4 ms·

Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream. Both had bad actors trying to cover up the leak, and caused the nuclear scare to go even worse.

by bb88 2y ago

Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream. Both had bad actors trying to cover up the leak, and caused the nuclear scare to go even worse. France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!). Even when I was an intern at a power company, the leaders there saw the nuclear power plant the company owned as an "albatross around their neck".

Terr_ 2y ago
Over in Washington, the Hanford nuclear site is a big demonstration that we haven't really solved the holistic problems of nuclear waste. (Technical, financial, legal, political.) Even just trying to ship it elsewhere for processing gets blocked by other states and cities.
- wbl 2y ago
  The Hanford site could be solved with a bunch of cement but we promised to restore. Now of course we don't dump waste the same way.
  - bb88 2y ago
    That's the joke with the 3-eyed fish on the Simpsons: "It's all fine. You're supposed to be okay with nuclear waste in your environment." I kinda want to get this Simpson's Jersey with a 3-eyed fish as the mascot that says Hanford or something on the back of it. I was thinking it should say maybe CESIUM 137 on the back. https://www.ebay.com/itm/373450099460 https://www.ebay.com/itm/373450099460
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      Relevant clip, Mr. Burns' political ad claiming Blinky the three-eyed fish is, if anything, benefitting from the radiation. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFhxFDCNTc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFhxFDCNTc
- bb88 2y ago
  Nuclear waste is much like the national debt. Future generations will be dealing with it. And that's certainly the case with Hanford.
- zizee 2y ago
  Most of the storage challenges are political, rather than engineering. There is so much fear around this stuff, but it's usually based on the incorrect notion that radioactive wastes is both super dangerous, and lasts forever. But this is not true. The super dangerous stuff doesn't hang around that long, whilst the stuff that does isn't that dangerous. The super-duper dangerous radioactive waste has a relatively short half-life, and volume. The vast amount of waste is fairly benign. It's a solvable problem.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Perhaps, but the world is full of examples of problems that are/were "solvable" but remained unsolved for long periods of time causing a lot of harm. The fact that the problem still exists at all is an indicator it's not actually that easy.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Like Universal healthcare? Very hard problem, we should learn from all those other 150 countries that have it. Very smart people. Wish I saved the quote, but I remember reading something to the tone of "Everybody across all lines wants healthcare. But 8 rich people disagree, so it's complicated".
  - taurath 2y ago
    Radiation and long term consequences of radioactive contamination is very specifically terrifying to the general public because you can neither see nor feel it happening and the consequences may not happen until much later. Both of those effects create an outsized defensive response that is not irrational at all but just most people are unable to modulate their perceptions of the size of threats like that.
    - zizee 2y ago
      It's not irrational, but it's a similar concern to things like lead poisoning (similar because you cannot see it, and the effects are long term). Like with any risk, there should be appropriate and proportional risk mitigation strategies put in place. Current strategies are outsized compared to the risk. The anti-nuclear environmental movement will go down in history as one of the biggest own goals. If nuclear power had have had continued investment into engineering improvements, the world would be in a much better place WRT climate change.
kortilla 2y ago
> France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!). Socialism is a red herring. 3 mile island and Chernobyl showed that state owned and private owned can equally be fucked up. France owning their plants is completely orthogonal to safety.
- bb88 2y ago
  No one could be held responsible for the people affected by either of those accidents. Metropolitan Edison was only responsible to the regulatory agencies and their shareholders. Russia was a dictatorship. The problem with regulatory agencies in the US are, they're not directly voted in by the public and they can be corrupted by bribery or regulatory capture. Further violating regulations results in monetary fines or maybe getting their license revoked, but not jail time for the bad actors.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Note that voters mostly cannot be bothered to learn about such boards when they can elect them. There are alwaysa number on my ballot where I find out from seeing my sample ballot and I have no clue how to find out how I should vote after trying to look.
acdha 2y ago
Yes, nothing is certain but I do think it wasn’t preordained – a White House which took climate change seriously, which wasn’t so invested in fossil fuel production, might have shifted the conversation to making nuclear safer because it would also reduce the even larger ecological footprint of coal and oil production. Reagan famously appointed a self-described “anti-environmentalist” and counted the dubious accomplishments of increasing strip-mining and opening up land for oil drilling so pretty much anyone would have been an improvement.
- yyyk 2y ago
  Carter created the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, whose main remit was various coal-to-oil schemes. Add in 1980s tech and you end up with such incredible pollution* that even strip mining everything is more environmentally friendly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation * You start from coal which has more carbon than oil in any grade you choose, and then add the extra inefficiency of the process so you need more coal than had you burnt it directly. It's like burning coal in a super inefficient manner.
worik 2y ago
> Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream With very good reason. Nuclear power leaves a 200,000 year head ache. Climate change is a mild problem in comparison, it will correct itself in centuries (taking most of civilisation with it, but mēh!)
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I think it'd be easier to figure out how to manage that nuclear waste than burning humanity towards extinction and trying to deal with it when we get to it.
  - redwall_hp 2y ago
    If oil/methane/coal waste was a solid cube that could be buried underground, instead of in the atmosphere, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
pfdietz 2y ago
What killed nuclear in the US wasn't Chernobyl or TMI. It was PURPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Regulatory_Policies_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Regulatory_Poli... This flooded the power markets in the US with new, non-utility sources, while at the same time it helped reduce growth in demand by encouraging efficiency. Together, these squeezed out any prospect for starting new nuclear construction projects.
jmclnx 2y ago
Plus you forgot the 1978 Seabrook Protests. Most of the hate was due to where it was built, not the fact it was built. It was really NIMBY on steroids plus a poor choice of location. So even conservative people in NH hated that plant due to its location. But the press spun it as hate towards nuclear power. So that put a big black mark on the industry, maybe even more so because both Liberals and Right Wing people came out against it.
- bb88 2y ago
  So where should we put nuclear reactors then? Should we put a new California nuclear reactor in downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles? If nuclear proponents are saying nuclear technology is safe, then it shouldn't matter where we put it. It's just an education issue, right? The problem is, that nobody really trusts nuclear, or more specifically nobody really trusts corporations with nuclear power. I will point out there's a high correlation between a given nuclear accident and a coverup of that nuclear accident.
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    Areas where there is more then a one 1 lane road for evacuations. If you have ever been there, there are only 2 ways out, go north or go south for about 10 miles in either direction on a one lane road. In the summer the population of that area grows to hundreds of thousands. That area is by far the worse area for a plant. There are no evacuations signs there because there is only 1 way in and out.

