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Nuclear energy is clean

470 points by mpweiher 4y ago

JanisErdmanis 4y ago
I find it asonishing that only now I learn that radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous. Also other good arguments are put forward by normalizing material costs VS expected energy production capacity.
- p1esk 4y ago
  radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous If it’s radioactive it’s dangerous. The article points out that radioactive waste doesn’t stay radioactive for very long, contrary to what is commonly believed.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    Radioactive sources have all kinds of applications in industry and medicine. If you have been to the dentist, you have probably been near one. They are dangerous in the same sense that a falling brick is dangerous.
    - timr 4y ago
      Come to New York to see the extent to which a fearful people will go to prevent the danger from falling bricks. [1] /s I'm joking here, but the joke underscores a painful truth: an irrationally fearful, small group of people seem to be able to utterly paralyze democratic society, and this pathology seems to be worse in societies that self-identify as focused on collective good. People who define themselves by their own idealism are easily sidetracked by hypothetical risks. As for New York, it isn't entirely unrelated that they're shutting down their one remaining nuclear plant (and as a result, dramatically increasing NYCs dependency on fossil fuels) [2]. [1] https://www.6sqft.com/the-number-of-sidewalk-sheds-in-nyc-has-tripled-over-past-two-decades/ https://www.6sqft.com/the-number-of-sidewalk-sheds-in-nyc-ha... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/nyregion/indian-point-power-plant-closing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/nyregion/indian-point-pow...
    - p1esk 4y ago
      I’m sorry, are you questioning the fact that exposure to strong gamma radiation would kill you? What are you talking about?
      - stefan_ 4y ago
        It can kill you like taking a fork to the nearest power outlet can kill you. Do you suggest we get rid of them? Of course not. They are risks to be managed, and history suggests the risk is fantastically low.
        p1esk 4y ago
        How is this relevant? Did you read JanisErdmanis’ comment I responded to?
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    Bananas are radioactive and not dangerous.
    - p1esk 4y ago
      In the context of a discussion about nuclear reactors bananas are not radioactive.
epistasis 4y ago
> But the amount of concrete and steel for sun and wind is striking. This has to do with the low energy density of these two. No, it's not striking at all, and this is just as BS argument as the people arguing that nuclear isn't clean. As far as the energy density, include all the steel and concrete used outside of the reaction chamber, and you will find that nuclear and solar are pretty much on the same order of magnitude, and that's using the numbers from newer reactor designs that have consciously tried to reduce the amount of concrete by a factor of two. But of course, all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy.
- ggm 4y ago
  To me, it's about the shape of the logistic curve from planning, through construction to supply, and it's lifetime. We should start nuclear construction now, but for supply in 8+ years time. And therefore we should start increasing construction of wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery now, to supply lower watts, but useful watts inside the 8 year window. As supply matches demand we can remove coal and gas, and when the nuclear comes on line, increase the pace of their removal and repurpose surplus wind and solar to hydrogen production for ammonia, and hydrogen fuel cells, and domestic gas replacement.
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    We should do some of all of that, I agree in large part (along with some diversified storage), the issue as the parent comment pointed out is who is going to stake billions on what looks like it will be a risky and poor ROI with significant construction delays and cost overruns. Would be easier for China
- losteric 4y ago
  > all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy. I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There are numerous startups working to bring down cost. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
elietoubi 4y ago
Super interesting how there is a big push for nuclear in the tech world right now. To play the devils advocate, there are some pretty solid reasons why Nuclear is not ideal.The biggest one to me is the risk or nuclear material proliferation: Iran for instance is hiding their military nuclear program behind a civilian nuclear goal. Nuclear is probably net better than coal but it's not the (only) solution to climate change.
- tehsauce 4y ago
  If the US built more clean nuclear plants that would somehow help Iran develop nuclear weapons faster? Surely the slope cannot be that slippery.
  - dugite-code 4y ago
    Clearly that was used as a historical example of a bad actor. The nuclear debate is not a US only discusion
  - hammock 4y ago
    It might help the US develop more nuclear weapons faster…
    - mgfist 4y ago
      The US has been decommissioning nukes for ages now. They're expensive as hell to maintain and the US has enough to flatten the earth as is.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  > Super interesting how there is a big push for nuclear in the tech world right now. And about the why, here's the reason. https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumption-carbon-footprin/ https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti...
- jeffbee 4y ago
  It's only "super interesting" to those who study astroturfing and other forms of manipulative public relations.
tehsauce 4y ago
I’m curious what caused those 0.02 deaths per terawatt for solar.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  Roof installers (no cap).
- zbrozek 4y ago
  At a guess, accidents during installation or maintenance, e.g., falling off a roof or grabbing live high voltage DC.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tus666 4y ago
> The argument is well known: nuclear power causes pollution It does? News to me.
- cesarb 4y ago
  Nuclear power has a paradox with respect to pollution: it's a highly dangerous form of pollution (heavy metals which are also radioactive), but in normal operation, it's completely contained (and nuclear power operators tend to be very paranoid about it; minor amounts of radiation which would be considered harmless everywhere else are treated as unacceptable outside the designated radioactive areas). So depending on how you look of it, it can either have a high amount of dangerous pollution, or none at all. (There's another form of pollution from nuclear power plants, which is heat pollution from discharged cooling water, but most people aren't talking about that.)
  - tamaharbor 4y ago
    The energy it takes to refine the uranium is also not zero.
    - runarberg 4y ago
      And uranium mining operations are also known for leaving a bit of a mess around them, polluting nearby rivers, etc. Suspiciously often close to indigenous lands as well.
  - mgfist 4y ago
    Nuclear power pollution is the best kind: dense and contained. Imagine I tell you we could put 10% of the world's trash in a olympic sized swimming pool. Pretty appealing eh?
    - tus666 4y ago
      That's not pollution - that is waste. Waste =/= pollution.
bad_alloc 4y ago
We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens, like in the case of the stolen solar power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokmak_Solar_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokmak_Solar_Energy).
- Barrin92 4y ago
  particularly relevant because the need for more energy is by far strongest in regions that are geopolitical hotbeds with often unstable governments and threats of terrorism. With nuclear infrastructure both as a target and source for material.
- peppertree 4y ago
  Nuclear energy is safe but humans are not.
  - boredemployee 4y ago
    Yep. It's amazing the effort we have to spent to avoid disasters provoked by our own specie.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Yes. So we have to make decisions with those two factors in mind
  - otikik 4y ago
    We have people dying of breathing complications right now and we have so much CO2 in our atmosphere that we're changing the weather. We need nuclear energy precisely because humans are not safe.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power. Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees. On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact. But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.
tern 4y ago
Potentially we can't build nuclear fast enough to replace fossil fuels https://youtu.be/O0pt3ioQuNc https://youtu.be/O0pt3ioQuNc 22:19
I_am_tiberius 4y ago
I think nuclear power plants aren't worth the risk. I often hear arguments such as that modern reactors don't have the issues old ones had etc.. As long as it can't be guaranteed to me that e.g. a terror attack doesn't cause a 1000 km2 area around the plant to be unlivable for 100 years, I most likely won't change my opinion. I think living in the stone age is better than taking the risk.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  I think this line of thinking has defaulted us onto a path of drastically increased carbon in the atmosphere, with no signs of stopping, which is at best going to drastically change the world and take centuries to remove, and at worst could trigger a massive biosphere collapse that drives our species to extinction. The Earth has 150 MILLION km2 of land. We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 km2 unlivable patches of ground and still be perfectly fine. Prioritize your fear.
  - I_am_tiberius 4y ago
    Why do you think you have to decide between bad and worse? I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle.
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      I don't. I think the generation before me misprioritized their fear and decided to block progress on nuclear fission, which implicitly supported the continued expansion of carbon fuel burning, to the detriment of future generations. It's an observation of historical fact, not a future decision. > I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle. I think we should prioritize the continuance of civilization over the planet. The planet and life on it will be perfectly fine after we're gone. It's been through drastically worse.
    - mgfist 4y ago
      Because you have to look at reality. You may be willing to do that (though I doubt it), but people at large do not.
mah4k4l 4y ago
Plutonium problem multiplies in top predators. Here already for thousands of years now thanks to nuclear plant disasters. Which are avoided by causing a slow power plant disaster by releasing radioactive pressure to the environment. Guy Debord's comment on this from Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: "much more civilized to sip a littl wine all of the time than to drink the whole bottle all at once like a Pole" :-) Nuclear energy is a subsidised energy source, lobbied by powers that be on the corridors of power in the EU and everywhere else. Solar is cheaper. Humanity is out of it's depth with this stuff. Could cause massive extinction event eventually even if we stopped now by killing and mutating sperm cells and all that. Go have a holiday in Fukushima. Go visit the deformed children still born in Uzbekistan near these places.
felixfurtak 4y ago
> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper .. unless it gets inside you, in which case it can be extremely damaging.
jmyeet 4y ago
