They Fictionalize Nuclear Disasters Like Chernobyl Because They Kill So Few

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/09/the-reason-they-fictionalize-nuclear-disasters-like-chernobyl-is-because-they-kill-so-few-people/

by mpweiher • 7 years ago

117 166 7 years ago

forbes.com

mpweiher2• 7 years ago

“With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management who led a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”

whatshisface• 7 years ago

According to Wikipedia,

At present, radiation levels have dropped considerably, compared to the fatal levels of April 1986

Which says that yes, Pripyat should have been evacuated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat

Tharkun• 7 years ago

Not to mention the whole groundwater incident...which, had it not been for (suicidal?) miners digging a tunnel, the water supply of FIFTY MILLION people would have been contaminated.

option5• 7 years ago

I grew up in a city (Slavutich) ~ 35 miles from Prioyat where it was evacuated. Radiation levels there two times smaller than in Manhattan ( which is still within the norm).

Interestingly, some people refused to evacuate from nearby villages and still live there (within evacuated 30km zone) at the very old age.

mpweiher2• 7 years ago

Interestingly, the source given for the "fatal levels" (footnote 20) appears to be the book "Bugging In and Bugging Out", which is a survivalist guide:

https://www.amazon.com/Bugging-Out-David-Crossley/dp/1291390...

Whether such a book is a reliable source for that kind of claim is certainly debatable, but even more interestingly, the cited page does not even say anything about "fatal" levels of radiation:

"Although radiation levels in Pripyat have now dropped sufficiently for tourists to be allowed to visit the city, ..."

https://books.google.de/books?id=9NlCCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA59&lpg=PA...

mrspuratic• 7 years ago

The parent comment has had its context stripped: it was about the Fukushima evacuation which resulted, directly or indirectly, in an estimated 2100 fatalities (or "premature deaths" to be precise). Mass panic, evacuation and long-term displacement have predictable consequences.

beat10• 7 years ago

Talking about risk mitigation in hindsight as unnecessary is a very bad view of risk management, especially for someone who is supposedly an expert at it.

You don't do risk mitigation because things will go badly, you do it because it could go badly.

Or alternately, you could use "password" for all your passwords, after all, if no one ever breaks into your accounts, there's no reason to have bothered with difficult passwords.

dfsegoat2• 7 years ago

Couldn't agree more. Take Harold McCluskey [1] - "The Atomic Man" - who was involved with a pretty horrendous accident at Hanford, WA - and ended up with radioactive Americium-241 [2] embedded in his face/hands etc. - continuously irradiating him with a-particles.

You would think - "That's it for that guy"... Well, he ended up dying of pre-existing coronary artery disease - nothing to do with radiation or cancer, despite having massive amounts of radioactive material in his body, post-mortem.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium-241

adrianN3• 7 years ago

Sample size of 1. That's like the smokers who tell stories of centenarian smokers to prove that tobacco is not all that dangerous.

dfsegoat2• 7 years ago

No. It's a case study that shows that a worst case exposure to radioactive material is not a death sentence.

Are you familiar with the term "Case study" or "Case report"? It it is a medical/other study that follows a single individual over time. These are published daily in many medical journals.

option5• 7 years ago

for more samples go to the villages in the 30 km zone around Chernobyl- few people refused to evacuate and still live there at the very old age. Though I doubt they were ever exposed to such high levels of radiation as mentioned in the parent.

jellicle• 7 years ago

The guy lived for ten years after the accident. He spent the first four or five years undergoing chelation therapy daily to remove the radioisotopes from his body tissues. At the time of his death, the dose model suggested he would have about a 12% chance of not having cancer. He didn't have cancer.

So, he rolled a 1 on an 8-sided die and didn't get cancer in that time. If he had lived longer, cancer would be a near certainty, though it still might not have been what killed him.

DanBC• 7 years ago

But see eg the Demon Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

or the Kramatorks accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

HarryHirsch• 7 years ago

Or the "radioactive gold" incident in NY State, when someone melted down gold radiotherapy seeds, and that's how the regional jewelry gold supply became contaminated. The government even issued public advisory posters, it was bad: https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/hpposters/goldjewelry.ht...

AlphaGeekZulu2• 7 years ago

OK, simple question: would you be willing to get yourself contaminated with Americium-241 in the same way as the Atomic Man (for example, to proof how harmless a-particles in the body are, or, lets say for money)?

