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You know how I know environmentalists are just dragging their feet on nuclear for ideological reasons? When we talk about a storage facility for nuclear waste,

You know how I know environmentalists are just dragging their feet on nuclear for ideological reasons? When we talk about a storage facility for nuclear waste, a scenario they insist you prepare for: if human civilization completely collapses to the point that any of the currently spoken languages on earth are no longer able to be read how to we keep the, whatever comes after us, from busting up the concrete and digging down deep into the earth and playing with it. That's the last gasp of someone out of obstructionist ideas. I've had these people tell me that launching the waste into the sun would be dangerous for the sun, they aren't serious and need to be ignored. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...

dane-pgp 4y ago
> if human civilization completely collapses Even if it doesn't, nuclear waste storage is still a very expensive and indefinitely long project (assuming you want to keep adding to it, stop it poisoning the ground water, and stop terrorists getting access to it, etc.) > I've had these people tell me that It's still strawmanning if you pick an actual bad argument that someone told you and don't just come up with the bad argument yourself. I'm sure you're smart enough to imagine the failure modes of trying to launch millions of rockets full of nuclear waste, so the environmentalists are right to oppose such an idea even if they can't articulate why.
- pornel 4y ago
  You know nuclear waste isn't green glowing leaky barrells like in cartoons, right? It's stored as solid glass. For super-duper cautious extra safety it can be stored below ground water levels. The volume of the high-level waste is relatively tiny (roughly a swimming pool per year per country). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    You're right, it sounds like it should be easy to avoid these cartoonishly bad outcomes, but unfortunately reality doesn't always meet our expectations. "Why Germany is digging up its nuclear waste" "But the waste had to be stored somewhere, so the voices that warned against selecting Asse II were ignored." "The office concluded that the risk of groundwater contamination was too big, and the only truly safe option was to retrieve all the waste from the mine and store it elsewhere." https://euobserver.com/eu-political/132085 https://euobserver.com/eu-political/132085 (Thank you for offering a fact-based criticism, though, rather than just angrily downvoting.)
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      > Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. > “Today, nobody would choose this mine to place radioactive waste,” Bautz told journalists during a recent tour of the mine, in the north-western state of Lower Saxony. How is this applicable in 2022? This proves his point, not yours. The problems from your article have long been solved.
      - dane-pgp 4y ago
        I'm just not convinced by the argument "Nuclear power is safe as long as we don't make any of the mistakes of previous generations". Chernobyl didn't make the mistakes of Windscale; Fukushima didn't make the mistakes of Chernobyl; and future nuclear power stations won't make the mistakes of Fukushima (hopefully). It's possible that the track record for nuclear plants, and handling radioactive waste, is getting better, but it's also possible that on the scale of hundreds of years, there will be new things that go wrong which we didn't predict. I'm not asking for perfection, though. All I'm saying is that nuclear energy has a history of costing more and being more deadly than its proponents claim, and it's already too expensive to build (both generation and waste storage) at scale, safely, and on time in nearly all countries.
        pornel 4y ago
        Count how many people have died in these accidents directly and possibly from thyroid cancers, and compare to lung cancers attributed to coal. Coal kills way more people. It's killing right now. There are estimates that more people died from fuel poverty due to closure of Fukushima and subsequent raise in fuel prices, than the Fukushima accident itself. Coal power plants release more radioactive pollution than nuclear power plants, simply because coal is never 100% pure and the sheer volume of coal burned. So you are demanding perfection. Your fear of hypothetical future risk of harm is perpetuating the actual harm currently happening.
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
Also, as a more near term issue, say next 1000 years, what happens in case of war? Right now number of nuclear plants are so few that each could be tracked by the world, e.g. Russia getting hold of Chernobyl area was frightening. But if there are 10 times or even 100 times more number of plants in many more countries, some country will use some other's nuclear plant to prove collateral damage, what Iraq did to Kuwait(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires)
- willcipriano 4y ago
  For thirty years people have been asking that question, telling us to use "renewables" instead. Renewables aren't getting here fast enough, we can wait another thirty years burning fossil fuels or we can start building nuclear plants now.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Building nuclear plants is really not something that I'd put in the category of "things one can do quickly".
  - Kon5ole 4y ago
    Renewables are getting here faster than nuclear. At a fundamental level this is because you can mobilize a lot more manpower building renewables than you can building nuclear. A million homeowners adding solar power versus decade-long nuclear power plant projects. During the past decade in Germany, renewables added more power generation capacity than all the remaining nuclear reactors did combined. That energy is here now, and half of it gave benefits already 5 years ago. So I don't think it's wise to divert money from renewables and storage to build new nuclear, but keeping existing nuclear around for as long as possible is a completely different matter.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      > That energy is here now Is it? "CO2 emissions per capita in Germany are equivalent to 9.44 tons per person" [0] "CO2 emissions per capita in France are equivalent to 5.13 tons per person" [1] [0]https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/germany-co2-emission https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/germany-co2-emis... & https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location... [1]https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emiss... & https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=FR https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
legulere 4y ago
How many of the languages that were spoken 10000 years ago do we still speak? Launching nuclear waste in space is dangerous, not because of what it will do there but because a lot of rockets explode on their way there scattering parts as fine particles all over the world.
- haadej 4y ago
  Modern rockets, such as the Falcon 9, have an extremely low failure rate. Falcon 9 itself has had over 160 launches, with only 1 complete failure.
  - martin_a 4y ago
    Would you bet that there's not a second failure which distributes nuclear waste in our atmosphere?
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      You mean like a coal plant operating under normal conditions?
      - martin_a 4y ago
        [flagged]
cratermoon 4y ago
Maybe it's more of a problem than pro-nuke people think. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14179-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14179-w

