The real concern here is making sure the existing nuclear plants have a clear glide slope toward end-of-life. Nuclear power is an extremely tight community. On the nuclear carrier I was on (powered by Westinghouse plants), there was a valve (a valve!) malfunctioning and the tech rep flown out from the company took one look at it and said "This bit's in backward". "How do you know?" "I designed it". Which means the same guy had been working on that system for 30 years.
The people working for this company are a matter of national security. I sure hope Secretary Mattis understands that.
This, also, by the way, is a great illustration of Elon Musk's contention that these technologies don't just keep working. Brilliant, competent engineers and scientists have to invest themselves in making them work.
Living in a world where technology seems outdated after 3-4 years, having reactors reliably serving up power for several decades is kind of amazing.
On the other hand, this does keep the number of people in the industry small. Sure, demonization of the power source, and regulatory standards that inhibit the development of new technologies also help, but it seems like this would be a problem regardless.
I've always wondered what the demand/pay is for engineers looking to enter the nuclear industry is like.
Personally, I feel as though modern acceptable standards of near-immediate obsolescence as normal are kind of depressing and abnormal.
Seeing technology become outdated after 3-4 years is kind of amazing in all the wrong ways.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that what we're really seeing is explosive advances, and to think about being stuck where we were 3-4 years ago, frozen in time, without permission to advance is a horrible thought.
But at the same time, I hate not being about to used something I paid thousands of dollars for, less than five years later, because I scratched a CD-ROM, and downloads for compatible upgraded drivers are not supported.
True. My scanner is second hand. It was given to me because its drivers were not compatible with windows 7 onward. Thanks to linux and open drivers, this scanner got a life extension of 6 years so far and it's still doin' great.
There most be an increasing amount of hardware/software with egregious business value (hundred million+) with a decreasing number of surviving/available designers etc. Rationally if these people were required to fix or maintain such systems their yearly value would be in the millions wouldn't it?
For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier. Do they deserve to be?
You jest, but my first job[1] was back in 2005-ish for a small company[2] in Slovenia building web dashboards for Slovenia's nuclear power plant[3]. PHP and good old forms. My job was parsing the XML data and feeding it into some sort of graph component. Can't remember if they gave me a built graph component or I had to build one from scratch.
Not the kind of startup you'd hear about on HN of course.
And no, I don't know what the motivation was for the nuclear power plant to issue a RFP that involved web dashboards. Maybe upgrading their interfaces from the analog ones built in the 80's?
of course, Berkeley will need to abandon its "nuclear free zone" policy. but i see that as a solvable problem, once they recognize the potential for revenue enhancement.
In all seriousness, there have been attempts at startups looking to disrupt the nuclear industry. It's hit several problems, in the form of bad science and harsh regulation.
Apparently hacking plutonium is not easily accomplished.
> There most be an increasing amount of hardware/software with egregious business value (hundred million+) with a decreasing number of surviving/available designers etc.
Yeah. I see a lot of COBOL guys that are extremely critical resources for big enterprises. As GP said, they are not paid like C-suite executives, but not very far from it, and no one asks them how they spend their time. Needless to say they are a very relaxed bunch.
A colleague of mine was involved in verifying the software that controlls the shut-down procedures of the Darlington [0] plant. Now he's working on proofs of block-chain ciphers of some sort or another. I don't believe he's quite rich but he can certainly be rather selective of job opportunities.
> For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier
From stories I've heard, in these situations people like to come in not as employees but as consultants, at which point there are many hundreds of dollars per hour spent.
That actually relieves some concerns I had, given the root comment (which I have to admit, caused some distress). I imagine there are more people currently in the Navy that might leave if the demand and pay were high enough. Hopefully that covers enough of the important skill-sets needed.
Sure it has. Now it has a WiFi antenna and an embedded webserver so that you can see the temperature of the water on your smartphone(app installation required)
The boiler will get software updates until the next 3-4 year cycle, then you will need to buy a new boiler to get the latest BoilerOS(tm) that adds the ability to remotely set the temperature. No need for that to be secure...What's the worst that could happen??? It's just a boiler...
You just added another line to my face. So thanks for that. Just don't leave out the small openboileros crew serving up lawsuit magnet heat due to insurance issues of modifying your water boiling code.
Only officially sanctioned iBoiler parts may be used. Use of an unauthorized part will cause the boiler to enter DRM guard mode and cease operation for violation of the OpenBoilerOS software license.
You can expect a nastygram from the BSA(Boiler Software Alliance) for your attempt to circumvent their DRM.
Last year, I interviewed with one of the companies that was born by Westinghouse shedding units a couple of decades ago and they still do this kind of thing.
