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

Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

bluewin.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 1001 posts

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#641

Post by fsh »

thelastgallon wrote: post #567

Two things to keep in mind when thinking about nuclear 1) Has the lowest deaths/TWH: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... 2) Any country that is not US absolutely needs to invest in nuclear technology. This is for your own security. In addition to providing energy security, it also provides physical security (with a bit more work). Without nuclear, your country will remain vulnerable to: 1)…

With nuclear energy, you are dependent on whoever has uranium. This is not a theoretical risk, and already has political and economic consequences for the few countries with a large nuclear energy share [1]. It would be much worse if a significant amount of global energy was produced with nuclear energy.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#642

Post by mpweiher »

frollogaston wrote: post #555
leonidasrup wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste management has been solved problem. "A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository "The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP…

Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though. Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes in…

No technology is 100% safe, so that is a straw man.

However, nuclear energy is the safest form of electricity generation we have.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#643

Post by RealityVoid »

dalyons wrote: post #615
holoduke wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mindset that makes people stuck in time. Sorry but SMRs are potentially very cheap. Not at this point. ,but when operated on scale they will be. You need to start

This is just faith without evidence

I mean... you've got to have faith in your theory before testing it out. I am not having any opinion here about this, but the cycle in my mind is theory, belief, test, updated model of reality. I can imagine similar things said before we managed to have powered flight, "Pshhhsst! We'll never fly! The law of gravity forbids it."

You do need to have unreasonable goals for things once in a while. In this case, I don't have a particularly fixed stance about SMR's, but the claim that "Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical" feels a bit stronger than it is warranted. Never is a damn' looooong time. And I can easily imagine things being less efficient, but having other advantages that make them more economical. Claiming it's impossible is just stretching.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#644

Post by bobthepanda »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #618
tfourb wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".

They don't need to build reactors just to retain a military nuclear program. They specifically maintain a nuclear deterrent by policy, they don't need an excuse. They build reactors because they need more power. They have 60+ reactors and will have more nuclear the US by the end of the decade. They're also heavily investing in next-gen reactors which they wouldn't need to do if they just wanted a weapons program. Yes…

it is worth noting that if you were to measure by degree of subsidy, the planned output for nuclear has not really budged, but wind and solar are exploding in China in comparison.

> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.

> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Global-report-confirms-an...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#645

Post by EinigeKreise »

pydry wrote: post #373
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind. Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro…

>They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. Virtually nowhere gets zero sun. Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation. As well as a very low population density. It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disa…

> Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.

Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#646

Post by kamma4434 »

onraglanroad wrote: post #350
lenerdenator wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days. Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.

European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind. People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.

European cars are opaque surveillance machines just as well, so why bother?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#647

Post by chickenbig »

LtdJorge wrote: post #590
crote wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power. Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.

You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium

> You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#648

Post by adrianN »

fakedang wrote: post #636
crote wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power. Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.

Hahaha, uninformed comment right here. Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.

You don’t have to make a nuclear bomb for highly effective terrorism. Just blow up the reactor

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#649

Post by adrianwaj »

fsh wrote: post #641
thelastgallon wrote: post #567

Two things to keep in mind when thinking about nuclear 1) Has the lowest deaths/TWH: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... 2) Any country that is not US absolutely needs to invest in nuclear technology. This is for your own security. In addition to providing energy security, it also provides physical security (with a bit more work). Without nuclear, your country will remain vulnerable to: 1)…

With nuclear energy, you are dependent on whoever has uranium. This is not a theoretical risk, and already has political and economic consequences for the few countries with a large nuclear energy share [1]. It would be much worse if a significant amount of global energy was produced with nuclear energy. [1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...

It's a salient point.

I think solar panels in space (where it's always sunny and the panels can be paper thin and orders of magnitude more efficient) with wireless transmission to Earth would be ideal. But I'm sure there are technologies out there that are either secret, dangerous-to-know or just suppressed that never get the attention they deserve due to vested interests. I also like the idea of speeding up radioactive decay with lasers or (safely??) shooting radioactive waste into space.

"Nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water."

But good luck finding a better alternative.

Solar panels require very high heat to manufacture and are difficult/costly to recycle. Channeling or capturing energy from a different dimension would be best. I wonder how the ancients did it... or investigate downed UFOs... or take a trip into the future. But then stay quiet because it's more than just a crisis of energy, it's a crisis of conscience!

Post reply on HN