
Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest - mpweiher
https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy/
======
payne92
I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of
investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human
history.

We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a
human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been
mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now
with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.

We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.

~~~
padseeker
What do you mean "politicization"? Please saw the movie the China syndrome and
then 3 mile island happened. Then people were very afraid. These were real
possibilities. Does anyone want to live near a nuclear power plant? Do you? I
sure as hell would not. How can you twist fear of a disaster in
"politicization"?

You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was
being discussed about the risks of global warming and greenhouse gasses back
in the heyday of nuclear power, i.e. the 1970's. The last nuclear power plant
in the US was built in the 1970s, which was when the last major accident that
happened in the US (3 mile Island). That's not even considering Chernobyl.

~~~
Chathamization
> Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened.

Yeah, I'm surprised by how little attention this gets. A significant accident
occurred that wasn't supposed to, and subsequent investigations showed that
there were significant lapses, including from regulators. People can't be
experts in nuclear plant design, construct, regulation, inspections, etc., so
they need to be able to rely on the authorities in charge. When that trust is
betrayed, it naturally has consequences. You can't just say to people, "Well,
yeah, last time we told you to trust us we were completely wrong, but this
time will be different!"

When problems happen that aren't supposed to happen, people are naturally
going to be overly cautious and skeptical of future assurances. That's not an
entirely unreasonable reaction.

~~~
nickik
It is a unreasonable reaction because the amount of damage compared to the
reaction was totally out of proportion.

Compare it to the damage of coal and it would not even show statistically.

------
simias
People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of
taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe,
the _perceived_ risk appears much greater.

In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go
_extremely_ wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast
getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions
seem manageable.

Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on
the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're
still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but
that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe
energy with very little CO2 emissions.

I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even
a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if
it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.

In particular I genuinely do not understand why most ecologists seem to be
staunchly anti-nuclear. I can understand asking for better funding in
renewable R&D and planning for a transition but, at least in Europe,
ecologists seem to favor dropping nuclear immediately, no matter the cost. For
instance they applauded when Germany decided to completely stop producing
nuclear energy, even if it meant more pollution in the short term. I find that
hard to justify.

~~~
Recurecur
New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown. LFRs
include an electrically cooled salt plug that seals a holding tank. If power
fails, the molten salt melts the plug, and the fuel safely drains into the
tank. I particularly like ThorCon's concept, where the reactor is underground.
Another plus of this reactor type is that water cooling isn't needed, so
siting is much more flexible.

Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon
estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW
worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.

[http://thorconpower.com/](http://thorconpower.com/)

I suggest watching the video on this page, it gives a good perspective:

[http://thorconpower.com/news](http://thorconpower.com/news)

~~~
beat
"Completely eliminates the possibility" sounds like something a supervillain
would say.

I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea.
It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible
tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at
those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.

Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been
promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.

Be careful with your language.

~~~
appleiigs
The senior engineer at my company was from Duke Energy. At the beginning of
the Fukushima incident he loudly proclaimed that the safety mechanisms would
kick in, preventing a disaster. He held educational session during lunch so he
could explain the engineering. We all know the rest of the story.

~~~
nickik
That just means he was an idiot. The problems of the design were well known.
The potential failure points were well known and are part of the design. This
is nothing new and has been understood for a long time.

A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.

A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these
problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level
is hard to even imagine.

------
Animats
It doesn't kill many people, because even when there's a disaster, there's
time to evacuate. But you lose an entire city once in a while.

Major reactor disasters so far:

\- SL-1. Steam explosion due to control rod lifted too far during maintenance.
Small experimental reactor, built in the middle of nowhere (Idaho Reactor Test
Station) for good reason. Inherently unsafe design.

\- Three Mile Island. Meltdown due to cooling water failure due to instrument
confusion. Contained by good containment vessel. No casualties. That's what
should have happened at Fukushima.

\- AVR pebble bed reactor. Pebble jam, radiation leak into ground. Contained,
but too much of a mess to decommission.

\- Chernobyl. Meltdown and fire due to operational error during testing.
Totally inadequate containment. Entire region evacuated and contaminated for
decades.

\- Fukushima. Loss of coolant and meltdown. Containment vessel too small,
reactor cores melted through in three reactors. Containment problem well known
in advance; Peach Bottom PA has same design.

A big, strong, containment vessel can keep a meltdown from becoming a major
disaster and has done so at least twice. Size matters; a large containment
vessel faces lower pressures when all the water boils to become steam. But a
good worst-case containment vessel can cost as much as the rest of the plant.

Some of the recently-touted small reactor designs try to omit a containment
vessel on the grounds that their design couldn't possibly melt down. That's
probably not a good approach.

~~~
AdamJacobMuller
> Some of the recently-touted small reactor designs try to omit a containment
> vessel on the grounds that their design couldn't possibly melt down. That's
> probably not a good approach.

Agreed, but, fail-safe and walkaway-safe designs coupled with moderate
containment vessels seem like a good medium. It is all about mitigating risk.
I don't think we should ever accept that a design has actual 0 risk for
meltdown, but, if you design with a goal of having 0 risk of uncontained
failures and then design containment for a moderate level of failure, that
seems like you have a robust overall solution.

~~~
contravariant
>design containment for a moderate level of failure

What on earth does this mean? When would an (as of yet) uncontained failure be
considered moderate?

~~~
godelski
In a nuclear disaster case, it isn't nothing or Chernobyl. Like all things in
life, there is stuff between the extremes.

------
the_gastropod
It appears that these figures take into account _just_ energy production. They
don't seem include the mining, enriching, construction of reactors, disposal
of waste, decommissioning reactors, etc. When mining low-grade ore (which
isn't uncommon, and is becoming more command as high-grade ore becomes more
scarce), nuclear plants are as inefficient as coal-fired plants [1]. Nuclear
advocates tend to ignore the full system, and focus on where nuclear shines:
power production. The setup to get to that point is extremely costly.

[1] [https://www.stormsmith.nl/i05.html](https://www.stormsmith.nl/i05.html)

~~~
mikeash
What are the sources of CO2 for mining and all the rest? If it's electricity
production then you're basically blaming nuclear for emissions from fossil
fuel generation, since those would be much lower in an all-nuclear world. If
it's transport then it's more justified, but when looking at how it could be
in the future, transport can be electrified to close that loop.

~~~
datenwolf
It's mostly due to the chemistry required to liberate the Uranium from the
ore. What you have in the ore is mostly Uranium oxides. You have to strip away
those pesky oxygen atoms in order to further process the Uranium. And in that
process quite the amount of CO2 is produced. Now keep in mind that this must
be done to all the Uranium, before it undergoes enrichtment. So for every atom
of U235 you get about 200 (give or take) atoms of U238 and you have to account
for all of them on the chemical side of things.

It's not that much better with Throrium either.

~~~
hueving
How is that compared to mining for battery and solar material? It's a double
standard to hold nuclear accountable for manufacturing when the same is not
applied to solar/wind.

~~~
ekianjo
batteries and solar components need numerous extracts of minerals and a bunch
of chemistry as well but as.you pointed out the solar lobby is happy to ignore
all that when claiming they are a clean source of energy.

~~~
kbenson
_No_ source of energy is clean, in that respect. The best you can do is
separate one time production and continuing operating pollution, and account
for both. Using that to show pollution per Mhh at 5, 10 and 20 year intervals
should be sufficient.

~~~
mikeash
Reiterating my original comment, it would also be good to distinguish between
the whole-lifecycle pollution generated _now_ , with current electrical and
transportation infrastructure, and the whole-lifecycle pollution you could
achieve if you applied the "clean" technology to the whole lifecycle.

For example, solar panel production requires a lot of electricity. That
electricity is mostly generated from fossil fuels. But if you supplied that
electricity with solar panels instead, it would be way cleaner. Which is
correct? We should probably present both numbers, if possible.

~~~
kbenson
An optimistic upper bound (unlikely but possible renewable adoption for
material production energy), and pessimistic lower bound (current mix of
evnergy for material production), and a best guess. That might convey enough
information to give someone a good guess as to how things might turn out.

It starts to sounds complicated, and to be a lot of information to digest for
a decision, but another way of looking at it is that correctly assessing and
planning for energy needs in the future is _so important_ that ignoring
information like that when making an assessment is _irresponsible_. We need
more nytimes.com style widgets that allow you to tweak the values to easily
digest data like this, and that clearly reference where the data and
assumptions come from.

------
beat
Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other
renewables (except biomass).

I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most
optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30
years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in
greenhouse gasses.

Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or beat
nuclear, with lower setup costs and other barriers to entry. A wide variety of
storage are being actively developed (with real investor support) to cache
cheap surplus production from solar/wind, making a mostly-solar grid viable.
What will our solar/wind/storage grid look like in 30 years?

Nuclear as a stepping-stone to solar won't matter. It's faster and easier to
just to straight to solar.

