[Gondolin]

I am flabbergasted that some commenters here argue against nuclear because of waste and accidents, while ignoring that

- coal produce radioactive waste too

- it kills a lot more persons (without taking into account global warning) due to air pollution

- the economic cost of nuclear may be underestimated, but this is nothing compared to the economic cost of global warming.

Renewable (wind and solar) are extremely important, but nuclear replace coal and gas. Renewable alone are not enough, especially since we will need a lot more electric energy for transport and to decarbonise the atmosphere; so both are needed.

It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan.

People's priority are wrongly aligned: first close coals and gas plants using renewable, and then think about reducing nuclear plants once we have good storage technology.

Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents). Taking global warming into account, this is way worse; if nothing is done we are talking about billions of death to total collapse of human civilisation.

Compared to that, the human and economic cost of nuclear waste and a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice is trivial.

Nuclear energy is a vital tool against global warming, and I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that.

[lispm]

I find it puzzling that proponents of nuclear technology make various claims without any calculations to back that up.

'a vital tool agains global warming'? What does that mean in numbers? How many nuclear power plants of what types for what amount of effort would be built in what timeframe for to make any sizeable contribution? How would it work?

A single reactor in the west is >10bn $ and takes a decade or more to build, while not being able to be financed on the market (see the UK).

[pytester]

Yep, Hinkley point is ~£95 per MWh while renewables are ~£45. It makes no sense to complain about how polluting coal plants are in relation to nuclear. It isn't the main source of competition.

Germany has been taking both nuclear and coal offline and renewables have been plugging the gap for both for some years now and will likely continue to do so.

It boggles my mind that the nuclear industry itself demands that all disaster cleanup costs over $300 million be shouldered by the government yet it is trying to project an image of how it is the "safe" option. If they don't have enough faith in their own safety to raise the cap why should we?

[Gondolin]

Germany has been taking coal offline after taking nuclear offline; and are replacing coal by gas (so they depend even more on Russia) instead of replacing it by nuclear or renewable.

They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.

In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world, and we don't know the time frame to get to it (there are huge technological challenges, while the challenge for nuclear reactor are solved since 50 years. Of course they are still RD to be done on the nuclear side too, like molten salt reactors).

Given the economic and human cost of global warming, investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet. Again, I am not saying that nuclear is a miracle energy that will solve all our problem (fusion would be). Nuclear energy does have a lot of problems. But these problems are trivial which respect to global warming, and we should solve global warming first (which again will involve even more electricity than we produce right now).

Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!) is like worrying about a leak under the sink while the whole house is on fire.

[pytester]

It certainly doesn't look like natural gas usage is ramping up:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

>They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.

That's because France started replacing fossil fuels with nuclear in the 80s. That was the only sensible approach to reducing CO2 in the 80s. This isn't the 80s though.

>In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world

I mean, it's half the cost of nuclear and it doesn't include the risks (however small) of catastrophe.

In an ideal world we could swap out fossil fuels for something clean overnight - obviously it takes about 30 years. The question isn't "what can we replace fossil fuels with overnight", it's "what can take over from fossil fuels?"

[Gondolin]

If I count lignite + coal + natural gas + mineral oil, it goes from 76.9GW in 2010 to 79.3GW in 2019. So it did not go down either. That's because Germany needs a back up energy source for now. It could have gone down by 10GW had Germany closed coal rather than nuclear first.

[pytester]

Yes, maybe they should have closed coal rather than nuclear first between 2010 and 2014.

However, from this point onward it makes little difference. It makes little economic sense to build new nuclear plants given that they are more expensive and no sense to build coal. Renewables are more than capable of taking over as old nuclear and coal plants are phased out.

The issue now is how fast to phase out rickety old nuclear plants and rickety old coal plants.

[lispm]

What does GW measure in this context? Electricity production is usually measured in TWh.

[ftr45]

>I mean, it's half the cost of nuclear

it's not https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

[pfdietz]

Your report is from 2015. Given how rapidly PV costs have continued to decline (and how major nuclear efforts collapsed with cost explosions since then), that's useless.

[lispm]

> Germany has been taking coal offline after taking nuclear offline; and are replacing coal by gas (so they depend even more on Russia) instead of replacing it by nuclear or renewable

Germany's Energiewende is a many decade long plan with going beyond 80+ renewable energy for electricity in 2050.

The Energiewende is not just about CO2 reductions, it is about making renewable energy viable in an industrialized country. This has impact for all of us. Not just in Germany.

If the US had a forward looking government and population, we would much further along the way. The energy consumption in the US is twice as high per capita as in Germany and there is no credible energy policy beyond fracking gas. The current US president is a coal lover and he was voted for that into his office. Imagine the amount of research money and infrastructure money the US COULD invest into a new energy systems - instead it wastes money on wars, consumption and trillion dollar deficits.

> investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet

That's why it has to go and somebody has to invest to make that viable. Germany is doing exactly that.

> Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!)

Germany did focus on renewable energy and the most incompatible industry had to go first.

Renewable energy is not about nuclear and renewable side by side - this won't work.

Nuclear is a huge state owned monopolistic system. Renewable is market oriented, decentralized, non-monopolistic. The break-up of the old system was inevitable to jump-start the new energy system.

It's a complete paradigm shift like going from Mainframe computing to a distributed Internet.

[Gondolin]

Germany's goal is laudable, but even if it manages to go full renewable by 2050 that's still 40 years of green house gas emissions it could have avoided had it gone both nuclear and renewable.

Nuclear can be made smaller (molten salt reactor, but I do admit that there are huge challenges for that too), and more flexible. Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's, but France's can be quite flexible: for those of you who can read French <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1102620969808658432.html> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.

[lispm]

> molten salt reactor

will have zero impact in the next three decades. There is no market offering and no buyer.

No one is investing in yet another fuel cycle and nuclear technology. There are no reactors of scale and there is no industry surrounding it.

> Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's

Germany had a few flexible nuclear plants. But all old.

> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.

The result is that France has invested very little in renewable energy in the last decades and created a very inefficient and state owned energy system.

France's centralized nuclear state owned energy system and distributed multi-producer/owner renewable energy are largely incompatible systems. Proof: the lack of investments into renewable in the last decades in France.

The main question is this: where are CURRENT investments going. Not nuclear, but renewable. This future had been made possible by investments like the German Energiewende, while other countries did invest in mostly nothing. They even failed to bring nuclear forward (-> US). The US sits on a bunch of outdated reactors and not much idea how to replace them economically with newer and better ones.

[ElBarto]

Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point and you'll see that it is not really realistic.

Then, take into account the goal of making of vehicles electric in the next 20 years.

There is no viable alternative to nuclear as of today even if renewables should of course be pushed as much as possible.

Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons. (wood fired plants are counted as renewables in the EU, by the way)

The absolute priority should be to get rid of emissions, i.e. fossil fuels. Germany decided to get rid of nuclear energy first.

They are not a good example to follow.

[lispm]

> Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons

It does because it is a relatively industrialized country. CO2 emissions fell last year by 4.5%.

These are actual numbers for electricity production in Germany: from 2017 to 2018:

5.6% more wind electricity, 6.3% more solar electricity.

2.7% less coal/lignite, 6% less hard coal, 9% less gas.

The share of renewable energy of electricity production is 40%.

In 2030 it is projected to be at around 65%.

This is going to be a revolution. We now have working days in 2019 where >60% of the electricity are coming from renewables. There was a week this year with 64.8% renewable energy for electricity, with wind providing 48.4%. Two decades ago this was thought to be impossible.

[ElBarto]

> It does because it is a relatively industrialized country.

No, it does because its electricity comes from fossil fuels.

You are completely avoiding the point of my comment. Germany could have much, much lower emissions with nuclear but it has decided to continue emitting for political reasons, while trying to claim that they are 'green'...

[lispm]

We could also be much much less habitated with one Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event.

[pytester]

>Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point

Hinkley Point = 3200 MW Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW

That's about 1,100 wind turbines at current tech. GE is working on a 12 MW wind turbine - it would take 270 of them would replace Hinkley point.

[joss82]

3MW is the peak power when the wind is blowing constantly at the maximum speed the wind turbine was designed to operate (and not over, at which point the turbine enters safe mode and stops to prevent damage).

Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...

[pytester]

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

Quite right, my mistake.

GE's new turbine has a 63% capacity apparently. So, 428 of them are needed, apparently.

Either way, I don't see what is so intrinsically unrealistic about setting up 500 of these things offshore as compared to a hinkley point.

Gansu Wind farm in China is 8,000MW - already 2.5x onen Hinkley.

[nikdaheratik]

You seem to be leaving out the fact that most nuclear plants have a fair amount of downtime as well in order to refuel. While I don't have UK statistics, in the US it's typically 30-40 days per year when they don't run (so 10% of the time or more). So, you would need more than one source to make up for the nuclear plant's downtime just as you would to make up for areas offshore where the wind isn't blowing at top speed.

[logifail]

> Nuclear's is 80%

Why is that?

I'm sure we're all broadly in favour of free markets. Do electricity consumers buy nuclear because it's good value?[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

[lispm]

Germany has 30000+ wind turbines.

[ElBarto]

> An average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2.5–3 MW can produce more than 6 million kWh in a year

(Source: http://www.ewea.org/wind-energy-basics/faq/)

That's an actual average of 685 kW, so 4,700 turbines for Hinkley Point. But that's still the _average_ production. If, or rather when, there's no wind during a high demand period you get a nice blackout.

