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

Nuclear power is too safe

jackdevanney.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 201 posts

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#151

Post by tooltower »

piva00 wrote: post #95
throwbadubadu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see again just how fearful and critical the situation is around Ukrainian plant... with climate change conflicts in the world will likely increase. So yeah, call me fearful, we don't need that and could have been long into enough multiple better alternatives. They are no option for most of the world.

> They are no option for most of the world. It's the crux of the issue for me. I'm not at all against nuclear reactors as part of the energy mix of some countries but the vast majority of countries do not have the infrastructure (socioeconomic included) to properly maintain dozens of reactors going with a stellar safety record. It takes a lot of money, low corruption, stability, and properly following procedures to k…

You might be surprised by how much of the world uses nuclear power, and has done so for decades: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

Indeed, your argument about stability and infrastructure all applies to other modern amenities too. E.g. air travel. They have all worked fine.

I myself come from a country of high corruption. Yet I trust them to maintain nuclear power plants.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#152

Post by chkaloon »

I think what is missed here is the perceived function curve of deaths avoided vs spending. For most of those programs, people think things are more or less linear - the more you spend, the better things get, smoothly. Easy to find an equilibrium.

For nuclear, it is perceived to be more of a step function - you decrease spending until something bad happens, and then it is REALLY bad. So the tendency is to spend to stay as far away from that step as possible.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#153

Post by beached_whale »

epups wrote: post #6

If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically. Since it exists for long and people formed an emotional reaction to incidents that were not that serious, while dying constantly from things they cannot see (like air pollution from coal), we are in this weird scenario where otherwise educated people say absolutely stupid th…

The density is astonishing too. A 2000MW plant is small compared to the equiv solar/wind. Not saying not have solar/wind(the opposite) but when a city needs a lot of energy, nuclear is often a really good source. The build times are almost all red tape too and that is something governments have chose to do.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#154

Post by 7952 »

chkaloon wrote: post #152

I think what is missed here is the perceived function curve of deaths avoided vs spending. For most of those programs, people think things are more or less linear - the more you spend, the better things get, smoothly. Easy to find an equilibrium. For nuclear, it is perceived to be more of a step function - you decrease spending until something bad happens, and then it is REALLY bad. So the tendency is to spend to sta…

I think that approach could be explained by the inherent difficulty in modelling risk for complex systems.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#155

Post by epups »

Gwypaas wrote: post #135
illiarian wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical nuclear fearmongers throwing nonsensical number about. "Japan has spent roughly 1 trillion yen ($7.3 billion) annually on the damage caused by the meltdowns at the Fukushima " That amounts to 84 billion dollars. That includes everything, including compensations and decomissioning. The cleanup itself is roughly 30 billion dollars. While the costs are still huge, note: this is for a plant that was both hit by a…

Lying with numbers? We should rely on the Japanese government instead of random HN:ers defending their pet technology. > The cost of dealing with the aftermath of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will reach 21.5 trillion yen , roughly double the government's initial prediction of 11 trillion yen, preliminary calculations released on Dec. 8 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have sho…

So you provide a source that is 2x larger than the estimate from the other guy but over 10x smaller than yours, and you accuse him of lying with numbers?

The fact that they spent a lot of money to clean the area just proves they thought this level of investment was needed, not that it actually was. If in fact they overspent, as I believe they did, this is consistent with the idea from the article, that there is overspending on misguided levels of safety when it comes to nuclear.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#157

Post by LorenPechtel »

otherme123 wrote: post #29
epups wrote: post #6

If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically. Since it exists for long and people formed an emotional reaction to incidents that were not that serious, while dying constantly from things they cannot see (like air pollution from coal), we are in this weird scenario where otherwise educated people say absolutely stupid th…

Regulations are also hitting coal hard, at least in Europe. UK got rid of coal. The article is making it sound like coal plants can do whatever they want, while nuclear have it worse. I don't think the way is to lower the safety for nukes, but to raise the safety requirements of coal. This article sounds like someone claiming that airbags are barely used, and removing them is a good way to get cheaper cars for all at…

It's effectively impossible to raise the safety standards for coal to anything like nuclear safety standards.

