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Everytime I read a comment like this (claiming nuclear is clean, ignoring the atomic waste contaminating your land with radiation for the next hundreds of thous

Everytime I read a comment like this (claiming nuclear is clean, ignoring the atomic waste contaminating your land with radiation for the next hundreds of thousands of years, which is starting to become a severe problem for example here in Germany), I notice that the commenter is usually from the US. I wonder why this is?

amit_m 11y ago
The waste produced by a nuclear power plant is orders of magnitude less than what a coal power plant produces. Even if we only look at radioactive waste - coal power plants produce more of it, only instead of being stored in a special underground site it is dispersed into the atmosphere giving us cancer. So yes, nuclear waste is a serious issue, but let's not forget that the alternatives have major environmental costs as well. (not from the US)
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Nuclear waste is orders of magnitude less in volume but orders of magnitude more dangerous, to the point we have to plan to keep it out of reach for literally millenia.
  - hueving 11y ago
    This was a solved issue with Yucca Mountain in the US, but then fear mongering and political back-peddling caused it to be blocked at the last minute. Nuclear plants had to help pay for its development and then got screwed when it came time for the payoff.
  - iwwr 11y ago
    There are several aspects to this. 1. Nuclear waste, even when not processed, is not that large in volume and it can be stored in a space on the order of a hectare (about 2.5 acres) for the entire US nuclear waste production over several decades. Consider the comparative amount of storage needed for just coal ash, as well as the environmental hazards that presents. 2. The reason the US does have comparatively more waste is because the government forbids any reprocessing of nuclear fuel. For example, merely separating out the more radioactive isotopes, you can greatly reduce the volume. Reprocessed fuel can also be partially reused in a nuclear reactor and the French have great experience with that. 3. Even reprocessed "spent" fuel can be useful in 3rd and 4th generation reactors. Spent fuel today is still a valuable future resource, so it needn't be buried and guarded for millennia afterwards. 4. Natural nuclear fuel usage can be greatly more effective with nuclear breeding, which can turn non-fissile U-238 and Th-232 into the fissile U-235 and U-233 respectively. Right now, what's actually burned is mainly U-235, an extremely rare isotope (the minor constituent of "natural uranium") and that's comparatively as rare and expensive as platinum. Breeding can increase the energy obtained from the same quantity of fuel by 10-100 times.
    - cm2187 11y ago
      The other point that we tend to forget about nuclear waste is that it is not only minuscule in term of size, but it can also be confined. When a factory releases gas in the atmosphere, we loose control of this gas. To me the main problem with nuclear energy is not the waste, which even if we never intend to recycle is such a tiny volume that being afraid of it is like an elephant being afraid of a mosquito. The problem is rather the chernobyl/Fukushima risk. I am not a specialist but I understand that switching to Thorium could reduce a lot that risk. Most nuclear reactors around the world have been built in the 60s/70s. I would expect that if we decide to replace them, there would be a sufficient critical mass to justify the cost of moving away from uranium.
      - mpweiher 11y ago
        > The problem is rather the chernobyl/Fukushima risk. The risk from these types of accidents is less than the toll from fossil fuels in normal operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... For Fukushima: ".. no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure.." "no evidence to support the idea.. will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects".
        DasIch 11y ago
        The toll from fossil fuels is however much easier to deal with. The worst case scenario for a nuclear reactor failure in Germany, is that there is no Germany afterwards.
        mpweiher 11y ago
