[HN Gopher] Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting do...
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Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear
site
Author : tapper
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-12-15 10:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| jen729w wrote:
| Tangentially related, but as everyone here seems to enjoy talk of
| nuclear [things], it's worth a recommendation:
|
| Nevil Shute's 1957 novel 'On the Beach'.
|
| If you want high-level spoilers, Wikipedia is your friend. I
| shan't say a word other than that it's a terrific little book
| that I can't believe I'd never heard of. I just read it last
| week.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)
| canadianfella wrote:
| arethuza wrote:
| Air cooled nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? Quite
| a lot as it turns out:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
| mannykannot wrote:
| Fortunately, the director of Britain's Atomic Energy Research
| Establishment, John Cockcroft, insisted on filters being
| retrofitted to the cooling air exhaust stacks (not specifically
| out of concerns for a fire.) This expensive and time-consuming
| addendum was ridiculed as "Cockcroft's Folly" until the fire,
| when they captured ~95% of the discharge.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Fol...
| arethuza wrote:
| I wondered for years what the big towers were for and what
| the odd looking bits on top were - was amazed to find out
| that they were chimneys and the bits on top were filters!
| Arrath wrote:
| I do hope he spent the rest of his life on a big "I told you
| so" tour to anyone who had uttered 'Cockcroft's Folly' before
| the accident.
| yodelshady wrote:
| To add context, the described plant was a weapons programme
| that predates any civilian nuclear energy. In fact it also
| predates the hydrogen bomb, so that war planners vastly
| overestimated the amount of plutonium needed.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Beats river cooled reactors..
| jacquesm wrote:
| Rivers can and do dry up or reduce significantly in flow.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| I ment the first sovjet reactor, were they literally
| diverted a river through the reactor core. Polluting all
| villages and a sea down stream forever.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh that's really ugly, do you know which reactor this
| was?
| dTal wrote:
| They are referring to Mayak, and however ugly you're
| picturing, it's probably worse: a Chernobyl-level
| radiological release, but on deliberate as operational
| procedure.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak
| jacquesm wrote:
| Holy crap, I never knew about this. Wow. That's a level
| of irresponsibility that I did not think would exist even
| in that part of the world. Incredible.
| karencarits wrote:
| Not to downplay the significance of this disaster, but this is
| one of the worst nuclear accidents we know - yet "It is
| estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240
| additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal".
| Not all dams are used for power, of course, but the failure of
| the Banqiao Reservoir Dam[0] is estimated to have killed 171
| 000
|
| I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life
| and health
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
| Retric wrote:
| In general people build dams to #1 store water, #2 save
| lives, and only a distant 3rd generate power.
|
| Most of the 62 dams that collapsed in that hurricane where
| not hydroelectric dams. And it's not clear the existence of
| these dams played that significant role in the death total
| considering China's history with even more devastating
| floods.
| maria2 wrote:
| But the nuclear power plant has the potential to make large
| swaths of land uninhabitable for thousands of years. There's
| clearly a difference.
| nebopolis wrote:
| Dams have the side effect of making huge swaths of land
| uninhabitable automatically as soon as they start filling.
|
| From the Three Gorges Dam
|
| > China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with
| Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350
| villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the
| reservoir
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Planned and managed operational characteristics are not
| sudden-onset, unanticipated, and highly-disruptive
| catastrophes. They're fully-anticipated side-effects.
|
| Your comment really doesn't speak to the nature of the
| phenomenon.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The <<inhabitable for thousands of years>> is a myth. Do
| you know how many people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
| today?
|
| Poeple vastly overestimate the dangerous of this stuff
| after a few years. Fukushima and Prypiat are probably safer
| to live than the average Asian city center due to air
| pollution, or even the Midwest due to pesticide exposure...
| maria2 wrote:
| How many people live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone?
| Svetlana Alexievich interviewed some of "The Zone's"
| residents in her excellent book Voices From Chernobyl.
