> Is it right to ignore the cost of the evacuation of Tokyo, merely because an unplanned flow of water saved us? What if we assume the maximum cost of a nuclear event is not $1 trillion for the Fukushima we lived, but $10 trillion for the Fukushima we escaped
This continued focus on cost rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense. Even if there is risk of a $10 trillion disaster, once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy.
As might have been predicted, Japan struggled for a few years then admitted that having electricity justifies taking some rational risks and is working to undo the damage caused by post-Fukushima overreaction.
The western powers are facing a serious energy crisis because as a body politic there was an insistence on choosing technology ideologically rather than using practical concerns. It is unfortunate that there was a decision make to test how much stress the margins of society can take rather than making a break for cheap energy in the 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s.
Maybe renewables can do it now in the 20s, but the experience in places like Germany is that they are cheaper but also less effective at maintaining a comfortable society. And that 40 years delay was still foolish regardless.
Why would you equal-to-coal today? You need to equal wind, solar or at least gas safety.
Lately I'm reading a lot about lowering nuclear safety to improve costs. Imagine cars makers asking to get rid of ABS, airbags, safety belts... to make cheaper cars. Any sane person would raise a brow when hearing that, any industry should aim to be as safe as possible, not to cut costs on safety and assume some preventable deaths with a happy smile.
> Imagine cars makers asking to get rid of ABS, airbags, safety belts...
But cars with all those safety features are still much more risky then nuclear plants. Cars can kill you. Practically speaking nuclear plants cannot. They force people to move. If you are going to complain about preventable deaths, what is your plan to make cars safe? We haven't done all we can do. If we bought the speed limits down to walking pace and banned reversing we'd save a huge number of lives (including small toddlers, it remains a tear jerker every time someone reverses over their own toddler).
Why are you accepting high risks from cars but raising an eyebrow at nuclear plants? It isn't rational. You know people, right now, who will be killed by cars. Why isn't something being done [0]?
> in the page 5 you can see that regulatory costs are minimal
Nuclear is the only technology that gets more expensive the more is built. And I'll give you a hint. That anomaly is 100% caused by the regulatory framework.
The report is obviously misjudging something. They're probably doing something like assuming only things that the regulators explicitly ask for count as regulatory costs. We should see a learning effect in the nuclear industry where technology gets cheaper over time.
[0] That was rhetorical. The answer is because it'd be damn silly and the costs would far outweight the benefits. Everyone can see that because the costs are obvious and felt personally. It is unfortunate the the costs of lacking energy are going to be felt before people accept that there aren't alternatives to building new powerplants.
You can argue that it was not ramped down and could have been phased out more quickly but you also have to look at the political discussion at the time of deciding to put a stop on nuclear.
Japan’s power grid apparently has problems making increased capacity and load sharing difficult, and they rely a lot on imported fossil fuels. It explains among other things why they’re so enthusiastic about hydrogen and not so much about electric cars. I’m not sure what lessons other countries can learn from their choices.
There is certainly bias, but there’s also a whole lot of “refuse to acknowledge reality”.
Certainly, there is a cost/benefit to compare, but really, bluntly, we’re shit at cleaning up nuclear disasters.
In every situation where they’ve occurred, it’s taken longer and cost more than anticipated, and the point here is that this enormously expensive disaster could have been 10x worse if not for a lucky coincidence.
> Even if there is a risk of a $10 trillion disaster…
/sigh…
The problem is not that it’s too expensive; it’s that we’re not technologically advanced enough to deal with nuclear disasters other than brute force “pack everything into bricks and bury it in a hole”.
People will do it, because they close their eyes and hope nothing goes wrong (hey, won’t be in office when it does, this is your problem next generation, haha~), but things will go wrong, and it will. Again. Be crushingly expensive.
…and until we solve ”deal with it when it goes wrong”, bluntly, nuclear energy is always going to be controversial based on different levels of risk acceptance by different groups.
It’s not cognitive bias. You just have a different opinion. Neither you nor they are “right” about acceptable levels of risk.
The solution isn’t singing and dancing about nuclear power being safe.
It is not safe.
The solution is find ways to make it safe by being able to contain, control and deal with nuclear materials without needing “10000 years in a hole in the ground” for waste material, or “evacuate the entire metropolitan Tokyo” when things go wrong. Those are not things that happen with “safe” technology.
What if the Tsunami had hit Tokyo? How big would that disaster have been?
Sendai is a much smaller city and it had over 100k destroyed buildings, 15k dead or missing, and well over 100k without shelter. Estimates of the damage to infrastructure is estimated in the $Trillion range (over $300B spent in direct govt rebuilding incentives).
Maybe we shouldn't build large cities next to water since we're not technologically advanced enough to deal with natural disasters?