Also:

> So a 2-megawatt wind turbine would require a total area of about half a square kilometer

(Source: https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-1230463...

So for those 4,700 turbines you need more than 2,350 km^2, so the whole of Dorset covered and as said, you'd still need a backup.

[ftr45]

>Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW

it doesn't work like that , capacity factor of wind is almost half of the capacity factor of nuclear

[yostrovs]

... when the wind blows.

[pytester]

Yep, although:

* The wind is always blowing somewhere.

* At current prices it makes sense just to overproduce and figure out ways to time shift demand (e.g. start using electric storage heaters again)

[throw082]

Regarding your comment on wood fired plants: To me it seems that you imply that that is not renewable, which I do not understand. If you regrow the trees that you've burned (cleanly) down then your net impact will be zero, right?

[ftr45]

nuclear is the safest and cheapest option https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

[pfdietz]

Maybe you should try living in 2019, rather than 2012 or 2015.

[ftr45]

maybe 4 years aren't so relevant,maybe you should bring proof's of what you say

[pfdietz]

Solar costs have fallen very rapidly. Four years is forever for this subject. You should acquaint yourself with the basics of the situation.

[theshrike79]

Building new nuclear is slow and expensive because we stopped doing it for a looong time.

Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.

[lispm]

Check the fate of the EPR projects.

Just replacing eol reactors in the west will be hard.

[Amygaz]

There isn’t a single line in OP’s post that isn’t wrong. He gets the costs wrong, he gets the deployment wrong, he gets efficiencies wrong, he get political stories wrong. If a post is not going to get downvoted, HN should at least have a way to label it as incorrect.

[dv_dt]

A tell is the comparison is always vs coal instead of natural gas or renewables ...

[vlehto]

http://withouthotair.com/

"A vital tool agains global warming" means that it's our only possibility. It's not about cost, it's about what is physically possible.

[aurelwu]

It's always about cost, if it wasn't about cost we could just build so much PV/Wind + Power to Gas/Liquid Facilities as we need and be done with it. And building new nuclear is way more expensive than projected in your link, (No blame to the authors, 10 years ago they couldn't know that those numbers are not realistic) while Wind/PV are still becoming cheaper every year)

they assume ~1,3 Billion per 1 GW nuclear capacity[0], but right now it looks like 3-5 Billion per 1 GW is more whats happening. [0] http://withouthotair.com/c28/page_216.shtml [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

[vlehto]

It's not about cost, because there is not enough wind, solar, tidal and geothermal energy combined on the British isles to satisfy power consumption.

If you take single fuck up, that's been shown in court to be fuck up and then deduct from there that nuclear power is all over as expensive Olkiluoto 3, then umm.

Do you also smoke because your granny smoked and lived to her nineties?

[kuzehanka]

> It's always about cost

As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant.

During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done.

Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource spent or per unit climate change impact, and that fact will increasingly override dollar costs or public perception as the the climate gets increasingly hostile.

Until the crisis becomes apparent, I am sure nuclear will continue to be a mostly ignored option across europe and the west while political forces dominate the issue. China on the other hand isn't bothered by public sentiment[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-lik...

[nikdaheratik]

That isn't true about war and it certainly isn't true about public utilities. People went to jail all the time for overcharging the government during times of war. Money is a way to measure value and it always matters.

As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.

One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.

[lispm]

just claiming that without any numbers and without scenarios to back it up will convince no one.

You'll need to answer real practical questions like the UK currently faces: who will build the proposed reactors and who will pay how much for it. It's not like this is an easy question, just check the news the UK from the past few years, with Hitachi and Toshiba giving up.

France's state owned nuclear industry builds another plant in the UK - with a proposed cost of 20bn pounds... The decision for this reactor took almost ten years.

[aurelwu]

the energy density would be a factor if we had any actual space issues. But the area needed for solar and wind is not what is the problem. I agree with you that it is an emergency where not enough action is taken, but even then why not go for 100% Renewables (with Battery, Power-To-Gas, Power-To-Liquid etc. as storage) when that is cheaper than nuclear.

[kuzehanka]

Three reasons.

1: It's not actually cheaper than nuclear. The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China). Discounting this cost makes nuclear the dominant option. Factoring for lifecycle costs pushes it much further ahead. Fun fact: there is currently no way to recycle photovoltaics whose useful lifespan is 20 years.

2: Use of landmass. Deploying wind or solar consumes landmass which must be cleared of flora/fauna. The landmass required to power a nation via these means is not at all negligible. This is contrary to managing climate change for obvious reasons.

Geothermal power stands as an exception here and should absolutely be deployed over nuclear where permissible.