| It's not a fun place to live, unless having all your
| teeth fall out is fun.
| yodelshady wrote:
| _Nowhere in Europe_ is a fun place to live any more
| thanks to what we _are still using_ in place of nuclear
| power. Summers are brutal, winters are brutally
| expensive, oh, and we funded a genocide in our own
| borders, and probably a few more in the Middle East.
| Because, as it turns out, winter is fucking defined as
| "that point in time when there's not much solar going
| around at these latitudes, and sometimes it's not windy
| either".
|
| So yes, I'm fucking bitter about that, and about people
| like you.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Ironic as it sounds, nuclear _weapons_ in many ways have
| far shorter-term impacts than nuclear _reactors_.
|
| The Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb contained 64 kg of
| highly-refined uranium, of which less than 1 kg
| fissioned, the remainder being vapourised in the ensuing
| blast and distributed over a wide area. That dispersal in
| large part _reduces_ the risk of radioactivity as it is
| so highly diluted. The rule of thumb for nuclear blasts
| is the "seven-ten rule": every sevenfold increase in
| hours from the blast reduces residual radiation by a
| factor of 10. That rule-of-thumb is an approximation, but
| with nearly 7^7 hours since the blast, radiation _by that
| rule_ would be one ten-millionth the level 1 hour
| following the blast.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_seven-
| ten_...>
|
| Chernobyl put 400 times more radioactive material into
| the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb:
|
| <https://www.scifacts.net/earth/chernobyl-400-times-more-
| radi...>
|
| It's also worth noting that Chernobyl, _and several other
| presently-operating nuclear power plants_ are in the
| middle of a war zone and have been the site of active
| fighting, bombardment, and missile strikes.
|
| I don't find a figure for the mass of the Elephant's Foot
| at Chernobyl, though it's clearly many tonnes of matter.
|
| In the case of Fukushima, the total _reactor core and
| fuel_ waste on site is measured in _hundreds of tonnes_ ,
| with 560 tonnes of reactor fuel, from melted-down
| reactors, on site.
|
| <https://www.citizen.org/news/how-much-radioactive-
| material-i...>
|
| (There's another 680 tonnes of _spent waste fuel_ ,
| presumably in containment, on site. I'm _excluding_ that
| from this discussion as _that_ happens to be a managed
| waste stream.)
|
| The _immediate vicinity_ of both Chernobyl and Fukushima
| will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least
| many centuries, if not thousands of years.
| arethuza wrote:
| Yes - I've got the book "Atomic Accidents" and it starts with
| a description of a disaster at a Russian hydro plant:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-
| Shushenskaya_power_stat...
| yabones wrote:
| I think a big part of what makes people so afraid of
| radiation is how easy it is to detect. Imagine if you had a
| geiger counter that detected Dioxin, Benzine, or PFAS
| contamination? It would be going off pretty much constantly.
| You can detect radioactive materials with a cheap detector,
| where you need an entire lab to find regular poisons, which
| doesn't help with our lack of ability to assess risk.
|
| For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have
| a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house.
| They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning
| Teflon cookware.
|
| It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution
| kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the
| entire history of atomic power production. But most people
| don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel
| factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| The eye opener for me was, when i read that one overheated
| teflon cookware kills all birds in a whole area.
| https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/teflon-
| polytetrafluor...
|
| Its like a trenchwarfare coated nightmare.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Most people are not aware that carbon, potassium and
| calcium are radioactive elements.
|
| Despite that, our body contains large quantities of them.
|
| Like also for the chemical toxins, the dangers of radiation
| depend on the dose, and we should not worry when it is low
| enough.
|
| Also platinum is a radioactive element, but those who wear
| platinum jewelry are seldom aware of this.
|
| All computer displays are slightly radioactive, because the
| ITO transparent electrodes contain indium, which is a
| radioactive element too.
|
| The ceramic kitchen knives are slightly radioactive,
| because their blades are made of zirconia, and both
| zirconium and hafnium are radioactive elements (all Zr,
| unless specially purified for nuclear reactors, contains
| Hf).
