5 ms·

I was with you up until the nuclear part. I don't know about the US, but most resistance in Europe is not "prejudice" about plant safety, but educated concerns

I was with you up until the nuclear part. I don't know about the US, but most resistance in Europe is not "prejudice" about plant safety, but educated concerns about waste and waste-storage safety. As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns but tries to make the other side look like dumb scared peasants, I'll be on the anti-nuclear side. For one reason and one reason only: I may not be able to judge how safe modern nuclear energy is, but I'm damn well able to perceive which side is being the most dishonest. If I can't trust people to have an honest debate, I'm definitely not trusting these same people with nuclear plants, however safe it may be possible to do in theory.

nawitus 13y ago
Waste is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...
- onemorepassword 13y ago
  You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. Congrats. Edit: Just to be clear, I belong to the part of the population you can convince of nuclear energy, at least as an intermediate solution. But not this way.
  - nollidge 13y ago
    > You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. I'm sure the proof is obvious to you, but how about explaining it for the rest of us?
    - thoughtsimple 13y ago
      This might help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository It is anything but a solved problem. And of course none of this talks about decommissioning reactors and what to do with the low level nuclear waste that is the decommissioned reactor.
      - jholman 13y ago
        Yes. Plus, there's an epistemological asymmetry here. We can know that it's not yet solved (and I would agree that we do know this right now). We cannot know that it is solved, at least not without waiting tens of thousands of years. Even if we escape current frying pans, we'll still have a fire to deal with. So I agree with onemorepassword's claim that nawitus's comment is indicative of dishonesty, because it demonstrates a level of confidence that no reasonable well-informed person would have, about the human ability to control events in advance, for a hundred thousand years. (I don't agree with all of what onemorepassword says, especially the implication that the pro-nuclear crowd is more dishonest than the anti-nuclear.... 99% of the utterances by the anti-nuclear crowd are VERY dishonest.)
- Intermernet 13y ago
  Have you by any chance seen the Futurama episode "A Big Piece Of Garbage"? A few points: Onkalo is in Finland, and the storage facility is ONLY for waste from Finnish nuclear plants. It also isn't complete as far as I'm aware. I see that Sweden are also building the same style of storage facility in Östhammar, but I don't see any similar construction going on in the USA, France, UK, Japan etc. It may be happening, but there definitely isn't a lot of press about it. This leads me to agree with the grand-parent's point about honesty. Surely, if this form of storage is actually a solution, everyone would be doing it and advertising loudly that they were. Secondly, the KBS-3 standard's final step involves storing the waste for 100,000 years! And, according to the Wikipedia article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3, linked from the article you provided the URL for) there were some questions raised about the copper capsules used as one of the storage layers, and the fact that the Finnish company building the Onkalo facility (Posiva, owned by the 2 main players in Finnish nuclear plants) seems to be being duplicitous in the way these questions are being dealt with. From the article "independent research conducted in Finland has supported the results of Szakálos's group. However, in public, Posiva dismissed the independent research in Sweden and Finland, referring to its own safety studies." So, to quote the grandparent comment, "As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns ... I'll be on the anti-nuclear side."
michaelochurch 13y ago
I agree with you that this is a serious issue and deserves a lot more attention than it gets. One of the reasons why market capitalism works in many (not all) cases is that it produces relative excellence (in pricing, new product discovery, and sometimes allocation of resources) out of mediocrity. Firms and most people are mediocre agents with mediocre aims, mediocre ethics, and mediocre execution and reliability. Yet, through "magic", we get a system that excels in comparison to any planned economy. When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant. I don't know that there are easy answers, though. We can't fully trust private companies, but governments are only marginally better (and that's because of superior attention to incentives and checks-and-balances in political infrastructure; it took hundreds of years and many wars to get that). We need energy, and we need it with near-100% reliability even though we cannot trust fully any of the agents providing it, and even though we're not fully aware of the black swan risks (tasteless Deepwater Horizon pun here) that come with any endeavor that affects the earth so much as energy production.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant. The "radioactive for a long time" thing is really hopelessly misunderstood. The unique thing about producing something which is dangerous for a long time is not that it stays dangerous, it's that it ever stops being dangerous. You mine "coal" and you unearth ore that contains elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, antimony, selenium and thallium. The same goes for most mining operations. You want your rare earth metals for your wind turbines and hybrid batteries, same deal. Geological deposits are rarely elementally pure. That is some awful stuff, and it never decays. It sticks around until the end of time. So if you're worried about the future, worry more about "until the end of time" than "for thousands of years." But let's keep talking about nuclear. Where does 10,000 years come from? What you're referring to is the half life of Plutonium-239 at ~24,000 years. Pu-239 is weapons grade. The problem with it is very much not that we don't know what to do with it. The problem is we do know what to do with it. But you can't stop Iran from getting the bomb by not building new reactors in Virginia. Moreover, if you have no desire to blow up a city you can mix Pu-239 with Pu-240 which makes it useless for bombs but great for reactor fuel, and using it as reactor fuel destroys it in a lot fewer than 24,000 years. The other byproducts with multi-thousand year half lives are the same thing -- reactor fuel. Isotopes of Uranium and Thorium. They're actinides which are either fissile or can reasonably be converted to fissile isotopes. If you like irrationally scary numbers, Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 BILLION years. The thing is, Th-232 isn't produced by reactors, it's the most common isotope found in the ground. It's fuel, not waste. And it's not even very radioactive -- the longer the half life of an isotope, the more stable it is and the less radioactive it is. The most problematic components of "nuclear waste" are isotopes of Strontium and Cesium that have half lives of a few decades and are things you very much do not want to get into the soil or the water. But that is no different than any of the variety of poisonous and toxic chemicals we deal with on an industrial scale every day. And they have significant commercial value as radiation sources e.g. in nuclear medicine. You do have to be careful in handling and storing them, but how is that different than any other sensitive industrial use chemicals other than OMG NUKULAR?
DennisP 13y ago
The thing about waste is that most of it is really unspent fuel, which can be burned in fast reactors or molten salt reactors. So really we don't need to store it for thousands of years, but just until those reactors become available. Russia has had a fast reactor in commercial use for several years now, and several of the small modular designs are fast reactors. There are molten salt efforts ongoing in several countries, including a billion-dollar effort in China, at least two startups in the U.S., and another in Canada. Once we're using all our fuel, the only remaining waste is the fission products, which become less radioactive than the original ore after a couple centuries.
astrodust 13y ago
It's easy! You just take your nuclear waste and dump it somewhere a thousand miles from where anybody lives. What's that, you say? There are no places in Europe a thousand miles from where anyone lives? Oh. That could prove to be a problem. Maybe Uzbekistan could help.
snowwrestler 13y ago
Nuclear power does not have to be perfectly clean to be useful; it just has to be cleaner than the energy sources it displaces. In the U.S. those energy sources are coal burning plants, which produce incredible amounts of pollution--including radioactivity.

