
Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity - lukeqsee
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-safest-way-to-make-electricity-according-to-2007-study/2011/03/22/AFQUbyQC_print.html
======
marze
When I see a story like this, it reminds me that the events in Japan represent
the biggest PR challenge the nuclear industry has faced in many years. Fifty
billion dollars of nuclear reactor US taxpayer-backed loan guarantees hang in
the balance.

The industry has been working for the past few decades to rehabilitate the
image of nuclear power after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and now they
have to contend with videos of a 1/2 mile tall mushroom cloud over a Japanese
reactor and the continuing press coverage. Talk about challenging.

I think the HN community may have difficulty appreciating the challenges of
nuclear reactor design because it is so different from software. In software,
you have known bugs and unknown bugs. Once you've got the known bugs down to a
low enough level and aren't finding too many new ones, you might release. The
consequences of a bug is generally not too bad, certainly not on the order of
making 800 square miles of real estate worthless, for example.

In engineering a nuclear plant, you have 90 tons of nuclear fuel generating
3,000,000,000 J of heat every second. The only reason it doesn't immediately
turn into a big bubbling blob of molten uranium is that pumps the size of SUVs
are pumping water over the fuel and removing all that heat. Every nuclear
plant in the world is one minute from 90 tons of fuel melting into the
basement if the water flow stops and fall-back systems fail. Fortunately, the
engineering on these plants is done extremely carefully, with multiple
independent systems in place to prevent exactly this by halting the nuclear
chain reactions with neutron absorbing rods as well as by ensuring the flow of
cooling water.

However, the events in Japan exposed an "unknown bug" in the design, that if
you flood the basements of the plants with water you can lose backup power and
coolant flow. While this particular "bug" is relatively easy to correct, it is
a reminder that other unknown bugs may exist waiting to be exposed by other
unexpected sets of circumstances.

It is good to remember Richard Feynman's quote about the space shuttle
Challenger disaster, "For a successful technology, reality must take
precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

~~~
billmcneale
Number of casualties from nuclear plant accidents: a few thousands.

Number of casualties from coal mining accidents this past century [2]:
100,000.

That's accidents in coal mines alone, not even counting lung diseases and
similar.

The fact that it takes a 9.0 tsunami after forty years of complete absence of
nuclear accidents to bring this to the front page should be indication enough
that nuclear is not just safer than most of the other energy production
techniques, it's also the one that has the highest energy rendering.

Any Green voter who's done their homework should be voting for more energy to
be generated by nuclear plants, not less.

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining>

~~~
gnosis
_"Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation
released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new
book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th
anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility."_

<http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/26>

Excerpts of the book here:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2009.1181.is...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2009.1181.issue-1/issuetoc)

~~~
pella
full book:

 _Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment:
(PDF; 4,3 MB)_ <http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf>

source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment)

------
jbm
Great.

I can't drink milk, had to avoid water for a day or two, having problem
finding relatively uncontaminated meat, 20 km or so of this country is
probably going to be left unlivable and so on.

I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying
the damage from Fukushima. Mod me down all you want. I will be happy to pay
attention when someone purchases land at a fair price near Fukushima #2 and
raises his children there.

Until then, you are handwaving for industry or for some vision of
"environmentally friendly power". Put money on the table, or frankly, your
opinion is worthless.

We need nuclear power. Unfortunately, the culture of misinformation and
understating danger around nuclear power means it is going to be impossible
for it to supply the majority of our power. What this means in terms of loss
of quality of life is not lost on me.

~~~
jerf
"20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable"

[citation requested] I haven't seen any hint of that. Is that from actual
scientific reports based on sensible standards of "unlivable" (i.e., based in
sensible risk analysis), or is it just based on unscientific worries?

And did you have a hard time finding "uncontaminated" meat because there was
actually a shortage of meat that was scientifically unsafe to eat, or because
there was a shortage of meat due to an overzealous safety organization that
proactively condemned vast swathes of goods unnecessarily to look active and
because people are just really scared? Because if the latter, this turns the
argument circular; nuclear is dangerous because governments overreach and
aggressively condemn things because nuclear is dangerous.

If you got actual sources, I'd love to hear about them, in all seriousness,
and then I'd like to know why I didn't hear about 20 kms being rendered
uninhabitable yet. But I'd like to see the citation first.

~~~
route66
I remember Erik Naggum calling out this "citation requested" calls as being
passive aggressive, On HN I see them mostly coming along when the view of the
other is not accepted. The radiation levels and the finding of Pu in the
ground, leaking out radioactive water and the like have already been reported
to death.

This call for sources, at the same time demanding they be sensible and have to
use sensible definitions in this kind of discussions has an unfortunate "get
off my lawn" tone to it.

Clearing the area is also already openly discussed by the Japanese
governement. By contrasting "overzealous safety organizations" with "sensible
risk based analysis" you put excatly no argument forward but already indicate
what you would do with any such source.

~~~
Natsu
> I remember Erik Naggum calling out this "citation requested" calls as being
> passive aggressive, On HN I see them mostly coming along when the view of
> the other is not accepted.

I, personally, have provided citations for every single person who requested
one of me as far as I know, not to mention answering quite a few requests made
to others. Feel free to trawl my comment history looking for examples. If you
can find one that I haven't seen, I'll go dig up a citation to support it.

It's hard to trust someone's opinion if they can't explain the facts upon
which they base it. Of course I'm still wrong sometimes, but the exercise
helps me to prove to myself whether or not I know what the hell I'm talking
about. I often find new information and refine my opinions accordingly. That's
how I learn.

