[HN Gopher] I changed my mind about nuclear waste
___________________________________________________________________
I changed my mind about nuclear waste
Author : bilsbie
Score : 315 points
Date : 2023-02-10 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zionlights.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zionlights.substack.com)
| helf wrote:
| the fearmongering and all around nuclear is deeply ingrained in
| the public consciousness. It will be hard to kill it. Sadly.
| There are all sorts of designs that are awesome but havent been
| put to wide use because its insanely expensive to even get
| permits for a nuclear plant (if it is even possible) not to
| mention the insane costs to actual build one. Economies of scale
| never took hold due to a couple of incidents (of OLD designs and
| OLD installations for the most part) being flung everywhere. And
| then you'd have prominent scientists, even, getting vocal about
| being against nuclear. For whatever fucking reason.
|
| Irks the hell out of me.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Say what you will, but I don't think you'll ever get economies
| of scale in nuclear like you will with solar (or even wind).
| You can certainly get _some_ economies of scale, but those cost
| benefits are almost always a function of number of units
| produced.
|
| Nuclear just doesn't need that many units produced - so it will
| never get the same functional benefit.
|
| Unless you're planning on going down to Asimov-esque wearable
| reactors (and I don't realistically think you are) nuclear just
| doesn't make enough units to really get the same benefits from
| scale.
|
| Solar on the other hand... each unit is producing 100watts of
| power, and you're making a literal shit load of units.
| Production numbers are very high, and it benefits enormously
| from economies of scale.
|
| Basically - even the smallest reactor designs we're talking
| about for nuclear are in the 20mw range/unit.
|
| Solar is 100-300w/unit. (watts - not megawatts). We're making
| nearly 70 THOUSAND units of solar for every unit of nuclear, at
| nuclear's smallest size.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The main problem is that nuclear is too expensive. You make a
| commitment that lats for centuries, which makes the actual cost
| of the energy way more expensive than most anything else. Our
| children for generations will have to pay for the "cheap"
| energy we consume today. This has been proven several times
| now, most nuclear operators in the world have been bailed out
| by taxpayers at least once, one way or another.
|
| Separately from that there is the undeniable risk of
| catastrophic failure laying waste to very large areas of land
| for centuries. The reactor design is not the main reason for
| this risk, humans are. No matter how amazing the reactor is, as
| long as it produces waste it's unsafe during a war, for
| example. We've not had a century without war yet.
| aeonik wrote:
| I've been a bit of a nuclear nerd for a long time, and somehow
| the author still shares information that is new to me: I had no
| idea how quickly high-level waste dissipated, love the plots of
| the radioactive decay.
|
| > _The decay of heat and radioactivity over time means that after
| only forty years, the radioactivity of used fuel has decreased to
| about one-thousandth of the level at the point when it was
| unloaded. Less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. The
| portion that stays radioactive for longer is about as radioactive
| as some things found in nature and can be easily shielded to
| protect humans._
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is somewhat logical. Radiation isn't free and if something
| radiates a lot, it loses quite a lot of energy while radiating.
|
| Typically: intense radiation is caused by massive presence of
| isotopes with short half-life, which means that they go away
| quite quickly.
|
| Even the notorious Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl, made of molten
| core content, is now much safer than it used to be, to the
| degree that people are now willing to enter the room and make
| photos of it [0]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)
| zizee wrote:
| It's an often (deliberately?) overlooked aspect of nuclear
| waste discussions. People will loudly say "radioactive waste
| needs to be stored for thousands of years", and "you go near
| some radioactive waste, you will surely die from radiation
| exposure". This gets combined into something like "This highly
| dangerous stuff, that you cannot approach stays highly
| dangerous and unapproachable for 10k years". Then people say
| "how can we possibly hope to store this incredibly dangerous
| stuff for 10k years, it's such a hard problem to solve, better
| not create this stuff in the first place, no more nuclear!".
|
| But the stuff that lasts 10k years is a very different beast
| from the stuff that kills you quickly from just being near it.
| The supremely radioactive stuff tends to have a very short
| half-life. We can think about storage methods in very human
| time-frames, it's much more achievable. The other, long half
| life stuff needn't be stored with nearly the same extremly
| stringent standards, because it just isn't so extremely
| dangerous.
| uoaei wrote:
| "About" and "less than" are lovely weasel words for the
| ideologically committed.
|
| According to this graph, the truth is more like 1% after 100
| years, 0.1% after 10,000 years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel?useskin=vec...
| nicoburns wrote:
| IMO that's quite misleading. It's true that the amount of
| radition will dramatically decline. But it does so unevenly,
| and certain isotopes last much much longer. That's not really a
| problem if the waste stays contained in one location, but if
| that waste somehow leaked into water sources or similar then it
| could have significant consequences. Even a very small amounts
| of these isotopes can be dangerous if inhaled or ingested.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Good news if you haven't heard it, due to tech from the fracking
| industry the nuclear waste problem is solved:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal
| jollyllama wrote:
| I doubt the safety of fracking. This sounds even more dangerous
| than the alternatives; if something goes wrong, how can it be
| fixed, being so deep underground? Yucca Mountain always sounded
| like the best plan.
| willcipriano wrote:
| If something goes wrong it's so deep in the earth that it
| doesn't matter.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the
| industry, founded an activist group that claims:
|
| > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science.
|
| Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science".
|
| edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and
| GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting.
|
| I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and
| Shellenberger to be running the same "I used to be an
| environmentalist" story:
|
| https://www.netzerowatch.com/gwpf-welcomes-newfound-realism-...
|
| > In recent days, former Extinction Rebellion spokesman Zion
| Lights has announced her conversion to the cause of nuclear
| energy, while so-called "eco-modernist" Michael Shellenberger has
| gone further, and apologised for the years he spent
| scaremongering over climate change in a long article at Forbes
| website.
|
| > Welcoming these developments, GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser
| said:
|
| > It's great to see these prominent green campaigners disavowing
| the eco-extremism that has done such damage to the world. When
| Michael Shellenberger says that climate change isn't even the
| biggest environmental problem the world faces, he's echoing a
| view that the GWPF has highlighted since our inception."
|
| Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some
| nudity in the banner image):
|
| https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-...
|
| > There have been a number of stories in the press in the last
| few weeks with criticisms about Extinction Rebellion by Zion
| Lights, UK director of the pro-nuclear lobby group Environmental
| Progress. It appears that Lights is engaged in a deliberate PR
| campaign to discredit Extinction Rebellion.
|
| > For any editors who might be considering platforming Lights, we
| would like to make you aware of some information about the
| organisation she works for and her employer, Michael
| Shellenberger.
| sampo wrote:
| > Extinction rebellion have a page on her
|
| You accuse someone to have a "cavalier attitude to science" and
| "being in cahoots with" parties you allege are suspicious and
| _then_ you proceed to use Extinction Rebellion as a source? You
| should worry more how cavalier Extinction Rebellion are, and
| who they are in cahoots with.
| erpellan wrote:
| Citation needed.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not counter a
| single point she made in her article. Her logic and her facts
| were solid.
|
| If they're not, I'd love to see a take down of that. But I see
| no problem with anything she wrote, I remain convinced nuclear
| is the only rational energy source left, and all this fear
| mongering about nuclear is causing us to slowly kill ourselves.
| erpellan wrote:
| It takes a decade to bring a nuclear plant online, at
| astronomical cost. Instead, why not take that money and start
| building wind turbines, solar PV and grid-scale batteries?
| They can start generating (ie. delivering ROI) in a matter of
| months, be constructed incrementally and are cheaper per KWH.
| Accujack wrote:
| Newer designs (existing reactors use 1970s technology) are
| cheaper and faster to build. Look up the concept of "Small
| Modular Reactors".
| lanstin wrote:
| If we had started a serious decarbonization 20 yeats ago,
| sure, but solar is now so cheap and easy that it will be
| harder for large scale nuclear to ramp up in time to matter.
| Maybe those container nuclear plants and maybe the last 20%
| of base capacit by 2040. But slowing solar in deference to
| nuclear would prolong the era of high atmospheric carbon.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > but solar is now so cheap and easy that it will be harder
| for large scale nuclear to ramp up in time to matter
|
| There's still the storage and base load problem. But I am
| 100% with you that we shouldn't slow solar in deference to
| nuclear; what we should be doing is mapping out what we
| want our next generation energy mix to look like (solar,
| wind, pumped storage, nuclear, geothermal, etc) on a
| regional basis, stop fucking around and arguing about it,
| and just get on with building it.
|
| I live in an area (Canadian prairies) where max energy
| consumption lines up with with minimum solar and wind
| production (-40C in December on a calm night). Even during
| the day, those calm bitterly cold days only have about 8
| hours of sunlight from a sun that barely comes over the
| horizon. We're starting to build solar, we've had wind for
| a while, but even though we've committed to building SMR
| Nuclear, we're still in a situation where we've got coal
| and natural gas plants that are approaching EOL and they'll
| likely be replaced/retrofitted to burn more fossil fuels
| because we won't have any sufficiently reliable baseload
| ready.
| munk-a wrote:
| Both certainly have their place and the balance has
| definitely shifted from where it was thirty years ago -
| renewables are much more competitive now but I think
| Nuclear has a pretty critical role to play when it comes to
| surge capacity.
| nomel wrote:
| > so cheap and easy
|
| I think this is a little misleading, unless there' a good
| story for storage and long distance power transmission,
| which I haven't seen yet.
| dools wrote:
| China's doing amazing work on long distance transmission
| using high voltage DC:
|
| https://youtu.be/rThkjp-bp8M
| Aloha wrote:
| I think we could build 100 plants in under a decade - it
| takes us being willing to build them assembly line like,
| meaning no more 'designed for the site' plants.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The EPR and AP1000 reactor designs were supposed to be
| the end of "designed for the site" reactors, and they
| were. The same designs get built at different geographic
| locations. The problem is that they're no better at
| meeting cost and schedule targets than older reactor
| designs. They're still late and over budget.
|
| Can small modular reactors like those designed by NuScale
| do better? Maybe. But we're not going to find out sooner
| than 2030, which is when NuScale plans to have its first
| plant operational: https://www.nuscalepower.com/en/about
| jabl wrote:
| How about we stop this ridiculous nuclear vs. renewables
| culture war, while fossil fuels are laughing all the way to
| the bank? Yes, we should build more solar (and even as a
| 'nuke bro', seeing solar prices drop at the rate they have
| is one of the genuinely positive news in the otherwise
| pretty dystopic climate change discourse), we should build
| more nuclear, we should build wind, we should build more
| hydro (though not that much potential left), we should
| build transmission, we should build storage.
| Beldin wrote:
| > _While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not
| counter a single point she made in her article._
|
| True.
|
| > _her logic and her facts were solid._
|
| I came to a somewhat different conclusion after reading that
| article: I felt it was sufficiently blatant, manipulative,
| and simply wrong that no one would fall for that. Ah well.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The fossil fuel industry is not funding pro-nuclear arguments
| because they want to see 50% of their business lost to
| nuclear. They are not worried about losing huge profits to
| nuclear because _from a purely economic perspective_ nuclear
| is not cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Hence it doesn't
| pose a major threat, absent massive government-subsidized
| build-outs (which aren't remotely on the table now.)
|
| The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR because
| they realize that renewables _do_ pose a major economic
| threat to their business in the short term, since they are
| now cost-effective enough to replace vast chunks of their
| business (even if not 100% of it.) Pro-nuclear (and
| coincidentally anti-renewable) PR is the most efficient way
| to protect their business. If they can convince the public
| [incorrectly] that the best way to decarbonize rapidly is to
| abandon /block renewable build-outs because "nuclear is the
| only way" then they've paid enormous dividends to their
| shareholders.
|
| If your response to the above is "these random technical
| points are correct, what's the problem", then the problem is:
| those random technical points are largely a distraction from
| the important questions of how we decarbonize quickly. The
| fossil fuel industry understands this perfectly, because they
| have a lot of skin in the game.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| > If your response to the above is "these random technical
| points are correct, what's the problem"
|
| I don't disagree whatsoever that the fossil fuel industry
| is up to tricks. What I'm saying is I don't care what their
| intentions are. I care about results. If Hitler came back
| and found a way to fix climate change, but his intention
| was in order to create a better planet for Aryan people,
| I'd simultaneously despise him and support the fix.
|
| That's an extreme example of course, but trying to make my
| point that when we're facing extinction, we shouldn't take
| solutions off the table. We should ignore intentions and
| look at results.
|
| To me, all this arguing about their intentions is a
| distraction that keeps us from solving the problem.
|
| We have a slim chance of fixing climate change, and I have
| yet to see a single fact to dissuade me from believing
| nuclear is our best hope. Even if the people behind the
| push turned out to be scumbags.
| yongjik wrote:
| > The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR
| because they realize that renewables do pose a major
| economic threat to their business in the short term
|
| Last time I heard, it wasn't pro-nuclear France that
| urgently built a new LNG terminal, it was staunchly anti-
| nuclear Germany (in 2023!!). So I have doubt about your
| analysis.
| aktenlage wrote:
| I hope you also heard that _Germany exports electricity
| to France_. The natural gas is mostly needed for heating
| and industrial processes and that cannot be simply
| replaced by nuclear electricity.
| skrbjc wrote:
| You're sharing misleading information here. While this is
| true recently, it's not like France has been consistently
| short of energy. Typically it's Germany that imports
| energy from France.
|
| "Due to the technical problems affecting French reactors,
| Germany for the first time sold more power to France than
| it received from its neighbour, doubling its year-earlier
| export volume there.
|
| France produced 15.1% less power in 2022 and the volume
| fell short of national usage by 1%."
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-
| germany-...
| Krasnol wrote:
| > The fossil fuel industry is not funding pro-nuclear
| arguments because they want to see 50% of their business
| lost to nuclear.
|
| In Germany it's the same companies running fossil and
| nuclear btw.
|
| They also expand into renewables now.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Nuclear is not cost-competitive in the US because it is
| defined as not being competitive! The problem is the
| standard for radiation is as low as reasonably achievable.
| Oops, that means that if nuclear isn't expensive that means
| you could pile more safety systems on it. It's a stealth
| ban.
|
| Now, if your objective is public safety you should use a
| different standard: Better than any viable competing
| technology. Within the limit of rounding nuclear is
| currently 100x safer than it's closest competitor: natural
| gas. By mandating that level of nuclear safety we are
| actually increasing deaths by causing the use of a far more
| dangerous technology instead.
|
| (And note that her post repeats a common mistake about
| nuclear safety--assigning the Fukushima deaths to the
| nuclear plant rather than to the politicians. The
| evacuation of the city did not make sense from a safety
| standpoint. Growing food there will not be a good idea for
| some time but the expected death toll from sitting put was
| zero. The only non-worker nuclear power deaths are from
| Chernobyl.)
| sgu999 wrote:
| > The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR
| because they realize that renewables do pose a major
| economic threat to their business in the short term, since
| they are now cost-effective enough to replace vast chunks
| of their business (even if not 100% of it.)
|
| I wonder if it's not even more cynical than that because it
| doesn't seem right. We still need an alternative
| controllable* source of energy when renewables can't cover
| the demand (no wind, no sunshine), and it needs to cover
| peak demand... For now aside from hydro it's mostly fossil
| fuels: coal, gas and oil.
|
| As far as the current tech goes, my understanding is that
| "renewables" are much more compatible with profits from
| fossil fuel than nuclear power is.
|
| * is "controllable" the right word in this context in
| english?
| closewith wrote:
| > * is "controllable" the right word in this context in
| english?
|
| I believe the appropriate term is dispatchable.
| goatlover wrote:
| How are renewables more competitive with fossil fuel than
| nuclear when it comes to storage and transmission? At least
| nuclear can keep producing when the sun is down and the
| wind isn't blowing. It's also more energy dense, so it can
| scale to cover demand. We're not decarbonizing the economy
| without those factors being accounted for.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| > The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR
| because they realize that renewables do pose a major
| economic threat to their business in the short term, since
| they are now cost-effective enough to replace vast chunks
| of their business (even if not 100% of it.) Pro-nuclear
| (and coincidentally anti-renewable) PR is the most
| efficient way to protect their business. If they can
| convince the public [incorrectly] that the best way to
| decarbonize rapidly is to abandon/block renewable build-
| outs because "nuclear is the only way" then they've paid
| enormous dividends to their shareholders.
