
How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment - yinso
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_nuclear_power_is_hurting_the_environment?language=en
======
legulere
Nuclear power has three big issues:

\- Costs: In recent years it has become prohibitively expensive in the west to
build nuclear reactors. Hinkley point C in the UK will have higher cost per
MWh than wind or even photovoltaics.

\- Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former
salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not
nothing at all.

\- Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has
catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors
like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.

~~~
antris
> Costs

Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear
than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's
100x more regulated.

> Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt
> mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not
> nothing at all

And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to
other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive
waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for
the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little.

You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to _compare_ the data
between different solutions.

> Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has
> catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human
> errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.

Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to
radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall
nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-
de...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-
price-always-paid/#45914f7349d2)

~~~
makomk
> Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due
> to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero.

This is the problem with the pro-nuclear approach to nuclear safety. Fukoshima
was a massive safety failure. Something that was supposed to never happen did,
the cooling failed, the reactors melted down, the containment breached and
radioactive isotopes leaked and kept on leaking. At that point, it's not
engineering that's protecting people, it's sheer luck and we don't even know
the odds of the bet or the stake. We don't know how likely it was for an even
bigger containment breach to occur, for things to have gone far worse, because
the whole event was outside of the plan. Not only that, it was due to an issue
that had already been pointed out by TEPCO's internal planning documents and
ignored. (Then there's the huge economic costs of the radiation leaks.) Just
ignoring this as a minor incident is inviting further failures which may not
be so kind.

~~~
saulrh
Fukushima was fifty years old. Compared to modern reactors, it's approximately
as unsafe as a car from 1971 is compared to a modern car [1]. Which is to say,
it's pants-shittingly unsafe and we should've replaced it 20 years ago but
idiots say we're not allowed to "because it's dangerous oooh noooo".

If you want to badmouth nuclear by spouting off its worst-case scenarios
rather than its average or expected scenarios, I invite you to do the same for
the alternatives. Coal's worst case causes the Great Smog and Beijing and New
Delhi. Oil's worst case causes the Exxon Valdez and Piper Alpha and the Texas
City Refinery explosion and oh yeah global climate change. Hydro's worst case
is the Banqiao Dam burst, which _directly_ killed 200,000 people and forced 11
million out of their homes. Badmouthing nuclear over fukushima and chernobyl
is like badmouthing cars because a Fluorine tanker crashed in downtown Seattle
around 1935.

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g)

~~~
ethbro
To synthesize what both of you are saying, I think the biggest problem nuclear
has is that (a) current regulations make new reactor construction
prohibitively expensive & (b) current regulations are designed around
preventing problems that occurred in reactors 50 years ago.

We're essentially strangling the innovation that would fix the things we're
terrified of, which are why the regulations exist in the first place!

As a result, we still have Gen II reactors (Watts Bar) coming online. In 2016.

~~~
saulrh
Bureaucracy: "We can't let you build this. It doesn't satisfy requirement
IXX.53-A."

Engineer: "The one about the primary turboencabulator?"

Bureaucracy: "Yes. Your reactor needs it to be certified to the standards laid
out in Index 437."

Engineer: "There aren't any turboencabulators in the design. Our design uses
retroencabulators. That's how it's so safe; the primary turboencabulator was
the primary failure point. There is no primary turboencabulator to certify."

Bureaucracy: "I'm sorry, but we can't accept this design without a
certification for a primary turboencabulator. It can't be safe without one.
Maybe you should start over?"

~~~
digi_owl
Thing is though, how can the engineer claim this new retroencabulator is safe?

