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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

I'll keep saying nuclear is one of the best technologies we can use for power generation. In addition to the fact that the falures at Fukushima, TMI, and Chernobyl were all caused by HUMANS interfering with engineering plans and systems, or not being trained proeprly (Fukushima designers called for higher seawalls, overrulled; TMI was human error massively compounding a simple mechanical failure which could have been recovered from; Chernobyl had key safety systems disabled). There are several newer, much safer designs that when used with proper training and engineers being listened to, can provide us with very clean power with stability and land use that solar and wind can't match. You combine that with wind/solar/water during the day, and you have yourself an amazingly clean power grid that works 24/7.

I was 1, living in Pittsburgh. My father was called in among many others to help determine how to recover.

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The fact is that HUMANS will build the new reactors; interfere with engineering plans and systems; and not be trained properly.

If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built.

I have talked to people in the coal power industry. There are plenty of cases of accidents.

In one case they started up the generator with the oil pumps turned off - the multi-tonne rotor ripped off the bearing then rolled through the hall crushing everything in its path. What if that had been a nuclear power station?

A manager without a clue asked for a chute to be opened, the worker tried to explain why that was a bad idea, the manager insisted and a few kilograms of coal dropped down on them.

It can take minutes for the mulit-tonne generator to synchronise with the 50Hz supply frequency. There are special electric motors that retard or advance the generator until it is in sync, then keep it in sync. Normally there are resistors to allow the sync to happen slowly. However in one case it was thrown to full power before the sync was complete. There was a momentary blackout through the southern UK while a huge amount of power was used to sync the generator in a fraction of a second. Strangely the fuses didn't blow.

You're so paralyzed by fear of a nuclear accident you miss the big picture. For example, the fly ash emitted burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.[1] Sure the results of a nuclear meltdown are scary on the local level. But you know what's a lot scarier on the global level? Runaway climate change. It took the worse earthquake in the Japan's recorded history along with several human mistakes on an outdated reactor to cause Fukushima. And we don't more of these designs.

Like the article discussed, what we want is the government to be smart about nuclear power. There 7 million deaths annually due to air pollution. How many American lives are lost due to terrorism? And yet we wasted $4 trillion in the Middle East after 911. Imagine if we spent that on new reactor designs and fusion research?

Global warming is the biggest threat facing our species. It's time we stopped worrying about our neighborhood and starting thinking about our planet.

[1]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short

When I was 8, I read a 1970s novel, describing a struggle of young nuclear engineers to promote newer reactor design through the behemoths of rigid bureaucracy. The new design was inherently safer and thus did not need the expensive steel containment shell built around, thus saving resources to the Motherland.

Chernobyl happened the next year, we lived 250km north of it. Luckily for us, most of the fallout precipitated on heads of other people some 100km south. Yet the radiation levels were a part of daily weather forecast for the next decade. We didn't have a toaster, a microwave, a dishwasher or a VCR home then, but we owned a radiometer.

We were instructed to hide from the rain in the weeks after the accident. I remember hiding with a friend under concrete slabs at a construction site on our way from school. The habit kind of stuck in the unconscious: in Belarus, people still scramble for cover at the slightest hint of rain, even though the accident was a full generation ago. I only realized it after living abroad for some years.

Anyway, whenever someone on Reddit or here rediscovers that Nuclear is Safe when Done Right, I always remember that novel.

I doubt anyone ever claimed that Chernobyl was nuclear Done Right. It was probably the most unsafe reactor design ever put into production.

The best modern designs have a strong negative feedback: as the fuel gets hotter, the reaction rate slows down, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. Chernobyl did the opposite: as the fuel got hotter the nuclear reactions happened faster. It relied on human operation of control rods to keep it from blowing up. And on top of that it skipped the containment shell.

Actually, it relied on two complimentary safeguard circuits to restrict the rod movements within its calculated performance envelope. They could not be overriden from the front panel, so electricians were dispatched to cut them off, in order to conduct an "experiment" in the wake of International Labour Day. How safe are the other reactor designs when malicious human intervention is considered is still a very open question.

