They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission.
While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not. We have only directly amd definitively linked about 50 deaths to radiation released in commercial fission accidents. It's like a really bad bus crash. And that doesnt even count the social and emotional costs of fear and evacuation, which are large.
But context matters. Particlates from fossil and biofuel cause more death every 7 hours than the high estimate of deaths from nuclears entire history (using 4000 in chernobyl).
So nuclear fission is very safe. It's not perfectly safe, but it is orders of magnitude safer than the average energy source. Oh and it is carbon free so it prevents future deaths from climate change. So yeah.
> They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission.
Competent engineers are perfectly capable of maintaining a nuclear reactor, _technically_ speaking.
Large projects are vulnerable to all vices of human nature though. Idiots in manglement. Greedy people trying to squeeze out more profit. Terrorists. Maffiosi, whether running a country or not. Let's not forget that scale is not just about money or spatial dimensions, but also time...
We have a perfect example: Enerhodar, Ukraine. A working nuclear power plant is in the middle of a war zone right now.
This still doesn't address GP's comparison to fossil. Fossil powerplants are no less vulnerable to all of those things you listed, and in fact they were indeed used in wars, from Saddam burning Kuwait's fields in 1991 to Houthi drones attacking Saudi fields more recently to Libyan civil war. None of that is used against fossil the same way it's used against nuclear.
You keep bringing up climate change, like the only alternative is coal. Do you really think that nuclear fission can be a key player in reducing emissions to net zero? It seems far too expensive and slow to set up for something this urgent.
Fossil + biofuel makes 80% of our energy today. Getting rid of that will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy. Wind and solar need to be built out at breakneck speed if we want to be serious. Much faster than what we're doing now. So does nuclear fission.
I assume you're only looking at the slow and expensive nuclear builds?
China is looking to build 150 new reactors to meet its goals.
We also have ways of making nuclear reactors extremely quickly if we want to get really serious. In the 1970s we started building a facility in Jacksonville Fl capable of delivering 4 large LWRs per year in a shipyard-like factory. The reactors were to be floated off to their sites (the first of which were offshore). They installed the world's largest gantry crane at the facility. Sadly the oil shocks reduced the energy demand where their first customers were (New Jersey refineries) and the effort failed after they received a construction license from the nuclear regulatory commission. Building zero carbon power plant gigafactories like this can solve climate change, you betcha.
Whatever source we use it needs to be built out at breakneck speed. It just seems that wind, solar, and batteries are more amenable to that than nuclear in a basic logistical sense. All of the ways people suggest to make nuclear faster and cheaper already exist in those fields.
By expensive, I mean in $/kWh - yes we could build enough nuclear power plants to stop carbon emissions, but if the cost of energy is multiple times greater than that of renewables, why not invest in those instead?
I've heard this idea that we should "do everything", but I don't get that, why don't we do the best thing as well and as fast as we can?
> but if the cost of energy is multiple times greater than that of renewables, why not invest in those instead?
First of all, we are investing more in renewables right now than nuclear. Much much more.
Second of all, your statement is true for LCOE, but LCOE is an inappropriate metric for systems costs. It does not include the cost of storage, additional transmission lines to reach thousands of distributed wind/solar sites, extra capacity to fill up the storage, the required smart grid tech, etc.
Quoting just LCOE is becoming extremely problematic. Everyone does it, and it's very misleading.
> While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not.
> That's basically a judge saying it. The scientific basis is very unclear.
"In January 2015, the MHLW [Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare] compiled medical knowledge on lung cancer and radiation exposure in a report resulting from a review meeting of medical experts, and published the immediate view similar to that for thyroid cancer. The first claim for case of lung cancer was approved by MHLW in August 2018, and this was also the first case involving death."
--From "Responses and Actions Taken by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan on Radiation Protection at Works Relating to the Accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant 9th Edition (Fiscal Year of 2021)" https://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/topics/2011eq/workers/ri/ar/r...
I understand that he received an estimated 74 mSv of radiation, somewhat below the level of 100 mSv acute / 300 mSv annual that has been shown to cause a measurable increase risk of cancer (e.g. from 40% lifetime risk to 40.1% lifetime risk). It's extremely dubious to say that this was definitely from Fukushima radiation. If that dose is accurate, the likelihood of it being from Fukushima radiation is probably less than 1%. Not impossible. But not likely, and far from a sure thing.
For comparison, the 23 firefighters who died from acute radiation syndrome at Chernobyl got doses as high as 13,400 mSv, almost 2000x higher than this guy.
> I understand that he received an estimated 74 mSv of radiation
"The ministry said he had been exposed to about 195 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation. The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends avoiding more than 1-20 mSv per year, and according to Reuters, exposure to 100 mSv a year is 'the lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is clearly evident.'" https://time.com/5388178/japan-first-fukushima-radiation-dea...
