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I am 100% in favor of any technology that allows us to stop emitting CO2 in a short time-frame, including nuclear. My reservation about the pro-nuclear (online)

I am 100% in favor of any technology that allows us to stop emitting CO2 in a short time-frame, including nuclear. My reservation about the pro-nuclear (online) argument is that it always seems to be framed more as an excuse to "punch some hippies" than as a serious effort to calculate the cost of deploying nuclear at scale, let alone an effort to marshal political opinion to a state that would allow for any of it to happen.

ouid 4y ago
You are the first person I have ever heard present this sentiment.
- marmetio 4y ago
  Yeah I've never heard of it, either. I haven't even really seen hippies in the opposition. They're just normal people who, as soon as they hear the word "nuclear", panic really hard and refuse to receive any new information that would actually address their concerns.
  - Arnt 4y ago
    Try it. Say my concern is that the relevant nuclear operators are organisationally similar to TEPCO. Give me some new information that either explains how they are different, or explains that an organisation like TEPCO is well suited to run a nuclear reactor safely.
    - marmetio 4y ago
      You're kind of proving my point here. Your concern is that an operator can be unsafe, which is valid and will always be true. So no, I won't argue against your contrived framing. The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city. This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions. For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        > For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically. A great start would be not consistently lying about everything until the lies are indisputably proven and then pretending it never happened every single time about everything for over 70 years. Demonstrate a walkaway safe pebble bed reactor or similar that doesn't break down constantly or start leaking unsustainable levels of Kr-85. Remediate the hundreds of contaminated mines, spills and processing sites that the buck is being passed on. Stop demanding unlimited indemnity from any accident exceeding a pittance. Actually tell the truth about contamination events and levels entailed in standard practise ahead of time. Allow actually independent third parties rather than industry bodies to confirm claims on site, and estimate costs that are somewhere in the ballpark of reality with no backroom 'service' contracts. Stop pretending you've 'solved' waste by gathering a quarter of the money required and saying "we'll probably bury the SNF somewhere", don't worry about all the low level and intermediate waste. Demonstrate the existence of a viable fuel source or breeding program that isn't walking a tight rope on the edge of prompt criticality. Demonstrate a reprocessing process that doesn't push an entire continent's coastlines to 5% of safe limits whilst producing barely enough fuel to run about 2GW of reactors. Then it's worth considering as something that isn't just another scam. Until that point the oligopily of the nuclear industry should be rightly treated as a bunch of craven ghouls who are having a tantrum because they were held to account and didn't get to hoard billions whilst killing millions of people like the coal barons did.
        marmetio 4y ago
        I'm not a marketing person. I have no idea how they'll address past bad behavior, dispel common myths, or educate about fundamentally new technologies that eliminate old problems. I'm just saying they'll eventually have to do it.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        The alternative is we ignore the entire cesspit and acknowledge that accepting 2-5% of energy being provided by fossil fuels in a small minority of countries until storage matures is better than putting everything on hold and hoping that gifting a few trillion dollars to people who have done nothing but scam will work better.
_cenw 4y ago
I've resigned myself to hoping France makes new investments so we can just buy it from them on the market. Nuclear isn't happening in Germany. Barely anyone in the anti-nuclear movement is willing to have a discussion beyond "Chernobyl was bad, THTR was a huge failure and waste disposal is a problem I will accept nothing but a perfect solution on".
- RGamma 4y ago
  What are current feasible, sustainable solutions to long-term nuclear waste storage? Any pointers?
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    > What are current feasible, sustainable solutions to long-term nuclear waste storage? Any pointers? Bury it in geologically stable areas. At some point: it will cool down on its own, or technology will be developed to re-use it in an economically-amiable fashion and we can bring it back up. We know how to re-process it [1] but no body really wants to pay for that. As it stands: before we start worrying about what happens to nuclear "waste" 500+ years in the future, we have to get through the next 100 years and all the issues that climate change is causing right now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site
  - _cenw 4y ago
    All I know is that I'm more comfortable burying some extra waste next to the stuff we already have to bury somewhere (like Onkalo) than burn more fossil fuels. Trading long term for short term isn't the best, but I don't really see anything else getting us off a track to further global ecological devastation you couldn't cause with nuclear waste even if you were trying.