|
| This is an interesting theory devoid of evidence to back it
| up.
| robbintt wrote:
| Can you share the details about renewables being cost
| competitive with oil?
| robbintt wrote:
| Perplexity.ai provides explicit sources:
|
| https://www.perplexity.ai/?s=u&uuid=2921714c-3614-41ae-82
| d1-...
| robbintt wrote:
| chat.openai.com claims it is true, albeit without
| specific sources:
|
| Yes, there is a significant amount of data and research
| that supports the increasing competitiveness of renewable
| energy compared to oil. Here are a few examples:
|
| The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that in
| 2020, the average global cost of producing electricity
| from solar photovoltaic (PV) systems was lower than the
| cost of producing electricity from new fossil fuel
| plants, including coal and natural gas.
|
| A recent study by the consultancy firm Lazard found that
| the cost of utility-scale solar and wind energy in the
| United States has fallen significantly in recent years,
| and is now cheaper than the cost of power generated from
| coal and natural gas in most regions of the country.
|
| The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy
| Laboratory (NREL) reported that the levelized cost of
| energy (LCOE) for wind and solar energy in the United
| States has fallen by more than 50% over the past decade,
| and is projected to continue to decline in the future.
|
| According to the International Renewable Energy Agency
| (IRENA), the cost of solar PV and wind energy has
| declined by over 80% and 60%, respectively, since 2010.
| IRENA also found that renewable energy is now the
| cheapest source of new power generation in many
| countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and
| the United States.
|
| These are just a few examples, but they demonstrate the
| trend of declining costs for renewable energy and
| increasing competitiveness with oil and other fossil
| fuels.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No. They are not remotely cost competitive, the data
| saying otherwise is a case of lying with statistics.
|
| Yes, the cost of generating a watt-hour of power from
| renewables is competitive with fossil fuels. If you could
| put those watt-hours in a tank somewhere those numbers
| would work. However, a tank for a watt-hour is called a
| battery--and storing that watt-hour is going to cost you
| more than creating it.
|
| In practice what happens is that renewables reduce the
| fuel use by gas plants. You still need just as many gas
| plants, though, and once you count those costs the
| renewables are no longer the cheapest.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| Out of curiosity, I asked "How can we fix the climate
| crisis? Be specific."
|
| Obviously we shouldn't rely on ChatGPT for our answers to
| life, but it's not a terrible list. Except for the
| absolute lack of any mention of nuclear, which I think
| fairly reflects the zeitgeist but not the real science.
|
| Here's what it said:
|
| 1. Switch to Renewable Energy Sources: We should phase
| out the use of fossil fuels and switch to renewable
| energy sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and
| hydropower. This would reduce carbon dioxide emissions
| and other pollutants from burning fossil fuels.
|
| 2. Increase Energy Efficiency: We should invest in
| technologies and practices that reduce energy
| consumption, such as LED lighting, efficient heating and
| cooling systems, and better insulation.
|
| 3. Plant Trees and Protect Forests: Trees absorb carbon
| dioxide, so planting more of them can help reduce the
| amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We should
| also protect existing forests and prevent deforestation.
|
| 4. Reduce Food Waste: Food waste is a major contributor
| to climate change, as it releases methane and other
| greenhouse gases when it decomposes. We should reduce
| food waste and increase food recycling.
|
| 5. Reduce Meat Consumption: Animal agriculture is a major
| source of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants, so
| reducing meat consumption can help reduce emissions. We
| should also promote plant-based diets.
|
| 6. Improve Transportation: We should invest in public
| transportation, electric vehicles, and other low-emission
| transportation options. This would reduce emissions from
| cars and other vehicles.
|
| 7. Educate and Advocate: We must educate people about the
| causes and consequences of climate change, and advocate
| for public policies that can help mitigate climate
| change.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _then they've paid enormous dividends to their
| shareholders._
|
| Who are themselves.
|
| (Just thought the story would make more sense if I filled
| in that last part. :-))
| timerol wrote:
| > I also learned that batteries cannot be recycled.
|
| That seems factually incorrect, and the anti-renewables
| paragraph was the thing that jumped out at me most, though
| the author claims not "to say that we should abandon
| renewables altogether, but to illustrate that all energy
| generation carries an environmental cost, and no solution is
| perfect."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/public-relations/how-to-
| cr...
|
| Nuclear should be a part of decarbonization, and you can
| search my comment history here to see I've said so for a long
| time. But the breezy 'I was misinformed!' tone of this
| article is PR because it dismisses rather than engages with
| criticisms of the nuclear industry.
|
| For contrast, consider that British Nuclear Fuels used the
| Irish Sea as a dumping ground for nuclear waste through the
| 1970s, becoming a significant bone of contention between the
| UK and the Republic of Ireland: https://cdn.thejournal.ie/med
| ia/2012/11/filedownload31607en....
|
| Though practices have since changed and risks appear to have
| been mitigated, the substack article just ignores the
| uncomfortable reality of past abuses which should inform
| policy assessments. When someone tells a just-so story, even
| if you agree with it - in fact, especially then - you should
| question whether it's purpose is to educate or to manipulate.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, if the fission industry wants to be taken seriously they
| need to hire assassins to murder Shellenberger in his sleep. I
| have some sympathy for the scientific and technical
| justifications for fission, but I have some doubts about the
| economics and whether capitalist private utilities can be
| trusted to operate the reactors. I have zero doubts that
| Shellenberger is a mendacious tool of the fossil fuel industry
| who will say or do literally anything that will lead to a
| repeat appearance on Fox News. Therefore with him on the side
| of fission I am firmly 100% against it.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The fact that the most publicly visible spokesperson for
| nuclear energy is regularly on Fox News saying that Climate
| Change isn't a big deal, is mind blowing to me. That's like
| it's number one selling point, and their salesman is
| pretending it's not real.
| archgoon wrote:
| The author gave a fairly detailed account of how nuclear waste
| is processed and its general safety. Which claims do you take
| issue with?
|
| As it stands, I have learned considerably more from her post.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Hopefully you didn't learn too many false things, like e.g.
| her claim:
|
| > I also learned that batteries cannot be recycled.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| > GWPF
|
| The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a British foundation
| highly critical of the anthropogenic global warming scientific
| consensus.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...
| qclibre22 wrote:
| > anthropogenic global warming scientific consensus
|
| Isn't there some serious, vigorous debate on this topic?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The only real debate is whether completely upending the
| climate in a very short (ecologically speaking) time frame
| will be net beneficial for _humans_ or net detrimental for
| _humans_. We know it will be net detrimental for the
| general ecology and currently existing species.
|
| And from what I've read a bunch of the people claiming it
| will be a benefit for humans are speaking strictly on an
| economic basis, not a quality of life basis.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| There's a lot of noise made by those whose ox is going to
| get gored by getting serious about the climate. There's no
| scientific debate other than in the size of the debacle.
| (For example, methane hydrate--it's not included in the
| IPCC reports at all because our estimates are still too
| wide. Note that on the high end it's *worse* than the high
| end estimates for the effects of CO2--and they will add.
| Earth has seen that kind of temperature before--most of the
| rocks laid down at that time don't have fossils.)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| There's an inverse correlation between the intensity of
| your coefficients.
| bitwize wrote:
| No, there's not. Virtually all scientists with any
| knowledge of the relevant science concede that global
| warming is occurring, largely due to human activity.
| DennisP wrote:
| What's more, the core facts of anthropogenic climate
| change are based on fairly basic thermodynamics, and were
| predicted with decent accuracy as far back as 1896. A
| great little book covering this is the recent _The
| Physics of Climate Change_.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Not really. There are a few people that disagree with the
| consensus (that's the definition after all) and they get
| outsized media attention.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Shellenberger is such a hack it's hard to stomach, it's a shame
| that he went full throttle into the tedious IDW culture wars
| rather than doing something useful with his time.
| zeagle wrote:
| Good pickup. Reading it I really couldn't see someone that was
| anti nuclear yet claims to have not been aware / motivated
| enough to learn about key, basic concepts like radioactive
| decay now being capable of writing a piece like this. It is
| very well crafted to apologetically make an antinuclear view
| point look juvenile and immature.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > It is very well crafted to apologetically make an
| antinuclear view point look juvenile and immature.
|
| That was my reaction; but the way she characterizes her
| younger self was not at all convincing. People who change
| their views show more sympathy and understanding for their
| younger self than the author does, who just dismisses herself
| as a naive idiot (before moving on to explain the rather
| basic things she's "learned" about radioactive materials in
| the meantime).
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| OK, but she's not incorrect as far as the need for more nuclear
| esp in lieu of fossil fuels
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| This is definitely the reddit or twitter style take I would
| expect from someone outside the industry.
|
| I worked in the industry for about a decade on nuclear, solar,
| wind, coal, and natural gas. I mostly worked in capacity
| planning and did some light industrial engineering.
|
| There is not some massive split between 'Big fossil fuel' and
| 'big renewable'. Most of the generators are diversified in a
| blend of all different types of power plants. It's ridiculous
| to advance these conspiracy theories about companies running
| marketting campaigns against themselves.
|
| This claim that every statement about nuclear power is some
| 'industry shill' narrative is really ignorant and misinformed.
| Then there is the lines-on-the-corkboard about what
| organizations they belong to... trying to infer that this is
| some sort of nefarious pysop.. when in reality most people in
| the industry are part of organizations that span every power
| source.
|
| I did alot of work with SCE and Nextera which are both
| incredibly diversified and have a variety of power plants.
|
| Even the infamous Duke (typically considered heavy on fossil
| fuels) has plenty of renewable and nuclear generation.
|
| There is also a complete lack of knowledge about base load
| versus peak load, and other aspects of power generation in the
| thread below. The commenter in the thread claiming that
| 'Renewables are ALWAYS cheaper' is not correct and is running
| an interesting theory that energy companies want to create
| pollution so badly that they will throw away potential profits
| and lose money.
|
| This entire discussion is pretty much the peak of software
| engineers who can't tell the difference between a crescent and
| a ratchet weighing in expertise about an industrial field they
| do not comprehend.
| Veen wrote:
| Shill or not, she's right.
| [deleted]
| remorses wrote:
| i don't see the problem supporting something with both words
| and facts
|
| if you think that nuclear is an awesome energy source why
| shouldn't you work for increasing its adoption?
| xyzelement wrote:
| To point out the perhaps obvious, there's nothing in your post
| that addresses anything presented in the article on the fact or
| argument level.
|
| "I don't like her and someone she works with" isn't persuasive.
| On a controversial topic, everyone with a view is going to be
| disliked by _someone_ - it carries to significance.
|
| I suppose your user name checks out...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| As does yours.
| Balgair wrote:
| She also had a recent piece out on The Free Press (formerly the
| Common Sense substack)
|
| https://www.thefp.com/p/climate-activism-has-a-cult-problem
|
| TLDR: She writes about her time in Extinction Rebellion as a
| media guru and highlights some issues the group has with it's
| 'eccentric' founder.
|
| That article came out 18 days ago. So there seems to be
| something of a media coordination going on.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for
| some nudity in the banner image
|
| Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power--
| which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like
| France did--the naked tree huggers did as much to set back
| climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
|
| At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo
| that was likely to stand until today anyway, because renewables
| have only become cost competitive relatively recently. Even
| without lobbying by the oil industry people had powerful
| incentives until now to stick with the technology that didn't
| require them to put on a sweater or pay more for energy.
|
| The anti-nuclear movement by contrast knee-capped the last best
| hope for climate change mitigation. A technology that could
| have been deployed--and catalyzed electrification and energy
| storage efforts--decades ago when we had more runway.
| debacle wrote:
| Fear of nuclear is distrust in the government.
|
| I believe in nuclear as a technology, and I believe in
| mankind's ability to perform science and engineering tasks.
|
| I don't have a lot of faith in the role of the government in
| properly and adequately regulating a booming nuclear
| industry.
| eropple wrote:
| The hypothetical specter of government incompetence is
| greater than the actual harm being done here-and-now?
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Fear of nuclear is distrust in the government.
|
| Is it though? The US Navy has a pretty impressive nuclear
| safety record for the number of reactors they have in
| service.
|
| To flip it, would you have more trust in a private company
| with nuclear safety? If the same decisions being made that
| allows PG&E to cut their funding for maintenance that
| allows their lines to be the cause of California's forest
| fires, why would we trust they would pay for the upkeep on
| a nuclear reactor?
| debacle wrote:
| I've worked in the energy industry. There is complete
| capture there. When PG&E is the "bad guy" it's because
| the government needs them to be. ERCOT works the same way
| (though is better).
|
| If the government wanted PG&E to properly fund their line
| maintenance, PG&E would properly fund their line
| maintenance.
| mjhay wrote:
| The fossil fuel lobby has actually promoted nuclear FUD,
| including by funding anti-science "environmentalist" groups.
| geysersam wrote:
| There is so much wrong with this comment I'm not sure where
| to begin.
|
| 0. Nuclear is not forbidden.
|
| 1. Nuclear power _is_ exceedingly common in many countries.
|
| 2. Electricity production is not (by far) the only source of
| carbon emissions. Why have we also not seen any major action
| to reduce emissions from other sources? Or did the
| treehuggers also force people to fly, eat meat and drive
| large cars?
|
| 3. > Last best hope.
|
| Energy efficiency. Regulation incentivizing fuel efficiency.
| Low carbon public transportation. Incentives to reduce the
| carbon emissions from agriculture. Renewables. The list of
| available remedies is long.
|
| But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the
| destruction profit driven market capitalism caused. If that
| soothes your cognitive dissonance.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the
| destruction profit driven market capitalism caused.
|
| The alternative economic systems are even worse on
| environmental grounds, and their only saving grace is their
| ineptness and inefficiency, which limits the amount of
| damage they cause.
|
| Like, have you heard about environmental disaster of Aral
| Sea? About how Soviet Union explicitly pursued maximizing
| fossil extraction as its core economic policy? About the
| environmental disaster of Great Leap Forward? Check out the
| list of 10 most polluted places in the world, where are
| they? Literally the only one that got its pollution under
| capitalism is _in Zambia_ , all the rest are in former
| Soviet Union, China and India, which started doing market
| economy when they were already high polluters.
| rayiner wrote:
| > But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the
| destruction profit driven market capitalism caused. If that
| soothes your cognitive dissonance
|
| This is laughable. I come from a country that's officially
| socialist. But even people from there want to come to Texas
| and drive a big SUV and live in a big house with a pool.
| Better yet, they want to attain that same standard of
| living in their own country.
|
| If environmentalists tell people to turn down the
| thermostat and stop eating meet and crowd into public
| transit, they will lose every time.
| ackfoobar wrote:
| > Nuclear is not forbidden.
|
| What is this point replying to?
|
| Anyway, over-regulation can make nuclear energy
| commercially unviable. It doesn't take a ban for nuclear to
| die.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| General nuclear paranoia stemming from Cold War M.A.D.,
| Chernobyl and Three Mile Island seem to spring to my mind.
| Not so much your naked tree-hugger in a historical vacuum
| theory.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear
| power--which the west could have started adopting in the
| 1970s like France did--the naked tree huggers did as much to
| set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
|
| I've always hoped they're secretly funded/friends with the
| oil lobby, because otherwise that's just pure sadness.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I don't know if they were directly funded by the oil lobby,
| but I'm not sure that they needed to be either.
|
| At a minimum, it seems that (thanks to ignorance) they
| lapped up all of the anti-nuclear FUD that was generated by
| the oil lobby and others.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Actually just by russia.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| Russia is one of the biggest producers of nuclear power
| plants equipment.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| I'd like to also echo this. Best analysis of the history
| behind the anti-nuclear craze of the 60s and 70s is
| basically Russia infiltrated the Hippie Movement of the
| 60s to exploit the "government is bad" soft anarchism
| (=minarchism) in the movement to delay America from
| getting a leg up.
|
| For the past 100+ years, Russia has been one of the
| largest energy players in the world, bigger than Saudi
| Arabia. You can see this today in the Russian Invasion in
| Ukraine, as Germany tries to comply with the
| international regulations and shut the Russian Nord
| Stream pipeline off and can't; Russia has a stranglehold
| on everyone on that side of the world.
|
| So, given that, they feared an America that could meet
| its energy needs without pollution, heavy investment, and
| significant cost; while Russia was literally killing its
| own people to make the oil and gas flow as a cost of
| doing business. Thus, they slipped right in and used the
| Hippies to astroturf an anti-nuclear position.