        That's a big claim. Do you have big evidence to back it up? Take into consideration that 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan did not cause Japan to not exist afterwards. In fact, the damage and death toll from those two bombs was less than from the wholly conventional Tokyo firestorm. Yes, nuclear technology is a big lever, and yes, big levers are dangerous. But it's simply not as earth-shatteringly more dangerous as people believe. Remember that there have been no deaths so far from the Fukushima meltdown, which was about as bad as you can imagine, with bad siting, bad technology, bad safety precautions, awful handling etc. At the same time, the Tsunami that caused the meltdown did cause over 15000 deaths.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    How long does it take non-nuclear waste to decay? For many types of dangerous waste, the answer is "forever." Yet we treat the nuclear stuff as being much worse. Why is that?
iaw 11y ago
Which is ironic to me because the US is less pro-nuclear than numerous EU countries.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  It's because the U.S. is so hesitant to do nuclear that its inhabitants are so pro-nuclear. The U.S. isn't having to deal with nuclear's faults.
  - sjwright 11y ago
    I'm pro-nuclear because it's one of the lowest risk forms of electricity production in terms of human lives per kilowatt, with the possible exception of utility scale solar. The occasional wind turbine workers and rooftop solar installers have been killed doing their work; in extremely small numbers but each turbine and rooftop only makes a minuscule quantity of energy. Hydro is usually very safe, except that the dams can fail and wipe out entire cities. When Banqiao Dam failed, 26 thousand people died. If you want to talk about the "what if" dangers of nuclear, you have to accept that Hydro's "what if" scenarios are far, far, far more deadly. Deaths per trillion kW hours 170,000 Coal 36,000 Oil 24,000 Biomass 4,000 Gas 1,400 Hydro 440 Solar (rooftop) 150 Wind 90 Nuclear Source: http://onforb.es/1JpfxzR http://onforb.es/1JpfxzR
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      That link seems to be unrelated, you probably put the wrong one. I notice that Wind and Solar aren't much worse than Nuclear, though, and they don't produce highly radioactive, toxic waste we must safely store for millenia, don't take decades to set up, don't cost as much, do not require incredibly high levels of competence to be safe...
      - sjwright 11y ago
        There are plenty of sources with broadly similar numbers. Google is your friend. https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+per+kilowatt https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+per+kilowatt I'm all on board for wind and solar, we should be deploying as much of it as possible. But if we want to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy in the next 50 years, we need more than just solar and wind. Saying that nuclear power produces "highly radioactive, toxic waste" is extremely misleading and demonstrates a core misunderstanding of the nuclear fuel cycle. This stuff is only scary because it has been pitched as the boogie monster by anti-nuclear weapons campaigners who were completely uneducated about the difference between the two. If you educate yourself about nuclear power, your views might change. http://archive.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/11/moore_qa http://archive.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/11/mo...
panic 11y ago
How does atomic waste contaminate the land with radiation? Isn't it shielded?
- lostlogin 11y ago
  It should be - there is a fairly large industry that cleans up the shoddy shielding from past years.
necrodawg 11y ago
Nuclear is pretty clean if the waste is dealt with properly and stored safely, until we figure out how to use it. My understanding is that the radiation problem in Germany is since Chernobyl... I don't think people's viewpoint on this issue has anything to do with nationality.
- germanier 11y ago
  Germany started their nuclear power phase-out in 2002, well before Fukushima. In 2010 the Merkel government decided to extend the lifetime of the existing power plants by 8 to 14 years, which was heavily criticized at that time. The only thing the Fukushima 2011 incident resulted in was that the phase out was accelerated but it would have occurred nonetheless. > if the waste is dealt with properly and stored safely At least in Germany, nobody figured out yet how to store the waste properly for a long-time. Remember, that the country is densely populated. For example, take a look at the Asse II mine.
  - necrodawg 11y ago
    Fukushima had a big impact on nuclear policy in Germany. I'm just saying it doesn't make sense given its geological stability. There's a world outside Germany. Pay someone outside Germany to deal with it.
    - julien_c 11y ago
      If I'm not mistaken Germany shipped nuclear waste to Normandy, France (by train) a couple of times. It didn't fly well with either public opinions, though.
