11 ms·

One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted de

One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right? So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?

mwint 4y ago
Probably the issue is that access to water (for cooling) correlates highly with access to water (for human civilization).
philwelch 4y ago
The Chernobyl power plant did not have a containment building around the reactors until after the meltdown. Every Western nuclear power plant has a containment building around the reactors. That's the single biggest factor.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  TMI and Fukushima had containment, for all the good it did.
  - Vecr 4y ago
    It did a lot of good? TMI slagged the core but the containment held, and Fukushima's cores (the ones that melted, obviously) was still mostly covered, the hydrogen explosion was the major problem.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      TMI vented a very large amount of radioactive krypton. (Given its density, it would better be described as dumped to the river, where it spread out along the banks downstream, gassing riverfront neighborhoods.) Fukushima's containment exploded in hydrogen detonations, and vented a great deal of radioisotopes. They are today flushing tritium to the ocean, which seems wasteful; we will want the 3He that decays to.
hushpuppy 4y ago
The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build Chernobyl style nuclear reactors. The design was bad to begin with and it really didn't have any sort of containment or bunker or anything like that to speak of. This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up. I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends on physics to be safe, not human operators. Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed correctly.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  > The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build Chernobyl style nuclear reactors Or, indeed, any at all. Thus, also no Fukushimas, and no TMIs, and no Santa Susanas.
  - kwere 4y ago
    you know that "nuclear energy fear" is conceptually equal to "airplane fear" in trasportation?. Both are the most safe by output (kwh vs miles travelled) against deaths in their own categories.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Rendering large areas uninhabitable is plenty of harm. And death is not the only detrimental health impact.
      - barfingclouds 4y ago
        Santa susana is bad and something I’m even vocal about, but that was nuclear experiments, not nuclear power
jeffbee 4y ago
If you're willing to dedicate that much land you could just cover it in solar panels and generate 1500GW of peak electricity for less money.
- rswskg 4y ago
  *in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter, northern hemisphere, etc etc...
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    Okay, put in batteries, still an order of magnitude cheaper than a nuclear plant without any risk of doomsday
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Not even remotely true. Global battery production is around 300 GWh per year. The US alone uses 12.5 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses ~60TWh. That's 8 years of global battery output to fulfill just one hour of electricity storage.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        There is absolutely no need for batteries to provide for storage, so that is a misleading assertion.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        And what, pray tell, would we be using for storage instead? Surely you're not going to suggest some untested and unproven storage mechanism like hydrogen storage, ammonia, thermal batteries, etc. Those technologies have never been built at anything remotely close to grid-scale, and thus we have no idea what they'd actually cost when we attempt to build them at grid scale. Batteries and hyrodelectric storage are the only energy storage mechanisms for which we have any meaningful cost history.
Manuel_D 4y ago
There was also no real incentive to clean up the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The town of Pripyat existed for the purpose of supporting the nuclear power plants. So when the plants closed, there's no reason to clean up the contamination. This is in contrast to Fukushima, in which the majority of the exclusion zone has been rehabilitated.
layer8 4y ago
Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
- trashtester 4y ago
  EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms. Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg. In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk. And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.) In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality. If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.
  - layer8 4y ago
    The website is official information from the German federal agency for radiation protection. While the risk now is low, and the article is actually giving a useful comparison to radiation exposure in airplane travel, you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day, and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl. The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      > you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably still less than simply breathing the air in a city, though. > and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30 years). > The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP. And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil. By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over a very large population, you could calculate some number of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about 100mSv are harmless. In any case, at that level, the risk for any given individual is so small, that it disappears next to any other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into account for your personal behavior.
dboreham 4y ago
This was the original (1040s, Fermi) idea, hence reactors in Idaho (after becoming alarmed that they had constructed a reactor in downtown Chicago). I think however there's a reason this isn't done now: it acknowledges that large reactors aren't safe (which they're not), therefore begs the question why build them at all. For the idea to become viable, climate change would need to become a much more immediate pressing concern, allowing the trade off to be made between irradiating some Utah desert vs boiling the planet.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Lots of reasons invite the question, why build them at all? There is no answer, because we have overwhelmingly more attractive alternatives.
Bromeo 4y ago
I don't disagree with your main point, but what's the point of making a nature preserve in an already uninhabited area? Since it's uninhabited right now the animals are probably doing just fine. Also, power plants (of any kind) need heavy machinery for construction as well as regular maintenance.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  A nature preserve is there to keep somebody sweeping in anytime and eliminating the habitat. Which happens all the damn time. Starbase, e.g.
bell-cot 4y ago
Planning nuclear power plants based upon the Chernobyl disaster is kinda like planning road and bridge construction based upon the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) ) Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down IMMEDIATELY."
- ncmncm 4y ago
  They all resemble a historic disaster, more or less. Renewables don't, though.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Ah, no. The (numerous) historic disasters which most renewables resemble are those where civilizations implicitly assumed that the current climate - patterns of wind, rain, temperature, etc. - would continue indefinitely. Then...SH*T, the climate changed, often over rather large areas, and the civilization(s) which had conveniently assumed that that couldn't happen suffered or failed. (If you're not familiar with this in the context of renewable energy, then you might want to google for news stories on what the long-term drought in the western U.S. is doing to the "sure thing, forever" supply of hydroelectricity at many of the major dams.)
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Moving goalposts, much? The environs of Hoover Dam are exactly as safe today as 10,000 years ago, and will reliably be as safe 10,000 years in the future provided no nukes blow up upwind or upstream. Solar panels floating on the Hoover Dam reservoir will happily produce as much power as the dam at full tilt, with enough left over to pump water back up to it for overnight use, reduce evaporation enough that water drought will be substantially less problematic, and provide power for desalination besides. Floating, water-chilled panels will last at least 50 years, by which time they will likely not be needed anymore.

