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I changed my mind about nuclear waste

• FullyFunctional 4y ago
  I don’t think nuclear is evil, but Rosie’s look at the financials suggests there are better options: https://youtu.be/quI_8xYSWYE https://youtu.be/quI_8xYSWYE
  • jchw 4y ago
    Disclaimer: I did not watch the video linked. For what it's worth, I do agree, but I think we'll probably need to have (subsidized) nuclear as part of the solution anyways, especially in places where we don't have ample room for wind/solar/battery storage.
    • willnonya 4y ago
      It would be irononic for the government to subsidize something that they've significantly contributed to increasing the cost of.
      • dale_glass 4y ago
        A huge amount of the cost increases are there to make it actually safe. Windscale could have been cheaper, but some jerk called Cockfort insisted on additional filters just in case -- oh wait, that "Cockfort's folly" turned what could have been a horrifying accident into a merely bad one. Chernobyl was cheap, but it didn't have a containment building. Modern nuclear is safer, but that cost more money. Nuclear needs emergency cooling to be safe, which costs more money. It needs redundancy, which costs more. And so on. So what is it exactly what you think needs cutting?
    • mikeyouse 4y ago
      Honestly, given the trajectory of nuclear costs compare to battery costs - it's going to make far more sense to build power lines to places that don't have renewable potential.
      • jchw 4y ago
        I get what you're saying, but consider a place like Japan. That strategy is probably not viable everywhere.
        • mikeyouse 4y ago
          It'll be interesting to see how everything develops but Japan has an absurd amount of offshore wind potential. Their country is set up perfectly to take advantage of it given their major cities are all up and down the coast, they're also ~100 miles from mainland Korea which has plenty of wind and solar potential as well. There are geopolitical concerns to relying on your neighbors for energy transmission, but it's hard to think of any technical or financial reasons that would stop it. Given current learning rates and cost trends, utility solar will likely be under $0.01/kwh in just about every place on earth. Certainly within 15 years, likely within 10. When new-build nuclear is above $0.10/kwh and takes a decade to build, the delta buys you a ton of storage.
          • jchw 4y ago
            I agree that it'll be interesting to see. A primarily-wind Japan would be cool if it could be done, and it seems like a win/win. I wonder if it still makes sense to keep nuclear energy around in the mix as a sort of backup, though. We've already got a ton of plants that could probably last more decades with proper maintenance to my understanding, and despite making up a small number of energy production facilities they make up a huge mix of the energy in the world, so it seems like it could be a solid backup plan in a primarily wind and solar world.
            • mikeyouse 4y ago
              Oh yeah, existing plants can be operated at very low cost -- if they're sited in safe locations, and certified / refurbished for extended use beyond their design life, it definitely makes sense to keep them running for as long as possible. If Japan overbuilds their wind resources while maintaining their nuclear fleet, they could send the nuclear electrons the other direction and power Korea with nuclear.
  • glitchc 4y ago
    Her analysis is fundamentally flawed. For a stable energy source, it cannot be solar alone or wind alone. Rather it needs to be solar plus battery and wind plus battery. Let's factor in the costs of producing maintaining and environmentally disposing of those batteries and let's see how the numbers shake out, ceteris paribus of course.
    • uoaei 4y ago
      Interesting point. One other very important point is what those batteries will be made of. Using lithium is really only necessary for batteries that move with the devices they power, because it's so light. For stationary energy storage, lithium is overkill and you may be able to use heavier storage solutions (sodium instead of lithium, sand batteries storing thermal energy, etc.) for installations. There's also still the real possibility that we develop suitable supercapacitors with graphene or other extremely cheap materials. I don't know what the process is for recycling graphene but considering it's pure carbon I doubt it will be much trouble. I know supercapacitors are not batteries but the advancements in one can definitely help cross-pollinate advancements in the other.
    • dale_glass 4y ago
      Unfortunately nuclear doesn't appear to be a viable supplement. Suppose a grid with just nuclear and solar. Nuclear may be overall very stable, but solar is still not, and so you still need storage. The only difference is how much of it you need. But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical. Solar is much, much cheaper and therefore any economically minded person would build solar if they had a choice, and would just not enter the business space at all if they couldn't. The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times. The idea was that nuclear is cheap but unwieldy, and can be supplemented with small amounts of more flexible but more expensive sources for when it can't adjust fast enough. But that just hasn't panned out.
      • LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        > But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical. Against what honest option? If fossil fuel plants had to charge to cover the deaths from pollution they'd be blistering expensive. It could just as easily be said that nuclear power is the only source we can truly afford. > The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times. Right, because it's not really a business. Power is infrastructure.
• Animats 4y ago
  Once waste has made it to dry cask storage, it's not much of a problem. But there are still too many spent fuel rods in cooling pools at power stations. That stuff was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain, but for political reasons, that didn't happen.
  • orangepurple 4y ago
    Until it explodes because it was filled with organic instead of clay kitty litter and costs $500 million to 2 billion and two years to clean up (this happened at WIPP in 2014) https://theecologist.org/2016/sep/20/wipp-nuclear-waste-accident-will-cost-us-taxpayers-2-billion https://theecologist.org/2016/sep/20/wipp-nuclear-waste-acci... It seems that nobody can safely deal with nuclear material cost effectively. From the article: Worse still, mismanagement of the clean-up has involved poor safety practices. Last year, the DOE's Independent Office of Enterprise Assessments released a report that found that WIPP clean-up operations were being rushed to meet the scheduled reopening date and that this pressure was contributing to poor safety practices. The report states: "The EA analysis considered operational events and reviews conducted during May 2014 through May 2015 and identified a significant negative trend in performance of work. During this period, strong and unrealistic schedule pressures on the workforce contributed to poor safety performance and incidents during that time are indicators of the potential for a future serious safety incident." The report points to "serious issues in conduct of operations, job hazard analysis, and safety basis." Specific problems identified in the report include: workers incorrectly changing filters resulting in five safety violations; waste oil left underground for an extended period despite a renewed emphasis on combustible load reduction; fire water lines inadequately protected against freezing; inadequate processes leading a small fire underground, followed by the failure of workers and their supervisor to report the fire; an operator improperly leaving a trainee to operate a waste hoist, the hoist being improperly used, tripping a safety relay and shutting down the hoist for hours; an engineer violating two safety postings to remove a waste hoist safety guard; workers removing a grating to an underground tank and not posting a barricade, causing a fall hazard; a backlog of hundreds of preventive maintenance items; and failing to properly track overtime such that "personnel may be working past the point of safety".