Ok, so another pro-nuclear puff piece. Why do I say that? Because it talks about nuclear waste without ever mentioning the other kind: fuel processing waste. Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different processes. So U-235 and U-238 are chemically identical. So how do you enrich a sample? Centrifuges. You make a Uranium gas. The U-238 molecules will be heavier. Spin them in a centrifuge and you can extract them at a greater percentage and then pass on the gas to the next centrifuge. You do this repeatedly until you get the enrichment level you want and then extract the metal from the gas. The gas of choice is UF6 (Uranium Hexaflouride). That itself is a toxic byproduct that needs to be stored or otherwise dealt with. We don't really have a good solution for this either. There is some reprocessing that basically turns UF6 into less toxic UF4 but it's not really economic. As always, pro-nuclear propaganda focuses on deaths because deaths doesn't capture the negative impact of nuclear. Why? Because the Chernobyl disaster directly killed less than 100 (it also probably killed tens of thousands through cancers in the following years but that's harder to attribute and easier for people to collectively ignore). But still the Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone, from one incident, is quite literally 1,000 square miles even now, almost 40 years later. Deaths or deaths per TWh just doesn't capture that impact and those failure modes, which is precisely why such propaganda focuses on deaths. But none of that is the big problem with commercial nuclear power. It's the fallibility of humans to manage, maintain, build and transport and store (fuel and waste) to a sufficient level to avoid disasters. The profit motive provides an incentive to skimp on some or all of these. Corruption is an issue with both corporations and governments. Humans are just incredibly bad at managing long-term consequences, which is why we have the climate crisis to begin with.
- tedk-42 4y ago
  How many years have France been safely operating their Nuclear plants? Germany too? You speak of a Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I don't see anyone living where they've put up large scale solar farms or next to wind turbines. You're right about humans not managing long term consequences well. From lead poisoning 40 years ago to 20 years from now when we have to deal with the waste of solar left behind (perhaps toxic waste if not dealt with right now). We need nuclear now. No nonsense blockers. Build more plants and replace the coal, oil and gas base load stations we're running now to try slow the rate of carbon we're throwing into the sky. And yes, we need more investment into solar and wind. It's a solution that is solved by multiple alternatives, not dummies getting behind one alternative and saying no to the rest.
nimbius 4y ago
I really want to believe nuclear is as clean as the author says, but the biggest challenge is storing the waste for three hundred years. were talking small amounts, sure, but contamination of groundwater and surrounding soil isn't something we in the US have a stellar track record with. camp lejunes benzene contaminated drinking water happened in only a 29 year span, and the only real remedy is a class action lawsuit. no one admitted fault. most of our reactors are elderly, and most of the regulatory capture means they leak like a sieve and rarely face any consequences or shutdowns. until we reform the edifice that controls this waste I fear nuclear will just be another headline crisis event.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Storing waste for 300 years isn't a huge problem. Dry casks shouldn't go anywhere. The problem is dealing with the waste at that point, because it's so radiologically cold an amateur terrorist group could extract the plutonium, which is almost entirely still there.
jaimex2 4y ago
Tell that to anyone trying to decommission a reactor. France is having a great time.
Beldin 4y ago
The article is a bit fast and loose with its data. Borssele indeed has limited high-energy radioactive waste; the article omits that there is also low-energy radioactive waste - a lot more, in fact. Similarly, recycling may be a problem for solar panels, but is that better for nuclear? I have never heard / read about how to recycle the (radioactive) non-fuel parts of a nuclear reactor. I'm not against nuclear per se, but articles such as this one don't help. I think there's a genuine case for nuclear to be made; this isn't it.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Recycling is not in fact any kind of problem for solar. There is a large, organized campaign by the derelict energy industry to plant the meme of solar as some kind of toxic menace but it just isn't one. There is no cadmium in solar panels. There was a small amount in thin film panels briefly favored by utility-scale solar plants but thin film is economically dead and nobody is buying those. Antimony is used in the glass, not the panel. The glass contains ~1g/kg of antimony, and PV panels contain about 50 tonnes of glass per MW (most of the panel mass is the glass). That works out to 50kg of antimony per MW, i.e. basically none. If you took all the antimony out of a 1GW solar plant and somehow dissolved it in water - which can't happen because antimony trioxide isn't even soluble in water, and dissolving metals out of glass with water is practically impossible - and if you dumped all that into Lake Shasta, it would still be within drinking water standards. And again, nobody will dump this into the environment because fifty million kilos of high-grade glass is going to get recycled, not dumped. I think it's sad that the nuclear boosters are being duped into spreading these lies about solar panels.
Animats 4y ago
Waste disposal isn't that hard. The Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland pretty much has it covered. First, you find a hard-rock mountain where geology shows nothing much happening in the last few million years, and there's nothing worth mining. Worldwide, there are many mountain ranges like that. Then tunnel way down, but preferably above the water table. Drill holes in the tunnel floor. Put waste in suitable containers. There are a few approaches. Mixing the waste with molten glass and pouring it into big stainless steel thimbles is one approach. Put containers in holes. Fill with bentonite. Seal off with concrete. Eventually, seal off the whole installation and forget about it.
- purerandomness 4y ago
  How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?
  - jseliger 4y ago
    How do we communicate to civilisations in the present how bad the emissions from goal and gas plants are? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/why-the-new-pollution-literature-is-credible.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh... Because we appear to have no sense of proportion, or trade-offs.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Current thinking is not to mark the place. Why attract attention to it? Any future civilization capable of finding that it's interesting and digging down through a mile or more of hard rock and concrete probably knows about radioactivity.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain? The more dangerous stuff burns itself out quickly (short half-life), and the longer-lasting stuff is not very dangerous given the type of radiation it is and can be blocked quite easily So, probably bury it deep enough with little external sign that it's actually there, and if it is actually discovered it won't be that big of a deal: > The main concern associated with spent nuclear fuel – radioactivity – diminishes with time. > About 40 years after it's done making power, the heat and radioactivity of the fuel bundle will have fallen by over 99%. * https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148416881180674 https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148416881180674 > About three containers are needed to store the quantity of fuel that is removed each 12-24 months; the space taken up by even a 60 year plant life is less than is needed for a Wal-Mart even without any efforts to efficiently stack the containers. * https://atomicinsights.com/time-for-plan-b-yucca-mountain-project-should-close-shop/ https://atomicinsights.com/time-for-plan-b-yucca-mountain-pr...
entropicgravity 4y ago
Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge drop in the cost of solar and wind. Not only is solar/wind cheap but because these can be built in a year or two, as opposed to decades for nuclear, governments accountants will much prefer them over nuclear. Nuclear will have some niche segments and I see a small nuclear design is about to be approved in the US that would be useful. But in the big picture of over all power generation nuclear will continue to fade away.
- otikik 4y ago
  Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are only clean if their backup is clean, too. Otherwise they are an incomplete solution. Nuclear a better, greener backup.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. It depends on where you live. In my country (which is a huge country), the backup is hydroelectric dams. Burning fossil fuels (and nuclear) is mostly kept constant during the day, it's the hydroelectric dams which follow both the load and the changes in solar and wind.
- p_l 4y ago
  A big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't dispatchable. A 100 MWe nuclear power plant fitting in the space of small local power plant isn't equivalent of a 100MW solar or wind plant - for my local area, the equivalent solar/wind plant is about a combination of few Gigawatts of nameplate capacity of solar and wind plants (allowing for very optimistic storage tech, it gets "down" to 1180 MW solar + 410 MW wind + 840 MWh battery at 170MW output + 50MW hydrogen turbine backed by 10186 MWh stored hydrogen. It's also 1.5x the cost of plonking EPR-based NPP.) Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.
Flocular 4y ago
A good estimate to gauge the societal investment needed to generate electricity in a certain way, is to look at its total cost in dollar/MWh. Wikipedia has a nice graphic prepared for just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... (which ignores externalized costs like CO2 or nuclear waste) You can see in there that nuclear has triple the cost compared to solar. As we need to replace as much fossil-fueled power plants as possible and as quickly as possible, wasting ressources into building nuclear power plants sounds stupid. Other interesting factors: * Heating climate is a risk for nuclear https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-the-leading-cause-of-nuclear-power-outages/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t... * Maintenance cost is hard to predict https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-up-cost-of-nuclear-plant-outages https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-up-c... * 30 planned + 60 unplanned days shutdown on average https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252
- lmm 4y ago
  And how does that compare to the business-as-usual shutdowns of solar (every night, cloudy days, winter as a whole) which unlike nuclear are highly correlated between separate plants? If storage is cheap enough then solar will be an important part of the mix. But unless you have the right geography for geothermal or hydro (which probably means flooding a bigger area than the chernobyl exclusion zone before you've even started, but leaving that aside), nuclear is still the only viable option for clean, reliable baseline power. It's not an either/or, we should be building both.
  - Flocular 4y ago
    That is just to show that nuclear isn't a magical always-on power source that some of the pro-nuclear folks make it out to be. Also: we can install twice the capacity in MW for solar and still have money left over to put into a smarter grid or storage compared to nuclear.
    - 4y ago
crmd 4y ago
The most interesting thing in the article for me was that the 250 reactors needed to power Europe would produce 1.3 cubic kilometers of nuclear waste per year. That’s actually way more waste volume than I assumed. I wonder what the figure is for the United States.
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  there isn't enough uranium for that
- brutusborn 4y ago
  I couldn't find that number. Is it hidden in the figures or did you calculate it off something?
  - crmd 4y ago
