[roenxi]

Are you suggesting we should roll nuclear safety back to 1980s USSR standards? That is a lot more extreme than what I'm comfortable with, and sounds like it is bordering on recklessness. Those were the goons that caused Chernobyl.

I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target. Nobody is advocating ignoring 50 years of improvements in safety tech and understanding, we just shouldn't be bankrupting nuclear companies in pursuit of impossible goals.

The standard for damage should be similar to coal.

[hef19898]

Are you intentinaly misreading my comments? Sure seems so.

If anything, Chernobyl shows us that, regardless of how low regulatory and safety standards are, economic and career interests always push people and organizations to violate them. Hence, the point would be to put even stricter regulations in place.

On the other hand, you took official incident reports as, to qupte, economic recommendations. And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.

Generally so, HN has a really problem with quantifying risks. In FMEAs, the detectability, propability and severity of a failure mode are combined to calculate a risk value. If a risk is potentially disastrous, and if nuclear accidents are disastrous they really and truely are, the underlying failure modes have to be mitigated rigirously. There is no thought of "some accidents have to be accepted for the greater good" in developing systems that can, and have, killed people. This attitude shows in each and every discussion around aerospace accidents as well... And it is the main rwason I have a hard time accepting software devs as part of the greater engineering community.

[roenxi]

If you think someone is misreading your comments, my advice is to either shrug and accept that not everyone understands or try to explain yourself more clearly. Paranoia is a bad mindset. And energy policy is, fundamentally, about economics. We've regulated a lot of industries out of existence for no particular reason and, while that annoys me, the damage is slight compared to the huge societal costs of the crazy energy policies the Western powers have been adopting.

1980s standards of safety aren't really an acceptable option in the modern era, and you are the person laying down 1980s and 1990s reports as something to be referred to. That isn't a very good strategy IMO, we should be aiming for higher standards than they could achieve then. We have much better tech and science now. The issue is that the regulations have gone waaay overboard, we're pushing huge costs onto the nuclear industry for next to no benefit to anyone.

> And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.

I still am, the amount of oversight the nuclear industry has been subjected to is silly.

However, and this is a point I thought was going to be obvious to everyone, 1980s USSR standards are also silly. Not as silly as the modern standard, in principle, but nevertheless I think we can do better.

I'm thinking that society can maybe be talked down off the ledge and accept airline-industry levels of safety. Then we can have cheap power and historically outstanding safety and an order of magnitude less environmental damage than coal, and cheaper power prices. It'd be a great equilibrium. Regressing to the 80s is not really something I'm tabling as an option here. If the plan was to do that then the anti-nuclear people would have some respectable points.

[hef19898]

Airline industry levels of safety? So real six sigma? I am all for that! Just as a heads up, that includes all those incidents that never make to the news. You know, a crack here, corrosion there. A failed sensor, a insignificant coolant leak...

And you know why the Chernobyl reports are so significant? Because to date it is the worst nuclear accident, also the most thoroughly investigated one. And specifically because of all the fuck ups, it allows us to see a lot of risks and issues in one single report, not spread across a half dozen or so. Added bonus, everyone knows about Chernobyl.

After all, I read it, multiple times actually. I also read some of the public reports on the 737 Max, and the basic parallels in behaviour of people and organizations are astonishing.

Just im case so, I am not saying coal is better, we absolutely should leave existing nuclear plants online as long as sofely possible. Building new ones is just not economically feasible anymore, for almost a decade so. Wind and solar are simply cheaper, and hence more profitable fprninvestors, and the environment. And until tue transition is complete, nuclear and some gas plants for covering peak demand short notice, is a viable way to go.

By the way, regarding 80s and 90s safety regulations, you do know from when most of the current nuclear fleet dates, right? And there is so much retrofitting you can do...

[bumby]

>HN has a really problem with quantifying risks.

Humans, in general have a real problem quantifying risks, especially risks involving low probability events. I don't think this is unique to HN (although, it seems like there may be a disproportionate amount of confidence discussing these risks).

[mschuster91]

> I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target.

The problem is: what are you willing to tolerate? Here in Bavaria, many decades after Chernobyl, you still have to scan wild game meat and shrooms for radioactivity. You can't even assume that a dead zone around a disaster site will be kept secure - the Ukraine war proved that, with uneducated Russian troops disturbing the radioactive dust layer as they moved around and entrenched themselves around Chernobyl. The only place where it's really feasible to have a nuclear accident site contained reasonably well is the continental United States, everything else is way too much at risk for third-party interference.

Nuclear radiation is among the worst issues you can have... you can't see it, people aren't aware of how radiation sources look like, and it's way WAY too easy to cause serious incidents the more widespread its use is - the "orphan sources" wikipedia article is pretty damning, and a lot of that is the relatively small amounts that are used in radiotherapy devices. As a species, we can't even have these secured and protected from theft and incompetent idiots - how anyone can ask for even more usage of nuclear energy is beyond me.

[hef19898]

In the end it seems the pro nuclear, and indirectly anti-renewables, argument seems to boil to renewables being a socialist conspiracy to sabotage the Western economy and society or something like that.

[nickpp]

I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables.

Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.

[mschuster91]

> I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables.

We have a ton of these people in Germany. "Technologieoffen" they call themselves - the reality is that they want to keep the old structure of big utilities and massive profits for shareholders alive.

> Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.

That's what a grid is for. Build a national grid with serious transfer capacities (China can do it over 1000s of km's, so the US can just as well if it wanted), and suddenly you can use East Coast solar to power the West Coast. Or here in Europe, with French and Portuguese offshore wind and solar from Northern Africa. On top of that, incentivise large consumers (data centers, heavy industry) to upgrade their processes to be able to handle dynamic load shedding, and invest into powerful gas and hydrogen fuel cell based peaker plants to cover for the very small amount in a year where neither solar, wind nor dammed hydro is enough to supply the entire country.

