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Ask HN: Nuclear plants in war zones: A valid reason not to build more
The media has frequently been screaming about the dangers of one of the nuclear powerplants in Ukraine being targeted and damaged in the war.
A dirty nuke, radiation over Europe the scenarios being discussed are plentiful.
To me this seems to be the best argument to not invest and rely on nuclear powerplants going forward.
Ukraine has several other types of power generators / plants that are not featured much in the media. The exception being hydropower when a dam was damaged.
The argument “There will never be a war here” seems foolish to me.
- wcoenen 4y agoFor some designs of small nuclear reactors (SMR), the reactor is completely buried underground. That would probably eliminate most of this risk.
- akg_67 4y agoFog of War. Don’t get influenced by FUD generated by any side. You are hearing what one or the other side want you to hear.
- wizardman 4y ago(Disclaimer: I'm just a random guy who doesn't know much about energy production. I'm just sharing my opinion.) Unfortunately, we don't have other reliable clean alternatives. At the moment nuclear energy is the cleanest reliable energy we have. This is why China is building 150 reactors at the moment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... Also it is not in anyone's interest to have a nuclear accident. What if there is a nuclear accident in Ukraine and the wind starts blowing east? There are other more likely things that scare me more like chemical/biological warfare and military drones that can fit in a backpack.
- _Microft 4y agoThere has been ~ 180GW of NEW solar power installed in 2021. It's got a capacity factor of 10-25% but even that newly installed usable power is already a sizable portion of ALL nuclear power in current use (~400 GW with ~50GW of additional nuclear power capacity being built (how long does that take? 5-10 years per power plant? That'd make an extra ~ 5-10GW/yr then)). Photovoltaics are also still on the exponential part of their trajectory installation-wise and also on an exponentially decaying trajectory cost-wise. I'd not bet against solar power with all these things considered. If anything, I'd start building additional HVDC power lines to geographically smooth out local variation of available power.
- Kuinox 4y agoSolar output is ridiculously low in Europe winter, Germany take exactly the path you describe, fully renewable. Except it don't provide a base load, so they must use gas. You list installed capacity, solar available capacity rarely ever reach installed capacity in Europe.
- _Microft 4y ago> You list installed capacity, solar available capacity rarely ever reach installed capacity That ratio is called "capacity factor" which I actually mentioned to be around 10-25%. There's a Wikipedia article on it if you want to know more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
- pfdietz 4y agoEurope could use hydrogen for seasonal load leveling (as well as wind). The capacity for hydrogen storage in salt formations in Europe is many millions of GWh. This would still be cheaper than nuclear.
- Kuinox 4y ago> This would still be cheaper than nuclear. Source needed. Germany electricity price is one of the highest price in europe while having invested heavily in renewables. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy_prices/enprices.html https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy_prices... > Europe could use hydrogen for seasonal load leveling You propose to use an unproven tech, never made at scale, instead of an existing, working one ? Germany already have industrial scale Power2Gaz, which is a way to store energy, but they are still relying heavily on coal, and have one of the highest electricity price.
- gregjor 4y agoStop watching so much popular media, with their sensational catastrophe scenarios. Why spend any time floating ideas like this that have no chance of making any difference? How about we don't build cities in possible war zones, since lots of people get killed in cities during war. Look up Chernobyl. Ukraine already had a meltdown disaster. Spoiler: Europe survived.
- napier 4y agoJust barely and only because the still functioning USSR prestig preservation urges kicked in and fed a million biorobots to secure the reactors and build the sarcophagus.
- dewey 4y agoNot sure if "Europe survived" is what we should be striving for. The exclusion zone which can't be inhabited for more than 3000 years to come is still 1,000 sq mi large. You can also still measure higher rates of radioactivity in mushrooms and game.
- replygirl 4y agothe exclusion zone is open to tourism and has accidentally become one of the most successful wildlife sanctuaries. most parts of the zone will expose you to around 1 uSv/hr or less, or about 1/500 the exposure from an hour in an airplane. people go there without PPE
- pfortuny 4y agoYou should also think about chemical plants, then.
