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

Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

blog.rootsofprogress.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 105 posts

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#81

Post by cedws »

XorNot wrote: post #39
littlecranky67 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed. When the Ukraine war broke out, in Germany we had discussions how we could no longer rely on cheap russian gas and there we politicians actively demanding NPP to be reactivated. At the same time our government decided to spent 100 bilion € for the military and defense. This is surreal, when experts explain how "safe" NPPS are, the safety assumptions never asume a war going on around that NPP. If you fac…

Making your plans around existential crises happening to your nation is foolish. There isn't going to just be "a war" in Germany - there never was. A war in germany is a war with NATO, which is a nuclear war, and thus "what if the nuclear powerplant is hit" is rather mundane compared to "our cities and citizens have been incinerated".

Europe is already engaged in a hybrid war. The next escalation isn't necessarily nuclear. It would most likely look like mutual sabotage to infrastructure, including energy and water supplies. Nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort, neither side will be eager to launch, and especially not before intense conventional warfare.

>Making your plans around existential crises happening to your nation is foolish

Foolish is not being prepared for the worst.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#82

Post by TheRoque »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #67
TheRoque wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really a game changer though ? AFAIK countries that made the shift to solar and wind can't still store they energy and have to rely on fossil still to power they country (e.g. Germany). On top of that, if the whole world made the shift to solar, wind and batteries, I assume the scarcity of some materials will become an issue. According to this [1] Lithium for example is expected to have a shortage by 2025. Ther…

Watching what China does is always instructive. Despite platitudes to the contrary, climate change is a tertiary concern of theirs. What they care most about is (1) energy independence and (2) cost. So 10-15 years ago they started building a lot of nuclear, solar and coal. As the cost of solar plummeted and nuclear went up they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. For the last 5 years they've built seve…

What's IOW... ?

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#83

Post by myrmidon »

486sx33 wrote: post #77

Ok, this is crazy. I stopped reading when the author says evacuating the people from Fukushima was unnecessary. Of course it is necessary. What good is a world where everyone is irradiated and dying of cancer ? We have enough already. This guy is either on Westinghouse’s payroll or some kind of pharmaceutical company about to release a new injectable therapy. Fukushima proved that the nuclear industry in fact isn’t d…

> I stopped reading when the author says evacuating the people from Fukushima was unnecessary.

I disagree strongly on this.

I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that I would be willing to trade of risk of mortality in exchange for keeping and staying at my home (especially older people!).

If you displace over 100000 people you need a good justification-- if you lack observable excess mortality from radiation in the non-evacuated population, you clearly, objectively overevacuated in my view.

I do agree with the article that current regulation tends to focus too much on mitigating irrelevant/marginal risks (driving up costs too much), but I think this can still be true even though the resulting cumulative risk is too high: "Overregulation" is NOT a one-dimensional quantity.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#84

Post by the_third_wave »

Gud wrote: post #70
ekianjo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> m. It's a skewed perspective to think that NATO involvement would end up in a nuclear war. of course it would end up in a nuclear war. NATO is encircling Russia and if Russia feels cornered you should expect them to use anything available to them.

Russia is encircling themselves with NATO by bullying everyone around them.

This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation;

1 - Nato was formed as a defence block against the "second Russian Empire" i.e. the Soviet Union and is still around to counter the budding "third Russian Empire".

2 - even since being conquered by the Mongol Empire Russia has been paranoid about the possibility of some conquering entity crossing its long border to rush into its vast territory. They want mountain ranges, sea or some other barrier between them and that potential enemy. If none of the sort can be had they want a buffer zone - they call it neutral states but in reality they mean vassal states, e.g. Belarus - between them and "the others". Those vassal states were gathered into a "counter-NATO" in the form of the Warsaw Pact.

3 - after the dissolution of the "second Russian Empire" and with that of the Warsaw Pact the former vassal states, fed up with being subservient to their oppressive neighbour bully took their chances and ran with it by joining NATO.

4 - Meanwhile Russia depopulated, was taken over by a new (old) gang of kleptocrats under first Yeltsin, then Putin while "the West" was busily "spreading democracy" by bombing and invading countries which were deemed to be essential for their economies by virtue of them being rich in natural resources. Some people and companies got richer, many people died and democracy was far to be found. This provided the Russian kleptocrats with a credible excuse for creating a new version of the old "us versus them" narrative: NATO is just like the Mongol Empire out on conquering our land to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. The recent flurry of "gender" and "alfabet soup" propaganda pushed by the current US regime just adds fuel to this fire and has given Putin a plausible (if false) cover of being the one who "defends traditional Christian values", going so far as to offer "asylum" to those who want to "flee corrupted Western values" [1].