ouid 4y ago

You are the first person I have ever heard present this sentiment.

marmetio 4y ago
Yeah I've never heard of it, either. I haven't even really seen hippies in the opposition. They're just normal people who, as soon as they hear the word "nuclear", panic really hard and refuse to receive any new information that would actually address their concerns.
- Arnt 4y ago
  Try it. Say my concern is that the relevant nuclear operators are organisationally similar to TEPCO. Give me some new information that either explains how they are different, or explains that an organisation like TEPCO is well suited to run a nuclear reactor safely.
  - marmetio 4y ago
    You're kind of proving my point here. Your concern is that an operator can be unsafe, which is valid and will always be true. So no, I won't argue against your contrived framing. The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city. This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions. For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      > For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically. A great start would be not consistently lying about everything until the lies are indisputably proven and then pretending it never happened every single time about everything for over 70 years. Demonstrate a walkaway safe pebble bed reactor or similar that doesn't break down constantly or start leaking unsustainable levels of Kr-85. Remediate the hundreds of contaminated mines, spills and processing sites that the buck is being passed on. Stop demanding unlimited indemnity from any accident exceeding a pittance. Actually tell the truth about contamination events and levels entailed in standard practise ahead of time. Allow actually independent third parties rather than industry bodies to confirm claims on site, and estimate costs that are somewhere in the ballpark of reality with no backroom 'service' contracts. Stop pretending you've 'solved' waste by gathering a quarter of the money required and saying "we'll probably bury the SNF somewhere", don't worry about all the low level and intermediate waste. Demonstrate the existence of a viable fuel source or breeding program that isn't walking a tight rope on the edge of prompt criticality. Demonstrate a reprocessing process that doesn't push an entire continent's coastlines to 5% of safe limits whilst producing barely enough fuel to run about 2GW of reactors. Then it's worth considering as something that isn't just another scam. Until that point the oligopily of the nuclear industry should be rightly treated as a bunch of craven ghouls who are having a tantrum because they were held to account and didn't get to hoard billions whilst killing millions of people like the coal barons did.
      - marmetio 4y ago
        I'm not a marketing person. I have no idea how they'll address past bad behavior, dispel common myths, or educate about fundamentally new technologies that eliminate old problems. I'm just saying they'll eventually have to do it.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        The alternative is we ignore the entire cesspit and acknowledge that accepting 2-5% of energy being provided by fossil fuels in a small minority of countries until storage matures is better than putting everything on hold and hoping that gifting a few trillion dollars to people who have done nothing but scam will work better.

_cenw 4y ago

I've resigned myself to hoping France makes new investments so we can just buy it from them on the market. Nuclear isn't happening in Germany. Barely anyone in the anti-nuclear movement is willing to have a discussion beyond "Chernobyl was bad, THTR was a huge failure and waste disposal is a problem I will accept nothing but a perfect solution on".

RGamma 4y ago
What are current feasible, sustainable solutions to long-term nuclear waste storage? Any pointers?
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > What are current feasible, sustainable solutions to long-term nuclear waste storage? Any pointers? Bury it in geologically stable areas. At some point: it will cool down on its own, or technology will be developed to re-use it in an economically-amiable fashion and we can bring it back up. We know how to re-process it [1] but no body really wants to pay for that. As it stands: before we start worrying about what happens to nuclear "waste" 500+ years in the future, we have to get through the next 100 years and all the issues that climate change is causing right now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site
- _cenw 4y ago
  All I know is that I'm more comfortable burying some extra waste next to the stuff we already have to bury somewhere (like Onkalo) than burn more fossil fuels. Trading long term for short term isn't the best, but I don't really see anything else getting us off a track to further global ecological devastation you couldn't cause with nuclear waste even if you were trying.