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What a giant fucking waste of effort. That waste is fuel, and in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste. This obsession with nuclear was

What a giant fucking waste of effort. That waste is fuel, and in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste. This obsession with nuclear waste is ridiculous. We produce less of it than any other kind of energy waste by four orders of magnitude, and it's far less radioactive than the waste that's being belched into the atmosphere to cause global warming. This ridiculous hand-wringing is why we're shutting nuclear reactors down during a fuel shortage crisis in the middle of climate change. We have *got* to stop pretending this is real work.

TehCorwiz 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide... This disagrees with your assertion that “…in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste.” The page lists waste incidents going back to the 50s.
- deleted 5y ago
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- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  As far as I can see, there isn't a single waste incident anywhere in that list. It kind of looks like you googled for something, didn't read it, and started arguing. Looks like the only thing even mentioned there is that in the 1950s, there was an incident, and someone who isn't a doctor made an estimate that some cancer deaths might have happened later. Amusingly, it's the same person who predicted 20 million deaths from Chernobyl, and still insists they happened and are being covered up. Can you tell me which specific disagreement you see there? I'd like to think you're not listening to the guy who says there were three secret holocausts worth of death in the 1990s.
  - ozim 5y ago
    I agree, list does not indicate anything about waste unless it is "metal waste".
    - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
      Typical anti-nuke: pretends they've found contrary evidence, hasn't Three different people in this thread told me to ignore the physicists, the history, and the real world evidence, and to pretend that what we were waiting on was the half-life of uranium It's really embarrassing that HN isn't able to reject these things successfully. This is anti-vax level thinking
- booi 5y ago
  I agree that's a pretty strong statement to make but most of the accidents didn't have anything to do with the "waste" and more with the fuel and reactors. I would argue we're not talking about a lot of people though, compared to the billions that climate change is going to affect not to mention the millions that are already affected by pollution and other carbon-based energy production effects.
- fastaguy88 5y ago
  This seems to be a very broad definition of 'nuclear waste'. When I search for "waste" on that page, I find one incident, involving a waste furnace explosion (not the waste itself) and a second one in Russia in 1957 where a large amount of waste was released with no immediate fatalities, but possibly 200 later excess deaths. And, as the page points out, coal burning power plants emit (with little or no long-term "containment") 100-times as much radioactive waste. The argument against nuclear power is safe disposal of the "waste", but, as the OP pointed out, it is hard to find any examples of deaths because of nuclear waste (there certainly have been more deaths because of accidents, but even here, coal mining/burning/waste disposal clearly is much higher risk, even ignoring CO2 output).
  - oriolid 5y ago
    Which accident are you referring to? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster refers a source that claims 8015 deaths and no comparison to coal-fired power plants. Of course, one could argue that the accident was related to processing spent fuel into nuclear weapons material and would not have happened if it had just been buried. Or that it is should not be called waste if it's treated as raw material to something else.
    - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
      > refers a source that claims 8015 deaths It says in literally the very next sentence that no evidence of that is known, and more recent studies put the number between 45 and 55. Please have some rudimentary skepticism.
tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago
So significant amount of nuclear waste has been produced for what, 50 years? We know it's very dangerous and we now need to make sure it's safely contained on a time scale which if it ended today would start during stone age. And this is no problem because during the last 50 years no one has been harmed? That reasoning sounds incredible stupid to me.
- shabier 5y ago
  I suppose that parent comment is trying to say that given our history with nuclear waste, especially with the increasing caution, it hasn't caused any (significant) incident by the waste
  - tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago
    Yes? But given that our history with nuclear waste is a blip and we have to make sure it continue to works throughout wars, dictatorships and so on for the next 10 000 years, then how is the current track record relevant? It's akin to saying it's safe to eat led because I did it 5 minutes ago and so far I'm feeling perfectly fine. It's an argument which either is some form or propaganda or just stupid.
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  First, yes I agree that nuclear waste is an important issue that should be getting more attention than it does. However, this should not be thought of as a 10,000 or more year problem. Think back on the incredible expansion of knowledge in the last 100 years. Do we really believe that in another 100 years or so we won't have a way to safely reprocess this waste? This is a one or two hundred year problem at most. Can we not safely store two or three warehouses of material for 100 years? Thinking of this as a ten or fifty thousand year problem expresses a tremendous pessimism in the human ability to innovate.
  - dahdum 5y ago
    > Thinking of this as a ten or fifty thousand year problem expresses a tremendous pessimism in the human ability to innovate. It’s quite fatalistic. The arguments are usually about protecting some future Stone Age human society from it. Seems like the assumption is civilization will crumble and human intelligence will decline so much that they wouldn’t be able to figure out or notice that some ancient waste they dug up is killing them.
croes 5y ago
Are you kidding me? Homo sapiens exists since 300,000 years, nuclear waste since 80 years, uranium 235 as a half time of 700 million years. The mentioning of human history is pretty useless and misleading because nuclear waste only exists for 0.03% of human history but it will exists more than 2,000 times longer than mankind exists so far. That's plenty of time for things going wrong. It's like falling out of a window on the 100th floor and free-falling after 3 floors and saying: "everything has gone well so far". We already can't get a grip on climate change and plastic waste, let alone waste that has to be stored safely for 700 million years.