In a context of rising tides, yes, that's not a smart idea. Like it wasn't smart to do it in the context of middle-age piracy in the Mediterranean, or when the Roman Empire crumbled and cities on plains became indefensible - people moved to hills and mountains, further from the coast.
Sendai was hit by a tsunami and the cost was huge, but if you visit Sendai now, it’s quite nice.
People can understand this kind of risk.
There was a disaster, it got cleaned up. Now, people live there and are happy.
The same is true of many other floods.
So… I’d say we technologically advanced enough to deal with flood waters.
Unlike, literally every nuclear disaster.
Believe what you want to believe dude. No amount of snark, prancing or shaking your fist at the sky about nuclear safety is going to convince people it’s safe.
…until we have technological solutions that more effectively deal with nuclear radiation, radioactive substances and radiation related illness.
I've stayed with people in Sendai before and after 2011.
Based on the snarky prancing I don't think you have, dude.
Watch footage of that event again and repeat the words, "People can understand this kind of risk".
Over 7M people use 300km of track and ~300 subway stations in Tokyo daily. Below sea level without electricity? There are many possible horrors we choose not to consider every day. Dealing with them rationally as a society is the only real hope.
> (hey, won’t be in office when it does, this is your problem next generation, haha~)
Isn't global warming a problem we're trying to ignore and offload to the next generations too? Despite all you said is true, I still think we're better equipped to deal with nuclear power plants than hurricanes, floodings and all the other disasters that climate change has in store for us in the future. This is something we have to consider too when discussing the cost/danger-benefits of nuclear energy.
Has anyone else noticed these kind of posts appear quickly for certain vested-interest areas, get voted to the top but don't have much if any backup to them?
Let's break this down.
> rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense
Agreed
> ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy.
No justification given in the form of a cost/benefit analysis (which the poster just invoked the need for), just a flat statement that it is the "best possible". Note the use of weasel word 'best'.
> having electricity justifies taking some rational risks and is working to undo the damage caused by post-Fukushima overreaction ... there was an insistence on choosing technology ideologically rather than using practical concerns
"Rational" in "rational risks", and "overreaction", also "ideologically" versus "practical concerns" More weasel words, pure emotive invocations.
I could go on, but let's finish with
> that they are cheaper but also less effective at maintaining a comfortable society
Absolutely no justification for this, and completely ignoring the fact that climate change is now kicking in badly.
How the hell did this get voted to the top, because I'm starting to have my suspicions. If it's not shilling then it certainly against HN rules "..don't post shallow dismissals ... A good critical comment teaches us something", this being precisely a shallow dismissal and nothing I can learn from except some people are wilfully blind to what they don't want to see.
Something, somewhere is blatantly going wrong with commenting.
Seems to me it's effectively impossible to get evidence of shilling, but if this is indistinguishable from shallow dismissals – which it precisely is – this post should be dealt with in an equivalent way.
That said, the moderators are glad to delete certain kinds of posts (including some of mine, rightly or wrongly), but not this kind. And maybe they are right not to, but I'd like to know why.
Edit: I come to HN because there's a lot of good, informative posts and also descriptions of people's experience. This is really valuable stuff, but it's being drowned out by timewasting fluff and garbage to the point where I'm starting to regret coming here, and I especially regret posting something that tries to be informative when the only response I get for a few subjects (eg. drugs) appears to be co-ordinated, weaponised downvoting. Downvotes are fine, but I need to know why someone disagrees.
The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy. There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change.
> The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy
Maybe. Do you have anything to back that up?
> There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change
That would possibly include me, but that does not allow glossing over their risks and failures, which is exactly what the parent post did. I'm not disagreeing with it, I'm asking it to be backed up with evidence. To repeat, this isn't about nuclear energy but the quality of HN posts about various subjects.
I don't see nuclear proponents comparing potential cost (say $10T) against benefit (power produced during plant's lifetime - optimistically $10B (over 30 years). That's 1000:1 against.
By wikipedia, there are about 170 nuclear power plants and have been 6 accidents costing over $1B - approximately 1 in 30 plants have had very expensive accidents.
Those odds don't make sense for any country. Though they might make sense for an investor, knowing that they won't be required to pay those big costs - they might win and (in the event of a disaster) they only loose their investment. Perhaps if they have to guarantee the $10T potential costs, they'd look realistically at the "investment".
"Initial estimates of costs to Japanese taxpayers were in excess of 12 trillion yen ($100 billion).[299] In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion)"
I am not against nuclear power, but I am deeply worried by people like you who clearly only want to see the upside - and it is that which makes me nervous of nuclear power not the technology itself but the blindness of people around it."Costing over $1 billion" is just plain misleading.