  • Accujack 4y ago
• NKosmatos 4y ago
  Excellent post and very informative. Nuclear power production is the only way forward if we want to have a chance of not completely destroying our environment. Let’s hope that nuclear fusion will become mainstream sooner than later.
• glitchc 4y ago
  Thank you. I believe all environmentalists need to curb their fear and absorb a healthy dose of science. It would limit the outpouring of outrageous, fear-mongering statements to leave some room for serious adult discussions on how to tackle the energy problems we face as a species.
  • pflenker 4y ago
    I think it’s condescending to claim that environmentalists are guided mainly by emotions and people who share your view are guided by science. The problems surrounding nuclear waste is not as clear cut as the article suggests.
    • glitchc 4y ago
      The fact that you feel personally attacked by my statement suggests that your beliefs are well, beliefs, and not necessarily grounded in fact. I recommend you read "The Wizard and The Prophet" as it chronicles the dawn of the environmentalist movement in an engaging and insightful way. That environmentalism was largely funded by wealthy folks, most of whom had only a rudimentary understanding of science, should be a clue towards how much science factors into those discussions.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        This is a bogus argument. If want to discuss the relative level of science in current beliefs about, say, nuclear waste, then go ahead and do so. But please do not impugne current "environmentalists" (a group which, as far as this topic goes, includes a number of "actual scientists") with your claims about the origins of the environmental movement. As for those claims, the environmental movement in the USA is generally dated back to the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", and in its early years was not really funded by anyone at all. In addition, most things are largely funded by wealthy folks, so this observation is largely content free.
      • throwbadubadu 4y ago
        But it's also not like every scientist (vs environmentalist, can't we just stop with stupid generalization and classification like that?) would be in full support of going on with nuclear as civil power source, and there is also more than pure science to consider. Stuff fails (from waste disposal processes to planes falling out of the sky) not because we have not understood the science or almost perfect processes established, but for many various reasons? I think it's also unfair to claim poster before as feeling attacked, and then giving statement about his beliefs, which you don't know. So could do the same thing here? Those grounded facts extrapolated to the complex practical reality is again itself just belief, and could do the same here then...
• whatshisface 4y ago
  >I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons. That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the areas around them are contaminated. If you want to use this as an argument for the safety of nuclear waste disposal, you would have to explain why the armed force's problems with waste disposal are specific to them and will never spread to regulated private industry. (P.S. the history of that is not great either and you might end up arguing that something which has already happened never will.)
  • erentz 4y ago
    I think this part stems from a common response you see from anti-nuclear folks, who frequently point to the issues at Hanford as a reason to be against civilian nuclear power. She's trying to make clear the difference between civilian nuclear power and waste management and historical waste from military nuclear weapons programs. Remembering also Hanford waste issues date as far back as the Manhattan Project during WW2.
    • whatshisface 4y ago
      Civilian nuclear waste management has a better track record than military nuclear waste management and civilian chemical waste management. Is that a permanent condition, or a fluke?
      • erentz 4y ago
        We are talking about 32 countries with civilian nuclear power operating for several decades. With oversight by an international body that tracks every bit of nuclear material. Using processes that differ from what was done at Hanford, producing waste different from Hanford. That has been working well, stored well and safely without issue. The military didn't start from that position, it started from "Joe just throw that shit in a pit over there, don't even bother keeping records." Hanford has no resemblance to civilian nuclear power. I think the onus is on those who keep saying it does (despite the evidence to the contrary) to demonstrate it.
• supermatt 4y ago
  Can nuclear waste undergo fusion to turn it back into whatever it was before by using energy from renewables, thereby acting as a form of energy storage?
  • fredgrott 4y ago
    It's an operation cycle of very specific reactors, if I remember right its a variation of breeder reactors.
    • pdonis 4y ago
      Breeders don't reverse the nuclear reactions that take place when a reactor is producing power. They use the neutron flux from those reactions to induce different reactions (involving much less energy per nucleus) in surrounding material that produce fissile isotopes in that material.
    • NegativeK 4y ago
      Breeder reactors work by having less useful elements capture neutrons and turn into more useful elements. Capturing all of the fission byproducts and reversing the process is going to be so technically difficult and energy costly that, in this context, it might as well be impossible.
  • db48x 4y ago
    No, that would cost more energy than we extracted from it. However, what we call “spent fuel” isn’t fully used up. It can no longer be used in a normal reactor, but reactors can be build which can continue extracting energy from it. In fact, only about 2% of the usable energy has been extracted from the fuel by the time we start calling it waste. Most of the high–level waste from today’s reactors is really just fuel for reactors that we haven’t built yet, due to over–regulation.
    • smn1234 4y ago
      this is fascinating and unexpected. Do you have more literature on this ?
• aeonik 4y ago
  I've been a bit of a nuclear nerd for a long time, and somehow the author still shares information that is new to me: I had no idea how quickly high-level waste dissipated, love the plots of the radioactive decay. > The decay of heat and radioactivity over time means that after only forty years, the radioactivity of used fuel has decreased to about one-thousandth of the level at the point when it was unloaded. Less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. The portion that stays radioactive for longer is about as radioactive as some things found in nature and can be easily shielded to protect humans.
  • inglor_cz 4y ago
    It is somewhat logical. Radiation isn't free and if something radiates a lot, it loses quite a lot of energy while radiating. Typically: intense radiation is caused by massive presence of isotopes with short half-life, which means that they go away quite quickly. Even the notorious Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl, made of molten core content, is now much safer than it used to be, to the degree that people are now willing to enter the room and make photos of it [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)
  • uoaei 4y ago
    "About" and "less than" are lovely weasel words for the ideologically committed. According to this graph, the truth is more like 1% after 100 years, 0.1% after 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel?useskin=vector#/media/File:Activitytotal1.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel?useskin=vec...
  • nicoburns 4y ago
    IMO that's quite misleading. It's true that the amount of radition will dramatically decline. But it does so unevenly, and certain isotopes last much much longer. That's not really a problem if the waste stays contained in one location, but if that waste somehow leaked into water sources or similar then it could have significant consequences. Even a very small amounts of these isotopes can be dangerous if inhaled or ingested.