5 - This gives the kleptocrats in "the East" the excuse they needed to make a push for creating the "third Russian Empire" to keep out the "new Mongol Empire" while their counterparts in "the West" have all the excuse they need to expand NATO to keep the "Russian bear" at bay.

6 - rinse and repeat

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-russia-safe-haven-for-...

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#85

Post by Earw0rm »

XorNot wrote: post #43
Earw0rm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you got some sources for that? Thermal forcing from existing plants (and thermal sink from their energy output) seems like it'd be tiny compared to solar thermal forcing. I realise GHG from their waste gases is a huge problem, but direct thermal forcing?

I don't know how this constantly comes up on HN but I have seen it mentioned across every type of energy thread. And people could trivially disprove the notion in mere seconds by Googling the solar irradiance of the sun over the Earth, but for some reason they never do before posting.

Not all irradiance translates into heat, but even if it's only a few W/m2, that's megawatts per sq km, and terawatts for a France sized area.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#86

Post by Earw0rm »

Festro wrote: post #65
Earw0rm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the most useful definition of rich/poor how much access to resources you can buy? As in, how can someone be both getting poorer but also enjoying increasing access to resources? Buying power is a pretty good measure here unless I've missed something? (I'm talking about this in a global context where we can assume asset wealth is pretty much negligible, i.e. it's not a case of people burning through savings to a…

I agree, but in practise this has been difficult to measure, thus the existence of 'poverty lines' which have been defined as $1/day, $2/day etc, and been fairly static for a long time. For a poverty line definition then, as I mentioned, we can observe fewer people being below the poverty line as time goes on, but we're ignoring inflation and buying power. Fewer people being under the $1/day poverty line is great, un…

Ok,that makes sense. My country (UK) uses a definition of poverty that's based on a % of median household income, which doesn't tell you anything about buying power.

If your income is below 60% of median, you're in poverty per the government's definition.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#87

Post by cogman10 »

michaelt wrote: post #32

Here in the UK it would be super convenient if cost-effective nuclear power plants could be built. After all, to decarbonise the economy we need to replace petrol cars with EVs, and gas-fired central heating with heat pumps - which will mean a big increase in demand for electricity. A lot of that heat demand will be in winter, when solar output is at its lowest. And a lot of our existing power plants are past the end…

> And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling.

This is the #1 reason why I'm a bit more pessimistic on nuclear than I used to be.

I still think it has a place in a modern power grid and probably increasingly so as available sites for renewables go down. However, we simply aren't there yet. Both renewables and batteries have seen precipitous drops in pricing which ultimately means they make more sense as they are both cheaper and faster to deploy.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#88

Post by pepa65 »

the_third_wave wrote: post #84
Gud wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is encircling themselves with NATO by bullying everyone around them.

This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation; 1 - Nato was formed as a defence block against the "second Russian Empire" i.e. the Soviet Union and is still around to counter the budding "third Russian Empire". 2 - even since being conquered by the Mongol Empire Russia has been paranoid about the possibility of some conquering entity crossing its long border to rush into its vast territory. They want mountain ranges,…

It would be more complete if you would account for the kleptocrats in the West.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#89

Post by rasz »

cedws wrote: post #28
littlecranky67 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed. When the Ukraine war broke out, in Germany we had discussions how we could no longer rely on cheap russian gas and there we politicians actively demanding NPP to be reactivated. At the same time our government decided to spent 100 bilion € for the military and defense. This is surreal, when experts explain how "safe" NPPS are, the safety assumptions never asume a war going on around that NPP. If you fac…

Much easier to target one NPP than thousands of windmills and solar panels distributed throughout the country too.

Weird thing to say considering russians didnt bomb any NPPs yet, but did actually brick Viasat disabling "remote monitoring access to over 5,800 wind turbines"

.. in Germany of all places

https://cyberconflicts.cyberpeaceinstitute.org/law-and-polic...

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#90

Post by pepa65 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #47
maelito wrote: post #13

> Or they were—costs are so high now that we don‘t even build plants anymore. That's factually wrong. France has a program of nuclear building. We don't build a lot of plants in Europe, but we do.

And this has absolutely nothing to do with having to maintain a nuclear stockpile, because France unlike other nations in the European Union doesn't have nuclear weapons. /s

Come on man, everybody knows France has their own nuclear weapons, have had for many decades.
Post reply on HN