|
| Reagan may have torn down that wall, but Russia won the
| cold war; and then they made sure, post-Soviet, to make
| sure we'd never attain energy independence. The end
| result of _that_ trainwreck is currently under
| investigation by the FBI as per the recommendations of
| the Jan 6th Committee.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| Russia produce not only oil and gas but also is one of
| the biggest nuclear plant equipment exporters. If I were
| them I would rather sponsor articles on how it is hard to
| dispose of solar panels...
| fsflover wrote:
| https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-
| anti-n...
| bboygravity wrote:
| Not sure if that's controversial? I don't think the fossil
| fuel industry (or Putin) could've wished for better allies
| than the Energiewende (anti-nuclear, pro Russian gas with a
| bit of solar and wind) supporters in Europe.
|
| Whoever was behind it successfully managed to delay nuclear
| fission adoption by about 60 years for all of the EU and UK
| except France causing massive amounts of totally unnecessary
| CO2 emissions in the process.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| Putin is an omni-present monster, sure, and an oil and gas
| monster to that. But he also is THE biggest nuclear power
| monster:
|
| [Rosatom] ranks first in the overseas NPP construction,
| responsible for 76% of global nuclear technology exports:
| 35 nuclear power plant units, at different stages of
| development, in 12 countries, as of December 2020.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosatom
| sonofhans wrote:
| I can't believe you're blaming "tree huggers" for this, when
| the clear beneficiary is the global fossil fuel industry,
| who've been lobbying against nuclear power since the 50s.
| Shit, many anti-nuclear groups have been funded by fossil
| fuel industry for decades. At best, their protests were
| political cover for governments to do what the oil industry
| paid them to do.
| sgu999 wrote:
| Do you have sources for these claims?
| Eduard wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
| nuclear_movement#Fossil...
| api wrote:
| The rabid anti nukes were more useful idiots. You're right
| that the real power is in the fossil fuel industry which
| was happy to use them.
| goatlover wrote:
| Is that really true in Germany? Chernobyl was such a big
| deal to the German public, making nuclear very unpopular.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Are you sure there's a difference here?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenpeace_Energ
| y
| wirrbel wrote:
| > Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear
| power--which the west could have started adopting in the
| 1970s like France did--the naked tree huggers did as much to
| set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
|
| You would have thought that France would have supplied the
| European continent with electricity now that Russia cut its
| gas supply, but it turns out that France received electricity
| from Germany even during this time.
|
| It turns out that even new builds of nuclear power plants
| take years to be completed. Getting safety right is a
| challenge, the more we know about engineering and material
| science for nuclear plants, the more we know about challenges
| in building them, the more we need to do to avoid these
| risks, the harder it is to build a safe power plant.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Our national energy company EDF has been the largest energy
| exporter in Europe for ages, in 2019 it was the largest in
| the world. In addition to that it's made us the cleanest
| country in the continent for close to 40 years (along with
| hydro-rich countries). The notion that 2022 is a smoking
| gun for nuclear is ridiculous. All it reflects is the past
| 12 years of successive liberal governments writing laws and
| reforms to gut our nuclear fleet and EDF in favour of
| private companies.
| ptilt wrote:
| What you don't know is that in the 2010's the left wing had
| a agreement with the Green Party to stop all nuclear by
| 2050. That's why we stop financing and maintaining a lot of
| nuclear plants. It turned out it was a bad idea..
| shortcake27 wrote:
| While I don't know anything about that agreement, I
| assume it would have had been a push for renewables.
|
| By 2050 it will be easily possible to power the world
| using renewables. Ending nuclear at that point doesn't
| sound like a bad idea to me.
| goatlover wrote:
| How do you know it will be possible by 2050 to go full
| renewable?
| shortcake27 wrote:
| By using elementary grade extrapolation. Right now in
| 2023 there are multiple countries generating over 90% of
| electricity from renewables.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| France was strongarmed by Germany and by shitty election
| related deals to elect Hollande into massive nuclear power
| closures and reductions, coupled with presidents unable to
| see more than 5 years ahead means that nuclear plants both
| do not get renewed and also get closed for absolutely no
| reason. See Fessenheim.
|
| The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to build a
| safe power plant, it's that there's been no will from
| anyone, or active harm from incompetent shitheads.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Hollande wanted to diversify France because it's not and
| they had to pay for this stupidity and still do to this
| day.
|
| Fessenheim is the perfect reason for why Hollande wanted
| to close some of those plants: old, accident ridden, one
| of those which have to be closed down in summer due to
| possible overheating of nearby rivers and to top that
| off: it's in a region which may have earthquakes for
| which it is not prepared...
|
| > The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to
| build a safe power plant, it's that there's been no will
| from anyone, or active harm from incompetent shitheads.
|
| Weird because there are plenty western countries which do
| have popular support for nuclear energy but still
| struggle with construction times and costs in
| astronomical ways.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You wouldn't have thought that unless you thought France
| had capacity to power Germany just lying around.
| mikojan wrote:
| Apparently Germany had capacity to power France just
| lying around.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Literally lying around in a pile of beautiful black lumps
| of coal.
| syvolt wrote:
| I agree and I think the damage to humanity that the anti-
| nuclear movement has done is incalculable. So many years of
| progress have been missed out on... and while some of it was
| due to greed (fossil fuel industry funding), most of it was
| just misplaced fear, whether propaganda induced or from an
| inability to see the full picture.
|
| The anti-nuclear movement is also still alive and doing well
| but at this point it's like arguing over spilled milk, the
| damage is mostly done and a lot of is irreversible. We can
| try to salvage nuclear but we've already regressed to further
| impure sources in some countries so progress seems unlikely.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I don't think so. People in the US have and have had net-
| positive views on nuclear energy. It's not like public
| sentiment has turned against nuclear energy because of naked
| tree hugging protesters. For example, this polling [1] from
| Pew shows that only 27% of the US public thinks the
| government should discourage nuclear power with everyone else
| saying the government should either encourage or be neutral
| towards it.
|
| Of course some green energy climate tree hugger whatever
| protesters oppose nuclear energy, but they are powerless and
| don't change public opinion much and certainly don't
| influence outcomes. To my knowledge it's government
| regulations and laws that stifle nuclear energy - not
| protesters or climate people.
|
| 1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2022/03/23/americans-c...
| pydry wrote:
| So, between the sheer 5x higher cost of nuclear power and
| people who hug trees your consided analysis is that the
| latter held back nuclear power more?
|
| It's like an Illuminati conspiracy theory except with people
| who dont use soap...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Nuclear power is only "5x" higher cost if you utterly
| ignore the environmental catastrophe of fossil fuels.
|
| Global warming will cost countless trillions and displace,
| sicken, and/or kill billions in the coming centuries.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I'm quite sure op meant 5x higher than certain renewables
| not fossil.
|
| Nobody is talking about fossil anymore. It's on the way
| out just like nuclear.
| goatlover wrote:
| At some point it will, but has fossil fuel use actually
| declined so far? From what a I've read, the Arctic is
| being looked at as a new frontier for oil and gas
| exploration as the ice retreats.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Yes, it has declined in countries which invest into
| renewables:
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-
| energy-c...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s
| like France did
|
| France is often considered to be in "The West".
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Agree. It's quite possibly, and I say this in full awareness
| of the scope, one of the biggest own goals in the history of
| Earth.
| somethoughts wrote:
| To me - it seems the existential fear around climate change
| is the topic of the day for environmentalists only because
| nuclear ended up not gaining traction. Nuclear
| waste/proliferation is not the number one existential threat
| these days only because it's used so little (both because of
| PR issues and lack of economics/long term maintenance
| challenges).
|
| The masses of environmentalists moved on from nuclear in the
| 80's but would surely return if nuclear regained traction.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This message feels like you're trying to make a case that the
| author must be dismissed because of her group affiliation. Is
| there anything in the argument itself that you find incorrect
| or misleading?
| leemelone wrote:
| I would like to see a MASSIVE increase in the amount of nuclear
| power in use around the world. AND, I appreciate calling out
| conflicts of interest, astroturfing, and artificial "viral"
| information campaigns.
|
| Thank you for outing the author.
| denderson wrote:
| There is one problem with Nuclear power that was never talked
| about before the Ukraine War: War itself. More specifically,
| war in the area that is powered by nuclear. Damage to
| reactors, power plant workers fleeing, damage to nuclear
| waste containers, and more.
| toolz wrote:
| afaik all modern designs for nuclear power are aimed at
| being small so they can be installed underground, which
| would make them much safer during these events.
|
| e.g. Here's a company that was licensed to build SMR (small
| modular reactors) last month that is designed to be
| underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power
| somethoughts wrote:
| As an add on to that - if nuclear energy did start becoming
| mass produced in the developed world where _some_ modicum
| of safety /regulation around waste can be assumed, once all
| of the necessary reactors are built out to supply first
| world energy needs, at best, those same private
| developers/contractors will start lobbying efforts in more
| questionable parts of the world to build these things. Then
| it be framed as an equity issue - why is the first world
| preventing the rest of the world from catching up - even
| though its actually just a plain "it's not safe to build it
| in a country in the middle of a civil war".
|
| The more likely scenario I would envision is that - under
| the guise of business "joint venture partnerships in next
| generation energy" - the technological know how and access
| to a steady stream of the requisite raw materials to build
| weapons will leak to more questionable parts of the world.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I think this is rather a silly thing to be concerned
| about given the consequences of the world either running
| out of cheap energy or continuing to dump huge amounts of
| CO2 into the atmosphere. I will roll the dice on your
| crystal ball being defective rather than the alternative.
| somethoughts wrote:
| My hot take, pretending I was an environmentalist, is
| that fossil fuel/climate change is the object d'ire for
| environmentalists only because nuclear ended up not
| gaining traction. The masses of environmentalists have
| moved on to a different front of the battlefield for
| protecting the earth but would return if nuclear gained
| traction.
|
| It's kind of like now that humans conquered polio and
| smallpox, the next challenge toward advancing the human
| race is ridding ourselves of cancer. If polio and
| smallpox returned, we'd be back to fighting those.
| [deleted]
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Your baseless theories ascribing borderline malicious
| intentions on the part of actors like environmentalists
| and nuclear construction interests are amusing, but I
| fail to see why they should be taken seriously.
| erentz wrote:
| It actually seems to be a case study that empirically
| proves the opposite. Hundreds of thousands dead in the
| Russian invasion of Ukraine so far, untold injuries.
| Incredible amounts of destruction of cities and civilian
| infrastructure. But yet none from an exploding nuclear
| power plant. Why? Because its not really possible and it
| serves very little point. If the goal is to terrorize
| people and inflict damage there are much better ways as has
| been demonstrated.
|
| > power plant workers fleeing
|
| That is an argument for no power plants with workers
| anywhere.
|
| In WW2 dams were attacked causing lots of damage. I haven't
| seen anyone using that as an argument that we should
| demolish all hydro dams lest they become targets in a
| future war. Strangely this kind of thinking only applies to
| nuclear power.
|
| You may find this bit of history interesting:
| https://www.rferl.org/a/european-remembrance-day-ukraine-
| lit...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Control/operation of nuclear plants has already been a
| target of brinksmanship. And while your point about dams
| is a good one, disasters like a dam collapse (which just
| happened as a result of the Turkey/Syria earthquake, and
| is adding to the already catastrophic devastation), are
| more localized in time than nuclear incidents which
| present long-term environmental challenges. Sometime I'd
| like to visit Chernobyl, but I'm not sure I'd live there.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > But yet none from an exploding nuclear power plant.
| Why?
|
| Interesting question.
|
| I think the answer is that Russia didn't plan to occupy
| the largest nuclear power plant in Europe; they occupied
| Ukrainian territory, and there was a NPP in it. I think
| it's inconvenient for them to have international
| inspectors paying attention to the ZNPP. It's right on
| the frontline; it's on the shore of this huge reservoir
| on the Dniepro, and Ukraine occupies the opposite shore.
|
| Russia doesn't need the energy from ZNPP; if there's one
| thing they have plenty of, it's energy.
|
| And for Ukraine's part, they are playing a slow game. I
| think it suits them that Russia has this inconvenience in
| the middle of their frontline.
| chasil wrote:
| If a pressurized water reactor is hit breached with
| explosives, it instantly releases superheated water vapor
| carrying radioactive iodine and caesium.
|
| For reactors that could be threatened, they should be
| "walk-away safe" and even more focused on recycling spent
| fuel so large quantities are not necessary to keep on
| hand.
| remorses wrote:
| Radioactive material is not something you can only find in
| nuclear plants (you can get same levels of radioactive
| materials in hospitals for example), there are also much
| easier ways to cause worse disasters (think about
| destroying a dam for example)
| zzzeek wrote:
| how is destroying an entire dam easier than making an
| armed incursion into a nuclear power plant to steal
| radioactive waste? Just in terms of metric tons of
| ammunition needed
|
| not to mention, maybe the place you want to attack
| doesn't have a dam?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| A destroyed dam is temporary damage. There are going to
| be eventually gravely ill Russian soldiers last year
| because they ignored the warnings in the Chernobyl
| exclusion area.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/world/europe/ukraine-
| cher...
|
| > In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier
| from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit
| picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site
| with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much
| radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of
| a Geiger counter, Mr. Simyonov said. It was not clear
| what happened to the man, he said.
|
| > But in invisible hot spots, some covering an acre or
| two, some just a few square yards, radiation can soar to
| thousands of times normal ambient levels.
|
| > A soldier in such a spot would be exposed every hour to
| what experts consider a safe limit for an entire year,
| said Mr. Chareyron, the nuclear expert. The most
| dangerous isotopes in the soil are Cesium 137, Strontium
| 90 and various isotopes of plutonium. Days or weeks spent
| in these areas bring a high risk of causing cancer, he
| said.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| "Temporary damage", really? The deaths of those
| downstream from a burst dam are no less permanent than
| the death of an irradiated Russian. And there are a lot
| more of the former than the latter.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yes. Just like the black death was temporary damage.
|
| Fission waste is truly long term. Just like
| desertification.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| All deaths are permanent. Count them up and the result is
| clear.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| All we are is dust in the wind.
|
| I agree with you.
| twblalock wrote:
| Do you really expect anyone involved in this to be unaffiliated
| with some kind of group?
|
| This is just an ad hominem attack that does nothing to rebut
| the arguments.
| godelski wrote:
| > The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the
| industry
|
| This is a pretty serious claim.
|
| > edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and
| GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting.
|
| This is an EVEN MORE serious claim.
|
| Both of these need some serious backing. I don't see how what
| you're following up with is evidence to this claim. Maybe
| there's something I'm not getting because it just looks like
| typical group fighting to me. Political groups use strong
| language and often are quick to criticize other groups who are
| not aligned to a goal in the way that they are aligned
| (including wanting similar high level outcomes but through
| different means). I watched the Shellenberger Fox news link
| that they provided. More than half is Tucker on his typical
| idiotic rant then Shellenberger saying things that are like 70%
| true but out of context. Can't tell if he's just an idiot that
| doesn't grasp what "the nerds" are telling him or malicious
| (often difficult).
|
| For the fossil fuel funding claims, I didn't dig in but I'll
| say that I actually wouldn't be surprised. These companies have
| a long history of funding several environmentalist groups. They
| had a history of funding Sierra Nevada Club[0] to promote anti-
| nuclear sentiment (this was highly successful btw). But the
| story here is actually more complicated than it would seem at
| first glance. I do think the Sierra Nevada Club members and
| even leaders (mostly) had good intentions and did believe that
| they were acting in the best interest of the environment. The
| same is probably true about the above group. But to see why
| this may be true we need to ask who benefits the most if you
| have differing groups that are concerned with reaching 0
| emissions fighting one another? Fossil fuels. They are the
| current de facto solution to energy and unfortunately momentum
| is a powerful force. They've gladly promoted this war. (It's
| also not like they don't often try to paint themselves green.