| adrian_b wrote:
| Someone has downvoted this, but I cannot understand the
| reason, unless it was due to ignorance.
|
| Everything written above are facts, not opinions.
|
| They are little known facts, which is why I have
| mentioned them. Uranium and thorium are the most
| radioactive among the elements that have survived since
| the creation of the Solar System, but they are not the
| only radioactive primordial elements, there are many
| others.
|
| Most people who are afraid of radiation do not realize
| how many of the surrounding objects are radioactive,
| without being dangerous because of that.
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| Typically, when one refers to an element as "radioactive"
| one is either referring to a particular isotope that is
| radioactive (e.g., C14) or an element in which the most
| abundant naturally occurring isotope(s) are radioactive
| (e.g., U). To call "carbon" radioactive, is technically
| true I suppose depending on your view but the level of
| radioactivity in natural carbon is so low that it is an
| almost meaningless truth. Potassium and calcium have a
| bit more natural radioactivity, but still it poses no
| health issues. The other elements you list are
| essentially the same, except perhaps Halfnium (have not
| checked). Heck by the definition you seem to be using of
| the term "radioactive element", I do not think there
| exists a non-radioactive element.
|
| Of course, you are correct that the dangers of
| radioactivity depend on the dose. But your message is
| diminished by overly emphasizing the radioactivity in
| carbon and other naturally occurring elements that pose
| zero health risk and frankly are so very non-radioactive
| in a relative sense.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| It is not easy to detect UNLESS you have a geiger counter.
| Those Russian soldiers dug trenches around Tchernobyl
| blissfully unawhere of any problems. They carried the dirt
| into the dwellings and labs where people still have to
| work, causing ongoing problems.
|
| If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any
| radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment
| can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you
| somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Except, of course, that the story about the Russian
| soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up.
|
| > any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your
| equipment can do its damage for a long time
|
| If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains
| after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless.
| It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your
| body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with
| iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life
| and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario,
| you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad
| but that's also very far from the made up stories about
| soldiers' acute irradiation).
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| > Except, of course, that the story about the Russian
| soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up.
|
| There are satellite photos of trenches dug around the red
| forest where Russian soldiers had deployed?
| kergonath wrote:
| Not ideal in terms of radionuclide release. Also not a great
| coolant due to the ridiculously small heat capacity. Also,
| these reactors had no other purpose than producing plutonium
| for weapons and the design is completely useless for anything
| else.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates:
|
| > Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-
| motion race against time, which will last so long that even the
| grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The
| process will cost at least PS121bn.
|
| Example:
|
| > The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more
| rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing
| plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid - enough
| to fill a few hundred bathtubs - dripped out of a ruptured pipe.
| The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at
| least PS300m.
|
| Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private
| partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private
| industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe
| me? Example [1]:
|
| > The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear
| plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for
| individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
|
| So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating
| company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think
| about that.
|
| The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than
| Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less
| severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale
| Fire [2].
|
| [1]:
| https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
| mhh__ wrote:
| Sellafield is decommissioning in large part a plant designed to
| any% speedrun weapons grade material, not power.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates:
|
| For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better
| knowledge and engineering expertise to build safer, better,
| more efficient, less "polluting" (for some definition of the
| word) reactors.
|
| FWIW, this week in the cold snap in the UK, we've relied on
| good old fossil fuel and... nuclear, because the wind isn't
| blowing and the Sun isn't shining.
|
| https://gridwatch.co.uk/
|
| Also, being old enough to have lived through the press-hysteria
| of Chernobyl: "we're all going to die or have babies with 3
| arms", we ended up with maybe 4000 deaths over 50 years, and an
| area now rich with wildlife. And that's an uncontrolled nuclear
| accident.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
|
| Compare that to the number of people that die through coal mine
| accidents a year and air pollution and so on. Then there's oil
| slicks killing wildlife, rig accidents, pipelines hundreds, if
| not thousands of miles long and so on. Or natural gas, with
| explosions and so on. Plus all the carbon emissions for
| transporting millions upon millions of tons of the stuff.