    Those exact numbers are cited in the last paragraph of the article.
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      My bad, I skimmed it looking for km2 or 1.3.
- JanisErdmanis 4y ago
  Your numbers are wrong. It is a known fact that France produces less than ~ 1 m^3 radioactive waste annually.
  - Kon5ole 4y ago
    It is not not a known fact, it is in fact not true. France has over 1 million m3 of waste, and I assure you they have not been operating nuclear plants for over a million years. :) Sources: https://www.ompe.org/en/france-doesnt-know-what-to-do-with-its-radioactive-waste/ https://www.ompe.org/en/france-doesnt-know-what-to-do-with-i... The La Manche facility had 527 000m3 of waste in 1994: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredisposal-of-short-lived-waste-in-france/ https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredisposal-of-shor...
GuB-42 4y ago
> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper. It is indeed harmless outside of your body, but it is devastating inside of your body. The reason is that outside of your body, it is blocked by your layer of dead skin, if it gets to it, your dead skin ends up pretty messed up as it absorbs all the energy of the alpha particle. But no big deal, it is dead, doesn't take part of your biology, can't turn cancerous. But now, if that alpha emitter ends up inside of your body, maybe in your lungs as you breathe in radioactive dust, it will end up dumping all of its energy inside of your live cells, damaging DNA and doing everything bad ionizing radiation can do. Gamma radiation, the unstoppable one is actually less dangerous if it finds its way inside your body, that's because it will go right through it, it will mess up a few cells on its way out, but most of its energy will be dumped outside of you.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  How is it going to get inside your body?
  - GuB-42 4y ago
    Mostly from dust you breathe in, or contaminated water or food. And in one famous case, injected by a secret agent using an umbrella.
    - dxdm 4y ago
      > And in one famous case, injected by a secret agent using an umbrella I think you're mixing up the Litvinenko murder, which used polonium in a beverage, and Makenko, who got injected with poision with the tip of an umbrella.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  Apparently the author has never heard of Polonium-210, arguably the deadliest substance on Earth. what makes it so deadly is it has an extremely short half life (~138 days) and releases almost all of that energy as alpha particles. How leathal? Roughly 6.8 trillionths of a gram [1]. Luckily Po-210 isn't a huge danger because of the short half life and it's really only produced by governments in very small quantities. But the point is that any alpha particle emitter ingested is potentially a massive health risk. And what happens at an accident like Chernobyl? It scatters a ton of dust over a huge area that consists of many radioactive isotopes, some of which are just toxic by themselves (eg Caesium) but also some of them are alpha particle emitters. That dust gets into the food chain. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-polonium-idINDEE87T0EJ20120830 https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-po...
more_corn 4y ago
Except when it isn’t. Granted it’s cleaner than coal and gas. But there’s the pesky problem of waste, plants that cost billions, decom is not cheap, easy or clean. Oh and the financial incentives to operate longer and cheaper than is safe.
jbverschoor 4y ago
The problem with nuclear energy is that lekker don’t understand how it works. It’s some magic invisible thing, radiation will kill everyone, and an accident will wipe away half the planet. The public should be educated how reactors work, and what the risks are, and what the limits of those risks are.
vlunkr 4y ago
Really interesting to see how much people fight nuclear power. We’ve been complaining about fossil fuels for decades, and now that the US seems to be seriously exploring a viable alternative you’re going to complain about it? I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it?
- indymike 4y ago
  > I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it? This is really what the whole argument boils down to: nuclear, or global warming. There's really not real, feasible renewable answer. It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors. Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > There's really not real, feasible renewable answer. But there is, and it's likely cheaper than the nuclear answer.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors. At least for solar, that comparison is specious. It would be like separately counting each rod or even each pellet of nuclear fuel in a reactor's core, and using that as an argument against nuclear power. It makes more sense to compare whole solar power plants, not individual panels. From a quick look at the data for my country, most solar power plants have over 20 MW output each, and they are in facilities with 3-10 solar power plants. Looking at the same data source, wind also seems to use a similar grouping here (power plants containing several turbines with a total output over 20MW, then grouped into facilities with 3-10 power plants). > Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power. Cost is not the only argument. If you want to make it quickly, construction time is just as important, and nuclear loses badly here (though I might be a bit biased on that, since the latest reactor being built near where I live has been under construction for decades, with no end in sight). Solar and to a lesser extent wind have the advantage of simplicity and modularity, which tend to not only reduce the cost, but also enable them to be built quicker and in parallel, and make them much less risky to build; if one out of ten 20 MW solar power plants being built hits a problem, you still have the other nine, but if your single 1350 MW reactor being built since the 1980s hits some unexpected problem, you have nothing. As for the level of regulation, it's an unavoidable consequence of how dangerous nuclear fuel (and the materials and fluids irradiated by it in the reactor core) is; you have to make sure it stays contained, so that a nuclear power plant is as safe as (or even safer than) other kinds of power plant. But that's not the whole reason for the high cost; there's the complexity of the reactor itself (including materials which can resist the radiation), and nuclear power plants tend to use things like a single hydrogen-cooled gigawatt-power turbine for each reactor core. Just the electrical infrastructure (transformers, circuit breakers, etc) which can deal with gigawatt levels of power at once is already costly.
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stevenjgarner 4y ago
Before we get all gung-ho on nuclear power, perhaps we could try solving the existential nuclear problems we already have. FACTS [0]: 1. The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'. 2. The transport of this waste poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment. 3. Plutonium is the most dangerous material in the world. 4. Nuclear waste is hazardous for tens of thousands of years. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations. 5. Even if put into a geological repository, the waste might emerge and threaten future generations. 6. Nobody knows the true costs of waste management. The costs are so high that nuclear power can never be economic. IMO, nuclear power does not represent what's best about the US but highlights its weaknesses. Americans love their quarterly reports, but are not good so good at 100 year plans, let alone 100,000 year plans. Nuclear waste lasts for a very long time. The amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at US nuclear power plants continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year [1]. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. Federal funding for the Repository ened amidst widespread national, state, regional and tribal opposition. [2]. Meanwhile the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades. So yeah you the US taxpayer are paying for it, whether your utility use nuclear generated electricity or not. => The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'. Without a permanent national storage solution, the government pays the utilities to store the waste on site. Over time utilities move some of the older spent fuel into "dry cask" storage. These casks are stainless steel canisters surrounded by concrete. Fuel is typically cooled at least five years in the pool before transfer to cask. NRC has authorized transfer as early as three years; the industry norm is about 10 years. The NRC certifies cask designs and licenses dry cask storage facilities for up to 40 years. [3] Not thousands of years! Assuming idealistically that generation of nuclear power stops today, then the EXISTING nuclear waste will have to be stored not for hundreds of years, not for thousands of years, not for tens of thousands of years, but for hundreds of thousands of years. That is the existing waste, which will continue to cost "tens of billions of dollars per decades", with a lifetime storage cost that makes the cost of the original nuclear power plant (typically with only a 30-year life anyway) negligible by comparison. Again that is the exsiting waste. So assuming we continue to generate nuclear power, the nuclear waste continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year, each ton with its own lifetime storage cost. And we're talking about GROWING that nuclear capacity. Let's grow the already exponential lifetime storage cost. Not even the Federal Reserve of the United States of America will be able to create enough money to pay for the total cost of ownership of nuclear power. There are different types of nuclear waste - high-level waste, transuranic waste, Uranium or thorium mill tailings, Low-level waste, Technologically enhanced naturally-occurring radioactive material (TENORM) [4]. Like most things, these too follow the 80/20 rule - 80% of the waste is lower level waste and 20% is higher level waste. Make sure you know which waste is being discussed. Each type must be disposed of according to its risk to human health and the environment. Plutonium Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years! That is the time it takes for the radioactive level to become half of what it is now. The nation has over 85,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. DOE is responsible for disposing of this high-level waste in a permanent geologic repository, but has yet to build such a facility because policymakers have been at an impasse over what to do with this spent fuel since 2010. As a result, the amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at nuclear power plants across the country continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year. Meanwhile, the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades. DOE also oversees the treatment and disposal of about 90 million gallons of radioactive waste from the nation's nuclear weapons program. Most of this waste is stored in tanks at 3 DOE sites. According to federal law, certain high-level mixed waste must be vitrified—a process in which the waste is immobilized in glass—and disposed of in a deep geologic repository. However, DOE estimates that about 90% of the volume of this waste contains about 10% of the radioactivity and is therefore considered to be low-activity waste. [1] [0] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... [1] https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... [3] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r... [4] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste
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justatdotin 4y ago
toxic sludge is good for you
rkhassen9 4y ago
