7 ms·

To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunam

To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning. Nuclear safety is a multifacted issue and only the news media would take one fact (Fukushima was avoidable) and reach a conclusion (proving that nuclear is completely safe / completely risky). I'm personally an advocate for fission, because power storage has a long way to go before wind/solar can handle baseload. I especially like the newer designs such a Moltex (http://www.moltexenergy.com/ http://www.moltexenergy.com/). But that one fact about Fukushima isn't enough to support that position so I didn't bring that into the discussion.

joelthelion 11y ago
> To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning. Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact. Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.
- jahewson 11y ago
  There's no excuse for obvious mistakes. This wasn't something tricky. There are hundreds of years old stone markers in that area documenting the level which previous Tsunmis have reached - well above the level of the power plant. The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously enforced. Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusion.
  - abakker 11y ago
    I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have radiation and waste to deal with. Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen. Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.
    - jahewson 11y ago
      Likewise it would be a mistake to assume that it's totally unsafe based on a single instance of poor planning. But it's true that reactors of this vintage are flawed and the risks probably are too high. Fortunately we have modern reactor designs to fix that.
    - AstralStorm 11y ago
      But do you care the same when a filter in your local coal plant fails? That happens way, way more often and actually releases way more hazardous substances that are even harder to remove. Moreover, any stop/start of the plant likely requires oil burner start which requires the filters to be disabled (or they'd be destroyed). Specifically, mildly radioactive ash, large amounts of smoke, sulfur and nitrites. These leach into groundwater easily (unlike fallout) and are also biomagnified like fission products. Only natural gas is comparatively clean and there are major problems with dependency and delivery infrastructure. (Plus it is about just as environmentally friendly to mine as coal.)
  - TorKlingberg 11y ago
    Nobody was predicting a major nuclear accident in Japan before 2011. It makes me wonder how many other obvious mistakes are out there. Contrary to your post, Japan has a strong reputation for safety and reliability in engineering. That kind of cultural explanations are very spurious anyway. I can come up with similar ones for many countries.
- oxalo 11y ago
  Has anyone done any research on how much 'energy' is stored in wind currents? How many wind turbines can we erect before we affect the climate by disrupting air currents?
  - AstralStorm 11y ago
    We don't even have enough metals and plastics to even attempt to do that. It's not an issue, do the back of the envelope calculations yourself. The more important concern would be immense noise pollution and interference with migrant birds.
    - alphydan 11y ago
      Clearly you haven't done the back of the envelope calculation. Many people have looked at the problem and it's not a trivial one. First, to see how much wind could be harnessed see for ex. [0] or [1]. Assuming 100TW of power, it's ~10^7 turbines. If each one has 50*10^3 kg of steel, it's somewhere between 10^10 - 10^11 kg of steel. 100,000,000 tons if I'm not mistaking. It turns out that Japan produced as much steel on its own, just in 2014. If my estimate is off by a factor of 10, china produced 800 million tons of steel! Glassfibre could be challenging to scale, but it's hardly a scarce resource. I can also see you have never worked or lived next to a wind turbine. I worked a few yards away from one for a year and the noise was imperceptible inside the building. (Mostly because, when it's moving fast, it's very windy, i.e. very noisy already due to the wind). Finally, the migrant bird issue is an issue, but it's not hard to solve. Radar and Sonar systems exist to detect migrating flocks of birds and slow down the turbines [3]. But more importantly, buildings, skyscrapers and cars are the number one killer of birds (not turbines). Numbers would change, of course, if we truly tried to extract all accessible, high yield winds. But careful planning and technological solutions would mean that migrant birds would not be more affected than they are today by the human infrastructure. [0] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/015021;jsessionid=523A13B13EFAF469894647306CAF7380.c3 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/0150... [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10933.