> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.

Funnily, I have almost the opposite view. I'm terrified of old nuclear because those first gen power plants are all missing a lot of safety lessons. Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.

I want old nuclear plants to be either upgraded or decommissioned. I have much less concern about new nuclear (other than it taking a very long time and an a lot of money to deploy).

A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.

Nuclear reactors are regularly maintained, tested and checked. When possible, old plants are upgraded to new safety standards.

You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...

Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues. They have been dragging their feet for decades on the subject and instead of building new reactors 10-20 years ago, they are now un-decomissioning older reactors..

    > Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues.

I want to point out that Belgium has the (global) gold standard of nuclear regulation. They have annual reviews, 5 year major reassessments, and 10 year Periodic Safety Review (PSR). The purpose of the PSR is to build a plan to keep all nuclear plants up-to-date with state of the art safety mechanisms. Each PSR has mandatory upgrades. If operators fail or refuse these upgrades, they are forced to shutdown. There is no one other country who does nuclear safety quite like Belgium.

old!= bad. You fix stuff and you operate it safely. Running existing units for as long as possible is sensible.

Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission.

These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.

On the contrary, Japan is changing it's energy policy and restarting it's nuclear reactors.

"Japan’s Energy Plan: New Policy Shifts Nuclear Power Stance from Reduction to Maximization"

https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01195/

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Hmm, I may have been too vague. When I stated "these" I was talking specifically about the Fukushima plants and not Japan's policy for reactors nationally.

Are they planning on restarting the Fukushima plants? I didn't think they were.

The Fukushima plants were completely destroyed by the meltdowns and subsequent Hydrogen explosions that were caused by the Tsunami.

There was never any chance of "restarting" them, so not sure why you brought that up.

Because I'm confused at to what the

> On the contrary

was about. Contrary to what?

Contrary to your claim Japan is not shutting down its nuclear reactors. It is restarting them.

Not a claim I made.

> These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.

This was about the Fukushima reactors that were completely destroyed? In response to a discussion of Belgian reactors that are completely different?

Fukushima units were dismantled more from fear of public opinion. They could have operated unaffected units further safely with proper fixes

All nuclear reactors are massively safer than coal power plants though. If you excluded climate change and Co2 emissions entirely and measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated the difference would be astronomical.

> measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated

In this case, we find that nuclear nuclear reactors are 2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than gas and coal power plants.

do you account for all the air pollution and downstream health effects coal power plants cause?

Or you know, just build renewables and storage. Displace vastly more coal faster with a death per kWh where the only injuries comes from traditional construction and mechanical industry work.

No need for any special casing.

> where the only injuries comes from traditional construction and mechanical industry work.

Still count.

They do count, but look at it from a societal perspective.

For the general public no harm can come their way.

Unless they through some mechanical failure manage to walk underneath a wind turbine shedding or collapsing.

Same with solar. Which is even less risky.

For nuclear power the about all effects from a large scale failure will impact society through either radiation or life changing evacuations.

And then society is on the hook to pay for the entire cleanup work.

For renewables the only people who get harmed are those who work in the industry. The risk for the general public is zero.

evacuation in Fukushima was forced. They could have stayed just as well - dose was too small. Statistically nuclear is great. Even more so considering fossil firming strategy in many countries

Here your blind conviction always praise nuclear power lost you the plot. All based on hindsight.

Knowing the outcome that happened and perfectly slicing the decisions to fit that.

How do you expect to be the politician ordering not to evacuate when you have a nuclear plant in unstable condition undergoing hydrogen explosions while you’re flying blind about the true state of things. You know, the hindsight.

Radiation data was known. Due to sensors outside of the plant area. Jp govt ignored it.

Even more so, after the accident when the situation was certain, evacuation orders weren't immediately cancelled to let people back into their homes despite the dose being very low, in some cases even below natural background radiation levels in other areas of Japan

Unnecessary evacuation killed over 2.3k people. That's half of waht are expected to die fron Chernobyl accident over a century per UN or about 5 times more vs nr of expected deaths per updated UNSCEAR reports. Fear of nuclear killed more people than nuclear itself ij this case

You’re still missing the point.

Radiation data was known. But that assumes that it can’t change.

How can you assume that nothing will change for nuclear plant undergoing hydrogen explosions which you’ve lost all control over?

I think you know this, which is why your stuck in hindsight and trying to shift the discussion to other topics.

There's no need to do such harsh rushed evacuation even if situation was much worse as Chernobyl proves. Many that died from evacuation were old or sick people that wouldn't have had symptoms even if it was as bad as Chernobyl (even though it would be physically impossible to have uranium burning into clouds there like in Chernobyl due to design difference)

What's worse, after situation was known and stabilized, government didn't cancel evacuation orders but kept them for years even though the dose was small.

I'm not shifting the discussion but telling the reality, a reality that killed many people even though they could have lived https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014919702...

Which is again hindsight trying to downplay what was at hand.

How do you know it wouldn’t become worse than Chernobyl when you have lost control?

Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?

Because you can't have Chernobyl by design. Like physically.

Nobody is downplaying the risks- not evacuating sick people and old people would have done far less damage regardless of the incident outcome. They just wouldn't have lived enough or a very small nr would have been affected

And as said, what's worse. When incident was tackled and radiation levels known, govt didn't rush to lift the orders causing even more deaths.

I'm not afraid of renewables and bess and never said that, don't put words in my mouth. I just realize that without nuclear countries will be bound to expanding gas firming if they dont have hydro, just like Germany. We can make a bet that even in 30y German emissions per kwh will still be worse than french ones due to this firming. In other words due to antinuclear policy in 50y of energiewende Germany will still have worse emissions vs France which did the job in about 20y of Messmer

Still. What the industry learnt after Fukushima was to tighten the and stress test the plans. An even stronger mandate to "within this area always evacuate".

Looking at what is happening gas usage is cratering all over Europe. What you are saying is someone assuming nothing will ever change. Even though BESS and renewables are completely reshaping the markets.

Justifying your standpoint by that the renewable industry in the early 2000s didn't deliver enough results.

But you do realize that we live in 2026 right? That is an entirely different beast. That is the industry that is delivering all new capacity globally and causing Indias and Chinas coal usage to decline in absolute terms.

And that industry will continue to scale. While you're stuck advocating for the technology that doesn't even complement it.

... and add a pipe to vent the hydrogen gases outside instead of accumulating it inside the reactor building!

Those old reactors in Belgium have already had several issues.

> Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.

You used plural? What disasters are you talking about?

Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway).

Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineers..)

I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However:

> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors

The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.

The Fukushima quake was a truly extraordinary outlier though!

4th biggest quake ever recorded in history hit at the exact spot where the tsunami could overpower the protective wall at the reactor. Yet nobody died from the radiation.

Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten. No one demands we stop building cities by the ocean.

    > Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten.

You are wrong. They are not forgotten.

I lost count at 50

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

That list includes:

- a nuclear missile test site

- theft of radioactive material

- incorrect disposal of research or medical equipment

- radiotherapy accidents

If you can't be bothered to examine your sources for relevance, why should we?

What nuclear disasters? Exactly? Name one nuclear disaster at an old nuclear plant whose lessons weren’t applied to the whole fleet.

I think the issue comes with unknown unknowns. Before Fukushima someone might have said the same thing you just have, but a new disaster still came along and caused a lot of issues. I am still bullish on nuclear, but I think waving away concerns might do more harm than good.

Unknown design flaws in old nuclear power plants wouldn't be fixed in new nuclear power plants, unless if by chance.

Fukushima was a known risk though, they just never bothered to fix the problem. Plus just being planned in the 60s meant the initial design was born only about 15 years after nuclear power was invented. Fukishima was like driving around in a Model T, being told original brakes and tires and lack of seatbelts were unsafe, but still being regularly driven down busy roads without bothering to upgrade those features.

You reckon during the 44 years Fukushima Daiitchi operated there were no systems control and data acquisition upgrades?

And you reckon that the site operated for 44 years on a Gen II design without melting down is somehow an insisted or how unsafe those reactors were.

If that earthquake and tsunami had been only a bit different in either magnitude or location, those reactors could be operating still now.

Or if the plant operated had hardened those backup generators and water pumps a bit more.

There are 70 AP1000 reactors in operation, construction or planned.

Look at this:

Because of its simplified design compared to a Westinghouse generation II PWR, the AP1000 has:

50% fewer safety-related valves 35% fewer pumps 80% less safety-related piping 85% less control cable 45% less seismic building volume

Isn’t this the kind of thing hackers and tech advocates should be getting a raging hardon over.

This reactor does nearly twice as much as its predecessor using half the materials to build, at least for some systems.

Fukushima failed because of the aftermath of a 9.1 earthquake.

Huh! News to me. I thought it was a CIA false flag Mossad MKUltra LSD Lizard people remote viewing black ops program.

And your telling me it just a regular commercial off the shelf run if the mill garden variety earthquake.

Man to I need to touch grass.

theres the well known inherent problem with the graphite at UK AGR reactors which could be very bad (can crack or misshape in such a way that the control rods or fuel rods cant be moved), not to mention the boiler cracking at the weldseams, they only mitigated this at some sites because they all are slightly different in design, they basically ignored it in the ones which didnt yet have it for decades ,the regulator ended up finding exactly that lessons learnt on older reactors were not being applied to newer ones which had the same problems inherent to them

The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.

The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.

Even in case of RBMK where were many lessons learned. There are still to this day 7 operational RBMKs in Russia.

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

RMBKs are irrelevant to nuclear reactor safety.

You had a good argument up until you went there.

Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal

I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'

Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...

Happy to be proven wrong, but https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

> it occasionally irradiates a swath

That has happened exactly once.

>That has happened exactly once.

And affected an area about the size of half the continental US, causing expensive countermeasures to be taken for 40 years and counting.

Maybe once was enough?

Care to document what expensive countermeasures are nowadays being taken in the area the size of half the continental US?

I can give some scattered examples:

Norway 2025: https://www.dsa.no/en/radioactivity-in-food-and-environment/...

"Every year, sheep herds in selected municipalities must be brought down onto cultivated land and given clean feed for a certain number of weeks before they can be slaughtered, in order to bring the levels in the meat down below the maximum permitted level."

Germany 2026, 3000 boar at 100-200 euros compensation each:

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...

Scotland was done after "only" 25 years:

https://robedwards53.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/25-years-on-ch...

“It has taken nearly 25 years for the contamination of Scottish soils to decay to officially safe levels – and we're 1,400 miles away,”

Northern norway - scotland - bavaria - ukraine, that's about half the continental US affected for decades, so it's a fair comparison wouldn't you agree?

It would be interesting to do a survey in Eastern Europe countries of the effect of eating 'too hot to eat' stuff for a generation.

Because, I can assure you, nothing of that kind has ever been done here. And we are much, much, closer.

In fact, I do remember that summer being known for extreme abundance of wild mushrooms. People happily picked them.

My country has its share of public health problems, but I am not aware of an obvious radioactivity-induced signal.

>And we are much, much, closer.

The fallout does not necessarily fall er, out closer to the plant. It depends on weather, which way the winds blew and where it happened to rain.

That said, you may by all means be right that the fears from what actually happened was too high. You may also be wrong, it's hard to tell.

But that is actually not relevant to the point. We know that actual Chernobyl caused expensive countermeasures to be deployed in a very large area for a long time because there was a measurable reason to do so.

The important thing to consider here is not how bad it actually was, but how bad it could have been.

If the plant had burned for months instead of days, it would have been so bad that any discussion about nuclear power today would only be done as satire.

Yes, it is true, the weather at that time did that big loop thing, taking the bad stuff up to Scandinavia and then eventually looping it back.

Still, some stuff clearly came here, the mushrooms appreciated it.

Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to figure out what was the real impact.

You are correct, things could have been much worse. On the other hand, also as a result of Chernobyl, anything similar is nowadays much less likely.

At the end, it is always a tradeoff. Germany and others turning off their nuclear power stations got themselves in quite an energetic problem. Especially nowadays with all the wars and their consequences.