Only clean if you don't count the 24,000 years half life of the waste. Funny how 'waste'does not sound like a very clean word. What is clean is living in a way that doesn't consume so much energy. Can implement right now with no longterm repercussion, just a bit of short term pain of self control. Kind of like taking care of our own bodies.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  HN is the boostiest of the boosters with nuclear. It's just a bunch of cheerleaders. Just pass on all mentions of it. They've got absolutely zero interest in material reality here. It's completely fantasy driven. It's not worth it. They're way too ideologically committed
joak 4y ago
There is this idea that nuclear is not being deployed because people have a wrong perception of risks. However, the main reason is the economy. The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. We can blame regulation and the hypothetically wrong public perception about safety, but the reality is that costs cannot go down easily because of the innovation dynamics: 1. It takes several years to build a nuclear reactor. Hence, innovations take a decade to reach the market. Learning curve has to be slow. 2. A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped, it has to be build on site. This makes manufacturing automation, economies of scale and competition hard. In other words: you cannot have factories in China, or elsewhere, shipping cheap nuclear reactors all over the planet. A change in regulation might lower the costs, but it's not going to improve much the innovation dynamics. In conclusion, all this talking is mostly irrelevant: nuclear reactors are simply not going to be built because they are not competitive. And things are getting worse by the day because the alternatives have a better innovation cycle.
- m2fkxy 4y ago
  > In conclusion, (...) nuclear reactors are simply not going to be built because they are not competitive What do you mean? 50+ reactors are under construction as we write [1], and almost twice as much are planned [2] (with even more proposed). Furthermore: > A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped Marine nuclear reactors (of which 200-ish are in active service) and Chukotka's floating nuclear power plants are notable counter-examples. Especially with marine reactors being the baseline for the philosophy behind SMRs. [1] https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstructionreactorsbycountry.aspx https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstruction... [2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
  - rattray 4y ago
    Can you share sources? I'm surprised that so many reactors are being built.
    - 4y ago
exabrial 4y ago
Given the intense energy needed to produce steel towers, the mass amounts of concrete needed (which emits a lot if co2 as curses), fire roads created, carbon fiber blades created, shipped, et all what’s the payoff for a single wind tower all in? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of rational discussion.
phyzome 4y ago
The amount of bad comparisons and statistical sleight-of-hand in this piece is pretty astonishing.
stmfreak 4y ago
Clean because no one has yet measured the ten thousand year containment costs and unintentional releases. Clean because we have somehow written off the devastation of Chernobyl and Fukushima as trivial. I don’t want a nuclear plant within 100 miles of my home because I have lived through three meltdowns and do not want to be displaced by a fourth. But sure, in the moment nuclear emissions are super green.
- chrismartin 4y ago
  We gotta fill the gaps between intermittent output from renewables somehow. Would you rather fill those gaps with fossil fuels? Because that's the choice.
cycomanic 4y ago
This article perfectly exemplifies the arguments in discussions. Lets just concentrate on the waste discussion. The article says heavy metals in solar panels are a problem (I kind of agree, although the way it is described makes it out like we are talking about huge amounts, in reality the lead in solar panels is largely from soldering so very small amounts. Orders of magnitude more are being used for other applications (like car batteries)). They then say that recycling is currently still a problem (sort of true, although there are companies who say they can 100% recycling solar panels already). Similarly for wind they say we still don't know how to recycle the carbon blades, again sort of correct (but there are many other applications of carbon fibre which produce much more waste). Then when it comes to nuclear waste however, the argument is we can ignore pretty much all long lasting waste, because of some development in the future will make recycling of spend fuel rods feasible. So essentially he is comparing the current state of solar panel recycling to some future potential nuclear waste recycling. That's a dishonest comparison. Moreover ignoring the amount of waste from dismantling the nuclear power plant (which needs to go into nuclear storage because it is radioactive due to irradiation), while talking about the carbon fibre from wind turbines is also disingenuous. We see the same argumentive structure when talking about the economics; the current state of renewables is compared to some potential future state of nuclear. While in reality renewables are on an exponential cost reduction trajectory and all the nuclear potential is completely unproven.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jaredklewis 4y ago
  I agree with some of your criticism of the article, but I disagree that nuclear waste is a problem. Yes, we have to store it somewhere. But all US plants combined make ~5k cubic meters of nuclear waste a year. To put that in perspective, the strategic oil reserve is 100 million cubic meters. A single aircraft carrier is 2 million cubic meters. Political will aside, finding a place to store this stuff doesn’t seem like a massive problem.
  - arinlen 4y ago
Bolkan 4y ago
Aren't we going to deplete our uranium+thorium resources by the year 2100?
LightG 4y ago
Same vibe: "Fuel scarcity is not a problem. Russia is now a reliable and stable power supplier."
kiemrong08 4y ago
Solar power basiclly is nuclear energy
ephimetheus 4y ago
> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper. That is not correct. Yes, alpha radiation doesn’t penetrate skin, but is dangerous if you ingest it. That’s one of the reasons people have abandoned underground long-term storage sites: they all eventually have water break ins and the worry is that the waste will contaminate fresh water supplies.
LatteLazy 4y ago
The killer for nuclear is the expense and the non-zero risk of catastrophe. No one has a real plan to deal with the costs (it's a very large problem with political issues around waste costs). Modular reactors might help with this (small or not) but who wants to spend a trillion £/$/Euros to find out they don't? Most people insist on pretending the costs aren't prohibitive and that's not really a viable solution. No one has a real plan to deal with risks: * like it or not you cannot compare all risks on a simple probabilitycost basis. People treat a 1/1mil chance they will lose their homes more seriously than a 1/10 chance they will get lung cancer in 40 years. the underlying issues are not technological, they're organisational and political (We've had safe reactor designs for decades, then someone comes along and disables all the safety features to get 5% more power to secure their quarterly bonus). So you cannot solve them with a redesign at a tech level.
Kon5ole 4y ago
The article seems to support its headline by claiming that most of the millions of m3 of waste currently being stored by nuclear operating nations doesn't exist and that the remaining part is harmless because it's only plutonium.
d--b 4y ago
The article makes its point well, but its title is unnecessarily polarizing. However little, fission does produce dangerous materials that need to be handled very carefully and stored in places where nobody cares that they are actually radioactive. What if fission was to replace 90% of other energy sources. Would you trust everyone in the world to dispose of their waste responsibly? And while Chernobyl is far in the rear-view mirror, Fukushima is not. So while improbable, it is hard to argue that catastrophic nuclear events won't happen again. Why not acknowledge the tradeoff in the title and say it's one of the cleanest and safest. People get the point about air travel: "it seems riskier because catastrophic failures are much more spectacular, but overall air travel is a lot safer than car travel". No one is saying "planes don't crash"
TedShiller 4y ago
Has this guy been to Fukushima?
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Fukushima. Chernobyl. What happens during a war when someone bombs a nuclear reactor? Clean doesn't mean safe.
floppiplopp 4y ago
Not only is the waste a problem, we haven't found an adequate solution for in almost 70 years, but, again, the issue with nuclear is the amount of resources available. There simply isn't enough fissile material out there to make an impact on climate change.
uwagar 4y ago
lol
BlinkenBlinken 4y ago
As an comment on the article "nuclear-energy-is-clean". The rationale is that there is no problem, at least not a large one. Dilemma is the protection of future generations of mankind against possible hazards posed by stored nuclear waste products. Are we, humans capable of wielding this king of technology responsibly? Think about terrorism and dirty bombs. Or even more benign reactor disruption due to human error? After al, al humans are fallible. This remains a hot topic in any political arena's al over de globe. As for unforeseen consequences due to natural disaster, one might consider exposure to nuclear gamma radiation and poisoning. Can mankind handle this responsibility? I think not, see case Chernobyl. A perfect demonstration of human short comings and inability to cope with the aftermath. Keep in mind that MYRRHA is stil research. It remains to be seen of/when it is commercially viable. Also keep in mind the alternatives. E.g. a Molten Salt Reactor or MSR, people may hear the term Thorium reactor. Also research. Side note: As for the nuclear waste from Borssele which is in cased in glass to ensure stable storage and prevent leakage, it cannot be repurposed for reuse. Just my thoughts.
largolagrande 4y ago
[A sidenote about investing in nuclear plants, with the example of the UK] The United Kingdom is an interesting example of a country which is very interested in having nuclear power and which has less and less of it at the moment because of a lack of investment. As you probably know, the UK is fairly liberal country, which means that it relies heavily on private companies to get things achieved. Nuclear power, as opposed to coal and gas, has the particularity of having an economic structure in which you have to pay for almost everything before starting up the plant. You have a huge share of initial investment, and then the relative share of operating costs is very small. And when you are in a context where you have to pay for just about everything before you start the plant, it's a context in which, in the world of private capital, it's hard to to do. In other words, private companies like not to wait too long to see the ROI. So when you have to put in a lot of money, build for 8 years, possibly 10, possibly even 12 years, before you start to have a €1 turnover, this is stuff that the private sector doesn't like at all. So in the UK, the fact that the electricity production system was placed in the private domain (as in many other places in Europe, but it has been done even earlier in the UK than in the other places) led to a lack of investment in nuclear plants. (Exactly the same process happened with the railways in the UK)
vfclists 4y ago
No one ever head of the Integral Fast Reactor which uses the "nuclear waste" as fuel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU Somehow it never comes up in nuclear power discussions. The only problem with nuclear is there are no future sales from it. Capitalism works on having something to sell in the future. Once nuclear is reliable and safe there is no more money to be made from it and this is why all the Greens are no more than fronts for the fossil fuel industry. They are hellbent on pushing inadequate alternatives which make carbon based fuels the only reliable ones.

