Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says former spokeswoman | Hacker News Reader

Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says former spokeswoman

bbc.com

64 pointssandGorgon154 comments

Nuclear was perhaps the correct option 20 years ago.

A nuclear power plant can easily take a decade to build (Hinkley C, announced 2010, approved 2016, generation expected 2025), how many decades will it take to build enough plants to replace our current fossil fuel based generation?

It is time we don't have anymore. We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

> A nuclear power plant can easily take a decade to build (Hinkley C, announced 2010, approved 2016, generation expected 2025), how many decades will it take to build enough plants to replace our current fossil fuel based generation?

If it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant then building enough nuclear plants should take... about a decade? It's not as if you build one, wait until it's completely finished and then start building a second one somewhere else. You build more than one starting right now and then more than one is finished in about a decade. Less if people would stop using "it takes too long" and similar as an excuse to make it take longer to build them.

> If it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant then building enough nuclear plants should take... about a decade?

Only if the world had unlimited access to appropriately skilled engineers and trades people, and the mountain of resources required to construct a nuclear power station.

Training people for something as specialised as building nuclear power stations is very time consuming in its own right.

It's not that simple. If you want to build more nuclear plants at the same time you also need more workers, more specialized factories and a proven design that has been field tested so that you don't end up with a fleet of defective plants after you have built 100 of them.

>It's not as if you build one, wait until it's completely finished

If you assign a worker to Hinkley C then he is going to work at Hinkley C until it is finished. You can't just send him to a different plant. That would delay Hinkley C.

> If you want to build more nuclear plants at the same time you also need more workers

So hire more workers. Most "nuclear plant construction work" isn't some foreign species of construction work. It's pouring concrete and laying pipe. The main part that isn't is the reactor vessel itself, but that's the part that can be made on an assembly line and shipped in.

> more specialized factories

Building a factory takes what, a year? Then it's mass production.

> a proven design

This is literally the main reason construction takes as long as it does already. If it isn't accomplishing that then throw that process away and build them all in three years with plenty of time left over to correct any issues before bringing them online.

> If you assign a worker to Hinkley C then he is going to work at Hinkley C until it is finished. You can't just send him to a different plant. That would delay Hinkley C.

Fortunately there is not only a single worker in the entire country, and arbitrarily many can be trained on a scale not measured in decades.

If it was that simple why does literally every nuclear power plant run way behind schedule and way over budget?

First, because there are regulatory problems (e.g. regulators changing the rules after the part of the plant they apply to has already been built). Second, because they're not being built at scale.

Building and tearing down nuclear power plants tends to cost vastly more money (billions!) than estimated at the time of their planning, especially with the more recent ones. They require massive subsidies.

"Especially the more recent ones" is strong evidence that the problem could be solved, e.g. by building modern plants using a regulatory environment similar to the one that created the U.S. plants that have been running safely for decades.

And how much is climate change estimated to cost?

I was aleays intrigued by constant arguments around cost.

Maybe energy is too cheap! An average pair of jeans is travels the world 3 times at various stages of manufacture and distribution. That shouldnt be happening

Billions with a "b"? We're talking about climate change here. How many trillions is it worth not to get to 2 degree? 3 degrees?

what's our supply of people and equipment capable of building safe nuclear power plants? I'm going to take a wild stab and proclaim that supply is relatively inelastic and possibly extremely so in the short term...

So i'm guessing it probably is pretty close to impossible to build too many in one go simultaneously, like other relative mega-structures or infrastructure, you are generally limited to a handful in generalized localities at any one time.

You're talking about a problem that applies to projects that take on the scale of months, because you can't train new people that fast.

You can go from the existing stock of people with degrees in things like physics and chemistry to a graduate degree in nuclear engineering in less than three years, much less doing that for construction work.

This is a completely fallacious argument. You would've said the same thing 20 years ago.

Secondly, just because one plant takes a decade to build, that does NOT mean we can't build 100 plants in a decade. Again, your argument does not make any sense. If we had started 20 years ago, we very well could be stamping out SMRs by the hundreds, today.

Finally, granting the urgency you claim, there is no evidence to suggest replacing fossil fuel based generation with renewable is going to be quicker than nuclear. To frame it as such is misleading.

Well, the worst possible outcome is potentially catastrophic enough that actually, you want to invest in both simultaneously.

This. Myopia on a single method for reducing carbon emissions is how you get rolling blackouts. Perfect is truly the enemy of good here.

The best time to build a nuclear power station was twenty years ago, but the second best time is now.

I've heard conflicting stories about that. On the one hand, the people from TerraPower seem to have a solution with a good ecobalance. It was featured in the documentary about Bill Gates. On the other hand, I've heard several people claim that renewables are much cheaper and have better ecobalances, but I haven't seen the evidence for it.

