Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#411

Post by jrflowers » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

lolc wrote: post #328

jrflowers wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety. https://www.nr-ha.org/history

> ... which has adversely affected public health or safety. Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.

> Would not trust them as a source.

Ok

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Bo...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#412

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #388

chpatrick wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

[deleted]

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#413

Post by m101 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

doodledoodahs wrote: post #366

Czarcasm wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2015-2016 I did some mechanical engineering work at BWXT, designing nuclear waste containers for the Bruce Power CANDU reactor refurbishment program. I learned that the spent fuel storage is pretty trivial for a few reasons: 1. The amount of fuel waste produced by a reactor is volumetrically tiny. So it's not too expensive to just have a relatively small guarded yard of sealed storage casks next to the reactor, wh…

What about the waste inherent in decommissioning plants?

For the parts of the plant that cannot be put into landfill then storage like any other waste. Given how long they last, and how much energy they output, the waste is still very low per unit energy. Try this:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#414

Post by throwthrowuknow » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #395

indoordin0saur wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container. The storage units for this stuff is incredibly…

Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown? It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic. Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.

Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.

If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#415

Post by gpm » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #383

gpm wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials. Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world…

> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials. The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now. If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear powe…

Chernobyl killed 30 or 31 directly (i.e. acute radiation poisoning), and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed... I don't know where your 28 number comes from but there's no dispute that the direct number is higher than that...

There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of military ones.

But if we're looking for civilian radiation deaths the majority outside of Chernobyl aren't nuclear power, they're radiotherapy, because the nuclear power industry was appropriately regulated after the early mass casualty events resulting from military nuclear reactors (e.g. the Kyshtym disaster at 200 to 8000 deaths) and the Windscale Fire at (100 to 240 deaths) and it's harder to regulate the more wildly distributed health care applications.

That we're handling things with appropriate care isn't evidence that they're not dangerous.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#416

Post by mpweiher » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #159

mpweiher wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That competition is handily won by wind and solar. In the meantime in Switzerland: "Our cheapest electricity product is nuclear electricity." https://ewr.ch/elektrizitaet/stromprodukte/

Yes, if you put the cost of commissioning and decommissioning the reactor onto your taxpayers instead of including it in the cost of power, nuclear can be very cheap. I didn't try and translate the German ; but that's the trick Ontario Canada uses to false claim that nuclear power is cheap.

That turns out not to be the case.

The prices are all-inclusive.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#417

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #253

sharpneli wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that. There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter. What should one do then? Just shut everything down?

Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days. That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe. Th…

> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days

Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#418

Post by throwthrowuknow » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #388

chpatrick wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#419

Post by speed_spread » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #267

chinathrow wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you drill holes into the outer containment hull.

What if you destroy a dam? It would be catastrophic too... but nobody votes against dams for some reason.

Whoosh. Holes -> Swiss Cheese.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#420

Post by Kon5ole » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

I feel the same frustration but for the opposite reason. I am entirely confident you must be misinformed, not me.

I suggest you read actual bookkeeping statements from nuclear operators, national budget items, historical records about radiation incidents, nuclear deposits, agreement texts and the like, instead of reading books that can only be true if they adhere to the information in such sources.

- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power

It it is inherent to nuclear power, because you really need to spend the money and effort to keep it safe. It's very dangerous.

Here is where people usually say "but stats show it's killed fewer people per GWh generated than other sources". But that's not relevant at all. Nuclear power is dangerous entirely independently of that statistic. The reason so few have died is precisely that we spend all that money keeping it safe!

A gun is dangerous even before you shoot someone with it. It's not safe because nobody has shot it yet.

Science will tell you in detail what would happen if radioactive waste was spread in a populated area. There is so much information, please read up on it. So far it hasn't happened. Even Chernobyl was very far from a worst-case scenario.

- nuclear waste is not a problem

Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily.

The US gov spends millions per year guarding abandoned nuclear waste. They don't do it for no reason.

Again, you need to realize that it is actually dangerous. That's why it's expensive. You need to spend LOTS of money to keep it safe.

- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero

Not even remotely true, some examples, from a very long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident

People have died from radiation exposure every decade since it was discovered. People die from minutes of exposure to barely visible amounts of radioactive elements.

Please follow your inclination to be informed. Don't take my word, don't take Jacks, go to the records of actual events and base your opinion on that.

My take - In 2026 we have developed a type of glass that can fetch electricity entirely for free from sunshine and store it in a container of the most abundant element on earth, or even use the surplus carbon from the atmosphere to generate synthetic fuel that can store energy for years.

That's where we should spend time, money and effort.