8 ms·
There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste
- asciilifeform 18y agoAnti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous, in the same way that religious conservatives like STDs such as HIV - because they provide a grounding in reality for some of their pathological whining and blind hatreds.
- Retric 18y agoI agree that extreamly radioactive substances tend to be valueable, but there is a lot of low grade waste that's not worth reprocessing. It's not cost effective to do anything with reactor walls after you decomission a reactor. Granted these things tend to become less dangerous over time, but dumping that stuff into a large geologicaly stable hole in the ground seems like a great option.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoAnother effective way to deal with the low grade waste is to pulverize it and spread the dust in the wilderness. Or mix it with concrete and build a school with it. A concrete example: In terms of radiation dose, a depleted uranium cutting board is equivalent to granite countertops. Most low level radioactive waste is just not that dangerous. Dilution is as effective as storage.
- sp332 18y agoThat's what they said about dumping garbage in the ocean.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoThe main issue with garbage is volume/surface area. Fishing nets are huge. The volume of low level nuclear waste is so low as to be negligable.
- ramchip 18y agoImagine the public uproar there would be if a school were built with anything that sounds like "nuclear waste". Also, AFAIK depleted uranium comes from the enrichment process, not from the actual reactor.
- asciilifeform 18y agoAmusingly, every American school I've ever been inside was built of cinderblock - a type of brick made from the fairly radioactive ashes from the exhaust of coal power plants. Don't take my word for it, ask a kid to take a Geiger counter to school one day. (I wonder if that is an expellable offense in our times?)
- adrianwaj 18y agoThere was a recent thread about amateur rockets: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583550 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583550 The technology is becoming more accessible and cheaper. Why not just pack the most dangerous nuclear waste onto a rocket and blast it out of the atmosphere and out of any orbit, perhaps into the sun?? The risk is something happening to the rocket on the way up. It sounds absurd but there's a lot more radioactive things in space, and costs for such a procedure seem to be lowering.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doesn't seem too bright.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doesn't seem too bright.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doesn't seem too bright.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doens't seem too bright.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- asciilifeform 18y agoIt should be noted that the force with which the contents of an exploding rocket hit the ground is not infinite, and objects have been built to withstand it. In particular, the casing of the plutonium bricks used in the radiothermal generators which powered certain space probes had this property.
- ensignavenger 18y agoI'm religious and conservative (Don't know if I'm a "religious conservative", though- depends on your definition, I guess) and I most certainly do NOT like STD's! I am not worried about contracting one myself, but I don't want any one else to either. I don't do those sorts of things (pre/extra marital sex) but I have friends who do, and I don't want them to get an STD.
- biohacker42 18y agoYou are a rational human being. Your type is quiet and doesn't make the headlines. The "religious conservatives" who do make the headlines are not like you.
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoYes. Unfortunately we live in a world on the web where people who are religious, atheists, conservative, liberal, or whatever are put into little boxes and made fun of. This is what passes for wisdom anymore (instead of rational, clear discussion about beliefs and issues)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- rw 18y agoSome anti-nuclear activists do. Have you only ever seen whiny and blind activism?
- stuff4ben 18y agoYour argument is ridiculous. I know of no religious conservatives or anyone else for that matter who like STDs. You should research a little more before spewing your own blind hatred since many religious conservatives donate their time and money to eliminate those same diseases as well as poverty, hunger, and others laudable goals. Obviously one can go on and on about the various good things that religious conservatives do. My point was that it is disingenuous to portray all religious conservatives as a group that enjoys the pain and suffering of fellow human beings in order to further their goals.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- asciilifeform 18y ago> know of no religious conservatives or anyone else for that matter who like STDs Then you willfully ignorant, at best: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hiv+god's+punishment&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq= http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hiv+god's+punishmen... I stand by my argument. Whether or not they openly claim to like STDs, religious conservatives and, say, HIV are natural friends. To the extent that the fundamentalist religions actually believe in their stated goals of discouraging promiscuous and homosexual conduct, the popular fear of HIV et al helps to make sexual mores more Victorian than they otherwise would be. If and when we exterminate all STDs (a pocket-sized instant tester costing <$100 would do just that, and may be around the corner) and develop perfect unobtrusive birth control (say, immunocontraceptives currently being tested), sexual taboos will eventually go the way of the taboo on working on Sundays. And religions which attempt to restrict sexual conduct will be viewed as revolting anachronisms.