> it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable

The big fear for me would be that this happens to a nuclear power plant that is located in a densely populated area (of which there are many). Chernobyl was bad, but imagine the impact if the exclusion zone contained a major city.

Two new AP1000 reactors are being built in Ukraine. During a hot war.

That’s how safe and important these things are.

> That’s how safe and important these things are.

I don't think something being done in war time is evidence of it's safety! If anything, way tends to encourage more risk taking.

The only real problem with the Fukushima incident was the (unnecessary) evacuation. It really would be best if they weren't built too close to where people live.

>How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...

When did a dam failure in the Ukraine affect wildlife in Sweden for 30+ years? It's kind of a several-orders-of-magnitude larger area being affected for orders-of-magniture longer timespans.

Exxon valdez and even deepwater horizon is ancient history, Chernobyl is not, in fact it's current events. And will be, for the foreseeable future, as will Fukushima.

No Japanese alive today will stop paying for Fukushima for as long as they live. Are any other costs from the tsunami still ongoing?

>Happy to be proven wrong, but

Won't prove you wrong but maybe it will make you reconsider the link as a support of your argument:

Danger is what could happen, not what has actually happened.

A loaded gun is dangerous even if it hasn't been fired yet, nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam.

This is exactly my point. You are looking at a single fantastic instance: you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction, illness, and death per TWh. To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim

> nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam

Banqiao dam was a single hydroelectric installation, for which the estimated death toll of its failure is in the ballpark of every nuclear death combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki

>you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction

Sorry but this isn't true. You base this claim on what has happened but not what could have happened, which is a mistake.

The actual truth is that 1 Chernobyl almost ruined Europe. If the heroic individuals who managed to stop the graphite fire had said "f it I'm outta here" instead of sacrificing their lives, it would have made large areas in far corners of Europe uninhabitable, and even larger areas unsuitable for farming, for decades.

This is not hyperbole, it is a likely outcome based on the amount of material that would have been released and prevailing weather patterns.

It didn't actually happen, but it could have. We were spared the worst case scenarios from Chernobyl.

100 Chernobyls would not have been 100 Chernobyls that lasted for a week, most of them would have pumped out sterilizing levels of radiation for months. Nothing humans have done to date would be comparable to such a scenario.

Danger is not related to what has happened, but what could happen. This is important to keep in mind when discussing things that will have consequences for centuries. Many things happen over centuries, we're not even a century from WW2 yet.

>To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim

Figuratively, of course. I meant that the deepwater event is handled and done. We don't actively need to consider how to handle it today. Nature is still recovering but you can eat any fish you catch in the gulf without worrying about the oil spill and you don't need to clean any birds.

Chernobyl is not over, and won't be for the foreseeable future. It could cause new fallout 100 years from now, our grandchildren might have to pay for a new sarcophagus, at the very least pay for maintenance of the existing one. It is an ongoing cost on several national budgets.

Only a very few things that humans do really compares to the the consequences from nuclear power. It's troubling to see it being so severely misunderstood and belittled even on a forum like this. If we decide to do it it should at the very least be with a good understanding of the actual risks.

> I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'

Yep. It's called radiophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

And it is far, far deadlier than nuclear energy itself.

> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.

> Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though

I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?

Fukushima. It was a Gen 1 plant which already has the issue that a thermal runaway is possible. There were other examples of this happening like TMI. The backup for Fukushima was onsite generators which were flooded and ultimately failed causing the meltdown.

The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not something that can be applied across the fleet because it requires more infrastructure and an almost complete redesign of the reactor's setup. Which is why these early reactors all have a potential risk of thermal runaway.

Edit: It looks like all gen Is have been decommissioned as of 2015, which is great. But we really should now be talking about decommissioning gen IIs and leaping forward to Gen IVs.

It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster

1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths

2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan

3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money

> 1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths

"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".

It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.

> 2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan

Sure, but Belgium has to be prepared for something like the North Sea flood of 1953 - which climate change is only going to make worse.

> 3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

Irrelevant.

> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money

Correct, but a nuclear power plant in Belgium should be safe enough to survive the kind of disaster which is likely to happen in Belgium - which is very much a topic of debate.

If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?

> Irrelevant.

How can that be irrelevant. The disaster was directly caused by a very specific external factor that was not properly accounted for when it was built i.e. it's not generalizable to all nuclear plants in different areas.

> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?

Because it doesn't make sense from a risk management perspective, the risk is astronomically low and impossible to estimate, just like the potential damage which might be huge and again impossible to estimate. How do you even calculate the premiums or anything else for that matter?

> "Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".

The actual death toll of the accident itself is zero.

There was one incident of cancer that was ruled a "workplace accident" by an insurance tribunal that went through the press without much vetting.

However, this was for his overall work at the plant, largely preceding the accident.

The WHO says there has been and will be no measurable health impact due to Fukushima.

What caused a lot of deaths was the evacuation that almost certainly should not have happened.

"The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?

Nuclear is insured. The German nuclear insurance so far has paid out €15000,- since it was created in 1957.

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

For comparison, just the German nuclear auto-insurance pays out north of €15 billion per year.

There is a reason both Japan and Ukraine maintain and are actually expanding their nuclear programs.

>Nuclear is insured.

You should read the article you linked to. It actually explains that nuclear is defacto not insured, and that is the reason why they have only paid 15000 euros in total.

The TLDR is that basically no matter what happens, the cost is covered by the government of the country the plant is located in, and secondly other governments.

This is course also true even if nothing goes wrong with the plants, future tax payers pay for decommissioning, maintenance, storage etc.

None of this addresses the points made. It is talking around the subject by trying to shift the focus or narrow the perspective.

The cleanup bill is real.

The inability to get insurance is real.

The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.

The possibility of Fukushima scale accidents all depend on local conditions. And it may be as trivial as upgrades and component changes over the decades leading to safeties protecting the component rather than the larger system causing defense in depth to fail. Like happened in Forsmark in 2006.

Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history. There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.

> The inability to get insurance is real.

Which obviously doesn't prove what you think it proves...

> The cleanup bill is real

This still feels irrational compared to other dangerous industries.

> The inability to get insurance is real

It's real, but how much of it is rooted in emotional fear or bad industrial policy?

> The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.

And that's one of the lessons to learn from the Fukushima accident, that's why Canada changed their evacuation plans to be more granular for example.

> Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.

Storage gets very expensive as your share of renewables increases (because the capacity factor of storage goes down then). Having an amount of clean firm generation (nuclear) brings the overall cost of the system down.

edit: capacity factor might be the wrong term for storage, the point is their rate of utilization goes down and so does their profitability.

> There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.

I don't understand what we could effectively do with civil nuclear builds decades ago cannot be replicated today. Let's also talk about the cost of the transition to renewables in Germany please.

>>1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths

>"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".

Wikipedia asserts one "suspected" death, which I think is within bounds to call "basically zero". It does list a couple dozen injuries.

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

Just a few lines down:

> The displacements resulted in at least 51 deaths as well as stress and fear of radiological hazards

It's not clear the mismanaged massive evacuation was even necessary. In hindsight its like that less people would have died if they just stayed there for a few more days.

> It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.

Apparently wildlife is thriving in the radiation zone.

Intensity of radiation fades over the years (exponential decay). The bad stuff is gone fairly quickly. Decades means pretty low levels.

Just leave the radiation zone as a nature preserve, like the Chernobyl zone.

> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

> Irrelevant.

Well, that needs more nuance.

You have to understand that Japan is unusually well prepared for natural disasters. From earthquake resistant building codes, to alarm systems, education, to building, to earthquake refuges. I would venture to say that it is the most earhquake-prepared country in the world (although I have no proof of that point and I don't feel like looking for evidence on that it). Earthquakes that would have killed hundreds in other countries are footnotes in the news in Japan.

The earthquake alone was not enough to bring down Fukushima; the reactors shut down, as designed. The earthquake wasn't the direct cause of many deaths. It is difficult to estimate given the circumstances, but tens or maybe hundreds.

So in in that sense, yes, the earthquake is irrelevant.

However, after the earthquake, came the tsunami. That did shut down the Fukushima backup generators. No generators means no cooling, which means meltdown.

The tsunami also killed the most people. Now, why is this relevant?

Because the Japanese have had drills and tsunami education for decades. They have seawalls, strong buildings, and prepared infrastructure. The tsunami hit the least populated areas of the coast. In short, they were aware, trained and prepared, and they were not hit where most people live.

And still, ~15000+ died. That gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.

Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island. On top of that there have been dozens of near-misses. On the other hand: what would have been the result of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami hitting a wind farm, or a PV installation?

Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business, with virtually unlimited damages if something goes seriously wrong. I'm sure all the reactor operators reviewed their flood procedures after Fukushima and a 1:1 repeat is unlikely, but why didn't they do so before the incident? What other potential causes did the industry miss?

In this case it was indeed a large-scale natural disaster which caused the accident, but how sure are we that some medium-scale terrorism can't do the same, or some small-scale internal sabotage or negligent maintenance? The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.

Thought experiment: imagine nuclear were 100 times as deadly as it is, but ten times more prevalent (supplanting other fossil fuels, or even hydroelectric)

What would be the net effect? (I think it would be roughly on par with gas or hydroelectric and an order of magnitude safer than other fossil fuels even with this extremely pessimistic hypothetical)

> What would be the net effect?

It wouldn't be a linear increase i.e. you can more or less estimate how many people would die per MWh produced in hydro, gas, coal etc. plants.

With nuclear if somebody dies that means a some sort of catastrophic event likely occurred regardless if a 1 or 100+ people die the reactor will be out of commission and it will cost a massive amount of money to contain it.

I'm not following the argument for being able to estimate deaths per [T]Wh for hydro, gas, etc. but not nuclear. I think hydroelectric is especially analogous

Should we include this case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Why wouldn't we?

> Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island.

Three Mile Island was a success in the sense that even the worst case scenario the safety measures are sufficient to more or less fully contain it.

In Chernobyl's case... well yes it proves that if you let incompetent and stupid people build and operate nuclear power plants horrible things can happen.

> Three Mile Island was a success in the sense that even the worst case scenario

No, as it involved a partial meltdown, not a complete meltdown.

It's a success. The redundant systems of 3mi meant that the 10 miles around it received the effect of a chest x-ray.

I mean we allow coal plants to vent radioactive material. Surely nuclear considering it an accident is an improvement.

A nuclear accident with far more devastating consequences is possible.

The debate isn't about "nuclear or coal?" but about "nuclear or renewables?"

You're arguing based on pure hypotheticals.

> Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business,

Well, let me introduce you to airplanes — flying is inherently risky, and so many people have died on commercial flights. We should abolish it immediately!

> The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.

Maybe. I'm more concerned about coal plants that are, as we speak, dumping metric tons of harmful materials, including radioactive ones, into the atmosphere we all breathe, which causes approximately 100_000 people to die each year.

These are real things happening right now, not some hypothetical problems that may happen, but haven't in the last 60 years of commercial nuclear reactor operations.

Seriously, all you can cling to are what, 2-3 major accidents in all this time? With negligible death tolls? Please. This is just concern trolling.

I was arguing about the fact that the number of deaths on the tsunami was relevant. I think you must have answered to the wrong thread.

> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?

Almost every plant is bespoke, leading each plant to have unknown failure modes and rates. Additionally, insurance works by pooling risk amongst a large group of individuals but the statistical uncertainties of failure rates (too few events) and low total rate of plants leads to an incredibly uncertain risk profile.

The claim made in your first sentence is actually a reason to be concerned.

And also largely irrelevant to a possible future standardised fleet.

Also, obviously, that could lead to an issue with one being an issue with many.

The fact that it's impossible to estimate the risk because the failure rates are unknown is concerning?

Yes, more frequent failures would make it easier for insurance companies to estimate the risk and calculate premiums but I don't exactly see how that would be good thing...

The impression I've gotten is that almost all of the massive bills associated with nuclear power are because of an irrational fear of the radiation. Factoring in all the nuclear disasters and the radiations released from them, nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.

