The overriding impression I get is that the whole facility is complicated. There are lots of processes in place, and lots of very trained people required to keep it all running. The size and complexity of the control rooms for example, but also the inevitable maintenance and inspection of all the piping etc. Even the details of the cleanup (checking each store foot, grinding surfaces etc.)
I've recently been on a train in Europe and I saw solar panels and wind turbines everywhere. And what's striking by comparison is the lack of people or extraneous construction. They're just solar panels, or wind turbines. They're easy to install, easy (read cheap) to maintain, and are mostly just left alone to do their thing.
If I had a $100b to invest then solar, wind, even battery, is much more attractive than the time, complexity, uncertainty, running cost etc of nuclear. Not to even start on cleanup issues.
I get the base-load issue. But even there current storage is more attractive. And investing in future storage technology seems like a better return.
The argument against nuclear (fission, and even more so fusion) is purely financial. We can nimby and worry about the radiation but ultimately nuclear doesn't happen because financially its a dead end.
Base load is one of those terms that nuclear power proponents love because it turns a negative in a positive. Nuclear plants are very expensive to turn off and on. Nuclear plants leave you no choice but to leave them running 24x7, even when power that is an order of magnitude cheaper is available most of the time. Proponents call this base load. But technically it's just very expensive power that you can't turn off when it's completely redundant.
Flexible load is where the action is these days because renewables sometimes push energy prices into the negative whenever there's too much of it. Having to expend fuel during such times is a negative thing.
The big benefit gas plants have over coal and nuclear plants is that you can turn them off and on quicker. So you don't have to run them 24x7. Newer coal plants are similarly cheaper to use for backup power generation. A common mistake with assumptions about Chinese coal plants is that yes they build lots of them. And no, they mostly aren't running a lot. Their coal use actually is starting to decline. The new plants are more flexible and they use them to replace the older ones.
Renewables are plenty and cheaper most of the time. Batteries can deal with short term fluctuations and help time shift renewable power to cover peak loads in the morning and evenings.
And if you can bring online some gas/coal power when it's actually needed, there is no need for base load.
In practice this is still quite often but not most of the time and gradually declining. With dirt cheap renewables + batteries coming online by the hundreds of gw per year, the ability to turn the rest off is the most important feature with backup power generation.
Nuclear plants remain stupidly expensive and lack this feature.
Civilian nuclear plants can be easily regulated between 50% - 100% of maximal output, with power gradients of up to 2% / min. (Submarine nuclear reactors are designed for even faster gradients). In France, because nuclear power plants are the dominating source of electricity, nuclear power plants have to ramp up and down the output on daily basis.
When possible you want to run nuclear power plant at 100%, because there are almost no savings in operating costs (because nuclear fuel is so cheap) in comparison to a nuclear power plant running at 50%.
The current Chinese electricity strategy is to minimize the costs of electricity, get as much electricity from hydro, wind, solar as cheaply possible and fill the rest with cheap coal power. China currently doesn't use batteries for renewables backup in any significant amount (in comparison the size of the Chinese electricity grid).
China currently doesn't have access to cheap natural gas, in contrast to US. The amount of electricity produced from natural gas is very small in China.
Nuclear power in China is still very small, in comparison with coal power.
Will China build more and more renewables? Yes, but only if the costs of the whole electricity mix will stay low. They will not overbuild renewables. They will not build very large amounts of battery storage, if coal power will be cheaper.
> Nuclear plants remain stupidly expensive and lack this feature.
Combining nuclear with some secondary application that can run only at energy surplus times, such as desalination or pumped hydro, might help with the economics.
Desalination and pumping desalinated seawater through long distances might actually be a nice idea to reduce desertification or to increase agricultural output.
this gets repeated over and over again but its false:
> Nuclear power plants are routinely used in load following mode on a large scale in France, although "it is generally accepted that this is not an ideal economic situation for nuclear stations".[42] Unit A at the now decommissioned German Biblis Nuclear Power Plant was designed to modulate its output 15% per minute between 40% and 100% of its nominal power.