If not, what is the point of your contribution to the discussion?

clucas2• 7 years ago

This is a false dilemma. It is possible for something to be less deadly than people generally think, but still not safe enought that anyone would be accept unneccessary exposure to that thing.

jdefr89• 7 years ago

You blatantly ignore the others who did in fact die from radiation exposure.. The case study you were referring to is not grounds for "radiation isn't all that bad.." It poses a significant risk, and since it can mutate/destroy DNA, I am willing to bet it did indeed play a part in at least the acceleration of the heart disease. You're body is a full system made up of very complex sub-systems, and each system influences the behavior of the others..

This argument is equivalent to "vaccines are bad because a soccer mom said their son died because of it."

You're statement of "its no big deal" implies you can just walk into Chernobyl and come out feeling great. If you think that is the case, you should visit the radioactive site and find out..

option5• 7 years ago

Three anti-science lobbies dragging our world back into the dark ages:

1) anti-vaxxers 2) anti-nuclear 3) anti-GMO

Let’s have a better public education before it is to late.

I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. While no one denies it was a huge disaster in which people died; they way nuclear is portrayed in (most) of the Western world is disgusting. As of today (accounting for all past death) nuclear is the safest form of power generation (statistically even safer than solar, measured in deaths/mwt). Do we want to stop climate change? If yes - nuclear is an essential part of the solution.

beat10• 7 years ago

Please, never say "safer than solar". Even if technically correct from a certain perspective, it sounds like an "argue to win" point, and just alienates the very people you want to win to your side - environmentally-minded folks who might be convinced of the benefits of nuclear power.

From a less narrow perspective, it shows a total ignorance of how risk analysis works. It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. This is intuitively obvious to the people you're trying to impress with this line. So don't use it.

petschge3• 7 years ago

Also there is a huge difference between workers installing solar panels dying on the job from falling of roofs and citizens getting killed by exploding nuclear plants. The former is a risk they were very aware of, had some control over and were payed to accept. The latter is a risk imposed on them outside of their control and without compensation (and if they vote to get rid of that risk HN viciously attacts them).

option5• 7 years ago

Regarding risk analysis - past track record is very important, especially when we have decades of it.

Nuclear is very heavy regulated (and it should be) to prevent possible risks and new designs are very safe

falcolas4• 7 years ago

Decades after the Chernobyl disaster, a worst case scenario, and the total number of people's health negatively impacted is well under 100k. I think it's safe to say that, regardless of the choice between "could" or "have", the number of lives impacted is relatively small (in the scale of power-generation related injuries and deaths).

shawnz6• 7 years ago

It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed.

I don't understand. Why should there be any difference between these, unless you're saying that the safety of solar/wind is improving faster than the safety of nuclear is improving?

jabl3• 7 years ago

It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed.

Really? So we should take into account scenarios like 1. Solar installer falls from roof, hits car, dies 2. Car didn't have handbrake on, starts to roll down the driveway, rolling over the toddler playing in the yard, killing her too 3. Rolls into the street, causing a school bus full of children to swerve and hit a LNG tanker, causing a massive explosion killing everybody onboard.

Of course, in reality, we need to take into account realistic failure pathways and plan accordingly. Per such analysis, both solar and nuclear are both very safe.

CyanBird12• 7 years ago

Nuclear is not an essential part of any solution, it is more expensive than solar and wind per Mwatt, it takes far longer to build new plants, and if you want to make sure those plants are actually safe then you need to invest billions of dollars into them leading again to a higher price for electricity, the risks for said plants are still there, and unlike solar or wind they require big rivers or water bodies nearby. Uranium extraction and processing is still a dirty power hungry affair and that won't change any time soon.

Having deaths/mwt is also stupidly misleading because no solar plant ever had the risk of exploding and decimating a chunk of Eastern Europe, not to mention forcing thousands out of their homes and abandoning everything behind never to return

If you want to discuss things, then don't do it by misleading statements, that only makes you look like an angsty teen that opposes the status quo simply because it is cool to do so

nabla95• 7 years ago

More expensive than solar and wind per MW comparison misses something essential.

If you can't figure it out, you are missing the big picture.

Nuclear is not full solution for all energy needs, but it has that something that makes it very effective part in the mix together with wind and solar.

Anyone?

gnusty_gnurc3• 7 years ago

Ok, so what are solar cells other than semiconductors that pretty rapidly wear out and need to be scrapped. Who is recycling these? Answer: no one. They’re going to be e-waste shipped off somewhere to seep cadmium and other harmful elements into the environment. The idea that nuclear is dirty, ignores the very real byproducts of current renewables.

At least nuclear energy centralizes waste. With renewables we’re spreading generation across a country, with little control of ensuring the materials are ever recycled in a responsible way.

