[dismayedjim]

So glad Canada plans to litter our country with these soon. They want SMR's in every logging camp, remote community, mine, and so on. Sure they are more dangerous per GW and more costly per GW but they are MUCH cheaper initially so small unqualified companies can get involved. Let the good times roll.

[kenned3]

i live within 10KM of pickering Nuclear. I have no concerns as nuclear is among the safest form of power available.

A coal plant puts more radioactive isotopes into the air then any nuclear plant.

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

dont let the facts get in the way..

[hannasanarion]

Nuclear power plants aren't the same thing as portable nuclear batteries, which is what these are.

[thu2111]

No, but risk is all relative.

The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.

These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.

I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.

[mikesabbagh]

History of nuclear has taught us that nuclear is very safe until an accident happens. You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen. here in Quebec, we decided to close a nuclear reactor after Fukushima at a cost of $2 billion

[Chris2048]

> You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen

I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location.

security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.

[oddmiral]

Chornobyl alone put more radioactive isotopes into air than all coal plants combined. Don't know about ground and water.

[bitcharmer]

This statement could definitely use a source.

[drran]

For coal power stations:

«According to estimates by the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s coal-fired power stations currently generate waste containing around 5,000 tonnes of uranium and 15,000 tonnes of thorium. Collectively, that’s over 100 times more radiation dumped into the environment than that released by nuclear power stations.»

About 1% of it is leaked into air, so about 500 tonnes of uranium and 1500 tonnes of thorium are leaked into air every year.

However, uranium and thorium are much less dangerous than radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium.

[drran]

For Chornobyl, I found estimate at Wikipedia: «An early estimate for total nuclear fuel material released to the environment was 3±1.5%; this was later revised to 3.5±0.5%. This corresponds to the atmospheric emission of 6 tonnes (5.9 long tons; 6.6 short tons) of fragmented fuel.[127]»

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...

[Chris2048]

But is this an apt comparison. The soviet union was pretty independent from the rest of the west. I's sooner qualify that western/European nuclear is safe, so the average isn't dragged down by despotic/unstable nations.

Nuclear proliferation is a worldwide concern, but a new power plant in your backyard is as safe as relative to the national record.

[jmnicolas]

> A coal plant puts more radioactive isotopes into the air then any nuclear plant.

Until the nuclear plant suffers a catastrophic accident...

[namdnay]

The thing is, a coal plant is a guaranteed continuous catastrophic incident.

[jmnicolas]

Don't discount nuclear waste as well. I'm not trying to promote coal here, but nuclear energy has problems too and shouldn't be touted as something it's not: a safe and clean solution.

[posix_me_less]

Don't overblow nuclear waste. Normal responsible operation produces very little waste per electric MWh produced. And we know how to handle it. No energy production solution is perfect but compared to coal/gas pollution it can eliminate it is a nonbrainer.

[lovemenot]

... And we know how to handle it.

I do not agree with this overall. It holds true only for some timescales and for some assumptions of risk factors.

Not specifically about waste, but still relevant. Fukushima and other plants in Japan were designed to withstand a 100 year tsunami. Bad luck that 3/11/11 was greater than that.

[ecpottinger]

Here in Canada we use the CANDU system which is far safer than the systems like what you found in Three Mile Island - and no-one is as foolish as to do the Russian tests again.

[arcticbull]

Just a friendly reminder that nuclear power causes fewer deaths per terawatt hour than any other energy source known to man.

[oddmiral]

We will know that after cooling of nuclear waste to background level only, which will not happen soon.

[posix_me_less]

Nuclear waste is safely stored in pools and other facilities, it does not hurt anybody.

[Chris2048]

if you bury it in the same place you dug the uranium ore from, doesn't that resolve it?

[lovemenot]

A friendly rejoinder.

Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't.

Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit.

Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment.

Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.

[arcticbull]

30% is a completely arbitrary level that you’ve picked with no justification. I’d suggest you cite some sources to provide depth to the argument that 30% of world power is materially different.

[lovemenot]

Arbitrary yes. Pick another number that is substantially larger than current share.

I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example.

If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints.

So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.

[jaakl]

Which day in Paris? Single accident did not increase overall air travel safety significantly, regardless of what impression you could get from the press.

[lovemenot]

A single Concorde crash drove that aircraft's safety profile down from the very best to amongst the worst per passenger mile of any aircraft.

[eeZah7Ux]

...as long as you completely ignore any catastrophic risk for the next 10.000 years.

[scaladev]

Do you want a bit of perspective from someone who's been living under a very thick pall of coal-produced smog for many years? 100-500 µg/m³ of PM2.5 at day time (depends on wind speed mostly, right now it's 550 µg), twice or thrice that at night. I don't think my body can tolerate this much longer. If we were to switch the coal power plants to nuclear energy, I'd jump up and down like a little girl. A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly.

[arcticbull]

Not to mention coal actually disperses a ton of radioactive waste, as it contains both uranium and thorium [1].

