Nuclear power helped prevent ~2M deaths in the last 50 years

https://twitter.com/rafaelmgrossi/status/1512061341212704771

by torts • 4 years ago

316 246 4 years ago

jbirer• 4 years ago

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

ch4s36• 4 years ago

There was 1 confirmed radiation death at Fukushima and more people died from the evacuation than the accident. The exposure to radiation in the exclusion zone was very low, probably too low to cause any excess cancer in the generally elderly population there.

rob742• 4 years ago

Well, there were no deaths because of the contamination in the contaminated area, because the contaminated area was evacuated. D'uh...

formerly_proven2• 4 years ago

By 2018 more than 3700 people have died in relation to the evacuation (there's a technical criterion for this, basically death materially brought on by the worsened living conditions or issues during evacuation). IIRC there are no increased cancer rates among the population. The majority of evacuated people have not returned to their homes. The social and mental health impact of the evacuation was and is massive.

anon_123g987• 4 years ago

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

mpweiher• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

danbruc5• 4 years ago

What is the actual claim here? Nuclear power didn't prevent any deaths, after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or another. So it must be something like two million people would have died earlier without nuclear power, but by how much? Does it mean nuclear power saved the equivalent of two million average lifespans? Or would two million people more have died in coal mines?

mytailorisrich5• 4 years ago

Obviously when something is said to have "prevented deaths" this means early deaths from accidents/illness...

Here, as is explained is the tweet, the claim is based on the reduction in air pollution.

danbruc5• 4 years ago

Without further details that is not really helpful. If everyone died one week earlier because of additional air pollution, would that mean nuclear power saved everyone's life? And it certainly makes a difference whether the average loss of lifetime is a week or ten years.

arlort• 4 years ago

A more interesting metric would maybe be years of life expectancy, but that's probably too much of a hassle to calculate for a metric which is relatively speaking useless

pvaldes4• 4 years ago

the claim is based on the reduction in air pollution.

That has been heavily improved in the last years by a better car design, better materials, motor burning regulated by electronics and a much more strict regulation in vehicle emissions.

Thus nuclear would be bragging here about other's merits.

Using the same argument we could claim also that combustible fossils had saved millions of lives in the last years because cars now have much more plastic parts than before (reduced weight -> less mass to move -> less fuel spent to move it -> less air pollution).

rob742• 4 years ago

Well, he claims that these lives "would have been lost due to air pollution". The question is, what was the alternative considered for this study? Probably the worst kind of coal plant they could imagine, without any kind of filtration technology? Because I'm pretty sure that the number of lives lost in the last 50 years due to pollution from coal power plants in, let's say, Germany (Ok, West Germany before 1990) is pretty close to zero.

Ok, there are of course other countries with less strict regulations, but then the question is this: would a country that is not capable to regulate its coal plant operators so that they don't kill people via pollution be capable to regulate its nuclear plant operators so that they operate their plants safely?

danbruc5• 4 years ago

The problem is that »[...] lives that would have been lost due to air pollution.« makes no sense. The closest meaningful literal interpretation would be, that the additional air pollution would have effect no one except two million people and those would have died earlier than without the additional air pollution. But that still doesn't tell much unless you specify how much earlier they would have died.

In reality additional air pollution, on average, shortens everyone's life expectancy by a certain amount and that is a meaningful measure. So maybe the claim is supposed to mean that nuclear power saved about two million times the average life expectancy during the last 50 years which is very roughly one week for everyone. But it is not even clear if the number is supposed to be a global number or for a more specific area.

ClumsyPilot3• 4 years ago

"after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or another."

Well then we should let killers out of prison.

danbruc5• 4 years ago

That's the point, whether the killers are in prison or free, everyone will die. But with the killers in freedom, people will have a decreased life expectancy and that decrease - simply on average or also taking into account the distribution - is a meaningful way to measure the impact.

But that analogy is not really good, in case of the killers you can pretty much quantify how many people died because of them and therefore you could say not releasing the killers saved two million lives. [1] In case of some additional air pollution you are not able to say who died because of it, you can only observe a change in life expectancy.

[1] But even that is only meaningful to a certain extend - if all the killers decided to only kill people seconds before they died from another reason, that two million lives saved really means two million times ten seconds saved.

_vufv2• 4 years ago

Nuclear weapons likely prevented >100M deaths in the last 50 years. Mutually Assured Destruction is the only reason we didn't have another hot world war since 1945.

If there were no nuclear weapons now, you'd have a full scale NATO/Russia war today and a US/China war in a few months.

Very ironically, Mahnattan Project heads should receive a few Nobel Peace prizes posthoumously.

Synaesthesia2• 4 years ago

After WW2 Europe learned its lesson: another war would destroy the entire region, even with conventional arms. But nuclear weapons did not prevent this war.

The manner which the weapons were used certainly precludes them from a peace prize IMO

simonh5• 4 years ago

I don't understand how you can think that logic would work in Europe, but didn't work in the many parts of the world that went on to have full on wars WW2 style. Vietnam, Iran/Iraq, Many Arab/Israeli conflicts, etc, etc. What's special about Europe that would have made it immune?

The answer is profuse nuclear weapons that made any direct conflict in Europe unthinkable for either side. Ukraine demonstrates clearly that when conventional war is thinkable, it only takes one side to feel they have the upper hand to make it happen. Nukes are the only reason Russian tanks aren't already dipping their treads in the sea along the coast of the Baltic States, or at least trying to.

_vufv2• 4 years ago

After WW2 Europe learned its lesson...

From what I gather, there were no lessons learned in Europe. Huge majority of current European leaders seem to be itching to enhance the current conflict even with nuclear weapons being a thing.

We didn't evolve since WW2. I have no doubts that we're still as partisan, as greedy, as vengeful, as self-righteous as our predecessors of the 20th century.

ganzuul3• 4 years ago

At the cost of our ability to imagine a future, giving rise to the poverty called "postmodernism".

