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This is why I’m always suspicious of nuclear folks touting the “incredible safety” of nuclear. Sure whatever new wave thing their paycheck depends on them belie

by jakear 6y ago

This is why I’m always suspicious of nuclear folks touting the “incredible safety” of nuclear. Sure whatever new wave thing their paycheck depends on them believing is safe might be safe now, but what about in 50 years when it’s 10 years past it’s duty cycle and there’s no budget to maintain it and it’s slowly leaking radioactive waste into the groundwater for a decade+ straight?

eigenrick 6y ago
You have a right to be suspicious, but to be fair, this isn't from nuclear energy. It was from tritium weapons research and production. Hanford was one of the sites of the Manhattan project, in the infancy of nuclear experimentation. The tanks mentioned in this article are containing stuff that, frankly, nobody knows exactly what it is or how to dispose of it. Modern nuclear reactors have been designed and built with your concerns in mind for at least 40 years. All the "modern" operating reactors have no known end of life. They also emit less radiation than a coal plant. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- jakear 6y ago
  > at least 40 years ...seeing as $MY_AGE+40 is smaller than $HUMAN_LIFE_EXPECTANCY, this does exceedingly little to reassure me. Taking my progeny into consideration tips the scales even further away from being reassured. > no known end of life Quite literally all that means is we haven't tested them enough to know when they'll break a priori, and instead we'll just have to deal with the consequences when they inevitably do. > They also emit less radiation than a coal plant. That's not taking into account everything we don't know about how they'll hold up as time ticks on. It's equivalent to me saying "this newfangled browser engine I just made is much safer than chomium, look at how few CVE's it has!"
  - eigenrick 6y ago
    Either you're trolling or you've actually just compared the state of software engineering (let's be fair, it's not engineering, but application development) with real engineering disciplines. Unlike software, people actually take engineering projects, especially those that risk public health, very seriously. Of course every aspect of these systems, in whole and in part, have been tested exhaustively. There are a number of things that can be proven about nuclear power plants. Millions of man hours have gone into their research and design. They are rigorously monitored and controlled. Their emissions in every form is highly regulated. If one is within 3 decades of failure, we'd know it. When engineers and scientists say that there isn't a single power plant that is going to fail in the next 40 years. It's not a guess.
    - jakear 6y ago
      What was the point in time between when the existing myriad failing/failed nuclear installations were designed and now that the engineers started taking risk to public health seriously, testing every component exhaustively, and putting lots of hours in to research and design? > If one is within 3 decades of failure, we'd know it > When engineers and scientists say that there isn't a single power plant that is going to fail in the next 40 years. It's not a guess. Why didn't we know it about Fukushima? Things happen beyond the control of man, to make claims like the above is impossible.
      - eigenrick 6y ago
        Fair enough. Fukushima is a good example of a system with multiple, redundant safeguards that were violated pretty much simultaneously. They've ruled that it was preventable, however. It's become a case study and spawned new audit and safeguard procedures. I'm not going to guarantee that nuclear is the safest power source until the end of time. But at present, it is, actually. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
tallanvor 6y ago
Hanford was primarily a weapons research and production facility. It's biggest claim to fame is that it produced the plutonium used in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The problems there aren't due to the normal radioactive waste produced in nuclear power plants, rather it's due to the various materials used in weapons production and general nuclear research being mixed together in waste tanks. While the waste from operating nuclear power plants certainly isn't minimal, these days we can at least store it safely. Of course, as Fukushima showed, us, there have been very bad assumptions made about the types of disasters nuclear power plants might face.
- jakear 6y ago
  > these days we can at least store it safely Did the folks creating the containers in the article believe themselves to be creating unsafe storage? I doubt it. Our current situation is no different. We think it's safe because we haven't seen it break, when we do see it break it will be in an unexpected way, probably ahead of the time we thought it'd break.
  - coddingtonbear 6y ago
    In that time, it was thought that rapidly building a nuclear deterrent against the soviets was important enough that the environment could be sacrificed. You can see this effect throughout the defense industry throughout the cold war, probably most viscerally in the example of the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.
  - karaterobot 6y ago
    They did not worry about whether it could be stored safely long term, because that was not their mandate. And, because Hanford had some of the first [large scale] reactors ever built, they did not know much about what the requirements of long-term safety and storage would even be. 80 years later, we know a lot more, and have a different set of expectations for how to store and handle nuclear waste. It's fair to be skeptical, but not fair to condemn them based on past mistakes which have been specifically addressed. It would be like saying modern cars must be unsafe, because cars from the 1940s don't have seatbelts or airbags. It doesn't follow. You could also say "well, we know about some safety issues, but what about the ones we don't know about yet?" but that attitude extends to all of science and engineering as well. We have to proceed with caution, but proceed nonetheless.
s5300 6y ago
If a nation can't maintain its power sources, it probably deserves to fail as a nation...
- jakear 6y ago
  Sure, but if they're nuclear sources it'll bring the world down with it.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    No, it won't. This isn't The 100.
    - jakear 6y ago
      The leaking nuclear waste will magically disappear and the ground water will magically deradiate when the nation collapses? I have my doubts...
firebaze 6y ago
The decay chain of most isotopes, accompanied by their respective probabilities are known, as well as the decay products of the given decay (which includes decay energy + mode - alpha, beta or gamma, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay). Thus, for known radioactive isotope composites we can conclude which isotopes will be prevalent in which timeframe, and how much and which radioactive radiation will be emitted. As such it is possible to conclusively state how much radiation danger for living entities (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)) will be emitted over a certain time frame. Since the composition of nuclear waste is usually known or verifiable, and applying the known decay chains, it is possible to derive the duration and amount of risk. I trust e.g. climate change and the scientists behind it; but their basis is, statistically, much weaker than the statistics and science behind nuclear decay (which is much easier to measure and to verify). Also, geologists are - if trusted - also able to predict the permeability of the composition of the underground over a given period. They are able to (to the best of our knowledge) deduce the age of sediments >40k years into the past.