LorenPechtel5• 7 years ago

The real price of solar and wind is vastly more than the current market price.

The current system is highly subsidized by the existing power infrastructure. You use the sun when it's shining and the grid when it's not--but that means you need just as many generators, they just burn a bit less fuel.

The cost per kWh for pure solar power is something that's not discussed much, I did manage to find one figure of over $1 per kWh and the lowest (which I considered questionable as they were pushing off-grid systems) was $.40 per kWh.

klez• 7 years ago

About GMO, you don't need to be anti-science to be against them.

My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. And you don't get to use the seeds produced from the plants themselves because either they're sterile or you're legally prevented to do so. I mean, there's even a concept of "seed piracy", which to me is crazy.

The day we have "free-as-in-freedom" (and, of course, safe) GMOs is the day I won't be against them.

I'm a bit perplexed when people here go crazy because John Deere refuses to let people repair their own tractors but as soon as someone is against GMOs it's anti-science.

shawnz6• 7 years ago

I don't think this is really being "against GMOs" though, what you're really against is IP law surrounding GMOs. It's like saying you're "anti-film" just because you don't support the MPAA. It's attacking the wrong target and giving people a bad taste regarding GMOs even though they have the potential to do great things for society.

epistasis5• 7 years ago

My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them.

This is getting a bit off topic, but GMO has absolutely zero to do with this, and is a completely unrelated facet of agribusiness.

Plant patents go back long before GMOs were ever a possibility. Hybrids, which don't reproduce true, have also been a huge mainstay of farming since longe before GMOs.

It's fine to be concerned with the monetization of plant life, but GMOs are not an aspect related to that.

There are plenty of non-profits that are trying to make better products that can be freely distributed and grown by farmers, but such misleading information stymies their efforts.

mLuby• 7 years ago

On why we fear radiation >nuclear accidents remind us of nuclear bombs and our vulnerability to them.

I disagree. I think we fear radiation because we know there is a lethal threat present but we can't individually detect it, like nerve gas or perhaps something like Ebola. It triggers our threat response without giving us a clear source for the danger, which causes the generalized fear.

lixtra• 7 years ago

there is a lethal threat present but we can't individually detect it

But this is true for so many pollutants: lead in the water, mercury in lamps...

erentz3• 7 years ago

Radiation is definitely creepy and poorly understood. There was a great video by the Veritasium guy on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0

Punch line, you definitely wanna stay away from ciggarettes if you don't like radiation.

There's also this crazy woman (I think she's German?) who likes to go play with radiation sources. She has the most dead pan voice that barely changes except to possibly register some excitement when she finds a particularly hot source of radiation. She has a bunch of videos exploring Chernobyl. It's quite interesting for example to watch her pick apart dirt to find the single hot particle: https://youtu.be/C9npqRJ_9P8?t=150

radcon2• 7 years ago

There is no reliable evidence. . .

The premise of the entire article seems to rely on this one fallacy.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in a case like this where the effects are extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to measure AND there were extraordinary efforts made to suppress all the evidence.

lostmsu• 7 years ago

Extraordinary efforts to suppress evidence would be very visible on their own thought.

TheOtherHobbes2• 7 years ago

Successful efforts to suppress evidence would be invisible, by definition.

pitaj• 7 years ago

Reason dictates we assume the negative when there is not conclusive evidence towards the positive claim.

ncallaway4• 7 years ago

That's...not always true.

We also have to consider the risks of the various results, and weight them against our priors.

If we think something is fairly unlikely (1% chance of being true), and as yet has no evidence to support or refute it, but would cause the total destruction of the earth, reason would dictate that we assume that it is true until we have evidence that it is not.

This is obviously quite sensitive to what our individual priors are about something in a world where we don't yet have any evidence. This will naturally produce different conclusions for different people (you may assess the world-destroying event to only have a .000000001% chance of occurring, in which case it's pretty reasonable for you to assume it's false until we have evidence that it's true). But, for any individual, I don't believe the situation should not be as simple as your suggestion.

Edit: of course, this presumes self-preservation as a goal which is not something which can be determined by reason. Of course, it's a goal shared by a vast majority of humans, so I feel it's a reasonable assumption here. As reason/logic are used as a tool to support our goals, I feel it's fair to include such a goal as part of our reasoning consideration.

daear• 7 years ago

Reason never dictates we assume a negative because a positive is unprovable. We may consider a negative, but we would need evidence of it before believing the claim.

radcon2• 7 years ago

Mesothelioma victims would beg to differ.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 7 years ago

That's ridiculous. Without evidence, stay uncertain.

pdorje3• 7 years ago

I read the article and just thought about the big tobacco "merchants of doubt" strategy... causality is pretty hard in general; ascribing certain causality to a disease 20 years after radiation exposure is way harder.