I would also remark there was a deserved stream of criticism from the West both for the reactor design and the containment effort that followed. The overwhelming opinion throughout the 1990s-2000s was that the Western designs are safe and catastrophic scenarios like Chernobyl are implausible. Then Fukushima happens, the three reactors blow up and the only saving grace for Japan was the wind blowing oceanside. And the containment is done by low wage workers in sneakers, while Asimo and its advanced robot colleagues play robosoccer in Tokyo.

The narrative is now changed to other designs being "inherently safe", although it's not very plausible how any concentrated, massive release of energy can be made inherently safe. Yes you can reduce probabilities and exclude some catastrophic scenarios, but this is a thing with crises: they always come unexpected. I'm sure when the plug in a molten salt reactor fails for some reason (say tectonic shift from a quake), there will no doubt be another design touted as safe.

Now consider that fission power atm is what, 10-15% of compound world power generation? As of now it's focused in a handful of nations, most of whom are known for safety culture. As it proliferates worldwide, the average quality of maintenance will decline and the number of stations would naturally multiply, so perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades. And we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here.

I'd really really rather wait for fusion.

I'd be happy to wait for fusion, if catastrophic climate change were not bearing down on us like a freight train.

And also if coal were not killing many thousands of people every year, and we didn't have so many large dams past their designed lifespan.

Well frankly, converting to fission in near term (say 15 years) worldwide is pure speculation on our side. This is just not going to happen. I just hope natural gas, hydro and the increasing green generation component can help us get by and perhaps reduce the coal usage.

> Then Fukushima happens

Which was nowhere close to as bad as Chernobyl. There is a lot of fear-mongering going around that tries to imply they were somehow similar, but most of that relies on people not understanding the difference between a steam explosion in Chernobyl's reactor core (which had no containment building) blowing finely pulverized radioactive graphite and fission products across the landscape, and Fukushima's hydrogen explosions outside the containment chamber, which caused far less damage and left most of the fuel still contained in the reactor cores.

Nobody has died from radiation at Fukushima Daiichi, and there is a good chance any future cancer risk is extremely low. In fact, the way the reactor survived the worse earthquake and tsunami on record without causing a radiation hazard like some places around Chernobyl shows how safe nuclear power is, even in old designs. This was confirmed at the nearby Fukushima Daini reactor, which survived the earthquake and tsunami.

> perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades

Extrapolating from two incidents isn't useful. Since one of those data points wasn't significant nuclear accident, you're now trying to extrapolate form a single data point, which is not the kind of math we should base policy on.

The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly. Even if you count every single nuclear associated disaster (including Chernobyl), there number of people injured/killed and the land impact of those disasters is insignificant noise compared to what the coal (or chemical) industry has done.

> we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here

So you haven't looked at any of the advances in nuclear power that have been made over the last sever decades? Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem. Most technologies advanced a lot over the last 40+ years - why would you assume that nuclear never advanced past the 60s?

> Which was nowhere close to as bad as Chernobyl.

Both were Level 7 accidents on INES scale. Fukushima release was about 1/6th of Chernobyl, but ended up blowing 4/5ths of its contents over the ocean. At some point, evacuation of Tokyo metro area was considered. Yeah no, both were pretty bad and the same magnitude events.

> The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly.

Fair point, but there's not much coal use in Belarus (mostly natural gas), nor in Norway where I am now (clean energy from the dam to my car's plug). For Belarus, the impact, in health, land and culture was incomparable to that of other energy accidents.

> Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem.

Right, they have the weapon proliferation problem that you can't design away.

Breeders aren't necessarily proliferative. The IFR for example ends up with a mix of plutonium isotopes which is more difficult to weaponize than natural uranium ore. The main problem is the need for a high fissile load at startup, but the same mix works for that.

Thorium breeders are another possibility, as long as you're not isolating protactinium.

Another route is Transatomic's design. It's not actually a breeder, and runs on uranium enriched as low as 1.6%, but burns up almost all the transuranics because it leaves them in the fuel mix for a long time, removes fission products, and has really good neutron economy.

Even if you use breeders with potential proliferation issues, one way to go would be to keep those reactors in weapons states, and use them to dispose of the waste from non-weapons states.

> shows how safe nuclear power is, even in old designs.

