8 ms·

1) makes the same mistake as the author. Yes, after 600 years you can hold it in your hand for a brief moment without dying. You have to swallow, or be in cont

by ArnoVW 4y ago

1) makes the same mistake as the author. Yes, after 600 years you can hold it in your hand for a brief moment without dying. You have to swallow, or be in contact 24/7. But if you live in an area with contaminated air or water, you're going to swallow, and on a daily basis. The difficulty of nuclear storage is not guarding highly radioactive stuff the first 100 years. It's the medium and low radioactive stuff that you need to keep out of the water and air the next 10,000. Also, even if you don't drop dead straight away, if your life is shortened by 10 years, that sort of sucks too. Of course, that means you need to concern yourself with the people will live then. And since we are already having great difficulty keeping our place in the universe habitable for our children...

chasil 4y ago
Contrast this with the dangers to humanity inherent in other forms of power generation. Hydropower has, thus far, proven far more dangerous. The collapse of the Banqiao dam in China led to between 26,000 to 240,000 estimated fatalities that impacted 30 cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure Coal, of course, exceeds this by orders of magnitude.
- pydry 4y ago
  Wind, solar, batteries and pumped storage have yet to kill 240,000 people and are cheaper than nuclear power. It's not 1980 any more.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Nuclear has yet to kill 240,000 people as well. Fossil and biofuel normal-operation particulates kill a high-ball long-term Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours.
    - twaw 4y ago
      Emm, these people are killed by cancer, every year. Unless we will find cure for cancer very soon, Chornobyl kills dozens of thousands per year right now.
      - acidburnNSA 4y ago
        That's outrageously inconsistent with all scientific studies. "Among the residents of Belarus, Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades. Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated." https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html Note that thyroid cancers rarely lead to fatality.
  - scatters 4y ago
    That's only because they haven't been in use at scale for as long. Solar power kills more people than nuclear does, and wind isn't far behind.
- simlevesque 4y ago
  > The collapse of the Banqiao dam in China led to between 26,000 to 240,000 estimated fatalities that impacted 30 cities Not downplaying those deaths, but at least you can rebuild on the land right after. Seems way different than having some part of the world off limit for 10,000 years.
  - chasil 4y ago
    I would not assume that to be the case. Thirty cities were hit by flood waters that were moving at 50 km/hr. This likely involved many, many industrial chemicals, solvents, waste, and other harmful elements that were generally disbursed.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      I've read everything I can find on Banqiao, and have commented and posted on it several times. Repeating what I've written before: [T]he failures largely accrued from institutional hubris, engineering insufficiency, lack of relevant domain knowledge (often deliberate ignorance or denial, see especially Vajont, also St. Francis), poor overall management, lack of disaster preparation, drilling, or readiness, limited resurces or capabilities (especially in developing countries), communications breakdown (see Banqiao's comms loss), and inadequate response in light of imminent or present threat. None of these are domain-specific to hydraulic civil engineering or absent from nuclear engineering projects. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553> And: The specific failings at Banqiao were virtually all managerial and political, not technical; poor engineering, inadequate safety provisions, underestimated environmental and operational risks, poor contingency planning, unforeseen perfect storm (literally), severed communications, insufficient warnings, no community disaster preparation, inadequate rescue and recovery. None of these failures are specific to hydro, all apply to nuclear power, and as non-engineering problems there is no technical fix that makes them go away. In Banqiao, about 25,000 people died in the immediate inundation. Another 150,000 died in the following weeks of starvation and disease. There's no great mystery as to how such deaths are avoided: floodwaters are mitigated by high ground and evacuation centres; starvation and disease by food, water, and medical stocks; and rescue & recovery by trained teams and equipment. Reestablishment of communications, transport, and utilities is critical. China at the time was desperately poor, politically dysfunctional, and gambled hugely on risk and lost. Other major hydro disasters tend to share these traits. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327114> The risks from Banqiao were short-term (acute), though profound. They could have been mitigated by planning, preparation, warnings, evacuation, and response. China at the time lacked the safety and civil defence maturity and mindsets, the political will, the engineering culture, and simply the capacity to respond appropriately given the magnitude of the disaster. The deaths were avoidable, and similar threats, say the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure. The engineering failure resulted in costs, but no loss of life, nor any significant damage to property other than the dam itself. The U.S. still does see occasional dam failures, as with the Edenville and Sanford Dam failures of 19 May 2020. Here again poor engineering, construction, and operation created the risk, though again, preparedness and response prevented deaths, though in this case there was significant property damage. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenville_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenville_Dam> Today, Chernobyl and Fukushima are exclusion zones, and they will be for centuries. The reactor cores themselves, for tens of thousands of years. This is far longer than the companies, countries, cultures, and even languages extant at the time of the disasters --- our capacity to address risks and management at this scale is utterly nonexistent. Banqiao is home to 17 million people who face no ongoing concerns from the incident. Dam failures are short-lastting disasters, occurring over hours, days, or perhaps weeks. Nuclear failures are long-lasting disasters, occurring over decades, centuries, and perhaps millennia.
- rolph 4y ago
  a dam collapsing due to crappy engineering practice, isnt a property of hydro electric power, but the risk of such is perhaps 2nd or third order consequence of a dams existence, alongside orthagonal circumstances.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    And nuclear waste getting out (which has to my knowledge never happened and caused harm) is also a result of crappy engineering practice and isn't a property of nuclear power. The risk of such is similarly a 2nd or third order consequence of a nuclear power plant's existence, alongside orthagonal circumstances.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      > never happened and caused harm Hanford. Simi Valley. USSR.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated (vs 0.03 for Nuclear - somewhere between wind and solar). Coal deaths translate to about 5 Chernobyl's per year (assuming the UNSCEAR 4000 deaths number) in the United States alone. Unlike nuclear power, coal is also responsible for spreading nuclear waste around the countryside because coal contains uranium and thorium that's concentrated in the ash left over after it's burned. [1] [edit] > Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas. [1] Waste from nuclear plants is nice and contained in neat little bundles that are monitored, safe and if you're worried, can be put into Yucca Mountain. [edit] btw, Yucca Mountain is conveniently located next to the Nevada Test Site, where the US tested many nuclear weapons, mostly underground, from 1957 to 1992. NTS contains some of the most radioactive land areas in the world. So at least you can be confident knowing you're putting the new spicy rocks in with the rest of them. [2] However, nuclear waste is very much a non-issue. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... [2] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nevada-test-site-downwinders https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nevada-test-site-down...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas. [1] Cool. Now explain what happens in the ground water around Kadapa or Rossing or Kakadu. Nuclear waste is very much an issue, you're just trying to focus on the stuff you have a vague plan for rather than no plan. Noone is suggesting more coal. They're suggesting renewables which are faster, cheaper, less centralized, less dependent on oligopolies and hostile foreign actors, more able to be deployed in unstable regions, just as safe, less polluting, produce less non-radioactive waste, and use fewer materials.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  In this line of reasoning a collapsing dam serves as a warning, but a meltdown is a once (oops, twice) in a lifetime anomaly that will never happen again!
vagrantJin 4y ago
> And since we are already having great difficulty keeping our place in the universe habitable for our children... You must be joking. We'll figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste safer as we go. For now, it's the best thing we've got to combat fossil fuel dependency. > But if you live in an area with contaminated air or water, you're going to swallow, and on a daily basis. There is no "safe enough to lick it" industrial process. Humans figured out how to build pyramids millenia ago with hand tools. We will figure it out.
pdonis 4y ago
> The difficulty of nuclear storage is not guarding highly radioactive stuff the first 100 years. It's the medium and low radioactive stuff that you need to keep out of the water and air the next 10,000. You don't have to deal with the latter if you reprocess the "waste". Which, well before 10,000 years, you're going to do anyway, because on that time scale there will be significant economic value in retrieving usable fuel from it. The only reason reprocessing is not done now in the US is politics; other countries have been doing it for decades with no problems. And as it gets more expensive to mine more fuel, reprocessing becomes more and more of an economic advantage.

