13 ms·

How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.

by cyjackx 5mo ago

Tepix 5mo ago
Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.
- littlestymaar 5mo ago
  The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture. The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers). In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000! I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants. The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion when they were dumb enough to sleep there.
    - littlestymaar 5mo ago
      > I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants. If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade. > The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint). And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe. Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.
    - Mawr 5mo ago
      Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable. As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering. Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of what, the two or three major incidents you can think of? This simple calculation alone makes your arguments utterly ridiculous. We accept 1000x the risk and cost of that on a daily basis, in e.g. driving, gas and coal plants. Go ahead and evacuate to get away from the negative effects of soot, tire dust, CO2, and all the other fun pollution that's spread out over the entire atmosphere. Good luck living on Mars.
      - littlestymaar 5mo ago
        It's even worse than this, you'd don't even need to compare to other industries, nuclear-induced death over the past 40 years are negligible even when you compare to stuff like professional diseases of maids or electricians (and I'm purposely not picking hazardous professions…).
  - Tepix 5mo ago
    > The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture. What would your definition of a "major incident" be for photovoltaics?
- AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
  - lxgr 5mo ago
    Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
    - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
      - lxgr 5mo ago
        That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse. I don't doubt that that resulting number is still very low, or there (being intentionally optimistic about politics and society here) wouldn't be any nuclear plants. Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up. > Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs. In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). But that's besides the larger point of low probability and historical risk.
        AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
        > That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse. The data is sparse because the rate is very low. If the world used twice as much nuclear power as it does now, we don't have enough statistical data to predict with high accuracy if something as bad as Chernobyl would happen two more times or zero more times but the existing data allows us to be pretty confident it wouldn't be 100 more times. Meanwhile coal kills more people than 100 Chernobyls every year in just the US. There is also reason to suspect Chernobyl was an outlier because the USSR was such an authoritarian nightmare. They not only screwed up the design of the reactor (positive void coefficient, no containment building) but then also its operation and the response. The majority of the confirmed deaths were plant workers and emergency responders who got radiation exposure after being sent in without training or relevant equipment. It took the USSR more than three days to admit that it had even happened so that people living next to the plant would know to leave the immediate area. Screwing it up that bad required more than an honest mistake. > Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up. The "thousands of years" thing is essentially fake. Radiological half-life is the inverse of intensity. Things with a half-life of five minutes are super radioactive. Things with a half-life of thousands of years aren't much above background. For example, there is an isotope of uranium that has a half-life of four billion years. It's also a pain because its decay chain contains radon gas. ZOMG what are we going to do with it for that long? Well, that's the one that represents 99.3% of natural uranium straight out of the ground, which is why homes in areas with natural granite need radon reduction systems, so it turns out the answer to what we do with it is we can put it in a reactor and use it to generate electricity and that will turn it into something with a shorter half life that goes away sooner. And the major ones that are "thousands of years" can also be used to generate electricity if we would actually separate them and use them for that to get rid of them instead of wringing our hands about where we're supposed to keep them. > In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). It's also lower because nuclear plants are pretty obsessive about safety vs. random solar installation company whose job application test is to see if you can make it onto a third story roof with a two story ladder.
littlestymaar 5mo ago
It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal. The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.
- ViewTrick1002 5mo ago
  ”If we compare apples to oranges nuclear power is cheap”. You can finance the competition in the same way and get similarly cheaper prices. Hinkley Point C just got a loan at a 7% interest rate to finish the plant. That is after about all uncertainty should already have been discovered. Now add making a profit and factor in the risk on top and you’ll end up with electricity costing $400 per MWh
  - thatcat 5mo ago
    If risk and disposal is factored into coal, gas, solar power, what would be cheaper? Nuclear has recyclable fuel processes and fail safe systems available.
    - ViewTrick1002 5mo ago
      That cost doesn’t even factor in disposal because no one knows the true cost yet. Not sure what risk you think come from renewables and storage?
      - littlestymaar 5mo ago
        > That cost doesn’t even factor in disposal because no one knows the true cost yet There's still some cost factored in, unlike any other industry where the government is expected to clean up after the fact. > Not sure what risk you think come from renewables The grid collapse risk (See what happened in Spain last year, which caused 8 deaths, more than every nuclear power plant accidents in the Western world combined…). Grid operators are currently investing a trillion Euro in the EU alone in order to adapt the grid to the new challenges caused by intermittent and distributed energy sources, and this will never be accounted for in renewable electricity prices… (hence the paradox: the more “cheap energy” is being deployed in Europe, the more expensive the electricity prices become). > and storage "Storage" doesn't exist yet as a most people imagine it. Batteries can help ease a few hours of peak load/low supply but that's pretty much it, pumped storage is very situational with limited deployment capabilities. So the risk is that the technology simply never materialize.
nl 5mo ago
MIT actually measured this, and the conclusion might surprise you: > Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators “required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material.” Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects. > But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs. > By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate. > So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
rtpg 5mo ago
France is all-in on nuclear. Their reactors are still pretty expensive. Worth it, but expensive. Each reactor is a huge piece of infrastructure where small mistakes compound. No matter how little regulation you have reworking these giant buildings takes a lot of work, if only from the physics of it all. If there's magic that makes em massively cheaper someone should tell France.
- mpweiher 5mo ago
  Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker. Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years. They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us. With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not? They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW. https://www.powermag.com/france-to-slash-reliance-on-nuclear-in-new-draft-policy/ https://www.powermag.com/france-to-slash-reliance-on-nuclear... So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off. Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them. But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville. Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KbQEMFRkM&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KbQEMFRkM&t=7s And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps. So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all. Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.

