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It's a little dishonest to state a casualty rate when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet. That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.

> That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.

I thought the problem was solved:

1. Dig hole.

2. Put it in hole.

3. Guard hole.

There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years. And if you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human from 10000 years ago, you'll realize how non-trivial that is - no language, culture or knowledge capture system would survive for this long intact. There is a fascinating body of research about how to solve this problem (with no definite answer). E.g. see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...

This stupidly assumes that the people that dig the hole won't be able to communicate with generations after it.

The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.

> won't be able to communicate with generations after it.

Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.

> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet

Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.

> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.

The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.

"Stupidy"

Strangely it seems to be considered a problem by those who are actually working in the field.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/...

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...

One can at least hope that humanity's level of technology does not regress. So then there is at least the fact that the radioactivity can be detected even after the signs have long gone.

Possibly, though not guaranteed - we have radioactivity detectors, but not many people carry them with them and use them on everything around. We'd still need to somehow communicate that this place needs detecting - and if people there would not be using nuclear energy for some reason, they might not even think about needing to check that place for radioactivity, at least not until there is some serious trouble.

> There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years.

I can imagine some sort of post-apocalyptic copper age religion where the religious brotherhood exist to guard the 'cursed caves', without understanding why. But everyone knows that people who enter the caves either die at the hands of the strangely deformed beasts who live there, or of a mysterious sickness sometime afterwards.

Yeah, I probably played too much D&D as a child :)

I would like to take this moment to vent, and wave at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk .

The argument that we need to do something about this waste beyond the timeframe of our civilisation is mind boggling to me. This is the only risk we seem to take this seriously - in no other arena can I recall people arguing about what something will look like in 10,000 years. What about war between America and China? >1% chance, massive potential for death and destruction. Who cares if some poor person digs into an old nuclear waste dump in 500 years compared to that?

We can leave this problem to the future. If they have regressed so far that they can't detect nuclear then they have bigger problems than radiation poisoning.

Threats to energy security are so much more of a threat than potentially maybe not being able to figure out how to reprocess spent fuel until it isn't a health hazard.

The main problem is nobody can agree where to dig the hole.

The hole is already dug. Instead of going in the hole, the waste is sitting in collecting ponds or concrete casks very, very close (100 yards) from major waterways.

The original poster was talking about the possibility of human error (particularly the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) so it was not "a little dishonest" to focus on the deaths from power sources that one could attribute to human error.

>...when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet.

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

(Funding for the integral fast reactor was killed by Bill Clinton, but there is no reason that the US or some other country couldn't fund this or any of the other 4th gen designs.)

>...That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.

Right now nuclear waste is a very manageable problem and relatively soon the waste could be used to produce electricity if we so desire. Considering that no one of the general public has been killed from nuclear waste (and tens of thousands die each year from burning coal) why would someone consider nuclear waste a "massive problem"?

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

The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.

The practical barrier to reprocessing and burning spent fuel isn't technical or political: it's economic. Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.

> Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.

Soon is relative. Nuclear power has only existed for just over 70 years. These things take time, and progress is intensely stagnated because of the fear and regulation involved.

>...The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.

Yes a breeder reactor was one of the first electricity-generating nuclear power plants, but that doesn't mean we need to rush. We have enough storage capacity for decades before we need to worry about the level of high level waste.

>...Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.

At the present time. Even if plans like getting uranium have sea water work out, we might start burning high level at some point just to deal with the high level waste if we run out of room. It makes a lot more sense to burn waste for electricity than to spend millions to bury it in the ground for millennia.

It's also dishonest to claim (Without any qualifications) that spent nuclear fuel will be deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.

Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years?

How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disasters kill over the next ~100 years? Because that's the alternative we're looking at.

Furthermore, people don't understand that decommissioning coal reactors is also time consuming and dangerous. Here in Toronto, the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station was decommissioned in 1983 and remains quite radioactive, despite not even burning coal in its later years. There is a 24 hour guard presence.

Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet.

If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital on the planet, solar will still kill more people than nuclear would under those circumstances.

So the reasoning here eludes me: perhaps it's that people don't understand nuclear so it must be bad ? It's how we got to Trump ...

TLDR: public opinion takes an idea. It declares it a bad idea. Comes up with much worse ideas for it's given criteria and enforces conformance to those ideas. Solar and wind both kill more people than nuclear, short term and long term.

Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

> It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.

Also, it is not true you can't safely go there now. In fact you can go there for a vacation trip: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrain... "More than 10,000 tourists now explore the disaster site every year."

Even from those 50, a number died due to the physical effects of walking into vapor that was several thousand degrees. Yes, they would likely have died of radiation exposure, but they survived nowhere near long enough for that to occur. It is a VERY bad idea to spray water on something that is being fed with tens of megawatts of power. This is what happens, of course, when the government orders workers into a reactor they know nothing about. Of course those were also nuclear related deaths, but ... At Chernobyl at least the radiation death toll can realistically be claimed to be nonzero, but people dying from a direct consequence of the disaster, and actually dying from radiation exposure is low double digits. People affected by it, and having worse health as a result of it MAY be in the thousands. However, after decades of tracking, it will probably rather be in the hundreds.

The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...

For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.

The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.

e.g. https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/chinas-solar...

Solar and wind have a rate of zero nuclear accidents per install, and as that seems to be the only kind of accident you or anyone else counts towards nuclear power's total they're clearly better than nuclear in that regard.

Is there dispute over the long term toxicity of nuclear waste? It's not hard to find numerous toxic, long lived isotopes. The world has no shortage of waste and the volumes are growing, not shrinking. Im not a proponent of coal, and at the scales my part of the world needs, hydro fills most the need. Yeah, it needs maintaining but that's unlikely to be more costly than nuclear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product

No, but there is a dispute over how dangerous it is - or more specifically, how many people it's likely to kill.

We're close to capacity for the world's utilization of hydro. It can only grow ~20% in the next 30 years - which would let it... Take ~10% of coal's contribution to power generation.

Hydro power is generally cheaper then coal. If we could use more of it, we would be.

It's totally solved from a technical standpoint. Dig a hole half a mile deep in bedrock in a tectonically stable area, and whatever you put in that hole is safe forever. But that's kinda expensive, so we keep burying it in people's backyards and then going "gosh, this is hard!" when it bites us in the ass.

People keep repeating the baseline fallacy, but that is what it is. http://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/publ...

Judging by that PDF, it's hard to call it a fallacy without palming a card or three.

if we could use nuclear power exclusive to fix carbon, I think it would be worth it. I think a lot of people would say that this is worth it, and this inequality is in favor of nuclear power over the safest possible coal power.

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/29/521926674/climate-friendly-coa...

> And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time

So what does that tell you about the motivations of much of the movement that opposes nuclear and fossil fuels? They're not motivated by continued human flourishing, that's for sure.