4 ms·

> Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our sh

by htag 4y ago

> Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad of a nuclear incident. In comparison burning fossil fuels is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Way less sensational. You can do math and say nuclear has a safer track record than coal/oil. You can point to design, engineering or management faults with historical failures. It doesn't change the fact that nuclear had a very fair chance at being the future and shown itself to not be trustworthy. If humanity was a little more perfect maybe we could have pulled it off

dmix 4y ago
Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy. It seems the more modern "socially-democratic" a country was over the last 30-40yrs the more anti-nuclear it became. The raw output of markets or the tough hand of socialist dictatorship was the biggest positive driving force in the early history of fission energy. But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc). I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.
- sph 4y ago
  > Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy. Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research: We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.
- htag 4y ago
  > The raw output of markets or the tough hand of socialist dictatorship was the biggest positive driving force in the early history of fission energy. Is this true? I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'. 1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us. 2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era. 3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    I disagree that its not the economic choice. I think everybody would agree that for 50 years before lets say the year 2000 is was overwhelmingly the only economic choice for green energy (outside to hydro limited by geography). After 1990 specially 2000 lots of governments around the world started to massively subsidize solar and wind. While often at the same time having policies punishing nuclear in various ways. The uneconomical solar and wind became economic because of massive government orders and investment. Even the US often simply set targets for solar and wind that utility providers had to reach. Even nuclear nations like France did so. So why did wind and solar turn economical, massive investment around the world in making it so. Had Germany, France and the rest of the EU simply gone all in on even a Gen3+ reactor design, and had order 200 of them since 1990, it would also be very economical. History of nuclear shows that if you build the same plant in large numbers, they can be built and finished far faster and cheaper. And that is even before we consider the huge reduction in capital cost if you go from a PWR design to a GenIV design. Just in terms of the scale of the project, there is a huge difference. Sadly by the time that technology was getting ready for serious commercialization, nuclear was basically seen as legacy and almost all government stopped most research and stop investing in it. Imagine if nuclear in the 80s had the support wind/solar did in the last decade. If every utility in the US simply sad 'you need X% nuclear by Y date'. And in Europe at the same time as France was building its reactors, Germany, Nordics, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain had also built reactors at the same time. During the Kyoto protocol talks, France already had a mostly green grid because of nuclear. But somehow essentially nobody copied this success story because it simply wasn't politically viable in most places. It took decade plus after Kyoto before wind/solar were commercially viable but really only if you don't consider intermittency a problem and the market doesn't give you a penalty for it (it usually didn't because before wind/solar that just wasn't an issue). Yet despite solar and wind not being economical, massive investment in it happened and eventually it was made economical thanks to economics of scale. I would claim if all the investment that was made in wind/solar since 1992 had been made in nuclear, we would produce more green energy now and the cost curve would be driven even lower, and baseload power would be solved as intermittency is simply not a thing. We would not need to redesign grids because nuclear plants would map nicely onto the current grid, if you just replace coal with nuclear. So, its all about economics of scale, that makes it energy production cheap. Putting up huge wind mills is cheap because there are lots of trained people to do it, the factories can produce large volumes. The largest wind mills now are by themselves large then a whole GenIV plant would be. And produce like 95% less energy and not even consistently. > I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. You missed that it is green and no CO2. That was not a reason anybody cared about before 2000 but since then it was part of the rational in some countries. I would like to hear why you think fission can't be economic in principle. Maybe you can make the argument that Gen3 reactors can't be economical but based on first principles, fission itself can be economical if you had economics of scale seems a stretch.
boredhedgehog 4y ago
> I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Airliners have the same problem, yet their spin doctors are much more successful. Everybody keeps believing they're the safest form of travel.
gjm11 4y ago
People think of Fukushima as (1) one of the very worst nuclear incidents there has ever been, and also as (2) something that cost very few lives. Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes. So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.
- htag 4y ago
  I think you're missing key elements to the Fukushima story. It wasn't a surprise natural disaster, it was a predictable eventuality. 1. People tried to ring alarm bells about the building codes (and the reactor specifically) not being able to handle earthquakes of a size Fukushima was likely to experience. They were on deaf ears. 2. Japanese government admitted guilt for poor oversight and regulation. 3. Three executives were put on trail for negligence. There were found not guilty, but that's not the same as innocent.
  - gjm11 4y ago
    Oh, for sure, Fukushima's story is not one where everyone did the right thing. It's one where there was negligence and carelessness, as well as a huge (and, yes, in some sense predictable) natural disaster ... and despite all that, the actual reactor-related consequences were not so very bad. If the question were, say, "how much should we trust the Japanese government?" then Fukushima is not very encouraging. But if it's "how worried should we be about nuclear power?" it seems pretty encouraging to me. Lots of errors and negligence, huge natural disaster, and even so scarcely any lives lost and most of the harm done would have been the same without the nuclear power plant.
panick21_ 4y ago
Fukushima itself killed 0 people. Compared to the overall issues caused by the tsunami its footnote really. > caused a 20km Questionable if that is actually necessary or just over-reaction.

