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Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

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

#301

Post by blackguardx »

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…

You still need to provide base load capacity. Wind and Solar can't do that. Hydroelectric can, but can't be put everywhere and has its own environmental impact story.

Grid-scale storage is one possibility, but more work needs to be done to make it viable. For technologies that exist today, nuclear looks the best for base load capacity.

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

#302

Post by iheartmemcache »

CydeWeys wrote: post #210
bmcusick wrote: post #202

Ctrl+F "Solar", "Wind". No matches found. That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list? Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off. Most solar installation these days…

I'd be surprised if the biggest source of injury from solar wasn't from installers falling off roofs. You can't count all of those injuries against solar itself, though, as roofing injuries will happen regardless, and putting up solar panels greatly extends the life of a roof, so the amortized total injury to installers doesn't go up as much.

Probably true, though for what its worth OSHA[0] (yeah yeah "nanny state" and all) dictates pretty clearly the federal obligations on training and equipping roof workers with full body harnesses, lanyards, and proper anchorage points to effectively eliminate fall related injuries. Whether or not the employe(e|r) adheres to these regulations[1] is another issue, but the risk can effectively be mitigated almost entirely (the "total fall distance" is to be no more than 6 feet with a safety factor to the ground of no less than 3 feet)[2].

RE: Grandparent - the production of solar panels isn't as "green" as you may think. See: IEEE[3].

RE: Wind - The standard horizontal-axis blade design (i.e. what Siemens and other major commercial institutions offer) have ecological impacts on wildlife[4].

====

[0] Forgive the US centric analysis.

[1] I.e., cell-tower deaths are notorious for these sorts of violations -- both due to the endemic sub-sub-sub-contracting strategy that Verizon, et al, uses to distance themselves from the bad PR and litigation, as well as the employee these jobs tend to attract (risk takers/adrenaline junkies) who, even if given the proper gear will neglect to use it often due to machismo. Following full protocol, the injury risk decreases quite notably.

[2] https://www.osha.gov/Publications/OSHA3755.pdf

[3] http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-... Rare earth metals, processing with hydrofluoric acid, all the usual suspects one would expect. And this isn't a Koch-brothers funded gas/oil funded piece of propaganda. For goodness sakes, this is the IEEE -- about as pro-green (while keeping the science legitimate) as you can get.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... - Just playing devils advocate here, offshore wind is basically the closest to a panacea IMO. There are events where 100% of the Dutch utility grid is powered entirely by their offshore wind. Their trains are 100% 'green' too (see: https://futurism.com/all-dutch-trains-now-run-on-100-wind-po...)

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

#303

Post by thinkcontext »

m0skit0 wrote: post #234
thinkcontext wrote: post #218

I find this line of reasoning a little misleading. Looking at nuclear's safety record isn't entirely the correct measure, its that the potential consequences are so extreme. Consider Fukushima. In some ways Japan got lucky, it was entirely possible that an additional reactor on the site could have melted down and the holding pond could have breached. Because of this they were having to consider evacuating areas on th…

Got lucky? I think the opposite: Chernobyl was unlucky. I mean, you're basically calling all these nuclear incidents "lucky". That doesn't statistically hold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...

Imagine you were behind the scenes of the Fukushima crisis. You have to begin planning for the evacuation of the outskirts of Tokyo because you have been told that the situation on the plant site is uncontrolled, there have been multiple meltdowns and explosions and there's the possibility for things to get worse. At that point the game has changed around the calculation of risk. A few days later the situation is declared under control. How do you feel? I can think of no appropriate feeling aside from "lucky".

The point is that the error bars around nuclear power operation are so large that perceptions of risk are not the same as for conventional power.

Its interesting to think about the role of luck for Chernobyl. A grossly unsafe design combined with a bunch of incompetents performing live tests with multiple safety systems disabled, not much luck there. Was there luck in consequences of what followed? Possibly.

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

#304

Post by martinald »

mikeash wrote: post #192
dfox wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is problem that happens in the German/European electrical grid right now, not at some point in future.

Right, but in the context of a world where 30-40% of the grid is solar/wind, it's easy.

It's not. Germany is having to do this right now - hitting 30-40% and it's really expensive.

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

#305

Post by ajross »

dfox wrote: post #206
padseeker wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Solar, wind and hydro are energy sources that depend on weather and cannot be regulated except by throwing the generated energy away, thus with today's energy grids cannot be used as majority of the generating capacity. On the other hand biomass can be stored and used according to demand. Pumped storage is in the grand scheme of things horrendously inefficient in essentially any metric one cares about (energy efficie…

Those are still not reasons to exclude them in a list of "safest major power sources".

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

#306

Post by LeifCarrotson »

adamsea wrote: post #168
nnfy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> sleazy ever since the accident.

Do you mean "even"?

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

#308

Post by bildung »

ethanwillis wrote: post #86
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.

One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced? When I was reading about this IIRC all of the nuclear waste we have produced in the US over the life of our nuclear programs could be stored in an area the size of a football field. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

> One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced?

A lot of the generated waste is not the used up fuel itself, but contaminated construction materials etc. So lower radiation, but still not something you have to bury somewhere. In the region I live in an old nuclear plant gets deconstructed for over two decades now because its tricky to seperate uncontaminated from contanimated material. The whole deconstruction costs an estimated €5 billion by the way.

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

#309

Post by saagarjha »

xg15 wrote: post #56
simias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well because in the end the amount of power is what matters? I'm not sure I understand your point. If you replace nuclear with renewable (or the other way around) you'll have to produce the same amount of power, all other things being equal.

Yes, however this assumes that number of deaths of any technology would linearly scale with its energy output. e.g. if I built n times more wind turbines to match the energy output of nuclear energy then, according to this measure, I would also get n times the number of wind-power-related deaths. I see no basis for that assumption, especially as nuclear energy has known risks that e.g. wind power doesn't.

> I see no basis for that assumption, especially as nuclear energy has known risks that e.g. wind power doesn't.

But why do the risks matter? One would expect that two turbines or nuclear power plants would kill twice as many people, on average…

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

#310

Post by outworlder »

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.

Well, would be sufficiently safe. Just not in Fukushima.

It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok.

Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis.

Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generators brought by trucks due to some electrical incompatibility.

Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.

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