There is a whole world of thought surrounding the nuclear shadow that needs to be the context of any discussion on hypersonic weapons. ABM against those is automated warfare and the rise of the machines.

The situation on Earth is called Einstein's Prison, which is why antigravity is a matter of life or death for we who are stuck in this oubliette.

diffeomorphism• 4 years ago

True, but has nothing to do with the article/tweet's topic?

testplzignore• 4 years ago

Imagine if the US had developed them one year earlier. Would we have used them against Germany rather than lose 100k people in a land invasion? Would the indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons become the norm? There are worse nations and leaders throughout history who would have destroyed the world if they had the same tech. Of course I'm speaking from an American bias.

I should add that I personally find the use of nuclear weapons against Japan unnecessary and immoral.

hedora7• 4 years ago

The US probably would have done something similar a year earlier. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a tech demo for the benefit of the Russians. It was certainly immoral (and racist) but saved many more foreign lives than it cost.

As bad as Hitler was, the Russians killed orders of magnitude more civilians in that war, and were ready to launch into the rest of Europe after Berlin fell.

Unless they changed tactics, they would have run scorched earth campaigns in Western Europe, and Hitler's concentration camps would just be a footnote in most history texts.

Edit: Also, if you haven't seen it, watch Grave of the Fireflies. The US did far worse things to Japan than nuking it. There's a reason the Japanese surrendered well before the nukes.

formerly_proven2• 4 years ago

People in general do not understand how nuclear strategy works. Almost everyone just goes "nuclear weapons bad remove them pls" (especially in Germany). The ignorance and misunderstanding is almost comical.

gxqoz• 4 years ago

Perhaps you might want to read Command and Control, a book about the terrifying history of near misses in terms of nuclear weapons. It may well be true that nuclear weapons have reduced hot wars. But it can be equally true that had a few small things gone a different way, the world could have been subjected to an even more horrible nuclear war. And this is still very much the situation.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...

cycomanic6• 4 years ago

You mean it has prevented a hot war between the US and Russia, instead we had lots of substitute wars were mostly only brown people died (sarcasm!). Essentially nuclear weapons meant that all nuclear powers could act with impunity toward non-nuclear powers who were not directly aligned with any of the blocks. I mean Ukraine is like a prime exhibition, Putin would have likely never invaded if he didn't have nuclear weapons, and the west would have likely reacted much earlier.

The arguments are definitely not as straight-forward.

kongolongo• 4 years ago

I think it's kind of a reach to say that nuclear weapons saving lives through the deterrence of MAD can also be included in nuclear power saving lives. I think they can be relatively distinct.

For example there have been many instances where countries have specifically stopped at nuclear power, but not begin research or further refinement into creating nuclear weapons (because of possible sanctions, international backlash, etc). IIRC there are roughly 20ish countries that have nuclear power, but no nuclear weapons.

BoardsOfCanada• 4 years ago

Mutually assured destruction is analogue to the martingale betting strategy. You can raise your chances of winning a small amount as close to 100% as you can afford by just risking everything if you lose.

godelski3• 4 years ago

Nuclear energy is also the best way to perform nuclear de-proliferation and has been by far the most successful means to date.[0]

A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear power plants. The program was the largest and most successful nuclear non-proliferation program to date.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

runarberg10• 4 years ago

You might be asking the wrong question. An equally valid question would be: If Russia didn’t have nukes, would it have so haphazardly invaded Ukraine?

In fact we have a comparative case study. In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq at the time didn’t have nukes. The USA and other responded by promptly invading Iraq.

Now with this history in mind. Why wouldn’t NATO respond to Russian hostilities by sending their military to protect Ukrainian sovereignty if Russia didn’t have nukes. And with that in mind would Russia have engaged in this horror if it was sure of its futility. All this horrors could have been prevented if we had eliminated these weapons of terror while we had a chance.

NOTE: My main point with this exercise is to provide an alternate hypothetical situation which leads to the opposite results. This is to prove a point that you cannot for certain speculate that MAD has saved lives. An equally valid hypothetical can speculate that MAD actually costs lives.

dham• 4 years ago

I think it's the main tragedy of the human race is not staying with nuclear and going all in. Unfortunately the fad of being afraid of nuclear will probably be the downfall of the human race. We would have had energy solved by the 80's. Almost sickening to think about.

simonh5• 4 years ago

I don't know, early reactor designs were pretty unsafe and I'm not sure a lot more of them would have been better. Sometimes taking time to mature a technology, even one that's hugely beneficial in the long term, works better than just piling in quickly and risking finding that you invested in a developmental dead end. Having said that now nuclear does seem to be a mature technology with significant benefits.

ganzuul3• 4 years ago

The airborne reactor was our ticket to the future but it didn't produce plutonium.

twofornone2• 4 years ago

I don't know, early reactor designs were pretty unsafe and I'm not sure a lot more of them would have been better

There have been what, 5 events in the last 50 years that released a significant amount of radiation, only one catastrophic meltdown (Chernobyl), out of thousands of plants running continuously for decades? Seems pretty safe to me...

ganzuul3• 4 years ago

Those who campaigned against it, ostensibly on behalf of the environment, irreversibly damaged the reputation of environmentalists by letting themselves be duped. Now people think that putting the atmosphere on the free market through CO2 scrubbers is a good idea, although the market's intelligence can never replicate what a billion years of genetic evolution has produced. We will suffocate ourselves in the race to the bottom.

