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

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

#421

Post by gruturo » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:11 PM UTC

catwell wrote: post #361

oconnor663 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were the safer designs available in 1971?

Yes. Pressurized water reactors are very old, they were developed around the same time as boiling water reactors, in the 50s. Their superior safety has been known for a long time as well, which is why all 58 French reactors active today are PWRs (and most of those in the US are as well). That being said, it is still probably a bad idea to put a power plant in a place which is known to be exposed to tsunami...

> That being said, it is still probably a bad idea to put a power plant in a place which is known to be exposed to tsunami...

...Especially in the country which originated the word tsunami

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

#422

Post by BinaryIdiot » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:14 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #197

Before Chernobyl blew up, nuclear energy proponents promised us, nuclear energy was safe. When Chernobyl blew up, it was obviously a stupid Soviet design, with stupid operating personnel. But now we've got new reactors, they are safe! Nothing could ever happen! Then Fukushima blew up. That was obviously okay, because it was a Tsunami in conjunction with a few other improbable acts, and we obviously can't expect the n…

This reasoning is really closed minded and nonsensical. I've never seen the literature where people said "they are safe! Nothing could ever happen!". In fact melt downs are in many hollywood movies so I'm not sure how anyone could ever get this narrative.

Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima never "blew up". There are myths that many still believe today that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb (it can't). You seem to be attempting to stroke that fear with your wording whereas what you really mean is "melted down" or "failed".

Regardless, each generation of nuclear power plant is safer than the last. Some of the newest designs require reactions to be explicitly maintained and when that stops or fails it stops the reaction. What you seem to be suggesting is that, because there were past failures that have caused damage to surrounding areas and people, that we should never try to make further progress.

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

#423

Post by MR4D » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:14 PM UTC

This is laughable. It's almost like saying that nuclear weapons are safer than sticks and stones because nuclear weapons have killed less people. Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct.

Likewise for nuclear power accidents.

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

#424

Post by maho » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:14 PM UTC

While I mostly agree with the article's risk assessments, it unfortunately leaves out one major risk factor: Nuclear proliferation. If more and more countries have access to nuclear power plants, then they also have the possibility to divert significant quantities (SQ) [1] of fissile materials towards nuclear weapons.

I cannot find the source right now, but a talk given by non-proliferation experts outlined how accounting for fissile material in a reactor is about 99% accurate. But even 1% of nuclear fuel, on a nuclear-powered-world scale, is equivalent to hundreds of SQs per year, assuming current genration and next-generation reactor technologies.

A nuclear conflict, even if regional (only a few dozen discharges) can potentially have dire, world-wide consequences. The article should have at least touched on those.

[1]: http://nsspi.tamu.edu/nssep/reference/technical-safeguards-t...

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

#425

Post by freeflight » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #172

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.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-... > In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres resp…

> The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption.

Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen.

These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed [0]. The solution? Just "regulate" that in the case of emergency cooling the cooling water needs to be pre-heated, so the temperature shock doesn't break the pressure vessel.

Whatever could go wrong with that approach? I guess nobody can imagine a scenario in which the reactor would need massive cooling but the surrounding infrastructure is destroyed and the water can't be pre-heated, what happens then?

Nobody knows and I'd be really surprised if anybody, in a position of responsibility, has even thought that far about this whole mess. It rather feels like they are operating on the principle of "Let's just hope this never happens instead of planning for what we gonna do when it happens and set resources aside".

[0] http://www.fanc.fgov.be/nl/page/doel-3-tihange-2-flaw-indica...

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

#426

Post by beat » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #406

fsloth wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's much better to burn up the fuel and spread it into the atmosphere where it will cause a massive climate change. Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.

> Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago. Last I checked, it still is. Solar can't get anywhere near baseline production that we need currently due to lack of storage options. And solar is the only thing which currently has even the possibility of scaling.

Careful how you phrase that. There are lots of storage options that are viable - batteries, gravity, thermal, compressed air, etc - but none that have become major commercial products or installed on the grid at scale. Yet.

But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that.

This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest.

So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.

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

#427

Post by oh_sigh » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

roryisok wrote: post #412

ars wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead. Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.) From here: http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear... (and you can google…

The risk of injury or death while installing solar may be greater than nuclear by the numbers, but if a guy falls off his roof installing a solar panel it doesn't poison the land around him for hundreds of years

If a guy falls off a roof building a nuclear plant, it doesn't poison the land for hundreds of years either. A more fair comparison would be if a PV manufacturing plant had an industrial accident and hundreds of thousands of gallons of nasty chemicals o to the land.

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

#428

Post by BinaryIdiot » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:17 PM UTC

MR4D wrote: post #423

This is laughable. It's almost like saying that nuclear weapons are safer than sticks and stones because nuclear weapons have killed less people. Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct. Likewise for nuclear power accidents.

> Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct. Likewise for nuclear power accidents.

Please elaborate. How can nuclear power plants make our species extinct?

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

#429

Post by Chathamization » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:17 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…

> Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.

The last time I really looked into it, it seemed like nuclear energy was a pretty way to combat global warming. It has numerous issues like cost, construction time, production bottlenecks, etc. Renewables seemed a lot better (particularly when you factor things in like the cost reduction as production ramps up), but it would be a mistake to simply think about energy production. From what I recall, things like improving energy efficiency were at least as important.

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

#430

Post by dpark » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 7:19 PM UTC

roryisok wrote: post #412

ars wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead. Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.) From here: http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear... (and you can google…

The risk of injury or death while installing solar may be greater than nuclear by the numbers, but if a guy falls off his roof installing a solar panel it doesn't poison the land around him for hundreds of years

Perhaps not, but the waste from solar panel manufacturing might.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...

> The paper’s investigation, published in March 2008, profiled a Chinese polysilicon facility owned by Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., located near the Yellow River in the country’s Henan province. This facility supplied polysilicon to Suntech Power Holdings, at the time the world’s largest solar-cell manufacturer, as well as to several other high-profile photovoltaics companies.

> The reporters found that the company was dumping silicon tetrachloride waste on neighboring fields instead of investing in equipment that could reprocess it, rendering those fields useless for growing crops and inflaming the eyes and throats of nearby residents. And the article suggested that the company was not alone in this practice.