If he has documented tests etc, how about going the route of getting the
paperwork amended? And if not, should the bureaucrats just take his word that
this time it is safe? That was what they were saying with the turboencabulator
as well...

~~~
ethbro
I think the problem the parent was getting at is that parts new enough that
regulations have not been written are automatically non-viable due to
bureaucracy substituting outsourced regulation documents for in-house
technical expertise. With the end result of regulators being incapable of
making technical decisions that fall outside the already written regulated
scenarios.

I would hope that this is less of an issue in nuclear regulation, due to them
hopefully having engineering resources on staff. But I do know it's a common
problem with less technically focused branches of government.

------
_ph_
As a consequence of the Chernobyl incident, parts of western Europe are still
contaminated. For example, it is still not entirely safe to eat mushrooms or
wild boar from Bavaria. And that is not going to change in my life time. About
a 1000km away from Chernobyl. I am a physicist and certainly do not have
irrational fears of nuclear energy. But the risks and uses of nuclear have to
be carefully considered. Looking at the prices paid for modern reactors being
built right now, they seem to be quite more expensive than wind and solar
installations.

~~~
hiddenkrypt
As a consequence of the Centralia incident[1], a portion of Pennsylvania, USA
has been rendered practically uninhabitable since 1963. The fire may continue
burning for up to two hundred and fifty years. It is not the only persistent
coal mine fire in that state, let alone worldwide.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire)

I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of the Chernobyl incident or the dangers
of nuclear accidents, but to provide context. Even ignoring the energy balance
which show nuclear as being safer per KWH than any other tech (including wind
and solar), even including the disasters of fukushima and chernobyl, Nuclear
has been safer and less damaging to the environment than coal.

Wind and solar are great, I'd love to see more use and developments there.
They can't compete with the energy density of coal, let alone atomics.

------
creshal
Nuclear's inability to be _both_ cheap and reliable is hurting it more. Once
you add up all the costs for decommissioning old power plants and nuclear
repositories (usually paid by the state, not the company owning the power
plant), it becomes really uneconomical. Even compared to solar, nowadays.

~~~
witty_username
How is nuclear not reliable? There's no dependence on other countries for fuel
and no need for the sun or wind to be there.

~~~
deelowe
The op said CHEAP and RELIABLE. They kind of have to be reliable and as a
result are very expensive.

------
pents90
Some of the worst data presentation offenses are being committed in this talk,
including graphs with misleading axes, trend lines derived from too few data
points, and no acknowledgement of exponential trends, such as solar energy's
adoption.

~~~
berntb
Solar can certainly solve the energy problems for many countries, given that
cheaper energy storage really is created. But not for e.g. northern Europe.
There just is too little sun, especially in the winter.

Also, it seems transports will be radically electrified the coming two
decades, which will strongly increase the demand for electricity.

I have no problems with environmentalists, my problem is that so many of them
rather burn oil than build nuclear plants.

~~~
paulmd
Solving energy storage on that level is a non-trivial task. People don't
understand just how energy-dense liquid and solid fuels are, but you
essentially need _geological-scale_ solutions in order to replace them
(pumped-storage hydro or compressed-air in deep caverns). Those require
specific geological formations and in the case of pumped-storage hydro has a
pretty negative environmental footprint. You take a mountain range and you
flood it and drain it on a daily basis, anything that used to be there is now
underwater half the time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-
storage_hydroelectricit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-
storage_hydroelectricity)

There is about 740 TWh of pumped-storage capacity available worldwide. If we
gave every single US household a Tesla Powerwall (6.4 KWh) it would add up to
0.7936 TWh of capacity. If we keep the US average of 2.55 people per household
and scale that up to the 7.4 billion people worldwide (2.89 billion
households) that's still only 18.49 TWh. One per person worldwide, 44.8 TWh.
Maybe double that if we give every person on the planet an electric car that's
tied into the grid too.

So if we gave every person a Powerwall, that's 6% of the presently extant
pumped-storage capacity. And it's certainly not like we've made any sort of
systematic attempt to fully exploit pumped storage, if we are doing worldwide
solutions then we can go a lot farther on the other side of the equation too.

Again, people vastly underestimate just how great liquid fuels are at storing
energy in comparison to how shitty batteries are. We're talking about liquid
fuels having more than 100x the energy density of a lithium-ion battery here.
Batteries are convenient from a design perspective but they are wildly
inefficient from a density perspective.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)

If anything, the advent of cheap clean electricity from nuclear should shift
us toward synthetic liquid fuels for the energy density involved. There's
nothing stopping you from pulling carbon out of the air and synthesizing it
back into a long-chain hydrocarbon. It's also significantly cleaner than
fossil-derived fuel.

