So yes, nuclear waste is a serious issue, but let's not forget that the alternatives have major environmental costs as well.
(not from the US)
1. Nuclear waste, even when not processed, is not that large in volume and it can be stored in a space on the order of a hectare (about 2.5 acres) for the entire US nuclear waste production over several decades. Consider the comparative amount of storage needed for just coal ash, as well as the environmental hazards that presents.
2. The reason the US does have comparatively more waste is because the government forbids any reprocessing of nuclear fuel. For example, merely separating out the more radioactive isotopes, you can greatly reduce the volume. Reprocessed fuel can also be partially reused in a nuclear reactor and the French have great experience with that.
3. Even reprocessed "spent" fuel can be useful in 3rd and 4th generation reactors. Spent fuel today is still a valuable future resource, so it needn't be buried and guarded for millennia afterwards.
4. Natural nuclear fuel usage can be greatly more effective with nuclear breeding, which can turn non-fissile U-238 and Th-232 into the fissile U-235 and U-233 respectively. Right now, what's actually burned is mainly U-235, an extremely rare isotope (the minor constituent of "natural uranium") and that's comparatively as rare and expensive as platinum. Breeding can increase the energy obtained from the same quantity of fuel by 10-100 times.
To me the main problem with nuclear energy is not the waste, which even if we never intend to recycle is such a tiny volume that being afraid of it is like an elephant being afraid of a mosquito. The problem is rather the chernobyl/Fukushima risk.
I am not a specialist but I understand that switching to Thorium could reduce a lot that risk. Most nuclear reactors around the world have been built in the 60s/70s. I would expect that if we decide to replace them, there would be a sufficient critical mass to justify the cost of moving away from uranium.
The risk from these types of accidents is less than the toll from fossil fuels in normal operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
For Fukushima: ".. no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure.." "no evidence to support the idea.. will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects".
Take into consideration that 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan did not cause Japan to not exist afterwards. In fact, the damage and death toll from those two bombs was less than from the wholly conventional Tokyo firestorm.
Yes, nuclear technology is a big lever, and yes, big levers are dangerous. But it's simply not as earth-shatteringly more dangerous as people believe.
Remember that there have been no deaths so far from the Fukushima meltdown, which was about as bad as you can imagine, with bad siting, bad technology, bad safety precautions, awful handling etc. At the same time, the Tsunami that caused the meltdown did cause over 15000 deaths.
Again, I think you've reached the right conclusion, but looking at the lack of long-term damage from the bombs doesn't tell us anything either way about the potential for damage from a reactor.
1) I wrote "take into consideration". That means that this is something to consider, not something that proves my thesis conclusively. So your criticism is misplaced.
2) You also miss the fact that bombs are designed to cause as much damage as possible, whereas reactors are designed to contain damage as much as possible. A candle contains much more energy than a stick of dynamite, yet the former is far more damaging.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_ot...
Referencing: http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Publ...
Compare the section: "Chernobyl compared with an atomic bomb".
But what do the IAEA and the WHO know about anything?
First, they show conclusively that "amount of radioactive material" is not the be-all/end-all measurement that you make it out to be. Nuclear tests put a total of 100-1000 times the nuclear material of Chernobyl into the atmosphere, and yet we are also still here.
> It makes no sense to "take into consideration" [..]
Furthermore, they do exactly what you claim "makes no sense". They "take into consideration" the effects of the bombs, and they compare those effects. They do come to the conclusion that the effects are different, one factor being that Chernobyl had more material, a counter-effect being that the radiation from Chernobyl is much more low-level and thus much less harmful (in fact, there are indications that low-level radiation may be beneficial).
But "into consideration" they certainly take. QED.
But yes, more modern reactors would be better, but these aren't being built.
That kind of stuff is why we need to get rid of nuclear power altogether. All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes.. and of course, to a lesser extent, people who rationalize not moving away from nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
When coal has a major incident, though, it still produces the same pollutants as if it's working correctly.
When nuclear has incidents, like the plants of Brunsbüttel and Krümmel that frequently had leaks, you end up with the highest leukemia quote worldwide [1].
