The World Really Could Go Nuclear

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-really-could-go-nuclear/

by tdaltonc • 11 years ago

58 109 11 years ago

brc7• 11 years ago

"If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored"

Well, exactly. The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population.

Of course nuclear fission is the answer to large scale energy. It always has been. Weapons proliferation can be addressed with new designs and materials. Safety can be addressed with passive systems.

The technical answers are simple compared to fusion or elaborate harvesting of diffuse energy such as sunlight, wind or tides.

The logical conclusion is that the people making the most noise are not in it for the solutions, but for the noise and attention. I'm not the only one to think this, but expect the groupthink to smite my comment anyway.

cft• 11 years ago

The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population.

No. They are actually interesting in assuming power in the society by foregoing the standard societal ascension mechanisms.

Retra• 11 years ago

There are no 'standard' ascension mechanisms, and no reason anyone should follow them if there were.

dasil003• 11 years ago

Your comment makes less sense than the underpants gnomes' business plan.

bigdubs• 11 years ago

Another side benefit is addressing water shortages with nuclear desalinization.

eitally• 11 years ago

Apparently this is starting to happen in select places (like Saudi Arabia). This is a very.good.thing.

tgflynn2• 11 years ago

I agree with you on the problem of modern society seeming to be unable to make good collective decisions.

I'm not convinced restarting nuclear makes sense today though. Solar seems to be on an economically winning trajectory and building nuclear plants is very expensive, apparently even for countries that are good at it, like France.

tptacek4• 11 years ago

I'm pro-nuclear, I think, but no argument on HN ever got more persuasive by tacking on a preemptive dismissal of disagreement as "groupthink".

Do you want to talk about nuclear energy on HN, or do you want to talk about how you feel about talking about nuclear energy on HN? The former topic seems much more interesting than the latter.

mgalka3• 11 years ago

Great! I'll chip in on both.

Don't think he meant it as a dismissal, just as a preemptive nudge to discourage actual groupthink.

For countries that already have nuclear weapons, I don't even see a valid argument against nuclear power. Agree, the only think holding us back is politicians who are afraid to use the word "nuclear."

brc7• 11 years ago

Well, obviously it's the former. Perhaps calling out groupthink in a parent comment is unnecessary. However I have seen many, many instances where a zero/negative growth anti-capital mindset, complete with student -level slogans dominates discussions. I didn't expect to start a conversation, to be honest. But there are some good replies here.

grecy3• 11 years ago

I've been pro-nuclear for a long time, though the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little.

What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?".

I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.

ploxiln• 11 years ago

I think Fukushima, and various investigations and revelations it inspired, showed how the problems are more social than technical.

Nuclear power plants produce a lot of power very cheaply for many years. But companies can't help but push the boundaries to boost profits, extending plant life past spec and skimping on maintenance and safety measures, with just a bit of regulatory capture to smooth the process.

I'm still pro-nuclear. We just need to follow through on the regulation. Maybe we can start by not being so damn secretive about nuclear stuff. Anyway, we have to build new ones to take on the capacity so we can shut down old ones. Which means we can't be so scared of building them, since not building them is what's unsafe.

wisty• 11 years ago

Fukushima was caused by a Mw 9.0 earthquake / tsunami which cased over 15,000 deaths, in a 1st world country with the world's best earthquake mitigation. The meltdown was caused by an absolutely huge disaster.

The contamination might kill a few hundred, and has resulted in an exclusion zone.

IMO, the biggest problem with nuclear is how unacceptable disasters are. One old reactors built in high risk zone has a little meltdown, and the entire world freaks out over it. This is a major practical impediment to nuclear - you won't get costs getting driven down (for better or worse), because people see the risk as completely taboo.

It's like people worrying about tall buildings, because of 9/11. There's always risks.

xrange• 11 years ago

the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little.

This is what I don't understand. The earthquake and tsunami that caused Fukushima's problems killed 20,000 people, and created an almost unimaginable amount of devastation. No one has died from Fukushima's radiation, and no one is expected to die. How horrible would the disaster have to be for a 1,000 people to have died from radiation? Would there have been 1,000,000 other deaths?

I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power

...this nails it on the head. It seems like most of the thoughts about nuclear power seems to be in the category of "we've created something unnatural, and we're worried that we'll anger the gods, and they'll release the invisible evil spirits as punishment". Not that I'm saying that we shouldn't have to take aspect of human nature into account.

http://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/textonly562-pandoras-b...

pdonis4• 11 years ago

when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan.

