Agree completely. It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run. We need much more, if we want to advance as a species.
I'm somewhat weary of people talking of civilization progress as if its definition is obvious and universal.
And even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased. You can't run a hummingbird or mammalian brains on photosynthesis directly, it's just not energy-dense enough.
This thread is becoming recursive. Is organism complexity progress? Everyone might agree with you, or not. That's because progress is whatever we say it is. It's subjective, in that everyone can have a different view of it, and it's non-constant, in that you can change your mind whenever. Progress is such a loaded word today. I'm hardpressed to find more than a few words with so much cultural baggage. Even someone who agrees that good and evil are in the eyes of the observer, can often say that the definition of Progress is self-evident.
Things like reliable and easy access to clean water, refrigeration for medicine and food, shelter against the weather, clothing, cleaning mechanisms for the above, all of these are non-equilibrium phenomena and so take energy.
So we either need more sources of power or fewer people. I'm glad that birth rates are falling, but lots of people don't have those basic technological tools, so energy technology will need to be rolled out or our definition of empathy will need to change to allow for lots of people to suffer.
AFAIK, more than enough food and clothing for all people is currently produced, shelter and cleaning probably isn't far, refrigeration for medicine and required food wouldn't take much of industrial output and problems with access to clean water is often caused by "progress" and could be solved with more strategy rather than energy.
Either way, I think most of current energy consumption is for things like heating / cooling inefficient homes, manufacturing things people don't really need, inefficient transportation, brain-dead things like making oil from tar sands etc.
Heck, look at how the complexity of life increased as soon as mitochondria were invented, going from genomes measured in millions of base pairs for bacteria to billions for amoebas once cells were no longer caught in the square/cube trap of respirating over the cell wall.
Hell, even here a lot of people believe that technological progress is a linear path towards the future, even when there's evidence contrary to that assumption. Without even reaching for evidence from other fields, it's trivial to find examples of entire theories that have been forgotten and rediscovered. Think of Low-Density Parity-check codes, that were developed in the 1960s and essentially forgotten for 20 or so years. A lot of technology has been found and then lost.
This is a popular supposition, but is mostly a misunderstanding of Hegel, promulgated by Left Hegelians like Marx. Hegel’s argument was that thought moves toward a greater state of contradiction, not progress, but that this evolved sustainment of the contradiction represents a more rational form.
Todd McGowan at the University of Vermont wrote a whole book on this subject:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/emancipation-after-hegel/97802...
On the other hand, it's hard to see how civilization could continue to function without the prospect of "growing the pie". If/when we reach a steady state of finite resources, it seems highly likely that the best strategy (individually and tribally) is acquire resources at the expense of one's neighbors (before they acquire your resources first). This has been the default state of nature for nearly all biological history, with occasional exceptions of growth and plenty.
I don't have an answer here, long-term; and where the rubber meets the road, I do think our corporate model of "your business is failing if it's not growing" results in more negative than positive externalities (at least, beyond a certain equilibrium), and should be eyed critically. But the growth model is as much about social mindset as it is real-world wealth generation; and luckily we have lots more progress we can make (both on and off Terra Firma) before we're at risk of fully diminished returns on the growth of sentient well-being. The question is one of intelligent growth (cue Bucky Fuller [0]), rather than a locust-like runaway replicator pattern, which is clearly net-negative even if it looks like growth when zoomed in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship...
Advancing as a species can merely making sure that everyone got a safe environment, freedoms, access to education and health, etc.
There are still billions of people who barely have the quality of life that most of Hacker News reader does.
The big problems are 1) gigatons of soot coming over the north poles, permanently lowering the albedo of the planet and 2) pumping water into the dry upper atmosphere via jet exhaust, creating permanent cloud layers where they didn’t exist.
Solve those two issues, and we’d have a much more interesting debate...
Short term cloud layer albedo effects are even smaller.