"Base load is one of those terms that nuclear power proponents love because it turns a negative in a positive."
I love how anti-nuclear types argue against such a basic concept as base load just because it helps THEIR argument. Base load is simply the lowest wattage the grid needs in a time period and does vary a lot but NEVER goes to zero. Wind and solar are a very poor fit for this due to their variability. Batteries can help but are expensive and wind and solar variability is offset using gas turbines.
Data centers always want to run 24/7 and significantly increase base load, which is why the big hyperscalers are all making deals for nuclear power. A nuclear reactor generating power for a data center that needs its entire output 100% of the time is an ideal scenario.
If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.
Nuclear industry is running with very high quality standards, this requires very good training, good maintenance. In this aspects, nuclear industry is similar to aircraft industry.
Solar panels are cheap to install, wind turbines are not so cheap to install.
Solar panels are cheap to maintain. Maintenance of offshore wind turbines is very expensive, therefor offshore wind turbines are more expensive, build with higher quality, than onshore wind turbines - so they require less frequent maintenance.
I assume you are from US. The big difference between US and Europe energy landscape is the cost of natural gas, Europe pays 4-5x higher prices for natural gas then US. When solar power don't supply electricity (at night or under cloud cover) and wind has slow speeds (can happen for multiple weeks) some countries from Europe can use hydro-power (Norway, Austria, Switzerland), some countries can burn coal (Poland, Germany), but most European countries have to burn very expensive gas.
The biggest source of electricity in Europe in the year 2025 was natural gas.
>If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.
That's an unfair comparison. We are talking about operational costs, not capital costs. A fair comparison would include nuclear's capital costs, which don't do it any favors - nuclear plants also need fancy turbine blades.
Not that I'm against nuclear, I think we're completely mad to be still burning (burning! so primitive!) ancient plants, coming up on a century after Magic Energy Rocks were discovered. "Cost" is a fickle metric when so many costs are externalized in both space and time - nobody cares if the effects of pollution are felt years down the line, thousands of miles away.
But it's funny that governments throw wildly generous subsidies and special legal treatment at domestic food production, correctly perceiving cheap reliable food as upstream of a functioning society, yet fail to similarly "overinvest" in energy sources for machines as well as humans. I hazard that most of the European countries that depended heavily on Russian gas would not have been so blase if their population had been subsisting off Russian food imports.
We should be building out tremendous energy capacity using every conceivable technology available. Any country that does this is virtually guaranteed wealth, for energy is fungible with almost everything else. The equation is so obvious that failure to do so implies regulatory capture by entrenched energy interests. "Too cheap to meter" belongs in the same rhetorical bucket as "Perfect sound forever" - a promise that was retracted as soon as it became clear that scarcity was more profitable than abundance.
Interesting. You can see the building from the beach and I always wondered what's inside. And while it's the only (decommissioned) nuclear power plant on Long Island, it's not the only nuclear reactor. There was also the High Flux Beam Reactor at BNL that was decommissioned in the 90s:
...or the evacuation of highly populated Long Island.
Three Mile Island was a * big * deal - if that had happened on Long Island, it would've been unimaginable disaster and permanent stain on NYC.
To many people, "three strikes you're out" - 3MI, Chernobyl and Fukushima was the final straw, reasoning that even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology, so "Homer Simpson" stands no chance.
Meanwhile, even the country's leading experts have no politically viable strategy for disposing of the waste, including the risk of derailments, terrorism, etc.
This isn't the world I want, but it's reality. IRL, people would rather die slowly from CO2 than live with the fear of 3MI/Chernobyl/Fukushima regardless of how rare they are (and they're not).
I'm optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues, but I can understand why voters go full NIMBY.
While I think you are accurately describing how people do/would react, the "big deal" you describe killed, injured, or caused adverse health effects for exactly zero people. It is possible that these are inevitable outcomes of human psychology, but a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power, even after all of the events you describe. A Chernobyl level accident every single year would have killed fewer people (by a few OOM) than particulate emissions from coal, and that's completely ignoring any climate effects.