So I'm personally undecided and with my limited knowledge believe that investing in renewable energy and new, modern nuclear power plants seems to be the right solution. In any case, change needs to occur as soon and fast as possible. But I'd be interested in sources to better information, particularly the claims I've heard that the costs for nuclear power plants is too high.

Is there an unbiased,reliable source for looking up complete ecobalances for energy sources, including the whole lifespan and all manufacturing of components and their disposal?

I feel that untill the last coal powerplant is gone, splitting hair on ecobalance is a distraction.

Full ecobalance is hard, many variables, many will vary by country or by state/county.

> It is time we don't have anymore. We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

You think that can be done faster than 10 years?

The UK managed something like 5% -> 25% renewables in the past 10 years; complete decarbonisation of electricity isn't really possible in 10 years, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Especially as the price has fallen so dramatically; large areas of the US are ripe for cheap solar.

As mentioned by topbanana you need storage for renewables. No good solution at the moment for that problem.

.. but we've already done that 5 to 25% increase. Without significant storage. Storage will be needed to get to 100%, but we've already displaced all the coal generation with renewables! (and, I admit, some gas)

Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. Keep expanding the renewables until 0-carbon moments are possible and curtailment starts to be a problem. Maybe 50%?

(or, in meme format: noooo, you can't just replace everything with renewables! haha wind turbine go brrr)

The 5% -> 25% was literally the easiest part. The big expensive downsides to renewables really aren't a factor. Intermittency is minor when you can fall back on 75%, if there's only 50% to fall back on that's a problem.

Building one-offs after spending years battling scientific illiteracy in the courts is indeed time consuming, but there is actually no reason we couldn't just churn them out assembly line style. The technology is pretty mature now.

We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

Those things aren't without lead time either. Wind farms don't grow on trees. Solar panels have an intricate manufacturing process requiring rare earth elements.

Case in point: China has built and put into production several EPR-design reactors while the projects started earlier in Europe are still lingering.

>We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

And don't forget reducing power usage. Corona has shown that we can drastically reduce the amount of commuters on the road and airplanes in the sky.

And also reduced our basic freedom, our economies, and placed millions into poverty.

Covid isn’t a good example of a sustainable balancing of the environment over human activity.

To be fair, our lifestyles weren't sustainable in the first place. That's kind of the point.

Of course it would have an economic impact, but our economy has been unsustainable for a long time.

The lockdown is/was an extraordinarily shitty situation for a lot of people and is therefore not a permanent solution for climate change.

I understand that some climate change deniers may be motivated by their belief that the adaptations we would have to make to reverse it would negatively impact the economy. Interestingly enough, the those change that covid has forced have had devastating economic impacts.

I wouldn’t count on that. A lot of people are already brisling against the restrictions imposed in response to the pandemic despite the virus actually existing — I doubt they would be sustainable once this crisis has passed.

Renewables don't work short term without gas peaking plants, which are not renewable and are extremely bad for the environment.

"Renewables", as usually pitched, are anything but renewable. Solar with gas peaking plants is not renewable. Wind with gas peaking plants is not renewable. Nuclear on the other hand, is extremely green and can be working at 100% capacity on windless sunless drought-stricken days.

I think we can do both, no? Build a fleet of small reactor sites around the country, deploy PV everywhere now, and invest in battery technologies for tomorrow.

If we end up with way too much energy production, we undercut fossil entirely, plus get to use some to start physically fixing environmental damage being done. Carbon capture, etc.

Yep.

The total levelized cost of energy (LCOE[1]) for both wind and solar is now lower than nuclear: it's cheaper to procure equivalent power production via non-nuclear means.

The UK's Business, Energy and Industry Strategy department published energy production cost estimates in 2016[2], and the Open Energy Information organization has collated similar statistics[3].

You're spot on that post-energy-generation storage remains a problem - I'd be really glad to hear if anyone in this thread has up-to-date knowledge of where we are with regards to that.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy

[2] - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[3] - https://openei.org/apps/TCDB/

"post-energy-generation storage" is only a problem for the intermittent generators like solar and wind. This is exactly why nuclear is a solution. It doesn't suffer from problems of storage and can easily offset intermittence of other power sources by varying its power, as long as those different kinds of generators are on the same grid.

This is the key reason we are talking about nuclear, it is not simply about levelized cost.

Do you have any references (i.e. quantative statistics) for how much of a problem storage is?

It'd be really useful to understand how large a gap exists there - it's not something I'd claim to know about at all.

Self-replying; perhaps the downvote(s) were for not doing my own research...? :)

Here's a starter reading resource from the National Renewable Energy Lab in the US: https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/declining-renewable-...

And some more reading material from OpenEI: https://openei.org/wiki/Solar+Storage

Nuclear (and everything else) has the same problem, demand is not constant. You want to cover the yearly peak even if its a 1 in a hundred year snowstorm or heatwave thats causing it.

