Radioactive ruthenium from an undeclared major nuclear release in 2017
pnas.org
pnas.org
I think you meant, talk about it on page 5 of the paper or on some sidebar on the website, be enraged for exactly two days and then immediately drop the topic and don't do any followup?
The situation above is a major fuck up of the local authorities. A lot of journalists out there would make a career if they break a story like that and ride the hype wave for the next year or two. So if you want to make something public it is much more difficult to stop you nowadays rather then to publish anything.
A huge proportion of society (who are eligible to vote) don't hear about these things even after a journalist has fought tooth and nail to release the story.
People, for many varied and complex reasons, tend not to care about this sort of stuff unless it gets glamorized.
See Edward Snowden for one example. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, promises made and serious discussion of the problem, but is the situation now any better?
I have a feeling that the modern method to deal with PR nightmares is to acknowledge the problem, promise to fix it, and then just let the hype die before doubling down on the nefarious behavior, but with better op-sec.
If it's not obvious, I'm getting (even more) jaded about the whole issue.
Sounds like it got cleaned up in the 1990s.
This is the guy to figure it out: https://www.armscontrol.org/about/daryl_kimball
That's not the resume of someone not able to get the word out.
"Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't despite everyone dropping dead from cancer" is a tempting and juicy narrative and will generally be welcomed with open arms around here even if it turns out reality is a lot more mundane (reality is almost always more mundane than the story).
This does not appear to be an example of corporate bad behavior because it is lacking in both negligence and malice.
If you want to be outraged over evil corporations go read about DuPont poisoning the water in various places. There's been a few longer articles posted here about it fairly recently and they seem to actually be acting in bad faith.
It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office in 2019 and look at decisions made decades ago and say "they should have known" when in in all liklihood the people doing this probably didn't know they were leaving behind an unsafe level of radioactivity.
Speaking generally about pollution, not this specific case, everybody wants to see everything as the result of some bad actor(s) so they can have someone to blame. Reality is often much more mundane. Usually either it was not widely known that the thing was dangerous at that level of exposure, the people who could know didn't want to go looking for the knowledge or society considered the pollution worth it and if it bothered you the onus was on you to limit your own exposure (social media comparison anyone?). If you didn't want to smell paint all day you didn't live downwind of the paint factory. Times have changed a lot and to try and look at decisions in the past through the lens of modern values is a fools errand, to put it charitably.
In an ideal society it still would be a challenge to deal with the unprocessable wastes of nuclear fission (some extremely poisonous and with half lifes well beyond thousand years). But we are far from ideal and the incentives to not just offload it onto future generations are simply not there.
There is no question that there are risks and they are non trivial - but they are mostly manageable through proper regulation!
That seems like a gross exaggeration, almost to the degree of willful ignorance.
The amount of premature death as well as increase in morbidity caused by the entire nuclear energy industry in the US is significantly lower than any other source of power. Simply the steel and concrete alone required for solar power pushes it's morality rate higher.
While our current secretary of energy, Rick Perry, might have had no clue what the department of energy did when he wanted to abolish it as a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, it and other regulatory bodies are quite effective an ensuring we have safe nuclear facilities.
WRT. energy needs - pulling carbon out of the atmosphere will be energy-intensive; it's yet another reason why we need clean and cheap energy (and lots of it!). Nuclear shouldn't be taken off the table.
The current estimate is +3.2 deg in 2100, but it still assumes that the current actions progress:
Radioactive releases like this are endemic to every coal-burning power station, which while a problem for public health certainly isn't publicized like this is.
Remember, carbon emissions will also destroy the planet if the current projections are anything to go by; I think the chance (certainly less likely with modern reactor designs) that a few local areas are rendered uninhabitable is a tradeoff society will need to be willing to make when the alternative is that the entire planet be rendered uninhabitable over a significantly longer timeframe.