> a slippage between tectonic plates so powerful that it moved Honshu, the main island of Japan, 2.4 meters to the east. The earthquake generated a tsunami 14 meters high
The definition of a black swan event.
And yet the conclusion is, unsurprisingly, indistinguishable from "nuclear is bad, be very very wary".
Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Banqiao dam failure that killed anywhere from 25 000 to 240 000 and left 11 million people homeless.
You can still build nuclear reactors, they are not banned. But you want to build them ignoring safety lessons.
The aeronautical industry is improving safety all the time, and accidents prompt new safety measures. They don't scoof accidents without analysis and adaptation, saying "if you want to fly you must accept that some 787-MAX are crashing down from time to time, but still safer than traveling by car, we did the math". No, they landed the plane and adapted.
> But you want to build them ignoring safety lessons.
No, I don't
> The aeronautical industry is improving safety all the time, and accidents prompt new safety measures.
Yes, they do.
Note: we're still flying. The number of aircraft is increasing. And we don't turn aircraft into boogey men.
Had aircraft been treated the way nuclear plants are treated, we'd stop building most of them in the early 80s, and the construction of each new one would be met with strong opposition and campaigns to shut the entire thing down.
You're ignoring the fact that humans generally do not think in terms of expected value, nor should they. An improbable outcome of widespread catastrophe (irradiating a million people) is and should be treated as something worse than a more-probable outcome of localized catastrophe (plane crash). You can't just do "loss x probability = cost".
> An improbable outcome of widespread catastrophe (irradiating a million people) is and should be treated as something worse than a more-probable outcome of localized catastrophe (plane crash).
Quoting myself again:
Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Banqiao dam failure that killed anywhere from 25 000 to 240 000 and left 11 million people homeless.
Fair about the dam. If that happened in the West then yes, it'd change things. The biggest dam failures in North America for example have never been that big. And you'd surely never get a major new dam built today anywhere near any kind of populated area in the USA.
Also, it's worth noting that nuclear disasters remain dangerous for amounts of time ranging from "one generation" to "longer than human history so far", adding an extra element of catastrophe.
The crucial difference is that people consent to get on a plane.
There are quite a few people who are afraid of flying, so afraid that they refuse to fly. That’s of course their prerogative.
The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody, including the people who didn’t want them to be built, and even people in neighboring countries who didn’t even get a vote on it - depending on which way the wind blows.
So the nuclear power station has to be built as safely as the most fearful person demands.
> The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody
Why do we keep building hydroelectric plants (and dams in general)? Why do we keep building coal plants which are more radioactive than niclear plants, and are often located in densely populated areas?
Why don't you apply the same logic to other things?
We are not? We are building renewables where the risks all come from the people working on the equipment. Fitting the analogy of airline safety nicely.
And yet nobody consented to climate change. I certainly didn't. They also don't consent to PM2.5 from uncovered coal trains running through residential areas. Nobody consents to being downstream of a hydroelectric dam...
I wasn’t saying that we can’t have nuclear power at all. I was saying that we can’t nuclear power that is as risky as aviation. If that makes nuclear unviable, then so be it.
Getting on an aircraft involves taking a risk. You may die. People die every year because they boarded an aircraft. The risk is small, but it’s not zero. We are okay with people taking this risk because they chose to do it.
For nuclear power, small is not good enough, the risk of a serious incident such as Chernobyl has to be effectively zero. This is very expensive.
Hydroelectric is not really comparable, if you are not happy living downstream of a hydro plant then you can move somewhere else.
Nuclear fails in unpredictable ways. When Chernobyl happened, the whole of Europe held its breath to see which way the fallout would blow. The only way to escape the risk is heavy regulation or bans.
Had nuclear plants been treated the way airplanes are treated, any fault in one plant would lead to steps to redesign all of them, present and future, to definitively avoid this fault; and frankly, the fact that this is not being done is such a massive fuckup that it's making me more anti-nuclear.
My pro-nuclear position is based on an assumption of baseline competence! This doesn't seem to actually be the case!
Incorrect, old aircraft are grandfathered into new regulations. This is why it's so hard to get the GA industry to switch away from leaded avgas, because it's almost impossible to certify new engines.
However, it took less than 60 years of commercial nuclear power generation for that black swan event to occur. (Compare hydro-engineering, where it's common to design for 100-year events and even 500-year events. Also, compare tsunami stones marking flood levels from the 1930s.)
> However, it took less than 60 years of commercial nuclear power generation for that black swan event to occur.
Hmm... We've been building cities for millenia, but look, in this event "45,700 buildings were destroyed and 144,300 were damaged by the quake and tsunami".
> Compare hydro-engineering, where it's common to design for 100-year events and even 500-year events
The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure was the collapse of the Banqiao Dam and 61 other dams in Henan, China, under the influence of Typhoon Nina in August 1975. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected a total population of 10.15 million and inundated around 30 cities and counties of 12,000 square kilometers (or 3 million acres), with an estimated death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000. The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses.