~~~
ars
> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or
> other renewables (except biomass).

You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead.

Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of
installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries.
(Falls for example.)

From here: [http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-
nuclear...](http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-
energy-vs-wind-and-solar/) (and you can google tons more sources):

Deathprint:

    
    
        Wind ………………  0.15 deaths / TWh
        CSP …………………  0.44 deaths / TWh
        Nuclear ………  0.04 deaths / TWh
    

Or here:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-
deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#7a9ec6da709b)

~~~
roryisok
The risk of injury or death while installing solar may be greater than nuclear
by the numbers, but if a guy falls off his roof installing a solar panel it
doesn't poison the land around him for hundreds of years

~~~
oh_sigh
If a guy falls off a roof building a nuclear plant, it doesn't poison the land
for hundreds of years either. A more fair comparison would be if a PV
manufacturing plant had an industrial accident and hundreds of thousands of
gallons of nasty chemicals o to the land.

~~~
roryisok
Yes I suppose it would. But if I had to choose (and I really hope I never do)
I'd rather have silicon tetrachloride spilled in my town than nuclear waste.

------
Tomte
Before Chernobyl blew up, nuclear energy proponents promised us, nuclear
energy was safe.

When Chernobyl blew up, it was obviously a stupid Soviet design, with stupid
operating personnel. But now we've got new reactors, they are safe! Nothing
could ever happen!

Then Fukushima blew up. That was obviously okay, because it was a Tsunami in
conjunction with a few other improbable acts, and we obviously can't expect
the nuclear industry to plan for that!

So we're now in the next round. Again, we're totally safe. We've got passive
reactors. Really disruptive ( _g_ ) tech!

I'm sorry, I said it before and I said it again: proponents of nuclear energy
have either been lying to us every single time over the last decades, or they
can't really manage nuclear energy.

I don't care which one it is, and I don't care whether they believe nuclear
energy is safe now. They have been playing with catastrophes of a magnitude we
can't really comprehend, and the best they manage to do is "it could have been
even worse" and "we promise this was the last time".

As far as I'm concerned, I'm all for making sure it was the _last_ time.

~~~
gruturo
Are you aware that the Fukushima reactor was actually 6 years older than
Chernobyl?

Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal -
the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of
recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic.

Of course no matter how well you design it, people _will_ fuck up and use it
the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safety margins. And this only
accounts extreme stupidity and dysfunctional management - it does not even
consider deliberate attempts to blow the damn thing up (actually the Chernobyl
tests could be considered that, but i mean an absolute nightmare scenario like
a takeover by technically competent terrorists)

Which is why you need to take _all_ these chances into account, add a level 9
tsunami, a comet, a once in 100000 years quake, Godzilla, a zombie apocalypse,
Stuxnet, wanacry, the second coming of Christ, the Rapture, North Korea, Dr
Strangelove and a dangerously bored Trump, and you engineer everything to be
_still_ impossible to blow up.

Which is what we have actually been doing. They're not getting built because
certifying a new design is horribly expensive, and the anti-nuclear opposition
would limit their deployment, making them anti economical, but no, we haven't
stopped improving them.

Unfortunately we still run the old ones, which, like a car built in the 60s,
would be so much less safe to not even be legal nowadays, but you need to take
into account that they're on the road.

China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in
the western world (I hope).

We badly need something to bridge the gap between now and when
renewables+batteries can completely fulfill demand, because meanwhile fossile
fuel plants get deployed instead, and we are really fucking up the planet with
those.

~~~
guscost
> Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline
> criminal...

Here's an old comment backing this up with sources:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13349940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13349940)

> China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in
> the western world (I hope).

If the Chinese end up leading the way to a fission-powered future, it will be
a great thing for the world. Don't forget the safety features!

------
cjsuk
Apart from the waste.

We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a
few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope
that they will know what to do.

So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our
descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we
are now.

~~~
sbarker
We should shoot the waste into to sun.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
It's actually easier to leave the solar system than it is to hit the sun.

(Earth orbits the sun at 30 km/s [1]. That means you need -30 km/s of ∆v to
kill the energy we're born with. The escape velocity for our solar system from
Earth's orbit, meanwhile, is about 42 km/s [2]. So you just need 12 km/s of ∆v
to skip town.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_orbit)

[2] sqrt((2 * 6.7E-11 * 2E30) / (150 * 10^6)) _given G~6.7E11 [a], mass of the
sun is about 2E30 kg [b] and the Earth orbiting the Sun from about 150 million
km [b]; for escape velocity [c]_

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

[b]
[https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/LeonVaysburd.shtml](https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/LeonVaysburd.shtml)

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

~~~
logfromblammo
That's good calculation there, but the number we're concerned with is the
amount of ∆v that the spacecraft has to generate itself. If you just get
_close enough_ to the sun, a spacecraft could use the solar wind and solar
magnetic field to shed more velocity, until it is close enough to aerobrake in
the sun's atmosphere.

Once you're out in the Oort cloud on the way out, you can't exactly deploy a
solar sail to get another push (unless you make it impractically large).

~~~
JumpCrisscross
The outermost layer of the Sun ends at 0.1 AU [1]. To put that in perspective,
Mercury orbits at between 0.3 and 0.5 AU [2]. (It costs about 13 km / s to get
to Mercury exiting from LEO.)

It's much cheaper to fling things out of the Solar System than into the Sun.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Atmosphere](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Atmosphere)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_\(planet\))

~~~
logfromblammo
Again, you are thinking in terms of propellant carried up from Earth.

Thrust available to a spacecraft using a solar sail is a function of distance
to the sun. The sail is a fixed cost, but it may be presumed to degrade over
time. It has no propellant that costs additional money to launch.

If you go in, the ever decreasing efficiency of the sail is offset by the
greater available energy from the solar wind, and you may still be able to
complete the mission (more slowly) with a damaged sail. Your available thrust
increases with every kilometer closer to the sun.

If you go out, the decreasing efficiency of the sail compounds with the lesser
total energy available to the sail, and if the sail is damaged, you may never
reach escape velocity at all. You will never have more thrust than the instant
the sail deploys.

------
chris_va
There are a couple of things everyone should know when it comes to energy
production:

1) Energy investment is primarily driven by cost, not perceived/actual safety.
Safety regulations do affect cost, but not enough to significantly change
investment (at least in the US, with the current conditions).

2) Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same
thing, and are not comparable. The concept that "solar and wind will save us
all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things
worse in many ways.

Nuclear fear mongering has resulted in high levels of regulations around
nuclear power, but even without that natural gas has an edge in $/kWh. There
just hasn't been demand to build nuclear. On top of that, nuclear needs to run
24/7 to amortize high capital costs. With solar/wind, there is high
variability in grid supply, so nuclear is significantly less cost effective,
and is getting phased out in favor of low-capex plants (i.e. natural gas).

Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35%
renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No
nuclear, no coal.

(source: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group)

~~~
Chathamization
> The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is
> fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.

Sure, this comes up a lot in these discussions. We don't need to rely 100% on
any one type of plant, and we don't even have to eliminate coal plants
completely. In the end, we're going to have to use a variety of options to
fight climate change, and some of the major ones (like increased efficiency)
aren't even going to deal with energy production.

~~~
chris_va
I agree that we'll likely have a mix, but the point I was trying to make was:

Before, we had low variability in demand, so things like nuclear, hydro, and
geothermal ("clean" methods of producing base load power) had a chance to
compete.

Now, we have high variability in demand, so all of those solutions are out
(though hydro is a special case), unless externalities like future-cost of CO2
is priced into production cost via taxes or cap&trade.

Wind/Solar + Storage is too expensive, so the market will shift to wind/solar
+ natural gas. We'll end up burning possibly more fossil fuel, or roughly the
same.

------
eloff
My understanding, which is admittedly drawn from HN "napkin math" , is that at
current prices for solar and wind, nuclear is a non-starter. That trend is
only intensifying. It seems to me that nuclear could have been a good option,
but because we've neglected it for so long, squashed innovation with
regulations (not necessarily complaining that it didn't need the regulations!)
it is uncompetitive economically and will likely stay that way for the near
future. Amazingly enough even coal is uncompetitive in many parts of the world
now too. The future is starting to turn green under the invisible hand of
market economics.

~~~
martinald
Solar and wind has a lot of 'negative externalities' though that are generally
borne by the grid or other operators. I think the economics really work
against it at high% penetration (30-40%+).

The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT
natural gas.

This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only
producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar blips). This
massively increases the capex of CCGT plants, as you're only producing rarely.
This would get more and more extreme with more solar+wind penetration.

