Nuclear power is too safe
jackdevanney.substack.com
jackdevanney.substack.com
Yes, nuclear is way too safe. Regulations keep piling on, adding costs and construction time, with no measurable benefit other than political expediency.
Air pollution from coal has many problems.
But invisibility is not one of those problems. You can see it.
Here is a counter-example.
First, guess what is one of the most abundant element on earth. Uranium. [1] Now consider what is a common pollutant when we mine coal or burn it. Uranium. [2,3, 6]
Saying that we should burn coal because we are afraid of nuclear/radioactive waste is ad absurdum.
And unlike nuclear plants it is questionable if we process the radioactive waste in question [4 & 5 show the contradiction in assuming if the post-processing is done correctly or not]
[1]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-fuel-facts-uranium
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
[3] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/langsdorf2/ [4] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po... [5] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta... [6] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/power/references/hvis...
We need to figure out storage and hopefully that doesn't involve lithium -- too scarce and its mining is destructive.
I support using nuclear too as a) there is a lot of improvements since the 60s - 80s -- e.g. nuclear reactor without the use of any water/steam -- using electromagnetic field deviations via plasma.
And b) it provides an option for a steady power basis -- a necessity in any electrical power grid. But not always available with non-fossil alternatives when the weather patterns and solar exposure of a number of countries do not conform with their power consumption. Europe is relatively lucky here. (Source studies/workshops/projects in undergrad + grad school. Don't think things have moved that much since then unfortunately.)
Another option is ensuring a robust and connected almost continent wide power grids. U.S. and Europe are getting there and has saved us from a lot of issues. Examples here of its usefulness -- UK power issues between Scotland and England, and ... Texas. That will help solar and wind adoption.
Your source says it's the 48th most abundant element in crustal rocks. Doesn't sound that common to me.
40 times more likely to find than silver. 500 more than gold.
There is this old 1981 article about how to recover uranium from lignite by the Oak Ridge National Labs https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030438...
P.S. (Because I have been digging and reading on all the issues related to how uranium is distributed on Earth’s crust; if someone else is interested) Also a bit random to non-Europeans citation but the concentration of Uranium (in its various forms/compounds) is causing issues when we access deeper aquifers. Perhaps, something to consider also in California https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
In addition, you'd also be lacking the decades of safety data that we can use to turn the tide.
It's the crux of the issue for me.
I'm not at all against nuclear reactors as part of the energy mix of some countries but the vast majority of countries do not have the infrastructure (socioeconomic included) to properly maintain dozens of reactors going with a stellar safety record.
It takes a lot of money, low corruption, stability, and properly following procedures to keep nuclear reactors safe. I can't see those conditions being met by a large set of countries over 5-7 decades to consider nuclear reactors as a solution. When you consider that even Japan with Fukushima had issues with designing a safe plant...
Indeed, your argument about stability and infrastructure all applies to other modern amenities too. E.g. air travel. They have all worked fine.
I myself come from a country of high corruption. Yet I trust them to maintain nuclear power plants.
Read the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and you'll understand why the red tape just grows. Big Energy Co's don't want their profits to decrease, and the people with the oil rights wouldn't own those nuclear plants and there is nothing stopping more companies from making competing systems as tech were to progress. Oil can be owned and protected by force. Thats the key difference.
The article is making it sound like coal plants can do whatever they want, while nuclear have it worse. I don't think the way is to lower the safety for nukes, but to raise the safety requirements of coal. This article sounds like someone claiming that airbags are barely used, and removing them is a good way to get cheaper cars for all at the low cost of a few thousand deaths.
Friendly reminder that half french nukes are plagued with leaks since the last year, and we would never know how serious they are or how close we were to a disaster. With current safety standards.
Consult this graph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png
And then reflect on the fact that it probably wasn't regulation that resulted in them ceasing to use coal in the 2010s. It was predictable from the 60s by anyone equipped with a ruler.
Nuclear power at least can keep going in the UK. It's not getting bigger, but is not falling either. Imagine they say today "National Grid targets being Nuclear free by 2040", like in Germany: it would hit harder than any safety regulation you could write, not just halting new plants, but shuting down existing ones.
Not quite
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Electric...
I guess while there's a guy in UK doing a barbeque with coal, I can't say "UK got rid of coal" here.
