[eloff]

People got scared (somewhat legitimately) and we regulated them to death. It became so risky and so expensive to invest in nuclear that nobody, not even the big companies with nuclear divisions like GE did it.

People talk about failures of the market all the time, and there are many. This was one of the failures of regulation.

I think we're starting to see a small revival here finally, but is it too late? Renewables are driving down the cost of electricity so any nuclear companies not only have to find a way to be profitable today, but 1, 2, 3 decades from now.

[dTal]

I think it was mostly a failure of human psychology. The over-regulation was simply a manifestation of that - democracy working perfectly.

Blunder 1: war. We dropped a nuclear bomb before we ever made a nuclear power plant. Nuclear became inextricably linked with sickness and death instead of power and prosperity.

Blunder 2: broken heuristic risk assessment. Radiation is scary because it's "spooky" - it's undetectable, and it kills you in a nasty, body-horror kind of way - a long time after exposure. (Although many environmental toxins also fit this bill and aren't so "spooky", so I'm not sure what's going on there). Fossil fuels just aren't "spooky" in the same way, even though the numbers show them as far more dangerous. Chernobyl is enough to put people off nuclear entirely, but even a hundred Chernobyls would not be as bad as the environmental damage wrought by the carbon industry. A bold claim? We're in the middle of a global mass extinction. A hundred Chernobyls wouldn't be a blip in Earth's biodiversity. Even Chernobyl itself is practically a wildlife sanctuary now.

Blunder 3: Status quo bias. Sure, fossil fuels are terrible in many ways. But better the devil you know!

[II2II]

For the general population, nuclear energy may be spooky. On the other hand, some opponents of nuclear energy are well informed. Claiming that their risk assessment is broken does not help the discussion because chances are that they are assessing different risks and they are looking towards different solutions.

From what I have seen, nuclear has earned a negative reputation from far more than its association with weapons and disasters. Many supporters of nuclear also overly enthusiastic in presenting it as the solution rather than as a solution. It makes it sound like the issues with nuclear are being glossed over, or outright ignored. This, in turn, makes supporters of nuclear sound ill informed or as though they have a vested interest.

If nuclear power is going to have much hope for adoption, people need to be informed of how it works, what the risk factors are (preferably with other forms of power generation being used as context), and what is being done to address those risks. Even then, there is going to be some opposition because different people will view different risks differently.

[sp332]

Not sure I agree with #1. Nuclear power had a super utopian vibe going for a good couple of decades. Nuclear power plant orders only started to decline in the early 70's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Age

[dTal]

I don't think you can entirely discount the effects of 20 years of Cold War existential threat, accompanied by duck-and-cover videos and the like. People were terrified and fascinated by nuclear technology - this is the era of Godzilla, and of mutant superheroes. Yes, there was a utopian vibe as well, courtesy of a concerted propaganda campaign [1] - but when the eco-movement kicked off in the 70s, nuclear was right in the firing line. That didn't spring from nowhere - it was decades of accumulated fear finding an expression.

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

[ewzimm]

I agree that it seems like a massive wasted opportunity, but the most compelling argument I've heard against nuclear power is that it creates a vulnerability. If a nuclear power plant in New York City had been successfully attacked 18 years ago, what would the damage have been? We may need to focus on the security of existing infrastructure before we begin to build the next generation of power.

[dTal]

Step 1: Don't build nuclear plants in the middle of major cities.

Step 2: Build extremely strong containment. Not that hard, just keep pouring concrete.

Step 3: Be at peace with the fact that even the worst nuclear incident, while harrowing, would not be the end of the world - which fossil fuels literally are. And it's not like fossil fuels are immune to massive eco-disaster failure points. Deepwater Horizon was far more damaging than Chernobyl - millions of animals perished.

Optional Step 4: don't use a reactor design that involves huge piles of flammable radioactive carbon, uncontained - try for something where the reaction stops if anything goes wrong. Then at worst you get a toxic site, instead of vast amounts of atmospheric radiation.