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

[rob74]

Sorry for that, but may I ask where you live? Because if the pollution is coming from a coal power plant, there are filters for that. And I shudder to think what the people (mis)managing that coal power plant could do if it was nuclear instead...

[mixermachine]

How about switching to renewables + batteries? Solar is now as cheap as coal power in China.

When you add some batteries you will be fine with no pollution. And no waste your childerns childern (and beyond) have to take care of.

[arcticbull]

It's not actually true that batteries and solar are a perfect clean solution - and neither is wind. Better than coal to be sure, but it's not what you're making it out to be.

Rare earth metals have to be mined in remote portions of China in dystopian hellscapes. Lithium and other minerals also have to be mined, and leave toxic tailing ponds. Solar panels frequently have cadmium and tellurium, which are also hazardous, and need to be managed. Plastics and composites in wind turbines also cannot be recycled.

There are no perfect solutions, and the future will almost certainly require a mixture of kinds of energy.

[eeZah7Ux]

> Do you want a bit of perspective

Thanks but I don't need a strawman.

[arcticbull]

Nothing is risk free. The nice thing about nuclear power is that radiation is really easy to detect, with you know, a Geiger counter.

On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.

[bob29]

Detecting radiation isn't the hard (or expensive) part https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225...

Its not nuclear vs oil and gas. Renewables are an alternative with lower cost and lower waste.

A good safety history is a measure of what happened, not what could happen.

[posix_me_less]

Nuclear energy has exceptionally good safety history.

[eeZah7Ux]

> Nothing is risk free.

I specifically called out SYSTEMIC risk.

What's the systemic risk of solar panels and wind power, for example? A terrorist attack destroying 100 millions solar panels?

> On the other hand

The usual false dichotomy between nuclear and oil/coal/gas.

> And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.

...not to mention the direct release of heat into the atmosphere due to poorly isolated house heating, industrial production and electric generation plants themselves. None of which is mitigated by nuclear. Rather, it's made even worse by any source of cheap electricity.

[posix_me_less]

Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand attacks from crazies. Terrorist attacks done so far have had minimal impact on infrastructure. It is a very minor and manageable threat.

Release of heat due to chemical and nuclear sources does heat the planet, but the contribution to heating compared to effect of increasing CO2 concentration is negligible in the range of 1%, this is well known.

[SquareWheel]

As a Canuck I'm enthused about an increased adoption of nuclear energy. It's far safer than coal or oil, and is able to generate energy on-demand. It's a great pairing to solar, wind, and hydro.

[rixed]

> and is able to generate energy on-demand

Last time i studied this topic one of the main drawback of nuclear energy was precisely that it required accurate forecasts of future demand, so not suitable for "on demand" production, because of how long it takes to cool down. Had anything improved in this area?

[Gwypaas]

More modern designs can ramp faster, but still not fast. The main issue is that the largest cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital investment to build it and staff to run it, which is fixed. In comparison fuel costs seem to hover at about 25%.

Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear on price many hours of the day this becomes an even harder calculation.

Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation of storage can make the same, and still undercut you.

This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.

[SquareWheel]

It sounds like it makes more sense with sufficient battery technologies then (which don't yet exist).

Thanks for the information.

[SquareWheel]

That's a fair criticism. I don't know the numbers, but I'd be curious to see them. Especially around modern designs.

[rob74]

> It's a great pairing to solar, wind, and hydro

No it's not - to compensate for times when there is not enough energy from renewable sources, you need power plants that can be shut down and brought back online quickly, and nuclear plants are certainly not that.

[feb]

Nuclear power plants can vary power output quickly if planned during the design. As France has an installed capacity of more than 60 GW of nuclear power production, their power plants can quickly adapt their production. That's needed to keep the network balanced.

[lovemenot]

France has 80% nuclear. It works there not because French reactors can respond meaningfully to short-term meteorology, but because: 1) France is connected to a continent-sized grid and 2) All of France's neighbours are nowhere near 80% nuclear, so will buy this baseload power.

If Germany, NL, Denmark, Spain, UK et al. had 80% nuclear France's nuclear power would become uneconomic.

It's the grid and unique political considerations, not those plants' responsiveness that makes it work for France.

[feb]

The French do vary the power of the reactors to follow the load [1] [2]. They don't purely rely on their neighbors, far from it. As a consequence, the usage factor of the plants is lower than nuclear plants in countries where they they purely use them for base load.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant [2] https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/aen-infos-suivi-...

[posix_me_less]

Incorrect, we don't need all power plants to ramp up/down in seconds. Energy demand of a provider during the day follows roughly the same curve for the specific time of year. Thus ramping up/down of baseload can be and is planned in advance. The random variations from that prediction can be handled by smaller number of responsive plants.

[lxe]

I think SMRs are very different from RTG. SMR is an essentially a small and fairly complex reactor design, like a molten salt reactor. It heats water or other liquid, turns it into steam, steam spins a turbine, just like a regular power plant.

An RTG is just a hot piece of radioactive material surrounded by thermocouples that directly convert the heat into electricity.

[pfdietz]

SMRs are not radioisotope thermal generators.