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?

#491

Post by littlestymaar » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

ovi256 wrote: post #466

littlestymaar wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why ? Paris is as far from Nogent NPP (89 km) as Kiev is from Chernobyl NPP, so there's plenty of space to setup an exclusion zone, even in the worst case scenario of an open core meltdown (which are much less probable with Western PWR designs). You stopped halfway through in your reasoning: a PWR reactor is less prone to reactor meltdown than an RBMK one, AND the consequences would be different . Because there's n…

But this scenario is much easier to handle than an open core meltdown. The Seine supplies drinking water upstream from Nogent. I guess that must be by design when the siting decision was made. So even the need to discharge contamination in the Seine wouldn't matter that much. It would forbid some uses of the Seine for a few months. Containment pools can be readily dug to contain discharge until activity levels decay…

> But this scenario is much easier to handle than an open core meltdown.

It's still not handled in Fukushima yet… And because of that, Fukushima is higher than Chernobyl in terms of radioactive material released in the environment…

> The Seine supplies drinking water upstream from Nogent.

What?

> These worst case scenarios have already been gamed through during the plant planning process.

This is probably why some people won't ever trust nuclear: the feeling of invulnerability conveyed by some nuclear enthusiasts, is just scary.

I'm long on nuclear, I moved from Paris to the middle of nowhere because my wife is working at the local powerplant, I studied nuclear engineering myself in engineering school and even considered it as a career (but I eventually chose software engineering instead). And let me tell you: this argument “These worst case scenarios have already been gamed through during the plant planning process” is bullshit. The plant was designed, then after some bad experience (France and worldwide) security was improved, then computer simulation improved and they discovered other failure possibilities and improved the security again. Then, Fukushima happened, and they discovered huge holes in security (especially when you lose all power supply AND all water supply, which wasn't a scenario deemed plausible before) and they improved security yet again (they created the FARN to have a dedicated emergency response agency, in case everybody else is busy as hell with other issues, and they added new bunkerized and elevated diesel generators to ensure the power is never fully lost).

But we cannot be 100% sure we have everything covered now, and I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if another catastrophic event occurred in the next twenty years somewhere in the world. (And if it happens in France, I'm ready to bet this will be caused by fire, because French safety standards regarding fires are waaay behind UK ones.

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

#492

Post by m4rtink » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #113

mycall wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had enough solar to power the world, would all of the solar cells actually lower the temperature of Earth due to being black?

No. If you want to keep the planet cool you need to use white surfaces or mirrors to reflect that energy back into space. Plus most electricty/energy that isn't stored somehow gets converted into heat. That's just how the universe works. If you capture some energy with your solar panel just to immediately release ~100% of it as heat again because you power your servers with it, you didn't accomplish anything.

Still you could use that energy to power the work needed to bring the temperature down - produce the mirrors you mention, extract stuff from atmosphere that makes the temperature higher and store it, etc..

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

#493

Post by m4rtink » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

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

Firstly, it's not really waste. Only a fraction of useful energy has been extracted & there is a lot of useful elements mixed in due to all the transmutations and fision going on. There are techniques to reprocess used nuckear fuel into more fuel and other useful substances but there is often no political will & a lot of noise from people protesting agains anything nuclear that prevents used up fuel from being properly reused.

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

#494

Post by numpad0 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

m4rtink wrote: post #488

numpad0 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virginia -class nuclear submarine(GE "S9G" PWR using HEU cores, 210 MWth) takes as little as 1-2 year from laydown to launching. 19 such hulls is in service, 11 in construction.

Thats still pretty small and usage specific - modern 1000 MW electricity producing nuclear power plants produce about 3000 MW of heat, so about 15x the naval nuclear reactor in your example.

Like I said, US had commissioned around 20 of those reactors in the past couple decades.

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

#495

Post by jerven » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

jakehop wrote: post #449

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 battery isn't the source of the energy. You are missing wind and solar (which isn't free), an electrical grid overdesigned for the peak-energy requirements (since you will not get all of your energy over the course of a day). 4 APR-1400 will cost the UAE ~ $24.4 bn to complete. So $600 bn will give you 98 APR-1400 reactors, for a total of 131GW of electrical power – not to mention twice that in thermal power, whi…

So to meet the requirement of the poster I replied too, you need to spend another +/- $1800bn to get to the 500Gw peak power production. What amount of wind and solar can you purchase for that? Considering you have just bought the battery per the description? Hornsea 1 pricing would get you there, and that includes transmission etc. With Hornsea 2 being half that and other offshore even cheaper.

