4 ms·

If we subjected solar and wind to the same level of regulatory burden (as in: ensured that they would have the same level of expected harms/deaths/accidents as

If we subjected solar and wind to the same level of regulatory burden (as in: ensured that they would have the same level of expected harms/deaths/accidents as nuclear), they also would be completely unprofitable. If we subjected all our generation to the same regulatory burden, nuclear would be profitable again because our power would be drastically more expensive.

ethanbond 3y ago
I am very pro nuclear but I am also very pro stringent regulation around nuclear. I don’t find the argument that nuclear reactors could be regulated as windmills super compelling, but that’s just me.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  While I personally think nuclear is overregulated, my point wasn't even that you need to decrease regulation. I was just pointing that if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated, since they both kill more people/MWh generated than nuclear does.
  - jacobedawson 3y ago
    Genuine question - I wasn't aware of this (fatalities per mwh for wind & solar), what would be the best source to find out more?
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      It's bullshit. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... Even using sources from a decade ago, pro nuclear sources like world in data couldn't find any credible sources to back that claim. And solar and wind were just getting started a decade ago.
      - MostlyStable 3y ago
        INteresting that they cite this exact paper in that figure but it has very different numbers (and is the newest of their citations). [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... -edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar. I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects. In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      This was the first publication I found from a google scholar search (there are others as well)[0] Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates. I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive) However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events. [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
    - philipkglass 3y ago
      This is as good of a source as any: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... However, be sure to dig into the methodology. Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources. We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher... Note that the deaths for nuclear energy include only radiation related deaths, whereas the accidents for solar and wind include "mundane" accidents like workers falling from heights. Nuclear power plants have their own non-radioactive accidents, though, like this one: https://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/cfen/CB1011025.html https://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/cfen/CB1011025.html (5 workers killed at Mihama nuclear power plant due to accidental steam release) I have not seen any comparison that tries to sum up non-radioactive accidents for nuclear power and incorporate them in the deaths-per-TWh rate for nuclear power. The number will still be lower than anything based on combustion, but at these very low numbers it could make a meaningful difference in the relative rates.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    > if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be on a number of fatalities per MWh basis, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric.
    - CRConrad 3y ago
      > I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric. Why not; what would be a better one?
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        You'd want to include cost in a similar way to medicine and other engineering areas do. Doing X (new medical procedure, changing a road intersection) would save Y lives for Z cost. If the cost Z is low you can shift resources to it from areas where cost Z is high per life or QUALY (quality adjusted life year) saved and overall save more lives.
        MostlyStable 3y ago
        Yes exactly. Nuclear regulation has had diminishing returns on safety for probably 50+ years. Are newer nuclear designs safer than they were in the 80s? Yes. Are they _enough_ safer to justify the increased cost relative those older designs? Almost definitely not. In the same way, we _could_ make wind and solar and coal etc. as safe as nuclear currently is. But it would _dramatically_ increase costs. That was my entire point. Nuclear is only not profitable because it's competing with generation technologies that are not required to meet the same safety standards. The US nuclear regulatory regime _explicitly_ does not include costs when determining if a new regulatory rule is necessary. Any amount of safety at any cost is always justified. No other generation technology has that mindset.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      That doesn't matter. It only matters if there's a good reason to not measure it that way, and why another measure is better.
  - canadianfella 3y ago
    [dead]
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    >> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited. By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. ) One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries. So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      To the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2]. 1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear-evacuation-order-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
      - bruce511 3y ago
- pstuart 3y ago
  Small Modular Reactors should make regulation a lot easier vs bespoke behemoth power plants. Unfortunately they still seem to be all promise and no deliveries.
  - mharig 3y ago
    AFAIK they are all breeder reactors. So they can be rather easy modified to breed Plutonium and the likes. Good luck, if one of them shows up in the hands of Daesh or other religious-ideologically or political-ideologically disturbed minds. Edit: Furthermore, small reactors produce more radioactive waste than big ones. Although the study I read was about conventional reactors, IIRC.
_aavaa_ 3y ago
Except there isn’t a reason to do this. Solar panels do not have radiantion leaks. Wind turbines do not meltdown. Hydro damns don’t need millennia long storage plans for their waste. Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  The reason we care about those things is that they kill people. It turns out that, even with those things, nuclear kills fewer people than everything else. Wind turbines kill people other ways. Hydro dams literally have the record for the single most catastrophic energy related disaster in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And even dams that don't fail are so much worse for the environment that I can't even explain it. Dams on the west coast are probably the single biggest reason for the collapse of west coast salmon populations (among countless other species). Dams are an ecological disaster even when they are working perfectly. Nuclear at least has to fail before it causes major issues.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    > nuclear kills fewer people than everything else For some reason, this seems to have omitted solar power from the list of examples of technologies that have a higher body count than nuclear power. In the meantime, let's examine how many cities have needed to be evacuated due to the catastrophic failure of solar plants.
    - orwin 3y ago
      You're probably joking, but solar installation killed my uncle's employee (he had 3), which made him sell his installation business (he still has 2 solar farms I think). I'm pretty sur solar kill more per generated MW than wind. The main difference is that solar/wind only kill or inconvenience/maim blue collar workers. It's like chemical spills in North America, you only hear about it if it inconvenience white collar or large owners, if it's only 30k blue collar workers, it'll hardly make national news.
- fuzztester 3y ago
imtringued 3y ago
You do realize that nobody dies during the operation of a solar farm? Yes people fall off roofs during installation, but effective regulation for that is far cheaper than you would think.

ethanbond 3y ago

I am very pro nuclear but I am also very pro stringent regulation around nuclear. I don’t find the argument that nuclear reactors could be regulated as windmills super compelling, but that’s just me.

