When I was a kid, living in the equivalent of Kentucky, a nuclear accident in the equivalent of the Bahamas made it so we couldn't eat wild berries from the woods anymore.
Now a middle aged man over 30 years later, sheep from my home area still measure levels of radioactivity too high for human consumption.
That's why I feel most options are better than nuclear power, for any purpose except perhaps space probes.
The thing is that there are long living isotopes in the upper soil of the forests. As they are long living, they have not decayed yet enough and are not going to in the next decades. Something does not need to kill 80% of the population to be a significant health risk. With the isotopes relevant in Bavaria, they are only dangerous when eaten. So there is nothing dangerous about living in those regions. However mushrooms tend to aggregate the radioactive particles and so do the wild boar eating from the mushrooms. Not every animal is contaminated, but every single one has to be scanned for radiation, before they can be eaten, and quite a few have to be destroyed every year.
Edit: Now I'm wondering (and doubtful) if the same precautions were taken in the rest of Europe.
Bavaria had been contaminated the most, other parts of Germany have less residual radiation - the weather situation (wind, rain) created very inhomogeneous distribution back then. I found this map about the distribution: http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/gz54e7a9f2.png
200 grams of mushrooms with 3,000 becquerel cesium-137 per kilogram corresponds to a load of 0.008 millisievert . This corresponds to the radiation load on a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria.
And:
If wild game or wild growing fungi are consumed in conventional quantities, the additional radiation load is comparatively low, but it is avoidable.
In other words, there is no danger to one's health - no more that one is exposed to by living regular life and being subject to various low-level radiation sources present in the environment. The regulations have very low acceptable level, just to be safe, but there is very little actual danger from the levels present right now.
From Wikipedia[1]:
For comparison, natural radiation levels inside the US capitol building are such that a human body would receive an additional dose rate of 0.85 mSv/a.
So, working in a granite building for about 4 days is as dangerous as eating a meal of "contaminated" mushrooms. Thousand of people do the former every day. Or about the same as one dental xray. I think my conclusion that it is done out of overabundance of caution still seems to be correct.
Anyway, I have not claimed, that occasional eating of mushrooms is going to kill you. Still, the doses are high enough to warrant an official warning not too often to eat these mushrooms (you have a dental X-ray not every day either), and enough animals are contaminated high enough to be destroyed.
Overall, the life in Bavaria is not impacted by the radiation. But I find it startling, that over a thousand kilometers away from Chernobyl, the Bavarian landscape is contaminated and will be for decades. It shows me, that we do not want to risk a reoccurrence of such events.
Why wasn't it safe ? Because that type of reactors creates a lot of high pressure radioactive gassses , and in the case of an accident, those gases spread far.
But we now have reactors types that (a) can't physically blow up , their temperature is limited, and (b) contain very little to no radioactive gasses , so even in the worst case scenario, we'll be just left with an enclosed pool of radioactive material, which is safe.
So please don't judge nuclear by it's past.
Interested in learning more about these reactor types. I hear different reactor names discussed, but I'm not sure what's right on the cutting edge.
The most dangerous types of reactor is graphite moderated ones. (Because graphite burns lot more readily than water.) Practically all of the actually severe accidents happened with those. They have not been built since Chernobyl.
(Also, as a Kentuckian I'm curious what "the equivalent of Kentucky" is.) :)
He's probably in Eastern or Northern Europe and talking about Chernobyl.
I also want to transition to clean energy, but I'm much more afraid of global warming than nuclear disasters.
> Nuclear waste is treated securely enough for now in Europe, and future may bring us scientific development to resolve this problem in future.
No it's not. We have quite big problems with storage in Germany[1]. Other waste is stored next to the nuclear facilities who created it or on the road to and from La Hague where radioactivity is leaking into water and air[2,3].
[1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/braunschweig_ha...
[2]http://www.taz.de/!5154538/
[3]https://www.greenpeace.de/node/11699
Or hey, don't forget Sellafield where 2014 the employees have been asked to stay at home but everything is totally OK. Unfortunately nobody told that to the birds who were drinking contaminated water from open SFPs.
E: how is the wikipedia artikel solving the problems we already have and which resulted from the current nuclear waste storage?! I've asked that above. This whole thread results from a quasi "roses and butterflies" comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Transmutatio...
You are free to continue believing that nuclear power is too dangerous afterwards, it's certainly not all roses and butterflies.
Right now your comments sound extremely confrontational and rude, at least on my end of the pipe.
But if it turns out that we'll need an active (as in "needs manpower") care-taking of this waste for several thousands of years, we get into the compounded interests area.
Also, there's the immediate (last 50 years) issues such as barrels of waste being treated in silly manners; e.g. thrown into the ocean near the coast and shot to pieces by air-planes if they surface...
Politicians and corporations will do anything to save money, if they think they'll get away with it. That makes nuclear waste much more dangerous than it should be.
It's not a problem, we'll have clean fusion in 20 years :D /s
There's an interesting rebuttal to his episode here that is worth reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/08/24/please-jo...
We don't. Dig a shaft half a mile deep in bedrock in a tectonically stable area, and anything you put there will be safe for the next million years.
But that's kind of expensive, so we keep dumping the shit in the ocean or in shallow graves in the backyard.
Out of all wastes to be mismanaged, higher radiation would probably be the easiest to detect - simple detectors are widely available commercially.
Yes, we need ways to store, or recycle - there are ways to do that too - nuclear waste, but that doesn't seem to be an intractable problem, and I don't think this is the main hindrance to the wider spread of the nuclear energetic. Irrational fears of "radiation" and political issues seem to be more prominent there.
(2) Every coastal towns, cities, estuaries, and natural preserves will be wiped out within a thousand years. Across the globe. Including entire nations. (Well, to be fair, they will cease to be nations long before that.)
There's really no comparison.
For arguments regarding (2), see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_global_wa...
> A study in 2015 found that assuming cumulative fossil fuel emissions of 10 000 gigatonnes of carbon, the Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt completely over the following millennia, contributing 58 m to global sea-level rise, and 30 m within the first 1000 years.
Per Wiki:
> According to the World Health Organization in 2011, urban outdoor air pollution, from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass is estimated to cause 1.3 million deaths worldwide per year and indoor air pollution from biomass and fossil fuel burning is estimated to cause approximately 2 million premature deaths.[14] In 2013 a team of researchers estimated the number of premature deaths caused by particulate matter in outdoor air pollution as 2.1 million, occurring annually.[4][5]
And see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
Nuclear is safer and better in every way even if you multiplied all the past disasters by ten. There really is no comparison.
Where to store some icky stuff isn't really a huge drawback, its a political problem because humans have no sense of scale.
Sure we did. We close them down where ever it's possible. Just like we should do and do with nuclear power plants.
> Nuclear is safer and better in every way even if you multiplied all the past disasters by ten. There really is no comparison.
What a brilliant argument you have there. Oh wait. No it's not. You actually did not bring anything up to counter the problem caused by nuclear plants: nuclear waste. Just some juicy whataboutism.
> its a political problem because humans have no sense of scale.
People have enough sense of scale to realize that the waste will be there forever and while some are safely away from it, others can watch your rusty barrels go to hell and pollute the environment. Funny because John Oliver had a piece about that just last week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
What's good about that at all?!