What I would like to see is an across-the-board change to safety regulation: A technology is deemed safe enough if it's 50% better than the closest *meaningful* competitor. Let's evaluate nuclear by that standard and see what we get:
The closest meaningful competitor is natural gas. (Although you could make an argument for considering gas-backed renewables a source. I have never seen safety numbers for such combos.) Natural gas has a death rate of 2.82/Twh--by my proposal nuke would be deemed adequate at 1.41/Twh even if better were possible. Reality: 0.03/Twh. 47x as safe as needed. (And note that the natural gas numbers do not include any global warming related deaths, the real picture is even more out of whack.)
(As for coal--it's 6.5x as bad as natural gas, and more global warming to boot.)
This is one of these cases where lowering safety standards would actually save lives by making the safer option more attractive. It's why the FAA accepts lap infants on airplanes--they know that a lap infant will fare considerably worse than someone properly strapped in if there's trouble, but said infant is still safer as a lap infant in an airplane than properly strapped in in a car. The lap infant rules shift some people on the edge from driving to flying.
Current reactors around the world only have a limited amount of backup time, days/weeks, before the spent fuel pool boils off and the fuel burns resulting in a massive disaster spreading radioactive ash across wide swaths of land.
Newer reactors, like the pool-type, metal-fueled, small modular Sodium Fast Reactor [2] are significantly more efficient, are air-cooled, automatically shutdown without human, electronic or mechanical intervention, and by using electro-metallurgical separation, can recycle up to 96 percent of the fissionable material.
[1] https://nuclear.gepower.com/content/dam/gepower-nuclear/glob...
[2] https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-p...
The fact fail safe designs 'exist' isn't an argument for continuing to operate the ones we have. Or building more of those non-fail-safe designs which is what's currently happening around the world right now.
As long as the cleanup cost is externalized and paid for by my tax dollars you're damn right I'm reacting emotional. Wouldn't you, if they set up the plant in your backyard (think Europe's population density)?
The sun gives us 10,000 times earths energy demand, so maybe we stop discussing nuclear industry marketing blogs and shift focus on energy storage technology.
The occurrence of nuclear accidents is so rare and the potential cost so high that a typical insurance company business model can't accommodate that risk.
You could try develop some kind of insurance bond scheme where nuclear power plant needs to raise a capital buffer to protect against accidents, and in case of an accident, bond investors lose their money. But even this kind of a scheme would be pretty difficult to pull off in a scale that would cover all potential losses, and someone (government) would need to take the tail risk.
And just to be clear, even now, nuclear plants do not go completely uninsured.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
And that makes the cost of an accident not just much higher, but also essentially incalculable. "How irrational are the public and the pandering politicians going to be this decade?" is a difficult variable to price into your models.
And since the costs are, in fact, largely driven by the politics and irrational public fears, it actually makes sense to have the public bear those costs...in a weird way.
How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large? And I'm an advocate for nuclear power, I believe we should've invested in it decades ago to avoid the worst of climate change to come, I just can't agree that the whole issue is "politics and emotion", that's just shoving the real problems with nukes under the rug. Cost of maintenance, cost of decommissioning, baseline factors required for safe operation (including the socioeconomic and political environment of the country a reactor is at), sourcing of fissile material, permanent deposits for nuclear waste, etc.
No it's not. For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation. Another example: the fishermen of the Fukushima prefecture are suffering. But not because there's anything wrong with the fish, it's that people are afraid.
Fear of nuclear kills far more people than nuclear does.
Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".
Again, you are speaking from emotion, not fact.
> It's not just politics and emotion
Not just, but mostly.
> How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large?
Because the potential damage is not actually "so large", as has been amply demonstrated by now, see in particularly Fukushima, but even Chernobyl. Never mind non-events like Three Mile Island.
And fear is never a good reaction, because it leads exactly to the distortions of perception that you are demonstrating.
Can you provide sources for this claim?
> Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".
There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ [0]. You have an opinion but we still haven't figured out how damaging the radiation there is for animals or not. I'd rather not have humans living around a potentially dangerous poisoned area until the effects are understood.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X1...
And in fact, the LNT model greatly overestimated the casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There's tons of references for this on the web, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...