More than that, had the reactors been gravity-shutdown capable ones and gravity fed cooling (rather than pump driven) and the seawalls been higher as originally proposed, none of us would be talking about Fukushima. So like you said, safety isn't unattainable. Just the opposite, it's usually sabotaged by people who have no place making such calls.

I'd really really rather wait for fusion.

Over 40 years ago, when I was checking out colleges to attend, the tour at one school took us thru a fusion research lab that iirc had a Tokomak (or some similar contraption).

IMO no way that practical fusion happens even 40 years from now. I won't be around to see it.

Maybe the Chicago Cubs win another World Series before we see practical fusion? Could that happen? :)

I never expected to see space rockets landing down on their feet, like in 1950s sci-fi novels, yet here we are :)

"I'd really really rather wait for fusion."

This is like the computer company that loses business after announcing the date for its next model, except worse, because there's no date for fusion. The threat of fusion is sucking the air out of fission.

> How safe are the other reactor designs when malicious human intervention is considered is still a very open question.

Nothing is safe from malicious action, absolutely nothing. You can cut someone with a piece of paper, drown them with a glass of water, or stab them in the throat with a pencil. You can even simply punch someone with your hand in the back of the neck and kill them. We simply make malicious action difficult and unlikely through design and rules, exactly how we manage cars and coal plants and nuclear weapons.

Exactly. And I think we all can agree that a sharp pencil does not have the same worst case scenario potential as an automatic rifle or nuclear weapon. It is really hard to sabotage a coal plant with the same national impact as an INES L7 nuclear accident. I think among the "conventional" energy sources only some of the hydro sites come close.

Let's look at the worst possible case for molten salt reactors and imagine that somehow the reactor gets cracked wide open.

With a solid-fueled reactor, you need enough fuel for 18 months (the normal refueling cycle). With liquid fuel you can add a little bit of fissionable material as often as you want, so your fuel has barely enough reactivity to keep your plant operating.

With solid fuel, the fission products build up over that 18 months. With liquid fuel, three things happen:

- Noble gases bubble right out of the fuel to an outgas system. You get a tank of xenon and krypton. You can take that away to secure storage as often as you like.

- Some metallic fission products plate onto collectors.

- The major fission products we worry about are cesium, strontium, and iodine. In conventional reactors they're gases, but in MSRs they bond very strongly into fluoride salts. Optionally we can remove them as we go.

So in our imaginary catastrophe there's not enough reactivity for a big excursion, there's less decay heat than in a conventional reactor, and most of the radioactive stuff is liquid that quickly cools to solid rock. There's nothing to drive any kind of explosion, since it's all chemically stable and at atmospheric pressure.

It's worth noting that Fukushima's reactor survived a 9.0 earthquake without significant physical damage. It was the loss of electric power that took it out, and that's a problem molten salt reactors don't have at all.

> If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built.

And, as I mentioned, we have designs that can be run safely by fallible humans, we just need to keep penny pinchers from breaking the design during design/construction. And extra $1,000,000 here and there for a safety margin is a far better investment than hundreds of millions in cleanup.

I find it hard to understand why there's still support for nuclear power, particularly given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all.

* It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.

* Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.

* The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.

* Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.

There's really not a lot to like about the nuclear power industry. Can anyone explain why we shouldn't just leave this method of power generation behind as a tragic mistake?

Because we need to get off of fossil fuels and wind/solar is intermittent, so it can't provide base load power without huge numbers of batteries or other technology that hasn't scaled up yet (e.g. molten salt/flywheels).

Hydro provides base power. No fancy technologies needed.

Doesn't hydro require certain preconditions that are not true everywhere?

Generally, yes, very much so.

Technically, no. Artificial hydro (more commonly known as pumped storage) means you can essentially store energy in gravity, anywhere. i.e. build a container at an elevated position, pump water into it using intermittent energy (e.g. wind at night, excess solar etc), drop water down through a turbine to generate electricity again to provide a low baseload.

The reality is that 1) this is hugely expensive and so generally pumped storage is restricted to exploit existing natural resources with lots of elevated mountains between which one can store ridiculous volumes of water rather than build your own giant water container.

So generally hydro is limited to existing water resources (e.g. large rivers), or storage resources (e.g. mountains) which are quite limited.