  • zizee 4y ago
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry, founded an activist group that claims: > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science. Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science". edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting. I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and Shellenberger to be running the same "I used to be an environmentalist" story: https://www.netzerowatch.com/gwpf-welcomes-newfound-realism-among-prominent-green-campaigners/ https://www.netzerowatch.com/gwpf-welcomes-newfound-realism-... > In recent days, former Extinction Rebellion spokesman Zion Lights has announced her conversion to the cause of nuclear energy, while so-called “eco-modernist” Michael Shellenberger has gone further, and apologised for the years he spent scaremongering over climate change in a long article at Forbes website. > Welcoming these developments, GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said: > It’s great to see these prominent green campaigners disavowing the eco-extremism that has done such damage to the world. When Michael Shellenberger says that climate change isn’t even the biggest environmental problem the world faces, he’s echoing a view that the GWPF has highlighted since our inception.” Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image): https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-lights-michael-shellenberger-and-the-breakthrough-institute/ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-... > There have been a number of stories in the press in the last few weeks with criticisms about Extinction Rebellion by Zion Lights, UK director of the pro-nuclear lobby group Environmental Progress. It appears that Lights is engaged in a deliberate PR campaign to discredit Extinction Rebellion. > For any editors who might be considering platforming Lights, we would like to make you aware of some information about the organisation she works for and her employer, Michael Shellenberger.
  • archgoon 4y ago
    The author gave a fairly detailed account of how nuclear waste is processed and its general safety. Which claims do you take issue with? As it stands, I have learned considerably more from her post.
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Hopefully you didn't learn too many false things, like e.g. her claim: > I also learned that batteries cannot be recycled.
• Adraghast 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • fernandotakai 4y ago
    can you explain why?
    • Adraghast 4y ago
      Author went from Extinction Rebellion (deeply suspicious in its own right, but neither here nor there) to working for Michael Shellenberger, a lifelong PR flack for the nuclear and fossil fuel industries. Now is the public face of a “group” called Emergency Reactor — spend twenty seconds looking at its website and Twitter and it’s clear the entire purpose is to derail renewables — spun up by Daniel Aegerter, who through his private VC fund, Armada AG, is invested in a number of nuclear startups including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Last Energy, and Oklo.
  • josephcsible 4y ago
    From the guidelines: > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
    • Adraghast 4y ago
      Don’t care
• yellow_lead 4y ago
  The author says the waste isn't liquid, but also says that spent fuel rods are cooled in pools for several years. Does the water not become irradiated in that time?
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    Does your cup of water become irradiated from having a hot spoon stuck in it? I think the water is mostly safe. At worst the water will have little slivers of radioactive material floating in it but that’s only if something already went wrong, so I imagine it’s cleaned before being discharged. Ultimately you can also cool it down and reuse it, so you might not need all that much water relatively speaking.
    • fragmede 4y ago
      My hot spoon isn't made up of uranium and didn't come out of a nuclear reactor, and isn't radioactive, so I'm not sure how that addresses GP's concerns.
      • LarryMullins 4y ago
        Your hot spoon is in fact radioactive, emitting thermal radiation. Thermal radiation doesn't make things it hits radioactive. Neither does your microwave oven or even gamma radiation. Radioactivity can be induced in things by neutron radiation, but not EM radiation. It is safe to eat food which has been irradiated with gamma radiation, and chances are you have many times before (it is fairly common for dried spices and herbs to be irradiated for preservation purposes.)
        • idlewords 4y ago
          Things that emit thermal radiation are not radioactive. An easy way to conceptualize it for stuff here on Earth is that radioactivity involves stuff flying out of the nucleus of an atom, while other forms of radiation do not.
• johndhi 4y ago
  This was an awesome article. It makes me feel better. I feel like I have generalized anxiety about nuclear waste existing out there, and this quelled it.
  • kuschkufan 4y ago
    yeah, i agree - what a great feel good article. light on any hard facts, but makes that up with feel good stuff. right what people needed to bolster their existing opinion of "nuclear energy = good"
• legitster 4y ago
  I'm all for fighting the good fight on this, but I'm also a realist: consumer sentiment isn't going to change much. People on the extremes will still fight to the nails on MSG, Flouride in water, GMO, etc. But the median person doesn't really care where their power comes from when they hit a switch so long as it's cheap. If we want any serious progress on Nuclear you need regulators with authority to ignore organized civilian protestation. And the only way that happens is when politicians have their backs against the wall when it comes to energy options.
  • uoaei 4y ago
    Virtually no one who is critical of nuclear thinks that "it's scary" is the best, or even a good, reason for not having nuclear. But loads of analysis have been done on the financials of different energy generation methods and shows very clearly that, except for those contracted to build and maintain the thing, no one sees a real benefit. It simply doesn't pan out to plan and build new nuclear reactors today, considering what we could do with that money (solar, wind) over the 10 years it takes from groundbreaking to first day online for nuclear facilities.
    • j0hnyl 4y ago
      Do you have any good source of reading on this? Most of my layman googling seems to suggest otherwise.
    • legitster 4y ago
      The financials don't live in a vacuum though. Nuclear is only so expensive because there is a lack of supply chain on reactors and absurd regulations. The average nuclear reactor is over 40 years old(!) and well past due for replacement. So the cost is skewed by unrealistic maintenance demand on reactors that are 3 generations old because we can't politically replace them with anything other than a Natural Gas plant. Meanwhile, renewables enjoy fast-tracking and subsidies. But keep in mind renewables currently only benefit places that are either windy or sunny. There are going to be diminishing returns as they fill up our power diet. We are still going to need power supplies that can keep New York powered in the winter. Or power that can be turned on/off to meet seasonal demand. So unless we want to keep natural gas and coal plants around indefinitely, we are going to need some amount of nuclear power in the mix.
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  Is nuclear demonization just political attempts to destabilize the west and prevent us from prosperity that comes from cheap clean energy? Why are US politicians not allowing building more nuclear and driving prices down? Are the democrats or the republicans pro-nuclear? I will vote for whoever is more pro nuclear.
  • 0xDEF 4y ago
    >Is nuclear demonization just political attempts to destabilize the west and prevent us from prosperity that comes from cheap clean energy? The anti-nuclear movement in Western Europe was funded and trained by the Soviet Union. However I doubt that is the reason the US failed to embrace nuclear energy. The problem in the US is that the fossil fuel industry is employing more people and paying more to lobbyists than the nuclear energy industry.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Aeolun 4y ago
  I like how he says there is no radiation leaking out of those dry casks. That sounds like obvious nonsense to me. There’s radiation, it’s just not significant. It’s like saying an x-ray has no radiation when you compare it to a CT scan.
  • aflag 4y ago
    I think you're technically correct, but there are a lot of other sources of radiation in our daily lives. I don't know how much radiation leaks out, but if it's similar to naturally occurring sources, I think it's fair to say there is no radiation leaking.
