The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident. In the spring of 1957, only months before the fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment. Like the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British government. Later studies on the release of radioactive material due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.
It would have been a lot worse without "Cockcroft's Folly" - massive filters built on top of the "chimneys" that caught radioactive crud coming up the stack.
These reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big nuclear bonfires!
He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source. Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.
Indeed, people should always bear in mind Windscale was a nuclear weapons facility hidden inside a power plant than a genuine attempt at a power station.
There is a somewhat similar technology for LWRs: systems that filter soluble fission products (including iodine in second generation systems) from steam so the steam can be vented from the containment structure in an accident. These would have been very useful at Fukushima.
The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they don't need that high a voltage.
After reading The Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age, which chronicles all major nuclear incidents (up to the 1990's I think) I had two key takeaways. There are far more missing nuclear submarines than I would have ever expected, and Britain does not have the right cultural mindset for dealing with nuclear safety. Apologies if that offends anyone.
Follow up question. Can you name a country that does have a good cultural mindset for nuclear safety?
Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
I've come to think that France might have a good culture in this respect. No major train crashes for years; there's never been a serious accident on the TGV. They have nuclear reactors all over the place and they seem to have managed to operate them safely. Airbus by all accounts seems to have a good safety culture.
Maybe it's because of the 'fraternité' in 'liberté égalité fraternité; they have very strong culture of public solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say Britain or the US.
And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.
That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons why France has had major success with no issues. There's nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.
It’s not all good news though - more than half of the fleet were offline at one point last year, to repair cracks that had developed. Arguably the standardized design led to all these reactors having the same problem at about the same time, where some diversity of design might have limited the “blast radius” of this flaw.
Don't be silly, everyone on HN knows that Europe has no industry! /sarcasm
(more seriously, the French nuclear industry has avoided major disasters but at the cost of some expensive repairs as the fleet is aging together. At least they didn't skimp on the repairs.)
France has a gini coefficient of 32.4, UK 35.1. In comparison the US has one of 41.5, and Norway 27.7. There's not a huge difference in income inequality between France and the UK.
Edit: none of these seem to be "missing". I think they meant that there are a number of unrecovered (in some cases even intentionally scuttled) nuclear submarine wrecks.
I'm very hopeful that within a hundred years this madness will stop and nuclear power will be common place. It's evolved and come along way since Chernobyl... Small modular reactor's and molten salt reactors can pump out more than enough clean energy and without the fear mongering and waste side effects. Apologies to British Petroleum
What exactly gives you any confidence that nuclear power will ever experience a resurgence in the future?
To me, it appears to be a niche technology with a host of problems (fuel mining, decomissioning and fuel reprocessing are dirty and expensive) that is completely incapable of competing with renewable power on cost already, and current trendlines (plant vs. wind/solar/battery costs) are absolutely NOT favorable.
I encounter this highly (and IMO irrationally) favorable view of nuclear power very frequently on HN and would really like to understand why this is so prevalent...
For example MSR's can operate at very high temperatures, can recycle nuclear waste, don't use fuel-rod's and can be made to be smaller and more economical than the older pressurized water reactors that you're referring too.
That reads like a fluff piece to me, which seems unsurprising considering the source; my understanding is that all we have right now are research reactors, i.e. the things are not really suitable for commercial use even if they could already be built/deployed quickly and at scale (which they can't).
And that makes the economics just wishful thinking-- to back them up, we would need first a finalized, commercial design, then to actually build it in some numbers, and verify cost effectiveness. And this is a point that renewables already reached a decade ago, while still getting cheaper...
Nuclear power in general also suffers from the big problem that it becomes even less attractive the more cheap intermittent power is available, because all the costs are fixed; just turning these on when there is no wind/sun makes the already bad cost efficiency even worse...
This wind-and-solar religious argument isn't necessary and I'm guessing it's based in European poltics. I'm OK with wind and solar but not at the scale where it's the only option... And that's because it doesn't work at scale... As Germany found out you can't meet peek demand with just wind and solar:
They have "dark doldrums" and have to revert to natural gas and diesel power plants (which is why BP and American energy companies push wind and solar). On top of that you can't just cover the entire countryside in massive wind turbines or solar panels. You've got protected species and you've got NIMBY. Why push the endless political pissing matches when you could easily develop nuclear power too? Do both. Let nuclear power handle the doldrums.
