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Comment by Archelaos | Hacker News Reader

How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade?

How many more meltdowns per decade?

Everything has downsides, and it has to be compared to the alternatives.

In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning coal or burning Russian gas. (If the Finns dedicated a substantial chunk of their forests to this one generator, they could maybe use biomass.)

Coal kills two orders of magnitude more people per GWh than nuclear--and it does that when operating nominally, not when malfunctioning--and it produces three or four orders of magnitude more waste and more environmental harm from mining.

Russian gas has geopolitical/national security problems.

Biomass is a roundabout way of burning diesel fuel and gas, while degrading and eroding forest soils and polluting watersheds.

The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.

> The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.

That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too. Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this could be correct.

I do find your other points more convincing, though with some "citation needed" wrt. coal.

I can't speak to the meltdown statistic, but for coal: just the burning alone is responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually[1].

And that's before we consider the environmental and health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused) heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a decade ago, and was an ash pond[3].

Edit: I can personally recommend "The Buffalo Creek Disaster" (ISBN 9780394723433) as a writeup by a lawyer involved in a similar coal ash accident (one that directly killed over 100 people).

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_pond

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

WHO has particulate air pollution from fossil and biofuel killing just about 8 million people per year (a Chernobyl of people (short + long term) every 7 hours). Add in that they also cause climate change and non-combustion sources like nuclear, wind, solar, hydro all look pretty darn awesome.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution

No remotely modern reactor has melted down.

Just as you wouldn't factor Amelia Earhart's plane into 2022 air safety prognoses, you shouldn't use Chernobyl reactors for nuclear safety.

That's a great analogy.

I love this reply. We can go even further. If we would approach air safety in such way as Nuclear, then de Havilland DH.106 Comet would be first and last commercial jet.

Nuclear fision reactors safety technology have moved further. There are challenges, but we havent even tried to solve them fully (as we were busy improving gas burning efficiency)

What are the biggest safety improvements that have become mainstream since Chernobyl?

Control rods aren't tipped with iron. Iron has a positive coefficient of reactivity.

The most obvious is that rods naturally fall into water now, which dampens the neutron exchange to a stop, which works automatically in case of power cut (The rest of improvements are about preventing water from overheating and forming H2, and preventing H2 from overpressuring the chambers or exploding, which happened in both Chernobyl and Fukushima).

The improvements were already mainstream before Chernobyl was built. It's all about making reactors tolerant to operator error, and if something does go wrong, make sure it goes wrong slowly, so operators have lots of time to react.

The RBMK reactor is quite an elegant design. Simple plug-and-play architecture for adding and removing fuel and other assemblies while the reactor was running, perfect for things like doping silicon for semiconductors and producing plutonium for weapons. But to get this capability you have to either give up affordability or safety, and they chose to give up safety.

> No remotely modern reactor has melted down

TMI and Fukushima were both "modern" when built. All reactors that melted down did because operators ignored construction, maintenance, or operating safety standards. Other plants not yet melted down show evidence of more construction standard failings: pumps installed despite failing to meet specifications, bolts of substituted, inadequate steel. Diablo Canyon is built directly on a fault line. Now we learn that new EPR plants are inherently flawed, by design.

Ignoring standards is, by the evidence, itself standard procedure for building and operating civil nuke plants. Our global society, as it is conducted, is by the evidence unable to produce and operate a safe civil nuke.

Less radioactive waste than coal power plants, and significant less devastation compared to continuing funding wars by buying gas, oil and coal.

Energy generation is always a trade off. Right now the world is reacting to the fossil fuel funded wars created by one such trade off. We are also in the middle of causing irreversible climate change, which would cause more damage than any amount of meltdowns or nuclear waste could ever get near.

Naturally there are alternatives. If money were no objection then green hydrogen looks pretty nice, and one could always extract heat from the core of the earth as long the technology was safe enough to do so. As soon we have a technology that get proven to be cheaper, safer and more scalable than nuclear we should all switch to that. Buying natural gas from Russia is for multiple obvious reason not that.

> Less radioactive waste than coal power plants

Less radioactive EMISSION during NORMAL OPERATION than coal plants (and I think that ignores radioactivity released in uranium mining). The amount of radioactivity in the spent fuel rods of a nuclear plant is vastly higher than that liberated by a coal plant.

It is estimated that around 1/5 of people living around a coal ash lake has gotten cancer. Thankfully there are no such number for people living near nuclear plants, or around sites of nuclear waste disposal. The amount of people who has died to radiation thanks to coal vastly outnumber the amount of people who has died to nuclear waste. If we including mining, coal mining is a symbol of one of the most dangerous job a person could do, and it has harvested many more souls than uranium mining.