| They fund plenty of green campaigns and even carbon scrubbing
| technologies. This is done for PR but those groups still get
| money. Kinda like filming yourself giving the homeless food and
| putting it on youtube. You get rich but the homeless probably
| (?) did get more food than they would have otherwise. The
| ethics is complicated here even if it is clear you're not a
| saint)
|
| The fossil fuel industry wants us to think that the
| conversation is "renewables vs nuclear" instead of "renewables
| + nuclear vs renewables alone to fight fossil fuels". Moreso,
| they want us to think that energy can be acquired
| homogeneously. They both fund the nuclear bro idiots that want
| a 100% nuclear grid (ludicrous notion) as well as the renewable
| bros that think solar + batteries are going to work well in
| major cities that have weeks with no sun. Neither of these
| groups are listening to the real scientists working on this
| shit. These same scientists will even tell you that this is a
| complicated issue and they may not even know the full answer
| themselves but are working as a community to solve this. Why?
| Because climate change is the most complicated threat humans
| have ever faced and unfortunately no singular person has enough
| expertise to answer half these questions accurately (though can
| have relatively good accuracy). The honest to god truth is that
| while we have our stupid uninformed quibbling online we aren't
| actively building out zero carbon solutions and the fossil fuel
| industry not only continues but grows because our energy needs
| also do. The honest to god truth is that the scientific
| community generally just says "let's just not take nuclear off
| the table. We'll use renewables where they best fit and nuclear
| is a good option if/when there are gaps to fill." While we
| quibble the threat grows[1] and the cost to turn back balloons.
|
| [0] https://environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuclear
|
| [1] There have been grounds made and we're not actually on the
| "business as usual" trajectory, but we are still not building
| nearly fast enough. Carbon neutral isn't enough, we need to be
| carbon negative. A much tougher goal. The truth here is that
| even to reach net zero we're going to have to learn how to
| scrub chemicals from the atmosphere and oceans. Emissions are
| far more than vehicles and energy, and many of these are more
| difficult to decarbonize.
| [deleted]
| ashton314 wrote:
| The test video for storage canisters does not disappoint:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu1YFshFuI4
| MrTortoise wrote:
| so the half life of uranium 235 is 235,000 years and you have a
| graph of something with a half life of 300 years...
|
| i am pro nuclear btw
| rndmize wrote:
| While it's good the author has gained a better understanding of
| nuclear waste, I feel that they're almost repeating their
| mistakes in their discussion of renewable waste. I'm fairly sure
| that everything they listed - solar panels, turbines, batteries -
| can be recycled; the question generally is whether its cost-
| effective to do so. (Another important question is probably on
| whether we want to spend the money on developing recycling
| methods for these types of things in the first place).
|
| I'm increasingly of the opinion that if we want effective
| recycling solutions for stuff like this, one of the biggest steps
| we could take is strong right-to-repair laws. There should be a
| push for designing things in such a way that they are easy to
| disassemble, part out, and replace pieces of. Not only does this
| make things easier to fix and extend their lifespan, but it also
| would make them easier to disassemble for recycling/waste
| purposes.
|
| Requiring manufacturers to release documentation (design,
| components, most common failure modes, common repairs) on their
| products at some point after they no longer manufacture them is
| probably a harder sell but would be pretty nice - trawling old
| forums to figure out how to repair my 12-year-old subwoofer is a
| pain and unreliable, and having manufacturers responsible for
| hosting that information would make it more consistently
| available.
| strbean wrote:
| Right to Repair is incredibly important, but also feels
| incredibly insufficient in this context. What we really need is
| Obligation to Repair, or something of that nature. Producers of
| goods need to be accountable for the lifecycle of those goods.
| bborud wrote:
| I don't agree. If we move to goalposts too far down the field
| the political resistance will guarantee that we accomplish
| less. We have to focus on making repairing stuff possible and
| economically feasible first. And I think it will need to
| happen somewhat gradually so the industry can learn how to
| design things that can be repaired. We also need to build a
| robust repair industry. With training for repair personnel as
| well as the supply chain and logistics side.
|
| Make repairs attractive, and cheap enough and we might not
| need to bring up a wall of legislation that makes market
| access too hard for new entrants. This could quickly develop
| into a game where only companies with really deep pockets are
| even able to produce anything.
|
| (I work for a startup. We occasionally have to make hardware.
| Enabling people to repair the stuff we make is something
| we're happy to do. But if we had to be accountable for the
| entire lifecycle, that would be another thing. What happens
| if we go tits up?)
| strbean wrote:
| Totally agree from a practicality standpoint.
|
| In regards to undue burden on companies:
|
| > I work for a startup. We occasionally have to make
| hardware.
|
| > What happens if we go tits up?
|
| I think if you go tits up, it's the same situation as when
| a business goes bankrupt and leaves behind a contaminated
| site. But goods produced by small businesses and startups
| are marginal compared to those produced by big businesses.
| There should be strong incentives for businesses to manage
| the end of life for their goods, so they will attempt to
| recover those goods and see that they are recycled. That
| will also incentivize them to design products that _can_ be
| recycled, and as profitably as possible.
| troupe wrote:
| Saying that a turbine can theoretically be recycled, but at
| such a high cost that people simple bury them in a field is
| pretty much the same as saying they can't be recycled.
| depr wrote:
| Turbine blades at least can't really be recycled, just search
| for "turbine blade landfill".
| TacoSteemers wrote:
| FYI, there are recent improvements.
|
| "Vestas unveils circularity solution to end landfill for
| turbine blades"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34716743
| shortcake27 wrote:
| > trawling old forums to figure out how to repair my 12-year-
| old subwoofer is a pain and unreliable
|
| A few years ago I had the same experience. It cost me $30 and
| 10 minutes to replace the subwoofer speaker in my 20 year old
| Mission home theatre, but finding the right speaker was quite
| difficult. I trawled forums and ended up ordering a speaker
| from a German manufacturer that had all sorts of speakers for
| specialised applications.
|
| Most people would have just thrown out the entire setup and
| bought a new one, expensive and wasteful. Yet it was so trivial
| to fix with the right knowledge. And it sounded great, better
| than most setups I hear today.
|
| It makes me wonder whether home theatres bought today will
| still be functioning in the 2040s. It seems unlikely as
| soundbars are all the rage these days which communicate over
| bluetooth/hdmi protocols that get superseded every few years,
| forcing you to constantly upgrade. Makes me appreciate the
| "dumb" aspect of that old setup I had.
| bborud wrote:
| > one of the biggest steps we could take is strong right-to-
| repair laws
|
| I could not agree more. Thank you for bringing this up.
|
| I think part of why this doesn't turn up more often when green
| parties try to get elected is that it isn't sexy enough. It is
| much more fun to imagine building new and shiny stuff or have
| an opportunity to strongly signal values. But something as
| boring as laws that would require _all_ manufacturers to design
| for repairability and banning any manufacturer who even looks
| like they are trying to limit who can repair stuff, is too
| boring.
|
| I agree: this would be a very good place to start.
| jheitmann wrote:
| > Less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. This portion can
| be easily isolated and shielded
|
| How would this work? My assumption was that the pellets are
| fairly homogeneous. Does the decay happen faster in exterior of
| the pellet? Or is there some process to concentrate the
| radiation?
| wcerfgba wrote:
| I am wondering the same question. I suppose if the decay is
| totally random throughout any given volume of uranium, then
| separating it out would have to be chemical or electromagnetic
| or something?
| Accujack wrote:
| The pellets are homogeneous. The reprocessing of fuel involves
| melting or dissolving them and chemically separating out the
| waste products, with the remaining unused fuel going back into
| new pellets.
|
| The waste products are spread throughout the fuel pellets
| evenly, so the pellets have to be deconstructed to remove them.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| I wonder how much The Simpsons contributed to nuclear fear.
|
| No, but seriously, I only have one criticism. What about all the
| rest of the world? The developed world and the big developing
| countries might be trusted with nuclear fission, but there are
| still a whole bunch of countries who cannot be. So in some sense
| this debate is stupid. Deploy nuclear were it makes sense, but
| there are definitely places where renewables are their only green
| option. Luckily lots of those places have plenty of sun and wind.
| Accujack wrote:
| Electricity can be delivered over thousands of miles with the
| right wires in place, so there's no need to spread reactors
| everywhere, especially considering we need relatively few
| nuclear power plants to meet everyone's energy needs.
| rmujica wrote:
| I learned that Core Temperatures must be checked, and that
| Venting Gas Prevents Explosion
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| This comment, and a few of its siblings, kind of smell like:
| "Look, I'm not racist, but can we trust _these guys_ with this
| technology? " Some of them can read, you know. Event count.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Why prefer a technology that needs such trust in the first
| place?
|
| Hell - we don't even trust Russia with reactors in Ukraine
| right now, why should we have any sort of realistic trust for
| places that are less stable?
|
| Especially when we actually have alternative green energy at
| this point.
|
| Say what you will about solar, but it doesn't explode and
| contaminate large areas when bombed or improperly maintained,
| and you can't get incredibly effective bombs as a side effect
| of deploying solar.
|
| All that aside - I think solar/wind just out compete nuclear
| on costs, and that's really the sticking point. And solar at
| least just _keeps_ getting cheaper. We 're really not that
| far off from a point where excess solar can just be used to
| create hydrocarbons on demand that can act as base load
| during off hours and inclement weather.
|
| To compare - solar is down near 3 cents/kwh for utility
| scale. Nuclear is sitting at ~46 cents/kwh.
|
| So nuclear is 15 times more expensive, and solar costs are
| STILL GOING DOWN.
|
| Residential solar installs do better than nuclear (7 to 8
| cents/kwh) - by a factor of SIX!
|
| Frankly - I'd really rather push the solar button as hard as
| possible and continue experimenting with base load providers.
| who knows - We may actually get fusion (definitely feels
| closer than it used to) and then fission becomes a military
| only affair.
|
| And while I'm certainly not opposed to the creation of
| nuclear in a lot of places - I think the tech has a lot of
| downsides (again - not the least of which is cost) that
| really cripple it.
|
| Long comment short - If I have to pick between coal and
| nuclear... sign me up for nuclear. If I have to pick between
| nuclear and solar... I'm hitting the solar button as fast and
| hard as possible.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Probably none? Nothing "bad" ever happens in a Simpsons
| episode, especially around nuclear materials.
| phs318u wrote:
| I've said this before and I'll say it again. Until the Price-
| Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act gets repealed, the
| nuclear industry can take a hike.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > constructed in the United States before 2026
|
| Looks like it's going to expire soon anyway.
| phs318u wrote:
| It will be very interesting to see how hard the industry will
| lobby to have it renewed.
| snow_mac wrote:
| I wish nuclear power was more widespread in the USA then solar
| power. In Colorado we get our 67% of our power from Coal and
| Natural Gas the rest from renewables like wind (26%), solar,
| hydro and biomass...
|
| The really cool thing about nuclear is that the plant can dial up
| production of power based on demand. In the summer they can
| rapidly scale up demand to allow people to cool their houses.
|
| Nuclear is really the environmentally friendly choice. Wind
| turbines at end of life aren't recyclable nor are solar panels
| croes wrote:
| Sure, and never ever would a company cut costs to raise profit
| and ignore safety standards.
|
| Just visit Asse in Germany and hug some of the rotting barrels
| with nuclear waste.
|
| The problem isn't technology but greed and stupidity.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| I don't think nuclear is evil, but Rosie's look at the financials
| suggests there are better options: https://youtu.be/quI_8xYSWYE
| jchw wrote:
| Disclaimer: I did not watch the video linked.
|
| For what it's worth, I do agree, but I think we'll probably
| need to have (subsidized) nuclear as part of the solution
| anyways, especially in places where we don't have ample room
| for wind/solar/battery storage.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Honestly, given the trajectory of nuclear costs compare to
| battery costs - it's going to make far more sense to build
| power lines to places that don't have renewable potential.
| jchw wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but consider a place like Japan.
| That strategy is probably not viable everywhere.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how everything develops but
| Japan has an absurd amount of offshore wind potential.
| Their country is set up perfectly to take advantage of it
| given their major cities are all up and down the coast,
| they're also ~100 miles from mainland Korea which has
| plenty of wind and solar potential as well.
|
| There are geopolitical concerns to relying on your
| neighbors for energy transmission, but it's hard to think
| of any technical or financial reasons that would stop it.
| Given current learning rates and cost trends, utility
| solar will likely be under $0.01/kwh in just about every
| place on earth. Certainly within 15 years, likely within
| 10. When new-build nuclear is above $0.10/kwh and takes a
| decade to build, the delta buys you a ton of storage.
| jchw wrote:
| I agree that it'll be interesting to see. A primarily-
| wind Japan would be cool if it could be done, and it
| seems like a win/win.
|
| I wonder if it _still_ makes sense to keep nuclear energy
| around in the mix as a sort of backup, though. We 've
| already got a ton of plants that could probably last more
| decades with proper maintenance to my understanding, and
| despite making up a small number of energy production
| facilities they make up a huge mix of the energy in the
| world, so it seems like it could be a solid backup plan
| in a primarily wind and solar world.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Oh yeah, existing plants can be operated at very low cost
| -- if they're sited in safe locations, and certified /
| refurbished for extended use beyond their design life, it
| definitely makes sense to keep them running for as long
| as possible. If Japan overbuilds their wind resources
| while maintaining their nuclear fleet, they could send
| the nuclear electrons the other direction and power Korea
| with nuclear.
| willnonya wrote:
| It would be irononic for the government to subsidize
| something that they've significantly contributed to
| increasing the cost of.
| dale_glass wrote:
| A huge amount of the cost increases are there to make it
| actually safe.
|
| Windscale could have been cheaper, but some jerk called
| Cockfort insisted on additional filters just in case -- oh
| wait, that "Cockfort's folly" turned what could have been a
| horrifying accident into a merely bad one.
|
| Chernobyl was cheap, but it didn't have a containment
| building. Modern nuclear is safer, but that cost more
| money. Nuclear needs emergency cooling to be safe, which
| costs more money. It needs redundancy, which costs more.
| And so on.
|
| So what is it exactly what you think needs cutting?
| glitchc wrote:
| Her analysis is fundamentally flawed. For a stable energy
| source, it cannot be solar alone or wind alone. Rather it needs
| to be solar plus battery and wind plus battery. Let's factor in
| the costs of producing maintaining and environmentally
| disposing of those batteries and let's see how the numbers
| shake out, ceteris paribus of course.
| patapong wrote:
| At what price difference does this become a non-issue? I.e.
| if wind and solar are 10x cheaper than nuclear, can we have a
| stable grid by overprovisioning like crazy and building
| distributed networks, coupled with limited storage in the
| form of pumped hydro and batteries?
| dyndos wrote:
| It doesn't matter how overprovisioned your solar field is
| at night.
|
| Hydro is an excellent pseudobattery but it's not available
| everywhere.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Or solar plus CAES. Or pumped hydro. Plus some loads can be
| shifted.
| uoaei wrote:
| Interesting point. One other very important point is what
| those batteries will be made of. Using lithium is really only
| necessary for batteries that move with the devices they
| power, because it's so light. For stationary energy storage,
| lithium is overkill and you may be able to use heavier
| storage solutions (sodium instead of lithium, sand batteries
| storing thermal energy, etc.) for installations.
|
| There's also still the real possibility that we develop
| suitable supercapacitors with graphene or other extremely
| cheap materials. I don't know what the process is for
| recycling graphene but considering it's pure carbon I doubt
| it will be much trouble. I know supercapacitors are not
| batteries but the advancements in one can definitely help
| cross-pollinate advancements in the other.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| Batteries aren't the only way to store energy. Here's a short
| list of other ways to store energy:
|
| - Pumped hydro: Use electricity now to pump water uphill.
| When power is needed, water is allowed to flow back downhill,
| powering a turbine to generate electricity.
|
| - Thermal storage: Heat up water or molten salt. This heat
| can be used directly later (e.g., use hot water for showers)
| or to power steam turbines to generate electricity
|
| - Flywheels: spin up a heavy wheel, which can "smooth" out
| power delivery when inputs briefly shut off
|
| - Compressed air: can be stored / used to power turbines to
| generate electricity later
|
| - Fuel generation: can use electricity during high-production
| times to generate fuels like hydrogen (electrolysis ) or
| methane (reverse methanogenesis).
|
| None of these are silver-bullets. But if used intelligently
| for specific problems, they're excellent tools to help cover
| the volatile output of wind/solar.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Unfortunately nuclear doesn't appear to be a viable
| supplement.
|
| Suppose a grid with just nuclear and solar. Nuclear may be
| overall very stable, but solar is still not, and so you still
| need storage. The only difference is how much of it you need.
|
| But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really
| economical. Solar is much, much cheaper and therefore any
| economically minded person would build solar if they had a
| choice, and would just not enter the business space at all if
| they couldn't.