What was your reaction when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened? We had no real plan then, either. And the aggregate impact of that incident was arguably larger than that of Fukushima. (For example, the "highly contaminated water" released into the ocean from Fukushima is probably going to do a lot less ecological damage than the oil released by Deepwater Horizon. The contaminated water will just get diluted to the point where it's indistinguishable from other ocean water. The oil, not so much.)

we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.

First of all, a nuclear reactor that produces 1 Gw of electricity doesn't have any more "immense power" than a coal, oil, or natural gas plant that produces the same electrical power output.

Second, we have every right to insist that, before a nuclear reactor gets built, we have a contingency plan in case something goes wrong. But, to be fair, we should insist on that for all sources of energy. Want to drill for oil? What's your contingency plan if there's a leak in the well? As I commented to someone else upthread, nuclear power appears to be the only energy technology where everyone focuses on the worst case; other energy sources seem to get what amounts to a free pass in this regard.

brc7• 11 years ago

We have no plan for cars hitting each other at highway speeds either. We just send out the fire and police to mop up and look for survivors. Every day, around the world, more people are killed and injured in vehicles than the entire history of nuclear accidents. Over time, better road and car design has reduced this toll, but physics can only be overcome to a limited extent.

What is important is that we be proactive. Nuclear plants are reaching end of life, and will either be replaced with more nuclear or replaced with coal. Those are the choices. Coal mining kills more people than nuclear ever has.

Life is risky. By all means make sane decisions on risk but the current policy of sitting on our hands and hoping for a miracle is just wrong. Replace old plants with better designed, safer, new plants.

datenwolf5• 11 years ago

The technical answers are simple

cough waste management cough

We're talking about megayear timescales when it comes to nuclear fission waste.

Humans have been around for how long? What's the age of the oldest building around? What's the usual timescale for modern age buildings to deteriorate?

odonnellryan• 11 years ago

Is dumping it in a mountain hoping we'll figure it out in 100,000 years not valid? I'm being completely serious. Our current problems are on the span of hundreds of years. If we have hundreds of thousands we will be able to sort it out. It's barely borrowing on the future.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

I am completely OK with burying it inside a mountain or a geologically suitable mine. True, we should be very selective about where we put it given that waste can be hazardous over geological timescales.

DennisP8• 11 years ago

Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel.

Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, one since 1980. The U.S. had the Integral Fast Reactor almost complete in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration shut down the program.

The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. That's a human timescale. When I lived in Germany, we had a brewery in town that had been continuously operating for 800 years.

jerf• 11 years ago

"We're talking about megayear timescales"

No, we're not. Anything with megayear halflifes is effectively not radioactive.

There's a lot of great answers. None of them are politically feasible because instead of thinking of it as an engineering problem, people think of it with the Sealed Evil In A Can memeset [1] and treat it like it is eternally a baleful evil demon that smites everyone that so much as thinks about it for too long, by magic.

It is, literally, a small problem, as in, literally, we're not really talking about very much stuff volumetrically.

It's only a problem because paradoxically people treat it with such fear that it stays a problem, because we're so fearful that nobody is even allowed to try to solve the problem because to our fearful brains it would basically be poking the baleful evil spirit with a stick. If it were just legal to stick it in glass bricks and stack them up somewhere, as has been studied, we could be done thinking about it, but instead we have to leave it in a more dangerous form. It is frankly difficult for me not to see this as a problem that people in charge make sure to deliberately make sure stays unsolved because it suits them, not because I'm really prone to conspiracy theories but simply because while not necessarily "trivial", it's just not that hard of a problem. You should fear your local garbage dump a lot more than you fear a pile of glass bricks piled in a mountain in Nevada.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SealedEvilInACan

brc7• 11 years ago

What is surprising to me is actually how small the waste is, especially compared to the amount of energy that was extracted.

One mountain can be used to bury the waste. That is a tiny footprint compared to other, conventional means.

Even a single small hydro dam - itself a great way of making power - covers a far larger area of the earths surface than all the nuclear waste ever made, combined. Compared to coal waste and even the mining waste for rare earths, it is a tiny amount of waste.