If we switched all our greenhouse gas emissions to nuclear, I agree there’s huge room for localized waste heat. But reducing albedo effects isn’t going to help if we keep emitting greenhouse gases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA&feature=youtu.be...
It's hard to say without knowing your definition of long run so would you care to explain why you believe that less energy is required in your long run?
I see it as exactly the opposite, in the short/medium term we will use more energy but it will eventually go into reverse.
Maybe Jevons Paradox will intervene and you are correct, I don't know
For the record, my long run is 150+ years, if only to make sure that we are all dead.
We produce way more energy than we use. We currently do not have an easy way to store it. So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs, especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak). Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.
That's not how it works. If you generate more than you need, you will have the opposite of a brown out (overvoltage and/or overfrequency). Generation and consumption of power have to always be precisely matched.
> especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak).
When everyone gets home and flips their light switch, the extra demand slightly reduces the system voltage and frequency; feedback loops on the power plants then increase their generation to match the extra demand.
> Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.
Keeping the generators running at their maximum means you have no margin for extra demand or sudden loss of generation (for instance, another power plant or a transmission line having an issue and shutting down). It's better to keep the generators running below the maximum to have a reserve for when these things happen.
Science fiction is fun and all, but even an ecologically ruined Earth is going to be a much more welcoming environment to live in than anything else the solar system has to offer. Meaningful exploration of the solar system will be restricted to unmanned probes and complex missions that require 100 Earthbound support staff for each human we send into space.
Continuing to live on Earth will require a big reduction in the amount of energy we use per capita. We're already above what the Earth can realistically handle, and the global population is still growing.
Can you explain in which way solar is not a "near-infinite source of energy"? I mean... there are without doubt technical challenges and all that (but arguably less technical challenges than to do the same with nuclear), but there really is no relevant limit to the deployment of solar cells if you include things like large-scale installations in the desert.
Additionally, The storage density of molten salt is far lower than the generation capacity of a reactor.
Cutting-edge solar panels have about 23% theoretical efficiency. Stirling dish systems have about a 30% theoretical efficiency and about a 25% real-world efficiency.
But no one would do that, because we don't need power at the same rate all the time. Near the equator, where most people on the planet live, our need for energy is correlated with when the sun is shining and air con is running and people are awake.
This is why solar is better even at the mythical "baseload" than nuclear is.
Nope.
In fact, a minority of people live near the equator... for good reason:
https://www.datagraver.com/case/world-population-distributio...
Also, the base load most of us are talking about isn't created by people for the most part... it's created by industry, without which life on the equator or anywhere else would be rather primitive.
In any case, the equator is going to become unlivable in the next few decades to the point where populations in equatorial areas will drop drastically.
Anecdotally, it doesn't ring true to me from my time in Thailand and Malaysia, where inefficient air con would be left on in poorly insulated houses overnight to help people sleep. I couldn't find any graphs like you can trivially find for power grids in the west.
But I did find this article[1] which indicates the record power consumption occurred at 9:35pm, beating the previous record which occurred at 10:28pm a few years prior, and both of these are times where it's all going to be coming from batteries.
But this isn't necessarily representative. Even if your reference is a book I'd be happy to purchase it, I find solar penetration in developing countries particularly interesting.
[1] https://www.thaipbsworld.com/power-consumption-in-bangkok-su...
This would be a game changer for the major continents like Europe, US, Africa where you could have power coming from hydro, thermal, solar, wind etc and being shipped to where it is needed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...
Considering how costly and inflexible all superconductors are, I don't see why they would help.
The technology isn't a problem. Superconductors wouldn't solve anything. It is a political problem.
HVDC cabels are already routinely build undersea. There is a 700km long cable under construction between the UK and Noreway. The longest HVDC connection is over 2000km long in Brazil.
Superconductors have a maximum current, if you go above that current, the superconductor will gain resistance and the heat will destroy it. So you would still use high voltage transmission.