3: Excess capacity. The climate debate is converging on the fact that we are past the point of no return and we need to actively sequester carbon out of the atmosphere to get back to a healthy scenario. Ignoring the specifics, this basically means that we need to 'un-spend' all the energy that we have consumed over the last 50 years via fossil fuels. While still meeting the growing energy demands of civilisaion. We need to be producing a huge excess of energy for this strategy to be viable.

Renewables are nice, but pragmatically they are not nearly enough to dig us out of the hole where we have found ourselves.

[lispm]

repeated appeals were not what I was looking for. where are the numbers which describe the the contribution of nuclear power to control global warming? How many? What timeframe? Costs? Who builds them? Which models? Where do we build them? What effects does it have when? What are possible scenarios?

If nuclear proponents want to be taken serious, they need to answer those kinds of questions. Currently nuclear is stagnating on a global scale.

[vlehto]

If you take climate change stuff seriously, then the answers are these:

>How many?

As many as you can build. You run out of engineers and carpenters before you make too many reactors in time.

>What timeframe?

Now.

>Costs?

Doesn't matter that much. Easily cheaper than climate change.

>Who builds them?

Whoever can.

>Which models?

Hardly matters, any model is safer than burning coal.

>Where do we build them?

Doesn't matter. Any location is safer than burning coal.

>What effects does it have when?

Hope that we might have climate change to stop below 3 degrees.

[lispm]

Just like I thought. You have no idea how to do it, what it is going to cost and what impact it will have.

This will convince nobody.

[vlehto]

Are you doubting nuclear or are you doubting climate change?

[mch82]

Two important questions to ask are:

- Will you volunteer to live by the nuclear plant or waste storage facilities?

- Will you work at or advise your friends & family to work there?

[orbifold]

People have done these calculations. They come out in favor of nuclear in terms of area efficiency and price per kilowatt hour. It is just that politically it is a hard sell in a lot of countries.

[pfdietz]

And in the real world, instead of the calculations, nuclear is far behind in price per kWh. Unfortunately for nuclear, the power has to be generated in the real world, not on powerpoint slides.

[doe88]

I'm pro-puclear energy, but I also have enough experience and cynicism in life to also know that the biggest danger of nuclear is the human factor itself. As long as men and women will be men and women, there will be errors, malice, corruption, and all kind of factors that will affect our safety. Applying strict measures and processes will limit these risks but the current opacity of this industry is already a bad start and an hindrance to its success. I know it's not an easy problem to fix but it is vital to our safety on the long term.

[j16sdiz]

Nuclear energy need long term commitment. You can't simply shut it down by stop funding it.

This is not something I trust our government can do.

Other then that, nuclear is very clean and safe.

[progfix]

And I am flabbergasted (again) because of the pro nuclear power comments. Why should we create energy from something so complicated and hard to control when we have something simple and easy to grasp like water, solar and windpower? I understand statistically speaking a nuclear power plant is save, but the risk is calculated by multiplying propability of occurance and potential loss. The potential loss in a maximum credible accident of a power plant is much much higher than in any other form of energy generation.

Sure, we can build nuclear power plants, but let's make sure that we have used our potential for wind-, water- and solar power generation first (besides other stuff, like having good insulation on buildings, LEDs, etc).

I also feel like people are pro- or contra nuclear power to show their alliance to their political parties more than for rational reasons. We should stop that.

[theshrike79]

Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind. These require power in the scale of Terawatts each year. 24/7.

Renewables like solar and wind are decent for offsetting peaks and maybe generate some household electricity, but you're delusional if you think they can be used to replace coal or nuclear in the next decade. Or even quarter century.

Until we make giant leaps in energy storage technology, we NEED something that can provide a steady base flow of electricity 24/7/365.

And currently nuclear power is our best option for that. Burning fossil fuels (coal, wood, etc) is shit, we have only a limited number of places for water power.

[the_why_of_y]

What is needed as a complement to renewable energy is dispatchable generation, i.e., plants that can be quickly turned on and off as the supply from renewables changes. Nuclear (and also coal) is a really bad option for this because the time to turn these plants on an off is measured in days.

[theshrike79]

There really aren't any of these in the scale we need, they're used even today to offset peak loads. And all of them still burn fossil fuels.

The US has a fancy water pumping station in the scale we'd need (3000MW)[0], but it relies heavily on the local geography and wouldn't be economically feasible in the Netherlands for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

[pfdietz]

The reason peaking turbines use fossil fuels is the lack of a carbon tax sufficient to drive them to other inputs. In particular, they'd migrate to renewable hydrogen in a CO2-constrained situation.

[imtringued]

Intermittency is completely irrelevant because reductions in CO2 can still happen if you switch from coal baseload to load following gas which produces half as much Co2 and is only used when renewables don't produce energy.

[Amygaz]

Except than China and Australia are doing exactly what you said cannot be done.