------
TGJ
While the safest, the waste will be with the Earth for a long time to come.
Longer than any corporation will be around, or government agency. There has to
be a clear cut plan to deal with the waste of nuclear power that accounts for
it's life span, and possible natural disasters. Currently all waste is stored
at the power plants and the only current plan is to encase the waste in
concrete. But where to go with that concrete? How to label the concrete to
make sure future generations know that it is dangerous? How to ensure constant
security and safety of the waste? We cannot move forward with nuclear energy
until the problem of its waste is dealt with.

~~~
lukeqsee
That consideration is the biggest.

Nuclear power is safe, intrinsically. Nuclear waste is devastation waiting to
happen (if not now, in the future).

~~~
waterlesscloud
It's a bit much to say that a system that requires multiple elaborate systems
of safeguards is "intrinsically" safe.

~~~
lukeqsee
"Intrinsically safer" was probably the better term.

------
ChuckMcM
When ever I see this I realize its not really helpful. Sure all the facts are
true but as I've said before you can't argue with people who are scared.

In other news a hole developed in a SWA 737 jet flying to Sacremento and did
an emergency descent from 32000 to 12000 feet. Will it cause people to stop
flying? Some, perhaps, but for the most part no.

When you read that someone on the freeway died driving a '72 Buick that only
had lap belts and no air bags you say "gee, its great we have them now, we've
just had fewer highway deaths than have ever been recorded since 1949.

The same is certainly true with nuclear power plants, if we were rational we
would say, "fine" lets relicense "older" reactors on the provision they are
dismantled and replaced. Have we learned a lot about building reactors? Sure,
could we get rid of the older ones faster if we built new safe ones more
quickly? Absolutely. But we have to either learn not to be afraid (respectful
yes, afraid no) of nuclear power and radiation. Perhaps we should learn about
it in school, perhaps we should provide low cost detectors for folks.

I think its part of growing up as a species.

------
nl
Only marginally related, but it has been surprising to me that US media seems
to talk about the risk of a "radiation cloud floating over the Pacific" (which
is effectively a non-existent risk to health), and yet doesn't talk about the
risk to Californian nuclear plants from earthquakes & tsunamis.

For example, to quote Wikipedia:

 _Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant
at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. It was built directly
over a geological fault line, and is located near a second fault... Diablo
Canyon was originally designed to withstand a 6.75 magnitude earthquake from
four faults, including the nearby San Andreas and Hosgri faults.,[6] but was
later upgraded to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake.... In September 1981, PG &E
discovered that a single set of blueprints was used for these structural
supports; workers were supposed to have reversed the plans when switching to
the second reactor, but did not.[11] According to Charles Perrow, the result
of the error was that "many parts were needlessly reinforced, while others,
which should have been strengthened, were left untouched."_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant>

Or take a look at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is
literally built _on the beach_ :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station)

~~~
veidr
Urrgh, I agree, this is so ludicrous and stupid. I wish I could say it was
surprising, but it is an example of what I mean when I say 'maybe we
(collectively) aren't mature enough to handle <insert awesome technology
here>'.

------
Tichy
Not even one mention of solar power? Maybe the technology is not at its peak
yet, but combines with saving a lot of energy, is it not an option? Let's not
forget that a lot of money went into perfecting nuclear power, probably a lot
more than into solar power.

Comparing with coal deaths seems a bit like a strawman. Also I don't trust the
way the victims of Chernobyl are calculated. Adding up victims from survivor
stories ("all my colleagues are dead by now") seems to easily give more than
26 deaths.

Yes, I love electricity, too - especially for computing. But I also think the
world could be improved a lot by saving energy at the right places. I'd be
much happier if there were less cars, for example. I think I could power my
computer with a solar panel, even when not living in the desert.

Heating seems to be another big one. Where I live renting is the norm, so home
owners don't have much of an incentive to insulate houses properly (renters
pay the energy bill).

At the very least, please give me an Android phone with a Geiger Counter so
that I can check the milk when I go shopping...

~~~
asharp
Strangely enough it takes very little money, nor energy to produce nuclear
power. It's very simple at its core. Have a look at the first research
reactors and you'll find that you need basically no technology to produce
reactors that produce useful amounts of energy.

On the other hand solar power, especially photovoltaics is stupidly complex.
Photovoltaics requires semiconductor processes, arguably one of the most
complex things ever reliably harnessed by man to create.

Saying that you want to power your computer from a solar cell seems green,
until you think of all the energy that went into building that solar cell. All
the waste materials, the toxic waste produced in fabrication, the pollution,
etc. Then it seems decidedly less green then, say, plugging it in to the wall
socket.

~~~
Tichy
And yet nature all around us seems to thrive on solar power alone, with zero
toxic waste byproduct.

I don't think pollution in production is a must, either. You don't have to
dump your garbage in the river.

~~~
asharp
First off no, nature doesn't thrive off solar power alone. At the very least
hydrothermal vents provide energy to most aquatic life past the thermocline.

I'd also like to point out that the sun produces more radioactivity then
anything likely to be found on earth, and fusion as a whole accounts for all
the heavy metals ever created in the universe. (just some food for thought).

~~~
Tichy
I know about the hydrothermal vents, but I don't think nature needs them.

The sun example was discussed to death in another thread. Sorry, I think it is
just a silly comparison.

------
mashmac2
Seth Godin made the same point last week--with a neat graphic:

[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-
triumph-...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-
coal-marketing.html)

(He got his image from here:
[http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visuali...](http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976))

------
justatdotin
hmmm, the entire article excludes the words 'weapons' and 'waste'. all nuclear
reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to
manage well beyond the forseeable future. Here in Australia, we've come up
with a state-of-the-art answer to our own burden of nuclear waste (arising
from 30 years of experimentation and research reactors) - we're building a
road out to a remote desert location, building a shed and dumping the unwanted
problem on the tribal lands of a disempowered, de-funded indigenous community.
Real reassuring, huh?

