Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 619 posts

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#161

Post by dane-pgp »

Lazare wrote: post #127
codingdave wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it kills a very low number of people per TWh. I worked in energy for 5 years. Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. The goal was zero. We did not reach that goal, but nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.

Obviously zero deaths is a great target, yes. Obviously zero deaths is impossible. No energy production method causes zero deaths; even wind and solar have a death toll (eg, from workers falling off things, construction accidents, manufacturing processes, etc), and yes, at the scale we're talking about that adds up. Everything causes deaths when you're talking about thousands of TWhs. At most you can minimise the dea…

The buried lede from that article:

> But Japan relies on coal for more than a third of its power generation needs. And while older coal plants will start retiring, eventually reducing overall coal dependency, the country still expects to meet more than a quarter of its electricity needs from coal in 2030.

So this decade Japan's reliance on coal power will roughly drop from 33% to 25%. To provide even more context, Japan's energy consumption has been falling since before the 2011 disaster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japan_energy_and_GDP.svg

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#162

Post by pfdietz »

p1mrx wrote: post #142
etimberg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What challenges do you foresee in responding over days/weeks/months?

The challenge is just having enough raw capacity to meet demand using intermittent renewable sources. Weather varies on the scale of days/weeks, and winter is cold because of limited sunlight. What energy source will we use to stay warm all winter?

Make hydrogen, store it underground, and have enough combustion turbines available to back up the grid. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is about 5% of the cost of a nuclear power plant, per unit of power output.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#163

Post by ClumsyPilot »

mrtksn wrote: post #96
corty wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima and Czernobyl are reactor types that lack the features to fail gracefully. If you want to see an accident in a reactor that does, read about TMI. Newer reactors like EPRs are even more graceful when failing.

And what would be the excuse when the new reactors fail disastrously? None of the failed ones were considered dangerous before they fail, they were all supposed to be impossible to cause a disaster due to redundancies, passive and active safety mechanisms. They were all supposed to be built perfectly and the people who operate them were supposed to know what they are doing. Yet, we have Chernobyl and Fukushima. What…

>"And what would be the excuse when the new reactors fail disastrously? "

CANDU reactors are failsafe and have been for 50 years. Fukushima or Chernobyl style disaster in phisically impossible with their heavy-water, unpressurised design.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#164

Post by Retric »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #150
Retric wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just part of the story, annual nuclear refueling is also surprisingly expensive. The raw material is cheap, but you need to refine it to reactor grade, creating fuel rods, and only use ~6% of it before replacing the rods. So on net it ends up being quite costly before considering long term storage. You also need to shutdown the reactor for refueling. Other costs like maintenance starts to really add up over ti…

What is "quite costly", compared to wha? The statement is so vague its not informative - how much is it actually? It's cheaper than millions of tons of coal needed to produce an equivalent amount of energy, or any other fossil fuel. Only renewables have lower running costs. Nuclear is not expensive in Russia , France or China

If Uranium fuel rods where the only cost, nuclear would be ~50% as expensive as direct Solar in the US. Unfortunately, it represents 10% of of nuclear’s overall costs per kWh in the US. So compared to the perception or competing energy sources, refueling is surprisingly expensive.

With current US nuclear subsides it’s less expensive for power companies to use unsubsidized solar power and lithium batteries than build Nuclear. That’s not a question of which is more green, just basic economics.

PS: Numbers from a very pro nuclear article: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#165

Post by rgbrenner »

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

solar/wind + batteries is now cheaper than coal and nuclear. And it can be brought online faster with virtually no safety issues.

Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissioning some disaster decades from now.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#166

Post by pfdietz »

imtringued wrote: post #89
bpodgursky wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a ridiculous statement. The schedule and cost overruns is BECAUSE of un-ending environmental reviews, community protests, more safety planning lawsuits, then lawsuits over the disposal of waste, then another environmental impact review... These are all problems for which we have reasonable technical solutions (ex: Yucca mountain was a GREAT solution for nuclear waste storage until breeder reactors come online…

No the reasons are far simpler. Nuclear has been abandoned for decades. Anyone who wants to do anything in this space has to start from scratch, which is very expensive. There is a reason why there is a move to modular reactors. It's easier to produce a thousand of them (or at least finish your first 10 prototypes before you go bankrupt), than to produce 20 "boutique" power plants.

HMRs (Hail Mary Reactors) are being pursued because all other options for nuclear are gone. I very much doubt they're going to go anywhere.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#167

Post by pfdietz »

johnisgood wrote: post #124
zyxzevn wrote: post #120

I don't care much about the radiation. And this is always the wrong argument. I care about (1) the pollution with 100,000 years of half-life and (2) corruption and (3) Murphy's law. None of these problems are even closely solved. The only constant is that errors will be made. My previous generation thought that it was OK to put waste into the oceans. Or dump it in Africa. Some Thorium solutions may work, but they nee…

What about fusion reactors? ITER is WIP. https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion

They are remarkable in that they are likely to be larger, more expensive, more complex, less reliable, and overall less workable than even today's fission power plants.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#168

Post by DoctorOetker »

nicoburns wrote: post #85
nabla9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those costs are negligible compared to climate change. Fukushima every 5 years for next 1000 years, or gradually leaking long term nuclear waste, are several orders of magnitude less harmful for humanity or life on earth than climate change.

But investing in wind, solar and storage would be much cheaper still. The fukushima cleanup effort has cost close to $100 billion. Imagine where we could take renewable and energy storag tech with that level of investment.

Just looked up some numbers from Wikipedia:

"Japan had 282 GW of total installed electricity generating capacity in 2010"

"A 2010 study by the Japanese government (pre-Fukushima disaster), called the Energy White Paper,[citation needed] concluded the cost for kilowatt hour was ¥49 for solar, ¥10 to ¥14 for wind, and ¥5 or ¥6 for nuclear power.

Masayoshi Son, an advocate for renewable energy, however, has pointed out that the government estimates for nuclear power did not include the costs for reprocessing the fuel or disaster insurance liability. Son estimated that if these costs were included, the cost of nuclear power was about the same as wind power.[49][50][51]

More recently, the cost of solar in Japan has decreased to between ¥13.1/kWh to ¥21.3/kWh (on average, ¥15.3/kWh, or $0.142/kWh).[52] "

And:

"Photovoltaic prices have fallen from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to nearly $0.102 per watt in October 2019, for multi crystalline silicon solar cells and module price to $0.21 per watt."

so ~10W/$ for photovoltaic gives 1TW for $100 billion, about four times larger than the 2010 installed energy generation capacity.

realistically there will be more costs than just the panels.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#169

Post by rgbrenner »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #125
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the…

Your post conveniently ignores solar/wind + batteries, which is even cheaper than coal.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#170

Post by colordrops »

drivebycomment wrote: post #151
colordrops wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it kills a very low number of people per TWh This is a grossly naive and over-simplistic way to judge safety and efficacy. Yes, perhaps fewer people die in a major accidents, but then you've left a large swath of land unusable for hundreds or thousands of years. And the cost for managing the disasters is astronomical. In a place like Japan, they lose a not insignificant portion of landmass to an accident. While oth…

Which large parcel of land in Japan is unusable for hundreds of years ? I am not aware of any large area declared unusable that way.

http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclea...
Post reply on HN