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I remember writing a similar HN comment shortly before Fukushima, feeling very smart at the time. Well Fukushima happened and left me wondering if we as humans

I remember writing a similar HN comment shortly before Fukushima, feeling very smart at the time. Well Fukushima happened and left me wondering if we as humans are able to maintain something that can generate so much potentially irreversible damage, with our tendencies to cut-corners, wing-it and just being less than perfect. I hang my hat in shame over that comment everytime I read of more irradiated water leaking into the Pacific.

adrianN 10y ago
You have to weigh the alternatives. Continuing to use coal for base load is much worse for almost everyone compared to nuclear.
- Roritharr 10y ago
  Almost everyone living right now. And yes you are right, coal is horrible. But atleast i can imagine some piece of technology sucking co2 and other toxic gasses out of the atmosphere. Less so with irradiated Elements. How to get radioactive saltwater out of the Pacific? Can't imagine how one would go about cleaning that mess up. Think of the near SciFi Solutions Tepco tries to Contain the irradiated groundwater. If you have to spend the Energy equivalent of another nuclear powerplant trying to create artificial Frozen earth barriers just to POTENTIALLY contain the mess you've made... Things get surreal.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Burning coal releases plenty of radioactive ash right into the atmosphere.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    OK, but nuclear waste existed before we took it out of the ground. That stuff was still radioactive BEFORE. Also, putting it in a safe place is easy. Just pick your favorite mountain in a desert. No ground water there.
- Pokepokalypse 10y ago
  Here's an alternative. Every baby squirted out by religious fundamentalists, increases the demand for more energy utilization, more carbon. How about people stop having families with 7, 8, 9 + kids, and moderate our impulses to 1-2 kids? Oh wait. Sorry. That's "racism", "eugenics", and "genocide".
  - tomp 10y ago
    Our economic systems aren't able to deal with zero-population growth, let alone negative population growth. That's a much more significant problem than any kind of "-cide".
acidburnNSA 10y ago
It was a bad accident and I was worried about it to. But in retrospect, zero people died from Fukushima and the surrounding land is mostly at dose rates well below some area's natural background already. Compared to the alternatives that are killing people as we speak it doesn't seem that bad.
- toyg 10y ago
  > zero people died from Fukushima You don't really know that until you have 20 years of cancer rates to study, and even then you still won't be sure, because god knows where the ocean sent all that crap. Regardless of accidents, anyway, the dirty little secret of nuclear is still there: untreatable waste. Sure, we don't breathe it like fossil fuel byproducts, but it's still there, ruining the planet. EDIT: Note I'm not mentioning coal anywhere. Solar and wind have little to no waste - that is what we should be aiming for. It's doable, today - if only we make sure all the money that goes into white-elephant new nuclear or new coal goes in actual green energy.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    > Regardless of accidents, anyway, the dirty little secret of nuclear is still there: untreatable waste. That waste can at least be sequestered. Coal ash emits radioactivity into the surrounding environment, whereas stored nuclear waste doesn't. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
  - 0xfeba 10y ago
    Relatively contained waste compared to the waste products of coal burning that are just spewed into the air? Please. And with newer generation reactors, waste is even less of a problem than in the past.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > untreatable waste. Sure, we don't breathe it like fossil fuel byproducts, but it's still there, ruining the planet. It's not ruining the planet when it's sitting safely in storage. Not to mention, there's very, very little of it. Every other industry is dealing with much bigger amounts of dangerous waste; if you want to worry about something, worry about chemical plants, electronics recycling and plastic bottles.
kw71 10y ago
Try not to feel so guilty. I think everything on the planet has been contaminated a little bit since 16 July 1945.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
How many people died in Fukushima? Especially compared to disasters at coal mines?
mannykannot 10y ago
The damage that global warming will do will be far less reversible that the damage Fukushima did. In an ideal world, fission power could be avoided, but while we wait for that, the greenhouse gases are building up. Fission has to be evaluated against the politically feasible alternatives.
rz2k 10y ago
I suspect that one of the biggest problems is a human one. That is, the most knowledgeable experts, who are in charge and should be, are also under the constant impression that the safety of nuclear power plants is unfairly criticized. When you must always be in defense mode, do you begin to internalize that perspective almost as though it is a debating position? During the Fukishima disaster there were some of the worst arguments immaginable given by nuclear energy proponents. For example: you can't expect the engineers to have designed for such a massive earthquake and a tsunami! If you can enumerate a thousand things that happen about once a thousand years, you can reasonably expect about one of them to occur in the next year, but it can be difficult to nme them unless you are in the right frame of mind. How many natural disasters occur every decade that we are "shocked" could ever happen? My impression is that the engineers behind Fukishima were not actually insane, and did try to build a plant that would survive an earthquake and a tsunami, but their models were incorrect about the likelihood of different wave heights, and perhaps even more accurately, the cooling system simply had insufficient redundancies. Finally, what I really feel most discussions lose sight of is that both Chernobyl and Fukishima were very far from being worst case disasters. In both disasters once an uncommon set of events set them in motion, an also uncommon amount of heroism and ingenuity prevented the disasters from spiralling further out of control. I don't mean to say so much that it is unimaginable that people would risk their lives to save others in their own towns, so much as to say that that was the last line of defense, and it was necessary to use it, contrary to what I what the models should rely on. What if instead, the on site engineers had been as reliable as the New Orleans police during hurricane Katrina?

adrianN 10y ago

You have to weigh the alternatives. Continuing to use coal for base load is much worse for almost everyone compared to nuclear.

