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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Every time I've seen one of these threads on HN asserting that nuclear is safer than the alternatives and I've looked more closely into the claims, I've wound up unconvinced because of omissions like the one you've identified. It's gotten to the point that I tend to tune out pro-nuclear arguments on HN. :( I'm sure there are good arguments in there somewhere, but I don't have the bandwidth to sort them out from the misleading ones.

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The argument is that the human race gets to survive and progress, unlike the one where we destroy our planet with a run-away carbon dioxide greenhouse effect.

You're missing some. For example, nuclear is implemented on a wide scale, but it's far too late to mitigate catastrophic climate change, and we are unable to prevent meltdowns in the insuing decline, accelerating the decline.

One of the requirements for modern nuclear reactor design is that they are fail safe, ie cannot meltdown due to a loss of power or other malfunction.

I still haven't heard a convincing protocol for long term storage of spent fuel. That's even worse than a remotely possible nuclear disaster: because unless a solution is found, it's a certainty.

The real answer is mostly "don't do that".

Spent fuel rods can't be used anymore because about 5% of the uranium has been converted into elements that slow down the reaction. The remaining uranium is still good.

Due to a presidential order by Carter, we waste that uranium. The process for recovering the unused uranium (called "reprocessing") is vaguely similar to the process for making bombs. We'd rather not have lots of countries making bombs. The idea was that by not reprocessing our own fuel, we could set an example and hope that somehow that would keep other countries from making bombs. Yes, that is terrible logic.

Japan does the reprocessing. We could do it too, and it wouldn't suddenly arm the world with nukes.

If the fuel is reprocessed, we could cut our need to mine uranium and cut our need to store radioactive material. It's about a 95% reduction. The uranium itself is the long-lived portion, so we'd clear up that problem too.

We could also recover rare-earth elements from the spent fuel. This is the only practical way to create rare-earth elements.

Of course, that doesn't get rid of 100% of the waste. We don't really have a shortage of great places to store it. The worries about burial are blown way out of proportion. All of the proposed facilities for burial are ridiculous overkill.

France does reprocessing, too, and they're very good at it:

> https://orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploration-to...

> https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968

France seems to be the only country that's very good at it - nuclear reprocessing everywhere else has a pretty poor safety record, with widespread radioactive contamination and an unfortunate tendency to irradiate workers. (It's also, as I understand it, the exact same process used to produce weapons grade plutonium for bombs, not merely similar.)

Well, you separate the spent fuel into chemical components by suitable chemical processes. One of those components is plutonium salts. So, yes, reprocessing is a rather direct way to nuke materials.

There are reprocessing schemes like pyroprocessing that are less useful for producing bomb materials. But yes, currently at industrial scale the method of choice is PUREX, which AFAIK is the same process which is used for producing Pu for weapons. Although when reprocessing high burnup spent fuel from commercial reactors you get Pu with an isotopic composition poorly suited for weapons.

It's this line of thinking that ultimately pushes me to being pro-nuclear.

However, I think our optimism regarding the political situation is more misplaced than our optimism regarding the tech.

Here, you criticize Carter's order and present an alternative. A great one, even: Not having the order in place and doing the reprocessing.

But that's not reality, right? It's more likely that we'll have Carter's order and some new dumb order in the next few years. Nuclear is inherently scary and will always be politicized.

I agree somewhat regarding the overblown burial worries. But I could make a really great commercial out of the disaster scenarios involved there. They'll never not be convincing arguments.

Radiation is a silent killer. Nuclear weapons are the worst thing humanity has made. Not being afraid of nuclear power is rational only within a very narrow discussion window, one which most people simply cannot see through.

I guess my frustration here is that the pro-nuclear side constantly uses arguments that don't work and casually dismisses being afraid of the smallest and largest deadly thing. There's lots of "just" and "most" and it all feels so hand-wavy.

"We checked the numbers, we've got the worst thing under control." It's just not a convincing argument to most people. I don't know how to fix this, but it's definitely not another politicized pro/anti divide.

(Not OP)

> our optimism regarding the political situation is more misplaced than our optimism regarding the tech

Yeah, living in Germany I am afraid this is going absolutely nowhere. I've given up on seeing nuclear energy help us even a little bit in this emergency, but I do try to still inform people about how out of proportion the fatalities from coal and the fatalities from fission power really are. We're shutting down nuclear before coal? Environmentalists in Germany are handing out stickers for it and you see them on literally every third car or building. It's ludicrous. I've never seen a disinformation campaign more effective than this. It's like fear of flying but without the people claiming it's safe or faster than traditional methods. Not a one in Germany; no one I've spoken to was even neutral about nuclear. Next, when they realize their safety argument isn't logical, they turn to costs. What do they think the costs of extreme weather events, ecosystem collapse, and mass relocations will be?!

