Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#81

Post by chelical » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #73

chelical wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, nuclear power plants can also take a decade or more to build.

> To be fair, nuclear power plants can also take a decade or more to build. That's kind of the point. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. And even if batteries become cost effective in a decade or more, that's when people start installing them at scale. It's not as if you could replace the entire grid with them overnight either.

Fair point. I hadn't considered the time to install all the batteries on a massive scale on top of the time to reduce the production cost.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#82

Post by manfredo » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #50

nickelcitymario wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't disagree with anything you said here, however: > and they have the old coal plants to fill in the gaps ...this is the problem with solar and most renewables. They have gaps. The question, it seems to me, is are we in a fight for the survival of our species, or not? If we are, then we should pull all the stops. I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to have a liveable planet. I'll pay the bloody premium…

> If we are, then we should pull all the stops... But is coal not one of the stops? I guess you should help me understand. Why should we use nuclear instead of coal to fill the gaps? They both pollute. With wind providing the lion's share of the energy, the use of coal is drawn down considerably in any case. And coal is far less expensive than nuclear, even with the onerous regulations that have been slapped on it re…

> Why should we use nuclear instead of coal to fill the gaps? They both pollute.

The idea that nuclear waste disposal is even remotely comparable to fossil fuel pollution is intellectually dishonest in the extreme. Coal plants pump toxic, carcinogenic, and radioactive waste directly into the atmosphere. Nuclear plants produce waste that can be sealed up and buried in a remote area. The hypothetical situations in which nuclear waste disposal could result in poisoning humans are borderline fantasy, usually involving societal collapse to such an extent that all records of the disposal sites are lost and some future civilization digs a mile deep in rural Finland for no conceivable reason.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#83

Post by nickik » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #41

clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. Witness Vogtie. Take away all taxes and regulations, then compare the price of, say, Iowa, building a nuclear plant instead of just slapping up windmills wherever they want. (Remember, we're assuming zero regulations. So while slapping up windmills would normally be incredibly illegal, we're able to do that under the conditions that our thought experiment postul…

> In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive.

This is only now wit the current regulation and legal technology. There is no fundamental reason, that nuclear power production should be so expensive.

If we go from first principle, nuclear power requires the least amount of land, the least amount of resources and not a lot of people to run. It runs for very long time.

Nuclear plants were massively out-competing coal in the 80s until there was a huge regulatory changes that essentially killed the industry. Since then no new reactor technology has been license, pretty much all research has been killed, access to nuclear materials is basically impossible, almost no new nuclear plants were built.

And just as with anything else, higher production makes things efficient. If you build one nuclear plant ever 10 years its gone be very expensive. This has been proven for nuclear plants over and over, any place that attempted to build many found that you could actually build them pretty fast and cheap.

Also, there is a massive step up in our ability to improve nuclear power. Wind and solar will not get all that much better. With nuclear we are operating on 2% efficiency and we are having to build massive building and civil engineering to get it done. Even if we have know for 40-50 years that we could massively improve this technology, it just wasn't done. For example, having nuclear power plants that can load follow very effectively.

> That's why nuclear is on the ropes in the US, if you give people a choice, they tend to vote with their wallets.

If its all about cost then nothing competes with gas most of the time. If you take into account end-to-end cost of solar its quite a bit more expensive then people like to quote. In reality with intensive and tax credits, solar and wind would not be so successful outside of a few perfectly located places. And the cost goes up the closer you want to go to 100%. The approach the government likes of slowly getting utilities to up their % of green energy will run into more and more problems the longer it goes on.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#84

Post by nickik » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

metric10 wrote: post #34

clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

I suspect the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima Daiichi incidents also had a part to play in public perception.

Or rather the MASSIVE overreaction compared to the actual events. Chernobyl was a Soviet reactor that was designed to make nuclear weapons. Three Mile Island killed less people then 1000s of mining accidents, pipeline explosions and lots of other things.

The perception of Three Mile Island was hilariously out of scale with the actual danger.

The regulatory overreaction was so big that since then basically the whole nuclear industry died and has been on life support for 30 years.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#85

Post by deburo » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #48

rayiner wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first paragraph misses the mark, because, unlike a nuclear plant, a windmill or solar plant isn't a standalone power source. To have reliable baseload power with renewables, you need massive battery storage. Right now, you don't factor in the (very high) cost of building battery storage into the cost of wind power because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power. But the co…

> because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power... That's right. So why would you not decommission all of that incredibly expensive nuclear, and draw down your use of the coal plants to fill in the gaps? That's how most dispatch stacks work. It's just common sense. Consumers want to save money. Utilities want to make enough money. There's just no way you use nuclear in any sc…

The promise of new nuclear plant designs is to cut down construction cost. This is pretty exciting. I think nuclear power will make a come back in popularity in the next few years, as more and more news and promises surface about those designs.