      - germanier 11y ago
        They used the nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague but that waste was shipped back to Germany afterwards. Same with the waste that was processed in Sellafield, though nothing has returned yet from there. Using those sites for commercial waste is not allowed anymore since 2005 though.
unepipe 11y ago
Because coal power releases more radiation than nuclear power, and those energy sources are what americans know best. Nuclear is the lesser of two evils, and less ubiquitous. It's somewhat of a false dichotomy.
adrianN 11y ago
We could also start getting our shit together and build some breeder reactors that burn up >90% of what we now call "waste" and produce end-products with much shorter half-times than current reactors.
- mtreis86 11y ago
  Right. Eventually uranium 238 decays down to non-radioactive lead. http://www.ccnr.org/decay_U238.html http://www.ccnr.org/decay_U238.html
  - handelaar 11y ago
    Inasmuch as if you'd had a pound of it when the earth was formed, you'd still have half a pound of it now, sure. Mathematically-speaking that remaining half pound of U238 will fully turn into lead approximately... never.
mpweiher 11y ago
From Germany here. The issue is not that nuclear is "clean" in an absolute sense, it's that the alternatives are incredibly more dirty and dangerous so relative to those it is incredibly clean. Here are 3 articles comparing the death-rates of various means of generating power. Nice graphical representation: http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/ http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclea... For each death attributable to nuclear, 4000 are attributable to coal. 4000:1. Incredible, but apparently true. NASA shows the deaths that have already been prevented due to nuclear, currently the rate appears to be 80000 per year. That's 80000 people alive per year who would have been dead without nuclear: http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/ http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/ Forbes has a nice comprehensive overview that shows rooftop solar having a higher death rate than nuclear: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de... [EDIT: pulled salient points from the quoted articles into the post]
- kuschku 11y ago
  And still, we have with Nuclear issues like this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch
  - mpweiher 11y ago
    Except that that is in all likelihood not a nuclear issue at all. If you read that article you quoted, you will see that the only study to actually look at other such clusters found that the main correlation were not geographical factors (such as proximity to nuclear facilities or air bases), but rather demographic factors. "Im Zuge der Auswertung der Studie zeigte sich, dass nicht Umweltfaktoren, wie die Nähe zu Kernkraftwerken, zu Militärflugplätzen oder anderen häufig als Verursacher in Rede stehender Anlagen mit dem Auftreten der Leukämiefälle korrelieren, sondern dass demografische Faktoren die signifikantesten Merkmale darstellen, in denen die untersuchten Cluster übereinstimmen."
- notahacker 11y ago
  Google also turns up what appears to be the original source for those oft-repeated statics http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... It's fair to say the author's methodology is interesting. Only 50 deaths from Chernobyl count... as it would be "tenuous" to count other people that eventually died from radiation poisoning (even using the figures accepted by bodies responsible for promoting atomic energy). It's apparently not "tenuous" to count ballpark estimates of a million lives shortened due to coal particulate poisoning, however, or indeed to guesstimate 1/6 of all roofing deaths are likely to be from solar. It's something of an understatement to say this is not the most intellectually honest exploration of statistics around an issue. Compare with the New Scientist's claim - based on a study by the IAE - that the ratio should be around 14:1 for coal, and 1.5:1 for natural gas. Better than coal, certainly, but not spectacularly safe even compared with burning other fossil fuels https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-fuels-are-far-deadlier-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-f...
ianstallings 11y ago
And I wonder how you know where they're from, considering there is no city/country listed on their profile. Can you please explain how you arrived at that from OPs simple comment?
Aoyagi 11y ago
It's maybe not cleaner, but the waste is more under control, localized.

