The official numbers around radiation exposure from Three Mile Island claim minimal radiation exposure, yet studies have found numerous contradictory effects including 64% increased rates of cancer, > 50% increase in young infant mortality, and various other ill effects. [1] Studies have not been able to prove a causal link, but that's largely because they take, as an assumption, the correctness of the official numbers, making it essentially impossible to reject the null hypothesis or, in other words, prove a causal link.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident_hea...

There's a slew of studies mentioned in your link, not all aligned with some "official" policy of suppression - and they amount in total to tentative evidence of maybe something.

Statistically it's inconclusive whether slight increases in some zones from a bit below average to a bit above average cancer rates is linked to TMI or to stress and|or increased screening.

What is certain, beyond a doubt, is that within the last week an explosion at a nickel plant in Indonesia left at least 13 dead and 46 injured.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/24/explosion-at-a...

That's an example of the generally unreported and ongoing human cost of battery technology.

Note Well: I'm not pro nuclear OR anti battery - I am pragmatic about the real consequences of resource mining and extraction having been part of exploration geophysics and global resource mapping for several decades.

Are you suggesting that a death due to an explosion at a plant owned by "PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel" counts against batteries, because some of them use nickel, but not nuclear plants, which pretty much require nickel-containing stainless steel for its anti-corrosion properties?

No.

I'm stating that to date all mining and processing of resources involves deaths, multilations, long term disease, etc.

I'm asserting that to date the cumulative deaths from the nuclear power industry do not yet equal the deaths from a single Bhopal disaster (pesticide processing, half a million people exposed, many dead).

I'm putting forward as a simple fact that as wind, solar, batteries, etc continue to scale up from the small sliver of total global energy they currently are to ideally matching the current percentage of coal there will need to be a substantial increase in the tonnages of nickel, copper, lithium, and more that are mined, concentrated, processed and extracted and that comes with substantial increases in the wastes associated with these industries and the known risks to human life.

I would suggest that anybody making a human risk argument on any single portion of the energy industry look broadly at the risks across the board.

It's perfectly fine to chest beat about safety, I'm for it.

It's callously indifferent to only give a damn about a few deaths in a sector not approved while ignoring those in sectors liked.

Until we stop building and burning coal for power “radiation” is not an excuse because coal power puts off far more radiation then TMI ever did even with a partial meltdown

No one banned nuclear. But of course it is the only sensible reaction to such an incident to check your designs for faults and review all reactors under construction. And then decide whether it is prudent to continue with the construction and which changes would be required.

In effect they did through overzealous safety requirements (which made it more expensive compared to other forms of electricity generation)

this regulatory inconsistency is mostly irrational, because it's clear through other policies that society values safety much less in other policies (eg. driving, all the emissions from other sources, gun safety, etc)

of course regulations are not perfect mirrors of society's preferences, but it's close enough. (and of course society doesn't "has to be" consistent, but I would say a pretty vocal minority, perhaps even the majority wishes it to be so)

.

.

that said, yes, if the world would order 1000+ nuclear power plants, all standardized, then we could have it cheaper, because then it would make sense to invest in automation, and maybe modular small reactors can already get enough traction. but since we are not ordering that many and even AP1000 is just a brand not really a standard, there's practically no economies of scale

Considering the potential damage, nuclear is right up there with aviation, medical and life science when it comes to safety standards. Because each and every incident can be traced back to ignoring whatever safety standards and practices where applicable at the time these accidents happened.

Someone would have to pay for those 1000 NPPs, and in the current market conditions no one is willing to, because the ROI isn't there. Even you said so, there is no NPP standard in place to begin with, so before those 1000 plants are ordered, this standard design has to defined, agreed upon and developed first. And that takes how long in your opinion?

Yes, and the safety conscious approach is great, and aviation and medicine are a pretty good examples, they can be safe and cheap at the same time. (Notwithstanding the usual [and rightful!] grumbling about the FDA, and the Boeing/FAA MCAS fuckup.)

The ROI is not there because other forms of electricity generation didn't have to pay for most of their externalities[1], and people don't give a damn about actual safety profile, or mid-long term overall costs, it's simply the usual sentimentalism-theater.

