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Existing nuclear reactors are already extremely safe, and they still can't be built because of safety concerns. The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is imposs

Existing nuclear reactors are already extremely safe, and they still can't be built because of safety concerns. The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle. It also provides the argument that wanting to bury reactors 1 mile deep shows how incredibly dangerous nuclear power really is.

manvillej 2y ago
there is pretty strong evidence that Nuclear energy is significantly safer than most energy production with the exception of wind & solar which are similarly as safe. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- jayd16 2y ago
  Well ok, they're as safe as long as we're extremely vigilant but does it then follow that we should be more relaxed about safety concerns? I don't think showing the stats is all that convincing to people when the worst case scenario is so impactful. My guess is we'll need to see newer safer designs before public options shift.
  - foxyv 2y ago
    I would not describe the current nuclear power regulatory system as "Extremely Vigilant." More like "Extremely Litigious." I think lawyers have made more on nuclear power than concrete companies and nuclear engineers combined.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  And unlike wind and solar can be used on-demand akin to coal, making it an extremely attractive option to run alongside renewables, especially year round. Solar panels are literally useless 75% of the year in at least 1/3rd of the US and we still rely on coal because of that. Sure, batteries may exist in the future that can handle solar, and maybe panels will exist in the future that will be more efficient, but we have technology now that can outpace renewables consistently and on-demand.
  - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
    Which means nuclear and renewables are the worst possible companions imaginable. Nuclear and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands. They are fundamentally incompatible. For every passing year more existing reactors will spend more time turned off because the power they produce is too expensive. Let alone insanely expensive new builds. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-prices-negative-france-solar-panel-wind-renewable-nuclear-green-2024-6 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-... Batteries are here now, and delivering nuclear scale energy day in and day out in California. https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
    - exe34 2y ago
      do you happen to know why we can't dump the energy into something like smelting, desalination or other heavy industry?
      - amonon 2y ago
        I am uniformed on this, but those industries likely take time to scale up. A large scale desalination plant requires a significant amount of infrastructure.
        ViewTrick1002 2y ago
        The question is also: Where are you building it? No one will want anything from your desalination plant in Norway, and shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive. The next problem is energy cost vs. duty cycle. The less you run due to only utilizing cheap prices the higher the impact of fixed costs on your business.
        mrguyorama 2y ago
        >shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive. Except for a significant portion of the GDP of Fiji
- ViewTrick1002 2y ago
  The difference is who gets harmed. For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents because the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment. For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated. It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.
  - mgfist 2y ago
    Better to compare to fossil fuels, which kill far more people and animals both directly (eg. explosions) and indirectly (emissions).
    - mythrwy 2y ago
      100,000 people dying one at a time over the course of a decade seems to have a lower public relations impact then 1000 people dying in a once-in-a-century spectacularly tragic accident. Even though the total casualties are higher. Fentanyl is a prime example. I believe (from memory) over 100,000 people die of it each year in the in the US. Everyone knows it's a problem. We should "do something". But, we don't. Nobody cares enough (except as a platitude come election time). However if 1000 people died in a bomb attack (or similar) it would be top news for weeks and they would be scrambling the military and make us take our wedding rings off for scanning at airports.
      - wordpad25 2y ago
        It's also who is impacted, right, Fentanyl deaths are self inflicted
        mythrwy 2y ago