“Better than coal” is a weak argument. Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades. The problem for nuclear isn’t anything irrational - it’s economics and operational and deployment flexibility - newer tech like solar PV, gas turbines, batteries and wind have created a new Pareto frontier for electricity generation and nuclear just isn’t anywhere near this frontier for any objective.

> Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades.

What are talking about?

* China's installed coal-based power generation capacity was 1080 GW in 2021, about half the total installed capacity of power stations in China.*

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

India is the fifth-largest geological coal reserves globally and as the second-largest consumer, coal continues to be an indispensable energy source, contributing to 55% of the national energy mix. Over the past decade, thermal power, predominantly fueled by coal, has consistently accounted for more than 74% of our total power generation.

https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documen...

The last new coal power plant to come on-line in the US was in 2013 at Sandy Creek - 13 years ago. The last new coal power station built in Australia - Bluewaters Power station was built in 2009 - 17 years ago. In Europe coal's share has dropped from over 40% of generation at its peak in 2007 - about 20 years ago - and has declined to about 9%. Coal's days are over - natural gas is cheaper and more flexible, while solar PV and wind are cheaper.

There is of course a large installed base - a coal plant will last 50 years. The fact that developing countries have large installed coal capacity is neither here nor there.

That's kinda like saying we can release the tiger from the cage because it hasn't killed anyone while it was in the cage.

No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers because tigers pretty much never get out of their cages and get a to kill people unless there is some massive fuckup (i.e. you let soviet engineers supervise your tiger)

>No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers

No, then the original statement would have to have been "we should keep paying big bills so we can have safe nuclear", but it wasn't.

To be more direct, using statistics about incidents to claim something is safe a fallacy. Something extremely dangerous that is kept safe through effort and expense won't appear in the stats until you remove the effort and expense.

After genetically engineering a super tiger and keeping it hungry.

Not quite, because there have been disasters and radiation leaks. And if the number of deaths per megawatt produced is 10,000 times less than coal, despite those radiation leaks, radiation leaks cannot be anywhere as dangerous as commonly perceived.

> nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.

If we demonstrate scientific honesty and begin to apply the same level of techniques that are used to obtain the result of "10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt", we can come to the conclusion that even a small accident at a small nuclear power plant can destroy life on planet Earth as a phenomenon.

> Lead to basically zero direct deaths

Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done by a power generation mechanism.

> Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan

Yeah, crazy stuff happens and radioactive spills have longterm effects on the environment that are hard to address.

> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

That's a non-sequitur.

> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money

Japan has spent the equivalent of $180B cleaning up the mess Fukoshima left behind. [1] Decomissioning the old reactors and replacing them with the safer to avoid unexpected disasters which cost hundreds of billions does seem like a good use of money. Far better than just hoping something unexpected doesn't happen.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38131248

It's always hard count indirect deaths.

We could for example argue that Japan, by stopping it's nuclear power plants for long time and replacing it's cheap nuclear electricity with expensive imported gas electricity caused more deaths than by direct radiological impact of Fukoshima accident.

"Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident"

https://docs.iza.org/dp12687.pdf

"In an effort to meet the energy demands, nuclear power was replaced by imported fossil fuels, which led to increases in electricity prices. The price increases led to a reduction in electricity consumption but only during the coldest times of the year. Given its protective effects from extreme weather, the reduced electricity consumption led to an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increased mortality resulting from the higher energy prices outnumbered the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting that applying the precautionary principle caused more harm than good."

In term of money, you have look at the sums that Japan has been pouring into importing gas, which was needed to replace the missing nuclear power generation.

"With the Japanese government’s blessing, these companies are encouraging other countries to use more gas and LNG by investing US$93 billion from March 2013 to March 2024 in midstream and downstream oil and gas infrastructure globally."

https://energyexplained.substack.com/p/japan-1-how-fukushima...

I pretty much fully agree.

I'm not actually arguing that Gen II plants need to be decommissioned immediately. I'm arguing that they need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.

The process that takes can look like running the Gen II reactor while a replacement Gen IV reactor is being built and then decommissioning after the IV reactor is up and running.

I'm not against using nuclear, far from it. But I do think we need to actually have a plan about how we evolve the current nuclear fleet.

> Gen II … need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.

Why? The overwhelming majority of Gen II reactors aren’t on the east coast of Japan.

And the lessons learned from Fukushima Daiitchi can be applied elsewhere to mitigate similar risks.

My opinion is it’s more prudent to run the existing fleet for its economically useful life, remembering that reliable base load can have more value than intermittent wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.

You also don’t get process heat not district heating from wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.

Gen II reactors everywhere are subject to war and sabotage. Places that are currently safe aren't always safe.

Fukushima was a demonstration that these reactors can still melt down. It doesn't take exactly fukushima to cause a meltdown.

The reason to prioritize decommissioning is because the new generations of reactors are completely safe. There can be no meltdown, even if they are explicitly sabotaged. Then the bigger risk becomes not the reactor but the management of waste.

What Gen II reactors are is effectively a landmine in a box. The proposed solution to avoid detonating the landmine is adding more pillows, buffers, and padding, but still keeping the landmine because it'd be expensive to replace.

I think that's just a bad idea. Unexpected things happen. They don't have to (and probably won't) look exactly like a Tsunami hitting the facility. So why not replace the box with a landmine with one that doesn't have the landmine. Yes it cost money to do, but it's simply safer and completely eliminates a whole class of risks.

There are many kinds of Gen IV reactors. Which of the Gen IV reactors would you prefer? Which Gen IV reactor can not melt down, even if explicitly sabotaged?

> Which of the Gen IV reactors would you prefer?

TBH, probably the SCWR. They seem like the easiest to build without a lot of new surprises.

> Which Gen IV reactor can not melt down, even if explicitly sabotaged?

One like the BREST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) . Funnily my preferred reactor, the SCWR, would probably not be immune to some sabotage, specifically explosives around the reactor. But a reactor which uses a metal coolant would be. It just so happens that the nature of a SCWR cooled with water means that the reactor core has to be much beefier anyways, so it's a lot harder to really damage even if that was an explicit goal.

> Gen II reactors everywhere are subject to war and sabotage.

<eye roll> this is just bullshit.

Which Gen II reactors are subject to war, exactly?

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, where one employ was killed by a drone strike?

What’s the status of the four new planned(?) reactors at Khmelnitski?

Wikipedia seems to indicate that two new AP1000 reactors are under construction.

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

A country that is having a hot war with its neighbour Russia(!) is getting the fuck on with it, while the rest of the Western world still thinks windmills are cool.

> Which Gen II reactors are subject to war, exactly?

Potentially any of them. World governments aren't static. Mitt Romney was literally laughed at for talking about the Russian military threat in 2012.

> two new AP1000

These are Gen III+ reactors, which thoughout this thread I've been saying we should be building to replace the Gen II reactors.

If Ukraine was building new Gen II reactors you might have a point.

> > ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

> That's a non-sequitur.

I think this is to establish that the large number of deaths from the disaster weren't due to the nuclear plant, which people seem to assume.

People assume it, I did not. Nor did I claim it. It is a non-sequitur because we aren't talking about deaths from natural disasters.

We actually are.

There are plenty of smaller nuclear power reactor issues listen on Wikipedia, but the three big ones are Chernobyl, but that was an RMBK, which no one built except those crazy Russians, TMI which didn’t kill or injury anyone, and Fukushima Daiitchi which resulted in one death.

So we’re not really talking about deaths from nuclear power reactors, because there aren’t any, discounting Chernobyl because that won’t ever happen again.

So we must be talking about the deaths from that one natural disaster associated with the Fukushima Daiitchi meltdowns. Otherwise, I dint know what deaths you’re talking about.

More people injur themselves falling off ladders while trying to clean their solar panels than nuclear power ever will.

You are, I'm not.

Good luck.

Ok, which deaths from nuclear power.

State your case, enumerate them.

The idea that nuclear isn’t safe, and can’t be competitive in thr market is just nonsense.

Seventeen AP1000s are currently in operation or under construction. Four are in operation at two sites in China, two at Sanmen Nuclear Power Station and two at Haiyang Nuclear Power Plant. As of 2019, all four Chinese reactors were completed and connected to the grid, and as of 2026, eleven more are under construction.

It goes on…

Two are in operation at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant near Augusta, Georgia, in the United States, with Vogtle 3 having come online in July 2023, and Vogtle 4 in April 2024. Construction at Vogtle suffered numerous delays and cost overruns. Construction of two additional reactors at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station near Columbia, South Carolina, led to Westinghouse's bankruptcy in 2017 and the cancellation of construction at that site. It was reported in January 2025 by The Wall Street Journal and The State that Santee Cooper, the sole owner of the stored parts and unfinished construction, is exploring construction and financing partners to finish construction these two reactors. The need for large amounts of electricity for data centers is said to be the driving factor for their renewed interest.

Twenty-four more AP1000s are currently being planned, with six in India, nine in Ukraine, three in Poland, two in Bulgaria, and four in the United States.

China is currently developing more advanced versions and owns their patent rights. The first AP1000 began operations in China at Sanmen, where Unit 1 became the first AP1000 to achieve criticality in June 2018, and was connected to the grid the next month. Further builds in China will be based on the modified CAP1000 and CAP1400 designs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

The fact is, nuclear power is a 21st century success story.

> State your case, enumerate them.

My case is that Gen II reactors have a design flaw which gives them a risk that should be eliminated. We should replace Gen II reactors with Gen III or later reactors as none of them suffer from the same problems as Gen II reactors do.

The rest of your post is about AP1000, which is a Gen III+ reactor. A fine reactor to replace Gen II reactors with.

I've made this point, to you, a couple of times so now I feel like you aren't actually reading my responses.

I'm not interested in one sided conversations.

Yes we actually are talking about deaths from natural disasters.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant was destroyed by the Tsunami. It didn't spontaneously combust.

A lot of other infrastructure that was impacted/destroyed by the Tsunami claimed lives. For example, a dam broke due to the Tsunami and that dam breach killed 4 people. Which coincidentally happens to be 4 more than were killed by the nuclear power plant when it was destroyed by the Tsunami.

IDK why you'd think a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors in an article about decommissioning nuclear reactors should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters.

More people die from car accidents and heart attacks. More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure. Also non-sequiturs because we are not talking about that here.

It is very tangentially related because the nuclear accident in the current thread was caused by an earthquake that also killed people. Not something that affects the discussion about how we should handle nuclear plants in the future because "This number is bigger" is a meaninglessly point to make.

> a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors

This is actually an article about Belgium taking over nuclear plants for restart.

> should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters

How did we get to natural disasters?

Well:

You brought up Fukushima, where a natural disaster destroyed a nuclear power station. You also claimed, incorrectly, that Japan was turning off reactors, when in fact they are currently in the process of turning them back on.

So: we got to natural disasters because you brought up natural disasters.

And yes, technical equipment and infrastructure gets destroyed in natural disasters. Like that dam in Japan that killed 4 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami. Like that nuclear power plant that killed 0 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami.

> More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure.

What. The. Fuck. Are. You. On. About.

That has never happened.

Radiation poisoning. From sun exposure.

Are you ok? Would like some water? Do you want to sit down?

If you think that’s a thing, I don’t know what to say. I hope you don’t vote.

You should stop now before you embarrass yourself. Go away and do some reading. Come back when you’re read to play with the big kids.

We’re doomed!

UV light is radiation from the sun. Sun burns are, in fact, a form of radiation poisoning.

I'm sorry this isn't something you knew.

Also, be aware you are violating HN posting guidelines. I'm not going to interact with you further because you are just flaming.

While I don't agree with the previous poster's phrasing, this is disingenuous. It's like saying someone dying of heatstroke actually died of radiation poisoning due to the infrared radiation hitting them.

Radiation poisoning refers to ionizing radiation, not to anything that can be claimed to be radiated.

UV light is ionizing radiation. It's not as penetrative as gamma radiation but it still interacts in the same manor as gamma.

The interaction of UV light with the skin causing a sunburn is the skin being damaged by ionizing radiation ultimately causing it to die off. Skin cancer happens when the DNA of a skin cell gets damaged in a way that doesn't cause the cell to die and instead reproduces uncontrolled.