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10933.full.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro... [3] http://www.detect-inc.com/wind.html,http://www.dtbird.com/ http://www.detect-inc.com/wind.html,http://www.dtbird.com/
- diamondlovesyou 11y ago
  > It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact. Fukushima's obvious issue was known before it before it became a mistake. We aren't discussing unknowns. > Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Right; fortunately we have reactor designs now that are intrinsically failsafe (ie the failsafes rely on physical laws, and thus can't fail). Why don't we use them? Funding/politics. As you said, nothing is black and white. > Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy. What other forms of energy? Chemical energy is limited and is just as hard to make safe (coal/oil is really bad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...), which are arguably just as bad if not worse than nuclear power). Wind/solar is limited without storage; even with storage it's still limited.
  - nickik 11y ago
    My plan would be Gas and then replace it with Solar thermal energy. Im open to using nuclear in addition or instead of gas. However my (limited) research seems that Nuclear is actually quite expensive and probebly could not compete in a market against gas. Gas is fine because the burning is efficant, we seem to have quite a bit and its CO2 is accaptable. We really need to be working on Solar thermal energy. It combines the renewable energy with the consistancy of gas/coal/nuclear plus its safer then either of those. I don't understand why its not used as much (Their are a number of theories).
- briffle 11y ago
  I agree, but it should also be pointed out that the reactor was something like 60 years old. Newer reactors incorporate many improvements based on research and new risk modeling, etc. Keeping reactors past their planned service life means these improvements don't get put in. We need to be replacing oils reactors with newer, safer, more modular reactors.
- marcus_holmes 11y ago
  "more controllable"? As the article says, Fukishima killed nobody, and wind power energy generation has killed more people than nuclear power generation. I don't know how much more controllable you want?
  - vacri 11y ago
    > wind power energy generation has killed more people than nuclear power generation Have you got a source for that claim? I'm genuinely interested to see how that stacks up, given that Chernobyl alone killed about 50 people directly, and a handwavy amount from increased cancer rates.
    - FeepingCreature 11y ago
      http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm lists wind power with 35 deaths in America, according to the site that links to it. Less than nuclear, but much more if you weight it by power produced. Most deaths seem to happen by people falling off the things. Or turbines falling on people during installation. I think maybe people take nuclear plant maintenance more seriously or something.
    - shkkmo 11y ago
      This was posted elsewhere in this thread and breaks down deaths per TWH by energy source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... According to this data, nuclear is far safer than other sources.
      - marcus_holmes 11y ago
        never seen those stats before. That's awesome. Interesting that Hydro is the safest apart from that one accident. I wonder if that's a long-term trend - that hydro accidents are very rare but very very bad. I guess we'll find out.
    - marcus_holmes 11y ago
andrewprock 11y ago
Ok, so I think we agree this was an "obvious" mistake. Given that "obvious" mistakes occur, should one consider using technologies with catastrophic failure modes?
- jahewson 11y ago
  Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes". Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown, we can have our cake and eat it too. Now let's do that.
  - acqq 11y ago
    > Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown Any plant that works, or is it the same old "in 5 years it will work, this time really"?
  - e12e 11y ago
    I'm not sure that's such a clever analogy. First, because traffic deaths is an issue most places with cars, both due to drunk-driving (obvious failure mode), and other more complex/random failures. And while a drunk driver can (and do) kill a family of careful drivers/a pedestrian -- a nuclear plant failure is more akin to the terrible accidents we've seen with derailed trains carrying crude oil, see eg: http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-2015-3 http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-20... What we do know, is that all current states able to build nuclear reactors, have suffered from incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors when it comes to large contracts. I've seen no evidence that this has changed. So it would seem that effective disaster mitigation should account for our current reality: We can't store nuclear waste safely, we can't transport it safely, and we can't build nuclear reactors that are safe enough, given the high risk of disasters. I don't think there are any obvious solutions to world energy supply; higher efficiency, less waste are a given (easy to say, hard to implement). Fundamentally, we need to move away from "thinking oil" -- I don't think highly concentrated liquid fuel traded on a (physical/geographic) global market is part of a sustainable future. On the other hand, I don't think we'll replace air freight with Zeppelins - so clearly we'll need some kind of combustion. Maybe hydrocarbons created with electricity, or in combination with biofuels - some manner which is more carbon neutral. And in a way that doesn't destroy our food chain. Local transportation in the form of electric trains and cars, in preference to hydrocarbons. The US is a parody of efficient transportation, but I'm not very hopeful for reform. Even in little Norway, car-sharing hasn't been particularly successful -- poor city planning and habit means that people waste time sitting in long traffic jams, one person to a car. There are quite a few areas ripe to be made more effective with existing technology. But if we can't muster the will to kill the idea of one car per adult, I don't see much hope for other areas.
stephenr 11y ago
> the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground If it had been a heap of solar panels and wind turbines that got hit by a wave, at worst they'd lose some generating capacity and find the odd solar panel washing up in Hawaii. Every accident "would have never happened if...". the point is to reduce the consequences when things do happen - we know damn well we can't stop every accident. Honestly nuclear power had plenty of issues to solve before the Fukushima accident.
- jahewson 11y ago
  No, the point is to stop accidents from happening. Specially when they're this obviously preventable. I mean, we're talking about literally the most obvious precaution that one could possibly take when building in a Tsunai zone. Edit: Really, downvotes?
  - stephenr 11y ago
    > No, the point is to stop accidents from happening. | An unexpected and undesirable event, especially one resulting in damage or harm | An unforeseen incident So... your solution is basically to invent real-life, legit 100% accurate fortune tellers?
- AstralStorm 11y ago
  If it had been a factory producing solar panels, the whole production capability of solar panels would be set back by decades. Their production is this centralized. Heck, it doesn't even take a tsunami to destroy quite fragile solar panels - just a bigger hailstorm. Plus, I think you didn't even consider how harmful the resulting battery chemical spill would be if such an accident happened.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    > If it had been a factory producing solar panels, the whole production capability of solar panels would be set back by decades If it had been a factory creating coco-pops the whole pacific ocean would have become a chocolate milkshake. We can make random "if it was.." statements all day, but most of the other things it might have been wouldn't require it to be so close to such a large body of water for cooling purposes.
bpyne 11y ago
Well, Moltex sounds interesting. Am I reading it correctly that it could actually utilize the nuclear waste from solid fuel reactors? Is there a potential environmental or human health downside?

