
It's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power - Osiris30
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/apr/11/time-dispel-myths-about-nuclear-power-chernobyl-fukushima
======
paulsutter
Fukushima was caused by shoddy planning. From a Carnegie Endowment report[1]:

    
    
      "The original design-basis tsunami for Fukushima Daiichi of 3.1 
      meters was chosen because a 1960 earthquake off the coast of 
      Chile created a tsunami of that height on the Fukushima coast."
    

Assuming that future tsunamis would be no higher than a recent historical
tsunami is already silly. But it's worse:

    
    
      "one compilation of historical tsunamis in and around Japan lists 
      twelve events since 1498 having a maximum amplitude of more than 
      10 meters, six of which had a maximum amplitude of over 20 meters."
    

In 2002 they already knew the seawater pumps were located too low, but took no
action:

    
    
      "Fukushima Daiichi’s design basis tsunami was estimated to have 
      a maximum height of 3.1 meters above mean sea level. Given this, 
      TEPCO decided to locate the seawater intake buildings at 4 meters 
      above sea level and the main plant buildings at the top of a 
      slope 10 meters about sea level"
    
      "In 2002, on the basis of a new methodology for assessing tsunami 
      safety developed by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, TEPCO 
      voluntarily reevaluated the tsunami hazard and adopted a 
      revised design-basis tsunami height of 5.7 meters. Yet, NISA 
      neither updated the licensing documents to reflect this change 
      nor reviewed TEPCO’s analysis. Given that the revised 
      design-basis tsunami was now 1.4 meters above the seawater pumps, 
      such a review should have been conducted."
    

[1]
[http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf](http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf)

~~~
tunesmith
This is one of those "Therefore, what?" points... (although you may not have
intended anything more than sharing some very interesting and relevant
information).

But I can see a "therefore, we should not dismiss nuclear power due to some
shoddy planning". And, I can see a "therefore, we can expect some degree of
shoddy planning in any engineering project, given that it happened even with a
nuclear plant, where the risks were well-known ahead of time."

~~~
paulsutter
To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had
built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they
did tsunami planning.

Nuclear safety is a multifacted issue and only the news media would take one
fact (Fukushima was avoidable) and reach a conclusion (proving that nuclear is
completely safe / completely risky).

I'm personally an advocate for fission, because power storage has a long way
to go before wind/solar can handle baseload. I especially like the newer
designs such a Moltex
([http://www.moltexenergy.com/](http://www.moltexenergy.com/)). But that one
fact about Fukushima isn't enough to support that position so I didn't bring
that into the discussion.

~~~
joelthelion
> To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had
> built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they
> did tsunami planning.

Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other
reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact.

Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and
to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut
down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to
transition to other more controllable forms of energy.

~~~
jahewson
There's no excuse for obvious mistakes. This wasn't something tricky. There
are hundreds of years old stone markers in that area documenting the level
which previous Tsunmis have reached - well above the level of the power plant.

The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of
planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable
to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in
other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously
enforced.

Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different
cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong
conclusion.

~~~
abakker
I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only
passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the
fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult
to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it
is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have
radiation and waste to deal with.

Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be
totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable
failures happen.

Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but
a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have
no good method of ameliorating.

~~~
AstralStorm
But do you care the same when a filter in your local coal plant fails? That
happens way, way more often and actually releases way more hazardous
substances that are even harder to remove. Moreover, any stop/start of the
plant likely requires oil burner start which requires the filters to be
disabled (or they'd be destroyed).

Specifically, mildly radioactive ash, large amounts of smoke, sulfur and
nitrites. These leach into groundwater easily (unlike fallout) and are also
biomagnified like fission products.

Only natural gas is comparatively clean and there are major problems with
dependency and delivery infrastructure. (Plus it is about just as
environmentally friendly to mine as coal.)

------
codingdave
If I were to come up to you, and describe the perfectly running software I can
build, and show you how there have been problems in the past, but they were
door to poor planning, bad design, human error, etc... and show that perfect
construction of software is quite possible... would you buy my argument that
in the future, problems will not occur?

This is the same thing. Yes, it is possible to do it right and be perfectly
safe. It is also possible for someone to not do it right. And if someone does
so, the repercussions are severe.

Having worked in the energy industry, the goal is to minimize risk. Saying it
is OK for nuclear to have some inherent risk because so does everyone else is
true, but over-simplified. The consequence of a nuclear accident is much
greater than the consequence of a wind power accident, so the reduction of
risk in nuclear power needs to also be greatly reduced vs. other forms of
power generation.

I would not describe myself as anti-nuclear, but I do not believe we need it.
I believe solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc, can provide the power we need
in this world. Why take on greater consequences to the risks of power
generation unless it truly is needed?

~~~
wrsh07
Their point is that these risks are overblown. Nobody died from Fukushima. So
if the major accident you're concerned about was, in fact, completely due to
human error [and even still the number of deaths was relatively small], why
are you still so skeptical?

It would be very difficult to change this picture
[[http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#production](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#production)]
to using only clean energies without ramping up our nuclear.

Finally, when literal millions die per year because of air pollution, you are
choosing something significantly more dangerous [and worse for the
environment] because of _many fewer_ memorable nuclear power-related deaths.