The article you linked is full of opinionated pessimistic whining, but since its over 3 years old its easy to compare its negative outlook on renewable focused policy with actual results:
According to https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm, current german electricity mix is ~50% renewable since beginning of the year. Used to be 35% in 2018. So the "unreachable" target of 80% in 2050 seems completely trivial; just keep doing things at a similar rate and that target is in reach within a single decade (!!).
Intermittency of renewable sources is a problem that has multiple perfectly viable solutions, namely overprovisioning, storage, grid connectivity and peaker plants. Finding the most cost effective mix of those (and adjusting it over time as technology evolves) is a problem that the free market is perfectly equipped to solve.
Area consumption is not a big issue, neither for solar nor for wind, because roofs and agriculture (and the off-shore option in the case of wind).
Nuclear power is a bad mix with renewables because it's already too expensive and building it for peak loads makes that drastically worse since it's all fixed cost basically. Gas powered plants are super attractive with renewables because of the very same dynamics (cheap installation costs and variable costs that largely depend on actual utilization).
In the extremely unlikely case that battery technology fails completely it would always be possible to use hydrogen as energy storage in combination with refitted gas peaker plants. But that scenario appears unlikely to me.
Also note that renewables have already overtaken nuclear power in the US, too; given recent experiences with the nuclear industry it seems EXTREMELY unlikely to me that this trend would ever reverse.
> In the extremely unlikely case that battery technology fails completely it would always be possible to use hydrogen as energy storage in combination with refitted gas peaker plants. But that scenario appears unlikely to me.
That is not "extremely unlikely" it is 100%ly inevitable. Luckily hydrogen as energy storage is already happening now.
Batteries that buffer about a week of household electricity (100kwh) are already affordable enough to be installed in cars, and the whole sector is still improving rapidly.
You will inevitably need storage capacity of weeks or even months. Especially with regards to seasonal energy shifts (e.g. solar power generated in the summer but used for heating in the winter). There is no prospect of batteries pulling that off. You will need hydrogen for that. Batteries will ultimately just end up being for daily buffers of energy, and probably nothing beyond that once you realize the necessity of hydrogen.
This does not seem so obvious to me. Scenarios where we solve intermittency by improved grid connectivity and overprovisioning with only minimal storage seem quite plausible; transporting gigawatts of power over thousands of kilometers is a solved problem after all.
(I think the main problem is purely political in that nations don't want to depend on others for energy, and outside of a few exceptions that would probably be necessary if storage was to be minimized).
Grid connectivity is not magic. It will cost trillions to pull off and it still doesn't solve the problem of intermittency beyond daily fluctuations. Overprovisioning is just wasting energy. It also guarantees a free source of energy for whatever can utilizing it, which will also certainly be hydrogen production since it is effectively unlimited in its ability to scale up.
The political problem is also not something you can dismiss. It will kill off most of the plans for global connectivity. And in fact this is a good thing as dependency on another country for energy is a bad idea (see Europe's dependency on Russia energy).
So in the end, you really can't get away from hydrogen. It is simply too good of an idea and the alternatives are either impossible or totally unacceptable.
Certain people push this narrative that renewables cannot meet any need, basically at all, and are pushing that we should invest in nuclear instead, precisely because it is expensive and will go no where for quite some time so that fossil fuels continue to be needed for longer. It's intentionally done to try to handicap renewable energy progress.
Renewables have obvious deficiencies which are not resolved simply by having more of them. By shunning nuclear you choose to have fossil fuel power plants everywhere to keep the flow of power consistent and matching demand. Grid-level storage is just as much of an unsolved problem as affordable nuclear, but while getting nuclear costs down is a matter of iterating and improving existing technologies, grid-level storage will likely require brand new technologies which are far from guaranteed.
At this point I don't think nuclear is the way; I think it's got too many hurdles and we don't have enough time to figure it out in a safe way, if we ever can get the costs down and improve safety at the same time. But it's undeniably attractive as a nearly carbon-free energy source.
Deciding that anyone with a different opinion than yours on a complex topic must be some kind of shill for big oil is doing yourself a disservice.
