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

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

#161

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

jussij wrote: post #140

yellowapple wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's fishing you want, the water reservoirs for nuclear power plants make for good spots. I used to live over by the Rancho Seco plant, and its backup water reservoir (and the surrounding land) is still maintained as a public park even decades after the plant shut down (and was maintained as such even when the plant was operational, from what I understand). Good trout over there.

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

#162

Post by 0xffff2 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #97

anotherbrownguy wrote: post #52

Isn't nuclear hysteria created mostly by American CleanTech industry? Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?

Solar doesn't have to be reliable; it just has to charge a battery (or some other means of energy storage) which is reliable. Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.

>Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.

At the risk of being even more pedantic, solar is fusion power, whereas "nuclear" in the common parlance refers specifically to fission.

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

#163

Post by datenwolf » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #116

the_gastropod wrote: post #96

It appears that these figures take into account _just_ energy production. They don't seem include the mining, enriching, construction of reactors, disposal of waste, decommissioning reactors, etc. When mining low-grade ore (which isn't uncommon, and is becoming more command as high-grade ore becomes more scarce), nuclear plants are as inefficient as coal-fired plants [1]. Nuclear advocates tend to ignore the full sys…

What are the sources of CO2 for mining and all the rest? If it's electricity production then you're basically blaming nuclear for emissions from fossil fuel generation, since those would be much lower in an all-nuclear world. If it's transport then it's more justified, but when looking at how it could be in the future, transport can be electrified to close that loop.

It's mostly due to the chemistry required to liberate the Uranium from the ore. What you have in the ore is mostly Uranium oxides. You have to strip away those pesky oxygen atoms in order to further process the Uranium. And in that process quite the amount of CO2 is produced. Now keep in mind that this must be done to all the Uranium, before it undergoes enrichtment. So for every atom of U235 you get about 200 (give or take) atoms of U238 and you have to account for all of them on the chemical side of things.

It's not that much better with Throrium either.

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

#164

Post by mikeash » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #37

xg15 wrote: post #12

Can anyone explain to me why "deaths/tWh" is even a meaningful measure? Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power. I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.…

I'm only aware of two deaths specifically caused by wind power, when two engineers were caught on top of one when it caught fire. It's likely such a negligible number that it wouldn't even show up on the graph.

According to this, there are multiple fatal accidents in the wind power industry each year: http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf

Wikipedia's stats on energy production fatalities have wind being pretty decent, at 150 deaths per PWh (rooftop solar is 440, US hydro is 5, US nuclear is 0.01, and fossil fuels are in the thousands), but if the number is negligible it's only because wind power itself is negligible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

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

#165

Post by oconnor663 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

amluto wrote: post #152

padseeker wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fukushima was a boiling water reactor, which is not a good design. A good design would be passively safe, which more or less means that you can turn off the plant and walk away without a disaster occurring.

Were the safer designs available in 1971?

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

#166

Post by padseeker » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #158

padseeker wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are TOTALLY playing games. Solar and Wind are relatively young, but power generated by Water based dams have been around for decades, yet only biomass is mentioned. The omission is deliberate.

1. The world's available hydro resources are nearly tapped. 2. Hydro power generation is only second to coal in the number of people it killed. [1] 3. Hydro power generation is complete hell on the environment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...

Those are all valid points. But why were they skipped over? Why was solar and wind skipped over? It barely mentions them, pretends that they don't exist.

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

#167

Post by mikeash » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:59 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.

When you say "win," do you mean be worse? Because I think the others mean it as being better, and I'm getting confused.

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

#168

Post by adamsea » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

nnfy wrote: post #151

lispm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market&regulations for nuclear were set up. Government largely financed it and insures it. The large scale, the…

Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.

Your standard of safety does not sound appropriate for nuclear reactors. And, the decision not to spend the money to make Fukushima safer may well have been a craven, if not corrupt, one. TEPCO has been pretty sleazy ever since the accident.

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

#169

Post by PeCaN » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

padseeker wrote: post #139

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.

> I bet Fukushima was pretty damn safe, maybe one of the best nuclear power plants designed.

While it was an okay plant, they'd actually been warned about the emergency cooling system as early as 1967. Also, they ignored a 2008 study saying that their plant was vulnerable to tsunamis. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found that all the causes of the accident were foreseeable prior to 2011.

> The best designs cannot account for everything.

The common factor in nuclear accidents so far has been operator error, and it's true the best designs cannot completely account for that.

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

#170

Post by nnfy » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

amluto wrote: post #152

padseeker wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fukushima was a boiling water reactor, which is not a good design. A good design would be passively safe, which more or less means that you can turn off the plant and walk away without a disaster occurring.

"Good" design is ill defined. The fact that a design is riskier than an alternative does not immediately make it worse. Especially when safety can be engineered to arbitrary standards with enough money.