Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants
theregister.com
theregister.com
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2111833119]
From the Abstract: "Here, we compare three distinct SMR designs to an 1,100-MWelec pressurized water reactor in terms of the energy-equivalent volume, (radio-)chemistry, decay heat, and fissile isotope composition of (notional) high-, intermediate-, and low-level waste streams. Results reveal that water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30...."
Lead author credentials: [https://fsi.stanford.edu/people/lindsay-krall]
Thing is coal doesn't ostensibly have a nuclear waste disposal problem because it just dumps it into the atmosphere, the worst possible disposal means. Shits in everybody's mouth basically, worse than that actually, huge ultimate cause of cancer. Small nuclear reactors could instead vaporize the "waste" and boom, problem solved, by the same standards used by those demonizing them.
Now on the other hand, what if you mandated height limit on smokestacks? If a cone were drawn from its tip at a 3° angle, the coal plant must own all the land at the base of that cone and use it only for that smokestack. It can always build a smokestack, it must simply be shorter. Stop making the problem seem so diffuse and difficult to measure, make a big red mark on the cancer charts, that'll address their nuclear waste pretty quick. Or tax the revenues of the plant based on the height of the smokestack, 90 meters, 90%, 10 meters, 10%. Hey, no smokestack no taxes, why don't they try that for size since they hate taxes so much?
So come up with a cone angle and a max height.
Then we'll see who the big polluter is.
Also: I divine coal pays out Greenpeace and other green activists to get them to demonize nuclear power. Germany's denuclearization in favor of coal was a huge coup[1]. Coal basically doesn't care about green energy provided it's not economically viable, then aw hell no. Because if it's not economically viable it increases demand for coal in the part of the economy that must pick up the slack for inviable energy production. Whereas nuclear is economically viable so it just kills coal plants, like serial killers of coal plants (and internally coal calls nuclear serial rapists).
Montgomery Burns, Mr. Burns, is an autobiographical projection of coal plant owners onto nuclear plant owners. The main bad guy in the Simpsons is a confession by the coal industry. Real nuclear plant owners for starters know everything about the plant, and secondly don't do smear campaigns like Mr. Burns does nearly as much as those coming in the opposite direction, the Simpsons first and foremost. That level.
They're pretty quiet spesh since the Simpsons started. And do everything to avoid accidents, cool things. So for one, using really old software and hardware because it's never failed and likely never will, air gapped. Better algorithms, I can vouch. Going for reliability all the way, getting the absolute best welders (nuclear welding is the highest paid specialty in welding). Making investments in more safety. Using Steampunk technology, no really, so in England they used brass and steam valves and regulators but that look like 19th century Victorian steam power plants, because that is not susceptible to eg hacking and electromagnetic pulse-type problems from the atoms. Safety contests with nuclear operators from all over the world (China competes very hard in these).
And they've never fucked up on American soil! The Simpsons has I think more nuclear accidents, leaks, exfiltrations of nuclear material (like in every single opening sequence) than...History in total, by a huge factor, by a factor of 10 in my opinion. The Simpsons insult nuclear engineering in absolutely literally every single fucking episode, every single one, no exceptions no apologies, 728 episodes hundreds of hours of slander. Turns out it's a confession of coal telling people whom they really are.
[1] And it's wrong to expect there not be nuclear accidents, that's insulting. Of course there will be! It's a reaction from coal whose accidents, or lessons as I call them, were longer ago.
And suppose there is a nuclear accident, another one in two years. You know what happens then? Nature reserve, because the only animal that really suffers from the resulting radiation is the animal whose exclusion allows every other organism in it to prosper (note that human lifespan telescoped very dramatically in very little time unlike that of other animals, which if long-lived have been so for much longer and have better adaptations to cancer). The universal predator is absent. Chernobyl is beautiful with life at this point, Fukushima also, and the best thing is nobody will encroach on them with eg bribery or corruption, they're No Man's Land indefinitely.
Sadly, humans have an inability to make meaningful comparisons between statistically remote probabilities. Nuclear power will always have an uphill battle convincing the general public that it is safe because its accidents are so horrific and outside of the normal scope of experience of humans (vs coal, which is just fire that everyone has personal experience and understanding of). It may well be that this perception was in part cemented in the mind of humanity by the horror of the use of the first nuclear bombs. Had nuclear power been introduced to the world in a more peaceful fashion without such devastation, perhaps its trajectory in the public eye would have been different.
Now fire? Personal experience, yes, I have personal experience. But coal fire? Fireblast? Firestorm? What kind of fire? Gunpowder? What is oxidizing, if it is even oxidization, are we calling it fire when it's a fluorine compound reaction?
So coal power has much worse smokestacks than nuclear's steam towers, those smokestacks have to be sky-high to lie about the harm they produce. The height of the stacks is the true extent to which the lies are piled higher and deeper. Illustrates the point of the harm, otherwise why use anything, just a bonfire.
What is the purpose of a chimney? It's just fire. No big deal if the smoke just stays there, right?
Yes there is, you start coughing harder and harder, and if you ignore that, you get worse, if you're trapped you could die. Smoke kills. Generally houses on fire kill with the smoke, not with the heat or flame.
And yeah one little cigarette can produce a lot of smoke, enough for people to complain and tell you to put it out, or give you a fine or punish you. So then a ton of carbon, with some amount of phosphorus, uranium, thorium and radium in it? They combine in the combustion in all kinds of ways. 100x more nuclear pollution, from fire, than a nuclear plant. The smoke from a cigarette in fact contains radioactive phosphorus from the fertilizer and radium because of the hair on the tobacco leaves and roots, that's what gives cancer the most. And how many cigarettes can a man smoke in his lifetime? 40 grams per box of cigarette, like 200,000 cigarettes is 10,000 boxes, that's less than a ton of cigarette filling. Not even getting all that smoke, that's enough to kill a man. Plus second hand smoke, and they're morally equivalent to coal.
You forgot about mercury and arsenic.