by jakear 6y ago

eigenrick 6y ago

You have a right to be suspicious, but to be fair, this isn't from nuclear energy. It was from tritium weapons research and production. Hanford was one of the sites of the Manhattan project, in the infancy of nuclear experimentation. The tanks mentioned in this article are containing stuff that, frankly, nobody knows exactly what it is or how to dispose of it. Modern nuclear reactors have been designed and built with your concerns in mind for at least 40 years. All the "modern" operating reactors have no known end of life. They also emit less radiation than a coal plant. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

jakear 6y ago
> at least 40 years ...seeing as $MY_AGE+40 is smaller than $HUMAN_LIFE_EXPECTANCY, this does exceedingly little to reassure me. Taking my progeny into consideration tips the scales even further away from being reassured. > no known end of life Quite literally all that means is we haven't tested them enough to know when they'll break a priori, and instead we'll just have to deal with the consequences when they inevitably do. > They also emit less radiation than a coal plant. That's not taking into account everything we don't know about how they'll hold up as time ticks on. It's equivalent to me saying "this newfangled browser engine I just made is much safer than chomium, look at how few CVE's it has!"
- eigenrick 6y ago
  Either you're trolling or you've actually just compared the state of software engineering (let's be fair, it's not engineering, but application development) with real engineering disciplines. Unlike software, people actually take engineering projects, especially those that risk public health, very seriously. Of course every aspect of these systems, in whole and in part, have been tested exhaustively. There are a number of things that can be proven about nuclear power plants. Millions of man hours have gone into their research and design. They are rigorously monitored and controlled. Their emissions in every form is highly regulated. If one is within 3 decades of failure, we'd know it. When engineers and scientists say that there isn't a single power plant that is going to fail in the next 40 years. It's not a guess.
  - jakear 6y ago
    What was the point in time between when the existing myriad failing/failed nuclear installations were designed and now that the engineers started taking risk to public health seriously, testing every component exhaustively, and putting lots of hours in to research and design? > If one is within 3 decades of failure, we'd know it > When engineers and scientists say that there isn't a single power plant that is going to fail in the next 40 years. It's not a guess. Why didn't we know it about Fukushima? Things happen beyond the control of man, to make claims like the above is impossible.
    - eigenrick 6y ago
      Fair enough. Fukushima is a good example of a system with multiple, redundant safeguards that were violated pretty much simultaneously. They've ruled that it was preventable, however. It's become a case study and spawned new audit and safeguard procedures. I'm not going to guarantee that nuclear is the safest power source until the end of time. But at present, it is, actually. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

tallanvor 6y ago

Hanford was primarily a weapons research and production facility. It's biggest claim to fame is that it produced the plutonium used in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The problems there aren't due to the normal radioactive waste produced in nuclear power plants, rather it's due to the various materials used in weapons production and general nuclear research being mixed together in waste tanks. While the waste from operating nuclear power plants certainly isn't minimal, these days we can at least store it safely. Of course, as Fukushima showed, us, there have been very bad assumptions made about the types of disasters nuclear power plants might face.

jakear 6y ago
> these days we can at least store it safely Did the folks creating the containers in the article believe themselves to be creating unsafe storage? I doubt it. Our current situation is no different. We think it's safe because we haven't seen it break, when we do see it break it will be in an unexpected way, probably ahead of the time we thought it'd break.
- coddingtonbear 6y ago
  In that time, it was thought that rapidly building a nuclear deterrent against the soviets was important enough that the environment could be sacrificed. You can see this effect throughout the defense industry throughout the cold war, probably most viscerally in the example of the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  They did not worry about whether it could be stored safely long term, because that was not their mandate. And, because Hanford had some of the first [large scale] reactors ever built, they did not know much about what the requirements of long-term safety and storage would even be. 80 years later, we know a lot more, and have a different set of expectations for how to store and handle nuclear waste. It's fair to be skeptical, but not fair to condemn them based on past mistakes which have been specifically addressed. It would be like saying modern cars must be unsafe, because cars from the 1940s don't have seatbelts or airbags. It doesn't follow. You could also say "well, we know about some safety issues, but what about the ones we don't know about yet?" but that attitude extends to all of science and engineering as well. We have to proceed with caution, but proceed nonetheless.

s5300 6y ago

If a nation can't maintain its power sources, it probably deserves to fail as a nation...

jakear 6y ago
Sure, but if they're nuclear sources it'll bring the world down with it.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  No, it won't. This isn't The 100.
  - jakear 6y ago
    The leaking nuclear waste will magically disappear and the ground water will magically deradiate when the nation collapses? I have my doubts...

firebaze 6y ago

The decay chain of most isotopes, accompanied by their respective probabilities are known, as well as the decay products of the given decay (which includes decay energy + mode - alpha, beta or gamma, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay). Thus, for known radioactive isotope composites we can conclude which isotopes will be prevalent in which timeframe, and how much and which radioactive radiation will be emitted. As such it is possible to conclusively state how much radiation danger for living entities (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)) will be emitted over a certain time frame. Since the composition of nuclear waste is usually known or verifiable, and applying the known decay chains, it is possible to derive the duration and amount of risk. I trust e.g. climate change and the scientists behind it; but their basis is, statistically, much weaker than the statistics and science behind nuclear decay (which is much easier to measure and to verify). Also, geologists are - if trusted - also able to predict the permeability of the composition of the underground over a given period. They are able to (to the best of our knowledge) deduce the age of sediments >40k years into the past.