So you can either build 10x as many nuclear plants and run them at .1 capacity most of the time or build 5x as many and use some of the surplus energy to create stored power like hydrogen.

Doing either of those things with renewables will be massively cheaper than nuclear.

There doesn't seem to be anyone who is actually enthusiastic about nuclear, only people who are misinformed about renewables because their news sources have been trying to prop up fossil fuel interests for the last two decades.

The IPCC predicts 2 degrees of temperature increase by 2050, which is the same as between 1950-2000.

I believe they also think world GDP _increase_ (not actual GDP) might be 6% less due to this, but don't quote me on that.

This is the number 1 authority on climate change.

While there are risks associated with that increase, it won't be the end of the world. Despite what the sensationalist media says, or democratic politicians and 15 year olds predicting the end of the world in 12 years. That is simply not true. The world will not become a ball of flame, in a few decades. Not even the UN thinks so.

There is plenty of time to build nuclear power plants, if that's how we wanted to deal with this issue.

Most people have no idea how fucked we actually are.

What happens after 2050? Climate change continues, even if the world goes completely carbon neutral. Economic damage continues.

Read the report, the only way to keep to 2 degrees is to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The sequestation industry would have to be larger than the oil industry was at its peak.

Given that we can't even switch to renewables and plant trees, what are the odds we will subsidise an enormous industry to fix the atmosphere?

Actually, another interesting argument that gets ignored is that global warming is not proportional to emissions. You need exponential increase in emissions for a linear increase in warming. Therefore since we are actually close to starting to reduce our emissions, global warming will probably peak and then cool.

This is also in the IPCC's report, but gets ignored everywhere.

Reading LT3000s post on this is very insightful: https://lt3000.blogspot.com/2019/11/contrarianism-esg-invest...

While technically correct (except cooling), that insight is of limited value.

Eating habbits are a great parallel - I have been gaining weight during lockdown, and discussed it with a friend, and he replied "don't worry, you will only reach a certain weight and then stop growing." Well, thats true, but I don't want to reach equilibrium of 150kg. Similarly, 2 degrees is the point we will reach in 2050, the global equilibroum will be much higher. We will reach it asymptotically, but that doesnt help.

There will be no cooling, because the CO2 level in the atmosphere dictates the equilibrium point.

Further to the post, it is interesting but gives the impression of renewable technology as if we are still in the 70's. Firstly, coal is not neccessary, we have steel production with hydrogen instead of coal. Secondly, US is massively behind other developed nations, coal is gone or dissapearing from power generation of most major economies within 5 years.

Lastly it claims EU's carbon price is damaging for the economy, but thats a ridiculous claim - the price is absolutely miniscule. $25 means an average cost of ~150 per head per year. Thats nothing! Lastly, that money doesn't dissapear, it funds infrastructure, so we can reduce taxes elsewhere.

Except, the increase between 1950-2000 was the highest amount of emissions for any period of that duration. If you're looking for reassurance, that period is not the benchmark you should be taking for comparison. We are currently suffering the effects of our exploitation and devastation over that period, just as we are currently in a much better position because of banning CFCs in the 80s. Climate change isn't an instantaneous process.

The only problem is that if you tell everyone that we have plenty of time then nobody is going to do anything until it is too late. I hate sensationalism in both directions but as it is right now, humans certainly aren't going to stop at 2 degrees.

I disagree and would like to point out that "12 years" is a strawman. You've got to think a bit more long-term and about all effects on the environment and living conditions as a whole.

If you take an unbiased look at climate change, resource exhaustion, and species extinction, then it becomes hard to believe that mankind will have the conditions to thrive on Earth in 200 years from now. It may be possible, maybe with technological inventions, but it certainly doesn't look that way. We're only about 200 years into massive industrialization and have already damaged Earth on an unprecedented scale.

The current species extinction graph alone should worry people way more than it tends to do right now. Changes to the oceans are also extremely alarming, because certain conditions in the oceans could trigger a collapse of most of the ecosystem.

Are you sure GDP is the right metric to be looking at?

Suppose there was some event that killed all homeless people - it might not affect GDP much. Should we do let such event happen and conclude it's no big deal?

> Suppose there was some event that killed all homeless people

Yes, this is called homelessness.

OK, not all homeless people, or even most, but the survival rate for homelessness is absolutely terrible and few care. ( https://www.crisis.org.uk/media/236799/crisis_homelessness_k... "Homeless people are more likely to die young, with an average age of death of 47 years old and even lower for homeless women at 43")

Similarly with the millions of refugees coming from Syria and Libya, "let them die at sea" is a popular position and "murder them rather than letting them in" is gaining traction.

The pandemic has really opened my eyes to just how OK people are with the mass death of strangers.

> refugees

That example does not strengthen your case. While not unopposed, there are still lots and lots of pro refugee people and many countries let them in.