You may note the tsunami stones, marking flood levels from the 1930s with inscriptions like, "Do not build any homes below this point (…) Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis." Also, earthquakes, even sever ones (there had been 9 with magnitudes > 8 in the 100 years before), are expected and reoccurring events in Japan. They had been explicit design criteria for the power plant. This was quite literally a 100-year event with similar past events happening in the last 100 years before this. So this is hardly a black swan.
An earthquake and tsunami in the country who coined the term is now a "Black Swan event" to make an attempt at painting the nuclear power plants failure in favorable light.
Even more entertaining is that Fukushima lead to widespread changes across the industry around independent core cooling and gas filtration.
The regulators found systemic deficiencies in the industry, but let's roll that back!
As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. Thus independent core cooling was not a Black Swan event, it was systemic.
> An earthquake and tsunami in the country who coined the term is now a "Black Swan event" to make an attempt at painting the nuclear power plants failure in favorable light.
How many earthquakes do you know that move an entire island by 2.4 meters?
How many 14-meter tsunamis have there been?
"A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences"
> The regulators found systemic deficiencies in the industry, but let's roll that back!
Of course that is not what I'm saying. But do let the FUD roll.
Following that multiple studies showed that Fukushima could get hit by +15m tsunamis and suggested heightening the sea wall.
Now you are trying to redefine Black Swan to fit your narrative.
Take what the author said about COVID-19.
> According to Taleb, as it was expected with great certainty that a global pandemic would eventually take place, the COVID-19 pandemic is not a black swan, but is considered to be a white swan; such an event has a major effect, but is compatible with statistical properties.
Similarly, there is a great certainty that a +15m tsunami will hit any of the existing nuclear power plants in Japan. Fukushima was not a Black Swan, simply human negligence.
> Now you are trying to redefine Black Swan to fit your narrative.
Ah yes. It's my bad. "The most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake recorded in the world since modern seismography began in 1900" can never be classified as a Black Swan event, and I apologize for my mistake.
As for tsunami,
"The sea walls in several cities had been built to protect against tsunamis of much lower heights. Also, many people caught in the tsunami thought they were on high enough ground to be safe. According to a special committee on disaster prevention designated by the Japanese government, the tsunami protection policy had been intended to deal with only tsunamis that had been scientifically proved to occur repeatedly."
My apologies, this wasn't a Black Swan event either. Totally predictable, and not beyond what's normally expected.
> According to Taleb, as it was expected with great certainty that a global pandemic would eventually take place,
It's funny how all Nostradamuses "prove" their vague predictions only after something occurs.
What was it said about black swan events?
"The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight."
Note that this particular megatsunami is completely irrelevant when we're talking about Fukushima. Because context matters. You can't just say "oh we had 500 meter megatsunamis, Fukushima should have protected against those".
The one you linked happened:
- in a narrow bay
- with a dual-slide that involved both a huge rockfall, and a huge release of sediment connected to a glacier breaking off
---
It's also the first time I've heard of this event, and.... Just wow. Never thought it would be possible
---
Edit: According to Wikipedia all megatsunamis recorded since 1900 were caused by landslides: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami Only some of the landslides were caused by earthquakes.
By your 'logic' no dam can be built as they all stand a chance of a direct hit from a meteorite.
Risk-wise the Fukushima nuclear disaster cause less direct and indirect death than many accidents and natural disasers .. including deaths from, say, fertilizer depot explosions, oil rig accidents, etc.
In the hypothetical situation where Tokyo needed to be evacuated, or a large enough portion of the population there feared for their health and wanted to leave, i wonder if in the long term, the redistribution of population back into regional Japan would not be a good thing over all.
Yes. Like when you’re driving using a GPS map. You can’t look at the map and see if you’ve made the wrong turn, because it always recalculates the route and determines the currently correct path to your destination, and shows you as being on that path. (The only exception is when it tells you to make a U-turn.)
People have a hard on for regional areas, but the practical reality is people enjoy the benefits of living in cities too much to want to live in rural areas. They are also way worse at actually providing for the needs of those people efficiently.
The spent-fuel pond fire is also the ongoing risk at Zaporizhzhya. There's a long list of stressors going into that probabilistic equation: e.g. the reservoir it draws on for cooling water source collapsed with the dam bombing; and all of its connections to the offsite power grid have disappeared, save one (now a single point of failure).
It's a story from the Davis Besse NPP operators, who happened to face the exact same fault as caused the accident at Three Mile Island... and made it through OK... except they experienced it first, 18 months earlier.