As for weapons, although the old cold-war powers continue to slowly reduce the
huge numbers of conventional nuclear weapons they hold, they're also building
new ones. And at the same time as the total number of nuclear warheads in the
world is slowly decreasing, the total number of actors holding those weapons
is greater than ever, with the proliferation of nuclear materials and
technologies spreading despite all rhetoric and pantomime surrounding the NPT.
As Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: "For eight years in the
White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected
to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted
to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ... then we'd have to put
them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the
reasonability scale."

finally, to the question of renewables : I totally reject the repeated
assertions that renewables can't provide scalable or baseload power. Here in
sunny Australia, we're following the lead of nations like Spain and building a
few large grid connected solar-thermal and solar-hybrid plants, that compare
well with the capacities of old fossil and hydro plants. Already, large remote
communities in my part of the country are powered entirely by solar
concentrator arrays.

So I say, stick your nuclear power reactors where the sun doesn't shine.

~~~
asharp
Nuclear power reactors can be produced without any real proliferation risk,
see for example thorium reactors.

Similarly the thorium fuel cycle is a lot clearer, ie. assuming that you can
recycle actinide wastes, there is very little radioactivity after the first
few hundred years: [http://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/docs/00/04/14/97/PDF/documen...](http://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/docs/00/04/14/97/PDF/document_IAEA.pdf)

Finally, if you have waste of any sort that you want to keep away from humans
(A large amount of chemical waste would also seem to fit this bill), where
else would you put it, aside from the centre of the most geologically stable
continent on earth? Thousands of kms from habitation, far from any
groundwater, and most likely on a large sheet of granite given the geology of
the outback. Assuming it was properly built underground, I can't think of a
better place to put it.

Solar power is interesting, but it has two properties which make it less
useful then it would first seem.

* First you need to find a place that is very hot and very dry. That generally requires that you move far inland and far north and away from the coastline. This then means that you somehow need to transfer the power to the major cities, which are built almost entirely on the coastline, causing massive amounts of energy loss.

* Secondly on any non-equitorial latitude you have the problem of seasons affecting your baseload capacity. This then means that trying to manage any power grid that derives a substantial amount of its power from solar thermal plants is going to be, well, an interesting problem.

* Finally you will always have the problem of trying to manage these types of power plants, ie. you can't simply "turn up" a solar thermal or photovoltaic plant like you can a gas fired or coal fired plant. This then causes issues when you have a sudden need for power.

Overall though, it is a very interesting source of renewable energy.

~~~
justatdotin
thanks A#:

thorium? maybe. but all of the reactors currently dotting the globe, and any
of those which may be built in the near future, all use uranium. I'd hate for
us to make the mistake of basing decisions about whether or not to retire
existing aging uranium reactors on the promises of theoretical thorium models.
We certainly shouldn't keep building dangerous uranium reactors simply
because, one day, hopefully, there might be thorium models that might be
safer. Like I said : this industry's been promising more than they can deliver
since Go.

waste: out of sight / out of mind? not good enough: this material should
remain prominent in the eyes and minds of the technological wizards who
created it.

Solar: these sound like valid concerns, and I don't know enough to answer
them, but I'm pretty sure that there's a lot more to build before we hit those
constraints.

~~~
asharp
The candu reactors are thorium. As was AVR... Last I heard there were reactors
in india/china using thorium.

All the gen IV reactors I remember are thorium based, however keep in mind
that most of the gen IV reactors can be made with uranium, it's just that
thorium is a rather nice fuel. Well, if you don't need to build any more
nukes, that is.

To be perfectly honest, once you've mined out all of the nuclear materials out
of nuclear waste, what you're left with is a fairly standard bundle of heavy
metals that we deal with all the time in chemeng. (ie. what do you do to the
Cad in Nicads?)

Anything that's fertile can be converted into fuel. Anything that's fissable
is fuel. Anything that is usefully radioactive can be used either directly in
a reactor or indirectly in betavoltaics and related.

One major problem at the moment is that it's not politically viable to
reprocess waste anywhere near completely, and even though waste storage is
basically solved in much the same way that the waste storage of garbase is
basically solved (Where do you think the toxins go when you throw something
else out?), we can't really do either and so you end up with waste just piling
up in places where it honestly shouldn't be.

~~~
justatdotin
candu say they can do thorium, but no-one's actually doing it. Yeah maybe
india and china have each experimented, but I don't think anyone's using
thorium for power. there's a huge, rich thorium deposit down the road from me,
but they're planning to bury it all again after extracting the associated
REEs. Like I said, maybe one day we'll be making decisions about thorium
reactors, but here and now it's uranium reactors (most of them GenII) that
deserve our focus, because these are the ones which are operating or scheduled
for construction.

------
BasDirks
You guys know about the problem of nuclear waste right? You've read plenty
about it right?

Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favor of
nuclear power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like
you reason about nuclear power, send me a note naming your products so I know
what to stay away from.

~~~
jbri
You guys know about the problem of climate change, right? You've read plenty
about it, right?

Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favour of
every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power is just a tiny bit short-sighted.
If you make your software like you reason about every-feasible-alternative-to-
nuclear-power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away
from.

~~~
danenania
Perhaps attempting to solve a major problem with something that also causes
major problems isn't much of a solution.

------
veidr
I looooves me some electricity.