And I think one point the series makes that he tries to make the opposite, is that people at Chernobyl and adjacencies had "the friendly atom", they didn't had much fear of radiation. Even someone as Akimov, who had a lifetime exposure in another accident before Chernobyl, were "chasing the dragon tail" of radiation. Vodka clears it up, right?

The thing is, like quantum behavior in general, chance is pretty much high when we talk radiation. The chance of DNA or cellular damage being significant and leading to something, when you just perchance aspire a few particles of some isotope "grows" with time and how strong and the type of the source. Up to acute exposure it is just a very hard multi-causal probabilistic situation.

Normally we understand that a few times background radiation wouldn't harm you, when even the sun and background radiation are in fact always harming us, mostly, of course, in ways our body can USUALLY cope with. So, any increase in magnitude, is an increase in probable suffering, and we are talking millennia here, with some isotopes.

So, nuclear energy may have its uses, sure. Particularly, we have a lot of reactors working now, and perhaps we should let them take their course. But not to fear radiation with extreme prejudice is just to be careless about it. This is an industry tied with the defense department. The dejects are strategic and must be guarded and watched -- and don't come with thorium and new ways of recycling... it might be less so, but it is always a pretty dirty business, with the military and defense, and human errors, and "acts of god".

I believe when the Chernobyl series guy said "it couldn't have happened in the US", well... that exact way, not. But capitalism has, as we all so painfully know now, it's own incentives for disinformation and lies. Also, I live in Brazil, where they are always trying to revive some dated German project to build reactors. And if the Japanese had "issues", anyone can.

We in Brazil can't even contain common dirt, so it doesn't come upon us and kill hundreds... don't believe engineers will save us, believe human incompetence and greed may take longer, but always find a crack and blow the whole thing up -- no matter the economic system.

edit: tried to fix convoluted sentence in the third paragraph, and a few misspellings.

emiliobumachar3• 7 years ago

Fellow Brazilian here. Many if not most of our energy comes from hydroelectricity. We just had two catastrophic dam failures in the last few years, causing hundreds of deaths. (mining residue dams unrelated to hydroelectricity). The worldwide death toll record for dam failure is in the hundreds of thousands, long ago in China.

The risks of nuclear power are large on themselves, but they have to be compared with the risks of other types of energy.

A rooftop solar panel installer that falls and dies will make the local news if as much.

And don't even get me started on coal.

alkonaut• 7 years ago

The dramatic death added is of course fiction. But the economic damage of Chernobyl is still very hard to measure. For example, 20% of reindeer slaughtered in Sweden (of 50-75k per year) had to be discarded because of radiation for years after the incident. This wasn’t in Ukraine, or even in the Soviet Union. It was in Sweden.

We talked about CS137 and radiation levels of meat and other things for many years even though we were never of course in any risk of suddenly bleeding from our skin or having an increased rate of birth defects. The levels were low but still very much there. You were fine so long as you didn’t overconsume. A lot of things had too high levels to be sold, which affected a lot of companies (the reindeer industry is just one example.)

neffy• 7 years ago

Gorbachev is on record as accrediting the cost of cleaning up Chernobyl/preventing something much worse as being one of the reasons for the collapse of the soviet union.

A conservative estimate would put over 1% of the working population of the USSR on site at some point in the cleanup/sarcophagus construction - and bear in mind the EU had to fund the construction of the second sarcophagus.

So ignore the human cost, which has vanished behind propaganda at the moment, just add up the energy it produced, and put that against the economic cost. Then hypothetically take all that effort, and research, and put it into alternative forms of clean fuel production....

nosianu• 7 years ago

To add to your Sweden, here is government information from Germany, about radioactivity in game and mushrooms in the state of Bavaria: http://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushr... (latest data is from 2018)

The "BfS" is "the federal government office for radiation protection".

So even today they still have measures in place introduced after Chernobyl. Measurements have gone down of course, but it will take a long time before they can stop maintaining that webpage.

zaarn• 7 years ago

To add some anecdotes; the local hunter organisation in my village (south bavaria) has to dispose almost 50% of the killed boars due to the radioactive contamination, many of those over 10 times the legal safety limit. And that's only the boars that are measured, there is likely a huge dark number of radioactive boars being consumed or hunted.

EamonnMR2• 7 years ago

Should be noted that (spoiler) some of the people the author presumed instantly killed in ep1 are actually shown alive later.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

Like... about half of the Gomel region of Belarus has almost no young people anymore. When the incompetence is sufficiently extreme, the outcomes are dire and felt by many.