That's the same thing that happens when someone is exposed to ionizing radiation from nuclear waste/fallout. The main difference being that damage isn't limited to the skin, it penetrates deeper due to the higher frequency of gamma radiation.

It's really not disingenuous. It's just something people don't think about because getting a sunburn is a common human experience.

Okay, but this isn't a one-on-one conversation. It's a public, multi-way message board involving people who will assume that.

> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death

This is not true at all.

Direct Occupational Deaths (Mining & Accidents)

Even in a highly regulated environment like the United States, coal mining is not a zero-fatality industry. United States: According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), there were 8 coal mining deaths in 2025 and 10 in 2024. This is a massive improvement from 1907 (the deadliest year), which saw 3,242 deaths.

In countries with less stringent safety oversight, the numbers are much higher. For example, China's coal industry—though improving—has historically recorded hundreds to thousands of deaths annually.

In 2022 alone, hundreds of people died in global coal mine accidents.

Chronic Disease: "Black Lung" (pneumoconiosis) is still a leading cause of death for miners. In the U.S. alone, thousands of former miners die every decade from lung diseases directly caused by inhaling coal dust.

> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death,

There have been plenty of direct deaths caused by coal power. Coal dust can be quite explosive and has caused a lot of deaths over the years. And plenty of coal fired boilers, both stationary and mobile (locomotives) and failed causing plenty of deaths.

It's instructive (and scary) to google pictures of exploded boilers!

> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done

By that definition housefires also lead to very few direct deaths if most people die due to smoke inhalation instead of burning alive.

Unlike with nuclear that, even if we entirely ignore CO2 emissions and climate change the remaining "indirect" damage due to pollution and long-term effects on the environment are largely know and quantifiable and are astronomically higher per MHw produced compared to nuclear power.

> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths.

Huh? Are you not counting coal mining, which historically caused thousands of deaths per year and presumably still causes at least hundreds per year (not sure what info we have on that from China).

I don't know but i feel like Nuclear reactors are something worth taking to the 99.99% percentile of safety. How much money does it really cost? And how does that money compare to the economic prosperity of the land that is currently radiation free. As well, i think us (assuming) not knowledgeable Nuclear engineers discussing the cost benefit of reactor safety should be basically locked out of the conversation. Plausible sounding soundbites are just too easily generated these days for anyone without credentials to have stake in these decisions.

Nuclear is already at a much higher safety standard than 99.99%!

About costs: it is actually cheap. 95% of the average total cost of a MWh is in building the plant. Comparisons sometimes show the cost of a MWh from wind or solar, but is a fallacy because they assume an infrastructure on the side to ensure 24x7 power generation (i.e. they point out a marginal cost instead of average total cost).

Yep!

Wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries are cheap!

Until you factor in the gas peaker plants that need to be built watt-for-watt unless you’re okay with poor people freezing in the dark, or melting in the heat. Because rich people can afford their own back up generators or on-site batteries.

> How much money does it really cost?

The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...

And if that nuclear would be displacing coal power, you have to consider the health and environmental costs of that coal generation which you haven't displaced.

> climate policy

Fuck climate policy.

There could be an earthquake any moment now that ruptures a massive natural CO formation that would eclipse any anthropogenic generated emissions in matter of hours. What have we done to mitigate that risk? Nothing.

There is a non-zero chance Earth will be relieved of the responsibility of harbouring complex life any moment now by a loose pile of gravel travelling at 60 kilometres a second. Zero mitigation.

Let’s work out this food-housing-energy deal for everyone before we mandate unaffordable unreliable energy that results in unaffordable everything.

Maybe your shielded from that because your own a mid six figure income at $UNICORN, but I guarantee you the rest of us have had enough of this climate change fucking bullshit luxury belief.

> What have we done to mitigate that risk

Climate change isn't a risk that needs mitigation, it is not a contingency of hypothetical events. It is happening right now, and lives are already being claimed.

Maybe you are shielded from that and want to keep your lifestyle rather than adapting.

> It is happening right now

We don’t actually know that.

We don’t have a second, identical Earth, where an industrial revolution powered by coal and oil and gas didn’t happen.

Maybe you don't know it. The rest of us who can read scientific work have a pretty good idea.

Hey man, I live on a small farm ~50km from the city, where we get to battle more and more wildfires every year, and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer. Climate change is a bigger issue for a lot of of the world than your personal experience might suggest

> and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer.

It no longer rains enough?

Are you a time traveller?

Otherwise you can’t possibly know that.

When it comes to climate and weather, no amount of recent past data can reliably predict what’s going to happen next.

I know that in the last 5 years, we've had 3 major droughts, and in the preceding 50 years, no droughts. This is more than sufficient evidence for me.

I'm not going to argue long-term weather cycles versus man-made climate change with you.

Air pollution has a direct negative impact on everyone's quality of life, I don't see why would you chose to decouple from "food-housing-energy". Coal would still be a bad deal even if climate change wasn't a concern.

The Fukushima disaster could have been averted simply by putting the backup electric generators on a platform, and venting the hydrogen gases outside.

Yes.

Or not having your plant destroyed by the biggest Tsunami in recorded Japanese history, much larger than the size they planned for when they built the plant.

Or upgrading the seawall to the size mandated after scientists found out that Tsunamis of that size could actually happen, despite having no historical record of them. One of the reasons TEPCO was culpable.

A sister plant of the Fukushima plant actually survived a slightly higher crest and was even used as a shelter for Tsunami victims, because one engineer had insisted on the sea wall being higher.

German plants for example, despite facing no immediate Tsunami risks, have bunkered and distributed backup generators as well as mandatory hydrogen recombinators. Any German plant at the same location would have survived largely unscathed.

A larger seawall can still fail. Better to put the generators on a platform. Simple and cheap.

Another backup would have been a pipe leading away from the reactor, where one can, from a short distance, pump water into it and it would cool the reactor.

Everything is "simple" with hindsight in mind.

After SL-1 we realized that that we needed to allow a reactor to fully shut down even with the most important control rod stuck in a fully withdrawn position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1#Accident_and_response

> Everything is "simple" with hindsight in mind.

The fixes are still simple and cost little.

I used to work at Boeing on airliner design. The guiding principle is "what happens when X fails" and design for that. It is not "design so X cannot fail", as we do not know how to design things that cannot fail. For Fukushima, it is "what happens if the seawall fails", not "the seawall cannot fail".

Airliners are safe not because critical parts cannot fail, but because there is a backup plan for every critical part.

Venting explosive gas into the building seems like a complete failure to do a proper failure analysis.

>at Boeing on airliner design. The guiding principle is "what happens when X fails"...Airliners are safe not because critical parts cannot fail, but because there is a backup plan for every critical part.

And yet creating a culture that is vigilant and consistently applies due diligence is hard. To that point: Boeing identified the 737-Max MCAS as 'hazardous' in their analysis. Putting aside that 'catastrophic' was the more appropriate rating, they still did not appropriately design their system when that system failed. (By their own processes, 'hazardous' meant it should not be designed with single-point hardware failures)* That implies it is as much a human/cultural issue as a technical one.

* before any claims that the system was designed just fine because the pilots could have avoided the issue with the appropriate actions, those are administrative hazard mitigations which are generally considered less desirable than hardware fixes, especially when engineering mitigations are already installed but not used. Removing the hazard >> engineering controls >> administrative controls >> PPE. To the GPP point, hindsight is easy, managing risk, people, and processes is hard.

The backup for MCAS was simple:

1. restore normal trim using the thumb switches (which override MCAS inputs)

2. turn the trim system off.

The proof of that is that's what the crew did in the first MCAS incident, and they landed safely.

Check the previous note I left above with the * on why that is considered a poor mitigation.

Administrative procedures are bad mitigations in general but especially bad when a) it’s a safety critical issue and b) the hardware for an engineering mitigation is already installed. That’s like saying death could have been avoided if people would have just packed parachutes (PPE). Maybe true, but bad hazard mitigation.

I do understand your point, and the MCAS system needed improvement.

But still, dealing with runaway stabilizer trim is a basic thing every pilot needs to know. 1 crew did it, and proceeded normally and safely. Two other crews did not follow emergency procedures, and paid the ultimate price. After the first crash, Boeing sent around an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating the procedure. The Egypt Air crew did not follow the procedure.

The reason the stab trim cutoff switch is prominent on the center console is because it is a very important switch.

I've also talked to 737 pilots and another who emailed me about it and confirmed that they considered those crashes as pilot error.

Nevertheless, I agree that the MCAS system was deficient.

The main reason I don’t consider it pilot error is because the pilots did not get training on the system. So the proper mitigation required quick understanding of a system they did not know about, which is incredibly difficult with an intermittent failure like MCAS. If it was identified too late, the force required for trim was too great to be applied manually. Expecting that knowledge and timing to be in place is why it’s not a reliable mitigation when there is no training.

There are lots of proximate causes, but the lack of training to avoid a new airframe certification is a huge one.

Lets try to speak as adults about this.

1) There are at least 403 cases registered of Fukushima residents developing Thyroid cancers after 2011 and the study is still ongoing. This is five times the expected cancer ratio.

Of those at least 155 cases of malignant cancers happened in children (Sokawa 2024). We know that thyroid cancers are rare among young people... except in one special place were a sudden increase in similar cases was registered since the 80's. This place is called Chernobyl. Children that lived in towns around Fukushima daichi where the accident happened have three times more probability of suffering thyroid cancer than children that lived in towns farther from the plant.

2) Not the strong excuse that it seems, after the company was warned by scientists about the possibility of such earthquake and the urgency to improve their safety measures. They had a lot of time to fix it, and did absolutely nothing

You write as if Fukushima was the only example. Take chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

You are correct that there were only few deaths but there was radiation damage, and if you sum that up then Fukushima was definitely noticable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident

Chernobyl happened, but it’s irrelevant to calculating risk for any other operational nuclear power reactor.

That RMBK was built by those crazy Russians who thought it was reasonable to not even bother with a containment vessel / building.

> It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster Lead to basically zero direct deaths

Which was really just pure luck.

It was melting down. Humans could not go in to stop it, robots could not go in to stop it. Pure luck it didn’t go a lot bigger.

Also it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water, which will have impacts for a very long time

> severe contamination of ocean water

No it didn’t

Like I said at the time, you could melt all of the cores down at the Fukushima Daiitchi site and dissolve them all in to the oceans and it would be undetectable in sea water.

The oceans weigh around 10^21 kilograms, and the six reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi would weigh, what, several hundred tons and contain, what, several tens of tonnes of radioactive products.

We’re talking beyond parts per trillion.

Greenpeace lied a lot about it at the time, though. Maybe that's where it comes from.

I wonder how much money it made Greenpeace. A million? Two million?

> Which was really just pure luck.

It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred. Yes it could have been worse, and I suppose it could have been struck by a meteor too.

> it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water

Citation please. I suggest reading the relevant Wikipedia article in full.

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

> It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred.

The tsunami and tidal wave that took out the generators were unlucky.

The fantastically lucky part was that it didn’t create an explosion and spew much more radiation into the air. We couldn’t do anything to stop it, just stand back and hope for the best.

that was immensely lucky.

> 1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths

"Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Official figures show that there have been 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture. Disaster-related deaths are in addition to the about 19,500 that were killed by the earthquake or tsunami."

According to the "World Nuclear Association" (mission: to facilitate the growth of the nuclear sector by connecting players across the value chain, representing the industry’s position in key world forums, and providing authoritative information and influencing key audiences)

Source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...

It would be a good idea to actually read the source you're quoting to see if it supports your case.

> 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture*, that were not due to radiation-induced damage or to the earthquake or to the tsunami, had been identified by the Japanese authorities. About 90% of deaths were for persons above 66 years of age. Of these, about 30% occurred within the first three months of the evacuations, and about 80% within two years.

> The premature disaster-related deaths were mainly related to (i) physical and mental illness brought about by having to reside in shelters and the trauma of being forced to move from care settings and homes; and (ii) delays in obtaining needed medical support because of the enormous destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

If, instead of the nuclear power plant, Japan had deployed photovoltaic panels or wind turbines, the evacuation would not have been necessary and some of these people would have survived.