joelthelion 11y ago

> To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning. Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact. Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.

jahewson 11y ago
There's no excuse for obvious mistakes. This wasn't something tricky. There are hundreds of years old stone markers in that area documenting the level which previous Tsunmis have reached - well above the level of the power plant. The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously enforced. Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusion.
- abakker 11y ago
  I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have radiation and waste to deal with. Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen. Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.
  - jahewson 11y ago
    Likewise it would be a mistake to assume that it's totally unsafe based on a single instance of poor planning. But it's true that reactors of this vintage are flawed and the risks probably are too high. Fortunately we have modern reactor designs to fix that.
  - AstralStorm 11y ago
    But do you care the same when a filter in your local coal plant fails? That happens way, way more often and actually releases way more hazardous substances that are even harder to remove. Moreover, any stop/start of the plant likely requires oil burner start which requires the filters to be disabled (or they'd be destroyed). Specifically, mildly radioactive ash, large amounts of smoke, sulfur and nitrites. These leach into groundwater easily (unlike fallout) and are also biomagnified like fission products. Only natural gas is comparatively clean and there are major problems with dependency and delivery infrastructure. (Plus it is about just as environmentally friendly to mine as coal.)
- TorKlingberg 11y ago
  Nobody was predicting a major nuclear accident in Japan before 2011. It makes me wonder how many other obvious mistakes are out there. Contrary to your post, Japan has a strong reputation for safety and reliability in engineering. That kind of cultural explanations are very spurious anyway. I can come up with similar ones for many countries.
oxalo 11y ago
Has anyone done any research on how much 'energy' is stored in wind currents? How many wind turbines can we erect before we affect the climate by disrupting air currents?
- AstralStorm 11y ago
  We don't even have enough metals and plastics to even attempt to do that. It's not an issue, do the back of the envelope calculations yourself. The more important concern would be immense noise pollution and interference with migrant birds.
  - alphydan 11y ago
    Clearly you haven't done the back of the envelope calculation. Many people have looked at the problem and it's not a trivial one. First, to see how much wind could be harnessed see for ex. [0] or [1]. Assuming 100TW of power, it's ~10^7 turbines. If each one has 50*10^3 kg of steel, it's somewhere between 10^10 - 10^11 kg of steel. 100,000,000 tons if I'm not mistaking. It turns out that Japan produced as much steel on its own, just in 2014. If my estimate is off by a factor of 10, china produced 800 million tons of steel! Glassfibre could be challenging to scale, but it's hardly a scarce resource. I can also see you have never worked or lived next to a wind turbine. I worked a few yards away from one for a year and the noise was imperceptible inside the building. (Mostly because, when it's moving fast, it's very windy, i.e. very noisy already due to the wind). Finally, the migrant bird issue is an issue, but it's not hard to solve. Radar and Sonar systems exist to detect migrating flocks of birds and slow down the turbines [3]. But more importantly, buildings, skyscrapers and cars are the number one killer of birds (not turbines). Numbers would change, of course, if we truly tried to extract all accessible, high yield winds. But careful planning and technological solutions would mean that migrant birds would not be more affected than they are today by the human infrastructure. [0] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/015021;jsessionid=523A13B13EFAF469894647306CAF7380.c3 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/0150... [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10933.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10933.full.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro... [3] http://www.detect-inc.com/wind.html,http://www.dtbird.com/ http://www.detect-inc.com/wind.html,http://www.dtbird.com/
diamondlovesyou 11y ago
> It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact. Fukushima's obvious issue was known before it before it became a mistake. We aren't discussing unknowns. > Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Right; fortunately we have reactor designs now that are intrinsically failsafe (ie the failsafes rely on physical laws, and thus can't fail). Why don't we use them? Funding/politics. As you said, nothing is black and white. > Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy. What other forms of energy? Chemical energy is limited and is just as hard to make safe (coal/oil is really bad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...), which are arguably just as bad if not worse than nuclear power). Wind/solar is limited without storage; even with storage it's still limited.
- nickik 11y ago
  My plan would be Gas and then replace it with Solar thermal energy. Im open to using nuclear in addition or instead of gas. However my (limited) research seems that Nuclear is actually quite expensive and probebly could not compete in a market against gas. Gas is fine because the burning is efficant, we seem to have quite a bit and its CO2 is accaptable. We really need to be working on Solar thermal energy. It combines the renewable energy with the consistancy of gas/coal/nuclear plus its safer then either of those. I don't understand why its not used as much (Their are a number of theories).
briffle 11y ago
I agree, but it should also be pointed out that the reactor was something like 60 years old. Newer reactors incorporate many improvements based on research and new risk modeling, etc. Keeping reactors past their planned service life means these improvements don't get put in. We need to be replacing oils reactors with newer, safer, more modular reactors.
marcus_holmes 11y ago
"more controllable"? As the article says, Fukishima killed nobody, and wind power energy generation has killed more people than nuclear power generation. I don't know how much more controllable you want?
- vacri 11y ago
  > wind power energy generation has killed more people than nuclear power generation Have you got a source for that claim? I'm genuinely interested to see how that stacks up, given that Chernobyl alone killed about 50 people directly, and a handwavy amount from increased cancer rates.
  - FeepingCreature 11y ago
    http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm lists wind power with 35 deaths in America, according to the site that links to it. Less than nuclear, but much more if you weight it by power produced. Most deaths seem to happen by people falling off the things. Or turbines falling on people during installation. I think maybe people take nuclear plant maintenance more seriously or something.
  - shkkmo 11y ago
    This was posted elsewhere in this thread and breaks down deaths per TWH by energy source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... According to this data, nuclear is far safer than other sources.
    - marcus_holmes 11y ago
      never seen those stats before. That's awesome. Interesting that Hydro is the safest apart from that one accident. I wonder if that's a long-term trend - that hydro accidents are very rare but very very bad. I guess we'll find out.
  - marcus_holmes 11y ago

andrewprock 11y ago

Ok, so I think we agree this was an "obvious" mistake. Given that "obvious" mistakes occur, should one consider using technologies with catastrophic failure modes?