I want nuclear to become the energy of choice for the west, primarily because the alternatives would practically bankrupt even the richest regions of the U.S. (if you look at the relation between increased reliance on batteries, and the subsequent increased demand for higher daily/monthly/bimonthly minimum supply) if taken too seriously.

However, downplaying Chernobyl in particular (considering how similar many plants either are, or seem to the public; and considering how near-soviet levels of incompetence can be seen regionally in the west today) is a bad play.

The single incident is extremely dramatic, ruined many people's lives, and still costs a fortune to keep in check. While some of the response is exaggerated or driven by unfounded fears; the fact remains that people from widely varying cultures tend not to find the places that faced the aftermath of Chernobyl desirable or healthy places to live.

jonawesomegreen• 7 years ago

As the article mentions it seems like the show "Chernobyl" is a dream come true for the anti-nuclear crowd. Its dramatization of the event is truly horrific and actually had me questioning my support of nuclear power as a sensible alternative.

Watching it has me wondering a lot about how bad the accident actually was. I've done a little research and the number of fatalities seem to vary wildly depending on the source.

Does anyone have any reasonably good un-biased sources of information about the accident?

tomjen3• 7 years ago

The author of the post cites a UN report. Those are probably pretty fair.

codewritinfool2• 7 years ago

"The Truth about Chernobyl" by Grigori Medvedev is good IMO.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 7 years ago

Estimating the health impact of the disaster is very difficult because we don't have a robust model for the damage that low radiation exposure causes.

Ultimately, it's a problem of statistical power. High doses - large effect sizes - are relatively easy to work with and we can see effects without too much issue. But small effect sizes require large samples for suitable statistical power to avoid type II error, and perhaps more importantly, observational studies become extremely prone to even small confounding factors. In the case of studying radiation, or any number of drugs, diets, or environmental risks, you can't ethically perform experiments. "Natural" experiments like Chernobyl, Hiroshima, etc. are still beset by confounding factors.

So the best we can do is take the data from higher exposures and extrapolate that data back to the origin. But then you run into the issue of whether the regression comes back to meet the origin (linear no threshold - LNT), curves and sits along the x-axis for a while (threshold effects), or even dips below (hormesis). The truth is that we don't really know what happens at lower levels of exposure. The conservative approach is to assume the worst case, and thus LNT tends to get the most play in the literature. Hormesis has also picked up an air of woo and psuedoscience over time, but the idea isn't altogether unreasonable.

Calculations of 'how bad' Chernobyl was all depend on what model you assume, so there's plenty of room for variation in that, in addition to the spotty historical evidence.

thrower123• 7 years ago

It just makes me very angry that Chernobyl and Three Mile Island occurred, and the public was whipped into such an ignorantly self-destructive fervor to lobby against nuclear power and make it so expensive to develop. We've lost a good fifty years of additional experience and improvements and iterations on design, and meanwhile we have burned billions of tons of coal in the interim, releasing pollution and exhaust particles that contain more radioactive material than all the nuclear accidents ever, and even all the military atomic munitions testing.

Such a pyrrhic victory for the environmentalists, and a catastrophic disaster for the rest of us.

emiliobumachar3• 7 years ago

+1. It's a very little-known fact that coal energy produces radiation for all practical purposes. It does so by digging up naturally radioactive particles that would otherwise remain locked deep into the Earth, and putting them in the atmosphere.

schoosi• 7 years ago

Not to say I don't appreciate how safe modern nuclear is, but if you're writing an article about the over-dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster, I think it hurts your argument when you neglect to mention the hundreds of thousands who were forced to permanently relocate and the thousand-square mile Exclusion Zone that is still uninhabitable 30 years later. If the disaster were at the nuclear plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Exclusion Zone would include all of Eastern Massachusetts, including the cities of Boston, Providence, and Worcester.

Circuits7• 7 years ago

You don't think not mentioning any of the other problems with nuclear energy hurts the argument? Are we really going to ignore the problem of containing spent fuel?

Circuits7• 7 years ago

People down voting this comment, care to add a comment about why you are down voting it? Surely, it's not because you believe spent fuel is not a problem? I hope not because it is a HUGE problem perhaps bigger even than dumping CO2 into the air if you ask me.

dingus• 7 years ago

Reiterating your point, the area is uninhabitable on a timescale of thousands of years. Some estimates are at 20,000 years. The timeline of that region being poisonous extends so far beyond our current history that it's effectively permanent.