> By shunning nuclear you choose to have fossil fuel power plants everywhere to keep the flow of power consistent and matching demand.
Nuclear is base load - it takes days to change power levels - and cannot be a substitute for fast-reacting power sources
If I had a penny for every HNer who opens their mouth to pontificate about how turning off nukes means a less reliable grid or "we'll need fossil fuel plants to make the grid reliable", I'd be a very rich person.
The madness is people in charge of nuclear facilities being able to cover up accidents with the complicity of governments. Windscale is now called Sellafield because it had acquired such a bad reputation that the UK government decided to just give it a nicer name as a PR move. In addition to incidents described in OP's article, operators dumped ~200kg of plutonium into the Irish Sea in the 1950s, as well as other waste byproducts subsequently. These quantities are probably small enough not to present any great risk to life or local ecology, but using a small sea as a dumping ground without the agreement or even awareness of neighbors hardly builds confidence. There have also been numerous smaller scale incidents over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
I'm pro-nuclear and share your optimism about small modern reactor designs. But any nuclear proposal that doesn't include safety and transparency as core values that take priority over all other considerations deserves to be rejected. There's a reason that people have grave doubts about the integrity of the nuclear industry, and it's not technical but social. There are way too many nuclear proposals that lead off with happy talk about the benefits, and defer discussion of safety, transparency, cost and so on until those issues are raised as objections. It's a PR strategy and I automatically distrust it, because that 'good vibes only' mindset is likely to embed itself in the subsequent management of the plant and lead to cover-your-ass style decision-making.
tl;dr I like nuclear technology, it's the operators I don't trust.
> There are far more missing nuclear submarines than I would have ever expected
Of all nuclear accidents, these are easily the least concerning. For one, only two western nuclear submarines have ever been lost and those were well publicized, nobody should be surprised by those. The Soviets/Russians lost quite a few, which I don't think many people would find surprising, but it's really not a big deal anyway from an environmental perspective. Sea water is excellent shielding, the wrecks are now used as habitats for all kinds of sea life which is unfazed by the radiation. As for heavy metal pollution, ocean water already has several billion tons of uranium and other heavy metals dissolved in it, naturally. A few more tons from a few reactor cores is nothing.
Quite frankly, we should view deliberately dropping old nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical method of disposal. In fact, the Soviets and the UK have deliberately done this several times and (the US and Switzerland did too, to a much lesser extent.) There is no evidence that any of this has caused any harm to the environment.
I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war part of the world.
This is assuming the LNT (linear no threshold) model of radiation damage is true. Which it probably isn't. Lower than predicted deaths from accidents such as Windscale/Sellafield are sometimes taken as arguments against LNT.
However, in all such discussions, one needs to be aware of the strong interest of the British government to keep all things around it's nuclear weapons program secret. So maybe the public figures are fake.
Few things in medicine are linear. DNA has error-correcting codes, much like a hard drive or network connection.
In hard drives or networks, errors are tolerable below a certain threshold. It's a different story once unrecoverable errors start to occur (data loss, system crashes, perhaps errors getting caught by higher-level things like exceptions).
I'd expect DNA, cells and biological systems are probably similar. The error correcting mechanisms can probably handle some errors up to a threshold (which probably itself varies between individuals).
As some of the other comments have noted, Windscale (now Sellafield) was part of the British nuclear weapons programme. That covered everything in secrecy which was bad for public trust. And this has always been difficult to extricate from uranium-based processes. It's where the "peace" in "Greenpeace" comes from; a lot of historical opposition to nuclear reactors was driven by the knowledge that the resulting plutonium would be used to make even more bombs.
I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents, nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot.
a) the British state has a very, very long track record of lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety claims hard to take seriously.
b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic - the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
c) up until about 1990, nuclear reactors using U -> Pu cycles were a critical component of building nuclear weapons, and the designed intent of nuclear weapons was casualty figures in the hundreds of millions. This sat uneasily alongside a policy of "of course we don't intend to actually do that unless threatened".
Every now and again people remember this when looking at Iran, Ukraine, Taiwan etc.