The serious issue with nuclear is that they cost billions of dollars to build. At the moment, in Germany 44% of the total power is generated using renewables [1], in peak times (i.e. summer) renewables account for up to 70% of the month's load [2]. The investment for NPPs can't ever be recouped at that point, which is why even small scale projects such as NuScale got the boot [3]. No matter what the pro-nuclear crowd hopes, the free market has decided against it.

[1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimasch...

[2] https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-f...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...

[nickpp]

Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. Hence no free market when it comes to building nuclear power plants, unfortunately. Otherwise we’d have a glut of safe electricity at amazingly low prices. Of course safety was the pretext for that overregulation but when such a complex technology has the lowest deaths per megawatt (except solar) [0] - maybe we can relax the rules a little.

I know about your suggestions and while they are all good ideas I just don’t see them widely implemented in reality for some reason. Maybe because they all require government intervention which is slow, expensive and prone to corruption from the fossil fuel lobby.

Meanwhile the non-renewable part of energy generation is made burning coal, gas and oil and spewing pollution and even radioactive particles in the air, pollution that kills millions every year. Also spewing CO2 causing climate change, e civilization-ending danger getting closer and harder to avoid.

Maybe nuclear deserves a second chance?

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

[hef19898]

No free market for nuclear? Interesting, but not true. Simoly kWh prices show that wind and solar were cheaper than Hinkley C already, what, 5 years ago? Since then, solar is getting cheaper every year.

On electricity markets, which in Europe only take variable coats into account, the ranking, cheapest to most expensive, is: wind and solar, hydro, coal, nuclear and oil followed by gas. So even there, in hard cold numbers, nuclear looses. Even without taking the huge fix costs of nuclear plants into account, or the long term coats like waste storage.

Why do you think even small, and potentially cheaper, reactor projects get axed?

[mschuster91]

> Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. There is no free market when it comes to nuclear, unfortunately.

And for good reason. There is no power generation that has a potential for serious damage compared to nuclear. The cost of Chernobyl was at least 235 billion dollars [1], Fukushima is estimated to end up at around 200 billion dollars [2]. The only other kind of power generation that can destroy entire swaths of land in a single strike is dammed hydro, but even the largest catastrophe to date, the Kakhovka dam destruction in Ukraine, cost only 14 billion dollars [3] - and it didn't render the affected land permanently uninhabitable and only cost the lives of about 50 people, compared to Chernobyl's death toll.

It's utter madness to risk this much money and this much destruction when there are so many different ways of getting power. Nuclear power may be the cheapest per kWh on paper, but that is only because the worst-case risk is implicitly assumed by the government without accounting for it in insurance premiums - at least the major Western countries limit operator exposure to liability claims to a fraction of the potential cost [4]. This is beyond unsustainable, it's financial russian roulette.

We will not be able to live entirely without NPPs, I agree on that one, as we need them to create Co-60 for radiotherapy sources and the nuclear weapon powers to get new feedstock to maintain the warheads, but we should try as a species to get rid of nuclear weapons anyway and only keep the minimum we need for radiotherapy and fundamental research.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/chernobyl...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253929/

[3] https://www.voanews.com/a/un-reports-staggering-14-billion-c...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

[hef19898]

There we agree. There is only one problem: nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors in the West, they are not competetive with renewables anymore. So every dollar invested in new nuclear reactors is a wasted dollar. The fossil fuel lobby benegits largely from that, because every dollar going into nuclear projects, which will be completed at least a decade later if not more, is a dollar not going into renewables going online in the next year. And it is the latter that posses a problem for fossil fuel plants, not the former.

Anyway, as with EVs, capitalism has decided: wind and solar it is, that's where the money goes and not nuclear. For mostly the same reasons come 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. Profits and money.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore.

I'm not convinced.

I'm expecting the automotive industry will just start producing vehicles that aren't effected by that requirement and those will be marketed in much the same way as SUVs have become pretty much the only vehicle type available because they're permitted to emmit more CO2.

[nickpp]

Yes, free markets have fuelled a technological boom that delivered us renewables - an incredible, completely unexpected feat. But it may be a case of too little too late.

The problem is we spent last 100 years spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instead of switching to nuclear due to the nuclear fear-mongering from environmentalists. Now we are facing Climate Change, a civilization-ending danger. And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.

The rational strategy would thus be a (slow, controlled, careful) cost-reducing deregulation and nuclear buildup in parallel with renewables and closing down of legacy plants.

But we are facing the same resistance and fear mongering from the exact same politicians and ideologues that got us into this predicament in the first place. I am pretty sure no solution can come from the same people and way of thinking that created the problem.

[hef19898]

Fun fact: Free markets have not a lot to do with the technological leap of solar, that was mostly German subsidies for PV. In the end only Chinese companies benegited from that, but that is a different topic.

Nobody, I repeat nobody, is financing new nuclear reactors in the developed world (except specialized and military applications). The money goes, for quote a while now, into renewables and, sadly, some coal plants (which is mainly due to CO2 certificates being too dirt cheap, and making coal plants financially viable). The free market and financials decided against nuclear, as did politics in a lot of countries.

One thing you do ignore so, getting new nuclear reactors up and running takes decades in Europe, there is no such thing as a fast built out. Not even if the public and political will would be there, which it isn't. All we do achieve with argueing for new nuclear capacity is slowing the build out of wind and solar down and slow development of grid scale storage tech.

[mschuster91]

> And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.

It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs.

Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).