Another massive problem is solar+wind overproduction, which is really hard to
solve and is starting to really hit the German, UK and California grids. On
very sunny AND windy days you get massive energy overproduction. You then have
to either:

a) Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing
installations as the Germans found out) b) Pay other (natgas, coal, nuclear,
etc) operators to shut down, which can be very expensive c) Hope that negative
electricity prices make more demand. This is unlikely to happen as industrial
users can't switch on extra production quick enough to respond to this.

This is made worse by feed in tariffs being paid at any energy price,
incentivizing solar+wind to continue generating even if electricity price is
negative (say it is -€0.05kWh spot, but your FIT is €0.20/kWh, you are still
going to produce as you will net 0.15euro per kWh.

The two 'solutions' which are often mentioned are battery storage and HVDC
long distance transmission.

Battery storage is still horrendously expensive on a kWh basis. It may come
down, but this is an enormous problem. I am personally not sure there is
enough lithium left that is easily extracted to make this viable at the scale
(billions of kWh) required.

HVDC connections I also am suspicious of - if it's sunny and windy in Germany,
it is likely to also be the same 1000km away more or less.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Weirdly, every story I read about this as it starts to happen on windy/sunny
weekends and holidays is headlined "Excess solar/wind blah blah" and when you
read the story, there's still coal and gas powered electricity production
happening at the same time.

Even in your entirely hypothetical example you say they're having to pay
natgas and coal to stop production.

Is it just me or is that really weird?

I mean turning off coal and gas is kind of the point, isn't it?

~~~
martinald
Coal can't be shut down easily, it's incredibly expensive and inefficient to
dial it up and down. Natgas is easier but still quite a slow process.

If you could turn gas and coal up and down in a few minutes, then perhaps you
would have a point. But coal can take 6-24hrs and natgas 1-4hrs. It won't
suddenly stop when you have a massive gust of wind.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Wind and solar generation are highly predictable on those timescales, you can
find predicted and actual generation graphs from various sources. They're
certainly more predictable than demand.

More realistic excuses I've heard are long term contracts, potentially with
minimum run times for fossil plants. Which are therefore the actual problem at
the moment.

------
lootsauce
This report seems to discount the tail risks involved with potential future
nuclear accidents. Lets ignore the very complicated question of risk tradeoffs
vs other sources for the moment.

Nuclear power has extreme tail risk that is hard to quantify based on the few
examples of it happening. For the thee major events we can reference how do we
know we didn't simply get lucky?

With fukushima for example, "Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011
earthquake and tsunami has revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin
margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people."
[1]

Clearly the lack of deaths directly attributable to nuclear accidents does not
accurately capture the risks.

So what exactly is the risk of a catastrophic event that has thankfully never
happened but could? Its not clear but rather than rolling dice with those
risks we can actually make better systems without those unquantifiable risks
in the first place. That takes us to the tradeoff calculus.

Just in the realm of nuclear power there are far better approaches we should
be investing in as opposed to traditional plants such as LFTR [2] which does
not have proliferation, waste or meltdown risk.

Picking on coal is a little unfair at this time because coal is being
supplanted by much cleaner natural gas purely on market forces and solar and
wind are growing dramatically. Of course there are issues with these as well,
scaling issues and their own kind of impacts but they do not harbor the same
kind of unquantifiable massive tail risk of traditional nuclear.

[1]
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1218411...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/12184114/Fukushima-
Tokyo-was-on-the-brink-of-nuclear-catastrophe-admits-former-prime-
minister.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor)

------
ThinkBeat
The discussion I have seen so far on this thread go something like this:

1\. Nuclear is really safe. The best. 2\. Someone brings up an incident that
actually happened. 3\. Apologists excuse the incidents that happened because
a. It wasnt designed right b. It was due to corruption c. It was bad planning.
etc.

We live in the real world here. You dont prove nuclear is safe by excusing
every accident and actually using the disaster to prove how safe it is.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"2\. Someone brings up an incident that actually happened"

Generally an "incident that actually happened" in which no one was actually,
you know, killed.

------
titzer
The ironic thing is, and I'll probably be downvoted for even positing this,
but Chernobyl was the best thing that ever happened to that local environment,
at least when you look how local wildlife has bounced back since it's been
cordoned off as an exclusion zone.

[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-
wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/)

~~~
_ph_
I get your point, but I think it should be clarified. What is good for "the
environment" and what is good for mankind are very different things. Wild boar
in Bavaria have less reasons to be eaten by humans, now that they are
radioactive. For us humans it is of course less beneficial to live in a
regions where we should not eat game and mushrooms.

------
xelas
Let's cut a crap, shell we? We can't solve climate change problem which might
be acute for last 20 years, yet we believe somehow that we are able to solve
storage issue of nuclear waste for next 100 000. Egyptian pyramids are ONLY
5000 years old! And we are not 100% sure what is written in there.

How do you warn next generation after 10 000 years, that some particular site
is dangerous/radiaoctive? How do we keep something safe for 100 000 years? Is
our Earth look same after 20 000 years, 50 000 years, 70 000 years? Will there
be new volcano or shift of tectonic plates? Ice age? How do you keep such
waste safe?

Even as of today, there is no final storage solution for spent nuclear fuel.
There is one know being built in Finland, and it is just for waste produces in
Finland. BTW, there is very nice movie about it: Into Eternity. You should
look it!

------
thinkcontext
I find this line of reasoning a little misleading. Looking at nuclear's safety
record isn't entirely the correct measure, its that the potential consequences
are so extreme.

Consider Fukushima. In some ways Japan got lucky, it was entirely possible
that an additional reactor on the site could have melted down and the holding
pond could have breached. Because of this they were having to consider
evacuating areas on the outskirts of Tokyo. Obviously, if that had happened we
wouldn't even be having this conversation.

I don't claim that we have considered the risks appropriately, have a sensible
nuclear policy, or are considering nuclear correctly wrt climate change. But
to claim nuclear is the safest because direct deaths to date are lower is not
the full story.

~~~
m0skit0
Got lucky? I think the opposite: Chernobyl was unlucky. I mean, you're
basically calling all these nuclear incidents "lucky". That doesn't
statistically hold.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents)

~~~
nisa
Chernobyl was not unlucky. This was organisational failure and technical
failure - few to none knew about xenon pit and that positive void coefficient
was a compromise at the time to fulfill the demands.

Fukushima? I'd say ignoring the known geological situation and dangers (no
excuse for that IMHO) and the design of the backup cooling system that fails
on a flood is also not unlucky.

It's compromises to save cost and ignore dangers both times.

We also have rotting reactors here in Europe:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station)

------
inputcoffee
Two important points:

1\. What about wind and solar?

2\. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep
nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the
same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.

~~~
windlep
Indeed, it also fails to mention hydroelectric. Nor is there any mention of
how much it costs per TW/h, especially when you factor in the insane cost from
just a single accident or the fact that the waste has to be safely and
securely stored for a very long time.

------
jesus92gz-spain
How can nuclear (fision) energy be safer than wind/solar/hydro? New efficient
solar cells should be enough, environment friendly, and safer than other
alternatives as long as the manufacturing of these are environment friendly as
well. Also, everyone can setup their own solar plant at home, I almost did so,
but the price of the materials and the setup are too high for me.

I'd like you to consider if nuclear material is useful for something apart
from generating energy. It may be useful for other things we don't even know
right now, and in the future we may have consumed all the resources.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
The manufacture of solar panels is not as safe or as environmentally friendly
as you might hope, just like how buying a new Prius to replace your car is
probably a net loss for the environment unless your existing one is already
near the end of its useful life.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
You have to look at the whole market. When you buy a new car the old one gets
resold to someone else, which causes yet another even older car to be resold
and so on through the market until the oldest, broken-est car actually exits
the market (assuming the total market size is static, if it's growing then you
need to compare the Prius against the other new cars that would enter the
market) so as long as you're replacing existing usage then you're probably
doing good.

------
DrNuke
YCombinator was investing in nuclear energy recently, so an update may be nice
here, both at short and medium term level. Thanks in advance.

------
moomin
I'm something of a fan of nuclear power, but there's no way it's safer than a
solar panel array.

Ah, they didn't include renewables. Colour me surprised.

