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Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

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Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#211

Post by ip26 »

est31 wrote: post #92
avar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal). Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.

Indeed, coal is even worse than nuclear. So let's have neither but renewables instead :). Compared to europe, the USA is a big country and it is also further in the south which means more sun for solar collectors.

I'd love to see a future with all renewables. But nuclear seems like a good hedge bet, or even just an interim.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#212

Post by joe_the_user »

avar wrote: post #80
est31 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those fission sceptics. The main problems I have with fission isn't technological issues, it's human issues. E.g. in Fukushima, people were forced to move back into their homes, without giving them an option to get compensated instead. Furthermore, engineers pointed out that there were issues with the way Fukushima was built but their concerns were discarded. Human issue again. Fission plants should be bui…

What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal). Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.

Yes, fossil fuels are an ongoing disaster, one that in the form of global warming has a capacity to possibly make the planet unlivable. But all the disasters of fossil fuels are invisible and thus provoke little reaction in the public - and moreover, fossil fuels have vast vested interests protecting them.

We need to come up with an alternative to this. Nuclear in the ideal could be that. But nuclear's track record is murky, nuclear's cost is murky. For all I know, solar and wind are X times less effective than nuclear though as mentioned real world costs versus theoretical costs are still problem. I mean, consider raw solar now is the cheapest energy source but maybe solar plus reverse hydro would be some proportion more expensive.

Thus if we're creating an alternative to fossil fuels, solar and wind seems like a clear real world win.

An nuclear requires huge upfront money because it requires huge upfront energy investment. This risk of nuclear isn't just disaster, it's that this huge investment fails to pay as calculated and this is a risk that's materialized in the past.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#213

Post by [deleted] »

bhntr3 wrote: post #66
noobermin wrote: post #30

I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-m…

> the public is skeptical regarding fission for good reason: history has not been kind to the kind of disasters fission reactors have wrought. It's not just that! I was pro-fission until someone educated me how horribly irresponsible we've been about our nuclear waste disposal. And how dangerous it is. Deep waste storage has been deadlocked in government since the 80s so waste is just hanging out by each reactor. If…

[deleted]

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#214

Post by a12432 »

dang wrote: post #210
qaq wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's a good thing you can freely move to North Korea where such atrocities are not possible.

Please don't violate the site guidelines. They ask you to flag egregious comments rather than feeding trolls. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

throwaway actually had a valid informative point, followed by some sarcasm. the troll is the person you replied to, and you yourself. you should not flag, downvote, and shadow* people to make yourself feel more in control of your life.

your moderation practices are what has been detrimental to this site more than any trolls or spam. you have turned this site into a subreddit, just with an interface written in 1991.

Please don't violate what the site is for. It's for people wanting actual quality information, not for you as a mod to feel satisfied. You are literally removing things people have wanted to see. A quality discussion does not mean "super nice and agrees with my childlike style of humor." It means more pertinent information. You seem to define pertinent information as "troll" while not noticing the actual trolls. Here is a guideline: you need to be replaced.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#215

Post by labster »

roenxi wrote: post #159
labster wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renewables need materials, which are mined So, what about mining fissile materials? How clean is that, particularly with regard to tailings and wastewater? Are there any studies out there without a bias on this? I mean, it's okay to be biased against coal, any non-metallurgical uses really put the "fossil" in fossil fuels. But I know there are all sorts of weird edge cases. Like we're going to want to continue to c…

> So, what about mining fissile materials? I worked with Rio Tinto (mining corporation) for some time, and happened to know a few people in management positions at the Ranger Uranium Mine. I can assure you it was one of the most environmentally conscious operations the group was managing, and super-senior management seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. It was a source of much frustration, because as a compa…

This is what I love about HN, instant access to experts in the field, so we don't have to argue our assumptions.

I guess it's unsurprising that uranium operations run a lot cleaner than fossil fuel extraction, given the politics involved.

I'm not against fission power itself, but being in California makes me kind of a NIMBY on the issue. All you need is somewhere with water and without active fault lines, and nope, not seeing a good spot. The evacuation plans for San Onofre involved moving one to eight million people, or about eight million ways something could go wrong.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#216

Post by jjoonathan »

jkravitz61 wrote: post #79
smsm42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is ever free of a potential for trouble. Solar panel could fall from the roof and hit someone over the head, and I'm sure that happened already, but nobody makes a huge deal out of it. Nuclear incidents are made huge deal of. It's a fight between Jane Fonda and Edward Teller, and Fonda is winning because a movie actress is apparently more trustworthy in a questions of nuclear energy than actual nuclear physic…

Sure, but a very bad nuclear incident (accidental or not) could more or less kill millions of people pretty quickly. Obviously hydrocarbons will kill more than that, but the optics of a nuclear catastrophe are in my opinion far worse than global warming which to many people is pretty abstract.

That's really the crux of the issue. Nobody cares if a thousand or two additional jobbers die falling off of roofs while installing solar panels, but if one person is exposed to sub-lethal quantities of radiation, everyone cares.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#217

Post by ip26 »

hoaw wrote: post #129
javagram wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s puzzling how 50 years later, with much better technology, we can’t build plants on the scale of what was built in the 60s. The US navy uses nuclear reactors for their aircraft carriers and they don’t seem to have the same problems getting them built and installed that commercial power operators do now. I wonder what makes the difference, I tried googling but couldn’t find a good comparison. Perhaps it is just no…

To succeed with large project you generally have to develop competence in-house first to know what you are doing. Today it is quite unpopular, at least in western countries, for the government to do that. When things become more accessible, it doesn't necessarily mean they become simpler. In fact there is often added complexity. It isn't just nuclear power plants, but all kinds of infrastructure.

It feels like we couldn't build the goddamn interstate system today, and you can't tell me that's due to a lack of pavement-laying competence.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#218

Post by ip26 »

darkerside wrote: post #101
chiefalchemist wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it's fairly obvious that the continued use of fossil fuels will lead us to danger than fission. Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable. We'' just have to figure out how to deal with the fission devil until we get fusion. Hopefully, fusion isn't too far off.

> Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable Trading the devil you know for the one you don't is wisely considered a bad idea

See, this is why we shouldn't have banned trans fats. Sure they were killing people, and sure we knew it, but the devil you know...

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#219

Post by addicted »

est31 wrote: post #56
noobermin wrote: post #30

I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-m…

I'm one of those fission sceptics. The main problems I have with fission isn't technological issues, it's human issues. E.g. in Fukushima, people were forced to move back into their homes, without giving them an option to get compensated instead. Furthermore, engineers pointed out that there were issues with the way Fukushima was built but their concerns were discarded. Human issue again. Fission plants should be bui…

I struggle to buy the idea that people are irrationally overestimating the costs of nuclear when the industry has needed a legally mandated cap to its liabilities to operate.

The existence of the cap indicates that the industry itself believes that the costs of a black swan event in the nuclear industry could be ridiculously high.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#220

Post by addicted »

avar wrote: post #80
est31 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those fission sceptics. The main problems I have with fission isn't technological issues, it's human issues. E.g. in Fukushima, people were forced to move back into their homes, without giving them an option to get compensated instead. Furthermore, engineers pointed out that there were issues with the way Fukushima was built but their concerns were discarded. Human issue again. Fission plants should be bui…

What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal). Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.

Most nuclear renewable energy competitors are cheaper than nuclear.

Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere.

It seems foolish to divert money intended to reduce polluting sources of energy into the more expensive nuclear alternative, until the share of coal and natural gas is low enough that more stable sources of energy are neeeded.

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