What the UK has a long long track record of, is CND and Greenpeace misrepresenting or outright lying to the general public about all aspects of nuclear power and often conflating it with nuclear weapons. I trust scientists over Doris, 63, from Derby, who doesn't like nuclear power 'for reasons'.
b) All Western countries have an economic problem with nuclear power because the government has been involved since day one for obvious military reasons, limiting the ability to commercialise it and hence reduce costs. SpaceX launches cost 10% of government launches because they've been allowed to commercialise rockets.
How about the events mentioned in TFA, where the government covered up the extent of the radiation leak from the fire in the nuclear plant of unsafe design operated despite repeated accidents, which would have resulted in catastrophic release of uranium dust if not for the individual decision by the the project lead to build filters into the chimneys despite ridicule from the rest of the team?
It has been commercialised? What are EDF and Westinghouse? Even Rolls-Royce is touting the small modular reactor beloved of HN. The problem is that the UK government contracting out to privateish nuclear (state-owned EDF and China General Nuclear Power Group) still hasn't reduced costs.
No, the cost advantage of SpaceX is that they're allowed to fail. This cannot apply to the nuclear industry.
a) OP's article includes the observation that a report into a serious fire was suppressed for 30 years. Perhaps start your search for evidence with what has already been provided, and then broaden to include the whole history of the plant.
b) it seems like the high costs are less a function of government inefficiency than the fact that reprocessing for weapon production is difficult and dangerous, which adds to the cost. Commercial endeavors don't have or want to produce plutonium, but if you think that private industry is somehow immune from the creation of negative externalities, corner-cutting, or cover-ups then I've got an incredible new cryptocurrency opportunity just for you.
Something like windscale would never be built again either. It was an air cooled research reactor designed to make weapon fuel, not power generation or anything useful for civilian purposes. As they learned, air cooling at that scale was a terrible idea and never used again.
> 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Does this include emissions from stuff like motor vehicles, kitchen stoves etc? Or just emissions from power plants which could reasonably be replaced with nuclear?
> I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Great that the alternative in 2023 are renewables and not fossil fuel then!
Now you are being disingenuous. Everyone reputable separates "traditional biofuels", which include poorer people cooking over open wood fires, from modern biofuels.
Traditional biofuels are being replaced with renewables at an incredible pace since it allows for distributed power generation, and a better life, globally.
Modern biofuels are one alternative among others, including synthetic fuels, likely to be used for long-distance air travel and ocean-crossing commercial shipping. That is an incredibly tiny source of pollution today and one that we will very easily regulate to handle potential particle emissions in the future.
No need to insult. I think most people agree that low-carbon, long-term sustainable, clean are the goals, not renewability. It's widely accepted that some renewables like biofuel in general have both air pollution and climate challenges. Take a look at the IPCC's lifecycle CO2 assessments for proof.
The goal is to reduce the world's primary energy from 80% fossil and renewable biofuel down to zero as fast as possible. Sounds like you're making the error where you think it has to be either wind/solar/hydro or nuclear. This is not a zero sum game.
In a fantasy world of infinite resources it is not a zero sum game. In a world where we have prioritize the use of limited resources 5-10x the impact goes a long way.
Apropos of the theme, I have a family member who does height work. Every year (typically in the months where weather will allow), he gets contracted to do some disassembly of buildings at Sellafield (Windscale as was). What follows is hearsay, but still fun :)
The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown) things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer, quickly.
The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread over decades and decades.
Anyone working in a facility like this is absolutely wearing multiple dosimeters.
They will have a cumulative exposure meter, this measures a total amount of dosage over a period of time and is how official things like monthly/yearly/lifetime limits for radiation workers are calculated. This meter is for things like "oops you went 2% over your yearly radiation dose and it's only November you have to stop working until January or you increase your lifetime cancer risk by .94%"
They will also have an acute meter, this is basically a tiny geiger counter which alarms above specific levels. This is for situations like "oh shit that pipe you just stepped next to has a leak and if you don't leave the room in the next 60 seconds, your never going to have any kids (or much worse)."
In some highly critical locations, it's possible for people to wear multiples of each of these, especially the cumulative meters because they are cheap and there might be multiple stakeholders who each have a process for ensuring compliance (e.g. your employer requires one, the facility requires one and the government requires one) -- this is rare bureaucratic nonsense but happens.
