Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

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Early in the days when nuclear physics found application, it promised to bring great benefit to society in addition to its tremendous utility in warfare. There are lots of opinions about this sort of thing, but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste. Furthermore, while accidents are rare, they have enduring impact in the locations where they occur.

Today, of all days, we all feel the impact of an uncontrolled and exponentially-spreading biological disaster. Gene drive can have a similar impact, if it goes awry.

To wield a weapon of extinction that we barely understand is folly. There are as many opportunities for loss of control through mutation as there are mosquitoes. While the biomechanics probably don't work out, it seems like a bad idea to attempt such an extinction when each of our tiny adversaries are equipped with hypodermic needles and a penchant for mammalian blood.

Your point regarding the consequence of not acting is very well-taken. It only takes a day or two in a country with tropical disease to understand how crippling it is, not just to individuals, but to entire continents of people. The happiness of billions of lives does hang in the balance. Before going with the "nuclear" (or should I write "CRISPR"?) option, one should explore every other avenue to its end.

I'm a physicist -- I see in CRISPR all the good and bad that physicists encountered at the dawn of the nuclear age. Be real, real careful with it.

There are also other issues. Technology has advanced and information is more easily available. Nuclear technology has proliferated - even small countries can nowadays use it, and probably many large companies also could.

Biotech could be harmful in a massive way, done by a much smaller operator.

So "we" don't really get to say. Someone will just use these technologies. This is what Bill Joy wrote of in 2000, in the essay "Why the future doesn't need us". How do we organize society around this different harm dynamic?

EDIT: In some sense, nuclear technology is a great success story. Not used in anger since the second world war. Countries like Italy and Sweden had nuclear programs, but they didn't end up there. (Ariane and Vega solid boosters are Italian for that reason.) Political ways were found to contain it.

I hadn't imagined a large, energy intense company running their own reactor before reading your comment. What an idea to start the morning!

Even factoring in the rare accidents, nuclear energy kills less people per GW and per GW*h than coal (by a factor of 2000) and rooftop solar (by a factor of 10).

The death toll of not using nuclear is higher than that of using it.

The concern is not only about the number of people die.

Large areas become uninhabitable practically forever and people are uprooted, becoming refugees overnight with no chance to go back ever. Suffering also increases through cancers, inability to breed, and/or deformed babies.

Death per kW doesn't capture that picture, I don't know why anyone would optimize for death per kW alone.

The above figures hold true for disabilty-adjusted life years.

Coal does all that too, it's just spread across wider areas and longer time. Japan is somewhat unique in how little flat land there is, typically there would be miles and miles of uninhabited space around a nuke power plant.

Screening thousands of Chernobyl cleanup workers didn't discover elevated cancer risks, as far as I remember the only group that was measurably affected was the people who refused to relocate.

My argument is that you can’t look at dead bodies per kW/h and claim one is better than the other.

It doesn’t incorporate the relocation of potentially tens of millions of people on a single incident. It doesn’t incorporate the political complexities and so on.

People don’t simply look at the probability of getting killed and be fine with being uprooted if something happens. People don’t want to risk being relocated overnight. The death thing isn’t even a concern, most people don’t even believe that it would happen to them.

People are afraid of being relocated but not afraid of being killed? Well then, check how many people were relocated due to hydro and coal quarries.

And they are not happy about it many of the times. Protests are widespread when such facilities are to be built. It’s not happening overnight, they usually get compensated handsomely but people still don’t want it. On nuclear, it’s much more hardcore, you leave overnight to never come back and it’s very unlikely to get fair compensation.

What is hard to understand that people don’t want this to happen to them?

Death? Big deal, people face death through the entire history to preserve their way of life. There are professions where death is an occupational hazard. Nobody cares about death. What's scary is to lose your life in a sense of losing everything that you worked for, some people commit suicide when they lose something that they cared and build through the years.

>Furthermore, while accidents are rare, they have enduring impact in the locations where they occur.

And coal emission, gas spill, oil spill, dam burst, dam construction dont?

>but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

France has no problem.

> >but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

> France has no problem.

France is part of the world, and thus has part of the problem. Maybe France isn't contributing to it, but we as humans own it now.

This is not very practical answer.

France got waste reprocessing to the extent where decades of electricity provided to Paris only leave several glass slabs of waste behind [1].

France has solution to the problem [2], where the rest of the world choses to ignore it while championing solutions that are not really helping.

So, France got the answer.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

[2] Decarbonization in 10 years: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYp2uVFVcAEWAoW?format=jpg&name=...

To be fair, France still don't fully know what to do with radioactive waste.

We're kinda good at recycling it (so, indeed not the horrifying process your [1] describes), but the final non reusable waste is in fact just stored where it's produced, waiting for better ideas on what to do with it, so it's not exactly ideal. There are a dozen of publicly funded current research projets on that, so let's cross fingers. Overall, I'd say that our policies are pretty solid to get us towards a good solution in the best possible shape, but I wouldn't say that France got the answer yet.

(Also, old plants deconstruction is a planned problem with currently no planned solutions.)

You have to store high-level waste for hundreds or thousands of years before it's safe.

Heavy metal wastes never become safe. A dump site for cadmium or chromium or lead or arsenic waste will be exactly as hostile to life around it in ten thousand years as it is today. The only way for it to "become safe" over time is for it to leak into the environment and distribute the damage over time. In practice, the "solution" for heavy metal industrial waste is to store it where it's produced and ignore it. Usually in huge open pits, which are just great for the environment around them /s.

I just look at it from a systems engineering perspective and think a whole bunch of nearly-identical systems sharing the same physical layer with no separation between them is terrifyingly vulnerable no matter what you do.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that we don't live in a bubble. Even if we don't study nuclear weapons or biological engineering, our enemies will.

There is also a problem with thinking that everyone that isn't you is an enemy.

It's better to have weapons but never need to use them than to need weapons but not have them.

Do note that having weapons makes you infinitely more likely to use them.

And not having them, when someone else has them, makes it infinitely more likely they'll waggle their eyebrows at you and have you quietly comply with their every demand.

Europe doesn't have large militaries, which is fine as long as they're satellite states of the U.S.

And not having them, when someone else has them, makes it infinitely more likely they'll waggle their eyebrows at you and have you quietly comply with their every demand.

European nations don't have large militaries, which is fine as long as they're satellite states of the U.S.

At the scale of nations, this line of thinking is very much necessary.

Are you a nation?

No, but he lives in one.

He?

Integers identify as male :)

> our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

Emotionally, not physically. We let ignorance take over and fear drive decisions.

Your comparison of CRISPR to nuclear bombs and meltdowns just puts it into the irrational fear category.

You said yourself that you’re a physicist. Why do you think that qualifies you to talk about the risks of gene editing with CRISPR?

> You said yourself that you’re a physicist. Why do you think that qualifies you to talk about the risks of gene editing with CRISPR?

He says, on a site devoted to people talking about things about which 99% of them know nothing.

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