If a Naval unit has an issue, they'll attempt to reproduce it and develop a solution at a remote location. If they can't, they'll send an engineer across the planet to evaluate and fix it.
They do this even for not "critical" systems. I was impressed at that level of dedication.
It was this part that made me re-think whether or not I wanted the position. I wasn't ready to commit to being available to travel to the other side of the planet at a moment's notice if/when something goes wrong but I do appreciate the commitment.
The current rush to the bottom school of thought in cost-saving will have a serious detrimental effect on our military prowess. Sure, some people think that's a good thing but I do not.
I may be misreading your message, but this approach seems to be an example of rational, good engineering. If a system is broken in a faraway place it is best to analyze it and develop a fix in a well equipped lab convenient for experts to work in. Once the solution is known, deploy and validate it, ideally remotely or by shipping components, not by sending your experts on site.
Sending an expert to a remote site or a ship to fix a problem is a last resort.
When N=10, and each one is a strategic asset, which, if found disabled, would cause every major head of state in the world to reassess their long-term global postures on technology, defense, and relations with the US, it doesn't take much to buy that plane ticket.
I worked as a mechanical engineer in the nuclear power industry for a couple years and this happened frequently even for normal power plants.
Like, one of the first projects I worked on was diagnosing a malfunctioning valve where most of the work was finite element analysis on computers, but we still had to send someone to take measurements and temperature readings since the company that made the valve no longer existed (and I'm not sure how you'd ship something like that since it was very large and used with contaminated water)
I agree that the cost of the plane ticket is minor but this IMO makes the proper procedure starting with lab replication even more important.
You usually get much better results when you work in a well equipped lab and have access to the right experts. For anything non-trivial "replicate, understand, fix, deploy" is a much better approach. Not always possible, and when it is not going to site may be the only option, but it should be fallback, not primary path. My 2c.
I think you are misreading; my reading of the parent post is that their last paragraph has the meaning "the push to lower military spending will remove the ability to afford the current process, which is bad, because the current process works great."
You appear to be thinking that problems can typically be replicated in a lab without sending an expert to the remote site. My supercomputing startup (PathScale) made specialized networks for supercomputers. While most problems could be solved with remote diagnostics, I still spent a lot of time flying to customer sites. Sure, you can call it "a last resort", but it's necessary if the problem can't be replicated in the lab.
Agree completely. Sometimes you cannot replicate things in the lab; then you go. But you do this only if you cannot replicate.
I spend part of my time developing large, real time, visible systems and when things do not go as planned there is always a lot of pressure to go on site now and "just fix it". I have taken my lumps to learn that the right approach is to say "no, we will start in our lab".
If you can, take that job. You will not regret it. Consider this: that tech rep probably had a resume that a dozen companies would kill for, and he's still at Westinghouse. Flying across the planet, landing on aircraft carriers.
Take it. I worked in a job like that, the emergencies are few & far in-between. When there is one, there are probably multiple people on the team that can handle it.
My group used to have a list to sign up for going out on sea trials. I never got high enough on it to go. If you don't want to go, I doubt you would have to.
This is why I'm against nuclear power. As safe as the technology could be, it still run by humans who make errors.
If you think a bit being put in backwards isn't a big deal, check out the history of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
> The San Onofre station had technical problems over the years. In July 1982, Time wrote, "The firm Bechtel was ... embarrassed in 1977, when it installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards" at San Onofre.
Backwards. The reactor was installed backwards.
It goes on.
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
I think this is not an argument against nuclear power, but an argument against the very complicated reactor designs that are in widespread use. Because they start with an inherently unsafe design, they can only be made safe with many layers of protective measures.
Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.
On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.
Anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than the reality. A recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. Can you imagine the type of coverage the media would have given if 200,000 people had to be evacuated near a nuclear power plant?
(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much less health consequences than the other.)
It's a little dishonest to state a casualty rate when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet. That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
It's also dishonest to claim (Without any qualifications) that spent nuclear fuel will be deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years?
How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disasters kill over the next ~100 years? Because that's the alternative we're looking at.
Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet.
If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital on the planet, solar will still kill more people than nuclear would under those circumstances.
So the reasoning here eludes me: perhaps it's that people don't understand nuclear so it must be bad ? It's how we got to Trump ...
TLDR: public opinion takes an idea. It declares it a bad idea. Comes up with much worse ideas for it's given criteria and enforces conformance to those ideas. Solar and wind both kill more people than nuclear, short term and long term.
Solar and wind have a rate of zero nuclear accidents per install, and as that seems to be the only kind of accident you or anyone else counts towards nuclear power's total they're clearly better than nuclear in that regard.
Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.
> It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.
There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.
Even from those 50, a number died due to the physical effects of walking into vapor that was several thousand degrees. Yes, they would likely have died of radiation exposure, but they survived nowhere near long enough for that to occur. It is a VERY bad idea to spray water on something that is being fed with tens of megawatts of power. This is what happens, of course, when the government orders workers into a reactor they know nothing about. Of course those were also nuclear related deaths, but ... At Chernobyl at least the radiation death toll can realistically be claimed to be nonzero, but people dying from a direct consequence of the disaster, and actually dying from radiation exposure is low double digits. People affected by it, and having worse health as a result of it MAY be in the thousands. However, after decades of tracking, it will probably rather be in the hundreds.
The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...
For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.
The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.
Furthermore, people don't understand that decommissioning coal reactors is also time consuming and dangerous. Here in Toronto, the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station was decommissioned in 1983 and remains quite radioactive, despite not even burning coal in its later years. There is a 24 hour guard presence.
Is there dispute over the long term toxicity of nuclear waste? It's not hard to find numerous toxic, long lived isotopes. The world has no shortage of waste and the volumes are growing, not shrinking.
Im not a proponent of coal, and at the scales my part of the world needs, hydro fills most the need. Yeah, it needs maintaining but that's unlikely to be more costly than nuclear.
No, but there is a dispute over how dangerous it is - or more specifically, how many people it's likely to kill.
We're close to capacity for the world's utilization of hydro. It can only grow ~20% in the next 30 years - which would let it... Take ~10% of coal's contribution to power generation.
Hydro power is generally cheaper then coal. If we could use more of it, we would be.
The original poster was talking about the possibility of human error (particularly the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) so it was not "a little dishonest" to focus on the deaths from power sources that one could attribute to human error.
>...when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet.
Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
(Funding for the integral fast reactor was killed by Bill Clinton, but there is no reason that the US or some other country couldn't fund this or any of the other 4th gen designs.)
>...That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
Right now nuclear waste is a very manageable problem and relatively soon the waste could be used to produce electricity if we so desire. Considering that no one of the general public has been killed from nuclear waste (and tens of thousands die each year from burning coal) why would someone consider nuclear waste a "massive problem"?
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
The practical barrier to reprocessing and burning spent fuel isn't technical or political: it's economic. Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
>...The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
Yes a breeder reactor was one of the first electricity-generating nuclear power plants, but that doesn't mean we need to rush. We have enough storage capacity for decades before we need to worry about the level of high level waste.
>...Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
At the present time. Even if plans like getting uranium have sea water work out, we might start burning high level at some point just to deal with the high level waste if we run out of room. It makes a lot more sense to burn waste for electricity than to spend millions to bury it in the ground for millennia.
> Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
Soon is relative. Nuclear power has only existed for just over 70 years. These things take time, and progress is intensely stagnated because of the fear and regulation involved.
It's totally solved from a technical standpoint. Dig a hole half a mile deep in bedrock in a tectonically stable area, and whatever you put in that hole is safe forever. But that's kinda expensive, so we keep burying it in people's backyards and then going "gosh, this is hard!" when it bites us in the ass.
There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years. And if you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human from 10000 years ago, you'll realize how non-trivial that is - no language, culture or knowledge capture system would survive for this long intact. There is a fascinating body of research about how to solve this problem (with no definite answer). E.g. see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...
> There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years.
I can imagine some sort of post-apocalyptic copper age religion where the religious brotherhood exist to guard the 'cursed caves', without understanding why. But everyone knows that people who enter the caves either die at the hands of the strangely deformed beasts who live there, or of a mysterious sickness sometime afterwards.
Yeah, I probably played too much D&D as a child :)
The argument that we need to do something about this waste beyond the timeframe of our civilisation is mind boggling to me. This is the only risk we seem to take this seriously - in no other arena can I recall people arguing about what something will look like in 10,000 years. What about war between America and China? >1% chance, massive potential for death and destruction. Who cares if some poor person digs into an old nuclear waste dump in 500 years compared to that?
We can leave this problem to the future. If they have regressed so far that they can't detect nuclear then they have bigger problems than radiation poisoning.
Threats to energy security are so much more of a threat than potentially maybe not being able to figure out how to reprocess spent fuel until it isn't a health hazard.
This stupidly assumes that the people that dig the hole won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
> won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.
> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet
Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.
> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.
One can at least hope that humanity's level of technology does not regress. So then there is at least the fact that the radioactivity can be detected even after the signs have long gone.
Possibly, though not guaranteed - we have radioactivity detectors, but not many people carry them with them and use them on everything around. We'd still need to somehow communicate that this place needs detecting - and if people there would not be using nuclear energy for some reason, they might not even think about needing to check that place for radioactivity, at least not until there is some serious trouble.