nawitus 13y ago

Waste is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...

onemorepassword 13y ago
You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. Congrats. Edit: Just to be clear, I belong to the part of the population you can convince of nuclear energy, at least as an intermediate solution. But not this way.
- nollidge 13y ago
  > You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. I'm sure the proof is obvious to you, but how about explaining it for the rest of us?
  - thoughtsimple 13y ago
    This might help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository It is anything but a solved problem. And of course none of this talks about decommissioning reactors and what to do with the low level nuclear waste that is the decommissioned reactor.
    - jholman 13y ago
      Yes. Plus, there's an epistemological asymmetry here. We can know that it's not yet solved (and I would agree that we do know this right now). We cannot know that it is solved, at least not without waiting tens of thousands of years. Even if we escape current frying pans, we'll still have a fire to deal with. So I agree with onemorepassword's claim that nawitus's comment is indicative of dishonesty, because it demonstrates a level of confidence that no reasonable well-informed person would have, about the human ability to control events in advance, for a hundred thousand years. (I don't agree with all of what onemorepassword says, especially the implication that the pro-nuclear crowd is more dishonest than the anti-nuclear.... 99% of the utterances by the anti-nuclear crowd are VERY dishonest.)
Intermernet 13y ago
Have you by any chance seen the Futurama episode "A Big Piece Of Garbage"? A few points: Onkalo is in Finland, and the storage facility is ONLY for waste from Finnish nuclear plants. It also isn't complete as far as I'm aware. I see that Sweden are also building the same style of storage facility in Östhammar, but I don't see any similar construction going on in the USA, France, UK, Japan etc. It may be happening, but there definitely isn't a lot of press about it. This leads me to agree with the grand-parent's point about honesty. Surely, if this form of storage is actually a solution, everyone would be doing it and advertising loudly that they were. Secondly, the KBS-3 standard's final step involves storing the waste for 100,000 years! And, according to the Wikipedia article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3, linked from the article you provided the URL for) there were some questions raised about the copper capsules used as one of the storage layers, and the fact that the Finnish company building the Onkalo facility (Posiva, owned by the 2 main players in Finnish nuclear plants) seems to be being duplicitous in the way these questions are being dealt with. From the article "independent research conducted in Finland has supported the results of Szakálos's group. However, in public, Posiva dismissed the independent research in Sweden and Finland, referring to its own safety studies." So, to quote the grandparent comment, "As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns ... I'll be on the anti-nuclear side."