So, even though I'm presently suffering some annoyances in my daily life here
in Tokyo (sporadically contaminated drinking water, suspect milk and other
foodstuffs, not enough electricity to maintain our previous standard of
living, Internet outages forfuckssake), and even though I bristle any time
anybody (this article's author included) ignorantly implies that we _know_ all
the bad things that were (or will be) caused by the meltdown at Chernobyl, I
am totally 'pro-nuke' in the sense that I want more nuke plants to be built
and maintained to produce electricity for us to use.

And, the premise that nuke power is the safest power we've come up with (among
power sources that actually have produced a significant fraction of the power
we use), is incontrovertibly true. This article is only one of dozens making
that point.

However, people take this idea a bit too far, by not putting it into the right
time context. A truly bad nuke disaster is forever (not _literally_ , but for
all intents and purposes). And we've never really had one yet. The thinking
that Chernobyl is as bad as it can get is totally, obviously wrong--but it is
implicit in a lot of the discussion.

Maybe Fukushima won't get to the level of Chernobyl--and that's still a maybe
btw, as it is still getting worse--but it's easy and plausible to conceive of
how it could have been much worse. A couple more serial failures, the
epicenter of the quake being closer, whatever--this ancient, obsolete plant
could very well have had all six reactors achieve full meltdown.

The woeful, pathetic--even funny, it's so bad--disaster preparedness that we
now know TEPCO had implemented confirms a basic thing a lot of us have
suspected: collectively, as a society (or separately, as a bunch of disparate
societies), we just might not be mature enough in our thinking to strike the
right balance of precaution and preparedness to handle nuclear power as safely
as it should be handled.

Technologically, I think nuke power is awesome. Societally, our ability to
responsibly deal with the dangers it presents is very suspect, IMO.
Unfortunately, I think that is a much harder problem to address.

Probably some societies are better than others at this. Much like some seven
year olds are responsible enough to handle a pocket knife and others totally
aren't.

What we've seen (and are still seeing) in Japan has been much more pathetic,
unprepared, and technologically primitive than a lot of us would have
expected. Much more like my dumbshit little nephew who cut off the tip of his
little finger and then sat there crying about it than like the one who taught
himself to whittle sticks into Indian figurines.

Because the response to Fukushima has been so haphazard, reactive, and
incompetent, I think many normal people now have this gut-reaction urge to
reevaluate nuclear power, and that urge is basically correct. Of course, there
is a lot of hysteria and empirically incorrect thinking flying around, but
that happens any time a large number of humans discuss just about anything.

Still, the takeaway from this disaster shouldn't be 'nuclear power is teh
awesome! no problem, bro!! nukes ftw!!'

It should be that nuclear power is indeed awesome, but our human systems that
govern the deployment, administration, safeguarding, and--perhaps most
importantly--sunsetting of nuclear power plants needs to be significantly
reworked and dramatically improved.

I don't see why we should build even one more plant without the safety
planning and preventive measures being an order of magnitude better than they
have been so far. OTOH, I hope we can get it together to demand that work be
done, and then do it, so that we can build more power plants, so that we can
get our electricity back and I can turn on my lights and air conditioner here
without feeling like an asshole.

~~~
jedsmith
> nuke power is the safest power we've come up with (among power sources that
> actually have produced a significant fraction of the power we use)

This is crucial, and is why blanket statements like "nuclear power is safe"
are dangerous. There is an absolutely essential qualifier required on the end
of any assertion about nuclear safety, and I'm glad to see that you put it in
parentheses here. Nuclear power is the best... _at scale_. It's completely
rational to recognize that for what it is.

I will be the first to praise the virtues of renewable energy. Solar, wind,
tidal, and so on are all far better implementations to solve the problem of
producing electricity. All of them, however, have a crippling fault that
prevents them from reaching the potential of economics and supply that nuclear
can. Importantly, that doesn't doom them -- that just means more investment
and thinking is required before they can reach their potential.

Hell, renewable energy is the energy sector's Python 3. We'll get there
someday, you can use it now, and it's a fabulous nirvana of harmony. Today,
however, it's just a little rough around the edges, and a challenge to work
with because the full support of the ecosystem isn't there. So, for now, we
advise Python 2: let's split some atoms.

Watching HN's reaction to Fukushima has aggravated me at times, and made me
cheer at others; it's naïveté to exclaim that nuclear power is completely
safe, but a roughly equal helping of naïveté to claim that there are superior
alternatives at this moment.

(Edited for brevity.)

~~~
gnosis
_"Scientific American, a most conservative scientific publication, in a cover
story on October 26, 2009 -- unveiled its 'A Plan for a Sustainable Future.'
It declared in its 'Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables"
that, 'wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the
world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.'

The British magazine New Scientist, in a special October 11-17, 2009, issue on
safe, clean, renewable energy technologies -- titled 'Our Brighter Future' --
presented a United Nations report declaring that 'renewable energy that can
already be harnessed economically would supply the world's electricity
needs.'"_

From: _"Renewables Are More Than Ready"_

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/renewables-
are-m...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/renewables-are-more-
than-_b_842160.html)

~~~
Natsu
"Water" sounds like it would include such things as the Banqiao dam.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Banqiao_Dam>

I'm also not sure that I would take a couple of magazine articles as proof
that we can manage all of those at scale. Don't misunderstand, though. I would
be very glad to be proven wrong by someone actually implementing these at
scale.

It's easy to say "economically" after all and another thing to do it. After
all, if power companies can save money doing this, they will.

------
kscaldef
"Nuclear power is the safest way to make electricity"... so long as you
pretend the only other option is fossil fuels.