However, by coincidence, your position is right, for two reasons:
1. Single nuclear warheads routinely have blast radii of tens of km rather than, as you suggest, hundreds of meters. So in fact a single warhead can indeed destroy thousands of square km.
2. 1000km² of solar panels would be 1000 GWp; at a low-cost module price of €0.19/W (the average for 2019) that's €190 billion. Currently solar plants are not built that large, nor nearly so.
If terrorists have a nuclear warhead they are going to use it against a city not solar panels. Similarly if terrorists have a weapon that can take out thousands of square km of panels it can easily take out existing powerplants (which btw are not armored or in bunkers - apart from some limited shield on nuclear powerplant cores.
The point here is that solar panels are not more vulnerable to terrorists than the existing infrastructure and are probably less vulnerable due to size and how distributed they are.
But for you: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
On top of that there are political challenges. I have a hard time imagine Europe in current climate being happy to rely exclusively on power from the Sahara.
I guess in the future we'll use imported solar for hard to solve problems, e.g. turn it into hydrogen or synthetic fuels (which also makes the transmission loss problem much smaller), while our electricity needs will be served mostly by local wind and solar.
No, running solar on rooftops isn't the most practical use either. Depending on latitude, weather, cost of solar installation and battery installation, orientation and layout of roof to the sun, the problems with snow, rain, and hail, the lack of solar at night, the fact that none of this generates enough power for those times when you need it most like in the middle of winter in northern climates, etc. Solar and wind will never meet the growing needs of modern economy. Period. It's a pipe dream.
They are great supplemental sources of electricity. They cannot power a first world economy.
Solar and wind absolutely can produce all the energy the world currently needs, using only a tiny fraction of available land area. You could power the whole of the US by 100 square miles of solar panels in the southwest, backed with one square mile of batteries [1]. Clearly it's a hard problem and there are many obstacles to overcome, but just as clearly it's not fundamentally unsolvable.
Long-distance electrical transmission is actually pretty efficient nowadays, so that's not a showstopper either.
Bottom line, optimists are responsible for progress and while many people on HN are content to write comments about how it can't be done, somewhere there's an entrepreneur working hard to make it happen - and the smart money is on them, collectively, over the long-term - and thank goodness for that!
[1] http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/we...
It not impossible at all, we have the technology, it just money. Replacing 200,000 miles of cables, with a price tag of a few millions per mile is a project the US could undertake. Replacing all the power station to handle the very high voltage is similarly possible.
When choosing between the many alternatives it is something which should be calculated next to the cost of building nuclear plants in a distrusted pattern, and the long term cost of nuclear waste that such plan would entail. If entrepreneurs could invent power transmission cables and power stations that can manage millions of volts and cost a fraction of existing methods to install would make a centralized place for power generation a much more attractive option.
60,000 square miles is half of Arizona. Now suppose we want to scale up energy consumption in the U.S. by a factor of 100. At that point, you're at twice the land area of the U.S. Even at current consumption, the amount of ecological damage you're causing by covering half of Arizona with solar panels is huge.
On the other hand, if you wanted to replace all U.S. energy production with nuclear, you'd need about 7-10x more than we have today, or about 1000 reactors. The land area for these reactors is about 700 square miles, or about 25x25 miles. If we wanted to scale it up by a factor of 100, we'd be looking at half of Arizona again.
Energy consumption is actually dropping in the US currently, but I don't expect that trend to continue indefinitely, eventually we will get to 100x energy usage. And you're right, at that point solar wouldn't cut it.
But that's a far cry from your original post saying it won't work for a developed nation, when it clearly can work for the world's richest and most energy intensive nation.
As for the very far future when solar won't cut it? I'm sure we'll use a lot of nuclear, and by then probably a lot of nuclear fusion. Or maybe we won't have those crazy energy requirements because we've moved most industry off the planet like per Jeff Bezos' vision of the future. It's enough to get ourselves sorted in the present, so we can have a bright future, and solar and wind power can help us achieve that. There's no reason nuclear can't be a part of that picture, but they have a hard challenge ahead because current nuclear is not competitive cost wise with renewables plus energy storage.