Also Canada is complaining that they have a massive surplus of hydroelectricity, that they would like to sell us, but it’s apparently very complicated to get anyone to agree on anything, even if the total infrastructure cost and the energy would be cheaper than a nuclear plant.

[Gravityloss]

Modern electric arc steel mills can be stopped and started easily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_mill#Minimill

[pfdietz]

| Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind.

Ah, the Argument from Bad Engineering. If you stop and think real hard I'm sure you could imagine many ways to do this. And they'd be cheaper than trying to run steel mills off nuclear reactors.

[wtallis]

Ok, then: What's you're preferred form of industrial-scale energy storage?

[pfdietz]

For this application? Pumped hydro, high temperature thermal in firebrick (a technology used by the steel industry in the 1920s), and hydrogen.

Also, adapt iron/steel production to use direct electrolytic methods, although that's going to require more R&D. The potential for dispatchability of demand is enormous.

[vlehto]

If you are interested in some numbers about the subject, there is very good resource for the case of British isles. The situation is of course different for USA the people per area is different. But you anyhow can get a grasp why renewables are problematic.

http://withouthotair.com/

[Gondolin]

Renewable are a way better source of energy than nuclear power and we should definitively invest on them. But currently they does not suffice (because we don't have enough energy storage capacity). So we need nuclear both - now, to complete renewable, instead of using gas/coal - in the future, as a back up plan, if good storage technology is not found and renewable are not enough.

Remember that we will need a lot more electric energy if we want electric cars and use energy for decarbonisation; so we should use nuclear until renewable completely fill the gap.

[MertsA]

If you're just talking about potential loss hydropower is not the argument you want to make here. Just the Banqiao dam failure alone has caused far more fatalities than nuclear power ever has including Chernobyl.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Even just recently in the United States the Oroville dam came pretty close to catastrophe and required the evacuation of 188,000 people. Repairing the Oroville dam cost $1.1 billion, even back in the 70s the Teton Dam collapse cost over $300 million.

I'm all in favor of using hydroelectric power in places where we need to build a dam to control flooding but building a dam for power alone is ecologically damaging, floods tons of land, and even if you wanted to try to build more, there's not a lot of suitable locations.

As for the complexity of keeping a nuclear reactor under control, this isn't the 50s, we have reactor designs that are dramatically safer than older reactors, we aren't building them. I think you're wrong about trying to conserve energy as well. I'm not saying that we should waste it, but real conservation of energy isn't going to happen without significantly changing our current lifestyles. We don't need to do that if we just invest in sustainable clean energy in the form of nuclear power in the first place.

[mk89]

>Why should we create energy from something so complicated and hard to control when we have something simple and easy to grasp like water, solar and windpower?

I think because it's way more expensive than having a mixed source of energy. The issue is what are we able to give up for having energy? Air pollution? Security that I don't get blown in a nuclear plant explosion (the fear is always there it seems...) ? Money? I think that nuclear energy is not bad, it's just a transition, as the parent comment said. And it's a better transition than coal.

[jtolmar]

Has anyone discredited the old deaths per kilowatt hour metric? [1]

If not, nuclear is still the safest source of power, even including disasters like Chernoble and Fukushima. The major disasters come to mind more readily because they receive heavy media coverage, but this is in part because they're so rare, unlike the utterly routine problem of coal ash ponds spilling. Outside of major disasters, nuclear power produces so much energy that it's safer than wind power, which only kills people via construction and maintenance accidents.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

[theshrike79]

Yep. Coal plant deaths are local news.

A nuclear power plant failure (however minor) is global news for weeks and weeks.

[v_lisivka]

Nuclear power plant failure, like Chornobyl, _can_ make whole continent inhabitable for thousands of years.

[gambiting]

Chernobyl made a large area a restricted zone, but nowhere near a continent scale. Besides, I really dislike people bringing up Chernobyl as an example of dangers - the RBMK reactor type like the one in Chernobyl still operates in 10 reactors producing electricity(and they will until 2024 at least). Even Chernobyl itself operated into 2000s before the last reactor block was shut down. And the only catastrophic fault with them happened because of an idiotic test that basically was meant to test what happens if you switch off all cooling and disable all safeguards - well, the reactor explodes, that's what. The test itself was criminal.

[v_lisivka]

Nobody said that Chornobyl hit whole continent, but it's because some people sacrificed their lives to stop continent scale disaster[1], not because it was small scale disaster.

Chornobyl operated till 2000s because cheap atom blasted huge hole in budget of Ukraine. They stopped when Ukraine received financial help to close these reactors. Tax payers and international aid covered these expenses and will continue to cover them for next few centuries at least. Closure of single reactor costs significant part of budget of small country. Closure of bunch of reactors can eat whole budget or two.

