6 ms·

When the said plant project started over 10 years ago, I was an opponent of nuclear power, participating in demonstrations etc. Nowadays I'm really thankful for

by Yaggo 5y ago

When the said plant project started over 10 years ago, I was an opponent of nuclear power, participating in demonstrations etc. Nowadays I'm really thankful for the new plant, as every non-fossil energy source is absolutely crucial, not to mention my electricity bill. Actually nuclear has the lowest carbon footprint, and a big advantage of being able to deliver very stable power output. The challenge with waste storage and other risks are real of course, but we just have to to accept them in the current situation of global warming.

ridruejo 5y ago
And from a geopolitical perspective, given everything going on and Finland’s neighbour
rosndo 5y ago
> The challenge with waste storage and other risks are real of course But the “challenge” with waste storage is a big lie. The French have all the waste ever generated by their nuclear program sitting under the floor of a single room. The quantities of “waste” generated by nuclear plants are not really meaningful even over long time horizons.
- chinathrow 5y ago
  How can you be so sure about that? We have like waste from max 40-50 years now sitting around and the problem is still unsolved. I doubt that civilisation can manage to manage this waste for 100'000y to come.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    It's sitting around. Solid. Inert. Meanwhile there are gigatons of CO2 released to the atmosphere every year that causes an extremely acute global problem and we have no idea what to do to that either.
    - chinathrow 5y ago
      My post was not about CO2 (the fact that I hate that we emit way too much that I remove some via Stripe Climatr). Sitting nuclear waste still needs to be maintained for centuries to come and we still have no solition for that.
      - Paradigma11 5y ago
        But there is little difference to maintain the current amount of waste or 100 times as much.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Because the quantities of waste are laughable https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-waste-is-there-in-the-world/ https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-wast... (The HLW is what people mostly worry about) Even in a weird scenario where we don’t start recycling our nuclear “waste”, storing 100000x the current amounts would not present a particularly huge challenge.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    The really radioactive stuff (fission products) is basically gone after 300 years. The longer-lived stuff (transuranic elements: plutonium etc) could in theory be recycled and burned up in another reactor, though this probably won't happen in practice. It's not as scary as the fission products though: it's less mobile, less bioavailable, less radioactive, etc. Still definitely a hazard, but a lower grade of hazard.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    The waste will be radioactive for 100000 years, but it will not be dangerous for that long. Low levels of radioactivity is not a problem. It takes a much shorter time for the waste to reach the same level of radioactivity that the original ore that we dug out of the earth had.
- foverzar 5y ago
  It's not even an actual "waste". Given a proper nuclear cycle and a proper diversity of reactors, you can both extract precious isotopes and reuse "waste" as fuel for another kind of reactor. AFAIK, Russia, for example, had got extremely good at cycling nuclear materials. I assume it is due to the fact that after Chernobyl they were actually forced to invest in nuclear energy due to safety reasons, rather then abandon it.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    The detail you’re overlooking is that it stays active for thousands of years, so even a small volume will end up being very costly. And other countries have much higher volume of waste stored, how about 40000m3? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_...
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      The most radioactive fraction has relatively short lifetimes. (There is only so much energy that can be radiated out.) Even the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl is much less radioactive now, mere 35 years after the accident. The less radioactive fraction will indeed stay active for thousands of years, but its level of radiation will be closer to natural sources than to an atomic bomb.
      - thriftwy 5y ago
        There's a sour spot of isotopes with half-lives of 1-100 thousands years, these are still very radioactive but will not decay in any forseeable future.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Uh, there's plenty of spent fuel components that aren't fissile. It's not a perpetual motion machine. So to say that it's not "actual waste" is rather unhelpful.
    - 5y ago
- logifail 5y ago
  > [..] all the waste ever generated [...] All the waste? https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.... "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020"
  - Accujack 5y ago
    Those are numbers for the waste from bomb making, not power generation.
    - yencabulator 5y ago
      Those two have been linked together ever since the discovery of the chain reactions. The US nuclear weapons are managed by the Department of Energy..
  - rosndo 5y ago
    >All the waste? Probably not the most boring kind of waste. > "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020" It’s worth noting that even a million cubic feet isn’t a big quantity, this is something one guy with an excavator could feasibly bury. (Not that we should actually pursue the guy-with-excavator disposal strategy)
    - petre 5y ago
