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Notes -
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!
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."
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:
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.
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I addressed this in the footnote.
It is a quite common myth that living near a nuclear power plant emits radiation during ongoing operations.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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