by bb88 2y ago

Terr_ 2y ago

Over in Washington, the Hanford nuclear site is a big demonstration that we haven't really solved the holistic problems of nuclear waste. (Technical, financial, legal, political.) Even just trying to ship it elsewhere for processing gets blocked by other states and cities.

wbl 2y ago
The Hanford site could be solved with a bunch of cement but we promised to restore. Now of course we don't dump waste the same way.
- bb88 2y ago
  That's the joke with the 3-eyed fish on the Simpsons: "It's all fine. You're supposed to be okay with nuclear waste in your environment." I kinda want to get this Simpson's Jersey with a 3-eyed fish as the mascot that says Hanford or something on the back of it. I was thinking it should say maybe CESIUM 137 on the back. https://www.ebay.com/itm/373450099460 https://www.ebay.com/itm/373450099460
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Relevant clip, Mr. Burns' political ad claiming Blinky the three-eyed fish is, if anything, benefitting from the radiation. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFhxFDCNTc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFhxFDCNTc
bb88 2y ago
Nuclear waste is much like the national debt. Future generations will be dealing with it. And that's certainly the case with Hanford.
zizee 2y ago
Most of the storage challenges are political, rather than engineering. There is so much fear around this stuff, but it's usually based on the incorrect notion that radioactive wastes is both super dangerous, and lasts forever. But this is not true. The super dangerous stuff doesn't hang around that long, whilst the stuff that does isn't that dangerous. The super-duper dangerous radioactive waste has a relatively short half-life, and volume. The vast amount of waste is fairly benign. It's a solvable problem.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Perhaps, but the world is full of examples of problems that are/were "solvable" but remained unsolved for long periods of time causing a lot of harm. The fact that the problem still exists at all is an indicator it's not actually that easy.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Like Universal healthcare? Very hard problem, we should learn from all those other 150 countries that have it. Very smart people. Wish I saved the quote, but I remember reading something to the tone of "Everybody across all lines wants healthcare. But 8 rich people disagree, so it's complicated".
- taurath 2y ago
  Radiation and long term consequences of radioactive contamination is very specifically terrifying to the general public because you can neither see nor feel it happening and the consequences may not happen until much later. Both of those effects create an outsized defensive response that is not irrational at all but just most people are unable to modulate their perceptions of the size of threats like that.
  - zizee 2y ago
    It's not irrational, but it's a similar concern to things like lead poisoning (similar because you cannot see it, and the effects are long term). Like with any risk, there should be appropriate and proportional risk mitigation strategies put in place. Current strategies are outsized compared to the risk. The anti-nuclear environmental movement will go down in history as one of the biggest own goals. If nuclear power had have had continued investment into engineering improvements, the world would be in a much better place WRT climate change.