- _Microft 4y agoA valid concern but these are a lot harder to replace than nuclear power plants. Electricity and heat are fungible, chemical products are not. You can't replace sulfuric acid with water.
- replygirl 4y agobased on how grids have fared over the last decade, you also can't replace nuclear with wind, solar, and batteries.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoYeah, those batteries that have been struggling to keep above 70% uptime for the decade suddenly going offline en masse due to safety issues are a huge problwm
- replygirl 4y agothat _is_ more likely with batteries, just put them somewhere especially cold or hot--like near an offshore wind farm or a desert solar array--and cut power to the thermal management. they're also more flammable and easier to use as an explosive than a modern reactor
- Schroedingersat 4y ago> more flammable and easier to use as an explosive than a modern reactor So we're good for 1 year or so of primary energy via PWRs? After that the fuel runs out for reactors that aren't made of 100s of tonnes of liquid sodium each (and have no evidence of working reliably or not catching fire and being shut down for a year every few months), or (assuming they actually ever work) contain 0.5% of the entire world reserves of beryllium each.
- replygirl 4y agosince chernobyl there have been a few very major civilian reactor meltdowns, and zero deaths caused by them
- pvaldes 4y agoPlease don't lie about proven facts. It's embarrassing to read it again and again.
- replygirl 4y agozero deaths tmi, zero deaths fukushima, what am i missing here?
- pvaldes 4y agoBetter information, probably. And the will to search for it.
- replygirl 4y agowhere am i wrong
- pfdietz 4y agoThis claim ignores the statistical deaths from cancer from radiation released by Fukushima. These deaths cannot be detected, but that doesn't mean they can be legitimately asserted to be zero.
- replygirl 4y agoby "statistical" are you referring to LNT-based predictions?
- pfdietz 4y agoYes. And before you go off on the nuclear-stan argument against LNT (which the NRC has soundly rejected, btw), realize that LNT helps nuclear. Without it, regulation would not be "we can't detect the effect, so we'll assume it's zero", but rather "we can't detect the effect, so we'll go with the maximum effect not ruled out by evidence". That would increase the projected cancer deaths vs. what LNT would predict. NRC denial of petition on LNT: https://www.regulations.gov/document/NRC-2015-0057-0671 https://www.regulations.gov/document/NRC-2015-0057-0671
- napier 4y agoWar zones, potential war zones, or climate risk zones. See not only Ukraine this last year but the fact that France ran low on cool enough to be useful cooling water due to the summer heatwave. Unacceptable and unnecessary tactical risks. Don't risk rendering an city uninhabitable per generation at best for the sake of boiling water.
- scarface74 4y ago> The argument “There will never be a war here” seems foolish to me. You know the same country that is invading Ukraine that may target a nuclear power plant could just as easily just drop its own nuclear weapons right?
- kzrdude 4y agoAnother thing, just to show how far away we are from resilience in this sense: Having a surveillance state with perfect information about where everyone lives and maybe what their politics are.. that is not safe in case your country is occupied by a hostile force!
- formerly_proven 4y agoThe danger of hitting a PWR core just right so it actually becomes a dirty bomb instead of having a meltdown seems kinda irrelevant next to the overall casualties of a war. “Real” dirty bombs aren’t really any more deadly than a conventional bomb; they’re not WMDs. They just happen to make continued inhabitation of an area more risky or impossible for some time. Keep in mind that radiological dangers are very easy and cheap to measure, especially compared to chemical or biological contamination.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoA dirty bomb would render areas uninhabitable - or at least dangerous - for decades after a war is over. I really don't understand why nuclear power is still being taken seriously. It's expensive and slow to build, expensive and slow to decommission, dirty, unsafe, and strategically risky - not just because of the dirty bomb issue, but because it's not a distributed technology and operates from a small number of critical locations. Renewables have none of these issues.