Our societies risk tolerance with nuclear is literally orders of magnitude disconnected from how we treat risk from any other source, and as a result we are all poorer, less healthy, and have injured the environment to a dramatically greater degree relative to a pro-nuclear alternative timeline.
Three Mile Island was expensive, but nobody was injured. TMI had a big, strong containment vessel. Although they had a meltdown, the containment did its job and held.
Fukushima had too small a containment vessel. It was only slightly larger than the reactor pressure vessel, and it failed to contain the pressures of the meltdown.
Chernobyl had no containment at all.
Instead of all these "modular reactor" excuses for weaker containment vessels, such as NuScale, what's needed is more work on making very large pressure vessels cheaply. There's been progress in robotic welding of thick sections.
> optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues
The obstacles aren't technical. They never really have been. The obstacles are human: political, bureaucratic, and corporate. It's not about "can we build a safe nuclear plant?". It's about "do you trust these bozos to build a safe nuclear plant?", remembering that if said bozos screw up, the damage is basically irreversible.
That's the problem.
LILCO Shoreham, for example, famously couldn't build backup gernerators that worked, until they exploded and had to be completely redesigned and replaced. Does that inspire confidence in the rest of their plant?
Funny coincidence, I just read this morning about how the risk of cancer from radiation is massively exaggerated[1]. I'm not convinced that the overall health risk from nuclear power is worse than the health risk from coal plants.
> even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology,
Fukushima was a terrible design, where there is no passive failsafe - the reactor is still reacting after scram, and still getting hotter, but the heat no longer powers the cooling systems, which rely on external power that must be operating.
It's not Chernobyl bad, but, if you shouldn't need anything external to the reactor to keep it safe if disconnected from everything outside.
The problem is the technology being dependent on a highly sophisticated industrial environment, which is not allowed to go through phases of economic decline and knowledge loss. Nobody has distrust into the engineering, everyone distrusts the social component. Humans do not make for great material when it comes to forming sturdy, reliable organizations.
In Fukushima, there were no radiation deaths, and the long term effects of radiation on the population will be undetectable. The deaths that did occur were due to the unnecessary evacuations.
The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″
Personal note: the Fukushima accident turned me from a nuclear skeptic to a nuclear supporter. This happened quite a bit. At least for people who actually paid attention.
And remember that this was all due to a historically unprecedented earthquake and Tsunami that killed 18000 people and caused half a trillion dollars in damage (in 2025 dollars).
During that earthquake, more people died due to breaking dams than of radiation in that natural disaster. Are we dismantling our dams?
There is no 100% safe technology. Nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation we have, although solar and wind are so close that the differences don't really matter.
According to this NASA study, nuclear power saved 1,8 million lives up to 2011, with many millions more lives saved in the future.
On the flip-side, the most consequential negative health effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima came from turning off nuclear power plants and not building more.
If the US and the rest of Europe follow Germany's example they could lose the chance to prevent over 200,000 deaths and 14,000 MtCO2 emissions by 2035.
We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately
141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally
And we absolutly know how to deal with the waste, and it's not particularly difficult. In fact, we have multiple ways of disposing of the small amounts of waste. NPPs are very secure against terrorism.
The waste thing is weird. We're able to dispose of other highly toxic substances. One dangerous thing frequently mentioned about nuclear waste is that it remains dangerous for thousands of years. But many other dangerous substances remain dangerous forever. It seems like having a concrete span of time makes it scarier even though it's objectively better.
Mayak Production Association in 2017 - nobody knows what happened to this day because Russia refuses to release any info about it but it was a huge release - over 100–300 TBq of ruthenium-106.
There's the Nyonoksa explosion in 2019.
Also, we might as well count Hanaford, because of massive amounts of radioactive material released starting in the 40's that continued until the plant was shut down.