I'd gladly wallow in the shame of global despot if it meant we could reverse this madness of irresponsibility. :p

akamaka2• 4 years ago

Not really true, because electricity generation is only a fraction of energy usage. Most of our greenhouse gas emissions come from other sources like transportation, industrial processes, and agriculture, so there are actually a quite a wide range of technological problems that need to be solved beyond just deploying more nuclear.

robotresearcher• 4 years ago

Sure, but more solutions are feasible if power is cheap and plentiful.

nestorD• 4 years ago

But, we now how to convert most of those process to electric. The engineering challenges have been solved.

It is just not cost effective at the moment because you would have to update manufacturing process for all the things you want to change and that takes money. But with cheap electricity, oil/gas becoming more expensive and political incentives...

lkbm• 4 years ago

In the 1970s, the US had plans to build 1,000 nuclear power plants. If they were the average size, I believe would come to double our current electrical generation capacity. Where would we be with cheap, plentiful, carbon-neutral electricity?

"Electricity and heat" has been the dominant source of emissions in the US since at least 1990[0]. Even if most of that is the "heat" part, we can heat much more efficiency with electricity than with gas nearly the entire year in all our climates, and in the rare cases where that's not true, resistance heating can cover the offset. The only reason we use gas is because it was cheaper.

Second on the list is transportation, much of which is finally hitting viability for electrification right now. Again, if we'd had cheap, plentiful electricity, that would have spurred on development and implementation much earlier. Maybe not the 1980, but a decade or two sooner definitely seems believable.

There are likely some industrial processes that we can't easily switch over, but I think given a cost incentive, we'd find a way for most things.

I am kind of assuming the switchover would mean "cheap" electricity. Maybe we'd have plentiful expensive electricity, but I'd expect market forces to push the price down.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#annual-greenh...

godelski3• 4 years ago

But energy is still a major factor in climate change. Imagine if the US's energy production looked like France's[0]. Potentially this would have also affected total global emissions as other countries typically follow US technologically. But that is speculation. But either way it would have reduced the climate problem in a significant way, making our current path forward easier (though yeah, it wouldn't have avoided the catastrophe. But let's recognize that this is extremely multifaceted).

[0] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR

timeon• 4 years ago

The fad of being afraid of nuclear was not real issue as it was already pointed here - electricity generation is not only issue. But even if we are talking about electricity generation - there are countries that had loads of coal so they stayed with coal-fired power stations. Why there is no nuclear power plant in Poland? Because of people being afraid of nuclear? That seems bit naive.

cycomanic6• 4 years ago

What would it have meant to go all in? The reasons for not going all in, were certainly not because of the environmental movements.

Also if we extrapolate from the nuclear accidents that we had, with the current number of power plants we had a major incident every 20-30 years or so. If we would have wanted to supply all our power from nuclear it would have meant at least a tripling of reactors (more like 5 times or so, given the developing world), so given the rate of incidents we would have a major incident every 10 years at least. Considering that they tend to render large areas completely uninhabitable in 50 years significant areas on all continents would be uninhabitable.

The shame is that we haven't gone all in on renewables and storage much earlier.

DennisP4• 4 years ago

We've had three major incidents that come to everyone's mind:

- Chernobyl, involving a reactor that didn't even have a containment dome, and in which the reaction rate sped up as the fuel got hotter. (The opposite is true of all modern reactors.)

- Fukushima, which failed due to a major earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands of people, while the radiation release didn't kill anyone. The exclusion zone there is only 20 square kilometers. And this was with a reactor design from the 1970s; a nearby plant ten years newer faced the same challenges and did fine.

- Three Mile Island, in which containment worked very well and radiation never went above background levels.

Aside from Chernobyl that seems like a pretty decent safety record to me. By comparison, nobody worries about hydropower, despite hydro having the worst accident of any power plant ever: Banqaio Dam, which killed 26,000 people immediately and another 150,000 or so in the aftermath.

The reason we didn't go all in on renewables earlier was that they were too expensive in the 20th century. Nuclear was not, as proven by France, which converted to 80% nuclear over the course of a couple decades.

999900000999• 4 years ago

Until the local government cuts funding to the nuclear plant. Then maintenance goes undone, and eventually you're leaking radioactive waste into the local environment.

If you build a wind farm in the desert, and in 40 years it's abandoned, it's not really a big deal. I guess you're unlucky, one of the turbines might fall on someone, but you're not going to have dangerous nuclear waste to dispose of.

How antiquated, you ask? In Washington, there is a pipe break every day. And according to EPA data, thousands of water and sewer systems across the country may be too old to function properly -- so old, in fact, that some were built during the Civil War.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/despite-civil-war-era-pipes-am...

Assume that anything you build today, may be abandoned in a few generations.

jbullock35• 4 years ago

The linked tweet doesn't provide a citation or context for the "helped prevent ~2M deaths" claim. But there is work in this area which suggests that "~2M lives saved" in the last 50 years underestimates the benefits of nuclear power by a lot.

One commenter here writes

What is the actual claim here? Nuclear power didn't prevent any deaths, after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or another. So it must be something like two million people would have died earlier without nuclear power, but by how much?

That's a better way to think about the problem: not "lives saved," but life-years saved. Calculations of life-years saved are necessarily sketchy, but there is at least one promising preliminary effort [1]. See especially page 22.

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/production-sitebuilder-v1-0-1...

ouid• 4 years ago

The idea that people are simultaneously intelligent enough to understand the somewhat nuanced argument that nuclear power is safe, but also so stupid that "2 million lives saved" makes more sense to them than just a number of QALYs is, I think, an abject failure of science journalism. If you explain everything like everyone is 5, you reap what you sow.

danbruc5• 4 years ago

For those unfamiliar with the unit, QALY is quality-adjusted life year. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

anonporridge2• 4 years ago

Life-years saved is a step in the right direction, but still the wrong metric to focus on in my opinion.

Healthy life-years is a much better metric to optimize.