~~~
ronald_raygun
Renewables solve a different problem though. There aren't great ways of
storing energy on a large scale. So you end up needed two components to a grid
- a baseline that you can scale up whenever (coal, natural gas, nuclear), and
a renewable component. Saying that nuclear is the safest in regards to a
baseline energy load is a valid argument to make.

~~~
zanny
Mechanically we have the perfect solution to storing power - reverse hydro.
Pump up into a reservoir while the grid is full of renewables that you drain
through turbines when the renewables drop off. All the logistics are solved
problems, it is mostly a matter of just paying to transition to it:

* The grid itself would need a dramatic rework. It needs renovation for renewables in the first place, but introducing a hydro base load solution increases pressures on existing infrastructure.

* You need enough solar / wind volume to justify a sizable centralized investment in such a power solution. But broad wind/solar causes problems involving peak grid load well before you even start _building_ these things, along with the aforementioned grid updates, make a real chicken and egg problem.

Hydro storage facilities are also vulnerable to extreme climate, take a long
time to build (especially in countries where bureaucracy makes building
anything take 10x longer than it should) and aren't expandable.

But they would work, easily, to solve the power storage problem. Hail
potential energy!

------
have_faith
Is it the safest when projecting for increased usage? While also taking into
account modern threat vectors to a nuclear plant? I have no idea, just
thinking out loud.

------
xg15
Can anyone explain to me why "deaths/tWh" is even a meaningful measure?

Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is
disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That
seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.

I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the
average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.

Also, why did they leave away hydro, water and wind power in those "deaths per
x" charts?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm only aware of two deaths specifically caused by wind power, when two
engineers were caught on top of one when it caught fire. It's likely such a
negligible number that it wouldn't even show up on the graph.

~~~
mikeash
According to this, there are multiple fatal accidents in the wind power
industry each year:
[http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf](http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf)

Wikipedia's stats on energy production fatalities have wind being pretty
decent, at 150 deaths per PWh (rooftop solar is 440, US hydro is 5, US nuclear
is 0.01, and fossil fuels are in the thousands), but if the number is
negligible it's only because wind power itself is negligible:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities)

------
chicob
Fission power's bad rep is bad for fusion power, the latter being way more
safe in any respect.

Anyway, although it is a serious issue, to this day no cities had to be
evacuated permanently because of air pollution.

Regretfully, nuclear energy has an aura of doom, and investment in nuclear
power plants wrongfully reek of hubris.

Even if it isn't a renewable source, fission power is one of our best allies
in tackling CO2 emissions. At least it may buy us some time before fusion
power and the dissemination of renewables.

------
JoshMnem
Arguments for nuclear power tend to ignore a few things:

\- They talk about ideal power plants, but not actual power plants. Are they
assuming that when the world switches to nuclear, that every country will
build these ideal types of plants and maintain them well?

\- Pro-nuclear arguments don't talk about inevitable wars. When nuclear power
plants are scattered across the world in countries that will eventually become
unstable, the potential outcomes look different. We are living through an
amazing time for peace in many countries, but it isn't a given that things
will remain peaceful like this.

\- Radiation has a cultural effect as well, and those plants and storage
facilities make likely targets, since radiation disasters tend to cause people
to panic.

\- After there is no more power from given plants or fuel, there is less
incentive to take care of the waste and cleanup.

I'm not entirely against nuclear power, but I think that it's more complicated
of an issue than most nuclear proponents claim.

Energy efficiency and use reduction are two other areas to consider. If it's
possible to change behavior and opinions around nuclear energy then it should
be possible to change behavior and opinions about efficiency.

------
epistasis
Before we even get to the safety, and the disposal of the nuclear waste, we
have huge difficulties with the basic economics and construction of nuclear in
the US.

The two plants under construction, Summer and Vogtle, have been plagued by
construction difficulties and cost overruns. The Summer plant was _just_
finally cancelled today. It seems that the Vogtle plant is going to follow the
same route.

The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these
large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared. The time for
nuclear in the US is done. Other options are cheaper, faster, and more
responsive. And that's ignoring the political aspect of it all.

[http://www.utilitydive.com/news/breaking-santee-cooper-
scana...](http://www.utilitydive.com/news/breaking-santee-cooper-scana-
abandon-summer-nuclear-plant-construction/448262/)

~~~
clock_tower
> The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these
> large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared.

And whose fault is that? Not the fault of nuclear-power supporters and
advocates! Nuclear didn't die, it was killed.

~~~
epistasis
Hold on, there's more than enough blame to go around.

Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy and lies to Toshiba [1] weren't
caused by nuclear's opponents. That's all on the heads of Westinghouse's
management. And if management was competent, perhaps Summer would have been
closer to being on budget.

It's not as though the AP1000 is impossible to build, other countries are
doing it just fine. It's just impossible for US contractors to pull through,
apparently. That's not the fault of nuclear's detractors.

[1][https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/westinghouse...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/westinghouse-
files-for-bankruptcy-in-a-blow-to-nuclear-power-
industry/2017/03/29/4a64b6f2-1338-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html)

~~~
clock_tower
I'm not surprised that Westinghouse behaved idiotically; they've always struck
me as the Ford of washing machines, and I can only imagine what they're like
at utility scale...

It sounds like the best course of action is to bring in foreign firms to
construct reactors in the US; but that'll probably have to wait for the 2020
election... if it happens at all, that is.

~~~
epistasis
Westinghouse built something like 25% of all nuclear reactors worldwide. That
they are failing for just 4 more reactors is a bit shocking to me, honestly,
and I would not have expected it.

If it takes 10 years to plan and build a new reactor, I simply can't see the
point of trying it in 2020. Sizing our solar and wind resources to cover our
needs during seasonal lows, building HVDC, and adding storage at 2030 prices
seems like a far smarter move economically.

Unless there are improvements that halve the cost of nuclear, and make it so
that it's only a $1B gamble instead of a $10B gamble, I simply can't see why
anybody would put up capital. There are lots of government backed loans on
these things, but even then it's going to be a hard sell to investors.
Everybody has been burned by these projects.

------
bmcusick
Ctrl+F "Solar", "Wind". No matches found.

That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't
they be on the list?

Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They
don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and
maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes
people fall off.

Most solar installation these days however are utility scale deployments in
empty fields. It's pretty low risk, plus the same pollution and AGW benefits
that nuclear benefits from.

As an aside, I wonder if anyone has done the math on storing high-level
nuclear waste on the Moon, now that a fully reusable SpaceX Falcon Heavy is
almost here. That might be cheaper than the financial and political costs of
places like Yucca Mountain.

~~~
CydeWeys
I'd be surprised if the biggest source of injury from solar wasn't from
installers falling off roofs.

You can't count all of those injuries against solar itself, though, as roofing
injuries will happen regardless, and putting up solar panels greatly extends
the life of a roof, so the amortized total injury to installers doesn't go up
as much.

~~~
bmcusick
Plus with Tesla's solar roof, you might say that the _additional_ risk of
solar is zero, since it's (probably, I'm guessing) no more dangerous to
install than any other roof.

~~~
CydeWeys
And if it lasts longer than a tar-asphalt shingle roof, which seems reasonable
given the materials involved, it will actually reduce deaths.

~~~
bmcusick
Right. Great point. It could cut risks in half if it lasts twice as long.

~~~
iheartmemcache
We'd need long term statistics to fully develop a model of risk. I.e.,
(admittedly, anecdotally) within the first year or two of having his
monocrystalline setup, Dave[1] suffered damage to one panel (aerial debris)
requiring a service call to replace the unit. If this happens on a semi-
frequent basis (i.e. one panel per ~3 years per install) the risk profile
changes not insignificantly.

[1] [https://player.fm/series/eevblog/eevblog-844-solar-panel-
rep...](https://player.fm/series/eevblog/eevblog-844-solar-panel-replacement)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I've had workmen on my roof for damaged slates due to high wind, so again,
with a Tesla roof this could conceivably be a negative death rate of the solar
tiles are stronger than standard tiles, which they claim they are.

------
frabbit
As the article makes clear, this another technology that might be useful in
the future, but is currently unusable thanks to the problem of the waste
generated from it. There are no safe options for storing nuclear waste right
now.

It really is time that we start looking at cutting back mindless generation
and consumption of energy and that mostly means a big shift in lifestyle for
North American and European consumers.

Either that or else you can all explain to your children and grandchildren
(whom you love very much and would do anything for etc.) that you decided that
living an hour's drive or more from work and commuting in every day while
eating fresh dragonfruit and shrimp flown from the other side of the world was
just fine.

Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Time to start actually working on the first of those.

------
vbuwivbiu
I'm against centralized power generation of any kind. Make a household fusion
generator that's safe and maybe I'll consider it, but until then I'm for solar
because it can be deployed in a decentralized network (with batteries), and
it's clean.

That leaves the problem of the mining and manufacture, which is still
centralized. This problem can be solved with GM organisms. We engineer fungi
and bacteria to grow on roofs and generate electricity. They'd use CO2 in the
growing process too. We can grow batteries in a similar way. Bacteria, yeast
and viruses can do anything. They're the ultimate nanotech, we just need to
learn how to program them.

~~~
zukzuk
Came here to say more or less this. A centralized power grid was perhaps
unavoidable, but now that decentralization is a possibility, the sooner the
better. Nuclear is a good option when compared to big gas or oil plants, but
what we really need is an energy paradigm shift, and there is little room for
fission power in a decentralized grid.

