Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/is-nuclear-power-worth-the-risk

by melling • 7 years ago

31 44 7 years ago

AngryData• 7 years ago

Nuclear power is the only surefire way to provide for all of our current and future energy needs, especially if you factor in carbon sequestering. On top of all that, per megawatt produced it is the safest form of energy production. Yeah there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people weren't purposefully kept ignorant of nuclear power and politicians weren't afraid to properly fund and manage it. Fukushima design was made using 50s nuclear technology that's like 15 years past it's first invention. It should have been either decommissioned or rebuilt to modern designs, but of course no one was willing to fund or support such a thing. It's like driving around in a Model-T then being surprised that it doesn't have airbags and seat belts when something goes wrong.

de_watcher• 7 years ago

The window of opportunity to redesign reliably has closed. We have too much software now.

redis_mlc• 7 years ago

there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people

You can always spot the nuclear apologist because they gloss over the intractable people issues with managing reactors for literally decades without a single lapse.

I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors.

The horrible reality we're now facing is that once you build a reactor, political forces force re-certification decades beyond their original design - regardless of the interior condition of the reactor.

At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.

exmadscientist• 7 years ago

You've hit the nail on the head here. I think the main mistake advocates of nuclear energy make is to talk about the safety and reliability of the technology. But the technology isn't the problem: we know how to safely build and operate nuclear reactors. The issue is the human factor. It only takes one person in a position of authority to cause one mistake that leads to a nuclear disaster. No one competent would ever have let that mistake happen... but how often do idiots rise to positions of power?

Or, put another way, do you trust Congress to make the right rules for operating a nuclear power station?

iforgotpassword• 7 years ago

Exactly. The hn crowd is probably especially biased here since it's a lot of geeks with a very idealistic view of the world, where every single individual on this planet is driven by the highest of moral values exclusively. Let me just copy and paste part of a comment I made on the recycling post yesterday:

Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get them out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit.

lm284694• 7 years ago

think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors.

Compared to ? Trusting people to manage coal power plants, mines, off shore platforms, oil tankers, &c. ?

At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.

France - lot of nuclear reactors : 13ct per KWh

Germany - shutting down nuclear reactors, still heavily relying on coal : 30ct per KWh

mc32• 7 years ago

Lapses happen. That’s human nature. It’s having failsafes and enough of them to mitigate and minimize any negative outcomes.

nickik4• 7 years ago

I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors.

Except that its the safest form of energy production in the Western world and the waste majorities of countries have not had a single death from nuclear power.

Your statement flat out contradicts all evidence.

manfredo7• 7 years ago

This isn't an issue with nuclear power, but rather a symptom of a political system focused on short-term goals when the nuclear industry fundamentally operates on the scale of decades at least. Furthermore the problems with nuclear power you've listed are self-fulfilling. Nuclear plants have to have extended life cycles, because people don't want to build new plants, because nuclear plants are having their life cycles extended. Electricity prices skyrocket after the closure of a nuclear plant because a replacement was no built, because people don't want to build nuclear plants, because they point out that electricity prices skyrocket when plants eventually close.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

Nuclear was always high risk; Fukushima begged for disaster. Human errors dogged it from the beginning. The region had experienced multiple large tsumani in the century before it was built. Hello? The site started out as a 33-meter bluff, which was lowered to 7-meters. TEPCO was warned about their emergency generators and did nothing. Pretty damn sure these were not engineering decisions.

heisenbit• 7 years ago

The waste storage problem is not solved.

And looking at how much the clean up of large scale nuclear processing has and will cost it is not cheap either.

Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.

lm284694• 7 years ago

Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.

You need 300 to 1000+ windmill to replace a single nuclear power plant. Might be doable in the US but there is no way to do that in France for example. Same for sun, good look replacing a nuclear plant in northern Europe with a solar farm, it's not Nevada.

Nuclear is on demand, wind and sun are not.

The waste storage problem is not solved.

Renewable energy storage is not solved.

onreact• 7 years ago

Thank you for adding some common sense to that debate. Safe nuclear is like "clean coal".

cogman102• 7 years ago

The ultimate solution to the waste problem is fusion.