> Oh think of the nuclear waste, oh think of the poor little spent fuel rods leaking into our puppies' drinking water, oh think of all the horrible unspeakable tragedies we will get when every Monday Chernobyl repeats but worse, Fridays are for Fukushimas, and the rest of the weekdays are for all the usual GreenPeace-made-up dangers. But of course instead currently, of course, we enjoy the peaceful and prosperous energy abundance granted to us by ... checks notes ... the same geniuses who delivered the just one-more-lane will solve the traffic jams for sure hit comedy series, the single-family house exclusive rated 10/10 absolute heavens on Earth[2], healthcare as an investment [3], but muh guns [4], and so on.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Largo,+FL,+USA/@27.9213946... whatever the hell is going on here :o

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773426 private equity takeover is amazing for hospitals(' profitabilty)

[4] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/special-report/u... muh guns and muh freedum to leave guns in not-even-locked cars to get stolen

What are you even talking about? and what have guns to do with any of that? Or Greenpeace? After all, it is a well known fact that NPPs are uninsureable, always have been. Because insurance compabies are extremely good at running risk-premium-profit models, and those all tell the same thing: don't offer insurance for NPPs above very small amounts that are nowhere near enough to cover a serious accident.

I'm talking about the usual failure of policy-through-populism. Nuclear energy is in the same category as those I mentioned.

Uninsurable at what price? If NPPs work without insurance, maybe it's irrelevant anyway. (Especially since private parties hardly can just run their own NPPs, and states already run them or allow them to be run without insurance.)

That said I don't know whether residents near NPPs have a higher preimum because of the plant. Or even whether they can get policies from insurers. But if they can, then insurance already does underwrite some of the costs of potential accidents.

>Because each and every incident can be traced back to ignoring whatever safety standards and practices where applicable at the time these accidents happened.

No they absolutely cannot. Many incidents happened due to yet unimagined failures. For example, KLM Flight 867, which lost all four engines due to a common mode failure (flying through ash clouds). The plane landed safely and safety standards were updated to provide guidance on avoiding, detecting, and reacting to ash ingestion.

TMI was a similar situation. At that point, nobody had really considered human factors engineering for nuclear plants. Nobody considered the risk of having a lamp that indicated that a valve had been asked to close instead of that it actually was closed.

One major challenge that aviation has handled better than nuclear and much better than chemical production is ensuring that issues get reported promptly and treated seriously. Aviation calls it "just culture", where mistakes and accidents are treated with retraining and lenience, but covering up issues is treated very harshly. This is absolutely necessary, otherwise you end up with major communications issues like we saw with MetEd during TMI or Tepco during Fukishima.

I ment nuclear accidents and disasters, both Chernobyl and Fukushima can be traced back to ignoring safety rules and regulations.

Ah I see. Let me write up a few thoughts about the "big 3" nuclear accidents.

Chernobyl was a very poor design, with a positive void coefficient of reactivity (i.e. temperature goes up, steam goes up, reactivity goes up, leading to runaway feedback) and no containment building. It was operated in a very poor manner as well, which was the principle cause of the failure. Some sources[1] claim that this poor design and unsafe operating conditions were well known to plant management and Soviet leadership, and were covered up in the name of Progress and production pressures. There was even a very similar accident that occurred during a very similar test in Leningrad in 1975, albeit with less extreme consequences, which was fully covered up, even from plant operators at other RBMK reactors.[2]

Fukushima was a pretty well designed and operated reactor, but the design basis did not consider the risk of a large tsunami, rather instead focusing on typhoons. Ironically, they actually removed a larger "natural sea wall" (i.e. a cliff) that would have protected the plant.[3] The big lesson learned here is to have prepositioned stocks of generators, batteries, replacement parts, etc close enough to the plant to be supplied promptly as needed, but far enough away to hopefully be excluded from any local disasters, aka the FLEX program.[4]

On the other hand, TMI was an accident in which the operators made the wrong call, primarily because they had been trained to be concerned about one specific danger ("going solid" and bursting the pressurizer, requiring less water injection), but really they were facing a totally different one (small break loss of cooling, requiring more high pressure water injection).[5] Interestingly, a very similar accident happened at Davis Besse in Ohio only a few years before, but without any major consequences, as the operations team recognized the mistake and resolved it, but these lessons learned were not well communicated to operators of other plants. This failure and others like it led to the establishment of WANO (international) and INPO (USA) which are organizations intended to help operators share experiences with each other in a timely and safe manner.[6][7]

1: https://www.reuters.com/world/unsealed-soviet-archives-revea...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Nuclear_Power_Plant

3: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem...