jahewson 11y ago
Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes". Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown, we can have our cake and eat it too. Now let's do that.
- acqq 11y ago
  > Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown Any plant that works, or is it the same old "in 5 years it will work, this time really"?
- e12e 11y ago
  I'm not sure that's such a clever analogy. First, because traffic deaths is an issue most places with cars, both due to drunk-driving (obvious failure mode), and other more complex/random failures. And while a drunk driver can (and do) kill a family of careful drivers/a pedestrian -- a nuclear plant failure is more akin to the terrible accidents we've seen with derailed trains carrying crude oil, see eg: http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-2015-3 http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-20... What we do know, is that all current states able to build nuclear reactors, have suffered from incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors when it comes to large contracts. I've seen no evidence that this has changed. So it would seem that effective disaster mitigation should account for our current reality: We can't store nuclear waste safely, we can't transport it safely, and we can't build nuclear reactors that are safe enough, given the high risk of disasters. I don't think there are any obvious solutions to world energy supply; higher efficiency, less waste are a given (easy to say, hard to implement). Fundamentally, we need to move away from "thinking oil" -- I don't think highly concentrated liquid fuel traded on a (physical/geographic) global market is part of a sustainable future. On the other hand, I don't think we'll replace air freight with Zeppelins - so clearly we'll need some kind of combustion. Maybe hydrocarbons created with electricity, or in combination with biofuels - some manner which is more carbon neutral. And in a way that doesn't destroy our food chain. Local transportation in the form of electric trains and cars, in preference to hydrocarbons. The US is a parody of efficient transportation, but I'm not very hopeful for reform. Even in little Norway, car-sharing hasn't been particularly successful -- poor city planning and habit means that people waste time sitting in long traffic jams, one person to a car. There are quite a few areas ripe to be made more effective with existing technology. But if we can't muster the will to kill the idea of one car per adult, I don't see much hope for other areas.

stephenr 11y ago

> the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground If it had been a heap of solar panels and wind turbines that got hit by a wave, at worst they'd lose some generating capacity and find the odd solar panel washing up in Hawaii. Every accident "would have never happened if...". the point is to reduce the consequences when things do happen - we know damn well we can't stop every accident. Honestly nuclear power had plenty of issues to solve before the Fukushima accident.

jahewson 11y ago
No, the point is to stop accidents from happening. Specially when they're this obviously preventable. I mean, we're talking about literally the most obvious precaution that one could possibly take when building in a Tsunai zone. Edit: Really, downvotes?
- stephenr 11y ago
  > No, the point is to stop accidents from happening. | An unexpected and undesirable event, especially one resulting in damage or harm | An unforeseen incident So... your solution is basically to invent real-life, legit 100% accurate fortune tellers?
AstralStorm 11y ago
If it had been a factory producing solar panels, the whole production capability of solar panels would be set back by decades. Their production is this centralized. Heck, it doesn't even take a tsunami to destroy quite fragile solar panels - just a bigger hailstorm. Plus, I think you didn't even consider how harmful the resulting battery chemical spill would be if such an accident happened.
- stephenr 11y ago
  > If it had been a factory producing solar panels, the whole production capability of solar panels would be set back by decades If it had been a factory creating coco-pops the whole pacific ocean would have become a chocolate milkshake. We can make random "if it was.." statements all day, but most of the other things it might have been wouldn't require it to be so close to such a large body of water for cooling purposes.

bpyne 11y ago

Well, Moltex sounds interesting. Am I reading it correctly that it could actually utilize the nuclear waste from solid fuel reactors? Is there a potential environmental or human health downside?