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legulere

Your opponents of course seem ignorant if you turn them into straw-men.

There are legitimate concerns against nuclear:

Lack of a proper handling of nuclear waste, which is pretty much impossible given the timeframe.

Weakness to improper handling. Human error is very common and should not be able to lead to catastrophic events.

Weakness to unknown unknowns. Chernobyl and Fukushima haven’t been predicted, we’re not able to see all failure modes.

Usefulness of civilian technology in the spread of nuclear weapons. Just think of why the US keeps Iran from building up a civilian nuclear industry.

Expensiveness. Cost is mostly bound by construction costs, which rose faster than inflation.

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Waste is easily the biggest straw-man concern there is against nuclear. The entirety of the nuclear waste produced by US nuclear grid electric power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. We test waster supplies for uranium already because naturally occurring uranium sometimes gets into drinking water and it has to be filtered out [2].

Burying spent nuclear fuel in bedrock, with no aquifer poses zero risk. The only way it's getting out is by deliberate human intervention. Any nefarious group that has the capability of doing this could inflict far more harm by conventional means. And even if it somehow, by some mysterious force, leaks into the water supply we have infrastructure to detect it and filter it.

We dispose of materials far more toxic than nuclear waste on a regular basis.

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

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

> The entirety of the nuclear waste produced by US nuclear grid electric power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high

No, this is just spent fuel. There's a lot more to nuclear waste than spent fuel.

Correct, the bulk of nuclear waste is from nuclear weapons development and manufacture. In power generation the containment vessel and cooling water also get irradiated. But that's not persistent waste, and doesn't require long term storage.

How dangerous is low level waste? Based on what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem super radioactive in itself, but it sounds like some of it may have a lot of “problematic” material like dust.

Hey, aren't you the guy who was saying that solar-powered electric freight trains would only be able to run at night? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240032

I agree that nuclear waste is probably a manageable problem, but not for the reasons you say. "Zero risk" is not a thing that actually exists anywhere ever. "Bedrock with no aquifer" is a thing that exists, but it's not what you're looking for: the rockhead under a desert, for example, is bedrock with no aquifer, and it's commonly very porous and water-permeable. What you want is impermeable rock that will stay that way, like a salt deposit, which is indeed pretty safe—many salt domes have successfully kept petroleum or natural gas from leaking to the surface for 300 million years or more.

The special difficulty of nuclear waste is not that it's especially toxic—far more toxic materials certainly exist, even commonplace materials like hydrofluoric acid, hydrazine, and tetraethyllead. But if you pour hydrofluoric acid on the ground in most places, it becomes completely nontoxic within a few minutes. Hydrazine loses most of its toxicity if you just set it on fire, although burning it to totally nontoxic materials requires a little more care. Tetraethyllead also loses most of its toxicity when you burn it, though the resulting lead compounds were still toxic enough to cause a worldwide crime wave lasting decades.

What's special about nuclear waste is that no such simple means of detoxification exists. The only way to detoxify nuclear waste is with another nuclear reactor—and that's not only in need of additional development to bring it from the laboratory to production, it's also commonly prohibited because of proliferation concerns.

The real risk with nuclear waste, though, is not that disposing of it safely is rocket science; it's that the people who are in charge of it in countries like the US are the same ridiculous bumbling assclowns who've bungled the covid pandemic so badly. (Did you know that, though China was vaccinating college students last July, 1000 people a day are dying from covid in the US?) Have you read about the cat-litter explosion at WIPP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20... Someone used "an organic cat litter" in place of "inorganic cat litter" to immobilize the nuclear waste, so it caught on fire.

Fortunately, all of this is moot; as I said, nuclear energy is now so much more expensive than solar energy that there's no longer any reason to use it except in a few special niches, and that's unlikely to change for decades. Enjoy your Video Toaster.

The comment said that solar powered trains would only be able to run at night if wind generation is sufficient to power them in the absence of solar power - at least not without massive amounts of storage to account for this intermittency.