~~~
jedsmith
At scale, right now, those _are_ the only two options.

~~~
kscaldef
Well, for that matter, we don't have enough nuclear power production capacity
to meet our needs either, so I don't entirely see your point. Reducing the
amount of power we're producing with fossil fuels will mean needing to
increase our production from other sources, but it doesn't mandate that we
have to increase it from a particular source.

~~~
jedsmith
My point is that fossil fuels and nuclear power are the only two types that
scale efficiently with current technology. Everything else doesn't scale as
well. Not sure how else to word that, and that's exactly what I meant up
there.

It has nothing to do with current capacity. Nuclear has lost a lot to debates
much like this one; however, if we _wanted_ the capacity, nuclear would step
up and fill it in at a reasonable price. The same amount of power generated by
the alternatives would be astronomically expensive. That's one of the problems
that plague the alternatives you've named: either they are far too expensive
to use at any kind of large scale, or suitable locations are in thin supply,
or power output fluctuates unsuitably with a change in weather, and so on.
They just can't compete.

The current research into nuclear is making it even cheaper and safer
(thorium, etc); the current research into the alternatives is making them
cheap enough to be possible with significant demand.

~~~
eliasmacpherson
The reasonable price you talk about doesn't include the cost of disposal.
Whatever about providing electricity to be consumed at scale, dealing with
radioactive waste has not been successful at small scale, why would it work at
large scale? A lot of people display hubris about the merits of the on paper
research reactors, what about their unknown unknowns?

------
singular
A major problem here is that people often conflate nuclear power plants with
nuclear bombs - in people's imaginations nuclear power plants could go up like
a bomb and are therefore very dangerous. The fact that this is impossible
doesn't get in the way of people's general perception, unfortunately.

Actually looking at the evidence provides a different story altogether - the
XKCD radiation chart [1] being one of the most striking examples of the levels
of radiation we're talking about here.

It's a pity (though not unexpected) that the media lap up this kind of
sentiment despite the fact that hey, our planet is dying, and maybe we need to
stop playing around with misconceptions for a second and maybe try and work on
fixing this?

I guess our grandchildren will be the ones to find out how this one plays out.

[1]:<http://xkcd.com/radiation/>

~~~
singular
Hey - why the downvote? I know it sounds silly, but I genuinely believe that
is a significant part of the general popular view of nuclear power plants,
silly or not.

------
ck2
By the way, the destroyed nuclear plant, just like the BP disaster, had
avoided government regulation via apathy and corruption in the monitoring
process.

So regardless of the supposed engineered safety of any of these extreme
measures, once you take out the oversight that is planned into these
studies/reports, everything goes out the window.

Everyone needs to state in their claims what will happen when everything fails
because no-one bothered to follow up and do what they were supposed to.

------
danenania
"History suggests that nuclear power rarely kills and causes little illness.
That’s also the conclusion engineers reach when they model scenarios for
thousands of potential accidents."

Auditing nuclear power's extremely short history is not a valid method of
assessing risk. In poker they call this 'results oriented thinking'.
Especially when discussing black swan events, history is almost by definition
not a very useful basis for predictions.

~~~
cturner
The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for
decades.

If fact, history inflates the risk by bringing into consideration known
weaknesses of earlier reactor designs.

~~~
danenania
"The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for
decades."

In the context of highly unlikely events and the mathematics of probability, a
period of decades is an extremely small sample. Consider that some of the
types of events we are discussing may only happen once in a century. Clearly
in this case several decades is not enough to fully gauge what the true risks
of nuclear are to humans in the long term. One worst case scenario disaster
would tip the scales quite heavily.

------
dcosson
I saw this graphic the other day that puts into perspective various sources of
radiation exposure (from xkcd, but it's not a joke...) I didn't realize that
the lowest levels clearly linked to increased risk of cancer were so high.

<http://xkcd.com/radiation/>

------
thekevan
Yes but is it like saying wolves are safer than dogs because statistically
your are less likely to be harmed by a wolf than a dog? It ignores the fact
that if you do run afoul of a wolf, you are done.

~~~
nitrogen
Not quite, because those who actually calculate statistics can account for
differences in exposure. For example, the correct statistic to use with wolves
and dogs would be something like, "survival rate after pissing off the animal
in a similar environment," not just "total number of casualties." With nuclear
vs. fossil fuel, the relevant statistic is deaths per terawatt-hour of energy
produced, not deaths in total.

~~~
varjag
IAEA and WHO are notorious for counting only directly attributable deaths. If
someone dies from radiation-induced cancer 10 years after in the ripe age of
30-something, it doesn't get in the stats. Then the stats get perpetuated
endlessly by nuclear fanboys.

~~~
veidr
Yeah, that is the most frustrating thing about the arguments from Chernobyl
revisionists.

There was no possibility to do all the science that would ideally have been
done, everywhere it should have been done. So the anecdotal evidence is often
the _only_ evidence--and it is discounted. That is where you get idiotic
statements like 'only 28 people died as a result of Chernobyl'. Also, there
are many other things that happened to people short of death that nevertheless
really sucked, e.g. getting nonfatal thyroid cancer.

There's definitely merit to having a compendium of only rigorous scientific
results, of course, but it doesn't help advance the debate (or the species)
when such work is mischaracterized and used to promulgate bogus conclusions
(much less weird fanboy ideologies).

------
RuadhanMc
What about Wave Power? It's pretty safe and has a very minimal environmental
impact, almost constant output and for the most part is hidden from eye.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power>

Just listened to an interesting podcast about it on Late Night Live:

[http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948....](http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948.htm)

Obviously this wouldn't work for landlocked countries or countries which don't
have shores with a constant supply of waves (I'm looking at you Baltic Sea)
but for many parts of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Japan, etc, it might
just be what we need.