The Fischer-Tropsch process has been around for a century and there's lots of
neat modern tweaks to it. It just takes a lot of energy (more than you get out
of it obviously) but if we have lots of nuclear power then why not use it as a
dense energy-store over batteries? It saves us a heck of a lot of rebuilding
infrastructure too.

------
exDM69
Does anyone know of a reliable source for comparison of the environmental,
cost and health effects of different forms of energy? I've had a hard time
finding a good source that isn't politically motivated and biased.

It's very difficult to evaluate e.g. wind turbines (poor output) and
photovoltaics (exotic raw materials) against nuclear with the information I've
found.

~~~
iaw
Having worked in a related part of the electricity industry: not as far as I
know. As far as I can tell _everyone_ has an agenda.

I am in favor of fission as a primary energy resource but there's no way to
have an honest comparative conversation because everyone is jockeying for the
upperhand.

~~~
exDM69
My thoughts exactly.

I'm under the impression that e.g. wind power should not be built at all for
electricity production (output is just too little) but all the subsidies it
enjoys makes it a worthwhile business. Considering whether this is true is
difficult because the facts are intentionally obscured and for example the
wind power capacity is often at some nominal wind speed which is often a lot
more than the average at the location. In my home country, a 1MW wind turbine
was built but the nominal output is at 13 m/s while the average wind speed is
around 6 m/s, yielding about an eighth of the nominal power (proportional to
the speed cubed).

The same is true for photovoltaics as the raw materials need a huge volume of
earth to be mined for a miniscule amount of material.

Nuclear isn't any different, it's hard to get facts from uranium mining and
enrichment, especially given its military value and the surrounding secrecy.

For this reason, I usually refrain from any energy policy discussion. I can't
have an opinion if I can't have the facts. Without facts, these discussions
often devolve into emotional shouting contests.

~~~
iaw
From what I've eked out over the years:

\- Wind is not that good of an energy source but in some areas can provide
offsetting capacity. Built at any scale wind becomes useless due to numerous
factors, especially predicting production and storage.

\- Solar in some very specific areas makes perfect sense (Mexica, Southern US,
etc) but in most places will never be economic. While a little more
predictable than wind it's still not ideal and suffers from similar storage
problems. At scale it does serious damage to the environment (Mojave desert
installation is a good example...)

\- Hydro & Geothermals are phenomenal in the few areas where they exist (e.g.
Canada).

\- Coal is pretty bad both for the miners pulling it out of the ground and the
environment we burn it into. It's an economic powerhouse and a ton of capacity
exists so it's going to be hard to get away from.

\- Gas Turbines are horribly inefficient but will probably become more and
more common as the political will to solve the underlying problems is lacking
and they are the only feasible stopgap.

\- Nuclear Fission is between a rock and a hard place. On one side, too much
regulation is preventing active development. On the other side, without
sufficient regulation the companies will play fast and loose with a seriously
dangerous substance. Deepwater horizon can give you an idea of how much buck-
shifting could occur. Sadly, fission is the only resource that is currently
practical and won't exacerbate an already tenuous climate.

Nuclear Fusion is the holy grail of power generation but there are serious
engineering challenges behind it. We are as far from economically viable
controlled fusion now as we were from the moon in mid-1962 but there's no JFK
swinging the force of a nation-state behind the technology making it's
likelihood of realization low.

In short, we're screwed.

~~~
exDM69
This is pretty much what I think but I'm looking for citable source

~~~
iaw
If you find it do let me know.

------
gioele
Redutio ad bombarolum:

Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a nuclear power plant =>
possible irreparable ecological disaster.

Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a solar plant => a few broken
glasses to clean up.

You choose.

More seriously, nuclear power is the future of clean energy. But (future)
nuclear fusion, not (current) nuclear fission.

~~~
default_user
You may be joking, but seriously the possible irreparable damage is indeed an
argument for me that gets insufficiently addressed by the pro nuclear people.

