The brain is not designed to understand statistics. Nuclear accidents are theatrical and fun, and therefore get a lot of play on the media when they happen. Look no further than the media circus surrounding Fukushima to confirm.
Everybody is scared to death of Sharks, yet sharks killed only 1 person in the US last year. Cows killed 20, 75% of which were deliberate attacks, but almost no one is afraid of a Cow.
Meanwhile 17,775 people died in traffic accidents, yet people jump in cars like it's routine. You're literally 17,000% more likely to die in your own car than you are by a shark, but again, brains don't understand that.
People and their egos crave control. With something like driving, you feel at least somewhat in control of your own destiny. Coming face to face with a shark does not afford the same sense, same with an unstoppable chain reaction occurring deep in a nuclear reactor and the ensuing fallout.
Plus, our reptile brains has deeply ingrained fear of wild animals, cars are too new invention to be able to affect our instinct the same way sharks do.
You're correct, but there's only been a few failures like that in the entire history of Nuclear energy, one of which was a ridiculous test far beyond the scope of logic and reason (Chernobyl), one of which was a completely safe and designed failure that killed no one and did nearly nothing in terms of actual damage (3 Mile Island) and one that was the result of a plant being hit in the exact wrong spot by a natural event that it had not been designed to withstand in the first place, and despite that, still failed in a largely predictable and contained way.
And not to mention, the much wider used coal plants and natural gas plants kill way more people in a lot less theatrical ways, largely through disease of the lungs and skin. Again though watching someone die of black lung isn't nearly as interesting as watching someone die of radiation sickness, so we don't hear about it.
You may be on to something. Have we checked how far North Korea is able to launch sharks and cars? /s I think nuclear can't be compared to cars and sharks.
Where are you getting these numbers? Particularly the cow one (deliberate killings only).
Generally intrigued.
> yet people jump in cars like it's routine.
It is routine. Time spent driving is much, much, much higher than time spent swimming near sharks. So...
My brain understands that if I refused to go skydiving, then I can not die from a skydiving accident. Which is about as likely as going for a swim instead of a drive to get to work.
I've encountered thousands of cars today. I've yet to encounter a single shark in decades. I'd expect very high danger in the presence of a shark. I've not yet been injured by all the cars I've seen in my life.
People understanding of stats is fine. They understand that the pre-requisite to being attacked by a shark is super-extremely low. That does not make sharks safe. I'll put my hand on the hood of a car any day instead of on a shark.
Your reasoning about Fukushima shows the same kind of problem: it's because of all the urgent actions after the accident that there's not been more consequences. Your argument would show that a house on fire is not dangerous because after people were evacuated, no one died of burning. It's the evacualtion of of a fire that saves life, it's not the lack of danger of a blazing inferno.
Oh I love that analogy, I thought I would figure out where it came from. Most people reference the times story [1] which talks about 20 cows a year, however that story references a CDC study [2] which talks about 21 cows over 5 years. Which makes it actually about 4 people a year (average) being killed by cows. Which is still more than death by Sharks at about 1 every other year on average according to [3].
[1] "The image of cows as placid, gentle creatures is a city slicker’s fantasy, judging from an article published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States." --
https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/dangerous-co...
[2] "A total of 21 deaths met the case definition for 2003--2008 (Table 1). Four fatalities occurred in 2003, two in 2004, six in 2005, and three each year during 2006--2008." -- https://www.cdc.gov/mmWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5829a2.htm
On the other hand, IIRC nuclear has a reverse bell curve, where it's most dangerous at the very start and end of its' lifetime. And if you take nuclear plants that are not quite at the end of their lifetime, then average the deaths over their last 40 years, and compare that average to solar (the majority of which are 3 years old or less - at the start of their lifetime), then you can make nuclear appear an order of magnitude safer than they actually are.
People don't handle statistics well, but statistics are also easily manipulated and therefore potentially completely unreliable (Mark Twain quote here). It's not quite as simple as "people need to listen to the statistics".
Also, people go to the beach way less often than they go near roads. If most people only go to the beach 1 day a year and go on roads every day, then it's more like "you're 50x more likely to die by car than by shark". That's a far cry from 17000x.
That said, I've always thought that stat could be abused to push car safety - "Imagine you're attacked by a shark - now, cars are like that but TIMES FIFTY! Drive safe, look both ways, etc".
This has been known for a long time in informed circles.
The problems with nuclear are waste and that we use vastly outdated designs and fuel sources.
Nuclear is not perfect, but we should not buy into a perfection fallacy when looking to get away from fossil fuels.
Solar is a better long term bet but a good progressive nuclear strategy that added a handful of small modern reactors could be massively complementary to it.
Waste is a miniscule problem. Put it in the ground. Or, perhaps, in the side of a mountain...
The only reason waste is an issue in the United States is that the Congress decided that nuclear waste repositories have to last for 10,000 years uninterrupted. As far as we know this is just about impossible. 10 millenia ago we were in the caves.
Placed at the bottom of a pool, it's perfectly safe. This is a solved problem. The issue is political (especially from uneducated NIMBYs) rather than technical.
What a flawed comparison. Take the water from the pool and drink it and give it your livestock to drink and water your plants with it and see how that works out over the span of a few decades.
Is it the safest when projecting for increased usage? While also taking into account modern threat vectors to a nuclear plant? I have no idea, just thinking out loud.
"In 2011 the United States mined 9% of the uranium consumed by its nuclear power plants.[7] The remainder was imported, principally from Russia and Kazakhstan (38%), Canada, and Australia.[8][9][10] Although uranium production has declined to low levels, the United States has the fourth-largest uranium resource in the world, behind Australia, Canada, and Kazakhstan.[9]"
Major imports into the US come from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, and Russia. Namibia used to be a bigger import source country, but it's apparently dropped off in recent years.
All the energy sources in this article except for nuclear are horrible for our environment and for our health. The important question is what do we replace them with. And if that is the important question, what good is this article if it shows only one solution, explicitly not comparing it with the other solutions?
Chernobyl: 56 direct deaths, estimated 4000 killed by cancer caused by it, economic damage: $235b
Radiation of the disaster still detectable all over Europe.
Fukushima: 6 dead, estimate of 1600 more people killed indirectly, economic damage so far: between $10b and $100b
Radiation detectable on California beaches.
No solution for the radioactive waste (other than dumping it into the pacific where it can mingle with the Great Pacific Garbage patch)
FUCK energy sources that are capable of doing that.
FUCK these opinion pieces.
Can anyone explain to me why "deaths/tWh" is even a meaningful measure?
Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.
I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.
Also, why did they leave away hydro, water and wind power in those "deaths per x" charts?
Yes, however this assumes that number of deaths of any technology would linearly scale with its energy output.
e.g. if I built n times more wind turbines to match the energy output of nuclear energy then, according to this measure, I would also get n times the number of wind-power-related deaths.
I see no basis for that assumption, especially as nuclear energy has known risks that e.g. wind power doesn't.
Do you think coal mining deaths should not be counted if they occur 200 miles away from the power station the mine supplies? What about if the deaths occurred a continent away?
I'm pretty sure hydroelectric would actually win statistics 1, 3, and 4 "hands down". It'd also be a serious contender for 2 and 6.
This is of course excluding coal, which I'm 92% sure makes even hydroelectric (let alone nuclear) look like a peaceful meadow full of fairies and butterflies by comparison.
All I can say is I'd rather be spending time catching fish on a lake created by a hydroelectric system, then cooking those fish at night in the camp site by the lake, than doing the same anywhere inside the Chernobyl 30 km Exclusion Zone or the Fukushima 20 km Exclusion Zone.
If it's fishing you want, the water reservoirs for nuclear power plants make for good spots. I used to live over by the Rancho Seco plant, and its backup water reservoir (and the surrounding land) is still maintained as a public park even decades after the plant shut down (and was maintained as such even when the plant was operational, from what I understand). Good trout over there.
The Chernobyl 30 km Exclusion Zone is actually not that bad, apart from the slight radioactivity. Since there's no human interference, it's essentially a sanctuary for local wildlife.
"Win" was (I'm guessing) used in a negative context to mean "worse", so I used it in a similar way. Kind of like how Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot tend to "win" competitions for murdering the most people.
How is it skewed? It's a cost-benefit analysis. tWh is the benefit, deaths are the safety cost. In other words, if your country needs X amount of power, and you know the deaths/tWh for each energy source, then you can figure out how many people would die if your country used that energy source to produce its power.
Relevantly, some nuclear plants are paired with hydro schemes, in order to make the flat output of nuclear plants economically match the bumpy daytime peak of consumer demand.
The reason why many nuclear plants are colocated with hydroelectric dams is that the dam is good source for cooling water in 3rd cooling loop and that it is good backup power source for black start of the nuclear plant. Ability of nuclear plant to scale its output power according to demand is usually significantly higher than of hydro.
I'm only aware of two deaths specifically caused by wind power, when two engineers were caught on top of one when it caught fire. It's likely such a negligible number that it wouldn't even show up on the graph.
Wikipedia's stats on energy production fatalities have wind being pretty decent, at 150 deaths per PWh (rooftop solar is 440, US hydro is 5, US nuclear is 0.01, and fossil fuels are in the thousands), but if the number is negligible it's only because wind power itself is negligible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
> I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.
This is a bad analogy. A good analogy would be: if you had to travel 1000 miles, it would be safer to do it by car than on foot because car is safer per mile travelled.
It's meaningful because it provides a rational basis for comparing the risk of various power sources. It's the same as comparing deaths/mile to evaluate self-driving cars.
People are overwhelmingly bad at risk assessment, which is why one can be anti-nuclear and afraid of terrorist attacks (both lower risk), while happily driving to work at a coal mine (both higher risk).
Terawatt-hours are a direct measurement of what we want from an energy source, namely, energy. The equivalent for transportation would be deaths/mile, which is indeed a commonly used metric of transportation safety. Deaths/TWh is very meaningful.
It's not a perfect measurement, as Nuclear is similar to solar in that it provides power to it's own schedule. Normally this will mean gas or coal being throttled below their capacity. It's possible that this affects their deaths/TWh negatively, though perhaps not as maybe the sourcing of the fuel is the big problem with those plants, but e.g. if it's 5 people who die building the nuclear and gas plant, and then the gas plant throttles down overnight because the nuclear plant can't, then the nuclear plant wins unfairly.
> Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.
Erm, wtf? The world's energy requirements are a more-or-less fixed number of tWh, no? Like, if 1 nuclear reactor produces as much energy as 10000 wind turbines, comparing the deaths that would be caused by 1 reactor to the deaths that would be caused by 10000 turbines seems like the obviously correct comparison to make.
It's the absolute opposite of skewed. It's fair and representative. If a country needs XX TWh/year, this is exactly how many deaths will be caused by the various production methods.
You car analogy is on the other hand completely wrong: the death/HP is a meaningless indicator. How about deaths per mile travelled? Check out the values at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which has a section for traveling (named Additional)
I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history.
We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.
We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.
>I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history.
It's more or less ensured that we won't be in any shape to record histories sooner rather than later.
Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market®ulations for nuclear were set up.
Government largely financed it and insures it.
The large scale, the monopolistic businesses and the government centric energy politics made it ideal for corruption. Remember, Fukushima was claimed to be fully save after inspections, just before the accident happened, which destroyed several reactors.
The investment into nuclear energy was a political decision. Every further investment into nuclear is a political decision. The 'small modern reactors' are mostly funded by government and the users are mostly military. The military is already mostly the only user of small reactors: nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Now we see other players which favor other energy politics (like the current US President who favors fossil fuels like coal, because his voters want jobs in the coal industry).
Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
Your standard of safety does not sound appropriate for nuclear reactors. And, the decision not to spend the money to make Fukushima safer may well have been a craven, if not corrupt, one. TEPCO has been pretty sleazy ever since the accident.
> In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres respectively, both induced by magnitude 7.7 earthquakes. The June 1896 earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.3 produced a tsunami with run-up height of 38 metres in Tohoku region, killing more than 27,000 people.
This risk needs to be addressed. That many people were killed by a tsunami is a catastrophe. But one would also like to have a stable energy system that does not go down like that and creates a huge problem (financial, technological, human, ...) for several decades.
The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Reactors were claimed save, which in a single event were totally wrecked. We are not talking about a single problem, but multiple problems (failing electricity backups, failing outside electricity, exploding buildings, ...), design mistakes (fuel is difficult to reach) and problems generated by running these reactors (like the amount of spent fuel on-site which needs lots of electricity for cooling).
> The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption.
Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen.
These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed [0].
The solution? Just "regulate" that in the case of emergency cooling the cooling water needs to be pre-heated, so the temperature shock doesn't break the pressure vessel.
Whatever could go wrong with that approach? I guess nobody can imagine a scenario in which the reactor would need massive cooling but the surrounding infrastructure is destroyed and the water can't be pre-heated, what happens then?
Nobody knows and I'd be really surprised if anybody, in a position of responsibility, has even thought that far about this whole mess. It rather feels like they are operating on the principle of "Let's just hope this never happens instead of planning for what we gonna do when it happens and set resources aside".
New inspection tools showed micro fissures. The power plant was stopped as a precaution.
Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted. Still extra security measures are set, just in case.
To me this just shows that the security is taken seriously. Why is the public opinion so scared about such an exemplary event?
> Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted.
Sorry but that's plain and simply wrong, you are vastly misrepresenting the situation and chain of events.
These micro-fractures are not part of the design and they are evolving [0], documentation of the manufacturing can't be found and it's assumed the manufacturer made them vanish on purpose to hide the fact that cheaper materials had been used to build, leading to the fractures.
These reactors have been controversial for years, they've been taken offline and online many times to look for new fractures and they keep finding new ones, fractures which shouldn't even be there in the first place.
It's amazing how you try to turn this into an "everything is safe, there's no reason to be worried, it was always broken!" even tho everything about this screams "you better be worried" and the neighboring German states (and the Dutch) are already hoarding Iodine tablets [1].
Even the Belgians themselves handed them out to their population, tho they used ISIS as a scapegoat at that time [2]
We are talking about the pressure vessel here, not some unimportant plumping part on some auxiliary system, and they just keep on watching as more fractures build up in there. Where do you think this is gonna lead? The warning signs can't get any worse than this considering these reactors are also running past their original life time.
Your own post confirms my assertion that the magnitude 9 earthquake was an exceedingly rare event and did not necessarily need to be designed for. It had been at least one hundred years since the last earthquake of that magnitude. Same for a >10 meter tsunami.
Large scale disasters almost always present as a conglomerate of smaller problems; multiple failures during 100-500 year disasters once again do not indicate poor safety standards and/or corruption.
Safety design is expensive, and there is always a balance between cost and risk, in literally everything that we as humans do, individually and collectively. Hindsight alone is not enough to bill this reactor as unsafe. There are thousands of BWRs operating globally without incident, and they have been for decades. It is ignorant to presume that they are all time bombs.
Edit: I'd like to kindly remind the community that down votes are not for communicating disagreement.
How can you say it was safe with a straight face when it clearly wasn't? That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
Well, I guess it's because I would consider my car extremely safe, with something stupid like 12 airbags, active brake assist, active collision prevention, it will even call for help automatically after an accident, without any input from me. Yet obviously it's not safe if it gets hit by a truck going 80mph, and it's not an impossible scenario. If they made fukishima stronger to withstand larger tsunamis, it could still be destroyed by an even larger one. It was "safe" within certain parameters.
We can argue that those parameters were wrong, but that's a different discussion.
Lets take your car that is smashed, upside-down in a ditch.
When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens. Some vehicles have such safety precautions, but only when the situation seems to warrant it (a Jeep, for example).