|
| The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times.
| The idea was that nuclear is cheap but unwieldy, and can be
| supplemented with small amounts of more flexible but more
| expensive sources for when it can't adjust fast enough. But
| that just hasn't panned out.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really
| economical.
|
| Against what honest option? If fossil fuel plants had to
| charge to cover the deaths from pollution they'd be
| blistering expensive.
|
| It could just as easily be said that nuclear power is the
| only source we can truly afford.
|
| > The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern
| times.
|
| Right, because it's not really a business. Power is
| infrastructure.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Against what honest option? If fossil fuel plants had
| to charge to cover the deaths from pollution they'd be
| blistering expensive.
|
| Solar, wind, natural gas, geothermal, thermal solar,
| hydro.
|
| > Right, because it's not really a business. Power is
| infrastructure.
|
| An infrastructure that underlies way too many things. Say
| we subsidize nuclear with taxes. But everyone uses
| electricity. So what does it matter whether the nuclear
| plant gets $50 from me from my power bill, or $50 I have
| paid in taxes?
|
| In the end, it has to be paid for, and that means that if
| you go with an expensive power source people and
| industries will have a reason to move somewhere cheaper.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > if you go with an expensive power source people and
| industries will have a reason to move somewhere cheaper.
|
| The other options aren't cheaper, you just aren't being
| sued for the damages they caused (yet).
|
| Creation and decommissioning of solar and wind are quite
| polluting, natgas is a byproduct of the dirtier fossil
| fuels, and geothermal and hydro are only practical in a
| limited number of areas.
|
| > So what does it matter whether the nuclear plant gets
| $50 from me from my power bill ...?
|
| Because treating dirty power production as just a
| business, like a muffin shop, isn't appropriate for
| society. We're making poor decisions for the group
| because we make them individually, buying dangerous
| gasoline today rather than saving to build clean power.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal and
| don't hold power plants accountable for their emissions. Do
| you really want the cheapest power?
| danans wrote:
| > If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal
| and don't hold power plants accountable for their
| emissions.
|
| That's not the cheapest, because the price for the
| emissions gets paid (whether or not we choose to account
| for it).
|
| The cheapest is the source of new power capacity that
| provides the lowest total levelized cost - including its
| externalities - at a given level of reliability
| (firmness). Right now, that's a race between
| renewables+storage and combined cycle natural gas.
| dale_glass wrote:
| What I want doesn't really matter. What I'm saying is
| that solutions must be possible to implement.
|
| So say somehow I've got $10 billion burning a hole in my
| pocket. Would I build nuclear with that? No, it'd be
| stupid, because chances are high I would never see a
| profit.
|
| So I would build solar. It's not reliable and troublesome
| for the grid? Well, not my problem to solve, I'm merely a
| power provider, balancing the grid isn't my
| responsibility.
|
| Ok, say there's a really well intentioned politician,
| will they use lots of tax money to build nuclear? But why
| would they? In modern countries such things are achieved
| by consensus, which means one person can hardly take
| credit for it, and they may never see it actually start
| operating during their term.
|
| A political party then? Power tends to switch back and
| forth, and the next power in party is fairly likely to
| sabotage their predecessors legacy. Since the plants take
| a long time to build the chances are slim for a party in
| favor to see the benefits.
| Adraghast wrote:
| This is astroturfing.
| josephcsible wrote:
| From the guidelines:
|
| > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling,
| bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades
| discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about
| abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| can you explain why?
| Tomte wrote:
| Re: nuclear waste, I'm sure there is a perfect way to handle it.
| But look up "Asse" for how it works in the real world. Also look
| up how long Germany has been searching for a final burial ground.
|
| I'm confident if we made the author an absolutist ruler he would
| find a way that's better than what we have. We just have this
| nasty thing called democracy, and citizens' initiatives and huge
| protests and so on.
|
| And that's the real world we're living in, not some imaginative
| fantasy land.
| Accujack wrote:
| Nice to see you didn't actually read the article. It's written
| by a woman, by the way.
| Animats wrote:
| Once waste has made it to dry cask storage, it's not much of a
| problem. But there are still too many spent fuel rods in cooling
| pools at power stations. That stuff was supposed to go to Yucca
| Mountain, but for political reasons, that didn't happen.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Until it explodes because it was filled with organic instead of
| clay kitty litter and costs $500 million to 2 billion and two
| years to clean up (this happened at WIPP in 2014)
|
| https://theecologist.org/2016/sep/20/wipp-nuclear-waste-acci...
|
| It seems that nobody can safely deal with nuclear material cost
| effectively.
|
| From the article:
|
| Worse still, mismanagement of the clean-up has involved poor
| safety practices. Last year, the DOE's Independent Office of
| Enterprise Assessments released a report that found that WIPP
| clean-up operations were being rushed to meet the scheduled
| reopening date and that this pressure was contributing to poor
| safety practices.
|
| The report states: "The EA analysis considered operational
| events and reviews conducted during May 2014 through May 2015
| and identified a significant negative trend in performance of
| work. During this period, strong and unrealistic schedule
| pressures on the workforce contributed to poor safety
| performance and incidents during that time are indicators of
| the potential for a future serious safety incident."
|
| The report points to "serious issues in conduct of operations,
| job hazard analysis, and safety basis." Specific problems
| identified in the report include:
|
| workers incorrectly changing filters resulting in five safety
| violations;
|
| waste oil left underground for an extended period despite a
| renewed emphasis on combustible load reduction;
|
| fire water lines inadequately protected against freezing;
|
| inadequate processes leading a small fire underground, followed
| by the failure of workers and their supervisor to report the
| fire;
|
| an operator improperly leaving a trainee to operate a waste
| hoist, the hoist being improperly used, tripping a safety relay
| and shutting down the hoist for hours;
|
| an engineer violating two safety postings to remove a waste
| hoist safety guard;
|
| workers removing a grating to an underground tank and not
| posting a barricade, causing a fall hazard;
|
| a backlog of hundreds of preventive maintenance items; and
|
| failing to properly track overtime such that "personnel may be
| working past the point of safety".
| Accujack wrote:
| No, Yucca mountain (burial site) was mostly for non fuel waste,
| scientific, and weapons waste. The spent fuel rods were
| supposed to be moved to above ground storage at the same site
| until they could be reprocessed or became inert.
|
| Most waste in cooling pools is there to cool, not for storage..
| if it is able be moved, then it is moved to a cask.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Excellent post and very informative. Nuclear power production is
| the only way forward if we want to have a chance of not
| completely destroying our environment. Let's hope that nuclear
| fusion will become mainstream sooner than later.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| The author says the waste isn't liquid, but also says that spent
| fuel rods are cooled in pools for several years. Does the water
| not become irradiated in that time?
| tromp wrote:
| Answered here:
|
| https://www.quora.com/Does-water-become-radioactive-after-be...
| jaywalk wrote:
| The water does not become irradiated:
| https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101433/why-doesn...
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| The term you are looking for is "neutron activation".
| Irradiation alone doesn't make things radioactive, they have to
| capture fast neutrons specifically in order to be transmuted
| into unstable isotopes. Hydrogen and Oxygen are less
| susceptible to this than heavier elements which is why it is so
| hard to make heavy water. It does happen inside running nuclear
| reactors but spent fuel doesn't give off enough neutrons for it
| to be an issue.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| There are two main ways that something may become radioactive,
| being contaminated with little pieces of something radioactive
| (for instance nuclear fallout), or through neutron activation,
| in which neutron radiation creates radioactive isotopes in
| whatever it hits.
|
| Assuming the fuel rods have intact cladding, then the first
| shouldn't be happening in a cooling pond. However the fuel rods
| do give off neutron radiation, and a small amount of the
| hydrogen in the water is turned into tritium by that neutron
| radiation. Tritium is a weak beta emitter, it could harm you if
| you drank a lot of it. But it's not a long-term problem because
| it has a half life of 12 years.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Does your cup of water become irradiated from having a hot
| spoon stuck in it?
|
| I think the water is mostly safe. At worst the water will have
| little slivers of radioactive material floating in it but
| that's only if something already went wrong, so I imagine it's
| cleaned before being discharged.
|
| Ultimately you can also cool it down and reuse it, so you might
| not need all that much water relatively speaking.
| fragmede wrote:
| My hot spoon isn't made up of uranium and didn't come out of
| a nuclear reactor, and isn't radioactive, so I'm not sure how
| that addresses GP's concerns.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Your hot spoon is in fact radioactive, emitting thermal
| radiation. Thermal radiation doesn't make things it hits
| radioactive. Neither does your microwave oven or even gamma
| radiation. Radioactivity can be induced in things by
| neutron radiation, but not EM radiation. It is safe to eat
| food which has been irradiated with gamma radiation, and
| chances are you have many times before (it is fairly common
| for dried spices and herbs to be irradiated for
| preservation purposes.)
| idlewords wrote:
| Things that emit thermal radiation are not radioactive.
| An easy way to conceptualize it for stuff here on Earth
| is that radioactivity involves stuff flying out of the
| nucleus of an atom, while other forms of radiation do
| not.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Thermal radiation is in fact emitted from the nucleus of
| atoms; all matter emits black body radiation. The reason
| hot things generally aren't considered radioactive is
| because that would pull _literally all matter_ into the
| discussion.
|
| But that wasn't the point being made here. The point
| being made with the hot spoon example is that EM
| radiation doesn't make other things radioactive (except
| insofar as it heats things up). This is equally true of
| gamma radiation as thermal radiation. Thermal radiation
| and gamma radiation can both cause harm directly, but
| neither will make other things radioactive.
|
| That's why it's completely safe to eat food that was
| sterilized with gamma radiation intense enough to kill
| you outright.
| idlewords wrote:
| I think you may be confused about the distinction between
| radioactivity and black body radiation. The fact that
| gamma rays, microwaves, visible light and so on are all
| on a spectrum doesn't mean that every EM emitter is
| radioactive.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Whether or not you want to apply the term "radioactive"
| to a black body emitter is completely beside the point,
| which is that EM radiation doesn't make things
| radioactive. Your objection is to the use of a word, not
| the physics, so I think this discussion has run its
| course.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > so I imagine it's cleaned before being discharged.
|
| There's plutonium dust in the silt under the Irish Sea, off
| the coast from Sellafield. Inhaling a single particle of
| plutonium dust (much smaller than a 'sliver') can kill you. I
| think your imagination has misled you.
| idlewords wrote:
| You need a high intensity neutron flux to make water
| radioactive, which spent fuel doesn't provide. The kinds of
| radiation you find in a cooling pond won't activate water, so
| all you have to worry about is stuff potentially dissolving
| into it.
|
| Here's a paper on how water gets activated when it cools a
| nuclear core (which does have massive numbers of neutrons
| zipping around): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnucene.2019.103042
| glitchc wrote:
| Thank you. I believe all environmentalists need to curb their
| fear and absorb a healthy dose of science. It would limit the
| outpouring of outrageous, fear-mongering statements to leave some
| room for serious adult discussions on how to tackle the energy
| problems we face as a species.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well, the nuclear folks need a healthy dose of economics,
| because nuclear is not price competitive with current
| solar/wind, and those generation modes are still improving
| 10-20% per year on LCOE.
|
| So even if some super good nuclear reactor design was
| finalized, proposed, funded, and constructed on a wide basis,
| we're looking at, what, 10 years?
|
| 10 years of solar/wind likely improving at LEAST 5-10% per
| year. Compounded. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry almost always
| blows the budget, and if there's one thing modern America
| hasn't fixed its government budgets from being boondoggled.
|
| I'm a pro-nuclear person, I believe that price-matured
| wind/solar can be competed with using a future reactor design,
| hopefully one that is scalable, meltdown proof, uses all the
| fuel/no waste, can breed from thorium, nonfissile uranium, or
| long-term nuclear waste, AKA a LFTR/MSR, although I admit those
| have real challenges.
|
| We should probably keep existing nuclear functioning as load
| leveling on the grid, and continue aggressive funding of
| research/development of test reactors. But there really isn't a
| price competitive design in nuclear out there.
|
| And fusion? Pfft. Even if they can sustain a reaction, I highly
| doubt they'll even get to fission LCOE costs, and fusion isn't
| as clean as people think, those fast neutrons degrade/irradiate
| the confinement equipment.
| pflenker wrote:
| I think it's condescending to claim that environmentalists are
| guided mainly by emotions and people who share your view are
| guided by science. The problems surrounding nuclear waste is
| not as clear cut as the article suggests.
| glitchc wrote:
| The fact that you feel personally attacked by my statement
| suggests that your beliefs are well, beliefs, and not
| necessarily grounded in fact.
|
| I recommend you read "The Wizard and The Prophet" as it
| chronicles the dawn of the environmentalist movement in an
| engaging and insightful way. That environmentalism was
| largely funded by wealthy folks, most of whom had only a
| rudimentary understanding of science, should be a clue
| towards how much science factors into those discussions.
| acdha wrote:
| Consider that your emotional desire to feel smug and
| contrarian are being quite effectively manipulated by the
| wealthy industries funding the people whose ideas you're
| repeating.
|
| Environmentalism has a long history of scientists sounding
| alarms which turned out to be accurate, and your uninformed
| assertion otherwise is doing your credibility no service
| here.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This is a bogus argument. If want to discuss the relative
| level of science in _current_ beliefs about, say, nuclear
| waste, then go ahead and do so. But please do not impugne
| current "environmentalists" (a group which, as far as this
| topic goes, includes a number of "actual scientists") with
| your claims about the origins of the environmental
| movement.
|
| As for those claims, the environmental movement in the USA
| is generally dated back to the publication of Rachel
| Carson's "Silent Spring", and in its early years was not
| really funded by anyone at all. In addition, most things
| are largely funded by wealthy folks, so this observation is
| largely content free.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| But it's also not like every scientist (vs
| environmentalist, can't we just stop with stupid
| generalization and classification like that?) would be in
| full support of going on with nuclear as civil power
| source, and there is also more than pure science to
| consider.
|
| Stuff fails (from waste disposal processes to planes
| falling out of the sky) not because we have not understood
| the science or almost perfect processes established, but
| for many various reasons?
|
| I think it's also unfair to claim poster before as feeling
| attacked, and then giving statement about his beliefs,
| which you don't know. So could do the same thing here?
|
| Those grounded facts extrapolated to the complex practical
| reality is again itself just belief, and could do the same
| here then...
| pflenker wrote:
| No, that's not it, sorry. The line of argument which boils
| down to ,,my side is guided by logic and facts, while your
| side is guided by emotion and fear" makes the one who
| invokes it (ironically) vulnerable to missing valuable
| facts that might otherwise enrich or even challenge their
| mental model of the discussion at hand.
|
| Note that this is a meta discussion which comments on how
| you were presenting your thoughts.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Environmental activism is riddled with irrational emotional
| appeals that don't align with objective reality.
|
| One can make an argument that this is necessary to get the
| majority of people to care about the intractable hyperobject
| that is climate change, but I think it very clearly deserves
| condescension and ridicule when it becomes clear that these
| emotional appeals from environmental activists have been
| accidentally fighting legitimate possible solutions (nuclear)
| which has indirectly helped the fossil fuel industry that
| they're supposed to hate.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| The condescension is deserved. The green movement has done
| more harm than help to clean energy by blocking nuclear power
| trying to push energy sources that were not economically
| viable. This was mainly due to emotional backlash against
| nuclear energy.
| uoaei wrote:
| Condescension is never "deserved", you just decided to
| apply it.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Wrong, condescension is a social tool to discourage an
| unwanted behavior. Accepting the negative behavior
| encourages others to do the same thing.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Condescension is actually rude, and for that reason not a
| smart way to persuade people you're right. It gets you
| upvotes on Twaddle or whatever, but only from people who
| already agree with you.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Yes, it is rude. That's the point. It's not to convince
| people that already have their minds made up. It's to
| convince people that don't have their minds made up. They
| see they will be treated rudely if they adopt whatever
| the unwanted behavior is.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| [dead]
| johndhi wrote:
| This was an awesome article. It makes me feel better. I feel like
| I have generalized anxiety about nuclear waste existing out
| there, and this quelled it.