4: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1524/ML15244B006.pdf

5: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1556/tmi-operators-did-what...

6: https://www.wano.info/services/overview-of-services-(1)

7: https://www.inpo.info/history

And the estimated cleanup costs are ~500 billion, ~50 billion and ~1 billion. Expensive mistakes.

The cleanup costs are high enough that you could have literally replaced the entire nuclear power plant fleet of Japan and built new ones. When it comes to nuclear safety, tear it up and build again is cheaper than any single accident. Nuclear power plant advocates don't seem to understand the magnitude of the failure of a nuclear power plant. It simply is unacceptable.

Two additions to your otherwise great summary:

After the Leningrad incident, the RBMK Chief Engineering organisation announced changes to the operating procedures taken this incident into account to all RMBK plants. Those procedures where never written, and none of the operators asked about them neither. That was pure negligence, and no cover up (the cover up was invented by the HBO series, no idea why). What is true so, is that the whole bureaucracy and organisation in the USSR let Chenobyl 4 get away with well known safety and regulation violations before the accident, and those regulation were extremely lax by modern standards to begin with.

An interesting bit about Fukushima is not the reactor design, there is apparently nothing inherently wrong with that, but rather the site. As you said, the seawall was too low, mainly because during the site development earthquakes of the magnitude that caused the tsunami where not considered despite geological proof to the contrary. That was negligence number one. Number two occured after simulations years before the tsunami predicted pretty exactly the magnitude of the earthquake and the height of the following tsunami. Despite being fully aware of that simulation, and the effects on the site, no measures where taken, e.g. updated procedures or a heigher sea wall or moving batteries and generators to higher ground.

The IAEA reports on both, Chernobyl (the IAEA report in English includes translations of the two Soviet ones, and man are those two damning even before you consider who wrote them) and Fukushima are very good reads, highly recommended if you didn't read them already.

Potential damage is one thing, but for actual deaths coal is 1000 times more deadly per TWh than nuclear, so surely coal requires far more rigourous safety standards

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

It would never occur to me to defend coal...

You need to look at the potential consequences of an accident to determine how rigorous the safety standards should be. A metric such as deaths/TWh cannot answer that question and therefore should not be used to guide the answer.

You have to weigh the likelihood of potential harm. The liklihood of harm from the co2 pumped out by continued fossil fuel is far higher than some magical never before happened scenario

We're no longer talking about how rigorous the safety standards should be. Your claim was that deaths/TWh is a good metric to determine this, I disagreed and replied to that.

Deaths per twh shows just how safe nuclear is compared with other fuels, yet nuclear is the one overburdened with more safety requirements.

yes, but no.

so yes, nuclear is (almost?) the safest, but the direction of causality is the opposite.

it's safe because we made it safe, because the inherent nature basically necessitates is (because it's a form of energy generation that is a lot more efficient in big plants, and because fissile material requires a very careful handling compared to - for example - coal, and therefore the cost-benefit trade-offs of making NPPs very safe is basically a no-brainer up to a point)

the problem is that it's hard to find this inflection point where "more safety against acute problems" actually leads to more harm from "chronic problems", basically where we are reducing the meltdown events so low that we end up suffocating in fly ash from coal power plants. (not to mention the secondary effects of "killing" the nuclear industry.)

Meltdown events have basically been zero on designs for decades. But we still have massive barriers against nuclear when even things like wind kill more.

Everyone talks about Fukushima and the half a dozen cancer cases. Nobody talks about the ten thousand that died from other effects from the earthquake, nobody talks about the thousands that died that year to produce the same amount of output from coal

Same with airline security. I get my toothpaste check Kes out because of the “potential” of some deaths, yet nobody stopped me driving to the airport that morning, and driving actually kills thousands in the US alone every month.

The reason for not talking about that is that it's not relevant for this discussion. Deaths due to the earthquake that are unrelated to the nuclear power plant do not help us to assess nuclear accident risk.

Same goes for your airline security example. Car related accidents/attacks are unrelated to airplane accidents/attacks.

If nuclear power plants slowly created an exclusion zone around them that grows over time, then you would have a point since each individual plant would have a tiny exclusion zone, but the problem is that the accidents are the result of gross negligence in the cases of both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Arguing about modern safety standards is meaningless by the way. Back when the Fukushima accident happened, the Fukushima power plant was older than the one in Chernobyl. This tells us two things. People build unsafe nuclear power plant designs, even when safer ones are available and second, when regulations get stricter, the bad power plants stick around for decades until they fail. If you wanted to put nuclear power plants into the best spotlight possible, you would demand old power plants be replaced by new designs, since that massively reduces the risk of another accident that makes nuclear power look bad. However, what we hear all the time is that the nuclear power plant industry wants less safety regulations so that they can cheaply repeat mistakes of the past.