Off course, more people die because of coal power plants and off course the
net loss of land due to global warming is bigger compared to nuclear due to
rising sea levels. But you can still go to those flooded places (albeit in a
diving suite) and not get cancer... This is not the case for the Chernobyl
area or Fukushima. This place is lost and cannot be used by humans for a long
time. This cannot not happen when using coal power plants.

Take a small country like Switzerland. We cannot afford to lose any land. You
can do something about the death of people in the coal mining industry and you
can also do something to reduce the atmospheric CO2. But once a nuclear
accident happens the land is lost and nothing can be done about it.

And this point is never addressed properly. I don't care about the
probability, I care about the possibility.

~~~
hiddenkrypt
> This is not the case for the Chernobyl area or Fukushima. This place is lost
> and cannot be used by humans for a long time. This cannot not happen when
> using coal power plants.

Wrong.

The Centralia Mine fire has been burning since 1963.[1] The area of the mine
is extremely dangerous, causing the city above to be seized by eminent domain
and condemned. Poisonous, dangerously heated gases erupt from the ground at
random. Chernobyl is reaching the point where the radiation levels are low
enough for tourism. Centralia's mine fire will continue burning for up to 250
years. The released gasses will continue to contribute to atmospheric CO2 that
entire time. The radiological components of coal combustion (radium gas being
one) will continue to be released. It's already a known fact that coal power
plants cause more radiation in the cities around them than nuclear plants do.

This is not the only mine fire in the state of Pennsylvania[2], let alone the
only such site in the world.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Run_mine_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Run_mine_fire)

Say what you want about nuclear. Coal is far worse.

~~~
default_user
Thank you, I did not know that.

Just to clarify, I'm not for coal either. It's just an issue that is never
properly discussed in mainstream debates.

~~~
closeparen
Everyone is "not for coal either" but when you strongly oppose nuclear power
and weakly oppose coal power, you are fighting for more coal power.

------
szemet
According to the article 150 people die / trillionWh due to wind power.
According to wikipedia 269 birds die / trillionWh due to wind power.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#Birds)

So the death rate for birds is nearly the same that for people? Seems strange.
We can protect clueless birds better from the turbines, than the intelligent
and educated working people up there??? Or something is wrong with either of
the estimations...

~~~
Tharre
You should actually read the wikipedia article. The 269 birds / TWh number
stems from the lower estimation that between 20,000 and 573,000 birds per year
are killed from wind turbines in the US.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
A tangent. If we worry about bird deaths there are more important factors to
consider.
[https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml](https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml)

------
vg2001
In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. It's what I learned
when I was a child in the 1960s

~~~
sqeaky
Just like 20 years ago fusion was only 15 years out.

------
pasbesoin
It's fear of the humans engineering, managing, and politicking it.

Those humans haven't changed, and they don't seem to show much propensity for
changing.

------
libeclipse
The UK green party has some very good policies overall, but one pitfall is
that they're heavily against nuclear fission.

I was given the chance last year to question one of their MPs about their
stance on nuclear fusion and the general gist of the response was that they
didn't think that it would succeed but they're "not against research in the
field".

------
throwaway98237
Nuclear power is the problem of the "Black Swan" embodied.

------
slifin
The way nuclear is always pushed like this on Reddit and Hacker News makes me
wonder if there is a PR company behind these posts

If they are, are they acting in our collective interests? I frankly don't even
know

My gut feeling is I'd rather have wind solar hydro or something green on my
door step

~~~
dandelion_lover
The push is driven by the people who do not believe their "gut feeling", but
are trying to understand the depth of the problem, me included.

------
staticvar
No one will ever trust corporations or governments to operate a nuclear power
plant safely. Imagine if Enron had been managing a nuclear power plant. They
would have blown it up way before it came out that they were frauds and
crooks.

