[Gwypaas]

> You're imagining an act of god that does precisely so much damage that the difference between catastrophic failure and a non-event is this one cracked pipe. That was, please note, detected and fixed before failure.

Take the severe Forsmark incident in 2006 in Sweden. Many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. Thus loss of cooling became almost a certainty. That is why you test and do not accept half fixes to placate the operators profit margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...

> And the downside of that risk coming to fruition is a 0-death to near-0-death crisis (which is much better than whatever this precise external shock will cause).

And a at least $200B bill to cleanup the mess in Fukushimas case. Lets remove the Price Anderson Act so they have to pay the true cost for their risk?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

[roenxi]

> Lets remove the Price Anderson Act so they have to pay the true cost for their risk?

Yeah. The costs and benefits should be born by the capital owner. The issue is that if you want to force them to pay for a cost externality that should be balanced out by considering the benefit eternalities. For nuclear power? if the world was fair they'd get a much bigger net subsidy. The risks of nuclear power going critical are far smaller than the benefits from not having to use coal for example.

I forget what a life saved is worth in engineering terms. Something like 1 or 10 million per capita I think. $200 billion in cleanup only needs to save ~200-2,000 lives to be justified.

> Many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.

Things like pipes being cracked, for example? That is the issue here to me, this is part of a system of defences where it is anticipated that some of them won't be working. No one defence being broken should be a crisis.

I'm cool with the idea that they should fix their pipe. I'm not cool with it being treated like a big deal without pretty solid evidence that the deal is big.

[Gwypaas]

> The risks of nuclear power going critical are far smaller than the benefits from not having to use coal for example.

That is a strawman argument. Coal has generally been uneconomical since the advent of combined cycle gas turbines where gas infrastructure exists. Today renewables are vastly undercutting both.

Trying to frame it as a choice between nuclear and coal is only made because nuclear does not stack up against the real competition in 2023.

> I forget what a life saved is worth in engineering terms. Something like 1 or 10 million per capita I think. $200 billion in cleanup only needs to save ~200-2,000 lives to be justified.

Or we just build power generation without those third party risks. I do not understand why you are trying to frame a $200 billion cleanup bill as "nothing to see, move along sheeple!".

> I'm cool with the idea that they should fix their pipe. I'm not cool with it being treated like a big deal without pretty solid evidence that the deal is big.

Almost all nuclear accidents final hole in the Swiss cheese is some sort of loss of cooling. When the backup power fails due to negligent maintenance that is a big deal.

Fukushima led to us building stockpiles of backup generators together with the necessary electric connections allowing us us to fly them in with helicopters and connect them if the primary ones fail. Saying that failure in the primary ones is "fine, nothing to see" is sticking your head in the sand.

[roenxi]

Assessing a 1957 Act against the performance from then to today is hardly a strawman argument. Since we're talking about US Nuclear, we're talking about a design, risks and benefits of what is effectively 1973 tech.

If you want to talk about the future, then guessing at $200 billion cleanup bills seems unlikely. The design state of the art has come a long way since the dawn of the nuclear industry. We don't know what a serious failure of a post-Chernobyl design looks like because such a thing has never happened.

> Or we just build power generation without those third party risks. I do not understand why you are trying to frame a $200 billion cleanup bill as "nothing to see, move along sheeple!".

You are, at present, living with a >$200 billion cleanup bill because we didn't commit to Nuclear early enough. Given past performance, the odds of losing more than $200 billion from not enabling Nuclear now are quite high. Net benefits outweighing costs isn't that complicated a stance and I expect you'll understand it if you think about it.

And take note on the way through that the renewables proponents have serially overstated their case for years - Germany appears to be on the path to de-industrialising itself rather than admitting that its renewable program was actually quite expensive. I'd much rather have $200B as a one-off cost rather than the ongoing fiscal disaster of their Energiewende. The cost of renewables has improved a lot since then, but it seems unlikely that the situation on the ground is as lopsided as the raw costs suggest - being able to schedule the generation of power counts for something.

Also, what is with this "sheeple" business? I never said that. And I'm addressing the issue of cleanup cost directly.

> Almost all nuclear accidents final hole in the Swiss cheese is some sort of loss of cooling.

Yeah. If the cooling doesn't fail then it is pretty hard to see how accidents could happen. But the argument isn't that accidents won't happen - accidents do happen. We can only control probabilities and sooner or later everything fails.

The issue is that the situation is a lot like the UK in the 1750s refusing to use coal because of the risk of air pollution. They'd technically be right about the costs, but the upside of cheap power is much, much more important than the downside of things going wrong. Nuclear has a smaller cost than coal and a bigger upside. Pulling the plug on the nuclear industry was and remains foolish policy.

> Fukushima led to us building stockpiles of backup generators together with the necessary electric connections allowing us us to fly them in with helicopters and connect them if the primary ones fail. Saying that failure in the primary ones is "fine, nothing to see" is sticking your head in the sand.

I'm not sticking my head in the sand, I'm saying that a hypothetical failure of one component (which didn't happen and was caught by the inspection program) is acceptable. You just provided a new argument for why. These things have a lot of redundant layers of protection.