The nuclear plant was the same. It was safe when it was built, only it wasn't designed to handle that magnitude of earthquake because that strength is rare, especially for that area. This is despite designing it to withstand stronger than ever recorded earthquakes. Sure, afterwards the plant was unsafe, but so are many cars after accidents.
Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds.
The region got so small radiation dose it is already basically harmless ... Decontamination efforts will make it pass even irrational radiation safety levels within 10-20 years. "hundreds" of years is therefore stupid hyperbole.
Public has not accepted nuclear risks because it is ridiculously misinformed. Don't spread pointless fearmongering, please.
> Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds.
By official counts, 34 killed directly in the evacuation, 573 total, including indirectly, due to the disaster,and estimates are even with the evacuation, additional long-term cancer deaths due to the release could be in the 100+ range as well.
> In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens.
Except that cars now days do undergo rollover tests and are required to support 3x their weight when upside down.
> Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
I just read that some experts believe the standard should be increased to 4x. My previous assumption about my safety was a bit off, I am safe, but I could be safer.
>That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
I'd argue it's more like saying your car is safe when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
It is safe. The safest minivan is fantastically safe. Then it smashes into a semi truck at 80 mph and everyone dies. It was still a safe car, when compared to other cars.
That's a perfectly valid and logical conclusion, and indeed there are many big companies you've heard of (including Waymo, Tesla, Uber, and many conventional auto manufacturers) who are working on precisely that.
Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be.
"Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be."
You have it exactly backwards. Manually operated nuclear plants will evolve into fully automated, completely safe designs. A very similar approach to self-driving cars.
Major tsunamis in Japan aren't rare at all, they've occured multiple times in the past century. They also don't happen to follow a fixed time schedule.
If a built you a house, following all the protocols for safety, right next to an active volcano, would you consider it safe?
Well, would be sufficiently safe. Just not in Fukushima.
It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok.
Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis.
Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generators brought by trucks due to some electrical incompatibility.
Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
And how do you argue about the Diablo "safety" then? It's 6m above sea level, near a major fault line, in fact the only fault in the ring of fire which didn't go off yet in the last decade, and it's critical near to a major technical hub which will be destroyed for hundreds of years if the fault goes off, on land or at sea.
> Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
That's really where you want to put the blame? Don't you think that's a bit dishonest?
Nobody is stopping the operators of plants from modernizing plants, nobody except the realities of economics.
Don't kid yourself: If they can keep on running reactors with the least possible effort they will do so because everything related to nuclear involves massive investment costs.
If you had the choice between spending several billion of dollars on modernizing a plant, which you've already amortized, or NOT spending several billion dollars while still making massive profits from the plant, which of these two is the more likely thing to happen? Greed always wins out.
It's not like plant operators want to modernize their plants and are being stopped by protests, nobody is stopping them from modernizing except for their own economic bottom line.
So is it really economically at that point? Is developing, prototyping and building a next gen reactor worth the money? Do we even know how much it would take to account for other 1-in-100 year risks? Is it worth it over better solar/wind? Even this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-...
I think the answers are clearly, no, no, no, and fuck no. We should be spending money on better solar, wind, having a distributed energy grid, and fusion. Not on a technology that is equivalent to diesel at this point, and something that will kill us.
>It was developed out of government driven military technology
That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.
Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet.
PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.
"Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons."
Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
The UK had 26 of these Magnox reactors for electricity production. These nuclear reactors were coming out of military technology and some of them were built and operated for dual use: Plutonium production and energy production.
The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
That was essentially a demonstration plant. Note that it only ran for six years, only produced 1,926 kg of plutonium over its entire lifespan, and was shut down because producing plutonium from spent fuel from commercial power reactors proved to be uneconomic.
2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.
It's another example of a reactor designed to produce electricity and plutionium. North Korea a;so operated a smaller 5 MWe reactor creating electricity for a town and plutonium for their weapons program.
It's a reactor designed to produce large amounts of plutonium. Any reactor produces some amount of energy, nuclear reactions are famous for their energy creation.
>But not electricity. For that a power plant has also turbines, generators, etc., ...
Yes,but if you don't do that, you're just wasting energy. The US realized that, which is why they added electricity generation to the N Reactor. Both were still designed to create plutonium, and would not be built without the aim of nuclear weapons.
It's like saying we grow the same corn for the edible part and for biomass. While technically true, the edible part is driving the production.
In terms of manufacture, I agree. Further, Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years so we don't currently need anything in the way of production. So, yes direct production was mostly from dedicated reactors.
However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach.
>Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons.
ARPANET was designed, built, and operated to enable the exchange of information in the face of nuclear annihilation of cities.
The big famous radio dish on top of the hill behind Stanford and the signals research that went into it was placed there to look for anti-ICBM radar signals bouncing off of the moon from Russia.
We are standing on a mountain of tech based on research driven by the cold war. Nuclear energy is no different.
My favorite bit is, the first customer & funding grant of the transistor was for a particular application that needed something far more resilient to vibration, temperature, etc than vacuum tubes - ICBM's.
Well most of the internet and internet companies continue to exist because of military tech, and military strategy. It turns out the internet is a wonderful tool for psy-ops, and social influence, a la Arab Springs. Even Tor, and decentralization technologies are/were military tools.
Come on, network communication and nuclear energy are different planets. I kinda agree that without national plants things might have been better, but these kinds of efforts and risks cannot exist outside of govt for a while.
It will take some guys to figure out MSR designs if possible, and then they'll be small and safe enough to access the private market.
It's a bit different when you use it for terrorbombing not one, but two cities - to make sure the design works.
I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.
That is assuming Hiroshima and Nagasaki sped up the process of surrender (and probably assuming that most of that million of lives would have been lost to firebombing civilian targets). I don't think the point is unclear - but it could very well be wrong.
I don't think alternate-history fables is much of a defense for war crimes, however.
You might hold that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done to speed up Japan's surrender, and/or that they did speed up Japan's surrender by a meaningful amount. Further, you might argue that somehow two bombs was meaningfully better than one for this purpose.
From historical record, I'd say it's more likely Japan would've surrendered quickly either way - and that the motivation was more on establishing the USA as a superpower for the post-war era.
Either way, I think it's hard to argue that dropping of nuclear bombs on cities was done "for the sake of their people". After all, no-one was forcing the US to continue the war in the Pacific - or to capture Japan. The US could have sought a cease-fire and withdrawn to Hawaii or similar earlier borders. If the goal was to "save lives".
Yet the Japanese use/used the crap out of nuclear. You'd think they of all people would want nothing to do with it. At the end of the day it's all about dollars.
The Japanese people do largely want nothing to do with nuclear energy. Opposition to it still triggers some of their largest scale protests in a country that does everything to shy away from this kind of unrest.
But the political reality is that Japan is a client state of the US empire and the base of its operations in SE Asia. It's not functionally a democracy. The people who made money off of it were the alliance of conservative politicians and organized crime, backed by the CIA, who brought it to the country in the first place.
On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout.
And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly.
"And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly."
As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared.
This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.
That has nothing to do with the nonsense that we should avoid using something powerful or dangerous simply because our human senses are not equipped to detect it. You are literally surrounded by toxicity in modern materials, power transmission, and machinery. 110 volts is enough to arc and create ozone. Basements can accumulate radon. Cooking can release toxic gasses. These are not reasons alone to avoid modern conveniences.
Humans can detect CO2. An elevated level of CO2 makes you feel out of breath. Reducing O2 has no impact other than you pass out.
If you use fire, the "invisible" risks are oxygen deprivation or monoxide poisoning. You will be quite aware that something is wrong when there is too much CO2.
I'm more afraid of having nuclear power plants now that we no longer have a thriving industry to support innovation and technological progress in the field. From my understanding, we stopped innovating in fission power plant design decades ago.
I bet Fukushima was pretty damn safe, maybe one of the best nuclear power plants designed. The best designs cannot account for everything. There is always a risk of an accident, and you need consider not just accidental but intentional mishaps (dirty bombs).
Very low risk of something happening is not the same is the damaged caused if that risk becomes a reality.
Fukushima was a boiling water reactor, which is not a good design. A good design would be passively safe, which more or less means that you can turn off the plant and walk away without a disaster occurring.
Yes. Pressurized water reactors are very old, they were developed around the same time as boiling water reactors, in the 50s.
Their superior safety has been known for a long time as well, which is why all 58 French reactors active today are PWRs (and most of those in the US are as well).
That being said, it is still probably a bad idea to put a power plant in a place which is known to be exposed to tsunami...
I believe we had molten salt prototypes already at that time. If that design were favoured, instead of pressurised water, I bet it would have been pretty damn safe.
I believe they achieved relatively high standards despite the lack of funds anyway. (By the way, molten salt is coming back, but mostly lack the funding necessary to prototype bigger reactors.)
"Good" design is ill defined. The fact that a design is riskier than an alternative does not immediately make it worse. Especially when safety can be engineered to arbitrary standards with enough money.
> Especially when safety can be engineered to arbitrary standards with enough money.
There is not 'enough money'. If a reactor shows cracks in the steel in critical places, preventing this upfront might not be technologically possible and afterwards repairing might also be so expensive, that it economically makes no sense.
The big problem: if there is a technical problem, it is politically a very tough decision to close it, because of the costs involved (loss of profits from selling electricity, costs of decommissioning, costs of replacement, ...). Thus a more or less clear need to shutdown the reactor because of technical unfitness will conflict with financial interests and the scale of the money involved makes it worse.
I live pretty close to the San Onofre Nuclear station. They made some upgrades planned for 20 years of operation in 2010, and ended up shutting down the reactor due to premature wear in 2012, and are now planning to decommission the station. I'd be more worried about the financial concerns as an excuse to continue operating an unsafe station if I wasn't seeing the opposite happening in my own back yard right now.
The fact that a reactor may be failing after decades of use does not make it a poor design.
One optimizes for longevity during design, as well as other factors which cost money. It may have, for example, been cheaper to construct, with a strict lifetime after which it would be taken down."Good design" is almost always subjective.
That politics drive nuclear operators to maintain plants past their lifetimes does not indicate poor engineering.
> I bet Fukushima was pretty damn safe, maybe one of the best nuclear power plants designed.
While it was an okay plant, they'd actually been warned about the emergency cooling system as early as 1967. Also, they ignored a 2008 study saying that their plant was vulnerable to tsunamis. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found that all the causes of the accident were foreseeable prior to 2011.
> The best designs cannot account for everything.
The common factor in nuclear accidents so far has been operator error, and it's true the best designs cannot completely account for that.
The best designs can remove hole categories of errors. Different reactor types can be passively save and carry virtually zero risk catastrophic failure.
What do you mean "politicization"? Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened. Then people were very afraid. These were real possibilities. Does anyone want to live near a nuclear power plant? Do you? I sure as hell would not. How can you twist fear of a disaster in "politicization"?
You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the risks of global warming and greenhouse gasses back in the heyday of nuclear power, i.e. the 1970's. The last nuclear power plant in the US was built in the 1970s, which was when the last major accident that happened in the US (3 mile Island). That's not even considering Chernobyl.
so what is the alternative in the meantime? Everyone breathing coal particles and many people dying of lung cancer before their time? How is the current energy production safe by anY standards? did you even read the article ?
It was a conscious decision of a particular US military official (an admiral, IIRC) to use 235U / Pu based process in atomic power generation projects, specifically to be able to generate Pu in large quantities should a need arise.
If Th-based processes were chosen, that cannot easily generate Pu, nuclear proliferation won't be such a hazard. It would have far-reaching political consequences. E.g. USA is strictly against the Iran's nuclear program specifically because it might help produce bomb-grade fissile material.
235U-based processes are also pretty inefficient: about 1% of the nuclear material is burned when the (very active) fuel needs another cycle of refinement. Known Th-bases processes produce somehow less-active waste, and can burn more of the fuel before refinement is necessary.
A number of new, quite a bit safer, nuclear projects aimed to burn 235U and the current stockpiles of nuclear waste exist. But due to the fear-mongering, and likely due to relatively low coal and oil prices, they have little chance to be implemented, at least, in a reasonably short term.
No, I won't mind living near a well-maintained nuclear plant. In fact, I lived ~90km from one for 20+ years. I would be much less happy to live next to a major coal-burning plant, since it produces rather noticeable levels of radioactive contamination during normal operation [1].
I don't want to live next to a nuclear power plant, but I would be fine with living near a dozen of them.
You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment. Further, the sole large power plant in an area is automatically a military target, whereas if the same capacity were split across many facilities it becomes impractical to attack or control them all.
I'd love to see each municipality in the US above a certain population own and operate its own small reactor, using it to power the municipal utilities. But I do have a bit of a problem with a federal agency operating the only nuclear reactor in a 100-mile radius. It just ends up managed differently, becoming a political power center in addition to an electrical power center.
> You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment.
A higher number of reactors also means more chances that one of them fails because reactors that don't exist can't fail but those that do most certainly can.
As such the security gains, from infrastructure synergies, would have to be massive to actually be able to offset that.
The reactor that does not exist fails by releasing radioactive fly ash from the coal plant that was never shut down, because nothing was ever built to replace it. Don't discount substitution effects. Your argument would not put safety belts in cars, because the belt that was never installed cannot strangle or entrap its passenger.
Also, do you know of any reasons why the 1000th instance of a design might be less prone to failure than the 1st, or 10th?
Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles? There are many thousands of car door handles in use daily, such that all common failure modes have been seen, and then addressed in later manufactured models. The handle that fails can make the next handle made better able to avoid that specific failure mode.
You want things to fail just a little bit, but not enough to hurt anyone or cost too much money. If something fails, that means it isn't over-engineered for its intended purpose. And the failure point may then be examined to make the next design better, and improve upon existing maintenance strategies.
> The reactor that does not exist fails by releasing radioactive fly ash from the coal plant that was never shut down, because nothing was ever built to replace it. Don't discount substitution effects. Your argument would not put safety belts in cars, because the belt that was never installed cannot strangle or entrap its passenger.
That's a non-sequitur, there are alternatives besides coal just like there are more solutions to the problem than merely increasing energy production.
> Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles?
A car handle is only one piece of a bigger machine, one could argue it's actually rather unimportant because if your car handle fails your car still drives, as such I'm not sure that's actually a good example.
How many iterations did we have on cars, as a whole system, so far? Over a century of designing cars and how close are we to a car that never fails? Which should be a way easier task than trying to make nuclear reactor safe, we had more time for it and even way more need for it, yet we are still nowhere close to having our "perfect cars", as such I just don't see how "perfect nuclear" is anywhere in our reach.
> Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened.
Yeah, I'm surprised by how little attention this gets. A significant accident occurred that wasn't supposed to, and subsequent investigations showed that there were significant lapses, including from regulators. People can't be experts in nuclear plant design, construct, regulation, inspections, etc., so they need to be able to rely on the authorities in charge. When that trust is betrayed, it naturally has consequences. You can't just say to people, "Well, yeah, last time we told you to trust us we were completely wrong, but this time will be different!"
When problems happen that aren't supposed to happen, people are naturally going to be overly cautious and skeptical of future assurances. That's not an entirely unreasonable reaction.
Yes I do want to live next to a nuclear power plant. I miss my last house where I did, but I now work in a different state: it would be several hours every day of driving to live next to one.
Nuclear power plants are good neighbors: quiet and they pay a lot of taxes. Most of my neighbors when asked where the nuclear plant was pointed to the smokestacks on the coal power plant miles away.
The problem with nuclear energy is that a nuclear power plant isn't very different in concept from a nuclear bomb. Getting the latter from the former is a serious concern. Having the former accidentally turn into a dirty nuke (not a lot of force, but lots of fallout), is scarily easy. Just see 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl.