        True. Maybe substitute car accidents. If 10% of people who died in auto accidents each year were to perish in one horrible spectacular event it probably would be "transformative" as far as public policy.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  The evidence of safety isn't the issue it's that nuclear accidents however rare have huge implications so stick in people's minds. We're bad, mentally, at appreciating low level dangers that are diffuse like minor pollutants which kill slowly or degrade people's health over time. What does stick in our minds well are singular big events like terror attacks, Chernobyl or Deep Water Horizon. Even our legal systems address singular events better than low level harms because it's harder to deflect blame because the damages are so immediately identifiable; Fukushima and Chernobyl destroyed their closest cities and areas overnight in ways that they'll likely never recover from and the effects of their poisons are rapidly identifiable.
- Kon5ole 2y ago
  This is a common argument in discussions about nuclear power but it doesn't work. You can't claim that nuclear is safe based on history, you have to consider the potential. A gun is dangerous even if it hasn't killed anyone yet. We know that if you point the gun at someone and pull the trigger they die, hence it is considered dangerous. We knew this even before the first gun killed the first human. Similarly, we know that nuclear power plants can cause immense disasters in a worst case scenario, even though it hasn't happened yet.
  - LorenPechtel 2y ago
    The thing is we do know it can't happen. We had Chernobyl. It's the worst case for a runaway reactor. Did it cross the prompt critical line or not--I don't think this will ever be resolved but it doesn't matter. We saw what happens--power level through the roof, destroys the reactor, other than the radioactivity it didn't do much. It's also the worst case for a China Syndrome. Nothing happened, as a lot of the more sane people thought would be the case. The molten reactor core burned through the reactor floor but was no longer in an ideal configuration and thus no longer critical. (And it could not be critical as the moderators were destroyed, which would inherently take it subcritical.) Note that this is inevitable--the margin between critical (below which you don't get the heat to burn into the ground) and prompt critical (where it destroys itself and thus ceases melting) is very narrow. It's also the worst case for a radioactive spill. No containment dome, fire in the reactor contents. The supposed thousands of radiation deaths simply did not show up. We have about 90 that are clearly caused by the accident. We have a huge variation in the estimated numbers since then, the first that looks reasonable is the UN estimate of 4,000--to a large degree in the people Russia sent in to deal with the situation without proper safety equipment. For comparison the largest coal disaster was 1,500 dead--and I doubt you've ever heard of it.
    - Kon5ole 2y ago
      >The thing is we do know it can't happen. We had Chernobyl. >It's the worst case for a runaway reactor. No it was not. The worst case would have been that anyone involved with Chernobyl ran for their lives and abandoned the plant leaving it to burn to the ground, no sarcophagus was built, nobody spent billions on treating farmland all over europe, nobody destroyed animals unsuitable for human consumption for decades and nobody started screening for the excess cancer cases (which occurred everywhere in europe as well as behind the iron curtain) leaving them untreated until too late. None of that happened, luckily, but it could. Instead people gave their lives at the scene and others have worked their entire careers since to prevent Chernobyl from actually becoming a "worst case scenario". It is also a mistake to think that Chernobyl is a disaster in the past, it is not over yet. The latest sarcophagus was built not even a decade ago at a cost of over 2 billion USD. Why do you suppose that was deemed necessary? Also, it is currently in a warzone.
foxyv 2y ago
I think the biggest advantage to such a reactor is that it solves two major issues in nuclear power. Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt. You are right though that you will never win the safety argument. Nuclear has become entrenched in our culture as a world ending bugbear. Meanwhile the actual possibility of world ending climate change is just scooting along while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines.
- matrix2003 2y ago
  It’s not quite that simple, though. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be extremely geologically stable, and people still couldn’t swallow that pill. You still need some level of containment along with environmental studies and the additional complexity of excavating a large underground cavern. Even then, someone will be concerned (possibly rightfully so) about groundwater contamination. Fracking is a prime example of how connected that all can be.
  - foxyv 2y ago
    The problem with Yucca Mountain wasn't just the fact that they were storing waste there so much as the transportation of the waste through towns and cities. In this case, once the waste is created it is already in place to dispose of a mile underground solving another issue.
    - blueant 2y ago
      Mostly NIMBY problems that apply for the repository apply for transportation, but in lesser scale. Yucca was not as dry or geological stable as initially thought, and the requirements for "permanent" disposal are very stringent, so Yucca is not considered anymore for long-term storage.
      - foxyv 2y ago
