EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy • Hacker News Board

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#871

Post by natmaka » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

JackSlateur wrote: post #810

natmaka wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem When it comes to nuclear waste repositories real experts official publish: "Internationally, it is understood that there is no reliable scientific basis for predicting the process or likelihood of inadvertent human intrusion." Source: https://international.andra.fr/sites/international/files/201...

I have no idea how this information relates to the parent post;

A problem with nuclear waste is that living being (especially human beings) must not be exposed to it.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#872

Post by kevincox » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

gilbetron wrote: post #769

teamonkey wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s. Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... https://en.wik…

And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths. Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.

Most importantly if you scale fatalities by power generated Nuclear is one of the best (last I checked only bested by solar). Coal generates releases way more radiation into the environment and has way more deaths during mining.

People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#873

Post by strawhatguy » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #838

strawhatguy wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system. What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere . Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas. The regulations and the subsidies oug…

Renewables and storage have gotten so cheap that the areas where nuclear might still be competitive have greatly shrunk. Right now, the best remaining places for nuclear are in eastern Europe away from coasts. Even there, nuclear is at best competitive with optimistic assumptions. This also means that, globally, renewables are much cheaper than nuclear in most places. In a global economy, energy intensive industries…

Luckily EV mandates have been rolled back nationally (although not in my state yet). That’s a sure way to drive up the cost of storage anyway, when maybe battery storage is better served for this power station purpose instead.

Obviously using used car batteries might be a way to recycle these more effectively than what is currently available.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#874

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #803

kranke155 wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error. Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.

The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered). But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it. The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl. Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven a…

[deleted]

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#875

Post by burnt-resistor » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

prinny_ wrote: post #779

m101 wrote: post #561

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.

I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?

I was involved in the nuclear industry in the 90's.

Why impose externalities on others when solar and wind are so cheap and less risky? It seems like proponents fall for technological aspirationalism without considering pragmatic consequences and risks of shoveling enormous sums of money for unnecessary risks and inefficient allocations of capital because it's seems just barely unobtainable or blocked by "them" when it's simply economically unviable.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#876

Post by pembrook » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #842

pembrook wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It’s as simple as: A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough …and… B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times) You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear. Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it w…

But you're wrong. Batteries are now fine for diurnal storage, which is their intended use. Batteries are not fine for seasonal storage, but there are alternatives for that when it is needed. China is installing vastly more renewables than nuclear. Their nuclear builds appear to be just a holding action to preserve their capability to build NPPs; that can't last forever.

Yes the alternatives for the seasonal storage problem are...fossil fuels. So obviously if we can't solve the seasonal problem yet with batteries, current battery tech isn't capable enough to make clean energy a reality without Nuclear.

Also, China's energy mix is irrelevant for Europe, the two regions have vastly different climates, population distributions, and government.

Europe has much bigger seasonal gaps in the winter for things like solar; Hydro is huge in China due to massive river systems like the Yangtze, but basically tapped out in Europe; Wind is a huge opportunity in China but only works Offshore in Europe; Europe can't run cross-continent UHV grid systems like China due to beaurocratic impossibility; etc. etc.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#877

Post by nilslindemann » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #870

nilslindemann wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.

It’s important to understand the qualifier per unit of energy . The correct parable for you would have been the number of bear deaths vs interactions with bears weighed against number of car deaths vs interactions with cars.

You mean, number of deaths per incident? Yeah, that makes sense.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#878

Post by jvanderbot » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

scandox wrote: post #780

gilbetron wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths. Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.

I'm open to Nuclear if it can be done safely and if we can show we have the cultural maturity to keep it safe...but in the case of Chernobyl at least I think that statistics and other officious BS has been used to greatly downplay the true human cost in death, sickness, displacement and on many other metrics.

Ok plenty of responses to the Chernobyl thing, but without a definition of "safe" it's a moot argument. The injury per watt hour speaks for itself, unless you had something else in mind.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Post by nec4b » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #776

nec4b wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would point to the law of economics which says only renewables can get cheaper with investments? And which law of physics makes renewables work in places, which have little wind and solar?

It's typically called Wright's Law: https://quickonomics.com/terms/wrights-law/ But it's not a law that applies to all technologies, and it will likely end at some point, but there's at least 1-2 decades of cost decrease left. There is no law of physics that makes renewables work where there are poor renewable resources, except through transmission, which is usually engineered using several of Maxwell's laws.

I asked which economic law makes ONLY renewables getting cheaper with time. Why couldn't nuclear also get cheaper? Maxwell laws can't help with geopolitics though.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#880

Post by burnt-resistor » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

close04 wrote: post #657

oneshtein wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent. In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.

We can make nuclear safe (enough) but after one big incident nobody wanted the political career suicide to push for this. So we are stuck with criticizing stone-age level nuclear power because we never took it further. The West never stopped doing something just because the USSR didn’t do it properly. If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car acc…

No, we can't. I worked in the industry when there was strong, independent regulation and private engineering consultancies. These don't exist anymore. The NRC is stacked politically and it and EPRI lack the gray beards it once had and the engineering industry is a shadow of its former self. Dunning-Kruger ignorant proponents advocate for it without understanding the issues or the complications in this current situation that is a far different situation than 30 years ago that might've been reasonable when Duke Energy wanted a revival. Its time has passed because the economics of conventional alternatives make it moot.