It is very different. You can't just make an atom bomb out of what's available at a nuclear plant. They're entirely different concepts requiting diffrrent materials.
Chernobyl was an outdated design known to be dangerous at the time it was made, and something like the Chernobyl incident can't happen on anything newer. A study found statistically insignificant rises in cancer rates from the 3 Mile incident.
I recommend the book Atomic Accidents, it's very informative and I believe it went over specifically why a nuclear plant can't just explode like an atom bomb or even really help you make one.
I think it's worthwhile to differentiate between a critical mass fission/fusion bomb and a dirty bomb. A dirty bomb can be made from anything radioactive coupled with a conventional explosive, since the goal is just to spread the radioactive material as widely as possible. Fission/fusion bombs (what we typically would consider as "atomic bombs") are, as you said, way harder to pull off. The general public definitely likes to conflate the two.
No, your average nuclear plant doesn't have the makings of an atom bomb. But countries that are running nuclear power plants have an obvious incentive to create enrichment facilities for their nuclear power. These facilities are similar to those that enrich further for a nuclear bomb. Several countries have achieved nuclear bombs this way.
Furthermore nuclear plants do not all work the same way. There are advocates of thorium nuclear plants, because thorium is a much more abundant fuel source that should be able to operate more cleanly than uranium. However those plants generate uranium-233 which can be potentially separated through chemical processes in plants that are a lot easier to hide than centrifuges used for enrichment.
Both ways, nuclear power can be a step on the way to nuclear proliferation.
The fact that you would reference TMI in reference to dirty bombs is extremely telling in that you have no idea what you're talking about. The average radiation exposure outside TMI compound was less that an airplane flight or x-ray. Bananas are literally more dangerous.
Perhaps someone dropped a banana. The average exposure was 8 millirem (equivalent to a chest X-ray), and the peak outside the facility was 100 millirem (average annual exposure).
Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable, the public was scared witless of the possibility that there was an exposure. As a result millions of people were left with the concern that they could get cancer decades down the road. This public fear is also the most important impact of a dirty nuclear bomb used as a terrorist weapon. Very few of people will get sick, and fewer still will die. But lots will be scared.
> Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable,
Believable has nothing to do with it. An average dose of worst case 1000 times higher, 1.4 REM, doesn't even violate the US federal annual dose limits. Attempting to equivocate this with dirty bombs is either ignorant or a malicious, inflammatory lie to generate fear for an ulterior motive.
If you're trying to insinuate some kind of cover-up, the did a pretty terrible job because no new reactors came online after TMI for like 50 years.
The recalcitrant problem of nuclear waste storage is now a permanent part of human history going forward even if not one single nuke plant is ever onlined again. So the dangers of nukes are here to stay no matter what. Making a new nuke plant or not will not change this problem. One could even argue that if we continue developing nuke plants we'll get better at dealing with the waste. If we don't we'll get worse.
Having said that, it takes 30 years to online a new nuke plant. They have to be maintained over centuries. It's easier to make wind farms, geothermal and photovoltaics today, right now. We can't wait 30+ years for nukes to help our clean energy future happen.
Breeder reactors mostly fix the waste problem. Even without breeders, you should think hard about the tradeoff of having a fairly limited amount of solid stuff that you have to take care of for a very long time versus altering the climate of the whole planet and potentially messing up phytoplankton for a very long time, all while also causing all kinds of pollution.
Seems like a "grass is greener" case. The people of Fukushima Prefecture wish they could trade their nuke waste problem for a few dozen feet of sea level. I know I would if I were them.
The problem with nuclear goes back to the beginning. The original reason for nuclear research, and even the first reactors, was to breed bomb material. Nuclear power was an extension of "atoms for peace" which was originally political cover to continue weapons programs.
Some commercial reactors are secretly used for this purpose even today.
Nuclear may have a bright future but it's extremely difficult to cleave energy from the state interest in weapons. And I'm not just talking about the US, this is an issue with nuclear power worldwide.
The biggest blunder was using nuclear technology for bombs first. I'm afraid the word is forever tainted by history.
I don't understand why this would have any effect on domestic nuclear power production in the nations that already have nuclear weapons. Probably the most important question: why don't the US and China get more of their domestic power from Nuclear?
Also, I need to some source for the claims that Atoms for Peace was meant as a cover to transfer nuclear technology. I believe the program was created as a way to provide civilian nuclear generation capabilities to friendly nations, in return for a guarantee that nations would not use the technology for making nuclear weapons (India was probably the most famous "rogue": they used the know-how from the research reactors to build an actual nuclear weapon).
TRIGA type research reactors, probably the most popular model, are specifically designed to be "pulse reactors" that can produce rapid power spikes of 20,000+MW. I don't see how you could argue that the main purpose isn't simulating nuclear detonations.
Same with Sandia Z Pinch machine and NIF. It's all dual purpose tech to simulate bombs since actual testing isn't done anymore.
You won't find anyone that says it outright but the government interest in pulsed power is awful suspect.
This is a debate we have all the time, here in France, where we chose nuclear energy as main source of energy for several decades. Nowadays, everybody but lobbyists (because for those reasons, nuclear industry is strong, here) seems to agree renewable is the way to go (but we're far to be able to replace nuclear with renewable), mainly because:
* we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
* every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
That's a hard question. I certainly would not support replacing our nuclear plants with coal plants, I would prefer everyone stay with their current system and we go as fast as possible to replace them with something worth it : trying to replace a bad source with an other bad one, but a bit better, costs time, money and human resources.
But the article kind of make me raise an eyebrow when they say that for highly radioactive wastes, we just have to find deep burial sites that will know no geological activity for one million year. Certainly doesn't sound as easy as implied, especially if all earth starts using nuclear power as main energy source.
That being said, I remember reading a few months ago about a breakthrough in Germany in nuclear field, where no rare material (like plutonium) was needed, and wastes were greatly reduced. This could be a global way (and then, we may not even need renewable).
Why do you need a transitional solution? Why not Manhattan-Project the heck out of a purely renewable replacement? Coal is, for a variety of reasons, a terrible stopgap. And nuclear buildout is too slow and expensive.
For the cost of building significant new nuclear, we could build the new storage mechanisms, and all the solar/wind needed. Faster.
Why do you need renewable when there is practically unlimited nuclear fuel available.
> * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel. Different types of reactors can use that 'waste' and produce energy. Some reactor types produce far less, easier to deal with 'waste'. Much of that waste again can be used for different application.
The Nuclear waste issue is one of the most successful fear mongering campaigns ever.
The necessary science is done, early version of the technology were developed and are proven to work.
The problem is that no more work is put in developing and improving nuclear power but renewable energy gets money for research and subsidies like crazy. Coal also gets subsidies in many places.
> * every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
This is again manly a problem because of the lack of improvement over time. Different types of reacts would make this far easier. Sadly however we are still using the type of reactors designed for submarines.
I believe the focus on CO2 will go down as a pretty big blunder. As for nuclear, it seems pretty expensive when you account for the total lifecycle of the plants (see sibling comment from France).
We would be in a better place with respect to greenhouse gasses. But we're also subject to long term disposal of waste products and high risk of pollution of groundwater, and other water sources. Some of those risks will be risks for thousands of years.
The typical answers from nuclear proponents never cover what to do with the waste product.
> will go down as one of the major blunders in human history.
I agree, inability to properly advance nuclear energy will will be regarded as a big blunder in the future.
The great irony that Greenpeace, which supposedly wants to save environment, dealt so much damage to it, by protesting nuclear energy.
Nuclear suffers from the same problems as many political issues. The greatest risks of nuclear energy is not "safety," but rather cost, insurance, and financing. As humans our brains are attuned to avoid worst case scenarios instead of fearing more likely, but less scary situations.
Both sides hear the talking points. The talking points target our most passionate and overriding fears, instead of real world concerns. This is because these false fears are more effective than real ones for changing minds.
Having run for office on a few occasions, the most important factor about winning seems to be having a good narrative-- one which seems consistent with voters' personal experiences.
We'd be in a far better GHG situation if we had poured all that r&d into renewables, would have gotten solar cost below fossil 20-30 years earlier and probably left fracking and tar sands hydrocarbons forever in the ground.
One key problem... much of the world's population lives in nations socially incapable of supporting nuclear power, or with governments that cannot be trusted with significant quantities of nuclear materials due to proliferation, or both.
Advocacy of nuclear has a bad tendency to think of "the world" as the US, Europe, Japan, and China. Any solution that aggravates the haves/have-nots divide is going to cause problems.
Seriously, there's zero reason that we don't have small portable safe nuclear reactors to power neighbourhoods and large oceangoing vessels by now. Since ocean freight liners and oil tankers produce a large portion if not the largest portion of the current air pollution, it just makes sense to get them completely off of diesel and bunker fuel and equip them with small nuclear reactions, something like a LFTR would be perfect... had we spent the last 40-50 years researching them.
Thankfully, at least China has picked up the slack with LFTR research and hope to have something going within the next 5-10 years. Maybe then the rest of the world will wake up.
We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
Not in the same state and not in the same concentration. I'm not anti-nuclear in the least but let's not spread disinformation (or "fake news" in modern parlance).
The good news is breeder waste is a mix of very short half lives and very long half lives. The very short ones decay to safe levels quickly, and the very long ones have a low level of activity.
This. Conservation of energy/matter applies. If there's a lot of energy output and a fixed amount of input the duration must be small. You can visit the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You just can't spend a good chunk of your life there there.
Radioactive material decays as particles are emitted. If it has a long half-life, that pretty much means that the energy is being released rather slowly. In other words, just don't go poking at it and you'll be fine.
On the othe hand, stuff with a short half-life means that atoms are decaying rapidly. Particles are being knocked off with great rapidity. That stuff is much more dangerous, in the now. It is transferring energy, in a harmful form, quickly.
A long half-life means don't go poking at it for a while. A short half-life means you probably should consider containing it really well. We store both safely because we know people like to poke stuff, and it is harmful. It's just that the scary long half-lives only tell part of the story and many people seem to think those are the more problematic.
Disclaimer, I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. However, I've taken a whole lot of physics courses. Someone can probably explain this better than I.
From what I remember, the energy released by γ-radiation is quite low. I'm still not convinced that just because something emits γ-radiation, short or long half life, it has an inherently meaningful energy potential. α- and β-radiation: sure. But γ? It's harmful to humans for very different reasons than fissile material is a useful energy source, isn't it?
The energy of the radiated γ-photons has to come from somewhere. In the first approximation the fission reactor is device for releasing this energy faster while converting it into more mamageable form.
(Pure fission and Teller-Ulam bombs are about releasing said energy as fast and as completely as possible)
Even if the waste starts to leak, it will be just local problem and not big catastrophe. Compared to global warming, burying nuclear waste is more responsible solution for the future generations sake.
i'm sure that its safe to dump small amounts of radioactive material into the oceans, but if you start to build more reactors and dispose of all the waste into the ocean, the dilution will soon cease to be enough to offset a global ... disaster.
What does significantly radioactive mean? If I am a single individual, a single particle of Cesium or whatever could give me cancer. It's not an averages game when you're talking about real lives.
There's natural amounts of radiation that people are exposed to. Taking a commercial airline flight or handling a banana are good comparable measures - if it's less than those, it's not really worth worrying about.
Not necessarily. Ocean disposal of nuclear waste used to be an option, but was banned in 1993. Studies of disposal sites in use before then seem to indicate that any problems found were very local[0].
I don't think you understand how much energy would actually be required to launch the waste into the sun. Costs would have to be reduced by a couple orders of magnitude to make launching any significant amount of material into the sun viable.
That is hard (there was an article on HN about exactly this a while ago). You need a large amount of energy to cancel out our orbit or you just end up sending it into its own solar orbit (which will intersect with ours, to boot).
It's actually easier to leave the solar system than it is to hit the sun.
(Earth orbits the sun at 30 km/s [1]. That means you need -30 km/s of ∆v to kill the energy we're born with. The escape velocity for our solar system from Earth's orbit, meanwhile, is about 42 km/s [2]. So you just need 12 km/s of ∆v to skip town.)
[2] sqrt((2 * 6.7E-11 * 2E30) / (150 * 10^6)) given G~6.7E11 [a], mass of the sun is about 2E30 kg [b] and the Earth orbiting the Sun from about 150 million km [b]; for escape velocity [c]
That's good calculation there, but the number we're concerned with is the amount of ∆v that the spacecraft has to generate itself. If you just get close enough to the sun, a spacecraft could use the solar wind and solar magnetic field to shed more velocity, until it is close enough to aerobrake in the sun's atmosphere.
Once you're out in the Oort cloud on the way out, you can't exactly deploy a solar sail to get another push (unless you make it impractically large).
The outermost layer of the Sun ends at 0.1 AU [1]. To put that in perspective, Mercury orbits at between 0.3 and 0.5 AU [2]. (It costs about 13 km / s to get to Mercury exiting from LEO.)
It's much cheaper to fling things out of the Solar System than into the Sun.
Again, you are thinking in terms of propellant carried up from Earth.
Thrust available to a spacecraft using a solar sail is a function of distance to the sun. The sail is a fixed cost, but it may be presumed to degrade over time. It has no propellant that costs additional money to launch.
If you go in, the ever decreasing efficiency of the sail is offset by the greater available energy from the solar wind, and you may still be able to complete the mission (more slowly) with a damaged sail. Your available thrust increases with every kilometer closer to the sun.
If you go out, the decreasing efficiency of the sail compounds with the lesser total energy available to the sail, and if the sail is damaged, you may never reach escape velocity at all. You will never have more thrust than the instant the sail deploys.
Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
We could do like we do with coal, and just release the radioactivity into the atmosphere. That industry disposes of a lot of radioactive material that way.
You could argue that it's actually our social and legal system which is causing problems, rather than a deficiency of technology.
Not in the sense that people are being irrational, but in the sense that we don't have a good framework for dealing with liabilities -- like nuclear waste -- for extremely long periods of time. We could probably store it pretty well if anybody was motivated in paying the direct and indirect costs of doing so properly.
I live in Idaho, and something that comes up fairly regularly is whether to accept more nuclear waste shipments to be stored at the https://www.inl.gov indefinitely.
To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years. That would basically mean revisiting all the waste that is currently stored and freeze it in glass or whatever. If the industry did that for all existing waste and proved their expertise in that area, then I think more people would entertain the notion of more reactors.
Meanwhile we have people fighting for coal power plants even though their waste disposal plan for things like mercury and arsenic is basically "dump it into the air and hope it doesn't kill too many people." And that stuff stays dangerous until the heat death of the universe, not merely thousands of years.
> Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years.
The "Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982" charged utilities a 0.1 cent/kwh fee for disposal of nuclear waste, and the DOE was supposed to take receipt of that waste. There is $31 billion in reserve for waste disposal...
Breeder reactors have been around since the dawn of nuclear energy and are extremely efficient, re-using the bulk of harmful waste material as fuel. If we built more of those waste would be far less of a problem.
Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet support for actually building one has been tepid at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
The issue is nuclear energy is so risky that only nation-states are willing to underwrite the creation of plants. As a result regulations on plant design tend to be extremely conservative, so innovation is brought to a crawl. On top of that the origins of nuclear energy is weapons research, the waste was the original objective. So the most proven model of reactor is the one that produces the most waste. Put the two together and we're left with the simplest, least efficient design: light-water reactors.
Nuclear can be viable, but the government will have to grow some balls and take some extra risk. We could really use another Musk or Bezos to take on Nuclear Power the same way the former two are taking on space.
