's 0.04 (yes that includes the 4000 people who died at Chernobyl and the 1 person who died in Fukushima). [1] The US generates ~22% of its power from coal, about 900TWh. As such, coal kills 22,500 people per year in America - five and a half Chernobyl's per year. [2] Meanwhile the US generates ~19% of its power from nuclear, about 800TWh. This accounts for 32 deaths. [2] The disparity is so huge that even if you include the 2202 people who died evacuating the area around the Fukushima plant (who may well have evacuated anyways due to the tsunami), the nuclear power plant saved significantly more lives than it cost vs. having a coal, oil or natural gas plant there. [edit] For those curious about the math, the Fukushima plant has a nameplate 5306MW capacity and operated from 1979-2011. That means it generated a maximum of ~1500TWh. Based on the numbers in [1]: - A coal plant at Fukushima would have killed 36,900. - An oil plant would have killed 27,600. - A natural gas plant would have killed 4,200. - A biomass plant would have killed 6,900. - Hydro would have killed 1,950. So the second-worst nuclear accident in history was safer than a natural gas power plant even if you count the worst-case metric of everyone in the area who died leaving the area they may have left anyways. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Schroedingersat 4y ago

This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised. That aside, nuclear in its current form remains safe enough (probably still the safest). However, this stops being true the moment we blindly accept it and let chevron build a nuclear reactor with no oversight in brazil. The 'unfounded hysteria' is the only thing keeping the industry to account.

wyager 4y ago
> This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised. Only the most rudimentary linear models predict non-negligible diffuse loss of life from these events. More robust models predict minimal impact, or even a net positive impact on health! E.g. radiation hormesis models.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Wow. Radiation and having enough money drained from the public purse for cleanup to shut down every fossil fuel plant in the country is good for you acshuallly. That's a new one. Props on winning the gaslighting olympics there. Additionally 'negligible' in the context you used is still hundreds which is a great deal bigger than 1
LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
"The total number of deaths already attributable to Chernobyl or expected in the future over the lifetime of emergency workers and local residents in the most contaminated areas is estimated to be about 4000. This includes some 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome and nine children who died of thyroid cancer, and an estimated total of 3940 deaths [...] lifetime of about 600,000 people under consideration." - WHO https://apps.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index1.html The older Linear-No-Threshold model had predicted that small doses of radiation would have a small chance of causing harm. From watching Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and nuclear accidents, our new models have thresholds below which radiation has no observable effect over the lifetime. Chernobyl was a disaster but its death toll is equivalent to a month of North America's opioid epidemic.

credit_guy 4y ago

> by many metrics the safest forms Safety costs money. Traditional pressurized water reactors have their water under a pressure of 150 atm. A stovetop pressure cooker has a pressure of 2 atm. Sometimes pressure cookers explode, and it's not pretty. Now take that, multiply by 75, and make sure it's safe. There's only one way to do that: very thick steel walls. Walls that can only be made with huge forging presses, like in this eye-popping quote [1] Westinghouse says that the minimum requirement for making the largest AP1000 components is a 15,000 tonne press taking 350 tonne ingots. There's currently no forge of this size in the US. There's one of 15000 t, but it can only take ingots of 175 t, half of what AP1000 needs. This is what keeps the costs sky-high. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/heavy-manufacturing-of-power-plants.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

richk449 4y ago
Is it really true that the forging of the pressure vessel is a significant portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build a nuclear power plant? As your link explains, there are plenty of forges capable of pressing the required ingot size - located in the places that have modern steel fabrication capability. The US doesn’t have these presses because the US doesn’t have modern steel plants - not because the presses are super rare.
- bombcar 4y ago
  And we built steel presses ages ago, I can’t believe we can’t build a new one if we really needed one.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Furthermore, presses of this capacity aren't exactly cutting edge. The US built several on the 1950s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
Manuel_D 4y ago
The vast majority of nuclear power plants were built before three mile island[1] and the accompanying increases in regulation. The point is, even the supposedly "unsafe" nuclear plants are still vastly safer than most energy sources. You're correct about the infrastructure needs to construct pressure vessels. That's a large part of why nuclear plants were cheaper when built at scale during the 1960s and 70s. It's a lot easier for heavy industry to recoup the investment of building a heavy press if they have an order of 40 pressure vessels instead of 4. 1. Which, by the way, resulted in no radiation exposures or lasting exclusion zone.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

It can be a dangerous industry, especially if you started in the early days when less was known about safety standards. My dad started in nuclear at Hanford in the mid 70s and died of some weird cancer when he turned 70.

coryrc 4y ago
Hanford was for nuclear weapons, not nuclear power. It's a subtle difference, but very important. The mess created there was unnecessary for and not driven by nuclear power, and is like saying solar photovoltaic is bad because coal power plants also generate electricity.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  They simply tossed used chemicals on the ground out back. It was wartime. There is no comparison to a nuclear power plant or its operating policies.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  The two are deeply connected. See Iran.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Connected in the sense that one can be used as a political cover for the other, sure. But nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons require very different enrichment regimens. Nuclear fuel usually requires 20-30% enriched uranium. By comparison nuclear weapons require plutonium, enriched to near 100%.
    - Archelaos 4y ago
      The cover is not only political. One needs the plutonium for enrichment in the first place. If you fuel a nuclear power plant with uranium-235, you get it is a by-product. I consider nuclear proliferation as one of the largest dangers we are facing, because it increases the risk of conflicts escalating into nuclear wars. So everything that makes it harder to create nuclear weapons is important.

