Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants.
The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could.
If we could use only wind and solar power to fully replace fossil fuels and hydro, that could be a reasonable argument...
But it seems unrealistic to get enough energy without using some higher-density sources of energy, whether that's hydro or nuclear or oil, and if we're picking based on which one causes the least death, even accounting for wars and failures, nuclear seems to be a head and shoulder above the rest.
The primary thing that seems to be driving using coal plants and not using nuclear is purely monetary cost: nuclear plants take a huge up-front investment, coal plants already exist, and wind/solar can be transitioned to gradually with less up-front cost. The talk about nuclear's "danger" to me seems, quite plausibly, to be a post-facto justification based on not wanting to put up the money.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/12/11/mosul-dam-coll...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-probl...
Until we live in a world where we can micro-generate terawatts of power on a fully distributed, dynamic electrical grid -- if that's even possible -- the only practical technologies we have for satisfying our hunger for energy involve concentrated areas of high potential energy. Big energy, big target.
I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by heavy rain, and the danger feels similar. In fact, hydroelectric dams can even help prevent (or contain) flooding, so it's the opposite of causing damage in that case. Of course, we're not talking about tailings dams, which do leave behind a trail of contamination when they fail.
(An interesting case is the failure of a tailings dam many years ago which flooded the Rio Doce with pollution, with that flood being mostly stopped by a hydroelectric dam downriver. The hydroelectric dam contained the damage instead of causing it.)
I don't know what "people feel", but the reality of a large dam that is blown up is more like a tsunami than a normal flood. If it hits a city, casualties can easily reach the 10s or 100s of thousands, instantly.
In a way, an upstream dam is a health hazard for anyone in the area that might be flooded that should be concerning at the same level as living in an area that has had some nuclear contamination.
This isn’t common, to say the least.
Water is not that polite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...
Rivers are often dammed to create an artificial body of water that can be used for power generation. You are storing water from the river when it has a high flow rate, in order to be able to generate power when needed.
There is nothing that requires the area downstream from the dam to have been previously underwater.
They very easily could, especially if they wipe out a chemical plant, a dump site, or a number of other things.
If someone blows up Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, it'll be about 18e9 m3, hundreds of thousands dead, wholesale destruction of everything downstream, shutdown of every energy plant that uses the resevoir for cooling, not to mention the hydroelectic station, and untold damage when winds blow the exposed sediment all over the steppe. Which is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.
So? This Kakhovka dam is a legitimate military target as the last remaining supply route for russian troops in/around Kherson.
Not under the Geneva Convention "Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population." https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
More sanctions? Direct military action against a major (or any) nuclear power? Condemnation and isolation for decades or longer?
They have violated yet the Geneva convention (and its laws that oblige to hummanitary treatment of civils in a war) countless times in a few months, and at a level rarely seen before.
Couple of 1000lb bombs misplaced, some confusion and you can't stop it, only watch. Has to be a very unfortunate hit, but shit happens.
Compared to that, the Zaporoshya nuclear plant will just shut down as designed even if hit in all its reactors; release maybe a week's worth radiation, completely harmless, and then sit still. And it's just upstream.
Think about it.
So-called 'green energy' bears so much more hazards.
Intentionally breaching the dikes of the Yellow River killed nearly a million people, displaced several million more, and was a contributing factor to people turning towards the Chinese Communists and away from the KMT.
In case of nuclear incident, actual death may be lower but the affected people will keep being concerned about health issues and complain (rightfuly so) about the necessary relocation, which makes for stronger staying power in the news.
Bill a friend of mine built a large addition on a house which had flooded twice while he had been living there, once actually reaching the second story. In his mind it’s picture perfect 99.9% of the time so what’s an inconvenience every few decades. In the end he died before the next flood, but now there is a nice house in a flood plain.
This isn’t reserved to individuals, companies didn’t abandon large areas of NYC after the last flood. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/flood-hazard-ma...
So such trickle down just shifts who builds in such areas but it doesn’t prevent people from living or building in them.