Exactly - at which point I love to mention Thorcon Power and the amount of obstacles that they faced in the US only to have to go abroad and start building their absolutely incredible design and test reactor in Indonesia. Sad.
Nobody builds breeder reactors (except for generating weapons-grade materials) because they are seriously unsafe. I'm not anti-nuclear, but the idea of using breeders for civilian power generation is lunacy. There's a very good reason no one does that.
The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on. On paper, it seems ideal. So why has nobody built one? Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either. Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
The problem isn't "grow some balls". The problem is taking an honest look at the situation and ditching the wishful thinking.
I was a big fan of the idea of Thorium reactors years ago, until I found one of the reasons they aren't being actively pursued. I don't see it mentioned but briefly on Wikipedia, but there are really serious engineering challenges around the corrosiveness of the fuel. Take all the properties of normal salt, add fluoride, make it radioactive, and then make it really hot.
There are materials that can handle it, but they are expensive and IIRC they still need to be replaced regularly. Imagine having to replace most of the plumbing in a reactor every decade or whatever number of years.
The engineering challenges don't stop there, but that was the one that made me go, "Oh, ok, I get why they aren't being taken seriously yet." Our materials science just isn't advanced enough yet.
Ah, that makes sense. I've always assumed there's some powerful technical limitation, and it didn't seem to be in the reaction itself or the availability of fuel.
That breeders are unsafe is simply wrong as a general statement.
A Thorium or Uranium based liquid fuel molten salt reactor is incredibly save and highly viable for civilian power generation.
> The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on.
You massively underestimate the political and economical problems of these things. There are many different types of reactors and other ideas that have never managed to get to market.
Until very shorty it was basically impossible to develop one in the US. The Department of Energy would not grant anything, not even use of labs to anybody who wanted to research it. Much of the research itself was basically lost for a long time.
> Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either.
China is massively investing molten salt reactors, including liquid fuel thorium. They plans are pretty big.
Also, there are simple not that many people who do this kind of stuff. The early research was done in the US and most other piggyback of that and have continued to make marginal improvements.
> Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
India has tried earlier but failed. The reason was that they did not have the advanced science, not some fundamental problem. The went in another direction because they felt it was easier. The same problem did not apply to the US.
One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced? When I was reading about this IIRC all of the nuclear waste we have produced in the US over the life of our nuclear programs could be stored in an area the size of a football field.
That depends on what you qualify as waste. As for the actual otherwise unuseful radioactive reaction byproducts this might very well be true.
But in the industrial meaning nuclear waste also includes various stuff that can not (or could not at the time) be economically separated from the waste althought it is either not dangerous at all or useful as nuclear fuel. And also stuff that is simply radioactive and has nothing to do with nuclear reactors per se.
> One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced?
A lot of the generated waste is not the used up fuel itself, but contaminated construction materials etc. So lower radiation, but still not something you have to bury somewhere. In the region I live in an old nuclear plant gets deconstructed for over two decades now because its tricky to seperate uncontaminated from contanimated material. The whole deconstruction costs an estimated €5 billion by the way.
Lots of industrial processes create dangerous chemical wastes which remain dangerous forever. Why are you so worried about nuclear waste which is only dangerous for 10,000 years?
If safe storage is really the goal (I think part of the thinking is that we might someday have a use for the "waste") it seems highly technically feasible to encase it suitably, and drop it on the subducting side of the Mid-Pacific Subduction Zone.
Since the containers would be very dense, they'd embed deep into the sediment, many thousands of feet underwater. Over geologic time, subduction would draw them deeper and deeper, eventually into the Earth's mantle.
Problem solved, if permanent disposal is truly the goal.
Chernobyl: 56 direct deaths, estimated 4000 killed by cancer caused by it, economic damage: $235b Radiation of the disaster still detectable all over Europe.
Fukushima: 6 dead, estimate of 1600 more people killed indirectly, economic damage so far: between $10b and $100b Radiation detectable on California beaches. No solution for the radioactive waste (other than dumping it into the pacific where it can mingle with the Great Pacific Garbage patch)
2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
Indeed, it also fails to mention hydroelectric. Nor is there any mention of how much it costs per TW/h, especially when you factor in the insane cost from just a single accident or the fact that the waste has to be safely and securely stored for a very long time.
> 2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
Hydroelectric depends too much on orography. Not all countries have waterfalls, and if they have, they could be in inaccessible regions where it is very costly to build, let alone transport.
Isn't nuclear hysteria created mostly by American CleanTech industry?
Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?
Even that's not necessarily true; your run-of-the-mill lead-acid car battery works fine for this at small scales, and a collection of them can be good enough for household-wide use. Not the most environmentally-friendly option, but such batteries are cheap and abundant.
You're right that at large scales (neighborhood-wide, city-wide, nation-wide, etc.) we don't really have the battery infrastructure in place quite yet. I'd guess that said lack of infrastructure could be resolved well before 2025, though.
Modelling energy densities and costs tends to suggest that's not a viable option.
Flywheel energy storage is useful as a substitute for spinning reserve (that is, the inertial mass of extand thermal generation turbines), but other than serving to dampen grid fluctuations, it's not good for more than a few minutes', perhaps at the outside a few hours', storage.
There's so much lithium in the earth's oceans that if you manufactured batteries out of it would be enough to store 50 years worth of the world's electricity consumption.
>it just has to charge a battery (or some other means of energy storage) which is reliable.
That's not true. Let's say you build your system with enough solar panels to fully charge batteries that lasts 3 days. And lets say sun doesn't shine for 4 days, which is not uncommon. Where is your reliability? Lets say you are designing a system to have reliable power. How many days worth of power backup would you design it to support?
>Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
Yeah, and fossil fuels is solar. I don't see how it's worth mentioning.
How can nuclear (fision) energy be safer than wind/solar/hydro? New efficient solar cells should be enough, environment friendly, and safer than other alternatives as long as the manufacturing of these are environment friendly as well. Also, everyone can setup their own solar plant at home, I almost did so, but the price of the materials and the setup are too high for me.
I'd like you to consider if nuclear material is useful for something apart from generating energy. It may be useful for other things we don't even know right now, and in the future we may have consumed all the resources.
I believe it us due to the installation deaths. Typically solar cells are installed on rooftops, which are non-trivially dangerous places to work. Multiply the risk by tens of thousands of installations and we get fatalities due to solar power.
You serious?
And building an hydroelectric/atomic/coal plant is not dangerous?
It's not a too dangerous place, when the people who set these up are professionals who are following a security guideline.
I see lots of people working on their roof, so, at least for me, this is a nonsense argument to discredit solar energy.
The number should fall as solar becomes something that you add when a roof is constructed, rather than retro-fitted, since that roof work is already being done.
The manufacture of solar panels is not as safe or as environmentally friendly as you might hope, just like how buying a new Prius to replace your car is probably a net loss for the environment unless your existing one is already near the end of its useful life.
Yes, that's what I'm afraid of. Building solar cells might not be as environment friendly as I'd like, but hey, we can optimize these processes later on.
Building a nuclear plant would also be very unfriendly when it comes to ecology.
You have to look at the whole market. When you buy a new car the old one gets resold to someone else, which causes yet another even older car to be resold and so on through the market until the oldest, broken-est car actually exits the market (assuming the total market size is static, if it's growing then you need to compare the Prius against the other new cars that would enter the market) so as long as you're replacing existing usage then you're probably doing good.
People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater.
In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go extremely wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions seem manageable.
Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.
I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.
In particular I genuinely do not understand why most ecologists seem to be staunchly anti-nuclear. I can understand asking for better funding in renewable R&D and planning for a transition but, at least in Europe, ecologists seem to favor dropping nuclear immediately, no matter the cost. For instance they applauded when Germany decided to completely stop producing nuclear energy, even if it meant more pollution in the short term. I find that hard to justify.
> People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater. [...] I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.
I could not agree more, but unfortunately global warming suffers from the exact opposite effect. The perceived risk appears very low to most people, because it is not very spectacular on human time scales. Even though it is by far the greatest existential risk we face.
I'm no biologist or scientist of any sort, but it seems this is a problem with all apex predators to some degree. You get to the top of the food chain by adapting to and being highly reactive to short term and catastrophic risk. Once you get there you have to do a 180 and suddenly be highly attuned to subtle and long term issues to stay there. It's simply a different skill set and frame of mind.
The way humans tend to overvalue short term gain and underplay long term consequences is well covered. This line of thinking bleeds heavily into politics and how our societies organize. Would like to know if it is actually an apex predator thing, it might just be part of being a mortal animal.
You are right, there is pretty much nothing in biology that is. Humans are no exception, but until recently it was not a big problem because we did not have the power to significantly damage the climate and the biosphere (though the megafauna would probably disagree).
Fossil fuel powered technology has changed that, but we are psychologically and socially ill-equipped to deal with its transformative power.
Yes, of course. Long-term issues aren't any different than others; they only need longer (more generations) to manifest.
One class (meta-)examples are all mechanism actually promoting mutation, or other methods of genetic variation: Horizontal gene transfer is interesting in this regard. It's the ability to incorporate snippets of DNA the organism comes across.
These mechanisms are an adaptation to the "known unknowns": what if a new pathogen appears, or the environment (temperature, radiation, salinity etc) suddenly changes? To achieve some flexibility, these mechanisms make trade-offs, usually sacrificing short-term reproductive success.
It's probably not very informative to think of humans as apex predators. Yuval Harari in "Sapien" puts forth the interesting point that we were catapulted suddenly from cautious foragers to extreme lethality by our harnessing of fire and other technologies. We likely never had the chance to grow into the role of most dangerous animal. Thinking along those lines, our cautious forager ancestors probably did a lot of responding to short-term and catastrophic risk.
My dog may well have better apex predator instincts than I.
New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown. LFRs include an electrically cooled salt plug that seals a holding tank. If power fails, the molten salt melts the plug, and the fuel safely drains into the tank. I particularly like ThorCon's concept, where the reactor is underground. Another plus of this reactor type is that water cooling isn't needed, so siting is much more flexible.
Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.
"Completely eliminates the possibility" sounds like something a supervillain would say.
I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.
Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.
When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
Look, I'm actually pro-nuclear. But I think the arguments made for nuclear power are mostly awful, driven by techno-fetishism and wishful thinking rather than real logic. The "But I'm logical and you're just emotional!" argument is itself an emotional argument, a rush to claim a moral high ground (you'll see the exact same style and phrasing used in any political argument where privileged white guys are dismissing the points of women and minorities).
As others wisely pointed out in this thread, nuclear power suffers from a problem of feeling dangerous even when it's safe - and likewise, global warming feels safe even when it's an existential threat to civilization. If you want to make progress rather than score points, you need to take the emotional nature of the argument into account.
I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.
> When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
No.
Modern reactor designs are actually designed in a way that makes it difficult to maintain the reaction. If you are not actively maintaining it, then it will stop on its own. This is opposed to the most common existing designs, where you need to expend effort to _stop_ the reaction.
This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.
> This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.
So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.
> So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.
I didn't say anything about "completely eliminating the possibility of failure". I said "completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown" which is in fact correct.
ThorCon plans on operating the plants about 100 feet underground, which will even mitigate a deliberate attack with an airliner. There is no way to make anything absolutely, 100% safe, but this approach is mighty close.
That is in contrast with fossil fuel pollution, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.
>I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.
Not my argument, but the point is that comparing something to "what a supervillain" would say is an emotional, not logical, response. What supervillain introduces technologies that are immune to whole classes of failures?
>When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
If someone proposes switching from coal powered plants to natural gas powered plants with the argument that it completely eliminates the possibility of coal dust as a byproduct, would you deride them as well?
The senior engineer at my company was from Duke Energy. At the beginning of the Fukushima incident he loudly proclaimed that the safety mechanisms would kick in, preventing a disaster. He held educational session during lunch so he could explain the engineering. We all know the rest of the story.
That just means he was an idiot. The problems of the design were well known. The potential failure points were well known and are part of the design. This is nothing new and has been understood for a long time.
A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.
A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.
Do these designs also completely eliminate the possibility that human error or outright negligence could cause a catastrophic failure? Because those were almost always major factors in nuclear accidents.
Solar prices in the sunniest regions have already dipped below 3c unsubsidized, and are projected to keep falling for decades to come, even without any major technological breakthroughs. So aiming for that price 10 years out, with a new design isn't a very good sign
Renewable are all nice and good, but currently we're still building fossil fuel power plants all over the world. It would be better if we instead built nuclear plants. Expanding renewables and nuclear are not opposites of each other.
Is that a rhetorical question? Because night time usage largely relies on battery storage for which economies of scale are also reducing the cost in a similar predictable fashion.
However I will say there are newer solar panels that I've read about being tested which can theoretically produce power by moon light. Granted it won't be anywhere near the amount during the day but generating energy via solar at night time isn't entirely impossible it just won't be generating the same amount by orders of magnitude.
It really comes down to storage. Solar is just now passing coal costs. when it falls another order of magnitue, most of the effort will go to pumping water up hills or batteries or whatever.
It would be cheaper to do any number of things(battery storage, Nuclear, world power grid) than to build out more solar capacity to capture the pitiful full moon light once a month.
Solar at night is currently 10c (again it seems to be falling in price as more roll out), at least in places that have strong enough sunlight for concentrating solar:
I feel like when a company says 10 years away it generally means that the company is still looking for funding... and 5 years away generally means they finally got the funding and are now building and experimenting.
China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.
Its hard to compete in the nuclear business when literally everything else, including useless stuff like ethanol get subsidies like crazy. Also, existing regulation made much of this research impossible.
With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.
Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.
The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.
So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.
a) New designs are good, but something that's "10 years away" is more an idea, than it is a product.
b) It's not so much that designs can't be safe, but the trick is realizing real systems based on the design, that actually are safe. Over time.
Never underestimate the power of human mis-management when it comes to corrupting perfectly sound pieces of engineering, especially when you need to plan for a 50, 100 or 250 year horizon.
Some differences between the airplane analogy and the nuclear plant analogy:
1) When a plane fails catastrophically, the impact is limited to a smaller geographical area.
2) Pollution from the failure of a plane doesn't involve what is estimated to be a century-long endeavor to cleanup.
3) The toxicity from plane failures do not invade nearly every facet of life, making entire areas unlivable.
I am not a proponent of nuclear energy because we do not have a way to handle the full lifecycle, including failures. We will have this someday, but the idea of "well throw this waste into a rock formation somewhere and hope it doesn't cause a problem because it takes hundreds of years to handle" is just not reasonable. Even today, the Hanford site in Washington is leaking radioactive shit into the Columbia River and there is no estimated date to complete this cleanup.
I completely understand where you're coming from but you can't just take nuclear energy in a vacuum. Of course if the alternative was between nuclear power plants and the miracle energy drive which runs on dreams and produces terrawatts without any risks and any pollution then there's no question.
But that's not the world we live in. Today we have renewable energy, which is promising but not yet ready to be our sole source of energy. Then we have fossil energy which wrecks our climate at an alarming pace. Then we have nuclear which has its own set of problems but at least won't contribute to global warming.
Sure it's a tragedy that Pripyat and Fukushima are now unlivable and will remain so for a long, long time. But global warming will probably make entire continent-sized stretches of land effectively unlivable. That's what you should be pitting nuclear reactors against.
> Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.
The last time I really looked into it, it seemed like nuclear energy was a pretty way to combat global warming. It has numerous issues like cost, construction time, production bottlenecks, etc. Renewables seemed a lot better (particularly when you factor things in like the cost reduction as production ramps up), but it would be a mistake to simply think about energy production. From what I recall, things like improving energy efficiency were at least as important.
