EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.

I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.

My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.

I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.

> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

And then you have bad faith actors.

No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?

No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?

No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?

Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?

None of that has never ever happened, right?

This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.

Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.

This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.

Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.

having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?

Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.

But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.

Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated

Fun fact, pumped hydro was actually developed for nuclear originally in the 70s, since nuclear is a large source of power that is hard to ramp down during low demand periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...

Next to you and your family, then, since you’re happy trading with their risks.

A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.

It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.

In fact Chernobyl is incredibly badly remembered, because the firefighters who died responding to the initial blaze died of sepsis related to beta radiation burns from spending hours wearing their firefighting coats covered in radioactive dust.

Had they been removed promptly and hosed down, those people would've survived because they would not have received essentially a third degree burn over their entire body. And that's the point: they died of sepsis related complications, not any type of unique radiation damage and the Soviet doctors who treated them did get better at it once the protocols were established.

I would happily live next to a nuclear power plant, the reason not to is mostly to do with "it's still an industrial site". But like, lakeside land where I'm up or down stream from it but can clearly see it nearby? Sure.

It's one of the rare forms of industry where if I was ever worried about contamination a cheap portable device will warn me remotely. Unlike say, Asbestos and heavy metals...one of which there's a bunch in my current backyard.

Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.

Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.

And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.

There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.

Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.

This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here.

But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming?

China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference.

Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time.

(But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).

As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.

Note that these number are a bit old and since then, installation of consumer solar has increased significantly. Installation of solar panels on consumer roofs is much more dangerous than installation of solar panels in solar plants, so death rate for solar are significantly underestimated. Meanwhile accident rates of plant construction (nuclear, solar or otherwise) keep dropping.

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

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

IIRC Fukushima didn't actually leak enough radiation out to cause any significant environmental harm - quite possibly, most of the evacuations weren't even necessary, and the total toll among responders was only 25, with only 1 death.

Chernobyl was much worse, but other than responders and the high incidence rates of thyroid cancer in young children close to the disaster area, the total casualties were also lower than people assume. A lot of the early estimates were massively inflated.

Honestly it's quite possible that in both cases, we could have done much less relocation and evacuation, especially the fukushima response was largely driven by Japan's fear of nuclear technology.

My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each.

Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them.

This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.

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

Nuclear may not be the best option anymore (I'm skeptical that an ideal power generation mix doesn't include more nuclear than we currently have, but agree that it probably shouldn't be the primary source anymore), that doesn't change the fact that not using it for past 80+ years as our primary energy generation source was a huge civilizational blunder.

It became scarce because of some very widespread effect.

That's the lawyer definition though - because some 50 people sacrificed their lives and because we spent 600 billion euros on remedies during the first 30 years, nobody can prove how bad it might have been.

But scientists will tell you how much caesium and iodine was released per day of that fire burning, the force of the steam explosion that might have been, how close it was to the contaminate the ground water supply and so on.

Then doctors will tell you how that would affect the people living in the fallout areas, and for how long the ground and food supply would be affected.

So if you let go of the lawyer definition, estimates are easily in the double-digit million dead.

Which we risked for a grand total of 28 TWh of electricity produced from Chernobyl.

And that's the bigger point here - even if the risks were way less than they actually are, the payoff is not worth it. Electricity generation causes less than 1/4 of the co2 emissions in the US - road transportation alone is a larger source.

Nuclear is not and never was a solution to global warming. Best case it helps of course, but only until something happens like Fukushima or Chernobyl. The billions spent on those two incidents alone would have had a bigger effect if they were spent subsidizing electric cars, solar panels, battey production and such.