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by worik·7y ago·view on hn ↗
Do you really think that "nuclear can... be profitable" if the operators have to pay insurance premiums against the possibility of catastrophic failure?

What about paying to store the (albeit small amount of) long lived waste? What is the cost of permanently, and safely, storing a tonne of very poisonous material for hundreds of thousands of years? And do not say " deep-geologic placement" as there is no geological structure that we know of that is stable and seperated from the biosphere for those periods.

Nuclear power is socialising extraordinary risk and making future generations pay for today's energy.

Yes it can be profitable. But never moral

3 comments
> Yes it can be profitable. But never moral

Without comparing it to the morality of the alternatives, it's not really fair to say that.

The only other large power sources in existence today that are reliable and sufficient to meet demands are fossil fuels. Burning them has been demonstrated time and time again to shorten the lives of the millions who have to live near the pollution. Not to mention climate change, which is happening as a result of CO2 emissions.

Solar and wind are cheaper, but not reliable. You need to either have massive energy storage- whose cost to build would greatly exceed nuclear plants- or else additional fossil fuel plants to handle the fluctuations.

> if the operators have to pay insurance premiums against the possibility of catastrophic failure?

Nuclear in Ontario uses CANDU[0] reactors- a design which has never had any disasters. Insurance against catastrophic failure wouldn't be expensive given all of the long-proven safety features built in, and strong engineering regulations around operations.

> What is the cost of permanently, and safely, storing a tonne of very poisonous material for hundreds of thousands of years?

Cheaper than the costs to society for the thousands/millions of premature deaths each year from pollution and hundreds of millions who are going to be displaced from climate change. And worth pointing out as well that the CANDU design is versatile enough to be able to use the waste of some other reactor types or dismantled nuclear weapons as fuel.

It's all about context, is my point. And in the context of the world today, nuclear is (imho) the best choice as the baseline power generation system.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

Would petroleum be profitable if the drillers and refiners had to pay insurance premiums against global warming / climate change?
No it wouldn't. Which is why you keep hearing about Carbon Tax.
...or insurance against bloody war.
Nuclear is about the safest power source mankind has. Most research looks like this https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

And more modern designs than most countries use are much safer than the ones in the link.

It's safe in terms of deaths, but most power sources' failure modes don't include "render a large area uninhabitable for a century".
Have you looked at Hiroshima on google maps?

This is where the detonation occurred

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hiroshima+Atomic+Bomb+Hypo...

It's not particularly relevant, but I thought it was interesting seeing the people living so close to the site of a nuclear detonation.

And they never have been able to keep people from staying in, or moving back into, the area around Chernobyl.

There's an interesting documentary, "The Babushkas of Chernobyl" about some women who refused to leave.

Meanwhile NGOs like the http://www.hilfe-tschernobyl.de/ fund the removal of tumours of kids from Belarus who suffer due to the accident and support local hospitals and hospices where victims are being treated or live their last days.
>tumours of kids from Belarus who suffer due to the accident

Sounds like bullshit to me. There's no way to tell if it's due to the accident, and the statistics of such cases are not conclusive. And of course it's a German organization, which is a country known to be irrationally anti-nuclear, burning brown coal just to offset the closed nukes which had zero impact on the environment.

> but most power sources' failure modes don't include "render a large area uninhabitable for a century".

Large scale hydro is probably the closest to nuclear in this respect.

And is notable because it's success mode also does something similar.

(Of course, the “success” mode of fossil fuel power renders the whole planet uninhabitable, but not from a single average-size generating station.)

> "render a large area uninhabitable for a century".

I've never really understood this argument. Even if we set aside 1000 square miles of land for waste disposal, that's a rounding error in the amount of uninhabitable land on the planet. It's probably even a rounding error in land that has been made uninhabitable by humans for similarly long time spans.

Not waste disposal, nuclear disasters.

I think the waste problem is awkward but far from a dealbreaker for nuclear energy, especially with breeder reactors and other more efficient designs.

The problem is that even though nuclear reactors work the overwhelming majority of the time, such that disasters are practically a rounding error, when they happen they're rather spectacular.

The most spectacular one so far won’t render a place uninhabitable for a century, and it’s a terribly old design.

Where is the evidence of your century of uninhabitable failure mode going forward?

How about all the uninhabitable land from other power sources? There’s plenty of Superfund sites from traditional power generation.

If you’re going to criticize, be sure to apply the same standard to all methods.

When you dig into it carefully, you’ll find nuclear to be one of the cleanest, safest solutions, taking into account cost to build and externalities, cost for waste, lifetime of the plant, etc.

And modern designs don’t render a place dangerous after failure. That’s 1950 talking, not 2019. Google nuclear reactor safety and read about it. You’ll be surprised.

It’s not the terror so many associate with the word nuclear.

oh, and i forgot, the worst part of nuclear power is the fans.