Ecologists against nuclear baffles me too. You'd think they'd be booster #1. Worst-case, Chernobyl still worked out pretty darn well for the local ecosystem.
My understanding, which is admittedly drawn from HN "napkin math" , is that at current prices for solar and wind, nuclear is a non-starter. That trend is only intensifying. It seems to me that nuclear could have been a good option, but because we've neglected it for so long, squashed innovation with regulations (not necessarily complaining that it didn't need the regulations!) it is uncompetitive economically and will likely stay that way for the near future. Amazingly enough even coal is uncompetitive in many parts of the world now too. The future is starting to turn green under the invisible hand of market economics.
in my opinion, the problem with nuclear is the consequences of fuck-ups. if you fuck up with solar, wind, coal or oil, shit can get wrong. like oil spill in Mexico coast wrong, but manageable.
Chernobyl and Fukushima's fuck-up is still to this day not completely resolved.
Even leaving aside the question of how much insurance should be required and how to underwrite that, as well as what kind of reserve should be mandated for cleanup and long term waste storage, the economics of nuclear are very rough.
The lion's share of the costs are upfront and the break even period is measured in decades. What is the energy landscape going to look like in 30 years? That's a question that you need to be able to answer with high confidence if you want to correctly price bonds that will be used to construct a nuclear power plant to be paid off from the revenue of the plant. If the potential bond buyers can't answer that question with high confidence then they don't know what interest rate is appropriate for the bonds and they probably won't want to buy them.
Solar and wind has a lot of 'negative externalities' though that are generally borne by the grid or other operators. I think the economics really work against it at high% penetration (30-40%+).
The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas.
This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar blips). This massively increases the capex of CCGT plants, as you're only producing rarely. This would get more and more extreme with more solar+wind penetration.
Another massive problem is solar+wind overproduction, which is really hard to solve and is starting to really hit the German, UK and California grids. On very sunny AND windy days you get massive energy overproduction. You then have to either:
a) Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out)
b) Pay other (natgas, coal, nuclear, etc) operators to shut down, which can be very expensive
c) Hope that negative electricity prices make more demand. This is unlikely to happen as industrial users can't switch on extra production quick enough to respond to this.
This is made worse by feed in tariffs being paid at any energy price, incentivizing solar+wind to continue generating even if electricity price is negative (say it is -€0.05kWh spot, but your FIT is €0.20/kWh, you are still going to produce as you will net 0.15euro per kWh.
The two 'solutions' which are often mentioned are battery storage and HVDC long distance transmission.
Battery storage is still horrendously expensive on a kWh basis. It may come down, but this is an enormous problem. I am personally not sure there is enough lithium left that is easily extracted to make this viable at the scale (billions of kWh) required.
HVDC connections I also am suspicious of - if it's sunny and windy in Germany, it is likely to also be the same 1000km away more or less.
> Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out)
If we're talking about problems that show up when wind/solar becomes an order of magnitude more prevalent than it is now, why would you care about the cost of retrofitting anything?
Yes but little to no new stuff is getting fitted with this when installed outside of Germany. It significantly puts the price of installs up. You have to dump the power somewhere and it's not cheap/easy to.
I would assume that all-DC grid would happen before that (and solve the issues with grid stability). Extrapolating from the rate at which Europe migrated from 110V AC to 230V AC you are looking at at least 50 years for that to happen.
Weirdly, every story I read about this as it starts to happen on windy/sunny weekends and holidays is headlined "Excess solar/wind blah blah" and when you read the story, there's still coal and gas powered electricity production happening at the same time.
Even in your entirely hypothetical example you say they're having to pay natgas and coal to stop production.
Is it just me or is that really weird?
I mean turning off coal and gas is kind of the point, isn't it?
Coal can't be shut down easily, it's incredibly expensive and inefficient to dial it up and down. Natgas is easier but still quite a slow process.
If you could turn gas and coal up and down in a few minutes, then perhaps you would have a point. But coal can take 6-24hrs and natgas 1-4hrs. It won't suddenly stop when you have a massive gust of wind.
Keep in mind that coal is uncompetitive because of natural gas being so cheap, not because of renewables. Renewables are not supplanting natural gas at a reasonable rate.
While natural gas is better than coal, it's still not good from an emissions perspective compares to nuclear.
You still need to provide base load capacity. Wind and Solar can't do that. Hydroelectric can, but can't be put everywhere and has its own environmental impact story.
Grid-scale storage is one possibility, but more work needs to be done to make it viable. For technologies that exist today, nuclear looks the best for base load capacity.
Logical arguments do not apply in that scenario. Other energy forms might kill people a slow, invisible death. But when a nuclear reactor melts down the pictures of death and drama will go around the world.
In my opinion, the problem with nuclear is the consequences of fuck-ups. if you fuck up with solar, wind, coal or oil, shit can get wrong. like oil spill in Mexico coast wrong, but manageable.
Chernobyl and Fukushima's fuck-up is still to this day not completely resolved.
Let's focus in solar/wind for our peace's sake
You have to be very careful about these studies, because most official government studies flat out lie about the effects of nuclear disasters.
The most egregious example is Chernobyl, where the official Soviet position was that only a single person died from the disaster. But studies from other nations say the death toll may be close to one million. Well believe it or not a lot of these studies that show how safe nuclear is actually take the official Soviet data about chernobyl as truth. (I am not sure whether this is the case for this particular study because their source is behind a paywall).
But similar (if not as outrageous) lies have also been said about accidents in the west. The official story about three mile island for example is that it caused no deaths, yet studies find drastic increases of all kinds of cancers in the affected area. See, for example, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-mo...
I usually believe that we should be guided by science and data in our public decisions, but the data surrounding nuclear is so distorted by governments that it is just not to be trusted. And now that we have truly safe alternatives like solar and wind, we can finally put that nightmare behind us.
Yes you do. The WHO has been following the Chernobyl consequences, and come out with a new report about every decade. Each report dramatically lowers the estimate of deaths and other health consequences.
As a matter of fact, the largest health effects now are psychosocial effects. That is, fear of and (over-)reaction to the radiation effects is causing more actual harm than the radiation itself. So potentially one of the easiest ways to mitigate the harmful effects of nuclear accidents (best of course: let's not have any!) is to (over-)react less.
Of course not reacting at all would also be wrong, but it looks like the balance today is out of whack.
This is the year 2017 - This article deliberately skips over any consideration to Wind, Solar, etc. What kind of BULLSHIT excuse for journalism and scientific study is this? Who in the nuclear industry paid for this?
I only read the first 3 paragraphs but I can already tell you this article is not worth your time.
The article compares the statistics of energy sources, but all of the charts focus on fossil fuels. This article starts off giving lip service by offhand mentioning renewable sources in one sentence.
"While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored."
Maybe in the short term nuclear does kill fewer people, in the short term compared to recent history. If nuclear plants are maintained safely - thats a pretty big if - and no other disasters befall a plant, maybe there current status is true.
One of the many things I have learned while working in technology is Risk Assessments. If an upgrade or change has a low chance of failure but a high potential for damage then you need to be very careful and cautious. Nuclear Power strikes me as having a small chance of risk of failure but the potential damage of that failure is catastrophic.
There are only 3 nuclear power mishaps I know of - 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. I guess 3 Mile wasn't too bad, but the other 2 had epic consequences. That's not even considering the waste issue. Or a dirty bomb.
Taleb would say all this statistics are bullshit, cause they ignore the long tails. I doubt a gas or coal power station can destroy a nation. A nuclear plant has the potential to do so.
That is an excellent comment. The downvotes are already coming in, your comment was grayed out (downvoted) by the time I saw it. No substantive responses yet, just anonymous click revenge. :(
Are you seriously being that callous about Chernobyl? Several dozen people died from it. Many more statistically died from radiation exposure over the ensuing decades. Three hundred thousand people were forced to abandon their homes and relocate.
Chernobyl was a huge fucking disaster that killed people and had a huge negative impact on many people's lives. You don't get to minimize that just because a nearby reactor kept running.
I believe wind and solar are the best solutions for our future. But many concerns mentioned in this thread are becoming irrelevant in the face of emerging nuclear storage technology.
For example, the pebble bed reactor system eliminates the risk of a meltdown by no longer storing spent fuel in rods; it also makes the process for extracting fuel significantly more efficient. Presently we can only extract about 4% of energy contained in nuclear materials, with a PBR system the "pebbles" stay in circulation for longer, meaning we can extract more energy and pursue new designs that could ingratiate these systems into our cities without the catastrophic risks we face today.
The more people focus on this technology, the better it will get. But we can't improve if we don't try.
They're playing games with "major" in the title. Hydro and wind are ~5% of the US generation pool each, which I guess can be argued make them "minor". But then "biomass" appears in the chart too, and it's much smaller still, so no idea.
They are TOTALLY playing games. Solar and Wind are relatively young, but power generated by Water based dams have been around for decades, yet only biomass is mentioned. The omission is deliberate.
Those are all valid points. But why were they skipped over? Why was solar and wind skipped over? It barely mentions them, pretends that they don't exist.
Solar, wind and hydro are energy sources that depend on weather and cannot be regulated except by throwing the generated energy away, thus with today's energy grids cannot be used as majority of the generating capacity. On the other hand biomass can be stored and used according to demand.
Pumped storage is in the grand scheme of things horrendously inefficient in essentially any metric one cares about (energy efficiency, capacity per size, capacity for cost...).
Biomass, according to IEA [1], is 10% of global primary energy production. It might not contribute lot in the US, but for example here in Finland, wood biomass accounts for one quarter of all the primary energy production.
Comments with "bullshit" in all caps aren't a very good fit for HN. In the first two paragraphs you insinuate that they deliberately skip wind and solar (when wind and solar can't generate the kind of power that nuclear can), that this is a submarine article from the nuclear industry, that you didn't read it, and that nobody else should read it either. These elements combined are toxic to HN's culture of intellectual gratification.
They DID skip it for a reason. I'm telling you there is most likely an ulterior motive for this article. There is mention of biomass (which is burning of wood) but no mention of power generated by dams. The history of Solar and Wind are short and has grown astronomically. Maybe you could weasel out of doing any real analysis on it.
But what about hydro power? Why is that omitted. And the title says it all;
"It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest"
What were the epic consequences of Fukushima? No one died of radiation poisoning, and the actuarial deaths from cancer in the future are going to be minuscule compared to the natural disaster the precipitated it, and in any case much smaller than from fossil fuels. Under any cost-benefit analysis, the primary negative impact of Fukushima was the absurd amount of money being spent on decommissioning, but this is an argument for more pragmatism, not historical evidence for the danger of nuclear power.
Lawsuits from people who don't want to lose their government housing subsidies because they have an irrational fear of negligible radiation are the epic consequences?
Even if we ignore the black swan events (which each time they happen we hear how it could never happen again, etc), nuclear has a long, sordid history of massive schedule, cost and operational expense overruns. Energy companies stopped building nuclear not because of those damn eco warriors, but because they had been jaded by project after project that cost multiples (or magnitudes) of estimates. It just isn't cost effective.
There are some places where nuclear makes more sense -- on a spacecraft, for instance -- but in most worldly cases it is no longer a competitive option.
> This is the year 2017 - This article deliberately skips over any consideration to Wind, Solar, etc. What kind of BULLSHIT excuse for journalism and scientific study is this? Who in the nuclear industry paid for this?
Wind is hanging rapidly rotating turbines on thin shafts 100-200 meter off the ground. Are you seriously going to claim installing and maintaining those things is a safe occupation ? They are referred to as grinders, which relates to what happens to a technician who trips while inside the machine room (which is tiny and suspended 100m off of the ground, the gears are exposed, so you can imagine exactly what happened to get the name grinders).
Likewise, most solar is rooftop solar. Rooftop solar ? That is essentially placing large and heavy glass slabs high up in the air on sloping surfaces. Likewise, if I had that job, I might neglect to mention it to my life insurance, as this is not a particularly safe occupation either.
> "While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored."
Installations for both power sources are demanding a steady stream of human life, as is extracting the materials needed for construction of either wind or solar power. Construction of them is powered by coal (in the case of wind turbines by necessity, as coking is still how we produce steel). Also: China's mines are deathtraps, this is a LOT of human lives.
> Maybe in the short term nuclear does kill fewer people, in the short term compared to recent history. If nuclear plants are maintained safely - thats a pretty big if - and no other disasters befall a plant, maybe there current status is true.
As can be seen, even if you count Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear is still safer than most other forms of power. But that's a bit like chalking kills by a soldier that takes a nightlight powered by solar battery up to solar power.
For obvious reasons, any power source can easily be turned into a weapon.
Not to detract from your larger point, but rooftop solar is not most of the solar market. Utility scale solar panels (the fields of solar panels on 10' poles) is a lot bigger, and has lower risk.
Another thing to think about is that with solar roofs becoming a thing (there are more companies in this market than just Tesla), the additional risk associated with rooftop solar could be seen as "zero", since houses need to install a roof anyway.
But yes, your larger point that renewables aren't risk free is valid and correct.
Wind and solar are interesting sources of energy, but in the grand scheme of things, they still represent a tiny fraction of power production, and the article noted that on the onset.
BUT should you account for them, nuclear is still the safest, as according to this list†, solar, wind and hydro still carry higher deaths per quantity of energy produced.
You can't have a informed conclusion without reading the entire article. That said, it clearly states in the 2nd paragraph that the assessment is for energy types with the lowest negative health impact, with comparison limited to currently dominant sources including nuclear and not renewable types like wind or solar.
I only read the first 3 paragraphs because when you deliberately leave out a significant portion of the energy industry and make a statement that "Nuclear is safest compared to everything else" and then you don't include everything then you are lying. This article has already established up front it is trying to manipulate people.
No, you are projecting your irrational beliefs on the article.
It clearly states the parameters of discussion and titled the report according to the conclusion. They found that nuclear is safest major energy source They never blankly stated that "Nuclear is safest compared to everything else" and to claim that, especially without even reading the entire thing is ludicrous.
677 comments
[ 15.1 ms ] story [ 593 ms ] threadEverybody is scared to death of Sharks, yet sharks killed only 1 person in the US last year. Cows killed 20, 75% of which were deliberate attacks, but almost no one is afraid of a Cow.
Meanwhile 17,775 people died in traffic accidents, yet people jump in cars like it's routine. You're literally 17,000% more likely to die in your own car than you are by a shark, but again, brains don't understand that.
And not to mention, the much wider used coal plants and natural gas plants kill way more people in a lot less theatrical ways, largely through disease of the lungs and skin. Again though watching someone die of black lung isn't nearly as interesting as watching someone die of radiation sickness, so we don't hear about it.
Where are you getting these numbers? Particularly the cow one (deliberate killings only).
Generally intrigued.
> yet people jump in cars like it's routine. It is routine. Time spent driving is much, much, much higher than time spent swimming near sharks. So...
My brain understands that if I refused to go skydiving, then I can not die from a skydiving accident. Which is about as likely as going for a swim instead of a drive to get to work.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0613_050613_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal,_unprovoked_shar...
Also, closer to 30k+ traffic fatalities (last reported year is 2015, so far it seems) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
Still can't find cow numbers.
British cows are apparently similarly deadly: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cows-official...
Whoa, now I'm very concerned about snails.
People understanding of stats is fine. They understand that the pre-requisite to being attacked by a shark is super-extremely low. That does not make sharks safe. I'll put my hand on the hood of a car any day instead of on a shark.
Your reasoning about Fukushima shows the same kind of problem: it's because of all the urgent actions after the accident that there's not been more consequences. Your argument would show that a house on fire is not dangerous because after people were evacuated, no one died of burning. It's the evacualtion of of a fire that saves life, it's not the lack of danger of a blazing inferno.