- kajecounterhack 18y agoWay to take an unrepresentative part to mean the whole. Stop generalizing. That google search proves nothing except that there are a bunch of vocal idiots on the internet. It's not like that's something foreign. Don't make up silly hypothetical "if" statements. Let us look at reality: contraceptives are supported by most religious people. To say that religion is against contraception is to look at outmoded views from again, an unrepresentative part of an entire religion. And religions which attempt to restrict sexual conduct are already viewed by many as revolting anachronisms -- so you're just using a hypothetical statement to make an incorrect generalization to support the viewpoint you hold. You're wrong.
- tvon 18y ago> Anti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous (...) That really doesn't make any sense. They are opposed to nuclear power because they don't perceive it to be safe (which they learned from disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island), if it was perceived to be safe then they wouldn't be opposed to it. It's not like they hate the power it would give or the jobs i wold create, there is no other agenda for them to oppose it on (unless you're talking about astroturfing campaigns by alternatives, in which case I misunderstood you). Extreme religious conservatives are another story (and I add 'extreme' because someone can be religious, conservative, and perfectly sane).
- asciilifeform 18y ago> It's not like they hate the power it would give Please read the writings of the prominent environmentalists. Many of them want humans to hurry up and go extinct. Not necessarily in so many words, but anyone who advocates a return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is in fact calling for the murder of the billions of people who are alive only due to agriculture, of a kind which depends on modern energy sources.
- tvon 18y agoYou are applying extreme positions held by a minority to broad groups of people who don't hold those positions. To imply that being an environmentalist means advocating a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyle is absurd. Honestly it's starting to sound a bit hypocritical given your original statement.
- asciilifeform 18y agoI'm not simply talking about openly declared human-extinction advocates. The death by starvation of billions is a logical consequence of perfectly mainstream environmentalist platforms - pushing for the elimination of nuclear power, factory farming, pesticides, genetically-engineered crops, and other technologies which make our historically-unprecedented abundance of food and other necessities possible. I simply don't care about anyone's stated goals. What I care about is the logically inevitable results of the changes they are pursuing.
- thingie 18y agoI have already heard that it's in fact good that drugs have so many negative effects, because otherwise almost everyone would use them. But author of the idea wasn't able to explain why would it matter, if there were no negative effects. Because drugs are bad anyway, mmmkay? Sadly, this way of thinking isn't that uncommon :/ (and not limited to religious conservatives)
- cia_plant 18y agoIf it is irrational to fear a nuclear catastrophe, then why are the nuclear companies indemnified against exactly such a catastrophe by the Price-Anderson act? The industry has repeatedly lobbied for this act, so it seems that they are also afraid. Various reports have been produced by the NRC which attempt to "prove" that the chance of a catastrophe is low (1 in a million or what have you). The methodology of these studies is somewhat laughable: a catalogue of all possible failures is created, and a probability is estimated for each one; then the probabilities are multiplied by the consequences of the failure. So, there might be an estimate that a tornado will hit a plant every 100 years; given that a tornado hits a plant, there is a 1 in 10 chance that the containment will fail; and so on. Anyone who has worked in software knows that it is absurd to try to catalogue all failure modes of a complex system. Additionally, these reports have been marred by corruption. The Reactor Safety Study, produced in 1975, was eventually repudiated by the NRC in 1979. It was enormously misleading, summarizing the risks of nuclear power in terms of "early fatalities," whereas the cumulative fatalities from radiation exposure are far more serious. It is based on these sorts of flawed, self-serving studies that the nuclear industry brags about how "safe" its practices are. Overall, I find the tone of the nuclear debate very disappointing. Nuclear supporters seem to pretend that anti-nuclear activists are just irrational, with no arguments worth worrying about. There is not even an acknowledgment that there are still hard problems to solve with nuclear, or that mistakes were made in the past.