Furthermore, the site is costing us $2BN a year and will until roughly 2040. $2BN would be enough to install around 2GW of solar good for roughly 3–6 TWh/year. 450,000–500,000 "homes" worth of additional capacity.
Maybe this is a dumb question but couldn't we ship the waste to another planet (of course once we have rockets capable of doing so but that's not far imo).
It's the most expensive form of power generation. Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest and continue to get cheaper as volume goes up and all the tech around them matures. More and more storage methods are being developed and put into use.
Utilities and grid operators have lined up behind solar, wind, BSS, and HVDC transmission. That's what they are funding, installing, and buying power from. This has been a trend for a number of years now, around the world. That isn't some conspiracy or coincidence.
The only place this is still considered a debated topic, or nuclear is considered preferential, is social media and forums like HN.
An already built nuclear plant is cheaper than building new solar and wind, which is what this article is about. It had already started operational tests at 5% capacity when it was shut down.
And nuclear power doesn't inherently emit CO2 (or equivalents), which is what is meant by zero-carbon in this context.
The thing is that educated people like HN users see very simple thing: 1 kW nuclear can be safely replaced with 20 kW well distributed renewables. While solar is dirt cheap wind isn’t. Especially offshore wind. And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.
I grew up there. I was maybe 14 so I have some memory of how worked up the community was. I remember people talking about building a bridge to CT since there would be no other way to get people off the island. It was such a fierce time then, nothing compared to nowadays about seemingly anything though.
They should still build that bridge; it's funny to drive on 135 and just see the highway come to an end, but I'm not sure it would have survived even with the Long Island Sound link.
If you want to see the inside of another nuclear plant that New York decided to turn off, Radioactive Drew has a good tour of Indian Point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJSH1_GH1HQ
This video about Shoreham was my entry into the Proper People's channel. If you like this kind of abandoned structure exploration, I recommend checking out their other videos.
Not mentioned, but later on a gas turbine was built on site with some of the existing transmission infrastructure, and there’s also the Cross Sound Cable there, coming over from New Haven and connecting NYISO and ISO-NE.
Possibly not mentioned because some of the adjacent site is still very much used due to those facilities, making it even easier to be caught trespassing.
As an aside, and as a life-long Long-Islander, it has long been considered an open-secret (whether it's true or not) by many that Cold Spring Harbor Lab has a small nuclear reactor somewhere on site.
I would assume that it's not just the fuel, but also the construction materials etc. It's in the article that they had to grind down the surfaces of the spent fuel pool, the residue from that would probably weigh a lot on its own!
The overriding impression I get is that the whole facility is complicated. There are lots of processes in place, and lots of very trained people required to keep it all running. The size and complexity of the control rooms for example, but also the inevitable maintenance and inspection of all the piping etc. Even the details of the cleanup (checking each store foot, grinding surfaces etc.)
I've recently been on a train in Europe and I saw solar panels and wind turbines everywhere. And what's striking by comparison is the lack of people or extraneous construction. They're just solar panels, or wind turbines. They're easy to install, easy (read cheap) to maintain, and are mostly just left alone to do their thing.
If I had a $100b to invest then solar, wind, even battery, is much more attractive than the time, complexity, uncertainty, running cost etc of nuclear. Not to even start on cleanup issues.
I get the base-load issue. But even there current storage is more attractive. And investing in future storage technology seems like a better return.
The argument against nuclear (fission, and even more so fusion) is purely financial. We can nimby and worry about the radiation but ultimately nuclear doesn't happen because financially its a dead end.
Base load is one of those terms that nuclear power proponents love because it turns a negative in a positive. Nuclear plants are very expensive to turn off and on. Nuclear plants leave you no choice but to leave them running 24x7, even when power that is an order of magnitude cheaper is available most of the time. Proponents call this base load. But technically it's just very expensive power that you can't turn off when it's completely redundant.
Flexible load is where the action is these days because renewables sometimes push energy prices into the negative whenever there's too much of it. Having to expend fuel during such times is a negative thing.
