Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation? • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by pvaldes » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #269

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…

"the issue with nuclear is cost" the cost is the problem indeed, but the cost is something that can be lowered with sufficient amount of innovation - see how SpaceX managed to lower cost of sending satellites or people to the space. Nuclear energy researches were stagnant for many, many years - anything "atomic" was considered to be "non-green", and green movements were fighting nuclear energy vigorously, as a result…

> Another "success" of ecologist was that they've managed to scare people.

And that saves lives and protects the economy of entire areas.

In 1974 somebody wanted to build a nuclear plant in Murcia Spain. Same BWR model as Fukushima. A few ecologists marched with home made banners, a famous actor protested, and the plan eventually was dismissed.

In 2011, just 37 years after, the same area chosen to hold a nuclear plant suffered a 5.1 earthquake that devastated the city. The idiots were trying to build a nuclear plant over a fault.

Sometimes, ecologists just are right. Things would be really different in Europe today without this heroes daring to say the things that nobody wanted to hear.

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

#342

Post by nicoburns » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #252

pojzon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its about time a lot of nuclear power plans will reach their life-expancy. I wanna see how countries like France, Japan, Germany, Russia, China are going to deal with that. Fukushima was not a good example of “how to treat reports of damaged facility”. Goverment knew and did nothing. Newer nuclear reactors are safe, but older designs are a ticking time bombs.

Not a single person has died directly of radiation from the Fukushima accident. That's in the context of a tsunami wave that has directly killed large number of people by impact. So in general, Fukushima should be a very good example for promotion of nuclear power.

However the Fukushima cleanup has been very expensive (hundreds of billions of US dollars). If you factor in the cost of accidents like Fukushima then nuclear becomes pretty uncompetitive cost wise.

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

#343

Post by nicoburns » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:23 AM UTC

monadic2 wrote: post #189

nicoburns wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that there's always risk involved. As we know, that is true for nuclear as much as any other energy technology. My view on this is that we are not particularly far away from this being viable even with 2020 technology. And that this is especially true if we are creative in how we apply technology, for example by decentralising the grid and installing storage capacity in people's homes, and by being aggressi…

Sure, but the stakes are human existence on the planet. I don't know why you would turn away from solutions we already have with boundable risk.

Because I consider the renewables solution to have comparably bounded risk.

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

#344

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:24 AM UTC

dandare wrote: post #59

dv_dt wrote: post #5

The attitude on risks of radiation have little to do with the economic and technological failures of nuclear power. With multiple schedule and cost failures it seems like fission nuclear is an exercise in what is possible, but not really practical compared to what is accessible via renewables + storage and it's far less constrained financial and technological foundations.

Also let's not forget the problem of burnt fuel storage. Burned nuclear fuel will stay radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Unless we plan to offload the cost of storage to future generations - which we actually do now - nuclear power is horribly unprofitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

It can be stored safely, it's not even that difficult nor costly.

And for a fun side-project, check out what they make the blades of wind genreators out of. The 100 meter long ones they need to replace every 5-10 years because of mechanical wear and tear.

Answer: They're 100% unrecycleable carbon fiber or plastic fiber. The current "recycling process" is "dig a big-ass hole and dump them in there".

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

#345

Post by etothepii » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

baud147258 wrote: post #322

adrianN wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid a lot of storage requirements by making your grid smarter and electrifying transportation and heating. 60% renewables are possible with hardly any storage at all, certainly less than 12 hours. Shifting demand is always cheaper than storage. Once you've electrified transportation, you have hundreds of millions of car batteries that can help out with demand spikes. That distributes the high upfront cost o…

Also using car batteries seem an odd choice, as the mismatch between renewable production and electrical consumption (duck curve) happens in the early morning and in the evening, just when people are about to drive (so they don't want to have their batteries emptied by the grid), are driving (so their batteries aren't connected to the grid) or have finished their drive so the batteries aren't full

Very few commutes require the draining of an electric car battery. If the cars were parked plugged in during the day they whey would likely have sufficient capacity to help with the main after-work spikes, base load nuclear during the evening would then recharge over night.