------
pbreit
I have not skimmed but didn't see wind, solar or hydro?

------
quantdev
Trying to understand risk by looking at historic data alone is wrong when
you're talking about catastrophic ruin and uncertain tiny probabilities. Add
the word weapon in the headline quote to see what I mean,

"Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are the safest modern weapon"

Arguments that nuclear power are safe need to prove that while assuming the
worst-case scenario, since the probability of such a scenario is a-priori
unknown despite what much of this comment section seems to be claiming.

Solar is knowingly much safer because it is much easier to reason about.

------
meri_dian
China is charging ahead with nuclear in order to replace their outdated coal
dependent energy infrastructure.

>[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/china-
s-n...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/china-s-nuclear-
power-fleet-seen-overtaking-u-s-within-decade)

As they develop and improve their reactor technology their plan is to export
safer, more efficient fission reactors to the rest of the world.

------
maho
While I mostly agree with the article's risk assessments, it unfortunately
leaves out one major risk factor: Nuclear proliferation. If more and more
countries have access to nuclear power plants, then they also have the
possibility to divert significant quantities (SQ) [1] of fissile materials
towards nuclear weapons.

I cannot find the source right now, but a talk given by non-proliferation
experts outlined how accounting for fissile material in a reactor is about 99%
accurate. But even 1% of nuclear fuel, on a nuclear-powered-world scale, is
equivalent to hundreds of SQs per year, assuming current genration and next-
generation reactor technologies.

A nuclear conflict, even if regional (only a few dozen discharges) can
potentially have dire, world-wide consequences. The article should have at
least touched on those.

[1]: [http://nsspi.tamu.edu/nssep/reference/technical-
safeguards-t...](http://nsspi.tamu.edu/nssep/reference/technical-safeguards-
terminology/safeguards-approaches,-concepts,-and-measures/significant-
quantity/NSEP-Reference-Term-iPhone-RD.aspx)

------
egypturnash
[misleading headline]

> Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal,
> coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy; in 2014 these sources accounted
> for about 96% of global energy production. While the negative health impacts
> of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they
> have been less fully explored.

~~~
mmirate
Renewables aren't as reliable or powerful as fossil fuels or nuclear reactors;
one simply cannot power a grid with only renewables. And the one exception,
hydroelectric dams, are geography-dependent and can cause massive floods
during any rapid unplanned deconstructions.

------
Taylor_OD
Most people who I've talked to about their fears over nuclear energy say they
wouldn't want to be in the blast zone in case of a meltdown or near a
potential terrorist target. Then I pull up the map of existing nuclear plants
and more often than not they already live close to one. I've found its a fear
thing for most people.

------
ricw
The quoted statistics are interesting, but irrelevant when it comes to the
actual use of nuclear. Furthermore, why are solar and wind energy missing from
these stats? They account for 90% of new power in Europe in 2016 [1], and I'd
assume similar for the major world economies. I'd like to know who funded this
study. It screams of nuclear industry backing...

For anyone still being in disbelief of nuclear being made obsolete: Why has
not a single (!) private insurer been willing to fully insure a nuclear
facility without government backing?! The reason is simple: the risk is too
high, even for insurance companies worth billions.

TLDR: nuclear has, as yet, not worked using private financing.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/09/new-
ener...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/09/new-energy-
europe-renewable-sources-2016)

~~~
CydeWeys
The linked article just screams "last decade's energy mindset". Its conclusion
may have been true then but it's certainly not true now in the age of cheap
and widespread solar/wind.

------
tehabe
One thing is simply missing from the piece. You can't really distinguish
between the civil use of nuclear power and the military use.

Maybe there is some reactor design which can fix this but the reactors which
are currently being build are not those designs. Also they are build for 60+
years. A lot can happen in 60 years.

Discussing an energy source just by pointing about future developments is not
the answer. The EPR reactors in Finland and France are several times over
budget and took much longer than planed to build. In the time you could have
build wind turbines and solar cells all over the country with an equivalent or
higher amount of power output. And according to the current statistics every
added kilowatt would have been cheaper than the last one.

Also you might now say, but solar and wind are not always available. But at
the same time you think that all problems with nuclear can be overcome but not
the storage of electricity?

------
SubiculumCode
While the threats from coal and gas are regularly distributed through time
(near constant rate of pollutants) the threat from nuclear energy are sporadic
(ie meltdown, terror) and are thus harder to model and assess. Also agree with
others that wind and solar are being discounted unfairly despite their growth
factors.

------
qweqweqweqw
I've come to the conclusion that nuclear energy is a good thing when done
correctly, sadly we seem to be plagued by 60 year old power plants with severe
safety problems still running because the power companies don't care about
safety, they just want to run them as long as possible until they fail.

------
neurotech1
Nuclear energy is only as safe as the people operating it. Admiral Rickover
demanded a high personal standard for reactor personnel, and there was ZERO
reactor accidents[0] because of those standards.

IMO Natural Gas/BioGas powered turbine generators are better option to augment
wind and solar power generation. The GE LM6000 [1] gas turbine (based on a 747
GE CF6 engine) can produce 40MW+ of electricity. They could even recycle a
surplus CF6 engine to reduce manufacturing resources required.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_recor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000)

------
a_imho
I wonder how much nuclear suffers from PR. Clearly statistics are not really
effective at changing opinions. But what would happen if popular Elon
Musk/Steve Jobs type of public figure get into the lobby game with a nuclear
company? Could that swing perception either way?

~~~
dfox
It suffers a lot from bad PR since the start. In public view, nuclear anything
is usually related to atomic bomb and mushroom clouds and such stuff, although
most reactor designs are inherently incapable of sustaining uncontrolled
supercritical fission (excluding for example Chernobyl's RBMK).

------
meri_dian
Flying used to much more dangerous than it is now. But we improved the
technology and now it's safe enough that most don't think twice before getting
on a plane.

Discussions of nuclear power somehow ignore the fact that, like any other
technology, current reactor designs are not the final iteration. They can be
improved upon.

Look the Chinese Pebble Bed reactor:
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-
have-a...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a-
meltdown-proof-nuclear-reactor-next-year/)

If everyone aside from the Chinese ignore nuclear power, then the Chinese may
be the ones making a fortune selling their advanced reactor designs to
everyone else.

------
mncolinlee
Not true. In the short run, solar is the safest. A massive spill of solar
energy is just called a nice day. In the long run, it's the most dangerous.
The sun may eventually consume the Earth and much later, go nova.

~~~
acuozzo
> In the short run, solar is the safest.

The externalities of the production and disposal of solar panels cannot be
ignored in this kind of assessment.

------
1337biz
Logical arguments do not apply in that scenario. Other energy forms might kill
people a slow, invisible death. But when a nuclear reactor melts down the
pictures of death and drama will go around the world.

------
komali2
Now _that_ is an introduction!

>The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and
morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy
production process:

A lot of people here may know what mortality and morbidity mean straight off,
but I want to share this article as much as possible, and it does a great job
reaching out to laymen. I also like how it starts right off with "more energy
is good, here's a link demonstrating why, let's move on."