So why, when this happened a second time, did no one learn from the first occurrence? Why were people more worried about assigning blame, substandard training materials, and taking cover from lawsuits, than about ensuring this could not happen again?
THIS is why we cannot have nice things. It does not matter whether the technology can or cannot be implemented safely. It matters whether the human organizations that support that technology are up to the task of managing something where a single mistake can ruin tens of millions of people's lives, with consequences for ten thousand years. It's not like one plane dropping out of the sky, ruining 500 people's lives... this is a much longer term problem. And probabilistic risk assessment, as technically correct as it is when it gets perfect input information, is absolutely horrid at driving humans to make the right choices.
I agree with you, but you are overestimating the cost on live of an accident by many orders of magnitude.
How do you get to the tens of millions of live ruinned?
Chernobyl and surrounding areas had to be fully evacuated, and it was a pretty remote site in a very sparsely populated country. That's not tens of millions but probably in the single millions. If it happened in a denser area, like France or the US East Coast, it would probably reach 10m relatively easily.
According to Wikipedia, there was less than 200k people evacuated for Chernobyl.
Also, if you take a 30km radius, multiplied by the population density of California, you get only 274k people. (And I'm pretty sure that the powerplant are build in area which are less populated than the average).
As we leaned since, 30km radius is probably over-doing it.
That's considering the life of someone being evacuated to be "ruined"
Chernobyl is also not Three Mile Island. Chernobyl is so exceptional that it shouldn't be included in these discussions at all unless you're literally planning to build an RBMK reactor with out a containment building again and graphite tipped control rods.
My brain pulled that number from the article's discussion of Fukushima:
> In the worst case scenario, not made public until long after the disaster, the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area - 35 million people - would have to be moved to temporary shelter. The very existence of the nation of Japan was at stake. And no one - not TEPCO, the utility that owned Fukushima, not the Prime Minister, not the Japanese military - could do anything but hope.
Feel free to call that unreasonably-worst-case or just hyperbole. (It kind of is.) But that's where I got it.
This is the story of the Chernobyl disaster as well. There had been two similar accidents preceding it, in 1975 at the Leningrad NPP and in 1983 at the Ignalina NPP. Only after the second one the design flaws were well understood, but they weren't fixed in the following years.
>> A nuclear power plant's approximately twenty thousand safety components have a Rube Goldberg quality. Like dominoes, numerous pumps, valves, and switches must operate in the required sequence to simply pump cooling water or shut down the plant. There were innumerable unlikely combinations of failures that could cause an accident
Query: Is anything this complex designed this way today, without actually running all its failure modes through risk analysis before actually building it?
After watching industrial disaster post-mortems by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, I think the answer is yes. Plenty of stuff gets built without considering each failure mode.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadFinalist #7 in the Book Review Contest
This continued focus on cost rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense. Even if there is risk of a $10 trillion disaster, once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy.
As might have been predicted, Japan struggled for a few years then admitted that having electricity justifies taking some rational risks and is working to undo the damage caused by post-Fukushima overreaction.
The western powers are facing a serious energy crisis because as a body politic there was an insistence on choosing technology ideologically rather than using practical concerns. It is unfortunate that there was a decision make to test how much stress the margins of society can take rather than making a break for cheap energy in the 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s.
Maybe renewables can do it now in the 20s, but the experience in places like Germany is that they are cheaper but also less effective at maintaining a comfortable society. And that 40 years delay was still foolish regardless.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-pm-call-dev...
We genuinely don't know how much less it would cost to have nuclear power on an equal-safety-to-coal-power basis, because it's not been tried.
Lately I'm reading a lot about lowering nuclear safety to improve costs. Imagine cars makers asking to get rid of ABS, airbags, safety belts... to make cheaper cars. Any sane person would raise a brow when hearing that, any industry should aim to be as safe as possible, not to cut costs on safety and assume some preventable deaths with a happy smile.
It's also a lie: in this report https://www.nei.org/resources/reports-briefs/nuclear-costs-i... , in the page 5 you can see that regulatory costs are minimal (and the source should be nuclear friendly enough) after adapting for the Fukushima "lesson".
But cars with all those safety features are still much more risky then nuclear plants. Cars can kill you. Practically speaking nuclear plants cannot. They force people to move. If you are going to complain about preventable deaths, what is your plan to make cars safe? We haven't done all we can do. If we bought the speed limits down to walking pace and banned reversing we'd save a huge number of lives (including small toddlers, it remains a tear jerker every time someone reverses over their own toddler).
Why are you accepting high risks from cars but raising an eyebrow at nuclear plants? It isn't rational. You know people, right now, who will be killed by cars. Why isn't something being done [0]?
> in the page 5 you can see that regulatory costs are minimal
Nuclear is the only technology that gets more expensive the more is built. And I'll give you a hint. That anomaly is 100% caused by the regulatory framework.