What I would like to see is an across-the-board change to safety regulation: A technology is deemed safe enough if it's 50% better than the closest *meaningful* competitor. Let's evaluate nuclear by that standard and see what we get:

The closest meaningful competitor is natural gas. (Although you could make an argument for considering gas-backed renewables a source. I have never seen safety numbers for such combos.) Natural gas has a death rate of 2.82/Twh--by my proposal nuke would be deemed adequate at 1.41/Twh even if better were possible. Reality: 0.03/Twh. 47x as safe as needed. (And note that the natural gas numbers do not include any global warming related deaths, the real picture is even more out of whack.)

(As for coal--it's 6.5x as bad as natural gas, and more global warming to boot.)

This is one of these cases where lowering safety standards would actually save lives by making the safer option more attractive. It's why the FAA accepts lap infants on airplanes--they know that a lap infant will fare considerably worse than someone properly strapped in if there's trouble, but said infant is still safer as a lap infant in an airplane than properly strapped in in a car. The lap infant rules shift some people on the edge from driving to flying.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#158

Post by LorenPechtel »

piva00 wrote: post #95
throwbadubadu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see again just how fearful and critical the situation is around Ukrainian plant... with climate change conflicts in the world will likely increase. So yeah, call me fearful, we don't need that and could have been long into enough multiple better alternatives. They are no option for most of the world.

> They are no option for most of the world. It's the crux of the issue for me. I'm not at all against nuclear reactors as part of the energy mix of some countries but the vast majority of countries do not have the infrastructure (socioeconomic included) to properly maintain dozens of reactors going with a stellar safety record. It takes a lot of money, low corruption, stability, and properly following procedures to k…

While I do agree there were problems with Fukushima note that despite how badly things went the expected death toll was zero. That is, until the politicians got involved and killed hundreds in their need to be seen to do something (and their going anti-nuke is going to kill even more down the road.) Beware of safety data that assigns those deaths to nuclear. (The correct number is around .02 or .03 per Twh. When you see stuff around .07/Twh you're looking at contaminated data.)

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#159

Post by LorenPechtel »

mpweiher wrote: post #80
cryptoneo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is such good evidence it shouldn't be hard to get nuclear plants insured. Insurance companies usually don't decide based on ´emotional reactions to incidents that were not that serious´ but look at the facts. As long as the cleanup cost is externalized and paid for by my tax dollars you're damn right I'm reacting emotional. Wouldn't you, if they set up the plant in your backyard (think Europe's population de…

The problem is that the cost of an accident is also not driven by facts but by politics and emotion. And that makes the cost of an accident not just much higher, but also essentially incalculable. "How irrational are the public and the pandering politicians going to be this decade?" is a difficult variable to price into your models. And since the costs are, in fact, largely driven by the politics and irrational publi…

Witness Fukushima. The correct answer was to stay put. No food production in the area but the city was fine. All the Fukushima deaths were due to the evacuation.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#160

Post by LorenPechtel »

piva00 wrote: post #97
mpweiher wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the cost of an accident is also not driven by facts but by politics and emotion. And that makes the cost of an accident not just much higher, but also essentially incalculable. "How irrational are the public and the pandering politicians going to be this decade?" is a difficult variable to price into your models. And since the costs are, in fact, largely driven by the politics and irrational publi…

The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come. It's not just politics and emotion, it's transforming a large area of a country into a completely unproductive land, for centuries, where no one can live or work at... How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large? And I'm an advocate for nuclear power, I believe we should've invested in it decades ago to avoid the worst of climate…

Coal has already poisoned the entire world for centuries to come.

Consider the advice about not eating too much in the way of predator fish. That's because of contamination, mostly from coal plants.

Chernobyl is as bad as a nuke plant accident can be. Whether the core actually went prompt critical or destroyed itself just before doing so we will probably never know, but that's the worst that can happen. You simply can't shift the multiplication factor fast enough to make a bigger boom. Chernobyl is a drop in the bucket compared to what coal has been doing for ages. You can't get a China Syndrome accident, a molten mass digging it's way down will change shape as it goes--either going subcritical and quickly running out of heat, or going prompt critical and destroying itself.

Post reply on HN