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

#346

Post by roenxi » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:27 AM UTC

mantap wrote: post #278

roenxi wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are held to a much lower standard. I've seen people on HN seriously argue that we need to isolate nuclear waste from the biosphere for multiple generations, including contingencies for the collapse of English as a comprehensible language. What is the plan to isolate the poisonous meals in a solar panel for multiple generations? There isn't one. It just goes in landfill, I expect with relatively little concern f…

Radioactive material is treated differently because it is dangerous at a distance . You don't need to eat it or even touch it. Simply standing close enough to it is enough to be harmful. It's just not comparable to anything in a solar panel. After decommissioning a solar farm, at worst the soil might not be suitable for farming but nobody would complain about building a house there. For the same to be true of a nucle…

> Radioactive material is treated differently because it is dangerous at a distance. You don't need to eat it or even touch it. Simply standing close enough to it is enough to be harmful. It's just not comparable to anything in a solar panel.

I don't think that is true, the article cites that the majority of the bad cancer cases from Chernobyl were caused by ingestion of tainted milk.

Besides, the core of that argument there is you have no evidence ergo there is no problem. That isn't a good argument. There are some horrific substances used in industrial processes (like, eg, the production of solar panels). Just because you want to think about them in nuclear but not elsewhere doesn't mean the problems go away. Industrial waste is industrial waste; humanity has been ignoring this stuff for millennia. It is no reason to block something as measurably environmentally positive as nuclear. The numbers suggest nuclear does less harm.

We should be holding all the options to the same safety standards.

> After decommissioning a solar farm, at worst the soil might not be suitable for farming but nobody would complain about building a house there. For the same to be true of a nuclear plant a very expensive decommissioning process must be completed.

Don't build a house there then. Incidentally it'd be a prime spot for a new nuclear plant.

These things are perfectly safe for people to work in, the issue is highly localised. The area of a plant is small. And, again, by the numbers a solar panel farm is going to sterilise a larger area of land. The fact that in theory it could be used doesn't change the fact it is going to be unusable by virtue of being covered in solar panels.

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

#347

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

glogla wrote: post #307

dv_dt wrote: post #5

The attitude on risks of radiation have little to do with the economic and technological failures of nuclear power. With multiple schedule and cost failures it seems like fission nuclear is an exercise in what is possible, but not really practical compared to what is accessible via renewables + storage and it's far less constrained financial and technological foundations.

Do we have any examples of working renewables + storage? Because as far as I know, nobody in the world ever built grid scale storage. There are no proven commercial solutions available, no expertise built. There might not even be enough lithium on the planet to support all of this, who knows. Relying on something unproven to swoop in and save us ... might as well wait for fusion, right? In the end, what you're doing…

The only valid storage for renewables as of today (already built or could be built today) is pumping water or pressurizing air inside rock.

Both of which are only valid if you've already got the natural formations for that.

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

#348

Post by macspoofing » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #169

ComputerGuru wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no such thing as batteries for wind/solar. You have battery-based peaker plants and occasionally you may have the right geography to for pumped storage. But no, there is no battery storage technology capable of bridging the variability of wind/solar.

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

#349

Post by grey-area » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:32 AM UTC

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…

Correct. The right questions to ask is not 'But what about Chernobyl' (which is unlikely in most countries) but instead:

What about decommissioning costs?

Fukushima is a good example of costs from a normal accident we can expect from time to time. Costs are at 200b USD and rising, and they still don't have the reactor site under control.

Even normal decommissioning is incredibly expensive and usually covered by governments and ignored in the costs of electricity.

https://nuclear-news.net/2020/09/24/9-1-2-years-after-meltdo...

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

Nuclear fusion (if we ever get to commercial production), will make nuclear much more attractive again though and cut decommissioning costs a bit (though there is still the question of how to deal with reactor parts).

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

#350

Post by macspoofing » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:36 AM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #271

VBprogrammer wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the cost of storage would exceed the cost of generating the same power via a CCGT plant?

I just took parent's numbers at face value to show how they were misinterpreting them. I haven't seen much in the way of true apples to apples comparisons. Most solar plants with storage don't have much storage. For instance I saw a link this week on HN for $30 + $15/MWh for solar + storage, but the storage was only one hour of the nameplate capacity. Based on the falling prices of batteries, I don't think it will be…

> solar + storage providing power evenly over 24h (an unrealistic worst case) becomes economical.

That's not the the worst case. Solar output varies by season. So you have to have enough storage for multiple weeks. This also means you have to greatly over-provison solar panels so that they not only provide power, but also enough to charge batteries.