470 points by mpweiher 4y ago

I find it asonishing that only now I learn that radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous. Also other good arguments are put forward by normalizing material costs VS expected energy production capacity.

p1esk 4y ago
radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous If it’s radioactive it’s dangerous. The article points out that radioactive waste doesn’t stay radioactive for very long, contrary to what is commonly believed.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  Radioactive sources have all kinds of applications in industry and medicine. If you have been to the dentist, you have probably been near one. They are dangerous in the same sense that a falling brick is dangerous.
  - timr 4y ago
    Come to New York to see the extent to which a fearful people will go to prevent the danger from falling bricks. [1] /s I'm joking here, but the joke underscores a painful truth: an irrationally fearful, small group of people seem to be able to utterly paralyze democratic society, and this pathology seems to be worse in societies that self-identify as focused on collective good. People who define themselves by their own idealism are easily sidetracked by hypothetical risks. As for New York, it isn't entirely unrelated that they're shutting down their one remaining nuclear plant (and as a result, dramatically increasing NYCs dependency on fossil fuels) [2]. [1] https://www.6sqft.com/the-number-of-sidewalk-sheds-in-nyc-has-tripled-over-past-two-decades/ https://www.6sqft.com/the-number-of-sidewalk-sheds-in-nyc-ha... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/nyregion/indian-point-power-plant-closing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/nyregion/indian-point-pow...
  - p1esk 4y ago
    I’m sorry, are you questioning the fact that exposure to strong gamma radiation would kill you? What are you talking about?
    - stefan_ 4y ago
      It can kill you like taking a fork to the nearest power outlet can kill you. Do you suggest we get rid of them? Of course not. They are risks to be managed, and history suggests the risk is fantastically low.
      - p1esk 4y ago
        How is this relevant? Did you read JanisErdmanis’ comment I responded to?
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  Bananas are radioactive and not dangerous.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    In the context of a discussion about nuclear reactors bananas are not radioactive.

epistasis 4y ago

> But the amount of concrete and steel for sun and wind is striking. This has to do with the low energy density of these two. No, it's not striking at all, and this is just as BS argument as the people arguing that nuclear isn't clean. As far as the energy density, include all the steel and concrete used outside of the reaction chamber, and you will find that nuclear and solar are pretty much on the same order of magnitude, and that's using the numbers from newer reactor designs that have consciously tried to reduce the amount of concrete by a factor of two. But of course, all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy.

ggm 4y ago
To me, it's about the shape of the logistic curve from planning, through construction to supply, and it's lifetime. We should start nuclear construction now, but for supply in 8+ years time. And therefore we should start increasing construction of wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery now, to supply lower watts, but useful watts inside the 8 year window. As supply matches demand we can remove coal and gas, and when the nuclear comes on line, increase the pace of their removal and repurpose surplus wind and solar to hydrogen production for ammonia, and hydrogen fuel cells, and domestic gas replacement.
- kuhewa 4y ago
  We should do some of all of that, I agree in large part (along with some diversified storage), the issue as the parent comment pointed out is who is going to stake billions on what looks like it will be a risky and poor ROI with significant construction delays and cost overruns. Would be easier for China
losteric 4y ago
> all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy. I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There are numerous startups working to bring down cost. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

elietoubi 4y ago

Super interesting how there is a big push for nuclear in the tech world right now. To play the devils advocate, there are some pretty solid reasons why Nuclear is not ideal.The biggest one to me is the risk or nuclear material proliferation: Iran for instance is hiding their military nuclear program behind a civilian nuclear goal. Nuclear is probably net better than coal but it's not the (only) solution to climate change.

tehsauce 4y ago
If the US built more clean nuclear plants that would somehow help Iran develop nuclear weapons faster? Surely the slope cannot be that slippery.
- dugite-code 4y ago
  Clearly that was used as a historical example of a bad actor. The nuclear debate is not a US only discusion
- hammock 4y ago
  It might help the US develop more nuclear weapons faster…
  - mgfist 4y ago
    The US has been decommissioning nukes for ages now. They're expensive as hell to maintain and the US has enough to flatten the earth as is.
squarefoot 4y ago
> Super interesting how there is a big push for nuclear in the tech world right now. And about the why, here's the reason. https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumption-carbon-footprin/ https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti...
jeffbee 4y ago
It's only "super interesting" to those who study astroturfing and other forms of manipulative public relations.

tehsauce 4y ago

I’m curious what caused those 0.02 deaths per terawatt for solar.

jmyeet 4y ago
Roof installers (no cap).
zbrozek 4y ago
At a guess, accidents during installation or maintenance, e.g., falling off a roof or grabbing live high voltage DC.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tus666 4y ago

> The argument is well known: nuclear power causes pollution It does? News to me.

cesarb 4y ago
Nuclear power has a paradox with respect to pollution: it's a highly dangerous form of pollution (heavy metals which are also radioactive), but in normal operation, it's completely contained (and nuclear power operators tend to be very paranoid about it; minor amounts of radiation which would be considered harmless everywhere else are treated as unacceptable outside the designated radioactive areas). So depending on how you look of it, it can either have a high amount of dangerous pollution, or none at all. (There's another form of pollution from nuclear power plants, which is heat pollution from discharged cooling water, but most people aren't talking about that.)
- tamaharbor 4y ago
  The energy it takes to refine the uranium is also not zero.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    And uranium mining operations are also known for leaving a bit of a mess around them, polluting nearby rivers, etc. Suspiciously often close to indigenous lands as well.
- mgfist 4y ago
  Nuclear power pollution is the best kind: dense and contained. Imagine I tell you we could put 10% of the world's trash in a olympic sized swimming pool. Pretty appealing eh?
  - tus666 4y ago
    That's not pollution - that is waste. Waste =/= pollution.

bad_alloc 4y ago

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens, like in the case of the stolen solar power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokmak_Solar_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokmak_Solar_Energy).

Barrin92 4y ago
particularly relevant because the need for more energy is by far strongest in regions that are geopolitical hotbeds with often unstable governments and threats of terrorism. With nuclear infrastructure both as a target and source for material.
peppertree 4y ago
Nuclear energy is safe but humans are not.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  Yep. It's amazing the effort we have to spent to avoid disasters provoked by our own specie.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Yes. So we have to make decisions with those two factors in mind
- otikik 4y ago
  We have people dying of breathing complications right now and we have so much CO2 in our atmosphere that we're changing the weather. We need nuclear energy precisely because humans are not safe.
anonporridge 4y ago
This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power. Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees. On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact. But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.

tern 4y ago

Potentially we can't build nuclear fast enough to replace fossil fuels https://youtu.be/O0pt3ioQuNc https://youtu.be/O0pt3ioQuNc 22:19

I_am_tiberius 4y ago

I think nuclear power plants aren't worth the risk. I often hear arguments such as that modern reactors don't have the issues old ones had etc.. As long as it can't be guaranteed to me that e.g. a terror attack doesn't cause a 1000 km2 area around the plant to be unlivable for 100 years, I most likely won't change my opinion. I think living in the stone age is better than taking the risk.

anonporridge 4y ago
I think this line of thinking has defaulted us onto a path of drastically increased carbon in the atmosphere, with no signs of stopping, which is at best going to drastically change the world and take centuries to remove, and at worst could trigger a massive biosphere collapse that drives our species to extinction. The Earth has 150 MILLION km2 of land. We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 km2 unlivable patches of ground and still be perfectly fine. Prioritize your fear.
- I_am_tiberius 4y ago
  Why do you think you have to decide between bad and worse? I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    I don't. I think the generation before me misprioritized their fear and decided to block progress on nuclear fission, which implicitly supported the continued expansion of carbon fuel burning, to the detriment of future generations. It's an observation of historical fact, not a future decision. > I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle. I think we should prioritize the continuance of civilization over the planet. The planet and life on it will be perfectly fine after we're gone. It's been through drastically worse.
  - mgfist 4y ago
    Because you have to look at reality. You may be willing to do that (though I doubt it), but people at large do not.

mah4k4l 4y ago

Plutonium problem multiplies in top predators. Here already for thousands of years now thanks to nuclear plant disasters. Which are avoided by causing a slow power plant disaster by releasing radioactive pressure to the environment. Guy Debord's comment on this from Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: "much more civilized to sip a littl wine all of the time than to drink the whole bottle all at once like a Pole" :-) Nuclear energy is a subsidised energy source, lobbied by powers that be on the corridors of power in the EU and everywhere else. Solar is cheaper. Humanity is out of it's depth with this stuff. Could cause massive extinction event eventually even if we stopped now by killing and mutating sperm cells and all that. Go have a holiday in Fukushima. Go visit the deformed children still born in Uzbekistan near these places.

felixfurtak 4y ago

> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper .. unless it gets inside you, in which case it can be extremely damaging.