~~~
asharp
It's interesting, but from what i've seen of it (albiet not all that much), it
has two major issues.

* It has a low power density, hence requiring large arrays of collectors/etc. this makes it costly to build at scale.

* It generally either takes up valuable land (land by the sea is costly), or it requires lots of engineering to try and build/maintain these things out to sea.

It is very cool tech though.

~~~
RuadhanMc
The guys on the podcast were saying that the buoy is located 2 km offshore, so
not an eyesore as such, though I have not seen one yet, so can't judge.

Seems to be a more reliable solution than wind or solar if it can scale and it
is designed to withstand monster waves.

They say they are 3-4 years from deploying real installations (at the moment
they have 3 experimental sites).

~~~
asharp
Yeah, there are a few different types. One sits on shore and uses wave power
to compress air, which then runs turbines. This is probably the most efficient
method i've seen. There are a few others though, like the buoy method, etc.

Solar is about the most reliable solution you can come across, aside from an
RTG mostly because it has no real moving parts and as such has no real way to
fail.

What will be interesting is if they manage to up the energy density to the
point where it is economical to build.

------
motters
Certainly the amount of over-confidence, downplaying and sheer denial over the
Fukushima incident has been quite astonishing to witness. Repeatedly, pundits
of all kinds lined up to insist that the plant was in a safe condition and
that everything was under control and that there was no possibility of
contamination spreading beyond the plant perimeter. It may take some time
before we know the full extent of the environmental damage. If I was living in
the north or Japan I'd be extremely concerned about the health effects over
the next few years and decades.

------
Tichy
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining>:

"However, in lesser developed countries and some developing countries, many
miners continue to die annually, either through direct accidents in coal mines
or through adverse health consequences from working under poor conditions.
China, in particular, has the highest number of coal mining related deaths in
the world, with official statistics claiming that 6,027 deaths occurred in
2004.[19] To compare, 28 deaths were reported in the U.S. in the same
year.[20] Coal production in China is twice that in the U.S."

So counting deaths of coal mining from countries were human lives are
considered to be expendable resources sounds a bit dishonest. Not that I want
to promote coal mining, but I don't trust these PR pieces, sorry.

I think that article also counts accidents from people colliding with coal
transporting trains? How is Uranium transported, are there never any
collisions?

Also, abandoned mines seem popular for storing nuclear waste. Were the deaths
for creating those mines counted towards the nuclear power toll, too?

As for "we don't care about deaths in China", strange enough nuclear power
plants tend to be built next to country borders, so that possible pollution
has a good chance of blowing into the neighbor's land, not your own. At least
that is a story I heard about french nuclear power plants.

~~~
Natsu
Those accidents are _mining accidents_ alone. It ignores black lung, for
example.

For the other thing, if that's the actual reason they're locating plants
there, I'm against it, for whatever that's worth.

~~~
Tichy
What are you trying to say? I just pointed out that the numbers form the pro-
nuclear article are to be taken with a grain of salt. You can always do
creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good.

Do the black lung people even die because of it? If not they shouldn't count,
just as the cancer patients don't seem to count as long as they don't die in a
timely manner.

~~~
Natsu
> You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to
> look good.

Yes, that's why I'm trying to make it clear what all the numbers represent. I
believe that you're correct, for example, with China's coal miners having
about 4x as much accident risk as US miners, but I think that's still limited
to accident risk. I don't remember if Wikipedia explained which figures it was
comparing very carefully.

> Do the black lung people even die because of it?

<http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html>

"As dangerous an undertaking as coal mining is, there’s no comparison between
the risks of cave-ins or flooding or explosions, and the risks of contracting
this deadly disease. In the last decade alone, 10,000 miners have died from
black lung, compared with fewer than 400 from mine accidents."

See also: <http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-overview#a0199>

"The ICU mortality rate for patients with coal worker’s pneumoconiosis with
their first episode of respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation
was 40%, and the in-hospital mortality rate was 43%."

Also look at the treatment tab. Basically, the only treatment is preventative:
change jobs (at least get away from the dust!), stop smoking, vaccinations for
common lung infections, etc. Oh, yeah, you get put on oxygen, too. It doesn't
help your dead lungs, though.

<http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment>

Just a warning, but the pictures in part of that emedicine article are pretty
gross.

------
kgarten
Downvote me if you want, yet I'm really sad about Hacker News. This is the 4th
or 5th pro-nuclear propaganda article up-voted in a couple of weeks.
Personally, I'm always sceptical about superlatives.

Yes right ... the safest. Especially, for our children and their children. For
everybody who's a proponent of nuclear: If it is so save, why can't you get
one insurance company to insure a plant against accidents? And what do we do
with the waste? How do we deal it? How do we make it clear for coming
civilizations that they are not supposed to dig there etc. as the the waste
will stay hazardous for 100,000 years?

Please watch: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary)>

Is there any other way to make electricity that puts that high of a burden on
coming generations? Maybe I'm totally off, yet can effects from
coal/water/wind/sun power plants kill people 100 years after they been shut
down?

~~~
asharp
Sure. Global warming can kill people for tens of thousands of years to come.

Newer processes produce no fission products with a half life > 100y.
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle)
Proper reprocessing can dramatically reduce the amount of waste produced, and
the toxicity therein.

Just generally, but why would you expect insuring a nuclear plant to be any
more painful then insuring a pesticide plant/etc? A leaky pesticide plant can
easily wipe a town off the map. A leaky dam can wash away a city with ease.

I mean if you screw up your shale oil extraction you can end up with
oil/natural gas leaking in to groundwater for hundreds of k's. Similarly with
a burst dam at a gold mine, or....