| kuschkufan wrote:
| yeah, i agree - what a great feel good article. light on any
| hard facts, but makes that up with feel good stuff. right what
| people needed to bolster their existing opinion of "nuclear
| energy = good"
| legitster wrote:
| I'm all for fighting the good fight on this, but I'm also a
| realist: consumer sentiment isn't going to change much. People on
| the extremes will still fight to the nails on MSG, Flouride in
| water, GMO, etc. But the median person doesn't really care where
| their power comes from when they hit a switch so long as it's
| cheap.
|
| If we want any serious progress on Nuclear you need regulators
| with authority to ignore organized civilian protestation. And the
| only way that happens is when politicians have their backs
| against the wall when it comes to energy options.
| AlanSE wrote:
| I don't know if I agree with the "organized civilian
| protestation" entirely. While NIMBY did play a role
| historically, this seems out-of-touch when I consider the
| mothballed & troubled builds which are currently in South
| Carolina.
|
| I do believe regulators have their foot on the brakes, and
| there are some really telling stories from people in the actual
| industry. The level of paperwork and scrutiny are hard to
| fathom for people in other industries. But right now, in the
| US, that is more of a Federal political issue. The AP1000 lost
| crucial time due to added missile shield requirements. That
| doesn't scream local on-the-ground public resistance. You can
| pin some of this nearly directly to anti-nuclear views from
| (let's be honestly) Democratic senators (not from the south).
| Federal policy both encourages and discourages nuclear, but the
| domestic industry was too weak, and the regulatory policy took
| critical hits during a formative time.
|
| I care very deeply about addressing carbon emissions. I want
| nuclear to work, but that's not an argumentative hill I should
| die on when solar has seen costs go bananas. Maybe another
| human generation will change things, but from lived experience,
| I would bet not.
|
| As an engineer, I admit that either nuclear or solar COULD HAVE
| become the backbone of our energy system. But time is out for
| climate action. Solar is modular, proven, and roaring. Further
| deployment will create a new engineering problem of storage,
| but we don't have time to turn that into a delay tactic. There
| will be solutions to energy storage, just as there are
| solutions to nuclear waste. Neither are cheap, but either are a
| drop in the bucket compared to the climate damage we face.
| legitster wrote:
| Well, I largely think that NIMBY is still at play. If you are
| a senator you have nothing to gain with a nuclear reactor in
| your district. Compare this to Japan that doesn't have
| ridiculously cheap natural gas, and yet is still doubling
| down on nuclear despite Fukushima and constant protest.
|
| I think renewables are amazing and have a long way still to
| go, but I look at the current energy mix and it's hard to see
| a 100% renewables grid in our lifetime with foreseeable
| technology.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > ...consumer sentiment isn't going to change much.
|
| > ...the median person doesn't really care where their power
| comes from when they hit a switch so long as it's cheap.
|
| > If we want any serious progress on Nuclear you need
| regulators with authority to ignore organized civilian
| protestation.
|
| The reason sentiment isn't going to change is because much of
| the situation is dictated by greed. People want cheap power,
| the companies want money; both are driving forces compelling
| them to act not in their best interest but cheaply.
|
| Unless regulators can ignore commercial and private interests a
| like, then greed will always taint regulation. Which is why
| sentiment will never change.
|
| There's a complete lack of trust that the industry will do the
| right thing and sustain it long term because it is under
| constant pressure to be both profitable and cheap.
| uoaei wrote:
| Virtually no one who is critical of nuclear thinks that "it's
| scary" is the best, or even a good, reason for not having
| nuclear. But loads of analysis have been done on the financials
| of different energy generation methods and shows very clearly
| that, except for those contracted to build and maintain the
| thing, no one sees a real benefit. It simply doesn't pan out to
| plan and build new nuclear reactors today, considering what we
| could do with that money (solar, wind) over the 10 years it
| takes from groundbreaking to first day online for nuclear
| facilities.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| Do you have any good source of reading on this? Most of my
| layman googling seems to suggest otherwise.
| concordDance wrote:
| Thats because the price is 5x higher (inflation and power
| output adjusted) than the 70s plants. Due entirely to
| overregulation.
| legitster wrote:
| The financials don't live in a vacuum though. Nuclear is only
| so expensive because there is a lack of supply chain on
| reactors and absurd regulations.
|
| The average nuclear reactor is over 40 years old(!) and well
| past due for replacement. So the cost is skewed by
| unrealistic maintenance demand on reactors that are 3
| generations old because we can't politically replace them
| with anything other than a Natural Gas plant.
|
| Meanwhile, renewables enjoy fast-tracking and subsidies. But
| keep in mind renewables currently only benefit places that
| are either windy or sunny. There are going to be diminishing
| returns as they fill up our power diet. We are still going to
| need power supplies that can keep New York powered in the
| winter. Or power that can be turned on/off to meet seasonal
| demand. So unless we want to keep natural gas and coal plants
| around indefinitely, we are going to need _some_ amount of
| nuclear power in the mix.
| refuse wrote:
| A lot of people say that new reactor designs will be a game
| changer but I can't help but wonder how much more benefit
| they'll provide over plain old solar and wind with hydrogen
| for storage and transport.
|
| After the Ukraine invasion, I think it's also worth
| considering future political instability in reactor
| permitting and design. I believe the molten salt reactors
| negate a lot of the problems we've had to consider with the
| Zaporozhye nuclear plant being in a war zone, but I'm not
| sure it comes out to something much better than solar and
| wind.
|
| The micro reactors sound interesting though.
| legitster wrote:
| If anything, the Ukraine invasion changed my opinion the
| other way. Germany had the largest investment in solar and
| wind anywhere in the world. But their dirty secret was that
| they were dependent on malicious petrostates to keep the
| lights on this whole time.
|
| Meanwhile, the Nordics and France that when all-in on
| nuclear are enjoying relative energy independence.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Virtually no one who is critical of nuclear thinks that
| "it's scary" is the best, or even a good, reason for not
| having nuclear.
|
| That's 99.9% of Germany's anti-nuclear movement. The "it's
| just not economical" is a super recent addition (last 3
| years, I'd say) to the public debate, and it feels very much
| tacked on. If anyone discovered a method to bring down cost,
| most of those who are against nuclear energy wouldn't change
| their mind, because that's not an actual concern to them.
| legitster wrote:
| To further add to this, most arguments against the
| economics of nuclear are kind of dumb and circular. "We
| shouldn't bother making nuclear cheaper, it's too
| expensive!"
|
| Meanwhile, we are just supposed to take for granted that
| unforeseen technology will make energy storage and
| transport cheaper.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy
| with waste from nuclear weapons._
|
| That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's
| not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste
| than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history
| of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens
| with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the
| areas around them are contaminated.
|
| If you want to use this as an argument for the safety of nuclear
| waste disposal, you would have to explain why the armed force's
| problems with waste disposal are specific to them and will never
| spread to regulated private industry. (P.S. the history of that
| is not great either and you might end up arguing that something
| which has already happened never will.)
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Nuclear reactor fuel is pre-assembled. There are licenses to
| produce/consume/export/import/store/dispose the fuel
| assemblies, with the quantities and weights being an exactly
| known scientific fact. Everything is meticulously recorded and
| tracked from source to destination, with stringent security
| measures. Local, international and inter-governmental
| regulators monitor, inspect and verify; penalties are serious.
|
| Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production to
| the military scenarios, which have a completely different
| legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?
| [deleted]
| Accujack wrote:
| >Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production
| to the military scenarios, which have a completely different
| legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?
|
| Because the article took away their usual talking points
| regarding "nuclear waste bad" and "dangerous for 10,000
| years!".
|
| They're moving the goalposts to "You can't argue that nuclear
| waste disposal from power plants wouldn't cause a problem
| because the military doesn't dispose of most things correctly
| and private companies are probably just as bad or worse than
| the military, therefore you're wrong."
|
| Which doesn't make much sense.
| ghusto wrote:
| > That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point
|
| As nearly everyone here has pointed out, it not only doesn't
| miss the point, it _is_ the point, and it's not rhetorical,
| it's a statement of fact.
|
| Weapons waste is completely different to power-plant waste.
| That's the whole point of that sentence.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Well the author by her own disclosure is the founder of a
| nuclear energy lobby group. Or as she calls it "climate
| activist group". So yeah, I'm sure she was very _confused_ and
| in doubt with herself, I 'm happy it all turned out fine and
| she finally discovered that nuclear power is the solution to
| all our problems.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Or more importantly, would the same motivators for the military
| exist for private industries. My example would not be nuclear,
| but waste in general. I did 5 years in the Navy. Out at sea, by
| regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain
| materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from
| the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food
| waste. Plastic can't, batteries cant, etc. Do batteries and cut
| up fuel hoses find their way into the ocean? Yes. Is it because
| the Navy said so, no. From what I noticed, its about how easy
| it is to dispose of properly and you could notice it. When
| someone who made the process easier to dispose of batteries
| properly, most to everyone did it properly. When they changed
| out who was in charge of the trash detail and the new person in
| charge of the trash detail damn near required a 7 page
| dissertation and interrogation to allow you to turn in your
| dead batteries, people threw that shit in the ocean late at
| night when no one was out and about on the skin of the ship.
|
| My point being, usually when waste disposal is an issue in the
| military, its not necessarily because the military doesnt care.
| Its because the process to do things properly became to
| grueling for people to put up with (not right, but it happens).
| Sometimes that grueling process is from big Navy, sometimes it
| is because DC1 had a bad day and making your day a pain in the
| ass somehow makes him feel better.
| elil17 wrote:
| I think the biggest difference between the military and
| industry is that the civilian side of the government enforces
| laws on industry but does not enforce laws on the military. I
| know many people who would love to not have to deal with
| their company's waste disposal processes, but the
| consequences are quite severe (e.g. the fines are huge so you
| would be fired if you were found out).
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Do you mean to imply that you're not supposed to throw your
| dead car batteries into the ocean to help charge the electric
| eels?
| tcmart14 wrote:
| That is a good one. xD
| Eduard wrote:
| > Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards
| of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like
| aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the
| ocean, and so can food waste.
|
| So inconsistent. Literally trashy if true.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Not really. Clean metal is fine and so are food products.
| Clean metal can help form reefs and such, why the Navy
| sinks ships. Food waste, like apple cores and such, all
| biodegradable. But the trash has to go somewhere. So things
| that doesn't really hurt the ocean and break down, it goes
| in the ocean. Things that can actually hurt the ocean and
| won't break down get flow off the ship during resupply
| missions and get disposed of properly on land somewhere.
| whatshisface wrote:
| So, what you are expressing is one perspective on accidents,
| and it's true - the one guy who cares about cleaning up a
| spill is a good guy, the one guy who hoses it into a drain is
| a bad guy. I would like to offer another one.
|
| The water is going to take all of the people who did it
| right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average
| their actions together into a single number, the amount of
| contamination. On the other side, although an individual
| person can decide whether they're going to make disposing of
| those batteries easy or a bureaucratic power trip, when you
| are at the top and are going to fill 1,000 positions like
| that, you know in advance that some of them are going to be
| awful about it. So, from the top like from below, individual
| personal decisions become fixed quantities. Sending out 1,000
| people and allowing 250 of them to make the independent
| personal decision to do it wrong is really the same thing as
| doing it wrong yourself, because it's guaranteed to happen.
|
| That's essentially the story behind why you should think
| about accidents as an institutional problem even when they
| involve bad personal choices on the part of the people who
| did them. That One Guy is actually hundreds of people and
| although you can't tell in advance whether one person will do
| it you know that out of thousands, hundreds will.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > The water is going to take all of the people who did it
| right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average
| their actions together into a single number, the amount of
| contamination.
|
| I imagine that batteries, for one, would tend to sink to
| the bottom of the ocean (if not gulped up by a large
| animal), and would thus cause highly concentrated local
| contamination. It would really depend on exactly where the
| batteries were thrown overboard on how much damage each one
| caused.
|
| Otherwise I agree with what you're saying.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| There definitely are roots that can be traced to
| institutional problems. The case with a certain DC1 who
| thought being a pain would make him feel better, it is an
| institutional problem that someone like that was able to
| get to a position they were in. If someone with that kind
| of a personality rose up to being a DC1 and supervising the
| trash crew (although these kinds of duties are usually when
| someone is sent TAD because their division doesn't want to
| deal with them), that is a problem. So yea, you can boil it
| down to institutional problems, however it can be a little
| tricky because those institutional problems sometimes do
| not correlate directly.
| remote_phone wrote:
| I know people who were so sick and tired of trying to figure
| out where to dispose of their fluorescent light bulbs that
| they just threw them to the side of the road on the highway
| at night. It's completely undetectable.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Yup, same issue with e-waste. It can be a pain to properly
| dispose of your broken 10 year old laptop. So many people
| don't do it. It just does in the trash can with everything
| else. Make it easy, people do it, minus a few edge case
| shitheads. But I'd rather 75 out of 100 people do it right
| and have 25 shit heads than 75 shit heads and 25 people
| doing it right.
| JTbane wrote:
| I have a bunch of no-name laptop batteries lying around
| that no one will take. Apparently lithium ion waste is
| not as valuable as I thought.
| crote wrote:
| Does your country not have recycling centers?
|
| Over here every municipality has a center where you can
| just hand in any domestic waste unsuitable for the trash
| can. It's a bit inconvenient because you have to go out
| of your way, but it is definitely quite doable.
|
| And electronics can be handed in at any store which
| _sells_ electronics, which includes stores like the
| equivalent of Walmart or Home Depot. You 'll be going
| there anyways, so it's literally zero extra effort.
| Taywee wrote:
| We know this quite well here in Colorado Springs:
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/chemical-col...
| erentz wrote:
| I think this part stems from a common response you see from
| anti-nuclear folks, who frequently point to the issues at
| Hanford as a reason to be against civilian nuclear power. She's
| trying to make clear the difference between civilian nuclear
| power and waste management and historical waste from military
| nuclear weapons programs. Remembering also Hanford waste issues
| date as far back as the Manhattan Project during WW2.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Civilian nuclear waste management has a better track record
| than military nuclear waste management and civilian chemical
| waste management. Is that a permanent condition, or a fluke?
| troupe wrote:
| It is probably the result of military being secretive in
| nature and civilian efforts being more open so there is
| more oversight and awareness.
| erentz wrote:
| We are talking about 32 countries with civilian nuclear
| power operating for several decades. With oversight by an
| international body that tracks every bit of nuclear
| material. Using processes that differ from what was done at
| Hanford, producing waste different from Hanford. That has
| been working well, stored well and safely without issue.
| The military didn't start from that position, it started
| from "Joe just throw that shit in a pit over there, don't
| even bother keeping records." Hanford has no resemblance to
| civilian nuclear power. I think the onus is on those who
| keep saying it does (despite the evidence to the contrary)
| to demonstrate it.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > That has been working well, stored well and safely
| without issue.
|
| Fukushima Daiichi. In case those two words aren't enough
| to jog your memory:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_P
| owe...
|
| > "leading to releases of radioactivity and triggering a
| 30 km (19 mi) evacuation zone surrounding the plant"
|
| > "the Japanese government approved the dumping of
| radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific
| Ocean over the course of 30 years."
|
| I'm hopeful that when/if fusion reactors become prevalent
| that we will prioritize burning up the fusion waste
| radioactives. https://cns.utexas.edu/news/fusion-fission-
| hybrid
|
| But, of course, that's an if:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-
| run...
| erentz wrote:
| > Fukushima Daiichi. In case those two words aren't
| enough to jog your memory:
|
| Yes, I get that nuclear power scares people, which is why
| we should put aside our emotions on the subject and just
| deal with the facts. We've had decades of empirical
| evidence about nuclear safety at this point.
|
| Zero radio-logical related deaths from Fukushima. And
| zero deaths in all history from all other civilian
| nuclear waste.
|
| > "the Japanese government approved the dumping of
| radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific
| Ocean over the course of 30 years."
|
| It sounds scary. "Radioactive water!" But it's not an
| issue. How many will die or have shortened lifespan from
| this? Let me know and we can add it to the zero above.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The comment I was responding to was "WITHOUT ISSUE". A 30
| km exclusion zone, even if temporary, is AN ISSUE.
|
| > And zero deaths in all history from all other civilian
| nuclear waste.
|
| It's rare, but happens:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_ac
| cid...
|
| > September 30, 1999 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan
|
| > Two of these workers died.
|
| "Inadequately trained part-time workers prepared a uranyl
| nitrate solution containing about 16.6 kg (37 lb) of
| uranium, which exceeded the critical mass, into a
| precipitation tank at a uranium reprocessing facility in
| Tokai-mura northeast of Tokyo, Japan. The tank was not
| designed to dissolve this type of solution and was not
| configured to prevent eventual criticality. Three workers
| were exposed to (neutron) radiation doses in excess of
| allowable limits. Two of these workers died. 116 other
| workers received lesser doses of 1 mSv or greater though
| not in excess of the allowable limit.[39][40][41][36]"
| erentz wrote:
| We are discussing nuclear waste in this thread.
|
| I said "stored well and safely without issue".
|
| You find 2 dead workers from an industrial accident over
| a 70 year history that was not actually about nuclear
| waste but was a fuel processing and fabrication facility
| making fuel for experimental reactors. Not civilian power
| reactors. [1]
|
| Even if you included it (which clearly it's not related
| to waste so shouldn't) it would still be the safest and
| best managed waste of anything we have!
|
| The exclusion zone is not nuclear waste. It is
| interesting though because a lot of research after the
| event seems to show that the evacuation and such a large
| exclusion zone was a mistake and we should evacuate less
| in such events. But in the moment I get everyone was
| scared and didn't have a good idea of what to do.
|
| [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-
| and-sec...