Coal ash is nasty stuff, but that's very likely due to chemical toxicity (things like arsenic, especially in Appalachian coal), not radioactivity.

BTW, your chance of dying from cancer in your lifetime is about 20%, so I'm not sure that the 1/5 figure you gave there means anything.

I don't think they were saying that the radioactivity is causing the cancer in those 1/5 people. I read it as two separate points: coal plants simultaneously emit more radiation than nuclear plants, and coal plants cause more cancer via the other chemicals and rare earth elements they emit.

Yes. one of those other chemicals is arsenic which has a tendency to end up in peoples drinking water.

There is a place in the US that has a rather peculiar name of Cancer Alley. It is not a nuclear testing area, nuclear waste deposit area or area for nuclear plants. It is an area know for its petrochemical plants. It illustrate quite well the difference of nuclear waste that people are scared of, and fossil fuel waste that people accept as just normal part of life.

Spent fuel rods are a much safer destination for radioactive material, much better than particulate matter released into the atmosphere.

Alternatives like coal give off substantially more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant does under normal operations.

That's only if you ignore the radioactivity in uranium mine tailings.

That was already in the environment to begin with.

It was in the environment already in the same sense the uranium in coal was also in the environment already.

Maybe the problem is the uranium mine tailings are safely off in some poor country, not in the US where the coal ash would be?

They're in the US: https://www.energy.gov/em/moab-uranium-mill-tailings-remedia...

Most (99% as of 2018) uranium production is outside the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...

Very recently: U.S. utilities push White House not to sanction Russian uranium, see https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti...

Moreover the more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.

Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050")...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

The uranium ore was deep underground, not inhaled by nearby residents as wind blew it off the tailings pile.

"How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade?"

The popular YouTube channel The B1M has an interesting video on how Finland is tackling nuclear waste:

Finland might have solved nuclear power's biggest problem (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0

Nuclear power's "biggest problem" has been solved for decades. You can put everything in giant metal canisters and sink it into bedrock. It's vastly more expensive than doing nothing, but now that politicians are going to be held accountable for their fuckups they'll allocate the money.

And even after all that it's still far less expensive than remediating coal output.

Each and every time someone claims that we can perfectly predict bedrock future for hundreds of thousands years to come I have to remind us that plate tectonics only was admitted by geophysicists during the 1960's.

Hoping to know enough and for sure about all this is... a hope.

Stating that we know what our descendants will need/do in a so distant future is even more funny.

That's why you put it in an inches thick metal case and drop it down low. What, you think they just didn't consider that?

Such a major parameter wasn't considered 60 years ago... others ignored pertinent facts probably exists. My point was about what we (for the time being) ignore, albeit it is pertinent.

They "considered" such facts using a somewhat light approach: 'Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed amazement that the US Department of Energy had only just carried out the "11th hour" drilling tests.

  "It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven't done the technical work they should have done years ago," he told the paper.

  "It's going to have to cause some change of the design in the final analysis. It's going to impact the safety case."'

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/25/usa

Oops...

They also "considered" those metal containers as adequate during the 1990's, then... (what, you think "they" are omniscient?)... problems related to brines and high temperature arose...

https://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/board/mrs_duquette...

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0335/ML033500420.pdf

Oops...

Nuclear waste takes almost no space at all. meltdowns are extremely rare.

And heat-polluted waste waters? People keep pretending there are no externalities.

If the biggest externality is heated water in a subarctic climate, or nuclear waste that gets stored on-site indefinitely in casks and produces no notable leaks or accidents (like has been done in the US for a long time now), the externalities are way less than literally any other form of energy production. That includes Dams, solar power, geothermal, wind, you name it.

What prevents heated waste water from being used for…heat? Surely Finland uses central heating plants that pump hot water throughout the city (or maybe that’s just a Chinese/Russian thing?). What makes waste heat water less suited to heating, higher entropy?

I think it just not hot enough after electricity production. So temperature is not high enough after it passes through turbines. Specially due to distances involved.

Combined Heat and Power in Finland is very common, much more so than in rest of Europe. 80% of the fossil fuel power plants output both electricity and heated water. Compared to (quick googling) 8% in the US and 11% in EU.

Fear of nuclear power. People don't want water heated by it in their homes. So it is not done. It's not a purely rational thing.

The plants are also located away from cities, so utilizing the waste heat for district heating is uneconomical.

No, people aren’t pretending that. Heat pollution in water is a tiny local issue compared to global warming.

It’s like complaining that a wool blanket is itchy so it might be better to catch hypothermia and die.

> And heat-polluted waste waters?

That's hardly unique to nuclear plants; in particular, coal plants typically have lower thermal efficiency.

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