According to the then Prime Minister nuclear experts announced to him, while the accident was unfolding, that "The reactors' accident could, in the worst case, have caused the evacuation of the entire population living within a radius of 250km, including Tokyo, a total of 50 million people" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoto_Kan#In_media

Only the three least powerful of the six reactors were in operation at the time of the accident. Reactor #4 was off and unloaded.

Approximately 80% of the released cesium-137 (half-life: 30 years) was dispersed eastward by winds and deposited in the Pacific Ocean (far from human settlement), where the enormous volume of water and strong currents reduced its concentration. Other studies, such as those by Yasunari et al., confirm these undisputed facts, which are also accepted by nuclear agencies.

The sole cleanup may cost up to 660bn USD ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle... ).

To begin with.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was NOT using Generation I reactors.

"Gen I refers to the prototype and power reactors that launched civil nuclear power. This generation consists of early prototype reactors from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Shippingport (1957–1982) in Pennsylvania, Dresden-1 (1960–1978) in Illinois, and Calder Hall-1 (1956–2003) in the United Kingdom. This kind of reactor typically ran at power levels that were “proof-of-concept.”"

https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati...

Got my gens mixed up, so thanks.

But I think my point is still valid. These Gen II reactors should be retired and replaced.

> if input power fails fission ultimately stops

AIUI fission was stopped basically immediately. The problem was removing the decay heat from the fission by-products; without pumps to move cooling water that didn't happen.

I think modern reactor designs have enough passive cooling that this failure mode can't happen. There are a lot of active reactor plants where it still could be possible though.

Fukushima Daiichi is irrelevant to European nuclear reactor safety.

That's a big nevertheless.

Chernobyl lacked a containment and there are still reactors of the same type running without containment in Russia.

There’s still 7 RMBK reactors running, I believe.

And other than Chernobyl no melt downs.

So they seem to be fairly reliable if they aren’t run by clowns.

Well yes, Russia is Russia. The RBMK with its well-known design flaws could never have been certified/built in the West. Yes, these design flaws were well-known long before the Chernobyl accident.

In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had significant design flaws. Legasov's suicide in 1988, following frustrated attempts to promote nuclear and industrial safety reform, caused shockwaves throughout the scientific community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Improvements_since_the_Ch...

A list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Design_flaws_and_safety_i...

However, the units that are still operating were modified after the accident to remove at least a few of the elements of the accident chain that made the reactor inherently unsafe.

Still no containment, and still not anywhere close to the requirements for Western reactors, but they seem to be operating reasonably safely.

How about the VVER-440 still running e.g. in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that lack proper containment? Still only Russia being Russia?

The subject was modifications made to reactor types that had major accidents, and specifically the RBMK-1000.

Last I checked, the VVER-440 is not an RBMK-1000, did not explode at Chernobyl, and has not had a major accident.

"The two VVER-440 units in Loviisa, Finland have containment buildings that fulfil Western safety standards.

A typical design feature of nuclear reactors is layered safety barriers preventing escape of radioactive material. VVER reactors have three layers:

1. Fuel rods: the hermetic zirconium alloy (Zircaloy) cladding around the uranium oxide sintered ceramic fuel pellets provides a barrier resistant to heat and high pressure.

2. Reactor pressure vessel wall: a massive steel shell encases the whole fuel assembly and primary coolant hermetically.

3. Reactor building: a concrete containment building that encases the whole first circuit is strong enough to resist the pressure surge a breach in the first circuit would cause.

Compared to the RBMK reactors – the type involved in the Chernobyl disaster – the VVER uses an inherently safer design because the coolant is also the moderator, and by nature of its design has a negative void coefficient like all PWRs. It does not have the graphite-moderated RBMK's risk of increased reactivity and large power transients in the event of a loss of coolant accident. The RBMK reactors were also constructed without containment structures on grounds of cost due to their size; the VVER core is considerably smaller"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Safety_barriers

It also appears that the VVER-440 does have a containment building, and older variants that had problems with said containment building were forced to shut down.

"One of the earliest versions of the VVER-type, the VVER-440, manifested certain problems with its containment building design. As the V-230 and older models were from the outset not built to resist a design-critical large pipe break, the manufacturer added, with the newer V-213 model, a so called Bubble condenser tower that – with its additional volume and a number of water layers – aims to suppress the forces of rapidly escaping steam without the onset of a containment-leak. As a consequence, all member-countries[citation needed] with plants of the VVER-440 V-230 type, as well as older types, were forced by the politicians of the European Union to shut them down permanently. Because of this, the Bohunice Nuclear Power Plant had to close two reactors and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant had to close four. Whereas in the case of the Greifswald Nuclear Power Plant, the German regulatory body had already made the same decision in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall."

> A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.

Tell me you don't work in energy without telling me.

Most heavily regulated industry on the planet - constant upgrades and safety reports.

Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.

There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.

We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.

The difference between different generations is wildly different and regulations aren't structured to allow for upgrading. It becomes a cost and regulatory burden thing - might as well rebuild then upgrade, very little to do with safety.

And I agree. I think this is a place where the regulations are broken. They should be changed to encourage new gen nuclear be built. Ideally, they could be tweaked so that the sites of old nuclear plants can be reused to produce new nuclear plants.

> Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.

That's a bit of an impossible ask.

To give you a comparison with airplanes, F16 aren't "upgraded" to F35s. But there is an upgrade process, and F16s today are vastly different from F16s as they were in 1978.

Likewise for nuclear plants, reviews are done following incidents and new discoveries, and overhauls are done, both in terms of process and material changes. Gen2 plants aren't the same as they were when they were built.

half of french fleet through carenage? Gen 2 candus were recently allowed in Romania

Do you fly?

safety is great and in some cases it can be improved. check out what great carenage is in france

Even assuming all bad stuff, nuclear is statistically ok https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

The "old car" analogy seems right, with the extra complication that the car is supplying a non-trivial chunk of the country's electricity and replacing it is not quick

>I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.

Time and Cost seem like excellent reasons to get started now, so we can finish by 2035 and get some materials purchased before inflation gets even worse.

All of the excellent arguments Pro-existing plants apply to new ones too.

If you are starting now wind and solar are almost always your best investment. Some form of storage is next, but not until you have large amounts of wind+solar in the system. (which many areas are already reaching)

This just seems like kneejerk anti-Nuclear stance in disguise. Maybe you did intend it as just a neutral observation but it's hard to take it that way.

Like maybe you're right... why not also support Nuclear plants, which we in fact need for baseload energy? Surely there are better places to cut the budget than other carbon-free energy sources.

I have no argument with building out solar and wind maximally. I will always push for new Nuclear as part of the mix.

We don't need baseload energy! That is something the coal lobby likes to repeat but it is false. We need enough energy to supply demand. These days gas peaker plants amortize cheaper to run 24x7 than a new baseload plant and so a lot of new "baseload" is actually covered by a peaker plant.

Baseload doesn't have a consistent definition, but the general concept is some power plants are cheap at 100% output, but don't throttle back well, so you have a mix of these cheaper baseload plants, and the more expensive to operate peaker plants that are more expensive to operate, but can start/stop/slow as needed. However we don't need that. In any case even when baseload is cheaper than peaker, it is still much more expensive than wind+solar which have zero fuel costs, and so when you amortize the costs out wind+solar plus peaker plants to make up the difference is overall cheaper.

25 years ago I was with you - nuclear was the best answer. However wind+solar have really grown since then and now they your best bet. Because the times have changed I've in turned change. I'm against nuclear because it no longer makes sense even if the price was reasonable. (nuclear would still make sense for ships, I don't know how to push that though)

Edit: Come to think of it, I'd go so far as to say if you have a baseload coal plant today, you should be shutting it down immediately for new wind and solar plus gas peaker plants. It is economically stupid to not be doing that. Now, there may be coal power plants that are not baseload, but instead can be dispatchable. If so, I don't know how the economics of those play out. And likewise, nuclear, although it is baseload, probably is cheap enough to continue running as long as it's not too expensive to keep maintaining, and I would keep it running for the near future.

Gas peak plants are neither clean nor economical stable in Europe. The war in Ukraine and now the war in Iran has demonstrated how extreme the price of energy can become if we allow demand to exceed supply for any extended period, and multiple European governments in the last few years got elected explicitly to solve this. Having a single month cost as much as a full year, or even multiple years, is a costly lesson for voters and the economical effects are not slow to provide a second demonstration on how important stability is in the energy market.

Coal is not an option, nor is oil nor gas. Batteries for something like central/northern Europe is also not an option as a seasonal storage of weeks/months are prohibitively expensive. Hydro power has demonstrated to cause (near) extinctions of several species and ecosystems, modern research on soil has show some terrible numbers in terms of emissions, and the places where new hydro power could be built are basically zero. Biofuels from corn and oil is prohibitive expensive and also bad for the environment, and the amount of fraud currently being done in green washing corn ethanol as being "recycled" food waste is on a massive scale and not something Europe can build a seasonal storage on. Green hydrogen is not even economical yet for being used in manufacturing, not to mention being burned for electricity and heating. Carbon capture for synthetic fuel is even further away from being a realistic storage solution.

That leaves very few options, and if current world events continue as they have we will see more governments being elected on the promise of delivering a stable energy market. Wind+solar+Gas peaker plants are not that. It was already an bad idea when it got voted as "green" in EU, as it cemented a dependency on natural gas from Russia and middle east. In 2026 it should not be considered an option. Gas need to be phased out, as should the last few oil and coal plants.

yes. The whole hopium strategy in countries like Germany is expand gas to replace it sometime with dirt cheap H2

Where does this "need for baseload" energy come from? Baseload is a demand side concern. It can be fulfilled by any number of sources and we already have grids operating with zero baseload.

The grids have dispatchable power. But that is a different concerns.

Point out the "baseload power" in this grid:

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...

You also have to look at it in terms of outcomes. How do we get the most decarbonization the quickest per dollar spent?

Focusing on reducing the area under the curve. Looking at it from that perspective wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power leads to spending longer time entirely dependent on fossil fuels.

Given Hinkley Point C, a plant approved now will be operational some time in the 2040s.

I think people have missed how much of a hockey stick graph renewables deployment can look like. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...

Hinkley Point C is a prime example of regulation causing cost and schedule overruns.

"Fish disco", for example.

> time and cost as much as anything else

you people have been saying that for at least twenty years. In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe, sentiment is increasingly pro-nuke but your adage keeps things still. Of course yf you never start, you never finish.

> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.

> twenty years

When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.

Heartening to see someone talking about both the pros and cons. I find here and on, for example reddit or twitter, that people are unanimously in favour of Nuclear.

I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.

I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.

But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.

> Even small modular reactors fail to address this.

I'd be willing to engage with SMRs on the merits of actually constructed systems, but if you open https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-... and restrict to "operational" all but two of the projects disappear.

One in China and one in Russia.

I doubt they are talking about the same thing as the US companies. So it would be useless to extrapolate their economics.

Not only this, but the benefit of SMR is based on the possibility that they can be mass-produced at low cost. Until that happens, the benefit doesn’t exist. Solar and batteries and wind have already passed that threshold, but cheap mass-produced SMRs don’t exist yet, even if someone can point to a couple of expensive, bespoke SMRs.

It doesn’t really matter if people on HN or Reddit are in favor of nuclear. At the end of the day, nuclear will get built if someone thinks the cost is worth it over the alternatives. The Internet fan club is mostly irrelevant.

How the public understand what they are (or are not) signing up for is critical though.

And what is your median domestic electric unit price? (actually consumed)

It's certainly not £0.01203/kWh, or even in the same order of magnitude.

Later

(For context for non-Brits: there is a price cap of £0.2467 kWh currently, which many people are paying (or very close to that))

That relies on imports of nuclear from France and isn't winter, its easy to say you don't need nuclear when you import a massive amount of others nuclear when the sun doesn't shine as much.

UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.

> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.

If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?

Renewables are not suitable for replacing nuclear, coal and other traditional sources of energy due to the fact that you cannot control production.