DennisP8• 11 years ago

James Hansen is often considered pretty noisy and alarmist. He was one of the first to raise the issue, thinks we can't afford to go above 350ppm (we're at 400), and recently published a paper saying sea level rise could be much worse than generally expected.

In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he strongly advocates nuclear power, especially GenIV designs. In particular he talks about the Integral Fast Reactor.

Plenty of other prominent environmentalists are advocating nuclear these days; the documentary Pandora's Promise highlights several of them. And James Lovelock, who invented the "Gaia" concept, has advocated nuclear for years.

Animats2• 11 years ago

If only it didn't cost so much. And, about every 20 years, there's a Chernobyl or a Fukishima sized disaster.

China has 13 nuclear stations under construction, with 61 reactors and a total capacity of 40 to 75 gigawatts.

tptacek4• 11 years ago

What's the youngest nuclear plant to have suffered a major (say, INES 5+) incident? Fukushima Daiichi was pretty old.

dreamfactory2• 11 years ago

If we ignore the challenges of creating and operating an earthquake and human error proof station, waste is still not a solved problem. I once met an architect who was part of a group designing the early stations in the 50s. They asked back then about the waste and were assured that this would be solved in short measure before it became any kind of issue to worry about.

khuey2• 11 years ago

There's selection bias involved in answering that question, because most nuclear plants (at least ex-China) are pretty old.

Animats2• 11 years ago

The US still has Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania. Same reactor design as Fukishima. If they ever lose cooling water pumping, they will have a meltdown, just like Fukishima. All the regulators know this, so they have a lot of backup generators in different locations, and nine ways to get cooling water into the reactor. But the design is still not a good one.

BurningFrog• 11 years ago

Many people are terrified of flying, in part because the very few but big accidents get a lot of news coverage. Meanwhile vastly more people die in many daily smaller accidents.

Something similar is happening with nuclear energy vs fossil fuel.

I wish this could be reframed somehow, but maybe it's just how humans deal poorly with risk.

toomuchtodo2• 11 years ago

Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear, and they continue to get cheaper by the day.

I have yet to see waste from solar or wind mismanaged, or a solar or wind plant not be cooled properly after a fault, causing a meltdown.

Everyone comes to Hacker News comment threads like this to expound that nuclear is the way, while solar and wind continue their march towards domination. A nuclear plant takes ~10 years and at least $1 billion USD to come online. Solar and wind are going to be even further along by then.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-hu...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-30/seven-reas...

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/319535020/coal-gas-nuclear-hyd...

ceejayoz5• 11 years ago

And, about every 20 years, there's a Chernobyl or a Fukishima sized disaster.

Fukishima killed zero (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...). Chernobyl will kill about 4,000 when all's said and done (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/).

We lose more than that directly via coal mine accidents every year. Add in the deaths from pollution and the math gets even better in nuclear's favor.

Hell, hydroelectric killed 170k in 1975.

Steko3• 11 years ago

While the larger conclusion about safety being made here are correct, the blanket claims about Fukushima's death toll <5 years after the event strike me as disingenuous.

retrogradeorbit3• 11 years ago

Chernobyl killed 4000 as long as you don't count any cancers.

985,000 isn't such a feel good number, after all.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-de...

We need to start with the premise that nuclear is safe, and work back from there. We can redefine terms and ignore any research that doesn't fit with our agenda. Then when people question whether its a good idea we can setup a straw man and compare it to something obviously worse, like coal mining, and thus claim by relativity everything is great!

mgalka3• 11 years ago

Total deaths caused by Chernobyl: 4,000 Annual U.S. deaths caused by air pollution: 200,000

thescriptkiddie• 11 years ago

Chernobyl and Fukushima aren't in the same ballpark. They're barely on the same planet. The only similarity between the two incidents is that they both involved nuclear power stations.

gizmo686• 11 years ago

Actually they are the only two events in the level 7 nuclear disaster ballpark.

squozzer• 11 years ago

I have a very simple to understand yet very unlikely to be implemented standard of persuasion. Industry executives and engineers - and their families - should make a point of living near their plants.

chjohasbrouck2• 11 years ago

I never really understood the arguments against nuclear.

From the data I'm able to find, coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours globally, compared to about 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours generated from nuclear.

That would mean that burning coal for energy is nearly 2000x more dangerous than nuclear power.

