It makes perfect sense in a world where in the end every single thing is condensed down to profit.

Nuclear costs a fortune under the regulatory regime it's operated with to date.

We genuinely don't know how much less it would cost to have nuclear power on an equal-safety-to-coal-power basis, because it's not been tried.

Why would you equal-to-coal today? You need to equal wind, solar or at least gas safety.

Lately I'm reading a lot about lowering nuclear safety to improve costs. Imagine cars makers asking to get rid of ABS, airbags, safety belts... to make cheaper cars. Any sane person would raise a brow when hearing that, any industry should aim to be as safe as possible, not to cut costs on safety and assume some preventable deaths with a happy smile.

It's also a lie: in this report https://www.nei.org/resources/reports-briefs/nuclear-costs-i... , in the page 5 you can see that regulatory costs are minimal (and the source should be nuclear friendly enough) after adapting for the Fukushima "lesson".

> Imagine cars makers asking to get rid of ABS, airbags, safety belts...

But cars with all those safety features are still much more risky then nuclear plants. Cars can kill you. Practically speaking nuclear plants cannot. They force people to move. If you are going to complain about preventable deaths, what is your plan to make cars safe? We haven't done all we can do. If we bought the speed limits down to walking pace and banned reversing we'd save a huge number of lives (including small toddlers, it remains a tear jerker every time someone reverses over their own toddler).

Why are you accepting high risks from cars but raising an eyebrow at nuclear plants? It isn't rational. You know people, right now, who will be killed by cars. Why isn't something being done [0]?

> in the page 5 you can see that regulatory costs are minimal

Nuclear is the only technology that gets more expensive the more is built. And I'll give you a hint. That anomaly is 100% caused by the regulatory framework.

The report is obviously misjudging something. They're probably doing something like assuming only things that the regulators explicitly ask for count as regulatory costs. We should see a learning effect in the nuclear industry where technology gets cheaper over time.

[0] That was rhetorical. The answer is because it'd be damn silly and the costs would far outweight the benefits. Everyone can see that because the costs are obvious and felt personally. It is unfortunate the the costs of lacking energy are going to be felt before people accept that there aren't alternatives to building new powerplants.

> Why would you equal-to-coal today? You need to equal wind, solar or at least gas safety.

Some countries are closing nuclear plants and ramping up coal. (Look at Germany)

Nice point except coal was not ramped up.

You can argue that it was not ramped down and could have been phased out more quickly but you also have to look at the political discussion at the time of deciding to put a stop on nuclear.

It's not a bias. It's just the scope of the book.

Japan’s power grid apparently has problems making increased capacity and load sharing difficult, and they rely a lot on imported fossil fuels. It explains among other things why they’re so enthusiastic about hydrogen and not so much about electric cars. I’m not sure what lessons other countries can learn from their choices.

Here’s a deep dive about it:

https://tildes.net/~enviro/15sb/japan_to_invest_107_billion_...

There is certainly bias, but there’s also a whole lot of “refuse to acknowledge reality”.

Certainly, there is a cost/benefit to compare, but really, bluntly, we’re shit at cleaning up nuclear disasters.

In every situation where they’ve occurred, it’s taken longer and cost more than anticipated, and the point here is that this enormously expensive disaster could have been 10x worse if not for a lucky coincidence.

> Even if there is a risk of a $10 trillion disaster…

/sigh…

The problem is not that it’s too expensive; it’s that we’re not technologically advanced enough to deal with nuclear disasters other than brute force “pack everything into bricks and bury it in a hole”.

People will do it, because they close their eyes and hope nothing goes wrong (hey, won’t be in office when it does, this is your problem next generation, haha~), but things will go wrong, and it will. Again. Be crushingly expensive.

…and until we solve ”deal with it when it goes wrong”, bluntly, nuclear energy is always going to be controversial based on different levels of risk acceptance by different groups.

It’s not cognitive bias. You just have a different opinion. Neither you nor they are “right” about acceptable levels of risk.

The solution isn’t singing and dancing about nuclear power being safe.

It is not safe.

The solution is find ways to make it safe by being able to contain, control and deal with nuclear materials without needing “10000 years in a hole in the ground” for waste material, or “evacuate the entire metropolitan Tokyo” when things go wrong. Those are not things that happen with “safe” technology.

What if the Tsunami had hit Tokyo? How big would that disaster have been?

Sendai is a much smaller city and it had over 100k destroyed buildings, 15k dead or missing, and well over 100k without shelter. Estimates of the damage to infrastructure is estimated in the $Trillion range (over $300B spent in direct govt rebuilding incentives).

Maybe we shouldn't build large cities next to water since we're not technologically advanced enough to deal with natural disasters?

In a context of rising tides, yes, that's not a smart idea. Like it wasn't smart to do it in the context of middle-age piracy in the Mediterranean, or when the Roman Empire crumbled and cities on plains became indefensible - people moved to hills and mountains, further from the coast.

