8 ms·

This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: > Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will la

by jmyeet 4y ago

This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: > Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn. Example: > The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m. Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]: > The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants. So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that. The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2]. [1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Nuclear advocate here. With radiation, people often conflate measureable with hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them. Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them are borderline meaningless. Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel. That's why lots of people like nuclear. Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about that.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  The problem with all those assumptions is that the "radiological harm" is cumulative and it can accumulate in unexpected ways which aren't random. For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then do their damage for a long time. And there's no good framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year. Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out, because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose. And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions, but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget that while not that many people die even in major accidents, that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up. At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a trillion Dollar in cost, btw.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Actually it's the anti-nuclear crowd that frames pro-nuclear people in a way that pretends it's only coal or nuclear. The reality is that we are 80% fossil and biofuel and need everything that is at least 10x better on climate and health, which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal. The amount of energy transition we need is nearly unfathomable. To tie our hand behind our back because we are afraid of nuclear in this race is unwise. Antinuclear scare mongerers are forcing the Fukushima people to purify water so far below the natural radioactivity of seawater (which does contain slightly radioactive potassium and uranium) that it's truly ridiculous. That drives up costs unecessarily. Anyway what's the cost of failing to solve climate change or the cost of killing 8 million people per year with combustion? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-really-ok-if-japan-dumps-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-the-ocean/?sh=68b8d045b298 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-reall...
DrBazza 4y ago
> This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better knowledge and engineering expertise to build safer, better, more efficient, less "polluting" (for some definition of the word) reactors. FWIW, this week in the cold snap in the UK, we've relied on good old fossil fuel and... nuclear, because the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining. https://gridwatch.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.co.uk/ Also, being old enough to have lived through the press-hysteria of Chernobyl: "we're all going to die or have babies with 3 arms", we ended up with maybe 4000 deaths over 50 years, and an area now rich with wildlife. And that's an uncontrolled nuclear accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... Compare that to the number of people that die through coal mine accidents a year and air pollution and so on. Then there's oil slicks killing wildlife, rig accidents, pipelines hundreds, if not thousands of miles long and so on. Or natural gas, with explosions and so on. Plus all the carbon emissions for transporting millions upon millions of tons of the stuff. The world wide number of deaths due to nuclear in its entire history adds up to less deaths than there are probably in a typical week for fossil fuels (deaths mining, transporting, building, and deaths to the general population breathing it in, and let's add deaths from climate change in there, since that's literally what fossil fuels have caused). I'd go further and say the deaths worldwide per day directly (accidents) or indirectly (climate change + pollution) due to fossil fuel usage is more than all deaths ever due to nuclear in its history. I live near a nuclear power station, and I'm comfortable with that. In fact, where I live, there's approximately 1.5m living within 30 miles, and just beyond that... London. On balance, I'd take a fleet of new nuclear power stations over the absolute disaster that is fossil fuels and the days there's no sun or wind. Back to: 'oh but what about waste?' Bury it, with signs. If we've gotten too stupid to read in 500 years, we're likely too stupid to know how to dig down several thousand feet, and are probably banging rocks together and saying 'ug' to each other. It's really not a problem. I can't recall the last time someone stupidly went into an _existing_ nuclear waste dump anywhere in the world and then died. And if they have it's, what, 1 person out of 7 billion. > Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]: Well, of course. Because, built in the right way, you use nuclear reactors to breed weapons grade fuel. So governments are always involved. In turn this means that governments never let market forces, and hence private companies build competing nuclear reactors which would drive down costs because the government won't step out of the way. The UK pretty much had a choice of EDF or EDF to build a new nuclear reactor.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
It's estimated that coal use in the US costs $345 billion a year in hidden expenses (health problems and pollution etc) https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-study-idUSN1628366220110216 https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-study-idUSN16283662... Which are all paid by the public and government.
Neil44 4y ago
I am confused because you're mixing things from UK, US and russia in this post which obviously all have different laws. I'm not sayig you're wrong it's just confusing beause the situations from different countries aren't always comparable unless you explicitly establish that they are, it would be better to just stick to examples from the same country.
blitzar 4y ago
My naive solution is to actually double down. The site is "toxic", the community (and the grandchildren of those working on site) are entirely dependant upon the plant. Build more plants on site - you have the waste, but also the knowledge and the one community that is happy to have it in their back yard. As toxic as the waste in the pools out back is the last 20 years of will they wont they attitude towards not just further nuclear builds but hand wringing over paying to cleanup the experiments of the past which is where much of the waste comes from.
mhh__ 4y ago
Sellafield is decommissioning in large part a plant designed to any% speedrun weapons grade material, not power.