[1] "The image of cows as placid, gentle creatures is a city slicker’s fantasy, judging from an article published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States." -- https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/dangerous-co...
[2] "A total of 21 deaths met the case definition for 2003--2008 (Table 1). Four fatalities occurred in 2003, two in 2004, six in 2005, and three each year during 2006--2008." -- https://www.cdc.gov/mmWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5829a2.htm
[3] https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/fish/isaf/contributing-fac...
People don't handle statistics well, but statistics are also easily manipulated and therefore potentially completely unreliable (Mark Twain quote here). It's not quite as simple as "people need to listen to the statistics".
Also, people go to the beach way less often than they go near roads. If most people only go to the beach 1 day a year and go on roads every day, then it's more like "you're 50x more likely to die by car than by shark". That's a far cry from 17000x.
That said, I've always thought that stat could be abused to push car safety - "Imagine you're attacked by a shark - now, cars are like that but TIMES FIFTY! Drive safe, look both ways, etc".
e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234463
The problems with nuclear are waste and that we use vastly outdated designs and fuel sources.
Nuclear is not perfect, but we should not buy into a perfection fallacy when looking to get away from fossil fuels.
Solar is a better long term bet but a good progressive nuclear strategy that added a handful of small modern reactors could be massively complementary to it.
The only reason waste is an issue in the United States is that the Congress decided that nuclear waste repositories have to last for 10,000 years uninterrupted. As far as we know this is just about impossible. 10 millenia ago we were in the caves.
Placed at the bottom of a pool, it's perfectly safe. This is a solved problem. The issue is political (especially from uneducated NIMBYs) rather than technical.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_S...
[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=2150
[2]https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6
US as of 2012 buys about 25% of it from Canada and the rest from a variety of places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Source: https://www.eia.gov/uranium/marketing/pdf/umartable3figure5....
It's the enrichment which is the tricky part.
Fukushima: 6 dead, estimate of 1600 more people killed indirectly, economic damage so far: between $10b and $100b Radiation detectable on California beaches. No solution for the radioactive waste (other than dumping it into the pacific where it can mingle with the Great Pacific Garbage patch)
FUCK energy sources that are capable of doing that. FUCK these opinion pieces.
Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.
I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.
Also, why did they leave away hydro, water and wind power in those "deaths per x" charts?
If you replace nuclear with renewable (or the other way around) you'll have to produce the same amount of power, all other things being equal.
e.g. if I built n times more wind turbines to match the energy output of nuclear energy then, according to this measure, I would also get n times the number of wind-power-related deaths.
I see no basis for that assumption, especially as nuclear energy has known risks that e.g. wind power doesn't.
But why do the risks matter? One would expect that two turbines or nuclear power plants would kill twice as many people, on average…
* Square miles of uninhabitable land produced/tWh
* Fishing industries destroyed/tWh
* Agricultural land destroyed/tWh
* Peoples displaced/tWh
* Lethal toxic waste produced/tWh
* Clean up cost/tWh
This is of course excluding coal, which I'm 92% sure makes even hydroelectric (let alone nuclear) look like a peaceful meadow full of fairies and butterflies by comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
Wikipedia's stats on energy production fatalities have wind being pretty decent, at 150 deaths per PWh (rooftop solar is 440, US hydro is 5, US nuclear is 0.01, and fossil fuels are in the thousands), but if the number is negligible it's only because wind power itself is negligible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
This is a bad analogy. A good analogy would be: if you had to travel 1000 miles, it would be safer to do it by car than on foot because car is safer per mile travelled.
People are overwhelmingly bad at risk assessment, which is why one can be anti-nuclear and afraid of terrorist attacks (both lower risk), while happily driving to work at a coal mine (both higher risk).
Erm, wtf? The world's energy requirements are a more-or-less fixed number of tWh, no? Like, if 1 nuclear reactor produces as much energy as 10000 wind turbines, comparing the deaths that would be caused by 1 reactor to the deaths that would be caused by 10000 turbines seems like the obviously correct comparison to make.
You car analogy is on the other hand completely wrong: the death/HP is a meaningless indicator. How about deaths per mile travelled? Check out the values at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which has a section for traveling (named Additional)
We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.
We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.
It's more or less ensured that we won't be in any shape to record histories sooner rather than later.
The large scale, the monopolistic businesses and the government centric energy politics made it ideal for corruption. Remember, Fukushima was claimed to be fully save after inspections, just before the accident happened, which destroyed several reactors.
The investment into nuclear energy was a political decision. Every further investment into nuclear is a political decision. The 'small modern reactors' are mostly funded by government and the users are mostly military. The military is already mostly the only user of small reactors: nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Now we see other players which favor other energy politics (like the current US President who favors fossil fuels like coal, because his voters want jobs in the coal industry).
The point is: energy is always politics.
Do you mean "even"?
> In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres respectively, both induced by magnitude 7.7 earthquakes. The June 1896 earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.3 produced a tsunami with run-up height of 38 metres in Tohoku region, killing more than 27,000 people.
This risk needs to be addressed. That many people were killed by a tsunami is a catastrophe. But one would also like to have a stable energy system that does not go down like that and creates a huge problem (financial, technological, human, ...) for several decades.
The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Reactors were claimed save, which in a single event were totally wrecked. We are not talking about a single problem, but multiple problems (failing electricity backups, failing outside electricity, exploding buildings, ...), design mistakes (fuel is difficult to reach) and problems generated by running these reactors (like the amount of spent fuel on-site which needs lots of electricity for cooling).
Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen.
These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed [0]. The solution? Just "regulate" that in the case of emergency cooling the cooling water needs to be pre-heated, so the temperature shock doesn't break the pressure vessel.
Whatever could go wrong with that approach? I guess nobody can imagine a scenario in which the reactor would need massive cooling but the surrounding infrastructure is destroyed and the water can't be pre-heated, what happens then?
Nobody knows and I'd be really surprised if anybody, in a position of responsibility, has even thought that far about this whole mess. It rather feels like they are operating on the principle of "Let's just hope this never happens instead of planning for what we gonna do when it happens and set resources aside".
[0] http://www.fanc.fgov.be/nl/page/doel-3-tihange-2-flaw-indica...
To me this just shows that the security is taken seriously. Why is the public opinion so scared about such an exemplary event?
Sorry but that's plain and simply wrong, you are vastly misrepresenting the situation and chain of events.
These micro-fractures are not part of the design and they are evolving [0], documentation of the manufacturing can't be found and it's assumed the manufacturer made them vanish on purpose to hide the fact that cheaper materials had been used to build, leading to the fractures.
These reactors have been controversial for years, they've been taken offline and online many times to look for new fractures and they keep finding new ones, fractures which shouldn't even be there in the first place.
It's amazing how you try to turn this into an "everything is safe, there's no reason to be worried, it was always broken!" even tho everything about this screams "you better be worried" and the neighboring German states (and the Dutch) are already hoarding Iodine tablets [1].
Even the Belgians themselves handed them out to their population, tho they used ISIS as a scapegoat at that time [2]
We are talking about the pressure vessel here, not some unimportant plumping part on some auxiliary system, and they just keep on watching as more fractures build up in there. Where do you think this is gonna lead? The warning signs can't get any worse than this considering these reactors are also running past their original life time.
[0] http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/06/new-crac...
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/north-rhine-westphalia-prepares-for-bel...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/28/all-belgian-resid...
Large scale disasters almost always present as a conglomerate of smaller problems; multiple failures during 100-500 year disasters once again do not indicate poor safety standards and/or corruption.
Safety design is expensive, and there is always a balance between cost and risk, in literally everything that we as humans do, individually and collectively. Hindsight alone is not enough to bill this reactor as unsafe. There are thousands of BWRs operating globally without incident, and they have been for decades. It is ignorant to presume that they are all time bombs.
Edit: I'd like to kindly remind the community that down votes are not for communicating disagreement.
If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens. Some vehicles have such safety precautions, but only when the situation seems to warrant it (a Jeep, for example).
The nuclear plant was the same. It was safe when it was built, only it wasn't designed to handle that magnitude of earthquake because that strength is rare, especially for that area. This is despite designing it to withstand stronger than ever recorded earthquakes. Sure, afterwards the plant was unsafe, but so are many cars after accidents.
Agree or not, as a society we have accepted that traffic accident is a problem we don't want to pay the price to solve.
A "safe" car is just a mildly safer death trap.
In comparison, people haven't accepted that reactors would go shit and somewhat kill hundreds of people and trash whole regions for hundreds of years.
That's a risk that developpers have included in their plans to some point, but that the general public has not fundamentaly accepted.
Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds. The region got so small radiation dose it is already basically harmless ... Decontamination efforts will make it pass even irrational radiation safety levels within 10-20 years. "hundreds" of years is therefore stupid hyperbole.
Public has not accepted nuclear risks because it is ridiculously misinformed. Don't spread pointless fearmongering, please.
By official counts, 34 killed directly in the evacuation, 573 total, including indirectly, due to the disaster,and estimates are even with the evacuation, additional long-term cancer deaths due to the release could be in the 100+ range as well.
Except that cars now days do undergo rollover tests and are required to support 3x their weight when upside down.
> Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
I just read that some experts believe the standard should be increased to 4x. My previous assumption about my safety was a bit off, I am safe, but I could be safer.
Sadly enough, the increased rollover standards have created huge A pillars that impede visibility. Citation: http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance-safet...
So in this case, illogical worry about rollovers causes an actual measurable increase in pedestrian accidents.
Kinda like our worries about nuclear safety ended up causing even more radioactive pollution from burning coal.
I'd argue it's more like saying your car is safe when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
It is safe. The safest minivan is fantastically safe. Then it smashes into a semi truck at 80 mph and everyone dies. It was still a safe car, when compared to other cars.
Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be.
You have it exactly backwards. Manually operated nuclear plants will evolve into fully automated, completely safe designs. A very similar approach to self-driving cars.
If a built you a house, following all the protocols for safety, right next to an active volcano, would you consider it safe?
It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok.
Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis.
Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generators brought by trucks due to some electrical incompatibility.
Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
There's no safety, only luck and irrationality.
That's really where you want to put the blame? Don't you think that's a bit dishonest? Nobody is stopping the operators of plants from modernizing plants, nobody except the realities of economics.
Don't kid yourself: If they can keep on running reactors with the least possible effort they will do so because everything related to nuclear involves massive investment costs.
If you had the choice between spending several billion of dollars on modernizing a plant, which you've already amortized, or NOT spending several billion dollars while still making massive profits from the plant, which of these two is the more likely thing to happen? Greed always wins out.
It's not like plant operators want to modernize their plants and are being stopped by protests, nobody is stopping them from modernizing except for their own economic bottom line.
This is what parent meant - scaremongering (and resulting ridiculous hyperbole) destroys progress.
I think the answers are clearly, no, no, no, and fuck no. We should be spending money on better solar, wind, having a distributed energy grid, and fusion. Not on a technology that is equivalent to diesel at this point, and something that will kill us.
That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.
PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.
Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
Early commercial nuclear reactors, here the British Calder Hall Power Station, were producing plutionium and electricity.
The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
The US has almost 7,000.
The US has never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium, because they simply aren't well-suited for the purpose.
That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj...
2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/taechon.htm
It's a dual-use reactor: plutonium and electricity production (200 MWe).
> Any reactor produces some amount of energy
But not electricity. For that a power plant has also turbines, generators, etc., ...
The US for example had no electricity production in the early reactors for Plutonium production.
But the US Hanford N produced both Plutonium and electricity for the commercial grid for 21 years...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Reactor
Yes,but if you don't do that, you're just wasting energy. The US realized that, which is why they added electricity generation to the N Reactor. Both were still designed to create plutonium, and would not be built without the aim of nuclear weapons.
It's like saying we grow the same corn for the edible part and for biomass. While technically true, the edible part is driving the production.
However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach.
Further, there was an actual attempt to extract plutonium from civilian reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj... was really a legacy of this failure as it only produced 4,373 lb of plutonium vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site which produced most of the US's plutonium for nuclear weapons. Which is why I feel this is a little more nuanced than your suggesting.
ARPANET was designed, built, and operated to enable the exchange of information in the face of nuclear annihilation of cities.
The big famous radio dish on top of the hill behind Stanford and the signals research that went into it was placed there to look for anti-ICBM radar signals bouncing off of the moon from Russia.
We are standing on a mountain of tech based on research driven by the cold war. Nuclear energy is no different.
It will take some guys to figure out MSR designs if possible, and then they'll be small and safe enough to access the private market.
I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.
I don't think alternate-history fables is much of a defense for war crimes, however.
You might hold that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done to speed up Japan's surrender, and/or that they did speed up Japan's surrender by a meaningful amount. Further, you might argue that somehow two bombs was meaningfully better than one for this purpose.
From historical record, I'd say it's more likely Japan would've surrendered quickly either way - and that the motivation was more on establishing the USA as a superpower for the post-war era.
Either way, I think it's hard to argue that dropping of nuclear bombs on cities was done "for the sake of their people". After all, no-one was forcing the US to continue the war in the Pacific - or to capture Japan. The US could have sought a cease-fire and withdrawn to Hawaii or similar earlier borders. If the goal was to "save lives".
But the political reality is that Japan is a client state of the US empire and the base of its operations in SE Asia. It's not functionally a democracy. The people who made money off of it were the alliance of conservative politicians and organized crime, backed by the CIA, who brought it to the country in the first place.
http://www.japansubculture.com/how-the-cia-helped-put-the-ya...
I suggest people check out part six of Adam Curtis' Pandora's Box, that cover this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#...
On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout.
And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly.
As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared.
This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.
I said that fear was justified - not that we should or should not use those things.
Similarly we should indeed be afraid of CO for those very same reasons. I know I certainly have a healthy respect for, and fear of, CO.
If you use fire, the "invisible" risks are oxygen deprivation or monoxide poisoning. You will be quite aware that something is wrong when there is too much CO2.
No work on new better designed as continued, we just stopped building many of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...
http://www.nuscalepower.com/
Very low risk of something happening is not the same is the damaged caused if that risk becomes a reality.
Their superior safety has been known for a long time as well, which is why all 58 French reactors active today are PWRs (and most of those in the US are as well).
That being said, it is still probably a bad idea to put a power plant in a place which is known to be exposed to tsunami...
...Especially in the country which originated the word tsunami
I believe they achieved relatively high standards despite the lack of funds anyway. (By the way, molten salt is coming back, but mostly lack the funding necessary to prototype bigger reactors.)
There is not 'enough money'. If a reactor shows cracks in the steel in critical places, preventing this upfront might not be technologically possible and afterwards repairing might also be so expensive, that it economically makes no sense.
The big problem: if there is a technical problem, it is politically a very tough decision to close it, because of the costs involved (loss of profits from selling electricity, costs of decommissioning, costs of replacement, ...). Thus a more or less clear need to shutdown the reactor because of technical unfitness will conflict with financial interests and the scale of the money involved makes it worse.
One optimizes for longevity during design, as well as other factors which cost money. It may have, for example, been cheaper to construct, with a strict lifetime after which it would be taken down."Good design" is almost always subjective.
That politics drive nuclear operators to maintain plants past their lifetimes does not indicate poor engineering.
While it was an okay plant, they'd actually been warned about the emergency cooling system as early as 1967. Also, they ignored a 2008 study saying that their plant was vulnerable to tsunamis. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found that all the causes of the accident were foreseeable prior to 2011.
> The best designs cannot account for everything.
