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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Big week for nuclear power in Ontario

After France, I believe Ontario is the king of nuclear power generation: roughly 60% of the province's electricity is generated from its nuclear power plants. However there were growing issues: cost overruns and increased political opposition in the 1980s had prevented development of new reactors for decades, and the legal battles over just the initial environmental assessments of an attempt to build new reactors at the Darlington site beginning in 2006 meant the project ended up stillborn (the provincial government abandoned it in 2011, and the court scuffles went on for another five years past that). After that successive Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments were plenty happy to kick the can down the road: after all, getting new hydro or nuclear generation going is never something that's going to come online in time for next election, so it just all disappears beyond the political event horizon. Never mind the various projections anticipating a large and growing gap between generation and demand, a gap probably understated if electrification of heating/transport accelerates.

Then all of a sudden it becomes an issue because one of the major nuclear plants (Pickering) is all of a sudden due for retirement before the next election, and there's a mad scramble to fix things. But at least the positive is that it appears to have finally shaken decision-makers out of their reverie: 4,800 MW of new reactors at Bruce Power will see it reclaim its former status as the world's largest nuclear plant, and three new small modular reactors will add 1,200 MW more. The scale is considerable: just the three new SMRs will generate more electricity than Canada's ten largest windfarms combined.

And so far the response has been positive! Looking at Reddit comments might not necessarily be instructive of the general reaction but it's been nothing but relief so far. I've been scanning left-leaning legacy media (there isn't much left in Canada) and what criticism there has been so far has been mainly tepid concerns about cost (which are valid, controlling cost overruns are pretty important here).

It'll be interesting to see the federal response here. The current Minister of Environment, Steven Guilbeault, is a former Greenpeace guy and has been vocally anti-nuclear in the past. The regulatory hurdles these projects will have to mount are mainly federal and there is the potential for some kind of obstruction. On the other hand the current Trudeau government has been cautiously open, at least rhetorically, to new nuclear development and has been helping fund SMR development. We shall see how it pans out. In general public sentiment isn't an issue: the large majority of Ontario's population already lives close to a nuclear power plant and public support is high. The concern is how interest groups or specific influential individuals might use the legal system or regulatory requirements to kill by a thousand cuts.

I'm going to take this chance to indulge in just a little bit of optimism!

Looking at Reddit comments might not necessarily be instructive of the general reaction but it's been nothing but relief so far.

one thing that I've always found interesting is that the thing that tends to unite the internet is a very pro-nuclear power stance. reddit, twitter, themotte, hell even rdrama, are from what i can tell, decidedly pro-nuclear power. it's an interesting trend that i've seen that has had quite large staying power. it's hard to argue that reddit for example has the same general politics as it does 10 years ago, but even then the issue of nuclear power seems to be constant.

i'm sure there are some small groups that are anti-nuclear on the internet, but i think you'd be more hard pressed to find anti-nuclear communities online than to find a lot of different things. i find that observation to be pretty interesting.

i'd argue this is for good reason: nuclear power seems to be an amazing way to generate base load, tends to emit less radiation than coal powered plants1, and is dozens or hundreds of times cleaner than other energy sources.

1: the study i linked found that for the energy generated, more radiation is given out by fly ash, which contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium. while the amount of radiation that makes it into people from both of these sources isn't dangerous, it's worth pointing out when given the concerns of "gonna be irradiated."

Scientific American: Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste

the study i linked found that for the energy generated, more radiation is given out by fly ash, which contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium. while the amount of radiation that makes it into people from both of these sources isn't dangerous, it's worth pointing out when given the concerns of "gonna be irradiated."

The title of that article is laughably false. The underlying point it is based on, that under normal operation a nuclear plant releases less radioactive material into the environment than a coal plant, is technically true but grossly misleading. Under normal operation nuclear plants release essentially no radioactive material, the radioactivity concern is concentrated purely into the possibility of something going wrong. Sanity-check I did after encountering this argument a decade ago:

The EPA gives the radioactivity of average fly ash as 5.8 picocuries per gram, and the U.S. produces around 125 million tons of coal-combustion byproducts per year as of 2006. If we overestimate and assume all coal-combustion byproducts are the more-radioactive fly ash, that comes to around 658 curies worth of material per year. By comparison, a year after the Fukushima disaster TEPCO estimated total radiation releases as 538,100 terabecquerels - equivalent to 14,543,243 curies. Note that this assumes all fly ash is being released into the environment when modern first-world plants safely capture most of it. So one year after the Fukushima disaster it had already released more radiation than 22,000 years of 2006-era U.S. coal radiation emissions, under very pessimistic assumptions. Which means we can confidently estimate Fukushima has released far more radiation than all the coal burned in human history and all the coal remaining in the ground that could be burned combined.

This doesn't mean that nuclear power is overall a bad idea, but it's definitely not because coal is a worse radioactivity concern. From what I've heard this particular misleading talking point has been going around even before it started circulating on the internet, I remember someone telling me that it was going around Stanford decades ago. People should be cautious with counterintuitive factoids like this, because often they spread because they are too good to check.