Why do you need to control production? Why not over provision and store?

How?

There's this thing called battery

Battery storage is still very inefficient and doesn't scale to cover the winters in more northern latitutes.

> Why do you need to control production?

Because there's a minimum demand you must be able to supply.

Here in Norway we get just about all our power from hydro, and we have a lot of pumped storage lakes which we use as "water batteries". However, eventually hydro relies on water falling from the sky.

Not long ago there had been some really dry years, and our storage was running at record lows. Had the subsequent year been dry we'd be in a real pickle.

Another aspect here is that production is one thing, but grid-scale renewable production rarely happens right next to the primary consumers, and has to be transported. And the grid might not be able to.

Again here in Norway, we had a situation not long ago where the price difference between the north of Norway and the south of Norway was 100x because the south struggled to produce while the north was overflowing, but there was insufficient capacity on the grid to send all the energy being produced up north down south.

Tell me you've been in coma the past 10 years without telling me you've been in a coma the past 10 years.

Yes. On the other hand nuclear is still single biggest source of power in EU, despite german phaseout) There is still not a single country matching french emissions with ren alone if it doesnt have hydro/geothermal

In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.

As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.

In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.

I am surprised that this is the case after reading how Orban was behaving on the matter of its oil and gas sources. I guess the big problem is that the economy and heating is still very fossil dependent ?

Yes, we can't immediately convert all vehicles to electric and gas boilers to heat pumps, so if we lose access to gas and oil we're kind of screwed.

Orbán had 16 years of unlimited power to diversify from Russia as the only source though, so there's no excuse.

> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.

First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.

I don't understand your point

Everything is cheaper outsourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...

Not really sure what the relevance of this is, other than an argument against proliferation? I note that Pakistan has had a very rapid solar transition extremely recently.

> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime

I completely agree, but that's a massive "but". Belgium's nuclear power plants are mostly known for their reliability issues.

They are outdated 2nd-gen PWR reactors, designed by a company with no other nuclear experience, operating in some of the most densely populated areas of Europe. Keeping them operating long beyond their original design lifespan probably isn't the best idea - and it is almost a certainty that cleanup costs are going to be significantly higher than expected.

To me it sounds like Engie has struck an incredible deal by offloading a giant liability to the Belgian government.

reliability issues doesnt mean unsafe. Most EU units are gen2 and doing fine. Engie wants units shut down to push for new gas plants. If belgium keeps reactors on engie will suffer massively. Decomissioning of npp is generally fine too. Isar2 decom in germany is going full speed

> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.

This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.

Shutting down existing nuclear capacity to replace it with Russian or Saudi or Qatari oil and gas though........

The West built the existing rector fleet cheap and fast in the past, and those reactors have proven to be safe and reliable and maintainable.

It’s a proven technology with decades decades in service.

We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.

What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?

> We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.

The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.

That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.

Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.

> What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?

No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.

Germany did indeed make that choice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292341 can we call it Triceratops' law now?

thing is, when you look at what ABWR achieved, I wish we just thrown money at hitachi for a messmer like deployment in all EU countries that want nuclear

Renewables are cheap. Renewables plus battery storage still are not and nuclear is a reasonable alternative for base load power.

Renewables + battery are already the cheapest solution in some places. By the time a new nuclear power plant is built they will be cheaper everywhere.

People said that 40 years ago and see where we are today, if people hadn't said that we would have a much cleaner world today. We might have that good and cheap batteries in 20 years, but also possible we wont have that. Would you really wanna bet our planets climate on your gut feeling that batteries will get that good?

> People said that 40 years ago and see where we are today

That it's true today because people worked on it for 40 years? It would've been amazing if more nuclear had been built 40 years ago. But it wasn't and there's nothing you or I can do about it.

> We might have that good and cheap batteries in 20 years

They're already good and cheap. And more like 5 years than 20.

> Would you really wanna bet our planets climate on your gut feeling that batteries will get that good?

It isn't a gut feeling. They'll get better faster than you can build new nuclear because that's what we've seen in the past 20 years. No one's holding nuclear back on pure vibes. Solar + batteries is already beating nuclear and will continue to increase the lead. That's just math. Its true boss fight is fossil fuels and achieving mass electrification.

If anything, when new nuclear does get built eventually, it will benefit from all the progress made on electrification and new transmission and storage capacity.

Nuclear isn't an economically viable option for base load. Nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. If there is excess supply, forcefully turning off renewables to buy electricity from nuclear would make the electricity needlessly expensive and kill the free market. In other words: it can only be a base load if we massively subsidize it and throw away free renewable electricity.

On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.

renewables are already curtailed and market is still not killed. Nuclear is very expensive if you build it in 20y.

H2 per lazard even at 25%mix is as bas as vogtle in terms of lcoe. And thats with cheap us gas for the rest 75%

1. LCOE is not the appropriate metric, especially when you have intermittent renewables in the mix.

2. Lazard themselves say that their LCOE numbers for nuclear are not indicative.

https://x.com/mpweiher/status/1811656245700358478?s=20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16HVh_Fx6LQ

I know, full system lcoe must be considered with all bells and whistles. I'm comparing lcoe of worst nuclear project in us vs lcoe of hydrogen peakers

More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.

With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).

But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.

One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.

The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.

You can look at the projections by all the grid providers if you don't believe me.

Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable.

I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?

One small problem, nuclear is also dependent on water: https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-forc...

France was net exporting 14GW at that time. There's no reason for EDF to build cooling towers there - where would you sell the power?

Dry cooling towers exist.

Such a difficult resource to find.

I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.

"PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)."

On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

Good news: nuclear costs the same to run at max output as it does idle! No change in fuel costs.

Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions.

Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel.

Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed.

That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.

No not at all. You can vary reactor output, its generally as simple as pulling rods in or out. But they cannot just turn on and off. That takes a ton of time and effort.

Huh, I don't know where I read that their output can only be at 100% then.

It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.

There is a lot of disinformation about nuclear power that has been so widely and consistently disseminated that it has basically diffused into the background.

no, you can do wild variations as long as it's not full shutdown

Some reactor types are better at going up and down in power fast than others. It is definitely a solved problem, though, and has been for decades.

I remember, decades ago, that anti-nuclear activists (some of them were even university professors who ought to know better) argued that it was impossible while France had already been doing exactly that for decades (at the time).

A small amount of coal has a huge environmental impact.

look at open RTE data. You can modulate nuclear a lot.

Solar is REALLY CHEAP. And provided you keep existing central European gas heating infrastructure around for a while, you can basically just wait out the really good energy storage by using existing caverns you pre-fill with methane to keep your people from freezing. If you're not curtailing a substantial fraction of PV yield (yearly) in central Europe that's a sign there way not enough capacity yet.

Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate. We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.

Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.

New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.

It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.

in belgium case the choice is rather nuclear or new gas plants from engie. Why do you think engie wants them shut?

And importing gas famously has zero known serious externalities, as vividly demonstrated in Europe and the Gulf at the moment.

> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.

Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.

I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.

> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.

It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.

> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.

They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.

Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.

The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.

Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.

Do you also believe they're eventually going to balance the budget and tackle governmental debt?

For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money.

The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)

This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in

Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".

So your answer is use the state to force people to pay more for less competitive energy? There isn’t another choice here.

That's what we are currently doing. We are using the state to force people to pay for expensive intermittent renewables.

Where? In every country in the world? Because the world met something like 85% of the energy growth of 2025 with renewables. All regions of the world are seeing massive and accelerating renewables buildout. All forced by the state? Extraordinary claims require evidence.

The state's role is to help shape policies that might help people over a time horizon greater than a couple of years. Often, this means current people are supposed to subsidize the world for future generations. This used to be the societal handshake that let kids have better outcomes than their parents. Somewhere along the way, the average joe seems to have lost sight of that societal contract and is more focused on instant gratification and short term payback.

I agree in general, but you may as well be wishing for ponies and unicorns as for change here. Short term economics is the current dominant force.

Also consider that if you’re wrong about the progress of clean tech, and it closes the gaps on storage, the kids “better outcome” is going to be being locked into paying higher energy prices for a lot of their life. (Of course if you’re right it will help them)

Sure but at the end of the day(cade) if my kids end up paying more for green reliable energy it's not a bad outcome compared to the price on betting the farm on renewables/grid update/hopefully seasonal, scalable, cheap energy storage. I'd rather hedge my bets by also investing in nuclear.

> It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.

This is a different choice because the car analogy usually has "buy new one" as a term. Not having to build a new plant makes the choice far less controversial and also cheaper.

Also, turbines for gas plants are back ordered until 2030

A nuclear reactor can generate 1 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for 60 years.

At a cost which could generate ~10 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for decades if invested in renewables.

Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc.

What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing renewables with a 60 year lifespan.

We just don't do it because spending money on getting their expected operational lifetimes from decades to 60+ years is betting on extremely uncertain future returns.

Under appreciated benefits of Big Photodiode is that there's no moving parts larger than an electron.

They do degrade over time, especially due to weathering of the seals and UV exposure, but all the quoted numbers are worst-case.

(Inverters are more complicated products and may need more frequently replaced)

Nuclear reactors work at night and when there is no wind. Reliable electricity is far more valuable than unreliable electricity.

Did we have rolling blackouts from electricity shortages during the energy crisis? No.

Was the electricity extremely expensive? Yes.

Reliable electricity has a certain worth. And that is vastly lower than what nuclear power needs when running at 100% 24/7 all year around.

And that is disregarding that EDF is already crying about renewables crater the earning potential of their existing nuclear fleet due to load following and increased maintenance costs. Let alone horrifyingly expensive new builds.

but for ren you need parallel gas firming. For nuclear you need some backup, but not fully parallel grid. Paid off npp can generate very cheaply, at 4-7ct/kwh

I don’t see the difference with nuclear power? Take California, a yearly baseload of 15 GW and peak load of 52 GW. What problem is even a ”baseload” of nuclear power solving?

But we should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical. In that order.

EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.

And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.

France does not have a fully parallel nuclear power grid ready to step in when some other half isnt working. Germany has a fully parallel fossils firming grid on top of their ren deployments.

EDF isnt crying. It's just treated poorly even by looking at ARENH tax which was replaced with another one this year, while ren business gets CFD's and curtailment payments.

French nuclear fleet is extremely flexible, RTE data is public. In fact, due to ARENH law EDF was forced to subsidize competition because otherwise that competition would not exist.

Germany has a very dirty parallel coal electricity grid which is why it emits 5 to 6 times as much CO2 per joule as France.

With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.

You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.

Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.)

But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.

Competent engineering isn't enough. You also need to never end up being in a war zone, and being able to commit to ongoing maintenance forever, or outlawing all construction far downstream (or finding the even more scarce type of locations where nobody wants to build downstream).

Yeah, kinda?

In "most" military situations, the enemy would not want the dam destroyed - because it's a valuable part of what they want to conquer, or doing so would flood their own supply lines, or whatever. And having a well-placed reservoir could save your butt if a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms got started.

To keep providing power to the grid, everything from coal to solar to nuclear needs "forever" maintenance. Yes, an unmaintained dam is a hazard. That can be neutralized with a strategic breach, or (some locations) letting the reservoir silt up. But high-rise buildings, flood-control dikes, and quite a few other things are also "people die if not properly maintained" hazards.

The issue is that many large dams will kill a huge number of people if they fail.

The Banqiao dam failure alone is the worst power plant failure in human history by several magnitudes.

Not many dams have the potential to kill that many, but there are thousands of damns with potential to make Chernobyl look like a minor little affair.

As for wars, you just need to go back to 2023 for the last major dam to be blown as part of war. It "only" made 60k people homeless and killed 200-300. Just last year another dam was hit by drones but didn't burst.

While "big dam failed, lots of people died" is a very clicky headline, you are overselling it.

Between the direct costs (at the plant), and still having a 1,000 sq. mile exclusion zone 40 years later, Chernobyl really isn't overshadowed by the potential of thousands of dams.

And by the hellish standards of that war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain... - 200 to 300 dead is a rounding error.

We could have a Chernobyl every year, and the environmental impact would still be a rounding error compared to hydro, if we're going to go to environmental impacts rather than lives.