------
petre
This guy is right in many ways, but also check out other TED talks from actual
scientists, or at least engineers:

Kirk Sorensen
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw)

Sunniva Rose
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKl5X72NIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKl5X72NIc)

Srikumar Banerjee
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE)

------
sharemywin
Interesting article about cyber attacks and proliferation

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724697)

------
jlebrech
the future of nuclear
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY)

------
woliveirajr
If I understood it correctly, one big problem is that some "clean" energy like
solar and wind don't accumulate, i.e., it must be used as it is produced, and
that doesn't scale well with spikes in consume during the night and so on.

In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting. They would
charge during the day and discharge during the night. The fact that they move
around is a bonus :)

~~~
dogma1138
>In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting.

No, it really does not seem interesting, it seems like a terrible idea up
there with solar freaking roadways.

Car batteries have a completely different profile than long term storage
batteries.

Different voltage, charge and discharge cycles and drain and output
attenuation.

While Tesla does sell a "power wall" it has nothing to do with the car
batteries they use, it's a completely different beast and even that is not
optimised that well compared to dedicated household level battery storage.

>They would charge during the day and discharge during the night.

Nighttime electrical use is when it's at it's lowest, not to mention that why
would you want your car to be discharging at night? You need to drive it in
the morning, and if you want to save power you want to charge it at night not
to add to the day time use so you want a full battery in the morning.

>The fact that they move around is a bonus :)

A bonus for what? having a system that is unpredictable/unreliable because the
location, availability and density of your storage changes constantly?

~~~
ageofwant
Long term storage ? Since when is 12h drain/fill cycles "long term". The Tesla
power wall is functionally identical to its car batteries, using the same Li
ion battery tech. Optimisation is a matter of power profile programming,
modern converters are very capable.

What makes this tech more interesting is the fact that you could buy cheap
electricity from the garage you park you car during the day (the one with the
massive solar roof, close to cheap to maintain central transmission lines). A
million grid-connected batteries represents a very resilient power system with
interesting real-time energy markets on top.

It is very interesting indeed.

------
digi_owl
I found Adam Curtis' A is for Atom quite interesting regarding this.

Apparently at least the US reactors were essentially scaled up military
submarine reactors.

~~~
paulmd
Yep, and of course you have very different design goals for a submarine than
you would have in a fixed installation (long time between refuelings,
compactness, etc). They're also based on designs which were intended to breed
plutonium.

There's a lot which we could improve on if we were doing a clean-slate
redesign of our nuclear power infrastructure with an eye towards power
generation rather than military purposes.

Unfortunately it's very difficult to realize those reforms with the rampant
NIMBYism surrounding nuclear power. We can't even build plants that use
upgraded versions of existing technology let alone plants that are running on
novel technologies. They sometimes get pilot plants but they never make it out
of the prototype stage.

------
vg2001
In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I learned
when I was a child in the 1960s. It a truth renewed every year. We may need
gen IV fission for one reason, and one reason only: to get rid/at least reduce
nuc waste and weapon plutonium. Lets get that shit off the planet, its as bad
as CO2

~~~
nailer
> In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I
> learned when I was a child in the 1960s.

This is fascinating. I was an 80's kid, and we learnt in primary school that
by the year 2000, major cities will be underwater due to the greenhouse effect
from CO2 emissions. Not that climate change isn't still a threat: it's just
that we seem to forget the hype the media often builds up around legitimate
concepts.

------
Klasiaster
And where does the uranium come from…? Nobody cares about the enviornmental
and health issues in Niger etc.

~~~
ageofwant
Recovered from tailing of existing precious metal mines. An its a differential
measurement, not absolute, compare it against the damage being done by coal
and oil mining.

------
DannyB2
On the safety issue.

It's not that I don't trust the technology. It's that I don't trust the people
in charge of safety. It doesn't happen over night. But it is a gradual cost
cutting which leads to corner cutting. It is slow, inevitable and inexorable.

------
ilurkedhere
Thorium based reactors, anyone?

------
known
Cost of electricity by source.

1\. Natural gas

2\. Hydro

3\. Coal

4\. Nuclear

5\. Solar

6\. Wind

~~~
whamlastxmas
In terms of direct cost to consumer, maybe. This is ignoring literally all
externalities and loss of life due to pollution by coal or the tremendous
environmental damage of hydro/coal.