kortilla 2y ago

> France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!). Socialism is a red herring. 3 mile island and Chernobyl showed that state owned and private owned can equally be fucked up. France owning their plants is completely orthogonal to safety.

bb88 2y ago
No one could be held responsible for the people affected by either of those accidents. Metropolitan Edison was only responsible to the regulatory agencies and their shareholders. Russia was a dictatorship. The problem with regulatory agencies in the US are, they're not directly voted in by the public and they can be corrupted by bribery or regulatory capture. Further violating regulations results in monetary fines or maybe getting their license revoked, but not jail time for the bad actors.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Note that voters mostly cannot be bothered to learn about such boards when they can elect them. There are alwaysa number on my ballot where I find out from seeing my sample ballot and I have no clue how to find out how I should vote after trying to look.

acdha 2y ago

Yes, nothing is certain but I do think it wasn’t preordained – a White House which took climate change seriously, which wasn’t so invested in fossil fuel production, might have shifted the conversation to making nuclear safer because it would also reduce the even larger ecological footprint of coal and oil production. Reagan famously appointed a self-described “anti-environmentalist” and counted the dubious accomplishments of increasing strip-mining and opening up land for oil drilling so pretty much anyone would have been an improvement.

yyyk 2y ago
Carter created the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, whose main remit was various coal-to-oil schemes. Add in 1980s tech and you end up with such incredible pollution* that even strip mining everything is more environmentally friendly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation * You start from coal which has more carbon than oil in any grade you choose, and then add the extra inefficiency of the process so you need more coal than had you burnt it directly. It's like burning coal in a super inefficient manner.

worik 2y ago

> Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream With very good reason. Nuclear power leaves a 200,000 year head ache. Climate change is a mild problem in comparison, it will correct itself in centuries (taking most of civilisation with it, but mēh!)

johnnyanmac 2y ago
I think it'd be easier to figure out how to manage that nuclear waste than burning humanity towards extinction and trying to deal with it when we get to it.
- redwall_hp 2y ago
  If oil/methane/coal waste was a solid cube that could be buried underground, instead of in the atmosphere, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

pfdietz 2y ago

What killed nuclear in the US wasn't Chernobyl or TMI. It was PURPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Regulatory_Policies_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Regulatory_Poli... This flooded the power markets in the US with new, non-utility sources, while at the same time it helped reduce growth in demand by encouraging efficiency. Together, these squeezed out any prospect for starting new nuclear construction projects.

jmclnx 2y ago

Plus you forgot the 1978 Seabrook Protests. Most of the hate was due to where it was built, not the fact it was built. It was really NIMBY on steroids plus a poor choice of location. So even conservative people in NH hated that plant due to its location. But the press spun it as hate towards nuclear power. So that put a big black mark on the industry, maybe even more so because both Liberals and Right Wing people came out against it.

bb88 2y ago
So where should we put nuclear reactors then? Should we put a new California nuclear reactor in downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles? If nuclear proponents are saying nuclear technology is safe, then it shouldn't matter where we put it. It's just an education issue, right? The problem is, that nobody really trusts nuclear, or more specifically nobody really trusts corporations with nuclear power. I will point out there's a high correlation between a given nuclear accident and a coverup of that nuclear accident.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  Areas where there is more then a one 1 lane road for evacuations. If you have ever been there, there are only 2 ways out, go north or go south for about 10 miles in either direction on a one lane road. In the summer the population of that area grows to hundreds of thousands. That area is by far the worse area for a plant. There are no evacuations signs there because there is only 1 way in and out.