Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation? • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#201

Post by johnmorrison » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 3:52 AM UTC

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

Nuclear energy is regularly significantly (usually more than an order of magnitude, from what I've seen) cheaper for electricity than any other source in comparable countries (e.g. nuclear electricity in Toronto >10x cheaper than coal/solar electricity in Berlin)

Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime.

The main issue is the time it takes to get a plant built, and the heavy upfront investment. Both of these extend painfully the time before investors reach nonnegative ROI, which is (imo) part of why despite the actual profitability being much better human investors with inherently limited lifetimes opt for, for example, natural gas or solar installations.

+ Also of course, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than other sources of energy, which leads to good things like reduced accident deaths, but also heavily increases cost and time to build.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#202

Post by phendrenad2 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 3:53 AM UTC

sto_hristo wrote: post #22

Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. Being anxious about it is more than justified, especially with idiotic countries in mind. But that doesn't mean we need to abandon it. Nuclear is the future and there is no debate a…

I read somewhere that Fukushima's natural disaster wad a "once in 50-years event" which is like saying it's not your fault if you run a particular stop sign every day for 20 years because "the was only a 1% chance of someone coming the other way"

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#203

Post by manfredo » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

> Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it?

Compete against fossil fuels? No, but neither can solar and wind. Nuclear power also loses out against solar and wind in the very short term, and depending on the geography. Solar is cheap until you saturate the energy market during peak generation hours. Adding storage into the mix creates costs an order of magnitude larger than nuclear. We don't have a plan to decarbonize the electricity sector with solar and wind that doesn't involve a massive breakthrough in energy storage.

The reality is that the only proven ways of powering nations with carbon-free energy are either geographically dependent (hydroelectricity and geothermal power) and nuclear. Nuclear also provides additional benefits in the form of things like desalination with the waste heat - which is going to be highly in demand as climate change ramps up- and thermochemical hydrogen production, which is likely our best method of decarbonizing shipping.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#204

Post by manfredo » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:17 AM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #169

ComputerGuru wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the…

Your post conveniently ignores solar/wind + batteries, which is even cheaper than coal.

Where are you getting this claim? Natural gas costs somewhere between $40 and $70 per MWh [1]. Storage costs for batteries range from $100/KWh (very optimistic) to $300/KWh [2]. But that's per kilowatt hours. That's $100,000 per MWh to $300,000 per MWh.

Solar and wind's dispatchability remains its key weakness. Storage at anywhere near the required amounts remains a fantasy. That's why Germany and California are still burning fossil fuels for ~40% of their energy, while France's share of fossil fuel generation is under 10%.

1. https://blog.aee.net/the-numbers-are-in-and-renewables-are-w....

2. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73222.pdf

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#205

Post by manfredo » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

vianneychevalie wrote: post #200

aidenn0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also seems to be a problem because the US seems to have gotten much worse at building fixed structures (bridges, buildints &c.) over the last 100 year. Some of that cost is probably due to better workplace safety, but some of that cost has come in the past 40 years, and I don't feel like OSHA has tightened the screws that much in the psat 40 years.

Not only the US. The Flamanville EPR has suffered increased costs because the welders that actually learned how to do nuclear-level welds had retired by the time someone decided to build a new nuclear reactor after Chernobyl. Additionally, the foundries that build a key part of the nuclear core (I belive it’s called a chaudron in French, but it’s basically a big metal boiler) were not as good as they were, because th…

It's less that we've lost a technological capacity, and more than we are no longer leveraging economies of scale. France and the US built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (well, mostly just France in the 1980s). Nuclear power plants often require specialized parts that aren't found in any other industry. That means when one-off plants are built an entire portion of the supply chain needs to be rebuilt, but when a serial run of plants are constructed (as was done in France) overhead costs of setting up the supply chain are spread out across all plants.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#206

Post by bad_user » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

Ovah wrote: post #27

bad_user wrote: post #8

> " we know that things like bad diet, inactivity, obesity and alcohol can also cause cancer " No, we actually don't know that. I would say that correlation isn't causation, but for at least 3 of those factors I'm pretty sure we don't even have the correlation. This sentence here spoiled the entire article for me, as this is IMO an unacceptable mistake for a science journalist.