The hole is already dug. Instead of going in the hole, the waste is sitting in collecting ponds or concrete casks very, very close (100 yards) from major waterways.
if we could use nuclear power exclusive to fix carbon, I think it would be worth it. I think a lot of people would say that this is worth it, and this inequality is in favor of nuclear power over the safest possible coal power.
> And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time
So what does that tell you about the motivations of much of the movement that opposes nuclear and fossil fuels? They're not motivated by continued human flourishing, that's for sure.
This. So much this. People don't know what the hell they're talking about when it comes to nuclear power, but it doesn't stop them from talking about it as if they were experts.
Every technology is subject to human error and inherently dangerous. In fact we have many technologies that are way more dangerous to humans than nuclear - cars, chemical plants, pharmaceuticals, etc. There is no rational reason to single out nuclear technologies as being in need of unachievable absolute perfection when we are fine (not ideal, but also not so bad that it's not worth it) with many dangerous ones the way they are. I think it has more to do with irrational fears than rational risk assessments.
Statistically there are far more large-scale hydroelectric projects in the US that will kill thousands of people if they fail if those facilities are not properly maintained. A dam failure is unavoidable without lots of pre-planning, and even then, as recent events have shown, you can anticipate a problem and still not be able to deal with it.
Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
The worst case is probably like Chernobyl but involving multiple reactors. The probability of that is pretty low not only because Chernobyl served as a wake-up call, but because what happened at Chernobyl was an unfortunate chain of events that focused on only one reactor.
So in the worst case secnario you have a disaster which creates a new national park-sized area you can't live in. Compared with coal plants which used to render large portions of the continent unlivable for the hottest, haziest, smoggiest days in the summer, that's an acceptable risk.
> Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
It isn't as simple as that, with a lot of reactors. The ones at Fukushima were SCRAMmed. A running nuclear reactor will build up a collection of fission products that have various half-lives that can cause problems. In Fukushima's case, these fission products continued to decay and produced lots of heat (about 6.5% of the heat produced during normal operation, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). It was this heat that raised the temperature of the fuel and boiled off the cooling water and caused the disaster.
So basically, with lots of reactors, SCRAMming is not enough - you need to maintain cooling for quite a long time afterwards. It is entirely possible to build reactors where this is not the case.
We all know what happens to turkeys at thanksgiving, but we don't all know what the worst, or even average case is for a nuclear accident, nor how that is affected by the type of nuclear technology. This is an argument taking advantage of people's fear and ignorance.
An appropriate response to the turkey statement along these lines is to ask where the farm is and what people it serves. There are many farms in the world where statistically, Thanksgiving makes no difference to the mortality of the Turkeys.
The point being, historical statistics just don't tell you everything you need to make a decision…you need guarantees that all regimes have outcomes within acceptable parameters.
Accounting for Murphy's law, and that the worst case is always x% below your expectation (even after accounting for Murphy's law).
It's the only viable fix we have currently, and if I were elected god king of a nation I would push initiatives to build not only enough capacity with atomic power to meet demand but excess to keep costs very low.
People are worried about automation, the nation that can cheaply power automated factories and server farms in the future will prosper.
Solar and wind have no catastrophic downside, and storage is a tractable problem. A chronically small, grey-haired workforce that the population depends on both to power their lives and prevent catastrophe makes that workforce too powerful. It becomes a governance problem. I highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook for more insight on this.
Is large scale energy storage any better than just using nuclear energy?
They don't have the "nuclear" tag scaring people away, but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
Gravity based energy storage is inexpensive to construct and reliable. It is wasteful - but we're capturing an incredibly tiny proportion of the energy available from wind and solar for electricity.
> "Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to test its safety features – the results are impressive"
This is cherrypicking to make a point. The batteries still contain chemicals which are toxic to life and environment. There will come a time when those batteries are "consumed" and the chemicals within them need to be dealt with in some safe manner. As far as I know, there's no battery technology with any side effects.
Tesla's batteries are well designed and engineered. Batteries before them have exploded, caused fires and loss of life and property. As long as the nuclear plant was also well designed I can say
"I set fire to a nuclear plant to test its safety features. The plant shut down automatically – the results are impressive"
Isn't there large economic incentive to recycle large batteries?
I agree many won't be recycled, but until we snag ourselves and asteroid, we have a finite supply of lithium. People will do their best to not lose something worth money.
To be economically viable battery recycling is done in developing countries that don't enforce environmental regulations.
