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> That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well

> That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.

gambiting 2y ago
Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public. https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preservation/ https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv... And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.
- immibis 2y ago
  Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows and remote code execution are inherent features of C.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still many times more harmful and killed way more people. And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.
  - troupo 2y ago
    ~500 000 people dead from dam failures, and we still build hydroelectric plants. Hiroshima is a city of 2 million people even though it was the epicenter of a nuclear explosion.
    - myrmidon 2y ago
      Those arguments are misguided or even deliberately misleading. People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. Hiroshima was not significantly contaminated by radioactive material because the bomb dropped on it was not designed to do so (compare later speculative Cobalt-60 based designs), and the low amount of fissile material made incidental contamination a non-issue.
      - troupo 2y ago
        > People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. wat --- start quote --- In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon Nina. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30 cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000. The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses --- end quote --- This was literally caused by dam failures. And yet somehow we still build hydroelectric plants. By your flawed logic we should've stopped building them years ago. Because multiple human deaths, destruction and ecological disaster are literally built into every single dam. Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.
        myrmidon 2y ago
        You missed my point completely. That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity). Was it built to insufficient specifications? Absolutely! But building less dams does NOT lead to less victims during flooding, because the flooding then just happens completely uncontrolled. Spoiler alert: "Just not build any dams" doesn't do shit against flooding if you get 1m of rainfall within a day, and the people just die from starvation/infectious diseases instead (which is the source of >50% of the victims in the Banqiao incident, too), possibly in even greater numbers, because you have flooding everywhere. > Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima. Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? Because that is the critical flaw in your argument that I'm pointing out.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  IIRC, and I forget where I know this from so it might be bullshit, but the energy required to live a lifetime at a western lifestyle creates a grapefruit sized volume of the "highly dangerous don't go near this" type waste.
awjlogan 2y ago
Fun fact: in the UK low risk nuclear plant waste (for example workers' overalls) is bundled up and buried with... coal plant ash. Which is, of course, far more radioactive than the waste it is supposed to be protecting against. This was the case 15 years ago, may have changed since the UK has removed coal from its generation mix.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Why do you claim the coal ash is intended to be "protecting against" the nuclear plant waste and not just different types of radioactive waste being buried together?
  - awjlogan 2y ago
    Coal ash is not classed as radioactive and it was abundant and cheap as a useless by-product of burning coal. The point is more that things classed as "low level" waste from nuclear are most often completely harmless, just regulated differently due to public understanding of the word "nuclear". As such, its disposal is heavily regulated.
    - fransje26 2y ago
      > Coal ash is not classed as radioactive And yet the largest human release of radioactive material in the environment comes from coal ash.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Coal ash is commonly used in cement [1]. I would suspect the nuclear waste is being encased with cement to prevent its leakage with of course the punchline being that the encasement is more radioactive than its contents. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_combustion_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_combustion_products
7bit 2y ago
Nuclear energy seems less harmful because its damage is often invisible or long-term. However, uranium mining leaves behind 99.99% of the extracted material as radioactive waste, contaminating land and water for centuries. The mining sites are primarily in Indigenous territories—such as those of the Navajo in the U.S., First Nations in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and communities in Niger and Kazakhstan—where local populations suffer from radiation exposure, heavy metal poisoning, and increased cancer rates. While nuclear disasters receive global attention, the ongoing destruction from uranium mining remains largely ignored—out of sight, out of mind.
- roenxi 2y ago
  99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores. And uranium operations are pretty small on the scale of mine operations. It also is common enough in modern mining practice to put the nasty stuff at the bottom of the waste dump, as close as possible to the conditions where it came from. That seems unlikely to be causing any problems, especially without a source to gauge how political the studies are. We're talking populations that live close to the middle of nowhere, limited education, limited employment opportunities and questionable infrastructure. They're not going to get health and wellness outcomes as good as more urban populations.
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    > 99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores. This is a misleading take on heavy metal mining in general. Mining is not primarily harmful to local environments because it leads to more of the harmful extracted material; it is harmful because ore concentration is often rather low, and the extraction process produces millions of tons of toxic mineral slurry (=> more harmful than the ore), which has to be disposed somewhere (and preferably not in groundwater, which is the cheapest place to get rid of it). Don't get me wrong, I don't think that mining hazards are the showstopper for nuclear energy, but this ("harmful ore was already there before it is mined") is the wrong dismissal for that argument.
potato3732842 2y ago
You can mostly thank greenpeace and the hippie generation's legacy of political advocacy for that. Nations like France and formerly Germany have or had pretty sensible situations when it came to nuclear power.