The big benefit gas plants have over coal and nuclear plants is that you can turn them off and on quicker. So you don't have to run them 24x7. Newer coal plants are similarly cheaper to use for backup power generation. A common mistake with assumptions about Chinese coal plants is that yes they build lots of them. And no, they mostly aren't running a lot. Their coal use actually is starting to decline. The new plants are more flexible and they use them to replace the older ones.
Renewables are plenty and cheaper most of the time. Batteries can deal with short term fluctuations and help time shift renewable power to cover peak loads in the morning and evenings.
And if you can bring online some gas/coal power when it's actually needed, there is no need for base load.
In practice this is still quite often but not most of the time and gradually declining. With dirt cheap renewables + batteries coming online by the hundreds of gw per year, the ability to turn the rest off is the most important feature with backup power generation.
Nuclear plants remain stupidly expensive and lack this feature.
Civilian nuclear plants can be easily regulated between 50% - 100% of maximal output, with power gradients of up to 2% / min. (Submarine nuclear reactors are designed for even faster gradients). In France, because nuclear power plants are the dominating source of electricity, nuclear power plants have to ramp up and down the output on daily basis.
https://snetp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SNETP-Factsheet-...
When possible you want to run nuclear power plant at 100%, because there are almost no savings in operating costs (because nuclear fuel is so cheap) in comparison to a nuclear power plant running at 50%.
The current Chinese electricity strategy is to minimize the costs of electricity, get as much electricity from hydro, wind, solar as cheaply possible and fill the rest with cheap coal power. China currently doesn't use batteries for renewables backup in any significant amount (in comparison the size of the Chinese electricity grid).
China currently doesn't have access to cheap natural gas, in contrast to US. The amount of electricity produced from natural gas is very small in China.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
Nuclear power in China is still very small, in comparison with coal power.
Will China build more and more renewables? Yes, but only if the costs of the whole electricity mix will stay low. They will not overbuild renewables. They will not build very large amounts of battery storage, if coal power will be cheaper.
1 reply →
> Nuclear plants remain stupidly expensive and lack this feature.
Combining nuclear with some secondary application that can run only at energy surplus times, such as desalination or pumped hydro, might help with the economics.
Desalination and pumping desalinated seawater through long distances might actually be a nice idea to reduce desertification or to increase agricultural output.
3 replies →
this gets repeated over and over again but its false:
> Nuclear power plants are routinely used in load following mode on a large scale in France, although "it is generally accepted that this is not an ideal economic situation for nuclear stations".[42] Unit A at the now decommissioned German Biblis Nuclear Power Plant was designed to modulate its output 15% per minute between 40% and 100% of its nominal power.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant#Flexibilit...
"Base load is one of those terms that nuclear power proponents love because it turns a negative in a positive."
I love how anti-nuclear types argue against such a basic concept as base load just because it helps THEIR argument. Base load is simply the lowest wattage the grid needs in a time period and does vary a lot but NEVER goes to zero. Wind and solar are a very poor fit for this due to their variability. Batteries can help but are expensive and wind and solar variability is offset using gas turbines.
Data centers always want to run 24/7 and significantly increase base load, which is why the big hyperscalers are all making deals for nuclear power. A nuclear reactor generating power for a data center that needs its entire output 100% of the time is an ideal scenario.
2 replies →
If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.
Nuclear industry is running with very high quality standards, this requires very good training, good maintenance. In this aspects, nuclear industry is similar to aircraft industry.
Solar panels are cheap to install, wind turbines are not so cheap to install.
Solar panels are cheap to maintain. Maintenance of offshore wind turbines is very expensive, therefor offshore wind turbines are more expensive, build with higher quality, than onshore wind turbines - so they require less frequent maintenance.
I assume you are from US. The big difference between US and Europe energy landscape is the cost of natural gas, Europe pays 4-5x higher prices for natural gas then US. When solar power don't supply electricity (at night or under cloud cover) and wind has slow speeds (can happen for multiple weeks) some countries from Europe can use hydro-power (Norway, Austria, Switzerland), some countries can burn coal (Poland, Germany), but most European countries have to burn very expensive gas.