Also, at a guess the energy in solar panels drop with the square of distance to the sun. It is unlikely to be a good choice for interstellar travel if 'advance[ing] as a species' heads in the more fantastic directions.
A fundamental limitation of thermal steam engines is that they can only ever be 50% efficient, and you have to dump that waste heat in order to maintain power.
Already, heat mitigation systems for some existing nuclear plants are starting to fail during heat waves as the climate warms. And these are expensive systems: at Diablo Canyon in California, it's cheaper to replace an entire, functioning reactor with renewables than it is to simply build a new cooling system.
Which is all to say that nuclear won't scale tremendously well unless we 1) figure out fusion, and 2) figure out direct conversion of energy to electricity rather than using steam turbines to mechanically drive a generator.
For the ultimate goal that many people have for nuclear, as a power source when not on earth, these sorts of advancements are also likely also necessary. Cooling in space is not a trivial matter.
The solution is to keep using existing nuclear power and develop renewables for replacement. Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins. And that leaves out years of planning and dealing with contracts.
It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fission-and-fusion-what-d...
Batteries, usually reverse hydro power, is an interesting future technology. Some argue it is significant more developed than fusion. The bigger question is if its economically competitive compared to fission. There is costs and energy loss in every single step of producing electricity from renewables, transmitting it to the battery, converting it into potential, recreate the electricity, and finnally transmitting it to the end users. With fission you go directly from the power plant to the end user. Reverse hydro power plants also take a long time to build and either use a lot of land or coast. If you build it on land it also release a lot of methane as top layer of the land decompose.
Which countries? Germany for example isn't - yet. We're still in a place where we can reduce usage of both fossil fuels and nuclear, though that won't last unless we figure out effective means of energy storage.
Germany as an example illustrate the issue quite nice, as can be seen live at electricitymap.org. When the wind is blowing the country goes green with around 70% of energy being produced by wind. Very sunny days you get around 20% solar. Days like today that is a bit rainy and not very windy, and you have 60% fossil fuels. The constant is nuclear around 10%, so remove that and the above numbers will go up depending on weather conditions.
Coal causes 35.000 premature deaths in Europe every year, and 7 of the 10 most polluting industry sites on the continent are German lignite power plants.
The hypocrisy and constant lecturing from Die Grüne needs to stop.
Feel free to prove me wrong, but when the wind over Germany is still (<4ms) and its night, the amount of energy production using fossil fuels are higher than 70%, and thus at peak, fossil fueled energy production is higher now then before when nuclear stood for 30%.
But that's an irrelevant metric: What matters is the total CO2 released, ie the integrated value. So short-term, you replace coal plants by gas peakers, and transition to next-gen storage mechanisms long-term (better batteries, cryogenic storage, power-to-gas - the latter is especially interesting as Germany has pre-existing gas infrastructure than can store hundreds of TWh, and we use natural gas anyway for heating and industrial purposes).
So far there is very little investment to build out wind beyond having 100% wind in optimal conditions. Germany has almost hit that point, and if we look at neighbor Denmark then we can see what happens when it does reach 100%. Building wind beyond full capacity turns uneconomical quickly, as investors found out in Denmark.
The result is that the coal and natural gas plants will burn and continue polluting the world. The competitiveness of renewable is based on the cheap initial costs while it goes towards max capacity. The price tag does not include overcapacity, the batteries, cryogenic storage, power-to-gas and so on. It works fine as long as we don't think about the fossil fuels that get burned when the wind is still.