There are actual risks of creating permanent dead zones on the map. It shows incredible arrogance and a complete lack of foresight.

What happens when the Chernobyl confinement deteriorates every hundred years or so, and eventually nobody is around to maintain it anymore.

DuskStar3• 7 years ago

What happens when the Chernobyl confinement deteriorates every hundred years or so, and eventually nobody is around to maintain it anymore.

Well, nothing - because if there aren't people around to maintain it, there also aren't people around for it to affect. Couple that with the fact that the intensity of the radiation will have significantly decreased within a century and that cancer is a more serious concern in longer lived species and I think you'll find the impact on nature from any future leakage to be minimal.

mimixco• 7 years ago

It's worth mentioning that the lead Chernobyl investigator committed suicide [0] over his feelings of guilt in not being more forthright about the inherent dangers of the RBMK design.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/may/29/chernob...

beat10• 7 years ago

The whole article reeks of politicized shaming of those stupid treehuggers falling for the lies of corrupt Hollywood. Sigh.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, the arguments for nuclear power are rapidly fading - on economic grounds, not safety grounds. Even assuming that nuclear is as safe as its most enthusiastic proponents claim, it's not a good investment anymore. Why? Because the cost/energy of storage-backed wind/solar is plummeting, and we don't know yet where the bottom is, due to rapid advances in technology and increasing economies of scale in production and deployment. The cost of nuclear plants is largely up-front - they're cheap to operate over decades, but expensive to build. If someone spends billions on new plants, and by the time they're built a decade later, solar costs half as much as nuclear, there's almost no reason to even fire the plants up.

This isn't a safety risk. This is a capital risk. Businesses care more about risking their money than risking people's lives. Building more nuclear power right now could turn into the kind of boondoggle that bankrupts utilities. Think the public is mad about nuclear disaster risk? Wait til they're being asked to pay more on their bills to bail out a utility that wasted billions on unused nuclear plants.

And the financial risk just begs the question... what's the benefit of nuclear at all, in a world where storage-backed solar/wind is clearly the future? The cost is lower, the risk is lower, it's available to nations that can't afford (or shouldn't be allowed to have) nuclear plants, etc. Barriers to entry in terms of cost and time to market are extremely low, so low that even ordinary citizens can get in on the game.

Demanding nuclear power at this point makes no economic sense. Which means the demands have other motivations, and we should think about why we think nuclear is so darn important in this day and age.

clucas2• 7 years ago

If there is no economic sense in building nuke plants, we can just stop talking about it, right? Presumably the utilities will run their analysis, and if you're right, the plants will just never get built. Is the nuclear lobby so strong that it is able to force utilities to go against the simple economics? Even the coal lobby, which I assume (perhaps incorrectly?) is larger and more entrenched, is losing that battle...

I hope you're right, because these periodic debates (on HN and elsewhere) always have the same old arguments and no one ever seems to be convinced.

beat10• 7 years ago

When's the last time a new plant got built in the US? What's the construction rate for new plants, even in less regulated and more centrally controlled nations like Russia and China?

Economics is very powerful.

cletus• 7 years ago

I used to be pro-nuclear power but I've long since come to the conclusion that there are three fundamental problems that basically make nuclear power a non-starter:

1. While average deaths per kWh might be relatively low (compared to other forms of power generation) the worst case scenario is much, much worse. A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.

2. Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants. This requires long-term thinking way beyond quarterly profits. Because catastrophes are so unlikely but profit hits are so short term there is inevitable pressure to cut corners.

3. Governments have generally been pretty terrible at overseeing nuclear power industries. There are the dangers of regulatory capture and the temptation for politicians to kick the can down the street for the next guy to deal with. Political expediency is a powerful motivator. In the US, for example, the entire election/voting process has been politicized. Why is a Supervisor of Elections a political office? This is something fundamental to the function of our democracy and politicians are happy to throw it under the bus to get some short term political goal.

Just look at the politics of climate change. That can't trump (pardon the pun) politics. What makes you think the safety and oversight of nuclear power generation will?

4. Nuclear waste. We still have no large-scale long-term plan for how to dispose of nuclear waste. What's more, governments seem to bear the cost for this rather than the corporations that profit from the power generated. The issues here range from making areas around sites uninhabitable (eg nuclear waste leaking into the water table) to human threats (eg certain isotopes make for great dirty bombs).

Unless you have some solution for these problems, honestly I feel like you're wasting your time advocating for certainly fission power generation (and I'm not yet convinced nuclear fusion power generation is commercially viable).

colordrops2• 7 years ago

That's a risky stance for HN. I fully agree though. The arguments for nuclear always seem to ignore the human element which is the main risk factor.

erentz3• 7 years ago

1. While average deaths per kWh might be relatively low (compared to other forms of power generation) the worst case scenario is much, much worse. A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.