------
internalfx
Can anyone comment on if the LFTR is legit?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY)

~~~
wbl
It isn't. Molten salt is highly corrosive.

------
dijit
As a person who actually likes nuclear energy:

The issue I have with Nuclear is that we have not managed to fix the waste
issue, and nobody seems to want to talk about it.

I'm not a huge fan of "salting the earth" for 10,000 years.

And when you say "it's safe", you're inherently ignoring that you basically
have this toxic waste that is too costly to shoot into space and too dangerous
to keep anywhere on earth for 10,000 years where it wont eventually harm the
ecosystem.

------
joaomacp
I don't have much knowledge of the issue, but couldn't it be that big
investments in nuclear energy would propagate and facilitate the process of
isotope separation for enriching Uranium, which would mean more countries
having the technology to build nuclear weapons, and thus increase the risk of
nuclear war, and ultimately human extinction? This stuff sounds scary to me,
not the energy part

------
_Codemonkeyism
Most relevant sentence from article

"Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal,
oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy;"

------
jonbarker
A great documentary about this is "Pandora's Promise". In it quite a few
previous sustainable energy (wind, solar) advocates lay out the problem:
sustainable has too far to catch up and in order to get the developing world
to high quality of life they need high energy consumption per capita fast.
Only solution to this is a safe version of nuclear.

------
danieledavi
We should try to use as much as possible renewable resources and save
precious, expensive, rare elements to be used only for scientific research
purposes and space missions (propulsion and power plants). We have many
alternatives on earth but we don't have energetic alternatives on other
planets and outer space. We are just wasting the opportunity to go far.

------
marcoperaza
We don't have to choose between energy abundance and good stewardship of the
environment. Why do green activists and a majority of Western governments want
us to? Attempts to force Western countries to cut emissions, without a
corresponding transition to nuclear power, are unacceptable and represent a
wealth transfer from rich countries to poor countries.

------
shams93
Wind works so well in places like Santa Monica the utilities were able to make
it illegal to use wind power for your home. Fortunately they were not able to
do the same to solar. We have home owners in california generating more energy
than they use with their home solar panels, like my parents they generate more
than they use even at the height of the summer.

------
kumarski
I've been writing about, thinking about, and exploring lithospheric energy
extraction for the better part of 20 years.

I studied operations research during college in the hopes of working on
India's nuclear supply chain.

The west choked us out of Uranium and Plutonium, similar to how the British
choked us out of Rice during the Bengal Famine of 1943.

[http://engineersf.com/people-against-nuclear-
energy/](http://engineersf.com/people-against-nuclear-energy/)

[http://engineersf.com/nasa-needs-
plutonium%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8...](http://engineersf.com/nasa-needs-
plutonium%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8a238-for-interstellar-flight-the-only-viable-
production-source-is-nuclear-weapons-production-waste/)

[http://engineersf.com/2500-10000-indians-die-every-day-
from-...](http://engineersf.com/2500-10000-indians-die-every-day-from-lack-of-
uranium-access/)

[http://engineersf.com/why-is-india-so-behind-the-
question-i-...](http://engineersf.com/why-is-india-so-behind-the-question-i-
get-from-westerners/)

[http://engineersf.com/4000-kilometers-through-my-own-
country...](http://engineersf.com/4000-kilometers-through-my-own-country-an-
engineers-viewpoint/)

More than anything, the brown/black people of the world need the west to give
in to our demands for the approval of our uranium desires to help us get to
progress driven escape velocity Nitrogen + Steel economies.

~~~
dredmorbius
NB: That content might be interesting ... but it's not publicly readable.

You might consider writing for (or publishing to) a venue which makes its
works generally available.

------
tabtab
It's going to be politicized no matter what. Stop spanking humans for having
human nature and lecturing them about being more rational. Politicians have to
consider perception or they get voted out. It's just a technology that freaks
people out on an emotional level and you can't stop that.

~~~
mdpopescu
You underestimate the power of propaganda. It's what made people like
radioactive materials half a century ago [1] and what makes them fear nuclear
power now.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=radium+water+filter+ads+from...](https://www.google.com/search?q=radium+water+filter+ads+from+1960s&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiN8tLHm7TVAhVJvBQKHYS5B7cQsAQIJQ&biw=3440&bih=1310)

------
dsfyu404ed
I find it amusing that HN is so divided on this issue yet quite unanimous
distaste for how the middle east treats people and how the far east treats the
environment.

Nuclear power will look a lot prettier when it's competing on price with
socially and environmentally ethical solar cells and fossil fuels.

------
pps43
Comparison is incomplete without taking into consideration BDBA (beyond design
basis accidents). Probability of an accident worse than Chernobyl is low, but
not zero. Multiply it by economic loss from large densely populated area
becoming uninhabitable, and it can easily flip the conclusion.

------
prewett
This article severely underestimates the number of deaths by nuclear power by
not considering the deaths caused by leakage of radioactive materials over the
course of the next 10,000 years. In fact, there really isn't any way to know
that number for another 500 years at least.

------
skndr
With a potential reduction in the Department of Energy's budget, this might
not hold. There may not be enough funding to properly dispose of the waste.
Not to mention that some of the effects of past storage aren't well-catalogued
[0]:

 _Three years ago the D.O.E. sent the local tribes a letter to say they
shouldn’t eat the fish they caught in the river more than once a week.

[...]

Hanford turns out to be a good example of an American impulse: to avoid
knowledge that conflicts with whatever your narrow, short-term interests might
be. What we know about Hanford we know mainly from whistle-blowers who worked
inside the nuclear facility—and who have been ostracized by their community
for threatening the industry in a one-industry town. (“Resistance to
understanding a threat grows with proximity,” writes Brown.) One hundred and
forty-nine of the tanks in the Hanford farms are made of a single shell of a
steel ill-designed to contain highly acidic nuclear waste. Sixty-seven of them
have failed in some way and allowed waste or vapors to seep out. Each tank
contains its own particular stew of chemicals, so no two tanks can be managed
in the same way. At the top of many tanks accumulates a hydrogen gas, which,
if not vented, might cause the tank to explode. “There are Fukushima-level
events that could happen at any moment,” says Carpenter. “You’d be releasing
millions of curies of strontium 90 and cesium. And once it’s out there it
doesn’t go away—not for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

The people who created the plutonium for the first bombs, in the 1940s and
early 1950s, were understandably in too much of a rush to worry about what
might happen afterward. They simply dumped 120 million gallons of high-level
waste, and another 444 billion gallons of contaminated liquid, into the
ground. They piled uranium (half-life: 4.5 billion years) into unlined pits
near the Columbia River. They dug 42 miles of trenches to dispose of solid
radioactive waste—and left no good records of what’s in the trenches. In early
May of this year a tunnel at Hanford, built in the 1950s to bury low-level
waste, collapsed. In response, the workers dumped truckloads of dirt into the
hole. That dirt is now classified as low-level radioactive waste and needs to
be disposed of. “The reason the Hanford cleanup sucks—in a word—is shortcuts,”
said Carpenter. “Too many goddamn shortcuts.”_

[0] [http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-
energy-...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-risks-
michael-lewis)

------
melling
Strange, there have been lots of discussions about nuclear on HN and a lot of
people here don't like it.

e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234463)

~~~
pavel_lishin
According to the headline, that's to be expected.

------
agumonkey
A French engineer, Jean-Marc Jancovici, has been claiming this for a decade,
with many talks and documents. I'm only 80% fan of his reflection because he
doesn't account much for human change and new technological reconfiguration.

------
unabst
The public's nuclear acceptance is not about day to day death toll. It's about
broken promises and Armageddon.

Looking at the chart, I'd take gas over nuclear in a heartbeat thinking of
what nuclear has done to Japan. Nuclear can both power and destroy a country.
Gas and other options do not. Neither does solar or wind which are not even in
that chart.

Say we have a new technology that is safer than nuclear, but had a one in a
million chance to destroy Earth. It would be safest on paper, for however long
paper and researchers still existed.

"But Fukushima was a horrible place for a nuclear power plant and it was run
by incompetent people," you say. But that's exactly the point. If we make a
list of all the plants in the world and the safety measures they undermined
and their staffing situation, how many would be stellar? How many would even
admit anything?

~~~
mikeash
Natural gas kills 4,000 people per PWh generated. Fukushima killed zero
immediately, and might kill 100-200 eventually through increased cancer
incidences.

Fukushima made a few hundred square kilometers briefly unsafe, and some tens
of square kilometers temporarily uninhabitable. (Or really, inhabitable but
slightly unhealthy.) Fossil fuels are wrecking the entire planet.

It's interesting that Fukushima seems to be all people remember about the
Tohoku earthquake. 16,000 people died (for comparison the worst natural
disaster in the US, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, killed 6,000-12,000),
hundreds of thousands were displaced, and many towns were destroyed, but
nobody remembers that. A dam failure triggered by the earthquake killed 12
people but nobody uses this to argue against dams.

~~~
unabst
You're ignoring the suicide missions, the betrayed promises of the electric
company, the endless coverage on the news, the anxiety and fear, and the
government blatently lying about the health consequences. You're ignoring the
long term consequences of habitability, of raw fish being a vital food source
and the nuclear core having melt straight into the ocean. You're ignoring the
media censorship. And that many of the "few" victims of cancer were children.

The public's rejection of nuclear is about terror. With terrorists, we're
willing to turn foreign policy on its head and wage war and go as far as
travel bans. And with the terror of nuclear, Germany has shut down all of it's
plants. The consequence? Germans feel safer.

And no, no one has forgotten the Tsunami. That's blatantly offensive. I'm
talking about nuclear to stay on topic.

~~~
mikeash
What suicide missions? The only people who have died at the reactor were
killed by the tsunami.

You're worried about contamination of fish? Coal power has contaminated fish
throughout all the world's oceans with dangerous levels of mercury. You've
probably seen warnings for children and pregnant women to be careful about the
fish they eat and not to eat fish more than a couple of times a week. Coal is
responsible for about half of that. Compare this to fears about potential
contamination of some fish near Fukushima, and I'll take nuclear any day of
the week and twice on Sunday if that's the choice.

I constantly hear about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. I don't recall hearing
anything about the non-nuclear consequences of the earthquake after a few
months. Is it offensive to state what I see?