I think we learned the answer to that question last winter down in Texas.
Replace the wind farms with nuclear power and the problem goes away.
A combined cycle plant costs around $1/W. A nuclear power plant costs around $10/W.
Why do you want to spend so much more money than you have to, just so you can split atoms?
Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.
On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.
But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.
This is true for any other system of centralized energy production, including, notably, the one we have right now.
You underestimate the cost and lead times of the big distribution transformers found in grid substations. As an example, a fire two years ago on a substation transformer in the state of Amapá (while another transformer was broken and awaiting maintenance, and IIRC the third transformer of the set was also damaged by the fire) led to most of that state being without power for AFAIK nearly three weeks, until a replacement sent from another substation could be installed (and as a consequence, that other substation ended up without a spare until it could receive weeks later a replacement transformer from yet another substation). Note that building a new transformer instead of shuffling them between the substations wasn't an option, because it would take too long.
The most difficult part of the grid is the transmission infrastructure. The most valuable, high-lead-time part probably being the HV transformers that live near power plants.
One wonders whether famously-protected Finland keeps spares.
That doesn't sound like a very useful way to make decisions about anything except maybe missile defense and second strike capabilities. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient violence.
There's just no practical way to harden all of it against attack. And a tiny chance of some hypothetical future war isn't a good reason to choose a technology (combusting fossil fuels) that's gonna kill your own citizens every year, guaranteed. Why do your hypothetical future enemy's job for them?
If all you want to do is to knock out the electrical system of a country, you can use an EMP burst bomb over that country, and the grid will be down for months.
“Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...
...oh wait, https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complica...
(Spoiler: there is no such material.)
The highly radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years is actually quite small.
> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II. [2]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-let... [2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2022/05/ener...
Much of which stops being radioactive in the first year,
> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II.
Which is to be expected given that a (tiny) part of the waste is long term.
The article says otherwise. You can remove "large" from your sentence.
Also, it looks like you've been repeatedly posting flamewar comments. Can you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
A hydro plant can be attacked in a war situation just as much as a nuclear plant, so I don't see how that should be weighted as highly as you seem to imply. In fact, I'd argue that energy dependence on nations such as Russia are a much higher risk to geopolitical stability than nuclear power.
Some new fast reactor designs don't even need water for cooling. Also, China has built an experimental thorium reactor in Gobi desert which also doesn't need water for cooling.
I believe a lot if interesting stuff is coming in a few years.
Limit your eating of pike, but otherwise no major objections:
> Children, young people and persons of fertile age may not eat pike caught in a lake or in the sea more often than once or twice a month.
> Dioxin and PCB levels in fish from inland waters are normally low, and mercury levels are lower in other lake fish than in pike. The mercury and cesium-137 levels of fish vary from one lake to the other.
* https://www.ruokavirasto.fi/en/private-persons/information-o...
Coal poisons the water far worse, both from mining, air pollution, and coal ash. It even emits far more radiation than nuclear power.
> "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation".
Perhaps you should become a bit more informed before spouting nonsense like this.
If you are worrying about future large scale conflict then nuclear plants will be the least of your problems causing death and other things.
That is incorrect. Large scale != global or world war. It's a moot point though.
What isn't correct? What's the definition of a large scale conflict then? Anything above 2 neighbors fighting over their fence?
> egardless 'if there is military action that could affect nuclear plants it will involve nuclear weapons and kill us anyway' is a poor argument.
How is that a poor argument. In war you care about what is the most likely to kill you. Nukes are a very real risk when there's 50 000 out there ready to be launched at one moment's notice. Radiations that would kill you in 30 years is the least of anyone's worry. Just like you don't care about a cancer that could kill you 10 years from now if you are run over by a car.
Energy, water, food, resource security. Back to basics.
I'd rather the answer be a push for more advances in passive safety and planning that treats military attack as an eventuality.
Nothing to see here.
> Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).
So the anti-nuclear guys keeping point at the same list of 3-4 incidents time and time again, unable to recognize the ridiculousness and weakness of their argument - and the fact that their opposition to nuclear actively kills people year after year.