Nuclear plants have a linear cost. Going from 10% to 20% cost just as much as going from 90% to 100%. No overcapacity, no batteries, no conversion loss. You add 10% nuclear plants and you can demolish 10% fossil fueled plants. You build 10% additional wind farms and the same old fossil plants must remain. You demolish 10% of the nuclear plants, and you have to build the same amount of new fossil fueled plants in order to compensate when the wind is not blowing. New fossil fueled plants are going to get used, investments is going to be repaid, and political influence fill make sure that they continue to operate.
> What matters is the total CO2 released,
If people really thought so they would look at the electricitymap and look which countries does exactly that. Who has the lowest total CO2? The answer: those that can produce a constant base load without releasing CO2. Hydro or nuclear. Those that have invested most in renewable are not the ones with lowest total CO2.
In your nuclear-only scenario, without storage you'd need enough capacity to cover peak demand. This can be 2X or even 3X higher than average demand, so there would indeed be significant overcapacity. Very expensive!
Typical nuclear plants are also not good at demand response: to operate efficiently, their output must remain constant most of the time. Over-capacity at off-peak times is potentially a big problem on grids with a large portion of nuclear.
Some combination of storage, peaker plants, and demand response is required regardless of whether nuclear or renewables are used. The most cost-effective future grids are likely to use a diverse mix of technologies.
The cold hard truth is that it's impossible to operate a grid with solar & wind energy alone, unless and until a hypothetical battery storage breakthrough lands in the next decades.
I've just checked the realtime figures and as I write this, German electricity is 5 times more carbon intensive than in France (72% nuclear) : https://www.electricitymap.org/
In the US, even many old nuclear plants are struggling to compete without subsidies against renewables and natural gas.
Yes, but that's what the small modular reactors being proposed by Rolls-Royce, and others, intend to solve. If successful, they would greatly reduce the construction time, risk, and cost of nuclear projects.
Also, if Rolls-Royce projects 2029 it doesn't mean it's done by 2029 and most certainly not wide scale deployed/operable. So what kind of renewable infrastructure and tech will be deployed 15-20 years from now?
That's what you have to compare it with.
It's not a question of nuclear or renewables - we absolutely need renewables, and right now renewables are much cheaper, and can be delivered faster, than nuclear.
But there are regions of the world that may struggle to decarbonise completely without nuclear in the mix. Especially if you consider additional demands in the future from electrification of transport, building heat, etc.
If the electricity storage problem doesn't get solved (which is a pretty small "if", since it requires a very uncertain breakthrough in physics) : nowhere.
In 10 years the climate emergency will be even more salient, but one of coal/gas/nuclear/hydro will still be required in the mix.
Countries that can't have hydro for geography reasons, and have shut down nuclear early for political reasons will be a liability to the rest of the world.
We won't have a choice... it'll be down to either everyone accepting reduced quality of life or nuclear... at which point nuclear starts to look very good.
To nitpick a bit, he didn't say the sun was powered by fusion, he said fissionable elements are present in the sun. Which is entirely true.
Why are you comparing the state of nuclear energy today with the potential scientific breakthroughs of renewable energy in the future?
If you compare nuclear of today with renewables of today, then the winner is clear. If you compare the two accounting for potential scientific breakthroughs..who knows?
You need to keep a lot of hydrogen at plasma-hot temperatures and very high pressures for a long time. So you can't really do it with masses smaller than Jupiter, because smaller bodies can radiate the energy away faster, and produce fewer events from the lesser mass.
So the only technologically effective way to leverage solar is to deconstruct larger stars into red dwarfs between 0.08 and 0.35 solar mass, perhaps with a ferro-platosmiridium core to increase the overall density and make the reactions viable at lower overall mass. Then surround the whole thing with a Dyson shell and Shkadov/Caplan thruster.
It's a bit beyond our means right now.
And that includes hydro from evaporation-rainfall cycling, photosynthesis, and wind. Which basically leaves as alternate energy sources tidal, from the sun and moon dragging the oceans around, energy stored from long periods of solar absorption in ages past, residual geothermal, and nuclear.