jmyeet 4y ago

Ok, so another pro-nuclear puff piece. Why do I say that? Because it talks about nuclear waste without ever mentioning the other kind: fuel processing waste. Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different processes. So U-235 and U-238 are chemically identical. So how do you enrich a sample? Centrifuges. You make a Uranium gas. The U-238 molecules will be heavier. Spin them in a centrifuge and you can extract them at a greater percentage and then pass on the gas to the next centrifuge. You do this repeatedly until you get the enrichment level you want and then extract the metal from the gas. The gas of choice is UF6 (Uranium Hexaflouride). That itself is a toxic byproduct that needs to be stored or otherwise dealt with. We don't really have a good solution for this either. There is some reprocessing that basically turns UF6 into less toxic UF4 but it's not really economic. As always, pro-nuclear propaganda focuses on deaths because deaths doesn't capture the negative impact of nuclear. Why? Because the Chernobyl disaster directly killed less than 100 (it also probably killed tens of thousands through cancers in the following years but that's harder to attribute and easier for people to collectively ignore). But still the Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone, from one incident, is quite literally 1,000 square miles even now, almost 40 years later. Deaths or deaths per TWh just doesn't capture that impact and those failure modes, which is precisely why such propaganda focuses on deaths. But none of that is the big problem with commercial nuclear power. It's the fallibility of humans to manage, maintain, build and transport and store (fuel and waste) to a sufficient level to avoid disasters. The profit motive provides an incentive to skimp on some or all of these. Corruption is an issue with both corporations and governments. Humans are just incredibly bad at managing long-term consequences, which is why we have the climate crisis to begin with.

tedk-42 4y ago
How many years have France been safely operating their Nuclear plants? Germany too? You speak of a Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I don't see anyone living where they've put up large scale solar farms or next to wind turbines. You're right about humans not managing long term consequences well. From lead poisoning 40 years ago to 20 years from now when we have to deal with the waste of solar left behind (perhaps toxic waste if not dealt with right now). We need nuclear now. No nonsense blockers. Build more plants and replace the coal, oil and gas base load stations we're running now to try slow the rate of carbon we're throwing into the sky. And yes, we need more investment into solar and wind. It's a solution that is solved by multiple alternatives, not dummies getting behind one alternative and saying no to the rest.

nimbius 4y ago

I really want to believe nuclear is as clean as the author says, but the biggest challenge is storing the waste for three hundred years. were talking small amounts, sure, but contamination of groundwater and surrounding soil isn't something we in the US have a stellar track record with. camp lejunes benzene contaminated drinking water happened in only a 29 year span, and the only real remedy is a class action lawsuit. no one admitted fault. most of our reactors are elderly, and most of the regulatory capture means they leak like a sieve and rarely face any consequences or shutdowns. until we reform the edifice that controls this waste I fear nuclear will just be another headline crisis event.

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pfdietz 4y ago
Storing waste for 300 years isn't a huge problem. Dry casks shouldn't go anywhere. The problem is dealing with the waste at that point, because it's so radiologically cold an amateur terrorist group could extract the plutonium, which is almost entirely still there.

jaimex2 4y ago

Tell that to anyone trying to decommission a reactor. France is having a great time.

Beldin 4y ago

The article is a bit fast and loose with its data. Borssele indeed has limited high-energy radioactive waste; the article omits that there is also low-energy radioactive waste - a lot more, in fact. Similarly, recycling may be a problem for solar panels, but is that better for nuclear? I have never heard / read about how to recycle the (radioactive) non-fuel parts of a nuclear reactor. I'm not against nuclear per se, but articles such as this one don't help. I think there's a genuine case for nuclear to be made; this isn't it.

jeffbee 4y ago
Recycling is not in fact any kind of problem for solar. There is a large, organized campaign by the derelict energy industry to plant the meme of solar as some kind of toxic menace but it just isn't one. There is no cadmium in solar panels. There was a small amount in thin film panels briefly favored by utility-scale solar plants but thin film is economically dead and nobody is buying those. Antimony is used in the glass, not the panel. The glass contains ~1g/kg of antimony, and PV panels contain about 50 tonnes of glass per MW (most of the panel mass is the glass). That works out to 50kg of antimony per MW, i.e. basically none. If you took all the antimony out of a 1GW solar plant and somehow dissolved it in water - which can't happen because antimony trioxide isn't even soluble in water, and dissolving metals out of glass with water is practically impossible - and if you dumped all that into Lake Shasta, it would still be within drinking water standards. And again, nobody will dump this into the environment because fifty million kilos of high-grade glass is going to get recycled, not dumped. I think it's sad that the nuclear boosters are being duped into spreading these lies about solar panels.

Animats 4y ago

Waste disposal isn't that hard. The Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland pretty much has it covered. First, you find a hard-rock mountain where geology shows nothing much happening in the last few million years, and there's nothing worth mining. Worldwide, there are many mountain ranges like that. Then tunnel way down, but preferably above the water table. Drill holes in the tunnel floor. Put waste in suitable containers. There are a few approaches. Mixing the waste with molten glass and pouring it into big stainless steel thimbles is one approach. Put containers in holes. Fill with bentonite. Seal off with concrete. Eventually, seal off the whole installation and forget about it.

purerandomness 4y ago
How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?
- jseliger 4y ago
  How do we communicate to civilisations in the present how bad the emissions from goal and gas plants are? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/why-the-new-pollution-literature-is-credible.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh... Because we appear to have no sense of proportion, or trade-offs.
- Animats 4y ago
  Current thinking is not to mark the place. Why attract attention to it? Any future civilization capable of finding that it's interesting and digging down through a mile or more of hard rock and concrete probably knows about radioactivity.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain? The more dangerous stuff burns itself out quickly (short half-life), and the longer-lasting stuff is not very dangerous given the type of radiation it is and can be blocked quite easily So, probably bury it deep enough with little external sign that it's actually there, and if it is actually discovered it won't be that big of a deal: > The main concern associated with spent nuclear fuel – radioactivity – diminishes with time. > About 40 years after it's done making power, the heat and radioactivity of the fuel bundle will have fallen by over 99%. * https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148416881180674 https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148416881180674 > About three containers are needed to store the quantity of fuel that is removed each 12-24 months; the space taken up by even a 60 year plant life is less than is needed for a Wal-Mart even without any efforts to efficiently stack the containers. * https://atomicinsights.com/time-for-plan-b-yucca-mountain-project-should-close-shop/ https://atomicinsights.com/time-for-plan-b-yucca-mountain-pr...

entropicgravity 4y ago

Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge drop in the cost of solar and wind. Not only is solar/wind cheap but because these can be built in a year or two, as opposed to decades for nuclear, governments accountants will much prefer them over nuclear. Nuclear will have some niche segments and I see a small nuclear design is about to be approved in the US that would be useful. But in the big picture of over all power generation nuclear will continue to fade away.

otikik 4y ago
Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are only clean if their backup is clean, too. Otherwise they are an incomplete solution. Nuclear a better, greener backup.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. It depends on where you live. In my country (which is a huge country), the backup is hydroelectric dams. Burning fossil fuels (and nuclear) is mostly kept constant during the day, it's the hydroelectric dams which follow both the load and the changes in solar and wind.
p_l 4y ago
A big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't dispatchable. A 100 MWe nuclear power plant fitting in the space of small local power plant isn't equivalent of a 100MW solar or wind plant - for my local area, the equivalent solar/wind plant is about a combination of few Gigawatts of nameplate capacity of solar and wind plants (allowing for very optimistic storage tech, it gets "down" to 1180 MW solar + 410 MW wind + 840 MWh battery at 170MW output + 50MW hydrogen turbine backed by 10186 MWh stored hydrogen. It's also 1.5x the cost of plonking EPR-based NPP.) Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.

Flocular 4y ago

A good estimate to gauge the societal investment needed to generate electricity in a certain way, is to look at its total cost in dollar/MWh. Wikipedia has a nice graphic prepared for just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... (which ignores externalized costs like CO2 or nuclear waste) You can see in there that nuclear has triple the cost compared to solar. As we need to replace as much fossil-fueled power plants as possible and as quickly as possible, wasting ressources into building nuclear power plants sounds stupid. Other interesting factors: * Heating climate is a risk for nuclear https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-the-leading-cause-of-nuclear-power-outages/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t... * Maintenance cost is hard to predict https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-up-cost-of-nuclear-plant-outages https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-up-c... * 30 planned + 60 unplanned days shutdown on average https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252

lmm 4y ago
And how does that compare to the business-as-usual shutdowns of solar (every night, cloudy days, winter as a whole) which unlike nuclear are highly correlated between separate plants? If storage is cheap enough then solar will be an important part of the mix. But unless you have the right geography for geothermal or hydro (which probably means flooding a bigger area than the chernobyl exclusion zone before you've even started, but leaving that aside), nuclear is still the only viable option for clean, reliable baseline power. It's not an either/or, we should be building both.
- Flocular 4y ago
  That is just to show that nuclear isn't a magical always-on power source that some of the pro-nuclear folks make it out to be. Also: we can install twice the capacity in MW for solar and still have money left over to put into a smarter grid or storage compared to nuclear.
  - 4y ago

crmd 4y ago

The most interesting thing in the article for me was that the 250 reactors needed to power Europe would produce 1.3 cubic kilometers of nuclear waste per year. That’s actually way more waste volume than I assumed. I wonder what the figure is for the United States.

kitkat_new 4y ago
there isn't enough uranium for that
brutusborn 4y ago
I couldn't find that number. Is it hidden in the figures or did you calculate it off something?
- crmd 4y ago
  Those exact numbers are cited in the last paragraph of the article.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    My bad, I skimmed it looking for km2 or 1.3.
JanisErdmanis 4y ago
Your numbers are wrong. It is a known fact that France produces less than ~ 1 m^3 radioactive waste annually.
- Kon5ole 4y ago
  It is not not a known fact, it is in fact not true. France has over 1 million m3 of waste, and I assure you they have not been operating nuclear plants for over a million years. :) Sources: https://www.ompe.org/en/france-doesnt-know-what-to-do-with-its-radioactive-waste/ https://www.ompe.org/en/france-doesnt-know-what-to-do-with-i... The La Manche facility had 527 000m3 of waste in 1994: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredisposal-of-short-lived-waste-in-france/ https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredisposal-of-shor...

