6 ms·

Sleight of hand and lies as usual. Breeder reactors do not actually exist and never have. Hitting some fertile material with fast or heavy water moderated neut

Sleight of hand and lies as usual. Breeder reactors do not actually exist and never have. Hitting some fertile material with fast or heavy water moderated neutrons is the easy part. Reprocessing reactor grade plutonium is the hard part and every program that has attempted it on a commercial scale has failed spectacularly. The french reprocessing facilities for ex weapons MOX are filthy, release more radiation than TMI and Fukushima combined in normal operation, and are horrifically expensive, and the others are all kept secret. The BN800 is closest as it's running ~100% MOX right now (with no indication as to the source or whether it is using the breeding blanket), but noone even has any plans to attempt to reprocess spent plutonium based fuels, so at best it just doubles the amount of energy, doubles the amount of short lived extremely high level waste, and leaves you with a slightly higher level of long lived transuranics. The danger of the long lived waste isn't handling it, it's having it enter the ground water and ecosystem where it will build up in the food chain forever.

moloch-hai 4y ago
Also, ingestion is neither the most dangerous or most likely route to eventually-fatal exposure: inhalation of radioactive dust is the hazard. It might take years to deliver lung cancer, on schedule, but it is a bad way to go.
Manuel_D 4y ago
> The french reprocessing facilities for ex weapons MOX are filthy, release more radiation than TMI and Fukushima combined in normal operation, and are horrifically expensive, and the others are all kept secret. The only people making these claims are Greenpeace: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site In reality, a single transatlantic flight will expose you to more radiation than spending a year at the reprocessing site. Greenpeace had zero credibility on nuclear power. They think a million people died from Chernobyl. This is nothing more than propaganda. > The danger of the long lived waste isn't handling it, it's having it enter the ground water and ecosystem where it will build up in the food chain forever. You realize that naturally occurring uranium already contaminates many regions water supplies? But it's not the end of the world, it can be treated and filtered out: https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminates-water-california-central-valley https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > In reality, a single transatlantic flight will expose you to more radiation than spending a year at the reprocessing site. More attempted misdirection. The problem is the emissions into the atmosphere and ocean which is cumulative and spread over a much larger region, not the radiation on site. Much like coal: One La Hague running at full capacity for a coupleof decades is a relatively minor problem. A thousand of them running for a century using much more polluting feed stock is the issue. > Greenpeace had zero credibility on nuclear power. They think a million people died from Chernobyl. This is nothing more than propaganda. If it's not a problem then why not pay for third parties to put whatever sensors they please and run whatever tests they wish on the outlets, vents, and surrounding land rather than removing them and running a media suppression campaign? Proving Greenpeace wrong would make their job far easier. > You realize that naturally occurring uranium already contaminates many regions water supplies? But it's not the end of the world, it can be treated and filtered out: https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat... U238 isn't americium or neptunium or plutonium, and natural contamination levels are far lower than what happens around those mines.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Radiation density is what matters. Radiation that escapes into a much larger volume rapidly becomes negligibly more radioactive than the average. If the surrounding areas are contaminated, it should be trivial to find this without access to the plant itself. Unless this is radiation is completely contained in the plant, and in that case it's not really contamination is it? They don't want Greenpeace sticking random sensors everywhere, because they'll detect negligible amounts of radioisotopes and insist it's contamination. They're free to walk around less than a mile away from the plant with Geiger counters in and whatever other equipment they want. If nearby areas were contaminated, then being prohibited from entering the plant itself would pose no issue to discovering that contamination. And you can't just walk onto a nuclear facility, them being prohibited is not unusual in the slightest. It's like claiming the fact that Im not free to expose Area 51 is proof that there's something nefarious hidden there: aliens, genetically engineer Nekos, take your pick.

moloch-hai 4y ago

Also, ingestion is neither the most dangerous or most likely route to eventually-fatal exposure: inhalation of radioactive dust is the hazard. It might take years to deliver lung cancer, on schedule, but it is a bad way to go.

Manuel_D 4y ago

> The french reprocessing facilities for ex weapons MOX are filthy, release more radiation than TMI and Fukushima combined in normal operation, and are horrifically expensive, and the others are all kept secret. The only people making these claims are Greenpeace: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site In reality, a single transatlantic flight will expose you to more radiation than spending a year at the reprocessing site. Greenpeace had zero credibility on nuclear power. They think a million people died from Chernobyl. This is nothing more than propaganda. > The danger of the long lived waste isn't handling it, it's having it enter the ground water and ecosystem where it will build up in the food chain forever. You realize that naturally occurring uranium already contaminates many regions water supplies? But it's not the end of the world, it can be treated and filtered out: https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminates-water-california-central-valley https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat...

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> In reality, a single transatlantic flight will expose you to more radiation than spending a year at the reprocessing site. More attempted misdirection. The problem is the emissions into the atmosphere and ocean which is cumulative and spread over a much larger region, not the radiation on site. Much like coal: One La Hague running at full capacity for a coupleof decades is a relatively minor problem. A thousand of them running for a century using much more polluting feed stock is the issue. > Greenpeace had zero credibility on nuclear power. They think a million people died from Chernobyl. This is nothing more than propaganda. If it's not a problem then why not pay for third parties to put whatever sensors they please and run whatever tests they wish on the outlets, vents, and surrounding land rather than removing them and running a media suppression campaign? Proving Greenpeace wrong would make their job far easier. > You realize that naturally occurring uranium already contaminates many regions water supplies? But it's not the end of the world, it can be treated and filtered out: https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat... U238 isn't americium or neptunium or plutonium, and natural contamination levels are far lower than what happens around those mines.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Radiation density is what matters. Radiation that escapes into a much larger volume rapidly becomes negligibly more radioactive than the average. If the surrounding areas are contaminated, it should be trivial to find this without access to the plant itself. Unless this is radiation is completely contained in the plant, and in that case it's not really contamination is it? They don't want Greenpeace sticking random sensors everywhere, because they'll detect negligible amounts of radioisotopes and insist it's contamination. They're free to walk around less than a mile away from the plant with Geiger counters in and whatever other equipment they want. If nearby areas were contaminated, then being prohibited from entering the plant itself would pose no issue to discovering that contamination. And you can't just walk onto a nuclear facility, them being prohibited is not unusual in the slightest. It's like claiming the fact that Im not free to expose Area 51 is proof that there's something nefarious hidden there: aliens, genetically engineer Nekos, take your pick.