        I think the closer comparison would not be Yucca Mountain so much as deep bore hole research. You could essentially use the same equipment for boring your reactor hole to create disposal pits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text=Deep%20borehole%20disposal%20(DBD)%20is,that%20are%20excavated%20like%20mines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text....
TrexArms 2y ago
We don't build nukes because of cost. Anything else is propaganda.
- matrix2003 2y ago
  It may be slightly different that other forms of energy, because a large part of nuclear’s cost is regulatory compliance and political buy-in.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    The costs are not really due to regulations. They are because the construction industry is not exactly known for quality. We know how to design safe nuclear reactors. We just can't build them cost-effectively, because there is always some subsubsubsubcontractor that doesn't bother doing things by the book. Then an inspector notices that something is wrong and orders it dismantled and rebuilt. And this will be iterated until everyone manages to do the right thing at the same time.
    - matrix2003 2y ago
      Yeah, I guess that’s a large part of what I meant. It’s a space where you can’t cut corners.
- exe34 2y ago
  the cost is because of the never ending redtape and legislation around safety. every design is obsolete by the time it's built because there's a new regulation that must be observed - so we never achieved economies of scale.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Not true, at least not in Germany and Japan.
- datadeft 2y ago
  Why do we close down working nuclear power plants?
laweijfmvo 2y ago
Maybe when the "cold war generation" starts dying and is no longer the majority of politicians and voter bases, we'll get nuclear power
- layer8 2y ago
  Unless and until someone starts to use nuclear weapons again.
dist-epoch 2y ago
Yeah, the safety is so well engineered that accidents like Fukushima literally can't happen.
DrBazza 2y ago
> The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle. You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that. Meanwhile fossil fuels have killed tens of millions of people, billions of animals, and changed the climate. All directly or indirectly. Somehow, it's a version of the quote "Kill one man, and you're a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you're a conqueror", a few deaths due to Chernobyl, and people are focused on it. But those dead miners? Or those old people with lung disease? Or those thousands of miles of bleached, dead coral? Where's the outrage for that?
- cm2187 2y ago
  The energy that killed the most directly is hydro electricity. When a dam fails, it kills thousands to hundreds of thousands.
  - DrBazza 2y ago
    "Directly", perhaps. But hydro is still responsible for far fewer deaths than gas, oil, or coal: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
  - butlike 2y ago
    While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere or water which sparks conversations about global catastrophic disaster
    - troupo 2y ago
      > the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere Why are we still building coal plants then?
    - cesarb 2y ago
      > While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles Another way to put it: if the worst case happens, and a dam breaks and floods a large area, you can immediately go there and walk all over the damaged area with little more protection than a pair of sturdy boots. The worst you'd find would be things like transformer oil and some generator lubricants.
Kon5ole 2y ago
>Existing nuclear reactors are already extremely safe The perceived safety is the result of being operated by highly trained and vetted personnel 24/7/365 for decades on end. In actual fact nuclear reactors are extremely dangerous.
- 7952 2y ago
  And those personnel are really expensive.
- lnwlebjel 2y ago
  On thing I never see in these discussions is the toll on workers via radiation exposure. I worked at a nuclear plant in the 1990s and the exposure allowed to outage workers who worked six months a year was something like 5 REM, or 50yrs off radiation in 6 months. Are these deaths included in the statistics? It appears not - part of the issue undoubtedly is causal attribution to a cancer that occurs many years later. A cursory search of the literature suggests that not a lot of work has been done on this.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Are you calculating under LNT (Linear No Threshold)? Otherwise unless the rate is spiky it might be fine.
  - chickenbig 2y ago
    You went from dose to questioning whether their deaths are included. Did you have knowledge that there were there an abnormal number of deaths among the outage workers? 5 Rem is 50 mSv; the Wikipedia Sievert page lists this as "U.S. 10 C.F.R. § 20.1201(a)(1)(i) occupational dose limit, total effective dose equivalent, and the global average background radiation dose is 2.4 mSv/a, so ~20 years worth of background radiation.
jmyeet 2y ago