~~~
skybrian
Nobody died but a large region had to be evacuated. How much would it cost to
insure against that? Is nuclear power still cost-effective if we include the
cost of insuring against having to evacuate?

~~~
wrsh07
How expensive is air pollution?

You can't tacitly accept the costs of our current means of power while
criticizing the costs of nuclear. We need to make this decision explicitly,
not implicitly.

When you ask about the costs of nuclear power are you also considering the
costs of _not_ using nuclear power? [delays timeline for 100% renewable energy
which has climate costs, causes air pollution separate from that which is
killing millions annually, etc]

~~~
skybrian
I agree. For example a carbon tax would make costs easier to compare.

------
ergothus
I was once at a panel at a scifi convention (Dragoncon, for the curious) where
they had a few people working in various nuclear power related areas there to
discuss and answer questions.

While they were clearly biased, I felt they did a good job addressing the
issues directly. I too am biased (I tend to not trust anything that requires
maintenance on a time scale so much larger than we can comprehend) and my
walk-away conclusions were:

* There are a LOT of safety precautions, backups, and more backups - But I still don't trust those will survive human perversity [Edit: And that makes this point hard to settle - if I just don't trust any precautions would be enough, there's no effective way to add precautions that would change my opinion. ]

* Nuclear Power, with all the risks and detriments, has a very strong argument that the fossil-fuel alternatives we're using now are MORE damaging.

That last point was a huge deal to me. Instead of it being "Nuclear Power:
Safe/Unsafe", it became "Nuclear Power vs Fossil Fuels (largely coal): Which
is the bigger danger today".

I went from anti-nuclear power to "oh gee, I don't know, that's hard", which I
generally take as a sign that I've become somewhat enlightened on a topic.

~~~
eridius
As another commenter has said
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483147)),
we now have nuclear reactor designs that have failsafes that cannot fail
because they rely on physical laws. That should address your "survive human
perversity" concern.

As one example, look at the Pebble bed reactor
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-
bed_reactor#Safety_feat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-
bed_reactor#Safety_features)). The way it's designed, as the reactor
temperature increases, the reactor power decreases, and this is a completely
passive effect (meaning it happens without any human intervention), so in the
event of an accident the reactor will end up automatically reducing to safe
power levels all by itself.

~~~
ergothus
I'm less worried about a reactor going critical than I am the safe storage and
management of the waste. Anything from providing materials for a dirty bomb to
general pollution to just generating a safe-but-expensive mess to manage for a
really, really long time.

~~~
yompers888
For your future advantage in these discussions, please know that going
critical is a prerequisite for power generation; it is the steady state in
which a fission-causing neutron is given off from each fission. A sub-critical
reactor requires power input because it is not giving off enough energy to
sustain the chain reaction; its population of fission-causing neutrons will
exponentially decay, if left alone.

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

~~~
ergothus
You are correct, I expressed that poorly. Instead I should say "I'm less
worried about a disaster in the reactor itself..."

------
grecy
I'm by no means anti-nuclear, though watching Fukushima unfold showed me a
reality I hadn't fully thought out.

A few days after it all went bad, there was basically nothing we could do to
stop it, which is terrifying. No humans could go in there, and there were no
robots capable of doing the job.

So we as humans have the ability to build a machine of enormous power and
(possibly) radiation, but when things inevitably go bad from time to time, our
only course of action is to stand back and say "well, damn".

~~~
exabrial
A design from the 50s-60s era of nuclear design should not still be in service
for this reason.

We can do way better now. Our process, materials, and engineering have
advanced orders of magnitude.

~~~
Tepix
There is no terrorism-proof reactor design. We may have new tech but we also
have new problems. Besides, we haven't solved the ultimate disposal place
issue. It's highly irresponsible to produce waste that is dangerous for
thousands of years where noone has figured out how to handle it. Especially
considering terrorism, corruption, states collapsing and natural disasters.

~~~
VLM
>It's highly irresponsible to produce waste that is dangerous for thousands of
years where noone has figured out how to handle it.

The best part about nuclear waste is rapidly it becomes harmless, unlike every
other kind of waste we produce. Unfortunately most of our waste is not
nuclear, and therefore will contaminate the biosphere, basically forever.

~~~
dannypgh
Citation? I thought a lot of the waste products, and what they decay into, are
chemically toxic. Hardly "harmless"

------
emodendroket
I take issue with the account of Fukushima. Yes, a natural disaster kicked off
the chain of events, but it was not completely unforeseeable and stronger
safeguards and maintenance would have mitigated the disaster.

The big problem in my mind is not that nuclear power can't be safe but that I
don't see anything to give me confidence that it can regulated to ensure that
it actually is in practice.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
The only appreciable release of radiation was a result of the Soviets playing
fast and loose with shoddy infrastructure followed by higher ups attempting to
rectify the situation by burying their heads in the sand is good enough for
me.