|
| The world wide number of deaths due to nuclear in its _entire
| history_ adds up to less deaths than there are probably in a
| typical week for fossil fuels (deaths mining, transporting,
| building, and deaths to the general population breathing it in,
| and let 's add deaths from climate change in there, since
| that's literally what fossil fuels have caused).
|
| I'd go further and say the deaths worldwide per day directly
| (accidents) or indirectly (climate change + pollution) due to
| fossil fuel usage is more than all deaths ever due to nuclear
| in its history.
|
| I live near a nuclear power station, and I'm comfortable with
| that. In fact, where I live, there's approximately 1.5m living
| within 30 miles, and just beyond that... London.
|
| On balance, I'd take a fleet of new nuclear power stations over
| the absolute disaster that is fossil fuels and the days there's
| no sun or wind.
|
| Back to: 'oh but what about waste?'
|
| Bury it, with signs. If we've gotten too stupid to read in 500
| years, we're likely too stupid to know how to dig down several
| thousand feet, and are probably banging rocks together and
| saying 'ug' to each other. It's really not a problem. I can't
| recall the last time someone stupidly went into an _existing_
| nuclear waste dump anywhere in the world and then died. And if
| they have it's, what, 1 person out of 7 billion.
|
| > Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-
| private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to
| private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it.
| Don't believe me? Example [1]:
|
| Well, of course. Because, built in the right way, you use
| nuclear reactors to breed weapons grade fuel. So governments
| are always involved. In turn this means that governments never
| let market forces, and hence private companies build competing
| nuclear reactors which would drive down costs because the
| government won't step out of the way. The UK pretty much had a
| choice of EDF or EDF to build a new nuclear reactor.
| blitzar wrote:
| My naive solution is to actually double down. The site is
| "toxic", the community (and the grandchildren of those working
| on site) are entirely dependant upon the plant. Build more
| plants on site - you have the waste, but also the knowledge and
| the one community that is happy to have it in their back yard.
|
| As toxic as the waste in the pools out back is the last 20
| years of will they wont they attitude towards not just further
| nuclear builds but hand wringing over paying to cleanup the
| experiments of the past which is where much of the waste comes
| from.
| Neil44 wrote:
| I am confused because you're mixing things from UK, US and
| russia in this post which obviously all have different laws.
| I'm not sayig you're wrong it's just confusing beause the
| situations from different countries aren't always comparable
| unless you explicitly establish that they are, it would be
| better to just stick to examples from the same country.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| It's estimated that coal use in the US costs $345 billion a
| year in hidden expenses (health problems and pollution etc)
| https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-study-idUSN16283662...
|
| Which are all paid by the public and government.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear advocate here.
|
| With radiation, people often conflate measureable with
| hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying
| there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them.
|
| Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't
| see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300
| mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them
| are borderline meaningless.
|
| Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts
| remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution
| from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is
| happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has
| among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per
| kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear
| accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than
| fossil/biofuel.
|
| That's why lots of people like nuclear.
|
| Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while
| operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about
| that.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we
| don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute
| or 300 mSv over a long period of time.
|
| Waste from fission plants and incidents is hard to estimate
| for a variety of reasons. It tends to be incredibly long-
| lived. Small non-lethal (even non-harmful) amounts can
| accumulate in animals and plants to the point where there's
| still an impact from Chernobyl on widespread populations
| decades later [1]:
|
| > The German boars roam in forests nearly 950 miles (1,500
| kilometers ) from Chernobyl. Yet, the amount of radioactive
| cesium-137 within their tissue often registers dozens of
| times beyond the recommended limit for consumption and
| thousands of times above normal.
