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> Nuclear, of course, is the safest form of power generation there is. It's odd that one person would make a claim, then link to data that shows it not to be t

• notTooFarGone 3y ago
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  • deleted 3y ago
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  • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Renewables are cheaper and can make up a large part of the grid when properly integrated. No need for new expensive and unpopular nuclear They’re also variable, including—as we’re now learning—over long-ish timescales [1]. Developing all options is smart. Other countries seem to be able to deploy APT1000s just fine; SMRs should also receive more funding. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/us-wind-power-drop-2023 https://e360.yale.edu/digest/us-wind-power-drop-2023
    • toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Recent sodium battery developments might make renewable variability a moot point though. I want to support moonshots and “all options,” but cost management is also important (capital is finite if we’re not going to do MMT). How do you know when to stop throwing good money after bad? When does experimentation turn into pork? Hard to solve for imho, but I am curious what people smarter than me think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248627
      • HPsquared 3y ago
        Recent reactor developments can make nuclear accidents a moot point also. If new tech is allowed..
        • toomuchtodo 3y ago
          Yes, but never cheap enough. Until nuclear can beat renewables and batteries on cost, shrug. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
          • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
            > but never cheap enough Sure, if you ignore reliability the less-reliable options will look better. Going all in on solar and wind basically guarantees fifty years or more for at least one fossil fuel, gas in America and Europe and probably coal in Asia. To be clear, I think we should be going full throttle on solar and wind. But we should also be building nuclear reactors and investing heavily in SMRs; if we can’t do that due to decades of nuclear fearmongering having gutted our industry, we should import them from China.
            • toomuchtodo 3y ago
              Not ignoring reliability. I assume battery firmed renewables, still way cheaper than any nuclear. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38277123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38277123 https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/husic/media-releases/gencost-confirms-renewables-remain-cheapest-form-energy-cost-nuclear-reactors-skyrocket https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/husic/media-r...
        • garbagewoman 3y ago
          “If only they would allow it” isn’t a compelling argument for a technology
          • HPsquared 3y ago
            I mean allowed in the discussion. GP was talking about battery tech in early stages of development to boost renewables. So I said there exist reactor designs that promise to solve a lot of the safety and cost issues, if they could be further developed.
  • pdonis 3y ago
    > this accident If you mean Chernobyl, that is not representative of any reactor at all that any country except the Soviet Union ever built or ever will build. Let alone commercial power reactors trying to compete in today's market. Arguments against commercial nuclear power based on anything about Chernobyl are FUD.
    • llsf 3y ago
      Exactly. Chernobyl is FUD. All current reactors are different design and cannot be compared to Chernobyl. Nuclear is one of the safest way to produce a large quantity of energy. There is no clean energy, harvesting and transforming energy takes materials and generates stuff that we don't want. Talking about bad perception, fear of radioactivity is also disproportionate. It might be because it is not something we can really feel with our senses, and so it has this magic/unknown aura. People working in nuclear power plant receive less than radiologist technicians, dentists, or fly attendants. Which probably means that the safety might be too high. We should be able to drop from few notches. If coal was the agreed standard of death/TWH then nuclear could kill 800 times more per TWH. The public safety standards for coal and oil is well accepted. No one when building a multi GWH coal power plant screamed for the caused deaths. An yet, with nuclear kill 800 times less, it is always seen as something that will wipe the neighborhood. It is irrational. It might be because of the bomb of the same name. Even though they are totally different designs (nuclear power plant do not detonate large amount of explosive to start a reaction). It is fine to be cautious, but we have to stay rational. We should not diminish the risk of radioactivity, but current nuclear power plant designs are safer, and when they fail (even when a tsunami hits it) it does not kill as many people (source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec... https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2324/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2324/) There and XKCD for everything: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
  • Archelaos 3y ago
    > that less than 100 people died because of ... Such claims are usually meaningless if the deaths are not immediate, because the causes that contribute to a person's death are manifold. If you smoked a single cigarette in your life, this single cigarette might change something in a single cell in your lunges, which gives you cancer and you die from it a couple of years later. You just will never know. It is possible. But how likely is it? If a single beam from a radioactive decaying atom from Chernobyl hits a single cell of you, this might give you cancer and you die from it a couple of years later. You just will never know. It is possible. But how likely is it? If you smoked a single cigarette in your life and were hit by a single beam from a radioactive decaying atom from Chernobyl, and die a couple of years later from cancer: what killed you? The cigarette, Chernobyl, something else? Instead of talking about absoluted numbers here, we should talk about statistics, in other words: reduced life-expectancies. Aside of immediate casualties, this is the really reputable number of interest. So the question is: To what extent have how many people been exposed (so far and into the future) to radioactivity from Chernobyl and by how much did (and will) their life expectancy decrease in each case (depending on their rate of exposure)?