amit_m 11y ago

The waste produced by a nuclear power plant is orders of magnitude less than what a coal power plant produces. Even if we only look at radioactive waste - coal power plants produce more of it, only instead of being stored in a special underground site it is dispersed into the atmosphere giving us cancer. So yes, nuclear waste is a serious issue, but let's not forget that the alternatives have major environmental costs as well. (not from the US)

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Nuclear waste is orders of magnitude less in volume but orders of magnitude more dangerous, to the point we have to plan to keep it out of reach for literally millenia.
- hueving 11y ago
  This was a solved issue with Yucca Mountain in the US, but then fear mongering and political back-peddling caused it to be blocked at the last minute. Nuclear plants had to help pay for its development and then got screwed when it came time for the payoff.
- iwwr 11y ago
  There are several aspects to this. 1. Nuclear waste, even when not processed, is not that large in volume and it can be stored in a space on the order of a hectare (about 2.5 acres) for the entire US nuclear waste production over several decades. Consider the comparative amount of storage needed for just coal ash, as well as the environmental hazards that presents. 2. The reason the US does have comparatively more waste is because the government forbids any reprocessing of nuclear fuel. For example, merely separating out the more radioactive isotopes, you can greatly reduce the volume. Reprocessed fuel can also be partially reused in a nuclear reactor and the French have great experience with that. 3. Even reprocessed "spent" fuel can be useful in 3rd and 4th generation reactors. Spent fuel today is still a valuable future resource, so it needn't be buried and guarded for millennia afterwards. 4. Natural nuclear fuel usage can be greatly more effective with nuclear breeding, which can turn non-fissile U-238 and Th-232 into the fissile U-235 and U-233 respectively. Right now, what's actually burned is mainly U-235, an extremely rare isotope (the minor constituent of "natural uranium") and that's comparatively as rare and expensive as platinum. Breeding can increase the energy obtained from the same quantity of fuel by 10-100 times.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    The other point that we tend to forget about nuclear waste is that it is not only minuscule in term of size, but it can also be confined. When a factory releases gas in the atmosphere, we loose control of this gas. To me the main problem with nuclear energy is not the waste, which even if we never intend to recycle is such a tiny volume that being afraid of it is like an elephant being afraid of a mosquito. The problem is rather the chernobyl/Fukushima risk. I am not a specialist but I understand that switching to Thorium could reduce a lot that risk. Most nuclear reactors around the world have been built in the 60s/70s. I would expect that if we decide to replace them, there would be a sufficient critical mass to justify the cost of moving away from uranium.
    - mpweiher 11y ago
      > The problem is rather the chernobyl/Fukushima risk. The risk from these types of accidents is less than the toll from fossil fuels in normal operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... For Fukushima: ".. no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure.." "no evidence to support the idea.. will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects".
      - DasIch 11y ago
        The toll from fossil fuels is however much easier to deal with. The worst case scenario for a nuclear reactor failure in Germany, is that there is no Germany afterwards.
        mpweiher 11y ago
        That's a big claim. Do you have big evidence to back it up? Take into consideration that 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan did not cause Japan to not exist afterwards. In fact, the damage and death toll from those two bombs was less than from the wholly conventional Tokyo firestorm. Yes, nuclear technology is a big lever, and yes, big levers are dangerous. But it's simply not as earth-shatteringly more dangerous as people believe. Remember that there have been no deaths so far from the Fukushima meltdown, which was about as bad as you can imagine, with bad siting, bad technology, bad safety precautions, awful handling etc. At the same time, the Tsunami that caused the meltdown did cause over 15000 deaths.
- mikeash 11y ago
  How long does it take non-nuclear waste to decay? For many types of dangerous waste, the answer is "forever." Yet we treat the nuclear stuff as being much worse. Why is that?

iaw 11y ago

Which is ironic to me because the US is less pro-nuclear than numerous EU countries.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
It's because the U.S. is so hesitant to do nuclear that its inhabitants are so pro-nuclear. The U.S. isn't having to deal with nuclear's faults.
- sjwright 11y ago
  I'm pro-nuclear because it's one of the lowest risk forms of electricity production in terms of human lives per kilowatt, with the possible exception of utility scale solar. The occasional wind turbine workers and rooftop solar installers have been killed doing their work; in extremely small numbers but each turbine and rooftop only makes a minuscule quantity of energy. Hydro is usually very safe, except that the dams can fail and wipe out entire cities. When Banqiao Dam failed, 26 thousand people died. If you want to talk about the "what if" dangers of nuclear, you have to accept that Hydro's "what if" scenarios are far, far, far more deadly. Deaths per trillion kW hours 170,000 Coal 36,000 Oil 24,000 Biomass 4,000 Gas 1,400 Hydro 440 Solar (rooftop) 150 Wind 90 Nuclear Source: http://onforb.es/1JpfxzR http://onforb.es/1JpfxzR
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    That link seems to be unrelated, you probably put the wrong one. I notice that Wind and Solar aren't much worse than Nuclear, though, and they don't produce highly radioactive, toxic waste we must safely store for millenia, don't take decades to set up, don't cost as much, do not require incredibly high levels of competence to be safe...
    - sjwright 11y ago
      There are plenty of sources with broadly similar numbers. Google is your friend. https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+per+kilowatt https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+per+kilowatt I'm all on board for wind and solar, we should be deploying as much of it as possible. But if we want to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy in the next 50 years, we need more than just solar and wind. Saying that nuclear power produces "highly radioactive, toxic waste" is extremely misleading and demonstrates a core misunderstanding of the nuclear fuel cycle. This stuff is only scary because it has been pitched as the boogie monster by anti-nuclear weapons campaigners who were completely uneducated about the difference between the two. If you educate yourself about nuclear power, your views might change. http://archive.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/11/moore_qa http://archive.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/11/mo...

panic 11y ago

How does atomic waste contaminate the land with radiation? Isn't it shielded?

lostlogin 11y ago
It should be - there is a fairly large industry that cleans up the shoddy shielding from past years.

necrodawg 11y ago

Nuclear is pretty clean if the waste is dealt with properly and stored safely, until we figure out how to use it. My understanding is that the radiation problem in Germany is since Chernobyl... I don't think people's viewpoint on this issue has anything to do with nationality.