Fascinating. I have held this to be true for a very long time, but your point seems to check out. The only counterargument I wonder about is if the dispersal is different in a way relevant to health risks. I.e., maybe Fukushima makes the immediate area very irradiated, but the Earth in general is ~unaffected, whereas coal makes the Earth in general relevantly more irradiated.

The title of that article is laughably false. The underlying point it is based on, that under normal operation a nuclear plant releases less radioactive material into the environment than a coal plant, is technically true but grossly misleading.

I addressed this in the footnote.

the radioactivity concern is concentrated purely into the possibility of something going wrong.

It is a quite common myth that living near a nuclear power plant emits radiation during ongoing operations.

I addressed this in the footnote.

But it's not true that "for the energy generated, more radiation is given out by fly ash". You didn't say "so long as nothing goes wrong", so the average amount of radiation released per energy produced includes the risk of disaster. And since nuclear power plants involve significantly radioactive material and coal plants don't, even a tiny risk is enough to push the average way above coal plants. The fact that Fukushima alone released more radioactivity than the fly ash we would get from burning all coal deposits on Earth makes this clear.

It is a quite common myth that living near a nuclear power plant emits radiation during ongoing operations.

Then just say "nuclear power plants release virtually no radiation under normal operation". Don't try to make it sound like nuclear beats coal in terms of radiation, on a technicality sufficiently narrow that both you and the Scientific American article you link (and the people I've seen bring up this talking point before) stumble into outright falsehood. Nuclear beats coal on plenty of metrics, there is no need to compare them in terms of radioactivity besides the appeal of being counterintuitive.

It’s just hard to process low probablity, high impact events with common heuristics. It’s uncomfortable to mix a very low imprecise number with a very high imprecise number. You either approximate high impact to infinity and swear off nuclear or round off low probability to zero, seeing ‘the norm’ as what usually happens and the high impact event as an outlier. But this sort of scenario requires a norm reversal.

If an exploding nuclear plant releases more than all the routine radioactivity taken together, the ‘outlier’ is more significant than the ‘norm’. If you take a unit of radioactivity emitted by nuclear power at random, 99%+ it’s going to be from an uncontrolled discharge – routine operation radioactivity is irrelevant noise by comparison. Like it’s absurd to try to minimize terrorism in the US by calling 9/11 an ‘outlier’ – if you take a victim of terrorism at random, they’re likely from 9/11. If you care about impact, the small attacks are the outliers. If any data point should be shaved off for deviating from the norm, it’s them.

The problem with radioactivity is that it’s still not measuring impact, it just sounds scary. And coal plants have killed more people than nuclear plants with failures included.

Wouldn’t the rarity of the catastrophic failure matter as well? Other than 3 mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, I don’t think there’s been a catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant and we’ve had them for over 50 years. We’ve been using the technology for 18,000 days, or over a million hours with only a handful of failures. At some point the calculations would show an infinitesimal risk that could and probably should be neglected. We don’t include 9/11 type events in our calculations of building safety because the odds of a passenger jet hitting a building is small enough to neglect.

And if the question is generally is it safe, I think given the rarity of these events, we’re taking the release from a catastrophic failure and dividing it by the low odds (best guess one in a million) which is probably not as much as people think.

Wouldn’t the rarity of the catastrophic failure matter as well?

Which is why you do enough math to sanity-check the comparison. As I mentioned, Fukushima released more radioactivity than would be released by burning all the coal deposits on Earth. Nuclear power plants involve relevant amounts of radioactivity, coal plants don't. The fact that a release like Fukushima happened even once implies the odds aren't low enough to overcome the massive difference in radioactivity. Nuclear has plenty of advantages, and the risk of catastrophic failure is low enough that those other advantages might easily outweigh it, but being less of a radiation risk than coal is not one of them.

At some point the calculations would show an infinitesimal risk that could and probably should be neglected.

No. My point was, that number should never ever be rounded off to zero, despite our natural tendency to do so. That very very very small, extremely difficult to calculate probability, is the entirety of the problem for nuclear. Round something else up.

If it costs X dollars to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failure by 1% and the same amount to reduce routine radioactivity by 50 %, then somewhat counterintuitively you should choose the former. And if all your efforts to stop terrorism focus on preventing ‘lone wolf’ type attacks, you are ignoring most of the problem. I think most of the anti-terrorism stuff would have been silly one way or the other, and I like nuclear, but this is just math.

I’ll agree — if you’re the engineering team. Then yes, I want you to make your plant as safe as can be done with the money and time available.

On the other hand, I think as far as public debates, or public policy, a less than one in a million chance is not worth debating and in fact quite often means nothing will get done at all because the chance of something bad happening is not and can never be zero. And if you’re debating whether or not to build a skyscraper, there’s no reason to include “it might get struck by an airplane and collapse” simply because that kind of failure is so rare that brining it up as a part of the debate on building one would skew the debate against even needed buildings or technology. It stagnates society.

