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This discussion always drives me crazy. What would you rather have inherited from the Victoria Era: 1) complete ecological disaster in the form of a 5-degree

This discussion always drives me crazy. What would you rather have inherited from the Victoria Era: 1) complete ecological disaster in the form of a 5-degree average temperature increase and 10 metre sea level increase; causing widespread food insecurity, human displacement, and mass extinctions due to habitat loss 2) a modicum of nasty nuclear waste, some of which can be refined for interesting isotopes Also, we already leave a ludicrous amount of nasty industrial waste in the form of mining tailings, plastics fill our oceans, we constantly create electronic devices that can't be properly recycled and contain hazardous materials. Nuclear waste isn't even close to the top of the list of hazardous waste problems. If nuclear power is one of the solutions to climate change, THE existential threat to human survival, then hamstringing ourselves because of handwringing about waste is just setting us up to continue to delay doing anything about this impending threat.

ptah 7y ago
nuclear power might be impractical for a hotter earth http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity-generation-threatened-heatwaves http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity...
- ChrisRR 7y ago
  That's true during the hotter months, but that's a benefit of why renewable energy comes from different sources. When it's not very sunny, it may be windy, the tide might be changing, the rivers are still flowing, the ground is still warm. The same applies to nuclear, or when there's a shortage of oil or coal. You can't run one generator at full output, so you can increase the output of another.
  - ptah 7y ago
    why not just stick to clean energy sources
    - yrro 7y ago
      Base load
pjc50 7y ago
Well, from the 1950s we inherited a thin spread of radioisotopes contaminating the entire atmosphere: https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi... The problem of nuclear waste management is fundamentally one of public trust. People spent much of the 20th century going from "X is ubiquitous and perfectly safe" to "actually X has been poisoning you and the biosphere for decades". Cigarettes, leaded petrol, CFCs, pesticides, coal power, bisphenol A, and so on. People who object to the "perfectly safe" waste plans do so because they believe you are lying about the safety. (Personally I believe it's now too late for nuclear, it simply takes too long to build individual reactors, and a big bang plan would involve building thousands of them in parallel. Not to mention that the #8 and #10 global CO2 emitting countries are fundamentalist Islamic petro-states which aren't trusted with nuclear material.) There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. On the history of greens against nuclear reactors, mostly dating from the weapons issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 ; excellent rant on the public trust issue: https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blair-has-lost-it.html https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blai... (rather prescient about Hinkley Point C, which is still not built thirteen years later)
- roenxi 7y ago
  > There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. There is already a huge amount of material underground that is too dangerous for landfill. Too dangerous for landfill is a very low standard. I don't remember the exact volume, but I've been involved with an operation that probably excavated then entombed a volume of material that was of comparable volume to the nuclear industry's low-level waste. That material was not safe enough to go into landfill, we had to take special precautions with it. Humanity already deals with 10s if not 100s of millions of cubic meters of material that is not safe for landfill. Annually. So far so good.
tekkk 7y ago
It bugs me to no end that green party is by majority opposed to nuclear power while it is, in my opinion, one of the best clean energy sources that works everywhere, without being subject to alternating weather or natural resources. The process of storing nuclear waste is almost trivial and from what i've gathered from the current progress of nuclear reactors, one day most if not all of that waste could be used as fuel, leaving almost nothing left. Yet the same fear-mongering tactics as those used by populists are utilized to change public opinion to hinder its use. The modern nuclear plant is extremely safe and if built in stable geographical area (without earthquakes or tsunamis), it's fail-safe. The only reason something like tsernobyl happened was the massive managerial misjudgements and obsolete technology that would not happen in any properly run modern nuclear plant. It's just... dumb. Instead of thinking rationally people are driven by irrational fear while there exists so many worse things, that might cause your early demise yet people do nothing about them. The probability of getting hit by car must be exponentially higher than dying by nuclear disaster yet i dont see people advocating traffic safety with same fervor.

ptah 7y ago

nuclear power might be impractical for a hotter earth http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity-generation-threatened-heatwaves http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity...

ChrisRR 7y ago
That's true during the hotter months, but that's a benefit of why renewable energy comes from different sources. When it's not very sunny, it may be windy, the tide might be changing, the rivers are still flowing, the ground is still warm. The same applies to nuclear, or when there's a shortage of oil or coal. You can't run one generator at full output, so you can increase the output of another.
- ptah 7y ago
  why not just stick to clean energy sources
  - yrro 7y ago
    Base load

pjc50 7y ago

Well, from the 1950s we inherited a thin spread of radioisotopes contaminating the entire atmosphere: https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi... The problem of nuclear waste management is fundamentally one of public trust. People spent much of the 20th century going from "X is ubiquitous and perfectly safe" to "actually X has been poisoning you and the biosphere for decades". Cigarettes, leaded petrol, CFCs, pesticides, coal power, bisphenol A, and so on. People who object to the "perfectly safe" waste plans do so because they believe you are lying about the safety. (Personally I believe it's now too late for nuclear, it simply takes too long to build individual reactors, and a big bang plan would involve building thousands of them in parallel. Not to mention that the #8 and #10 global CO2 emitting countries are fundamentalist Islamic petro-states which aren't trusted with nuclear material.) There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. On the history of greens against nuclear reactors, mostly dating from the weapons issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 ; excellent rant on the public trust issue: https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blair-has-lost-it.html https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blai... (rather prescient about Hinkley Point C, which is still not built thirteen years later)

roenxi 7y ago
> There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. There is already a huge amount of material underground that is too dangerous for landfill. Too dangerous for landfill is a very low standard. I don't remember the exact volume, but I've been involved with an operation that probably excavated then entombed a volume of material that was of comparable volume to the nuclear industry's low-level waste. That material was not safe enough to go into landfill, we had to take special precautions with it. Humanity already deals with 10s if not 100s of millions of cubic meters of material that is not safe for landfill. Annually. So far so good.

tekkk 7y ago

It bugs me to no end that green party is by majority opposed to nuclear power while it is, in my opinion, one of the best clean energy sources that works everywhere, without being subject to alternating weather or natural resources. The process of storing nuclear waste is almost trivial and from what i've gathered from the current progress of nuclear reactors, one day most if not all of that waste could be used as fuel, leaving almost nothing left. Yet the same fear-mongering tactics as those used by populists are utilized to change public opinion to hinder its use. The modern nuclear plant is extremely safe and if built in stable geographical area (without earthquakes or tsunamis), it's fail-safe. The only reason something like tsernobyl happened was the massive managerial misjudgements and obsolete technology that would not happen in any properly run modern nuclear plant. It's just... dumb. Instead of thinking rationally people are driven by irrational fear while there exists so many worse things, that might cause your early demise yet people do nothing about them. The probability of getting hit by car must be exponentially higher than dying by nuclear disaster yet i dont see people advocating traffic safety with same fervor.