[1] https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat... couldn't find a more up to date source
Fossil plants are killing millions of people every year.
During heatwave this year, when we had temperatures around 43C for almost 2 weeks, hundreds of people died in my country because our energy grids were overloaded and ACs turned off. And many people can't even afford to pay for AC energy bills anyway so they don't use it. Our energy needs are growing every year and energy production can't keep up.
We NEED cheap energy that nuclear can give. This is the matter of survival at this point.
> most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.
i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick.
but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear.
i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591
If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar will be mostly ground mounted.
If you don't agree with that statistical value, and think it should be higher, why you've just argued we're not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants -- because $9 M is the value the NRC uses when determining if additional safety systems are warranted.
Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!).
But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.
To count deaths you need to look at a whole system--solar, wind + the gas plants that cover the gaps, or the hypothetical storage system that covers the gaps. Since we can't count deaths from a tech that doesn't even exist it's solar + wind + gas -- and most of those deaths will be from the gas.
But another takeaway from the current conflict is how incredible nuclear is at shoring up energy security. A nuclear plant can easily keep 18 months of fuel onsite as required storage space is trivial. A 2 or 3 year strategic reserve of uranium would likewise be a trivial project.
Meanwhile other base load sources like coal need dozens of rail cars worth of coal every single day. Gas needs a pipeline or again daily shipments of LNG.
So now Russia has cut off the gas and energy costs in Europe are exploding and they are having to build out tons of new LNG infrastructure.
Russia can basically turn the heat off in Europe because they under invested in nuclear power.
Although this would have no effect short-term since plants take a long time to build.
We need nuclear energy precisely because humans are not safe.
So we have to make decisions with those two factors in mind
Note that South Korea and France both have large operational nuclear power that is rather cheap to deploy because they basically copy-paste the same proven design and processes again and again. South Korea in particular has been under constant threat of attack by its neighbors for basically over a thousand years now yet went with nuclear decades ago. Comparatively, Switzerland didn’t choose nuclear for reasons I can’t quite remember even though they are fully capable technologically and in terms of process / bureaucracy able to manage the systems perfectly safely. Unsure about France’s reasoning but it’s difficult to compare power costs between France and neighboring Germany in good faith comparisons of energy policy either due to how different their electrical grid needs are.
It is absolutely uncompetitive, without.
[0] https://x-energy.com/media/news-releases/x-energy-canada-and...
On the surface this is very true. However, types of solar have caveats that do not manifest until you have a certain amount of utilization in the grid. Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions. The more inertia you have, the more work it takes to speed up or slow down the grid.
Hypothetically, a grid that is 50% PV solar and 50% others would experience severe stability issues if the other class of generation were to be substantially impacted (i.e. your big-bang-for-buck military targets).
You cannot run a power grid on PV solar alone. It just won't work at scale.
It's useful in traditional grids because we didn't have electronics that could more or less instantaneously respond to load changes - they had to rely on spinning generators instead.
But, this is a precipitous arrangement. If there is any drift in the clocks or some fault in the sync protocol, you can quickly wind up with a completely dead grid (because all your inverters will have killed each other).
Spinning metal is very simple and robust. The failure modes are all much more gradual in nature. Today, one or 2 bad inverters would not start a chain of horrible events because hundreds of tons of metal are not easily perturbed. Without inertia, a bad element in the grid can have substantially more impact.
A grid without rotating generators would act differently, for sure, as you won't have varying frequency to indicate if the grid is overloaded - you'd have to rely on different measures to understand how close parts of it might be to failure.
"Bad actors" in the grid can already cause severe problems regardless of spinning generators; if a power station goes offline the unexpected load spike can easily trip off most of the grid anyway. Smaller, distributed generators/inverters if anything are more reliable, as a fault in one is less likely to constitute an outsize portion of power generation. "Grid inertia" today is largely a result of the total machinery attached to the grid just massively outweighing any individual actor.
The rotating machines are wholly as dependent on controls as the inverters.