by ArnoVW 4y ago

chasil 4y ago

Contrast this with the dangers to humanity inherent in other forms of power generation. Hydropower has, thus far, proven far more dangerous. The collapse of the Banqiao dam in China led to between 26,000 to 240,000 estimated fatalities that impacted 30 cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure Coal, of course, exceeds this by orders of magnitude.

pydry 4y ago
Wind, solar, batteries and pumped storage have yet to kill 240,000 people and are cheaper than nuclear power. It's not 1980 any more.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Nuclear has yet to kill 240,000 people as well. Fossil and biofuel normal-operation particulates kill a high-ball long-term Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours.
  - twaw 4y ago
    Emm, these people are killed by cancer, every year. Unless we will find cure for cancer very soon, Chornobyl kills dozens of thousands per year right now.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      That's outrageously inconsistent with all scientific studies. "Among the residents of Belarus, Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades. Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated." https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html Note that thyroid cancers rarely lead to fatality.
- scatters 4y ago
  That's only because they haven't been in use at scale for as long. Solar power kills more people than nuclear does, and wind isn't far behind.
simlevesque 4y ago
> The collapse of the Banqiao dam in China led to between 26,000 to 240,000 estimated fatalities that impacted 30 cities Not downplaying those deaths, but at least you can rebuild on the land right after. Seems way different than having some part of the world off limit for 10,000 years.
- chasil 4y ago
  I would not assume that to be the case. Thirty cities were hit by flood waters that were moving at 50 km/hr. This likely involved many, many industrial chemicals, solvents, waste, and other harmful elements that were generally disbursed.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    I've read everything I can find on Banqiao, and have commented and posted on it several times. Repeating what I've written before: [T]he failures largely accrued from institutional hubris, engineering insufficiency, lack of relevant domain knowledge (often deliberate ignorance or denial, see especially Vajont, also St. Francis), poor overall management, lack of disaster preparation, drilling, or readiness, limited resurces or capabilities (especially in developing countries), communications breakdown (see Banqiao's comms loss), and inadequate response in light of imminent or present threat. None of these are domain-specific to hydraulic civil engineering or absent from nuclear engineering projects. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553> And: The specific failings at Banqiao were virtually all managerial and political, not technical; poor engineering, inadequate safety provisions, underestimated environmental and operational risks, poor contingency planning, unforeseen perfect storm (literally), severed communications, insufficient warnings, no community disaster preparation, inadequate rescue and recovery. None of these failures are specific to hydro, all apply to nuclear power, and as non-engineering problems there is no technical fix that makes them go away. In Banqiao, about 25,000 people died in the immediate inundation. Another 150,000 died in the following weeks of starvation and disease. There's no great mystery as to how such deaths are avoided: floodwaters are mitigated by high ground and evacuation centres; starvation and disease by food, water, and medical stocks; and rescue & recovery by trained teams and equipment. Reestablishment of communications, transport, and utilities is critical. China at the time was desperately poor, politically dysfunctional, and gambled hugely on risk and lost. Other major hydro disasters tend to share these traits. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327114> The risks from Banqiao were short-term (acute), though profound. They could have been mitigated by planning, preparation, warnings, evacuation, and response. China at the time lacked the safety and civil defence maturity and mindsets, the political will, the engineering culture, and simply the capacity to respond appropriately given the magnitude of the disaster. The deaths were avoidable, and similar threats, say the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure. The engineering failure resulted in costs, but no loss of life, nor any significant damage to property other than the dam itself. The U.S. still does see occasional dam failures, as with the Edenville and Sanford Dam failures of 19 May 2020. Here again poor engineering, construction, and operation created the risk, though again, preparedness and response prevented deaths, though in this case there was significant property damage. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenville_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenville_Dam> Today, Chernobyl and Fukushima are exclusion zones, and they will be for centuries. The reactor cores themselves, for tens of thousands of years. This is far longer than the companies, countries, cultures, and even languages extant at the time of the disasters --- our capacity to address risks and management at this scale is utterly nonexistent. Banqiao is home to 17 million people who face no ongoing concerns from the incident. Dam failures are short-lastting disasters, occurring over hours, days, or perhaps weeks. Nuclear failures are long-lasting disasters, occurring over decades, centuries, and perhaps millennia.
rolph 4y ago
a dam collapsing due to crappy engineering practice, isnt a property of hydro electric power, but the risk of such is perhaps 2nd or third order consequence of a dams existence, alongside orthagonal circumstances.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  And nuclear waste getting out (which has to my knowledge never happened and caused harm) is also a result of crappy engineering practice and isn't a property of nuclear power. The risk of such is similarly a 2nd or third order consequence of a nuclear power plant's existence, alongside orthagonal circumstances.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    > never happened and caused harm Hanford. Simi Valley. USSR.
arcticbull 4y ago
Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated (vs 0.03 for Nuclear - somewhere between wind and solar). Coal deaths translate to about 5 Chernobyl's per year (assuming the UNSCEAR 4000 deaths number) in the United States alone. Unlike nuclear power, coal is also responsible for spreading nuclear waste around the countryside because coal contains uranium and thorium that's concentrated in the ash left over after it's burned. [1] [edit] > Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas. [1] Waste from nuclear plants is nice and contained in neat little bundles that are monitored, safe and if you're worried, can be put into Yucca Mountain. [edit] btw, Yucca Mountain is conveniently located next to the Nevada Test Site, where the US tested many nuclear weapons, mostly underground, from 1957 to 1992. NTS contains some of the most radioactive land areas in the world. So at least you can be confident knowing you're putting the new spicy rocks in with the rest of them. [2] However, nuclear waste is very much a non-issue. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... [2] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nevada-test-site-downwinders https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nevada-test-site-down...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas. [1] Cool. Now explain what happens in the ground water around Kadapa or Rossing or Kakadu. Nuclear waste is very much an issue, you're just trying to focus on the stuff you have a vague plan for rather than no plan. Noone is suggesting more coal. They're suggesting renewables which are faster, cheaper, less centralized, less dependent on oligopolies and hostile foreign actors, more able to be deployed in unstable regions, just as safe, less polluting, produce less non-radioactive waste, and use fewer materials.
tinus_hn 4y ago
In this line of reasoning a collapsing dam serves as a warning, but a meltdown is a once (oops, twice) in a lifetime anomaly that will never happen again!

vagrantJin 4y ago

> And since we are already having great difficulty keeping our place in the universe habitable for our children... You must be joking. We'll figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste safer as we go. For now, it's the best thing we've got to combat fossil fuel dependency. > But if you live in an area with contaminated air or water, you're going to swallow, and on a daily basis. There is no "safe enough to lick it" industrial process. Humans figured out how to build pyramids millenia ago with hand tools. We will figure it out.

pdonis 4y ago

> The difficulty of nuclear storage is not guarding highly radioactive stuff the first 100 years. It's the medium and low radioactive stuff that you need to keep out of the water and air the next 10,000. You don't have to deal with the latter if you reprocess the "waste". Which, well before 10,000 years, you're going to do anyway, because on that time scale there will be significant economic value in retrieving usable fuel from it. The only reason reprocessing is not done now in the US is politics; other countries have been doing it for decades with no problems. And as it gets more expensive to mine more fuel, reprocessing becomes more and more of an economic advantage.