~~~
unabst
Humans went back into the plant not knowing if it was going to explode.
Whether they survived is not the issue. It's that they had to do it. Think
9/11 firefighters.

You're constantly reminded of Fukushima because the disaster is still ongoing.
An earthquake happens, people die, and we get over it. It's the ugly side of
mother nature, and we get over it. A nuclear disaster happens, and it's a shit
storm. Stories of incompetence, greed, shame, conspiracy, tragedy, and
betrayal. It's the ugly side of human nature. And we can't get over it. Like
the several radioactive isotopes that have a half-life of 30 years and remains
in the environment for decades, it continues to be a problem, and a reminder
of the worst of ourselves.

You don't get to decide who gets offended. Justifying offending people based
on what you did or didn't see, just shows you lack empathy. If you don't, I
would choose my words more carefully.

------
jonshariat
I"m not saying this is the main factor for not choosing nuclear but this
should be considered: the one difference with Nuclear is that when a system
fails, you can't use that area of land for a few thousand years.

------
lasermike026
The question is how can we do nuclear right? From outward appearances it looks
like have been doing it wrong, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima for
example. French nuclear systems appear to get it more right.

------
xyproto
If only there was no connection to nuclear weapons, which are... unsafe.

------
lordlimecat
Not shown in the graph: Hydroelectric, which conjures up images of beautiful
dams, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people who die at once when it
fails.

~~~
dredmorbius
Since I specifically highlighted the failure of Banqiao, and could give you
Vajont and ... an Indian dam disaster of about 5,000 souls: what hydropower
represents is a _systemic_ risk, but not a _long-tailed_ one.

The worst disasters, in 1975 (which is to say, _exceptionally_
deindustrialised) China, and in India, the deaths were amplified greatly by
inadequate preparation, planning, communications, and response.

Hubris has played a tremendous role in numerous dam failures (the above, Teton
Dam, Johnstown). Which ... is pretty much amplified if you look to nuclear
power.

Plus that long tail.

And there's the fact that there simply aren't many good natural hydro sites
left, which means that the upside potential for creating _additional_ risks is
small. A decidely mixed blessing, if you call it that, but so it is.

------
s0me0ne
Sure its safe when you dump all your waste in another state. If your state
that created the nuclear waste had to keep it, it would be a different story.

~~~
jamaicahest
>Sure its safe when you dump all your waste in another state. If your state
that created the nuclear waste had to keep it, it would be a different story.

The article says safest, not safe. And if we compare nuclear waste to carbon
dioxide emissions, which actually pollutes more worldwide?

------
jwildeboer
I stopped reading after "Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy
sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy"

------
PeterStuer
There is one huge problem with nuclear energy. Humanity has time and time
again proven they can not handle that kind of responsibility.

------
CodeWriter23
Bullshit. Any energy source where we do not have the technology to clean up
the worst case scenario is not the "safest".

------
kaikai
No one seems to think disposing of nuclear waste is a problem until someone
tries to dispose of it in their backyard.

------
VT_Drew
Can we just stop with this nonsense? If you have a byproduct that has be
buried in special containers in the desert, and that land can't be used, and
there are people actually trying to come up with symbols that indicate danger
that could span all language and culture in case a meteor hits the earth and
civilization slowly rebuilds then finds the site, then it isn't "safe" be any
stretch of the imagination.

------
deepnotderp
This assessment ignores the cm ecological cost of mining and waste disposal,
both highly nontrivial concerns.

------
jdeibele
When they use .00 on all the figures it calls into question everything else
about the article.

------
kzrdude
At the same time, it wasn't predicted that solar power would be this viable,
was it?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I've seen claims that the price decline has been predicted since the 1970s,
since almost all products get better when built at scale and that Germany and
China have both put government action into place based on these long term
trends.

Combined with carbon tax type modelling of coal's emmissions which would
massivel raise it's cost if accounted for, I'm not sure it's that unexpected.

------
oregontechninja
Check out NuScale if you want to see what a modern nuclear company is trying
to achieve.

------
secult
Popular belief in any difficult topic is not a good indicator of anything.

------
MR4D
This is laughable. It's almost like saying that nuclear weapons are safer than
sticks and stones because nuclear weapons have killed less people. Never mind
that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct.

Likewise for nuclear power accidents.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species
> extinct. Likewise for nuclear power accidents.

Please elaborate. How can nuclear power plants make our species extinct?

~~~
MR4D
A better phrasing would have been, "In a similar fashion", but I've answered
it below as well.

A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food
supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it
inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary protein.)

A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a
devastating effect on human health as well.

Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has
extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.

Sure, people will fall off their roof, but that is a distributed set of
events, not a concentrated one like a nuclear accident.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food
> supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it
> inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary
> protein.)

I don't think this is anywhere near remotely possible. Radiation has terrible
penetration into water as it is so water is a fantastic radiation shield but
even so if you wanted to poison the water with enough radiation to kill off
even a tiny amount of the food supply you'd...well I don't know the
calculations or even how to do them, honestly, but I'm pretty sure you'd need
orders of magnitude more uranium than we've ever mined (and it would have to
be enriched, too).

> A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have
> a devastating effect on human health as well.

Hmm, I think to cover enough of the atmosphere you'd need a really, really
huge nuclear explosion. I'm not sure how else you'd do it and even then most
estimate of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons wouldn't be able to kill
off all humans (though it's a considerable chunk if I remember correctly).

> Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has
> extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.

Yeah, it's riskier than Solar. Everything is, honestly. Even wind. But we also
have a high chance of dying in a car crash and that doesn't stop people and
the risk of a nuclear failure, especially in a modern plant, is almost zero.
It's far less risky than coal mining especially if you extract the uranium
from sea water (though I don't know how easily it is to enrich without mining
but then again I'm not a nuclear expert at all).

------
egl2016
tl;dr: if we assume deleterious effects from CO2-driven global warming and
discount effects from long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste, nuclear
is safer.

------
amai
Has the author ever been to Chernobyl or Fukushima lately?

------
amai
Nuclear energy is the safest energy source - on the sun.

------
anorphirith
the only problem is where to get the uranium, I believe russia gets it from
kazakhstan. france from niger. does US buys it from kazakhstan as well ?

~~~
pj_mukh
Friendly neighbours to the north[1]. We don't like tooting our horn enough,
but America gets the bulk of its energy raw materials from us.[2]

[1][https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=2150](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=2150)

[2][https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6)

------
swills
Clean, safe, too cheap to meter! /s

------
hristov
You have to be very careful about these studies, because most official
government studies flat out lie about the effects of nuclear disasters.

The most egregious example is Chernobyl, where the official Soviet position
was that only a single person died from the disaster. But studies from other
nations say the death toll may be close to one million. Well believe it or not
a lot of these studies that show how safe nuclear is actually take the
official Soviet data about chernobyl as truth. (I am not sure whether this is
the case for this particular study because their source is behind a paywall).

But similar (if not as outrageous) lies have also been said about accidents in
the west. The official story about three mile island for example is that it
caused no deaths, yet studies find drastic increases of all kinds of cancers
in the affected area. See, for example,
[https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-
mo...](https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-mortality-at-
three-mile-island/)