Compared to oil spills ("oops, we grounded our tanker") and dam failures
("maintenance, lolwut?") a lot of different things needed to come together for
the Chernobyl disaster to happen and the runners up, (3-mile, Fukushima) are
downright benign by comparison.

As long as we don't get complacent and half-ass things I have no problem with
nuclear power.

~~~
adrianN
I'm a strong supporter of nuclear power, but calling Fukushima benign is
counter productive. Thousands have lost their homes and there are dangerous
amounts of radiation leaking into the ground. The site will remain a money
sinkhole of ongoing mitigation measures for a long time. But besides these
direct effects, the handling of disaster showed that the responsible parties
were trying very hard to cover everything up and thus permanently destroyed
any confidence you might have had in them, proving the "human factors make
nuclear unsafe" crowd right.

~~~
adsfqwop
Unfortunately the human factor is exactly the problem with these types of
systems. I don't think humans can ever be considered to be safe stewards of
anything where a seemingly remote cascade event can wipe out life on the
planet.

Look at the disaster of Long-Term Capital Management from the financial
industry as an example, where a presumed ten sigma event almost wiped out the
whole western financial system.

[http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.fi/2007/05/11000000000000...](http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.fi/2007/05/11000000000000000000000000.html)

These nuclear reactors are built with the same underlying principles and risk-
management profiles. There's always the element of human error; you can't
over-engineer something you did not foresee. In addition to that you have the
enormous profit incentives from running nuclear power. These incentives can
overwhelm the incentives for safety, or lead to disregard of warnings where
profit potential would be compromised if warnings were attended to.

It's human, therefore it's hard to ever sleep completely sound knowing that
these constructions are running on the planet.

Fukushima didn't just happen because one mistake was made either. It happened
because a long string of mistakes and disregard of safety happened. Want to
bet it doesn't happen again? It's hard to bet against human nature...

[http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf](http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf)

~~~
MichaelGG
>presumed ten sigma event

How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?

I remember seeing a recent article here on HN about a guy that lost a ton of
(someone else's) money playing with oil contracts. He went on about how he
diligently planned for "huge" failures, such as a drop of _up to 30 percent_
in the price of oil.

I don't think it's fair to bring in finance. Natural disasters and nuclear
reactors are far more well behaved and understood.

~~~
this_user
> How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?

They don't properly, and that is the problem. A lot of it had to do with
creating models that do not reflect reality. They worked fine until
extraordinary circumstances occur under which they break down. A well known
mistake is assuming a normal distribution for financial returns. In reality
this greatly underestimates the likelihood and magnitude of extreme moves that
can cause catastrophic losses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan"
discusses this in great detail. The bottom line is essentially that a move
more extreme than what you anticipated is going to happen eventually.

LTCM made the mistake of neglecting the impact of changing correlations. The
thought they had outsmarted the market by eliminating risk from their
portfolio. But in times of financial turmoil, correlations of risky assets
tend to increase. If your carefully constructed and hedged portfolio does not
take this into account, you may be exposed to much more risk than you
intended. This is precisely what happend to them. The fund was bailed out by a
group of large banks, and their bets did eventually pay off, but the temporary
losses were far beyond what their models had anticipated.

------
justizin
I had the interesting experience of working in a startup under a VP of
Engineering who was a Nuclear Scientist and was part of the team the US sent
to Chernobyl's sister site - exact same plans, basically - to ensure its'
safety.

He told me that overwhelmingly what went wrong at Chernobyl is that the head
of the plant consistently ignored all of the alarms and monitoring in place,
because he was overconfident at what the results of his test would be. He
apparently died in the control room.

Interestingly, one thing the Russians did notably different was to have a big
guy, I want to think at the sister site his name was Sergei, basically live in
a hut next to the cooling lake, which was uphill from the plant. In the event
of a disaster, he had a humongous mallet he would use to slam open the valve,
draining the lake.

... or maybe this was all made up, I couldn't tell you tbh, but it sounded
legit to me. ;)

~~~
Tomte
_He told me that overwhelmingly what went wrong at Chernobyl is that the head
of the plant consistently ignored all of the alarms_

You may consider this an excuse of the kind "but that's not nuclear power's
fault" and you'd be right-ish, but I simply don't care who exactly is at fault
for whole regions to become uninhabitable in case of disaster.

That is connected to nuclear power in my risk assessment, even if you can make
a rational argument that it shouldn't be. And I'm very risk-averse when the
magnitude of consequences is that big.

Same with Fukushima: yes, everything was safe. Unconnected to the reactor per
se they made huge planning errors, underestimating a tsunami. Again, I don't
care.

It may be a bias or even a fallacy that Kahnemann has already described, but
it's a _useful_ and _correct_ fallacy, I would argue.

~~~
wrsh07
> for whole regions to become uninhabitable

Chernobyl has a 30km exclusion zone, and that's unnecessarily large.

