[Dangeranger]

The US is bifurcated between people who see no problem with current nuclear plants and those who see any nuclear plant as an abomination in need of removal.

It’s hard to have a reasonable debate about this issue when the sides are so diametrically opposed due to their dogmatic beliefs.

[jayd16]

This completely discounts the gas, coil and oil industry incentives to oppose nuclear power. Those are huge lobbies in the US. Much larger than Green Peace types being used as a smoke screen.

[JohnJamesRambo]

The question is do we need nuclear and the risks? Can renewables like wind, hydro, and solar provide what we need cheaper and without the dangers associated with nuclear? If so, then why even mess with it?

[luckydata]

The answer is yes, we need nuclear because there's no chance we'll get to 100% renewable energy in time to make a difference, nuclear could fill the niche we need to make wind and solar generation feasible.

[adventured]

It makes enormous sense to have some diversity in the electrical generation system, along with the essentially guaranteed & dependable output of nuclear. It's an excellent backbone. The US could very easily get to 30% renewables (17-18% now), 30% nuclear (19%-20% now), 40% natural gas (35%-36% now), from where the figures are at today. That ends coal. Then push forward on reducing the natural gas share thereafter. 30%-40% nuclear and 60%-70% renewables long-term, would perhaps be ideal.

We could trivially float ~$200 billion to build new nuclear plants and rapidly wipe out all the remaining coal power along with a modest increase in renewables and natural gas, rather than following the gradual coal decline route.

60 nuclear plants are giving us 19-20% of our power base now. It'd cost ~$200-$250 billion to take that up to 30%, assuming $7 billion each. Even if the cost were $10b each ($300b total), it'd be fine. The nuclear plants buy us many decades to keep pushing renewables higher. It's an irrelevant dollar price to pay, shouldered over decades (low yield debt), for the benefits. And it keeps our generation diversity intact.

[laurencerowe]

$10B seems cheap. Hinkley Point C is currently estimated at $25B.

[Reedx]

Bill has addressed this and explains why he's so frustrated with the notion: https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=520

[soperj]

Hydro has killed more people and ruined more land than Nuclear ever will.

[dredmorbius]

True. Banqiao dam, 1975, about 125,000 dead.

In a region that is now home to over 17 million, and in which life goes on. In notable contrast to Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Most of the specific dynamics of the Banqiao disaster were organisational, managerial, and political, rather than technical, which is to say: not specific to hydropower projects, and fully shared with nuclear projects. In fact we've seen precisely the same dynamics across multiple nuclear accidents and incidents.

The scale of the hydropower and nuclear industries is also worth noting. There are over 57,000 large dams worldwide, 40% in China.[1] There are 450 nuclear power plants operating worldwide.[2] Which is to say that the per-plant risk experience is 125 times greater for hydroelectric and hydraulic projects than for nuclear, and yes, there have been notable dam failures and failure modes: Johnstown, Vajont, Sempor, Panshet, Baldwin Hills, St. Francis, Teton. And several near misses: Oroville and Glen Canyon come to mind.

Many of the worst disasters have happened regions, or times, in which resources were low, understanding poor, and understandings of liability and risks deficient. Which if nuclear power expands, is likely to also be the case.

I've written on and submitted items on Banqiao several times at HN. It's an instructive case study, though the lessons may not be immediately apparent:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553

________________________________

Notes:

1. https://www.internationalrivers.org/questions-and-answers-ab...

2. https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-powe...

[ttul]

The risks are completely manageable. Aside from a couple of disasters, nuclear energy has not killed or poisoned very many people at all. There is a cost to all forms of energy production. But because nuclear involves weird stuff with atoms that most people don’t understand, they find it scarier.

[acidburnNSA]

At the moment there is a major world-wide threat due to carbon emissions causing climate change. Climate models are complex, but there is some consensus that continuing our emissions will lead to serious detriment to many species, including our own.

The world is 80% powered by fossil fuel today, and we are adding more fossil fuel every day. Alongside each installation of variable renewables is an installation of dispatchable fracked gas. When the sun sets on California, something like 10 GW of fracked gas comes online for the night [1].

[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...

Meanwhile nuclear plants are the only 24/7 (often 18 months continuous) near-zero carbon energy source we know of. We have them deployed at scale around the world (take a look at France in previous link, who decarbonized their entire grid with nuclear reactors in about 15 years in the 1970s as a side-effect of building a grid that didn't rely on energy imports).

Beyond being near-zero carbon, nuclear reactors don't emit air pollution during normal operation like combustion does (fossil, biofuel). Air pollution from fossil and bio kills millions per year [2].

[2] https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/

Meanwhile, the threats from nuclear are: "what do we do with the waste?" and "what about Chernobyl and Fukushima?"

Because there's so much energy in the atomic nucleus, there is very little volume of highly concentrated waste generated in nuclear reactors (2,000,000x less than in electron-shell waste). So little volume that rather than dumping it out the stack like most power plants do, nuclear reactors store all of their waste from decades of powering cities on site, waiting for final geologic disposition. This waste sits benign in concrete casks that have never and probably will never injure anyone. Here's what they look like [3].

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g

What is this final geologic repository? Well take a look at the Finns with the Onkalo repository. That's how you do it. Problem solved. [4].

[4] http://www.posiva.fi/en/media/image_gallery?gfid_2061=94#gal...

As for accidents, while Chernobyl did kill ~60 and cause up to 4000 early cancer deaths, Fukushima killed up to 1 person. This safety record, considering how much electricity has been pushed around, is actually impeccable and leader-class. By the numbers, nuclear reactors are much safer than baseline generators, and roughly as safe as wind and solar. [5]

[5] https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Of course this doesn't change people's minds. Facing climate change, the nuclear industry had better figure out how to communicate all this effectively while simultaneously reducing costs and improving safety, for all of our sake. While safety is already leadership class, the industry itself will not survive more Fukushima events due to human perceptions.

The nuclear industry hid under a rock hoping no one would notice it and protest it for decades. Now it has to come back out and explain why it's important and valuable.

For economics, if nuclear reactors benefited from their nearly carbon-free nature, they'd compete today. In France they're 30% cheaper than fracked gas.

In summary, the dangers from nuclear are minuscule compared to the dangers of climate change.

[rantwasp]

i would say yes. watch the series and see why nuclear as is has issues and what was proposed (ie they were not proposing to build yet another nuclear reactor, they actually designed and build a nuclear reactor that could run on current nuclear waste - and estimated that the current waste that we store could power all of the US for 125 years given the current energy needs).

i don't know if humans will still be a thing in 500 years but I can tell you that if we're still going to be around the history books are not going to be kinds to us in general and to Trump in particular.