Any other answer just isn't taking climate change seriously enough. Reactors are ready (with the proper funding) for construction today; solar/wind designs capable of supplying the quantity of baseload power nuclear can do not currently exist and neither does power storage- and they aren't nearly as scalable as building another reactor is (mainly due to land and raw materials usage) when power demands jump because everyone needs an air conditioning to survive the summer and a local desalinization plant (or water pipeline) because the rivers and aquifers no longer provide enough water. Additionally, if an energy-intensive carbon capture technology becomes available, the only energy source capable of powering such a device at the scale required is nuclear.
We've already offloaded our waste onto future generations. Might as well use the most effective technology we know how to create to stem the bleeding a bit.
As for land usage, if the USA did this it would be smaller than the road network, rising to “about the same” if you want to replace all ICE cars with battery cars.
CO2 capture, and desalination, don’t need to be run 24 hours per day, so there’s no reason to care if they don’t have energy storage to run at night. Likewise, AC is most important when, and just after, the sun is shining, so the storage need is low.
Storage does have a long way to go before we’re out of trouble, but even if I wasn’t fairly optimistic about it, PV knocks out the worst carbon sources first, giving us more time to build — for example — your preferred nuclear reactors.
Storage backed solar power is significantly lower than nuclear across most of the world. Further as a base load production Nuclear can’t cheaply follow demand which makes it a poor fit in a world with occasionally negative wholesale prices. That is what is stopping significantly increased Nuclear adoption.
(I agree that a lot of batteries may be a very good solution.)
This is either egregious intellectual laziness or a passive-aggressive attack, neither of which I'd like to see on HN. In any case, the answer is that we do, and fission is still orders of magnitude safer than coal.
What's the societal factors of coal and ICE again ?
Which might be okay if it wasn't for certain states whose prime directive is to cover up mistakes and issues.
Otherwise this article wouldn't exist and we'd be discussing ways to improve safety. Just look how they handled Chernobyl. It was pure luck that the majority of Europe wasn't contaminated as a result of disinformation, refusal to accept help in order to appear strong, and pure incompetence on all fronts. All followed by an unwillingness to fix the problem.
Nuclear fission power in such hands is seriously dangerous. Even Belgium is holistically incapable of safely running a nuclear plant as highlighted by Tihange.
I am completely with your sentiment but the true issue is real world handling. Idealistic scenarios don't help us.
It's all about perceived threat vs actual threat. In the case of nuclear energy the perceived threats is blown out of proportion, in the case of fossil fuel it's just business as usual. I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have issues, but I'd argue that nuclear issues are manageable/solvable whereas fossil fuel issues are not.
In the meantime just look at France vs Germany, nuclear is a net positive in every possible metrics I can come up with. How many people died directly/indirectly in the last 60 years because of german coal industry ? Way more than in all nuclear disasters world wide. And that's for a single country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
fr https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/El...
de https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/El...
So in a thousand years its a SEP - but we do need to slow or reduce global warming NOW
Have you thought about what could be offered up in the way of positive incentives for responsible behavior? Do they need to be positive incentives rather than overwhelming disincentives?
Copyedited
it's a shame, and i'm not yelling conspiracy, but this is how business and politics works, and that's a shame / sad.
If anyone was interested to follow up and research the current status of this valley you note, most likely they would meet similar resistance to publish their findings.
This is not how our society works or thinks, though. There is a strong current of punitive accountability. From a financial perspective, someone might argue that this makes sense: someone who causes harm to many others shouldn't be allowed to remain rich. However, implementing such a system means that organizations within will defend themselves vociferously.
This is why many businesses are starting to use low or no accountability systems to make sure that root cause analysis and mistakes are brought to the forefront after issues. I'm not suggesting that such a system would be easy to implement on a much larger level, especially with our level of inequality in the US, but perhaps the solution is just not to be so damn punitive, and perhaps the other aspects of issue remediation wouldn't be so damn bad. Perhaps there wouldn't be lawyers informing business owners that they can't apologize, because that is opening the doors to being completely destroyed by accountability.
Other common nasties include old rail depots and military depots. The stuff they used to clean locomotives was awful. I read a local article about a local military depot issue and a program called "Defense Environmental Restoration Program for Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS)". The New York/New Jersey District estimates it has $500M of cleanup to do, with an annual budget of $3-5M.