by htag 4y ago

dmix 4y ago

Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy. It seems the more modern "socially-democratic" a country was over the last 30-40yrs the more anti-nuclear it became. The raw output of markets or the tough hand of socialist dictatorship was the biggest positive driving force in the early history of fission energy. But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc). I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.

sph 4y ago
> Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy. Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research: We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.
htag 4y ago
> The raw output of markets or the tough hand of socialist dictatorship was the biggest positive driving force in the early history of fission energy. Is this true? I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'. 1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us. 2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era. 3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).
- panick21_ 4y ago
  I disagree that its not the economic choice. I think everybody would agree that for 50 years before lets say the year 2000 is was overwhelmingly the only economic choice for green energy (outside to hydro limited by geography). After 1990 specially 2000 lots of governments around the world started to massively subsidize solar and wind. While often at the same time having policies punishing nuclear in various ways. The uneconomical solar and wind became economic because of massive government orders and investment. Even the US often simply set targets for solar and wind that utility providers had to reach. Even nuclear nations like France did so. So why did wind and solar turn economical, massive investment around the world in making it so. Had Germany, France and the rest of the EU simply gone all in on even a Gen3+ reactor design, and had order 200 of them since 1990, it would also be very economical. History of nuclear shows that if you build the same plant in large numbers, they can be built and finished far faster and cheaper. And that is even before we consider the huge reduction in capital cost if you go from a PWR design to a GenIV design. Just in terms of the scale of the project, there is a huge difference. Sadly by the time that technology was getting ready for serious commercialization, nuclear was basically seen as legacy and almost all government stopped most research and stop investing in it. Imagine if nuclear in the 80s had the support wind/solar did in the last decade. If every utility in the US simply sad 'you need X% nuclear by Y date'. And in Europe at the same time as France was building its reactors, Germany, Nordics, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain had also built reactors at the same time. During the Kyoto protocol talks, France already had a mostly green grid because of nuclear. But somehow essentially nobody copied this success story because it simply wasn't politically viable in most places. It took decade plus after Kyoto before wind/solar were commercially viable but really only if you don't consider intermittency a problem and the market doesn't give you a penalty for it (it usually didn't because before wind/solar that just wasn't an issue). Yet despite solar and wind not being economical, massive investment in it happened and eventually it was made economical thanks to economics of scale. I would claim if all the investment that was made in wind/solar since 1992 had been made in nuclear, we would produce more green energy now and the cost curve would be driven even lower, and baseload power would be solved as intermittency is simply not a thing. We would not need to redesign grids because nuclear plants would map nicely onto the current grid, if you just replace coal with nuclear. So, its all about economics of scale, that makes it energy production cheap. Putting up huge wind mills is cheap because there are lots of trained people to do it, the factories can produce large volumes. The largest wind mills now are by themselves large then a whole GenIV plant would be. And produce like 95% less energy and not even consistently. > I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. You missed that it is green and no CO2. That was not a reason anybody cared about before 2000 but since then it was part of the rational in some countries. I would like to hear why you think fission can't be economic in principle. Maybe you can make the argument that Gen3 reactors can't be economical but based on first principles, fission itself can be economical if you had economics of scale seems a stretch.

boredhedgehog 4y ago

> I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Airliners have the same problem, yet their spin doctors are much more successful. Everybody keeps believing they're the safest form of travel.

gjm11 4y ago

People think of Fukushima as (1) one of the very worst nuclear incidents there has ever been, and also as (2) something that cost very few lives. Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes. So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.

htag 4y ago
I think you're missing key elements to the Fukushima story. It wasn't a surprise natural disaster, it was a predictable eventuality. 1. People tried to ring alarm bells about the building codes (and the reactor specifically) not being able to handle earthquakes of a size Fukushima was likely to experience. They were on deaf ears. 2. Japanese government admitted guilt for poor oversight and regulation. 3. Three executives were put on trail for negligence. There were found not guilty, but that's not the same as innocent.
- gjm11 4y ago
  Oh, for sure, Fukushima's story is not one where everyone did the right thing. It's one where there was negligence and carelessness, as well as a huge (and, yes, in some sense predictable) natural disaster ... and despite all that, the actual reactor-related consequences were not so very bad. If the question were, say, "how much should we trust the Japanese government?" then Fukushima is not very encouraging. But if it's "how worried should we be about nuclear power?" it seems pretty encouraging to me. Lots of errors and negligence, huge natural disaster, and even so scarcely any lives lost and most of the harm done would have been the same without the nuclear power plant.

panick21_ 4y ago

Fukushima itself killed 0 people. Compared to the overall issues caused by the tsunami its footnote really. > caused a 20km Questionable if that is actually necessary or just over-reaction.