> Same with Fukushima

Literally nobody died in Fukushima. It was just a memorable piece of
destruction caused by a natural disaster that killed 16,000 people.

~~~
Tomte
And you can mathematically prove that no possible future disaster could
possibly affect a larger area?

No? Okay, my point stands. I simply don't care about probability-weighted
outcomes there.

~~~
wrsh07
That's not how this works. We're not dealing in absolutes because this is real
life. We're dealing with probabilities and expected values. If nuclear power
provides a net good, we should consider using it, not blindly reject it.

Saying you "don't care about probability-weighted outcomes" means you aren't
willing to objectively value nuclear power. Why not? Why are you afraid of
nuclear power?

The point this article makes is that nuclear power is an incredibly safe
technology, and the concerns about it are exaggerated.

~~~
mohawk
It would be good if these risks were objectively valued, for example by
insuring the plant against meltdown costs.

Total economic loss estimates for the Fukushima meltdown are 250-500 bn
USD[1]. And if the wind had been slightly different those numbers would be a
lot higher, as Tokyo real estate would be affected.

And that insurance should also cover human error, terrorism, natural
disasters. Won't be cheap is my guess.

Which brings us to the biggest myth of all, that nuclear power is cheap when
you don't externalise so many costs.

[1] [http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-
heal...](http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-
policy-institute/responses/costs-and-consequences-of-fukushima.html)

~~~
wrsh07
Yeah, it'll make sense to do that when you start insuring other power plants
for the environmental damage they cause.

We're not charging a carbon tax on coal plants. We're not charging drivers for
the air pollution they cause in cities. If you believe the WHO when they say 7
million people die prematurely from air pollution, are you going to start
making air-polluters pay for that?
([http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-
pollut...](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-
pollution/en/)) Are you insuring dams against the floods they would cause if
they break?

It'd be great to do those things, but it's unreasonable to unfairly punish
nuclear when you're not willing to charge other power plant technology for
their expected negative externalities.

If you're going to start enacting "reasonable taxes" on negative
externalities, start by getting us off of dirty energy, not by preventing us
from using reusable energy.

~~~
mohawk
It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But
externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane
thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then
make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative
externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding
waste for centuries.

Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved
this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.

~~~
wrsh07
You can't reject one form of power [as worse than existing power] because of
externalities if you aren't considering the negative externalities of the
existing power. It's not out of fairness, it's out of minimizing future
damage.

If you aren't accurately considering the environmental damage of oil/coal/gas,
then you can't say they're superior to nuclear just because you are
considering its negatives.

I agree -- I look forward to a future of clean renewables, but even still wind
and solar are inconsistent. Our storage systems aren't good enough to "just
use batteries."[1]

We need a dependable, renewable form of energy that can bridge the gap for 80
years until our storage is good enough.

[1] [http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-
storage](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage)

------
pithic
If the risk/reward calculus of nuclear power is really favorable, then the
industry should accept full liability for damages. Repeal Price-Anderson
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act)).
Let them bear the market price of insuring against civil liability.

~~~
wmf
Right after coal bears the true price of air pollution?

------
Animats
Fukushima had a meltdown because all reactors of the General Electric Mark I
reactor design will melt down if they lose cooling pump power for 12-18 hours.
They have an undersized containment vessel. This was known as early as 1972.
Peach Bottom, in Pennsylvania, has the same reactor design, as do some other
US reactors.

We also need to stop storing used fuel rods at reactor sites. Yucca Mountain
may not be perfect, but it's so isolated that even if something goes badly
wrong, there's nobody around to be affected. The area was previously used for
outdoor nuclear weapons testing, after all.

Even if everybody evacuates after a disaster and it doesn't kill many people,
you don't get your city back.

------
lolc
In nuclear, there are many myths like "decomissioning costs are covered" or
"we know how to store the waste". And there are some blatant truths like
"risks like that cannot be insured against". But that's usually just accepted
as a given so I guess it's fine if the article doesn't mention that one.

I think the biggest myth in the article is the one where they assume that it
will have to be either fission or coal burning, pick one.

~~~
touristtam
oh yes, toxic waste production and safe storage facility. Those are definitely
the main point of contend against civil nuclear. Not even France with its 75%
energy generation hasn't found a way to recycle nuclear waste or at the very
least reduce their lifespan significantly.

------
collinmanderson
This seems to have ignored the 1600 people who died during Fukushima
evacuation, and it didn't mention the possible thyroid cancer cases in
children around Fukushima.

It also didn't mention link between spent nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons.
Seems to me that's a good reason to avoid it. (Yes, it might be possible to
separate these two, but it seems to me it's still a few years down the road.)