That's the unfortunate thing about abandoning fission reactors. Fusion is far safer and doesn't produce radioactive waste byproducts.

manfredo7• 7 years ago

The waste storage problem is solved: bury it underground in an area with no groundwater. The reason why no permanent storage has been built in the US (they have been built in Finland and in Asia) is because there's actually so little waste. The entirety of the waste from US nuclear power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high.

SideburnsOfDoom4• 7 years ago

per megawatt produced it (Nuclear power) is the safest form of energy production.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/25/chernoby...

Thousands dead, probably more, "up to 1 million under a worst-case scenario study". 5 million people still living on contaminated land, and it's not over.

manfredo7• 7 years ago

The figure of 1 million is given by Greenpeace which is not regarded to be even remotely authoritative. Even the figure of 6,000 is disputed. The WHO produced a figure of 4,000 [1]. In particular these estimates were projections about future cancer rates and similar illnesses. Now that we've actually advanced the clock 35 years we can make meaningful examinations of the affected population. As of 2005, less than 50 deaths due to illnesses attributed to radiation pollution from the Chernobyl disaster were recorded.

Furthermore, even if the worst-case figures in the ranges of the tens of thousands are taken as fact nuclear is still the safest forms of energy production.

1. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

CameronNemo• 7 years ago

Would be great to see a fossil fuels article with the same perspective. Too many people fail to apply the same standards to the status quo as they do to alternatives.

wruza• 7 years ago

What is the answer to this risk?

(Cough coal cough.)

rad_gruchalski• 7 years ago

As proven by Hambach Forest in Germany already.

Iv• 7 years ago

Here is what a clean and safe energy source looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...

Here is what nuclear energy wants to replace: https://endcoal.org/health/

kumarvvr• 7 years ago

At this point, there is no long teem alternative to baseload power apart from Nuclear.

Inless battery technology allows us to use renewable power as a baseload plant.

lm284694• 7 years ago

I see it that way: state of the art fossil fuel based energy production is harmful, no matter what. State of the art nuclear based energy production is extremely safe [0]. In a perfect world we'd use 100% clean renewable energy, but we're not living in a perfect world and nuclear is the 2nd best option.

We're literally the proverbial frog being slowly boiled alive.

[0] just don't run shady tests under dubious communistic governments and don't build it next to an ocean over an active seismic zone.

LatteLazy• 7 years ago

Risk isn't a single unified, fungible, quantifiable thing. We can't properly consider it or make decisions including it without understanding that.

A one in a million change of killing one million people is fundamentally different to a 100% chance of killing one person, even though the average outcome is the same.

You also can't get an honest assessment of risk without asking people to put their money where their mouth is: everyone considers themselves above average drivers, yet insurance companies won't touch some people (often those most convinced they're the lowest risk).

There are major economic and political concerns around any large project too, those add risks not present in the technology itself, and they don't just add new, clean, quantifiable risks, they also multiple (or reduce) existing risks in ways no one can predict or understand.

Before we can try to talk seriously about nuclear (or any other large project with a complex risk profile), we need a better understanding of risk itself. Any article that doesn't start at that point is (at best) uninformed chatter or (at worst) clickbait designed to start arguments.

ryanmercer• 7 years ago

Is radioactive coal ash (and other pollutants), from currently operating coal plants, falling from the skies worth it?

nickik4• 7 years ago

The failure of our society to turn into a nuclear based society will be looked laughed at in the future.

People in a 100 years will say 'they had invented everything they needed in the 1950-60 but failed to do anything'.

Its embarrassing for the human project and in time everybody will realize this.

Many a doctoral thesis will be written about how a whole society can be so dumb an short sighted.

esotericn• 7 years ago

Is the risk of nuclear higher than that of fossil fuel usage?

Climate change is a thing, right now, and we're exacerbating its' effects on an ongoing basis.

Is living worth the risk of dying?

Jamwinner• 7 years ago

This fear mongering puts us back decades.

Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?

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