This is specifically talking about lead batteries, but Lithium-Ion is basically the same: http://www.okinternational.org/lead-batteries/Recycling
If you generated all of the energy you used via atomic power at the end of your life the total size of that waste is about the size of a coke can.
1. How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process? Aren't we talking creating more batteries than we ever have before by several orders of magnitude here? We send most of our ewaste to the third world to be burned currently, this sounds like an ecological disaster.
2. Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun? A big project for sure but the reward is virtually unlimited, virtually free energy.
> How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process?
It doesn't matter. It can all be recycled.
> Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun?
I don't believe we're competent enough to manage nuclear waste in any form.
It can be, it isn't happening currently: "As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.[6] Another reason why it isn't being done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive as mined lithium"
Even so when recycled it still creates toxic waste in large quantities. What shall we do with that?
I'm not sure what the comment about "grey haired workforce" is in regards too, but "storage is a tractable problem" is often said without evidence. I'd need to see a smaller nation decommission all of its base load generators before that claim can be considered valid.
there was talk in this thread about how the engineers that designed the systems in use are the ones servicing them and have been for 20-30 years or so.
Being against nuclear for trivial reasons like these is why we have the alternative: coal plants. Those kill an estimated 300,000 thousand people per year[1].
It's only recently that renewables have become a realistic alternative in some (but not all) cases, but for decades we've had people dropping like flies due to coal, entirely because the public is too science illiterate to understand that nuclear isn't anywhere as big of a deal by comparison.
Thanks. I was trying to find some source of worldwide data. This[1] more reliable source says over 10,000 deaths in the US alone every year. It's not implausible that it's in the low hundreds of thousands annually worldwide.
Pollution from fossil fuels kills relatively quickly. Pollution from nuclear fuels remains dangerous for thousands of years. The deadliness of all forms of power depend strongly on regulations.
The jury is still out on which will kill more in the end. Though so far nuclear is looking really, really good.
> The deadliness of all forms of power depend strongly on regulations.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul. Coal plants release 100x more radioactive material than any other source in the world.
And that's not even to mention the operating dangers, from poor work environments to accidents. And that's not even mentioning the environmental disasters. Fossil fuel accidents have routinely devastated entire ecosystems, from Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon.
Nuclear power has the 'airplane safety' problem, people are terrified of air travel despite repeatedly being proven to be the safest form of transportation. The same is true for nuclear power. It is by far and away the safest form of energy generation, with the common myths repeatedly debunked time after time.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul.
You have a rather large flaw in your logic.
The statement that you are quoting is directly supported by the data in my link. Fatality rates in the US are generally an order of magnitude lower than in the rest of the world, because of US regulations. This is a statement of fact, and not an argument for any random regulations that you just thought up.
On your statement about radioactivity, coal plants distribute more radioactive material than nuclear, but nuclear produces more nasty waste per gigawatt than coal. So far nuclear has been astoundingly safe, but the eventual damage from nuclear depends on our ability to safely store that waste for longer than human history.
Does nuclear actually produce more nasty waste waste, or does it merely produce more local waste? Coal produces a huge amount of nasty waste, but the disposal problem is "solved" for much of it by just venting it into the atmosphere to go wherever it will.
What really brings it home for me are the warnings to limit seafood consumption for pregnant women, children, and other vulnerable populations due to mercury contamination. About half of that contamination comes from coal power. Coal is so dirty that it has made an entire type of food dangerous to consume!
Do you have magical pixies to transport the nuclear material there that can ensure it won't be stolen in transit? Can you create a secure facility in one of the most hostile climates in the world? If not, that will never work.
(Shrug) We've been hauling not only fissionable materials, but entire working reactors around the oceans for decades with an excellent safety record. So far no one has tried to steal fissionable materials from the US Navy, but I suppose anything is possible in a world going crazier by the day.
The costs of creating and staffing a secure storage facility would not be trivial, but then, nothing else about energy production is.
The main concern with facilities like WIPP isn't so much security against dedicated assaults, but keeping future subliterate humans from stumbling across the material for the next 10,000 years or so. Antarctica solves that problem nicely. No one who isn't equipped to deal with hazardous technology is ever going to visit Antarctica.
The suggestion doesn't seem so obviously ridiculous that it should be dismissed that easily. Bear in mind that the total quantity of material we're talking about is relatively small: a few thousand tons a year, which is far less than the capacity of a single typical container ship.
The economic value of nuclear waste is basically zero, so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism. And even if somebody does break into your secure facility, it's hard to imagine an easy way for them to get significant amounts of material out. Seems to me that you wouldn't have to try very hard to make a storage facility more secure than the nuclear plants themselves. Probably the biggest obstacles would be political, not technical.
> ...so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism.