Krümmel had major issues, with nuclear fuel being found in the area around the reactor, outside, on the ground, with the power plant leaking coolant frequently, and more incidents. [1]
Mismanagement with Nuclear can lead to far more problems than mismanagement with coal.
More Info and Links: [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leukämiecluster_Elbmarsch (Sadly, only German article available).
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kr%C3%BCmmel_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunsb%C3%BCttel_Nuclear_Power...
Yeah. No.
"Coal mining accidents resulted in 5,938 immediate deaths in 2005, and 4746 immediate deaths in 2006 in China alone according to the World Wildlife Fund"
So each year more deaths from coal accidents alone than the entire predicted, somewhat speculative and hard to ever prove death toll from Chernobyl over the next 20 or so years.
No, unfortunately, that's not all that's holding us back. There are still some pretty substantial, e.g., storage and transmission problems with the renewables.
Unless you want us to keep burning coal or some other nonsense like that...
Build power lines from everywhere to everywhere, and refit transformer stations to be up to the load of users producing more than using, and you fix that, too. (Incidentally, in Germany we’re having a huge debate about a huge powerline currently, NIMBY is one of the worst things that happened)
You do realize that the largest ever energy-generation accident was a dam failure? 171000 people killed in 1975 when a dam in China failed. And overall, hydroelectric facilities claim 94% of the fatalities of energy-production accidents.
What I am talking about is hydro-pump-storage.
That type of storage has no dam that could fail – you take two lakes, one higher than the other, connect them with a tunnel, and place a turbine in the tunnel. Now you can push the water up (store energy) or let it flow down (produce energy).
However, it is simply not true that hydro-pump storage never has a dam.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station
In fact, when you look at the list of pumped storage stations, the vast majority of them have dams:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
Fukushima was a standard design. Built by European and US companies in the same style as dozens of plants in Germany.
This is not "Fukushima was unsafe". If you say "Fukushima was unsafe", then half of Germany’s reactors are unsafe.
Shutting them down was the only option.
> making a few permanent wildlife reserves in the irradiated areas isn't a global catastrophe
You are talking about Japan. A country with one of the highest population densities worldwide. Declaring a whole province – and one with lots of history – off-limits is not going to happen. Currently they’ve been digging out the ground in half of the province.
----------
EDIT: Some more info:
Fukushima was a Boiling Water Generator built by General Electrics. Reactors of the exact same design are Krümmel (Germany), Brunsbüttel (Germany), Philippsburg (Germany), Isar (Germany). Krümmel and Brunsbüttel had constant issues, including the town next to it having the highest cancer rate on the planet.
The same design used by Fukushima is described in Wikipedia as "the second most common type of electricity-generating nuclear reactor".
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_water_reactor
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunsb%C3%BCttel_Nuclear_Power...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kr%C3%BCmmel_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...
> Fukushima was a standard design.
The design was unsafe. The company knew this. In fact it had been known for 35 years. It was not unfixably unsafe, and in fact 5 of the 10 reactors had been upgraded. These 5 shut down properly during the Tsunami and survived without problems.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023048879045763955...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-general-electric-knew...
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/16/fukushima-reactor-flaws-...
The main design flaw was that the vital emergency cooling equipment was sited in an unprotected building outside the protected reactor. This is especially troubling if you site your reactor on a Tsunami-ridden coast. It's less of a problem in the middle of Germany, where there are no Tsunamis. Or to put it another way: if you have a Tsunami reaching the middle of Germany, a meltdown at these powerplants is going to be among the least of your problems.
Of course, it is hard to demonstrate improvements, especially when nuclear power is so demonized.
It doesn't make sense to say it's hard to demonstrate improvements when it's not even under our control.
But demonizing nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
Gee, what a great idea! In fact, a slightly improved reactor was operating in the other Fukushima plant, and all its reactors were shut down safely after being hit by the same Tsunami.
More modern designs are safer still. For example, there are designs that do not require external power for a shutdown at all.
Here are 3 articles comparing the death-rates of various means of generating power.
Nice graphical representation:
http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclea...
For each death attributable to nuclear, 4000 are attributable to coal. 4000:1. Incredible, but apparently true.