If one stupid can devastate whole continent, then better to switch to something else, because it doesn't look like we will breed out stupid people in near future.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raB80HRA1IQ

[Tomte]

Sure, if we exclude everything that could go wrong, we have a very safe system.

Unfortunately, it happened. It really happened. And "only those stupid Russians could have done it" doesn't comfort me.

[imtringued]

It's not inhabitable but if you have a choice between living in a contaminated area or a non contaminated area then you will always choose the latter. The animals ib chernobyl actually thrive because of the lack of human intervention.

[tramav]

>It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones.

Today Germany is still affected by the radioactive fallout (Chernobyl). For example many wild boars in Thuringia are radioactively contaminated with caesium-137. It will still take about 300 years until the radioactive caesium-137 vanishes.

[stingraycharles]

A banana is radioactive as well. What is the exact negative effect compared to coal?

[Xylakant]

I hate the banana equivalent dose. It entirely papers over the substantial difference between alpha, beta and gamma radiation, ignores where radioactive substances accumulate in the body and what effect those differences on the actual inflicted damage have. It’s a cheap stunt to dismiss any sort of reasonable debate. If you cite it in defence of any actual nuclear fallout pollution, I personally consider it as proof that you’ve just disqualified in this discussion.

[wtallis]

I think you've somehow ended up with the exact opposite understanding of what the banana equivalent does is intended for. It serves to call attention to the fact that measurable radioactivity is not necessarily dangerous enough to worry about, and that an actual safety assessment requires more detail than just pointing out that something is radioactive.

Similarly, pointing out that there is a measurable amount of Cs-137 in wildlife in Germany is not a statement about safety. More context and more quantification is required to make it anything other than sensationalism.

[Xylakant]

> It serves to call attention to the fact that measurable radioactivity is not necessarily dangerous enough to worry about

That’s what it may have been created for, but it’s not what it’s used for.

> Similarly, pointing out that there is a measurable amount of Cs-137 in wildlife in Germany is not a statement about safety.

It’s been quantified and researched and the recommendation is still that one should control its intake of game meat and especially mushrooms from these regions because the CS-137 concentration can (depending on the kind) have multiples of the legal maximum (1) It’s perfectly safe to occasionally eat normal amounts’ but dismissing it as bananas is not appropriate.

(1) https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w...

[wtallis]

> It’s perfectly safe to occasionally eat normal amounts’ but dismissing it as bananas is not appropriate.

I'm not seeing anyone here trying to imply that it's as safe as bananas, but I do see a comment that tries to imply that the degree of Cs-137 contamination is about a thousand times higher than safe levels (300 years, ~30 year half-life). As your citation shows, the worst measurements of bioaccumulated Cs-137 in recent years have been merely 2-3x safe levels, with older outliers having been 10x safe levels.

[Amygaz]

Not only that but, you would have be constantly exposed by constantly eating bananas. And even at one banana/minute you would only be exposed to an amount of radiation that is lower than living on earth.

If BED was a thing, banana plantation workers would all radiation poisoning.

[tramav]

Don't you think it's a little short-sighted to think just in categories like black and white (i.e. coal and nuclear energy)? Coal is also very bad in my opinion. We should work towards using more renewable energy and its research. And what about reducing energy consumption?

[nikdaheratik]

Again, if nuclear power is such a great idea, why aren't more companies lobbying for it? The reality is that every place in the U.S. that it is economically feasible to build a plant, already has one. There's a nuclear plant in the middle of Kansas and it's barely viable. And that's ignoring the proliferation issue when we try and export any new versions of the tech to other countries that need new energy.

We're better off making solar, wind, etc. viable than pouring tons of money into a single area that we can't safely export to other places in the world.

And electrical energy is still only one part of the problem since we still need to replace the internal combusion enginees, and jet engines or at least find an alternative fuel source. Nuclear power isn't a panacea.

[blablabla123]

> - coal produce radioactive waste too

That's quite a statement. Do you have references?

I mean the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants is ridiculously difficult to handle because of its high temperature. It has to be wrapped in layers of containers - after cooling off for months (years?) in a water bath.

> It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan.

Fukushima lead to closing of Nuclear power plants, obviously, and not coal plants. The share of renewables in Germany increased a lot. To my knowledge the only coal power plants that were set up in the recent years were really modern ones. Therefore I cannot follow the argument, could you elaborate?

> Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents).

Recall also that there is no insurance that covers nuclear power plants but driving a car without insurance is not allowed in most countries.

The difference between coal and nuclear energy is that the latter is very close to the limits of what we can control.

