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

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

#581

Post by guscost » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:02 AM UTC

gruturo wrote: post #466

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…

Are you aware that the Fukushima reactor was actually 6 years older than Chernobyl? Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal - the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic. Of course no matter how well you design it, people will fuck up and use it the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safet…

> Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal...

Here's an old comment backing this up with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13349940

> China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).

If the Chinese end up leading the way to a fission-powered future, it will be a great thing for the world. Don't forget the safety features!

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

#582

Post by boomboomsubban » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:05 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #573

ianai wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You send it to Yucca mountain or you treat it for reuse like they do in France.

What was the opening date for Yucca mountain again?

Depends on how much of the original work is still usable, I'd guess ten years after funding it.

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

#583

Post by Retra » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:08 AM UTC

xxxdarrenxxx wrote: post #523

rsync wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly." As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared. This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.

Gas you use to cook with doesn't smell either. They add stuff to it so u can smell it. It is just as silently deadly without these additives.

They add stuff to it because it's very important to be able to detect when it is present.

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

#584

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:14 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #425

lispm wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#585

Post by chii » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:17 AM UTC

door wrote: post #433

tryitnow wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair this article doesn't say nuclear energy is safe - rather that it is the safest relative to other sources. You mention Chernobyl and Fukushima - but those only stand out because the effects were concentrated in time and space (happened all at once and afflicted specific geographical regions). The deleterious health effects of coal, oil, and natural gas are more diffuse. They don't make such good news storie…

it's not irrational to prefer probabilistic, long-term problems to maybe once or twice having to evacuate new york or tokyo

i dont think climate change is considered probablistic anymore.

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

#586

Post by QuarterReptile » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:20 AM UTC

beat wrote: post #477

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…

One key problem... much of the world's population lives in nations socially incapable of supporting nuclear power, or with governments that cannot be trusted with significant quantities of nuclear materials due to proliferation, or both. Advocacy of nuclear has a bad tendency to think of "the world" as the US, Europe, Japan, and China. Any solution that aggravates the haves/have-nots divide is going to cause problems…

Plenty of environmental groups would be pretty happy to curb emissions in "just" US, Europe, Japan, and China...

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

#587

Post by Retra » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:25 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #504

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A failed nuclear power plant can indeed explode like a nuclear bomb and it is generally believed that explosion #2 (there were two major explosions) at chernobyl was the result of a criticality and analogous to "the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon." Your statement seems to oppose itself. Fizzled would not be like a nuclear bomb so I don't quite understand what you're trying to refer to here. There is a reason…

"There are a few orders of magnitude between "fizzled nuclear weapon" and a "nuclear bomb"." In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same. Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have) and that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect. I am not categorically opposed to nuclear power. I just think it's w…

There's actually a big difference between coolant-based explosions caused by runaway reactor heat and a nuclear weapon. The process is not the same, even when they are both driven by criticality. And where the difference lies in terms of time-scales and pressures involved, and thus our ability to contain and protect against them, equating the two in this context is not honest. You may as well be comparing grenades and firecrackers.

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

#588

Post by mikeash » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:26 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #335

ekianjo wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

batteries and solar components need numerous extracts of minerals and a bunch of chemistry as well but as.you pointed out the solar lobby is happy to ignore all that when claiming they are a clean source of energy.

No source of energy is clean, in that respect. The best you can do is separate one time production and continuing operating pollution, and account for both. Using that to show pollution per Mhh at 5, 10 and 20 year intervals should be sufficient.

Reiterating my original comment, it would also be good to distinguish between the whole-lifecycle pollution generated now, with current electrical and transportation infrastructure, and the whole-lifecycle pollution you could achieve if you applied the "clean" technology to the whole lifecycle.

For example, solar panel production requires a lot of electricity. That electricity is mostly generated from fossil fuels. But if you supplied that electricity with solar panels instead, it would be way cleaner. Which is correct? We should probably present both numbers, if possible.

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

#589

Post by QuarterReptile » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:30 AM UTC

jsonne wrote: post #320

Koromix wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm no biologist or scientist of any sort, but it seems this is a problem with all apex predators to some degree. You get to the top of the food chain by adapting to and being highly reactive to short term and catastrophic risk. Once you get there you have to do a 180 and suddenly be highly attuned to subtle and long term issues to stay there. It's simply a different skill set and frame of mind.

It's probably not very informative to think of humans as apex predators. Yuval Harari in "Sapien" puts forth the interesting point that we were catapulted suddenly from cautious foragers to extreme lethality by our harnessing of fire and other technologies. We likely never had the chance to grow into the role of most dangerous animal. Thinking along those lines, our cautious forager ancestors probably did a lot of responding to short-term and catastrophic risk.

My dog may well have better apex predator instincts than I.

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

#590

Post by boomboomsubban » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 12:33 AM 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…

Your argument doesn't make sense to me. Nuclear proponents have argued that nuclear power is safe for decades, and the statistics that show they've been right so far are somehow proof that they've been lying this entire time?