There are large numbers of things that can cause massive ecological damage. A
good number of them are that bad that they arn't ever really reported:
[http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-
bp-...](http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-bp-exxon-
valdez-catastrophes/) as they continue on for years. It's just that some of
them are easier to use to sell papers then others.

~~~
kgarten
How's solar and wind power contributing to global warming? Even new, very
expensive coal plants are not contributing to global warming :) See:
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pump...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pumpe_power_station)

Thorium sounds great, can you tell me how many of the current power plants the
new ones planed in the US. will use Thorium? Could not find this information.
Is there some plan for proper reprocessing?

I can just talk for Germany, as I'm unfamiliar with the situation in the US or
elsewhere. In G. nuclear power plants are not insured, because no insurance
company takes the risk. Pesticide plants however are insured and have to pay a
lot for their potential risk. So in G. the nuclear power industry gets the
profits whereas the risks are shouldered by the citizens (and their
ancestors).

------
grammaton
It seems to me like Nuclear is the safest form of energy in the short term -
very few people die per gigawatt hour, if you will. But in the long term I'm
still not entirely convinced - we've only had nuclear power for a few decades,
but the waste is going to stick around for a lot longer than that, so calling
it "safe" on the basis of a very small amount of data relative to the whole
time we'll be affected by them seems...premature.

That said, we could solve a lot of the problems - and even get rid of existing
waste - by switching to newer reactor designs that are, among other things,
much safer.

Fat chance of that happening, at least in this country. We're just to firmly
wed to what is essentially a generation of outdated reactor designs.

------
lispm
Yeah, currently the spent fuel is piling up.

You need one a more large reprocessing sites and one or more storage sites.

Currently the nuclear industry is running without it.

------
jorangreef
I was at a physics lecture about Fukushima given two weeks ago at the
University of Cape Town. Here are some facts you may or may not know:

1\. The event of a serious nuclear catastrophe is 1 in every 10000 years per
nuclear plant.

2\. There are between 400-500 nuclear plants in the world.

3\. That means we can expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 20 years.

4\. When these events happen, the consequences last forever, it takes tens of
thousands of years for the land to recover.

5\. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays
constant (at 500), we would have at least 25 city-sized exclusion zones around
the world.

6\. These numbers only include nuclear power plants, they don't include
nuclear subs, warheads etc.

7\. These numbers exclude future advances in nuclear reliability though they
may only be asymptotic (Pareto). Most of the advances have likely been made
already.

8\. If we were to increase our nuclear power output, so as to be less reliant
on coal, they reckon we would need to double the number of nuclear power
plants.

9\. That means we can now expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 10 years.

10\. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays
constant (at 1000), we would have at least 50 city-sized exclusion zones
around the world.

11\. When a Chernobyl or worse happens, the fallout covers entire continents,
leading to a number of indirectly attributable deaths from thyroid cancer and
other cancers.

12\. These probabilities are based on pure physics, they do not factor in
negligence on the part of humans, tiredness, lack of funding, depreciation of
plant, government intervention, mismanagement etc. For instance in South
Africa, at the Koeberg nuclear plant, a loose bolt accidentally destroyed a
power generator, and last year in September, 91 workers were accidentally
exposed to very low doses of radiation (this was not widely reported to the
media, and it is not clear that an investigation was ever conducted into the
matter).

13\. Coal plants and mining plants leak radiation on a daily basis.

14\. Our parents teach us not to play with fire. Yet fire, when handled with
respect and care, is a powerful technology.

15\. Nuclear power, is also a fire, and a powerful technology, but it is an
"eternal" fire. When a nuclear disaster occurs, the consequences are forever.

16\. It is a question of asymmetric odds. The event of a disaster is remote.
It is so remote that the apparatus of our human mind finds it difficult to
comprehend. These events do happen, and when they do, they must be amortized
over thousands of generations.

17\. Only a fool would play Russian roulette at 6-1 odds. Long Term Capital
Management included minds of Nobel Prize calibre, yet they played it with
better odds and lost. Then they tried again under a different name and lost.
That didn't stop them from trying yet a third time:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management>

18\. LTCM played the game of asymmetric odds on behalf of a fund of investors.
Are we prepared to play it on behalf of generations? Even thousands of
generations yet to be born? Do we have the right?

18\. If it were a question of pure physics, then Nuclear power may appear to
be safe and controllable. But it is also a question of people, of incentives,
business deals, governments, and of consequences over future generations for
which we have no right to take responsibility. We need a safe and simple power
(or a combination of these).

19\. The trouble with Nuclear power (and I say this as someone who was once a
naive supporter) is that there are too many variables. There are hundreds of
variables within the realm of physics and there are hundreds more outside. We
know from other disciplines, that humans (no matter how smart) are simply just
not good enough at controlling variables like that.

20\. We cannot trust our models to control these things for us. Some models
are more useful than others, but ultimately our models fail, whether they be
Newtonian physics, or Black Scholes, that is what makes them models, they are
approximations of the data that we have at hand. The question is whether we
can deal with the situations that arise when our models fail us. A financial
meltdown? A plane crash? A destruction of a city for tens of thousands of
years?

------
lispm
I'm from Germany and I'm supporting our move to 100% renewable electricity
production by 2050 or earlier.

It will be interesting to see what the US does.

Let's say coal and gas are much more dangerous than nuclear and nuclear is the
way to go.

Let's also say renewables is not a way to go, because many people die from
erecting wind mills, bio mass plants and solar panels. Chemicals for solar
panel production are dirty and rare earth minerals need to be mined, too.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation>

Currently 20% of electricity in the US is generated with nuclear power
stations. There are around 100 in operations. Many of them are extremely old
and some even sit in dangerous regions with earth quakes. Let's say 20 of them
have to be shutdown soon.

68% of the electricity are provided by coal (45%) and gas (23%) power plants.
That is 3.4 times more electricity.

Now the US is going to replace the dangerous and dirty coal and gas with
nuclear.

So you need around new 250 nuclear reactors to phase out coal and gas. Maybe
less, because newer nuclear reactors generate more electricity. Maybe more,
because the electricity demand may rise.

Let's say a nuclear power plant and its direct infrastructure will cost around
5 billion a piece, that would be 1.25 trillion $. That sounds much, but given
that the US spends a trillion a year on 'defense', it might not be much. May
be the price will go down with production of 100 and more reactors.

Given that the political parties may want to have small government, the
majority of the nuclear reactors will have to be financed and operated by
companies.

So the tasks are:

* find a way to finance one or two trillion dollars

* decide and standardize on a new reactor design with inherent safety

* build up companies who will plan, build and operate the nuclear reactors

* find places for 250 new reactors (in addition to the existing 100)

* build, say, three reprocessing plants for those

* build, say, three breeder reactors

* find, say, three storage sites for nuclear waste

* get mining and an fuel enrichment going

The result would be about 85% electricity production with nuclear reactors and
complete phase out of gas and coal power plants.

What is the time scale for this? The full development of a new type of reactor
can be done in, say, 10 years. Add dealing with regulations, tests, ... - one
may need 20 years. Let's be optimistic and say ten. A new reprocessing plant,
would need, say, 10 years. A new storage site, say, 30 years.

So in the first ten years no reactor would be ready. That's pessimistic, since
there might be reactor designs that can be built earlier - it is optimistic,
since a really new design may need more time. Also the US has not built
commercial reactors for some time, so there is some time needed to get this
going again.

* 1st. decade, zero power plants

* 2nd. decade, ten power plants + a reprocessing site

* 3rd. decade, thirty power plants + another reprocessing site

* 4th decade, fifty new power plants + another reprocessing site, plus a new storage site

* 5th decade, 100 new power plants + a new storage site

* 6th decade, 100 new power plants

Result: new 290 nuclear power plants, 3 reprocessing sites, and two long term
storage sites.

This would also allow to shut down some of the older ones.

These are just assumptions.

That's basically what France did, now scaled to the US. France has 65 million
people and less electricity usage per person. The US is now at 300+ Million
people. That's around 4.5 times more. France operates around 50 nuclear power
plants. So, 350 in total in the US needed would be a good assumption (given
some constraints, like that France is very centralized and many people live
around Paris). France also has a shrinking population, where the US is still
growing - last I looked.