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  > We already can't get a grip on climate change and plastic waste, let alone waste that has to be stored safely for 700 million years. Please stop it with the physics theater. This stuff doesn't need to be stored for 70 years, let alone 700 million. Nuclear waste from a modern reactor is touch-safe. Not touch-safe in 50 years. Not touch-safe next week. It comes out of the reactor touch-safe. You just have to wait for it to cool down to room temperature. It's eat-safe in under ten years. I have no idea why anyone would look at someone saying "700 million years" and not be reduced to peals of laughter. Did you just look up the half-life of uranium 235 or something? The goal isn't to get rid of the uranium Why would you need that? There's uranium all over your house, right now. You know you eat tiny pieces of your plates constantly, right? I sure hope you don't own any Fiestaware. Uranium is perfectly safe, and in lots of your consumer products. Stop learning safety from Marvel movies. In 700 million years, if you actually had a dangerous energy source, life would have evolved to make it food by then. You know, like the black mold did with the space station in under a hundred, from a zillion miles away? The ultra-hot stuff that you're taught to fear never actually comes out of the reactor. The French glass their waste and put it in the floor, as a tourist attraction. They walk on top of it, no metal cladding, five foot gap. They've been doing it 40 years. Just how radioactive do you think this stuff is? Do you understand that hot springs like Yellowstone are way more radioactive than radioactive waste? Do you understand that we go bathing in those? (They're actually pretty nice, once you get used to the smell of sulfur.) Are you about to give me some mess about the kind of radiation? You going to try to teach me about roentegens vs grays? Look it up first. It's not going to play out the way you expect. Holy shit, man, look at the numbers. Like. Have ... have you ever looked at how much radiation you get from a TV tower? Have you ever checked where the closest TV tower is to you? The same people that are terrified of nuclear waste think there's nothing wrong with cell phone radiation. It's baffling to me. You get *so* *much* more radiation from a pair of bluetooth headphones than you ever will from nuclear waste I've got like ten bluetooth transponders around me just because I find cables annoying, and a cell phone in my pocket right now You know that football field of nuclear waste barrels that doesn't exist on the entire planet, but that John Oliver keeps pretending is a lot to save the entire planet? Go on, find it. Move one barrel out of the middle. Sit there. Bring your iPhone and a radiometer. Now hold your iPhone high enough up that the large amount of metal won't block your cell signal. Check the radiometer. Do you think you see more energy in the cell phone band, or all the others put together? Ooooooooh, better protect against that for (checks watch) 700 million years. And not, you know, the loss of the ecosphere. . > Are you kidding me? No, I am not kidding you. It's never killed anyone and it's never going to, no matter how much public panicing you do. If you cannot name a single person that's ever been killed by it - if it's safer than making bread flour and safer than skateboards, but it can stop climate change - then it's time to settle down. You're quoting the half lives of things that aren't even in the barrel, and you want to be taken seriously as some kind of source of knowledge. Stop. This is dishonest. Climate change is real. Solar power doesn't work. Wind power doesn't work. Nuclear power does work, and has the best safety record of any power system, almost by a factor of ten. If the most you can do is pretend there will be death someday, by mechanisms you can't describe, involving the wrong numbers and things that aren't present? Then you shouldn't be part of the discussion. The engineers and physicists do not agree with your future visions. I'm not willing to watch climate change destroy the planet I live on today, just because you think something bad will happen millions of years from now which the physicists say is wrong. Climate change is killing millions of people, today, and threatening biodiversity and the continental food supply We can stop it, but you're sitting here saying "but in millions of years" and you aren't even correct . > The mentioning of human history is pretty useless and misleading because It's what really happened. You're literally saying "ignore reality, ignore history, ignore the scientists, and pay attention to my scary stories." No; I don't think that I will. I've taken the relevant classes. They do not teach the things that you are saying. The second you say "reject the evidence of history," you have condemned any argument you could possibly make . > but it will exists more than 2,000 times longer than mankind exists so far. No, it won't. You just don't understand the physics involved. The actual hot products in those barrels don't even make it 10 years. Even the old ones didn't make it 50.
shkkmo 5y ago
> zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste. This is blatantly false. The second or third worst nuclear disaster in history was due to improperly stored nuclear waste.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster I agree with you about how nuclear has often been unfairly held to a much higher standard than other energy production methods. However, more misinformation isn't the solution to this.
- deleted 5y ago
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- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  Kyshtym was actually the worst nuclear disaster in history, not the second or third. Kyshtym was not actually caused by nuclear waste. In reality, the Russians were keeping hot fuel underground, and cooling it with water, a bizarre and wildly inappropriate design. A pump failed, and one of the water circuits stayed for more than a year. Eventually there was a steam blast. It had nothing to do with nuclear waste. It was a cooling system failure. The blast was 100% non-nuclear. As the worst disaster in nuclear history, the UN estimated death count is still below 80, and the actual known death count is 31. Trying to hold this up as some kind of serious risk, and playing the "technically correct, the best kind of correct" card, and using extremely heated language like "blatantly false," is just flat out destructive. Not only is your story incorrect, but even if it was correct, this kind of "disaster" is so small as to be irrelevant. Any major city on Earth has ten death counts like that a year and you can't name a single one in your city. This is how we stop climate change. Stop playing technicality fodder. You aren't as correct as you think you are, and even if you were correct, you'd be making the wrong call in the long run. If the worst disaster the industry has had in history doesn't add up to a bus accident, and it's already 20% of the way done stopping climate change? Then it's time to stop getting your rocks off to being able to say "but this one time it killed a couple dozen people 75 years ago." Especially because it absolute did not, and your claim of "blatant falsehood" is just you mis-learning history from HBO. Be clear: the maple syrup industry has two disasters with a higher death count in the same time frame. If you aren't calling for a global moratorium on delicious breakfast syrup, which cannot stop climate change, ask yourself why you need to drag out your knowledge of a trivial event 75 years ago, here. By the numbers, nuclear power is the safest technology of any kind in history. If you have to go back 75 years to find 50 dead folks, and you don't understand what a magically high quality safety record that is, please let other people handle this discussion.