Hydro's problem (along with wind and solar) is transmission requirements. Not everyone lives near a location where hydro is feasible.

It's also not particularly environmentally friendly to dam rivers everywhere.

Some of the wave-action stuff is interesting, but you've obviously got to be near a large body of water for that to work.

Hydro doesn't have to be large scale. If you can have small-scale wind and solar, you can have small-scale pumped storage, too.

Sure, it doesn't have to be large scale. But you brought it up as a replacement for base load nuclear, which small-scale pumped storage isn't going to do.

You want to talk about failure modes? The nuclear "worst case" has nothing on hydro.

Hydro power is responsible for the most fatal electricity generation incident ever: Banqiao Dam. It catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.

Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison.

Link for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

> According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine.

Video with computer simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPLXim9WG8

Indeed. Imagine what would happen if the Three Gorges Dam were to fail. There are over 360 million people living downstream of that one.

Christ. That's five percent of the entire world population.

Christ. That's five percent of the entire world population at the mercy of a single dam?

Why is nuclear power a better option than utility scale battery storage?

Utility-scale battery storage could definitely be an option, but batteries can be pretty nasty themselves. The alternatives like I mentioned (molten salt for solar, etc) need to be scaled up and could provide similar capacity.

The "base load" argument for nuclear isn't really convincing any more now that Iceland and Costa Rica are already using 100% renewable energy sources and several other countries are approaching it rapidly.

Bringing up Iceland as an example is a little disingenuous since the whole island is a volcano so they can use geothermal cheaply.

Costa Rica uses its large amount of rainfall and dams to use generate hydro power, and this article discusses a drought they had in the last year that meant they had to fire up the old fossil fuel plants: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/truth-b...

So I'd still consider having some base load capacity available fairly important.

> It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar.

You're probably looking at best-case vs. worst-case here. The expense of getting sufficient wind power in areas without wind or solar power in low-light areas can get pretty crazy. And a large portion of the expense of nuclear power is regulatory hurdles we impose on it.

> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic than the alternatives.

The success mode of the current most popular alternative (fossil fuels) has proven much more catastrophic. As for other things like wind and solar power, I think a lot of people are unconvinced that it's fair to call them "alternatives" yet. Nuclear has proven itself as a good general-purpose solution and they have not, and nuclear seems to be a lot better than what we are doing now.

> Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.

[citation needed]

It does happen.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/04/world/the-us-too-has-dumpe...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023047731045792685...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

http://www.cbrneportal.com/the-disposal-of-nuclear-waste-int...

Ocean floor disposal (also know of Sub-seabed) seems like a quite reasonable way of getting rid of nuclear waste you don't want to see again. Load it into a giant dart, drop it from a ship, allow it to pick up speed as it drops to the ocean floor, and it buries itself deep in the ocean's clay. It helps deal with concerns about access to the waste, as the number of submersibles that can work that deep is likely very small.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_floor_disposal

That's sounds like a process with no risk whatsoever.

For one thing, you're likely to piss off Godzilla.

> given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all.

Your metrics for "success" are interesting:

> It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.

According to [0] only onshore wind beats nuclear in terms of cost. However, that does not include the scaling issues wind has if you want to produce as much total MWe as a nuclear reactor (ex: there is only so much high quality wind onshore land).

> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.

This is the same logic for many anti-terrorism bills, but I will ignore that for now. This is also why they are regulated to such lengthy extremes, such as having backup power both onsite and offsite. It is also required to withstand winds that occur only once in 10,000 years.

> The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.

Sources? Much of it I know of is stored on site in giant pools because the waste belongs to the DoE, and the DoE still cannot find a compromise on how it should be handled.

> Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.

Replace "nuclear" with anything else and it is just as true. For example, structural engineering has had millenia lengths of time over nuclear to rack up disasters.

Ultimately, nuclear accidents amplify human error to a magnitude that many people find uncomfortable. Which is why the industry is regulated to a magnitude more than any other. It is not like they hand out reactor operator licenses to just anybody, either. 1 out of my undergraduate peers of ~7 got licensed to operate NCSU's PULSTAR research reactor, which has much simpler systems than a commercial power-producing reactor. It is also easy to forget that the nuclear industry in the USA has been near-paralyzed at the 1950's and 1960's level of technology, which is only about 20 years into the commercial reactor field. Unfortunately, there really is not any other industry I know of that, at 20 years into its growth, was paralyzed and allowed to operate for an additional 60-70 years. In that context, I think the US has done well given the little wiggle room regulation has allowed growth in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

That magnitude of regulation is hugely expensive though and tends to go up as new issues are detected.

The WHO did a massive study[0] and actually found nuclear killed far fewer people per watt than all others, even solar:

  Energy Source              Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

  Coal – world average              161
  Coal – China                      278
  Coal – USA                         15
  Oil                                36
  Natural Gas                         4
  Biofuel/Biomass                    12
  Peat                               12
  Solar (rooftop)                     0.44
  Wind                                0.15
  Hydro                               0.10
  Hydro - world including Banqiao)    1.4
  Nuclear                             0.04

Note that rooftop construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US, with high mortality rates from falls.[1]

Coal mining is extremely hazardous, it would top this chart even just looking at production. Folding in air pollution deaths from burning coal and you add thousands of deaths per day.[2]

Each year coal and oil kill more people than the entire 60 year history of nuclear, including every nuclear disaster.

Even if we focus on worst case scenarios, nuclear is safer. The impact of Chernobyl is wildly overestimated by the public.[3]

For hydro, let's just note that a dam failure in Banqiao killed 171,000. The highest death estimates for Chernobyl (and this is including expected early deaths from radiation exposure that still haven't appeared a few decades after the incident) and you're looking at maybe 4,000.

You could add a Chernobyl every year, even take the most aggressive estimates for early deaths caused by that accident, then ignore all air pollution deaths, and coal and oil would still be more dangerous. They're just that insanely deadly an industry. Nuclear's worst case is safer than coal and oil's average.

On cost I think you're mistaken too, nuclear remaining an incredibly cheap source of power per watt, but power economics are complicated and that'd take another discussion. All I can say is that this was the standard wisdom of everyone I knew who worked in the energy industry, despite occasional scare stories in magazines about how the "true" cost of nuclear is disguised by subsidies - the math doesn't quite add up.[4]

[0] Energy deathprints: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

[1] http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf

[2] Studies on air pollution deaths (spoiler: among the leading contributing factors to mortality worldwide): http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... ; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature1...

[3] An overview of the actual mortality impact of Chernobyl found it responsible for a few dozen deaths in emergency workers (fewer than 50, and some of those dying 20 years after the accident). It might be possible to eventually tie a few thousand early deaths to the incident, but we're still waiting, decades after it happened. In general, radiation hazards were widely exaggerated. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

[4] Admittedly biased source, but it runs a few publically available numbers, even nuclear projects with cost overruns look better than some renewable projects: http://nuclearradiophobia.blogspot.com/p/cost-of-nuclear-pow... I mean, ideally you get a mix of both sources, because they serve different purposes on the grid, but your bursty diurnal power isn't meant to serve as your cheap main source of power.

Interesting references thanks yet "official deaths" inherently underestimates the caused by nuclear energy. For instance there are only 28 official deaths for the Chernobyl disaster [1].

The WHO gives the number as "up to 4000 could eventually die" [2].

And some researchers give the number as "985,000, mostly from cancer" [3].

Since it's so hard to tally long term harm from such a hard to pin down source such stats are very hard to accurately quantify.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

[2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

[3] http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-de...

even with your highball estimate of 200x the WHO amount, that still puts Nuclear at <10% of the Coal amount

You're right that it's often hard to pin down long term impacts, but I don't think this is a debate with quite as wide a field of credible estimates as you suggest.

The 985,000 figure comes from an interesting source. It originated in a book that peer reviewers savaged, for, among other things, making up numbers without providing any justification whatsoever and ignoring the scientific method.

M. I. Balonov decried the book, claiming "it has very little scientific merit while being highly misleading to the lay reader." He called it science fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

While you're right that there are hard problems in long term forecasts, but there are entire fields of study, dosimetry and epidemiology, that have had smart people toiling away on those problems for their entire career, and this is maybe the most widely studied industrial disaster in history. We have made enormous strides in how to measure environmental radiation, doses received, and the correlation between those and increases in mortality. Individuals are hard, but population estimates are actually easier to calibrate over time. So if you write a book containing a sensationalist number to get some headlines, researchers will be able to tell you're pulling their leg.