Sendai was hit by a tsunami and the cost was huge, but if you visit Sendai now, it’s quite nice.

People can understand this kind of risk.

There was a disaster, it got cleaned up. Now, people live there and are happy.

The same is true of many other floods.

So… I’d say we technologically advanced enough to deal with flood waters.

Unlike, literally every nuclear disaster.

Believe what you want to believe dude. No amount of snark, prancing or shaking your fist at the sky about nuclear safety is going to convince people it’s safe.

…until we have technological solutions that more effectively deal with nuclear radiation, radioactive substances and radiation related illness.

I've stayed with people in Sendai before and after the tsunami.

Based on the snarky prancing I don't think you have, dude.

Watch footage of that event again and repeat the words, "People can understand this kind of risk".

> (hey, won’t be in office when it does, this is your problem next generation, haha~)

Isn't global warming a problem we're trying to ignore and offload to the next generations too? Despite all you said is true, I still think we're better equipped to deal with nuclear power plants than hurricanes, floodings and all the other disasters that climate change has in store for us in the future. This is something we have to consider too when discussing the cost/danger-benefits of nuclear energy.

Has anyone else noticed these kind of posts appear quickly for certain vested-interest areas, get voted to the top but don't have much if any backup to them?

Let's break this down.

> rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense

Agreed

> ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy.

No justification given in the form of a cost/benefit analysis (which the poster just invoked the need for), just a flat statement that it is the "best possible". Note the use of weasel word 'best'.

> having electricity justifies taking some rational risks and is working to undo the damage caused by post-Fukushima overreaction ... there was an insistence on choosing technology ideologically rather than using practical concerns

"Rational" in "rational risks", and "overreaction", also "ideologically" versus "practical concerns" More weasel words, pure emotive invocations.

I could go on, but let's finish with

> that they are cheaper but also less effective at maintaining a comfortable society

Absolutely no justification for this, and completely ignoring the fact that climate change is now kicking in badly.

How the hell did this get voted to the top, because I'm starting to have my suspicions. If it's not shilling then it certainly against HN rules "..don't post shallow dismissals ... A good critical comment teaches us something", this being precisely a shallow dismissal and nothing I can learn from except some people are wilfully blind to what they don't want to see.

Something, somewhere is blatantly going wrong with commenting.

The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy. There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change.

> The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy

Maybe. Do you have anything to back that up?

> There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change

That would possibly include me, but that does not allow glossing over their risks and failures, which is exactly what the parent post did. I'm not disagreeing with it, I'm asking it to be backed up with evidence. To repeat, this isn't about nuclear energy but the quality of HN posts about various subjects.

Accusations of shilling without evidence are also against HN rules. If you have a suspicion, it’s best to email HN.

Seems to me it's effectively impossible to get evidence of shilling, but if this is indistinguishable from shallow dismissals – which it precisely is – this post should be dealt with in an equivalent way.

That said, the moderators are glad to delete certain kinds of posts (including some of mine, rightly or wrongly), but not this kind. And maybe they are right not to, but I'd like to know why.

Edit: I come to HN because there's a lot of good, informative posts and also descriptions of people's experience. This is really valuable stuff, but it's being drowned out by timewasting fluff and garbage to the point where I'm starting to regret coming here, and I especially regret posting something that tries to be informative when the only response I get for a few subjects (eg. drugs) appears to be co-ordinated, weaponised downvoting. Downvotes are fine, but I need to know why someone disagrees.

Yes - cost v benefit - ha!

I don't see nuclear proponents comparing potential cost (say $10T) against benefit (power produced during plant's lifetime - optimistically $10B (over 30 years). That's 1000:1 against.

By wikipedia, there are about 170 nuclear power plants and have been 6 accidents costing over $1B - approximately 1 in 30 plants have had very expensive accidents.

Those odds don't make sense for any country. Though they might make sense for an investor, knowing that they won't be required to pay those big costs - they might win and (in the event of a disaster) they only loose their investment. Perhaps if they have to guarantee the $10T potential costs, they'd look realistically at the "investment".

> By wikipedia...

This is exactly what I'm talking about – provide the bloody link so we can actually check your claims.

Provide a link! Don't just tell us, allow us to verify!

Edit: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster

"Initial estimates of costs to Japanese taxpayers were in excess of 12 trillion yen ($100 billion).[299] In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion)"

I am not against nuclear power, but I am deeply worried by people like you who clearly only want to see the upside - and it is that which makes me nervous of nuclear power not the technology itself but the blindness of people around it."Costing over $1 billion" is just plain misleading.

For the record:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations

And "I do not think that [comment] means what you think it means." You seem to think that I see an upside to nuclear power. Read the comment.