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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons.

That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the areas around them are contaminated.

If you want to use this as an argument for the safety of nuclear waste disposal, you would have to explain why the armed force's problems with waste disposal are specific to them and will never spread to regulated private industry. (P.S. the history of that is not great either and you might end up arguing that something which has already happened never will.)

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>That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the areas around them are contaminated.

No, it's a plain statement, not a "tactic". Power plant waste is different from weapons waste, and disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem. She's talking about power plant waste because one major barrier to replacing climate changing coal fired power plants is the usual indoctrination people face regarding nuclear waste, with no distinction drawn between power plants and nuclear weapons waste.

Talking about weapons reactors or the military not disposing of chemicals properly is entirely irrelevant to the article and the discussion at hand.

>Power plant waste is different from weapons waste, and disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem.

If power plant waste was handled as badly as weapons waste was historically, it would be a problem. That's all I am saying, really.

Yes, but that's irrelevant. If prescription drugs were handled as badly as weapons waste was historically, it would be a problem too.

Same for e.g. plastic waste, food waste, or just about anything else. Military developing weapons tends to make a mess, which is why most countries are trying to change that.

Separating plutonium is separating plutonium. It's filthy no matter why you do it, and the past military fuckups are used to cover for the ongoing civilian fuckups.

This is conveniently forgotten whenever the subject of breeders is used to deflect from the lack of U235

> disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem.

Germany has been trying to find a location to safely dispose power plant waste for about 40 years or so. All the solutions so far didn't work out [1], they are still searching.

If you have a recommendation that actually works, I am sure they'd be happy to hear it...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)#Endlage...

The "Asse II" mine case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

For the period 1906 to 1988, when Asse II was an operational salt mine, there were 29 documented water breaches.[27] They were sometimes successfully sealed off, partly dry or sometimes with negligible inflows (less than 0.5 cubic metres (130 US gal) per day).[28]

Between 1988 and 2008 32 new entry points were recorded. In 1996, the BFS notified the Bundesumweltministerium that there was a risk of severe radioactive contamination if the mine ran full of water and that further investigation was urgently required.

Hardly a long term solution.

Or more importantly, would the same motivators for the military exist for private industries. My example would not be nuclear, but waste in general. I did 5 years in the Navy. Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food waste. Plastic can't, batteries cant, etc. Do batteries and cut up fuel hoses find their way into the ocean? Yes. Is it because the Navy said so, no. From what I noticed, its about how easy it is to dispose of properly and you could notice it. When someone who made the process easier to dispose of batteries properly, most to everyone did it properly. When they changed out who was in charge of the trash detail and the new person in charge of the trash detail damn near required a 7 page dissertation and interrogation to allow you to turn in your dead batteries, people threw that shit in the ocean late at night when no one was out and about on the skin of the ship.

My point being, usually when waste disposal is an issue in the military, its not necessarily because the military doesnt care. Its because the process to do things properly became to grueling for people to put up with (not right, but it happens). Sometimes that grueling process is from big Navy, sometimes it is because DC1 had a bad day and making your day a pain in the ass somehow makes him feel better.

So, what you are expressing is one perspective on accidents, and it's true - the one guy who cares about cleaning up a spill is a good guy, the one guy who hoses it into a drain is a bad guy. I would like to offer another one.

The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination. On the other side, although an individual person can decide whether they're going to make disposing of those batteries easy or a bureaucratic power trip, when you are at the top and are going to fill 1,000 positions like that, you know in advance that some of them are going to be awful about it. So, from the top like from below, individual personal decisions become fixed quantities. Sending out 1,000 people and allowing 250 of them to make the independent personal decision to do it wrong is really the same thing as doing it wrong yourself, because it's guaranteed to happen.

That's essentially the story behind why you should think about accidents as an institutional problem even when they involve bad personal choices on the part of the people who did them. That One Guy is actually hundreds of people and although you can't tell in advance whether one person will do it you know that out of thousands, hundreds will.

> The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination.