[ewzimm]

I agree with all these solutions, and I don't mean to imply that this is an unsurpassable problem, only that our existing security measures for infrastructure are already falling behind as we increasingly rely on them, and these compounding vulnerabilities put pressure on regulators to slow down development.

[imiller]

In US anyway, my understanding is that most of our containment structures should be sufficient to survive a plane impact without loss of containment. [1]

[1] https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/PVP/proceedings-abstr...

[bscphil]

Yes. Rather famously, the US tested this with a jet smashed directly into a concrete wall, resulting in the video in this article about it. https://interestingengineering.com/crashed-jet-nuclear-react...

[ewzimm]

I hope that would be the case, but there are other ways to attack infrastructure. Besides physical security vulnerabilities, we have a lot of critical infrastructure that's Internet-connected and running software with known vulnerabilities. Nuclear power plants are some of the most secure in this area, fortunately. There's also the unpatchable problem of the vulnerabilities of the human mind to be swayed by extremists, and young people with career opportunities are constantly targeted. We have procedures in place to protect against these sorts of things, but they are not advancing as fast as our attack surface is increasing, and we rightfully don't want to sacrifice privacy and freedom for security.

[natch]

It also creates a vulnerability to crony capitalism, top-down control, corruption, and overtaxation.

[magashna]

It doesn't help that we have headlines calling them "nukes" which continues that negative spin.

[nickik]

> People got scared (somewhat legitimately)

Not really. The reality is that most fear is based on totally false believes that exist in popular culture.

If people actually understood the real level of dangers they would not nearly be as scared.

[eloff]

The risk is real, but as you say is smaller than other risks we don't even think about, like the people coal has killed with pollution and will still kill through climate change upheaval.

[andrewla]

I don't think this can be considered a failure of regulation; that the regulation stopped short of an outright ban is much more of a failure of regulation in some ways.

The tail risks involved in nuclear power are just too high. It's not a question of laymen misunderstanding or thinking that radiation is magic or being scared by the specter of Chernobyl.

If there's anything that Fukushima should have taught us, it's that we underestimate the risk that bad things can happen with nuclear, and we overestimate our ability to engineer around those things.

I think it's increasingly likely that in the far future, when energy needs are no longer the bottleneck for progress, we'll look back on the idea of using nuclear fission as a power source as a laughably dangerous concept; on par with using x-rays for shoe sizing [1] or an atomic powered car [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

[flaviu1]

> If there's anything that Fukushima should have taught us, it's that we underestimate the risk that bad things can happen with nuclear, and we overestimate our ability to engineer around those things.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...:

> there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out.[11] However, studies by the World Health Organisation and Tokyo University have shown that no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths is expected[12]

So basically Fukushima has taught us that over-reacting to nuclear accidents has not yet gone out of fashion? And that even when "radiation releases exceed official safety guidelines", there are still almost no consequences to humans?

Comparing fission generation to those other things is unfair. Fission reactors produce gigawatts of power, Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were gimmicks and the Ford Nucleon was literally a toy.

[andrewla]

The severity of Chernobyl was greatly compounded by the fact that the Soviet government went out of their way to conceal the severity. The response to Fukushima had no such operations in place; the response was swift and well-organized and evacuations were rapid and deliberately more severe than the situation seemed to warrant. Monitoring was also used to detect elevated radioactive isotopes in drinking water and other secondary effects to prevent them from causing more widespread damage.

That said, is it your belief that if the government had taken no action to protect the civilian population, that the impact would have been similar -- "no consequences to humans" as you say? Don't confuse the severity of the scope of the accident with the casualty list; the disaster was very serious and should not be underplayed. And most of all, it should force all of us to reconsider our assessment of the potential damage that can be done by failing nuclear power plants.

[gizmo686]

I must have missed something with Fukashima. How much land area is going to be literally lost (sumberged in water) due to it? How many cities? How many species are projected to go extinct because of it?

Nuclear was our alternative to the biggest environmental crises we have ever faced. The baseline consequences of not using it are worse then the tail risks you cite.

[7952]

You could make exactly the same argument about renewables. In terms of negative impacts they are very similar.

