Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest • Hacker News Board

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#131

Post by jessriedel » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

padseeker wrote: post #91

This is the year 2017 - This article deliberately skips over any consideration to Wind, Solar, etc. What kind of BULLSHIT excuse for journalism and scientific study is this? Who in the nuclear industry paid for this? I only read the first 3 paragraphs but I can already tell you this article is not worth your time. The article compares the statistics of energy sources, but all of the charts focus on fossil fuels. This…

What were the epic consequences of Fukushima? No one died of radiation poisoning, and the actuarial deaths from cancer in the future are going to be minuscule compared to the natural disaster the precipitated it, and in any case much smaller than from fossil fuels. Under any cost-benefit analysis, the primary negative impact of Fukushima was the absurd amount of money being spent on decommissioning, but this is an argument for more pragmatism, not historical evidence for the danger of nuclear power.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#132

Post by endorphone » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

padseeker wrote: post #91

This is the year 2017 - This article deliberately skips over any consideration to Wind, Solar, etc. What kind of BULLSHIT excuse for journalism and scientific study is this? Who in the nuclear industry paid for this? I only read the first 3 paragraphs but I can already tell you this article is not worth your time. The article compares the statistics of energy sources, but all of the charts focus on fossil fuels. This…

Even if we ignore the black swan events (which each time they happen we hear how it could never happen again, etc), nuclear has a long, sordid history of massive schedule, cost and operational expense overruns. Energy companies stopped building nuclear not because of those damn eco warriors, but because they had been jaded by project after project that cost multiples (or magnitudes) of estimates. It just isn't cost effective.

There are some places where nuclear makes more sense -- on a spacecraft, for instance -- but in most worldly cases it is no longer a competitive option.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#133

Post by martinald » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #72

My understanding, which is admittedly drawn from HN "napkin math" , is that at current prices for solar and wind, nuclear is a non-starter. That trend is only intensifying. It seems to me that nuclear could have been a good option, but because we've neglected it for so long, squashed innovation with regulations (not necessarily complaining that it didn't need the regulations!) it is uncompetitive economically and wil…

Solar and wind has a lot of 'negative externalities' though that are generally borne by the grid or other operators. I think the economics really work against it at high% penetration (30-40%+).

The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas.

This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar blips). This massively increases the capex of CCGT plants, as you're only producing rarely. This would get more and more extreme with more solar+wind penetration.

Another massive problem is solar+wind overproduction, which is really hard to solve and is starting to really hit the German, UK and California grids. On very sunny AND windy days you get massive energy overproduction. You then have to either:

a) Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out) b) Pay other (natgas, coal, nuclear, etc) operators to shut down, which can be very expensive c) Hope that negative electricity prices make more demand. This is unlikely to happen as industrial users can't switch on extra production quick enough to respond to this.

This is made worse by feed in tariffs being paid at any energy price, incentivizing solar+wind to continue generating even if electricity price is negative (say it is -€0.05kWh spot, but your FIT is €0.20/kWh, you are still going to produce as you will net 0.15euro per kWh.

The two 'solutions' which are often mentioned are battery storage and HVDC long distance transmission.

Battery storage is still horrendously expensive on a kWh basis. It may come down, but this is an enormous problem. I am personally not sure there is enough lithium left that is easily extracted to make this viable at the scale (billions of kWh) required.

HVDC connections I also am suspicious of - if it's sunny and windy in Germany, it is likely to also be the same 1000km away more or less.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#134

Post by mikeash » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #80

cjsuk wrote: post #14

Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.

I live in Idaho, and something that comes up fairly regularly is whether to accept more nuclear waste shipments to be stored at the https://www.inl.gov indefinitely. To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years.…

Meanwhile we have people fighting for coal power plants even though their waste disposal plan for things like mercury and arsenic is basically "dump it into the air and hope it doesn't kill too many people." And that stuff stays dangerous until the heat death of the universe, not merely thousands of years.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#135

Post by SubiculumCode » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

While the threats from coal and gas are regularly distributed through time (near constant rate of pollutants) the threat from nuclear energy are sporadic (ie meltdown, terror) and are thus harder to model and assess. Also agree with others that wind and solar are being discounted unfairly despite their growth factors.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#136

Post by futhey » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

payne92 wrote: post #13

I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…

I'm more afraid of having nuclear power plants now that we no longer have a thriving industry to support innovation and technological progress in the field. From my understanding, we stopped innovating in fission power plant design decades ago.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#137

Post by Koromix » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:46 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #64

People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater. In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go extremely wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions seem…

> People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater. [...] I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.

I could not agree more, but unfortunately global warming suffers from the exact opposite effect. The perceived risk appears very low to most people, because it is not very spectacular on human time scales. Even though it is by far the greatest existential risk we face.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#138

Post by lmm » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:46 PM UTC

y4mi wrote: post #102

lmm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either it will be local, or it will be dilute enough not to matter.

until it doesn't and it does. i'm sure that its safe to dump small amounts of radioactive material into the oceans, but if you start to build more reactors and dispose of all the waste into the ocean, the dilution will soon cease to be enough to offset a global ... disaster.

Nope. Unless we start importing uranium from off-planet, there just isn't enough material to make the whole planet significantly radioactive.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#139

Post by padseeker » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

payne92 wrote: post #13

I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…

I bet Fukushima was pretty damn safe, maybe one of the best nuclear power plants designed. The best designs cannot account for everything. There is always a risk of an accident, and you need consider not just accidental but intentional mishaps (dirty bombs).

Very low risk of something happening is not the same is the damaged caused if that risk becomes a reality.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#140

Post by jussij » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #85

jussij wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few measurable statictics that Nuclear would win hands down: * Square miles of uninhabitable land produced/tWh * Fishing industries destroyed/tWh * Agricultural land destroyed/tWh * Peoples displaced/tWh * Lethal toxic waste produced/tWh * Clean up cost/tWh

I'm pretty sure hydroelectric would actually win statistics 1, 3, and 4 "hands down". It'd also be a serious contender for 2 and 6. This is of course excluding coal, which I'm 92% sure makes even hydroelectric (let alone nuclear) look like a peaceful meadow full of fairies and butterflies by comparison.

All I can say is I'd rather be spending time catching fish on a lake created by a hydroelectric system, then cooking those fish at night in the camp site by the lake, than doing the same anywhere inside the Chernobyl 30 km Exclusion Zone or the Fukushima 20 km Exclusion Zone.