Homelessness is a far unsexier issue where you can absolutely say people don’t care enough, but refugees are more of a counterexample.

Climate change will primarily affect Asian and African countries. There will be the largest refugee crisis ever but nothing a bullet to the head can't fix.

Westerners, on the other hand, will just stay at home thanks to AC and pretend everything is fine.

Of course GDP won't be a big deal. By the time the worst effects are there the Chinese population will have aged to the point where getting rid of the elderly is better for the GDP than keeping them.

You should not lump all western nations together. In northern Europe AC doesn't happen at home for the most part. Here in Germany it's a luxury because of the high prices for electricity.

You need to check the projected size of national economies by 2050. India and China overtake US.

People with more money generally can afford more bullets. I wouldn't rely on them.

"live by the sword, die by the sword"

Less GDP will also probably mean less pollution, so hopefully things will even out at some point.

The Problem is the GDP isn't vanishing. It will just move to other places e.g. China.

The study was mentioning a decrease in world GDP, so I think my conclusion should stand (as China is part of the “world” that presumably will experience a 6% GDP decline).

So we do...what? To power the US with solar you would need over 11 million acres of solar panels, and that's likely an extreme lowball estimate. That's half of Tennessee. That model doesn't really account for storage and intermittentcy issues, which we need to innovate ourselves out of. Some newer estimates also suggest we'd need more like all of Texas covered in solar panels. Sorry, but there aren't alternatives here. Nuclear is it.

Don’t forget reducing consumption.

I think it would be a good idea to put the first 2 words at the end of the title to make it less sensational?

Yes it would be even more logical to write

Nuclear power 'only option' says former Extinction Rebellion spokeswoman

since this not directly linked to this organization

But it has to be sensational.

The proper title should be "Michael Shellenberger buys prominent Extinction Rebellion member" and it should be in the boulevard section.

It's not like she ads any relevant insight or information to the topic. She just repeats the tag lines of Shellenbergers campaign. The only thing missing is someone mentioning his book.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is the name of the org -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion

But they aren't saying this if I understand correctly? Only someone formerly affiliated with them?

The current title [0] seems misleading indeed as she is no longer involved with them. The title suggested by user loulouxiv sounds less misleading decent. Maybe use this one?

[0] "Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says former spokeswoman"

I'm not really a fan of ER, calls itself a rebellion and then has the most milquetoast performances that could scarcely be even called a protest.

And yet they've got Priti Patel condemning them, putting them on the PREVENT list: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/10/xr-extinctio... and more recently talking up banning them entirely. It looks like their recent protest against the Murdoch press hit a nerve.

I've had many people tell me their methods are too extreme, and how dare these people block roads for some protest, you should just sit quetly in the corner corner a sign or soemthing.

What's an example of a decent protest in your view?

It seems like the environmental movement spends an enormous amount of time and energy arguing over small details over what we should do (how much of electrical energy should come from nuclear). Meanwhile we do nothing because people who don't want to are a majority. So what's the point in arguing?

Much of the older environmental movement was anti-nuclear first. Before global warming became a key issue the big threat was the instant obliteration of a large fraction of humanity by nuclear weapons, and since civilian power and weapons were tightly linked this led to campaigning against nuclear power. There were also lots of issues with waste dumping.

This goes all the way back to the French government murdering a protestor and sinking a ship to suppress protests; the Rainbow Warrior.

It just seems like a convenient thing for people to be tribal over, while as a whole they achieve nothing. There's is a scene in red dwarf where there is a holy war over the colour of the hats people should wear. This is the same thing as far as I can tell.

Rather, whatever diet you impose on western co2 emissions, which are already decreasing, is going to be dwarfed by China’s increase. China is building new coal power plants now. Environmentalists are not helping their credibility by focusing on second or third order details.

This is the core environmental problem: how do you get every country to cut their emissions and buy quite a lot? If you can't get them to do that (and we've failed completely) trying to get them to cut and cut a lot AND do it with nuclear (or whatever else) is a non starter.

International agreements? Like the Paris agreement that the US sabotaged for domestic political point-scoring?

Yeah. But if the US won't sign it it's already badly damaged. And if others won't act without them we're fucked. The US should get its shit together and get going. But I think plenty of other nations also wouldn't sign but can avoid admitting it because the US sabotages it for them. Otherwise we'd have a real agreement on climate between the EU, China, India and others. And then gradually force more people to join with trade scantions etc.

> But if the US won't sign it it's already badly damaged.

The USdid sign it .. under Obama. So Trump pulled out of it.

> a real agreement on climate between the EU, China, India and others

That is* the Paris accords.

I thought the (republican) senate refused to ratify it before Trump got in? Not to argue trump isn't a turd (he is), but US participation is Paris was dead long before he formally withdrew from it.