[natch]

How much money was spent on it, building it, operating it, cleaning it up, and losing what had been invested in the region around it? How have these costs have been passed on to the Japanese population as taxes, fees, or in other ways? I don't think we'll ever know.

If you are arguing that because you missed something, then the figure is zero, I don't think that's a reasonable argument. I don't think that is what you are saying, right?

Whatever the amount is, if that same amount of money had been put into renewables, many of those people would still be living in their homes today, with sustainable power for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes, when there is a crisis as you mention, the alternatives have to be weighed against each other. Just because one alternative addresses the crisis, doesn't mean it is the best alternative. Sure, we can use both if absolutely necessary (renewables and nuclear being the alternatives we are talking about here) but it makes more sense to me to start with the sensible one, namely, renewables, and use both only if, repeating myself, absolutely necessary.

Nuclear energy is less sensible from a consumer standpoint because it is more centralized, has larger safety issues, creates more hazardous wastes, impacts property values more, raises anxiety levels more, and is more susceptible to corruption, big industry control, crony capitalism, cost overruns, and leads to huge tax increases imposed to pay for all these issues.

Even the property value impact alone should be enough for nobody to want to have a nuclear power plant in their area.

We should go as far as possible with renewables before resorting to a technology that has larger problems.

[gizmo686]

Today. The policy decisions we are talking about were made decades ago, when nuclear was an established (although young) industry, are renewables were decades away from being viable.

The damage is done. Building nuclear now won't fix it. But with the benifit of hindsight (and the benifit of arguing for the counterfactual), but strangling nuclear power decades ago was a regulatory mistake with literally disasterous consequences.

[natch]

We will never know what other disasters we fortunately avoided though. And the automotive industry would have kept pushing gas cars, and we would not have averted global warming. I mean... here you are, saying we have a disaster looming, and what kind of car do you drive? Just playing the odds, probably an ICE car.

[gizmo686]

Throwing some numbers out.

In 2018, nuclear accounted for 4% of global energy production [0]. Since we have been shifting away from nuclear, this represents an underestimation.

Going back to Chernobyl, we have had 2 class 7 nuclear incidents. Scaling this up 25x, this gives us about 1 class 7 nuclear incident every 8 months; assuming no advances in safety occurred since the 70s, when both plants were built. For simplicity, I will round this down to twice a year.

So, how bad are these class 7 disasters? According to WHO estimations [1], Fukushima caused an estimated 0 acute deaths from radiation; 400 long-term deaths from radiation and 1,600 deaths from evacuations (I suspect elevated due to the trigger tsunami). For reference, the trigger natural disaster had about 15,897 deaths [2].

So, in terms of casualties, Fukushima made a natural disaster ~10% worse.

In terms of cost, Fukushima is estimated to cost about $187 billion USD in decommisioning and compensation (Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, 2016) [3]. In addition, the disaster also caused an estimated $266 billion USD in fuel imports to replace the lost power (as of 2016, so 5.5 years of imports); I should discount the hypothetical operating cost of Fukushima, but can't find the numbers for that.

So, to get to 100% nuclear power, we are looking at 2 Fukushima's a year. That is 3,200 deaths and $374 billion USD a year. (In practice, this would not work because there are grid problems once nuclear becomes a significant chunk of power production, but we are really talking about the margin; just extrapolating out to make the numbers clearer). Also, these costs are concentrating in the near term to the incidents, so will go down fairly quickly once we shift away from nuclear.

I was going to compare this to global warming, but it is hard to find good estimates on the damage, and this comment is also already involving much more research then I intenended to do.

In 2010, an estimated 3,000 people died from fine particle pollution from US power plants. [4]. This already almost exceeds are estimate for annual global deaths from nuclear power, so I can stop looking for all the other deaths non-nuclear power causes.

Estimating the cost of not nuclear is more difficult, and at this point I already spent way too much time on this.

I would, however, like to reiterate that this analysis started with me (in my judgment) comically overestimating the cost of the counter-factual nuclear disasters.

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

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

[3] https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/836/econom...

[4] https://www.catf.us/educational/coal-plant-pollution/