Regardless, I'm not sure why the inability to detoxify waste is such a concern. First of all, we do have the ability to reclaim >95% of it through reprocessing. This isn't detoxification per-se, but does represent a sizeable reduction in the amount of waste. And the remaining waste is stored underground. The danger of uranium entering the water supply already exists from naturally occurring uranium. The additional risk presented by waste buried in a known location, with no groundwater contamination risk is zero. Sure, if you want to be pedantic, it's not exactly zero: some nefarious group could dig it up and use it as a weapon. But any group with that level of capability could easily deal more damage through conventional means - so for all intents and purposes the risk is zero.

Aha, thanks for clearing that up.

I think probably trains will have an easier time carrying batteries than electric cars do: a one-tonne diesel internal-combustion-engine car might get (in medieval units) 40 miles per gallon of fuel, while diesel freight trains routinely get 480 miles per tonne-gallon. Teslas need to recharge about every 500 miles, so we should expect battery-powered electric freight trains with the same battery mass fraction as a Tesla to need to swap batteries roughly every 6000 miles or 10000 km. A night train making it through the night isn't going to be a problem.

If that's true, then why haven't batteries already replaced diesel engines in diesel-electric locomotives? I suspect it's a matter of battery costs and network effects. A gallon of diesel is 146 MJ, so a tonne-mile on a freight train costs 300 kJ, or 189 kJ/tonne/km in non-medieval units. Lead-acid batteries only give you roughly 20 kJ/US$, and low-power lithium-ion batteries are usually more like 10 kJ/US$. You get a multiplier of about 3 because diesel engines are typically about 35% efficient and electric motors are about 95% efficient, so you only need 70 kJ/tonne/km. But 500 km of range would still cost you 175 grand of lead-acid batteries for every 100-tonne railroad car in the train, which more than doubles the cost of the train. If you use lithium-ion instead, it's twice that: US$350k a car. So, expect this to take a significant amount of investment, and therefore take a couple of decades—if it happens at all, because quite possibly it's all-around cheaper to use cheap solar energy to produce ammonia or hydrocarbons and burn those on the train.

The inability to detoxify waste is a concern because detoxifying is what we normally do with hazardous waste. Learning to handle hazardous waste in a different way is risky and will involve some accidents. I mean, it already has.

> The comment said that solar powered trains would only be able to run at night if wind generation is sufficient to power them in the absence of solar power

To be perfectly fair, while that's presumably what you meant—and it's a sensible point—what you said was, "making it so that trains only run at night and on windy days".

Yes, trains can only run at night when it's also windy. I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that solar powered trains can only run at night, short of willful misinterpretation.

Well, if something runs only at night and on windy days, that means it runs at night, regardless of whether there is wind, and that it runs on windy days—which might mean "24-hour periods that have a lot of wind", thus also including the night, or "non-night periods that have a lot of wind", due to the semantic ambiguity of the English word "day". In this case, though, the ambiguity doesn't matter; it comes to the same thing. But the meaning is different from your intended meaning.

A different way of stating the meaning of "only at night and on windy days" is "always, except in the daytime when it isn't windy". But of course the daytime when it isn't windy is precisely when it's actually possible to run solar-powered trains without batteries, at least if you run overhead powerlines or a third rail down the whole train track.

What you meant was "trains run at night only on windy days", which could also be validly phrased (at the cost of some ambiguity) as "trains only run at night on windy days". But the extra "and" that you inserted in the middle of the phrase made it impossible to read the phrase as having your intended meaning. Perhaps you hadn't noticed the extra "and" when I quoted it in my earlier comment above, accounting for your confusion. Or perhaps you just don't speak English very well. Which is okay! I'm a second-language speaker too, and it's hard at times! But it's not a valid reason to accuse people of willfully misinterpreting you.