Is there something more to the opposition's argument than safety? Or is this just a case of the public being misinformed?

ericd• 11 years ago

coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per kilowatt-hour

Are you saying that running a gaming PC for 2 hours results in 170k deaths?

Syrup-tan• 11 years ago

If the PC is powered by coal energy, he's saying something like that.

c-slice• 11 years ago

I think you mean giga-watt hour.

slyall• 11 years ago

Actually the number seems to be per Trillion Kilowatt Hours.

and the US rate is 15,000 or 1/10th of that.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

chjohasbrouck2• 11 years ago

Sorry, deaths per trillionkWhr:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

khuey2• 11 years ago

It's a classic example of diffuse versus concentrated effects. Burning coal results in smaller effects to a large population (e.g. the shortened life expectancies of Chinese breathing coal smog) while much less frequent nuclear accidents result in large effects to a small population (e.g. the people exposed to radiation at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the resulting irradiated lands). Those 90 deaths from nuclear power are much more visible, while the 170k deaths from coal fade into the background.

tgflynn2• 11 years ago

Yes, and if we had done that 30 years ago when it made sense there would probably be far less concern about global warming today.

Today, with the rapid decline in the cost of solar energy, I'm far less convinced this would be a wise move.

akamaka3• 11 years ago

This article, like many pro-nuclear arguments, doesn't address the most basic problem -- is nuclear power cost effective?

Sure, it's cheap in theory, but nuclear power projects bring with them enormous project management risk. If you complete 90% of a wind farm installation, you get 90% of the power out. Completing 90% of a nuclear reactor gets you no power at all, and unexpected cost overruns can add up to billions of dollars. When a reactor shuts down for repairs, they sometimes take decades to complete. As of today, it can be argued that many countries' nuclear power programs were a financial mistake.

Then, once in a while, you find out that the original cost-benefit analysis was wrong. After the Fukushima accident left $200 billion of real estate uninhabitable, nuclear power plants across the world have revised their risk models, and now are spending more money for safety upgrades.

Finally, emerging technologies like wind and solar are showing immense promise, but predicting their future cost is equally difficult. All the best minds can only put together a very educated guess.

Yes, if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision.

But we got it wrong, and the today risks of getting it wrong again are bigger than ever.

DennisP8• 11 years ago

That's why there's such focus now on small modular reactors, with a bunch of startup companies attempting to develop them. The main impediment is the NRC, which has been slow to come up with licensing rules appropriate for small reactors or advanced designs (some of which have very good passive safety).

mmmBacon2• 11 years ago

Here's a recent article from IEEE Spectrum that argues that small reactors will never be cost competitive.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-forgotten-histor...

Gibbon1• 11 years ago

I tend to think the 'push' for small reactors, fifth generation reactors, and alternative designs is same as the 'push' for 'clean coal'. A political ploy to keep the government subsidies coming and forestall the eventual taxing of the industries externalities. And to hopefully prevent alternatives like solar from getting funding.

Seriously, solar is already at cost parity and the economics are getting better with time. Plus externalities are minimal. Compared to nuclear power which gets less economic over time and has very open ended externalities.

tptacek4• 11 years ago

Is there any possibility that the US will get so much power from wind, solar, and other renewables that it can realistically anticipate not burning coal? Every year we wait for renewable to offset coal, more people die from coal's impact.

ghshephard2• 11 years ago

The more advanced (Stanford Energy Symposium) research that I've seen suggests that there is only one possible power source that we can look to long term to meet the energy needs of the world, and that is Solar Energy. Nuclear Energy just won't be possible to build out quickly enough, inexpensively enough - even if we could do it safely. In particular, check out Nate Lewis's Solar Energy 101 (https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...) - In the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) where he makes a strong case that the only choice is Solar - not because it's a good one, but because there is nothing else out there that can meet our needs (And he spends a bit of time talking about Nuclear Energy, and why it comes up short).

The entire series is a gold mine for people who actually want to talk about energy generation and climate change on an informed basis rather than just making guesses to suit their particular world view.

With that said, one of my favorite futurists, Ramez Naam, who is a big proponent of Wind and Solar (See: http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/30/how-steady-can-the-wind-blow... and http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very...) still thinks we should invest in nuclear, as it has an important role to play in regions where renewable resources (Solar/Wind/GeoThermal/HydroElectric etc...) are not available, and as a hedge against storage (which is critical for solar/wind) technology not advancing to where we need it for 100% support of base-load power.

