The Radiation Exposure Lie • Hacker News Board

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#131

Post by LorenPechtel » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

Schiendelman wrote: post #127

LorenPechtel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is expensive because nuclear is defined as expensive. The problem lies with the standard of As Low As Reasonably Achievable. If you had reasonably priced nuclear power you could add more safety. Thus you have to add more safety. Thus you no longer have reasonably priced nuclear power. And, when it comes to power it's a totally wrong standard. You should not be looking to minimize individual technology risk, y…

If I'm making a decision about what generation capacity to build next, I can't change the definitions, and renewables are already the cheapest option. The only reason you're seeing data centers get natural gas is because they are mobile units that don't require permitting. That's not an economic problem, it's a regulatory problem, but it's a pretty easy one to fix in comparison to the national level nuclear regulator…

Just because you can't change the definitions doesn't mean society can't. As a company that wants some power you are right, natural gas is the cheapest.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#132

Post by lisper » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #129

lisper wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates Largely due to the costs of complying with draconian regulatory regimes.

I know a thing or two about project management and I can tell you that the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver on de-risking nuclear reactor construction projects. Building modules offsite seems like a good idea on the surface but the problem is that if they're delivered out of order or if they need rework you've made the on-site construction problem 3X harder and more expensive. You might be thinki…

> the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver

So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible.

My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his own included) that never saw the light of day because the political pressure against doing anything new with nuclear power was insurmountable.

The anti-nuclear lobby in the U.S. successfully killed nuclear power by 1) stopping all research and development and then 2) saying, "See? We told you it couldn't be done." Well, yeah, but the reason it couldn't be done was you, you idiots. And now we have climate change to deal with as a result, so thanks for that.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#133

Post by antonvs » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #107

antonvs wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the way people try to make the case that "we only made 371 km^2 uninhabitable, it's fine !"

Thousands of times of that area is lost permanently every year to climate change, extractive industries, desertification, pollution etc. (just desertification is estimated at around 2500x that number). With nuclear we always proceed with extreme to absurd levels of caution, in no small part because radiation is extremely easy to measure - unlike almost every other contaminant we put in the environment, which are hard…

Rationalizations.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#134

Post by MomsAVoxell » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #108

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War If it weren't for the deterrent factor in the radiation narrative, the Cold War would've become hotter - and there is some truth in the observation that younger generations, not having had this fear of radiation inculcated in them, are too flippant about the idea of a nuclear hot war as a consequence. So I hope folks will stop thinking that the radiation…

It's unfortunate that we only have one vocabulary for radiation to cover both a 100 uS dose of fallout and a 10 S one. If a quantity of rock drops on someone we have different words like "pebble" and "boulder" that tell us how concerned we should be. I was shocked to learn that "fallout" in the context of a nuclear war could mean something that could cause you to die in hours, not raise your lifetime risk of cancer s…

I guess we don't have the language because we don't have the experience.

Perhaps we should tune into what the Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors use to describe things. I seem to recall they had various phrases for different kinds of fallout ..

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#135

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #132

Zigurd wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a thing or two about project management and I can tell you that the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver on de-risking nuclear reactor construction projects. Building modules offsite seems like a good idea on the surface but the problem is that if they're delivered out of order or if they need rework you've made the on-site construction problem 3X harder and more expensive. You might be thinki…

> the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible. My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his ow…

> the nuclear industry was lousy with politics...

It's that way because nuclear power plants are prestige projects. They are now so un competitive with the price of renewables that you can't blame over regulation. Without the politics no nuclear projects would get started because they're not investable.

It wasn't last week that renewables became vastly cheaper than nuclear. It's been this way for at least a couple of decades, and power customers in Georgia are taking it in the pants for having supported nuclear power. You can't blame climate change on a lack of nuclear power, and lead times are so long that nuclear stands no chance of making a dent in climate change.