  • Accujack 4y ago
    There's more radioactivity in coal fired plant emissions gases than is coming from a storage cask. For that matter, you are emitting some radiation right now from radioactive potassium in your body. Everyone is.
• helf 4y ago
  the fearmongering and all around nuclear is deeply ingrained in the public consciousness. It will be hard to kill it. Sadly. There are all sorts of designs that are awesome but havent been put to wide use because its insanely expensive to even get permits for a nuclear plant (if it is even possible) not to mention the insane costs to actual build one. Economies of scale never took hold due to a couple of incidents (of OLD designs and OLD installations for the most part) being flung everywhere. And then you'd have prominent scientists, even, getting vocal about being against nuclear. For whatever fucking reason. Irks the hell out of me.
  • horsawlarway 4y ago
    Say what you will, but I don't think you'll ever get economies of scale in nuclear like you will with solar (or even wind). You can certainly get some economies of scale, but those cost benefits are almost always a function of number of units produced. Nuclear just doesn't need that many units produced - so it will never get the same functional benefit. Unless you're planning on going down to Asimov-esque wearable reactors (and I don't realistically think you are) nuclear just doesn't make enough units to really get the same benefits from scale. Solar on the other hand... each unit is producing 100watts of power, and you're making a literal shit load of units. Production numbers are very high, and it benefits enormously from economies of scale. Basically - even the smallest reactor designs we're talking about for nuclear are in the 20mw range/unit. Solar is 100-300w/unit. (watts - not megawatts). We're making nearly 70 THOUSAND units of solar for every unit of nuclear, at nuclear's smallest size.
    • skrbjc 4y ago
      The economies of scale for nuclear require far fewer units to have a benefit compared to something like solar panels. Because you aren't building 100s of 1000s of them like you need with solar panels. Just building two identical plants at the same time creates a huge cost savings.
  • Kon5ole 4y ago
    The main problem is that nuclear is too expensive. You make a commitment that lats for centuries, which makes the actual cost of the energy way more expensive than most anything else. Our children for generations will have to pay for the "cheap" energy we consume today. This has been proven several times now, most nuclear operators in the world have been bailed out by taxpayers at least once, one way or another. Separately from that there is the undeniable risk of catastrophic failure laying waste to very large areas of land for centuries. The reactor design is not the main reason for this risk, humans are. No matter how amazing the reactor is, as long as it produces waste it's unsafe during a war, for example. We've not had a century without war yet.
• willcipriano 4y ago
  Good news if you haven't heard it, due to tech from the fracking industry the nuclear waste problem is solved: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal
  • jollyllama 4y ago
    I doubt the safety of fracking. This sounds even more dangerous than the alternatives; if something goes wrong, how can it be fixed, being so deep underground? Yucca Mountain always sounded like the best plan.
    • willcipriano 4y ago
      If something goes wrong it's so deep in the earth that it doesn't matter.
• rndmize 4y ago
  While it's good the author has gained a better understanding of nuclear waste, I feel that they're almost repeating their mistakes in their discussion of renewable waste. I'm fairly sure that everything they listed - solar panels, turbines, batteries - can be recycled; the question generally is whether its cost-effective to do so. (Another important question is probably on whether we want to spend the money on developing recycling methods for these types of things in the first place). I'm increasingly of the opinion that if we want effective recycling solutions for stuff like this, one of the biggest steps we could take is strong right-to-repair laws. There should be a push for designing things in such a way that they are easy to disassemble, part out, and replace pieces of. Not only does this make things easier to fix and extend their lifespan, but it also would make them easier to disassemble for recycling/waste purposes. Requiring manufacturers to release documentation (design, components, most common failure modes, common repairs) on their products at some point after they no longer manufacture them is probably a harder sell but would be pretty nice - trawling old forums to figure out how to repair my 12-year-old subwoofer is a pain and unreliable, and having manufacturers responsible for hosting that information would make it more consistently available.
  • strbean 4y ago
    Right to Repair is incredibly important, but also feels incredibly insufficient in this context. What we really need is Obligation to Repair, or something of that nature. Producers of goods need to be accountable for the lifecycle of those goods.
    • bborud 4y ago
      I don't agree. If we move to goalposts too far down the field the political resistance will guarantee that we accomplish less. We have to focus on making repairing stuff possible and economically feasible first. And I think it will need to happen somewhat gradually so the industry can learn how to design things that can be repaired. We also need to build a robust repair industry. With training for repair personnel as well as the supply chain and logistics side. Make repairs attractive, and cheap enough and we might not need to bring up a wall of legislation that makes market access too hard for new entrants. This could quickly develop into a game where only companies with really deep pockets are even able to produce anything. (I work for a startup. We occasionally have to make hardware. Enabling people to repair the stuff we make is something we're happy to do. But if we had to be accountable for the entire lifecycle, that would be another thing. What happens if we go tits up?)
• snow_mac 4y ago
  I wish nuclear power was more widespread in the USA then solar power. In Colorado we get our 67% of our power from Coal and Natural Gas the rest from renewables like wind (26%), solar, hydro and biomass... The really cool thing about nuclear is that the plant can dial up production of power based on demand. In the summer they can rapidly scale up demand to allow people to cool their houses. Nuclear is really the environmentally friendly choice. Wind turbines at end of life aren't recyclable nor are solar panels
• Tomte 4y ago
  Re: nuclear waste, I'm sure there is a perfect way to handle it. But look up "Asse" for how it works in the real world. Also look up how long Germany has been searching for a final burial ground. I'm confident if we made the author an absolutist ruler he would find a way that's better than what we have. We just have this nasty thing called democracy, and citizens' initiatives and huge protests and so on. And that's the real world we're living in, not some imaginative fantasy land.
  • Accujack 4y ago
    Nice to see you didn't actually read the article. It's written by a woman, by the way.
• aliasxneo 4y ago
  There's a lot of misinformation about nuclear energy. I used to tell people that a quick way to get kicked out of the nuclear program in the U.S. Navy was to accidently forget to take off your thermoluminescent dosimeter (TLD) before boarding an airplane. The Navy uses TLDs to track radiation exposure of sailors and has a strict program in place for managing it. Turns out, hopping on an airplane is the quickest way to exceed your annual exposure limit. It helped people understand the safety protocols we have in place and that it's not this big scary thing waiting to give you cancer at any moment. Of course, it _is_ dangerous when handled incorrectly, but it's not the doomsday thing the media tends to make it.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  I grew up very anti-nuclear, but a lot of it was conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons which, back in the 80s, felt like they could fall any moment. But the technology has changed (though most reactors are not new), and more importantly, when compared with the effects of fossil fuels on climate, nuclear is by far the lesser evil. Sure, solar/wind/hydro renewables are important but they're not practical or feasible everywhere. I'm now pretty convinced nuclear needs to play an important part if we have any hope of significant emission reduction. So in that respect, as well meaning as the anti-nuclear green movement has been, they are wrong in opposing it today (in terms of power generation; nuclear weapons are an abomination).
