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For years Greenpeace and other "eco" organizations were fighting nuclear energy and now we have what we have. I understand that using solar or wind sounds sweet

• lambdadmitry 8y ago
  > if we learn some day how to efficiently store energy But we do. Redox batteries basically solve the problem of storage and scale very well [1], it's just the question of commercialization now (which is ongoing) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
• walkingolof 8y ago
  >but the dangers and difficulties were greatly overblown in the course of anti-nuclear propaganda. The nuclear waste generation is a _HUGE_ problem, the problem is so big that very few (if any) country really know how to solve it, look a the US for example as a really frightening example of an out of control waste problem, both from civil and military sources... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    The problem isn't big, it's only tricky. Countries deal with orders of magnitude more of even more toxic "regular" waste from chemical industry. Not to mention the (again, orders of magnitude more of) waste coming out of powerplant chimneys, that's out of mind because it quickly gets out of sight. It's tricky because of a combination of factors like long half-lives and unusual suitability for some of the material to be reprocessed into a weapon (both fission devices for nation states and terror devices for small groups, the latter more thanks to public perception than any actual effectiveness). This creates a lot of political obstacles, as it's easier to pass responsibility to someone else than it is to double-down and implement methods to reprocess, transmute or reuse the waste.
    • varjag 8y ago
      Organic chemical waste decomposes relatively quickly. Few of them survive 1000 year, and those that do are ironically things we perceive as safe (PET bottles and bags).
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Yes. But that's my point. Nuclear waste isn't a huge problem, because there isn't much of it compared to any other kind of waste. It's tricky, because it lives longer, it's harder to neuter, and well... it's radioactive.
        • abalone 8y ago
          > Nuclear waste isn't a huge problem, because there isn't much of it You just changed your argument. You originally said nuclear waste is less toxic than “‘regular’ waste from chemical industry,” not just that there was less of it. Even a smaller amount of highly toxic waste that stays that way for thousands of years is a huge problem.
          • Wildgoose 8y ago
            Either it's highly radioactive in which case it doesn't stay that way very long, or the opposite. Anything that remains radioactive for thousands of years is not very radioactive by definition.
          • mercutio2 8y ago
            I’m trying to find a charitable way to interpret your criticism, and I haven’t been able to find one. In every post in this thread, TeMPOraL has been making a consistent argument that nuclear produces orders of magnitude less waste than other not-routinely-treated-as-horrible industrial waste issues. You appear to be making the argument that “because there isn’t much of it” is a new argument, but that appears to be the core of their argument everywhere. Perhaps you were confusing who said what?
        • Reason077 8y ago
  • nukemandan 8y ago
    checkout fast breeder reactors. This is why I am so excited about them specifically: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-breeder-reactors-nuclear-waste-nightmare https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...
    • C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Well in the UK had committed in the 80's maybe. And if the UK didn't do silly thing like selling profitable nuke companies to Japan (source senior guy at Sellafield) - and allow you junior collation partners to kill of a key project to placate the green wing of the libdems. BTW I worked on research for fast breeders in my first job in fact one of the few times I went into our labs was to wrap a dummy fuel pin for two-phase flow tests.
  • nickik 8y ago
    No its not. The civilian nuclear waste issue is vastly overblown compared to the actual danger. Its almost impossible to solve because people think about it the wrong way, we need a change of understanding. Just like Oil before it was useful, we need to think of nuclear waste as a resource. It is mostly fuel and a combination of other potentially useful stuff. We need to be a nuclear society not a chemical society who wants to 'shut away' all the 'waste'.
  • speleding 8y ago
    The amount of long-lived nuclear waste generated per human over a life time is about the size of an apple. That's (unrealistically) assuming 100% nuclear electricity generation and no further progress in reducing the waste amount. It's a problem but compared to our greenhouse problems it's not _HUGE_.
    • abalone 8y ago
      Size is not the problem. Toxicity over centuries is the problem. Apples are a poor reference because it’s safe to be near them and they decompose within a year.