Define "safe". We've built less than a thousand commercial reactors ever and we've had multiple incidents where the impact will be felt for decades if not centuries. Nuclear advocates hand-wave away Chernobyl ("because Soviets") like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? Over $100 billion has been spent on the clean up and compensation so far, with the ultimate cost to approach $1 trillion, require tech that hasn't been invented yet and will take decades if not a century or more [1] And for what? The highest LCOE of any power source used for mass power generation. Now this idea (Deep Fission) is an interesting one. It's basically a take on geothermal where instead of relying on natural heating (eg from lava) you basically just use a small reactor. If anything goes wrong, you just bury the whole thing. This requires some more thought about what the failure modes look like and some analysis on what the cost of power is. It is an interesting idea though. [1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fukushima-cleanup-costs-swell-with-no-end-in-sight https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? One is an accident, the other is a natural disaster. Most countries don’t have earthquakes and tsunamis, so it’s not relevant. But more to your point, if we paid fair compensation to everyone harmed by fossil fuels, I doubt would it cost any less.
  - natmaka 2y ago
    All accidents are due to some error (human). A tsunami isn't the sole way to trigger an accident as there is an infinity potential human errors enabling a series of minor incidents leading to a disaster, nor will it always trigger one: another nuclear plant, closer to the tsunami epicenter than Fukushima was, didn't suffer much ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... ). Therefore the challenge is: "don't let any room for any human error: design, build, exploit and maintain perfectly" and this is clearly impossible. Another way is: use an approach (wind, solar...) not letting any room for a disaster.
darby_nine 2y ago
> It also provides the argument that wanting to bury reactors 1 mile deep shows how incredibly dangerous nuclear power really is. If this were true we would have buried coal plants decades ago
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  It's "funny" how much nuclear has to plan and prepare and care about its waste while Petrochemical companies get to just pump most of their waste, including radioactivity and mercury, directly into the air you breathe. Ain't it funny how only the companies who aren't already rich have to do the stuff that protects people.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Sorry, can't make that argument after Fukushima unless there is foolproof passive safety like a LFTR plug. A problem with organizationally managed safety is just the human error problem, and two that human organizations come to resent and undermine regulations, particularly at the management level. This attitude is rite in the nuclear industry in America, and similarly from what I can tell from tepco management of Fukushima. Nuclear needs a scalable price competitive meltdown proof full fuel usage reactor. I think LFTR, materials issues aside, is the solution, but possibly even that won't be able to compete long term with solar wind even with miraculous materials engineering.
thmsths 2y ago
Seriously this! Nuclear is held to the impossible standard of proving that no one will be harmed by it for the next 4000 years, as evidenced by some pointless bike shedding exercises like designing warning signs that can outlast civilization.
- taskforcegemini 2y ago
  yes, who cares about the generations that come after us. We used to dump barrels with this kind of waste into the sea and nothing bad ever happened with those.
natmaka 2y ago
> are already extremely safe This is debatable. What is pretty sure is that a field of wind turbines or solar panels just cannot trigger any disaster involving durably dangerous (and difficult to recover) stuff spread on a large geographic zone. > they still can't be built because of safety concerns Source? The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville Short version: it is very late and costs way more than planned, and the most prominent causes weren't "safety concerns" even if the Fukushima disaster happened during this project, and therefore added new requirements which, while non-negligible in absolute terms, were very minor causes of problems for this project. One of the main causes is known: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
snthpy 2y ago
Kinda. I'm in favor of using more nuclear power but I am concerned that the current designs (all?) require active cooling, even post power down, for extended periods of time. We saw with Fukushima how that can go wrong. How do you deal with the situation where the electric grid goes down for multiple days or weeks for whatever reason?
rmbyrro 2y ago
The main political obstacle isn't even reactor safety, but technology control. Nuclear powers don't want to facilitate other countries joining their club. Popularizing nuclear reactors will, as it did with India.
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
They can't be built because they take far too long to build and are uneconomic. The fuel supply is also geopolitically insecure. We're long past the time when the biggest criticism of nuclear power was its safety record.