[DanBC]

> That's quite a statement. Do you have references?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

> Coal is largely composed of organic matter, but it is the inorganic matter in coal—minerals and trace elements— that have been cited as possible causes of health, environmental, and technological problems associated with the use of coal. Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn). Although these elements are less chemically toxic than other coal constituents such as arsenic, selenium, or mercury, questions have been raised concerning possible risk from radiation. In order to accurately address these questions and to predict the mobility of radioactive elements during the coal fuel-cycle, it is important to determine the concentration, distribution, and form of radioactive elements in coal and fly ash.

[blablabla123]

Okay, that's surely a thing. In some regions like Southern Germany there is increased natural radioactivity in cellars that leads to more cases of lung cancer as far as I have heard.

But I'm quite sure this is still a completely different radioactivity problem one needs to cope with: hot, long living and very active material vs. cold, rather inactive material with short range radiation.

[hutzlibu]

"It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. "

Yes, that twisted logic annoys me as well. But beeing a german, I probably know more of the context.

Anti-Nuclear movement in germany is strong for historic reasons. Top-down politics who praised nuclear power and bombs for the people, which the people disagreed and then there were clashes with police, not only from extremists, but also the very normal people who got upset [0]

Also there was tschernobyl. The radioactive cloud from then went down in my area. Even today it is advised against eating mushrooms and meat from boars must be tested for radiation before it can be selled and they don't tell, how much meat is too contaminated, but probably much, as the hunters are still angry.

Also there were rumors that childs born shortly after tschernobyl had a much higher chance of missformed feet for example, but I never checked for truth. A friend of mine had, and the doctors made inofficial remarks, but officially nothing bad happened, because ukraine was a brother socialist state. (but this did was not the case for western germany, so again, I never fact checked that, but the rumors are there).

So there is a lot of fear.

And now we come to the twisted part: most of the anti-nuclear movement is indeed also against coal. And their solution (like mine, long-term) is renewable and they don't like the fact, that renewables are not 100% ready today or tomorrow, so they say, just reduce. So basically wishful thinking and rather doing something than nothing. (even if it is not the smartest move)

And btw. there is massive activism going on against coal at the moment, there is for example a forest occupied[1], which was supposed to get shoveld down for coal. And even though quite some of the protesters are lunatics, I wish them the best, as we really, really don't need more coal. But, and here comes the other important reason: money. There are still many companys and workers and unions deeply tied to coal mining and processing. So also a strong motivator for politics ... to still use coal, despite all climate change blabla.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest

[tangue]

what strikes me about pro nuclear comments, is the fact that never it's mentionned that uranium is a finite ressouce. So we're going to invest billions in a technology that will last 50 years ? The key word in renewable energies is renewable

[radford-neal]

Since 50 years is about the lifetime of a nuclear power plant, why not?

But in any case, thorium is very plentiful, and there has been good progress on extracting uranium from seawater. Plus, experience with other minerals would lead one to believe that there is probably more uranium that could be mined if there were a motive to find it.

[jason0597]

If you use the ancient reactor technology of a PWR burner, then sure. However, most pro-nuclear people are for breeder reactors, not burner reactors.

[leetcrew]

what makes you think we will run out of fissile materials in 50 years?

[beders]

Renewables can replace all of those: coal, gas, nuclear, oil.

No reason to be flabbergasted.

[vinniejames]

The best solution is to first implement distributed battery power instead of reliance on a grid.

This eliminates the need to have nuclear plants in close proximity to densely populated areas.

Plants can then be built in remote areas where the negative externalities will be drastically reduced, while still receiving the benefit of green, reliable energy.

[lazyjones]

> I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that.

Perhaps it's not very convincing to claim that "a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice" aren't as bad as an average temperature increase of 1 degree or so. Certainly seems borderline insane to me.

[kuzehanka]

The worst nuclear accidents that could possibly happen have already happened. We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. And yet the sum damage they caused is a negligible blip compared to how many people die due to the use of fossil fuels on any given month of any given year.

The environmental impact of nuclear power vs. fossil fuels or even renewables is just a negligible number no matter how you spin it.

I too am confused like the GP poster as to how otherwise intelligent people just break down into baseless fearmongering about imaginary disaster scenarios while ignoring that today's conventional energy industry is literally thousands of times worse.

If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[lazyjones]

> We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose.

How can you write such a ridiculous sentence? We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. It's a permanent subject of dispute here in Europe.

> If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart

One single accident in Europe would dwarf these inflated WHO numbers.

[kuzehanka]

> We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion.

Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.

[lazyjones]

I'm sure you will be able to look up the location of active nuclear power plants in central Europe and determine the population figures within the range of impact of an accident like Chernobyl's if you try. Start with Mohovce (largely uncontained and litigation since 2005 or so), Bohunice, Temelin and the large cities nearby...

[Tomte]

Why would we leave out terrorist attacks? Because they destroy your argument?