Also from there:
"It is believed that the health effects of the radioactivity release are primarily psychological rather than physical effects. [..] However, people who have been evacuated have suffered from depression and other mental health effects."
The same was true in Chernobyl, check the WHO reports that came out every decade. Each subsequent report reduced the estimated number of casualties linked to radiation by an order of magnitude, while the psychological impact increased.
> There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ
While there is no scientific consensus on the details, there is consensus that the red zone is not the poisonous wasteland you claimed. The wildlife has absolutely thrived.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/chernobyl-animals
https://www.wired.com/story/chernobyl-exclusion-zone-rewildi...
A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?
...and due to it not being a poisonous wasteland where life cannot thrive. As evidenced by it thriving.
> not because radiation isn't dangerous.
Somehow you slipped in the assumption that the radiation is definitely dangerous. Why? What is the evidence? The fact that wildlife is thriving?
And of course I never claimed the wildlife thrived because of the radiation.
Though of course there is evidence for the therapeutic effects of low-level radiation, for example:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14673618/
> A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?
Straw-man.
"This is not my preferred place to live" ≠ "This is place is uninhabitable".
For example, there are tons of places in my city where I wouldn't want to live. And yet tons of people do live there.
And I am sure there are tons of people who wouldn't want to live where I live. Even though I think it's pretty nice.
If the place is cheap, green, slightly hilly but not too much, with water nearby and excellent transportation options but no noise: sign me up! Certainly if the radiation is at levels of some of the stuff they're removing from Fukushima Prefecture (less than the background radiation in Denver and many other places).
Don't grow food, take care when messing with the soil. There are areas you certainly don't want to be digging as the orcs found out the hard way last year. It's like asbestos--harmless in place, dangerous if messed with.
Consider the advice about not eating too much in the way of predator fish. That's because of contamination, mostly from coal plants.
Chernobyl is as bad as a nuke plant accident can be. Whether the core actually went prompt critical or destroyed itself just before doing so we will probably never know, but that's the worst that can happen. You simply can't shift the multiplication factor fast enough to make a bigger boom. Chernobyl is a drop in the bucket compared to what coal has been doing for ages. You can't get a China Syndrome accident, a molten mass digging it's way down will change shape as it goes--either going subcritical and quickly running out of heat, or going prompt critical and destroying itself.
You're really making easy for those emotionally impacted by these deaths and whole regions made inhabitable to swallow your argument.
Isn't that expected for a technology that can poison a pretty large area of your country for hundreds of years if something go wrong?
As a member of the public I'd rather have strong regulations instead of lax ones until something bad happens and poisons a large swath of land... The potential damage is just too large, something has to imbue responsibilities and expectations on the ones exploiting the technology.
Could you expand on what type of regulation are you complaining about specifically?
This is pretty funny because we can look at 'AI' which is being called exactly that kind of breakthrough and it is wall-to-wall emotional reaction to its existence!
Also hidden in the small print, the assumption that future accidents would be "no worse" that previous ones. Because, you know, that's a given or something.
Not to mention that even the numbers he uses for casualties from prior accidents and later cancers are doctored by governments who had accidents on their watch trying to look good, and by research funded and astroturfed by the nuclear industry to make itself look better.
I’d like to see the authors back-of-the-envelope maths for the economic impact of the two or three in the UK alone.
Note that he included Three Mile Island amongst the radiation releases. Where's the exclusion zone?? It's not even a matter of cost, just look at the risks. You're at the fence of the reactor when it happens, you decide to walk away. Let's see how far you get before the risk of the trip exceeds the risk of staying. You come to a street--end of trip. It's more dangerous to cross the street than to stay put. (Admittedly, that's assuming an average crossing of an average street and streets vary. It's a lot safer to cross a 25 mph residential street than a 45 mph main street.)
Because these are ratios...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is spot on. This is like saying "driving is safe because I never died so far".
Besides, it neglected to mention many other problems, including nuclear proliferation, centralization of power etc.
Power reactors are basically useless for bomb production even if you reprocess the fuel. While it is actually possible to make a bomb from reactor waste it is *much* harder than making it from dedicated plutonium-production reactors.