Small modular reactors are also wishful thinking. We know what size reactor is the most economical and it isn't economical enough.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#136

Post by lisper » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #135

lisper wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible. My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his ow…

> the nuclear industry was lousy with politics... It's that way because nuclear power plants are prestige projects. They are now so un competitive with the price of renewables that you can't blame over regulation. Without the politics no nuclear projects would get started because they're not investable. It wasn't last week that renewables became vastly cheaper than nuclear. It's been this way for at least a couple of…

> you can't blame over regulation

I absolutely can. If nuclear power had not been over-regulated for 50 years the technology might be much more advanced now than it is. We will never know. It's kind of like pointing to the failure of public transportation in the U.S. and saying that this was inevitable, without taking into consideration the fact that there was a well-developed system of local rail before a criminal conspiracy of car, oil, and rubber companies dismantled it, making the poor quality of public transit into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The reason we don't have good public transit in the U.S. is not because it can't work but because we chose to force it not to work so that car, oil, and tire companies could make more money. It's the same with nuclear energy.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#137

Post by formerly_proven » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #133

formerly_proven wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of times of that area is lost permanently every year to climate change, extractive industries, desertification, pollution etc. (just desertification is estimated at around 2500x that number). With nuclear we always proceed with extreme to absurd levels of caution, in no small part because radiation is extremely easy to measure - unlike almost every other contaminant we put in the environment, which are hard…

Rationalizations.

> The irrational fear-factor associated with anything nuclear is highlighted by how much attention Fukushima, the nuclear disaster, which gravely injured like a dozen people, gets relative to the earthquake and tsunami causing it, which killed 20k people and leveled a huge stretch of coast.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#138

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:37 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #136

Zigurd wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the nuclear industry was lousy with politics... It's that way because nuclear power plants are prestige projects. They are now so un competitive with the price of renewables that you can't blame over regulation. Without the politics no nuclear projects would get started because they're not investable. It wasn't last week that renewables became vastly cheaper than nuclear. It's been this way for at least a couple of…

> you can't blame over regulation I absolutely can. If nuclear power had not been over-regulated for 50 years the technology might be much more advanced now than it is. We will never know. It's kind of like pointing to the failure of public transportation in the U.S. and saying that this was inevitable, without taking into consideration the fact that there was a well-developed system of local rail before a criminal c…

That's a lot of would've could've should've, nevertheless we can test that idea that nuclear power would be more advanced: it wasn't over regulated in the Soviet Union, and that got us the RBMK 1000, a design with inherent flaws that make the remaining reactors in operation a high risk. Nuclear power isn't over regulated in China and their reactor designs are adapted from existing mainstream reactor designs.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#139

Post by antonvs » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 12:50 AM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #137

antonvs wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rationalizations.

> The irrational fear-factor associated with anything nuclear is highlighted by how much attention Fukushima, the nuclear disaster, which gravely injured like a dozen people, gets relative to the earthquake and tsunami causing it, which killed 20k people and leveled a huge stretch of coast.

It leveled a huge stretch of coast, but didn't make it uninhabitable.

The false equivalences here are mind-numbingly obvious to anyone actually thinking about this instead of parroting something they've read.

I remember not being able to buy milk in Europe (Switzerland and Germany) in the 1980s because of Chernobyl. The increase in radioactivity in milk was orders of magnitude, due to fallout from Cesium 134 and 137 as well as isotopes of strontium and plutonium.

Now of course, the radiate-the-planet types always want to claim that was a one-off. But have you looked at the government of the United States of America recently? Imagine that group gets re-elected. They can't even manage simple construction projects or pools of water. Do you really want to trust the integrity of large swaths of the planet to people like that?

Or to people like the nutcases in Silicon Valley - Thiel, Musk, etc. - who think that regulations are for pussies.

The idea that humans can handle nuclear power responsibly is a sci-fi dream that our species is nowhere close to achieving. Stop confusing your fantasies with reality, it's dangerous to all of us.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#140

Post by Symmetry » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #134

Symmetry wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that we only have one vocabulary for radiation to cover both a 100 uS dose of fallout and a 10 S one. If a quantity of rock drops on someone we have different words like "pebble" and "boulder" that tell us how concerned we should be. I was shocked to learn that "fallout" in the context of a nuclear war could mean something that could cause you to die in hours, not raise your lifetime risk of cancer s…

I guess we don't have the language because we don't have the experience. Perhaps we should tune into what the Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors use to describe things. I seem to recall they had various phrases for different kinds of fallout ..

There actually wasn't any appreciable fallout after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Fallout is mostly generated when a bomb explodes close to the ground so that its neutrons are able to reach and transmute that ground into radioactive isotopes. The bombs dropped on Japan exploded high up to affect as large an area as possible. Many people suffered terribly from the ionizing radiation produced by those bombs, but all that damage was inflicted in the first microseconds immediately after the bombs detonated.