That is the weakest aspect of hydro - it causes massive green house gas releases during and in the aftermath of construction, and destroys vast ecosystems.

> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.

By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.

The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.

The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".

Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:

* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...

* Also: https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...

If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced.

I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?

You simply put waste deep underground in geologically stable rock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

And? Conventional power plants are killing people now.

There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity.

German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.

Considering how dangerous CO2 induced climate change could be this is like worrying about drowning when using water to extinguish fires.

wait till you learn what we do with arsenic which lasts forever...

> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans... And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places.

Shoving immigration diatribes randomly into unrelated discussions is really tiresome. Sir, this is a comment thread about nuclear power.

It’s absolutely related. It's constantly being excused by politicians as a solution to labor shortages.

> It’s absolutely related

To nuclear power?

What do labor shortages have to do with nuclear power?

The OP was drawing a connection between how the West has become less energy independent (not producing nuclear, importing energy) and how it’s become less labor independent (not producing people, importing them instead). The two are related because they are both caused by complacency, and they’re both destabilizing to the West.

That's a leap of logic. Europe also imports consumer goods, digital services, and much else. Why not talk about that?

Those are not mission critical for the survival of a civilization.

Clothing isn't critical? It's on Maslow's hierarchy. Digital and financial services are quite critical for modern society.

If you really think Europe isn't dependent on anything foreign other than energy and labor, you really haven't thought it through.

I never said it was exclusively labor and energy... but those are prerequisites for producing anything like clothing, food...

Nuclear power is a solution to labour shortages?

Because of powering AI?

> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else).

> And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places.

That seems fundamentally OK? The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.

If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children, the only thing that needs to happen is better education and the situation is actually good. We're on a reasonable trend with AI and robots. People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources.

It really isn't. The raw materials in our lives are a tiny fraction of our living costs in the west. 200 tons of concrete, steel, and plastic etc. in appropriate proportions is enough for a very nice house, yet it would cost less than a tenth of the sale price of that house: what you need to turn it into a nice house is expensive human labour.

The raw materials are cheap because we have machines to help extract them; before we invented them, those materials were also expensive.

The sale price of a house has little to do with labour. It's mostly about the number of humans competing to live in an area vs. how easy it is to get land in that area so that a new house can be built. I.e. the ratio of how many humans are involved vs the most limiting resource for producing the thing in question.

There is the point that how wealthy the competing humans are is also a major factor. But you're trying to bypass an argument about resource scarcity by pretending that resources aren't scarce. If you follow that path to its logical conclusion you're probably going to end up in a very confusing world because then it won't make sense why everyone doesn't just get a house (if someone can't afford a house, why not just upskill and learn how to build one? It isn't that hard and there are a lot of people who don't own a house but really want one and are more than happy to work for the privilege).

> It's mostly about the number of humans competing to live in an area vs. how easy it is to get land in that area so that a new house can be built

What attracts people to a place is often all the other people there. The actual land area is not close to being a limiting factor, we only build on about 1% of it.

> why everyone doesn't just get a house (if someone can't afford a house, why not just upskill and learn how to build one? It isn't that hard

You've not followed Colin Furze, I see. Even his basic concrete and steel tunnel and bunker isn't "just upskill" and done alone, he's got a team.

Clearly you've also never gotten a line by line price estimate for a house where you could save €50k by doing the plastering yourself, like I have turned down.

Some rough estimates for the time it takes to learn the necessay trades; if you think these are unreasonable, ask yourself how come e.g. plumbers cost so much on callout, or how long after graduating you were still a noob at whatever your day job is:

  * Basic construction literacy (plans, codes, sequencing): ~1-2 years (or 3-6 months intensive self-study + mentoring)
  * Site preparation & surveying basics: ~3-6 months
  * Excavation & earthworks operation: ~6-12 months
  * Concrete work (formwork, rebar, pouring, curing): ~1-2 years
  * Masonry (brick/block work): ~1-2 years
  * Carpentry (structural framing): ~2-4 years to solid competence
  * Roofing (structure, waterproofing): ~1-2 years
  * Plumbing (rough-in + fixtures): ~2-4 years
  * Electrical (wiring, panels, code compliance): ~3-5 years
  * HVAC installation: ~2-4 years
  * Insulation & air sealing: ~3–6 months
  * Drywall installation & finishing: ~6-12 months
  * Interior carpentry (doors, trim, cabinetry basics): ~1-2 years
  * Flooring (tile, wood, laminate): ~6-12 months
  * Painting & finishing: ~3-6 months
  * Window & door installation: ~6-12 months
  * Exterior finishes (siding, stucco, cladding): ~1-2 years
  * Project management (budgeting, scheduling, subcontractors): ~2-5 years practical experience
  * Health & safety compliance: ~3-6 months initial + continuous practice

Becoming individually competent in all trades needed to build a house to a professional standard is roughly a 10-15 year path.

A single person can reach "good enough to build a simple house" faster (perhaps 5 years if you skip the optional bits and keep the process count as low as possible), but quality, speed, and compliance will be limiting factors. And you'd need some person or people with all that knowledge to tell you which processes you could get away with not using, otherwise you'd end up with the house equivalent of vibe coded software.

This is also why houses in need of significant maintenence go for so little, sometimes even less than the land they're on.

Heck, if even just *insulation* from that list was as easy as you seem to think an entire house is, the UK would halve its heating bills as fast as its factories could make (or ports could import) foam.

I don't buy the idea that Europe might have abandoned the concept of childhood education all of a sudden. Most people I spend quite a lot more than 5 years learning skills; I know someone who spent 15 years in the education system to end up working at a petrol station. This long list is not relevant. These skills are clearly easy enough to learn.

> Clearly you've also never gotten a line by line price estimate for a house where you could save €50k by doing the plastering yourself, like I have turned down.

So how do you explain poverty? Why don't these people spend 12 months learning how to plaster and start making bank?

Could there be some important limitation based on physics that you're failing to account for?

> I don't buy the idea that Europe might have abandoned the concept of childhood education all of a sudden.

My school education didn't include pouring concrete, plastering, laying tiles, architecture. Just about covered some basic woodworking, but not the structural kind.

> These skills are clearly easy enough to learn.

UK minimum wage times fifteen years is enough to buy a house. After tax. As a 100% mortgage. And then the house would have a guarantee. And you'd have contributed to your own state pension, which you wouldn't have done if you'd simply learned the skills on your own, so hopefully this hypothetical education was a paid internship. And if you'd specialised in literally any one of those skills instead of generalising, you'd be able to earn more.

> So how do you explain poverty? Why don't these people spend 12 months learning how to plaster and start making bank?

Holy non-sequiter Batman!

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/builders-salary-SRCH_KO...

Watch a house getting built some time. There's a lot of people there. Even with UK's poorly thought-out greenbelts and planning permission driving up land prices, a house built in 6 months only takes 10 full time builders to have them be responsible for 50% of the average UK property price.

> Could there be some important limitation based on physics that you're failing to account for?

Physics? No. It's Baumol's cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

If it was physics, rich nations would just be outbidding poor nations for the resources to build houses. Poor nations do, in fact, have houses; they can afford them because their human labour is correspondingly cheap.

Ok, so let's quickly run through this argument. Stop me at the part you think is a mischaracterisation:

1) Resource constraints are negligible. Other than labour, obviously.

2) The skills to build a house are quick to acquire. It takes a couple of years. Less time than people are already spending anyway under general schooling as I assume the UK has 10 years compulsory education like most of the civilised world does.

3) The payback on a house is huge because the compensation for labour is high.

4) And I suspect you just demonstrated that people need to coordinate in groups of double-digit size to build a new house. Since they can sell the house for a 90% markup on costs they'd probably get wealthy doing it.

So is your argument here that the UK can comfortably house the entire world population? All 8.5 billion? Everyone gets a nice big apartment, maybe 2x the size of the current median? Let alone rental stress and housing unaffordability which are banished problems? Because given that we're ignoring the actual constraints (physical space, capital and materials) I'm not seeing what you think is the limiting factor here that doesn't just scale up as we add in more humans.

I don't see how any of this makes sense.

>The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources.

Taking this as true (it very evidently isn't), then since Europe already has declining birth rates, the logic step would be to prevent migration no? An influx of people would hurt.

>There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.

You say this as if this "amazing outcome" came out of nowhere, magically. People are forced into this because finances make it hard. That is not very nice.

>If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children

Why would this happen? From your comment, it doesn't seem to be something to expect?

By the way

>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

This sentence is so extremely out of touch as to be insulting.

I wasn't planning to answer but question marks sometimes bug. Sorry for the delay.

> Taking this as true (it very evidently isn't), then since Europe already has declining birth rates, the logic step would be to prevent migration no? An influx of people would hurt.

It's more directional than an end goal - for example 10 people is far too few, I'd expect living conditions to collapse. But if the population grows exponentially, there will eventually be too many. There's some optimum and it is probably far lower than 8 billion (I haven't run any numbers, I'd hazard 100-500 million people a continent, maybe lower).

> You say this as if this "amazing outcome" came out of nowhere, magically. People are forced into this because finances make it hard. That is not very nice.

This argument comes up a lot but it doesn't really make sense. Our ancestors had kids while living in conditions that we'd consider bad even for someone impoverished. I get that someone might not have kids because they feel that'd crimp their lifestyle but it is clear that they're setting their expectations high. The position is often literally "if I can't maintain the most comfortable lifestyle of anyone in my evolutionary history I won't have kids" - I meet a lot of people who wouldn't put up with conditions their parents had. That is a choice.

> Why would this happen? From your comment, it doesn't seem to be something to expect?

I dunno. I don't pay much attention to Africa.

> This sentence is so extremely out of touch as to be insulting.

I recommend deep breaths. Always a good option in times of stress.

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children.

>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

It sounds like one of those not very nice ways you describe more so than an active societywide choice. People aren't exactly choosing in the wide sense of the word. Their states population keeps going up despite often many decades of below replacement birthrates (thus aleviating pressure in places that retain higher birthrates) whilst they feel like they struggle with housing, childcare, pressure on their wages trough migration (and other things) and leave the parental nest at historically late times.

> Their states population keeps going up

What states, exactly? The EU as a whole has a population growth rate of 0.3% according to the world bank - that's as close to flat as makes no difference (and that's accounting for immigration!)

The only EU countries with a >1% growth rate are Ireland and Portugal.

Mine for example. Belgium.

The population has not shrunk a single year since the world wars but the natality has been below replacement since the start of the 70's if you take the colloquial replacement natality rate and since the world wars if you take the more realistic one.

I think just about every surrounding country is similar.

That growth is indeed slowing down but that has more to do with the natality continuing to drop.

There are indeed eastern european countries with far less migration which saw declines pulling the average down.

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources

Not particularly. We've ridden massive increases in both quality of life and population (at both the per-country and global scales) over the last two centuries.

In the sense that the global median income crept from about $0 to $10,000 sure over a few centuries. That's a big achievement but it isn't exactly the best case scenario. We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary.

> the global median income crept from about $0 to $10,000 sure over a few centuries

The floor is 2-300 USD equivalent, because that's what subsistence farming is, and it took two centuries to go from $1500 to $18811: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...

> We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary.

that's a massive shift of goalposts from "not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources".

> That's a big achievement but it isn't exactly the best case scenario. We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary

I actually agree with this vision. But I wouldn't say every human not being a millionaire is "the #1 problem" today.

So what do you think the #1 problem is?

Don't leave us all in suspense.

And we have brought the planet to its knees in the process...

Renewables and storage are cheaper and faster.

I agree that Europe needs to be energy independent. And population decline is a global problem.

Nuclear was the correct solution in the 90s. It's not now. Arguably you need to keep a small amount going to maintain a nuclear deterrent and subsidise it for that purpose, but that doesn't need to be any more than the current level of production.

> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else).

In my state the immediate costs to parents for raising a kid up to the age of 18 are around eight median gross incomes with the opportunity costs usually estimated about as high. This means having a kid loses parents around one quarter to one third of their total lifetime income. That's before even considering environmental factors. I don't think there's a decision an average person can make that's more ecologically destructive than having a child.

Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it.

Add in college and support through early-twenties (pretty baseline scenario for upper-middle class parents in the US) and the financial calculation is even tougher.

That said, if the most thoughtful potential parents don't have and raise civic-minded children, the percentage of new humans raised by less "enlightened" parents will increase, leading to a downward spiral.

For my part, I'm confident that the world is a better place because my two daughters are in it, and I'm definitely a better person for having been their father.

> This means having a kid loses parents around one quarter to one third of their total lifetime income.

There's no better investment.

Do you suggest every generation has it better in terms of the disposable income, so the kids can easily afford to support themselves _and_ fund their parents retirement? :)

I suggest that the costs around children are a marketing scare tactic from people who want to create a fear of having children.

You said, verbatim:

> There's no better investment.

I then asked how is this an _investment_ for the parents. Can you explain that?

I didn't ask about the off-tangent hypothesis, but the investment claim.

I'm going to treat this as a genuine question.

If your goal is to get into a debate on the financial returns to yourself based on children as some sort of investment vehicle then this won't go very far.

At a macro level, without children human civilization ceases to exist. That's the extreme case.

At a personal level, you have to look an intentional decision not to have children and compare it to the alternative. I am not including those who are unable to have children in this because I have known many couples through my life who weren't able and I fully realize what a difficult subject it is.

For those who chose not to have children, what is the ultimate financial or life goal? To have more disposable income to buy stuff, eat more fancy dinners? What's the point of investing or saving if you won't be able to pass it on?

Choosing not to have children is the result of years of pandering influence trying to convince people that they can't afford it, they aren't good enough, they'll be less happy, they'll have less avocado toast or a less important career. The goal of the marketing is two fold: either a) pander to a person's selfishness and convince them of all they will lose by having children or b) pander to a person's selflessness and convince them that the world is an overpopulated, terrible place that no compassionate person could possibly bring a child into. Both are coordinated messages designed to convince you not to have children.

Having children, on the other hand, ensures continuity of civilization. Ensures continuity of your family. Everything that you have learned that you feel value to pass on you get to teach to your children. You get to watch them grow up, teach them lessons from your own life, watch them become good citizens helping other people, falling in love, starting families of their own and contributing to society. You spend your life guiding them, helping them through difficulties.

All of the investments that you make financially can be passed on. You teach your children the financial lessons that you've learned and about the areas you wish you knew more about so that they may be able to be good stewards and improve on it from there. You teach them to be generous, to be charitable, to volunteer. You get to watch your children, grandchildren and sometimes even great grandchildren grow. And when you get old, that same family is there to care for you in your time of need.

Everything about your children is a multiplier of your family's values; your values.

Some of the people I mentioned who couldn't have children of their own chose to adopt. Some of them poured their time and energy into the service and education of youth. It's working towards the same goal.

Having children is one of life's greatest gifts. The institutions going out of their way to try to convince people not to have children are some of the most malicious that the world has ever known. If we were to ever quantify the number of lives that simply don't exist today as a result of those messages, the toll would be extreme. For people who have fallen victim to those messages, I hope there's still time to realize the truth.

VWCE

Unfortunately our economic system is a ponzi scheme that requires having children while constantly putting them into deeper and deeper debt. It will eventually collapse and take VWCE with it.

HN bio checks out.

Kids are an investment, not a sunk cost.

Anti-natalism is such a weird concept to me. Taken to the logical extreme aren’t you just arguing we should all kill ourselves?

Having kids is pretty far down my priority list but like, there's more to life than earning money.

Sure, as long as you're comfortable, meaning you can find a good job that will work around your parental duties, and thst pays well enough you can rent or buy within a catchment area :)

Sure, that's doable. Millions of working parents in powerty in every G7 country can attest how easy it is.

I grew up only a notch or two above poverty, I know what it's like and you can still be a good parent and not well off.

Kids that the population doesn't have will simply get imported from other countries. It has no impact.

> Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it.

Objectively if no-one has kids then there will be no more humans. I guess you could consider that an ecological win. If you don't, then someone has to have kids.

No, there will be plenty of Hindus and Muslims, cos they largely don’t give a fuck about any of this noise.

But Christianity and Western Civilisation can kiss its own arse goodbye if it thinks this is a reasonable ideology to instil in to its young people.

Don’t have kids because it’ll economically ruin your life, and it’s bad for the environment anyway.

Righteo then, get on ya spaceship n fuck off to Mars then. Free up some resources and economy for us who believe having a family is the most important thing humans can do and that Western civilisation is actually pretty neat!

"No, there will be plenty of Hindus and Muslims, cos they largely don’t give a fuck about any of this noise."

Have you looked at the TFRs in India and more developed Muslim countries lately?

Mostly under 2 and still dropping like a stone. Turkey, Iran or UAE are every bit as much on the road to disastrous demography as Europe is, only with some delay.

Does not surprise me... in both Europe and East Asia, the worst and deepest drops in fertility happened in previously very socially conservative societies (Spain, South Korea), while the trend was less sharp and sudden in, say, Scandinavia.

Well fuck hey.

Israel may be mankind’s only hope.

As far as I’m aware Israel is the only developed Western nation with a fertility rate above replacement.

Of course, it’s more nuanced than that.

Definitely seems to be a positive correlation between religiosity and fertility rate.

This (rational) attitude is why state pensions need to have a strong correlation with the number of children you parent until they complete secondary schooling -- there needs to be a financial payoff for the time, effort and money invested; those children are the ones financing the state pensions.

The people planning for retirement are mostly past child raising age; the best way to have bugger families is to encourage low standards and unprotected sex amongst young adults, which is the exact opposite of the public health and morality pressure my entire generation and those that followed me have been on the recieving end of.

That said, medical tech is speeding up like everything else, so non-human surrogacy, artificial wombs, longevity meds, are all likely to impact this balance on similar timescales to such a cultural shift.

> bigger families is to encourage low standards and unprotected sex amongst young adults

Factually incorrect.

The best way to ensure big families is to foster a culture getting marriage younger, stating married, and starting families younger.

Women have their best years of fertility from about 17 to their early thirties. Telling young women to prioritise long educations and a career over family is counter productive to carrying on a civilisation, and has largely gone on to be proven something many women regret - unsurprisingly.

Strong, cohesive, multigenerational families don’t come simply from encouraging young people to have unprotected sex, although yes that is a crude component of it.

You have a western view of things. There are other cultures which have communal upbringing, e.g. Kibbutz, Hadza, and ǃKung; and while they have ceremonies which are called marriage, Europe has seen religious conflicts over the things smaller than the difference between ǃKung and Catholic marriage sanctity.

The fact is that marriage as it is understood in the west today bears little in common with the institution of the same name in the same place in the 1950s, which itself was different from the institution of the same name in the 1800s depending on if you were in a Catholic or Protestant area, all of which differ from the institution of the same name in the 1500s, all of which differ from the institution of the same name in the 1200s, which themselves varied from Roman and Greek marriage that were different from each other. In the present day, the Mosuo so-called "walking marriage" is essentially indistinguishable from what a European or American would call "teens dating and being allowed to stay the night".

> Strong, cohesive, multigenerational families

I didn't say any of those adjectives.

The Mosuo case demonstrates your claim is false, regardless.

Furthermore, when the fear is a concern of not enough workers in the next generation to pay out the pensions of the old, it is unclear why any of your list of adjectives matter.

You’re a cultural relativist.

You think all cultures are equal?

They’re not.

Only one culture gave us pretty much everything the modern world enjoys today: Western European culture.

Microchips, invented be Westerners. Electricity. Telecommunications. Space travel, space probes, space telescopes. We pioneered and perfected all of those things. First to end slavery. Universal suffrage, gay marriage. We did all of that. Modern medicine, antibiotics. First to solve HIV. Eradicated malaria, tuberculosis, polio. All Western achievement.

Other than the Jewish tradition you mentioned, the others are merely irrelevant.

Other then Israel in the Middle East, basically no one is queuing to get in to countries other then Western ones. Everyone wants to come to the advanced European economies, France and Germany, the UK, and the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia.

Why? Because we’re awesome and everyone wants what we have.

Then I can be a millionaire just by having five, six kids! Because that is 48 median gross incomes, which is $4m. Better growth curve than most YC startups!

Losing money on each unit and making up for it in scale may win VC money, but doesn't work elsewhere.

> Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it.

Absolutely insane take imo. You do you man.

Having kids and raising them is your primary purpose as a man. Anything else you spend your time on is secondary to that.

You’re absolutely 100% correct.

As a mid-fourties family-less man, I absolutely regret many of the decisions I’ve made that got me here.

I’ve realised I’ve been playing at a low steaks table. Smashing box and doing drugs is something a guy should do very briefly, if at all, in his early twenties. This is not a Man’s Game.

Then he’d better man up and focus on what is Good and Right or his life will be a fucking waste.

I mean even just purely selfishly, being frail-aged and having no one who genuine cares about me is fucking terrifying.

Damn, that’s heavy man. I’m sorry. I don’t know your situation but men are fortunate enough to be able to reproduce later in life so you could still turn it around.

I had my first kid accidentally in college and dropped out to focus on that. Very grateful for it.

I also had a vasectomy about seven years ago, which are notoriously difficult to reverse.

> I had my first kid accidentally in college and dropped out to focus on that. Very grateful for it.

Good man.

Humankind should depopulate, we cannot sustain infinite growth and are already destroying our planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation

There’s more forested land in Europe today than there has been since the middle ages

Almost half of which is monocultural plantations and not actual _forests_.

That’s about as ecologically true as calling a bunch of crop fields grasslands.

I wouldn't focus on the Europe's forests though.

The biodiversity and nature loss around the world are staggering, and the meagre gains on one tiny continent don't offset that.

Citation needed.

Also, even if true, a lot is likely due to people leaving the countryside and migrating to the cities during the latter half of the 20th century. To feed these urban populations, an enormous amount of food needs to be imported from other countries. So really the deforestation has been exported, same as pollution from manufacturing.

You don't need citation for common knowledge.

If OP had said "in last 40 years" then yeah sure.

But since the middle ages, or 500 years ago, how is that common knowledge?

More tree plantations.

I think a better analogy would be an old gas boiler.

Worst case for a car is that you break down on the side of the road (or I guess the brake lines give out).

Worst case for an old unmaintained gas boiler is that your house explodes. I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.

Edit for the downvoters: A properly maintained old gas boiler will probably be fine for longer than its designed lifetime. Also here's some sources for the cracked concrete: https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual...

In light of that, planning for their decommissioning is very sensible I would say.

>I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.

Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?

Tihange and Doel have had incidents and significant maintenance downtime related to issues with concrete.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...

So we should burn more gas for some decades because of the ceiling of a backup system in the nonnuclear part of the plant?

Is this like when Van der Straeten with obviously no ulterior motive whatsoever decided we needed to shut them down over the ultrasonic scanning of those vats that nobody else does?

Knowing this country we'll drain a shitload of money trough a bunch of committees. Do feasibility studies of nonsensical shit and then eventually fix and improve support of the ceiling anyway whilst the backup system keeps working ...but at 10 times to cost, in a slow way and a couple years later than one would expect.

and this doesnt mean explosion still...

NPPs have actually gotten more reliable over time.

Worst case for a car is the approximately ten people who will die today in the US alone due to the poor state of their, or someone else's vehicle.

I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.

Yea, fair point.

Maybe there just isn't a good analogy for a more than 40 year old NPP.

Maybe an old NPP is just an old NPP.

Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding).

It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).

Strictly: Engie was forced by a previous Belgian government to decommision the nuclear power plants.

> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.

As you explain in your next paragraph, none of Belgium's power plants are within their planned lifetime. Tihange 1, Doel 1 and 2 were operating on an extended service cycle for a decade before their shutdown. The two youngest reactors (Doel 4 and Tihange 3) surpassed their planned lifetime last year.

It's not France but Engie, a french company with lots of gas business. New nuclear makes sense if it doesnt take 20y to build. Probably that's why US wants to partner with Korea/Japan