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| "Re-processing facility" means it comes from used rods
| (i.e. "waste").
|
| This is fine, you can have your thread dedicated solely
| to waste. Though I do think that waste reprocessing
| should also be included in such a thread.
|
| -----
|
| As to the more general matter, people aren't concerned so
| much with waste, as with everything about nuclear power.
| Including "accidental waste" such as that caused by the
| Chernobyl civilian reactor failure.
|
| Yes, I'm glad we're designing and building meltdown-proof
| reactors.
|
| The long-term waste, regardless of how it originates
| (whether from conventional waste, decommissionings, or
| what have you) needs to be processed such that people a
| hundred, thousand, ten thousand years from now don't have
| to do anything special about it.
|
| I think this can be done. But without stringent, real-
| time regulations I am not confident industry, or even
| government, will do what's necessary.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _" the Japanese government approved the dumping of
| radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific
| Ocean over the course of 30 years."_
|
| A minuscule amount of tritium, dumped into an ocean that
| has billions of tons of uranium dissolved in it. This
| Fukushima water issue is a perfect example of people
| letting emotions overrule rational thought.
| Accujack wrote:
| >That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point -
| it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier
| waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long
| history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way.
| It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of
| bases and the areas around them are contaminated.
|
| No, it's a plain statement, not a "tactic". Power plant waste
| is different from weapons waste, and disposing of power plant
| waste has never been a real problem. She's talking about power
| plant waste because one major barrier to replacing climate
| changing coal fired power plants is the usual indoctrination
| people face regarding nuclear waste, with no distinction drawn
| between power plants and nuclear weapons waste.
|
| Talking about weapons reactors or the military not disposing of
| chemicals properly is entirely irrelevant to the article and
| the discussion at hand.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Power plant waste is different from weapons waste, and
| disposing of power plant waste has never been a real
| problem._
|
| If power plant waste was handled as badly as weapons waste
| was historically, it would be a problem. That's all I am
| saying, really.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too_
|
| It tends to be a lot harder to detect too. With radioactive
| waste, we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely
| sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This
| allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher
| standard than most other industries.
|
| This is also the reason we can say with a high degree of
| confidence that first-world militaries have actually been very
| good at handling nuclear waste for a while now. The Manhattan
| Project era and a few years after that were very messy, but
| they have demonstrably cleaned up their act and figured out how
| to do things safely. Meanwhile the non-radioactive chemical
| pollution continues largely unabated. Never live near a
| military base if you value the well-being of any children you
| might have.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _we 're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely
| sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This
| allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher
| standard than most other industries._
|
| The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get
| leaked around bases, taking soil samples might be more
| expensive than walking around with a Geiger counter but it's
| well within the budgets of even local municipalities. The
| problem is that they don't really care all that much. Even
| something as simple as "standing far away from the pit where
| you're burning plastic," a practice that even law-breaking
| rural trash burners can manage, was too much for them in
| Iraq, shows you something about their institutional culture.
| willnonya wrote:
| You're confusing ignorance and apathy of individuals with
| institutional apathy.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The soldiers who got sick from the burn pits often knew
| it was bad for them, but had to follow orders. Personal
| apathy on the part of people who are giving the orders
| _is_ institutional apathy.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that
| get leaked around bases
|
| Even they will be hard pressed to detect chemical polutants
| at the extremely low concentrations that radiation can be
| trivially detected. But also, they know what to look for.
| What about everybody else in the area who don't even know
| what they should be looking for in the first place? With
| radioactive leaks it's easy, but DOW's chemical catalogue
| is thicker than a phonebook; you've got to be looking for
| something in particular or looking for half a billion
| different things all at once.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're saying - people living in towns
| near military bases do not* walk up and down the local
| creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare
| soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic
| chemicals. Maybe they should start, but I mean, that's
| not a good normal.
|
| *Edit: Except when they do.
| godelski wrote:
| > people living in towns near military bases do not walk
| up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any
| more than they compare soil samples against lists of
| plausibly leaked toxic chemicals
|
| Not quite true. There are pretty big and active citizen
| based radiation detection projects [0,1,2,3]. The reason
| for this is that radiation monitors are quite cheap now
| and the same people who build weather systems often
| connect a geiger counter. They're cheap and sensitive
| since the gov spent so much money trying to detect
| radiation from space, across borders, and even the
| smallest traces on people (to detect spies, scientists,
| etc) all from the Cold War. There are also citizen based
| communities monitoring water and soil, but this does
| require more work from the participant. They have to go
| out and collect samples. Processing can be both expensive
| and quite a bit of work. This isn't the same as hooking
| up a $100 device to your weather station, which is a
| leave and forget type system.
|
| We should note that both these communities are far more
| active in regions where there are greater dangers
| (history of nuclear sites/projects, oil facilities,
| military bases, etc). I'd also like to thank both these
| communities and others like them. They're all doing
| important work.
|
| [0]https://www.radiationnetwork.com/
|
| [1] https://jciv.iidj.net/map/
|
| [2] https://cemp.dri.edu/cemp/
|
| [3] https://www.epa.gov/radnet/near-real-time-and-
| laboratory-dat...
| LarryMullins wrote:
| There are a lot of geiger counters around operated by
| various organizations. Every time there is a radioactive
| leak just about anywhere in the world, it is promptly
| discovered even if that government _wants_ to keep it a
| secret. In fact it _is_ practical for you to own your own
| geiger counter if you live near a nuclear facility and
| are worried about it. The equipment needed for general
| analytical chemistry, which you 'd need to detect a great
| deal of chemical pollution, is a lot less practical. For
| some specific chemical pollutants, there simple and cheap
| tests which are practical for laypeople. But there's no
| such thing as a simple hand-held meter that will detect
| any arbitrary chemical pollutant.
|
| Hence, chemical pollution very often goes unnoticed for
| decades until somebody starts to wonder why half the
| babies in town are born without brains.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The radioactivity accidents that are picked up by
| environmental sensors tend to be very large-scale. The
| little, nasty ones, like the mining source that was lost
| in Australia, tend to disappear.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Minuscule tritium emissions are detected around nuclear
| power plants all the time, far below the level at which
| anybody should be concerned.
|
| There was even a case where alarms were sounded when a
| power plant worker was found to be radioactive due to
| radon in his home, which triggered detectors at work. The
| general chemical industry doesn't operate with anything
| even remotely close to this degree of care.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's a gas, making it the easiest possible case. I
| think a more plausible threat are the decaying temporary
| storage containers that a lot of low-grade waste is
| sitting in because nobody can find a permanent location
| for it. (Yes, that's largely due to political reasons,
| but political reasons are real!)
| LarryMullins wrote:
| From what I understand, in the case of the radon-
| contaminated nuclear worker, what they actually detected
| were the "radon daughters", the decay products of radon.
| Radon itself doesn't stick around very long, but when it
| decays it produces an atomic dust of polonium, lead, etc.
| That _dust_ is what tripped the alarms.
|
| Anything like that radioactive source from Australia
| would set of tons of alarms in a nuclear power plant. You
| wouldn't get it out the door. Incidents like that missing
| radioactive source in Australia happen where there are
| far fewer safeguards than at a nuclear power plant. Those
| sources generally go missing from abandoned medical
| equipment, food irradiation facilities, and that sort of
| thing. You'd be hard pressed to smuggle (let alone
| accidentally convey) something like a spent nuclear fuel
| pellet out of a power plant.
| godelski wrote:
| A gas is quite difficult to detect because it diffuses.
| This also makes them typically less dangerous because
| diffusion also means dilution. Levels do matter. Tritium
| is also pretty low in terms of radioactivity. The
| radiation cannot penetrate the skin except in very high
| levels (you can find keychains, watches, gun sights, etc
| with small bits of tritium and phosphorous to create long
| term glow objects). Ingestion and inhalation are more
| serious since your internal organs are more susceptible
| (see weighted dosage). The real cool thing is that we can
| measure radiation with high precision and in real time,
| so we can detect these dangers. Mostly because these
| devices are cheap.
|
| In addition to the requirement of a more active approach
| needed to detect ground/water contaminants there are also
| a larger variety of pollutants that are harmful. Many of
| these need specific tests, which can consume your
| samples. Of course we can do pretty good guesstimates for
| what we should look for, but we do need to recognize that
| the process is both more fuzzy and more involved. We can
| grow these projects by making them cheaper, but that's a
| tall order (it is happening though).
|
| Edit: I do want to note that most radiation detection
| devices do not distinguish between types of radiation.
| These differences do matter in danger levels. This can
| add complications the above but there is a decent signal
| that is still useful. But as with everything, some
| expertise and domain knowledge is quite important.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Last summer, on vacation, I stumbled upon some nuclear waste. I
| went looking for a visitor's center, but missed it and drove
| further up the road.
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/8C8uXWXcBxXGjz5Q7
|
| I pulled off the road across the river (Readsboro Rd) to turn
| around, and low and behold, I was looking straight across the dam
| at the waste. I always assumed the site would be bigger.)
|
| In hindsight I wish I took a picture with my whole family.
|
| Ironically, the waste has been there almost as long as the plant
| operated: https://decommissioningcollaborative.org/yankee-rowe/
| aliasxneo wrote:
| There's a lot of misinformation about nuclear energy. I used to
| tell people that a quick way to get kicked out of the nuclear
| program in the U.S. Navy was to accidently forget to take off
| your thermoluminescent dosimeter (TLD) before boarding an
| airplane. The Navy uses TLDs to track radiation exposure of
| sailors and has a strict program in place for managing it. Turns
| out, hopping on an airplane is the quickest way to exceed your
| annual exposure limit.
|
| It helped people understand the safety protocols we have in place
| and that it's not this big scary thing waiting to give you cancer
| at any moment. Of course, it _is_ dangerous when handled
| incorrectly, but it's not the doomsday thing the media tends to
| make it.
| bitwize wrote:
| People protest nuclear power because they do not trust the for-
| profit energy industry to handle waste properly. They expect the
| power companies to cut costs and process the waste in a slipshod
| measure that risks exposure to the environment and public.
|
| It's not about green goo leaking into the environment. It's about
| human failures and flaws in the system _we_ set up.
|
| Solar and wind are cheap. Focus on a renewables-only solution.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Is nuclear demonization just political attempts to destabilize
| the west and prevent us from prosperity that comes from cheap
| clean energy?
|
| Why are US politicians not allowing building more nuclear and
| driving prices down?
|
| Are the democrats or the republicans pro-nuclear? I will vote for
| whoever is more pro nuclear.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| >Is nuclear demonization just political attempts to destabilize
| the west and prevent us from prosperity that comes from cheap
| clean energy?
|
| The anti-nuclear movement in Western Europe was funded and
| trained by the Soviet Union.
|
| However I doubt that is the reason the US failed to embrace
| nuclear energy. The problem in the US is that the fossil fuel
| industry is employing more people and paying more to lobbyists
| than the nuclear energy industry.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I grew up very anti-nuclear, but a lot of it was conflation of
| nuclear energy with nuclear weapons which, back in the 80s, felt
| like they could fall any moment.
|
| But the technology has changed (though most reactors are not
| new), and more importantly, when compared with the effects of
| fossil fuels on climate, nuclear is by far the lesser evil. Sure,
| solar/wind/hydro renewables are important but they're not
| practical or feasible everywhere. I'm now pretty convinced
| nuclear needs to play an important part if we have any hope of
| significant emission reduction. So in that respect, as well
| meaning as the anti-nuclear green movement has been, they are
| wrong in opposing it today (in terms of power generation; nuclear
| weapons are an abomination).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons
|
| "Conflation" means (or at least implies) that one thing has
| been mistaken for the other.
|
| Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons
| production since the very beginning. The British MAGNOX
| reactors were designed (and used) to produce warheads as well
| as energy. Iran is under sanctions partly because it's feared
| they'll use any reactor they build to make warheads.
| Accujack wrote:
| >"Conflation" means (or at least implies) that one thing has
| been mistaken for the other.
|
| Yes, and the word is being used correctly here.
|
| >Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons
| production since the very beginning.
|
| No, they have not. While it's possible to get civilian power
| plants to produce (breed) nuclear materials, they aren't
| designed for it. Almost all weapons production at places like
| Savannah River and Hanford was done with purpose specific
| plants that created plutonium and U-235 by design.
|
| Iran is under sanctions not because it's feared they'll use
| power plants to make warheads but because they are working on
| enriching nuclear fuel to a level useful for weapons. IE,
| they're taking the same stuff that powers power plants and
| trying to concentrate it so they can make a weapon.
| sgt101 wrote:
| This made me laugh out loud.
|
| 1) I support Sizewell c & d. There's already two big reactors
| there, a third and fourth one make no difference to be fair. 2) I
| live about 20km from Sizewell. 3) The road that will be choked
| with traffic from building it is 1.5km away, the rail track is
| also 1.5km away - they should really build a sea pier like last
| time. 4) 5 years ago the wet storage at Sizewell suffered a leak.
| 5) No one noticed, until someone decided to do a wash
| [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jun/11/nuclear-...]
| 6) If they hadn't noticed then pond would have boiled enough to
| expose the rods. This would have taken just a few hours. 7) A
| column of fire would have erupted out of the pond, creating a
| radioactive plume that would have rendered my house
| uninhabitable, for like, 200 years.
|
| So, I do not give a toss about whether it glows green or not...
| but it's definitely scary stuff that needs to be watched.
|
| She is right about weapons though, that stuff is the real deal.
| There's 1000 Hiroshima's worth of Plutonium in a shed on the
| other side of the country [
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-sellafield-nuclear-wa...]
| - that's even scarier.
| hosh wrote:
| While nuclear power can give us the most bang for the buck, it's
| main flaw has to do with the degree of centralization it
| requires. It takes the infrastructure of an advanced civilization
| to not only design, build, and maintain the facilities and
| equipment, it also requires the educational infrastructure to
| produce the personnel needed to operate them safely. This means
| that it requires a degree of centralization, and the
| centralization of political and economic power to go with it.
| Futhermore, it also requires the grid needed to transmit the
| power have to take in demand surges into account.
|
| Perhaps the miniaturization efforts for nuclear power would mean
| a neighorhood, or even a site-level nuclear power. At this point,
| though, solar allows community-scale or site-scale deployments
| (but not necessarily community-scale manufacturing). Micro-grids,
| sized to the local demand surge can be deployed.
| zellyn wrote:
| Isn't this a case where efficiency through centralization is a
| huge win for the environment?
| hosh wrote:
| Centralization is not necessarily a win. There are other
| concerns besides efficiency -- such as resiliency.
|
| The efficiency gains we had with JIT global supply chain
| failing during the pandemic lockdowns is a great example.
|
| There are worst problems than just resiliency. As an example,
| overharvesting happens when the people consuming a resource
| is disconnected from those who harvest it. Traditionally,
| local harvesters were also the consumers, and there is
| immediate feedback on the limits of a harvest.
|
| It's made worse when we have been under a couple centuries of
| a civilization founded on the presumption that we have
| continuous, and unbounded growth.
| supermatt wrote:
| Can nuclear waste undergo fusion to turn it back into whatever it
| was before by using energy from renewables, thereby acting as a
| form of energy storage?