The report is obviously misjudging something. They're probably doing something like assuming only things that the regulators explicitly ask for count as regulatory costs. We should see a learning effect in the nuclear industry where technology gets cheaper over time.
[0] That was rhetorical. The answer is because it'd be damn silly and the costs would far outweight the benefits. Everyone can see that because the costs are obvious and felt personally. It is unfortunate the the costs of lacking energy are going to be felt before people accept that there aren't alternatives to building new powerplants.
Some countries are closing nuclear plants and ramping up coal. (Look at Germany)
You can argue that it was not ramped down and could have been phased out more quickly but you also have to look at the political discussion at the time of deciding to put a stop on nuclear.
Here’s a deep dive about it:
https://tildes.net/~enviro/15sb/japan_to_invest_107_billion_...
Certainly, there is a cost/benefit to compare, but really, bluntly, we’re shit at cleaning up nuclear disasters.
In every situation where they’ve occurred, it’s taken longer and cost more than anticipated, and the point here is that this enormously expensive disaster could have been 10x worse if not for a lucky coincidence.
> Even if there is a risk of a $10 trillion disaster…
/sigh…
The problem is not that it’s too expensive; it’s that we’re not technologically advanced enough to deal with nuclear disasters other than brute force “pack everything into bricks and bury it in a hole”.
People will do it, because they close their eyes and hope nothing goes wrong (hey, won’t be in office when it does, this is your problem next generation, haha~), but things will go wrong, and it will. Again. Be crushingly expensive.
…and until we solve ”deal with it when it goes wrong”, bluntly, nuclear energy is always going to be controversial based on different levels of risk acceptance by different groups.
It’s not cognitive bias. You just have a different opinion. Neither you nor they are “right” about acceptable levels of risk.
The solution isn’t singing and dancing about nuclear power being safe.
It is not safe.
The solution is find ways to make it safe by being able to contain, control and deal with nuclear materials without needing “10000 years in a hole in the ground” for waste material, or “evacuate the entire metropolitan Tokyo” when things go wrong. Those are not things that happen with “safe” technology.
Sendai is a much smaller city and it had over 100k destroyed buildings, 15k dead or missing, and well over 100k without shelter. Estimates of the damage to infrastructure is estimated in the $Trillion range (over $300B spent in direct govt rebuilding incentives).
Maybe we shouldn't build large cities next to water since we're not technologically advanced enough to deal with natural disasters?
People can understand this kind of risk.
There was a disaster, it got cleaned up. Now, people live there and are happy.
The same is true of many other floods.
So… I’d say we technologically advanced enough to deal with flood waters.
Unlike, literally every nuclear disaster.
Believe what you want to believe dude. No amount of snark, prancing or shaking your fist at the sky about nuclear safety is going to convince people it’s safe.
…until we have technological solutions that more effectively deal with nuclear radiation, radioactive substances and radiation related illness.
Based on the snarky prancing I don't think you have, dude.
Watch footage of that event again and repeat the words, "People can understand this kind of risk".
Over 7M people use 300km of track and ~300 subway stations in Tokyo daily. Below sea level without electricity? There are many possible horrors we choose not to consider every day. Dealing with them rationally as a society is the only real hope.
Isn't global warming a problem we're trying to ignore and offload to the next generations too? Despite all you said is true, I still think we're better equipped to deal with nuclear power plants than hurricanes, floodings and all the other disasters that climate change has in store for us in the future. This is something we have to consider too when discussing the cost/danger-benefits of nuclear energy.
Let's break this down.
> rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense
Agreed
> ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy.
No justification given in the form of a cost/benefit analysis (which the poster just invoked the need for), just a flat statement that it is the "best possible". Note the use of weasel word 'best'.
> having electricity justifies taking some rational risks and is working to undo the damage caused by post-Fukushima overreaction ... there was an insistence on choosing technology ideologically rather than using practical concerns
"Rational" in "rational risks", and "overreaction", also "ideologically" versus "practical concerns" More weasel words, pure emotive invocations.
I could go on, but let's finish with
> that they are cheaper but also less effective at maintaining a comfortable society
Absolutely no justification for this, and completely ignoring the fact that climate change is now kicking in badly.
How the hell did this get voted to the top, because I'm starting to have my suspicions. If it's not shilling then it certainly against HN rules "..don't post shallow dismissals ... A good critical comment teaches us something", this being precisely a shallow dismissal and nothing I can learn from except some people are wilfully blind to what they don't want to see.
Something, somewhere is blatantly going wrong with commenting.
That said, the moderators are glad to delete certain kinds of posts (including some of mine, rightly or wrongly), but not this kind. And maybe they are right not to, but I'd like to know why.