Why on earth would it make sense to think that someone is saying solar powered trains only run at night? I'm a native English speaker so I don't think you're in any position to try and lecture me.

It's absolutely a valid reason to accuse you of willful misinterpretation, especially when you bring this up more than a month later in an unrelated topic. Your reply was downvoted with good reason.

I brought it up precisely because what you were saying didn't make sense, because what you were saying in this thread didn't make sense either. The reason I thought you were saying what you, in fact, said, even though it wasn't what you meant, was that it appeared on this website under your name.

It seems like you have a long history of not worrying about whether the things you're saying don't make sense, and you're continuing it. Instead of responding, "Oh, I see what you mean, you're right, I actually did say the opposite of what I meant—thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify and taking so much time to explain at such great length what was in the end very simple and obvious," you're responding with some kind of chimpanzee status hierarchy nonsense about being "lectured" and what "position" I'm in. Instead of responding, "Oh, you're right about the 'bedrock with no aquifer' thing, that was totally wrong and didn't actually make sense," you just ignored it.

I guess you're just trying to score some kind of points rather than learn what is true and help others do the same?

These "concerns" show lack of understanding of current nuclear industry capabilities and realistic undestanding of real and potential disasters.

> Lack of a proper handling of nuclear waste

"Nuclear waste" handling is very non-lacking since 40's, there is no real problem with it. It is a contentious topic because NIMBY and because anti-nuclear propaganda, but not a real problem that needs to be solved. There is very little of such waste. It is already being stored in acceptable way - power plants have water pools for the hot stuff and storage facilities for the less hot stuff. The hot stuff becomes less hot after some time. France has a process in operation for converting the waste into glass and storing it safely in casks. No, keeping the waste away from people determined to dig up spent nuclear fuel for 100000 years isn't a real problem that needs to be solved.

> Weakness to improper handling. Human error is very common and should not be able to lead to catastrophic events.

Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are very small when you compare them to other industrial accidents, like chemical plants or oil/gas. People are dumb and sometimes they cause disasters like these. Many times bigger disasters (in terms of deaths, property damage) happen without people having a say, like tsunamis, hurricanes, volcano eruptions. Nuclear energy is much safer, in terms of deaths per kWh, than solar or wind energy.

> Usefulness of civilian technology in the spread of nuclear weapons.

All big countries where more nuclear energy will be most important in dropping the CO2 production already have nuclear weapons and are not going to get rid of them. Spread of nuclear weapons is not a relevant argument against most of new nuclear plants, because the weapons are already there.

> current nuclear industry capabilities

If I talked about that I would write way more negatively. Olkiluoto 3 is such a shut show for instance.

> there is no real problem with it.

You need to keep it from polluting the environment like the ground water, which is very hard to do on a geological timescale. Containers can rust or get crushed by forces. Not even saline formations are safe from water entry. Also you need to stop mishandling like dumping it in the Mediterranean like what happen end in Italy in the 80s.

> There is very little of such waste.

1 kg per capita per year like in France is not very little. And they don’t have any permanent storage location for that.

> Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are very small when you compare them to other industrial accidents, like chemical plants or oil/gas.

Which industrial accident has turned multiple hundreds to thousands of square kilometers into exclusion zones for decades of not centuries?

And we have been lucky that those accidents happened in relatively uninhabited areas.

> Nuclear energy is much safer, in terms of deaths per kWh, than solar or wind energy.

That’s both wrong and irrelevant as lack of deaths are just one aspect of safety.

> All big countries where more nuclear energy will be most important in dropping the CO2 production already have nuclear weapons

The world is not just 8 countries. Especially Africa will play a huge role when its population will get wealthier and consume more.

> very hard to do on a geological timescale.

Yes, but geological timescale (millions of years) is an absurd straw man. We have no influence on what happens with anything on that timescale. Civilizations come and go in thousands of years. On scale of millions of years various different disasters are much more impactful and inevitable, both human made (nuclear war) and natural (volcanoes, tsunamis, asteroid impacts). Little waste contaminating ground water a little is of NO concern to us.