TehCorwiz 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide... This disagrees with your assertion that “…in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste.” The page lists waste incidents going back to the 50s.

deleted 5y ago
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JohnHaugeland 5y ago
As far as I can see, there isn't a single waste incident anywhere in that list. It kind of looks like you googled for something, didn't read it, and started arguing. Looks like the only thing even mentioned there is that in the 1950s, there was an incident, and someone who isn't a doctor made an estimate that some cancer deaths might have happened later. Amusingly, it's the same person who predicted 20 million deaths from Chernobyl, and still insists they happened and are being covered up. Can you tell me which specific disagreement you see there? I'd like to think you're not listening to the guy who says there were three secret holocausts worth of death in the 1990s.
- ozim 5y ago
  I agree, list does not indicate anything about waste unless it is "metal waste".
  - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
    Typical anti-nuke: pretends they've found contrary evidence, hasn't Three different people in this thread told me to ignore the physicists, the history, and the real world evidence, and to pretend that what we were waiting on was the half-life of uranium It's really embarrassing that HN isn't able to reject these things successfully. This is anti-vax level thinking
booi 5y ago
I agree that's a pretty strong statement to make but most of the accidents didn't have anything to do with the "waste" and more with the fuel and reactors. I would argue we're not talking about a lot of people though, compared to the billions that climate change is going to affect not to mention the millions that are already affected by pollution and other carbon-based energy production effects.
fastaguy88 5y ago
This seems to be a very broad definition of 'nuclear waste'. When I search for "waste" on that page, I find one incident, involving a waste furnace explosion (not the waste itself) and a second one in Russia in 1957 where a large amount of waste was released with no immediate fatalities, but possibly 200 later excess deaths. And, as the page points out, coal burning power plants emit (with little or no long-term "containment") 100-times as much radioactive waste. The argument against nuclear power is safe disposal of the "waste", but, as the OP pointed out, it is hard to find any examples of deaths because of nuclear waste (there certainly have been more deaths because of accidents, but even here, coal mining/burning/waste disposal clearly is much higher risk, even ignoring CO2 output).
- oriolid 5y ago
  Which accident are you referring to? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster refers a source that claims 8015 deaths and no comparison to coal-fired power plants. Of course, one could argue that the accident was related to processing spent fuel into nuclear weapons material and would not have happened if it had just been buried. Or that it is should not be called waste if it's treated as raw material to something else.
  - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
    > refers a source that claims 8015 deaths It says in literally the very next sentence that no evidence of that is known, and more recent studies put the number between 45 and 55. Please have some rudimentary skepticism.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago

So significant amount of nuclear waste has been produced for what, 50 years? We know it's very dangerous and we now need to make sure it's safely contained on a time scale which if it ended today would start during stone age. And this is no problem because during the last 50 years no one has been harmed? That reasoning sounds incredible stupid to me.

shabier 5y ago
I suppose that parent comment is trying to say that given our history with nuclear waste, especially with the increasing caution, it hasn't caused any (significant) incident by the waste
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago
  Yes? But given that our history with nuclear waste is a blip and we have to make sure it continue to works throughout wars, dictatorships and so on for the next 10 000 years, then how is the current track record relevant? It's akin to saying it's safe to eat led because I did it 5 minutes ago and so far I'm feeling perfectly fine. It's an argument which either is some form or propaganda or just stupid.
dev_tty01 5y ago
First, yes I agree that nuclear waste is an important issue that should be getting more attention than it does. However, this should not be thought of as a 10,000 or more year problem. Think back on the incredible expansion of knowledge in the last 100 years. Do we really believe that in another 100 years or so we won't have a way to safely reprocess this waste? This is a one or two hundred year problem at most. Can we not safely store two or three warehouses of material for 100 years? Thinking of this as a ten or fifty thousand year problem expresses a tremendous pessimism in the human ability to innovate.
- dahdum 5y ago
  > Thinking of this as a ten or fifty thousand year problem expresses a tremendous pessimism in the human ability to innovate. It’s quite fatalistic. The arguments are usually about protecting some future Stone Age human society from it. Seems like the assumption is civilization will crumble and human intelligence will decline so much that they wouldn’t be able to figure out or notice that some ancient waste they dug up is killing them.