A little neutron-activated waste is indeed a small price to pay.
For my perspective, we should ban the worst waste first and then iterate. If we can build an energy grid without burning fossil fuels we should do so, preferable yesterday. If we can then build one that also is without nuclear waste then lets do that too, but my first priority is going to be to get rid of the fossil fuels.
What I do not want is replacing nuclear waste with fossil fuel waste. While we have an unsolved problem with nuclear waste, it is dwarfed by what can be done once run away climate change happens. A world where 100% of energy comes from nuclear is preferable over one where 100%, 80%, 50%, maybe even as low as 20% comes from fossil fuels.
To believe that is a problem is to not have grappled with just how big the world is and how much of it is uninhabitable to humans already. The human population is concentrated in an absurdly small footprint in major cities and fertile belts compared to the size of the planet. The area the waste would sterilise would be a non-issue.
I dunno. What do you want to be solved? If we call it poisonous instead of radioactive would you be happy? There are literally poisonous lakes out there and nobody cares much. One more doesn't matter. The only interesting thing about nuclear waste is we use a different word to describe the same outcomes. The outcomes don't seem that dangerous in the big picture.
I'm not sure what kind of "modern nuclear technology" you're referring to. Are you saying that our legacy power plants are bad, and should be replaced? At what cost?
> It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored.
So, a single nuclear power plant for the world?
Transporting nuclear waste is also a problem. Even in the US, where it doesn't need to cross oceans (ignoring Hawaii, Puerto Rico and maybe some other territories).
I'm also uncertain if we'll be likely to encourage modern nuclear reactors in Iran, North Korea and in various failed states. They may be safe wrt weapons grade nuclear weapons initially - but could the be modified? (honest question, I'm not sure how easy it would be to enrich material for a traditional bomb, or indeed a "dirty bomb". But small amount of high grade waste kind of sounds like it's usable for a dirty bomb?).
Right now, small enough amounts of waste are produced that reactors generating power actually store the stuff on site.
>but could the be modified?
Modern reactor types are specifically designed not to be proliferation risks. The only reason the older reactor types are risks is because the governments who originally built them wanted to produce weapons, so they chose the technology that allowed them to do so.
Waste could be used for a "dirty bomb" in some sense, but it wouldn't be terribly effective. "High level" is relative, and the isotopes that would make a dirty bomb truly scary aren't available except in fuel rods shortly after their removal from a reactor... at which point no one does anything to extract those isotopes anyway, they just stick the fuel in cooling ponds to decay down to lower levels of radiation.
I appreciate that you have a conviction that this is a problem, but you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions (and I don't mean nuclear waste encased in concrete) than rhetoric as a means to address my concerns.
It is an order-of-magnitude argument; a bit like arguing whether $1 billion or $1 million is more dollars. The difference between the two figures is almost exactly a billion dollars because there really is no comparison between orders of magnitude. Uranium is something like 6 orders of magnitude more energy dense than fossil fuels (so more of a trillion to a million) - the waste is a lot worse too, but it is nowhere near 6 orders of magnitude more dangerous, because that would suggest it is killing more people than the population of the earth already. Which it is not ^.
You can say you want something solved, but the problem you want solved is several orders of magnitude smaller than the problems everyone currently shrugs off as totally normal. The orders of magnitude are so different they do not need to be solved and can be handwaved. The nuclear waste problem is incomparably small compared to the fossil fuel problem which has proven to be tolerable despite 20+ years of resistance by Green groups.
It is also probably going to turn out to be smaller than the waste problem fabricating renewable will have by the same order of magnitude issue.
^ The evidence suggests it is actually not that much worse because it is so easy to isolate. It is practically achievable for nuclear waste to do less actual harm unit-to-unit than coal.
The real problem with nuclear is that it's a one way only system. The effects of other forms of fuel can in theory be sequestered eventually. Sequestration of nuclear waste is exactly something that yout don't want to happen.