  • denton-scratch 4y ago
    > conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons "Conflation" means (or at least implies) that one thing has been mistaken for the other. Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons production since the very beginning. The British MAGNOX reactors were designed (and used) to produce warheads as well as energy. Iran is under sanctions partly because it's feared they'll use any reactor they build to make warheads.
    • Accujack 4y ago
      >"Conflation" means (or at least implies) that one thing has been mistaken for the other. Yes, and the word is being used correctly here. >Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons production since the very beginning. No, they have not. While it's possible to get civilian power plants to produce (breed) nuclear materials, they aren't designed for it. Almost all weapons production at places like Savannah River and Hanford was done with purpose specific plants that created plutonium and U-235 by design. Iran is under sanctions not because it's feared they'll use power plants to make warheads but because they are working on enriching nuclear fuel to a level useful for weapons. IE, they're taking the same stuff that powers power plants and trying to concentrate it so they can make a weapon.
      • denton-scratch 4y ago
• xyst 4y ago
  Nuclear energy should be orthogonal to meeting future energy demand and transitioning to a zero carbon generating economy. While it takes a long time for a nuclear plant to come online and become fully efficient. It's better than sitting on our asses and breathing in the toxic waste generated by fossil fuels. Additionally, with the recent revelations in fusion, https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-make..., nuclear will be able to provide us with more runway as mankind continues to march forward towards a cleaner future.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Just on technical grounds, this is just not a very educational article. Any discussion of waste from the nuclear fission process should begin with an image of the periodic table and a chart of the curve of binding energy (whose peak, or trough, sits on Iron, which the most stable nuclei relative to fusion or fission processes). From there we can take a look at thermal fission product yield: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield Notably there are two peaks in isotopic distribution, but there are a great many species generated, with varying impact on human health if ingested, depending on whether they mimic species like calcium (in the same column on the periodic table) or are actually used (iodine in the thryoid gland for example). Note also there are some transuranics (plutonium etc.) formed by neutron capture in addition to the fission products. The risk is that these products don't stay sealed in their cooling pond containers (note that 'spent' is hardly the right term, it's really 'too hot to safely remain in the reactor' as they're still generating lots of energy by decay of the unstable isotopes). Eventually they cool off enough to go into dry cask storage (also a long-term risk). Usually in these discussions someone trots out a line like 'airplanes are risky, too, but we don't stop flying just because of the rare plane crash, do we?'. The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice about flying (note the nuclear-reactor-powered airplane was on the drawing boards for a while). The end result of this issue is that nuclear reactors have to be heavily over-engineered to take into account so-called 'black swan' events, see Fukushima. This inevitably raises the costs of nuclear power well above those for any other energy source, which is why many people (myself included) think it doesn't have much of a future except in certain niche situations. There are other issues, of course - high demand for cooling water, nuclear weapons material proliferation, uncertainties over high-grade uranium ore supplies (i.e. price fluctuations etc.), and so on, but attempting to claim long-term storage of nuclear waste is not a seriously problematic issue is just blatantly dishonest.
  • Aloisius 4y ago
    > The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice about flying I'm not sure we would if planes only crashed once a thirty years. Especially if crashes were limited to experimental or old planes with known design flaws.
• bitwize 4y ago
  People protest nuclear power because they do not trust the for-profit energy industry to handle waste properly. They expect the power companies to cut costs and process the waste in a slipshod measure that risks exposure to the environment and public. It's not about green goo leaking into the environment. It's about human failures and flaws in the system we set up. Solar and wind are cheap. Focus on a renewables-only solution.
• teekert 4y ago
  For a (feels like) more balanced view: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-nuclear-power-green.html?m=1 https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-nuclear-power-g...
• danans 4y ago
  > I also learned that batteries cannot be recycled. That's straight up misinformation
  • timbit42 4y ago
    It depends on what they mean by "cannot". It cannot be recycled today but it can be recycled when facilities are built to do it. The batteries currently in EVs will go to non-transportation uses when it is no longer able to be used in EVs. Then it will need recycling and that is when the recycling facilities will be built and begin recycling batteries.
    • danans 4y ago
      When not qualified, "cannot" generally means impossible.
• ashton314 4y ago
  The test video for storage canisters does not disappoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu1YFshFuI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu1YFshFuI4
• phs318u 4y ago
  I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Until the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act gets repealed, the nuclear industry can take a hike. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...
  • gwbas1c 4y ago
    > constructed in the United States before 2026 Looks like it's going to expire soon anyway.
    • phs318u 4y ago
      It will be very interesting to see how hard the industry will lobby to have it renewed.
• croes 4y ago
  Sure, and never ever would a company cut costs to raise profit and ignore safety standards. Just visit Asse in Germany and hug some of the rotting barrels with nuclear waste. The problem isn't technology but greed and stupidity.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  Last summer, on vacation, I stumbled upon some nuclear waste. I went looking for a visitor's center, but missed it and drove further up the road. https://goo.gl/maps/8C8uXWXcBxXGjz5Q7 https://goo.gl/maps/8C8uXWXcBxXGjz5Q7 I pulled off the road across the river (Readsboro Rd) to turn around, and low and behold, I was looking straight across the dam at the waste. I always assumed the site would be bigger.) In hindsight I wish I took a picture with my whole family. Ironically, the waste has been there almost as long as the plant operated: https://decommissioningcollaborative.org/yankee-rowe/ https://decommissioningcollaborative.org/yankee-rowe/
• sgt101 4y ago
  This made me laugh out loud. 1) I support Sizewell c & d. There's already two big reactors there, a third and fourth one make no difference to be fair. 2) I live about 20km from Sizewell. 3) The road that will be choked with traffic from building it is 1.5km away, the rail track is also 1.5km away - they should really build a sea pier like last time. 4) 5 years ago the wet storage at Sizewell suffered a leak. 5) No one noticed, until someone decided to do a wash [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jun/11/nuclear-waste-nuclearpower https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jun/11/nuclear-...] 6) If they hadn't noticed then pond would have boiled enough to expose the rods. This would have taken just a few hours. 7) A column of fire would have erupted out of the pond, creating a radioactive plume that would have rendered my house uninhabitable, for like, 200 years. So, I do not give a toss about whether it glows green or not... but it's definitely scary stuff that needs to be watched. She is right about weapons though, that stuff is the real deal. There's 1000 Hiroshima's worth of Plutonium in a shed on the other side of the country [ https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-sellafield-nuclear-waste-decommissioning https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-sellafield-nuclear-wa...] - that's even scarier.