- asciilifeform 18y agoCoal power plants steadily spew radioactive ash into the atmosphere. This is an empirically verifiable fact. And I have yet to see an anti-nuke activist give a rat's ass about dead coal miners - of whom there is a never-ending, steady flow. You lose.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- jfornear 18y agoComments like this should not be condoned on HN...
- Tichy 18y agoSorry, but that conspiracy theory does not add up. If they would not honestly believe the stuff was dangerous, they would have no reason to be against it.
- Adam503 18y agoTell us all how anti-nuclear activists caused Chernobyl. Ohhh... they didn't. "Nuclear submarine leaked radioactive waste into British waters, secret report reveals The Royal Navy's main nuclear submarine base has repeatedly leaked radioactive waste into the sea, previously secret documents show. Radioactive coolant and contaminated water were accidentally dumped into the sea at Faslane, near Glasgow, at least three times in recent years. And an internal Navy report described a 'recurrent theme' of failures to follow safety rules. The nuclear watchdog said problems were so serious it would have considered shutting the base down had it been a civilian operation - but it has no such legal powers over military sites...." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1173881/Nuclear-submarine-leaked-radioactive-waste-British-waters-secret-report-reveals.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1173881/Nuclear-subm... THIS is why the anti-nuclear movement is as strong as it is. They know the military and the nuclear industry HIDES serious accidents, Sometimes the military makes the accidents state secrets, and the radioactive material is left right where it spilled. This British Sub base has trashed the surrounding countryside and the people live near the base will be starting to drop dead from weird cancers any day now. Not to mention all of the former Soviet Navy bases are trashed by subs leaking radioactive waste.
- rms 18y agohttp://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160 http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160
- cakeface 18y agoI wonder if they could start reprocessing some of the waste that has already been stored at Yucca mountain.
- sachinag 18y agoIf this op/ed - it's not an article - is correct, then theoretically, sure. Practically, good luck getting people comfortable with the idea of taking it out. The interesting issue is that if we make it easier to reprocess spent fuel, then DPK and Iran and others might be able to get rid of their "civilian power" smokescreen and focus on just that part. Then, we're back where we started.
- ivankirigin 18y agoI'm not sure developing and deploying the technology domestically makes it easier for other countries to use it. Also, we're rapidly approaching an age when WMD will be accessible to very small groups. Our strategy should be to treat this like a reality today, and act accordingly. Terrorism is certainly no reason to fuck up our entire domestic energy policy.
- stewiecat 18y ago>Terrorism is certainly no reason to fuck up our entire domestic energy policy. Nor is terrorism a reason to fuck up the Constitution, but the prior Administration had no qualms doing that.
- superkarn 18y agoI've always wonder why we needed to get rid of nuclear waste. If it's radioactive enough to harm you, then obviously there's some kind of energy there. We just need to find out how to extract and use it (which is what the article is about).
- yummyfajitas 18y agoWe know how to extract and use it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing The only problem is political.
- jbert 18y ago> The only problem is political. And economic? Perhaps low-grade waste is the bigger issue?
- Kadin 18y agoLow-grade waste is problematic, but it's really no worse than lots of chemical and industrial waste that we produce and deal with every day. It's completely within the scope of current technology to dispose of it, since most low-level waste doesn't have particularly long decay times.