Here's an article shared by Bill Gates last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-ch...

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#86

Post by nickik » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #19

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course we like nuclear. This is a board full of people who want to see hard facts, numbers and metrics. By the numbers, nuclear kills a hell of a lot less people than fossil fuels, or anything else (even when using an age adjusted metric that more accurately represents the impact of fossil fuels than the "bazillion deaths" that headlines tout). In terms of disaster potential it's on the order of hydroelectric unle…

> In terms of disaster potential it's on the order of hydroelectric. Water disappears. Yes, a failed dam may kill thousands to tens of thousands, but the land is generally immediately reusable without major problems as long as there is no chemical industry in the floodpath. A nuclear reactor blowing up, though? The immediate death potential is mostly limited to the on-site staff and the "liquidators" (as evidenced in…

> A nuclear reactor blowing up, though? The immediate death potential is mostly limited to the on-site staff and the "liquidators" (as evidenced in Chernobyl), but the land wide swaths around the site can remain uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

Because a bit of land is what we are really running out off.

> To this day, wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria (1700 km away!) have to be radiation tested (https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article154639428/Bayer...) due to Cs exposure in the fallout of Chernobyl.

Because of massive government overreaction and idiotic regulation that make no sense at all because they are literally based on fake science that was accidentally adopted by government as a bases for regulation.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#87

Post by freeflight » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

deburo wrote: post #85

bilbo0s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power... That's right. So why would you not decommission all of that incredibly expensive nuclear, and draw down your use of the coal plants to fill in the gaps? That's how most dispatch stacks work. It's just common sense. Consumers want to save money. Utilities want to make enough money. There's just no way you use nuclear in any sc…

The promise of new nuclear plant designs is to cut down construction cost. This is pretty exciting. I think nuclear power will make a come back in popularity in the next few years, as more and more news and promises surface about those designs. Here's an article shared by Bill Gates last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-ch...

Cut down construction costs still won't solve fundamental problems like final waste storage [0] or a lack of proper epidemiological studies into the effects on people, particularly children and pregnant women [1], living near those plants.

Imho the way we've handled nuclear fission so far is far too reminiscent to other environmental disasters that took humanity decades to even recognize and finally act on, even when we had plenty of warnings from the very beginning [2].

[0] http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/looking-trash-can-nuc...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757021/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and...

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#88

Post by bliblah » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

To add another rebuttal to this comment.

I think Nuclear energy also represent situations that are both hyper rewarding and hyper risky.

An oil tanker can spill millions of gallons off the coast but that can be cleaned up and the damage will repair. Meanwhile Chernobyl and Fukushima are still abandoned and under constant surveillance and there are still no firm dates for when it will be "safe" to live there.

People who study Nuclear Engineering tend to be targets of assassination / surveillance by sovereign nations (The US and Irael has an active history of eliminating Iranian Nuclear Engineers for example [1]) in an effort to avoid the creation of nuclear weapons or require levels of security and bureaucracy that you don't see elsewhere in the energy industry, scaring off potential candidates.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#89

Post by freeflight » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #74

clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

The environmental movement went anti-nuclear over two very real things: the dumping of waste at sea, and nuclear testing - both because of the threat and the waste products ending up in the atmosphere. This was the era of direct action, culminating in the French government carrying out a state-sponsored terrorist attack that sunk the Rainbow Warrior and killed a photographer who was on board.

Decades later, it turns out those concerns were not completely unfounded [0].

[0] https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi...

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#90

Post by freeflight » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

bboygravity wrote: post #6

mrpopo wrote: post #2

Another reason for the "country’s shrinking appetite for nuclear" that I can cite is the North Korean terrorist threat. Rationally, there is little reason for the North Korean state to cause long term damage to a soil that they claim belongs to them, and also the number of such attacks is now close to zero, but as we all know this kind of fear will not go away. Renewables could work as a replacement, but this may onl…

"Renewables could work as a replacement" No. They can't as long as cheap energy storage on mass scales doesn't exist. Case in point: closing nuclear plants and replacing them with renewables is what Germany has been trying to do and has failed to do so far. They essentially replaced (and will continue to replace) nuclear by renewables paired with coal and gas plants running on standby. They can't cold start these pla…

> Case in point: closing nuclear plants and replacing them with renewables is what Germany has been trying to do and has failed to do so far.

Germany was the global top electricity exporter, by dollar value, in 2017 [0]. If that's what "failing" looks like, then maybe more countries should start "failing" like that?

In that context, coal and gas are only stop-gap technologies until storage technology and deployment has caught up, and coal is mostly only around for the same reasons as in the US: To not piss off the miners/lose those jobs.

[0] http://www.worldstopexports.com/electricity-exports-country/