There's a pretty good summary of the negative effects here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEYbgyL5n1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEYbgyL5n1g)

~~~
kirrent
The 1600 people who died in the evacuation were being evacuated during a
natural disaster that was far more devastating.

Not mentioning increased rates of thyroid cancer could be attributed to
journalistic integrity. There is no evidence of higher incidences of any
cancer in any group of residents and it's not expected that there will be.
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1022.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1022.full)

The plutonium in spent nuclear fuel is very difficult to purify to weapons
grade. If you're not satisfied with inspections of purifying facilities then
taking the waste off the hands of problem countries for free has been
discussed. Unfortunately, Uranium isn't that rare or hard for countries to
come by. If they really want nuclear weapons then a normal breeding program is
the simplest way to do it.

That video you linked to was hilarious. Reprocessing is a great idea. There's
no harm in waiting a hundred years for a method of getting rid of your spare
plutonium when it means you get to reduce the total amount of radioactive
waste anyway.

Also, while we may wail and gnash our teeth at having nowhere to store our
nuclear waste the truth is that governments overwhelmingly deal with the very
quite simple problem of storage in a competent manner. Certainly more
competently managed than our storage of the products of coal power generation
in our atmosphere has been.

------
johansch
I remember being about 14 (in 1991; 25 years ago) and learning about the
effects of CO2 emissions on climate change in school. It seemed blatantly
obvious - the only remotely feasible chance the planet had was to replace
coal/oil with nuclear. The risk calculation was trivial. (Even after seeing
the effects of Chernobyl in the years after 1986 in southern Sweden - we
couldn't pick berries and mushroom in the forest for a while and moose meat
was contaminated iirc.)

I'm so sad that we're still having this debate 25 years later and nothing has
changed.

------
bakhy
what bugs me is the possibility that one disaster, however unlikely, when it
happens may render a wider area uninhabitable for a longer period of time. is
this not the case?

and then, perhaps a bigger issue, waste management. just look at Germany [1],
supposedly a role model country. please note that the New Scientist text is
mostly about light waste, "just" 1000 years storage time. there's a committee
trying to plan storage of highly radioactive waste - for 1 million years! we
are a species of idiots. none of the plants generating that waste is going to
give us a million years of power.

as others have mentioned, Fukushima could have been prevented. and Japan has
also had accidents and cover-ups before [2]. all in all, it seems too risky.

and finally, what happened to Thorium plants? aren't they much much safer? or
the breeder reactors, how are those coming along?

[1] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075615-radioactive-
was...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075615-radioactive-waste-dogs-
germany-despite-abandoning-nuclear-power/) [2]
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20263-japans-
record-o...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20263-japans-record-of-
nuclear-cover-ups-and-accidents/)

------
ageofwant
I'm a voting member of that Australian Greens (representing ~10% of voting
public on a good day).

The green movement has yet to take responsibility for the disastrous effect
our rabid anti-nuclear narrative has had on the health of this planet. For a
movement that prides itself on conscientious reflection and progressive
evidence based policy our track record on this matter is truly dismal.

Green Party policy on nuclear power is a massive failure.

------
outworlder
I'm surprised to see this much advocacy of solar and wind here.

I do agree that we need way more of that, but what's the required size of a
solar power plant that's feeding an aluminum plant?

Get a few (modern) nuclear reactors for baseline load, fill the rest with
renewables. And shutdown the damned coal plants, those things spew radiation.

------
squozzer
Sadly, the article doesn't do the problems - of both a nuclear future and a
non-nuclear one - much justice. It relies on facts and figures, which even
taken at face value, will not spur many people to action.

Part of the problem is that in general, and particularly with expensive /
unattractive projects such as nuclear power plants, those who benefit the most
(power company execs, building contractors) assume the least amount of risk -
e.g. nearby residents and taxpayers. Same for jails and landfills - same game
with a different name.

As other commenters have suggested, those who believe in nuclear should
consider making a bold gesture. A petition drive might be interesting, but
expect a lot of doors slammed into one's face. But to me it still sounds too
conventional. Crowdfunding, anyone?

------
struct
For anyone interested in this topic, I can really recommend "Radiation: What
It Is, What You Need to Know" (by Robert Peter Gale and Eric Lax)[1] which
includes some very thorough discussion on Chernobyl and Fukushima. An
interesting point they raise about Chernobyl is the psychological fallout of
people thinking they were exposed: there was a notable rise in abortions and
quite a few plant workers drank themselves to death after the accident. It's
all very fascinating.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiation-What-You-Need-Know-
ebook/d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiation-What-You-Need-Know-
ebook/dp/B008TSBYLY/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-
text&ie=UTF8&qid=1460470306&sr=1-2&keywords=Radiation)

------
ebbv
Nuclear power is safe and clean in the abstract, where ideal safety procedures
are always followed and mistakes are never made.

But in the real world, human error always causes problems. The problem with
nuclear power is that the results of these problems are enormous and long
lived. That's why I am against nuclear power.

We have much, much safer alternatives in wind, solar, geothermal and hydro
electric. (Yes dam disasters have killed many, many people, I am not in favor
of building any more dams where that kind of risk is a possibility.) In my
mind there's no need for the risk that comes with nuclear power, we can build
out our power infrastructure with safer, renewable sources of energy.