Roritharr 10y ago
Almost everyone living right now. And yes you are right, coal is horrible. But atleast i can imagine some piece of technology sucking co2 and other toxic gasses out of the atmosphere. Less so with irradiated Elements. How to get radioactive saltwater out of the Pacific? Can't imagine how one would go about cleaning that mess up. Think of the near SciFi Solutions Tepco tries to Contain the irradiated groundwater. If you have to spend the Energy equivalent of another nuclear powerplant trying to create artificial Frozen earth barriers just to POTENTIALLY contain the mess you've made... Things get surreal.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Burning coal releases plenty of radioactive ash right into the atmosphere.
- stale2002 10y ago
  OK, but nuclear waste existed before we took it out of the ground. That stuff was still radioactive BEFORE. Also, putting it in a safe place is easy. Just pick your favorite mountain in a desert. No ground water there.
Pokepokalypse 10y ago
Here's an alternative. Every baby squirted out by religious fundamentalists, increases the demand for more energy utilization, more carbon. How about people stop having families with 7, 8, 9 + kids, and moderate our impulses to 1-2 kids? Oh wait. Sorry. That's "racism", "eugenics", and "genocide".
- tomp 10y ago
  Our economic systems aren't able to deal with zero-population growth, let alone negative population growth. That's a much more significant problem than any kind of "-cide".

acidburnNSA 10y ago

It was a bad accident and I was worried about it to. But in retrospect, zero people died from Fukushima and the surrounding land is mostly at dose rates well below some area's natural background already. Compared to the alternatives that are killing people as we speak it doesn't seem that bad.

toyg 10y ago
> zero people died from Fukushima You don't really know that until you have 20 years of cancer rates to study, and even then you still won't be sure, because god knows where the ocean sent all that crap. Regardless of accidents, anyway, the dirty little secret of nuclear is still there: untreatable waste. Sure, we don't breathe it like fossil fuel byproducts, but it's still there, ruining the planet. EDIT: Note I'm not mentioning coal anywhere. Solar and wind have little to no waste - that is what we should be aiming for. It's doable, today - if only we make sure all the money that goes into white-elephant new nuclear or new coal goes in actual green energy.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > Regardless of accidents, anyway, the dirty little secret of nuclear is still there: untreatable waste. That waste can at least be sequestered. Coal ash emits radioactivity into the surrounding environment, whereas stored nuclear waste doesn't. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- 0xfeba 10y ago
  Relatively contained waste compared to the waste products of coal burning that are just spewed into the air? Please. And with newer generation reactors, waste is even less of a problem than in the past.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > untreatable waste. Sure, we don't breathe it like fossil fuel byproducts, but it's still there, ruining the planet. It's not ruining the planet when it's sitting safely in storage. Not to mention, there's very, very little of it. Every other industry is dealing with much bigger amounts of dangerous waste; if you want to worry about something, worry about chemical plants, electronics recycling and plastic bottles.

kw71 10y ago

Try not to feel so guilty. I think everything on the planet has been contaminated a little bit since 16 July 1945.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

How many people died in Fukushima? Especially compared to disasters at coal mines?

mannykannot 10y ago

The damage that global warming will do will be far less reversible that the damage Fukushima did. In an ideal world, fission power could be avoided, but while we wait for that, the greenhouse gases are building up. Fission has to be evaluated against the politically feasible alternatives.

rz2k 10y ago

I suspect that one of the biggest problems is a human one. That is, the most knowledgeable experts, who are in charge and should be, are also under the constant impression that the safety of nuclear power plants is unfairly criticized. When you must always be in defense mode, do you begin to internalize that perspective almost as though it is a debating position? During the Fukishima disaster there were some of the worst arguments immaginable given by nuclear energy proponents. For example: you can't expect the engineers to have designed for such a massive earthquake and a tsunami! If you can enumerate a thousand things that happen about once a thousand years, you can reasonably expect about one of them to occur in the next year, but it can be difficult to nme them unless you are in the right frame of mind. How many natural disasters occur every decade that we are "shocked" could ever happen? My impression is that the engineers behind Fukishima were not actually insane, and did try to build a plant that would survive an earthquake and a tsunami, but their models were incorrect about the likelihood of different wave heights, and perhaps even more accurately, the cooling system simply had insufficient redundancies. Finally, what I really feel most discussions lose sight of is that both Chernobyl and Fukishima were very far from being worst case disasters. In both disasters once an uncommon set of events set them in motion, an also uncommon amount of heroism and ingenuity prevented the disasters from spiralling further out of control. I don't mean to say so much that it is unimaginable that people would risk their lives to save others in their own towns, so much as to say that that was the last line of defense, and it was necessary to use it, contrary to what I what the models should rely on. What if instead, the on site engineers had been as reliable as the New Orleans police during hurricane Katrina?