      It's 28317 cubic metres or 500 residential swimming pools, 4 by 7 by 2 metres. By contrast 250000 cubic metres of concrete went into OL3[1]. This is also low level waste such as Fukushima rubble. For reference the UK has LLW in storage amounting to 14700 cubic metres or 17800 tonnes by mass, with an activity of 11 terabecquerels. These are the estimates for decomissioning of all the Olkiluoto reactors[2]: "The amount of decommissioning waste is around 32 000 m3, generated from Olkiluoto 1 and 2 mainly during 2068-2076. The amount of Olkiluoto 3 decommissioning waste is estimated to be around 11000 m3 before packing and generated during 2079-2085. Additionally there will be approximately 2000 m3 of waste from the spent fuel interim storage decommissioning to be generated around 2100." 1. https://www.tvo.fi/uploads/File/2009/OL3_Basic_Facts_2009.pdf 2. https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/fi_2nd_nr.pdf
- doikor 5y ago
  Also Finland has for the most part solved our nuclear waste problem. A couple km down the road from Olkiluoto is Onkalo which is basically ready with now going through final checkups and to be put into use in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
  - spurgu 5y ago
    Yup. The risk factor there is that humans might go extinct and then aliens visit Earth in 20k years and decide to start digging.
    - doikor 5y ago
      Yeah the risks are really low. Basically you would have to dig down there for any risk. The risk simulations they did for it are hilarious to read This is the worst case scenario they thought about > Posiva on arvioinut ydinjätteiden pahimpia mahdollisia seurauksia. Skenaariossa ydinkanisteri syöpyisi puhki tuhannessa vuodessa lasketun sadantuhannen vuoden sijaan ja samanaikaisesti sitä ympäröivä savipuskuri katoaisi selittämättömästi. Lisäksi pohjavesi kulkisikin ylöspäin ja paikan päälle rakennettaisiin kaupunki. Ihminen, joka eläisi kehdosta hautaan saastuneimmalla neliömetrillä ja söisi vain sillä kasvanutta ruokaa ja joisi saastuneinta vettä, saisi vain kolminkertaisen säteilyannoksen Tampereen Pispalassa nyt asuviin ihmisiin nähden. Rough translation > Posivat has estimated the worst case scenarios. In the case the vessels would corrode in 1000 years instead of the calculated 100000 years and the clay barrier would "disappear" (nobody knows how it would do that) and the ground water would move upwards (it moves down in that area) and someone built a city above it and ate from crops grown on the worst possible radiated land they would get 3x the lifetime radiation does of someone living in Piispala, Tampere (the stuff in quotes is my additions)
      - spurgu 5y ago
        Hahaha, hilarious indeed!
dlandau 5y ago
Started over 10 years ago is an understatement. It was supposed to be finished over 10 years ago. First the Berlin airport, now this and James Webb Space Telescope: are we really just going to finish our collective homeworks?
- alex_duf 5y ago
  Estimations are really hard. I don't know about you but I consistently under evaluate every piece of work...
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
  - hairytrog 5y ago
    If you accurately estaimted the pain and time required to complete something, you'd never get started.
  - y4mi 5y ago
    It's rarely simple/honest misestimations with large government contracts though. There is just too much money to be made for the corrupt people to stay away. The honest and good offers are rarely taken, because they've realistic estimations - the dishonest one's only care about getting the contract, not finishing it... So they'll make the much better offer. And once work starts, the corruption keeps spreading. Everyone on every layer knows how unlikely their charges are going to be contested, so everyone just charges more for the same work, siphoning money from the project. I'd consider that a cultural issue, because people at large have really started to only think about themselves and no longer identify with their work ethic. Which is understandable because the employers generally treat their employees like disposable tools. I don't think there is any straightforward or easy solution, and it can get much much worse too. Just look at china's production issues for inland products, esp. food and consumable products.
    - 5y ago
sol_invictus 5y ago
It's almost as if you could benefit of thinking about second-order effects instead of following ideology blindly. Unfortunately nuanced discussion and thinking seems to be out of fashion.
user-the-name 5y ago
The challenge is a lot smaller than it is generally made out to be. Nuclear waste has a weird decay curve due to the absolute mess of isotopes it contains. That means it is insanely radioactive at first, but also decays very quickly. After a while, only the long-lived isotopes are left, but they are also not very radioactive. We tend to conflate the two, and assume that the waste is both highly radioactive AND long-lived, but this is not the case. It is highly radioactive for a reasonable amount of time, and then low-level radioactive for a really long time. The challenge is only how to handle it while it is incredibly radioactive, but the timescales involved are not at all impossible to deal with. Once it has cooled down, just leaving it buried is perfectly fine. There's very little long-term risk. (Let's say, as an oversimplification, that the time of high danger is maybe two hundred years - a long time to be sure, but not unprecedented in terms of large-scale engineering projects. Around that time, the radioactivity starts dropping very sharply.)
- dv_dt 5y ago
  The challenge even at low radioactivity is materials for containment. If containers are damaged by the waste, as they likely will be over long durations, than refreshing the containers is insanely complex and fraught with hazards.