That's a pretty big worry. This stuff is super dirty and in the wrong hands could cause a lot of problems. Unlike a pressure cooker bomb which either kills you, maims you, or doesn't do anything to you, a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
The smarter thing is to come up with better ways of reburning the fuel and storing it long-term on-site at the reactor which is already a secure facility. The total amount is small. They don't need tons of space to deal with it. The less you move this stuff around the better.
The risks there are more Fukishima in nature where if they lose power (at a power plant!) then they need some mechanism to circulate water in the cooling tanks to prevent a boil-off.
> a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
I feel obligated to point out that this also applies to things like lead paint, mercury (got any CFL bulbs?), red meat, burnt toast, gasoline vapors, asbestos, new car smell, and sunlight.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but not outrageously so. It's treated with a deference far beyond what's given to other stuff that kills us regularly.
Yes it is science illiteracy. It's being blind to a much larger diffuse harm in the face of some concentrated but much smaller harm.
It's arguably the most harmful kind of science illiteracy because it has the biggest impact on public policy. Everything from people opposing mandatory seat belt laws, to being overly concerned about e.g. genetically modified food or cell phone tower radiation.
I'm sure you mean well, but really, people who hold exactly the opinion you hold are in the aggregate the reason for literally millions of deaths that didn't need to happen worldwide since WWII.
We had all the data to indicate that burning fossil fuels was causing massive diffuse harm, nuclear was realistically the only alternative in most cases, but people didn't go for it because they were afraid, even though all the science showed that there was little to worry about in comparison to what we were already doing.
Sure someone installed a reactor backwards, but how are minor incidents like these at all relevant compared to literally tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year because we keep using the alternative?
I'm from the only remaining US state without a mandatory seat belt law, New Hampshire. As far as I can tell, we pair off equally with our neighbor to the west, Vermont, in road fatalities[1]. The two states are very similar in geography and population distribution, neither having much in the way of public transportation or large cities.
Regardless of the law, people are wearing seat belts at roughly the same rates. This is to say, at least in my corner of the world--seat belts save lives, but seat belt laws don't. People oppose these laws on philosophical grounds; the role of the state, acceptable levels of police discretion, etc.. Policy is messy, but at minimum must accommodate the values of those it represents.
In the meantime, in real world nuclear decommissioning currently increases the dependence on fossil fuels, and so every nuclear plant decommissioned in practice has a significant cost in lost lives from fossil fuels.
E.g. Germany's rush towards decommissioning after Fukushima has had a massively detrimental effect in Europe for this reason.
The death toll as a direct result of fearmongering against nuclear is by this point likely to be far larger than the total death toll of all nuclear incidents. If we hadn't had nuclear in first place, the cost in lives lost to other forms of plants would have been far greater than that again.
Yeah, it's a crazy decision resulting from "green groups'" radiophobia after Fukushima.
The government official estimated cost of shutting down all German nuclear plants is 55 billion Euros over the next decade. Although the (frankly more credible) 'unofficial' estimate puts the cost at 250 billion euros over the next decade.
Not to mention the fact it's resulted in their co2 emissions increasing in both 2015 and 2016 (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhou...). This also means increased deaths from air pollution. The German environment ministry now predicts they will probably not make their 2020 co2 reductions targets.
So other than the enormous cost, increased co2 emissions, and needless human deaths, good policy.
EDIT: And as for the whole "let's just replace everything with wind and solar", I'm not sure people fully appreciate what will be involved. In Germany's case, on a monthly basis, their wind plants manage an average capacity factor of ~20% (std. dev. 7.65 percentage points) and their solar plants manage an average capacity factor of ~10% (std. dev. of 6.41 percentage points). They have had months where solar only managed a measly 2% cap factor and wind 11%.
So let's say demand is 1TW/hr per month. This means they need to build about 11 times that in nameplate solar capacity, or around 5-6 times that in nameplate wind. So you also need to build 11/6 times the transmission infrastructure. And even then you will still have random blackouts due to the high variance in generation, so you also have to spend a bunch of money on grid-level storage.
> E.g. Germany's rush towards decommissioning after Fukushima has had a massively detrimental effect in Europe for this reason.
This says that German emissions from electricity generation were down, but that was offset by heating increases from a cold winter and emissions from increased good transportation:
1) you can not look at Germany in isolation. You need to take into account the import/export market. Decommissioning nuclear plants at a faster schedule substantially altered that, which affected other countries dependency on fossil fuels.
2) Germany is to their credit aggressively trying to get rid of its fossil fuel dependency, but the decommissioning of nuclear meant they needed to offset a significant shortfall. To the extent that hole was plugged by new clean energy capacity, that meant delaying decommissioning of far more lethal coal plants.