germanier 11y ago
Germany started their nuclear power phase-out in 2002, well before Fukushima. In 2010 the Merkel government decided to extend the lifetime of the existing power plants by 8 to 14 years, which was heavily criticized at that time. The only thing the Fukushima 2011 incident resulted in was that the phase out was accelerated but it would have occurred nonetheless. > if the waste is dealt with properly and stored safely At least in Germany, nobody figured out yet how to store the waste properly for a long-time. Remember, that the country is densely populated. For example, take a look at the Asse II mine.
- necrodawg 11y ago
  Fukushima had a big impact on nuclear policy in Germany. I'm just saying it doesn't make sense given its geological stability. There's a world outside Germany. Pay someone outside Germany to deal with it.
  - julien_c 11y ago
    If I'm not mistaken Germany shipped nuclear waste to Normandy, France (by train) a couple of times. It didn't fly well with either public opinions, though.
    - germanier 11y ago
      They used the nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague but that waste was shipped back to Germany afterwards. Same with the waste that was processed in Sellafield, though nothing has returned yet from there. Using those sites for commercial waste is not allowed anymore since 2005 though.

unepipe 11y ago

Because coal power releases more radiation than nuclear power, and those energy sources are what americans know best. Nuclear is the lesser of two evils, and less ubiquitous. It's somewhat of a false dichotomy.

adrianN 11y ago

We could also start getting our shit together and build some breeder reactors that burn up >90% of what we now call "waste" and produce end-products with much shorter half-times than current reactors.

mtreis86 11y ago
Right. Eventually uranium 238 decays down to non-radioactive lead. http://www.ccnr.org/decay_U238.html http://www.ccnr.org/decay_U238.html
- handelaar 11y ago
  Inasmuch as if you'd had a pound of it when the earth was formed, you'd still have half a pound of it now, sure. Mathematically-speaking that remaining half pound of U238 will fully turn into lead approximately... never.

mpweiher 11y ago

From Germany here. The issue is not that nuclear is "clean" in an absolute sense, it's that the alternatives are incredibly more dirty and dangerous so relative to those it is incredibly clean. Here are 3 articles comparing the death-rates of various means of generating power. Nice graphical representation: http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/ http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclea... For each death attributable to nuclear, 4000 are attributable to coal. 4000:1. Incredible, but apparently true. NASA shows the deaths that have already been prevented due to nuclear, currently the rate appears to be 80000 per year. That's 80000 people alive per year who would have been dead without nuclear: http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/ http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/ Forbes has a nice comprehensive overview that shows rooftop solar having a higher death rate than nuclear: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de... [EDIT: pulled salient points from the quoted articles into the post]

kuschku 11y ago
And still, we have with Nuclear issues like this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch
- mpweiher 11y ago
  Except that that is in all likelihood not a nuclear issue at all. If you read that article you quoted, you will see that the only study to actually look at other such clusters found that the main correlation were not geographical factors (such as proximity to nuclear facilities or air bases), but rather demographic factors. "Im Zuge der Auswertung der Studie zeigte sich, dass nicht Umweltfaktoren, wie die Nähe zu Kernkraftwerken, zu Militärflugplätzen oder anderen häufig als Verursacher in Rede stehender Anlagen mit dem Auftreten der Leukämiefälle korrelieren, sondern dass demografische Faktoren die signifikantesten Merkmale darstellen, in denen die untersuchten Cluster übereinstimmen."
notahacker 11y ago
Google also turns up what appears to be the original source for those oft-repeated statics http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... It's fair to say the author's methodology is interesting. Only 50 deaths from Chernobyl count... as it would be "tenuous" to count other people that eventually died from radiation poisoning (even using the figures accepted by bodies responsible for promoting atomic energy). It's apparently not "tenuous" to count ballpark estimates of a million lives shortened due to coal particulate poisoning, however, or indeed to guesstimate 1/6 of all roofing deaths are likely to be from solar. It's something of an understatement to say this is not the most intellectually honest exploration of statistics around an issue. Compare with the New Scientist's claim - based on a study by the IAE - that the ratio should be around 14:1 for coal, and 1.5:1 for natural gas. Better than coal, certainly, but not spectacularly safe even compared with burning other fossil fuels https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-fuels-are-far-deadlier-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-f...

ianstallings 11y ago

And I wonder how you know where they're from, considering there is no city/country listed on their profile. Can you please explain how you arrived at that from OPs simple comment?

Aoyagi 11y ago

It's maybe not cleaner, but the waste is more under control, localized.