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Comment by variaga | Hacker News Reader

Yes, only 3 incidents - but in 35 years we haven't managed to clean up the mess made by the first one. Chernobyl has been a hazard now for 4x longer than the reactor was in service.

That's the thing I would like to see from the pro-nuclear side - not more assurances that modern reactors are safe, but a demonstration that if something does go wrong, we could actually clean it up and it won't become another permanent blight on the landscape.

Fully clean up Chernobyl (or Hanford, Washington, which wasn't an "incident" but is still a radioactive mess) and I'll support more nuclear reactors 100%.

But I want a better remediation plan than "bulldoze all the radioactive stuff into a pile, pour a bunch of concrete on top and wait for a few centuries".

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Nobody is ever going to clean up Chernobyl because it happened in a location where the surrounding land is basically forest so there is no real incentive for anybody to want to allocate resources to do anything about it.

Hanford is basically the same thing except that the US actually cares enough to do something about it, just not enough to do it quickly.

The cleanup for Fukushima is likely to be completed before either of them because it's a location that people actually care about cleaning up.

If reports have to be believed, they’ll “clean up” fukushima by just... offloading all their shit in the ocean and hoping for the best. Reassuring. /s

Do you realize that a single reprocessing plant releases more than 10x more tritium in the ocean yearly than the amount currently contained at Fukushima? This has been happening safely for decades, under constant monitoring for impact on fish and other ocean life. The whole recent "Fukushima tritium release" news cycle is entirely FUD, and all nuclear safety experts agree that there is basically no risk involved. Please stop propagating the FUD.

(https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/25/national/social... has some of that information, but you can easily find more refs comparing tritium amounts at Fukushima vs. normal release at facilities like La Hague.)

Reprocessing plants are indeed much worse than nuclear power plants in terms of day-to-day radioactive release and many other safety aspects - which is why I get a little perplexed when nuclear proponents keep on pushing them as the solution to the nuclear waste problem. It's only waste because we foolishly don't use it as fuel, they say, but the processes for doing that are an absolute disaster (and also a nuclear weapons proliferation risk to boot).

They want to dump a tiny, tiny fraction of the radioactive material released from Fukushima. The water that they cooled the busted cores with picked up all sorts of crap, and they filtered out most of it. Tritium is really hard to remove though, so the cost/benefit ratio there is way higher than would justify removing it.

There have also been near misses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...

Had that liner perforated, high pressure fluid from the core would have jetted straight up into the control rod mechanisms.

(and that was just the fifth most serious event at the time since 1979, the first being the TMI accident in 1979.)

From your link:

> In January 2003, the plant's private network became infected with the slammer worm, which resulted in a five-hour loss of safety monitoring at the plant ....

What.

Well, we should also avoid hydro dams as well if we're going to go by the metric of one disaster is too many:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436

And this sort of ordeal may be way more of a concern with a nuke plant.

Well said. How the consensus on this thread ignores that huge point, I’m not sure.

It’s like people want to introduce more black swan possibilities in a world already inundated with them.

Look at the Hambach brown coal site in Germany. It’s 45 sq km of environmental destruction. Chernobyl’s concrete coffin is barely 1 sq km. And the rest of the area is returning to nature. Animals, at least aren’t affected by radiation anywhere near as badly as originally thought.

Large animals, and while the area is acting as somewhat of a refuge for them they depend on mobility from surrounding areas with more ordinary ecology.

Smaller forms of life have been profoundly impacted, and microbial life is so void there organic matter does not break down at regular rates. This has resulted in a buildup of petrified, dead organic matter that poses an elevated risk of wildfire. If/when it happens, radioactive material will be ejected into the atmosphere from the site once again.

Long-term research is showing that some medium-sized forms of life which we expected to do badly, such as mice and voles, seem to have some inherent resilience to radiation exposure in the area. On the other hands similar sized animals such as birds show a significantly higher rate of abnormalities.

'There's wildlife in chernobyl' is often mentioned to argue that we overestimate the harm from nuclear incidents - The reality is more complex.

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