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        An apple has a volume of ~100ml. A standard 20ft container has a volume of 33.2m^3 and would hold 332,000 people's worth of radioactive waste. 7-billion people's worth of radioactive waste would take a little over 21,000 containers. The largest container ships hold up to 20,000 containers. We could power the world with nuclear power only have to deal with a little more than a full container ship of waste. I'm sure if there was political will we'd have no problem finding a safe place for it. I suspect just sinking it over an ocean trench would be less bad for the environment than the status quo. It's mind boggling that we can generate all this energy by splitting atoms but we're still burning things and putting up windmills like it's the 1500s.
• iforgotpassword 8y ago
  The anti nuclear movement is not the main reason we didn't make progress. Capitalism is. The existing reactors still work, so why retire them even though they already exceeded their designed life span? Why invest billions into research and testing of newer, safer designs when the existing ones are "good enough"? Why try to reduce the amount and hazardousness of the waste when you can unload a lot of the cost and responsibility to politics and the tax payer? HN has this idealistic image of nuclear power where everything is handled by passionate responsible scientists, when in practice those plants are run by corporations trying to cut costs wherever possible. Better and more modern designs wouldn't change anything about that.
  • nukemandan 8y ago
    Aggressive anti-nuclear sentiment killed new construction due to HUGE costs to comply with regulation and HUGE costs for finances - more than half of the _entire cost of the plat_ in some cases. Yes - capitalism gave rise to the stop in production - The cost and risks were too high. Why? The anti-nuclear movement .
    • lexs 8y ago
      Is your statement here that regulations surrounding nuclear should be eased?
    • b1daly 8y ago
      The costs of regulation, while perhaps not ideally efficient, are a real cost of nuclear power. They are the mechanism by which risks to the common environment are controlled. Currently, and increasingly in the future, there is this huge “externality” in the full costs of burning fossil fuels, which is not being connected to the use. Basic economic theory argues that externalities need to be handled by “non-market” means. Which essentially means regulation. For whatever reason, the particulars of nuclear power enable enough political will to make a serious attempt at regulation aimed at minimizing (horrific) externalities. The problem of human induced climate change presents a scary political reality, in which the political structures required to apportion the “true” cost of fossil fuel use might be not be possible. Or possible in a way where the cure is worse than the disease. If these costs were indeed born by users, the competitive position of nuclear power might be improved. However, this is not a sufficient argument to relax regulatory requirements for nuclear power.
• lispm 8y ago
  It's nuclear itself. It's extremely expensive and currently only viable with massive centralized structures. Even commercial small scale nuclear will not work without government funding. The usual user is the military, which is currently the only user of small scale nuclear plants -> ships and submarines. Nuclear dies not because of 'eco' organizations, but because we've put zillions into it and now the nuclear landscape we got speaks for itself.
  • nickik 8y ago
    The two things interact. Because of the 'eco' and other organisation successful 'anti-nuke' organisation any improvement or discussion is made extremely difficult. I would say its one of the most successful 'campaigns' the 'eco' people have ever pulled. You ask normal people, who don't have a clue about nuclear energy if they support it and 'normal' people will simply say 'no' and the reason is some vague 'dangerous and waste'. Exactly what the messaging from these organisations was for 50 years. In some states, like Australia for example the minister is expressly forbidden by law to even consider a nuclear solution to a environmental or energy problem. In Austria Greenpeace activists surrounded newly build nuclear plant and forced is shutdown (it was replaced by coal but Greenpeace of course doesn't care). In Germany massive anti-war and green movement went strongly anti nuclear and progressively increased pressure against nukes and in a politically opportune moment they managed to shut down the whole industry. In Switzerland we passed a law not even allowing research on nuclear reactors mostly for the same nonsense reasons. You can go back to the original Sierra Club Anti-Nukes, they quite literally had an express strategy to sell one thing 'danger/waste' and they specifically did this to increase regulation in order to make it unprofitable. That is directly stated in their communication. This has been their strategy for 50 years and it has worked on the population and on governments around the world, people are simply misinformed. Of course they could not do it alone, but while they are loud the Oil/Coal lobby is massively against nuclear energy and always has been. You can find that even 40 years ago they cross financed anti-nuclear 'eco' people. The problem with the current landscape is that because of regulation in most countries is basically impossible to bring a new nuclear plant to market. Lots of government money dumped in a few (mostly government) project does not mean that nuclear as a technology is the problem.
