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

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

#391

Post by kohlerm »

roenxi wrote: post #248
rgbrenner wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

What are you doing with the waste? Coal being as dangerous is no argument, which also should not use coal. Also suing Coal has a different probability distribution. Coal power plants do not blow up like Nuclear power plants do. Even if they would do the consequences would be much smaller. How do you measure BTW lost area of the Chernobyl accident? You IMHO just cannot count only how many people died (which is difficult enough).

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

#392

Post by bpizzi »

kavi87 wrote: post #369

Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister ( https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en... ). Nuclear energy is great but it is a pain to build, maintain, manage, decommission etc.

> Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister (https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en...).

Your information is very misleading, very.

The quote come from the minister of the ecological transition, not 'energy minister', whose official duty is, quoting wikipedia 'responsible for preparing and implementing the French government’s policy in the fields of sustainable development, climate, energy transition, and biodiversity.'

This new minister has a political degree (Science Po), no technological background, and is member of the local pro-ecological party since 2000.

Of course she's referring to EPR as a mess, which is true in a certain way, but in her mind it's just a political stance she's feeling obligated to say publicly.

Of course the EPR is a giant project, maybe too giant, of course it was underestimated in order to get it going, and of course it takes much longer to be built than every one would want.

But that's the price of technological advancement, that's how we learn to build better things.

And what's the alternative? 1650MWe of wind turbines, where would you put it?

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

#393

Post by ryanstanton »

kohlerm wrote: post #387
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…

Note that cost would also include getting rid of the nuclear waste, which AFAIK is still not a solved problem. E.g. you could send the waste via rockets to thes sun, but that would be very costly ;-) The problem with the statistics is also that we cannot rely on averages here. E.g. one big accident might cause huge environmental issues. Estimating accurately how likely that is seems difficult to impossible

Regarding nuclear waste: first off, the amount of nuclear waste generated today is drastically less than in the past. During WWII and the Cold War era the methods for processing nukes was extremely crude, resulting in an embarrassing amount of waste, which we are still dealing with today. Today, the amount of waste is small fraction of that. Second, the waste problem has been solved by vitrification. Vitrification takes nuclear waste (in liquid or solid form) and blends it with molten glass in a high-strength steel casing. When it cools, it becomes solidified. Then it can be stored in a remote location. Vitrified nuclear waste poses no acute danger to humans and IMHO is much preferred to the damaging effects of fossil fuels which include both harmful pollutants (Particulate Matter, NOx, Ozone, etc.) and dramatic acceleration of climate change.

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

#394

Post by rib3ye »

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…

Why are containment and cost frequently seen as constants while the solar + battery solutions are frequently argued as the only practical solution as long as we keep funding the tech?

I have seen very few comments (if any) on HN that are critical of nuclear and offer thoughtful solutions on how to bring the cost down.

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

#395

Post by swilliamsio »

grey-area wrote: post #349
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 gover…

"What about Chernobyl" is usually outright dismissed as being an edge case owing its disaster to the Soviet regime, more concerned over image than safety.

The real important question, as you aluded to, is "What about Fukushima" - a disaster occuring in a rich, western nation, Japan; Japan is a nation generally seen as being on the leading edge of technology. If a disaster can occur in Japan, it can feasibly happen anywhere in the west.

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

#396

Post by moontear »

Maybe the fear of actual death by radiation is over-proportionate, but what about nuclear waste? It is only mentioned in the very end of the article, but many countries are having problems finding a suitable site for long-term storage of nuclear waste.

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

#397

Post by bregma »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #389
DanBC wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should be building nuclear everywhere, but it's important to realise the life of a nuclear power plant is between 20 to 40 years. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf > It is evident that the average age of power reactors in the IAEA's Member States is increasing. (See accompanying graphs.) By 2000, more than 50 nuclear plants will have been providing electricity for 25 years or longer.…

Surely the same aging effects also affect dams too, though?

The construction materials becoming brittle due to constant bombardment with nuclear emissions? Not noticeable in a hydroelectric dam. The materials becoming brittle and breaking down due to constant exposure to heat? Steam does not normally factor in hydroelectric production.

Nuclear ages faster then thermoelectric, which ages faster than hydroelectric. It's a tradeoff.

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

#398

Post by nullc »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #381
jerven wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

600 billion = +/- overnight cost of 30 nuclear powerplants (AP-1000). And would struggle with providing 500Gw that the battery above could. At that scale everything is expensive, but the market still seems to say that Nuclear is more expensive than the other options. My hand-wavy maths aside, the people who sign the checks seem to agree that today (2020, it is cheaper to get power from solar/wind + battery than nucle…

The batteries need to be replaced every 5 to 10 years depending on how many cycles they can endure. By comparison, the AP-1000 is rated to last 60 years. Furthermore you're being very pessimistic with the $20 billion dollar cost estimate for the AP1000. Plants with equivalent output have been built for less than $10 billion. When you include the cost of storage, solar and wind is still enormously more expensive than…

Batteries can be build that last more than 5 to 10 years.

e.g. https://ironedison.com/nickel-iron-ni-fe-battery

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

#399

Post by atoav »

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…

Well well. My girlfriends oldest brother died in what was a wave of cancer infant deaths that strangely coincides with the fallout of Chernobyl's radioactive cloud.

Her other brother came to the world deformed, which again happened to more mothers than hers. In my school class (~30 kids) alone there were 4 kids who had deformations or other mutations that affected their life's negatively (for those who still live: to this day). All of them were born in the years after the fallout.

In my region you are still adviced not to eat certain mushrooms or the meat of boars.

Not to speak that one death and one deformed child that needs life long attention does something to the families tho whom such things happen.

Of course all of it is incredibly hard to attribute this to Chernobyl, but the region which got the brink of the radioactive rain (southern Bavaria, southern Austria) had the most of such cases to such a degree that the doctors noticed it.

That being said: of course a lot improved after Chernobyl in terms of reactor safety. But nuclear is still a business, where a (not insignificant) part of the costs linked to waste and potential catastrophes aren't carried by those who earn the money.

So whether nuclear really is affordable depends on how you do the accounting — how much you get the public, the environment and by future generations to carry for free.

E.g. how much does it cost to store 1 kg of nuclear waste safely for 10 000 years? Is that cost prized into the cost of the produced electricity or do we expect future generations to carry it even after all uranium has been burned?

Please convince me that nuclear isn't a Ponzi-scheme on the future generations.

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

#400

Post by pvaldes »

ovi256 wrote: post #365
pvaldes wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 plan…

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake would not have done much to a GE Mark I BWR like the one in Fukushima - the 2011 magnitude 9 earthquake didn't damage the Fukushima Mark I. The tsunami did. This is a bad kind of fearmongering.

Not a joke at all. Just the presence of a old nuclear plant in a place being hit by an earthquake would have created enough reasonable doubts to distroy the tourism in the area. Loses by 2% of the country GDP at least since them. Probably much more if we extend the bad publicity to adjacent Mediterranean coasts.

Tourism is like 14% of the Spanish GDP so raise your offer or go away with your nuclear crap. No matter how safe you claim that it is, would be still a lose.

This in the best case. With even minor damages in the plant, things would turn scarily expensive. Really fast.

So it is a mistake to think in terms of either nuclear or fossils. In real life either you have nuclear, or you have tourism plus fisheries plus agriculture plus wind turbines. You can not just say that you want to replace Silicon Valley with a nuclear plant; that would be political suicide.

Nuclear needs to use exclusively a lot of room, can damage huge areas if something goes wrong, and is only justified if there is not a better option. At this moment there are potentially dozens of alternative uses that are not only better economically but also much safer.

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