~~~
justizin
Even though disasters with dams are terrifying, it is still just nature
reclaiming its' territory. There is no ecological fallout from a dam breaking.
Water's gonna water.

I'm still with you on trying to avoid this risk, but don't feel it's at all
comparable to the risk of a nuclear power plant.

------
patall
Well, I am not sure but from my point of view, this article misses quite a few
arguments against nuclear power. Some may be excusable but not mentioning
waste storage (or even regeneration, though I want to see it before I believe
it) at all. It does not tell about the destruction cost of nuclear plants
(that will never be covered by waste regeneration). It does not talk about
terrorist attacks on nuclear plants or just someone stealing radioactiv
material to make a dirty bomb. I understand that some arguments against
nuclear power are just nonsense but there are some quite tricky ones, picking
some that you are able to refute is rediculous.

Edit: and a broken dam in a (at the time) third world country that kills >80%
of 170.000 people later through famine and epidemics is nothing that
translates to the first world. I agree that hydro-electric power has some big
down-sides (like mentioned terrorist attacks) but still you should give things
in context. Fukushima happening in Angola would have been a different story
than in Japan.

------
zik
This article is deliberately misleading. It's wearing its biases on its sleeve
by admitting to only the direct deaths of Chernobyl (43) and saying that the
WHO's projected tally of 4000 deaths merely "might suffer some ill effects".
Death is certainly a pretty serious ill effect.

> The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian
> deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll#Chernobyl_disaster)

------
nickbauman
Nuclear plants are being shut down often because of safety concerns. Planning
a new nuke plant is a 30+ year prospect. Therefore while nuclear power has
potential, one wonders if a 30-year lead time _itself_ makes nuclear a risky
bet.

[http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-22/nuclear-reactor-
closin...](http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-22/nuclear-reactor-closings-us-
continue-roil-energy-industry)

------
ArtDev
The problem of what to do with radioactive wastewater have not been solved.

Nuclear power is not economical. It actually works really well on the small
scale, but not for city power generation.

Nuclear power is simply the worlds most expensive way to boil water. There are
cheaper ways to boil water! [http://www.nea.is/geothermal/electricity-
generation/](http://www.nea.is/geothermal/electricity-generation/)

~~~
NolF
You do know that most places don't have the geothermal energy close enough to
the surface to make that happen? Also you'll need to provide a source to show
that nuclear is "not economical" and "the worlds most expensive way to boil
water". All the evidence indicates some of the renewables are it [1]. About
77% of France's energy is nuclear, so I'm not sure what you mean it doesn't
work on a large scale...[2]

Fun fact a lot of aluminium is made in Iceland because of the cheap energy [3]

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

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

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland#Aluminium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland#Aluminium)

~~~
ArtDev
The Geothermal plants in Iceland are amazing to see. The tech is still quite
new though. There are many improvements that will make them more efficient.
Regardless, they are really really cheap to run.

I would imagine that drilling deeper will would allow for Geothermal plants in
more places in the world.

Here is some background info on the poor economics of nuclear power:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_trends)

[http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-
power](http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power)

~~~
DanBC
They're so cheap they might run a cable from Iceland to the UK to supply
power.

That would be a cable 30 cm in diametre and about 5600 km long.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075pxg8](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075pxg8)

> The Ice Link interconnector would link Iceland's cheap and carbon free
> electricity from hydro and geothermal to the UK. It could provide the
> equivalent power of a medium sized power plant through a copper cable laid
> under the sea between the two countries. Crucially the power would be
> reliable and available when other renewable sources such as wind and solar
> are not. However, as Tom Heap discovers when he visits the land of fire and
> ice, environmental campaigners like Bjork fear that this green solution for
> UK homes could create a need to develop into the pristine wilderness of
> Iceland's Highlands. Should we pursue our global climate goals even if it
> has the potential to affect untouched and fragile landscape elsewhere? Tough
> decisions for Iceland and for us all. Producer: Helen Lennard.

------
tehabe
Be careful when someone speaks about ideology if they were free of it.

"In the wake of Fukushima, Germany acquiesced to demands from lobby groups to
shut down its nuclear sector, building heavily polluting fossil-fuel plants in
their stead."

This is probably the worst part in this article, because coal is also
decreasing in Germany. Not as fast as nuclear but nuclear was always the
smaller than coal.

My main issue is, that again, someone believes that nuclear power is a way of
solving the climate change crisis. It isn't for that nuclear power never had a
big enough market share to begin with. Even the current plants which are being
build won't change that.

Also nuclear power is extremely expensive. The ones currently being build in
Finland and France are 3x over budget and are lagging behind years. Those two
plants will supply 1600 Watts for the grid.

You can get that from renewable energies in less than a year.

And yesterday I read that Chinese researchers developed a solar panel which
can even use also rain.

Why do people want a an energy source, which comes with so many unsolved
issues and only promises to solve them later. In the last 50 years none of the
issues could be solved. None! (I'm not talking about safety!)