I imagine that batteries, for one, would tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean (if not gulped up by a large animal), and would thus cause highly concentrated local contamination. It would really depend on exactly where the batteries were thrown overboard on how much damage each one caused.

Otherwise I agree with what you're saying.

There definitely are roots that can be traced to institutional problems. The case with a certain DC1 who thought being a pain would make him feel better, it is an institutional problem that someone like that was able to get to a position they were in. If someone with that kind of a personality rose up to being a DC1 and supervising the trash crew (although these kinds of duties are usually when someone is sent TAD because their division doesn't want to deal with them), that is a problem. So yea, you can boil it down to institutional problems, however it can be a little tricky because those institutional problems sometimes do not correlate directly.

I think the biggest difference between the military and industry is that the civilian side of the government enforces laws on industry but does not enforce laws on the military. I know many people who would love to not have to deal with their company's waste disposal processes, but the consequences are quite severe (e.g. the fines are huge so you would be fired if you were found out).

Do you mean to imply that you're not supposed to throw your dead car batteries into the ocean to help charge the electric eels?

That is a good one. xD

I know people who were so sick and tired of trying to figure out where to dispose of their fluorescent light bulbs that they just threw them to the side of the road on the highway at night. It’s completely undetectable.

Yup, same issue with e-waste. It can be a pain to properly dispose of your broken 10 year old laptop. So many people don't do it. It just does in the trash can with everything else. Make it easy, people do it, minus a few edge case shitheads. But I'd rather 75 out of 100 people do it right and have 25 shit heads than 75 shit heads and 25 people doing it right.

I have a bunch of no-name laptop batteries lying around that no one will take. Apparently lithium ion waste is not as valuable as I thought.

Does your country not have recycling centers?

Over here every municipality has a center where you can just hand in any domestic waste unsuitable for the trash can. It's a bit inconvenient because you have to go out of your way, but it is definitely quite doable.

And electronics can be handed in at any store which sells electronics, which includes stores like the equivalent of Walmart or Home Depot. You'll be going there anyways, so it's literally zero extra effort.

Recently I tried to figure out where to send a smashed TV. It was a 50”. Typically they barely sell any TVs smaller than that in the US these days. Best Buy won’t take any TVs for recycling if it’s over a certain screen size. Mine is too big. Once a year or something the town does a e-waste drop off. I’ll have to borrow a car big enough to fit this thing. It’s no wonder so many people toss them in a dumpster.

Its pretty spotty in the US. Where I specifically am, the city dump has a place and best buy will take small electronics. Someone else mentioned their TV being big, same at my local best buy. If you even have a local best buy or those stores anymore since quiet a few have closed in the medium to smaller towns. I think Best Buy is the only local store I know of that takes at least some e-waste (once again, only if it is on the smaller size like cellphones). But my local municipality does have an e-waste center at the city dump, but there are definitely areas in the US where there isn't, or it just isn't advertised/talked about. Even though we have one in my city, I would say probably most people have no clue it exists. Everyone can tell you when free dump day is to toss lawn garbage or couches or they can tell you when the county yard burn day is in the summer, but they can't tell you where to go to find the e-waste collection that is open most days of the year (in the same area as the regular dump). The city also doesn't really advertise it like they do when free trash day at the dump happens or the county during the county lawn trash burn day.

But I do know in my community, more awareness needs to be raised. Every year I get 3 fliers through out the year for garbage disposal, they really should send out 4. The 3 I get every year are, when we can burn lawn garbage, free dump day and when they do christmas tree pick-up. They should send out a 4th one once a year to just say, "hey these are the locations you can take your e-waste to."

> Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food waste.

So inconsistent. Literally trashy if true.

Not really. Clean metal is fine and so are food products. Clean metal can help form reefs and such, why the Navy sinks ships. Food waste, like apple cores and such, all biodegradable. But the trash has to go somewhere. So things that doesn't really hurt the ocean and break down, it goes in the ocean. Things that can actually hurt the ocean and won't break down get flow off the ship during resupply missions and get disposed of properly on land somewhere.

>Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard

Aren't food cans typically plastic lined?

> It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too

It tends to be a lot harder to detect too. With radioactive waste, we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.

This is also the reason we can say with a high degree of confidence that first-world militaries have actually been very good at handling nuclear waste for a while now. The Manhattan Project era and a few years after that were very messy, but they have demonstrably cleaned up their act and figured out how to do things safely. Meanwhile the non-radioactive chemical pollution continues largely unabated. Never live near a military base if you value the well-being of any children you might have.

>we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.

The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases, taking soil samples might be more expensive than walking around with a Geiger counter but it's well within the budgets of even local municipalities. The problem is that they don't really care all that much. Even something as simple as "standing far away from the pit where you're burning plastic," a practice that even law-breaking rural trash burners can manage, was too much for them in Iraq, shows you something about their institutional culture.

You're confusing ignorance and apathy of individuals with institutional apathy.

The soldiers who got sick from the burn pits often knew it was bad for them, but had to follow orders. Personal apathy on the part of people who are giving the orders is institutional apathy.

> The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases

Even they will be hard pressed to detect chemical polutants at the extremely low concentrations that radiation can be trivially detected. But also, they know what to look for. What about everybody else in the area who don't even know what they should be looking for in the first place? With radioactive leaks it's easy, but DOW's chemical catalogue is thicker than a phonebook; you've got to be looking for something in particular or looking for half a billion different things all at once.

I'm not sure what you're saying - people living in towns near military bases do not* walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals. Maybe they should start, but I mean, that's not a good normal.

*Edit: Except when they do.

There are a lot of geiger counters around operated by various organizations. Every time there is a radioactive leak just about anywhere in the world, it is promptly discovered even if that government wants to keep it a secret. In fact it is practical for you to own your own geiger counter if you live near a nuclear facility and are worried about it. The equipment needed for general analytical chemistry, which you'd need to detect a great deal of chemical pollution, is a lot less practical. For some specific chemical pollutants, there simple and cheap tests which are practical for laypeople. But there's no such thing as a simple hand-held meter that will detect any arbitrary chemical pollutant.

Hence, chemical pollution very often goes unnoticed for decades until somebody starts to wonder why half the babies in town are born without brains.

The radioactivity accidents that are picked up by environmental sensors tend to be very large-scale. The little, nasty ones, like the mining source that was lost in Australia, tend to disappear.

Minuscule tritium emissions are detected around nuclear power plants all the time, far below the level at which anybody should be concerned.

There was even a case where alarms were sounded when a power plant worker was found to be radioactive due to radon in his home, which triggered detectors at work. The general chemical industry doesn't operate with anything even remotely close to this degree of care.

That's a gas, making it the easiest possible case. I think a more plausible threat are the decaying temporary storage containers that a lot of low-grade waste is sitting in because nobody can find a permanent location for it. (Yes, that's largely due to political reasons, but political reasons are real!)

From what I understand, in the case of the radon-contaminated nuclear worker, what they actually detected were the "radon daughters", the decay products of radon. Radon itself doesn't stick around very long, but when it decays it produces an atomic dust of polonium, lead, etc. That dust is what tripped the alarms.

Anything like that radioactive source from Australia would set of tons of alarms in a nuclear power plant. You wouldn't get it out the door. Incidents like that missing radioactive source in Australia happen where there are far fewer safeguards than at a nuclear power plant. Those sources generally go missing from abandoned medical equipment, food irradiation facilities, and that sort of thing. You'd be hard pressed to smuggle (let alone accidentally convey) something like a spent nuclear fuel pellet out of a power plant.

A gas is quite difficult to detect because it diffuses. This also makes them typically less dangerous because diffusion also means dilution. Levels do matter. Tritium is also pretty low in terms of radioactivity. The radiation cannot penetrate the skin except in very high levels (you can find keychains, watches, gun sights, etc with small bits of tritium and phosphorous to create long term glow objects). Ingestion and inhalation are more serious since your internal organs are more susceptible (see weighted dosage). The real cool thing is that we can measure radiation with high precision and in real time, so we can detect these dangers. Mostly because these devices are cheap.

