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.
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.
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.
"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...
Are they planning on restarting the Fukushima plants? I didn't think they were.
There was never any chance of "restarting" them, so not sure why you brought that up.
> On the contrary
was about. Contrary to what?
This was about the Fukushima reactors that were completely destroyed? In response to a discussion of Belgian reactors that are completely different?
No need for any special casing.
Still count.
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.
In this case, we find that nuclear nuclear reactors are 2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than gas and coal power plants.
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.
And other than Chernobyl no melt downs.
So they seem to be fairly reliable if they aren’t run by clowns.
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.
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.
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.
You had a good argument up until you went there.
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...
Yep. It's called radiophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
And it is far, far deadlier than nuclear energy itself.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
<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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Good luck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 incorrectly claimed that Japan had "decided" to "decomission" "these" reactors, rather than "rebuild" them.
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.
I think most people who read this interpreted this as "these" meaning "Japan's reactor fleet". Because that's the only interpretation that makes at least a little sense (though it is wrong).
It certainly can't mean the reactors at Fukushima, because those have been destroyed, there never was any question of "rebuilding" them and so no "decision" not to do that. And not due to some unfixable "design flaw", but due to a Tsunami that another plant of the same design withstood without damage.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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?
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.
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.
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.
Which obviously doesn't prove what you think it proves...
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.
>"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.
> The displacements resulted in at least 51 deaths as well as stress and fear of radiological hazards
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
No, as it involved a partial meltdown, not a complete meltdown.
I mean we allow coal plants to vent radioactive material. Surely nuclear considering it an accident is an improvement.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
Also, obviously, that could lead to an issue with one being an issue with many.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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'm not going to argue long-term weather cycles versus man-made climate change with you.
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.
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.
"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...
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
That RMBK was built by those crazy Russians who thought it was reasonable to not even bother with a containment vessel / building.
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
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
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.
I wonder how much money it made Greenpeace. A million? Two million?
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...
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.
"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...
But I think my point is still valid. These Gen II reactors should be retired and replaced.
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.
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..)
> 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
- 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?
Tell me you don't work in energy without telling me.
Most heavily regulated industry on the planet - constant upgrades and safety reports.
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.
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.
Even assuming all bad stuff, nuclear is statistically ok https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
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.
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...
"Fish disco", for example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt they are talking about the same thing as the US companies. So it would be useless to extrapolate their economics.
UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.
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))
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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........
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?
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.
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.
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.
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%
2. Lazard themselves say that their LCOE numbers for nuclear are not indicative.
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'.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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 the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
Shoving immigration diatribes randomly into unrelated discussions is really tiresome. Sir, this is a comment thread about nuclear power.
To nuclear power?
If you really think Europe isn't dependent on anything foreign other than energy and labor, you really haven't thought it through.
Because of powering AI?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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".
I actually agree with this vision. But I wouldn't say every human not being a millionaire is "the #1 problem" today.
Don't leave us all in suspense.
>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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
There's no better investment.
Kids are an investment, not a sunk cost.
Sure, that's doable. Millions of working parents in powerty in every G7 country can attest how easy it is.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Absolutely insane take imo. You do you man.
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.
I had my first kid accidentally in college and dropped out to focus on that. Very grateful for it.
> I had my first kid accidentally in college and dropped out to focus on that. Very grateful for it.
Good man.
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.
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.
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 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.
That’s about as ecologically true as calling a bunch of crop fields grasslands.
The biodiversity and nature loss around the world are staggering, and the meagre gains on one tiny continent don't offset that.
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.
But since the middle ages, or 500 years ago, how is that common knowledge?
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.
Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...
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.
I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.
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.
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).