It's sort of irrelevant anyway, Paris was an "agreement" (not even that technically) to do nothing. That's why it's been in force for most of the world for a while and made zero difference.

Any plan that relies on the U.S. shelling out unlimited money to other countries isn't a plan.

And what does that have to do with the Paris agreement, which is about limiting emissions?

The Paris agreement was a bout wealth transfer more than it was emissions. Lip service was given to emissions so it could be positioned as a climate focused agreement.

If you don't know why Zion Lights about turn is interesting, it's because of this well known disastrous interview -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3kJwQBZOkM

I have to say, I'm quite surprised and happy, it seems there is hope yet.

We have passed the peak of oil production. Nuclear is the only solution to mitigate the crisis we are going to face. I think we will need to get rid of nuclear at long term (like 50 years). But for the next 20 years (probably 40), we need nuclear.

You can't get rid of nuclear in 50 years, the decay products take centuries to become safe.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53595839 "Trawsfynydd was shut down in 1991 after operating for a quarter of a century. Magnox said it still expected the site to be completely cleared by the 2083 target."

We have one long term nuclear waste facility in Finland (expected to be operational in 2023). It can handle about a hundred years of waste from an associated power plant before being completely buried. It was made because the Finnish law requires nuclear waste produced in Finland to be disposed of domestically.

I don't really know if any other country with nuclear power plants have any sort of a plan for what to do with it.

Not, Not the only.

There are a lot of room for improvement in using energy better. Cars do not need to spend so much fuel as before, and there is room for improvement in isolation of houses so they don't need so much energy.

None of those are related with nuclear energy but would reduce the climatic problem just now, not in ten years, without putting a low probability but catastrophic collateral effect in the middle of the road for our grandsons.

In any case with or without nuclear, with the highest wildfires registered in the history in Russia, Australia, Brazil and US (2019-2020) we either focus and solve the arsonism crimes, predatory logging, and environmental lack of water problems or we aren't going anywhere. Deliberate arsonism should be reclassified worldwide as crime against (the future of) humanity. If we can bomb a whole city in Irak, we should be able to drop water in California or Canberra.

> If we can bomb a whole city in Irak

Notwithstanding the human and archaeological impact of this, the environmental impact was pretty terrible as well. The oil consumption of all those tanks and planes can't have been small, as well as the burning oilfields that blackened the sky and all the depleted uranium rounds littering the country.

You have a point here. I'll rephrase it. If we can bomb a whole city in Irak, we should be able to stop bombing cities also. Is a much easier task and would help also to fix the climate problem.

Has anybody calculated how many greenhouse effect gasses are released when moving and dropping a bomb?

Cultural change can do a lot. Less consumption, less waste.

When I think about ICE.. every time someone used brakes in the past they were wasting energy ... at least EVs will recapture some of that.

In Germany we're pretty much at the base line it's to expensive to waste energy. After picking the low hanging fruit (light, lcd tvs, not using a dryer all the time) It gets very hard.

> "Deliberate arsonism should be reclassified worldwide as crime against (the future of) humanity"

You mean that, what the western countries did throughout the 19th and the 20th century, the developing countries aren't allowed to do now?

Why? Because some forests are burning near one of the richest cities in the world?

People in western countries had to bloody fight each mm, for those laws. Laws that are always eroding. Is a sisyphean task, even here.

Developing countries are sovereign and have governments and armies. Prominent environmentalists are assassinated each year in those countries and the cases remain inexplicably unsolved. All the time.

So, no more excuses and "come here and solve my environmental problems so I don't need to". No more "donate to save the rainforest for 40 years, so we can sell later the logs to the first company that knocks at my door". People can always choose not to vote for the mentally damaged candidate.

This is not an excuse. The western countries burned most of the fossil fuels, and are responsible for most of the world's deforestation.

You're effectively saying that other countries shouldn't be allowed to lift their population from poverty in the same way that the western countries did.

If so, then the west should pay up, or otherwise stfu.

This is a rotten old red herring and a false dichotomy that assumes that the way to get rich is selling the roof of your house.

They will not got rich if they destroy their nature. How they will pay for the services that it provides?

The world's supply of containment elements beryllium, niobium, zirconium, yttrium, and hafnium would be exhausted within ten years to thirty years if we were to produce enough nuclear power plants to supply our 15TW energy diet, assuming all other industrial uses of those elements were to cease and no advances in engineering were to provide alternatives.[0] To obtain one-tenth of our diet, we could get from 100 years to 300 years out of nuclear power under those same assumptions, exhausting those materials for the duration of our species due to irradiation of the containment materials.

If nuclear is a stop-gap measure worth pursuing, then we must face dire resource limitations.

[0] Derek Abbott. "Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?" Proceedings of the IEEE, October 2011

> exhausting those materials for the duration of our species due to irradiation of the containment materials.