The question with cost overruns is always why. In the US, litigation is generally the reason why. Is that the same in Canada?

It's more than litigation issues in the U.S. The EPC (general contractors) that build nuclear power plants in the U.S. have generally lost the technical ability to build such complex engineering projects. The major contractors and subcontractors (CB&I, S&W, Westinghouse, etc) have all gone bankrupt and the people who built our original fleet never properly transferred their knowledge to the next generation of workers. We should all be embarrassed by this. We likely would be bot embarrassed and angry if it was even acknowledged as a problem. Instead we hear about nebulous "legislation and regulation". Those are certainly part of the problem, but only one part.

I wonder if Canada fares better. I kind of doubt it. It seems like the Chinese and maybe the French are the only ones left who can handle these types of projects.

Modular plants are probably much more sensible efficiency wise, and US hasn't lost the ability to build thermal power plants.

E.g. the Danish design that provides 50 MWt through a molten salt loop from a module the size of a shipping container.

Stack 20 of these in a row in concrete coffins underground, and you have 1 GWt of heat. Do people really think it'd be more expensive than giant pressure reactors in giant containment domes that can melt down and need lots of infrastructure for safety?

The molten salt modules can't overheat, and if they're punctured the salt solidifies under 600°C or so.

As if things buried underground in reinforced concrete were at risk of getting shot through.

Maybe but the reason why that doesn’t exist is because litigation made it prohibitively expensive to build in the first instance resulting in depreciating the value of the goodwill.

The major contractors and subcontractors (CB&I, S&W, Westinghouse, etc) have all gone bankrupt and the people who built our original fleet never properly transferred their knowledge to the next generation of workers.

IMO, they were forced into bankruptcy. After Three Mile Island, the regulators simply refused to allow any new nuclear plants to be constructed. See the wikipedia list of US nuclear plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_States

There's about five US nuclear plants started every year, up until 1978. Then there's a little excitement at Three Mile Island in 1979, where nobody is hurt. No nuclear plants begin construction until 2013.

How would Ford survive if the US government decreed that they could not produce any new cars for 30 years, they could only go on with cars in production in 1979? What use is there in having skills for nuclear power plant design and construction if they're de facto illegal to use for 30 years? And that doesn't include the insane forced cost overruns regulation imposed, requiring nuclear plants cope with physically impossible engineering failures, amongst other abuses:

Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.

Regulation was the assassin, gun and bullet while Westinghouse was the corpse on the floor.

Did you happen to see the Safe Enough guest book review on ACX? I thought it was a neat look into the genesis of this regulatory regime.

I did read that. But I think it's silly to go to huge such huge efforts to reduce risk in nuclear energy while we pump out enormous amounts of air pollution with coal. Tens of thousands die every year in the US alone, millions worldwide... and people are worried about potential risks from freak events? We should worry about large, real, experienced dangers rather than small, unreal, conjecture-based dangers.

I see Fukushima and raise dam failures - those actually kill people in huge numbers. One dam failure in China made Fukushima look like a joke - 11 million homeless, 171,000 dead. Yet nobody scrambles to prevent dams being built, blanket-bans them by law.

As for the worst case scenarios... there's excessive hysteria about radiation. The methodology is dubious at best, linear no-limit threshold models are just a guessing game of extrapolating from real danger to effects that can't even be observed. It's unscientific and defies reason - should we build giant shades to blot out the sun (a major source of radiation)? If there's no safe threshold for nuclear-derived radiation, why should there be a safe threshold for UV (which again kills orders of magnitude more than nuclear energy ever has every single year). The cost of a major nuclear disaster is a social construct, people feeling like they ought to evacuate, be stressed or expensively clean up despite the effects being small. There's zero existential risk as well.

I wonder if Canada fares better. I kind of doubt it. It seems like the Chinese and maybe the French are the only ones left who can handle these types of projects.

Aren't Koreans pretty good too?

Better.

Best prices in the world, though given that it's Korea it could be a mirage.

It's basically exactly what happened to the UK nuclear submarine program.

Mostly because they are built at such a low rate. If Canada were to send four rockets into space and use custom built Canadian ones, they would cost a fortune and be delayed for years. Spacex is cheap because spacex launches several times a month. The nuclear industry in the west is stuck between silly levels of regulation, such as the decades of fighting over how to store waste and a lack of an industrial base.

If we are actually going to get somewhere with nuclear, we need to build 10+ reactors a year in the west.

And they need to be of similar type, to get Nth of a kind benefits. As one person once put it, the problem with the US nuclear industry is that "In France, they have hundreds of types of cheese, but only two types of reactors. In America, this is reversed."

And they need to be of similar type, to get Nth of a kind benefits.

I'll recommend Where are my damn learning curves? as a look into that topic. (I'll also recommend the rest of that blog in general, even though it's not Motte-like in its focus)

A combination of incompetence and low-key corruption is traditional in Canadian government projects; presumably the actual nuclear engineers will be pretty competent in this case, but the govt drones managing them probably won't -- which will allow the corporate overlords to extract a little graft.

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