3 ms·

I wonder what would occur if a climate-change driven wildfire reached a dry cask waste storage site (probably nothing tbh). The reasonable possibility of this r

• aerostable_slug 4y ago
  Nothing. They are designed to survive fire among many other contingencies. People who moan and groan about dry cask storage generally have no idea what they are talking about.
• bayesian_horse 4y ago
  The pro-nuke fanboys want to establish climate change as the only alternative to nuclear power. It's a false choice. Nuclear power has proven so unwieldy and hard to scale that renewable energy is going to be the faster solution, even if it is not fast enough. And with renewable energy, the technology might advance faster than anticipated. With nuclear energy, the risk might turn out more catastrophic than anticipated.
• _ph_ 4y ago
  If the containmaint fails, it means widespread contamination. This is basically the reason, Chernobyl was so bad: the graphite in the nuclear core caught fire and the fire launched a lot of radioactive material high into the air. So beyond the impact on the immediate region around the reactor, there were nuclear clouds moving across Europe. In consequence, a lot of forests in Bavaria are still contaminated. Even today, one needs to be a bit carefull eating mushrooms and especially wild boar (who ate a lot of mushrooms...) from the local forests. Also, that was the reason everyone was so thrilled by the news that Russian troups camped and lit fires in the contaminated forests around the reactor, both endangering themselves and spreading more radioactivity. Of course there is much less material involved than with the original accident, but still one wants to avoid any of this.