Though he also talks about Storage here: http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...

ekianjo2• 11 years ago

When a reactor shuts down for repairs, they sometimes take decades to complete. As of today, it can be argued that many countries' nuclear power programs were a financial mistake.

Financial mistake or not, not being dependent on Petrol for your electricity production is a huge win. It solves many other (political) problems.

pdeuchler• 11 years ago

Does it matter? It's not like we don't have the money, and even the most lackadaisical of climate change advocates can easily see the huge monetary cost it will impose. Overpaying by $200 billion for a very rare nuclear accident will be a bargain in comparison.

Also, there's the usual argument that with proliferation of a technology you gain efficiencies and costs drop (precipitously sometimes).

>> Yes, if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision.

Pushing the problem down the road because the solution isn't perfect probably is not the best idea at this point.

beambot• 11 years ago

$200B could pay for 1/6 of the US's annual electricity production if spent directly on solar. US Energy consumption is 4.6e9 MWh/yr [1]. Assume $2.5 per installed watt of solar (Google search) ==> $200e9 / 2.5 Watt installed => 80e3 MW installed => 0.7e9 MWh/yr.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

And that doesn't even account for the cost of the reactors...

pdonis4• 11 years ago

is nuclear power cost effective?

To answer this, you need to ask "compared to what?"

The article's implicit assumption is that the comparison should be between a possibly quite expensive future with nuclear power, and a possibly even more expensive future with climate change that is extremely costly to deal with. If you agree with the second possibility being a realistic one (I personally don't, but that's really a separate discussion), then the first one can look cost-effective, simply because it's cheaper than the alternative.

If, OTOH, you're comparing nuclear power with cheap fossil fuels, in an environment where even safe nuclear reactors have to undergo years of legal challenges on the NIMBY principle, whereas a new coal, oil, or natural gas plant gets up and running quickly, then of course nuclear power isn't going to look cost-effective. (People who favor the previous comparison, with the "expensive climate change" alternative, would probably say the "cheap fossil fuel" alternative only looks cheap because it doesn't take all the costs into account.) But that could change if fossil fuels get more expensive (whether because they simply get harder to extract, or they face increasing regulation based on other factors like climate change).

if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision.

Now you seem to be making a different implicit comparison, between what we have now and what you think we would have if we'd focused "carefully and properly" on nuclear power from the start. But we arguably haven't focused "carefully and properly" on fossil fuels either; for example, coal dust has killed far more people by causing respiratory problems than nuclear power has, yet it took decades for "clean coal" to even be a talking point. Why should nuclear be the only technology where we have to do it "carefully and properly" or not at all? If you're going to compare them fairly, you have to compare them at equivalent levels of risk.

arbuge• 11 years ago

> This article, like many pro-nuclear arguments, doesn't address the most basic problem -- is nuclear power cost effective?

That is really not the most basic problem though. Cost is a non-issue if the alternative is green house gas emissions which will eventually cause an apocalyptic global warming effect. What good will all the cost savings do at that point?

akamaka3• 11 years ago

My comment was written under the assumption that there is more than one path toward reducing CO2 emissions.

Putting that aside, I agree with you completely.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

I wish we would. Caution over nuclear externalities and criticism of poor safety/risk management by various nuclear authorities over the years are laudable, but too many greens look at te downsides of nuclear power in isolation, rather than in the context of the even more problematic fossil fuel incumbents and the realities of high demands for energy in developed economies. There is a huge opportunity cost to this ecological purity theater. The US administration has not really provided any leadership here, but at least it has approved and helped finance the construction of the first two reactors to be built in the US in 30 years so I suppose that's better than nothing.

hanniabu• 11 years ago

I'm not against nuclear as long as it's done properly and responsibly, but they usually aren't. As we all know, nuclear reactors can fail from either operational malfunctions or exterior effects such as earthquakes or tsunamis. However, when things go wrong, there are no backup plans in place for the backup plans when things go wrong, which is very much needed when we're talking about the types of consequences nuclear meltdowns can have. Not only this, but when things go wrong, the companies that run them try to keep the seriousness of the situation under wraps for as long as possible in order to protect the company and b then at which point it becomes too late to take more proactive measures.