• evolve2k 4y ago
  Look here’s what you want to consider. The waste needs to be stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century but for thousands of years. We can’t manage shit that needs a few years of care unless it continues to make profits right now. It’s a fucking joke. So your local government is recommending a nuclear waste dump, as mine is. Here’s basic maths to know if your getting screwed or if they’ll be doing all the coolest activities shown in the nice diagrams with big solid containers and a scientists in lab coats monitoring for issues for eternity. People will definitely be there working and maintaining 50 and 500 and 5,000 years after the initial political announcement, right? Anything needing maintenance for decades either needs to be politically important, like government spending on educational institutions or hospitals. What’s that you say? Your hospital buildings are decaying. Oh umm let’s chat further. Ok so back to the maths. This thing needs its own stewardship funding. Let’s say it costs a mere $20million a year to maintain. To be honest I don’t know the cost, insert X. So what your going to want is a simple endowment, setup in a nice 10,000 year organisation that’s free from corruption, that’ll reliably generate your needed $20M in funds a year. What’s that, the government haven’t announced support for a new corruption free, science institute that is funded upfront to run for eternity? I sure you just missed it. So your looking for an endowment that will reliable generate your $20M a year, or whatever figure, ongoingly, forever. Luckily this can be achieved, you just need to think of this like the interest to be earned from a big term deposit. With say a need for a say 2% guaranteed yield, nice and conservative, you’ll need around $1 Billion to be setup in a waste stewardship endowment institute thing. And here’s where you can expose all the BS. I’ve seen no announcements for anything close to these funds, for these types of facilities. All that seems to be budgeted for is intial job creation construction as well as a couple of political cycles of funding. These are mud map numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the grift involved in most of these initiatives when they are not taking straight on long long long term stewardship and how that’ll be funded 50, 500, 5000 years from now. Hell we can’t even think in those sort of long timeframes. <end of rant/>
  • quotemstr 4y ago
    > Look here’s what you want to consider. The waste needs to be stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century but for thousands of years. I find that people making this argument always always fail to engage with at least three important considerations. 1) As a consequence of how physics works, the more dangerous a radioisotope, the shorter the period for which it is dangerous. The most radioactive substances decay in years or decades, not millennia. Anti-nuclear activists routinely engage in a form of equivocation in which they juxtapose dangerous but short lived substances (e.g. Strontium-90 has a half life of a few decades) with long-lived but low-danger substances like Uranium (with a half life of billions of years), pretending that every form of radioactive waste is as dangerous as the most dangerous form for as long as the longest-lived form survives. 2) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore the possibility of reprocessing nuclear waste into more nuclear fuel. They pretend that our only option is to store this fuel indefinitely. They also use this epistemic void where reprocessing should be to argue that we don't have enough nuclear fuel on Earth to sustain civilization. We do, and we do by several orders of magnitude if we remember that nuclear "waste" can be turned into new fuel. 3) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore how modern civilization produces non-nuclear waste products that prompt similar concerns over waste safety. (See, for example, the famous Love Canal incident.) By fixating on nuclear waste and ignoring other industrial byproducts that are at least equally as harmful, anti-nuclear activists reveal themselves as being motivated by some kind of emotional or ideological opposition to "the atom" in particular instead of, as they claim, an altruistic concern for the safety of humanity in general. All in all, these people are Luddites, and they've set back the progress of carbon free energy by almost a century. We need to ignore people afraid of nuclear power in the same way that we ignore people who worry in public about the power of witches and Mercury in retrograde.
• intrasight 4y ago
  Nuclear is dead - in the US anyway. Nuclear never made sense in the US. We aren't the kind of society that can make rational, scientific, economic decisions. Nuclear REQUIRES success at that. No pro-nuclear arguments are going to change those societal facts on the ground. Nor is their any reason to try - because nuclear is dead.
• jheitmann 4y ago
  > Less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. This portion can be easily isolated and shielded How would this work? My assumption was that the pellets are fairly homogeneous. Does the decay happen faster in exterior of the pellet? Or is there some process to concentrate the radiation?
  • wcerfgba 4y ago
    I am wondering the same question. I suppose if the decay is totally random throughout any given volume of uranium, then separating it out would have to be chemical or electromagnetic or something?
  • Accujack 4y ago
    The pellets are homogeneous. The reprocessing of fuel involves melting or dissolving them and chemically separating out the waste products, with the remaining unused fuel going back into new pellets. The waste products are spread throughout the fuel pellets evenly, so the pellets have to be deconstructed to remove them.
• dauertewigkeit 4y ago
  I wonder how much The Simpsons contributed to nuclear fear. No, but seriously, I only have one criticism. What about all the rest of the world? The developed world and the big developing countries might be trusted with nuclear fission, but there are still a whole bunch of countries who cannot be. So in some sense this debate is stupid. Deploy nuclear were it makes sense, but there are definitely places where renewables are their only green option. Luckily lots of those places have plenty of sun and wind.
  • rmujica 4y ago
    I learned that Core Temperatures must be checked, and that Venting Gas Prevents Explosion
  • Accujack 4y ago
    Electricity can be delivered over thousands of miles with the right wires in place, so there's no need to spread reactors everywhere, especially considering we need relatively few nuclear power plants to meet everyone's energy needs.
  • throwaway744678 4y ago
    This comment, and a few of its siblings, kind of smell like: "Look, I'm not racist, but can we trust these guys with this technology?" Some of them can read, you know. Event count.