GuB-42 4y ago

> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper. It is indeed harmless outside of your body, but it is devastating inside of your body. The reason is that outside of your body, it is blocked by your layer of dead skin, if it gets to it, your dead skin ends up pretty messed up as it absorbs all the energy of the alpha particle. But no big deal, it is dead, doesn't take part of your biology, can't turn cancerous. But now, if that alpha emitter ends up inside of your body, maybe in your lungs as you breathe in radioactive dust, it will end up dumping all of its energy inside of your live cells, damaging DNA and doing everything bad ionizing radiation can do. Gamma radiation, the unstoppable one is actually less dangerous if it finds its way inside your body, that's because it will go right through it, it will mess up a few cells on its way out, but most of its energy will be dumped outside of you.

vlunkr 4y ago
How is it going to get inside your body?
- GuB-42 4y ago
  Mostly from dust you breathe in, or contaminated water or food. And in one famous case, injected by a secret agent using an umbrella.
  - dxdm 4y ago
    > And in one famous case, injected by a secret agent using an umbrella I think you're mixing up the Litvinenko murder, which used polonium in a beverage, and Makenko, who got injected with poision with the tip of an umbrella.
jmyeet 4y ago
Apparently the author has never heard of Polonium-210, arguably the deadliest substance on Earth. what makes it so deadly is it has an extremely short half life (~138 days) and releases almost all of that energy as alpha particles. How leathal? Roughly 6.8 trillionths of a gram [1]. Luckily Po-210 isn't a huge danger because of the short half life and it's really only produced by governments in very small quantities. But the point is that any alpha particle emitter ingested is potentially a massive health risk. And what happens at an accident like Chernobyl? It scatters a ton of dust over a huge area that consists of many radioactive isotopes, some of which are just toxic by themselves (eg Caesium) but also some of them are alpha particle emitters. That dust gets into the food chain. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-polonium-idINDEE87T0EJ20120830 https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-po...

more_corn 4y ago

Except when it isn’t. Granted it’s cleaner than coal and gas. But there’s the pesky problem of waste, plants that cost billions, decom is not cheap, easy or clean. Oh and the financial incentives to operate longer and cheaper than is safe.

jbverschoor 4y ago

The problem with nuclear energy is that lekker don’t understand how it works. It’s some magic invisible thing, radiation will kill everyone, and an accident will wipe away half the planet. The public should be educated how reactors work, and what the risks are, and what the limits of those risks are.

vlunkr 4y ago

Really interesting to see how much people fight nuclear power. We’ve been complaining about fossil fuels for decades, and now that the US seems to be seriously exploring a viable alternative you’re going to complain about it? I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it?

indymike 4y ago
> I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it? This is really what the whole argument boils down to: nuclear, or global warming. There's really not real, feasible renewable answer. It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors. Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > There's really not real, feasible renewable answer. But there is, and it's likely cheaper than the nuclear answer.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors. At least for solar, that comparison is specious. It would be like separately counting each rod or even each pellet of nuclear fuel in a reactor's core, and using that as an argument against nuclear power. It makes more sense to compare whole solar power plants, not individual panels. From a quick look at the data for my country, most solar power plants have over 20 MW output each, and they are in facilities with 3-10 solar power plants. Looking at the same data source, wind also seems to use a similar grouping here (power plants containing several turbines with a total output over 20MW, then grouped into facilities with 3-10 power plants). > Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power. Cost is not the only argument. If you want to make it quickly, construction time is just as important, and nuclear loses badly here (though I might be a bit biased on that, since the latest reactor being built near where I live has been under construction for decades, with no end in sight). Solar and to a lesser extent wind have the advantage of simplicity and modularity, which tend to not only reduce the cost, but also enable them to be built quicker and in parallel, and make them much less risky to build; if one out of ten 20 MW solar power plants being built hits a problem, you still have the other nine, but if your single 1350 MW reactor being built since the 1980s hits some unexpected problem, you have nothing. As for the level of regulation, it's an unavoidable consequence of how dangerous nuclear fuel (and the materials and fluids irradiated by it in the reactor core) is; you have to make sure it stays contained, so that a nuclear power plant is as safe as (or even safer than) other kinds of power plant. But that's not the whole reason for the high cost; there's the complexity of the reactor itself (including materials which can resist the radiation), and nuclear power plants tend to use things like a single hydrogen-cooled gigawatt-power turbine for each reactor core. Just the electrical infrastructure (transformers, circuit breakers, etc) which can deal with gigawatt levels of power at once is already costly.

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stevenjgarner 4y ago

Before we get all gung-ho on nuclear power, perhaps we could try solving the existential nuclear problems we already have. FACTS [0]: 1. The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'. 2. The transport of this waste poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment. 3. Plutonium is the most dangerous material in the world. 4. Nuclear waste is hazardous for tens of thousands of years. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations. 5. Even if put into a geological repository, the waste might emerge and threaten future generations. 6. Nobody knows the true costs of waste management. The costs are so high that nuclear power can never be economic. IMO, nuclear power does not represent what's best about the US but highlights its weaknesses. Americans love their quarterly reports, but are not good so good at 100 year plans, let alone 100,000 year plans. Nuclear waste lasts for a very long time. The amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at US nuclear power plants continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year [1]. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. Federal funding for the Repository ened amidst widespread national, state, regional and tribal opposition. [2]. Meanwhile the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades. So yeah you the US taxpayer are paying for it, whether your utility use nuclear generated electricity or not. => The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'. Without a permanent national storage solution, the government pays the utilities to store the waste on site. Over time utilities move some of the older spent fuel into "dry cask" storage. These casks are stainless steel canisters surrounded by concrete. Fuel is typically cooled at least five years in the pool before transfer to cask. NRC has authorized transfer as early as three years; the industry norm is about 10 years. The NRC certifies cask designs and licenses dry cask storage facilities for up to 40 years. [3] Not thousands of years! Assuming idealistically that generation of nuclear power stops today, then the EXISTING nuclear waste will have to be stored not for hundreds of years, not for thousands of years, not for tens of thousands of years, but for hundreds of thousands of years. That is the existing waste, which will continue to cost "tens of billions of dollars per decades", with a lifetime storage cost that makes the cost of the original nuclear power plant (typically with only a 30-year life anyway) negligible by comparison. Again that is the exsiting waste. So assuming we continue to generate nuclear power, the nuclear waste continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year, each ton with its own lifetime storage cost. And we're talking about GROWING that nuclear capacity. Let's grow the already exponential lifetime storage cost. Not even the Federal Reserve of the United States of America will be able to create enough money to pay for the total cost of ownership of nuclear power. There are different types of nuclear waste - high-level waste, transuranic waste, Uranium or thorium mill tailings, Low-level waste, Technologically enhanced naturally-occurring radioactive material (TENORM) [4]. Like most things, these too follow the 80/20 rule - 80% of the waste is lower level waste and 20% is higher level waste. Make sure you know which waste is being discussed. Each type must be disposed of according to its risk to human health and the environment. Plutonium Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years! That is the time it takes for the radioactive level to become half of what it is now. The nation has over 85,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. DOE is responsible for disposing of this high-level waste in a permanent geologic repository, but has yet to build such a facility because policymakers have been at an impasse over what to do with this spent fuel since 2010. As a result, the amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at nuclear power plants across the country continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year. Meanwhile, the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades. DOE also oversees the treatment and disposal of about 90 million gallons of radioactive waste from the nation's nuclear weapons program. Most of this waste is stored in tanks at 3 DOE sites. According to federal law, certain high-level mixed waste must be vitrified—a process in which the waste is immobilized in glass—and disposed of in a deep geologic repository. However, DOE estimates that about 90% of the volume of this waste contains about 10% of the radioactivity and is therefore considered to be low-activity waste. [1] [0] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... [1] https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... [3] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r... [4] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste

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justatdotin 4y ago

toxic sludge is good for you

rkhassen9 4y ago

Only clean if you don't count the 24,000 years half life of the waste. Funny how 'waste'does not sound like a very clean word. What is clean is living in a way that doesn't consume so much energy. Can implement right now with no longterm repercussion, just a bit of short term pain of self control. Kind of like taking care of our own bodies.

