Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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Let me tell you a little story. There is an area North of Amsterdam, where they stashed some by-products of the Agent-Orange production during the Vietnam war.

2-4-5T and a bunch of other nasties (Dioxins). That's bad industrial waste, not radioactive but still, you really don't want it near your village or water supply.

Those vats were stored there at the end of the Vietnam war and conveniently forgotten (by Philips Duphar). It was only about 10,000 barrels of junk, a very small fraction of your initial 32x32x32 meter cube, less than 10%.

It took decades to clean it all up, and some parts of it will never be cleaned up because we can't dig deep enough. Because in the meantime the Dioxin had made it into the groundwater plume, the damage of which will not be known for another couple of decades.

If that had been radioactive waste they wouldn't have been able to do much about it for another couple of hundred years.

I don't follow your push to minimize this problem, it is a huge issue and just thinking of a 'a single city made of high-level radio active waste' makes my skin crawl. Such a place should not exist, and the Philips-Duphar story should give you at least one datapoint on why burying stuff and letting future generations deal with it so we can have our perks today is not - in my opinion - a viable strategy.

Energy is a great thing but we are not lacking for energy at all, it's raining energy continuously, we are awash in it. But just like with a rain of soup, if you bring a fork you're not going to do much.

Let me counter that story with observation that there's something on the order of 500 000 tons of high-level nuclear waste currently stored by countries worldwide, and so far they manage. Point being that it can be handled responsibly. It probably wouldn't be the best idea in a perfect world, but we are kind of in a hurry right now, with every year of still being on fossil fuels adding to severity of future consequences.

My push to "minimize" this problem is a push towards recognizing that the problem is manageable in practice. The image of "single city made of high-level waste" was meant to picture just how little there is to manage, by volume, and once again - most of that we already know how to use as fuel; we just can't, because appropriate reactors aren't being built, primarily because people are afraid of the waste.

We may be technically drowning in energy from the Sun, but we're still not fast enough with making use of it. In the meantime, we have the closest thing after fusion to an energetic magic bullet - very high density, clean energy source with manageable waste - and we've been mostly sitting on it for decades now.

But maybe at this point it's really too late, maybe by the time enough reactors could come on-line, there really would be enough renewables to take over. It's unclear to me at this point whether the recent growth of solar and wind capacity is sustainable.

> so far they manage

Yes, by doing not much of anything and only across a very very short span of time compared to how long it will have to work eventually. That's a bit like saying that the landmine you are sitting on hasn't gone off yet. True, it hasn't. And it may never go off. But it is still a landmine and it is still quite dangerous. If you had the choice between not having a landmine to sit on in the first place vs sitting on one to keep it safe which would you take?

Of course "no landmine". But I'm not convinced yet we have that choice - that renewables really are growing fast enough and sustainably enough for there to be no point in building up nuclear capacity.

We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables. The major reason why so many countries wanted to have nuclear reactors was mostly because it was convenient cover for weapons research, and a way to make fissile material for weapons (Plutonium, for instance), not because it made clean or commercially viable energy.

France is a perfect example of this. When the oil crisis hit in the 70's they then used this knowledge to rapidly expand their use of nuclear power, which is now the highest in the world. But the reactors are aging, the waste is piling up and new construction has been delayed or halted indefinitely (and is already over budget).

Whether renewables are growing fast enough is something we control in a very direct way, and cranking out windmills and solar panels is really a mere matter of engineering. The latest iteration windmills make impressive power (8 to 12 MW design power is now a reality, something I did not expect to see in my lifetime), and can be mass produced economically.

They also tie into the grid at many locations, something aging grid infrastructure appreciates (the variability is another problem, but there are fortunately some solutions for that now).

> We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables.

Out of curiosity, is there a good estimate for how much money the world has spent on nuclear/renewable energy research? You'd think this information should be easy to find given the importance of the nuclear vs renewables debate, but it's not obvious to me how to find it.

Most of the money spent on nuclear research is spent on fusion projects and things like pebble bed reactors, most of this is in the proof-of-concept or early production stage and funded by governments.

Most of the money spent on renewables (solar, wind) is spent on scaling up and (boring, but necessary) production. Some (tidal, geothermal) has gone into proof of concept level projects. The amounts specified vary greatly based on the source.

ITER alone (originally projected to cost $5B) already clocks in at $20B and doesn't seem to be much closer to something resembling a working prototype than it was several years ago.

>We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables.

It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.

>Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources

From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11...

There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.

> It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.

That's a very bold statement for which I have seen absolutely no proof. Solar and wind do not have the long term waste issues associated with nuclear and cost a small fraction of nuclear per installed Watt of power generation.

There is no significant difference in CO2 output of nuclear vs solar or wind so you'd have a climate crisis just the same. If you're looking to displace fossil fuel with nuclear you're going to have to look much further than just electricity, and solar and wind are just as good or even better at that as nuclear power is. Working fusion would be better than all of these options, but unfortunately we don't have it.

> There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.

It may seem unlikely to you but it is a well established fact. France, China the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, some of the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material. The power generated was a by-product. Countries that got into the game later and that did not have access to nuclear technology were licensed 'safe' tech that could not be used for enrichment.

Iran and North Korea are only interested in nuclear power for weapons purposes, everything else is just a fig leaf.

> the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material

You got that exactly backwards. These five states all used production reactors to make their weapons Pu, which didn't produce useful power. Only later did they build power reactors, which don't produce weapons grade Pu.

Do you honestly think, Germany, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Finland, S Korea, Czechoslovakia etc. are/were also only interested in nuclear power as a cover for their weapons program?

However there would be far fewer storage sites where that risk would be occurring. Compared to the number of incidents caused by the chemical and fossil fuel industries on any time scale, and the hypothetical risk of small areas of contamination far outweighs the level of global contamination that is going on today (most of which isn't being acknowledged, let alone cleaned up).

You're going to run straight into 'NIMBY' and other political constraints for your eventually designated storage sites. I'm sure someone will find a way to argue that we should send it to the third world as long as we get to control the burial sites on account of proliferation worries. We've already done this with many other kinds of waste.

In the end it isn't about the area directly affected in the near future, it is about the long term effects and those are very hard to model accurately when it comes to massive deposits of nuclear waste.

Just a couple of the risks: massive terrorist target, risk of pooling, risk of large scale groundwater contamination, risk of the whole thing blowing up. These are not trivial and not all of them can be dealt with over the time-scales that the waste would still be significantly radio active.

Political structures are not stable across the time-scales that you are looking at here, you might end up seriously regretting any particular site a few hundred years into the future.

You aren't wrong, but how is that any different than the current situation with fossil fuels, chemicals, fertilizer plants, etc.? Historically, they've been put into poor and minority neighborhoods, since those groups couldn't NIMBY it, but I don't think that's going to be acceptable going forward.

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