I usually believe that we should be guided by science and data in our public
decisions, but the data surrounding nuclear is so distorted by governments
that it is just not to be trusted. And now that we have truly safe
alternatives like solar and wind, we can finally put that nightmare behind us.

~~~
mpweiher
> You have to be very careful about these studies

Yes you do. The WHO has been following the Chernobyl consequences, and come
out with a new report about every decade. Each report _dramatically_ lowers
the estimate of deaths and other health consequences.

As a matter of fact, the largest health effects now are psychosocial effects.
That is, fear of and (over-)reaction to the radiation effects is causing more
actual harm than the radiation itself. So potentially one of the easiest ways
to mitigate the harmful effects of nuclear accidents (best of course: let's
not have any!) is to (over-)react less.

Of course not reacting at all would also be wrong, but it looks like the
balance today is out of whack.

------
dredmorbius
The maps below correspond roughly to Zhumadian City, Henan Province, China.
The region spans about 100 km east-west. It is presently home to over 7
million people.[0]

[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Ndd82xj3j1o-3KcyvBkLTB1mR...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Ndd82xj3j1o-3KcyvBkLTB1mRBOfIhczIQOVHOZIdwOOkgaE40IJF4mBdKP11PecZaN59Yxag=w260-h178-p-rw)

In 1975, it was the site, or perhaps more accurately, _region_ , of the worst
power plant disaster in all history: the Banqiao dam failure. News of this
only fully emerged after over two decades.[1] You can spot the reservoir
itself at the far left of the images, at mid-height.

In the disaster, a confluence of events lead to the deaths of approximately
171,000 people, with 11 million displaced. There's considerable uncertainty in
those numbers.

The causes were multiple: siting, improper engineering, unheeded warnings, a
(literal) perfect storm (tropical typhoon striking a cold front and lingering
over the region for a full day, dropping over 1 meter of rain), improper
emergency plans, failed communications, situational confusion, nightfall, and
a hopelessly inadequate response and recovery. Of the deaths, "only" \-- a
term used advisedly -- 25,000 or so were due to direct flooding. The remaining
150,000 or so succumbed to starvation or disease in the weeks following the
events.

And yet: the book as been closed. The cities in the floodplain are rebuilt.
The dam itself has been rebuilt. Over 7 million people live in Zhumadian City,
95 millions in Henan Province total.

There is no disaster exclusion zone.

There is no disaster exclusion zone which will persist for the next three
centuries.

There is no molten reactor core.

There is no coreium.

There is no radioactive waste which will persist for 10,000 to 1 million
years.

The book is _closed._

Proponents of nuclear power assume that we can assess risks with tails not of
the decade or so of Banqiao, but of 100, 1,000, 1 million years. Utterly
outside the scope of any human institutions, _or of the human species itself_.

Our models of risks and of costs fail us.

(They've failed us as well in the case of fossil fuels, and, quite possibly,
for hydro power -- I'm not giving this example as endorsements of either, but
to give the story of risk and closure, or its lack. Those are other stories,
for other posts.)

The problems with nuclear power are massive, long-tailed, systemic and
potentially existential. The same _cannot_ be said of a wind farm or solar
array. There is no significant 10,000 year threat from wind power, or solar
power. We're not risking 30 - 60 km exclusion zones, on an unplanned basis, of
which we've created at least four in the half-decade of significant nuclear
energy applications: Hanford, Washington, Three Mile Island, Pennsyvania,
Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Fukushima, Japan. And this is with a global plant of
some 450 operating nuclear power plants as of 2017[2]

(This compares with over 7,600 power plants in the United States alone.[3])

 _None of these sites has been fully remediated._ In the specific case of
Hanford, the _current_ management plan is budgeted at $2 billion, _and there
is no final management plan in place._ This _eighty_ years after the facility
first opened.

If the total experience has been, say, 500 reactors, over 50 years, or 25,000
reactor-years of experience, and we've experienced at least four major
disasters, then our failure rate is 0.016%.

The global share of nuclear power generation in 2012 was about 10%.[4] Which
means that _without allowing for increased electrical consumption within
existing or extending to developing nations_ , the plant count would have to
increase tenfold.

Holding the reactor-year failure rate constant would mean 80 core meltdowns
per century.

Reducing that to the present rate of four meltdowns/century would require
reducing the failure rate to 0.0008%. That's five nines, if anyone's counting.

Five nines on a process involving weather, politics, business, social
upheaval, terrorism, sabotage, individual psychology, group psychology,
climate, communications, response, preparedness....

And ... the involvement of the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuzi, in the management
of TEPCO, who operated the Fukushima nuclear power plant.[5]

All of which played a tremendous role in how badly the Banqiao disaster itself
played out -- everything which happened at Banqiao _by dynamics_ could just as
well have happened in a nuclear plant.

But it wasn't a nuke, it was a dam. And after a few hours, the waters receded,
and after a few weeks, the land dried, and after a few months, recovery could
start, and after a couple of decades ... even in what was still a poor country
... the recovery was complete.

Banqiao was a disaster, no doubt.

But what it wasn't was a nuclear disaster.

________________________________

Notes:

0\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian)

1\.
[http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm](http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm)

2\. [https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-
Statistics/Worl...](https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-
Statistics/World-Statistics)

3\.
[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=65&t=3](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=65&t=3)

5\.
[http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...](http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld2014.pdf)

4\.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/ya...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/yakuza-
and-nuclear-mafia-nationalization-looms-tepco/333697/)

------
cratermoon
Two words: Hanford Site

------
FussyZeus
The brain is not designed to understand statistics. Nuclear accidents are
theatrical and fun, and therefore get a lot of play on the media when they
happen. Look no further than the media circus surrounding Fukushima to
confirm.

Everybody is scared to death of Sharks, yet sharks killed only 1 person in the
US last year. Cows killed 20, 75% of which were deliberate attacks, but almost
no one is afraid of a Cow.

Meanwhile 17,775 people died in traffic accidents, yet people jump in cars
like it's routine. You're literally 17,000% more likely to die in your own car
than you are by a shark, but again, brains don't understand that.

~~~
uoaei
People and their egos crave control. With something like driving, you feel at
least somewhat in control of your own destiny. Coming face to face with a
shark does not afford the same sense, same with an unstoppable chain reaction
occurring deep in a nuclear reactor and the ensuing fallout.

~~~
FussyZeus
You're correct, but there's only been a few failures like that in the entire
history of Nuclear energy, one of which was a ridiculous test far beyond the
scope of logic and reason (Chernobyl), one of which was a completely safe and
designed failure that killed no one and did nearly nothing in terms of actual
damage (3 Mile Island) and one that was the result of a plant being hit in the
exact wrong spot by a natural event that it had not been designed to withstand
in the first place, and despite that, still failed in a largely predictable
and contained way.

And not to mention, the much wider used coal plants and natural gas plants
kill way more people in a lot less theatrical ways, largely through disease of
the lungs and skin. Again though watching someone die of black lung isn't
nearly as interesting as watching someone die of radiation sickness, so we
don't hear about it.

------
pinaceae
Funny humans care about their children.

Nothing is scarier than birth-defects. Radiation causes very visible birth
defects.

Hence people are very, very scared of radiation. And rightly so.

A windpark will not cause disfigured babies. Hence wind is better.

And: Nuclear is the most expensive energy source, by FAR. safety, waste,
clean-up - super, super expensive. dismantle a wind park and it is gone, poof.
dismantle a reactor and now you have a new problem.

Also very hard to weaponize wind or solar. Blow up a wind park and well, the
wind park is gone. Steal a rotor and now you have a rotor.

etc etc etc.

What is sooo hard to understand about this?

------
nnfy
People are using Fukushima to rationalize their fear of nuclear, just like we
did after Three Mile Island and and Chernobyl. As someone else confirmed by
posting [1], the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami have not
happened for at least 100 years. We can tear the plant down in hindsight, but
it was designed to withstand probable events, just like any safety standards.
It may not be pleasant to speak of human life in this manner, but there is
always a cost/risk balance in any human endeavor, and this failure does not
necessarily indicate recklessness.

1.[http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-
and-...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-
security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx)

------
abritinthebay
This has been known for a long time in informed circles.

The problems with nuclear are waste and that we use vastly outdated designs
and fuel sources.

Nuclear is not perfect, but we should not buy into a perfection fallacy when
looking to get away from fossil fuels.

Solar is a better long term bet but a good progressive nuclear strategy that
added a handful of small modern reactors could be massively complementary to
it.

~~~
Fej
Waste is a miniscule problem. Put it in the ground. Or, perhaps, in the side
of a mountain...

The only reason waste is an issue in the United States is that the Congress
decided that nuclear waste repositories have to last for 10,000 years
uninterrupted. As far as we know this is just about impossible. 10 millenia
ago we were in the caves.

Placed at the bottom of a pool, it's perfectly safe. This is a solved problem.
The issue is political (especially from uneducated NIMBYs) rather than
technical.

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)

~~~
zuzun
What a flawed comparison. Take the water from the pool and drink it and give
it your livestock to drink and water your plants with it and see how that
works out over the span of a few decades.

------
anotherbrownguy
Isn't nuclear hysteria created mostly by American CleanTech industry?

Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power
anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil
fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of
years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?

~~~
yellowapple
Solar doesn't have to be reliable; it just has to charge a battery (or some
other means of energy storage) which _is_ reliable.

Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being _very_ pedantic) that solar is
technically nuclear power.

~~~
merpnderp
A very expensive battery made from a material we likely don't have enough of
to scale for the world.

~~~
michaelsbradley
It's not impossible that someone could make a breakthrough in Flywheel Energy
Storage for domestic use:

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

~~~
dredmorbius
Modelling energy densities and costs tends to suggest that's not a viable
option.

Flywheel energy storage is useful as a substitute for spinning reserve (that
is, the inertial mass of extand thermal generation turbines), but other than
serving to dampen grid fluctuations, it's not good for more than a few
minutes', perhaps at the _outside_ a few hours', storage.

------
jlebrech
what about thorium
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7baTdyHv8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7baTdyHv8g)

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_to_noise_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_to_noise_ratio)
is very high

------
tinco
All the energy sources in this article except for nuclear are horrible for our
environment and for our health. The important question is what do we replace
them with. And if that is the important question, what good is this article if
it shows only one solution, explicitly not comparing it with the other
solutions?