The common factor in nuclear accidents so far has been operator error, and it's true the best designs cannot completely account for that.
You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the risks of global warming and greenhouse gasses back in the heyday of nuclear power, i.e. the 1970's. The last nuclear power plant in the US was built in the 1970s, which was when the last major accident that happened in the US (3 mile Island). That's not even considering Chernobyl.
Wind and solar can not even cover all the required growth, specially not outside of the developed world.
Natural gas is a good option, specially to replace coal.
Modern nuclear plants however would be even better.
Actually, yes! Statistically it's safer than living next to a coal-fired plant.
If Th-based processes were chosen, that cannot easily generate Pu, nuclear proliferation won't be such a hazard. It would have far-reaching political consequences. E.g. USA is strictly against the Iran's nuclear program specifically because it might help produce bomb-grade fissile material.
235U-based processes are also pretty inefficient: about 1% of the nuclear material is burned when the (very active) fuel needs another cycle of refinement. Known Th-bases processes produce somehow less-active waste, and can burn more of the fuel before refinement is necessary.
A number of new, quite a bit safer, nuclear projects aimed to burn 235U and the current stockpiles of nuclear waste exist. But due to the fear-mongering, and likely due to relatively low coal and oil prices, they have little chance to be implemented, at least, in a reasonably short term.
No, I won't mind living near a well-maintained nuclear plant. In fact, I lived ~90km from one for 20+ years. I would be much less happy to live next to a major coal-burning plant, since it produces rather noticeable levels of radioactive contamination during normal operation [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Coal
You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment. Further, the sole large power plant in an area is automatically a military target, whereas if the same capacity were split across many facilities it becomes impractical to attack or control them all.
I'd love to see each municipality in the US above a certain population own and operate its own small reactor, using it to power the municipal utilities. But I do have a bit of a problem with a federal agency operating the only nuclear reactor in a 100-mile radius. It just ends up managed differently, becoming a political power center in addition to an electrical power center.
A higher number of reactors also means more chances that one of them fails because reactors that don't exist can't fail but those that do most certainly can.
As such the security gains, from infrastructure synergies, would have to be massive to actually be able to offset that.
Also, do you know of any reasons why the 1000th instance of a design might be less prone to failure than the 1st, or 10th?
Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles? There are many thousands of car door handles in use daily, such that all common failure modes have been seen, and then addressed in later manufactured models. The handle that fails can make the next handle made better able to avoid that specific failure mode.
You want things to fail just a little bit, but not enough to hurt anyone or cost too much money. If something fails, that means it isn't over-engineered for its intended purpose. And the failure point may then be examined to make the next design better, and improve upon existing maintenance strategies.
That's a non-sequitur, there are alternatives besides coal just like there are more solutions to the problem than merely increasing energy production.
> Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles?
A car handle is only one piece of a bigger machine, one could argue it's actually rather unimportant because if your car handle fails your car still drives, as such I'm not sure that's actually a good example.
How many iterations did we have on cars, as a whole system, so far? Over a century of designing cars and how close are we to a car that never fails? Which should be a way easier task than trying to make nuclear reactor safe, we had more time for it and even way more need for it, yet we are still nowhere close to having our "perfect cars", as such I just don't see how "perfect nuclear" is anywhere in our reach.
Yeah, I'm surprised by how little attention this gets. A significant accident occurred that wasn't supposed to, and subsequent investigations showed that there were significant lapses, including from regulators. People can't be experts in nuclear plant design, construct, regulation, inspections, etc., so they need to be able to rely on the authorities in charge. When that trust is betrayed, it naturally has consequences. You can't just say to people, "Well, yeah, last time we told you to trust us we were completely wrong, but this time will be different!"
When problems happen that aren't supposed to happen, people are naturally going to be overly cautious and skeptical of future assurances. That's not an entirely unreasonable reaction.
Compare it to the damage of coal and it would not even show statistically.
Nuclear power plants are good neighbors: quiet and they pay a lot of taxes. Most of my neighbors when asked where the nuclear plant was pointed to the smokestacks on the coal power plant miles away.
Using logic instead of emotion, yes I would. Hopefully the electricity costs would be cheaper.
Chernobyl was an outdated design known to be dangerous at the time it was made, and something like the Chernobyl incident can't happen on anything newer. A study found statistically insignificant rises in cancer rates from the 3 Mile incident.
I recommend the book Atomic Accidents, it's very informative and I believe it went over specifically why a nuclear plant can't just explode like an atom bomb or even really help you make one.
No, your average nuclear plant doesn't have the makings of an atom bomb. But countries that are running nuclear power plants have an obvious incentive to create enrichment facilities for their nuclear power. These facilities are similar to those that enrich further for a nuclear bomb. Several countries have achieved nuclear bombs this way.
Furthermore nuclear plants do not all work the same way. There are advocates of thorium nuclear plants, because thorium is a much more abundant fuel source that should be able to operate more cleanly than uranium. However those plants generate uranium-233 which can be potentially separated through chemical processes in plants that are a lot easier to hide than centrifuges used for enrichment.
Both ways, nuclear power can be a step on the way to nuclear proliferation.
The fact that you would reference TMI in reference to dirty bombs is extremely telling in that you have no idea what you're talking about. The average radiation exposure outside TMI compound was less that an airplane flight or x-ray. Bananas are literally more dangerous.
Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable, the public was scared witless of the possibility that there was an exposure. As a result millions of people were left with the concern that they could get cancer decades down the road. This public fear is also the most important impact of a dirty nuclear bomb used as a terrorist weapon. Very few of people will get sick, and fewer still will die. But lots will be scared.
> Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable,
Believable has nothing to do with it. An average dose of worst case 1000 times higher, 1.4 REM, doesn't even violate the US federal annual dose limits. Attempting to equivocate this with dirty bombs is either ignorant or a malicious, inflammatory lie to generate fear for an ulterior motive. If you're trying to insinuate some kind of cover-up, the did a pretty terrible job because no new reactors came online after TMI for like 50 years.
Really? How many people were killed at 3 Mile Island when it allegedly "accidentally turned into a dirty nuke"?
Having said that, it takes 30 years to online a new nuke plant. They have to be maintained over centuries. It's easier to make wind farms, geothermal and photovoltaics today, right now. We can't wait 30+ years for nukes to help our clean energy future happen.
Some commercial reactors are secretly used for this purpose even today.
Nuclear may have a bright future but it's extremely difficult to cleave energy from the state interest in weapons. And I'm not just talking about the US, this is an issue with nuclear power worldwide.
The biggest blunder was using nuclear technology for bombs first. I'm afraid the word is forever tainted by history.
Also, I need to some source for the claims that Atoms for Peace was meant as a cover to transfer nuclear technology. I believe the program was created as a way to provide civilian nuclear generation capabilities to friendly nations, in return for a guarantee that nations would not use the technology for making nuclear weapons (India was probably the most famous "rogue": they used the know-how from the research reactors to build an actual nuclear weapon).
Same with Sandia Z Pinch machine and NIF. It's all dual purpose tech to simulate bombs since actual testing isn't done anymore.
You won't find anyone that says it outright but the government interest in pulsed power is awful suspect.
* we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
* every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/exuberant
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/exorbitant
Everybody agrees with that. The question is whether we choose nuclear or coal during the transition to 100% renewable (if it ever happens).
> we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
> you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
I don't know if it's that bad. But again, is this worse than coal?
But the article kind of make me raise an eyebrow when they say that for highly radioactive wastes, we just have to find deep burial sites that will know no geological activity for one million year. Certainly doesn't sound as easy as implied, especially if all earth starts using nuclear power as main energy source.
That being said, I remember reading a few months ago about a breakthrough in Germany in nuclear field, where no rare material (like plutonium) was needed, and wastes were greatly reduced. This could be a global way (and then, we may not even need renewable).
For the cost of building significant new nuclear, we could build the new storage mechanisms, and all the solar/wind needed. Faster.
> * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel. Different types of reactors can use that 'waste' and produce energy. Some reactor types produce far less, easier to deal with 'waste'. Much of that waste again can be used for different application.
The Nuclear waste issue is one of the most successful fear mongering campaigns ever.
The necessary science is done, early version of the technology were developed and are proven to work.
The problem is that no more work is put in developing and improving nuclear power but renewable energy gets money for research and subsidies like crazy. Coal also gets subsidies in many places.
> * every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
This is again manly a problem because of the lack of improvement over time. Different types of reacts would make this far easier. Sadly however we are still using the type of reactors designed for submarines.
The typical answers from nuclear proponents never cover what to do with the waste product.
Also new reactor types have solved all these problems. They can create very little waste that only has to be stored a far shorter time.
The problem is that anti-nuclear people have created a environment where no more research happens and old technology just limps along.
The science is clear, the needed technology is understood, we just need somebody to build it. There are startups who try, but its very difficult.
I agree, inability to properly advance nuclear energy will will be regarded as a big blunder in the future. The great irony that Greenpeace, which supposedly wants to save environment, dealt so much damage to it, by protesting nuclear energy.
Both sides hear the talking points. The talking points target our most passionate and overriding fears, instead of real world concerns. This is because these false fears are more effective than real ones for changing minds.
Having run for office on a few occasions, the most important factor about winning seems to be having a good narrative-- one which seems consistent with voters' personal experiences.
Advocacy of nuclear has a bad tendency to think of "the world" as the US, Europe, Japan, and China. Any solution that aggravates the haves/have-nots divide is going to cause problems.
Thankfully, at least China has picked up the slack with LFTR research and hope to have something going within the next 5-10 years. Maybe then the rest of the world will wake up.
We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
Another myth. Of course we do: breeder reactors.
Hint: why is nuclear waste dangerous? because there is still loads of energy in it.
Breeders aren't the solution, they have waste products too, and those waste products are also radioactive.
I'd be totally for "Yucca Mountain OHV park"
It's likely that planned reactors would work, but they are also likely to be really expensive.
I though it was because of γ-radiation and long half lives? Are those properties unique to matter with high energy potential?
Radioactive material decays as particles are emitted. If it has a long half-life, that pretty much means that the energy is being released rather slowly. In other words, just don't go poking at it and you'll be fine.
On the othe hand, stuff with a short half-life means that atoms are decaying rapidly. Particles are being knocked off with great rapidity. That stuff is much more dangerous, in the now. It is transferring energy, in a harmful form, quickly.
A long half-life means don't go poking at it for a while. A short half-life means you probably should consider containing it really well. We store both safely because we know people like to poke stuff, and it is harmful. It's just that the scary long half-lives only tell part of the story and many people seem to think those are the more problematic.
Disclaimer, I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. However, I've taken a whole lot of physics courses. Someone can probably explain this better than I.
From what I remember, the energy released by γ-radiation is quite low. I'm still not convinced that just because something emits γ-radiation, short or long half life, it has an inherently meaningful energy potential. α- and β-radiation: sure. But γ? It's harmful to humans for very different reasons than fissile material is a useful energy source, isn't it?
Or am I completely misremembering this all?
(Pure fission and Teller-Ulam bombs are about releasing said energy as fast and as completely as possible)
i'm sure that its safe to dump small amounts of radioactive material into the oceans, but if you start to build more reactors and dispose of all the waste into the ocean, the dilution will soon cease to be enough to offset a global ... disaster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
(Earth orbits the sun at 30 km/s [1]. That means you need -30 km/s of ∆v to kill the energy we're born with. The escape velocity for our solar system from Earth's orbit, meanwhile, is about 42 km/s [2]. So you just need 12 km/s of ∆v to skip town.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_orbit
[2] sqrt((2 * 6.7E-11 * 2E30) / (150 * 10^6)) given G~6.7E11 [a], mass of the sun is about 2E30 kg [b] and the Earth orbiting the Sun from about 150 million km [b]; for escape velocity [c]
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant
[b] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/LeonVaysburd.shtml
[c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity
Once you're out in the Oort cloud on the way out, you can't exactly deploy a solar sail to get another push (unless you make it impractically large).
It's much cheaper to fling things out of the Solar System than into the Sun.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Atmosphere
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)
Thrust available to a spacecraft using a solar sail is a function of distance to the sun. The sail is a fixed cost, but it may be presumed to degrade over time. It has no propellant that costs additional money to launch.
If you go in, the ever decreasing efficiency of the sail is offset by the greater available energy from the solar wind, and you may still be able to complete the mission (more slowly) with a damaged sail. Your available thrust increases with every kilometer closer to the sun.
If you go out, the decreasing efficiency of the sail compounds with the lesser total energy available to the sail, and if the sail is damaged, you may never reach escape velocity at all. You will never have more thrust than the instant the sail deploys.
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/physics-trying-crash-sun/
We could do like we do with coal, and just release the radioactivity into the atmosphere. That industry disposes of a lot of radioactive material that way.
Not in the sense that people are being irrational, but in the sense that we don't have a good framework for dealing with liabilities -- like nuclear waste -- for extremely long periods of time. We could probably store it pretty well if anybody was motivated in paying the direct and indirect costs of doing so properly.
To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years. That would basically mean revisiting all the waste that is currently stored and freeze it in glass or whatever. If the industry did that for all existing waste and proved their expertise in that area, then I think more people would entertain the notion of more reactors.
The "Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982" charged utilities a 0.1 cent/kwh fee for disposal of nuclear waste, and the DOE was supposed to take receipt of that waste. There is $31 billion in reserve for waste disposal...
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1059999730
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet support for actually building one has been tepid at best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
The issue is nuclear energy is so risky that only nation-states are willing to underwrite the creation of plants. As a result regulations on plant design tend to be extremely conservative, so innovation is brought to a crawl. On top of that the origins of nuclear energy is weapons research, the waste was the original objective. So the most proven model of reactor is the one that produces the most waste. Put the two together and we're left with the simplest, least efficient design: light-water reactors.
Nuclear can be viable, but the government will have to grow some balls and take some extra risk. We could really use another Musk or Bezos to take on Nuclear Power the same way the former two are taking on space.
The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on. On paper, it seems ideal. So why has nobody built one? Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either. Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
The problem isn't "grow some balls". The problem is taking an honest look at the situation and ditching the wishful thinking.
There are materials that can handle it, but they are expensive and IIRC they still need to be replaced regularly. Imagine having to replace most of the plumbing in a reactor every decade or whatever number of years.
The engineering challenges don't stop there, but that was the one that made me go, "Oh, ok, I get why they aren't being taken seriously yet." Our materials science just isn't advanced enough yet.
On the plus side, China may be pursuing them more seriously: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...
A Thorium or Uranium based liquid fuel molten salt reactor is incredibly save and highly viable for civilian power generation.
> The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on.
You massively underestimate the political and economical problems of these things. There are many different types of reactors and other ideas that have never managed to get to market.
Until very shorty it was basically impossible to develop one in the US. The Department of Energy would not grant anything, not even use of labs to anybody who wanted to research it. Much of the research itself was basically lost for a long time.
> Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either.
China is massively investing molten salt reactors, including liquid fuel thorium. They plans are pretty big.
Also, there are simple not that many people who do this kind of stuff. The early research was done in the US and most other piggyback of that and have continued to make marginal improvements.
> Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
India has tried earlier but failed. The reason was that they did not have the advanced science, not some fundamental problem. The went in another direction because they felt it was easier. The same problem did not apply to the US.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But in the industrial meaning nuclear waste also includes various stuff that can not (or could not at the time) be economically separated from the waste althought it is either not dangerous at all or useful as nuclear fuel. And also stuff that is simply radioactive and has nothing to do with nuclear reactors per se.