Not going to comment on the rest of this, but I'm pretty sure we could reclaim those rare-earths if we really wanted to.

Since speeding up the half-life of the radioactive elements is off the table, what do you propose?

I propose that 99.9% of the rare earths have not undergone nuclear changes, and so could be separated out. If there are +neutron changes that create unstable isotopes, that would be hard - but ones that resulted in fast beta decay or fission would be easy.

Problems with transporting this large quantity of radioactive material (these elements being only a small fraction) to separating facilities and their subsequent handling are obvious, but the stakes are high enough that they're worth considering if what you say is true. Do you you think it's feasible on an industrial scale and without careful laboratory controls?

I think the issues with reprocessing low-level nuclear waste (which is what I think this would be) would be more political and economic than practical. But if we truly were running out of rare earths? Both of those would go away.

That being said, I would rather live near the power plant than the reprocessing facility. MUCH rather. But another few square miles of superfund site is a fantastic trade for the coral reefs of the world.

My heart says no to nuclear power. My brain says yes.

Nuclear power is pretty cool if you don't build the plants in risky areas or ignore safety measures.

I'm a radiation safety officer and the completeness of precautions taken is inversely proportional to the amount of greediness of the company's CEO.

Until that's solved, nuclear power is a double-edged sword, as seen in Chernobyl and Fukushima. There's currently no perfect solution to that energy problem.

What many people don't know: There's more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants because they burn that stuff and blow it into the air.

Fukushima killed 0 people. The evacuation has 2,000 deaths attributed to it.

In comparison the Earthquake and Tsunami killed 15,000 people.

Even setting aside the global effects of climate change, local air polution from coal burning kills 20,000 people a year in Europe alone [0], and 13,000 in the U.S. [1]

[0] http://www.env-health.org/IMG/pdf/heal_report_the_unpaid_hea...

[1] https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheT...

> Fukushima killed 0 people. The evacuation has 2,000 deaths attributed to it.

Why do you think that distinction is important? It's like saying that bikes don't kill people, only the hard surfaces you fall on when you crash do.

Because that's not a problem with nuclear power plants per se, more a problem with chaotically evacuating after a massive tsumani has destroyed mass amounts of infrastructure and killed thousands of people

That type of evacuation in circumstances without the tsunami would not have lead to 2,000 deaths.

> Fukushima killed 0 people

We could repeat this as many times as we want, but will be still a false statement.

If disinformation will continue to be the standard solution for managing all nuclear challenges, we are not ready for an adult discussion about it. Therefore nobody should be allowed to use this technology until we mature as species and we'll be able to focus in the real issues.

How many people did Fukishima kill then?

The answer for this question will not be available until the last Fukushima radiation will decay. Ask again in 100 years.

But in the meanwhile, I'll gave you something to meditate about. After the first 10 months baby mortality increased suddenly in the areas affected by radiation (and only in those areas). More than 1000 newborn died en excess with respect to the areas not affected. I assume that not all of those were evacuated, so evacuation is not the problem here.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044925/

Surprise, surprise, human foetuses are very sensitive to even low "safe?" doses of radiation, leading to miscarriages or lack of inner organs in non-viable newborns.

So, if those babies weren't fu*d by Fukushima, how would you explain that? With this information in mind, do you still consider that areas with and without radiation are equally safe?

Similar thing [1] happened in Berlin 9 months after Chernobyl. More babies than usual/expected were born with Trisomy 21.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/309/6948/158.full

Actually that is not what I searched for, but the only thing I found(after a casual search). I remember it to be more, dispersed all over the former German Democratic Republic which accounted for it, while the Bundesrepublik Deutschland didn't, or at least not at the times.

> Fukushima killed 0 people

Apologies, it caused 1 death. 7 years afterwards.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-45423575

> There's more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants because they burn that stuff and blow it into the air.

Trying to understand this: "more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants"

Is that for the day-to-day operations of a plant? I actually thought nuclear power plants don't emit any radiation in normal operations and only if something bad happens. Or if it's referring to a Fukushima like event how do you compare that? I have a hard time putting these two in relation.

is that for the day-to-day operations of a plant? I actually thought nuclear power plants don't emit any radiation in normal operations

There are naturally occurring particulates of radioactive elements in coal, these are released into the environment in the exhaust. No-one cares about this but they panic over a nuclear power station which actually emits an order of magnitude less radiation.

> but they panic over a nuclear power station

I don't think anyone panics over a nuclear power station that's working. What people are afraid of is a Fukushima / Chernobyl in their backyard and the non-existing long term storage options that are more sophisticated than burying it in the holes.

Is the same kind of radiation?

> What many people don't know: There's more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants because they burn that stuff and blow it into the air.

That's misleading the way you state it. The total amount is not a relevant measure without also knowing the concentration.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

> In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.