- SwellJoe 18y agoAnd it's definitely not worse than coal, which is our primary source of electricity in the United States. Merely mining it kills three to four dozen people in the US directly every year, on average, since the 90s (and it was dramatically higher in the past). I don't think I need to mention to HN that the production of nuclear power has killed zero people in that period. The waste produced by the burning of coal dwarfs the waste that is generated per kWh...it's literally several orders of magnitude larger. And the shortened lives of people breathing coal pollution certainly adds up to dramatically larger impact than that of nuclear waste. Yes, coal pollution is "safer" the nuclear waste in equal amounts, but neither is clean, and nuclear waste (low-grade or otherwise) can be contained safely, while coal simply produces too much to store or convert to non-dangerous forms. I talked to a Greenpeace activist a few weeks ago to try to understand how Greenpeace can still be anti-nuclear energy with all that we know about the costs of the alternatives. Obviously, an on-the-street activist isn't necessarily representative of all of Greenpeace, but she did have a pamphlet about nuclear energy that she was very familiar with. In short, there is no recognition in their materials that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are dramatically different (and so, "no nukes!" applied equally to weapons and energy in her mind, and she simply couldn't imagine that one could exist without the other). There was also a deep-seated denial about coal and the realistic options for moving off of coal. Her response was, "We shouldn't compromise on clean energy, it's too important. We need clean sources of energy, like solar and wind, to replace coal and nuclear power." Obviously, there's no reasoning with this sort of mentality.
- bcl 18y agoNuclear power is a solved engineering problem. France has been doing it for years. Here in the US the problem is so called 'green' activists who don't (or won't) understand the basic laws of physics.
- ramchip 18y agoAlthough I agree that modern nuclear reactors are extremely safe, I'd hardly say that the problem is 'solved'. They still don't use the fuel efficiently comparatively to what could be done with eg. breeder reactors, and the solution to the waste problem is still 'bury them'. Separating the nuclear waste by isotopes is a very complex and costly process, and even once it's done it doesn't necessarily follow that what is obtained can be used as fuel or for medicine. It depends on the reactor you use, or the kind of medical imaging you need to do. Research is still ongoing in nuclear (fission) technology.
- ivankirigin 18y agoIt's important to look at nuclear waste in the context of alternative energy generation processes. The solution to waste from coal plants is "pump that shit in the air and water", which is far worse than nuclear.
- parenthesis 18y ago"[a] coal power plant's radiation output [into the environment] is over 3 times greater" than that of a "nuclear power plant with the same electrical output". Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_station#Radioactive_trace_elements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_station#Radioactive_...
- enodo 18y agoGuy doesn't know what he is talking about. First, the French only recycle the waste once. After it goes through the second time, they don't recycle it again. They are building their own version of Yucca mountain to deal with it after that. Second, in 2003 a very detailed analysis of nuclear power options by a group of MIT Scientists found that recycling is more expensive than the once-through process. See http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/ http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/ I am not opposed to nuclear power, but as usual, we see crap on the WSJ editorial page.
- DarkShikari 18y agoThe only reason it's more expensive is because the disposal of nuclear waste is artificially cheap. If corporations had to pay for the cost of building phenomenally expensive disposal sites such as Yucca Mountain, recycling would suddenly become vastly more economical. Another issue is the very low price of uranium; reprocessing solutions weren't considered in the past because uranium was so incredibly cheap that it made no sense to attempt to reprocess spent fuel. One of the primary reasons recycling has become an issue again is that the price of uranium has risen enormously in recent years.
- sketerpot 18y agoThe nuclear power corporations have been paying for Yucca Mountain, actually. They've paid $30 billion so far and got nothing for it. An argument for reprocessing that might have better success is to argue for energy security: any country that can store enough uranium to last for a decade is pretty safe from fluctuations in uranium costs.