How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.

by cyjackx 5mo ago

How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.

Tepix 5mo ago

Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.

littlestymaar 5mo ago
The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture. The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers). In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000! I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
- watwut 5mo ago
  I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants. The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion when they were dumb enough to sleep there.
  - littlestymaar 5mo ago
    > I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants. If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade. > The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint). And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe. Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.
  - Mawr 5mo ago
    Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable. As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering. Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of what, the two or three major incidents you can think of? This simple calculation alone makes your arguments utterly ridiculous. We accept 1000x the risk and cost of that on a daily basis, in e.g. driving, gas and coal plants. Go ahead and evacuate to get away from the negative effects of soot, tire dust, CO2, and all the other fun pollution that's spread out over the entire atmosphere. Good luck living on Mars.
    - littlestymaar 5mo ago
      It's even worse than this, you'd don't even need to compare to other industries, nuclear-induced death over the past 40 years are negligible even when you compare to stuff like professional diseases of maids or electricians (and I'm purposely not picking hazardous professions…).
- Tepix 5mo ago
  > The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture. What would your definition of a "major incident" be for photovoltaics?
AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
- lxgr 5mo ago
  Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
  - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
    - lxgr 5mo ago
      That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse. I don't doubt that that resulting number is still very low, or there (being intentionally optimistic about politics and society here) wouldn't be any nuclear plants. Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up. > Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs. In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). But that's besides the larger point of low probability and historical risk.
      - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
        > That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse. The data is sparse because the rate is very low. If the world used twice as much nuclear power as it does now, we don't have enough statistical data to predict with high accuracy if something as bad as Chernobyl would happen two more times or zero more times but the existing data allows us to be pretty confident it wouldn't be 100 more times. Meanwhile coal kills more people than 100 Chernobyls every year in just the US. There is also reason to suspect Chernobyl was an outlier because the USSR was such an authoritarian nightmare. They not only screwed up the design of the reactor (positive void coefficient, no containment building) but then also its operation and the response. The majority of the confirmed deaths were plant workers and emergency responders who got radiation exposure after being sent in without training or relevant equipment. It took the USSR more than three days to admit that it had even happened so that people living next to the plant would know to leave the immediate area. Screwing it up that bad required more than an honest mistake. > Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up. The "thousands of years" thing is essentially fake. Radiological half-life is the inverse of intensity. Things with a half-life of five minutes are super radioactive. Things with a half-life of thousands of years aren't much above background. For example, there is an isotope of uranium that has a half-life of four billion years. It's also a pain because its decay chain contains radon gas. ZOMG what are we going to do with it for that long? Well, that's the one that represents 99.3% of natural uranium straight out of the ground, which is why homes in areas with natural granite need radon reduction systems, so it turns out the answer to what we do with it is we can put it in a reactor and use it to generate electricity and that will turn it into something with a shorter half life that goes away sooner. And the major ones that are "thousands of years" can also be used to generate electricity if we would actually separate them and use them for that to get rid of them instead of wringing our hands about where we're supposed to keep them. > In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). It's also lower because nuclear plants are pretty obsessive about safety vs. random solar installation company whose job application test is to see if you can make it onto a third story roof with a two story ladder.

littlestymaar 5mo ago

It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal. The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.

ViewTrick1002 5mo ago
”If we compare apples to oranges nuclear power is cheap”. You can finance the competition in the same way and get similarly cheaper prices. Hinkley Point C just got a loan at a 7% interest rate to finish the plant. That is after about all uncertainty should already have been discovered. Now add making a profit and factor in the risk on top and you’ll end up with electricity costing $400 per MWh
- thatcat 5mo ago
  If risk and disposal is factored into coal, gas, solar power, what would be cheaper? Nuclear has recyclable fuel processes and fail safe systems available.
  - ViewTrick1002 5mo ago
    That cost doesn’t even factor in disposal because no one knows the true cost yet. Not sure what risk you think come from renewables and storage?
    - littlestymaar 5mo ago
      > That cost doesn’t even factor in disposal because no one knows the true cost yet There's still some cost factored in, unlike any other industry where the government is expected to clean up after the fact. > Not sure what risk you think come from renewables The grid collapse risk (See what happened in Spain last year, which caused 8 deaths, more than every nuclear power plant accidents in the Western world combined…). Grid operators are currently investing a trillion Euro in the EU alone in order to adapt the grid to the new challenges caused by intermittent and distributed energy sources, and this will never be accounted for in renewable electricity prices… (hence the paradox: the more “cheap energy” is being deployed in Europe, the more expensive the electricity prices become). > and storage "Storage" doesn't exist yet as a most people imagine it. Batteries can help ease a few hours of peak load/low supply but that's pretty much it, pumped storage is very situational with limited deployment capabilities. So the risk is that the technology simply never materialize.

nl 5mo ago

MIT actually measured this, and the conclusion might surprise you: > Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators “required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material.” Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects. > But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs. > By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate. > So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

rtpg 5mo ago

France is all-in on nuclear. Their reactors are still pretty expensive. Worth it, but expensive. Each reactor is a huge piece of infrastructure where small mistakes compound. No matter how little regulation you have reworking these giant buildings takes a lot of work, if only from the physics of it all. If there's magic that makes em massively cheaper someone should tell France.

mpweiher 5mo ago
Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker. Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years. They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us. With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not? They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW. https://www.powermag.com/france-to-slash-reliance-on-nuclear-in-new-draft-policy/ https://www.powermag.com/france-to-slash-reliance-on-nuclear... So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off. Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them. But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville. Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KbQEMFRkM&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KbQEMFRkM&t=7s And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps. So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all. Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.