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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

Before people start criticizing nuclear power. This story is about the Hanford Site. This is where they exclusively made plutonium for bombs, starting from the Manhatten Project. It’s a very complex situation with waste all over the site for a number of reasons, some of them really bad (aka management incompetence, government outsourcing of responsibility, etc), some of them sort of understandable (hey Joe, it’s 1945, we don’t know much about this shit but it can’t possibly hurt anyone if we bury over there in this vast wasteland. Don’t worry we’ll remember where it is... doesn’t).

Tours of the Hanford site are available to US citizens. Highly recommend people also go to the Manahatten Project “B Reactor” out there which is available to everyone.

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My primary concern with nuclear power is the human element. For which we have a long and well-demonstrated history of limitations that don't match corresponding requirements.

In other words, we are creating something human history -- as well as contemporary events -- demonstrate we do not have an enduring ability to manage.

As they say, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. But we can perhaps do something to limit scope, particularly where alternatives are developing that are safer and, sliding down the development cost graph, more cost-effective.

P.S. I'll add that, until we can manufacture elements (more fully), I prefer to keep these limited resource available for potential future use, when we have acceptable alternatives -- for me, now, meaning solar, wind, hydro (all forms of solar energy, essentially).

Who knows what need we might have of them, in the future? What if really going to space requires them in significant quantity, but we burned them all up on street lighting and casinos? ;-)

(Wouldn't it be ironic if further sources were in space, but we didn't have enough to get there?)

Well we could manage to make flights safe I think we can make nuclear energy safe. The biggest problem is that just -like security- safety is against profits or if non-profit cases it is bigger cost.

The site of every airplane crash doesn't become an inhabitable danger lasting for multiple lifetimes.

Some try - here in NZ the foam used by emergency crews at airports has been found to be toxic (ages ago) but kept being used, poisoning large areas. The issue came to light for some people as their farm animals started suffering a range of strange ailments and dying.

https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/350886/firefighting-...

Neither do nuclear power plant meltdowns. Fukushima is habitable, Chernobyl is habitable. Most of the concerns around nuclear waste are almost entirely limited to military use. Storing spent fuel rods is a generally solved problem. Most nuclear waste when generating energy can be re-used in other contexts as well... military use creates the nasty by-products that can't be reused.

Could you explain what you mean by habitable? Is that in that you can walk around with relative safety in certain places, or that you can safely live their again?

I'd guess the latter. The way half-life works, the stuff that's dangerous to you as you walk around quickly decays and stops being dangerous.

The problem is with long half-life (and thus low-radioactivity) elements that sit on the trees, get mixed with soil, and thus eventually end up in ground water and local food chain. You might be able to walk around a disaster site safely in relatively short time after the event, but I wouldn't try growing anything there.

>Chernobyl is habitable

"Even today, radiation levels are so high that the workers responsible for rebuilding the sarcophagus are only allowed to work five hours a day for one month before taking 15 days of rest. Ukrainian officials estimated the area would not be safe for human life again for another 20,000 years" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster citing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#cite_note-T...

Even Fukushima, which released most of its radiation out to sea, still has 370 square kilometers of exclusion zone.. 90,000 acres of still-uninhabitable land..

http://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en03-08....

What about the CO2 production of airplanes? And about the aviation fuel production sites? Fracking to get it out from the ground? Have you ever seen what the oil industry done in Africa? Are ignorant or on purpose leaving out crucial details in the comparison?

>Before people start criticizing nuclear power. This story is about the Hanford Site.

Anything that went wrong with the Hanford Site can go wrong with any nuclear power factory.

It's the profit and human error factors...

Not sure how many techno-naive pro nuclear factory people know that in the real world (as opposed to the fantasy world where technology is all that matters), nuclear waste is giving to MAFIA owned companies to dispose, which then save money by just dumping it in the ocean...

Not joking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...

https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...

and that's the tip of the iceberg... Even worse in the developing world...

>Tours of the Hanford site are available to US citizens.

Quick look at their website says it's not available to the general public. Only government officials, students, etc.

Open to the general public, but slots are very limited, currently full for 2018.

https://www.hanford.gov/c.cfm/publicTours

To confirm - I did such a trip this summer. It was really incredible, would recommend it to anyone interested in walking right up to the face of the reactor.

For comparison, please provide a list of nuclear power success stories.

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