I just hope that, with better information, they will at least realize that we have a bigger problem than nuclear power, even if it doesn't mean they become neutral or in favor of building a new nuclear plant to help with the transition.

I guess the reprocessing cycle is also pretty delicate. A quick check on Wikipedia report:

1. Fuel has to cool in a pond for years (first opportunity for disaster.) 2. Fuel has to be dissolved (second opportunity for disaster.)

Also, Reagan lifted Carter’s ban, but Corporate didn’t lift a finger because no subsidy was given (as usual...)

No one is saying underground storage is perfect, but it's sacrificing a small portion of earth's volume for energy instead of our current strategy of dumping all our waste product in the atmosphere causing enormous damage.

Nuclear waste is actually the best kind of waste because of its very high density and the fact that it's solid.

The density is so high that the US has accumulated just 83,000 tons over several decades operating nuclear power plants:

> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

That may sound a lot but compared to coal or, in fact, any other type of power generating plant, the amount is absolutely tiny.

In France, the whole waste of the country's nuclear plant operation fits into one hall:

> https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968

What helps in reducing the waste by large margin is reprocessing the fuel and re-using it in fast reactors as explained here:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE

> compared to coal or, in fact, any other type of power generating plant

so nuclear creates less nuclear waste than PV, wind, or geothermal?

Yes. Producing semiconductors or rare earth magnets is not a very clean process, Silicon Valley has a lot of uglyness left over from such processes. Cheap renewables supplies produced in the far east are certainly not clean in that regard, and you need a lot more in mass and volume than with nuclear.

Absolutely. The entirety of the nuclear waste from US power generation fits in a volume the footprint of an American football field, and 10 meters high: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

Maybe geothermal creates less waste, since you just need to pipe water into the ground and drive a steam turbine. But most of the world doesn't have access to geothermal power.

I'm not sure what the point of your question is. PV, wind and geothermal don't produce nuclear waste and they only turn into waste after EOL but this applies to any construction.

At the end of 2016, the volume of radioactive waste present in France amounted to 1.5 million m3. This volume increased by 58% between 2002 and 2016. High level waste (HA) represents 0.2% of the volumes but 95% of the radioactivity. The latter have been multiplied by 2.2 over the period 2002-2016.

Source: https://ree.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/themes/pressions-e...

Coal, of course, is far simpler; the waste can be conveniently stored in peoples’ lungs, and occasionally spilled into rivers.

The advantage of nuclear here, arguably, is that the waste is at least somewhat containable.

Bury nuclear waste underground in an area with no aquifer. The scenarios where this results in contamination are borderline hyperbole, usually entailing the loss of all records of the waste's locations due to some sort of societal collapse followed by a future civilization digging up the waste for an inexplicable reason.

By comparison, what is the long term storage plan for fossil fuel emissions?

If we allow similar levels of hand-waving for both problems then:

Q: what is the long term storage plan for fossil fuel emissions?

A: Trees

Great, now come back to me with a plan to plant the trees required to offset carbon emissions. This is going to be challenging, because you'll need to reforest an area roughly the size of the continental United States to reduce atmospheric CO2 to levels from a century ago [1]. In order to actually do this, you'd need to desalinate massive amounts of water to feed trees in areas without vegetation. Generating the energy for desalination and pumping it inland would release massive amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere, necessitating more tress, necessitating more water, and so on. You'd probably have better chances sequestering carbon through an algae bloom in the oceans, but that too has drawbacks (namely, when the algae dies off it'll just release the carbon again).

By comparison we already have a nuclear waste facility built in the US, though it's use was cancelled by Congress (and it wouldn't make sense to put spent fuel there yet, since we would want it for reprocessing), and another site is under construction in Finland [3].

"Bury it underground, in an area with no aquifer" isn't hand wave. Storing nuclear waste really is that simple. The main concern for uranium is water contamination. It's actually a prevalent due to naturally occurring uranium [4]. Place the waste in an area with no aquifer and there is no risk of contamination even in the event that the containment vessels deteriorate.

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/how-t...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

4. https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat....

To store it in our atmosphere.

What prevents nuclear waste from being brought to were it came from? Can't you just grind up the nuclear waste and mix it up with the excess rock to obtain a material mixture that has background radiation than the mine it came from?

Well, at a high level that's what's being done. Nuclear fuel is mined from underground and the spent fuel is put back underground.

But it's much better to put it in a known location where it's away from water sources. Naturally occurring uranium is actually a fairly common pollutant in drinking water, putting the uranium back where it came from isn't always a good choice when there are better alternatives.

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