If we get people living to 200, but 120 of those years are in a miserable and extremely debilitated state, I consider that a failure compared to average life span of 100, where only 5 years are in an extremely debilitated state. i.e. getting 95 good healthy years + 5 bad ones >>> 80 healthy years and 120 bad ones.

I suppose you can make an argument that extending your miserable years can help a person survive long enough to eventually take advantage of body and mind rejuvenation tech, so there is some point where absolute maximization of life-years might make sense.

pydry4• 4 years ago

This is QALYS. It's how the UK allocates health care spending.

The UK allocates healthcare in a pretty humane, efficient and, ultimately, (whisper it!) communist manner.

runarberg10• 4 years ago

This is a strange shift in responsibility. Wouldn’t it be better to say: “Coal shortened the life of so and so many people”? After all If there were neither coal power (or other air polluting power) nor nuclear those lives wouldn’t have been shortened either.

ncmncm28• 4 years ago

Yes. This is an attempt to boost nukes, but however much better it makes nukes look, it makes renewables several times moreso.

KennyBlanken• 4 years ago

Nuclear power is clean at the plant but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline. Further, plants are estimated to have a carbon impact around the same or worse than natural gas because their supply chain is so expensive. Instead of the carbon coming from burning the fuel, it comes from the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping a nuclear power plant running.

HNers love to shout about the environmental impact of semiconductor production for solar panels and mining for batteries and even permanent magnets used in electric motors. But apparently reactor fuel comes out of the ground and is refined based on ...wishful thinking?

It's all moot. Nuclear power is not being deployed by utilities because it is one of the most expensive forms of energy generation. With almost a century of enormous subsidization and research, it has only increased in cost. Wind and solar have plummeted in cost. Wind is currently the cheapest, with solar hot on its tail. Solar continues to fall at around 10% a year.

Last year in the US alone, and only accounting for grid-scale projects, wind and solar have replaced nuclear at a 6:1 ratio. When you account for commercial and residential solar and wind, it's an even higher ratio.

Solar cells cost $76 per watt in the seventies and now it costs thirty cents per watt. That's a 250 fold reduction.

Wind has gone from 55 cents per kwhr in the eighties, to 5 cents today.

Nuclear? More expensive than it was in the eighties.

With HVDC transmission technology seeing wider and wider use, and well as battery technology plunging in cost: everyone in the industry and government sector considers "what energy source do we go forward with" as solved.

It's not just cheaper: it doesn't have any of the numerous concerns nuclear does. Solar panels can be recycled (or simply resold for applications where the 10-20% reduced capacity doesn't matter, ie where there's plenty of roof/land available relative to energy needs), and the biggest problem with wind turbines has been figuring out how to recycle the turbine blades when they're EOL, something that is now solved. GE is turning blades into concrete, and Vestas has figured out how to recycle blades into like-new fiberglass.

Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry.

hedora7• 4 years ago

It's unclear that battery scaling will happen in time to reach sharply negative carbon emissions, or that solar and wind will meet future energy demands. Our kids need to put all the carbon back in the ground, which means we need to put the first 10-20% back ourselves. That would double global energy consumption for decades, assuming we started today.

Your supply chain carbon arguments have a fundamental flaw: Transportation and the grid need to decarbonize regardless of which technology the power plant uses.

Solar panel production is being bootstrapped with coal based power plants. That doesn't imply coal plants will be needed moving forward, or that industrial (bursty, scheduled consumption) electicity will be scarce.

The fact that US nuclear plants are riduculously economically inefficient doesn't imply plants in the rest of the world are similarly bad, or that the technology is infeasible. The US environmental movement intentionally sabotaged the industry through the second half of the 20th century. Also, efficient, safe nuclear plants have been operated for decades in other countries.

Anyway, we're clearly headed to a situation where we have effectively infinite clean electricity during the day, thanks to solar.

The real questions are whether energy storage devices are cheaper than nuclear, and how economical it is to time shift energy-intensive industrial processes (basically building 2-3x more factory, but idling it at night).

I'm hoping there is some bursty carbon capture technology on the horizon, where buying more equipment for a higher burst capture rate is cheap, so the electricity produced for the quarter of the day where there's a massive surplus isn't wasted.

We need to do that anyway, and it would greatly reduce nuclear, hydro and energy storage demand.

ch4s36• 4 years ago

but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline

Not really. You need very little uranium to operate a plant, and a lot of it comes from decommissioned bombs. When we were mining it in the US, it caused far fewer problems than coal or natural gas.

dev_tty01• 4 years ago

Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry.

This is provably false on many fronts. There is a growing recognition that nuclear is the only low carbon source that can produce substantial carbon-free power in all weather conditions and all latitudes.

"There were over 50 additional nuclear reactors under construction in 2020, and hundreds more are planned primarily in Asia."

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/energy-nuclear-power-...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/nuclear-power-energy-...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/23/tech-billionaires-ral...

Nuclear may or may not become the dominant energy source, but to say "Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward" is simply incorrect.

DrBazza3• 4 years ago

Nuclear power should be exactly comparable to other types of power.

Deaths during construction. Carbon produced in construction.

Deaths caused by mining and transporting fuel. Carbon produced by that.

Deaths caused by consuming fuels. Carbon for that as well.

Deaths caused by accidents during the lifetime of the power source.

Deaths caused to wildlife and pollution.

Deaths caused by decommissioning and deconstruction. Carbon for that too.

Then lifetime for nuclear power station, vs oil, coal, gas, wind turbine, solar.

Finally you can do an unbiased comparison of each.

Nuclear power has saved many lives by not requiring dangerous coal mining, particulate emissions, and climate change effects.

jrootabega• 4 years ago

That's the real trolley problem: they have to be powered by SOMETHING.

hedora7• 4 years ago

The nature of the carbon production is important. Carbon from wired electricy is different from embodied carbon from battery electric vehicles, and both are different from CO2 equivalent emissions from the chemistry of the industrial process itself.