For the acute meters you might have multiple just for redundancy. It would really suck if you don't find out you're getting an abnormal dose until your friend walks into the room you've been standing in for an hour, or worse, when your cumulative meter is read days/weeks later.
Nitpick: probably better written as either 0.94% or as 1% — it is too easy to see 94% when skimming or unfamiliar (94 feels big, and percentages plus decimals are a little bit more complicated). Certainly I did a double-take.
I once had the pleasure of seeing Terry Pratchett speak, at the first Penguicon, near Detroit, MI. (Somewhen between 2006 and 2009, I think)
He told us, among other things, of working at a facility where they had to wear some sort of dosimeter, and were not allowed to leave the base without treatment if the card turned black, or something like that.
Then he mentioned one of the workers who turned up too hot to get IN to the base.
Turned out, he'd acquired some old aircraft instruments that used radium paint for nighttime visibility, and had been messing around with them.
A good video! Just to attempt a potentially frivolous answer to your question, the "race" in her video is about economic factors and this is often not particularly interesting to engineering minded folks, whereas nuclear power has all sorts of fun challenges, options, and processes going on. It's more interesting, perhaps, even if it's not the best option in a pragmatic sense.
There is a pervasive narrative in certain groups that renewables fundamentally cannot do "the job" of providing power for all of humanity. They cherry pick issues from current small scale deployments, ignore all the times and places it works just fine, and claim that only nuclear can handle our needs without reducing our way of life.
This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power plants and research. They do this because they actually care about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible.
This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something you don't understand.
Wait, I'm confused. In countries with heavy renewables investment in Europe, there are days when they make so much energy they have to export it, and there are days when the wind doesn't blow quite as much so they have to import energy instead.
That is a fact, right? Not some right wing propaganda.
So if we know this is a fact, how can we address the fact that renewables dip below what we need from time to time? How do you handle the baseload? I don't think that's "cherrypicking" - more like a fundamental issue that as far as I can see has only couple ways of being addressed - either have plants that run on fossil fuels, or.....nuclear power. Out of the two, nuclear wins easily when it comes to environmental cost, no?
Like....is literally anything I said in any way controversial?
And you do get that you completely failed to address anything that I asked, instead launching into a seque about something you've made up entirely in your head since I never said energy surplus is a bad thing? And no, I really don't want you to continue debating this point - I'd like you to answer my original question thank you.
Ok, nuclear is not dispatchable and therefore sucks at coping with spikes in generation or demand. You need either gas turbine (responds in minutes), hydro (seconds) or battery (milliseconds). "Base load" is not a good thing, it's a "this is useless for anything else, so all we can use it for is base load" thing.
""Base load" is not a good thing, it's a "this is useless for anything else, so all we can use it for is base load" thing."
Surely you want a base load capacity to always exist, no matter what, no? Covering for spikes is one thing, but your grid has to have an always-on level of generation that is always there, for various technical reasons.
>> hydro (seconds)
Genuine curiosity - what kind of hydro reacts in seconds? I literally used to live next to a hydro dam and the numbers they used to give visitors were around 10-15 minutes minimum to spool up the turbines and start delivering to the grid. We also had a hydro storage facility on top of a mountain nearby, similar thing - it takes time to open the sluices, it takes time for water to hit the turbines, it takes time for the turbines to spool up and get to the operational parameters before they can start sending power to the grid.
And finally I'm still not sure why you'd say that people who are cheering for nuclear power are only doing so to prelong the fossil fuel dominance?
Base load: no, you can get away with it because there's always some demand but if it ever drops below your base load level you suddenly need to find a way to dump energy off. A grid of perfectly dispatchable, if such a thing were possible, would be the ideal.
The nuclear fans are prolonging fossil fuels through their false claims that renewables can't achieve what they are already achieving. Scotland used to get 85% of its electricity from fossil fuels. That figure is 10% today. Nuclear fans keep pushing for a hugely expensive solution that will take at least a decade to start producing. It's a delaying tactic. I don't mean that anyone who is pushing for nuclear is a shill, I just think they've fallen for the narrative.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadThese reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big nuclear bonfires!
He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source. Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf
The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they don't need that high a voltage.
Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 - Nov 2014 (15 comments)
Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
Maybe it's because of the 'fraternité' in 'liberté égalité fraternité; they have very strong culture of public solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say Britain or the US.
And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons why France has had major success with no issues. There's nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.
While this has been a real problem and got them into some supply tight spots over winter it definitely speaks for their approach to safety.
(more seriously, the French nuclear industry has avoided major disasters but at the cost of some expensive repairs as the fleet is aging together. At least they didn't skimp on the repairs.)
Edit: none of these seem to be "missing". I think they meant that there are a number of unrecovered (in some cases even intentionally scuttled) nuclear submarine wrecks.
To me, it appears to be a niche technology with a host of problems (fuel mining, decomissioning and fuel reprocessing are dirty and expensive) that is completely incapable of competing with renewable power on cost already, and current trendlines (plant vs. wind/solar/battery costs) are absolutely NOT favorable.
I encounter this highly (and IMO irrationally) favorable view of nuclear power very frequently on HN and would really like to understand why this is so prevalent...
For example MSR's can operate at very high temperatures, can recycle nuclear waste, don't use fuel-rod's and can be made to be smaller and more economical than the older pressurized water reactors that you're referring too.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/spotlight-on-innovation...
And that makes the economics just wishful thinking-- to back them up, we would need first a finalized, commercial design, then to actually build it in some numbers, and verify cost effectiveness. And this is a point that renewables already reached a decade ago, while still getting cheaper...
Nuclear power in general also suffers from the big problem that it becomes even less attractive the more cheap intermittent power is available, because all the costs are fixed; just turning these on when there is no wind/sun makes the already bad cost efficiency even worse...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-...
They have "dark doldrums" and have to revert to natural gas and diesel power plants (which is why BP and American energy companies push wind and solar). On top of that you can't just cover the entire countryside in massive wind turbines or solar panels. You've got protected species and you've got NIMBY. Why push the endless political pissing matches when you could easily develop nuclear power too? Do both. Let nuclear power handle the doldrums.
According to https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm, current german electricity mix is ~50% renewable since beginning of the year. Used to be 35% in 2018. So the "unreachable" target of 80% in 2050 seems completely trivial; just keep doing things at a similar rate and that target is in reach within a single decade (!!).
Intermittency of renewable sources is a problem that has multiple perfectly viable solutions, namely overprovisioning, storage, grid connectivity and peaker plants. Finding the most cost effective mix of those (and adjusting it over time as technology evolves) is a problem that the free market is perfectly equipped to solve.
Area consumption is not a big issue, neither for solar nor for wind, because roofs and agriculture (and the off-shore option in the case of wind).
Nuclear power is a bad mix with renewables because it's already too expensive and building it for peak loads makes that drastically worse since it's all fixed cost basically. Gas powered plants are super attractive with renewables because of the very same dynamics (cheap installation costs and variable costs that largely depend on actual utilization).
In the extremely unlikely case that battery technology fails completely it would always be possible to use hydrogen as energy storage in combination with refitted gas peaker plants. But that scenario appears unlikely to me.
Also note that renewables have already overtaken nuclear power in the US, too; given recent experiences with the nuclear industry it seems EXTREMELY unlikely to me that this trend would ever reverse.
That is not "extremely unlikely" it is 100%ly inevitable. Luckily hydrogen as energy storage is already happening now.
Batteries that buffer about a week of household electricity (100kwh) are already affordable enough to be installed in cars, and the whole sector is still improving rapidly.
(I think the main problem is purely political in that nations don't want to depend on others for energy, and outside of a few exceptions that would probably be necessary if storage was to be minimized).
The political problem is also not something you can dismiss. It will kill off most of the plans for global connectivity. And in fact this is a good thing as dependency on another country for energy is a bad idea (see Europe's dependency on Russia energy).
So in the end, you really can't get away from hydrogen. It is simply too good of an idea and the alternatives are either impossible or totally unacceptable.
At this point I don't think nuclear is the way; I think it's got too many hurdles and we don't have enough time to figure it out in a safe way, if we ever can get the costs down and improve safety at the same time. But it's undeniably attractive as a nearly carbon-free energy source.
Deciding that anyone with a different opinion than yours on a complex topic must be some kind of shill for big oil is doing yourself a disservice.