> That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.

gambiting 2y ago

Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public. https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preservation/ https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv... And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.

immibis 2y ago
Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows and remote code execution are inherent features of C.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still many times more harmful and killed way more people. And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.
- troupo 2y ago
  ~500 000 people dead from dam failures, and we still build hydroelectric plants. Hiroshima is a city of 2 million people even though it was the epicenter of a nuclear explosion.
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    Those arguments are misguided or even deliberately misleading. People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. Hiroshima was not significantly contaminated by radioactive material because the bomb dropped on it was not designed to do so (compare later speculative Cobalt-60 based designs), and the low amount of fissile material made incidental contamination a non-issue.
    - troupo 2y ago
      > People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. wat --- start quote --- In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon Nina. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30 cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000. The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses --- end quote --- This was literally caused by dam failures. And yet somehow we still build hydroelectric plants. By your flawed logic we should've stopped building them years ago. Because multiple human deaths, destruction and ecological disaster are literally built into every single dam. Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.
      - myrmidon 2y ago
        You missed my point completely. That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity). Was it built to insufficient specifications? Absolutely! But building less dams does NOT lead to less victims during flooding, because the flooding then just happens completely uncontrolled. Spoiler alert: "Just not build any dams" doesn't do shit against flooding if you get 1m of rainfall within a day, and the people just die from starvation/infectious diseases instead (which is the source of >50% of the victims in the Banqiao incident, too), possibly in even greater numbers, because you have flooding everywhere. > Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima. Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? Because that is the critical flaw in your argument that I'm pointing out.
potato3732842 2y ago
IIRC, and I forget where I know this from so it might be bullshit, but the energy required to live a lifetime at a western lifestyle creates a grapefruit sized volume of the "highly dangerous don't go near this" type waste.

awjlogan 2y ago

Fun fact: in the UK low risk nuclear plant waste (for example workers' overalls) is bundled up and buried with... coal plant ash. Which is, of course, far more radioactive than the waste it is supposed to be protecting against. This was the case 15 years ago, may have changed since the UK has removed coal from its generation mix.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Why do you claim the coal ash is intended to be "protecting against" the nuclear plant waste and not just different types of radioactive waste being buried together?
- awjlogan 2y ago
  Coal ash is not classed as radioactive and it was abundant and cheap as a useless by-product of burning coal. The point is more that things classed as "low level" waste from nuclear are most often completely harmless, just regulated differently due to public understanding of the word "nuclear". As such, its disposal is heavily regulated.
  - fransje26 2y ago
    > Coal ash is not classed as radioactive And yet the largest human release of radioactive material in the environment comes from coal ash.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Coal ash is commonly used in cement [1]. I would suspect the nuclear waste is being encased with cement to prevent its leakage with of course the punchline being that the encasement is more radioactive than its contents. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_combustion_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_combustion_products

7bit 2y ago

Nuclear energy seems less harmful because its damage is often invisible or long-term. However, uranium mining leaves behind 99.99% of the extracted material as radioactive waste, contaminating land and water for centuries. The mining sites are primarily in Indigenous territories—such as those of the Navajo in the U.S., First Nations in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and communities in Niger and Kazakhstan—where local populations suffer from radiation exposure, heavy metal poisoning, and increased cancer rates. While nuclear disasters receive global attention, the ongoing destruction from uranium mining remains largely ignored—out of sight, out of mind.

roenxi 2y ago
99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores. And uranium operations are pretty small on the scale of mine operations. It also is common enough in modern mining practice to put the nasty stuff at the bottom of the waste dump, as close as possible to the conditions where it came from. That seems unlikely to be causing any problems, especially without a source to gauge how political the studies are. We're talking populations that live close to the middle of nowhere, limited education, limited employment opportunities and questionable infrastructure. They're not going to get health and wellness outcomes as good as more urban populations.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  > 99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores. This is a misleading take on heavy metal mining in general. Mining is not primarily harmful to local environments because it leads to more of the harmful extracted material; it is harmful because ore concentration is often rather low, and the extraction process produces millions of tons of toxic mineral slurry (=> more harmful than the ore), which has to be disposed somewhere (and preferably not in groundwater, which is the cheapest place to get rid of it). Don't get me wrong, I don't think that mining hazards are the showstopper for nuclear energy, but this ("harmful ore was already there before it is mined") is the wrong dismissal for that argument.

potato3732842 2y ago

You can mostly thank greenpeace and the hippie generation's legacy of political advocacy for that. Nations like France and formerly Germany have or had pretty sensible situations when it came to nuclear power.