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Regardless of how much you hate (or love) nuclear power, it is important to remember that radioactive decay is a stochastic process that doesn't give a crap abo

Regardless of how much you hate (or love) nuclear power, it is important to remember that radioactive decay is a stochastic process that doesn't give a crap about politics, policy, or nation states. As such, any prudent forward looking nuclear path needs to include methodology to transmute the unfortunate nuclide spectrum left over from light water reactors (LWR) into shorter lived species that don't need storage measured in epochs. New nuclear reactor technology with different neutron spectrums is likely the most prudent approach to effect this transmutation at scale. The "green movement" anti-nuclear camp cannot seem to see the scientific need to continue with nuclear fission at least long enough to clean up most of the mess we've already created. A coherent "full stop" nuclear policy should still include reprocessing and transmutation of the existing waste stockpile. Stopping short of this makes the extant waste problem catastrophically worse. --- I took radiochemistry in graduate school several years before the the origin story in the Brooking's article, and the appeal of molten salt reactors was well known then, albeit with more conventional fuel loads. The engineer in me gravitates towards the elegance of the proposed "Gen IV+" nuclear technologies, but the convoluted realities of nuclear power in today's form makes it hard for me to justify continuing the current path towards bigger and bigger light water reactors. My personal opinion is that we need to diverge from, or stop, the building of ever larger LWR. Because these reactors operate at elevated pressure, and have multi-megawatt levels of decay heat, accidents are always a specter. Research energy must then be diverted into technologies that will consume most of the long lived TRU waste. By the time the existing waste is transmuted, the performance of the transmuting reactor systems will be established enough that retaining or shuttering of those systems should be more clear. There will also be a long enough stretch of time in parallel to ascertain the asymptotic maturity state of the various renewable energy technologies.

sliverstorm 12y ago
The "green movement" anti-nuclear camp cannot seem to see... As a bleeding heart treehugger myself, the "green movements" are routinely susceptible to "letting perfect be the enemy of good", which is where a lot of my objections to those movements come from, and IMO where your particular point stems from as well.
- phasetransition 12y ago
  I very much understand the pull of the perfect over the good, and I'll bet you are right about it here. What I find most unfortunate in this specific context is the educational disconnect that prevents people from seeing the long term waste problem left by the immediate cessation of all present nuclear activities. That some people have an implicit understanding of "if all present nuclear activity was halted, suddenly things would become alright in the world of radioactive waste" seems like a large educational failure.
- aetherson 12y ago
  That's the proximate cause, but you need to go back one level to the root cause: The environmental movement of today is a political alliance between a group of essentially science-oriented types who see a looming problem and want to solve it most efficiently, and an essentially anti-scientific group who have a philosophical objection to aspects of modernity that they see as being opposed to a desirable state of nature. This alliance happened more than a generation ago, and like most close political alliances, it has resulted in a lot of cross-pollination of ideas from the two camps. So now you'll see people who are fundamentally anti-science use scientific arguments on, say, climate change. But nuclear power, GMO food crops, and geoengineering are none-the-less dead issues for the modern environmental movement because about half of that movement is not interested in the science of whether or not those things are on balance good: they are ultimate expressions of the un-natural modernity that that half of the movement wants to get rid of. They aren't being irrational, and they aren't just waiting to hear the right argument for why nuclear power is less likely to provoke a catastrophe that will lead to the loss of human life than the status quo. They are opposed to nuclear power per se, for what it inherently is, not for the specific effects it will have on humans or particular animals or anything. This isn't going to change unless the current big tent breaks up, and it's not clear that, like, scientific environmentalism has enough political clout to pass any part of its agenda if the current tent does break up. Edit: To make it more explicit, there are people within the environmental movement who prefer solar and wind power to fossil fuels, and fossil fuels to nuclear, not because they believe that the damage to current living things goes renewable < fossil < nuclear, but rather because the sun and the wind go on around us all the time even in a state of pure nature, and we're just redirecting the energy a little with windmills and solar cells, whereas fossil fuels are in a state of nature sitting around underground and should remain there, but at least they are in and of themselves natural objects, whereas nuclear power creates isotopes and elements that simply do not exist in any measurable quantity in a state of nature. It's about being as close as possible to that state of nature, not about the harm to humans or animals that nuclear waste does versus the harm that fossil fuel waste does.

sliverstorm 12y ago

The "green movement" anti-nuclear camp cannot seem to see... As a bleeding heart treehugger myself, the "green movements" are routinely susceptible to "letting perfect be the enemy of good", which is where a lot of my objections to those movements come from, and IMO where your particular point stems from as well.

phasetransition 12y ago
I very much understand the pull of the perfect over the good, and I'll bet you are right about it here. What I find most unfortunate in this specific context is the educational disconnect that prevents people from seeing the long term waste problem left by the immediate cessation of all present nuclear activities. That some people have an implicit understanding of "if all present nuclear activity was halted, suddenly things would become alright in the world of radioactive waste" seems like a large educational failure.
aetherson 12y ago
That's the proximate cause, but you need to go back one level to the root cause: The environmental movement of today is a political alliance between a group of essentially science-oriented types who see a looming problem and want to solve it most efficiently, and an essentially anti-scientific group who have a philosophical objection to aspects of modernity that they see as being opposed to a desirable state of nature. This alliance happened more than a generation ago, and like most close political alliances, it has resulted in a lot of cross-pollination of ideas from the two camps. So now you'll see people who are fundamentally anti-science use scientific arguments on, say, climate change. But nuclear power, GMO food crops, and geoengineering are none-the-less dead issues for the modern environmental movement because about half of that movement is not interested in the science of whether or not those things are on balance good: they are ultimate expressions of the un-natural modernity that that half of the movement wants to get rid of. They aren't being irrational, and they aren't just waiting to hear the right argument for why nuclear power is less likely to provoke a catastrophe that will lead to the loss of human life than the status quo. They are opposed to nuclear power per se, for what it inherently is, not for the specific effects it will have on humans or particular animals or anything. This isn't going to change unless the current big tent breaks up, and it's not clear that, like, scientific environmentalism has enough political clout to pass any part of its agenda if the current tent does break up. Edit: To make it more explicit, there are people within the environmental movement who prefer solar and wind power to fossil fuels, and fossil fuels to nuclear, not because they believe that the damage to current living things goes renewable < fossil < nuclear, but rather because the sun and the wind go on around us all the time even in a state of pure nature, and we're just redirecting the energy a little with windmills and solar cells, whereas fossil fuels are in a state of nature sitting around underground and should remain there, but at least they are in and of themselves natural objects, whereas nuclear power creates isotopes and elements that simply do not exist in any measurable quantity in a state of nature. It's about being as close as possible to that state of nature, not about the harm to humans or animals that nuclear waste does versus the harm that fossil fuel waste does.