Besides "synthetic inertia" on the PV inverters, there exist also synchronous condensers (basically a motor/generator spinning a heavy mass) which can already be found in many substations.
Wait what, Newton's inertia was about physical objects, not voltage stability? You talking base vs peak demand or what?
Here, I'll do the same thing: "Nuclear produces power 24/7, while solar can only usefully produce power for ~8 hours a day, or 1/3 of the day".
Sure, for that 1/3 of the day, solar does not have political problems like being shut down for danger. However, for 2/3 of the day, nuclear does not have the physics problem of being useless.
Each solution has pros and cons and I want my power to come from both.
And speaking of regional poisoning, I guess all of those heavy metal mines in poorer countries creating some quite dystopian scenes of large scale ecological destruction leading to total ecosystem collapse are OK because "NIMBY"! Can't wait to 10X that, especially when I remember that the energy density of nuclear fuels is so insanely high that the mining impact for powering all of humanity on it is something like 50X less than powering all of humanity on lithium batteries!
The battery production capacity is currently in a rapid growth phase. I'm not sure what timescales you think are "for some time longer", but I think 10 (optimistic) to 20 years (pessimistic) would be enough to see the global electricity market almost totally (95% or more) transformed to renewables.
While I personally am relaxed about nuclear power if it's done right, the political realities are that it terrifies people and that corners get cut just often enough to make the terror not entirely unjustified, so it's not going to happen on a significant scale unless there's a reason for the government to ignore the will of the people.
That's obvious because you don't want to compare the amount of lithium required for billions of cars and grid scale solar to cover 16 hours of energy per day.
You ignored it because 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.
Not only is uranium extremely energy dense, but power facilities are extremely small. Nuclear facilities are by far the smallest energy producing facilities, and solar fields are among the largest (both in terms of space and raw materials). This produces mining and material savings at every single step.
A world powered by Uranium only would require probably somewhere between 10,000X to 100,000 less mining than a world powered by solar batteries.
The energy density of uranium is truly amazing.
And the energy density of uranium is irrelevant even sessile, because it takes hundreds to thousands of times more mass around it to get useful energy out.
I had ignored it so as not to embarrass you further.
While you might not think several orders of magnitude have meaning, fortunately here in reality the fact that it requires far less overall mining to create and supply a uranium power station that it does to create and supply an equivalent (in power output) solar field with batteries has huge meaning.
While I do thank you for looking out for me, I urge you to in the future take time to introspect on yourself and views, so as to save yourself these issues. I know no one tries to be a hypocrite intentionally, so I know these are resolvable problems for the average HN'er. Good luck!
Unless this magickal energy density results in lower-cost electrical output, in quantity, it is just a load of guff.
What we know is that every use of uranium for civil power generation, ever, delivered only extremely expensive power. There has never been a single reactor, worldwide, that was not heavily subsidized by taxpayers, coerced above-market rates, or both. Nukes get even less competitive with each passing year, as the cost for renewables continues plummeting with no bottom in sight.
So, the compelling evidence is that energy density is of extremely limited value for civil power generation. If it has any practical value at all, its copious orders of magnitude are yet insufficient to overcome its extremely poor cost effectiveness.
And, places in the US where uranium was mined are marked by poisoned groundwater and early death. Those poisoned are not impressed with its magick. Nor am I.
If a solar facility gets carpet bombed during a war, you think it's more likely it will all just get somewhat cleaned up, and lots of it will be left in-situ and plowed over, or someone will actually remove every little dust particle? I think the lazy way out is what is most likely.
If you have to make shit up to support your argument, why even bother?
https://scdhec.gov/sites/default/files/Library/OR-1695.pdf
"Solar panel waste can include heavy metals such as silver, lead, arsenic and cadmium that – at certain levels – may be classified as hazardous waste"
That feels like saying "a woman who's not allowed to carry pepper spray is less likely to dress provocatively enough to lead to getting raped".
Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens, like in the case of the stolen solar power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokmak_Solar_Energy).