Until fossil fuels is at 0, decommissioning nuclear is bad policy.
Statistical innumeracy is what causes the exaggerated categorical fear of nuclear's risks vs the empirical and very present risks posed by fossil fuels. You don't get to just "be against" fossil fuels; you have to propose a credible alternative. Wind and solar are just now starting to become credible, and aren't even all the way there yet. If we had had a less hysterical nuclear policy 40 years ago we would not be in as bad shape now as we are. AND we would also not be stuck with 1960s reactor designs.
Moving away from fossil is very hard. Essentially we have two power sources available to us - Sun and nuclear. We are not very good at capturing sun energy directly, and doing it on massive scale requires both huge investment and global size actions that would have very serious consequences on global scale - from trivial cases like dams changing the terrains to more subtle like massive wind/solar installs changing wind/reflection/heat patterns and thus influencing the climate. I don't think we have any good data on how that would work on the scales needed to replace fossil fuels. With fossil fuels we essentially are using solar energy accumulated for millions of years. Very long term there's an obvious problem there, but on shorter term if we want to make do with only solar energy that is incoming right now, we need to become drastically more efficient in capturing it, and I don't think current technologies are there yet, and that we know how to deal with it on scales required to cover all present energy needs.
You should read up on Browns Ferry Nuclear in Alabama. BFN has three reactors but one was taken out of service for decades because an engineer was checking for leaks on a hose using a flame and set the insulation on fire.
Also they had a fin on one of the turbines of another reactor break off and it the reactor wall in the mid-2000s.
Wind, solar, dams and wave. They may not replace coal and other fossil fuels today but we can substitute a lot of our energy needs with a concerted effort into those renewables.
Hydro is also terrible for river ecology. Egypt gained a multi-billion dollar fertiliser industry (that didn't exist before) after they added dams to the Nile.
Dams hold back silt and sediment essential to farm land and despite everything you learned about fish ladders and salmon, they don't really work as well as the power companies say.
That is brilliantly put and I'm totally using it next time I have the energy conversation, and if it works as well as I suspect then just about every time after that too!
In a situation where something that severe (and malicious) is found, what would even be the short-term response? Are the management of the plant completely replaced?
Well, falsification of certificates seems to be quite common by nuclear subcontractors, and depending of the number of alternative shops able to do (kind of) the same thing (minus or plus correct quality...) those who falsify stuff might get away with a mere slap on the wrist and safety authorities telling them that it is bad, don't do it again.
I'm saying it catastrophically destroys my trust in the industry.
You're saying that you trust an industry that...
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against nuclear power.
Another view is that this demonstrates that the plants are engineered to be safe enough that despite these types of mistakes, incompetence and fraud, nuclear costs far fewer lives than the alternatives.
That argument sounds precipitously close to the reasoning that led to the Challenger disaster: "Even though this isn't supposed to happen, we've seen it before and it was fine" leading to a slow eroding of safety margins over time until at some point the shit hits the fan.
Except the NRC doesn't have a tolerance for erosion of safety, at all. Look at history, if anything they've gotten more strict over time. Once identified, there is strict procedure about rectifying it.
The problem with nuclear is that it is so heavily regulated that every little mistake that would fly under the radar in any other industry is instead explicitly called out, cited, and a resolution demanded. Which gives great visibility. But then some people misleadingly characterize it as "more unsafe" simply because its more visible, when really the alternative (followed by coal, natural gas, solar, wind, hydro) is to not call problems out at all in the name of "deregulation" which is an absolutely more dangerous way to go about things.
We've seen what happens even when plants are mismanaged to the point of failure, and the total death toll has still been a tiny fraction of what coal causes every year.
I'm more worried about the coal plants that are still spewing ash and uranium into the atmosphere and killing people by the tens or hundreds of thousands every year.
That itself is not a strong argument against nuclear power - because the exact same thing happens in every industry. If you look around carefully - at your workplace, at the shop you buy your food in, at the construction workers building that block nearby - you'll find staggering amount of fraud and incompetence almost everywhere. It actually makes one wonder how our increasingly complex world still somewhat works.
So keeping in mind that incompetence and fraud are commonplace and not something industry-specific, you have to consider what the numbers tell you about the safety of each option, and those numbers turn out to favour nuclear energy. Keep in mind that those statistics implicitly take into account all that incompetence and fraud you're worried about.
Do you install your own brake pads on your car? This goes for a lot of parts on the car you may drive. Yes, it's just your passengers and the possible victims of an accident, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong on your car. Is your trust in the auto-repair industry similarly 'catastrophically destroyed'?