michaelochurch 13y ago

I agree with you that this is a serious issue and deserves a lot more attention than it gets. One of the reasons why market capitalism works in many (not all) cases is that it produces relative excellence (in pricing, new product discovery, and sometimes allocation of resources) out of mediocrity. Firms and most people are mediocre agents with mediocre aims, mediocre ethics, and mediocre execution and reliability. Yet, through "magic", we get a system that excels in comparison to any planned economy. When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant. I don't know that there are easy answers, though. We can't fully trust private companies, but governments are only marginally better (and that's because of superior attention to incentives and checks-and-balances in political infrastructure; it took hundreds of years and many wars to get that). We need energy, and we need it with near-100% reliability even though we cannot trust fully any of the agents providing it, and even though we're not fully aware of the black swan risks (tasteless Deepwater Horizon pun here) that come with any endeavor that affects the earth so much as energy production.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
>When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant. The "radioactive for a long time" thing is really hopelessly misunderstood. The unique thing about producing something which is dangerous for a long time is not that it stays dangerous, it's that it ever stops being dangerous. You mine "coal" and you unearth ore that contains elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, antimony, selenium and thallium. The same goes for most mining operations. You want your rare earth metals for your wind turbines and hybrid batteries, same deal. Geological deposits are rarely elementally pure. That is some awful stuff, and it never decays. It sticks around until the end of time. So if you're worried about the future, worry more about "until the end of time" than "for thousands of years." But let's keep talking about nuclear. Where does 10,000 years come from? What you're referring to is the half life of Plutonium-239 at ~24,000 years. Pu-239 is weapons grade. The problem with it is very much not that we don't know what to do with it. The problem is we do know what to do with it. But you can't stop Iran from getting the bomb by not building new reactors in Virginia. Moreover, if you have no desire to blow up a city you can mix Pu-239 with Pu-240 which makes it useless for bombs but great for reactor fuel, and using it as reactor fuel destroys it in a lot fewer than 24,000 years. The other byproducts with multi-thousand year half lives are the same thing -- reactor fuel. Isotopes of Uranium and Thorium. They're actinides which are either fissile or can reasonably be converted to fissile isotopes. If you like irrationally scary numbers, Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 BILLION years. The thing is, Th-232 isn't produced by reactors, it's the most common isotope found in the ground. It's fuel, not waste. And it's not even very radioactive -- the longer the half life of an isotope, the more stable it is and the less radioactive it is. The most problematic components of "nuclear waste" are isotopes of Strontium and Cesium that have half lives of a few decades and are things you very much do not want to get into the soil or the water. But that is no different than any of the variety of poisonous and toxic chemicals we deal with on an industrial scale every day. And they have significant commercial value as radiation sources e.g. in nuclear medicine. You do have to be careful in handling and storing them, but how is that different than any other sensitive industrial use chemicals other than OMG NUKULAR?

DennisP 13y ago

The thing about waste is that most of it is really unspent fuel, which can be burned in fast reactors or molten salt reactors. So really we don't need to store it for thousands of years, but just until those reactors become available. Russia has had a fast reactor in commercial use for several years now, and several of the small modular designs are fast reactors. There are molten salt efforts ongoing in several countries, including a billion-dollar effort in China, at least two startups in the U.S., and another in Canada. Once we're using all our fuel, the only remaining waste is the fission products, which become less radioactive than the original ore after a couple centuries.

astrodust 13y ago

It's easy! You just take your nuclear waste and dump it somewhere a thousand miles from where anybody lives. What's that, you say? There are no places in Europe a thousand miles from where anyone lives? Oh. That could prove to be a problem. Maybe Uzbekistan could help.

snowwrestler 13y ago

Nuclear power does not have to be perfectly clean to be useful; it just has to be cleaner than the energy sources it displaces. In the U.S. those energy sources are coal burning plants, which produce incredible amounts of pollution--including radioactivity.