If you claim the safety requirements were overzealous, do you have any data to substantiate your claim?

On nuclear construction cost increases, from Crowley and Griffith 1982, “US construction cost rise threatens nuclear option” (via @whatisnuclear):

""" Ironically, some of the decisions that have been made in the name of improving safety margins for low probability events, may have reduced the safety margins for high probability events. The UE&C piping study uncovered numerous areas where the tolerances requested in the piping design documents might be appropriate for a machine shop oriented manufacturing operation, but are totally unrealistic for field construction. """

via https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-12-15

The whole quote is worth reading/skimming.

More importantly this zero risk approach has to be considered relative to all the other risks arising from building other types of power plants.

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

(and of course a bit more on the problems with the process at the NRC https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/waiting-on-the-nuclear-regu... )

And yet... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...

Is there a similar list for coal plants?

Also, skimming the list of USA incidents, there are a great deal of bullshit "incidents" in recent times. Most related to natural machanical breakdowns in non radioactive systems due to everything being operated decades past its expiration date. Wouldn't be happening if new NPPs had been built to replace these ancient designs.

Coal simply does not have the same risk profile so such a list does not exist.

> Wouldn't be happening if new NPPs had been built to replace these ancient designs.

That's possible but the economics have to make sense as well. You would do well to try and extend the lifetime of a NPP and run it as an LTO NPP, this maximises profits if it is possible to run the plant past the lifetime it was originally designed for. Incremental upgrades are the way to go in such a case.

You can literally operate the coal power plant until it falls apart and burns down and nobody gives a damn. Try doing that with a nuclear power plant.

And thus!

This is how a good culture of safety looks like. Treat small stuff seriously to prevent the big bad things. Similarly with aviation, and with medicine, etc.

> No one banned nuclear.

Sometimes, when your employer wants to fire you but doesn’t want you to be able to file for unemployment or accuse them of firing you for some legally impermissible reason, they just make it so miserable to keep working there that you end up quitting. There is a legal term for this: “constructive dismissal”. I hope the implied analogy is obvious.

Yes. But it proves nothing.

Coal cause more cancer and pumps a huge amount of radioactive material into the sky but I've not seen anyone closing coal power stations to stop that. The fear of nuclear power is just one of those irrational fears..

The long term plan is to shut down all coal plants. In the US alone coal usage has more than halved since 2008.

Of course people want to close coal power stations too. One might argue about the relative timing, but the goal is to get rid of nuclear and coal. And while a safely operating nuclear plant is actually pretty low on radiation, we unfortunately had severe incidents which released a lot of radiation. Here in Bavaria, the forests are still contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster. Wild boar meat still has to be checked for radiation and a lot of it destroyed as not fit for consumption. Never mind the meat which probably gets eaten unchecked.

This is pure whataboutism.

Silent downvotes, nice. The amount of nuclear shilling here...

Your comments are getting downvoted because they're breaking the site guidelines. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them instead? We'd appreciate it. Note these:

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

"Omit internet tropes"

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken"

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

So is bitching about nuclear while ignoring the much worse coal.

No one is ignoring coal lmao

People complaining about nuclear power are mostly concerned with cost and time needed for construction and no loosening regulations is not an option.

Maybe not no one

https://berkeley.municipal.codes/BMC/12.90.050

The funny thing is these effing boomers still protest against nuclear power at the end of University Avenue every month, as if this was somehow a relevant concern in 2023.

I remember when I lived there, they had to get a special exemption to use self-checkout machines made by 3M in the Berkeley library. I don't remember why 3M ended up on the bad boy list, probably something related to nuclear weapons though.

"The Peace and Justice Commission finds that it would violate the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act (NFBA) to approve a waiver of the law and contract with 3M Corporation for maintenance of the Library’s RFID system."

"Pursuant to B.M.C. Section 12.90.070, the City of Berkeley shall grant no contract to any person or business, which knowingly engages in work for nuclear weapons."

Thank you for the quotes. Can you provide the source too? Google search returns only this page for quoted searches for this text.