MostlyStable 3y ago
While I personally think nuclear is overregulated, my point wasn't even that you need to decrease regulation. I was just pointing that if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated, since they both kill more people/MWh generated than nuclear does.
- jacobedawson 3y ago
  Genuine question - I wasn't aware of this (fatalities per mwh for wind & solar), what would be the best source to find out more?
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    It's bullshit. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... Even using sources from a decade ago, pro nuclear sources like world in data couldn't find any credible sources to back that claim. And solar and wind were just getting started a decade ago.
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      INteresting that they cite this exact paper in that figure but it has very different numbers (and is the newest of their citations). [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... -edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar. I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects. In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    This was the first publication I found from a google scholar search (there are others as well)[0] Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates. I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive) However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events. [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    This is as good of a source as any: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... However, be sure to dig into the methodology. Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources. We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher... Note that the deaths for nuclear energy include only radiation related deaths, whereas the accidents for solar and wind include "mundane" accidents like workers falling from heights. Nuclear power plants have their own non-radioactive accidents, though, like this one: https://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/cfen/CB1011025.html https://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/cfen/CB1011025.html (5 workers killed at Mihama nuclear power plant due to accidental steam release) I have not seen any comparison that tries to sum up non-radioactive accidents for nuclear power and incorporate them in the deaths-per-TWh rate for nuclear power. The number will still be lower than anything based on combustion, but at these very low numbers it could make a meaningful difference in the relative rates.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  > if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be on a number of fatalities per MWh basis, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric.
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    > I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric. Why not; what would be a better one?
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      You'd want to include cost in a similar way to medicine and other engineering areas do. Doing X (new medical procedure, changing a road intersection) would save Y lives for Z cost. If the cost Z is low you can shift resources to it from areas where cost Z is high per life or QUALY (quality adjusted life year) saved and overall save more lives.
      - MostlyStable 3y ago
        Yes exactly. Nuclear regulation has had diminishing returns on safety for probably 50+ years. Are newer nuclear designs safer than they were in the 80s? Yes. Are they _enough_ safer to justify the increased cost relative those older designs? Almost definitely not. In the same way, we _could_ make wind and solar and coal etc. as safe as nuclear currently is. But it would _dramatically_ increase costs. That was my entire point. Nuclear is only not profitable because it's competing with generation technologies that are not required to meet the same safety standards. The US nuclear regulatory regime _explicitly_ does not include costs when determining if a new regulatory rule is necessary. Any amount of safety at any cost is always justified. No other generation technology has that mindset.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    That doesn't matter. It only matters if there's a good reason to not measure it that way, and why another measure is better.
- canadianfella 3y ago
  [dead]
Manuel_D 3y ago
Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.
- bruce511 3y ago
  >> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited. By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. ) One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries. So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    To the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2]. 1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear-evacuation-order-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
    - bruce511 3y ago
pstuart 3y ago
Small Modular Reactors should make regulation a lot easier vs bespoke behemoth power plants. Unfortunately they still seem to be all promise and no deliveries.
- mharig 3y ago
  AFAIK they are all breeder reactors. So they can be rather easy modified to breed Plutonium and the likes. Good luck, if one of them shows up in the hands of Daesh or other religious-ideologically or political-ideologically disturbed minds. Edit: Furthermore, small reactors produce more radioactive waste than big ones. Although the study I read was about conventional reactors, IIRC.

_aavaa_ 3y ago

Except there isn’t a reason to do this. Solar panels do not have radiantion leaks. Wind turbines do not meltdown. Hydro damns don’t need millennia long storage plans for their waste. Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.

MostlyStable 3y ago
The reason we care about those things is that they kill people. It turns out that, even with those things, nuclear kills fewer people than everything else. Wind turbines kill people other ways. Hydro dams literally have the record for the single most catastrophic energy related disaster in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And even dams that don't fail are so much worse for the environment that I can't even explain it. Dams on the west coast are probably the single biggest reason for the collapse of west coast salmon populations (among countless other species). Dams are an ecological disaster even when they are working perfectly. Nuclear at least has to fail before it causes major issues.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > nuclear kills fewer people than everything else For some reason, this seems to have omitted solar power from the list of examples of technologies that have a higher body count than nuclear power. In the meantime, let's examine how many cities have needed to be evacuated due to the catastrophic failure of solar plants.
  - orwin 3y ago
    You're probably joking, but solar installation killed my uncle's employee (he had 3), which made him sell his installation business (he still has 2 solar farms I think). I'm pretty sur solar kill more per generated MW than wind. The main difference is that solar/wind only kill or inconvenience/maim blue collar workers. It's like chemical spills in North America, you only hear about it if it inconvenience white collar or large owners, if it's only 30k blue collar workers, it'll hardly make national news.
fuzztester 3y ago

imtringued 3y ago

You do realize that nobody dies during the operation of a solar farm? Yes people fall off roofs during installation, but effective regulation for that is far cheaper than you would think.