manvillej 2y ago

there is pretty strong evidence that Nuclear energy is significantly safer than most energy production with the exception of wind & solar which are similarly as safe. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

jayd16 2y ago
Well ok, they're as safe as long as we're extremely vigilant but does it then follow that we should be more relaxed about safety concerns? I don't think showing the stats is all that convincing to people when the worst case scenario is so impactful. My guess is we'll need to see newer safer designs before public options shift.
- foxyv 2y ago
  I would not describe the current nuclear power regulatory system as "Extremely Vigilant." More like "Extremely Litigious." I think lawyers have made more on nuclear power than concrete companies and nuclear engineers combined.
tourmalinetaco 2y ago
And unlike wind and solar can be used on-demand akin to coal, making it an extremely attractive option to run alongside renewables, especially year round. Solar panels are literally useless 75% of the year in at least 1/3rd of the US and we still rely on coal because of that. Sure, batteries may exist in the future that can handle solar, and maybe panels will exist in the future that will be more efficient, but we have technology now that can outpace renewables consistently and on-demand.
- ViewTrick1002 2y ago
  Which means nuclear and renewables are the worst possible companions imaginable. Nuclear and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands. They are fundamentally incompatible. For every passing year more existing reactors will spend more time turned off because the power they produce is too expensive. Let alone insanely expensive new builds. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-prices-negative-france-solar-panel-wind-renewable-nuclear-green-2024-6 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-... Batteries are here now, and delivering nuclear scale energy day in and day out in California. https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
  - exe34 2y ago
    do you happen to know why we can't dump the energy into something like smelting, desalination or other heavy industry?
    - amonon 2y ago
      I am uniformed on this, but those industries likely take time to scale up. A large scale desalination plant requires a significant amount of infrastructure.
      - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
        The question is also: Where are you building it? No one will want anything from your desalination plant in Norway, and shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive. The next problem is energy cost vs. duty cycle. The less you run due to only utilizing cheap prices the higher the impact of fixed costs on your business.
        mrguyorama 2y ago
        >shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive. Except for a significant portion of the GDP of Fiji
ViewTrick1002 2y ago
The difference is who gets harmed. For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents because the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment. For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated. It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.
- mgfist 2y ago
  Better to compare to fossil fuels, which kill far more people and animals both directly (eg. explosions) and indirectly (emissions).
  - mythrwy 2y ago
    100,000 people dying one at a time over the course of a decade seems to have a lower public relations impact then 1000 people dying in a once-in-a-century spectacularly tragic accident. Even though the total casualties are higher. Fentanyl is a prime example. I believe (from memory) over 100,000 people die of it each year in the in the US. Everyone knows it's a problem. We should "do something". But, we don't. Nobody cares enough (except as a platitude come election time). However if 1000 people died in a bomb attack (or similar) it would be top news for weeks and they would be scrambling the military and make us take our wedding rings off for scanning at airports.
    - wordpad25 2y ago
      It's also who is impacted, right, Fentanyl deaths are self inflicted
      - mythrwy 2y ago
        True. Maybe substitute car accidents. If 10% of people who died in auto accidents each year were to perish in one horrible spectacular event it probably would be "transformative" as far as public policy.
rtkwe 2y ago
The evidence of safety isn't the issue it's that nuclear accidents however rare have huge implications so stick in people's minds. We're bad, mentally, at appreciating low level dangers that are diffuse like minor pollutants which kill slowly or degrade people's health over time. What does stick in our minds well are singular big events like terror attacks, Chernobyl or Deep Water Horizon. Even our legal systems address singular events better than low level harms because it's harder to deflect blame because the damages are so immediately identifiable; Fukushima and Chernobyl destroyed their closest cities and areas overnight in ways that they'll likely never recover from and the effects of their poisons are rapidly identifiable.
Kon5ole 2y ago
This is a common argument in discussions about nuclear power but it doesn't work. You can't claim that nuclear is safe based on history, you have to consider the potential. A gun is dangerous even if it hasn't killed anyone yet. We know that if you point the gun at someone and pull the trigger they die, hence it is considered dangerous. We knew this even before the first gun killed the first human. Similarly, we know that nuclear power plants can cause immense disasters in a worst case scenario, even though it hasn't happened yet.
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  The thing is we do know it can't happen. We had Chernobyl. It's the worst case for a runaway reactor. Did it cross the prompt critical line or not--I don't think this will ever be resolved but it doesn't matter. We saw what happens--power level through the roof, destroys the reactor, other than the radioactivity it didn't do much. It's also the worst case for a China Syndrome. Nothing happened, as a lot of the more sane people thought would be the case. The molten reactor core burned through the reactor floor but was no longer in an ideal configuration and thus no longer critical. (And it could not be critical as the moderators were destroyed, which would inherently take it subcritical.) Note that this is inevitable--the margin between critical (below which you don't get the heat to burn into the ground) and prompt critical (where it destroys itself and thus ceases melting) is very narrow. It's also the worst case for a radioactive spill. No containment dome, fire in the reactor contents. The supposed thousands of radiation deaths simply did not show up. We have about 90 that are clearly caused by the accident. We have a huge variation in the estimated numbers since then, the first that looks reasonable is the UN estimate of 4,000--to a large degree in the people Russia sent in to deal with the situation without proper safety equipment. For comparison the largest coal disaster was 1,500 dead--and I doubt you've ever heard of it.
  - Kon5ole 2y ago
    >The thing is we do know it can't happen. We had Chernobyl. >It's the worst case for a runaway reactor. No it was not. The worst case would have been that anyone involved with Chernobyl ran for their lives and abandoned the plant leaving it to burn to the ground, no sarcophagus was built, nobody spent billions on treating farmland all over europe, nobody destroyed animals unsuitable for human consumption for decades and nobody started screening for the excess cancer cases (which occurred everywhere in europe as well as behind the iron curtain) leaving them untreated until too late. None of that happened, luckily, but it could. Instead people gave their lives at the scene and others have worked their entire careers since to prevent Chernobyl from actually becoming a "worst case scenario". It is also a mistake to think that Chernobyl is a disaster in the past, it is not over yet. The latest sarcophagus was built not even a decade ago at a cost of over 2 billion USD. Why do you suppose that was deemed necessary? Also, it is currently in a warzone.