~~~
adrianN
If you can read German, here [1] is a study that says shutting off nuclear in
Germany causes 63 million tons of additional CO2 emission per year. It's from
BDI, an industry group, so take it with a grain of salt, but as the power we
used to produce in nuclear plants has to come from somewhere, it makes sense
that we produce a lot more CO2 to replace them. You can't just crank up wind
and solar to account for the difference, you have to burn more fossil fuels.

[1]
[http://www.r2b-energy.com/uploads/media/Kurzfassung_Ausstieg...](http://www.r2b-energy.com/uploads/media/Kurzfassung_Ausstieg2017.pdf)

~~~
patall
Well, but we should also not forget that one of the reasons we have not left
coal yet are the many jobs that depend on it. Just this weekend, there were
massive protest again from the coal and steel workers union against european
environment legislation.

------
smegel
> it is important to note that they operate on very different principles.

High fissile vs low fissile equates to different principals? What a load of
FUD in an article claims to show some insight on the matter.

------
xigency
I agree (sort of) with the premise of this article but I'm not sure I believe
all of its facts.

Specifically, the analysis of the negative effects of each respective
meltdown, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I personally believe there's reason to distrust any study on Chernobyl because
of the blatant cover-up mentioned and the interference of the Soviet
government, so it doesn't really work well as a citation to convince skeptics
of the safety of nuclear energy. Likewise, I don't know that we've seen the
full effects of Fukushima yet.

Here is one article that shows some of the milder social effects on residents:
[http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/life-
in...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/life-indoors-
exacts-toll-on-koriyama-children/#.VgGiGpcvaDl)

"Some of the smallest children in Koriyama, a short drive from the ruined
Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, barely know what it’s like to play
outside — fear of radiation has kept them indoors for much of their short
lives."

I lived at one point in time relatively near the Fukushima plant (100 km away)
at about 2 months after the disaster and I did follow pretty closely at that
time the pattern of fallout, but since returning to the USA it is not
something I have followed as closely as I should.

For me, the hardest part is seeing the impact on people I met and their
friends and families. But I also saw many people doing well even in the
hardship.

I did live somewhere (a university campus) with continual radiation level
monitoring, with levels somewhere below 0.12 uSv/hour or maybe twice the
background radiation of Rome, and I also took Iodine pills in the immediate
aftermath of the disaster. For that reason, maybe somewhat selfishly, and
because of all of the obvious reasons, I do believe that nuclear energy is
essential.

Side note: Fukushima Prefecture has the University of Aizu, which is the only
public, graduate-level university in Japan dedicated to computer science and
engineering.

------
lazyjones
Even if we completely ignore most of the risks and hidden costs, nuclear power
is still unattractive in its centralized form - large, expensive power plants
that require safety measures, usually a lot of water and huge overhead power
lines and need to keep operating or millions will be without electricity. On
top of that, the consumer is affected by (international) market price
fluctuations all the time.

I much prefer being self-sufficient with solar panels on my roof and some far
away plant as backup. Once nuclear power is safe, I'll happily put a small
reactor in my basement as backup too.

~~~
kilroy123
I agree the water usage is a huge concern. However, don't modern designs not
require massive amounts of water for cooling? I honestly don't know.

To be fair, I think the cost would go down if we started constructing a large
number of plants again.

We can not go 100% renewable without nuclear. Here's a great talk on the
reality of going 100% renewable:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_re...](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables?language=en)

~~~
matheweis
Thanks for linking that - really terrific back of the envelope estimates.

If anything, I found it to be quite encouraging. If we could just get people
behind some of those...

------
mtgx
Too late. In 5 years it will make little sense to start a nuclear power plant
instead of a solar power facility with batteries.

------
danielpwm
Sure, as long as the nuclear reactor is literally in your backyard and nowhere
close to me, I'm ok with nuclear power.

------
abpavel
The actual mortality rate from both Chernobyl and Fukushima are so low, I'm
not even sure what are we talking about half the time. Fear? Fear of a fear?
People store yellow cake at home just for fun, and it's perfectly legal and
OK. Yet at other times, just mentioning the word nuclear gives half of the
community brain cancer.

------
trhway
there are less than 500 nuclear reactors in the world. So less than 300 power
plants for the 50 years. There have been 2 major catastrophes- i.e. 1 per
13000 reactor/year (or 1 per 8000 power plant/year). Compare that to drunk
driving (which almost everybody agrees is unsafe) - 112 million alcohol-
impaired driving episodes in US per year produce 13,365 deaths
([http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...](http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/by_the_numbers/drunk_driving/index.html#_ftn1)),
ie. 1 death per 8000 drunk driving episodes.

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

1\. Natural gas

2\. Hydro

3\. Coal

4\. Nuclear

5\. Solar

6\. Wind