> In a 1978 paper for Science, J. P. McBride at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and his colleagues looked at the uranium and thorium content of fly ash from coal-fired power plants in Tennessee and Alabama. To answer the question of just how harmful leaching could be, the scientists estimated radiation exposure around the coal plants and compared it with exposure levels around boiling-water reactor and pressurized-water nuclear power plants.

> The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.

It absolutely is the relevant measure, as anything can be diluted: at Fukushima Tepco is not allowed to relase tritium water into the ocean because its technically radioactive. It would dilute in the oceans and make no actual difference. If they released it, there would be public outcry.

They are instead storing giant amounts of it on site.

Meanwhile coal powerplants throw radiation into air all day and noone raises an eyebrow.

> It would dilute in the oceans and make no actual difference.

Before it got diluted, would it lead to unwanted contamination of fish in the area?

Are we talking about a competent proffeshional, or someone who escaped the asylum?

You don't just dump it all at once at the local beach, you take it out to sea and do the diluting over several months.

You can even release it in the abbysal zone, where hardly anything lives.

Half-life of tritium is 12 years, so it would be mostly gone fairly quickly.

We definitely need a name for this. I will suggest "nuclear terraplanism".

Nuclear terraplanism is defined as refusing to understand basic biology and scientific knowledge known since much before to put men in the moon to promote a nuclear agenda, so the risks remain hidden or are deliberately left out of the master plan.

I'm talking about concepts that each biologist understand like vertical migration or bioaccumulation, or physical properties of water (Warm water ascends to surface... duh, who would suspect that?)

Just fill some old ultra large crude oil carriers [1] which aren't needed anymore with that stuff. Strip them of anything reusable, tow them to the Marianas Trench or some other abyss, hang some weights onto them, maybe giant bags of contaminated topsoil.

Sink.

Kanpai!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker#Size_categories

This is an incredibly irresponsible plan. Give me real solutions or stop this shit. WILL-NOT-WORK.

With this 60's mentality YOU-WILL-END-KILLING-SOMEONE

Can people, in the age if internet, learn a single thing about abyssal ecosystems? Do you know where most (if not all) abyssal fishes born? ALL ARE SURFACE FISHES. All are linked directly with fisheries.

We could achieve the same, just much cheaper, dumping it directly in the New York port.

Nothing lasts forever, even stars die, and in the end the universe itself.

Stop crying. Enjoy your time. The 60ies and 70ies mostly had "the right stuff". What remains now are mostly disturbed head-cases, and way too many of them.

Surely all issues you outlined apply to radioactive particles released by coal power-plants even more?

Example of "warm water rises" is silly - global ocean is not a teapot, water on the abyssal plain is not heated from the bottom.

> Example of "warm water rises" is silly - global ocean is not a teapot

You understand that the concept of radioactivity is linked somehow to release of heat. Do you?

It's not just Tritium. TEPCO, a Japanese power company, estimates that more than 70% of the tanks — that’s 700,000 tons of water — will need secondary treatment before the water is in any state to be released.

Also my guess would be that they lay a pipe from these tanks into the water to dump the 1 million tons, meaning there would be some spots with fairly high concentration for a long time.

We diverged a lot from initial claim of:

"total amount is not a relevant measure .." concentration.

That claim is incorrect - it is obviously possible to release tritium water without causing damage.

The actual management of Fukushima is a rabbithole, but if they spent years containing it, I dont think they will just flush it down a tube and call it a day.

> That claim is incorrect - it is obviously possible to release tritium water without causing damage.

Seems like you somehow misunderstood what I was saying then? You are basically restating my point.

The specifics of what's going on at Fukushima have nothing to do with it. Yes, if they can release contaminated water in a way that a maximal safe concentration is never exceeded, that would be safe.

I did not comment on whether nuclear plants are better or worse than coal plants or anything like that, I just pointed out that the argument about release of radioactive material by coal plants must be made in a different way (if that is possible) if it is to be effective.

NB: Please don't take this personally, but this looks like another example of interpreting a statement based on whether it superficially seems to fit into one's preferred narrative rather than looking at what was actually said. What I actually wrote is simply correct based on basic physics and biology.

I never took it badly - its hard to convey tone with just short text!

I think we were coming from different directions, i see what you are saying.

We don't know how much radiation is set free by nuclear power plants because the highly radioactive nuclear waste they leave behind will be around for tens of thousands of years and we don't know if and when it will contaminate the planet.

We know that waste is sitting in a pond, it's not set free, it's not capable of magically moving itself. We have no idea where any of those coal emissions ended up, and we still have piles of extremely toxic ash just like the nuclear waste.

My inner project manager says "why do all these projects overrun in cost and time" and "don't let the best be the enemy of the good". You can build a lot of renewables in the time it takes to get a nuclear plant up and running.

Yeah i'd prefer renewable energy.. but we've wasted too much time for that.