In addition to the requirement of a more active approach needed to detect ground/water contaminants there are also a larger variety of pollutants that are harmful. Many of these need specific tests, which can consume your samples. Of course we can do pretty good guesstimates for what we should look for, but we do need to recognize that the process is both more fuzzy and more involved. We can grow these projects by making them cheaper, but that's a tall order (it is happening though).

Edit: I do want to note that most radiation detection devices do not distinguish between types of radiation. These differences do matter in danger levels. This can add complications the above but there is a decent signal that is still useful. But as with everything, some expertise and domain knowledge is quite important.

> people living in towns near military bases do not walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals

Not quite true. There are pretty big and active citizen based radiation detection projects [0,1,2,3]. The reason for this is that radiation monitors are quite cheap now and the same people who build weather systems often connect a geiger counter. They're cheap and sensitive since the gov spent so much money trying to detect radiation from space, across borders, and even the smallest traces on people (to detect spies, scientists, etc) all from the Cold War. There are also citizen based communities monitoring water and soil, but this does require more work from the participant. They have to go out and collect samples. Processing can be both expensive and quite a bit of work. This isn't the same as hooking up a $100 device to your weather station, which is a leave and forget type system.

We should note that both these communities are far more active in regions where there are greater dangers (history of nuclear sites/projects, oil facilities, military bases, etc). I'd also like to thank both these communities and others like them. They're all doing important work.

[0]https://www.radiationnetwork.com/

[1] https://jciv.iidj.net/map/

[2] https://cemp.dri.edu/cemp/

[3] https://www.epa.gov/radnet/near-real-time-and-laboratory-dat...

Nuclear reactor fuel is pre-assembled. There are licenses to produce/consume/export/import/store/dispose the fuel assemblies, with the quantities and weights being an exactly known scientific fact. Everything is meticulously recorded and tracked from source to destination, with stringent security measures. Local, international and inter-governmental regulators monitor, inspect and verify; penalties are serious.

Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production to the military scenarios, which have a completely different legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?

>Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production to the military scenarios, which have a completely different legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?

Because the article took away their usual talking points regarding "nuclear waste bad" and "dangerous for 10,000 years!".

They're moving the goalposts to "You can't argue that nuclear waste disposal from power plants wouldn't cause a problem because the military doesn't dispose of most things correctly and private companies are probably just as bad or worse than the military, therefore you're wrong."

Which doesn't make much sense.

> That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point

As nearly everyone here has pointed out, it not only doesn't miss the point, it _is_ the point, and it's not rhetorical, it's a statement of fact.

Weapons waste is completely different to power-plant waste. That's the whole point of that sentence.

I think this part stems from a common response you see from anti-nuclear folks, who frequently point to the issues at Hanford as a reason to be against civilian nuclear power. She's trying to make clear the difference between civilian nuclear power and waste management and historical waste from military nuclear weapons programs. Remembering also Hanford waste issues date as far back as the Manhattan Project during WW2.

Civilian nuclear waste management has a better track record than military nuclear waste management and civilian chemical waste management. Is that a permanent condition, or a fluke?

We are talking about 32 countries with civilian nuclear power operating for several decades. With oversight by an international body that tracks every bit of nuclear material. Using processes that differ from what was done at Hanford, producing waste different from Hanford. That has been working well, stored well and safely without issue. The military didn't start from that position, it started from "Joe just throw that shit in a pit over there, don't even bother keeping records." Hanford has no resemblance to civilian nuclear power. I think the onus is on those who keep saying it does (despite the evidence to the contrary) to demonstrate it.

> That has been working well, stored well and safely without issue.

Fukushima Daiichi. In case those two words aren't enough to jog your memory:

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

> "leading to releases of radioactivity and triggering a 30 km (19 mi) evacuation zone surrounding the plant"

> "the Japanese government approved the dumping of radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years."