foxyv 2y ago

I think the biggest advantage to such a reactor is that it solves two major issues in nuclear power. Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt. You are right though that you will never win the safety argument. Nuclear has become entrenched in our culture as a world ending bugbear. Meanwhile the actual possibility of world ending climate change is just scooting along while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines.

matrix2003 2y ago
It’s not quite that simple, though. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be extremely geologically stable, and people still couldn’t swallow that pill. You still need some level of containment along with environmental studies and the additional complexity of excavating a large underground cavern. Even then, someone will be concerned (possibly rightfully so) about groundwater contamination. Fracking is a prime example of how connected that all can be.
- foxyv 2y ago
  The problem with Yucca Mountain wasn't just the fact that they were storing waste there so much as the transportation of the waste through towns and cities. In this case, once the waste is created it is already in place to dispose of a mile underground solving another issue.
  - blueant 2y ago
    Mostly NIMBY problems that apply for the repository apply for transportation, but in lesser scale. Yucca was not as dry or geological stable as initially thought, and the requirements for "permanent" disposal are very stringent, so Yucca is not considered anymore for long-term storage.
    - foxyv 2y ago
      I think the closer comparison would not be Yucca Mountain so much as deep bore hole research. You could essentially use the same equipment for boring your reactor hole to create disposal pits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text=Deep%20borehole%20disposal%20(DBD)%20is,that%20are%20excavated%20like%20mines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text....