~~~
TillE
> 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier

Do you know anywhere I could read about the specific plans for this? I assume
lots more wind turbines are a big part of it.

I buy green power from Vattenfall, and I know at the moment most of it is
hydroelectric imported from Norway.

~~~
lispm
If you can read German you find it here:

<http://www.uba.de/uba-info-medien-e/3997.html>

and here:

<http://www.umweltdaten.de/publikationen/fpdf-l/3997.pdf>

~~~
TillE
Perfect! I live in Germany, but I'm not a citizen, so my political engagement
is usually somewhat limited.

I'll take a closer look later, but the short answer seems to be "everything".
Mostly solar everywhere and wind in the countryside and offshore, but also
hydro, geothermal, and biomass.

------
phlux
What is difficult to reconcile is that we all know that nuclear meltdowns are
catastrophic events, that the resultant fallout/radioactive contamination is
utterly horrible.

Yet it seems that we dont build reactors with the types of failsafe systems
that truly are needed should meltdown occur.

Obviously this reactor is old, and was not built during a time when we really
knew what a meltdown looked like in real life. After Chernobyl, and now
Fukishima, I think we really really really need to look at what the failsafe
systems, containment, backup cooling and other system requirements really need
to be.

Should we build reactors only in D.U.M.B. like facilities? Should we build
them in old open-pit mines, such that they could be entombed properly.

Have we put enough research into containment facilities such that their
structures _will not_ melt?

I know that these faciliies have multiple backups, but clearly even then we
can have situations where they dont work. Yes, this was a trifecta of
incredibly fantastic circumstance, but it still happened and we are now
dealing with a shitstorm.

Watching the documentary last night about how the earthquake dropped the
coastline of japan upto 1 meter in elevation resulting in the sea-walls being
1 meter less than the tsunami - and the fact that clearly we know that
tsunamis _would_ occur there - placing a _6_ reactor facility _ON THE COAST
LINE_ seems pretty damn stupid at this point.

It's like "Nuclear energy is the safest energy there is, until its not!"

I am all for nuclear -- but its current incarnation is rife with the
traditional corrupt bullshit that plagues all other human endeavors; politics.

Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to
plan, produce and protect the worlds energy?

If we had an organization whose sole charter was to produce energy, and was
funded based on the economies of all the worlds countries - and energy was
metered out to all countries in a responsible way -- we could be much further
along to becoming a unified space-faring race....

/rant

~~~
philwelch
_Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to
plan, produce and protect the worlds energy?_

Large parts of the world actually tried this, not just for their energy needs
but for all other goods and services, too. It doesn't actually work that way
in reality.

~~~
phlux
I understand. However - I am curious - energy is the fundamental resource we
now are 100% dependent upon for survival. Obviously the energy industry knows
this , thus the fact that they have successfully staged a coup on global
politics.

I do find it interesting though, that there is not really any
apolitical/civilian organizations that seek to guide/set/create global energy
policy. I mean _real_ apolitical orgs - not a shill think-tank such as CFR BS.

God I'm getting cynical.

