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

Nuclear energy is clean

collectifission.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 709 posts

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#31

Post by TheDong »

bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants.

The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could.

If we could use only wind and solar power to fully replace fossil fuels and hydro, that could be a reasonable argument...

But it seems unrealistic to get enough energy without using some higher-density sources of energy, whether that's hydro or nuclear or oil, and if we're picking based on which one causes the least death, even accounting for wars and failures, nuclear seems to be a head and shoulder above the rest.

The primary thing that seems to be driving using coal plants and not using nuclear is purely monetary cost: nuclear plants take a huge up-front investment, coal plants already exist, and wind/solar can be transitioned to gradually with less up-front cost. The talk about nuclear's "danger" to me seems, quite plausibly, to be a post-facto justification based on not wanting to put up the money.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#32

Post by bob1029 »

anonporridge wrote: post #18
bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power. Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily…

> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

The most difficult part of the grid is the transmission infrastructure. The most valuable, high-lead-time part probably being the HV transformers that live near power plants.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#33

Post by squarefoot »

bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Russians never wanted to truly damage any reactor, including the one at Zaporizhzhia; they made some noise to spread fear and remind the world about the dangers of nuclear war and what could happen should anyone think of attacking them over there. Then they seized the reactors to take control of powerful sources of energy so they could cut them at will, then amassed weapons there for being the safest places around. Their strategy there was 50% PsyOps, that is, propaganda, and 50% military tactics. I find it extremely unlikely, but should something nasty happens to any of the Ukrainian nuclear reactors, it will be 99.9% by mistake.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#34

Post by TheDudeMan »

bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

When you say "nuclear", do you mean all forms of fission reactors? Or do you mean today's inferior designs? Your comment makes sense in the context of conventional light-water reactors. However, there exist more advanced reactor designs that are essentially meltdown-proof.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#35

Post by lioeters »

tehsauce wrote: post #23
bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Look at the numbers though. Fossil fuels kill many people every year, while nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical. The point of the article is to show that fears like the ones expressed above just aren’t supported by the data.

> nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical

Nothing to see here.

> Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#36

Post by tamaharbor »

cesarb wrote: post #25
tus666 wrote: post #7

> The argument is well known: nuclear power causes pollution It does? News to me.

Nuclear power has a paradox with respect to pollution: it's a highly dangerous form of pollution (heavy metals which are also radioactive), but in normal operation, it's completely contained (and nuclear power operators tend to be very paranoid about it; minor amounts of radiation which would be considered harmless everywhere else are treated as unacceptable outside the designated radioactive areas). So depending on…

The energy it takes to refine the uranium is also not zero.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#37

Post by Flankk »

anonporridge wrote: post #18
bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power. Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily…

Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years. In the United States, most nuclear waste is stored on site at the plant. This is because there is simply nowhere else to put it. Uranium is a natural material and will eventually run out, much like fossil fuels. In other words, cross nuclear off the list of sustainable energy. Solar energy would be the most obvious sustainable source, we just need better ways of converting the energy.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#38

Post by Beldin »

The article is a bit fast and loose with its data. Borssele indeed has limited high-energy radioactive waste; the article omits that there is also low-energy radioactive waste - a lot more, in fact.

Similarly, recycling may be a problem for solar panels, but is that better for nuclear? I have never heard / read about how to recycle the (radioactive) non-fuel parts of a nuclear reactor.

I'm not against nuclear per se, but articles such as this one don't help. I think there's a genuine case for nuclear to be made; this isn't it.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#39

Post by dugite-code »

tehsauce wrote: post #13
elietoubi wrote: post #4

Super interesting how there is a big push for nuclear in the tech world right now. To play the devils advocate, there are some pretty solid reasons why Nuclear is not ideal.The biggest one to me is the risk or nuclear material proliferation: Iran for instance is hiding their military nuclear program behind a civilian nuclear goal. Nuclear is probably net better than coal but it's not the (only) solution to climate ch…

If the US built more clean nuclear plants that would somehow help Iran develop nuclear weapons faster? Surely the slope cannot be that slippery.

Clearly that was used as a historical example of a bad actor. The nuclear debate is not a US only discusion

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#40

Post by Barrin92 »

bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

particularly relevant because the need for more energy is by far strongest in regions that are geopolitical hotbeds with often unstable governments and threats of terrorism. With nuclear infrastructure both as a target and source for material.
Post reply on HN