Is it too much to hope, somebody is going to do some open declaration? In times past, people felt a compulsion to report. It feels like we have had a cultural shift, and whoever has information, feels no obligation to report.
I wonder what life closer to the facility was like when this happened? How much did they get told about their exposure?
People hate whistleblowers. "Shoot the messenger. It's the easiest solution."
I just think that at a level where a peer review paper says "you did this" failure to respond is a fail in two dimensions: Its asocial and fundamentally stupid politically despite the "deny everything" posture every government takes, and its un-scientific: It makes it harder for other people to take your own science seriously, if you refuse to participate full-cycle in the process.
There was a submission on HN a while ago (I can't find it right now) that speculated that this release was related to Russia testing a nuclear jet-powered missile. A crash after a test flight would release radioactive materials from its reactor.
This report seems to strongly point against that theory.
[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18948/u-s-has-been-sec...
Hope you never need that information.
It is especially Solar and Wind that are on the rise in Germany
Per TWh produced, coal kills more than the power produced by Chernobyl.
Generation 4 reactors will very likely begin operation in the next 6-10 years. Just look at the integral molten salt reactor as an example.
We nerds love technology and this is really the main reason for strong pro-nuclear sentiment in places like HN. Health effects or emissions footprint have little to do with it.
I would not like to have a nuclear plant near my house, but if you have to chose between a coal plant that is polluting and radiating all the time is running and a new nuclear plant design that it would fail only in super rare events (there are designs that would be safe even if the cooling system fails) then I definitely don't want the coal plant.
Btw nuclear is used in medicine, there are labs that use radioactive materials, I think the number of this would grow and it may end up in countries you don't trust but you can't stop progress,
The reason nuclear crowd loves to focus on coal is it's the worst case conventional technology and hence the easiest to argue against. The arguments against hydro, wind or NG are a lot less convincing.
Ideally we would not have to chose and we can close all coal,gas and nuclear plants and replace them with renewable, if this is not possible then we should maybe use rationality and not emotions to dictate priorities. This means closing or reducing coal usage, keeping and using nuclear at full capacity .
How many of those nations would be royally screwed if Russia ever decides to stop supplying them with fossil fuels?
All reactors have failure modes, no? Any reactor that depends on people for the continued safe operation should include the assumption that incompetent and malicious people will eventually take control.
That's not unique to nuclear power, but a lot less can go wrong if an evil person gets control of a wind turbine.
That said, I'd still vote for a politician that proposed building new nuclear power plants.
There are designs to build reactors that can handle the case where no humans,electricity, water are present anymore, so we could build new safe reactors.
The bad people argument, the fuel in power reactors is not the same as the one in bombs, for bombs you need more "rich" Uranium, so the terrorists that would enter inside a safe reactor would have to have some super expertise to extract teh fuel and somehow make it a mass distruction weapon. You can have similar issues with chemical plants, those are not as protected and an explosion in such a chemical plant could do a lot of damage as we seen when accidents happen, or exploding a water dam, or putting poison in water... there are many bad scenarios you can imagine some evil terrorists could do
You can't have a completely safe power plant, period. You certainly can have one where you don't know a certain failure mode exists. For example RBMK prior to 1986, or a pebble bed reactor prior to THTR-300 incident.
And my war zone remark wasn't about fuel theft, but more likely things. Like dropping a buster bomb onto a live reactor.
I will need to research this, so if you can point me to the resource that made you have this opinion please share it with me, Thanks
I would imagine you can design a system that would have a fail safe, like when temperature gets to high it would melt a specific component and kickstarting a physical process that you could not stop.
>buster bombs
Those can also be dropped on chemical plants, water dams, fuel depos , it is not like the nuclear power plant would explode from a conventional bomb, I am not a physicist but I think it needs tons of neutrons to get critical so you would need maybe to drop a nuclear bomb on a nuclear plant so it is silly IMO, but if I am wrong link me reliable material.
