Comment by Llamamoe
21 hours ago
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
In Fukushima zero people died from radiation. If we regulated everything to a similar point (cars, planes, fossils), you'll start living like a monk. Fossils aren't just worse but orders of magnitude worse
In France after Fukushima nuclear plants that are 500 km inland had to be safeguarded against the risk of a tsunami.
They are in valleys and I think the risk assessment was heavily influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard which has been toned down quite a bit since... But IRSN (now ASNR) studies all kind of risks seriously...
Fukushima killled a couple of people? More died that day from car crashes.
This is incorrect and naive.
Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
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You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:
> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
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> Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
I agree coal power plants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.
And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
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Your 3 examples were all different regulatory regimes.
That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).
In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
Then why is the insurance for every single reactor public sector based?
Possibly because if there's a big accident, everybody in the region who gets cancer will sue, even if there's no detectable change to cancer rates.
Cancer is the smallest problem when bigger areas become inhabitable, and food inedible.
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No,
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
Fukushima and Chornobyl happened directly for a lack of paranoia, regulation and lobbing. I hope that we don't commit the same mistake again.
Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it or tightening targets far beyond any useful range. Also, arguably the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have, an example of paranoia as opposed to effective regulation.
(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).
Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
Lot of health impact of Chernobyl disaster was also because of Soviet's obsession with saving face.
The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.
Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine
> the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have
This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".
People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.
The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.
To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.
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> Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
What are they?
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The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards
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Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is.
Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence.
How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.
This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again. And breathing air in any big Asian city is much more dangerous than doing the same in Prypiat.
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Yeah, the problem is the overhyping of radiation's danger kind of covers-up the other problem, radiation weakens everything. Hairline cracks are a threat because the radiation is going to weaken the cement that's holding the very high pressure steam that's generating electricity.
Nuclear meltdowns have been common but dangerous radiation leaks rare and over-hyped, sure. But meltdowns involve an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment irrevocably breaking and that is what has made nuclear power uneconomical, not environmentalists' hand wringing. Indeed, I'd suspect nuclear company executives love to say the environmentos killed things, much better than saying their operations weren't economical.
> plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is... it's super deadly
"Super deadly" sounds enough scary to me, thanks
There are things that are "super deadly premium" of course. Stupidity terrifies me more than Plutonium. Specially when both things come together, but in the end the result is not much different.