The biggest source of electricity in Europe in the year 2025 was natural gas.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
>If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.
That's an unfair comparison. We are talking about operational costs, not capital costs. A fair comparison would include nuclear's capital costs, which don't do it any favors - nuclear plants also need fancy turbine blades.
Not that I'm against nuclear, I think we're completely mad to be still burning (burning! so primitive!) ancient plants, coming up on a century after Magic Energy Rocks were discovered. "Cost" is a fickle metric when so many costs are externalized in both space and time - nobody cares if the effects of pollution are felt years down the line, thousands of miles away.
But it's funny that governments throw wildly generous subsidies and special legal treatment at domestic food production, correctly perceiving cheap reliable food as upstream of a functioning society, yet fail to similarly "overinvest" in energy sources for machines as well as humans. I hazard that most of the European countries that depended heavily on Russian gas would not have been so blase if their population had been subsisting off Russian food imports.
We should be building out tremendous energy capacity using every conceivable technology available. Any country that does this is virtually guaranteed wealth, for energy is fungible with almost everything else. The equation is so obvious that failure to do so implies regulatory capture by entrenched energy interests. "Too cheap to meter" belongs in the same rhetorical bucket as "Perfect sound forever" - a promise that was retracted as soon as it became clear that scarcity was more profitable than abundance.
8 replies →
Interesting. You can see the building from the beach and I always wondered what's inside. And while it's the only (decommissioned) nuclear power plant on Long Island, it's not the only nuclear reactor. There was also the High Flux Beam Reactor at BNL that was decommissioned in the 90s:
https://www.bnl.gov/hfbr/
https://www.bnl.gov/hfbr/hfbr-complex.php
Oh, so that's what that building was!
What a depressing outcome. This could have powered hundreds of thousands of households, cheaply, without adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.
Not under LILCO management.[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/28/nyregion/the-end-of-lilco...
https://archive.is/P0JM
...or the evacuation of highly populated Long Island.
Three Mile Island was a * big * deal - if that had happened on Long Island, it would've been unimaginable disaster and permanent stain on NYC.
To many people, "three strikes you're out" - 3MI, Chernobyl and Fukushima was the final straw, reasoning that even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology, so "Homer Simpson" stands no chance.
Meanwhile, even the country's leading experts have no politically viable strategy for disposing of the waste, including the risk of derailments, terrorism, etc.
This isn't the world I want, but it's reality. IRL, people would rather die slowly from CO2 than live with the fear of 3MI/Chernobyl/Fukushima regardless of how rare they are (and they're not).
I'm optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues, but I can understand why voters go full NIMBY.
While I think you are accurately describing how people do/would react, the "big deal" you describe killed, injured, or caused adverse health effects for exactly zero people. It is possible that these are inevitable outcomes of human psychology, but a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power, even after all of the events you describe. A Chernobyl level accident every single year would have killed fewer people (by a few OOM) than particulate emissions from coal, and that's completely ignoring any climate effects.
Our societies risk tolerance with nuclear is literally orders of magnitude disconnected from how we treat risk from any other source, and as a result we are all poorer, less healthy, and have injured the environment to a dramatically greater degree relative to a pro-nuclear alternative timeline.
5 replies →
Three Mile Island was expensive, but nobody was injured. TMI had a big, strong containment vessel. Although they had a meltdown, the containment did its job and held.
Fukushima had too small a containment vessel. It was only slightly larger than the reactor pressure vessel, and it failed to contain the pressures of the meltdown.
Chernobyl had no containment at all.
Instead of all these "modular reactor" excuses for weaker containment vessels, such as NuScale, what's needed is more work on making very large pressure vessels cheaply. There's been progress in robotic welding of thick sections.
> optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues
The obstacles aren't technical. They never really have been. The obstacles are human: political, bureaucratic, and corporate. It's not about "can we build a safe nuclear plant?". It's about "do you trust these bozos to build a safe nuclear plant?", remembering that if said bozos screw up, the damage is basically irreversible.
That's the problem.
LILCO Shoreham, for example, famously couldn't build backup gernerators that worked, until they exploded and had to be completely redesigned and replaced. Does that inspire confidence in the rest of their plant?
Funny coincidence, I just read this morning about how the risk of cancer from radiation is massively exaggerated[1]. I'm not convinced that the overall health risk from nuclear power is worse than the health risk from coal plants.
[1]https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-lie-about-radiation/
3 replies →
> even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology,
Fukushima was a terrible design, where there is no passive failsafe - the reactor is still reacting after scram, and still getting hotter, but the heat no longer powers the cooling systems, which rely on external power that must be operating.
It's not Chernobyl bad, but, if you shouldn't need anything external to the reactor to keep it safe if disconnected from everything outside.
The problem is the technology being dependent on a highly sophisticated industrial environment, which is not allowed to go through phases of economic decline and knowledge loss. Nobody has distrust into the engineering, everyone distrusts the social component. Humans do not make for great material when it comes to forming sturdy, reliable organizations.
Why would you evacuate Long Island?
In Fukushima, there were no radiation deaths, and the long term effects of radiation on the population will be undetectable. The deaths that did occur were due to the unnecessary evacuations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
So due to Radiophobia, not radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-is...
Personal note: the Fukushima accident turned me from a nuclear skeptic to a nuclear supporter. This happened quite a bit. At least for people who actually paid attention.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nu...
And remember that this was all due to a historically unprecedented earthquake and Tsunami that killed 18000 people and caused half a trillion dollars in damage (in 2025 dollars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tōhoku_earthquake_and_tsu...
During that earthquake, more people died due to breaking dams than of radiation in that natural disaster. Are we dismantling our dams?
There is no 100% safe technology. Nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation we have, although solar and wind are so close that the differences don't really matter.
According to this NASA study, nuclear power saved 1,8 million lives up to 2011, with many millions more lives saved in the future.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html
On the flip-side, the most consequential negative health effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima came from turning off nuclear power plants and not building more.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
If the US and the rest of Europe follow Germany's example they could lose the chance to prevent over 200,000 deaths and 14,000 MtCO2 emissions by 2035.
https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/sites/science...
We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally
And we absolutly know how to deal with the waste, and it's not particularly difficult. In fact, we have multiple ways of disposing of the small amounts of waste. NPPs are very secure against terrorism.
The waste thing is weird. We're able to dispose of other highly toxic substances. One dangerous thing frequently mentioned about nuclear waste is that it remains dangerous for thousands of years. But many other dangerous substances remain dangerous forever. It seems like having a concrete span of time makes it scarier even though it's objectively better.
10 replies →
You're missing at least three other major events.
Sarov in 1997
Mayak Production Association in 2017 - nobody knows what happened to this day because Russia refuses to release any info about it but it was a huge release - over 100–300 TBq of ruthenium-106.
There's the Nyonoksa explosion in 2019.
Also, we might as well count Hanaford, because of massive amounts of radioactive material released starting in the 40's that continued until the plant was shut down.
Furthermore, the site is costing us $2BN a year and will until roughly 2040. $2BN would be enough to install around 2GW of solar good for roughly 3–6 TWh/year. 450,000–500,000 "homes" worth of additional capacity.
2 replies →
Maybe this is a dumb question but couldn't we ship the waste to another planet (of course once we have rockets capable of doing so but that's not far imo).
9 replies →
Nuclear is not zero-carbon nor is it "cheap."
It's the most expensive form of power generation. Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest and continue to get cheaper as volume goes up and all the tech around them matures. More and more storage methods are being developed and put into use.
Utilities and grid operators have lined up behind solar, wind, BSS, and HVDC transmission. That's what they are funding, installing, and buying power from. This has been a trend for a number of years now, around the world. That isn't some conspiracy or coincidence.