As you say, it's a matter of scale. A limited amount of nuclear power is probably fine, and safe. But it can never be the "solution" to our energy problems until the various problems are solved satisfactorily.
So as it stands, if we look at the real world instead of some hypothetical future, we continue to depend on types of power that causes not just the release of more harmful material, but the release of more radioactive material than nuclear.
If we get to a point where we have fully supplanted fossil fuels, and we need to consider whether to continue building nuclear or replace it with alternatives, then the situation may look different, but at the moment anything that slows the replacement of things like coal causes massive amounts of harm, both environmentally and in killing people.
We could have a Chernobyl a year, and it'd still cause us less harm than the continued dependence on coal.
How does the math work on this? It seems... hyperbolic.
Coal contains traces of uranium, which gets released during burning. The uranium released in such way would have been sufficient to generate the energy obtained from burning coal if it used for fission instead [0].
So indeed, now we disperse the nuclear fuel in the atmosphere and freaking out about it much less then when instead it is being processed in a plant, and coal left alone.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
While plants in e.g the US now captures most of it, huge quantities are still released into the air especially in countries with lower environmental standards.
But even places where it doesn't get released that just means having to deal with far more radioactive waste than nuclear plants produces.
Naturally occurring radioactivity in coal ash means that coal burning power plants release far more radioactivity into our environment than nuclear plants do. In fact, if you want to get the least amount of radioactivity into your body, the safest place is behind the shielding of a nuke plant, because it would also protect you from naturally occuring radiation.
If you add up the total of radioactive elements in Bequerels released annually by coal plants and then assume 100% of all waste from power generating plants could be ground up and released and count that up, the amount of radioactivity from nuclear plants would still be less than coal.
We burn a LOT of coal, and despite the media's portrayal of how much a problem radioactive waste is, it's very overblown for power generating plants. Weapons production is another matter, but we've already been trying to stop that from happening for years.
This is then burned in power plants, releasing the radioactive material into the atmosphere, and leaching it into groundwater from exposed piles of fly ash.
For examples, the half-life of output products from uranium-fueled SVBR-100 is ~550 years, and that can be reduced further by several technologies that are now available.
Most substances are toxic forever. If you bury mercury or lead in a hole a dig it up in a few million years it will be just as toxic. Radioactive substances are an anomaly in that they become less toxic over time.
It's turned into glass as far as I know (which isn't much). It's not like some ooze to leak out.
When we measure such things in terms of "increased cancer risk" and "possible thyroid dysfunction", it is far easier to discount, particularly as young people are not tremendously concerned when people above a certain age die of diseases that are already typical in the aged.
So even if we knew it exactly, people would still care less. It might be more relevant if, instead of death toll, it could be given a money value derived from additional healthcare expenses for exposed individuals, because young people implicitly know that they are the ones who pay when old people get sick.
If you look at a long enough time scale, anything can seem like a giant problem.
Then you have a faulty memory, and a selective one at that because the crisis is still on-going; there were an estimated 2000 from evacuation alone:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/03/01/editorials/f...
You think this is safe or healthy? 100k+ displaced people living in abject squalor in the 3rd richest nation on Earth? Often seen as less-thans by their fellow citizens due to the Meltdown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpxtMBOiD6A
What's even more conflicting is that this year's Olympics are scheduled to take place in Tokyo, all the while the food is contaminated, as is the water (and the air if they're still doing regular debris burns that spreads it around the World).
The cancer rates, thyroid maladies and heart disease are all correlated to the radiation exposure, but they don't have an interest in monitoring this accurately and reporting it to the Public due to typical Japanese 'cultural norms.' So, in it a very defying sense of abnormal behaviour, Japanese house wives have taken to measure their neighborhoods, as well as the food and the vacuumed debris.
