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