After all, end game is you use a carbon neutral technology to power itself, emissions from energy usage go to zero. Similarly, solving carbon emissions for batteries cleans up energy storage.

Also, deaths due to climate change dwarf all the other sources combined (except, maybe, for deaths from coal emissions), so direct deaths are a second order effect that can be ignored in practice.

yosito• 4 years ago

OurWorldInData has a lot of data for these types of comparisons: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

geph2021• 4 years ago

A retrospective analysis of the benefits of nuclear power avoids accounting for one of the major consequences: the nuclear waste, which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years.

antattack• 4 years ago

Now that there are cleaner alternatives we don't need new nuclear anymore to save lives.

rob_c2• 4 years ago

No you're right china gets a free pass to strip mine for batteries and solar cells with slave/prison labour... then we all sing that solar in the west is great...

throwaway65322• 4 years ago

I'm just waiting for the day all of the humans required to keep a one of the older, less safe designs running all become unavailable and the people required for disaster management when it melts down are also unavailable and the world experiences a completely unmitigated meltdown. I really don't think this is out of the realm of possibility within the next hundred years. The assumption here is a societal collapse of sorts where say 90% of the population go away. IIRC there were something like 600,000 people who responded to the cleanup of Chernobyl, and something like 4% of the radioactive material of a single reactor was all that leaked into the environment. I sort of see nuclear power plants (at least certain designs) as a ticking time bomb that'll potentially leave large parts of the planet uninhabitable (or maybe just really high rates of thyroid cancer in the remaining population) for the 10% that remain in a post collapse world.

Nuclear does have a great record on paper. It's the non-linear behavior that scares people. And when troops roll up and start shelling nuclear power plants and people go "oh... oh I didn't consider how it might function under these conditions" that that non-linearity rears its head again and people get pretty cold on nuclear when faced with situations like that.

whearyou• 4 years ago

Agreed.

But I think the accident severity distribution for a nuclear power plan is dramatically more heavy tailed than that for other severity distribution for other power sources. That is, the impact of an individual accident for a nuclear plant can reasonably be orders of magnitude beyond the impact for a non nuclear plant.

I don’t think that’s usually taken into account and I do think that swings the cost benefit analysis into a net negative relative to other options.

throwaway89434510• 4 years ago

Yeah, if people can throw around "deaths due to air pollution" it seems pretty legitimate to throw around "lives saved due to nuclear".

runarberg10• 4 years ago

It might seem legitimate but I disagree that it is. It needlessly promotes one alternative over unmentioned others, giving people the sense that the only mentioned alternative is the only sensible one.

Take a version of the trolley problem for example. A trolley is heading towards group of people tied to the tracks. You have the option to pull a lever and divert the trolley to another pair of tracks, but it will hit an engineer working on those tracks. You state that pulling the lever saves all these lives, but unmentioned is the alternative to derail the trolley to a runaway zone which saves everybody.

In this version of the trolley problem you can count the deaths due to inaction. Is it right however to shift the rhetoric and talk about how many lives saved due to one particular action without mentioning there was an alternative?

godelski3• 4 years ago

The 2M number is referenced here[0]

[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

johnnyb9• 4 years ago

The study is from NASA: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen&

Synaesthesia2• 4 years ago

Nuclear power has a lot of connections to the nuclear arms industry, and as such is highly secretive. Many nuclear reactors were in fact to make bomb fissile material, with power generation as a side effect. The disposal problem is often covered in a veil of secrecy, eg when it pertains to weapons.

This is why debating these issues, which I've looked at my whole life, can be troublesome. We just don't have all the facts!

https://cnduk.org/resources/links-nuclear-power-nuclear-weap...

ch4s36• 4 years ago

The VAST majority of reactors ever built were not built to generate fissile material for weapons, and the VAST majority of nuclear weapons were built using centrifuge facilities which are cheaper to build and simpler in some respects to operate. Reactors have in fact been used to dispose of material from weapons. Civilian disposal plans in the west are all a matter of public record and there have been reams of paper generated about the topic.

Yes, the weapons part is to some extent secretive, but the UNODA oversees disarmament so there is some multinational transparency.

pydry4• 4 years ago

Keeping a nuclear industry around is still a good way to keep a lid on nuclear arsenal costs. There are supply chain efficiencies, a pipeline of necessary skills, etc.

It's just a ridiculously expensive way to generate green energy.

When Iran builds nuclear reactors for "100% peaceful non military purposes" suddenly the western media can see through the ruse and understands all this.

cinntaile2• 4 years ago

As others have pointed out, what does this even mean? What kind of metric is this? What was it compared against? Where is the data? It doesn't exactly instill confidence that the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes claims like these, this is marketing fluff.

syngrog66• 4 years ago

wonder how many millions died from cancer from radiation from all the nuclear/atomic weapon tests, and the 2 major nuclear power plant disasters (that we know of)

curious if its still a numerical net win or a lose when you take that side into account

NovemberWhiskey• 4 years ago

Why would you bundle nuclear weapons tests together with civil applications?

Manuel_D10• 4 years ago

The largest credible estimates for Chernobyl are in the hundreds or in the single-digit thousands. Estimates larger than that make significant methodological errors, like failing to account for better technologies for diagnosing certain types of cancer (especially thyroid cancer).

For Fukushima, most estimates predict zero deaths due to radiation exposure besides the plant workers.

KptMarchewa2• 4 years ago

It rounds down to 0, counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

almet• 4 years ago

It's frightening to see how the nuclear power debate is done nowadays.

Yes, nuclear energy is generating less CO2 than some other forms of energy, but saying it's saving lives seems sketchy at best, and to be used as a "hammer argument". Because it's "saving lives", it's good.

All energy producing less CO2 than the current mix is "saving lives" in a way. So yes, we should aim for less production of CO2. There is no question here.

