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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Ah, oil sands. I've recently learned about the environmental issues surrounding them, and their existence makes any kind of complaining about dangers of nuclear waste completely ridiculous and/or disingenuous.

Just take a look at e.g. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_sands_tailings_p... ; apparently creating city-sized lakes of badly contained, liquid, ridiculously toxic, harmful for thousand years sludge is somewhat unremarkable, whereas replacing some of that demand with nuclear can't happen because of orders of magnitude less volume of much easier to handle (and reprocessable in the future) waste is somehow a show-stopper.

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Funny that you use one bad thing to make another bad thing a good thing.

If you view it that way, then remember there's no free lunch; generating any kind of energy is then an exercise of picking the least bad.

A slightly less charitable answer: at these orders of magnitude and potential consequences, it's replacing a bad thing with a "bad thing" in the same way replacing sickness with a vaccine is.

It does if they're alternatives for energy production. A joule is a joule.

No one is using oil sands to generate electricity (Estonia has a large shale oil industry and uses it to generate power, but recently most of their power is coal or cleaner wind and hydro from Finland), so the comparison to nuclear is not warranted.

Oil sands are terribly polluting as mentioned (and energy intensive to extract what oil you can), and are expensive to develop. As the use of oil declines (and the price stays below the floor necessary for oil sand production to break even), its unlikely oil sands will be a meaningful amount of oil production as we look to the future. While a positive gesture, at under $100 million its a small one.

Oil is apparently still 3% of electricity generation as of 2018 (via IEA, [0]). Still, my point really wasn't about nuclear vs. burning oil for energy. My point was about pointing to nuclear waste as an argument against nuclear energy, probably second most common argument (after "but Chernobyl and Fukushima!") and something I see on HN surprisingly often. Nuclear waste is seen as this magical, unique super-dangerous substance that we couldn't possibly handle safely. Whereas pollution from oil sands turns out to be just as dangerous, much worse in handling and containing, and there's a lot more of it, and yet we can handle it (even if poorly) and it doesn't even register with people beyond occasional news about some ecologists whining about the environment.

I'm happy to hear oil use declines (need to check up on that worldwide, that's extremely surprising - do you perchance mean that the growth rate of oil use is going down?).

[0] - https://www.iea.org/geco/electricity/

You’re right. It’s growth rate of oil consumption that is stalling, not overall consumption. My mistake!

link seems to be unavailable now

They have an erroneous trailing semicolon. If you remove that, the link works fine.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_sands_tailings_p...

Fixed, thanks.

Wow. Growing up in Alberta I heard so much about the tar sands in my mind they were huge. Yet that link shows them to be pretty small and localized to North of Fort Mac.

77 square kilometre for the ponds and 220 square kilometres for the ponds and structures. What would you call big that seems huge to me?

Growing up in Alberta the oil sands were such a big part of everyday life it sounded like half the province was mines. Yet 220km squared is only 20x11km, or 40 average sized farms. Of which there are about 50k farms in Alberta.

Sure its large compared to my house, but my house isn't worth billions nor does my house power a significant portion of the countries energy needs.

Compare that to the metro region of Calgary: 5,110.21 km squared.

> whereas replacing some of that demand with nuclear can't happen because of orders of magnitude less volume of much easier to handle (and reprocessable in the future) waste is somehow a show-stopper

I don't think the main issue is with the nuclear waste. It's with the fact that even though it's possible to build and operate safe nuclear plants, human nature gets in the way and prevents that from happening.

If we compare the year with the worst nuclear accident in history so far to a completely unremarkable year of fossil fuels, nuclear comes out ahead when it comes to safety.

Passive safety makes it sure that clueless operator can only result in a safe shutdown of the core and that it is physically impossible to maintain supercriticality in a core, basically by making it melt and separate into several sub-critical components.

It sounds like this measure would have prevented Chernobyl. The problem there wasn't all human operator - cheap graphite tips on the control rods?

It wasn't being cheap, but accepting things that didn't pass Soviet safety rules was one, another was that the process was not followed. Same design RBMK reactors have been operated for years without issue, but the Chernobyl plant did a test in wrong order,meaning that the safety measures that were backups for the tests... Weren't running.

After significant human process training, the rest of Chernobyl NPP operated till around 2005

Instead of us being frightened away from the benefits of nuclear because of the detriment demonstrated by the disaster, we should view Chernobyl as a necessary mistake meant to permanently lock in standards for even the most careless of governments. Even Fukushima comes to mind, even though a larger-than-expected natural disaster was the cause. After parsing the Wiki:

"... the switching stations that sent power from these backup generators to the reactors' cooling systems for Units 1 through 5 were still in the poorly protected turbine buildings..."

Sounds like there was still human engineering negligence. Perhaps that can teach us to restrict new reactors inland.

As some have pointed out in this thread, oil sand waste dumps could ultimately be more harmful than nuclear waste...

> It's with the fact that even though it's possible to build and operate safe nuclear plants, human nature gets in the way and prevents that from happening.

People have managed to do that with airliners, even though flying at 30,000 feet in -40F temps, insufficient oxygen, in a tin balloon filled with gas has nothing inherently safe about it. And yet airline travel is incredibly safe.

I.e. since we can make that safe, we can do that with reactors.

(For contrast, ever wonder how the US got the B-17's to England during WW2? The combat crews, as their first job, flew them there across the Atlantic. My dad (B-17 navigator) said more than a few took off from Newfoundland and were never heard from again. After the war they came back on a ship. Lindbergh came back on a ship, too.)

But isn’t this “nuclear’s weakness is humans” argument disproven by history? We humans have been running nuclear plants for a very long time and yet deaths from nuclear power are still lower than all other power sources, and much much much lower of course than fossil sources. So it seems more correct to say, actually we humans are better at running nuclear power safely than any other power source.

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