A lot of the generated waste is not the used up fuel itself, but contaminated construction materials etc. So lower radiation, but still not something you have to bury somewhere. In the region I live in an old nuclear plant gets deconstructed for over two decades now because its tricky to seperate uncontaminated from contanimated material. The whole deconstruction costs an estimated €5 billion by the way.
Since the containers would be very dense, they'd embed deep into the sediment, many thousands of feet underwater. Over geologic time, subduction would draw them deeper and deeper, eventually into the Earth's mantle.
Problem solved, if permanent disposal is truly the goal.
Chernobyl: 56 direct deaths, estimated 4000 killed by cancer caused by it, economic damage: $235b Radiation of the disaster still detectable all over Europe. Fukushima: 6 dead, estimate of 1600 more people killed indirectly, economic damage so far: between $10b and $100b Radiation detectable on California beaches. No solution for the radioactive waste (other than dumping it into the pacific where it can mingle with the Great Pacific Garbage patch)
1. What about wind and solar?
2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
this seems extremely hard to quantify.
Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?
Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
At the risk of being even more pedantic, solar is fusion power, whereas "nuclear" in the common parlance refers specifically to fission.
You're right that at large scales (neighborhood-wide, city-wide, nation-wide, etc.) we don't really have the battery infrastructure in place quite yet. I'd guess that said lack of infrastructure could be resolved well before 2025, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
Flywheel energy storage is useful as a substitute for spinning reserve (that is, the inertial mass of extand thermal generation turbines), but other than serving to dampen grid fluctuations, it's not good for more than a few minutes', perhaps at the outside a few hours', storage.
That's not true. Let's say you build your system with enough solar panels to fully charge batteries that lasts 3 days. And lets say sun doesn't shine for 4 days, which is not uncommon. Where is your reliability? Lets say you are designing a system to have reliable power. How many days worth of power backup would you design it to support?
>Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
Yeah, and fossil fuels is solar. I don't see how it's worth mentioning.
I'd like you to consider if nuclear material is useful for something apart from generating energy. It may be useful for other things we don't even know right now, and in the future we may have consumed all the resources.
It's not a too dangerous place, when the people who set these up are professionals who are following a security guideline. I see lots of people working on their roof, so, at least for me, this is a nonsense argument to discredit solar energy.
Yes, building power plants is dangerous too. The question is, how do they compare?
Wikipedia has some stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
Rooftop solar is vastly better than anything fossil fuels, but worse than nuclear, wind, and first-world hydropower.
In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go extremely wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions seem manageable.
Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.
I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.
In particular I genuinely do not understand why most ecologists seem to be staunchly anti-nuclear. I can understand asking for better funding in renewable R&D and planning for a transition but, at least in Europe, ecologists seem to favor dropping nuclear immediately, no matter the cost. For instance they applauded when Germany decided to completely stop producing nuclear energy, even if it meant more pollution in the short term. I find that hard to justify.
I could not agree more, but unfortunately global warming suffers from the exact opposite effect. The perceived risk appears very low to most people, because it is not very spectacular on human time scales. Even though it is by far the greatest existential risk we face.
Fossil fuel powered technology has changed that, but we are psychologically and socially ill-equipped to deal with its transformative power.
One class (meta-)examples are all mechanism actually promoting mutation, or other methods of genetic variation: Horizontal gene transfer is interesting in this regard. It's the ability to incorporate snippets of DNA the organism comes across.
These mechanisms are an adaptation to the "known unknowns": what if a new pathogen appears, or the environment (temperature, radiation, salinity etc) suddenly changes? To achieve some flexibility, these mechanisms make trade-offs, usually sacrificing short-term reproductive success.
My dog may well have better apex predator instincts than I.
Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.
http://thorconpower.com/
I suggest watching the video on this page, it gives a good perspective:
http://thorconpower.com/news
I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.
Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.
Be careful with your language.
That's because you reply with things like this.
>sounds like something a supervillain would say.
Look, I'm actually pro-nuclear. But I think the arguments made for nuclear power are mostly awful, driven by techno-fetishism and wishful thinking rather than real logic. The "But I'm logical and you're just emotional!" argument is itself an emotional argument, a rush to claim a moral high ground (you'll see the exact same style and phrasing used in any political argument where privileged white guys are dismissing the points of women and minorities).
As others wisely pointed out in this thread, nuclear power suffers from a problem of feeling dangerous even when it's safe - and likewise, global warming feels safe even when it's an existential threat to civilization. If you want to make progress rather than score points, you need to take the emotional nature of the argument into account.
I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.
No.
Modern reactor designs are actually designed in a way that makes it difficult to maintain the reaction. If you are not actively maintaining it, then it will stop on its own. This is opposed to the most common existing designs, where you need to expend effort to _stop_ the reaction.
This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.
So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.
I didn't say anything about "completely eliminating the possibility of failure". I said "completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown" which is in fact correct.
ThorCon plans on operating the plants about 100 feet underground, which will even mitigate a deliberate attack with an airliner. There is no way to make anything absolutely, 100% safe, but this approach is mighty close.
That is in contrast with fossil fuel pollution, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.
> New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown.
not necessarily of any failure, to which they were willing to accept that things can fail in novel ways, just not meltdowns in their view.
Not my argument, but the point is that comparing something to "what a supervillain" would say is an emotional, not logical, response. What supervillain introduces technologies that are immune to whole classes of failures?
>When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
If someone proposes switching from coal powered plants to natural gas powered plants with the argument that it completely eliminates the possibility of coal dust as a byproduct, would you deride them as well?
A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.
A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.
Renewable are all nice and good, but currently we're still building fossil fuel power plants all over the world. It would be better if we instead built nuclear plants. Expanding renewables and nuclear are not opposites of each other.
Is that a rhetorical question? Because night time usage largely relies on battery storage for which economies of scale are also reducing the cost in a similar predictable fashion.
However I will say there are newer solar panels that I've read about being tested which can theoretically produce power by moon light. Granted it won't be anywhere near the amount during the day but generating energy via solar at night time isn't entirely impossible it just won't be generating the same amount by orders of magnitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux
It would be cheaper to do any number of things(battery storage, Nuclear, world power grid) than to build out more solar capacity to capture the pitiful full moon light once a month.
https://www.thenational.ae/business/dubai-set-for-world-s-ch...
China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.
With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.
Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.
The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.
So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.
b) It's not so much that designs can't be safe, but the trick is realizing real systems based on the design, that actually are safe. Over time.
Never underestimate the power of human mis-management when it comes to corrupting perfectly sound pieces of engineering, especially when you need to plan for a 50, 100 or 250 year horizon.
1) When a plane fails catastrophically, the impact is limited to a smaller geographical area.
2) Pollution from the failure of a plane doesn't involve what is estimated to be a century-long endeavor to cleanup.
3) The toxicity from plane failures do not invade nearly every facet of life, making entire areas unlivable.
I am not a proponent of nuclear energy because we do not have a way to handle the full lifecycle, including failures. We will have this someday, but the idea of "well throw this waste into a rock formation somewhere and hope it doesn't cause a problem because it takes hundreds of years to handle" is just not reasonable. Even today, the Hanford site in Washington is leaking radioactive shit into the Columbia River and there is no estimated date to complete this cleanup.
But that's not the world we live in. Today we have renewable energy, which is promising but not yet ready to be our sole source of energy. Then we have fossil energy which wrecks our climate at an alarming pace. Then we have nuclear which has its own set of problems but at least won't contribute to global warming.
Sure it's a tragedy that Pripyat and Fukushima are now unlivable and will remain so for a long, long time. But global warming will probably make entire continent-sized stretches of land effectively unlivable. That's what you should be pitting nuclear reactors against.
The last time I really looked into it, it seemed like nuclear energy was a pretty way to combat global warming. It has numerous issues like cost, construction time, production bottlenecks, etc. Renewables seemed a lot better (particularly when you factor things in like the cost reduction as production ramps up), but it would be a mistake to simply think about energy production. From what I recall, things like improving energy efficiency were at least as important.
Chernobyl and Fukushima's fuck-up is still to this day not completely resolved.
Let's focus in solar/wind for our peace's sake
The lion's share of the costs are upfront and the break even period is measured in decades. What is the energy landscape going to look like in 30 years? That's a question that you need to be able to answer with high confidence if you want to correctly price bonds that will be used to construct a nuclear power plant to be paid off from the revenue of the plant. If the potential bond buyers can't answer that question with high confidence then they don't know what interest rate is appropriate for the bonds and they probably won't want to buy them.
The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas.
This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar blips). This massively increases the capex of CCGT plants, as you're only producing rarely. This would get more and more extreme with more solar+wind penetration.
Another massive problem is solar+wind overproduction, which is really hard to solve and is starting to really hit the German, UK and California grids. On very sunny AND windy days you get massive energy overproduction. You then have to either:
a) Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out) b) Pay other (natgas, coal, nuclear, etc) operators to shut down, which can be very expensive c) Hope that negative electricity prices make more demand. This is unlikely to happen as industrial users can't switch on extra production quick enough to respond to this.
This is made worse by feed in tariffs being paid at any energy price, incentivizing solar+wind to continue generating even if electricity price is negative (say it is -€0.05kWh spot, but your FIT is €0.20/kWh, you are still going to produce as you will net 0.15euro per kWh.
The two 'solutions' which are often mentioned are battery storage and HVDC long distance transmission.
Battery storage is still horrendously expensive on a kWh basis. It may come down, but this is an enormous problem. I am personally not sure there is enough lithium left that is easily extracted to make this viable at the scale (billions of kWh) required.
HVDC connections I also am suspicious of - if it's sunny and windy in Germany, it is likely to also be the same 1000km away more or less.
If we're talking about problems that show up when wind/solar becomes an order of magnitude more prevalent than it is now, why would you care about the cost of retrofitting anything?
Even in your entirely hypothetical example you say they're having to pay natgas and coal to stop production.
Is it just me or is that really weird?
I mean turning off coal and gas is kind of the point, isn't it?
If you could turn gas and coal up and down in a few minutes, then perhaps you would have a point. But coal can take 6-24hrs and natgas 1-4hrs. It won't suddenly stop when you have a massive gust of wind.
While natural gas is better than coal, it's still not good from an emissions perspective compares to nuclear.
Grid-scale storage is one possibility, but more work needs to be done to make it viable. For technologies that exist today, nuclear looks the best for base load capacity.
The most egregious example is Chernobyl, where the official Soviet position was that only a single person died from the disaster. But studies from other nations say the death toll may be close to one million. Well believe it or not a lot of these studies that show how safe nuclear is actually take the official Soviet data about chernobyl as truth. (I am not sure whether this is the case for this particular study because their source is behind a paywall).
But similar (if not as outrageous) lies have also been said about accidents in the west. The official story about three mile island for example is that it caused no deaths, yet studies find drastic increases of all kinds of cancers in the affected area. See, for example, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-mo...
I usually believe that we should be guided by science and data in our public decisions, but the data surrounding nuclear is so distorted by governments that it is just not to be trusted. And now that we have truly safe alternatives like solar and wind, we can finally put that nightmare behind us.
Yes you do. The WHO has been following the Chernobyl consequences, and come out with a new report about every decade. Each report dramatically lowers the estimate of deaths and other health consequences.
As a matter of fact, the largest health effects now are psychosocial effects. That is, fear of and (over-)reaction to the radiation effects is causing more actual harm than the radiation itself. So potentially one of the easiest ways to mitigate the harmful effects of nuclear accidents (best of course: let's not have any!) is to (over-)react less.
Of course not reacting at all would also be wrong, but it looks like the balance today is out of whack.
I only read the first 3 paragraphs but I can already tell you this article is not worth your time.
The article compares the statistics of energy sources, but all of the charts focus on fossil fuels. This article starts off giving lip service by offhand mentioning renewable sources in one sentence.
"While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored."
Maybe in the short term nuclear does kill fewer people, in the short term compared to recent history. If nuclear plants are maintained safely - thats a pretty big if - and no other disasters befall a plant, maybe there current status is true.
One of the many things I have learned while working in technology is Risk Assessments. If an upgrade or change has a low chance of failure but a high potential for damage then you need to be very careful and cautious. Nuclear Power strikes me as having a small chance of risk of failure but the potential damage of that failure is catastrophic.
There are only 3 nuclear power mishaps I know of - 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. I guess 3 Mile wasn't too bad, but the other 2 had epic consequences. That's not even considering the waste issue. Or a dirty bomb.
Nuclear accident badness is massively overplayed by the media.
Chernobyl was a huge fucking disaster that killed people and had a huge negative impact on many people's lives. You don't get to minimize that just because a nearby reactor kept running.
For example, the pebble bed reactor system eliminates the risk of a meltdown by no longer storing spent fuel in rods; it also makes the process for extracting fuel significantly more efficient. Presently we can only extract about 4% of energy contained in nuclear materials, with a PBR system the "pebbles" stay in circulation for longer, meaning we can extract more energy and pursue new designs that could ingratiate these systems into our cities without the catastrophic risks we face today.
The more people focus on this technology, the better it will get. But we can't improve if we don't try.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
2. Hydro power generation is only second to coal in the number of people it killed. [1]
3. Hydro power generation is complete hell on the environment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
Pumped storage is in the grand scheme of things horrendously inefficient in essentially any metric one cares about (energy efficiency, capacity per size, capacity for cost...).
1: https://www.iea.org/topics/renewables/subtopics/bioenergy/
The title says it: major energy sources. Wind and solar aren't.
But what about hydro power? Why is that omitted. And the title says it all;
"It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/10/japan-fukushim...
There are some places where nuclear makes more sense -- on a spacecraft, for instance -- but in most worldly cases it is no longer a competitive option.
Wind is hanging rapidly rotating turbines on thin shafts 100-200 meter off the ground. Are you seriously going to claim installing and maintaining those things is a safe occupation ? They are referred to as grinders, which relates to what happens to a technician who trips while inside the machine room (which is tiny and suspended 100m off of the ground, the gears are exposed, so you can imagine exactly what happened to get the name grinders).
Likewise, most solar is rooftop solar. Rooftop solar ? That is essentially placing large and heavy glass slabs high up in the air on sloping surfaces. Likewise, if I had that job, I might neglect to mention it to my life insurance, as this is not a particularly safe occupation either.
> "While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored."
Installations for both power sources are demanding a steady stream of human life, as is extracting the materials needed for construction of either wind or solar power. Construction of them is powered by coal (in the case of wind turbines by necessity, as coking is still how we produce steel). Also: China's mines are deathtraps, this is a LOT of human lives.
> Maybe in the short term nuclear does kill fewer people, in the short term compared to recent history. If nuclear plants are maintained safely - thats a pretty big if - and no other disasters befall a plant, maybe there current status is true.
As can be seen, even if you count Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear is still safer than most other forms of power. But that's a bit like chalking kills by a soldier that takes a nightlight powered by solar battery up to solar power.
For obvious reasons, any power source can easily be turned into a weapon.
Another thing to think about is that with solar roofs becoming a thing (there are more companies in this market than just Tesla), the additional risk associated with rooftop solar could be seen as "zero", since houses need to install a roof anyway.
But yes, your larger point that renewables aren't risk free is valid and correct.
BUT should you account for them, nuclear is still the safest, as according to this list†, solar, wind and hydro still carry higher deaths per quantity of energy produced.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidentsYou can't have a informed conclusion without reading the entire article. That said, it clearly states in the 2nd paragraph that the assessment is for energy types with the lowest negative health impact, with comparison limited to currently dominant sources including nuclear and not renewable types like wind or solar.
It clearly states the parameters of discussion and titled the report according to the conclusion. They found that nuclear is safest major energy source They never blankly stated that "Nuclear is safest compared to everything else" and to claim that, especially without even reading the entire thing is ludicrous.