|
| It's worth noting that not all toxic byproducts are
| radioactive. Cesium is toxic on its own. The Uranium and
| Plutonium decay chains include a lot of metals that even if
| you ignore the radioactive element, they're toxic, sometimes
| incredibly so.
|
| > ... 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from
| fossil and renewable biofuel combustion.
|
| [citation needed]
|
| This study [2] argues 1M/year, most of those concentrated in
| SE Asia (due to lack of regulation combined with coal use)
| and it's predominantly coal. For the US it's around 20,000.
| It's also not clear to me if this study includes emissions
| from automobiles.
|
| > ... nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental
| harm than fossil/biofuel.
|
| The Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone, decades later, still
| stands at (literally) a thousand square miles.
|
| Nuclear advocates always bring up coal (as a false dichotomy
| and it paints nuclear in the best light) and deaths because
| it's in many ways the least impactful dimension for nuclear.
| Likewise, they always talk about operational costs while
| brushing over capital costs (and thus the total cost of
| ownership) and the costs of waste handling and storage and
| ultimately the site cleanup costs. As the article notes here
| the current estimate for this one site sits at 121 billion
| pounds and will likely rise and take a century or more.
|
| [1]: https://phys.org/news/2011-04-germany-radioactive-boars-
| lega...
|
| [2]: https://www.healtheffects.org/publication/global-burden-
| dise...
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Do you know the dose rates from the boar in mSv/yr, and how
| it compares to background? Lol. See this is exactly what
| I'm talking about! Thank you.
|
| As for air pollution citation, here:
| https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The problem with all those assumptions is that the
| "radiological harm" is cumulative and it can accumulate in
| unexpected ways which aren't random.
|
| For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then
| do their damage for a long time. And there's no good
| framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for
| example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers
| dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year.
| Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few
| millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of
| radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is
| such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out,
| because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose.
|
| And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned
| in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative
| to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to
| forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an
| extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby
| scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions,
| but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget
| that while not that many people die even in major accidents,
| that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up.
| At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a
| trillion Dollar in cost, btw.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Actually it's the anti-nuclear crowd that frames pro-
| nuclear people in a way that pretends it's only coal or
| nuclear. The reality is that we are 80% fossil and biofuel
| and need everything that is at least 10x better on climate
| and health, which includes major expansion of wind, solar,
| hydro, nuclear, geothermal.
|
| The amount of energy transition we need is nearly
| unfathomable. To tie our hand behind our back because we
| are afraid of nuclear in this race is unwise.
|
| Antinuclear scare mongerers are forcing the Fukushima
| people to purify water so far below the natural
| radioactivity of seawater (which does contain slightly
| radioactive potassium and uranium) that it's truly
| ridiculous. That drives up costs unecessarily.
|
| Anyway what's the cost of failing to solve climate change
| or the cost of killing 8 million people per year with
| combustion?
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-
| reall...
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Now it sounds like "fossil and biofuel" is only coal. Not
| quite getting this.
|
| We should all be afraid of nuclear power. The risks are
| uncalculateable. Whoever thinks he can calculate the
| risks is delusional. It's not just that "impossible"
| accidents have happened a bit too often in the past. The
| bigger problem is that Humans are not that predictable
| and any nuclear waste stored is in danger of getting
| blown up by some army or warlord in the next few
| milennia. Same for active power plants, though for a
| shorter period.
|
| Ukraine is having this problem right now. What are the
| chances that Putin causes an incident with one of their
| plants? You can never say zero, and the situation is very
| fluid. For any reasonable estimation of risk, you'd have
| to assume a couple of decades of peace in your region: No
| war, civil war or major political upheaval. Some are
| willing to make that bet. I'm not, for any country.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Fossil and biofuel are the ones that kill 8M per year.
| Not just coal.
|
| That nice smell of wood burning in the air is pretty
| deadly, sadly enough.
|
| https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
| purerandomness wrote:
| > which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro,
| nuclear, geothermal.