mwint 4y ago

Probably the issue is that access to water (for cooling) correlates highly with access to water (for human civilization).

philwelch 4y ago

The Chernobyl power plant did not have a containment building around the reactors until after the meltdown. Every Western nuclear power plant has a containment building around the reactors. That's the single biggest factor.

ncmncm 4y ago
TMI and Fukushima had containment, for all the good it did.
- Vecr 4y ago
  It did a lot of good? TMI slagged the core but the containment held, and Fukushima's cores (the ones that melted, obviously) was still mostly covered, the hydrogen explosion was the major problem.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    TMI vented a very large amount of radioactive krypton. (Given its density, it would better be described as dumped to the river, where it spread out along the banks downstream, gassing riverfront neighborhoods.) Fukushima's containment exploded in hydrogen detonations, and vented a great deal of radioisotopes. They are today flushing tritium to the ocean, which seems wasteful; we will want the 3He that decays to.

hushpuppy 4y ago

The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build Chernobyl style nuclear reactors. The design was bad to begin with and it really didn't have any sort of containment or bunker or anything like that to speak of. This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up. I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends on physics to be safe, not human operators. Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed correctly.

ncmncm 4y ago
> The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build Chernobyl style nuclear reactors Or, indeed, any at all. Thus, also no Fukushimas, and no TMIs, and no Santa Susanas.
- kwere 4y ago
  you know that "nuclear energy fear" is conceptually equal to "airplane fear" in trasportation?. Both are the most safe by output (kwh vs miles travelled) against deaths in their own categories.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Rendering large areas uninhabitable is plenty of harm. And death is not the only detrimental health impact.
    - barfingclouds 4y ago
      Santa susana is bad and something I’m even vocal about, but that was nuclear experiments, not nuclear power

jeffbee 4y ago

If you're willing to dedicate that much land you could just cover it in solar panels and generate 1500GW of peak electricity for less money.