- andbberger 4y agoit is in fact objectively the safest base load power source. and economical when financed properly. but you're right, you can't run paxos on an AP1000
- luckylion 4y ago> A dirty bomb would render areas uninhabitable - or at least dangerous - for decades after a war is over. Russia has literal nuclear weapons that are made specifically for that purpose. They've threatened to use them. Why would they bomb a nuclear power plant to get an uncontrollable release instead of simply dropping a nuclear bomb if they want a nuclear war? Because obviously, that will happen if they're blowing up nuclear power plants.
- yellow_lead 4y agoBecause the political fallout is lower. Reportedly, the US has already outlined the consequences of Russia using nuclear weapons. I haven't heard of anything similar for damage to a nuclear power plant.
- andbberger 4y agocontainment buildings are built to withstand missile strikes and airlines crashing into them. it would take a deliberate effort to breach one. and since nuclear weapons exist, this is a ridiculous reason to not build nuclear power plants. if russia wanted to do area denial with a radiological weapon they would just set off a dirty bomb.
- franciscop 4y agoAs long as we replace nuclear with coal plants, which is what we are largely doing in Europe, I'm strongly pro-nuclear. Coal has an estimated death rate (only for power generation) of +100k people/year. I am really positive/hopeful for battery tech and solar panels getting better AND deployed more within the decade, and if we were replacing nuclear for that (or wind, or hydro) I'd be happy, but right now we are not doing that and there's just no comparison of the dangers IMHO. Nuclear is the "big and scary" airplane accident where lots of people die at once so it's in the news around the world, coal is the thousands of people quietly dying every year on car accidents. Edit: it seems I was wrong and coal itself has not meaningfully increased in EU, it's other non-renewable (gas mainly) that are less dangerous. I believe my point stands though for 2 reasons: they are still a lot more dangerous than nuclear, AND closing/not building more nuclear probably has delayed the closure of many coal plants.
- pfdietz 4y ago> As long as we replace nuclear with coal plants, which is what we are largely doing in Europe In Germany, coal use declined as nuclear declined. Is there some other country that counterbalanced this trend? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#/media/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#... Admittedly, coal use could have declined even faster if nuclear had not been phased out, but that's not what you were arguing.
- franciscop 4y agoLooking at numbers it seems I was wrong! I must've mixed Japan where I live now and has had a steep coal increase in the last 2 decades[1] with EU and the non-renewable (not coal) increase. In EU it's coal+gas+oil+etc as a "non-renewable" group that has been increasing (specially gas), while coal itself seems to have decreased slightly as well. As a combination, the non-renewable is less dangerous than coal itself, but still a lot worse than nuclear. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan
- the_third_wave 4y ago
- ozim 4y agoThis argument is like - never do anything because we all die. Maybe other counter argument would be thinking about meteor strikes - don't build nuclear reactors because meteor can hit it.
- paol 4y agoNo. There's right now a major dam that is feared Russia may blow up, just as it is feared that they might blow up the Nuclear power plant. If they did so, it would almost certainly cause more loss of life and damage than the NPP. Why aren't you asking "Dams in war zones: A valid reason not to build more?". I'll tell you why: 1) because that would be stupid; 2) because dams don't invoke irrational fears like "Nuclear" does. Just stop it.
- pvaldes 4y agoMaybe is because water in dams is safer than a radioactive cloud. With a dam you at least can run towards higher ground. Or because water in dams runs in predictable ways following gravity Or maybe is because 5 years after a dam disaster all had returned to normal, but 5 years after a nuclear disaster... nope, still is happening. In any case it seems that for some reason there is a wide consensus in the planet to tag dam accidents as safer than nuclear accidents
- sampo 4y agoLooks like similar risks are much greater with renewable power: Russia threatening to explode Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant could cause greater damage, than blowing up a nuclear power plant. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63341251 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63341251 Also historically, the largest dam accident in history has an estimated 20 000 to 200 000 death toll. This one data point is (almost) never included in comparisons of safety and death tolls of different energy sources, as it would skew hydropower and renewables look much worse in statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
- qa_acc 4y agoSo what is the point? No potentially dangerous industrial plants because, in case of war, they can became a risk ? But they are a risk even without a war. In other words: - no hydroelectric power plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... ); ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st... ); - no chemical plants ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chemical_disasters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chemical_disasters ); - no refineries, petroleum processing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills ); IMHO, nuclear plans are a good option to solve current energy needs and modern nuclear plans are safe even in worst case scenario in Ukraine I don't think a new Chernobyl disaster will be possible because that event was generated by events related to a chain of factors impossible to exist there. I think the better way to avoid the risk of nuclear disaster in case of war is to renounce to atomic bombs and working to avoid proliferation of that kind of weapons.