Edit: I come to HN because there's a lot of good, informative posts and also descriptions of people's experience. This is really valuable stuff, but it's being drowned out by timewasting fluff and garbage to the point where I'm starting to regret coming here, and I especially regret posting something that tries to be informative when the only response I get for a few subjects (eg. drugs) appears to be co-ordinated, weaponised downvoting. Downvotes are fine, but I need to know why someone disagrees.
Maybe. Do you have anything to back that up?
> There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change
That would possibly include me, but that does not allow glossing over their risks and failures, which is exactly what the parent post did. I'm not disagreeing with it, I'm asking it to be backed up with evidence. To repeat, this isn't about nuclear energy but the quality of HN posts about various subjects.
I don't see nuclear proponents comparing potential cost (say $10T) against benefit (power produced during plant's lifetime - optimistically $10B (over 30 years). That's 1000:1 against.
By wikipedia, there are about 170 nuclear power plants and have been 6 accidents costing over $1B - approximately 1 in 30 plants have had very expensive accidents.
Those odds don't make sense for any country. Though they might make sense for an investor, knowing that they won't be required to pay those big costs - they might win and (in the event of a disaster) they only loose their investment. Perhaps if they have to guarantee the $10T potential costs, they'd look realistically at the "investment".
This is exactly what I'm talking about – provide the bloody link so we can actually check your claims.
Provide a link! Don't just tell us, allow us to verify!
Edit: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster
"Initial estimates of costs to Japanese taxpayers were in excess of 12 trillion yen ($100 billion).[299] In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion)"
I am not against nuclear power, but I am deeply worried by people like you who clearly only want to see the upside - and it is that which makes me nervous of nuclear power not the technology itself but the blindness of people around it."Costing over $1 billion" is just plain misleading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations
And "I do not think that [comment] means what you think it means." You seem to think that I see an upside to nuclear power. Read the comment.
The definition of a black swan event.
And yet the conclusion is, unsurprisingly, indistinguishable from "nuclear is bad, be very very wary".
Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Banqiao dam failure that killed anywhere from 25 000 to 240 000 and left 11 million people homeless.
The aeronautical industry is improving safety all the time, and accidents prompt new safety measures. They don't scoof accidents without analysis and adaptation, saying "if you want to fly you must accept that some 787-MAX are crashing down from time to time, but still safer than traveling by car, we did the math". No, they landed the plane and adapted.
No, I don't
> The aeronautical industry is improving safety all the time, and accidents prompt new safety measures.
Yes, they do.
Note: we're still flying. The number of aircraft is increasing. And we don't turn aircraft into boogey men.
Had aircraft been treated the way nuclear plants are treated, we'd stop building most of them in the early 80s, and the construction of each new one would be met with strong opposition and campaigns to shut the entire thing down.
Quoting myself again:
Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Banqiao dam failure that killed anywhere from 25 000 to 240 000 and left 11 million people homeless.
Also, it's worth noting that nuclear disasters remain dangerous for amounts of time ranging from "one generation" to "longer than human history so far", adding an extra element of catastrophe.
There are quite a few people who are afraid of flying, so afraid that they refuse to fly. That’s of course their prerogative.
The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody, including the people who didn’t want them to be built, and even people in neighboring countries who didn’t even get a vote on it - depending on which way the wind blows.
So the nuclear power station has to be built as safely as the most fearful person demands.
Why do we keep building hydroelectric plants (and dams in general)? Why do we keep building coal plants which are more radioactive than niclear plants, and are often located in densely populated areas?
Why don't you apply the same logic to other things?
Getting on an aircraft involves taking a risk. You may die. People die every year because they boarded an aircraft. The risk is small, but it’s not zero. We are okay with people taking this risk because they chose to do it.
For nuclear power, small is not good enough, the risk of a serious incident such as Chernobyl has to be effectively zero. This is very expensive.
Hydroelectric is not really comparable, if you are not happy living downstream of a hydro plant then you can move somewhere else.
Nuclear fails in unpredictable ways. When Chernobyl happened, the whole of Europe held its breath to see which way the fallout would blow. The only way to escape the risk is heavy regulation or bans.
My pro-nuclear position is based on an assumption of baseline competence! This doesn't seem to actually be the case!
Hmm... We've been building cities for millenia, but look, in this event "45,700 buildings were destroyed and 144,300 were damaged by the quake and tsunami".
> Compare hydro-engineering, where it's common to design for 100-year events and even 500-year events
The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure was the collapse of the Banqiao Dam and 61 other dams in Henan, China, under the influence of Typhoon Nina in August 1975. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected a total population of 10.15 million and inundated around 30 cities and counties of 12,000 square kilometers (or 3 million acres), with an estimated death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000. The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses.
An earthquake and tsunami in the country who coined the term is now a "Black Swan event" to make an attempt at painting the nuclear power plants failure in favorable light.
