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

Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 277 posts

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#81

Post by pdonis »

dctoedt wrote: post #57
pdonis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible. (Whether those designs can support the requirements for military use, which are quite different from those for civilian power generation, is a different question.) That said, civilian nuclear power, at least in the US, was…

> Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible. That would be excellent — although color me doubtful; people always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up ....

> people always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up

That's why the passive safety features I referred to don't depend on people at all; they depend on the laws of physics, which are certainly more reliable than people. :-)

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#82

Post by fundatus »

jjk166 wrote: post #60
fundatus wrote: post #5

Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.

Except it's not an absurd cost to build. In South Korea LCOE of nuclear is less than half that of solar, at approximately $0.05/kwh. In most of the world, the cost of nuclear power has remained constant or decreased adjusted for inflation since the 60s, only in the US has the cost skyrocketed. This suggests a political issue, not a technological one.

Hinkley Point C, £23 billion for a measly ~3.000 MW. you could literally build ten+ times the capacity using modern, emission-free alternatives.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#83

Post by alerighi »

epistasis wrote: post #40

While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of cult…

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#84

Post by bluejekyll »

pdonis wrote: post #81
dctoedt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible. That would be excellent — although color me doubtful; people always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up ....

> people always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up That's why the passive safety features I referred to don't depend on people at all; they depend on the laws of physics, which are certainly more reliable than people. :-)

I assume people are still building [those things](edit: these new reactors), and I also bet they require some regular amount of maintenance.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#85

Post by Arnt »

pdonis wrote: post #46
dctoedt wrote: post #23

Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor. (Neither Three Mi…

Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible. (Whether those designs can support the requirements for military use, which are quite different from those for civilian power generation, is a different question.) That said, civilian nuclear power, at least in the US, was…

Digressing, perhaps… do you know anything about why the passive designs weren't built? There are something like 500 nuclear reactors, of which approximately zero use entirely passive safety features. Not 250, not even 50.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#87

Post by kristopolous »

smm11 wrote: post #31

Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.

Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag...

There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind

This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling requirements which require continuous power and water.

Spent waste today won't be ready for storage here for about 120 years - mid 22nd century.

All for something you could get with some windmills or solar panels

The blind nuclear boosterism on Hn is absurd. We are well on our way to fully decentralized renewable electricity that's so cheap it won't be metered and instead there's this fetish for centralized plants that take 10 years to construct, have waste that takes 120 years to process, and lead to multi-continent ecosystem disasters when predictable natural events happen. Cool tech...

Existing and deployed solar is 1/7th the cost of not yet deployed hypothetical advanced nuclear btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

Their best claimed future efforts make it 7x the cost. This is just about keeping power generation privatized metered monopolized centralized and boosted by the government while claiming it's a free market. Typical mindless libertarian drivel.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#88

Post by jjk166 »

fundatus wrote: post #79
jjk166 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of thousands of people dying per year vs mild inconvenience for wild boar hunters is hardly a difficult choice.

my point obviously being that this still affects plants, animals and humans in a much larger area than just the surrounding area - which makes the argument "We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years" not very compelling

And my point is that the alternative also affects plants, animals, and humans in a much larger area (infact worldwide) and too such a significantly greater degree that the comparison is laughable. If there was a button that would cause us to have a chernobyl every day and eliminate fossil fuels immediately, every minute that button went unpressed would kill 15 people. The actual breakeven point is a chernobyl every 3 hours.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#89

Post by alerighi »

fundatus wrote: post #5

Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.

Except they aren't cheaper than nuclear in any way. Nuclear power has a big cost to get started, it's a fact, but then a reactor, especially a modern one, can continue to function for nearly a century. If you factor that, the cost is risible given the benefit that nuclear power gives you.

Talking about renewable, how much does it cost to remain without energy? We take it for granted, but it's not, especially these day. Without energy we cannot work, the whole economy stops. I live in Italy and it's becoming pretty much a disaster. Companies close because the energy price is not sustainable and they will lose money if they operate. Does still nuclear seem expensive? We are talking about loosing hundreds of millions of euros every day, something that will pay the construction of a nuclear plant in a week. All of that because people voted against nuclear power plants, and we are in this situation. Now this winter when we will not have enough gas to heat our houses we well thank them for saving us from the enormous risk of nuclear power.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#90

Post by fi358 »

epistasis wrote: post #78
WalterBright wrote: post #11

Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...

The climate efforts of the past 20 years refute both of these claims decisively. First, carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not been effective. And there are massive barriers to enacting them, because there is no constituency that advocates for them. The progress we have made with reducing emissions has been through industrial policy of various sorts, rather than through single taxes. For every proble…

At least in countries like here in Finland, you get almost no energy from solar panels during winter months. 12 hours of storage to a solar array is not going to work at least here.
Post reply on HN