    • horsawlarway 4y ago
      Why prefer a technology that needs such trust in the first place? Hell - we don't even trust Russia with reactors in Ukraine right now, why should we have any sort of realistic trust for places that are less stable? Especially when we actually have alternative green energy at this point. Say what you will about solar, but it doesn't explode and contaminate large areas when bombed or improperly maintained, and you can't get incredibly effective bombs as a side effect of deploying solar. All that aside - I think solar/wind just out compete nuclear on costs, and that's really the sticking point. And solar at least just keeps getting cheaper. We're really not that far off from a point where excess solar can just be used to create hydrocarbons on demand that can act as base load during off hours and inclement weather. To compare - solar is down near 3 cents/kwh for utility scale. Nuclear is sitting at ~46 cents/kwh. So nuclear is 15 times more expensive, and solar costs are STILL GOING DOWN. Residential solar installs do better than nuclear (7 to 8 cents/kwh) - by a factor of SIX! Frankly - I'd really rather push the solar button as hard as possible and continue experimenting with base load providers. who knows - We may actually get fusion (definitely feels closer than it used to) and then fission becomes a military only affair. And while I'm certainly not opposed to the creation of nuclear in a lot of places - I think the tech has a lot of downsides (again - not the least of which is cost) that really cripple it. Long comment short - If I have to pick between coal and nuclear... sign me up for nuclear. If I have to pick between nuclear and solar... I'm hitting the solar button as fast and hard as possible.
• wcerfgba 4y ago
  > But radiation hasn’t harmed anywhere near as many people as fossil fuels. The implication with both this statement and the map is that we should be comparing the total number of people who died from radiation, and the total from fossil fuels, and see which is bigger, but there are other ways of evaluating (potential) harms. Nuclear power and other radtech is not equally common around the world, and neither are fossil fuels. In the context of promoting transition from one to the other, the important question is the relative harm of these two choices as a function of their deployment over time. There have been events from minor leaks to world-changing disasters, all of which are contingent on human factors which vary widely across time and space. So it's not clear that increasing global rollout of nuclear power will be as consistently safe in the future as it has been in the recent past.
  • gorgonical 4y ago
    There are a few ways of comparing these numbers. I think you're suggesting that something like deaths/kWh is a better metric, which I agree with; if we just go with total deaths than something like pedal-driven generators are the safest way to generate power, which is obviously an unhelpful statement. However, the greater point is that although nuclear power is dangerous by default because of the waste and risks of meltdowns it can be made very safe with engineering and still be a cheap generation method. By all accounts I'm familiar with fossil fuels cannot be made safe for either the environment or people while still being cost-effective. A major issue in the nuclear vs fossil fuels argument is perceived vs actual risk. I don't have the numbers, but even though Fukushima was a huge disaster, the death toll is officially 1. But the cleanup has been very expensive and very visible. Meanwhile, coal/gas/oil plants deflect the equivalent costs of their cleanup onto workers and people in the communities in increased mortality and healthcare costs. More succinctly, nuclear can be safe with effort, but fossil fuels seemingly can't be safe, no matter how much effort.
    • wcerfgba 4y ago
      I agree deaths/kWh is a better metrics, and I was probing into your point about how nuclear can be safer due to better engineering. Is the engineering alone enough? Can we engineer out the risky human parts? Perhaps today that looks like increasing automation of reactors, perhaps in future it means a computer could run an entire station without human inputs or oversight. Also great points about perceived vs actual risk, and observability of effects, as other things affecting the political landscape of nuclear!
• connorgutman 4y ago
  Call me chicken little but my beef with nuclear has always been about the people not the science. If we paint the Earth with reactors it’s a statistical likelihood that through corruption or incompetence someone will screw up. We can’t even keep 50 year old bridges from collapsing in the U.S and meanwhile every time a republican gets into office they bleed FEMA and the EPA dry. We currently have 55 power plants total but would need about 100x that to even put a dent in our electricity bill. Who’s going to build them? Contractors? How are those F-35s Lockheed made going? Another issue is that there are significant odds that global society is on a path towards collapse or backslide due to climate change. If we entered a period of catabolic collapse and governments around the world no longer had the money or infrastructure to manage the upkeep of these facilities what would happen. You can’t just flip a switch and turn the whole thing off. I’m not someone who thinks the world is going to end in a day but look how quickly things have deteriorated in Pakistan recently. Would governments have plans in place to deal with reactors if their economy suddenly collapsed? Honestly the biggest thing to me though is that nuclear is greedy. We’re trying to find cheat codes to avoid conservation and continue consuming copious amounts of electricity. It would be vastly more cost-effective and far less time consuming to dump all that money into energy reduction measures but that would disrupt capitalism and America’s addiction to endless consumption. Residential energy usage in the U.S is higher than commercial usage. Imagine if we banned cars in cities tomorrow, dumped money into public transit and high speed rail, banned meat, built sustainable urban housing, forced tech companies to do away with planned obsolescence, stopped flying unnecessarily, and so on. We could solve climate change in a decade through conservation but that would destroy the profits of those in power. Nuclear might sound great on paper but it’s the planetary equivalence of taking tums instead of putting down the Costco hotdog.
  • Accujack 4y ago
    >If we paint the Earth with reactors No need. About 5,300 1GW reactors would be enough to supply all electric needs world wide. With renewables added in, the number is even smaller. Electricity can be sent over wires, too, so there's no need to put reactors everywhere, we can keep them in secure locations if needed.
    • 4y ago
• hosh 4y ago
  While nuclear power can give us the most bang for the buck, it's main flaw has to do with the degree of centralization it requires. It takes the infrastructure of an advanced civilization to not only design, build, and maintain the facilities and equipment, it also requires the educational infrastructure to produce the personnel needed to operate them safely. This means that it requires a degree of centralization, and the centralization of political and economic power to go with it. Futhermore, it also requires the grid needed to transmit the power have to take in demand surges into account. Perhaps the miniaturization efforts for nuclear power would mean a neighorhood, or even a site-level nuclear power. At this point, though, solar allows community-scale or site-scale deployments (but not necessarily community-scale manufacturing). Micro-grids, sized to the local demand surge can be deployed.
  • zellyn 4y ago
    Isn't this a case where efficiency through centralization is a huge win for the environment?
    • hosh 4y ago
      Centralization is not necessarily a win. There are other concerns besides efficiency -- such as resiliency. The efficiency gains we had with JIT global supply chain failing during the pandemic lockdowns is a great example. There are worst problems than just resiliency. As an example, overharvesting happens when the people consuming a resource is disconnected from those who harvest it. Traditionally, local harvesters were also the consumers, and there is immediate feedback on the limits of a harvest. It's made worse when we have been under a couple centuries of a civilization founded on the presumption that we have continuous, and unbounded growth.
• MrTortoise 4y ago
  so the half life of uranium 235 is 235,000 years and you have a graph of something with a half life of 300 years... i am pro nuclear btw
• preisschild 4y ago
  https://whatisnuclear.com https://whatisnuclear.com is another great site with information about nuclear energy
• postultimate 4y ago
  Did they change their minds about the waste in the pools at Fukushima ? If those had collapsed (and at one point it looked as if they might), it would have fatally irradiated over 10,000 people.