|
| So why should we invest money into nuclear, which has the
| downsides of clean-up costs that literally never end,
| with the burden of having to communicate the risk to
| every human generation as long as humanity exists?
|
| Instead of untying our hand behind our back and simply
| invest massively in renewables, which have a lifecycle
| cost profile and risk profile that is much more
| predictable?
| realusername wrote:
| Because that's the only clean energy source working 24/7
| reliably and large scale electricity storage options are
| pretty much all terrible.
|
| Additionally the usage spikes are in winter where solar
| production is at the lowest of the year and it's not like
| you can gamble the electricity grid on having wind or
| not.
| qball wrote:
| >with the burden of having to communicate the risk to
| every human generation as long as humanity exists?
|
| We already have many industrial disasters with dangers
| that need to be communicated to every human generation to
| come in the form of acid mine drainage and whatnot. Those
| releases (which would happen absent human upkeep of dams
| and tailings ponds) are _also_ things that would
| absolutely wreck environments for hundreds to thousands
| of years if released.
|
| Every mine you open has clean-up costs that never end; it
| would be wiser to minimize the amount of new ones. You'll
| need more of them if you go with the intermittent sources
| of power because renewables are far more wasteful in
| terms of materials required (and because they inherently
| don't produce power constantly).
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear is unique due to its physics advantage in being
| able to run 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. A
| good nuclear fleet doesn't need backup or storage.
| Nuclear plants can follow load to the tune of 2-5% full
| power per minute, rain or shine, without depending on
| regional weather or seasonal rainfall.
|
| Furthermore we know the overall risk profile after
| operating them for 70 years. The numbers are in and
| they're excellent.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| It's wild to want to not use this.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Somehow this is rarely as fast or cheap as planned.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Often in part because people conflate measurable with hazardous
| with radiation. If the goal was to allow double the natural
| dose rates then it would be a lot easier. You need about 20x
| the natural dose rate for a year before you see an increase in
| cancer incidence from 42% baseline to 43%.
|
| https://whatisnuclear.com/dose-calc.html
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| There is no meaningful difference between measurable and
| hazardous radiation.
|
| You never know where the stuff builds up. Some isotopes get
| enriched in some organs and do damage over a long time.
| Depending on what the material actually is, it can get into
| unfortunate places and stay there for a few years,
| irradiating someone. It can get into the food supply doing
| some more damage than anticipated.
|
| None of that is calculateable, so it is better to treat every
| radiation as a risk. You also forget that workers may be
| wearing a dosimeter, but average people don't. They'd never
| know. You can easily reach the 20x increase if you have a
| contaminated object in your home or car or whatever, even if
| that contamination isn't that strong.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| This might be a good read for you.
|
| https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_f
| i...
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| If you think this disproves my point, it doesn't. They
| say there is no minimum dose level for damage, even
| though the "damage" at common doses may sound acceptable.
|
| The biggest problem people forget is time: If people stay
| in contact with contaminated material, especially if they
| ingest some, then it really doesn't matter that much how
| low the radiation is. That's why radioactive material is
| treated the way it is. As long as you have dosimeters and
| geiger counters and hazmat suits you have a calculateable
| risk. With even some of those assumptions broken, there
| is no calculation.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Here's the overall radiological impact of Chernobyl.
|
| https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-
| work/chernobyl.h...
| ck2 wrote:
| Weird I submitted this yesterday
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34003392
|
| Even the target url is the same?
| baud147258 wrote:
| according to the guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), reposting is
| allowed:
|
| > Are reposts ok?
|
| > If a story has not had significant attention in the last year
| or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury
| reposts as duplicates.
| ck2 wrote:
| Oh I didn't personally mind, I am glad the story got
| attention because nuclear is so popular around here without
| discussion of the hidden massive consequences.
|
| I just found it weird the code didn't catch the dupe from 24
| hours ago because it always redirects me when I submit a link
| that was posted the previous day and pushed off the page.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The submission queue is fickle.
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