  • garbagewoman 3y ago
    The widespread and breathless evangelism is odd to see, the nuclear power industry isn’t even that big. And it’s not like the fossil fuel companies would use nuclear as a pie in the sky concept to delay the construction of renewables, they’re not known for cynical astroturfing or dodgy tactics like this at all
• renewiltord 3y ago
  It's funny. I suppose Rank Order is not that useful when the top two ranks are very similar. The linked data is Nuclear 0.03 deaths / Solar 0.02 deaths. But we shouldn't use the rank order claim then haha. In fact, there's not that much utility to it consider 1,2,3 are in one class and then 4 is two orders of magnitude higher, and then 7 and 8 are one more magnitude higher.
• mrtracy 3y ago
  Nuclear actually is safe by pure incident metrics, even when counting higher casualty estimates for Chernobyl. The safety, of course, is not intrinsic: nuclear material is obviously very dangerous, especially in a running reactor. The safety record stems from the considerable regulation around building and operating these reactors, and the fact that the reactor has so little external surface area once running: * A very small fuel acquisition operation in comparison to fossil fuels. * Likewise, no externally released pollution outside of accidents, which is rare. * sites chosen for construction are picked for their stability, and are heavily engineered, meaning you also don’t have the installation worksite deaths which run up numbers for wind and solar. But again, this is only realized if the operational safety onsite is maintained. That said, it’s not the only dangerous power generation site: dammed hydroelectric can be a considerable danger depending on what is downstream. In general, I think nuclear would be very popular if natural gas and solar were not available; however, the costs to keep it safe are too high for it to be economical compared to those two sources.
  • jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    Generally I consider nuclear to be an incredible potential, hugely capable. But civilizationally I don't see us as being able to keep doing the right thing with it. If windmills mess up and come crashing down in 20 years, there's negative impact, but locally and short term. If nuclear waste of contaminated decommissioned sites have a particularly bad day in 300 years, it could cause massive long term widescale problems for potentially centuries. I want this to be something that governments get behind and do, want it to be a high priority that we put beyond the whims of the market. I want better realistic views of pricing in & maintaining the very very very long lived negative externalities. I want intense research in what makes good long term sense, what's sustainable. Nuclear has so much potential, is so compelling to me. But I do not see a species organized or driven enough to meet with the very long lived complexities and challenges, do not see the appetite to do the job extremely well. We are very safe about it, but ultimately our scope is short cheap reactors, not doing nuclear in a big lasting fashion, at scale to justify figuring out systematically. Breeder reactors remain this fancy expensive thing we once did, but don't do again. Cancellation of Integral Fast Reactor & failure to make a PRISM derivative is a really sad failure to mature; here we had a much cheaper safer proloferation-safe way to care for the whole nuclear lifecycle, and we never could muster the try, to see how we might do better. What few reactors that are getting built tend towards unambitious fuel-inefficient simple designs, that saddle us with long term problems. Edit: -2? What nonsense. Say something! I spent the effort to lay out a view & case, have some decency, downvote-squad; contribute back.
• ern 3y ago
  Article reads as overly dismissive of safety measures as well. Seems to be implying that measures to prevent construction workplace accidents are driving the cost up, for example.
  • andrewpolidori 3y ago
    Well it doesn't need to imply it, those measures do drive up the cost without debate. It's fine that they do though as we value people's lives more than that.
• gjm11 3y ago
  The thing linked to doesn't show it not to be true. It gives point estimates of 0.03 deaths per TWh for nuclear and 0.02 deaths per TWh for solar (and higher figures for everything else) and says "the uncertainties around these values mean they are likely to overlap". So it indeed doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is true, and if forced to guess on the basis of the numbers there you'd do best to guess that actually it's second-safest after solar, but it also doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is false" and a more accurate description would be "wind, nuclear and solar are all comparable to one another, and all much much much safer than any fossil fuels, there probably isn't that much difference between them, and we don't really have the data to tell what order they should go in". (Some slightly more concrete numbers: total electricity generation of the US is about 4000 TWh, so those figures suggest an average of about 120 deaths per year if that were all nuclear and about 90 deaths per year if it were all solar. For comparison, according to https://www.statista.com/chart/6024/causes-of-death-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/chart/6024/causes-of-death-in-the-u... these are on the same order of magnitude as "deaths by lawnmower" and "deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation".) It would probably have been better to say something like "the safest, along with solar and wind power". But everything we know is perfectly compatible with nuclear in fact being the safest, or the second safest, or the third safest.
  • warcher 3y ago
    There’s a lot of dudes on a lot of roofs for solar. A lot of electrical work done, maybe by electricians, probably by mildly upskilled roofers. I would be highly skeptical that solar is safer than nuclear. There’s just so much poorly regulated low skill low accountability construction work going on keeping it all running.
    • gjm11 3y ago
      Maybe the figures are for large-scale power-grid solar, or something? (I share your suspicion, though. And the figures being used for nuclear seem too high to me; e.g., no one is building nuclear power facilities as dangerous as Chernobyl any more, so far as I know.)
• llsf 3y ago
  You are right, th link shows that nuclear is the safest right after solar, if you count dead/Terawatt-hour. 0.03 for nuclear and 0.02 for solar. Solar is still very small (and intermittent) when it comes to production, for instance, less than 2% for US (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/US%20Energy%202022.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...). This single new UK nuclear power plant alone would account for 7% of UK production according to the article.