TrexArms 2y ago

We don't build nukes because of cost. Anything else is propaganda.

matrix2003 2y ago
It may be slightly different that other forms of energy, because a large part of nuclear’s cost is regulatory compliance and political buy-in.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  The costs are not really due to regulations. They are because the construction industry is not exactly known for quality. We know how to design safe nuclear reactors. We just can't build them cost-effectively, because there is always some subsubsubsubcontractor that doesn't bother doing things by the book. Then an inspector notices that something is wrong and orders it dismantled and rebuilt. And this will be iterated until everyone manages to do the right thing at the same time.
  - matrix2003 2y ago
    Yeah, I guess that’s a large part of what I meant. It’s a space where you can’t cut corners.
exe34 2y ago
the cost is because of the never ending redtape and legislation around safety. every design is obsolete by the time it's built because there's a new regulation that must be observed - so we never achieved economies of scale.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Not true, at least not in Germany and Japan.
datadeft 2y ago
Why do we close down working nuclear power plants?

laweijfmvo 2y ago

Maybe when the "cold war generation" starts dying and is no longer the majority of politicians and voter bases, we'll get nuclear power

layer8 2y ago
Unless and until someone starts to use nuclear weapons again.

dist-epoch 2y ago

Yeah, the safety is so well engineered that accidents like Fukushima literally can't happen.

DrBazza 2y ago

> The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle. You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that. Meanwhile fossil fuels have killed tens of millions of people, billions of animals, and changed the climate. All directly or indirectly. Somehow, it's a version of the quote "Kill one man, and you're a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you're a conqueror", a few deaths due to Chernobyl, and people are focused on it. But those dead miners? Or those old people with lung disease? Or those thousands of miles of bleached, dead coral? Where's the outrage for that?

cm2187 2y ago
The energy that killed the most directly is hydro electricity. When a dam fails, it kills thousands to hundreds of thousands.
- DrBazza 2y ago
  "Directly", perhaps. But hydro is still responsible for far fewer deaths than gas, oil, or coal: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- butlike 2y ago
  While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere or water which sparks conversations about global catastrophic disaster
  - troupo 2y ago
    > the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere Why are we still building coal plants then?
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles Another way to put it: if the worst case happens, and a dam breaks and floods a large area, you can immediately go there and walk all over the damaged area with little more protection than a pair of sturdy boots. The worst you'd find would be things like transformer oil and some generator lubricants.

Kon5ole 2y ago

>Existing nuclear reactors are already extremely safe The perceived safety is the result of being operated by highly trained and vetted personnel 24/7/365 for decades on end. In actual fact nuclear reactors are extremely dangerous.

7952 2y ago
And those personnel are really expensive.
lnwlebjel 2y ago
On thing I never see in these discussions is the toll on workers via radiation exposure. I worked at a nuclear plant in the 1990s and the exposure allowed to outage workers who worked six months a year was something like 5 REM, or 50yrs off radiation in 6 months. Are these deaths included in the statistics? It appears not - part of the issue undoubtedly is causal attribution to a cancer that occurs many years later. A cursory search of the literature suggests that not a lot of work has been done on this.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Are you calculating under LNT (Linear No Threshold)? Otherwise unless the rate is spiky it might be fine.
- chickenbig 2y ago
  You went from dose to questioning whether their deaths are included. Did you have knowledge that there were there an abnormal number of deaths among the outage workers? 5 Rem is 50 mSv; the Wikipedia Sievert page lists this as "U.S. 10 C.F.R. § 20.1201(a)(1)(i) occupational dose limit, total effective dose equivalent, and the global average background radiation dose is 2.4 mSv/a, so ~20 years worth of background radiation.

