4 ms·

It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels o

It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms. See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats. I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

Retric 1y ago
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
- theptip 1y ago
  Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors. I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear. My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable. I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off. > Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said. > https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewable-energy-boom-breaks-records/104086640 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
    - mirddes 1y ago
      it would be unwise to put all of ones eggs in someone else's basket. having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?
      - bobthepanda 1y ago
        > "They're installing 1GW per month of pumped hydro storage," Mr Buckley said. Fun fact, pumped hydro was actually developed for nuclear originally in the 70s, since nuclear is a large source of power that is hard to ramp down during low demand periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
        eichin 1y ago
        Err, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlewood_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlewood_Lake was completed in 1928 (for electrical demand regulation.) Much older than nuclear...
        Retric 1y ago
        Which is kind of funny as they where storing energy from a hydroelectric power plant, so building a larger dam would have been way more energy efficient.
        bobthepanda 1y ago
        Connecticut isn’t very elevated so a dam at a higher level may not have been very practical.
        bobthepanda 1y ago
        My bad. It's still notable that the sixth largest one in the world was still developed for nuclear plants.
phs318u 1y ago
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
- stinkbeetle 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Injury_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
- IMTDb 1y ago
  This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm. A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
  - LinXitoW 1y ago
    Well, no, that's more down to nuclear fans constantly using the worst possible comparisons, and creating false dichotomies. The better comparison are renewables or natural gas, not an ancient technology literally everybody (outside of it's investors) agrees is bad and should go.
    - IMTDb 1y ago
      Nuclear sits just between wind (slightly more dangerous) and solar (slightly less dangerous) per unit of electricity production, all of them being much safer than hydro; and ridiculously safer than gas, oil and coal. It's a really, really safe option. Note that these number are a bit old and since then, installation of consumer solar has increased significantly. Installation of solar panels on consumer roofs is much more dangerous than installation of solar panels in solar plants, so death rate for solar are significantly underestimated. Meanwhile accident rates of plant construction (nuclear, solar or otherwise) keep dropping. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
7952 1y ago
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
- theptip 1y ago
  True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
  - 7952 1y ago
    And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model. As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.
    - theptip 1y ago
      I get your point and would be much more inclined to agree if we were talking about trying to hit a 3x risk increase. But we are talking about huge risk margins here, many OOMs. My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each. Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them. This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.
javcasas 1y ago
The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents. And then you have bad faith actors. No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they? No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they? No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they? Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right? None of that has never ever happened, right?
- Llamamoe 1y ago
  > The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents. This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible. Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels. Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
  - avianlyric 1y ago
    > This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible. Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years. But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power. Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated
Kon5ole 1y ago
You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
- MostlyStable 1y ago
  A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change. And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas. There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages. Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.
  - LinXitoW 1y ago
    If you did what nuclear fans did and tried to cover most/all of the load with nuclear, you would necessarily need to build more nuclear power plants, which esp. in Europe would automatically put them closer to population. That would automatically increase the lives lost from catastrophies.
  - Kon5ole 1y ago
    >A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here. But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming? China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference. Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time. (But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).
tonkinai 1y ago
Climate has never stopped changing since the day the earth was formed, that's why we are here. Keep it "under control" is a wild target.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  "All wooden boats always leak a little, so stopping people from drilling holes through the hull is a wild target." It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.
- tonkinai 1y ago
  I’d like to apologize. Realized that the wording in my comment wasn’t appropriate.

Retric 1y ago

None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.

theptip 1y ago
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors. I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear. My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable. I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off. > Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said. > https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewable-energy-boom-breaks-records/104086640 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
  - mirddes 1y ago
    it would be unwise to put all of ones eggs in someone else's basket. having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?
    - bobthepanda 1y ago
      > "They're installing 1GW per month of pumped hydro storage," Mr Buckley said. Fun fact, pumped hydro was actually developed for nuclear originally in the 70s, since nuclear is a large source of power that is hard to ramp down during low demand periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
      - eichin 1y ago
        Err, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlewood_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlewood_Lake was completed in 1928 (for electrical demand regulation.) Much older than nuclear...
        Retric 1y ago
        Which is kind of funny as they where storing energy from a hydroelectric power plant, so building a larger dam would have been way more energy efficient.
        bobthepanda 1y ago
        Connecticut isn’t very elevated so a dam at a higher level may not have been very practical.
        bobthepanda 1y ago
        My bad. It's still notable that the sixth largest one in the world was still developed for nuclear plants.

phs318u 1y ago

When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

stinkbeetle 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Injury_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
IMTDb 1y ago
This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm. A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
- LinXitoW 1y ago
  Well, no, that's more down to nuclear fans constantly using the worst possible comparisons, and creating false dichotomies. The better comparison are renewables or natural gas, not an ancient technology literally everybody (outside of it's investors) agrees is bad and should go.
  - IMTDb 1y ago
    Nuclear sits just between wind (slightly more dangerous) and solar (slightly less dangerous) per unit of electricity production, all of them being much safer than hydro; and ridiculously safer than gas, oil and coal. It's a really, really safe option. Note that these number are a bit old and since then, installation of consumer solar has increased significantly. Installation of solar panels on consumer roofs is much more dangerous than installation of solar panels in solar plants, so death rate for solar are significantly underestimated. Meanwhile accident rates of plant construction (nuclear, solar or otherwise) keep dropping. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

7952 1y ago

The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.

theptip 1y ago
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
- 7952 1y ago
  And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model. As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.
  - theptip 1y ago
    I get your point and would be much more inclined to agree if we were talking about trying to hit a 3x risk increase. But we are talking about huge risk margins here, many OOMs. My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each. Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them. This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.

javcasas 1y ago

The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents. And then you have bad faith actors. No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they? No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they? No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they? Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right? None of that has never ever happened, right?

Llamamoe 1y ago
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents. This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible. Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels. Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
- avianlyric 1y ago
  > This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible. Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years. But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power. Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated

Kon5ole 1y ago

You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.

MostlyStable 1y ago
A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change. And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas. There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages. Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.
- LinXitoW 1y ago
  If you did what nuclear fans did and tried to cover most/all of the load with nuclear, you would necessarily need to build more nuclear power plants, which esp. in Europe would automatically put them closer to population. That would automatically increase the lives lost from catastrophies.
- Kon5ole 1y ago
  >A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here. But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming? China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference. Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time. (But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).

tonkinai 1y ago

Climate has never stopped changing since the day the earth was formed, that's why we are here. Keep it "under control" is a wild target.

Terr_ 1y ago
"All wooden boats always leak a little, so stopping people from drilling holes through the hull is a wild target." It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.
tonkinai 1y ago
I’d like to apologize. Realized that the wording in my comment wasn’t appropriate.