Correlation is indeed not causation. However all four statements hold true for correlation. And at least alcohol can cause cancer. - Bad diet: for example red meat increases risk of colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698595/ - physical activity reduces the risk of many cancers. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o... - overweight people have a higher risk of cance…

> - physical activity reduces the risk of many cancers

Logical fallacy.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#207

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #199

pfdietz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of land. The notion that land constraints seriously limit solar is an oft-repeated canard. You can see this by either comparing the land needed to the land available, or by comparing the cost of land to the cost of the equipment that is put on the land. Nuclear's land use typically ignores the land used by the distribution network for its power. If you add that in, the land ratio of solar vs. nuclear…

> There is plenty of land. The notion that land constraints seriously limit solar is an oft-repeated canard. I mean, I guess that's technically true, but not all land is made the same - solar is obviously going to be more productive in California, Arizona and Florida than it will be in Washington or Maine. I'm also not arguing that we can't do it because of land — it's poor land use, and works counter to the goal of…

Yes, not all land is the same. I think people who worry about land are thinking about the land they see every day, which is in populated areas. They don't think about the vast quantities of very cheap land outside those urban areas.

> How many ecosystems should be destroy by covering it in panels,

Many fewer than were destroyed covering far vaster areas with farms.

> How do you figure? You are going to have transmission from the desert to cities, and you will need last mile delivery either way.

That doesn't contradict the point I made.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#208

Post by manfredo » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

dv_dt wrote: post #39

raffraffraff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whereas with lovely coal and oil we get to ignore the problem. It's just smoke until... Catastrophic climate feedback loops, mass extinction, hundreds of millions of climate migrants escaping uninhabitable parts of earth, coral and shellfish disappear in acidic oceans, entire ecosystems collapse and etc etc. But nuclear had costs. Sure. But we could at least begin to calculate those costs.

Why does the answer always reply with coal and oil instead of Renewables and storage?

Because we need truly fantastic levels of storage to make renewables even remotely feasible. The US has 8 seconds of battery storage, and ~4 minutes of hydroelectric storage. We need 12 hours of storage to get to 80% renewable generation, and 3 weeks of storage to get to 100% renewable generation [1]. And even if we did go this route, we'd still need to cover 3-5% of the landmass of the Earth with solar panels to achieve this.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora....

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#209

Post by DoctorOetker » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

nobodyandproud wrote: post #183

DoctorOetker wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the price of protecting many small nuclear reactors against say aeroplanes will rise per watt. I certainly agree with death per TWh calculations being naive, but for a different reason: ethics trumps metrics. If I agree to climb a roof and maintain some solar panels in exchange for money, I am risking my own life and limb. A child 100 years from now will not fall off in my place. If you agree to work in a nuclear rea…

How do you quantify the life and healthcost of the mining, “recycling”, and disposal of the PV and the battery? PV and batteries are expected to last only three decades or a decade+, respectively. Unlike a centralized power source, decentralized power has all of the downsides that we have today with consumer garbage. Disposal is left to the consumer, which means it’s just going into landfills. Ethics is a strawman.

As long as the mining activity was by informed consent, i.e. no slavery explicit nor implicit, any life and healthcost of mining, recycling and disposal is incurred with informed consent...

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#210

Post by AtlasBarfed » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:35 AM UTC

DoctorOetker wrote: post #168

nicoburns wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But investing in wind, solar and storage would be much cheaper still. The fukushima cleanup effort has cost close to $100 billion. Imagine where we could take renewable and energy storag tech with that level of investment.

Just looked up some numbers from Wikipedia: "Japan had 282 GW of total installed electricity generating capacity in 2010" "A 2010 study by the Japanese government (pre-Fukushima disaster), called the Energy White Paper,[citation needed] concluded the cost for kilowatt hour was ¥49 for solar, ¥10 to ¥14 for wind, and ¥5 or ¥6 for nuclear power. Masayoshi Son, an advocate for renewable energy, however, has pointed out…

10 years ago? It's 2020, wind/solar have dropped by significant percentages every year since then.

Wind/solar are cheaper (LCOE) than everything except natural gas, which it is on parity with right now, and shortly will pass even for installed generation (meaning it will be worth it for electric companies to invest in replacing the natural gas generators)