We are probably too late in general.

> Yeah i'd prefer renewable energy.. but we've wasted too much time for that.

If that is your first thought, why would you even think of nuclear power as an alternative? Hinkley Point C "might" be finished 17 years after inception. If everything goes right from now on. For 9+ ct per kWh.

Ask about why it took so much time.

And consider how German wind farms look fine on net total, but can't provide power to south of Germany, so usually during max production time they pay Netherlands to shut off their wind farms and send the over produced power there.

If there was a real will to build low carbon power, we would be assembling both renewables and nuclear out of mass produced modules

WEll, it's my first thought, and i'm not energy expert.

My brain says human societies cannot guarantee the sort of long term management and integrity required to keep these facilities safe over extremely long lifetimes.

My reasoning says regarless of the technical merits in theory, people have managed to mess every kind of nuclear reactor setup, have been saying for decades "this time with the new design it's different", and have a horrible track record of nuclear waste storage/disposal (or lack thereof).

My reasoning says we have a few thousand tonnes of solid radioactive waste and a few tens of billions of tonnes of gaseous fossil waste that is wreaking havoc planetwide.

California alone, THIS YEAR alone, has lost an area 3 times the size of the Chernobyl exclusion zone due to weather that should be unusual, but won't be. Australia likewise. Forests near me have been lost due to parasites who should be killed by a frost that never came. This is the new normal. This doesn't end.

Those were the two options, and you knew it. Sorry but my life has been stories of people who claim to be environmental and frustrate every single practical effort to reduce emissions, then claim ignorance of the consequences. You knew.

Sorry, but there's a third option: reduce production and consumption (no quick fashion, more durable products, right to repair, penalty on constant ads, etc.), reduce needless transport (e.g. work from home, cut down tourism industry, cut down useless imports/exports, etc.), scale down population growth (this is already happening), and so on.

Unless we curb the endless growth mindset, the world will become a dumpster full of garbage anyway, regardless of the energy source.

And cheapo power will only encourage "more of the same".

I think the concerns around nuclear waste storage are a little overblown. A lot of nuclear waste is stored on site, which is an indication of how incredibly little of it is produced. Compare that to the hundreds of millions of tons (!) of toxic coal ash that are produced and dumped somewhere annually. Surely trading millions of tons of coal ash for a few tons of nuclear waste would be an improvement?

Here's a counter example:

a single person getting access to nuclear waste and e.g. spreading it through a city, can kill tens of thousands.

A little more difficult to do with coal ash or conventional waste...

You are not considering how long this stuff will be around and how dangerous it is.

That's like comparing a stockpile of bombs and comparing it to a single atomic bomb.

A dump of coal ash will contain high levels of lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, and selenium. Which will either slowly leach into ground water and water ways (sometimes abruptly by dam failures) or must be kept contained forever.

Heavy metal toxicity may be less dangerous than contamination with radioactive isotopes. But it's not clear to me that the waste rich in heavy metals is preferable if there's millions of times more of it. Because of the smaller scale, radioactive waste could just be put in a big building with some armed guards and regular inspections. Coal ash cannot be kept contained to that degree.

If you limit to USA, maybe that's true.

France managed to keep all its waste in a small hall thanks to reprocessing. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima involved ancient designs coupled with extra non-reactor errors.

>"mess every kind of nuclear reactor "

There are many reactor designs that have never suffered an accident, and some of them have been around since the 50's. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

>"horrible track record of nuclear waste"

Compared to what? On a normal year air pollution (combustion waste) kills 500,000 - 2,000,000 people, nuclear waste kills 0.

a horrible track record of nuclear waste storage/disposal (or lack thereof)

What is this horrible track record of which you speak? Some examples please.

LMGTFY!

https://earther.gizmodo.com/this-town-didnt-want-to-be-a-rad...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-environment-i...

https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...

https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long...

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-10-30/scotland-expos...

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/un-atomic-agency-probing-del...

https://apnews.com/ba820f02074247fc8486b63b7c87d6cb/russias-...

https://www.upi.com/Energy-News/2008/09/08/Nuclear-waste-sca...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-23...

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/02/oregons-response...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...

and tons more

I agree. The insistence on new designs is making me feel like they still haven't figured out what the real problem is.

> Ms Lights said she has since taken a role at campaign group Environmental Progress UK, whose campaigns include supporting the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk.

So she got a job at a nuclear lobby organisation.

This is great for her. I'm not sure the lobby will able to pay until her retirement but maybe she can make the jump back into renewables.

It seems odd that extinction rebellion need to do crazy stunts like glue themselves to tube trains to get in the papers, yet someone who leaves and says its unreasonable to abandon fossil fuels gets featured across multiple publications.

Why does she wear a kryptonite amulet?

As someone who works in the energy industry: it isn't.

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