That's 100 mSv acute. Did he get it acutely (i.e. in a day or two) or over years? If acute then yes, the measurable increment over a background 40% lifetime risk could be due to Fukushima. So then the question is what's the increment? Let's estimate that it's 1% (based on the noisy data at these still quite low doses). In that case, there is a 1 in 40 chance that his cancer death in 2016 was due to Fukushima in 2011.
It it wasn't acute and accumulated over >1 year, then there's a ~0% chance it was from Fukushima radiation.
It's not hand-waving. We've got got what, close to a billion fission reactor-hours worth of data? Perhaps more? We know exactly how safe they are.
Also: "safety issues?" Useless to talk about safety issues in a vacuum. Safety issues compared to what?
- Fossil fuels, which are literally guaranteed to fry this planet?
- Wind, water, solar? Great but not sufficient and/or feasible in all locales.
- An imaginary energy source with zero downsides? Let us know once you work out the details.
You point to Fukushima, thanks to which a region was rendered uninhabitable. I point to climate change caused by fossil fuel, thanks to which large swathes of the planet will soon be uninhabitable. I know which one I prefer. I'd prefer ten or a hundred Fukushimas in exchange for what's about to happen to our planet in the coming decades.
But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive. Many seem to live in this alternative reality where we can have bit super safe, lightly regulated and cheap nuclear.
I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes.
And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear in the West is actually a pretty complex thing. The US cannot even figure out why their roads and railroads cost many times that of other countries. If they cannot figure that out, then how are they going to solve a far trickier problem?
I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes.
While I accept that those two things (safe fission power, and cheap fission power) are in obvious tension with each other, your "choose only one" scenario is a false dichotomy.
A well-functioning, technologically advanced, and motivated country could easily overcome this. Standardized reactor designs, simplified reactor designs such as the newer molten salt reactor designs, etc.
We have the technology to do this safely and cheaper than we're doing it now; we just don't have the will.
Also, any talk of cost must include not only the short-term kWh cost, but the long term cost -- ie, the terrible cost of climate change that we'll soon be paying.
And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear
in the West is actually a pretty complex thing
Yeah, no arguments there. The US is no longer capable of tackling long term initiatives like this, because any change will necessarily upset the corporations that effectively own the government.
Nothing will change until the ice caps melt and half our coastal cities are flooded, and at that point something might happen but probably not anything good.
From the viewpoint of a utility, what matters is not large accidents (because their liability is capped) but rather smaller accidents that could ruin their investment. The TMI accident didn't kill anyone, but it gravely damaged the owner of the power plant, as they had just lost a large investment.
Because of this, fusion is likely WORSE from the utility's point of view than fission. While fusion reactors are less likely to have catastrophic accidents with large external effects, they are probably more likely to have localized accidents that ruin the reactor. In any case, a fusion reactor will have to be designed to be extremely reliable because repairing it after any accident will be so difficult, as it will be too radioactive for anyone to get in to repair it. All repairs will have to be done remotely.
What accident do you foresee that makes components of a fusion reactor sufficiently radio active?
Containment field failure should leave the components just as radio active as a controlled shutdown as the plasma distinguishes immediately or am i missing something?
Neutron bombardment will make the innards of the fusion reactor radioactive as part of its normal operation. No accident is required. The induced radioactivity will be so high that hands on access will be impossible, even with the reactor shut down. This will make maintenance difficult.
Maybe the next big VC fad after fusion will be radiation resistant robots.
I don't see how the lithium itself becomes radioactive. It will be contaminated with tritium, but presumably it's designed so that can be stripped out. Otherwise... maybe atoms of higher Z elements knocked into the lithium from the first micro of pipe surfaces by recoil after neutron collisions?
It would be hard to get and keep a thousand tons of atomically pure 6Li/7Li, even without neutrons spalling pipe surface atoms into it. And, with enough neutron flux, seems like you should expect to get a fair bit of "relatively unusual" products that your regular H/He extraction process leaves to accumulate.
But these are all second-order effects. A thousand tons of molten lithium is a big enough hazard even without radioactivated impurities. And even getting the 0.0000001% fraction of dissolved 3H out seems... difficult.
Deep geologic repositories have a scientific consensus as being safe and appropriate solutions to high level nuclear waste. Finland's Onkalo is mostly constructed and finishing up licensing right now. It's a solved problem.
The total amount of waste fuel produced by all of humanity since nuclear power became a thing is magnitudes less than the waste produced by solar panels and wind turbines that will need to be decommissioned due to age (some of them already in the near future)
Only if we never use fast reactors, which fission almost all the long-lived stuff. Take what's left, encase it in glass and bury it, and it'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years.
There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.