Comment by theptip
5 hours ago
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.
See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.
I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.
A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
And then you have bad faith actors.
No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?
No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?
No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?
Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?
None of that has never ever happened, right?
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
> This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.
But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.
Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated
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> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.
Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.
Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
> yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
Next to you and your family, then, since you’re happy trading with their risks.
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Climate change is planet wide. No nuclear incident has ever had such a widespread effect.
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off.
> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
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You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
Climate has never stopped changing since the day the earth was formed, that's why we are here. Keep it "under control" is a wild target.
"All wooden boats always leak a little, so stopping people from drilling holes through the hull is a wild target."
It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.