Nuclear is base load - it takes days to change power levels - and cannot be a substitute for fast-reacting power sources
If I had a penny for every HNer who opens their mouth to pontificate about how turning off nukes means a less reliable grid or "we'll need fossil fuel plants to make the grid reliable", I'd be a very rich person.
I'm pro-nuclear and share your optimism about small modern reactor designs. But any nuclear proposal that doesn't include safety and transparency as core values that take priority over all other considerations deserves to be rejected. There's a reason that people have grave doubts about the integrity of the nuclear industry, and it's not technical but social. There are way too many nuclear proposals that lead off with happy talk about the benefits, and defer discussion of safety, transparency, cost and so on until those issues are raised as objections. It's a PR strategy and I automatically distrust it, because that 'good vibes only' mindset is likely to embed itself in the subsequent management of the plant and lead to cover-your-ass style decision-making.
tl;dr I like nuclear technology, it's the operators I don't trust.
Of all nuclear accidents, these are easily the least concerning. For one, only two western nuclear submarines have ever been lost and those were well publicized, nobody should be surprised by those. The Soviets/Russians lost quite a few, which I don't think many people would find surprising, but it's really not a big deal anyway from an environmental perspective. Sea water is excellent shielding, the wrecks are now used as habitats for all kinds of sea life which is unfazed by the radiation. As for heavy metal pollution, ocean water already has several billion tons of uranium and other heavy metals dissolved in it, naturally. A few more tons from a few reactor cores is nothing.
Quite frankly, we should view deliberately dropping old nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical method of disposal. In fact, the Soviets and the UK have deliberately done this several times and (the US and Switzerland did too, to a much lesser extent.) There is no evidence that any of this has caused any harm to the environment.
Imagine the optics! If this is a good solution it would most certainly have to be done by governments in secrecy.
https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-...
It's an amazing story.
I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war part of the world.
Source: Mahaffey, "Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters"
However, in all such discussions, one needs to be aware of the strong interest of the British government to keep all things around it's nuclear weapons program secret. So maybe the public figures are fake.
In hard drives or networks, errors are tolerable below a certain threshold. It's a different story once unrecoverable errors start to occur (data loss, system crashes, perhaps errors getting caught by higher-level things like exceptions).
I'd expect DNA, cells and biological systems are probably similar. The error correcting mechanisms can probably handle some errors up to a threshold (which probably itself varies between individuals).
The worst case of this was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera , a foreshadow of the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for attacking Iraq.
I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents, nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
a) the British state has a very, very long track record of lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety claims hard to take seriously.
b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic - the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
Every now and again people remember this when looking at Iran, Ukraine, Taiwan etc.
d) the last UK agriculture impact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster were lifted in 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-18299228
What the UK has a long long track record of, is CND and Greenpeace misrepresenting or outright lying to the general public about all aspects of nuclear power and often conflating it with nuclear weapons. I trust scientists over Doris, 63, from Derby, who doesn't like nuclear power 'for reasons'.
b) All Western countries have an economic problem with nuclear power because the government has been involved since day one for obvious military reasons, limiting the ability to commercialise it and hence reduce costs. SpaceX launches cost 10% of government launches because they've been allowed to commercialise rockets.
No, the cost advantage of SpaceX is that they're allowed to fail. This cannot apply to the nuclear industry.
b) it seems like the high costs are less a function of government inefficiency than the fact that reprocessing for weapon production is difficult and dangerous, which adds to the cost. Commercial endeavors don't have or want to produce plutonium, but if you think that private industry is somehow immune from the creation of negative externalities, corner-cutting, or cover-ups then I've got an incredible new cryptocurrency opportunity just for you.
Does this include emissions from stuff like motor vehicles, kitchen stoves etc? Or just emissions from power plants which could reasonably be replaced with nuclear?
Car fossil can be reasonably replaced with nuclear through electric vehicles. Same with stoves.
Great that the alternative in 2023 are renewables and not fossil fuel then!
Traditional biofuels are being replaced with renewables at an incredible pace since it allows for distributed power generation, and a better life, globally.