> they don’t have any permanent storage location for that.

But it is very little, when compared to other kinds of waste. We can continue storing it at few special sites/pools/warehouses for hundreds of years like we do now. Of course, at some point putting the hot stuff in the ground becomes preferable.

France does not have Cigeo yet but it is in the works. "Permanent" is a bit too ambitious word, but long-term storage is planned. It is long-term, so there is no rush.

> into exclusion zones for decades of not centuries?

I meant in terms of deaths. Direct deaths due to Chernobyl are in the order of 60 people. Long term impact on deaths is very unclear and estimations are contested.

Exclusion zone due to Chernobyl accident was defined as 30km-radius disk centered at the plant. Radiation contamination is going down and overall long-term effect on ecosystem there is deemed positive by scientists expert on this area.

Creating an "exclusion zone" isn't exactly the worst thing that could happen in an industrial disaster. For example, the Bhopal gas disaster directly killed thousands of people and harmed half a million. Much more devastating.

> That’s both wrong and irrelevant as lack of deaths are just one aspect of safety.

Are you sure you want to subscribe under this ridiculous statement? If it is one aspect of safety, a very important one I might add, how is it irrelevant? Also, where did you read this fact about deaths/kWh of nuclear energy is wrong? It is a broadly accepted easily findable fact.

> The world is not just 8 countries. Especially Africa will play a huge role when its population will get wealthier and consume more.

"Will". Do you realize most of coal/gas power production happens in nuclear weapons wielding countries? What will happen with Africa is not clear now, they may build more nuclear or more coal/gas, time will tell.

> Direct deaths due to Chernobyl are in the order of 60 people. Long term impact on deaths is very unclear and estimations are contested ... the Bhopal gas disaster directly killed thousands of people and harmed half a million. Much more devastating

100, not 60, and while it's true that the long-term deaths from Chernobyl are "contested", the controversy is about whether only 4000 people have died from it so far, or more like 60,000 people. 350,000 people lost their homes.

In Bhopal, by comparison, the official death toll was 2259, but other estimates go as high as 16000. More to the point, though, almost 2 million people still live in Bhopal, more than before the disaster. Nobody lives in Pripyat now. Before the disaster 14000 people lived in Chernobyl itself; now 1000 people live there—state employees with short tours of duty, whose job it is to keep everybody else out of the Exclusion Zone except for brief, strictly monitored visits.

I don't think this supports a judgment that the Bhopal disaster—the worst such accident so far, despite the existence of many more pesticide plants and similar facilities than nuclear power plants—was "much more devastating".

But the whole safety debate is a moot point, since solar energy is so much cheaper than nuclear now that nuclear will be relegated to niche roles for decades.

Immediate damage on lives was much bigger with Bhopal, long-term it is hard to say and let's not pretend we can analyze it here. It is hard to compare long-term effects between Ukraine and India and how much those effects were due to disasters and how much due to botched response. Different political system, population density and moving options for people.

My point is accidents other than nuclear with similar death counts do happen, thousands or tens of thousands people die or have to relocate. Natural disasters happen too - the tsunami responsible for Fukushima disaster killed 15000 people.

These kinds of disasters are immense and bad, but the damages are quite contained and can't dictate energy policy all around the world. The existence and non-preventability of similary big natural disasters shows that the narrative about nuclear energy being too dangerous is unsubstantiated. Chernobyl disaster is a lesson, but it is quite limited in scope - it is about pitfalls of soviet-like safety-neglecting attitudes, putting people who do not know how the reactor works in charge. Much less on dangers of nuclear energy.

> Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are very small when you compare them to other industrial accidents, like chemical plants or oil/gas

Hmm, it's been 35 years and При́пʼять is still uninhabited—and, I think, uninhabitable—as part of the 2600-square-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Which chemical-plant or oil/gas industrial accidents are you thinking of that have rendered 5000 square kilometers uninhabitable for 35 years, or rendered 2600 square kilometers uninhabitable for 70 years? I'm supposing that "very small when you compare" implies at least a factor of 2—more likely a factor of 10?

I can't even think of any major wars that have had such an effect, although it's easy to think of wars and accidents that have killed more people. Chernobyl killed 100 people more or less immediately and several thousand more people over the years. The Fukushima accident itself has only killed one person so far, but the evacuation (to keep people from being killed by radioactivity) killed 2200 more people.

On the afternoon that При́пʼять was evacuated in 01986, it was the ninth atomgrad; today there are 11 atomgrads in Russia (ЗАТО under the authority of Росатом), producing 20% of Russia's electricity. If we had five times as many atomgrads, or if we had as many atomgrads as we have sites of chemical plants, how many uninhabitable atomic Exclusion Zones would we have by now? Would it be more, or—thanks to the extra experience—fewer? Surely some would be smaller than Chernobyl's, some larger.

I think there probably would have been a few hundred thousand more people dead in such accidents, and a few dozen more radioactive nature preserves like the Chernobyl zone, before we figured it out, and that would have been better than the global-warming catastrophe we were on track for a decade ago. For better or worse, though, that wasn't the way things went. Instead now we have solar energy that's not just cheaper than nuclear but cheaper than coal.

I meant in terms of number of deaths and significantly harmed people.

Exclusion zone is a human concept for human inhabitation, it does not mean the zone is lost from the map of Ukraine. According to scientists that study the zone, for the non-human ecosystem the benefits of people moving out outweigh the damage now. In time, the radiation will go down so people can live there. Some already do, even though it is illegal.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns...

> I meant in terms of number of deaths and significantly harmed people.

Okay, well, aside from the 4000–60'000 people who died from the Chernobyl disaster, 350'000 people permanently lost their homes, so they were significantly harmed. What "other industrial accidents, like chemical plants or oil/gas" is that "very small" compared to? What non-nuclear industrial accidents have permanently uprooted (or otherwise "significantly harmed") 700'000 or more people, wiping out entire centuries-old communities? Even the Beirut Blast (300,000 homeless, 210 dead, 7500 injured) and the Bhopal disaster (2500–16000 dead, 500'000 injured) didn't manage that.

It's probably true that the deer, rabbits, and black mold are better off, even if the people aren't, and that might be a good reason for deer, rabbits, and black mold to build nuclear power plants. But it's not a very convincing reason for people to build nuclear power plants.

(Global warming was, though, or should have been, until we had the better alternatives we have now.)

I agree entirely. Chernobyl and Fujisima are examples of old, obsolete, and flawed tech that has long been ironed out and removed. With the new rectifications on technology, international incidents like Fukushima would never have happened. Also, new reactors produce considerably less waste than old ones, making it a manageable problem. Finally, Nuclear does not emit greenhouse gases; It has always been “clean” in that sense

Anti-nuclear activists aren't my opponents. They're the opponents of Amiga fans. You know. The people I'm making fun of.

> There are legitimate concerns against nuclear:

Yeah, I agree. There were legitimate reasons not to buy an Amiga, too: it was expensive, it didn't run WordPerfect or Microsoft Flight Simulator, and then it stagnated. Probably 20 or 10 years ago the legitimate reasons not to use nuclear were less important than global warming.

Now they're irrelevant because nobody is going to use nuclear anyway except for things like submarines because it's too expensive.

> Chernobyl and Fukushima haven’t been predicted

Hmm, are you suggesting (non-gas-cooled) US and UK reactors were designed with a negative void coefficient without knowing that this was a safety feature? I think that in fact Chernobyl was predicted but happened anyway. Similarly the power company at Fukushima was found guilty of predicting the problem and then not preventing it.

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