To make matters worse, most nuclear reactors in the United States were built in the 1960s and 1970s and they were only designed for a lifespan of 40 years, which means most of them should be shut down. However, since a lot of money is at stake with how much reactors cost, regulators rewrite the rules and extend the useful life of the reactors and put us all in danger. That is what bothers me and that is why I am against nuclear reactors - because when money is on the line, all bets are off.

a3n3• 11 years ago

Not that I need everything perfect, but these are my concerns:

- The corporations building these things are hyper-corporations, many in the defense industry. Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral. To meet environmental, safety, disposal and cost concerns, they will go part way, but when they hit the knees of the various curves, they will convince Congress and citizens through advertising, co-opted scientists, and bribed members of Congress that everything is great and it's been taken care of.

- Waste. After however many decades, where is all the nuclear waste? Are we finally implementing the long range plans, to take care of wast and make future generations safe? At least out hundreds of years I would expect. I think the answer here is effectively no. I think we're still just studying it, and all involved are hoping someone else will deal with it later. There will never be enough Senators to vote for specific locations in their states, and transportation through their states. "On site" will magically be found to be perfectly fine after all. And it will end up being Hanford and Rocky Flats, with leaks into the water table, and shit stored next to shit that shouldn't be.

- Safety. What happens when we finally experience a catastrophe, because the corporations and governments kicked the safety can down the road so that these things could be built? It's going to happen, they're corporations and they must above all make a buck. What hyper-corporation could resist turning uranium into gold?

- Environmental. These things need to be cooled. They're next to rivers and oceans because of that. Ecosystems dwindle and die, because downstream temperatures will always be "within acceptable levels" that were set by agencies suffering from regulatory capture that are funded by bribed Congressmen. No one wants to be the single point of failure on the money pipeline.

- Cost. Balloon. Corporations make money no matter what. Even if a corporation is fined in proportion to its overrun, even if they refuse to pay and people are jailed (ha!), that money is still lost.

The only thing above that I'm inclined to give on is safety, it's probably an engineering possibility. But that's mere technical possibility, in the face of amoral corporations with a drive for profits stronger than the human drive for reproduction.

Color me sceptical.

brc7• 11 years ago

"Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral." sorry, but this is just wrong.

Lots of people posting and reading this work for corporations.

Do bad actors exist? Sure. Are all corporations at scale amoral? You make them sound like machines programmed by megalomaniacs, not places created by, worked at and invested in by ordinary people. Every 'corporation' I have ever worked at has been filled with people trying to do a good job under whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Brushing off the majority of good that large companies do as an argument is not correct.

a3n3• 11 years ago

I work for a corporation too. Lots of good people there. I'm good people.

I'm talking about hyper-corporations and billion dollar contracts. That many people, chasing that much money ... no one who's gotten to the point that they could with authority say "Nah, we shouldn't do this, it's wrong," ever would say that. No one at that level of accomplishment and tenure has it in them to say "Oh, and are the fish in that river really safe?"

a3n3• 11 years ago

"Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral." sorry, but this is just wrong.

Ahem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/business/volkswagen-is-ord...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240001

At best, corporations are amoral.

ClintEhrlich• 11 years ago

I spent a year of my life digging through the relevant literature back in 2008-2009 when I was coaching policy debate and the topic was alternative energy.

Based on my reading, I decided that the arguments in favor of nuclear power were significantly better than the defenses of renewable energy. So I made the strategic decision to write affirmatives about uranium enrichment and targeted procurement of nuclear-powered vessels.

That was how we won the national championship.

In other words: Even when the best debaters in the country have a year to prepare their counter-arguments, nuclear energy still tends to come out on top. Like facts, energy density is a stubborn thing.

aftbit• 11 years ago

Both of the countries lauded in this article undertook their nuclear programs at least partially for strategic reasons. The U.S. has massive reserves of coal - 480 billion tons[1]. Our strategic need is much lower.

Also, isn't Sweden supposedly phasing out nuclear power?

[1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=70&t=2

hackuser• 11 years ago

Perhaps the best argument for nuclear energy is that it's a nearly certain, affordable (if expensive) remedy to a catastrophic problem, climate change. How can we - how dare we - risk the lives of millions of people?

I'll add that we especially are risking other people's lives. While most people reading this have reaped the benefits of fossil fuels, likely we and our decendents mostly will survive while people in poor countries die.

The World Really Could Go Nuclear

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