croes 5y ago

Are you kidding me? Homo sapiens exists since 300,000 years, nuclear waste since 80 years, uranium 235 as a half time of 700 million years. The mentioning of human history is pretty useless and misleading because nuclear waste only exists for 0.03% of human history but it will exists more than 2,000 times longer than mankind exists so far. That's plenty of time for things going wrong. It's like falling out of a window on the 100th floor and free-falling after 3 floors and saying: "everything has gone well so far". We already can't get a grip on climate change and plastic waste, let alone waste that has to be stored safely for 700 million years.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> We already can't get a grip on climate change and plastic waste, let alone waste that has to be stored safely for 700 million years. Please stop it with the physics theater. This stuff doesn't need to be stored for 70 years, let alone 700 million. Nuclear waste from a modern reactor is touch-safe. Not touch-safe in 50 years. Not touch-safe next week. It comes out of the reactor touch-safe. You just have to wait for it to cool down to room temperature. It's eat-safe in under ten years. I have no idea why anyone would look at someone saying "700 million years" and not be reduced to peals of laughter. Did you just look up the half-life of uranium 235 or something? The goal isn't to get rid of the uranium Why would you need that? There's uranium all over your house, right now. You know you eat tiny pieces of your plates constantly, right? I sure hope you don't own any Fiestaware. Uranium is perfectly safe, and in lots of your consumer products. Stop learning safety from Marvel movies. In 700 million years, if you actually had a dangerous energy source, life would have evolved to make it food by then. You know, like the black mold did with the space station in under a hundred, from a zillion miles away? The ultra-hot stuff that you're taught to fear never actually comes out of the reactor. The French glass their waste and put it in the floor, as a tourist attraction. They walk on top of it, no metal cladding, five foot gap. They've been doing it 40 years. Just how radioactive do you think this stuff is? Do you understand that hot springs like Yellowstone are way more radioactive than radioactive waste? Do you understand that we go bathing in those? (They're actually pretty nice, once you get used to the smell of sulfur.) Are you about to give me some mess about the kind of radiation? You going to try to teach me about roentegens vs grays? Look it up first. It's not going to play out the way you expect. Holy shit, man, look at the numbers. Like. Have ... have you ever looked at how much radiation you get from a TV tower? Have you ever checked where the closest TV tower is to you? The same people that are terrified of nuclear waste think there's nothing wrong with cell phone radiation. It's baffling to me. You get *so* *much* more radiation from a pair of bluetooth headphones than you ever will from nuclear waste I've got like ten bluetooth transponders around me just because I find cables annoying, and a cell phone in my pocket right now You know that football field of nuclear waste barrels that doesn't exist on the entire planet, but that John Oliver keeps pretending is a lot to save the entire planet? Go on, find it. Move one barrel out of the middle. Sit there. Bring your iPhone and a radiometer. Now hold your iPhone high enough up that the large amount of metal won't block your cell signal. Check the radiometer. Do you think you see more energy in the cell phone band, or all the others put together? Ooooooooh, better protect against that for (checks watch) 700 million years. And not, you know, the loss of the ecosphere. . > Are you kidding me? No, I am not kidding you. It's never killed anyone and it's never going to, no matter how much public panicing you do. If you cannot name a single person that's ever been killed by it - if it's safer than making bread flour and safer than skateboards, but it can stop climate change - then it's time to settle down. You're quoting the half lives of things that aren't even in the barrel, and you want to be taken seriously as some kind of source of knowledge. Stop. This is dishonest. Climate change is real. Solar power doesn't work. Wind power doesn't work. Nuclear power does work, and has the best safety record of any power system, almost by a factor of ten. If the most you can do is pretend there will be death someday, by mechanisms you can't describe, involving the wrong numbers and things that aren't present? Then you shouldn't be part of the discussion. The engineers and physicists do not agree with your future visions. I'm not willing to watch climate change destroy the planet I live on today, just because you think something bad will happen millions of years from now which the physicists say is wrong. Climate change is killing millions of people, today, and threatening biodiversity and the continental food supply We can stop it, but you're sitting here saying "but in millions of years" and you aren't even correct . > The mentioning of human history is pretty useless and misleading because It's what really happened. You're literally saying "ignore reality, ignore history, ignore the scientists, and pay attention to my scary stories." No; I don't think that I will. I've taken the relevant classes. They do not teach the things that you are saying. The second you say "reject the evidence of history," you have condemned any argument you could possibly make . > but it will exists more than 2,000 times longer than mankind exists so far. No, it won't. You just don't understand the physics involved. The actual hot products in those barrels don't even make it 10 years. Even the old ones didn't make it 50.

shkkmo 5y ago

> zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste. This is blatantly false. The second or third worst nuclear disaster in history was due to improperly stored nuclear waste.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster I agree with you about how nuclear has often been unfairly held to a much higher standard than other energy production methods. However, more misinformation isn't the solution to this.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
Kyshtym was actually the worst nuclear disaster in history, not the second or third. Kyshtym was not actually caused by nuclear waste. In reality, the Russians were keeping hot fuel underground, and cooling it with water, a bizarre and wildly inappropriate design. A pump failed, and one of the water circuits stayed for more than a year. Eventually there was a steam blast. It had nothing to do with nuclear waste. It was a cooling system failure. The blast was 100% non-nuclear. As the worst disaster in nuclear history, the UN estimated death count is still below 80, and the actual known death count is 31. Trying to hold this up as some kind of serious risk, and playing the "technically correct, the best kind of correct" card, and using extremely heated language like "blatantly false," is just flat out destructive. Not only is your story incorrect, but even if it was correct, this kind of "disaster" is so small as to be irrelevant. Any major city on Earth has ten death counts like that a year and you can't name a single one in your city. This is how we stop climate change. Stop playing technicality fodder. You aren't as correct as you think you are, and even if you were correct, you'd be making the wrong call in the long run. If the worst disaster the industry has had in history doesn't add up to a bus accident, and it's already 20% of the way done stopping climate change? Then it's time to stop getting your rocks off to being able to say "but this one time it killed a couple dozen people 75 years ago." Especially because it absolute did not, and your claim of "blatant falsehood" is just you mis-learning history from HBO. Be clear: the maple syrup industry has two disasters with a higher death count in the same time frame. If you aren't calling for a global moratorium on delicious breakfast syrup, which cannot stop climate change, ask yourself why you need to drag out your knowledge of a trivial event 75 years ago, here. By the numbers, nuclear power is the safest technology of any kind in history. If you have to go back 75 years to find 50 dead folks, and you don't understand what a magically high quality safety record that is, please let other people handle this discussion.