After 60 years of being build and in action, the nuclear industry should be able to support it's own research needs. Considering the amounts still going to EurAtom (1.6 billion euro per five years) it is not yet as poor as one might expect.

I think the Nuclear proponents should really look at the numbers as they are today and in the near future * Why are they are these not good enough in a modern market place. * Why are the safe modern reactors not build ? * Why are the smaller modular reactors not yet in the market ? * Where are the complications? is it the NIMBYs or has the nuclear power industry taken the wrong direction ? * On a manufacturing level, how come I can order pv or wind turbines from a vast number of players at short notice (years) ? * What is required to compete with the expected pricing cost of battery, wind and solar of 2035 ? * Why are so many projects delayed in the construction phase ? How often from lawsuits How often from defects * Could nuclear be build at a rate that makes a difference if money and site licenses were not an issue ?

Nuclear should be wining, but why isn't it? My guess is that the physics is simple, but the chemistry is complicated.

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

#496

Post by bosie » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #478

bosie wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found the paper but couldn't find the 8GW claim. Doesn't that seem very little considering germany is producing electricity in the 500 TWh region?

The 8GW are in the abstract. 500TWh per year are about 60GW average. 8GW is quite a bit compared to that, but of course load shifting alone won't allow you get to 100% renewables.

Dang, i was reading the wrong paper. sorry.

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

#497

Post by pvaldes » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:42 PM 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.

> Not a single person has died directly of radiation from the Fukushima accident.

This claim has been extensively debunked in Hacker News yet.

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

#498

Post by Lazare » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

atoav wrote: post #399

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…

> My girlfriends oldest brother died in what was a wave of cancer infant deaths [..]

That's horrible, and I don't want to diminish it in any way. Nuclear power has killed many people, and impacted many more others negatively. Thousands, certainly, possibly tens of thousands. Some (very disputed) estimates for Chernobyl range as high as hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. Each of those is a unique tragedy.

On the other hand, fossil fuels kills thousands of people per day. There's no free lunch here. Deactivating a nuclear power plant and then having to rely on more coal than otherwise costs actual lives.

You can point to some actual victims of Chernobyl, so it feels realer to you, but the victims of fossil fuels are all around you too, and outnumber them enormously.

> of course a lot improved after Chernobyl

Quite true, but again, coal is hundreds of times more deadly than nuclear even if you include Chernobyl in the statistics. If you assume things have gotten better since then, then the deck is even more overwhelmingly stacked in favour of the safety of nuclear power.

To be clear: Even if you assume that nuclear power is a horrifying thing that will send a plume of radioactive ash across Europe every few decades causing birth defects and death, it still beats coal on safety. Of course, nobody thinks modern nuclear power plants are remotely that dangerous...and yet we're still building new coal plants, even today.

Oh, and not that it matter hugely, but:

> E.g. how much does it cost to store 1 kg of nuclear waste safely for 10 000 years?

So low it rounds to zero. I'm sceptical about the true unsubsidised costs of nuclear power, but waste storage isn't a particularly hard (or expensive) problem.

On the other hand, flip it around; what's the cost to store 1 kg of the radioactive waste safely? Wait, we can't store it safely; by the design of the plant it emits it straight into the atmosphere.

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

The real question is whether it's affordable for current generations. It's clearly just fine for future generations.

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

#499

Post by m4rtink » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #341

piokoch wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 plan…

Similar fear mongering resulted in Austria never completing their Zwentendorf nuclear powerplant. Instead they built a huge gas fired thernal plant & protest the Czech Temelin nuckear powerplant being completed, that resulted in many Czech dirty brown coal power plants being shut down. Really, a productive affair...

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

#500

Post by m4rtink » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #469

ovi256 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that the same argument didn't work in say, France, which has dozens of nuclear power plants (and a fuel reprocessing plant) on the coasts and yet continues having successful fisheries and tourism. You're implying that Spain couldn't have done the same thing ? Why not ? Are they any less capable ? More sensitive to radiation ?

Maybe more smart? Spain has the biggest fishing industry in EU and is the biggest producer of fish in the area. Period. France is not even close in terms of captures or people employed. And the area where the plant was about to be raised exports tomatoes to all EU currently. There are kilometers of greenhouses in the countryside. Another activity totally incompatible with the presence of a maybe-cracking-maybe-not an…

A lots of greenhouses nearby ? Well, thats perfect - nuclear power plants produce a lot of heat that could be used fow greenhouse heating instead of being dumped via cooling towers/sea water thermal exchangers. Win-Win!