jmyeet 2y ago

Define "safe". We've built less than a thousand commercial reactors ever and we've had multiple incidents where the impact will be felt for decades if not centuries. Nuclear advocates hand-wave away Chernobyl ("because Soviets") like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? Over $100 billion has been spent on the clean up and compensation so far, with the ultimate cost to approach $1 trillion, require tech that hasn't been invented yet and will take decades if not a century or more [1] And for what? The highest LCOE of any power source used for mass power generation. Now this idea (Deep Fission) is an interesting one. It's basically a take on geothermal where instead of relying on natural heating (eg from lava) you basically just use a small reactor. If anything goes wrong, you just bury the whole thing. This requires some more thought about what the failure modes look like and some analysis on what the cost of power is. It is an interesting idea though. [1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fukushima-cleanup-costs-swell-with-no-end-in-sight https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? One is an accident, the other is a natural disaster. Most countries don’t have earthquakes and tsunamis, so it’s not relevant. But more to your point, if we paid fair compensation to everyone harmed by fossil fuels, I doubt would it cost any less.
- natmaka 2y ago
  All accidents are due to some error (human). A tsunami isn't the sole way to trigger an accident as there is an infinity potential human errors enabling a series of minor incidents leading to a disaster, nor will it always trigger one: another nuclear plant, closer to the tsunami epicenter than Fukushima was, didn't suffer much ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... ). Therefore the challenge is: "don't let any room for any human error: design, build, exploit and maintain perfectly" and this is clearly impossible. Another way is: use an approach (wind, solar...) not letting any room for a disaster.

darby_nine 2y ago

> It also provides the argument that wanting to bury reactors 1 mile deep shows how incredibly dangerous nuclear power really is. If this were true we would have buried coal plants decades ago

mrguyorama 2y ago
It's "funny" how much nuclear has to plan and prepare and care about its waste while Petrochemical companies get to just pump most of their waste, including radioactivity and mercury, directly into the air you breathe. Ain't it funny how only the companies who aren't already rich have to do the stuff that protects people.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Sorry, can't make that argument after Fukushima unless there is foolproof passive safety like a LFTR plug. A problem with organizationally managed safety is just the human error problem, and two that human organizations come to resent and undermine regulations, particularly at the management level. This attitude is rite in the nuclear industry in America, and similarly from what I can tell from tepco management of Fukushima. Nuclear needs a scalable price competitive meltdown proof full fuel usage reactor. I think LFTR, materials issues aside, is the solution, but possibly even that won't be able to compete long term with solar wind even with miraculous materials engineering.

thmsths 2y ago

Seriously this! Nuclear is held to the impossible standard of proving that no one will be harmed by it for the next 4000 years, as evidenced by some pointless bike shedding exercises like designing warning signs that can outlast civilization.

taskforcegemini 2y ago
yes, who cares about the generations that come after us. We used to dump barrels with this kind of waste into the sea and nothing bad ever happened with those.

natmaka 2y ago

> are already extremely safe This is debatable. What is pretty sure is that a field of wind turbines or solar panels just cannot trigger any disaster involving durably dangerous (and difficult to recover) stuff spread on a large geographic zone. > they still can't be built because of safety concerns Source? The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville Short version: it is very late and costs way more than planned, and the most prominent causes weren't "safety concerns" even if the Fukushima disaster happened during this project, and therefore added new requirements which, while non-negligible in absolute terms, were very minor causes of problems for this project. One of the main causes is known: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

snthpy 2y ago

Kinda. I'm in favor of using more nuclear power but I am concerned that the current designs (all?) require active cooling, even post power down, for extended periods of time. We saw with Fukushima how that can go wrong. How do you deal with the situation where the electric grid goes down for multiple days or weeks for whatever reason?

rmbyrro 2y ago

The main political obstacle isn't even reactor safety, but technology control. Nuclear powers don't want to facilitate other countries joining their club. Popularizing nuclear reactors will, as it did with India.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago

They can't be built because they take far too long to build and are uneconomic. The fuel supply is also geopolitically insecure. We're long past the time when the biggest criticism of nuclear power was its safety record.