But I believe that in order to have a opinion on the matter we need to understand the whole picture.

- *Waste* : we don't really know what to do with them. We pile them up and try to protect humans from them, but really we don't know what to do more than that.

- *War risk* : if a plant is a military target, it might cause big trouble to the population around, and to the nature…

- *Dismantling* : we still don't know how to dismantle a nuclear power plant and we don't know the energetic cost of doing so. Still, we have many nuclear plants that are coming to their end of lives, and we still don't know how to so properly.

- *We don't have sufficient sources of uranium* : it seems that we lack some uranium in order to produce enough energy in a sustainable way.

- Also, uranium extraction is complex geo-politically and seems to creates a geographic context keen to a war on resources, especially if we don't have enough.

So, it might "save lives" wrt CO2 emissions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a clean energy, nor that's the energy of the future, in my opinion.

jopsen3• 4 years ago

I don't think it's lower CO2 emissions that saves lives. It's likely reduced air pollution.

Gas power plants probably have similar properties. (Not that I would advocate for gas)

In any case, most the problems around nuclear are lack of political will and economies of scale.

Manuel_D10• 4 years ago

Waste : we don't really know what to do with them. We pile them up and try to protect humans from them, but really we don't know what to do more than that.

We know exactly what to do with it: bury it underground, in bedrock, like what Finland is doing [1]. For countries like the USA that don't reprocess nuclear waste, it represents a future source of fuel so burying it is wasteful. There's also an incredibly small amount of waste: all nuclear waste from electricity generation in the USA fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [2].

War risk : if a plant is a military target, it might cause big trouble to the population around, and to the nature…

The risk posed by nuclear power plants in wartime is drastically lower than the actual war itself. The vulnerability of power plants are also overstated: reactors are essentially inside of bunkers, protected by meters of reinforced concrete. The Ukraine war has demonstrated the resilience of nuclear plants: none have been breached.

We don't have sufficient sources of uranium : it seems that we lack some uranium in order to produce enough energy in a sustainable way.

Existing terrestrial reserves are more than enough for centuries, or longer with reprocessing. Uranium seawater extraction affords an effectively unlimited supply [3].

Nuclear power represents the only non-intermittent source of carbon-free energy besides geographically limited sources like geothermal or hydroelectric power. For that reason, it's going to be the backbone of most countries' decarbonization efforts unless a massive breakthrough in storage is made.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

2. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

hans17292• 4 years ago

The fact that your solution for long-term storage isn't even operational yet renders the confidence in your line of arguments ad absurdum. The fact that you try to defuse the GPs concerns with short-sentenced bullet points says it all - you're dismissive and strongly opinionated, while the concerned are asking very valid questions. That's bad intellectual culture, to say the least.

ncmncm28• 4 years ago

No one has ever extracted uranium from seawater. Why not? Because it costs a lot more. But nukes are already not economically competitive. Making the fuel cost more makes them even less attractive.

ncmncm28• 4 years ago

If nukes prevented that many deaths, imagine how many solar + wind will prevent.

The point here is that each $10B spent on new generating capacity displaces some amount of coal generation. If you spend your $10B building nukes, it displaces A million tons / year of coal output, if you spend $10B building renewables, it instead displaces B million tons.

And B is much larger than A, because a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke.

The corollary is that each $ diverted from renewables to nukes is not just harmful, but brings climate disaster nearer. Best, of course, would be to stop diverting money to fossils, but all we can do about that is build out renewables + storage as fast as we can. Renewables will be running at 100% at all times, and each kWh produced displaces a kWh of fossil generation.

Displaced fossil generation in most markets is methane gas, because methane gas is cheaper and therefore preferred. But! anywhere coal is being used at all, they will prefer to cut coal output because cutting coal saves more money than cutting gas.

A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like nobody's business. Every last kWh of renewables + storage that can be put on the German grid, provided it is steady-enough output, displaces exactly that much coal.

The cost of storage is plummeting even faster than of solar or wind ever did, so there is some short-term sense in delaying storage build-out until it is cheaper, so you can buy more of it. But in the big picture, building out storage at any price is much, much better than waiting.

jopsen3• 4 years ago

In the meantime it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea.

We should just have doubled down on it 50 years ago.

So much geopolitical trouble would have been avoided if bad actors in the middle east and Russia wasn't flushed with cash.

cycomanic6• 4 years ago

So who do you think is one of the largest providers of uranium in Europe?

The arguments of Germany not being so dependent on Russia if they would have left their nuclear power plants running longer has been debunked several times. I believe this is largely nuclear power lobbyist taken advantage of the current situation. The EU is even more dependent on Uranium from Russia than gas. 20% of the natural Uranium and 26% of the enriched Uranium used in the EU comes from Russia and Kazastan [1]

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-...

this_user• 4 years ago

If nuclear power is such a great idea, then why has it never become the dominant technology globally despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry? Technologies that are strictly superior tend to dominate in the long run. Yet, nuclear power has always remained a niche player even in countries where there was not a lot of strong, organised opposition.

Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that nuclear power suffers from a lot of issues that have never properly been solved. And despite claims to the contrary, it is certainly not completely safe. The fact that dozens of Russian soldiers in Ukraine recently suffered radiation poisoning after digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone just highlights how long-lasting the environmental impact of nuclear accidents is. Admittedly, they should have known better, but how many exclusion zones like that can we afford to have globally from future nuclear accidents that are virtually guaranteed to happen eventually?

pvaldes4• 4 years ago

it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea.

And just 20.000 years to celebrate that the area will be as safe as it was before 1970.

180 years at least if we feel optimistic.

nicolaslem2• 4 years ago

a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke.