Modern biofuels are one alternative among others, including synthetic fuels, likely to be used for long-distance air travel and ocean-crossing commercial shipping. That is an incredibly tiny source of pollution today and one that we will very easily regulate to handle potential particle emissions in the future.
What are we optimizing for here? Impact or through any means possible justifying nuclear?
Tragedies are tragedies, and only scoundrels compete on the scale of tragedies.
But in fairness, this accident was small compared to Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown) things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer, quickly.
The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread over decades and decades.
They will have a cumulative exposure meter, this measures a total amount of dosage over a period of time and is how official things like monthly/yearly/lifetime limits for radiation workers are calculated. This meter is for things like "oops you went 2% over your yearly radiation dose and it's only November you have to stop working until January or you increase your lifetime cancer risk by .94%"
They will also have an acute meter, this is basically a tiny geiger counter which alarms above specific levels. This is for situations like "oh shit that pipe you just stepped next to has a leak and if you don't leave the room in the next 60 seconds, your never going to have any kids (or much worse)."
In some highly critical locations, it's possible for people to wear multiples of each of these, especially the cumulative meters because they are cheap and there might be multiple stakeholders who each have a process for ensuring compliance (e.g. your employer requires one, the facility requires one and the government requires one) -- this is rare bureaucratic nonsense but happens.
For the acute meters you might have multiple just for redundancy. It would really suck if you don't find out you're getting an abnormal dose until your friend walks into the room you've been standing in for an hour, or worse, when your cumulative meter is read days/weeks later.
Nitpick: probably better written as either 0.94% or as 1% — it is too easy to see 94% when skimming or unfamiliar (94 feels big, and percentages plus decimals are a little bit more complicated). Certainly I did a double-take.
He told us, among other things, of working at a facility where they had to wear some sort of dosimeter, and were not allowed to leave the base without treatment if the card turned black, or something like that.
Then he mentioned one of the workers who turned up too hot to get IN to the base.
Turned out, he'd acquired some old aircraft instruments that used radium paint for nighttime visibility, and had been messing around with them.
Fun times!
Given that it's just a technology choice, and that there are much cheaper [1], faster, options available I wonder why?
--- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI_8xYSWYE
This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power plants and research. They do this because they actually care about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible.
This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something you don't understand.
That is a fact, right? Not some right wing propaganda.
So if we know this is a fact, how can we address the fact that renewables dip below what we need from time to time? How do you handle the baseload? I don't think that's "cherrypicking" - more like a fundamental issue that as far as I can see has only couple ways of being addressed - either have plants that run on fossil fuels, or.....nuclear power. Out of the two, nuclear wins easily when it comes to environmental cost, no?
Like....is literally anything I said in any way controversial?
> there are days when they make so much energy they have to export it
"Oh no! Our power generation is making so much energy that we have to sell even more of it and make even more money! What a disaster!"
You do get that power companies want to make money, right?
Does that answer your question?
""Base load" is not a good thing, it's a "this is useless for anything else, so all we can use it for is base load" thing."
Surely you want a base load capacity to always exist, no matter what, no? Covering for spikes is one thing, but your grid has to have an always-on level of generation that is always there, for various technical reasons.
>> hydro (seconds)
Genuine curiosity - what kind of hydro reacts in seconds? I literally used to live next to a hydro dam and the numbers they used to give visitors were around 10-15 minutes minimum to spool up the turbines and start delivering to the grid. We also had a hydro storage facility on top of a mountain nearby, similar thing - it takes time to open the sluices, it takes time for water to hit the turbines, it takes time for the turbines to spool up and get to the operational parameters before they can start sending power to the grid.
And finally I'm still not sure why you'd say that people who are cheering for nuclear power are only doing so to prelong the fossil fuel dominance?
Hydro: "Cruachan power station can respond within 26 seconds to sudden demands for electricity." https://www.secret-scotland.com/place/cruachan-power-station
I live in Scotland.
The nuclear fans are prolonging fossil fuels through their false claims that renewables can't achieve what they are already achieving. Scotland used to get 85% of its electricity from fossil fuels. That figure is 10% today. Nuclear fans keep pushing for a hugely expensive solution that will take at least a decade to start producing. It's a delaying tactic. I don't mean that anyone who is pushing for nuclear is a shill, I just think they've fallen for the narrative.