Climate change is causing massive loss of land in the form of shifting climate and rising sea levels. And coal power's contribution to that lost land is far greater than the lost land at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Perhaps you deny climate change, but if you don't then you need to do a comparison of the portion of that climate change land loss attributable to each unit (GWh) of coal generation vs the portion of exclusion zone land lost per each unit of nuclear generation.

Then think about the fact that in the coming decades we'll apparently need about another 100GW per year in new generating capacity for the developing world. They want reliable constant power, and a large portion of that is going to be coal if they don't have other options.

2. Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants. This requires long-term thinking way beyond quarterly profits. Because catastrophes are so unlikely but profit hits are so short term there is inevitable pressure to cut corners.

Few problems with this thinking. First this is why nuclear power plants are regulated. Second, we've actually been running an experiment on this for the past 50+ years, the results are in, and they're described in terms of land loss and deaths, which are less than other forms.

There are also a number of walk away safe nuclear plant designs that have never been developed because we turned away from nuclear.

3. Governments have generally been pretty terrible at overseeing nuclear power industries...

This is just a continuation of 2.

4. Nuclear waste.

Nuclear waste is so damn small compared to waste from any other source. We do know how to dispose of it. Put it in a deep hole. Or burn it more in a breeder.

(eg certain isotopes make for great dirty bombs).

Yikes. Please go visit a nuclear power plant and see if you can get your hands on it. I think if your goal is terrorism there are a few hundred easier ways to go about it. You're more likely to find materials for a dirty bomb from nuclear medicine sources.

CyanBird12• 7 years ago

Climate change is causing massive loss of land in the form of shifting climate and rising sea levels. And coal power's contribution to that lost land is far greater than the lost land at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

False equivalency, as you are measuring the total land mass, to two specific accidents.

This is a perfect example as to why no-body trusts Nuclear power advocacy, because it twists and turns facts into a mush with the aim of pushing the agenda.

Building nuclear plants, & Uranium extraction and processing both release high amounts of CO2 gasses, to build nuclear plants isnt a magic wand that will fix global warming, it is an upfront cost, in the tens of billions of USD per plant, and after that comes the economic costs of constant subsidies. After all, nuclear power is the single most expensive way to produce energy after coal.

They want reliable constant power, and a large portion of that is going to be coal if they don't have other options.

"They want reliable constant power", except you can deliver that with a matrix of solar+natural gas, or solar+wind+natural gas, or solar+gas+batteries.

Again, you show yourself to not be discussing in good faith. Coal just like nuclear energy is simply not an economic endeavor anymore, it is all in gas, solar and wind. And energy matrices composed out of those can be highly reliable.

Few problems with this thinking. First this is why nuclear power plants are regulated.

I mean, Fukushima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl where all "regulated". "Known knowns, Known unknowns and Unknown unknowns". The risk costs of the Unknown unknowns for nuclear are simply stratospheric.

Also, going once again back to price, the safer you make the nuclear plants, the more the cost, and the higher the subsidies they need to receive from consumers and governments.

Also n2, as other people have mentioned in the thread, nuclear plants are always built by the lowest bidder, same with the staffing, same with the handling of nuclear waste. When you build a nuclear plant, you arent "trusting the best", you will always be trusting the cheapest guys in the business.

We do know how to dispose of it. Put it in a deep hole. Or burn it more in a breeder.

Except.... We dont, Yuka Mountain isnt really operating, there are like 2 nuclear waste disposal in Europe, Onkalo and another site in Germany, and in the past there have been serious claims of dilapidation and abandonment [0]

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-l...

When it comes to breeders, again, there's not a single one really working in the entire planet[1]. Spent nuclear fuel usually sits idly bye in rusting tanks [2, 3, 4], barrels, or besides the working reactors in the pools.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-st...

[3] https://www.thelocal.se/20140224/rust-found-on-vattenfall-nu...

[4] https://www.smh.com.au/national/rusted-barrels-of-radioactiv...

If you want people to actually believe what you say, you need to speak truthfully of how things actually work, not lie and give a rose tinted version of the facts

Balgair• 7 years ago

1. While average deaths per kWh might be relatively low (compared to other forms of power generation) the worst case scenario is much, much worse. A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.

This is one of the main issues with nuclear technology in general. We just don't have a good 'training data set' for many of the energy applications.