• TedShiller 4y ago
  I changed my mind too. Turns out it's really dangerous.
• cycomanic 4y ago
  > All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately ten yards. > The amount of high-level waste produced during nuclear energy production is also small: a typical large reactor produces about 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year. That's such a propaganda way of phrasing it, because it considers the waste is essentially pure uranium you would never be able to store it like this. It is actually quite a lot. Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year. > Worldwide, 97% of the waste produced by the nuclear power industry is classified as low- or medium-level waste. So essentially the actual amount of nuclear waste is 30 times as high. It's also funny considering the later part of the argument is how highly radioactive waste is not such a problem because it decays quickly. Well guess what mid and low level wast has often much longer lifetimes and it's still as dangerous as much hazardous chemical waste. The whole piece reads like a giant fluff piece, sprinkled with lots of nuclear industry talking points.
  • vidarh 4y ago
    > Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year. Who are "we"? The US alone consumed about 545 million short ton of coal in 2021 [1]. From what I can tell, that's in the range of 400 million m^3. Did I get the numbers wrong? (I just semi-randomly picked a converter online as I have no reference point to how heavy a cubic meter of coal is). Because that does not seem at all like about the same amount. [1] https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/ https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/
    • cycomanic 4y ago
      That's the whole point about my criticism. Uranium is incredibly dense so phrasing it in terms of volume of the uranium is just misleading. Regarding the calculation https://www.worldometers.info/coal/ https://www.worldometers.info/coal/ says we are burning 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal which is about 30000 cubic meters which is about the same as a football field up to 10 yards (~50mx90mx10m).
      • vidarh 4y ago
• ThinkBeat 4y ago
  I am not a nuclear scientist or a physicist. Here I put forward a layperson argument that I hav e heard or read about. I do believe some are quite valid. I also think arguments based on "in the future it is safe" because we have brand new safe reactors. People make mistakes. Those are hypotheticals, until new architecture reactors have been running for say 40/50 years Nuclear energy is not a renewable form of energy. If we use today's reactors the supply of economically viable uranium extraction is small enough that one should worry about it. There is plenty of uranium that can be extracted available. From the ocean for one. Presently that si not economically viable, and the environmental impact from large scale uranium extraction from the ocean are unknown but likely to be quite disruptive. There are designs like Molten Salt that solves the fuel problem since they can use spent uranium from regular reactors as fuel. This extends the availability of uranium fuel to such an extent that we dont have to worry about it. The biggest problem is what the US conclude in the 60?, 70? that corrosion from salt is a huge problem and a new alloy is needed to safely contain it. Or it will require continuing, probably remote only repair, reinforcement for the reactor to safely operate. Then there is the problem that no such large scale reactors exist. I think Russia might have a small one. There are applications in now to build some. I dont know if they have been approved or not. Given that it would be a new type of reactor, with new issues to be solved, I think we (world) should build one, and let it run for 40 years to learn from it. Move fast and break things is not a good approach to nuclear reactors. Pro Nuclear when confronted with the disasters that we know have happened the argument is a) The new reactors will be a lot safer. Really? They could not have new "bugs" that need to be addressed? b) Not a lot of people have died from nuclear but so many die for other fuels. This relies on a model of what fossile fuels may cause to happen over time. It is cumulative and not directly attributable. If I stand next to a busy highway near a coal powerplant I will not die from it. If I do so repeatedly over a long enough timescale it will impact my health, so will unhealthily eating, no exercise, smoking. Humans will in general die from combinations of these. Using the same argument, the other way people are still dying from Fukushima and Chernobyl. No it is not immediate and there are other factors, but occurrences of cancer and other related problems must be measured over a long timescale. c) In so far as we can make safer nuclear powerplants, we can construct fossile fuel power stations that produce far less harmfull emissions. Exactly what to do with the CO2 and other pollutants is a problem. c) WAR. We have been hit with a barrage of scenarios that will happen if a Russian missile or such blows up a nuclear powerplant, or several of them. Should we take that into accounts. d) If it is safe, then there is no reason to curb other sovereign nations from building out nuclear power without being hacked, bombed, and so on. e) If it is safe, how about getting a house in the middle of the desert and and have it stored in the yard and outhouse. Nobody really wants to do that. Safe storage of civilian spent fuel in Nevada even got stopped. We bury it im the ground and let someone else deal with it. (Which is also true with carbon capture) f) Spent uranium used as ammunition have shown drastic negative impact of the health of people who live in those areas afterwards. Saying something about the dangers. f) nuclear plants have so far had reasonably short lives. I think 50 to 80 years. Then you have real estate that cant be reused for other purposes. Fossile vs Nuclear is a bit like picking your poison. Neither seem like an excellent idea overall. We also saw big problems in Europe last year, were France had 50% of their nuclear reactors shut off for overdue maintenance. Sweden shut down one as well. Leaving a large gap between available energy and needed energy. When combinved with shutting off fossile fuel plants and later on the war in Ukraine which took Russian gas off the table in different ways. Europe was lucky they could start fossile fuels up again as a fall back. I do think the French problem with their simulations shut down of so many reactors was an orgy of bad planning rather than a directly attributable to nuclear energy. It does highlight that the older the plants get, the more effort needs to be put into keeping them safely running. When discussions like these come up on Internet forums they are usually quickly filled with strong pro-nuclear reactor activists. I find that a bit odd, and to the extent the forum allows it other voices are voted out, or certainly drowned out. I am not a nuclear scientist or a physicist. Here I put forward a layperson argument that I hav e heard or read about. I do believe some are quite valid.
• amai 4y ago
  „because of the nuclear industry’s high safety standards they are treated with rigorous caution“ That seem right out of the marketing brochure of the nuclear industry. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
• nilslindemann 4y ago
  Imagine global upheavals happening, such as a third world war, or a global plague, or a comet impact that resembles an apocalypse. Events that result in a loss of all or part of public control over these wastes. What happens, then, if at some point in the centuries after, someone opens such a barrel containing the waste? A Goiânia [1], but no one will be there to clean up. Unsuspecting people will spread the radiation across the world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
• amai 4y ago
  Insurance companies didn‘t change their mind about nuclear power. Without the guarantee that in case of an accident the government (and so all tax payers) will cover the costs, no nuclear power plant would ever have been built. This is a huge subsidy to the nuclear industry. No other industry has this or needs this.