- Tangurena 18y agoAccording to The Curve of Binding Energy, nuclear power was going to be subsidized by the sale of plutonium to the AEC. At about a megabuck per kilogram of plu, the sale of plu would pay for the cost of constructing and operating a nuclear power plant, and that lead to the AEC's Chairman claiming that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" because it would be a by-product of the nuclear fuel cycle. At the end of 2005, there were 1700 tons of privately owned plutonium in the US (the US military has about 100 tons of plu: about 2/3 are in actual weapons). http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodore/dp/0374515980 http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodore... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7006056.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7006056.stm If his claim is true, then it wasn't tree-huggers who killed off the nuclear power industry, nor Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, it was cold economics.
- willchang 18y agoFrom the article: > Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth's crust. This is off by 4 orders of magnitude: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth'...
- robin_reala 18y agoI thought that sounded fishy, but I didn’t go to check it out. Thanks for the reference.
- ramchip 18y agoThe author seems to forget that separating U235 from U238, plutonium, and a slew of various highly radioactive and hazardous materials isn't exactly something you do in your shed with a couple of beakers. Especially if you want medical-grade concentrations of exotic isotopes... Saying that plutonium can be reused as fuel is also an assumption on the reactor technology used. Imagine even just transporting the spent fuel to another plant. You can't permanently cast it in concrete and glass if you want to recycle it. Many isotopes for nuclear medicine are also produced in accelerators, not by recycling.
- davidw 18y agoI'll stick my neck out and start the "this is not hacker news!" thread. Just look at the discussion - "green activists", "religious conservatives", etc... looks more like reddit than hacker news, which is what happens when we stray from our "core competencies", to turn a phrase.
- falsestprophet 18y agoIt is silly to have a discussion about whether each submission falls within the guidelines. This submission has received more votes than any other today (80 at present) and has not been rejected by the moderators. What else do you want? In the end, this story is congruent with the community guidelines but your comment is not. Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- radu_floricica 18y agoIt's close, but it is. If some facts in this article are true they're technically interesting. Also the change in policy is real and has implications which do interest hackers. The discussion is a bit reddit-like, but it can't be helped. The article itself was interesting enough.
- weegee 18y agoJapan recycles their nuclear waste, should be done in the USA too. Hopefully Obama will be able to get new plants built, we're going to need them when all the cheap Chinese cars start coming in in a few years (it's already happening around my area, and they are cheap).
- gamble 18y agoOne of my civil engineering professors worked as a consultant on Yucca Mountain and the Swedish nuclear waste repository. I had the chance to talk to him about Yucca Mountain, and he was very critical of their approach. Yucca's design is intended to prevent contact between groundwater and the waste, and ensure the waste is always accessible. While it sounds like a good idea, it's hard to guarantee in practice and made the design very difficult to engineer. The Swedish design is simpler - they simply bury the waste and backfill the chambers. Waste is always in contact with groundwater, but the site was chosen so that diffusion through the rock is slow enough that it will decay to stable elements long before leaving the site.
- Oxryly 18y agoThat sounds implausible on the face of it. Its safer to let the waste contact the groundwater than to try not to...?
- gamble 18y agoNo, but it is extremely difficult to guarantee that you can hermetically seal nuclear waste from groundwater indefinitely, which is the standard Yucca Mountain has been held to. They've poured billions of dollars into engineering Yucca, but they'll never be able to eliminate the possibility of failure.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoCoal plants put out more radioactive waste directly into the atmosphere than nuclear plants generate. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioac... tell everyone you know, tell them again and again until it sinks in. everyone needs to know this. environmental groups need to be supporting nuclear plants. coal plants put out radioactive waste directly into the environment. the problem of storing it is trivial by comparison.
- Tichy 18y agoInteresting, but in the same sense you could say "there is no such thing as waste", because in theory everything could be recycled somehow (and if we have no use for it now, we might find some in the future - just as the article states about some of the radioactive waste). Yet getting rid of waste dumps and just keeping the garbage around at home seems infeasible for now. It is also not clear from the article how expensive recycling the radioactive waste would be.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- kayleighxoxo 18y agohello my name is kayleigh, i like to eat pie. that is my opion on nuclear mining