The last time I did that was in 1978 on a Rabbit - with no experience whatever. It was a piece of cake and they worked fine. I did the timing belt, too.
I sure as heck wouldn't try it on my 1999 Golf. I can't even change the headlight bulb.
It's not that hard, just a little awkward because you can't really see how it screws in while you're doing it because the light assembly is sealed except for the bulb hole.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against (nuclear, coal, gas, wind, solar, tidal, hydro) power.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that this history of errors and negligence is present in literally every industry. Literally all of them.
That was proven to be "fake news". Essentially someone talked to a source (Michael McKenna) that hadn't even talked to Perry after his name was floated. Later interviews with McKenna even had him saying that he was misquoted.
The DoE does lots of work in Texas, and as former governor Perry had experience in working with them on managing the US's nuclear weapons stockpile. Part of his campaign platform in 2011 was to split the National Nuclear Security Administration out of the DoE and give it to the DoD.
In his statement accepting the nomination, he specifically called out the role of the DoE in safeguarding the US nuclear arsenal.
Otherwise don't let me stop the "hurr Durr stupid Republicans" circle jerk.
"Oh. So you designed it so that it could go in backward, and that would cause it to malfunction? Must be embarrassing for you to come out and fix that now."
> He died of cancer as they didnt quite yet know that radiation was a problem for human health when they started out...
That's putting it a bit strong, after all Marie Curie died of "aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation" in 1934. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
And "actress Midori Naka, present during the bombing, was studied extensively for radiation poisoning. Her death in 1945 was the first to be officially documented as having been caused by radiation poisoning" http://www.news-medical.net/health/Radiation-Poisoning-Histo...
So they might not have had good statistics but they certainly had reason to be cautious.
Of course radiation is also used to treat cancer, there is a good side to many things.
And before that, women were poisoned with radium, which was used to mark watch dials with luminous paint. What's remarkable was that executives and scientists were aware of the toxic nature of the radioactive paint, yet the women were instructed to use their lips to form points on their brushes to make the painting more precise. Lawsuits happened in the 1930's.
well, yes - but maybe it was an issue of disclosure... my grandmother won a part of a class action lawsuit after my grandfather died where former GE nukes' families sued GE for wrongful death to to radiation....
They are all passed - so I dont have the details, I just recall having some minor conversations with my grandma about this.
That generation was fiercely quiet and corporate loyal...
Thats just a challenge to a construction worker. "Stupid pointy headed geeks got it backwards again dale! Help me get er in there right." Meaning only to keep the project rolling. This is why choice of crew, not just management, is critical in building.
Boeing is well aware of the problem with workers forcing things to fit the wrong way anyway, and take that into consideration, making it as hard as practical to do so.
For example, if the hydraulics are hooked up backwards, the controls are reversed, which is a disaster. So the design:
1. uses different port sizes for the input and output
2. one port uses left hand threads, the other right hand
3. the lines are physically not long enough to reach the wrong port
4. very clear labeling
5. inspections and signoffs
for westinghouse to file bankruptcy less than 90 days into a new republican administration with a focus on defense, nationalism, and domestic business is a pretty obvious move to get either a bailout or absorbed into DoD or DoE.
and i'm pretty sure the secretary of defense "understands" the people who run his entire nuclear fleet are sort of important, the question is, does rick perry? magic 8 ball says: reply hazy.
> This, also, by the way, is a great illustration of Elon Musk's contention that these technologies don't just keep working. Brilliant, competent engineers and scientists have to invest themselves in making them work.
Is this expressed in a paper, or conference that I can watch a video of?
Probably, but it's also intuitively obvious to anyone who's owned a car, or a house, or otherwise been responsible for the function of any reasonably complex machine. Things wear out. Things break. They have to be repaired or replaced if the process of which they're a part is to continue.
Knowledge is a crucial part of that, too. The Saturn rocket program is a great example - if we decided to go back to the moon tomorrow, we'd be a decade or more in the doing of it, because all the people who knew how to build those rockets, and the tools to build those rockets, and the tools to build those tools, and so on - are by now retired or deceased. We'd have to figure all that stuff out all over again, as nearly from scratch as makes no odds. There's no reason to imagine any other similarly complex technology would be different.
This is a great point, but I'm very pessimistic about existing infrastructure getting any attention from the administration. If we're unable to upgrade and secure our nukes (!), I don't see how this would be a priority for anyone. Until that is something goes bad...
The people working for this company are a matter of national security. I sure hope Secretary Mattis understands that.
This, also, by the way, is a great illustration of Elon Musk's contention that these technologies don't just keep working. Brilliant, competent engineers and scientists have to invest themselves in making them work.