Even more entertaining is that Fukushima lead to widespread changes across the industry around independent core cooling and gas filtration.
The regulators found systemic deficiencies in the industry, but let's roll that back!
As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. Thus independent core cooling was not a Black Swan event, it was systemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
How many earthquakes do you know that move an entire island by 2.4 meters?
How many 14-meter tsunamis have there been?
"A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences"
> The regulators found systemic deficiencies in the industry, but let's roll that back!
Of course that is not what I'm saying. But do let the FUD roll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_a...
Following that multiple studies showed that Fukushima could get hit by +15m tsunamis and suggested heightening the sea wall.
Now you are trying to redefine Black Swan to fit your narrative.
Take what the author said about COVID-19.
> According to Taleb, as it was expected with great certainty that a global pandemic would eventually take place, the COVID-19 pandemic is not a black swan, but is considered to be a white swan; such an event has a major effect, but is compatible with statistical properties.
Similarly, there is a great certainty that a +15m tsunami will hit any of the existing nuclear power plants in Japan. Fukushima was not a Black Swan, simply human negligence.
Ah yes. It's my bad. "The most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake recorded in the world since modern seismography began in 1900" can never be classified as a Black Swan event, and I apologize for my mistake.
As for tsunami,
"The sea walls in several cities had been built to protect against tsunamis of much lower heights. Also, many people caught in the tsunami thought they were on high enough ground to be safe. According to a special committee on disaster prevention designated by the Japanese government, the tsunami protection policy had been intended to deal with only tsunamis that had been scientifically proved to occur repeatedly."
My apologies, this wasn't a Black Swan event either. Totally predictable, and not beyond what's normally expected.
> According to Taleb, as it was expected with great certainty that a global pandemic would eventually take place,
It's funny how all Nostradamuses "prove" their vague predictions only after something occurs.
What was it said about black swan events?
"The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight."
Since 1900 there have been at least 12 megatsunami with a height up to 1/2 a kilometre.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_earthquake_a...
The one you linked happened:
- in a narrow bay
- with a dual-slide that involved both a huge rockfall, and a huge release of sediment connected to a glacier breaking off
---
It's also the first time I've heard of this event, and.... Just wow. Never thought it would be possible
---
Edit: According to Wikipedia all megatsunamis recorded since 1900 were caused by landslides: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami Only some of the landslides were caused by earthquakes.
Edit: but I agree with the "wow". I can't even imagine what a wall of water that tall would look like. That is just so outside normal experience.
They are extremely rare.
12 megatsunamis in 123 years spread over the entire surface of the earth.
And (b) holy crap that's terrifying.
If you can't build a nuclear plant, or a dam, while accounting for expected events, then maybe don't.
An earthquake of that magnitude, creating a Tsunami of that strength, striking in just the wrong place .. is very much a black swan event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilFEKSZQv5o
By your 'logic' no dam can be built as they all stand a chance of a direct hit from a meteorite.
Risk-wise the Fukushima nuclear disaster cause less direct and indirect death than many accidents and natural disasers .. including deaths from, say, fertilizer depot explosions, oil rig accidents, etc.
People have a hard on for regional areas, but the practical reality is people enjoy the benefits of living in cities too much to want to live in rural areas. They are also way worse at actually providing for the needs of those people efficiently.
It's a story from the Davis Besse NPP operators, who happened to face the exact same fault as caused the accident at Three Mile Island... and made it through OK... except they experienced it first, 18 months earlier.
So why, when this happened a second time, did no one learn from the first occurrence? Why were people more worried about assigning blame, substandard training materials, and taking cover from lawsuits, than about ensuring this could not happen again?
THIS is why we cannot have nice things. It does not matter whether the technology can or cannot be implemented safely. It matters whether the human organizations that support that technology are up to the task of managing something where a single mistake can ruin tens of millions of people's lives, with consequences for ten thousand years. It's not like one plane dropping out of the sky, ruining 500 people's lives... this is a much longer term problem. And probabilistic risk assessment, as technically correct as it is when it gets perfect input information, is absolutely horrid at driving humans to make the right choices.
As we leaned since, 30km radius is probably over-doing it.
That's considering the life of someone being evacuated to be "ruined"
> In the worst case scenario, not made public until long after the disaster, the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area - 35 million people - would have to be moved to temporary shelter. The very existence of the nation of Japan was at stake. And no one - not TEPCO, the utility that owned Fukushima, not the Prime Minister, not the Japanese military - could do anything but hope.
Feel free to call that unreasonably-worst-case or just hyperbole. (It kind of is.) But that's where I got it.
Query: Is anything this complex designed this way today, without actually running all its failure modes through risk analysis before actually building it?
https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB