Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

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There's a new Netflix Original called The Crown, and a few episodes in the London Fog of 1952 is a prominent plot point (no spoilers beyond that, though if you're a history buff it shouldn't be much of a spoiler anyway). Made me think considerably about how far we've come in terms of environmental regulations and our understanding of weather patterns.

I had honestly completely forgotten this even happened until that episode (though it gets a few of the finer details wrong, but nothing catastrophic.)

Kind of how mustard gas works, compound that turns to sulphuric acid when it gets wet.

So the compounds released from burning coal and the compounds found inside natural fog – an aqueous medium made of, you guessed it, water – work together to make droplets of sulphuric acid, the same stuff that makes 'acid rain'.

Remind me again why we can't have nuclear power?

While I sympathize with your sentiment, it's really disingenuous to play dumb.

Chernobyl and Fukushima would immediately come to mind.

"Nuclear power isn't 100% harmless" is a bad argument here, given the number of people that due from coal mining and processing and coal-originated externalities on an annual basis.

The number of deaths (including future cancer cases) due to Fukushima is estimated to be in the hundreds on the high end. Chernobyl is expected to have killed around 4,000 after cancer takes its toll. That's a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to the number of deaths directly and indirectly attributable to coal power.

How many people did these two incidents kill?

Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case; and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.

(Shrug) Put it in Antarctica. It'll be fine for 10,000 years there. No one will stumble across it accidentally, and we can get it back if we need it.

I've never understood why this is considered a problem.

How do you route the power from Antarctica to where it needs to be? That'd be an impractically large expense.

You can put the waste there without putting the power plants there.

But now you have the problem of transporting large quantities of nuclear waste for long time periods, with little tolerance for delays or stoppages.

At some point you have to accept that all energy sources have drawbacks. Besides not making a whole lot of sense, this particular objection is pretty small potatoes compared to toxic fogs that kill people by the thousands, or other fossil fuels that appear to be altering the climate on a planetary scale.

No, the existing storage pools at nuclear reactors provide a long-term buffer that can smooth out any irregularities in shipping. After all, there already is such an irregularity.

Once you start shipping the waste again, it's not really all that difficult. It's transported in containers which are essentially indestructible.

What gives you the ability to make a prediction on the 10,000-year scale? That seems wildly inappropriate. 10,000 years ago, you'd be the person saying "We should bury our magic artifacts in a big tomb in the desert! Nobody will find out what is inside for 10,000 years, because nobody can live in the desert and the sand is too hard to travel across..."

Any you'd be completely wrong about that. Because 10,000 years is far too long for some off-the-cuff calculation to draw reliable conclusions from. It's not even clear you could put this stuff safely on the moon once you start throwing around 10,000-year timescales.

The concern with long-term storage in places like WIPP is the possibility that future subliterate humans may access the site without being able to understand the warnings. But if we store the waste in Antarctica, that's not a realistic possibility. No one can go there without access to significant intellectual and technological resources.

And it's unreasonable to suggest that nuclear waste couldn't be safely stored on the moon. Any future civilizations who can travel to the moon will almost certainly be acquainted with nuclear physics themselves. However, launching high-level waste into space has obvious risks of its own. It will also make it hard to recycle it later, if future technologies are able to extract more power from it.

It's just as likely for some very literate future humans to build a city on top of it and have it seep into their ground water. Or maybe even a volcano or earthquake knocks it all out into our oceans.

It's not about other people being too stupid to handle it. It's that we're too stupid to handle it right now, so any way we handle it is liable to be a huge mistake in both unforeseen and easy-to-predict ways.

I think you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. Nobody is going to build a city on top of anything in Antarctica. The other calamities you mention aren't going to happen either, at least not in any location chosen for this purpose.

Meanwhile, people are dying right now from fossil fuel emissions. It just doesn't look all edgy and apocalyptic on CNN the way a nuclear accident does, so you don't care.

I don't actually think sticking it in Antarctica is a bad idea. I'm not arguing about that. I just think your attempt at making a 10,000-year prediction about human behavior and construction is absolutely crazy.

You don't even know what people are going to do 200 years from now, let alone 10,000. Try to image how much is going to happen in that much time. How many people will have lived and died? What is the population of Earth? What is the climate like? We just wouldn't build a city out there to drill for oil? Or any reason? Extrapolate this out.

Think about how inhospitable Antarctica is. If it didn't have breathable air, it would be like living on Mars. No one has ever lived there as far as we can tell, prior to scientific outposts established in the last 100 years or so. That's been true for millions of years and it will unquestionably be true for 10,000 more... unless of course we manage to melt all the ice by continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Again, the concern isn't about people who might build settlements to drill for oil or extract other resources. People who are doing that will be able to understand warning signs and keep themselves safe, and possibly even recycle what we've left behind. The problem is that, if our civilization falls for whatever reason, people who stumble across our disposal sites might not understand the warnings at all. Or worse, like you suggest, they might treat them like the Pyramids and try to plunder them without the slightest understanding of what they're getting into.

This will not happen in Antarctica because stupid people (as you put it) can't go there in the first place.

Transport is the only problem here. If there's a way of reburning fuel, or of containing it on-site long enough that most of the most harmful radiation has subsided you'll be fine.

The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous the radiation is. Radioactive elements with long half lives are generally less damaging and it's only from prolonged exposure you're in trouble.

Polonium is notoriously toxic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...) and has a furiously short half-life. Plutonium has a half-life of about 24,000 years so the radiation is spread out over a much, much longer period of time.

You can hold a plutonium sphere and suffer no ill-effects. The same cannot be said for one of polonium, something so nasty that nanograms of the material can kill you.

So basically it's the short-lived elements you need to worry about the most. The long-lived ones are relatively harmless. The biggest concern with those is securing them from those intent on using them for harm, as refining and weaponizing nuclear waste is a concern.

Transporting it there might be an issue.

So, make the Navy earn their keep by escorting it.

The US and Russian navies have already been transporting nuclear material all over the planet on their ships and submarines, in the form of both power-generation reactors and ballistic missiles. They have been doing so for decades with a very good safety record.

Wind power kills more people per kWh than nuclear does. Hydro power often relies on dams that devastate ecosystems. Solar is expensive as hell. I don't even know about tidal, does anyone even do that?

For what it is worth the cost of solar is dropping - and pretty steadily at that, if I recall correctly.

Japan has researched and is working on developing tidal energy [0]. But that's the only case I know of off-hand even related to tidal energy at all... and it hasn't been built yet.

[0] http://www.hydroworld.com/articles/2014/12/japan-develops-ti...

> Wind energy kills a mere 100 people or so per trillion kWhrs, the majority from falls during maintenance activities

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-ea...

According to wikipedia, wind kills about 150 per trillion Kwh. This is significantly more than nuclear.

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

France has had a tidal generator for 50 years, where have you been? I do recognize that model is limited, and other sites are few and fraught with the same issues as dams: natural flow is better for the ecosystem in those locations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_Tidal_Power_Station

Also [citations needed].

>Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case;

That might be theoretically true for the moment, but not in the near future. Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

>...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

>...and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.

Most cases? How is that? The issue with most of those sources are the very low capacity factor. There are obvious reasons that (except for hydro) that currently they generate very little percentage of the world's electricity. In the case of hydro it has caused more environmental devastation than almost any power source except coal and the accidents have caused orders of magnitude more devastation than other power sources.

Because it's insanely expensive and if we're going to go with the insanely expensive solution we should go with the one that's fully green and has lower start-up costs.

Uh, nuclear costs about the same as conventional coal [0].

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

"Remind me again why we can't have nuclear power?"

Ignorance and fear.

The Three Mile Island accident (1979) took place less than two weeks after the release of the movie The China Syndrome, the plot of which featured a coverup of a major nuclear accident. Activists seized the opportunity, and then-President Jimmy Carter (who had personal experience with nuclear engineering) failed to properly rein in public fears or beliefs about the accident (https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=sM1RAAAAIBAJ&sjid=W20D...). Despite a tenuous-at-best link between the accident and human health (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Hea...), for the longest time it was considered a "disaster". Growth of the nuclear industry in the United States took a major hit at this point.

Subsequent films such as Silkwood and general Cold War nuclear war fears did little to change the opinion of the layman that nuclear == bad.

The 1986 Chernobyl accident further reinforced these beliefs. People focused on the aftermath of the explosion and the Soviet coverup and generally ignored the underlying causes such as the antiquated design of the reactor and operator error. This incident had a major negative effect on the nuclear industry.

The 2011 Fukushima accident was an trainwreck of corporate negligence and insufficient government oversight. The facility, which had been operating since 1971, performed as intended when the earthquake struck but the subsequent tsunami breached the insufficient (identified as such since 2008) seawall and took out the generators powering the shutdown.

All these incidents demonstrate cases where negligence or antiquated design can lead to disaster. But few take a look at the successes. France, for instance, is a major user of nuclear energy and has avoided catastrophe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide...).

Fear of nuclear power is akin to "reefer madness" nonsense in the 1940s and 1950s.

Wow, that Post-Gazette article is illuminating. I knew Carter was a nuclear engineer, but I wasn't aware of how well-positioned he was to argue against people like Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader, and how ineffective he was at doing so. What an unfortunate lost opportunity.

I wonder if Nader's work fighting against nuclear power has ultimately cost more lives than he saved through auto safety advocacy.

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