| fredgrott wrote:
| It's an operation cycle of very specific reactors, if I
| remember right its a variation of breeder reactors.
| pdonis wrote:
| Breeders don't reverse the nuclear reactions that take place
| when a reactor is producing power. They use the neutron flux
| from those reactions to induce different reactions (involving
| much less energy per nucleus) in surrounding material that
| produce fissile isotopes in that material.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Breeder reactors work by having less useful elements capture
| neutrons and turn into more useful elements.
|
| Capturing all of the fission byproducts and reversing the
| process is going to be so technically difficult and energy
| costly that, in this context, it might as well be impossible.
| db48x wrote:
| No, that would cost more energy than we extracted from it.
| However, what we call "spent fuel" isn't fully used up. It can
| no longer be used in a normal reactor, but reactors can be
| build which can continue extracting energy from it. In fact,
| only about 2% of the usable energy has been extracted from the
| fuel by the time we start calling it waste. Most of the high-
| level waste from today's reactors is really just fuel for
| reactors that we haven't built yet, due to over-regulation.
| smn1234 wrote:
| this is fascinating and unexpected. Do you have more
| literature on this ?
| Timshel wrote:
| Breeder reactor:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor Not an
| expert but from what I read development stopped mainly due
| to uranium supply being sufficient making expensive further
| research not worth it. But on the security part using
| liquid sodium certainly contributed :).
| pdonis wrote:
| In principle, this might be possible since any reaction can in
| principle be run in reverse, given a sufficient supply of
| energy.
|
| In practice, I don't think this would be at all viable, and
| certainly would not be competitive with other much more
| straightforward forms of energy storage.
| [deleted]
| preisschild wrote:
| https://whatisnuclear.com is another great site with information
| about nuclear energy
| evolve2k wrote:
| Look here's what you want to consider. The waste needs to be
| stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century but
| for thousands of years.
|
| We can't manage shit that needs a few years of care unless it
| continues to make profits right now. It's a fucking joke.
|
| So your local government is recommending a nuclear waste dump, as
| mine is.
|
| Here's basic maths to know if your getting screwed or if they'll
| be doing all the coolest activities shown in the nice diagrams
| with big solid containers and a scientists in lab coats
| monitoring for issues for eternity. People will definitely be
| there working and maintaining 50 and 500 and 5,000 years after
| the initial political announcement, right?
|
| Anything needing maintenance for decades either needs to be
| politically important, like government spending on educational
| institutions or hospitals. What's that you say? Your hospital
| buildings are decaying. Oh umm let's chat further.
|
| Ok so back to the maths. This thing needs its own stewardship
| funding.
|
| Let's say it costs a mere $20million a year to maintain. To be
| honest I don't know the cost, insert X. So what your going to
| want is a simple endowment, setup in a nice 10,000 year
| organisation that's free from corruption, that'll reliably
| generate your needed $20M in funds a year. What's that, the
| government haven't announced support for a new corruption free,
| science institute that is funded upfront to run for eternity? I
| sure you just missed it.
|
| So your looking for an endowment that will reliable generate your
| $20M a year, or whatever figure, ongoingly, forever. Luckily this
| can be achieved, you just need to think of this like the interest
| to be earned from a big term deposit.
|
| With say a need for a say 2% guaranteed yield, nice and
| conservative, you'll need around $1 Billion to be setup in a
| waste stewardship endowment institute thing.
|
| And here's where you can expose all the BS. I've seen no
| announcements for anything close to these funds, for these types
| of facilities. All that seems to be budgeted for is intial job
| creation construction as well as a couple of political cycles of
| funding.
|
| These are mud map numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the
| grift involved in most of these initiatives when they are not
| taking straight on long long long term stewardship and how
| that'll be funded 50, 500, 5000 years from now. Hell we can't
| even think in those sort of long timeframes.
|
| <end of rant/>
| quotemstr wrote:
| > Look here's what you want to consider. The waste needs to be
| stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century
| but for thousands of years.
|
| I find that people making this argument always always fail to
| engage with at least three important considerations.
|
| 1) As a consequence of how physics works, the more dangerous a
| radioisotope, the shorter the period for which it is dangerous.
| The most radioactive substances decay in years or decades, not
| millennia. Anti-nuclear activists routinely engage in a form of
| equivocation in which they juxtapose dangerous but short lived
| substances (e.g. Strontium-90 has a half life of a few decades)
| with long-lived but low-danger substances like Uranium (with a
| half life of billions of years), pretending that every form of
| radioactive waste is as dangerous as the most dangerous form
| for as long as the longest-lived form survives.
|
| 2) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore the possibility of
| reprocessing nuclear waste into more nuclear fuel. They pretend
| that our only option is to store this fuel indefinitely. They
| also use this epistemic void where reprocessing should be to
| argue that we don't have enough nuclear fuel on Earth to
| sustain civilization. We do, and we do by several orders of
| magnitude if we remember that nuclear "waste" can be turned
| into new fuel.
|
| 3) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore how modern
| civilization produces non-nuclear waste products that prompt
| similar concerns over waste safety. (See, for example, the
| famous Love Canal incident.) By fixating on nuclear waste and
| ignoring other industrial byproducts that are at least equally
| as harmful, anti-nuclear activists reveal themselves as being
| motivated by some kind of emotional or ideological opposition
| to "the atom" in particular instead of, as they claim, an
| altruistic concern for the safety of humanity in general.
|
| All in all, these people are Luddites, and they've set back the
| progress of carbon free energy by almost a century. We need to
| ignore people afraid of nuclear power in the same way that we
| ignore people who worry in public about the power of witches
| and Mercury in retrograde.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The most radioactive substances decay in years or decades,
| not millennia.
|
| s/decay in/have half-lives of/
|
| Some of the stuff made in a nuke is not made by any other
| earthbound process, and even a tiny amount of it is
| dangerous. Plutonium has a half-life around 20,000 years. At
| a stretch, European civilization is 10,000 years old (and we
| generally struggle to read texts that old - when they exist
| at all).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore the possibility of
| reprocessing nuclear waste into more nuclear fuel.
|
| Quite the contrary; they oppose it. Windscale/Sellafield has
| been the target of protests for decades. The problem is, to
| extract and concentrate the stuff you want to output, you
| create a greatly increased volume of stuff that you don't
| want/can't sell.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| > But radiation hasn't harmed anywhere near as many people as
| fossil fuels.
|
| The implication with both this statement and the map is that we
| should be comparing the total number of people who died from
| radiation, and the total from fossil fuels, and see which is
| bigger, but there are other ways of evaluating (potential) harms.
|
| Nuclear power and other radtech is not equally common around the
| world, and neither are fossil fuels. In the context of promoting
| transition from one to the other, the important question is the
| relative harm of these two choices as a function of their
| deployment over time. There have been events from minor leaks to
| world-changing disasters, all of which are contingent on human
| factors which vary widely across time and space. So it's not
| clear that increasing global rollout of nuclear power will be as
| consistently safe in the future as it has been in the recent
| past.
| concordDance wrote:
| In deaths per KWh nuclear is king, with a thousandth of the
| deaths of gas and ten thousandth of coal. Until recently even
| solar was worse due to installers sometimes falling off roofs!
|
| E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-
| energy-p...
|
| I really do not understand why almost no one bothers to spend a
| couple of minutes looking up the actual numbers and analysis
| that people have been doing for decades... its universal in all
| subjects, not just nuclear.
| gorgonical wrote:
| There are a few ways of comparing these numbers. I think you're
| suggesting that something like deaths/kWh is a better metric,
| which I agree with; if we just go with total deaths than
| something like pedal-driven generators are the safest way to
| generate power, which is obviously an unhelpful statement.
|
| However, the greater point is that although nuclear power is
| dangerous by default because of the waste and risks of
| meltdowns it can be made very safe with engineering and still
| be a cheap generation method. By all accounts I'm familiar with
| fossil fuels cannot be made safe for either the environment or
| people while still being cost-effective.
|
| A major issue in the nuclear vs fossil fuels argument is
| perceived vs actual risk. I don't have the numbers, but even
| though Fukushima was a huge disaster, the death toll is
| officially 1. But the cleanup has been very expensive and very
| visible. Meanwhile, coal/gas/oil plants deflect the equivalent
| costs of their cleanup onto workers and people in the
| communities in increased mortality and healthcare costs.
|
| More succinctly, nuclear _can_ be safe with effort, but fossil
| fuels seemingly _can 't_ be safe, no matter how much effort.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| I agree deaths/kWh is a better metrics, and I was probing
| into your point about how nuclear can be safer due to better
| engineering. Is the engineering alone enough? Can we engineer
| out the risky human parts? Perhaps today that looks like
| increasing automation of reactors, perhaps in future it means
| a computer could run an entire station without human inputs
| or oversight.
|
| Also great points about perceived vs actual risk, and
| observability of effects, as other things affecting the
| political landscape of nuclear!
| teekert wrote:
| For a (feels like) more balanced view:
| https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-nuclear-power-g...
| danans wrote:
| > I also learned that batteries cannot be recycled.
|
| That's straight up misinformation
| connorgutman wrote:
| Call me chicken little but my beef with nuclear has always been
| about the people not the science. If we paint the Earth with
| reactors it's a statistical likelihood that through corruption or
| incompetence someone will screw up. We can't even keep 50 year
| old bridges from collapsing in the U.S and meanwhile every time a
| republican gets into office they bleed FEMA and the EPA dry. We
| currently have 55 power plants total but would need about 100x
| that to even put a dent in our electricity bill. Who's going to
| build them? Contractors? How are those F-35s Lockheed made going?
| Another issue is that there are significant odds that global
| society is on a path towards collapse or backslide due to climate
| change. If we entered a period of catabolic collapse and
| governments around the world no longer had the money or
| infrastructure to manage the upkeep of these facilities what
| would happen. You can't just flip a switch and turn the whole
| thing off. I'm not someone who thinks the world is going to end
| in a day but look how quickly things have deteriorated in
| Pakistan recently. Would governments have plans in place to deal
| with reactors if their economy suddenly collapsed? Honestly the
| biggest thing to me though is that nuclear is greedy. We're
| trying to find cheat codes to avoid conservation and continue
| consuming copious amounts of electricity. It would be vastly more
| cost-effective and far less time consuming to dump all that money
| into energy reduction measures but that would disrupt capitalism
| and America's addiction to endless consumption. Residential
| energy usage in the U.S is higher than commercial usage. Imagine
| if we banned cars in cities tomorrow, dumped money into public
| transit and high speed rail, banned meat, built sustainable urban
| housing, forced tech companies to do away with planned
| obsolescence, stopped flying unnecessarily, and so on. We could
| solve climate change in a decade through conservation but that
| would destroy the profits of those in power. Nuclear might sound
| great on paper but it's the planetary equivalence of taking tums
| instead of putting down the Costco hotdog.
| Accujack wrote:
| >If we paint the Earth with reactors
|
| No need. About 5,300 1GW reactors would be enough to supply all
| electric needs world wide. With renewables added in, the number
| is even smaller.
|
| Electricity can be sent over wires, too, so there's no need to
| put reactors everywhere, we can keep them in secure locations
| if needed.
| connorgutman wrote:
| 5,300 (in my opinion) qualifies as painting the Earth. If
| even one fails we're talking about centuries or millennial of
| damage control.
| shawnz wrote:
| What's more concerning, a corrupt or incompetent government
| mishandling one ton of nuclear fuel, or the same
| corrupt/incompetent government mishandling the _one million_
| tons of coal that would be needed to replace it? (which by the
| way, would have approximately the same amount of radioactive
| potential due to the natural radioactive contaminants that will
| get concentrated as you use it)
| connorgutman wrote:
| My entire point was that we should strive for neither. We
| could half per-capita energy consumption in the US and still
| consume twice as much as Brazil. If everyone in rich
| countries stopped being greedy we could easily meet global
| demands with renewables alone.
| goatlover wrote:
| Halving per-capita energy consumption has an economic cost
| in terms of reduced production, consumption and thus
| employment. Which will have a political cost in follow-up
| elections.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| Nuclear energy should be orthogonal to meeting future energy
| demand and transitioning to a zero carbon generating economy.
| While it takes a long time for a nuclear plant to come online and
| become fully efficient. It's better than sitting on our asses and
| breathing in the toxic waste generated by fossil fuels.
|
| Additionally, with the recent revelations in fusion,
| https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-make...,
| nuclear will be able to provide us with more runway as mankind
| continues to march forward towards a cleaner future.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Just on technical grounds, this is just not a very educational
| article. Any discussion of waste from the nuclear fission process
| should begin with an image of the periodic table and a chart of
| the curve of binding energy (whose peak, or trough, sits on Iron,
| which the most stable nuclei relative to fusion or fission
| processes). From there we can take a look at thermal fission
| product yield:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield
|
| Notably there are two peaks in isotopic distribution, but there
| are a great many species generated, with varying impact on human
| health if ingested, depending on whether they mimic species like
| calcium (in the same column on the periodic table) or are
| actually used (iodine in the thryoid gland for example). Note
| also there are some transuranics (plutonium etc.) formed by
| neutron capture in addition to the fission products.
|
| The risk is that these products don't stay sealed in their
| cooling pond containers (note that 'spent' is hardly the right
| term, it's really 'too hot to safely remain in the reactor' as
| they're still generating lots of energy by decay of the unstable
| isotopes). Eventually they cool off enough to go into dry cask
| storage (also a long-term risk).
|
| Usually in these discussions someone trots out a line like
| 'airplanes are risky, too, but we don't stop flying just because
| of the rare plane crash, do we?'. The answer to this is that if
| every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that
| had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive
| decontamination, then we'd think twice about flying (note the
| nuclear-reactor-powered airplane was on the drawing boards for a
| while).
|
| The end result of this issue is that nuclear reactors have to be
| heavily over-engineered to take into account so-called 'black
| swan' events, see Fukushima. This inevitably raises the costs of
| nuclear power well above those for any other energy source, which
| is why many people (myself included) think it doesn't have much
| of a future except in certain niche situations.
|
| There are other issues, of course - high demand for cooling
| water, nuclear weapons material proliferation, uncertainties over
| high-grade uranium ore supplies (i.e. price fluctuations etc.),
| and so on, but attempting to claim long-term storage of nuclear
| waste is not a seriously problematic issue is just blatantly
| dishonest.
| Aloisius wrote:
| > The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a
| 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits
| for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd
| think twice about flying
|
| I'm not sure we would if planes only crashed once a thirty
| years. Especially if crashes were limited to experimental or
| old planes with known design flaws.
| Accujack wrote:
| > if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion
| zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without
| extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice
|
| If every reactor accident created an exclusion zone like this
| that had to be kept off limits for that long, we likely
| wouldn't use reactors at all.
|
| Most of the nuclear accidents that have happened don't create
| problems that big, only Chernobyl and Fukushima. There have
| been hundreds of other incidents, but almost all of those have
| no after effects at all.
|
| For example, another well known accident was Three Mile Island.
| There were no detectable health effects from it and the
| background radiation was increased by 0.5% or so in the
| immediate area. No exclusion zone required.
| concordDance wrote:
| > The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a
| 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits
| for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination
|
| Thing is, that's genuinely not what's needed.
|
| You can live quite happily within a couple of miles of
| Chernobyl with a life expectancy difference much smaller than
| going from middle class to working class.
|
| Fukushima today is even less dangerous, basically negligible
| danger unless you're on the plant grounds.
| intrasight wrote:
| Nuclear is dead - in the US anyway. Nuclear never made sense in
| the US. We aren't the kind of society that can make rational,
| scientific, economic decisions. Nuclear REQUIRES success at that.
| No pro-nuclear arguments are going to change those societal facts
| on the ground. Nor is their any reason to try - because nuclear
| is dead.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I like how he says there is no radiation leaking out of those dry
| casks.
|
| That sounds like obvious nonsense to me. There's radiation, it's
| just not significant.
|
| It's like saying an x-ray has no radiation when you compare it to
| a CT scan.
| Accujack wrote:
| There's more radioactivity in coal fired plant emissions gases
| than is coming from a storage cask.
|
| For that matter, you are emitting some radiation right now from
| radioactive potassium in your body. Everyone is.
| aflag wrote:
| I think you're technically correct, but there are a lot of
| other sources of radiation in our daily lives. I don't know how
| much radiation leaks out, but if it's similar to naturally
| occurring sources, I think it's fair to say there is no
| radiation leaking.
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