lamontcg 4y ago

Current nuclear power runs the risk of a trillion dollar nuclear meltdown. This is something that solar and wind plants don't need to bother thinking about or mitigating, which makes the engineering vastly simpler. And as we get better at working with molten salt engineering it probably makes more sense to apply it to solving the solar baseload problem and not nuclear: https://phys.org/news/2022-10-molten-salt-corrosive-effect.html https://phys.org/news/2022-10-molten-salt-corrosive-effect.h...

hackerlight 4y ago
It doesn't if you build them away from cities, which many countries are capable of doing.
- teamonkey 4y ago
  Not many countries in Europe though. You also need a water source like a lake or river, which is where towns tend to be.
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    Well there won't be many towns left unless we start to build alot more nuclear thanks to climate change.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Nuclear is too expensive and slow to deploy to address climate change, it is being used as a distraction in order to slow down the transition from fossil fuels, just like hydrogen was.
      - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
        Nuclear is so far the fastest way to deploy clean energy and has been for decades. I don't see how the most sustainable source of energy is a distraction?
- 4y ago

legulere 4y ago

It’s weird to me to reduce safety to numbers of deaths. If a kitchen machine chops of a lot of fingers of users I wouldn’t call it safe. I think the risk that you have to evade everyone in a circle of several kilometers has to be taken into account.

andrepd 4y ago
Coal causes even more respiratory illnesses than deaths.

woeh 4y ago

I hear people bring up this argument in the Netherlands as well, when talking about the safety of nuclear energy. It does not put me entirely at ease though; the Netherlands is a very tiny and pretty crowded place, you are never far away from a city. And these statistics might very well be based on reactors build in remote areas. Would it still be safe to build one near dense populations, or would a future incident drastically skew the data?

Archelaos 4y ago

These statistics are pure propaganda. The data is not weighted. The one-year time period favours nuclear energy, whose waste has the potential to kill for millions of years. And the most problematic issue is that "mortality rate" can mean anything: If you count only accidents with more or less immediate deaths, you will always get a low number for nuclear; if you estimate prematurely deaths you can dramatically increase the number depending on the limit for "premature" (10 years, 1 year, 1 months, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour, ...?). This is the reason why the numbers for the Chernobyl accident range from 30 direct vitims to 985,000 premature deaths.[1] The estimates (for nuclear ar well as for non-nuclear) also vary widely depending on the underlying models, where a lot of uncertainties about causes and effects are located. Just one example: Cancer develops over decades, because a cell needs to accumulate a certain amount of mutations to turn into a cancer cell. Exposure to radioactivity causes mutations. How does that influences premature deaths? Well, the more reputable studies estimate an average value of lost lifetime. As a statistical average it applies to everyone. Taken individually, this means that everyone has a premature death due to nuclear (as well as to any other risk whatsoever). [1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

belorn 4y ago
There is a waste that will have the potential to kill until the end of time and produced at most mines, and exist in every electronics. Heavy metals. Lead is obviously the big one. It has the potential to kill every single person who will ever exist, and it is unearthed when we mine iron and stored as waste. Heavy metal poison also develops over decades and enter the body primarily from the food we eat. Lead ruptures the red blood cells, causes axons of nerve cells to degenerate, and kills the immune system. It is a slow and painful death. As a statistical thing, every item of steel that we own or use, like electricity and the devices that run on it, has statistically produced some amount of lead waste. It causes a half million death per year, it causes almost 10% of intellectual disability of otherwise unknown cause, and every single person who lives has some amount in them. You and me have lead in our bodies.
- Archelaos 4y ago

oxfordmale 4y ago

I agree nuclear power can be safer, however, those nuclear safety figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt. If these figures would wear a football shirt, it would list the nuclear industry as a major sponsor.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

There are two things I would dissent on the statistics. Actually, three. #1: Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Those numbers will be reliant on industry data, and regulatory agencies that have always wanted to keep the reactors in operation. And can we REALLY get a proper accounting of Chernobyl? #2: Solid fuel rod waste: it needs to be transported, stored, and all the safety on that is reliant on massive amounts of human faith and they can't forecast all the things that could cause solid fuel waste to be spilled, stolen, lost. Transport requires shutting down infrastructure (like the tunnels on the interstate in colorado). #3: Humans are necessary to monitor and maintain the safety systems. If a solid fuel rod starts runaway fissions, and the heat skyrockets, recovering from that is hard. Unlike MSRs which have a plug and a cooling pool that automatically compensates for an out of control reaction, no active systems, no human intervention, solid fuel rods require constant active monitoring. Even if you have the safety systems for real reliable statistics (and how could you know without as good a safety system as the MSR/LFTR plug), solid fuel rod processing, reprocessing transport, safety, lack of scalability will simple never be price competitive with solar/wind/battery. It can't compete with the current prices, and solar/wind/battery is still improving on 5-15% annual improvements. Obviously that won't continue indefinitely, but the point is that there is NO WAY to predict a stable price to even target for a 10-years-out nuclear project for a gigantic dome solid fuel rod reactor (and you HAVE to go big with solid fuel rod, both by design and for any chance of economics). But an MSR is much much much more scalable. This BYU one is closet sized, the original ORNL reactor that got politically axed was closet sized. I guess liquid is more "spillable" than solid rods, so it does have that going against it, but still. Very glad to see MSR research. Now, I'm pretty sure a "scalable" MSR will require as many or more of the headaches of solid rod nuclear waste transport, because I think that you can't compress all the equipment/processes for fission product extraction in a reactor, it would probably require transport to a central processing plant. But it might simply reduce to a "dangerous chemical" problem rather than "dangerous nuclear waste" problem, a distinction that is a political one. It may be that all fission and fusion research these days is a moot point in the shadow of solar/wind/battery economics, but I think it is valuable and I think there's a place for nuclear in the economy.