- pvaldes 4y agoTime to stop for a moment and appreciate this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqu_l29WioM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqu_l29WioM Putin would be basically gassing all Russia and his allies; he does not have a lot of friendly faces around those days. And Russians and his allies would stop pretending that they don't care about the war and would tear him alive. A miscalculation in Zaporizhzhia would be the same as Putin trowing himself from a window.
- Raydovsky 4y agoIt's fearmongering. I haven't seen a single expert be worried about ZPP. Also, some gas plants were hit. Now those exploded in a scary way. That's what I'd be worried about.
- markvdb 4y agoThere's a lot of reasons for optimism. Renewables plus storage are getting better than nuclear in so many ways. This alternative is faster to deploy, more resilient, (getting) less dependent on questionable imports, (getting) cheaper. The only structural disadvantage is space requirements, but even in that area, there is research on the benefits of symbiosis, like between agriculture and solar. My experience tells me that no lobbyist will be able to fend off something intrinsically better in the long term.
- Cwizard 4y agoIs there a design yet for a power system that can run on fully on renewables in realistic conditions? I looked into this in 2017 and at the time there was no realistic design, they all relied on Gas powered plants to provide on demand production. Because at the time battery technology was not at the point it could provide reliable baseload. Did this change? From my research at the time, all the articles claiming renewables where improving to the point of being the most cost-effective where just taking the average production output of a solarpanel/windturbine, dividing that by cost and then extrapolating. Obviously this does not work beyond a certain percentage of production.
- markvdb 4y agoA lot has happened since 2017. There's been enormous evolution in: - solar and wind electricity generation: drastic cost reduction, massive scale-up - interconnects: lower cost, strong growth, especially in the EU - green hydrogen ecosystem: incredible cost reduction, massive scale-up - battery storage: drastic cost reduction, massive scale-up - pumped hydro storage: eking out the last bits - other storage tech: liquid metal, compressed CO2, ... - heat pumps: massive scale-up, incremental efficiency improvements, also large scale sea source like Helsinki I'm especially hopeful when it comes to green hydrogen derivatives as energy carriers. One of the more popular studies in this regard is https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2021.11.067 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2021.11.067 .
- Kuinox 4y agoLooks at Europe, the country that doesn't have an enormous amount of hydro electricity and have the lowest carbon intensity for its electricity is France: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map Renewable cannot provide a base load (except hydro which require specific geography not everyone has), thus cannot work in practice. Germany use coal and natural gas to provide their baseload, but in doing so, emit so much polution they indirectly kill thousands of peoples each year: https://env-health.org/IMG/pdf/dark_cloud-full_report_final.pdf https://env-health.org/IMG/pdf/dark_cloud-full_report_final.... No, you cannot store enormous quantity of energy a fully renewable grid would need, it has never been done, and we need a solution right now. Since the 1980 France do low carbon electricity with it's nuclear, every days, whether there is sun or not, wether there is wind or not. It's an existing tech, that is known to work, and work at scale.
- Raydovsky 4y agoAnd its extremely safe.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago> No, you cannot store enormous quantity of energy a fully renewable grid would need, it has never been done, and we need a solution right now. Good thing electrolysers tend to be roughly on time and on budget. > It's an existing tech, that is known to work, and work at scale. Scale enough to fully exhaust the available U235 in one year if we move all energy generation on to it?
- davidguetta 4y agoYou are feaongering without data, a classic. Even a bad nuclear accident dont come close in term of casualties to using any other energy source in peace time.