The only place this is still considered a debated topic, or nuclear is considered preferential, is social media and forums like HN.
An already built nuclear plant is cheaper than building new solar and wind, which is what this article is about. It had already started operational tests at 5% capacity when it was shut down.
And nuclear power doesn't inherently emit CO2 (or equivalents), which is what is meant by zero-carbon in this context.
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The thing is that educated people like HN users see very simple thing: 1 kW nuclear can be safely replaced with 20 kW well distributed renewables. While solar is dirt cheap wind isn’t. Especially offshore wind. And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.
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> Nuclear is not zero-carbon nor is it "cheap."
1994.
> Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest [...]
1994
(2014)
from the article: "Originally published February 26, 2014."
I grew up there. I was maybe 14 so I have some memory of how worked up the community was. I remember people talking about building a bridge to CT since there would be no other way to get people off the island. It was such a fierce time then, nothing compared to nowadays about seemingly anything though.
They should still build that bridge; it's funny to drive on 135 and just see the highway come to an end, but I'm not sure it would have survived even with the Long Island Sound link.
If you want to see the inside of another nuclear plant that New York decided to turn off, Radioactive Drew has a good tour of Indian Point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJSH1_GH1HQ
if you want to see a video (9 years ago) from inside the plant, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONEm1ph3MP4 - the top comment is also interesting
This video about Shoreham was my entry into the Proper People's channel. If you like this kind of abandoned structure exploration, I recommend checking out their other videos.
Not mentioned, but later on a gas turbine was built on site with some of the existing transmission infrastructure, and there’s also the Cross Sound Cable there, coming over from New Haven and connecting NYISO and ISO-NE.
Possibly not mentioned because some of the adjacent site is still very much used due to those facilities, making it even easier to be caught trespassing.
Has the site also been decommissioned - or just hugged - none of the images are loading for me at the moment
All good its working for me now
I think the control panels are as compelling as the big industrial rooms. Fantastic pictures!
It would be interesting to bring a Geiger counter to measure if there's any residual radiation.
Anybody recognize the terminal on the desk? I've asked two LLMs and they were both very wrong.
https://i0.wp.com/nickcarr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IM...
Looks like a HP 2640 terminal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOXCPaHcr5U
the logo looks vaguely HP and the layout and logo matches this one
https://hpmuseum.net/images/2645A-35.jpg
(while i was typing that in, somebody else answered same)
Yup.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250606230458/https://hpmuseum....
Perfect fit half life the movie
If the design could be updated, it'd be a great thing to restart!
it's a little bit weird for a long abandoned site with all lights powered on.
Decommissioned, not abandoned. I imagine in order to offer it as a filming site, they need to make sure it's still safe.
why wasn't it scrapped? it's not like all that steel is irradiated.
Probably not economical to do that... Parts that could be sold, like 2/3 of the turbines, apparently were!
As for the parts of the steel that do get irradiated, anybody interested in seeing a flame cutter going to town to Blue Oyster Cult? I think so...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Jt8EMF5Lg
I'd love to see some videos of robotic diamond wire cutters on the biological shield concrete, but haven't found any of those.
Edit: found one! From Sweden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc5jdvc1yD8
As an aside, and as a life-long Long-Islander, it has long been considered an open-secret (whether it's true or not) by many that Cold Spring Harbor Lab has a small nuclear reactor somewhere on site.
$6 billion in 1973 would be $47 billion now and $6 billion in 1985 would be $19 billion now. All completely wasted due to irrational fear.
sorry but five MILLION pounds of nuclear waste?
how does that work? sounds like a lot.
I would assume that it's not just the fuel, but also the construction materials etc. It's in the article that they had to grind down the surfaces of the spent fuel pool, the residue from that would probably weigh a lot on its own!
The control panels that fuse schematics and buttons and indicators feel like a peak of design philosophy.
Intuitive, readily interpretable at a glance, spatially oriented (instead of tucked behind layers of tabs and recursive settings).