Storage is far from a solved problem. There are many solutions for storage but we have yet to see one truly work at scale.

ncmncm28• 4 years ago

False. Pumped hydro is already working at scale, and being built out as fast as capital can be scared up for it.

Pumped hydro can be used in what may be a surprisingly larger range of places than usually imagined. First, it does not need an existing dam in an existing watershed. It doesn't need any watershed, just a hill, ideally with a depression. A circular dam can even be built on top of a hill, and that is being done, although it is better if you don't need to build all the sides.

Pumped hydro can be used where there is no hill, if a deep cavity exists underground. Then, you pump water up and out of the cavity to charge it, and let it back in when you need power. Deep cavities exist all over the world. You can combine a hill reservoir and a deep-cavity reservoir to get enormously more energy storage.

Pumped hydro has been demonstrated using a spherical tank deep under the ocean. There, you have a pump/turbine at the bottom of the tank, and you pump the water out to charge it. Amazingly, you don't need a pipe down to the tank, because water vapor fills vacated space in the tank. You just need a wire. The tank doesn't need to be very big if it is placed deep enough; the deeper it is, the more "head" you have.

Liquifying air is extremely mature tech. So, storing liquified air is something already done at scale, for decades, and can absorb peak renewable power. Power is released by letting the gas vaporize through a turbine, warmed by ambient air, or even by heat pumped out in the first place, if banked. A 100 MW liquified-air storage facility is under construction in Chile.

Synthetic ammonia is mature tech. A GW-scale ammonia electric-synthesizer plant is under construction in Norway. Anhydrous ammonia can be burned in a gas turbine.

Synthetic hydrogen is mature tech, and being built out in volume. Efficiency will only ever increase, as better catalysts are discovered and put in service. You can store hydrogen in the same underground reservoirs where natural gas is stored today.

Iron-air batteries are mature enough tech that mega-factories to produce iron-air batteries are already under construction, to deliver in volume in 2023.

fsflover• 4 years ago

https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

ghostbrainalpha• 4 years ago

There are some counter arguments to what you said, but I agree for the most part.

The exact numbers are below for anyone curious.

The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

hedora7• 4 years ago

Those prices don't include storage or over-provisioning for cloudy / still days.

Nuclear is still likely cost effective at night, or in the rainy season. The only other carbon neutral technologies rely on special geographical features (geothermal, hydro).

One way to think about energy moving forward is reducing the problem to heating houses with heat pumps during stormy weather, or at night.

Solar, wind and batteries basically imply we'll have surplus energy in all other scenarios.

gregwebs3• 4 years ago

There’s still a significant environmental cost to renewables. Mining the materials for wind/solar and then to produce them (often this is powered by coal). And there’s no real plan for how we will safely dispose of used solar panels. And there are land use issues with solar unless it is done on rooftops, which is much more expensive. We need nuclear and solar and wind and storage. One is not always better than the others. They all have trade offs and a role to play.

ncmncm28• 4 years ago

This is all false.

Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the tellurium get recycled.

There is absolutely no land-use issue for solar: solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue stream and better yield.

Wind, also, coexists neatly with pasture and farming.

In any case, even were all solar farms single-use, the amount used up for that, for all our needs, would be less than is devoted to fossil fuel extraction today. So the land-use claim is simple FUD.

Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now.

ineedasername3• 4 years ago

The current problem for renewables is storage for times when solar/wind aren't producing. There's some promising work being done there, but nuclear power is existing tech that can fill that gap. The fastest path off carbon should have both renewable and nuclear investments working in paralll.

Too much NIMBY, too much irrational fear if it, so it's unlikely to happen in the US. The current Russian/Ukraine war makes me wonder if European countries might reconsider their stance on it. It's not too late, for plants scheduled to be shutdown 2+ years from now, to make plans to keep them online. It also gives them motivation to build new ones, which France announced it would do just this past February. Perhaps the biggest challenge for countries that haven't built one in a few decades is experienced engineers. The US for example may have people experienced with operating them, but probably not building them at scale. France's original Messmer Plan shows it's possibly to ramp up relatively quickly though.

ncmncm28• 4 years ago

Storage just needs to be built out. It takes time to build out.

But nowhere near as much time as it would take to build out nukes.

esteth• 4 years ago

Is storage a problem for a big country like the USA? If you have a connected grid, can’t you be reasonably sure it’s windy and sunny in some places and bring power from there?

I actually don’t know

orangecat• 4 years ago

A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like nobody's business.

Which follows their insane decision to shut down their nuclear plants.

ncmncm28• 4 years ago

Germany's need for natural gas to fire furnaces in people's houses would not be served by power from nuke plants.

hans17292• 4 years ago

ASK HN: does anyone familiar with the matter have access to robust predictive models wrt the impact on health of the expected problems with long-term storage of nuclear waste?

For the german/french speaking part of the audience, ARTE recently uploaded an insightful documentation on the state of nuclear facilities in France (which I found very sobering, to say the least): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXrL4tPMoM -- while that is surely not ARTEs best piece and you get an idea of the redactions opinion through editorialization, it's definitely a recommended watch. The link points to the german version.

Bottom lines:

- nuclear power is not as transparent about the existing impact on the environment as one would think. for example, rivers even in the middle of europe are regularly contaminated with "negligible" contaminants, where what is defined as "negligible" is _not only intransparent, but not publicly known and censored in cases of information-requests, with the given reason being raison d'être of the state (!)_

- the storage-situation is not only not robust (not a single long term storage concept actually proved viable, globally), but much worse than I'd have anticipated

[...] those are the points that immediately come to mind.