I'm hopeful that when/if fusion reactors become prevalent that we will prioritize burning up the fusion waste radioactives. https://cns.utexas.edu/news/fusion-fission-hybrid

But, of course, that's an if: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...

> "the Japanese government approved the dumping of radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years."

A minuscule amount of tritium, dumped into an ocean that has billions of tons of uranium dissolved in it. This Fukushima water issue is a perfect example of people letting emotions overrule rational thought.

> A minuscule amount of tritium, dumped into an ocean that has billions of tons of uranium

(And then marine life enters the room, accumulating this while ignoring that, and all those carefully raised math models, simulations and speeches fall like a house of cards).

The "National Association of Marine Laboratories" publishes a Position Paper titled "Scientific opposition to Japan’s planned release of over 1.3 million tons of radioactively contaminated water from the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster into the Pacific Ocean."

https://www.naml.org/policy/documents/2022-12-12%20Position%...

> Fukushima Daiichi. In case those two words aren't enough to jog your memory:

Yes, I get that nuclear power scares people, which is why we should put aside our emotions on the subject and just deal with the facts. We've had decades of empirical evidence about nuclear safety at this point.

Zero radio-logical related deaths from Fukushima. And zero deaths in all history from all other civilian nuclear waste.

> "the Japanese government approved the dumping of radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years."

It sounds scary. "Radioactive water!" But it's not an issue. How many will die or have shortened lifespan from this? Let me know and we can add it to the zero above.

The comment I was responding to was "WITHOUT ISSUE". A 30 km exclusion zone, even if temporary, is AN ISSUE.

> And zero deaths in all history from all other civilian nuclear waste.

It's rare, but happens:

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

> September 30, 1999 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan

> Two of these workers died.

"Inadequately trained part-time workers prepared a uranyl nitrate solution containing about 16.6 kg (37 lb) of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass, into a precipitation tank at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura northeast of Tokyo, Japan. The tank was not designed to dissolve this type of solution and was not configured to prevent eventual criticality. Three workers were exposed to (neutron) radiation doses in excess of allowable limits. Two of these workers died. 116 other workers received lesser doses of 1 mSv or greater though not in excess of the allowable limit.[39][40][41][36]"

We are discussing nuclear waste in this thread.

I said "stored well and safely without issue".

You find 2 dead workers from an industrial accident over a 70 year history that was not actually about nuclear waste but was a fuel processing and fabrication facility making fuel for experimental reactors. Not civilian power reactors. [1]

Even if you included it (which clearly it's not related to waste so shouldn't) it would still be the safest and best managed waste of anything we have!

The exclusion zone is not nuclear waste. It is interesting though because a lot of research after the event seems to show that the evacuation and such a large exclusion zone was a mistake and we should evacuate less in such events. But in the moment I get everyone was scared and didn't have a good idea of what to do.

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...

"Re-processing facility" means it comes from used rods (i.e. "waste").

This is fine, you can have your thread dedicated solely to waste. Though I do think that waste reprocessing should also be included in such a thread.

-----

As to the more general matter, people aren't concerned so much with waste, as with everything about nuclear power. Including "accidental waste" such as that caused by the Chernobyl civilian reactor failure.

Yes, I'm glad we're designing and building meltdown-proof reactors.

The long-term waste, regardless of how it originates (whether from conventional waste, decommissionings, or what have you) needs to be processed such that people a hundred, thousand, ten thousand years from now don't have to do anything special about it.

I think this can be done. But without stringent, real-time regulations I am not confident industry, or even government, will do what's necessary.

> Zero radio-logical related deaths from Fukushima. And zero deaths in all history from all other civilian nuclear waste.

Still a trillion dollar clean up.

It is probably the result of military being secretive in nature and civilian efforts being more open so there is more oversight and awareness.

We know this quite well here in Colorado Springs: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/chemical-col...

Well the author by her own disclosure is the founder of a nuclear energy lobby group. Or as she calls it "climate activist group". So yeah, I'm sure she was very confused and in doubt with herself, I'm happy it all turned out fine and she finally discovered that nuclear power is the solution to all our problems.

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