[kuzehanka]

What would a terrorist do with a nuclear powerplant exactly? We've flown fighter jets into nuclear powerplants to test them[1]. They're protected by armed guards. The US has a nuclear emergency task force ready to fly pumps and generators to any plant. The best attack even a highly resourced terrorist could mount would be to damage the cooling tower and not really make any difference?

If you're imagining some kind of super coordinated military unit taking control of a powerplant yeah sure maybe? They'd be much better used just poisoning the water supply.

This is exactly the kind of baseless fear driven hypothetical sentiment that I'd like to understand.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3072967/ns/business-check_point/t/...

[wtallis]

A bomb powerful enough to breach reactor containment but small enough to be smuggled past power plant security is already a nuclear bomb in its own right, and would be more effective used against population centers directly.

[tedk-42]

Explosion as in a nuclear one? Really isn't possible. The fissile material isn't pure enough.

I believe graphite rods are used as the safety to capture the neutrons in a nuclear fission reactor and effectively kill off the reaction.

Explosion as in Chernobyl level? That was basically water pressure.

[pfdietz]

Chernobyl had two explosions, a few seconds apart. The second, larger one was after most of the water had left the core. The reactor had a positive void coefficient, so losing water increased reactivity.

Of course these were prompt supercritical reactions in a moderated system, so they are not explosions in the sense of bombs, which are fast systems with neutron doubling times measured in fractions of a microsecond.

[lispm]

far from it. If nuclear fallout had been reached Tokyo, then we would talk about a much greater problem.

[ElBarto]

An accident in a nuclear plant that was constructed in a highly seismic and tsunami-prone area isn't an argument against nuclear power.

I'm sure that Germany can find a more suited location if they wanted...

Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them.

[lispm]

> Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them.

That's why we would like to see some of them being closed immediately.

[Gondolin]

Again, coal related death are of the order of 1-5 millions by year. By contrast the worst estimate for Chernobyl is 200000 deaths.

The closing of germany's reactor, which amount to around 60GWh, if it had been used instead to close coal based plants would have saved around 6000 lives per year. So over 10 years would have saved 60000 lives.

An average temperature increase of 1 degree would not be so bad, it would probably amount for a few million deaths and a few trillion dollar (don't forget the economic cost of displacement due to increased water level, this will concern a lot more km^2 than nuclear exclusion zone). Still worse than nuclear but not orders of magnitude more.

But the Paris agreement is about 2°C more and we are not headed to respect that, we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done.

And I live near a nuclear plant in France which almost had an accident similar to Fukushima during the 1999 tempest. So it's not like a Nuclear accident would not affect me...

[lazyjones]

> we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done.

It's beyond borderline insane how people make up these "billions of deaths" numbers with a straight face.

[DennisP]

Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree.

Billions of deaths at three degrees is probably overstating things, but three degrees does bring massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees. At four degrees, billions of deaths doesn't look that unlikely, and it starts getting hard to imagine how modern civilization could survive. More than that is unthinkable.

The book is a decade old but more recent work hasn't improved the outlook at all.

[Gondolin]

Of course I am not stating that billions of death would happen overnight, like if we had a supervolcano explosion.

Instead, it would be gradual, over 20-25 years. But you are right that I am overstating things, when I write billions I think 'between 100 Millions and 1 Billion'. (Recalling that over 25 years, air pollution alone is responsible for around 100 millions deaths). It would depend on the exact temperature change: 3°C or 3.5C.

And total civilisation collapse in unlikely (I hope!), except if there is a feedback factor in global warming and we head for 4°C or more.

[lazyjones]

> Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change

No thanks. He's a journalist and political activist, reading his foregone conclusions from selected papers he claims to have read is a waste of time.

[DennisP]

His account matches well with everything else I've seen on the subject. Well-referenced journalism isn't a bad way to get at the truth, right-wing bloviating to the contrary. And you could always look up a sampling of the sources to check up on him.

But of course, sticking with your own forgone conclusions is clearly better.

[vlehto]

"Climatic changes already are estimated to cause over 150,000 deaths annually."

https://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en/

Ten fold increase over the next century seems believable given that the projected effect has hardly started yet.

[lazyjones]

> Ten fold increase over the next century seems believable given that the projected effect has hardly started yet.

Good example for how these numbers are pulled out of thin air: take an old WHO estimate (which includes Malaria deaths), multiply by 10 for the heck of it and sum over 100 years...

[vlehto]

Predicting the future is always very imprecise. Take a look at the work of Thomas Malthus for taste.

If you want accurate numbers, could you first give accurate numbers of future dangers of nuclear? I want precise calculations based on reality. My hunch is that the number is zero, can you prove otherwise?

I would also appreciate numbers on things like why we have the time to dabble with renewables? Why it's going to be cost effective? How the power storage is solved? And how much land and natural resources are going to be used?