With weapons, we have a very good suspicion that 'tatical' uses of the technology will cause the end of the world. The probabilities are well-enough known and the outcomes are dire enough that we've been living in 'pax-nuclei' for nearly 80 years now.

With medicine, we know how nuclear based medtech works and we have a 'good enough' idea that the benefits outweight the costs. Yes, the contrast dye is not good for you, but it'll give us a really good idea where the blockage is. Yes, the radiation chemo is not fun, but the cancer will kill you before the radiation does. The probabilities are well known and the expected values are understood.

However, with nuclear energy, we do not have a good understanding of the expected values. Sure, the French run nuclear plants fairly well. But we thought that the Japanese did too, and look what happened when a 'black swan' came along. Deaths/KW-hr may be less for now, but we have a farily good suspicion that they could go up by a whole heck of a lot. Chernobyl was a disaster, but via the heroics of the people there, it was somewhat contained. What would have happened if they only had 90% of the heroes that were there? 80%? That fault-tree contains a lot of very bad situations. As such, it is not unreasonable to say that we need more information on nuclear energy before deciding on our energy future.

Grue33• 7 years ago

A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.

Neither is a nuclear plant. Cleaning up within a century seems feasible. A lot of Chernobyl exclusion zone is completely safe, it just hasn't been revised in decades. Just compare to how fast Fukushima exclusion zone is shrinking. And you're ignoring loss of land due to rising sea levels.

Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants.

If companies can be trusted to run hydroelectric plants, which have a capability to drown everyone downstream, then they can be trusted to run nuclear. I've never seen anyone campaigning to end hydro even though potential for disaster is much bigger (and hydro disasters with more casualties than Chernobyl happened several times).

We still have no large-scale long-term plan for how to dispose of nuclear waste

Given the amount of nuclear waste that is produces this seems a weak concern. Anything that's heavily radioactive is just an energy source to be reused (and there's a lot of research being done on this). And the alternative is a lot (and I mean a lot) of solar panels and batteries, and these need to be disposed of as well.

LorenPechtel5• 7 years ago

The Fukushima exclusion zone should never have existed in the first place. More people died in the evacuation than if everyone had just stayed put.

And the waste is a political issue, not a scientific one. Reprocess it to recover the fuel and useful isotopes. What's left decays to ambient in 10,000 years--and even if we used nuclear power forever it would never amount to more than one year's worth of fly ash from coal plants. And that fly ash is nasty stuff. A nuclear plant that emitted radiation like a coal plant would be shut down pronto.

extra88• 7 years ago

4. Nuclear waste. We still have no large-scale long-term plan for how to dispose of nuclear waste.

In North America, I think we do have a plan, put it in Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. Its use has been blocked for various reasons.

EamonnMR2• 7 years ago

Collectively all of the coal plants are going to render the world's coastlines uninhabitable, except to fish.

Circuits7• 7 years ago

No one will be able to live in Chernobyl for another 20 thousand years... the author persecutes the director of the show for up playing the severity of the disaster while simultaneous down playing it, fact. The author makes it seem like the disaster at Chernobyl was nothing more than a slight hic-up or a little boo-boo... let me reiterate, no one can live in Chernobyl for another 20 THOUSAND years. There are a LOT of reasons for why (current) nuclear energy productions methods are dangerous, fallout from a total meltdown is 1% of them. It certainly isn't the primary concern. The primary concern is what we do with the by product of a nuclear power plant, the spent fuel. What do we do with it? Shove it into some hole in the ground and write a note to the next 200 generations: "Oh, hey, sorry about poisoning your drinking water with our radioactive waste. We figured you could fix our problems for us if you dont mind!" There is nothing clean about nuclear power plants. Just because we aren't pumping CO2 into the air doesn't make it clean.

Grue33• 7 years ago

...except people live in Chernobyl all the time. It wasn't evacuated. The plant itself kept working with the remaining reactors until like 2000. You might have meant Pripyat but nobody has seriously tried to decontaminate it. It was a city built specifically for nuclear plant, with no history to speak of, so there was no sense to restore it.

Circuits7• 7 years ago

It was evacuated immediately (some 100k people), no one is allowed to live in the exclusion zone (19 square miles) and yes the final reactor wasn't closed down until 2000 but the other two were closed down before then, unit 1 in 1996 and unit 2 in 1991. The only reason and despite world outcry that those reactors stayed in operation was because they had no choice. So either your ignorant of the facts or your trying to put a positive spin on a terrible and tragic event... which makes you a huge pos.

dnautics• 7 years ago

The article fails to mention the liquidators.

They Fictionalize Nuclear Disasters Like Chernobyl Because They Kill So Few

Related Stories