by Yaggo 5y ago

ridruejo 5y ago

And from a geopolitical perspective, given everything going on and Finland’s neighbour

rosndo 5y ago

> The challenge with waste storage and other risks are real of course But the “challenge” with waste storage is a big lie. The French have all the waste ever generated by their nuclear program sitting under the floor of a single room. The quantities of “waste” generated by nuclear plants are not really meaningful even over long time horizons.

chinathrow 5y ago
How can you be so sure about that? We have like waste from max 40-50 years now sitting around and the problem is still unsolved. I doubt that civilisation can manage to manage this waste for 100'000y to come.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  It's sitting around. Solid. Inert. Meanwhile there are gigatons of CO2 released to the atmosphere every year that causes an extremely acute global problem and we have no idea what to do to that either.
  - chinathrow 5y ago
    My post was not about CO2 (the fact that I hate that we emit way too much that I remove some via Stripe Climatr). Sitting nuclear waste still needs to be maintained for centuries to come and we still have no solition for that.
    - Paradigma11 5y ago
      But there is little difference to maintain the current amount of waste or 100 times as much.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rosndo 5y ago
  Because the quantities of waste are laughable https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-waste-is-there-in-the-world/ https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-wast... (The HLW is what people mostly worry about) Even in a weird scenario where we don’t start recycling our nuclear “waste”, storing 100000x the current amounts would not present a particularly huge challenge.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  The really radioactive stuff (fission products) is basically gone after 300 years. The longer-lived stuff (transuranic elements: plutonium etc) could in theory be recycled and burned up in another reactor, though this probably won't happen in practice. It's not as scary as the fission products though: it's less mobile, less bioavailable, less radioactive, etc. Still definitely a hazard, but a lower grade of hazard.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  The waste will be radioactive for 100000 years, but it will not be dangerous for that long. Low levels of radioactivity is not a problem. It takes a much shorter time for the waste to reach the same level of radioactivity that the original ore that we dug out of the earth had.
foverzar 5y ago
It's not even an actual "waste". Given a proper nuclear cycle and a proper diversity of reactors, you can both extract precious isotopes and reuse "waste" as fuel for another kind of reactor. AFAIK, Russia, for example, had got extremely good at cycling nuclear materials. I assume it is due to the fact that after Chernobyl they were actually forced to invest in nuclear energy due to safety reasons, rather then abandon it.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  The detail you’re overlooking is that it stays active for thousands of years, so even a small volume will end up being very costly. And other countries have much higher volume of waste stored, how about 40000m3? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_...
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    The most radioactive fraction has relatively short lifetimes. (There is only so much energy that can be radiated out.) Even the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl is much less radioactive now, mere 35 years after the accident. The less radioactive fraction will indeed stay active for thousands of years, but its level of radiation will be closer to natural sources than to an atomic bomb.
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      There's a sour spot of isotopes with half-lives of 1-100 thousands years, these are still very radioactive but will not decay in any forseeable future.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Uh, there's plenty of spent fuel components that aren't fissile. It's not a perpetual motion machine. So to say that it's not "actual waste" is rather unhelpful.
  - 5y ago
logifail 5y ago
> [..] all the waste ever generated [...] All the waste? https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.... "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020"
- Accujack 5y ago
  Those are numbers for the waste from bomb making, not power generation.
  - yencabulator 5y ago
    Those two have been linked together ever since the discovery of the chain reactions. The US nuclear weapons are managed by the Department of Energy..
- rosndo 5y ago
  >All the waste? Probably not the most boring kind of waste. > "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020" It’s worth noting that even a million cubic feet isn’t a big quantity, this is something one guy with an excavator could feasibly bury. (Not that we should actually pursue the guy-with-excavator disposal strategy)
  - petre 5y ago
    It's 28317 cubic metres or 500 residential swimming pools, 4 by 7 by 2 metres. By contrast 250000 cubic metres of concrete went into OL3[1]. This is also low level waste such as Fukushima rubble. For reference the UK has LLW in storage amounting to 14700 cubic metres or 17800 tonnes by mass, with an activity of 11 terabecquerels. These are the estimates for decomissioning of all the Olkiluoto reactors[2]: "The amount of decommissioning waste is around 32 000 m3, generated from Olkiluoto 1 and 2 mainly during 2068-2076. The amount of Olkiluoto 3 decommissioning waste is estimated to be around 11000 m3 before packing and generated during 2079-2085. Additionally there will be approximately 2000 m3 of waste from the spent fuel interim storage decommissioning to be generated around 2100." 1. https://www.tvo.fi/uploads/File/2009/OL3_Basic_Facts_2009.pdf 2. https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/fi_2nd_nr.pdf
doikor 5y ago
Also Finland has for the most part solved our nuclear waste problem. A couple km down the road from Olkiluoto is Onkalo which is basically ready with now going through final checkups and to be put into use in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- spurgu 5y ago
  Yup. The risk factor there is that humans might go extinct and then aliens visit Earth in 20k years and decide to start digging.
  - doikor 5y ago
    Yeah the risks are really low. Basically you would have to dig down there for any risk. The risk simulations they did for it are hilarious to read This is the worst case scenario they thought about > Posiva on arvioinut ydinjätteiden pahimpia mahdollisia seurauksia. Skenaariossa ydinkanisteri syöpyisi puhki tuhannessa vuodessa lasketun sadantuhannen vuoden sijaan ja samanaikaisesti sitä ympäröivä savipuskuri katoaisi selittämättömästi. Lisäksi pohjavesi kulkisikin ylöspäin ja paikan päälle rakennettaisiin kaupunki. Ihminen, joka eläisi kehdosta hautaan saastuneimmalla neliömetrillä ja söisi vain sillä kasvanutta ruokaa ja joisi saastuneinta vettä, saisi vain kolminkertaisen säteilyannoksen Tampereen Pispalassa nyt asuviin ihmisiin nähden. Rough translation > Posivat has estimated the worst case scenarios. In the case the vessels would corrode in 1000 years instead of the calculated 100000 years and the clay barrier would "disappear" (nobody knows how it would do that) and the ground water would move upwards (it moves down in that area) and someone built a city above it and ate from crops grown on the worst possible radiated land they would get 3x the lifetime radiation does of someone living in Piispala, Tampere (the stuff in quotes is my additions)
    - spurgu 5y ago
      Hahaha, hilarious indeed!