dane-pgp 4y ago

> if human civilization completely collapses Even if it doesn't, nuclear waste storage is still a very expensive and indefinitely long project (assuming you want to keep adding to it, stop it poisoning the ground water, and stop terrorists getting access to it, etc.) > I've had these people tell me that It's still strawmanning if you pick an actual bad argument that someone told you and don't just come up with the bad argument yourself. I'm sure you're smart enough to imagine the failure modes of trying to launch millions of rockets full of nuclear waste, so the environmentalists are right to oppose such an idea even if they can't articulate why.

pornel 4y ago
You know nuclear waste isn't green glowing leaky barrells like in cartoons, right? It's stored as solid glass. For super-duper cautious extra safety it can be stored below ground water levels. The volume of the high-level waste is relatively tiny (roughly a swimming pool per year per country). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  You're right, it sounds like it should be easy to avoid these cartoonishly bad outcomes, but unfortunately reality doesn't always meet our expectations. "Why Germany is digging up its nuclear waste" "But the waste had to be stored somewhere, so the voices that warned against selecting Asse II were ignored." "The office concluded that the risk of groundwater contamination was too big, and the only truly safe option was to retrieve all the waste from the mine and store it elsewhere." https://euobserver.com/eu-political/132085 https://euobserver.com/eu-political/132085 (Thank you for offering a fact-based criticism, though, rather than just angrily downvoting.)
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    > Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. > “Today, nobody would choose this mine to place radioactive waste,” Bautz told journalists during a recent tour of the mine, in the north-western state of Lower Saxony. How is this applicable in 2022? This proves his point, not yours. The problems from your article have long been solved.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      I'm just not convinced by the argument "Nuclear power is safe as long as we don't make any of the mistakes of previous generations". Chernobyl didn't make the mistakes of Windscale; Fukushima didn't make the mistakes of Chernobyl; and future nuclear power stations won't make the mistakes of Fukushima (hopefully). It's possible that the track record for nuclear plants, and handling radioactive waste, is getting better, but it's also possible that on the scale of hundreds of years, there will be new things that go wrong which we didn't predict. I'm not asking for perfection, though. All I'm saying is that nuclear energy has a history of costing more and being more deadly than its proponents claim, and it's already too expensive to build (both generation and waste storage) at scale, safely, and on time in nearly all countries.
      - pornel 4y ago
        Count how many people have died in these accidents directly and possibly from thyroid cancers, and compare to lung cancers attributed to coal. Coal kills way more people. It's killing right now. There are estimates that more people died from fuel poverty due to closure of Fukushima and subsequent raise in fuel prices, than the Fukushima accident itself. Coal power plants release more radioactive pollution than nuclear power plants, simply because coal is never 100% pure and the sheer volume of coal burned. So you are demanding perfection. Your fear of hypothetical future risk of harm is perpetuating the actual harm currently happening.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

Also, as a more near term issue, say next 1000 years, what happens in case of war? Right now number of nuclear plants are so few that each could be tracked by the world, e.g. Russia getting hold of Chernobyl area was frightening. But if there are 10 times or even 100 times more number of plants in many more countries, some country will use some other's nuclear plant to prove collateral damage, what Iraq did to Kuwait(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires)

willcipriano 4y ago
For thirty years people have been asking that question, telling us to use "renewables" instead. Renewables aren't getting here fast enough, we can wait another thirty years burning fossil fuels or we can start building nuclear plants now.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Building nuclear plants is really not something that I'd put in the category of "things one can do quickly".
- Kon5ole 4y ago
  Renewables are getting here faster than nuclear. At a fundamental level this is because you can mobilize a lot more manpower building renewables than you can building nuclear. A million homeowners adding solar power versus decade-long nuclear power plant projects. During the past decade in Germany, renewables added more power generation capacity than all the remaining nuclear reactors did combined. That energy is here now, and half of it gave benefits already 5 years ago. So I don't think it's wise to divert money from renewables and storage to build new nuclear, but keeping existing nuclear around for as long as possible is a completely different matter.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    > That energy is here now Is it? "CO2 emissions per capita in Germany are equivalent to 9.44 tons per person" [0] "CO2 emissions per capita in France are equivalent to 5.13 tons per person" [1] [0]https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/germany-co2-emission https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/germany-co2-emis... & https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location... [1]https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emiss... & https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=FR https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

legulere 4y ago

How many of the languages that were spoken 10000 years ago do we still speak? Launching nuclear waste in space is dangerous, not because of what it will do there but because a lot of rockets explode on their way there scattering parts as fine particles all over the world.

haadej 4y ago
Modern rockets, such as the Falcon 9, have an extremely low failure rate. Falcon 9 itself has had over 160 launches, with only 1 complete failure.
- martin_a 4y ago
  Would you bet that there's not a second failure which distributes nuclear waste in our atmosphere?
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    You mean like a coal plant operating under normal conditions?
    - martin_a 4y ago
      [flagged]

cratermoon 4y ago

Maybe it's more of a problem than pro-nuke people think. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14179-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14179-w