kristopolous 4y ago
HN is the boostiest of the boosters with nuclear. It's just a bunch of cheerleaders. Just pass on all mentions of it. They've got absolutely zero interest in material reality here. It's completely fantasy driven. It's not worth it. They're way too ideologically committed

joak 4y ago

There is this idea that nuclear is not being deployed because people have a wrong perception of risks. However, the main reason is the economy. The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. We can blame regulation and the hypothetically wrong public perception about safety, but the reality is that costs cannot go down easily because of the innovation dynamics: 1. It takes several years to build a nuclear reactor. Hence, innovations take a decade to reach the market. Learning curve has to be slow. 2. A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped, it has to be build on site. This makes manufacturing automation, economies of scale and competition hard. In other words: you cannot have factories in China, or elsewhere, shipping cheap nuclear reactors all over the planet. A change in regulation might lower the costs, but it's not going to improve much the innovation dynamics. In conclusion, all this talking is mostly irrelevant: nuclear reactors are simply not going to be built because they are not competitive. And things are getting worse by the day because the alternatives have a better innovation cycle.

m2fkxy 4y ago
> In conclusion, (...) nuclear reactors are simply not going to be built because they are not competitive What do you mean? 50+ reactors are under construction as we write [1], and almost twice as much are planned [2] (with even more proposed). Furthermore: > A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped Marine nuclear reactors (of which 200-ish are in active service) and Chukotka's floating nuclear power plants are notable counter-examples. Especially with marine reactors being the baseline for the philosophy behind SMRs. [1] https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstructionreactorsbycountry.aspx https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstruction... [2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
- rattray 4y ago
  Can you share sources? I'm surprised that so many reactors are being built.
  - 4y ago

exabrial 4y ago

Given the intense energy needed to produce steel towers, the mass amounts of concrete needed (which emits a lot if co2 as curses), fire roads created, carbon fiber blades created, shipped, et all what’s the payoff for a single wind tower all in? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of rational discussion.

phyzome 4y ago

The amount of bad comparisons and statistical sleight-of-hand in this piece is pretty astonishing.

stmfreak 4y ago

Clean because no one has yet measured the ten thousand year containment costs and unintentional releases. Clean because we have somehow written off the devastation of Chernobyl and Fukushima as trivial. I don’t want a nuclear plant within 100 miles of my home because I have lived through three meltdowns and do not want to be displaced by a fourth. But sure, in the moment nuclear emissions are super green.

chrismartin 4y ago
We gotta fill the gaps between intermittent output from renewables somehow. Would you rather fill those gaps with fossil fuels? Because that's the choice.

cycomanic 4y ago

This article perfectly exemplifies the arguments in discussions. Lets just concentrate on the waste discussion. The article says heavy metals in solar panels are a problem (I kind of agree, although the way it is described makes it out like we are talking about huge amounts, in reality the lead in solar panels is largely from soldering so very small amounts. Orders of magnitude more are being used for other applications (like car batteries)). They then say that recycling is currently still a problem (sort of true, although there are companies who say they can 100% recycling solar panels already). Similarly for wind they say we still don't know how to recycle the carbon blades, again sort of correct (but there are many other applications of carbon fibre which produce much more waste). Then when it comes to nuclear waste however, the argument is we can ignore pretty much all long lasting waste, because of some development in the future will make recycling of spend fuel rods feasible. So essentially he is comparing the current state of solar panel recycling to some future potential nuclear waste recycling. That's a dishonest comparison. Moreover ignoring the amount of waste from dismantling the nuclear power plant (which needs to go into nuclear storage because it is radioactive due to irradiation), while talking about the carbon fibre from wind turbines is also disingenuous. We see the same argumentive structure when talking about the economics; the current state of renewables is compared to some potential future state of nuclear. While in reality renewables are on an exponential cost reduction trajectory and all the nuclear potential is completely unproven.

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jaredklewis 4y ago
I agree with some of your criticism of the article, but I disagree that nuclear waste is a problem. Yes, we have to store it somewhere. But all US plants combined make ~5k cubic meters of nuclear waste a year. To put that in perspective, the strategic oil reserve is 100 million cubic meters. A single aircraft carrier is 2 million cubic meters. Political will aside, finding a place to store this stuff doesn’t seem like a massive problem.
- arinlen 4y ago

Bolkan 4y ago

Aren't we going to deplete our uranium+thorium resources by the year 2100?

LightG 4y ago

Same vibe: "Fuel scarcity is not a problem. Russia is now a reliable and stable power supplier."

kiemrong08 4y ago

Solar power basiclly is nuclear energy

ephimetheus 4y ago

> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper. That is not correct. Yes, alpha radiation doesn’t penetrate skin, but is dangerous if you ingest it. That’s one of the reasons people have abandoned underground long-term storage sites: they all eventually have water break ins and the worry is that the waste will contaminate fresh water supplies.

LatteLazy 4y ago

The killer for nuclear is the expense and the non-zero risk of catastrophe. No one has a real plan to deal with the costs (it's a very large problem with political issues around waste costs). Modular reactors might help with this (small or not) but who wants to spend a trillion £/$/Euros to find out they don't? Most people insist on pretending the costs aren't prohibitive and that's not really a viable solution. No one has a real plan to deal with risks: * like it or not you cannot compare all risks on a simple probabilitycost basis. People treat a 1/1mil chance they will lose their homes more seriously than a 1/10 chance they will get lung cancer in 40 years. the underlying issues are not technological, they're organisational and political (We've had safe reactor designs for decades, then someone comes along and disables all the safety features to get 5% more power to secure their quarterly bonus). So you cannot solve them with a redesign at a tech level.

Kon5ole 4y ago

The article seems to support its headline by claiming that most of the millions of m3 of waste currently being stored by nuclear operating nations doesn't exist and that the remaining part is harmless because it's only plutonium.

d--b 4y ago

The article makes its point well, but its title is unnecessarily polarizing. However little, fission does produce dangerous materials that need to be handled very carefully and stored in places where nobody cares that they are actually radioactive. What if fission was to replace 90% of other energy sources. Would you trust everyone in the world to dispose of their waste responsibly? And while Chernobyl is far in the rear-view mirror, Fukushima is not. So while improbable, it is hard to argue that catastrophic nuclear events won't happen again. Why not acknowledge the tradeoff in the title and say it's one of the cleanest and safest. People get the point about air travel: "it seems riskier because catastrophic failures are much more spectacular, but overall air travel is a lot safer than car travel". No one is saying "planes don't crash"

TedShiller 4y ago

Has this guy been to Fukushima?

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Fukushima. Chernobyl. What happens during a war when someone bombs a nuclear reactor? Clean doesn't mean safe.

floppiplopp 4y ago

Not only is the waste a problem, we haven't found an adequate solution for in almost 70 years, but, again, the issue with nuclear is the amount of resources available. There simply isn't enough fissile material out there to make an impact on climate change.

uwagar 4y ago

lol

BlinkenBlinken 4y ago

As an comment on the article "nuclear-energy-is-clean". The rationale is that there is no problem, at least not a large one. Dilemma is the protection of future generations of mankind against possible hazards posed by stored nuclear waste products. Are we, humans capable of wielding this king of technology responsibly? Think about terrorism and dirty bombs. Or even more benign reactor disruption due to human error? After al, al humans are fallible. This remains a hot topic in any political arena's al over de globe. As for unforeseen consequences due to natural disaster, one might consider exposure to nuclear gamma radiation and poisoning. Can mankind handle this responsibility? I think not, see case Chernobyl. A perfect demonstration of human short comings and inability to cope with the aftermath. Keep in mind that MYRRHA is stil research. It remains to be seen of/when it is commercially viable. Also keep in mind the alternatives. E.g. a Molten Salt Reactor or MSR, people may hear the term Thorium reactor. Also research. Side note: As for the nuclear waste from Borssele which is in cased in glass to ensure stable storage and prevent leakage, it cannot be repurposed for reuse. Just my thoughts.

largolagrande 4y ago

[A sidenote about investing in nuclear plants, with the example of the UK] The United Kingdom is an interesting example of a country which is very interested in having nuclear power and which has less and less of it at the moment because of a lack of investment. As you probably know, the UK is fairly liberal country, which means that it relies heavily on private companies to get things achieved. Nuclear power, as opposed to coal and gas, has the particularity of having an economic structure in which you have to pay for almost everything before starting up the plant. You have a huge share of initial investment, and then the relative share of operating costs is very small. And when you are in a context where you have to pay for just about everything before you start the plant, it's a context in which, in the world of private capital, it's hard to to do. In other words, private companies like not to wait too long to see the ROI. So when you have to put in a lot of money, build for 8 years, possibly 10, possibly even 12 years, before you start to have a €1 turnover, this is stuff that the private sector doesn't like at all. So in the UK, the fact that the electricity production system was placed in the private domain (as in many other places in Europe, but it has been done even earlier in the UK than in the other places) led to a lack of investment in nuclear plants. (Exactly the same process happened with the railways in the UK)

vfclists 4y ago

No one ever head of the Integral Fast Reactor which uses the "nuclear waste" as fuel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU Somehow it never comes up in nuclear power discussions. The only problem with nuclear is there are no future sales from it. Capitalism works on having something to sell in the future. Once nuclear is reliable and safe there is no more money to be made from it and this is why all the Greens are no more than fronts for the fossil fuel industry. They are hellbent on pushing inadequate alternatives which make carbon based fuels the only reliable ones.