dlandau 5y ago

Started over 10 years ago is an understatement. It was supposed to be finished over 10 years ago. First the Berlin airport, now this and James Webb Space Telescope: are we really just going to finish our collective homeworks?

alex_duf 5y ago
Estimations are really hard. I don't know about you but I consistently under evaluate every piece of work...
- mannykannot 5y ago
  Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
- hairytrog 5y ago
  If you accurately estaimted the pain and time required to complete something, you'd never get started.
- y4mi 5y ago
  It's rarely simple/honest misestimations with large government contracts though. There is just too much money to be made for the corrupt people to stay away. The honest and good offers are rarely taken, because they've realistic estimations - the dishonest one's only care about getting the contract, not finishing it... So they'll make the much better offer. And once work starts, the corruption keeps spreading. Everyone on every layer knows how unlikely their charges are going to be contested, so everyone just charges more for the same work, siphoning money from the project. I'd consider that a cultural issue, because people at large have really started to only think about themselves and no longer identify with their work ethic. Which is understandable because the employers generally treat their employees like disposable tools. I don't think there is any straightforward or easy solution, and it can get much much worse too. Just look at china's production issues for inland products, esp. food and consumable products.
  - 5y ago

sol_invictus 5y ago

It's almost as if you could benefit of thinking about second-order effects instead of following ideology blindly. Unfortunately nuanced discussion and thinking seems to be out of fashion.

user-the-name 5y ago

The challenge is a lot smaller than it is generally made out to be. Nuclear waste has a weird decay curve due to the absolute mess of isotopes it contains. That means it is insanely radioactive at first, but also decays very quickly. After a while, only the long-lived isotopes are left, but they are also not very radioactive. We tend to conflate the two, and assume that the waste is both highly radioactive AND long-lived, but this is not the case. It is highly radioactive for a reasonable amount of time, and then low-level radioactive for a really long time. The challenge is only how to handle it while it is incredibly radioactive, but the timescales involved are not at all impossible to deal with. Once it has cooled down, just leaving it buried is perfectly fine. There's very little long-term risk. (Let's say, as an oversimplification, that the time of high danger is maybe two hundred years - a long time to be sure, but not unprecedented in terms of large-scale engineering projects. Around that time, the radioactivity starts dropping very sharply.)

dv_dt 5y ago
The challenge even at low radioactivity is materials for containment. If containers are damaged by the waste, as they likely will be over long durations, than refreshing the containers is insanely complex and fraught with hazards.