by jmyeet 4y ago

acidburnNSA 4y ago

Nuclear advocate here. With radiation, people often conflate measureable with hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them. Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them are borderline meaningless. Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel. That's why lots of people like nuclear. Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about that.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
The problem with all those assumptions is that the "radiological harm" is cumulative and it can accumulate in unexpected ways which aren't random. For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then do their damage for a long time. And there's no good framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year. Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out, because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose. And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions, but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget that while not that many people die even in major accidents, that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up. At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a trillion Dollar in cost, btw.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Actually it's the anti-nuclear crowd that frames pro-nuclear people in a way that pretends it's only coal or nuclear. The reality is that we are 80% fossil and biofuel and need everything that is at least 10x better on climate and health, which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal. The amount of energy transition we need is nearly unfathomable. To tie our hand behind our back because we are afraid of nuclear in this race is unwise. Antinuclear scare mongerers are forcing the Fukushima people to purify water so far below the natural radioactivity of seawater (which does contain slightly radioactive potassium and uranium) that it's truly ridiculous. That drives up costs unecessarily. Anyway what's the cost of failing to solve climate change or the cost of killing 8 million people per year with combustion? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-really-ok-if-japan-dumps-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-the-ocean/?sh=68b8d045b298 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-reall...

DrBazza 4y ago

> This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better knowledge and engineering expertise to build safer, better, more efficient, less "polluting" (for some definition of the word) reactors. FWIW, this week in the cold snap in the UK, we've relied on good old fossil fuel and... nuclear, because the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining. https://gridwatch.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.co.uk/ Also, being old enough to have lived through the press-hysteria of Chernobyl: "we're all going to die or have babies with 3 arms", we ended up with maybe 4000 deaths over 50 years, and an area now rich with wildlife. And that's an uncontrolled nuclear accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... Compare that to the number of people that die through coal mine accidents a year and air pollution and so on. Then there's oil slicks killing wildlife, rig accidents, pipelines hundreds, if not thousands of miles long and so on. Or natural gas, with explosions and so on. Plus all the carbon emissions for transporting millions upon millions of tons of the stuff. The world wide number of deaths due to nuclear in its entire history adds up to less deaths than there are probably in a typical week for fossil fuels (deaths mining, transporting, building, and deaths to the general population breathing it in, and let's add deaths from climate change in there, since that's literally what fossil fuels have caused). I'd go further and say the deaths worldwide per day directly (accidents) or indirectly (climate change + pollution) due to fossil fuel usage is more than all deaths ever due to nuclear in its history. I live near a nuclear power station, and I'm comfortable with that. In fact, where I live, there's approximately 1.5m living within 30 miles, and just beyond that... London. On balance, I'd take a fleet of new nuclear power stations over the absolute disaster that is fossil fuels and the days there's no sun or wind. Back to: 'oh but what about waste?' Bury it, with signs. If we've gotten too stupid to read in 500 years, we're likely too stupid to know how to dig down several thousand feet, and are probably banging rocks together and saying 'ug' to each other. It's really not a problem. I can't recall the last time someone stupidly went into an _existing_ nuclear waste dump anywhere in the world and then died. And if they have it's, what, 1 person out of 7 billion. > Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]: Well, of course. Because, built in the right way, you use nuclear reactors to breed weapons grade fuel. So governments are always involved. In turn this means that governments never let market forces, and hence private companies build competing nuclear reactors which would drive down costs because the government won't step out of the way. The UK pretty much had a choice of EDF or EDF to build a new nuclear reactor.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

It's estimated that coal use in the US costs $345 billion a year in hidden expenses (health problems and pollution etc) https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-study-idUSN1628366220110216 https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-study-idUSN16283662... Which are all paid by the public and government.

Neil44 4y ago

I am confused because you're mixing things from UK, US and russia in this post which obviously all have different laws. I'm not sayig you're wrong it's just confusing beause the situations from different countries aren't always comparable unless you explicitly establish that they are, it would be better to just stick to examples from the same country.

blitzar 4y ago

My naive solution is to actually double down. The site is "toxic", the community (and the grandchildren of those working on site) are entirely dependant upon the plant. Build more plants on site - you have the waste, but also the knowledge and the one community that is happy to have it in their back yard. As toxic as the waste in the pools out back is the last 20 years of will they wont they attitude towards not just further nuclear builds but hand wringing over paying to cleanup the experiments of the past which is where much of the waste comes from.

mhh__ 4y ago

Sellafield is decommissioning in large part a plant designed to any% speedrun weapons grade material, not power.