As rtpg says though, this is a bit of a moot point, because, sure, let's call it 985,000, then nuclear remains still the safest form of power by an enormous margin.

In part, b/c nuclear power has had a successful run in other countries. In France, for example, nuclear generates 75% of the electricity and the country is the 7th cheapest in the EU (28 countries) for delivered KwH. [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

The problem is we don't even know what it means to deal with waste for 10,000 years. If the Romans had used nuclear power, we'd still be guarding their waste. And they likely would have put it somewhere really out of the way - like London. If some of the technologies that can transmute waste intro shorter lived stuff come to fruition, fantastic. But until then nuclear power is just the worst kind of deficit spending, kicking the unknown and huge costs way into the future.

Cadmium never decays. It isn't dangerous for 10 kiloyears. It's dangerous forever. And I guarantee you that your average barrel of cadmium is worse to deal with than your average nuclear waste flask.

Even more than that, a nuke plant generates, amortized, several tons of waste per year. A few flasks. Which can get shoved into a volume the size of your garage. And then you basically forget about it. Unlike, say, a coal plant, which generates a reservoir worth of awful ash a year. Containment isn't even an option there.

Even more than that, even if our nuke plants vented directly into the atmosphere every now and then they'd still put out less radioactive waste than coal plants. Seriously, the only reason nuclear waste is dangerous is because it's concentrated. If we held nuclear plants to the same standards we do coal plants, "safe, permanent disposal" would be as simple as dumping it into the ocean and making sure it mixed up.

> If some of the technologies that can transmute waste intro shorter lived stuff come to fruition, fantastic.

Today we could be reducing the volume of HLW if the US deployed pyroprocessing and cadmium distillation. Unfortunately for the USA, those technologies are more mature in Korea.

London wasn't out of the way. Londinium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium) was the heart of their administration, the provincial capital, and a commercial center as well, which could merit imperial visits. Romans storing nuclear waste there would make about as much sense as Americans storing nuclear waste in Okinawa or Baghdad or Kabul (that is, none).

Somewhere out of the way then would be like the Sahara, which not coincidentally, is still out of the way; and desert regions are also where it's usually proposed to store waste.

I'm actually pretty sure if the U.S. thought it could get away with shipping it's nuclear waste to Kabul, it would do so.

"The problem is we don't even know what it means to deal with waste for 10,000 years."

After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the ore from which it came.

Anyone who pulls the "long half-life" ploy doesn't know what they're talking about.

Long half-life = less radioactive. By definition.

I mean, you do know that "half-life of infinity" is the same thing as "not radioactive at all", right?

We know that we can put the "waste" in breeder reactors and burn up >90% of it for energy, leaving only short lived isotopes. We don't build breeder reactors because they can be used to breed Plutonium, not because they're difficult to build. It's a purely political decision.

But how much waste would we be guarding, really? And how does that compare to all the coal we've burned?

At current energy rates & waste production rates etc, if you used only nuclear power, your consumption would result in roughly 7 lbs of nuclear waste over an 80 year lifespan.

We in the US had a plan, store it way deep under Yucca Mountain. The most likely worst case scenario is that there's a seismic event which makes thousands of tons of nuclear waste permanently inaccessible, buried in a mountain. That's concrete encased, sealed steel casks buried in a bloody mountain. That's not a lot to actually worry about. Plus, with reactor designs like fast breeders, you reuse a lot of the waste. And even with old designs, it's STILL less radioactive than coal.

The human problem will never go away, though. Ultimately, someone is going to want to cheap out on something, and will be unable or unwilling to consider very-low-probability catastrophic events, probably partly because people are so bad at thinking about very-low-probability events.

Even relatively high-probability, catastrophic risks are under assessed. Witness all the tailgaters on the highway.

Does this amount to: "If you accept the premise that you can trust people not to be idiots, nuclear power is perfectly safe"?

I say that as someone positively predisposed toward nuclear. People can also be stupid with other sources of energy, of course, but that kind of stupidity is the kind that kills people slowly and unglamorously.