My point here is: yes, great, we need to reduce the burden on the environment as much as possible, and _if_ nuclear is the way to go, then please, let's do that. But the unwillingness and lack of competence with regards to the long-term potentials for problems will bite us, and it will do so in more than one way, and I'm very concerned because of it. If the situation in central europe is as questionable as ARTE illuminates, I'm not sure I want to know how bad it is in regions with less political transparency. Hence the initial questions, primarily: who has access to such models?

herschel1132• 4 years ago

As always numbers as that are quite fuzzy. To estimate the risk, I like to look at physical modifications of our environment that _may_ prove dangerous, until we can prove their'e not. And if we look at the matter our earth and atmosphere is composed of, nuclear energy will likely do a much more distinct impact in the long term than any other man-made energy production efforts so far. While we are just causing turmoil in the carbon and mineral dust distribution of our planet, this is also done by animals and plants in the long term and by vulcans in the short term. But messing with the isotope and elemental composition is quite unique and happens far slower on a natural pace, and in other bodies like stars of course.

So tl;dr: We modify our planet in a _maybe_ destructive way for hundred thousands of years to come, by nuclear power generation. We don't know for sure if and how risky it is, but on other things (think of terrorism) we are taking vast efforts to keep risk at pace. So we should do with the elemental and isotope composition of our environment - by nuclear power!

jthrowsitaway• 4 years ago

And if we look at the matter our earth and atmosphere is composed of, nuclear energy will likely do a much more distinct impact in the long term than any other man-made energy production efforts so far.

Citation is very much needed. Comparing nuclear energy with the dirty business of the fossil fuel chain is a no-brainer in my mind. Nuclear energy isn't perfect, but it's a lot more contained than fossil fuels.

herschel1132• 4 years ago

Comparing nuclear energy with the dirty business of the fossil fuel chain is a no-brainer in my mind.

This may hold if, as most of those studies do, compare the almost-certain effects that are almost-now. They fail -like any study- on vague and long term effects. Eg. who will condense health effects of radiation spread by fighting in chernobyl ruins into a reasonable paper any time soon?

So we cannot reliable know the impact of nuclear waste, that if not treated again, will be nuclear waste for 100.000 of years for some kinds of waste and this is for sure.

For fossils, we in fact can not precisely know the if reducing CO2 emissions again, if climate effects will vane in time. But we have some expectations on the intertia this system has. Still not knowing precisely trigger effects that may start processes going thousands of years (melting ice etc.) And we can expect most dust and toxic effects to stop within years, if those operations are stopped. Nature will close the holes we digged in 10s of years.

For windmills, solar panels and batteries we can be sure it's impact is not far away from it's dirty production, maintenance and recycling impact. Again, of course, one day may prove we're going to far and all wind has been stopped by windmills...

deltaonefour• 4 years ago

This type of logic also justifies the nuclear bomb, as development of the nuclear bomb is an inevitable parallel to nuclear power.

Not against nuclear power, but as unwise as it is to ignore data, it's also unwise to blindly trust it without addressing non-quantifiable aspects of it. No other power source can do what it did to Chernobyl.

Are we really saying 4 or 5 Chernobyl level melt downs are ok every decade or so because the overall lives saved are greater? Hard to say, and also hard to say whether new technology can adequately reduce the risk of nuclear power.

My stance is that although we must move forward with nuclear if fusion doesn't pan out, we should nevertheless proceed with the utmost caution. I feel the attitude for nuclear power on HN is a little too enthusiastic. Tons of people are all in because of some statistical metrics.

Just keep in mind that numerical metrics are an accurate viewpoint, but they are just one angle out of multitudes of metrics, many of which cannot be quantified.

Archelaos• 4 years ago

Such statements like "measure x prevented/caused n deaths" should generally be considered highly dubious unless applied to a very narrow context (such as a randomized double blind placebo control study, etc.).

There is nothing that can really prevent death; everyone will die sooner or later. So speaking of "preventing/causing death" is an abbreviated way of speaking. It makes most sense when it is about "immediate death", but the longer it takes for a cause to develop its presumed effect, the less the effect can be solely attributed to this particular cause. It then makes no real sense to just count the numbers of deaths related to a particular cause, if it is only one of an actually unquantifiable number of contributory causes.

But analysing the structure of the statement closer, it becomes even more dubious, because (after applying some small interpretative clarifications) it follows the basic structure: "measure x prevented n of d, because it has an effect e that is (indirectly!)[1] somehow correlated with d". To evaluate the extent to which such a claim could probably be valid would require a considerable amount of background information. Just presenting it as a statement without any substantial discussion is not enlighting at all, but just polarizes the audience: if the statement fits into someone's already established belief system it is readily accepted at truth, and if it contradicts someone's belief system it is instantly rejected. There is no chance to learn anything from it.

[1] In the case of hypercapnia, CO2 can directly affect health, but I do not think that was the point of the statement.

pvaldes4• 4 years ago

Great. Now lets talk about the ~7M of people that had received or still have to receive economical support and help to mitigate the effects of Chernobyl on their health and properties.

PolygonSheep• 4 years ago

Since an argument about Chernobyl inevitably comes up when nuclear power is discussed I thought it would be interesting to ask: what would the coal/natural gas power equivalent of Chernobyl be? That is, an accident which caused significant death or ecological contamination.

The closest I can think of for a "coal Chernobyl" would be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

wdr1• 4 years ago

It baffles me how it's completely normal to avoid any mention of nuclear power when discussing climate change.

Kurzgesagt just did a great video[1] on what we should be hopeful for addressing climate change, but again, absolutely zero mention of nuclear power.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw

stjohnswarts6• 4 years ago

Me as well. I almost never hear nuclear advocates poo poo power from solar and wind, all are welcome, but coming from the other side they completely overlook the fact that nuclear power has been working fine for decades, is a 90% fix for climate change and yet they still lose their minds when you bring it up.

slantaclaus• 4 years ago

2 million is a very low ball estimate in my opinion. If it weren’t for nukes there would have been at least one more world war between WW2 and now.

Nuclear power helped prevent ~2M deaths in the last 50 years

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