rswskg 4y ago
*in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter, northern hemisphere, etc etc...
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Okay, put in batteries, still an order of magnitude cheaper than a nuclear plant without any risk of doomsday
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Not even remotely true. Global battery production is around 300 GWh per year. The US alone uses 12.5 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses ~60TWh. That's 8 years of global battery output to fulfill just one hour of electricity storage.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      There is absolutely no need for batteries to provide for storage, so that is a misleading assertion.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        And what, pray tell, would we be using for storage instead? Surely you're not going to suggest some untested and unproven storage mechanism like hydrogen storage, ammonia, thermal batteries, etc. Those technologies have never been built at anything remotely close to grid-scale, and thus we have no idea what they'd actually cost when we attempt to build them at grid scale. Batteries and hyrodelectric storage are the only energy storage mechanisms for which we have any meaningful cost history.

Manuel_D 4y ago

There was also no real incentive to clean up the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The town of Pripyat existed for the purpose of supporting the nuclear power plants. So when the plants closed, there's no reason to clean up the contamination. This is in contrast to Fukushima, in which the majority of the exclusion zone has been rehabilitated.

layer8 4y ago

Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

trashtester 4y ago
EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms. Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg. In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk. And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.) In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality. If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.
- layer8 4y ago
  The website is official information from the German federal agency for radiation protection. While the risk now is low, and the article is actually giving a useful comparison to radiation exposure in airplane travel, you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day, and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl. The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    > you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably still less than simply breathing the air in a city, though. > and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30 years). > The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP. And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil. By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over a very large population, you could calculate some number of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about 100mSv are harmless. In any case, at that level, the risk for any given individual is so small, that it disappears next to any other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into account for your personal behavior.

dboreham 4y ago

This was the original (1040s, Fermi) idea, hence reactors in Idaho (after becoming alarmed that they had constructed a reactor in downtown Chicago). I think however there's a reason this isn't done now: it acknowledges that large reactors aren't safe (which they're not), therefore begs the question why build them at all. For the idea to become viable, climate change would need to become a much more immediate pressing concern, allowing the trade off to be made between irradiating some Utah desert vs boiling the planet.

ncmncm 4y ago
Lots of reasons invite the question, why build them at all? There is no answer, because we have overwhelmingly more attractive alternatives.

Bromeo 4y ago

I don't disagree with your main point, but what's the point of making a nature preserve in an already uninhabited area? Since it's uninhabited right now the animals are probably doing just fine. Also, power plants (of any kind) need heavy machinery for construction as well as regular maintenance.

ncmncm 4y ago
A nature preserve is there to keep somebody sweeping in anytime and eliminating the habitat. Which happens all the damn time. Starbase, e.g.

bell-cot 4y ago

Planning nuclear power plants based upon the Chernobyl disaster is kinda like planning road and bridge construction based upon the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) ) Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down IMMEDIATELY."

ncmncm 4y ago
They all resemble a historic disaster, more or less. Renewables don't, though.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Ah, no. The (numerous) historic disasters which most renewables resemble are those where civilizations implicitly assumed that the current climate - patterns of wind, rain, temperature, etc. - would continue indefinitely. Then...SH*T, the climate changed, often over rather large areas, and the civilization(s) which had conveniently assumed that that couldn't happen suffered or failed. (If you're not familiar with this in the context of renewable energy, then you might want to google for news stories on what the long-term drought in the western U.S. is doing to the "sure thing, forever" supply of hydroelectricity at many of the major dams.)
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Moving goalposts, much? The environs of Hoover Dam are exactly as safe today as 10,000 years ago, and will reliably be as safe 10,000 years in the future provided no nukes blow up upwind or upstream. Solar panels floating on the Hoover Dam reservoir will happily produce as much power as the dam at full tilt, with enough left over to pump water back up to it for overnight use, reduce evaporation enough that water drought will be substantially less problematic, and provide power for desalination besides. Floating, water-chilled panels will last at least 50 years, by which time they will likely not be needed anymore.