This is quite honestly a bigger part of why Humanity has to solve its energy crisis, Greta makes a good case for what their generation is left to live with, but being in between the two generations as a millennial and having been around for both Chernobyl and Fukushima, its hardly comprehensive of the true costs. That last video even delves into the Children of Chernobyl, they are reporting large frequencies of cancer and various immunological diseases. This is more the norm that I ever thought in surrounding areas, when I lived in Croatia it was also the same. When I lived in Germany their were patches of Earth that looked scorched that had been hit particularly hard due to the Fallout of Chernobyl. Many farming families in that area went Bankrupt due to it.
I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum. You'll see first hand how perilous it could be, the infrastructure around coastal areas is another bottle neck that most don't consider an issue for things like evacuation until its too late; they often only have 1 way in-1 way out layouts.
Nuclear regulation is a joke, and is as entrenched and as corrupt as Big Oil. The legal system, in both Japan and the US, is equally as complicit as the Nuclear lobby and refuse to take preventive action, as was the case with why Fukushima was left exposed on the coastal area after TEPCO was warned, repeatedly by several studies, that is was prone Meltdown should something like that Tsunami happen. The Nuclear village/TEPCO/Japanese Government did nothing:
https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventabl...
> I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum.
For what it's worth, I've lived near nuclear power plants for over 30 years, and have no problem living near them until I die-- which will almost certainly not be from radiation unless we have a nuclear war. I had more radiation exposure from the coal fired power plant in my childhood town than from any of the nuclear plants I've been around.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
There are several answers to the question "what we can do with it", such as 1) reprocess it and use it again; 2) keep it in the power plant pools or similar storage facilities; 3) dump it to some deserted place where it isn't a big problem (high depth, stable earth crust). In the past, UK just dumped nuclear waste in barrels into the sea, which seems kind of convenient and irresponsible, but if done right (better isolation from sea creatures), this could work too.
It is true that there is no single universally agreed upon answer. But that is the same as with all other waste. Most of waste gets either burned or dumped at some place. The same will happen to nuclear "waste", until people start reprocessing it.
I'm familiar with your (1) (2) (3) items, but again, from what I've read these aren't fully satisfactory. (1) is probably ideal but hasn't really been cracked, (2) and (3) are just different facets of containment, but (3) is admittedly the most plausible right now.
We can tolerate a limited amount of this for sure, while we work on other solutions, but unless this question gets resolved it will hamper the widepsread adoption of nuclear.
The UK approach is interesting because yes, they just dumped it in the Irish sea. There's a deep underwater ravine between Scotland and Northern Ireland where it's all dumped, along with various other bits of old military hardware and other bits that are inconvenient.
Think about that the next time you here Bojo talking about building a bridge to Northern Ireland.
This is not liked by certain governments, even if theoretically NPT gives a framework to do it safely, and large scale commercial reprocessing essentially died after India used Canada-built CANDU reactors to kickstart their nuclear weapons program.
Nuclear waste has to be shipped to the facility. All the shipping routes from all the nearest waste-producing reactors converge there. That's naturally a concern to all those who live nearby.
Multiply by 8*10^9 people (a little more than the current world population) and you get 320,000 metric tons which is about 3/5th the capacity of the largest oil tankers.
Finding a place for that much waste per year is a political problem, not a technical problem. There's plenty of geologically "safe enough to outlast the radioactivity" places we could dig a deep hole (thanks to the fossil fuel industry that is a solved problem) to dump that much waste into.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf (no idea on source bias here, I didn't read the whole thing)
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
If energy prices rise then it will become worthwhile to extract, if they fall then it will be less so. Of course if the number of consumers rises this will also improve the viability of mining. According to this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia, it is currently uneconomic to proceed with several mining projects.
Regardless of economic considerations fissile material is a finite resource although it could be that we will never reach the limit.
In practical terms, however, switching nuclear reactors to use the Thorium fuel cycle would allow us to use a supply of fuel that would probably outlast human civilization.
Fission however (a) is politically unpopular and (b) has a waste problem that no country wants to own.