~~~
GlennS
Onshore wind is quite a bit cheaper than nuclear at this point. It is
politically difficult for aesthetic reasons though.

~~~
Retra
Yet for some reason giant mounds of stinking garbage are aesthetically and
politically acceptable...

------
dredmorbius
It's time to dispel the myth that the problems of nuclear are technical in
nature and have technical solutions.

The book to read in this context is Charles Perrow's _Normal Accidents_.

[http://www.ohio.edu/people/piccard/entropy/perrow.html](http://www.ohio.edu/people/piccard/entropy/perrow.html)

Humans have had roughly 50 years' commercial generating experience with
nuclear power. It took 25 years from first criticality to come up with
passibly useful and safe reactors. Of the fewer than 500 commercial reactors
which have been built, three have experienced significant core failures, and,
_despite design deficiencies in each_ , the _core_ failings in _all_ of these
cases, as well as numerous other non-reactor or non-core failures, have been
_organisational_.

Bad management. Bad design. Bad emergency response. _A continuous
underappreciation of the seriousness of what 's at hand when you decide to
start splitting atoms._

Fukushima was infiltrated by the Japanese mob. Future Gen IV and Gen V reactor
designs, other than _not being currently proven_ , raise risks of
proliferation and novel chemistry experiments (600C highly radioactive florine
salts -- what could possibly go wrong?) with a long-tail horizon of tens of
thousands to millions of years.

We don't have _any_ human institutions that are of comparable longevity. Our
companies, governmentals structures, even major religions and languages are
nowhere near that old. This is a mucking with things at scales we're nowhere
near capable of handling. Hell, the smartest minds in Silicon Valley can't
deliver cat gifs without stuffing browser exploits into the accompanying ads
networks.

Human and organisational problems _don 't_ have technical solutions. The scale
at which nuclear energy would need to be extended to replace existing fossil
fueled systems is on the order of 15,000 reactors, worldwide. At _present_
levels of energy consumption. Uranium itself won't deliver the energy we need
(proven resources are good for about 8 decades at present levels of nuclear
energy, _six years_ if all present energy were nuclear sourced). At present
rates of one core failure per roughly 100 reactor years, we'd see a meltdown
per century. How much safer are future designs, _organisations_ , and _people_
going to be? 10x? 100x? 1000x? Is creating a new radioactive wasteland only
once a century, until forever, acceptable?

Solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass have issues. Leaving glowing holes in the
ground, or nondiscretionary slightly mutagenic wildlife preserves, isn't one
of them.

The bigger lesson is that humans need to embrace limits. There are far too
many of us, consuming far too much, and ignoring for far too long the warnings
that we're exceeding any rational sustainable bounds.

Nuclear energy isn't going to address any of those issues. Facing reality
might.

~~~
peferron
Most car accidents are caused by human drivers, but purely technical solutions
have still drastically reduced death rates.

~~~
dredmorbius
Creating an urban landscape which doesn't require use of automobiles would
decrease them further.

------
leecarraher
we should invest in fossil fuel backed intermittent renewables like wind and
solar because hydroelectric is bad for environments, nuclear means there could
be a mushroom cloud blowin' up my neighborhood, and coal pollutes. Or at least
that's what my brochure from my local n̶a̶t̶u̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶g̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶l̶i̶e̶r̶
greenpeace tells me.

------
pinaceae
Nuclear is a prime example for Black Swan instances.

All fine until it blows - but when it blows, the catastrophe is really big.

If a windmill fails catastrophically, the area around it does not become
uninhabitable for at least decades.

~~~
GVIrish
That's true in the abstract, but the big picture is that we're trying to avoid
a much larger disaster with climate change. If wind+solar could fill the
world's energy needs now, that is what we would be doing. But that is far, far
off into the future, if it's possible at all.

Burning coal is causing damage to the environment now, killing people from air
pollution now, and potentially driving us towards climate change that will
kill and displace many millions of people. Nuclear has its downsides but it is
not going to raise sea level by 2 or 3 feet in the next century nor cause
widespread disruptions in crop growing, or cause devastating extreme weather.

A nuclear accident could result in an exclusion zone of a 2 or 3 dozen miles.
Climate change could cause global consequences that would be irreversible with
our current technology.

------
kemenaran
Maybe it's time to recognize investing in renewable energies is better than in
the dying nuclear power.

Nuclear is a fossil fuel too (uranium has to be extracted and is limited),
costs a tremendous amount of money in power-plant building and dismantling
costs, and concentrate the production of energy in a few remote places (which
makes transport costs higher).

Meanwhile, the number of places running on 100% renewable energies is
surprisingly high
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy#Places...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy#Places_with_around_100.25_renewable_electricity)).
Why would we need nuclear again?

~~~
adrianN
Uranium being limited is a red herring. Breeder reactors and Thorium can
provide us with power for hundreds of years.

Similarly, renewables are also fairly concentrated (optimal conditions for
wind power or solar are not evenly distributed) and need excellent
transmission networks because production is fluctuating.

~~~
dredmorbius
Hundreds of years isn't a long time.

~~~
AstralStorm
Enough to figure out properly working fusion if trends keep up.