It's true that large hydroelectric dams have the same problem. If some party decides to commit a war crime and destroy the dam you live downriver of, it could be catastrophic. The same consideration doesn't apply with large fossil fueled or wind/solar facilities because they have a much smaller danger radius if destroyed by heavy weapons.
People fighting against the Syrian government blew up a large natural gas facility during the civil war. If Syria generated power from nuclear reactors instead of gas, would the rebels have declined to destroy a reactor? It would certainly have been a war crime. But the Syrian civil war already saw many war crimes.
I don't think that any organized military would deliberately destroy live reactors. There's always a chance for accidents. "Pilot visually confirmed the target, mistaking the nuclear cooling towers for the designated coal plant's cooling towers."
I don't mean that people should eschew nuclear power because of what might happen in extraordinary wartime circumstances. But it is possible to release large quantities of dangerous fission products from a reactor facility just by attacking it with conventional high explosive weapons.
I am not sure about that, US dropped actual nuclear bombs and even today there are many that excuse this so I think that in a war US would bomb not only bridges,factories,coal plants but they would also bomb nuclear plants and there will be no significant criticism.
So you have nuclear plant that produces no CO2 and could produce radiation in a rare event , and you have a coal plant that produces CO2, other pollution in the smoke and radiation 100% of the time, similar with gas and other fossil fuels.
Honestly if you have 2 choices , live near the coal plant and it's smoke and radiation or live near a nuclear plant that will fail only of a super rare earthquake what do you chose ? Do you chose 100% harm vs 0.1(number I invented) harm ?
Fukushima taught the cynical lesson that overreaction to and media-fueled mindless panic about nuclear incidents causes more damage and death than nuclear incidents themselves.
"Nuclear is no free lunch", but you get to pick what you eat for the money you have. When you compare fossil fuel burning, which involves mining and shipping stupendous quantities of fuel and releasing equally stupendous amount of CO₂ pollution (including radioisotopes!) into atmosphere, to nuclear power, which involves mining, shipping and using tiny amounts of fuel for the same energy output, and the result is a tiny amount of solid waste... well, nuclear is a no-brainer here.
Yes, but did we really take that lesson to heart? Because one can react to that in different ways. Currently I'm leaning to towards, that yes, maybe I can be confident nuclear can be engineered to (for the money we have) acceptably safe. But I'm not convinced we can manage the social cost and education effort and corruption mitigation needed. Damage and death caused by panic is still damage and death.
But there is a lot of suffering involved with whole communities being erased and ghost towns - sometimes for no great reason. Some places didn't receive much of any radiation but are now dead. Even places where it's allowed now to move back to, people don't want to. Some are afraid, and some don't want to move back to an empty ghost town.
We are literally about to turn the whole planet into something equivalent to what people are afraid of just because of fear loosing some small communities. It is that absurd.
Not sure if the human race deserves to survive.
At first, I wasn't going to respond to that.
But then I found my answer - it doesn't matter. The Christian dogma for instance is, no we don't but God wants us to survive despite that we don't deserve it.
If you don't care for that, we will survive or not survive and either of these outcomes will be completely orthogonal to whether we deserve to survive or not.
I'm overly certain that humans will survive though, but the circumstances might not be to everyone's liking.
Obviously fossil fuels are not regulated for radioisotopes, but that doesn't mean every nuclear accident is reason to be yawning.
Risks from ionizing radiation
Although people in the incident's worst affected areas have a slightly higher risk of developing certain cancers such as leukemia, solid cancers, thyroid cancer, and breast cancer, very few cancers would be expected as a result of accumulated radiation exposures.
(That does not take into account the possibility of suffering extra radiation damage and chemical poisoning from ingesting radioactive elements, but this becomes manageable through thoroughly washing the living area and possibly not growing any food on contaminated soil.)
--
[0] - http://www.marklynas.org/2011/08/how-dangerous-is-the-fukush..., 2011
This coming from a guy that once swallowed a pill of radioactive iodine :)