[reacharavindh]

I know it is tiring to see this comment. But, the cost of nuclear power quoted everywhere does NOT include the cost of safely handling the waste from it for hundreds of years right? Until it is included it is like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil is the best thing in the world because it costs €1/barrel because they only need to factor the cost of digging for it.

[adhesive_wombat]

Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs, and money has to be committed into a trust (or some similar scheme) as part of getting approval in the first place.

And it would be more like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil only costs $100 per barrel because they don't need to pay for pollution remediation, healthcare costs, spill cleanup and their share of all climate change effects from the time they sold the oil until the time that oil's effects have been removed from the system. Which they don't.

[renox]

> Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs

In theory yes, but given that they aren't able to predict correctly the cost of building a nuclear station, I don't see why we should trust them on predicting the real cost of dismantling them..

[JohnHaugeland]

It's very easy to accurately predict the building costs of a nuclear reactor.

The overruns you're talking about come from politicians showing up halfway through the project and changing the rules to show their voters that they are involved

[renox]

In France the new nuclear reactors have been plagued by hardware issue, delays.. So no, it isn't 'easy' to predict the building costs, it's easy only when you're replicating an already existing reactor and only if it was built recently!

[JohnHaugeland]

> In France the new nuclear reactors have been plagued by hardware issue, delays

That's odd, can you show me some evidence of that?

[natmaka]

The new type of nuclear reactor is the "EPR".

The first project, in Finland (Olkiluoto-3) was a disaster: massive overcosts, 12 years late, customer lost, penalties paid, builder (Areva) saved thanks to public money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

The second project, in France (Flamanville-3) is an ongoing disaster: massive overcosts (from 3,3 to 19,4 billions €, and counting), aleady 10 years late and counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

The third project, in China (Taishan-1 & -2) was officially 5 years late and 60% overcosts (and very probably not break even for the builder). After 1 year one of the 2 reactors was stopped mid-2021 after an incident.

The fourth project, in the U.-K. (Hinkley-Point C), started in 2018 and already announced overcosts and late delivery.

Old reactors: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-chinon-3-rea...

Decommission costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18686703

[pydry]

Or insurance. If another fukushima strikes it's taxpayers on the hook for the $800 billion cleanup bill.

Makes all the propaganda about how safe it truly is ring a bit hollow when they dont pay for their own damn insurance.

[JohnHaugeland]

The Fukushima cleanup, unique in history and resulting from radically unlikely natural disasters, cost less than half what the fuel it replaced that decade would have

This is without considering the cost of climate change or all those prevented deaths

[natmaka]

The tsunami was the secondary cause, and believing that no-one could predict such a tsunami is misleading.

Proof: another nuclear plant was less distant from the tsunami and survived, because someone (Y. Hirai) foresaw it and could impose his views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

The hard truth is: even a predictable cause can trigger a disaster. And many aren't predictable.

Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case, as many reactors were properly shutdown when the wave came, operators reacted globally adequately...

The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".

This patently insufficient ability to foresee also sheds a light towards the "we know that dangerous nuclear waste will not be a problem for anyone during the next 100000 years or so".

Renewables can do the trick without all those threats.

[JohnHaugeland]

Your stories notwithstanding, every renewable deployment in history has failed to reach zero carbon.

 

> The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".

Yeah. And solar out-kills nuclear by a factor of nearly 20.

Your problem is that you're trying to consider nuclear in isolation, with no null hypothesis.

Every single replacement causes more death and more radioactive waste, no exceptions, even when you fold in the worst nuclear disasters in history.

.

> Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case

This is an absurd and incorrect viewpoint. Please do not hold yourself forwards as knowledgeable in these matters.

The Fukushima design was well known to be flawed, and the United States had been suing Japan to shut it down for ten years before this happened.

The seawall did not meet Japan's national standards.

You might as well call Union Carbide lucky. Go be an apologist on someone else's time.

[natmaka]

> every renewable deployment in history has failed to reach zero carbon.

No energy production mean reached zero carbon. Nuclear is far from this goal and cannot attain it on any financially realistic way.

Even France, which produces most of its electricity using nuclear reactors since the 90's, couldn't. Proof (red surfaces represent fossil fuels used for electricity production in France): https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi...

In France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it.

The fraction of consumed energy produced by renewables is booming, even in good old Europe. Proof: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nrg_ind_ured/...

Overall there is a working and more and more adopted way to build future energy systems... and another one...: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

> solar out-kills nuclear

This is false, as any serious meta-study shows: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Moreover those victims are past ones, and a new major nuclear disaster may cause many victims while solar-panels induced major disasters aren't even possible.

[pydry]

Every nuclear disaster is unique yet nobody is willing to bet on any of them being the last. Fukushima was also unique in that it caused coal usage to skyrocket in Japan - a problem Germany is not currently suffering from.

To me, the way to prove that something ISNT safe is to shout loudly about how safe it is and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong.

This is what the nuclear industry does and the government backs them.

[JohnHaugeland]

> Every nuclear disaster is unique

No nuclear disaster in history has added up to a bad single bus accident.

.

> and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong. \n This is what the nuclear industry does

This is, of course, the exact opposite of true. Nuclear power is the only kind of power expected to carry full disaster insurance (not even dams, which have death counts in the six digits.)

[natmaka]

Victims: there are dissenting opinions, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

No, nuclear isn't fully insured, in any nation (there are funds, providing for damages up to a low-caped total amount).

Power-producing dams failures are very rare and preventable, and albeit they are way more numerous and old than nuclear reactors the history path is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> dams, which have death counts in the six digits

This Banqiao case is a fluke, in similar conditions anything would go boom with way less latency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436

[krageon]

> radically unlikely

It's an island nation, and we're calling a tsunami "radically unlikely"? Given the time frames involved in cleaning up an event like what happened in Fukushima, once every 100 years is not very unlikely.

[imtringued]

You could have replaced all nuclear power plants with new ones for the cost of the fukushima cleanup.

As always your theoretical modern designs that are safe are useless if you are still running power plants that are older than chernobyl.

[JohnHaugeland]

Digging miles into the ground with a 4 story mechanized oil rig is much more complicated than putting some dirt into a barrel and walking past it with a Geiger counter monthly, buddy