NASA shows the deaths that have already been prevented due to nuclear, currently the rate appears to be 80000 per year. That's 80000 people alive per year who would have been dead without nuclear:
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/
Forbes has a nice comprehensive overview that shows rooftop solar having a higher death rate than nuclear:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
[EDIT: pulled salient points from the quoted articles into the post]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch
"Im Zuge der Auswertung der Studie zeigte sich, dass nicht Umweltfaktoren, wie die Nähe zu Kernkraftwerken, zu Militärflugplätzen oder anderen häufig als Verursacher in Rede stehender Anlagen mit dem Auftreten der Leukämiefälle korrelieren, sondern dass demografische Faktoren die signifikantesten Merkmale darstellen, in denen die untersuchten Cluster übereinstimmen."
It's fair to say the author's methodology is interesting. Only 50 deaths from Chernobyl count... as it would be "tenuous" to count other people that eventually died from radiation poisoning (even using the figures accepted by bodies responsible for promoting atomic energy). It's apparently not "tenuous" to count ballpark estimates of a million lives shortened due to coal particulate poisoning, however, or indeed to guesstimate 1/6 of all roofing deaths are likely to be from solar. It's something of an understatement to say this is not the most intellectually honest exploration of statistics around an issue.
Compare with the New Scientist's claim - based on a study by the IAE - that the ratio should be around 14:1 for coal, and 1.5:1 for natural gas. Better than coal, certainly, but not spectacularly safe even compared with burning other fossil fuels https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-f...
Not sure why quoting the WHO is "interesting", unless you mean "interesting" as in "a good way to proceed".
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
They say the death toll could reach 4000 (from the pool of emergency workers), but so far only 50 have been confirmed.
' [..] the radiation-induced increase of about 3% will be difficult to observe.'
'Poverty, “lifestyle” diseases now rampant in the former Soviet Union and mental health problems pose a far greater threat to local communities than does radiation exposure.'
'Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas'
'Notes Vinton, “The most important need is for accurate information on healthy lifestyles, together with better regulations to promote small, rural businesses. Poverty is the real danger. We need to take steps to empower people.”'
I mean, if you're doing a sincere comparison with "people whose lives may have been shortened by coal dust" and "back of the envelope guesstimate how many people die installing domestic solar", you simply don't pick "people definitely proven to have died from radiation poisoning at Chernobyl" as your comparison point.
Coal would look remarkably safe (which it isn't) if you required similar standards of proof of coal dust rather than lifestyle factors being the cause of premature death.
The future Chernobyl deaths are just that: predictions about what may happen in the future. They think it could happen, but they don't know. And due to the extremely low level of the signal, it will be very hard to tell if they do occur, because as the WHO report states, other effects such as poverty are much more significant.
So, no, the comparison to coal dust is not unfair at all.
But, for the sake of argument, let's completely ignore the coal dust and other respiratory or global warming effects, and concentrate on just the proven accidents. Heck, let's be super unfair and leave in the estimated possible statistical future deaths from Chernobyl, but only consider the documented deaths from coal accidents. That gives us 4000 deaths for Chernobyl and 4000-6000 per year for coal. So even when being totally unfair towards nuclear, it is somewhere between 20-40x safer than coal.
When you level the playing field, you have the 50 deaths from Chernobyl and around 131 others, though that includes lots of accidents not related to power generation. Around 180. Let's double it and call it an even 400. So 10x fewer deaths than coal. Except that's per year vs. since ever. So we're talking around 500-1000x safer.
No matter how you slice and dice the numbers, nuclear power is vastly safer than existing means of power generation, even given the sorry state of the industry today.
Of course, we should still be doing as much solar as we can (just be careful when installing!), and we should improve reactor designs so they are even more safe. For example using the liquid fuel thorium reactors, or concepts such as PIUS, which uses passive mechanisms relying mostly on physical laws to shut down and cool the reactor, rather than active mechanisms that can fail as they did at Fukushima-Daiichi. And hope that one or more of the multitude of nuclear fusion projects makes a breakthrough.
OK then, I sincerely acknowledge that the estimate of 4000 Chernobyl casualties is much more widely accepted (including by the nuclear industry) than the WTO's more speculative guess at how many people are having their lifespan reduced by exposure to coal particle dust. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise, but then I'm also perplexed by your assumption that none of the 3940 total casualties the WHO predicts from increases in rates of cancer and leukaemia among those most closely exposed to Chernobyl radiation have happened yet.
The lack of confirmed Chernobyl deaths is because - as the report you linked to states - cancers are common cause of death among people not exposed to nuclear accidents, not because 50 acute radiation sickness victims and 9 kids with thyroid cancer are the only people living or working near Chernobyl to have died a bit young over the last 30 years. I mean, I'm not sure any individual lung cancer has been directly proven to be a result of working down a coal mine either, but it would be an unusually outspoken proponent of coal that argues that it should be discounted as a risk altogether because of that, or because of difficulties gauging the precise size of the effect when miners tend to be poor and smoke a lot.
I'm going to go out on a limb and consider a published study suggesting nuclear is around 14 times safer than coal[1] and 1.5 times safer than natural gas a little more valid than your own back-of-the-envelope exercise, or indeed a blogger whose use of statistics is rather creative.
[1]though much as with flying being safer than driving, that's to a large extent because nobody is suicidal enough to run a nuclear plant with safety standards comparable to those of Chinese coal mines.
Mathematically-speaking that remaining half pound of U238 will fully turn into lead approximately... never.
My understanding is that the radiation problem in Germany is since Chernobyl...
I don't think people's viewpoint on this issue has anything to do with nationality.
> if the waste is dealt with properly and stored safely
At least in Germany, nobody figured out yet how to store the waste properly for a long-time. Remember, that the country is densely populated. For example, take a look at the Asse II mine.
There's a world outside Germany. Pay someone outside Germany to deal with it.
It didn't fly well with either public opinions, though.
Using those sites for commercial waste is not allowed anymore since 2005 though.
The thing is: No matter how often it is repeated, there is currently no safe place to store a sufficient volume of nuclear waste securely anywhere in the world. It's not just a simple question of "paying someone else".
Developing those sites seems possible but the solution to the waste problem isn't there yet.
And how is that going ? Not good.
The biggest problem with nuclear waste that everyone keeps overlooking is the potent NIMBY issue. In democracies politicians need to do what their constituents want in order to survive. And constituents will forever be scared to the bone about nuclear waste anywhere near them.
The occasional wind turbine workers and rooftop solar installers have been killed doing their work; in extremely small numbers but each turbine and rooftop only makes a minuscule quantity of energy.
Hydro is usually very safe, except that the dams can fail and wipe out entire cities. When Banqiao Dam failed, 26 thousand people died. If you want to talk about the "what if" dangers of nuclear, you have to accept that Hydro's "what if" scenarios are far, far, far more deadly.
Deaths per trillion kW hours
170,000 Coal
36,000 Oil
24,000 Biomass
4,000 Gas
1,400 Hydro
440 Solar (rooftop)
150 Wind
90 Nuclear
I notice that Wind and Solar aren't much worse than Nuclear, though, and they don't produce highly radioactive, toxic waste we must safely store for millenia, don't take decades to set up, don't cost as much, do not require incredibly high levels of competence to be safe...
https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+per+kilowatt
I'm all on board for wind and solar, we should be deploying as much of it as possible. But if we want to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy in the next 50 years, we need more than just solar and wind.
Saying that nuclear power produces "highly radioactive, toxic waste" is extremely misleading and demonstrates a core misunderstanding of the nuclear fuel cycle. This stuff is only scary because it has been pitched as the boogie monster by anti-nuclear weapons campaigners who were completely uneducated about the difference between the two.
If you educate yourself about nuclear power, your views might change.
http://archive.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/11/mo...
If we were to stop using hydro or wind the number of related deaths would quickly drop. With a lifetime of 100.000 years, today's nuclear waste has a potential to kill tenths millions.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the nuclear fuel cycle, and some very basic facts about radioactive material. The stuff that "kills" has a short half-life. The stuff that lasts for millennia is almost safe enough to store in your underpants.
Rather than parrot ignorant statements of others, please consider learning more about nuclear energy.
That it is dangerous for millennia seems to be a popular belief, so a source would be valuable.
Seems a bit strange having to cite something I learned in secondary school science class, but okay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_isotopes_b...