Exactly. When was the last time solar panels or a wind turbine melted down?

Workers occasionally fall off roofs and turbines. Not often, but often enough for them to cause more deaths per kilowatt than nuclear power.

Blades occasionally fall off...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R31p1q14SU

A friend's house caught fire because of a short in their rooftop solar panels.

This always jumps to mind:

http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg

Which is why you should always bring your escape gear with, no matter how long you intend to be.

Cascading failures and human error happen in all kinds of complex systems. You can't really say "that doesn't count" just because the failure was easily avoidable in hindsight.

It is a little naive considering how many HN reader probably have experience with complex software systems. If someone suggested running oracle on a grid of mainframes using some esoteric programming language we would be naturally sceptical but nuclear power always gets a free ride. Big and complicated is expensive even when it is the best solution on paper.

That's not an adequate comparison. You're comparing one simple solution to one complex solution. The actual comparison is one complex solution to several thousand simple solutions. What you're comparing is running oracle on a grid of mainframes using some esoteric programming language compared to running about 2,500 MariaDB servers (based on comparisons of modern wind turbines to modern nuclear generators). Oh, and that's just for one site. So you can manage a couple hundred unwieldy Oracle servers, or a quarter million MariaDB servers.

It is mitigating 1 million failure modes in one site or a few simple failure modes in 1 million sites. It wouldn't surprise me if wind turbines run SQLite!

So all we have to do is get rid of the humans?

Interestingly, that can be solved by using nuclear energy too.

Fukushima was caused by the decision to build on top of a known earthquake zone ..

Fukushima was caused by the most powerful Japanese earthquake in recorded history, followed by a tsunami that you'd need to build a 10-meter wall around the entire island to avoid. And the only people who died were plant workers trapped in the basement.

There's also still a 20km exclusion zone, apparently to remain in place for 30 years.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/11/...

That assertion is incorrect. There were other Nuclear Power Plants that were closer to the Tōhoku earthquake epicentre and just as affected by the proceeding tsunami. Of note is the Onagawa NPP which was used as a refuge to house residents (in the site gymnasium) during the event. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...]

To say that the plants construction in an earthquake prone environment, solely, would inevitably lead to the incident is false. Just like with most incidents (e.g aircraft) it is a compound of faults but most importantly obtuse human error and/or mishandling.

great example of a tech that works perfect in theory, but bombs horribly in practice.

accidents happen all the time, see the massive blasts in china recently. but, with other tech, the effects are limits to proximity.

tchernobyl's fallout cloud swept over europe. no other failure of tech comes close. learning from mistakes in nuclear is very expensive, we might run out of planet until it is perfected.

And a single mining accident can kill hundreds.

Coal mining kills hundreds without accidents.

Well that as well as does hydro power 35 died building one of Scotland's pumped storage systems.

> no other failure of tech comes close

Chernobyl killed 56 people directly. The full lifespan of the radioactive leak is statistically estimated to result in shortening the lifespan of roughly 4,000 people through cancer[0].

If you can't think of a more deadly technology failure incident, then you're horribly undereducated. You don't even need to go beyond the scope of electricity production to find incidents that were orders of magnitude more deadly. The Banqiao Dam hydro power station catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

how about you quote the whole wiki article?

"The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.[5] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[6] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[7] A disputed Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 premature cancer deaths occurred worldwide between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl.[8]"

after the dam in china broke, the area became habitable. tchernobyl's surroundings not so much.

the nice thing about radiation is the long term effects that make it so hard to measure. genetic issues in newborns are kind of hard to stomach.

and right now the waste figures worldwide do not include the reactors and buildings themselves. what exactly are you proposing there? using the nuclear reactor in the center of our solar system seems like a better bet.

I cited the wiki article for you. And from that I cited the most reputable, objective number rather than the unsubstantiated hysterical numbers claimed by activist groups.

Put your prejudices aside for a moment and consider it objectively. Nuclear power is demonstrably the safest form of energy generation per kilowatt with the sole exception of thermal solar. Wind turbines and photovoltaic solar are more deadly. I won't cite any specific source because there are literally hundreds.[0]

[0] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=deaths+per+kilowatt

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