• gaius 8y ago
  I believe we can find the way to reuse nuclear wastes Nuclear waste can be fed in to a breeder reactor and continue to generate useful energy. The key is understanding why nuclear waste is dangerous in the first place: because it still contains lots of energy!
• mcv 8y ago
  I used to be strongly opposed to nuclear energy, but I now see that as a mistake. I'm still no fan; nuclear has inherent dangers, and nuclear waste is a massive problem. But global warming is a far bigger problem, which poses far larger threats to the world. We should do whatever it takes to cut back on CO2. We shouldn't be having any coal plants anymore. Everything is better than continuing to burn coal and oil, and that includes nuclear. I don't see nuclear as a definitive energy source for the next thousand years, but I think we need it as a transitional energy source while we take coal offline and continue to invest in solar, wind, and energy storage.
  • goodpoint 8y ago
    > But global warming is a far bigger problem, which poses far larger threats to the world. We should do whatever it takes to cut back on CO2 It's not so simple: the ongoing environmental disaster is caused by many different sources of CO2 (e.g. concrete production), particulates, water usage and pollution, overfishing, animal farming, land pollution, ozone layer depletion. First, almost all electrical energy ends up being released in the environment as heat. Then, cheap energy only encourage faster production and consumption of goods, aka consumerism. There's a very strong correlation between per-capita income, energy use and waste/pollution production throughout human societies and past centuries. Very few environmental problems are solved by spending more energy.
    • mcv 8y ago
      There are many different environmental disasters, but many of them are already successfully being addressed. Acid rain is less, the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking, rivers are cleaner in many countries, the fish in my supermarkets are increasingly MSC or ASC. It shows that we can address these issues, and it works. CO2 is the big one that we can't seem to get a grip on, because it's so strongly tied to energy production, and energy is tied to prosperity. Carbon emissions were reduced the most during severe economic downturns. But we don't want to save the environment by making everybody poor. Recently, economic growth has become a bit more independent from energy use, thanks to improved insulation, LEDs and similar advances that help reduce energy use without reducing comfort. And that's important, because if you ask people to sacrifice comfort, prosperity and way of life to save the environment, they will resist. I don't mean to be arguing for consumerism, but if you ignore this, you're going to make the struggle a lot harder. Success is easier if you make it easy for people to do the right thing.
• jki275 8y ago
  We know exactly how to reuse nuclear waste. Carter changed the rule to disallow it because of proliferation concerns. Other countries don't have the issues we created for ourselves.
  • abalone 8y ago
    But proliferation is a legitimate concern, no?
    • carry_bit 8y ago
      When your country already has nukes, why not reprocess?
      • jki275 8y ago
        Exactly. It doesn't accomplish anything other than making it difficult to deal with our own nuclear waste.
      • abalone 8y ago
        Because it makes it easier for terrorists to obtain nuclear materials when they're deployed in civilian power plants as opposed to military facilities. That's one of the main concerns regarding proliferation.
• Faark 8y ago
  Nuclear is not a solution to the upcoming energy problem of developing countries. We don't want them to develop those capabilities. And the US government will likely bomb the shit out of those who try and cannot be stopped with softer means (aka their centrifuges breaking and scientists having accidents). Switching to green energy isn't just a technical challenge as it is often reduced to here. There are many aspects, including social and geopolitical ones. We cannot just wave those away and discuss about (the certainly cool) tech. Its ridiculous to say we want to solve our own energy problem with nuclear while forbidding Iran, North Korea & co to do so as well. Do you expect them to R&D solar+wind+storage by themselves?
  • amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    This certainly seems like the largest downside to me. Politics in the US has played up "energy independence" for decades, and from a security standpoint that makes perfect sense. So what should all of the third world do, exactly?