The basic problem is Plutonium isn't all the same. For a bomb you want Pu-239. The desired reaction is U-238 + n -> U-239. Decays (half life 23 minutes) to Np-239, decays (half life 2.36 days) to Pu-239. The undesired reaction is Pu-239 + n -> Pu-240. Not only does Pu-240 not go boom, but it's prone to spontaneous fission, spraying neutrons around. This is a bad thing, making your bomb very prone to being a fizzle. You defeat this by changing the fuel frequently, minimizing the Pu-240 buildup.
Nobody has ever used power reactors in a bomb program. While it could be done it couldn't be done without it being apparent to observers.
If the worst designed reactor of all time and the only one subject to the only accident in nuclear history to kill a large number of people is significantly safer per unit electricity than coal, it's not crazy to say that all the plants that are radically safer than said reactor design probably are spending too much on safety.
There are many issues with the economics of nuclear power but too much safety isn't one of them. The Chernobyl comparison conveniently ignores the liquidators by only looking at residents. Residents that have been evacuated, mind you. Even if radiation is not as harmful long-term as the LNT model makes us believe, which might very well be the case, we have to keep in mind what the forced evacuation of, say, New York, or Singapore would cost.
On top of that, nuclear power needs a lot of water. This means they can become less reliable, especially once they age.
And while coal power plants are on their way out, it is important to note how they have improved in terms of exhausts. Filters are a thing nowadays.
Finally, we have to compare NPPs with the alternative and that's not coal but PV and wind power combined with a large battery storage. Such a system is so much easier to deploy and starts production pretty much immediately. Whatever the economics of an idealized NPP are, that last fact alone will be hard to beat.
All that being said, it's important to note that NPP are an option to combat climate change. Like hydrogen, they are a technology that doesn't look as good as renewables, but that doesn't mean we don't need them. In the end, we need to put a price on a ton of carbon dioxide and then done everything that is cheaper than that price to avoid it.
> Not only does it need water, but the water can't stop for any reason without resulting in a disaster. You have to keep that spent fuel cool otherwise it'll burn itself.
I'd say your information is incomplete.
Nuclear power does not necessarily need water. Modern reactor designs do not use water at all, for example molten salt reactors that use salt for cooling instead of water.
Unlike wind power there are several ways to construct nuclear power plants, which eliminate the possibilities of several, if not all, of the scary failure modes, such as spontaneous meltdown, as is the case for the aforementioned reactor type. Instead of spontaneous meltdown of nuclear material, spontaneous lessening of nuclear activity is part of its design, in case total loss of control.
The problem is none of the existing 400 reactors are fail safe and none are being built.
Don’t use fantasy reactors that don’t exist to support the status quo.
Educate us. How does it do those bad things? Where can we read about them?
Otherwise it's just a fantasy. Like claiming 47% PV panels and 1kWh/kg batteries will be everywhere because they happened in a lab once.
And note that the safety numbers (coal roughly 1000x as dangerous) are based on current standards, it used to be much worse.
As for PV + battery--get back to us when we have the batteries and the safety numbers involved. We don't, the comparison can't even be made. The closest we can come is solar + wind backed up with gas--something for which I have never seen the safety numbers. Note that the need for multiple generators makes this option a lot more expensive than straight gas.
And as someone already mentioned. Nuclear needs to be very reliable, because malfunctions, while they may not cause armageddon, can kill entire blocks and make the cleanup even more costly than a normal decomissioning. You absolutely want to build these things to last and be reliable. Just look at Greifswald Unit 5 partially melting down less than a month into operation. In fact, Greifswald and their numerous close calls are a great example for where "less safe nuclear" would lead us.
E.g:
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta...
Then consider that the people you're trying to pull this straw man against want coal even less.
> "All the evacuations at Fukushima were unnecessary, and in the case of the frail [or] elderly murderously so. If there had been no evacuations, few members of the public would have received more than 1 mSv/day peak and some 1600 lives would have been saved, and some 100,000 less lives sadly disrupted. Even the EPA now counsels shelter-in-place rather than evacuation.
> At Chernobyl, it probably made sense to evacuate the 45,000 non-workers from Pripyat for a month or so. (Most of the plant workers never left. ) All the other evacuations were tragically unnecessary. The 1990 evacuations were completely senseless as is making the Exclusion Zone off-limits when the dose rates almost everywhere in the zone are below average planet wide and have been for a very long time."
A similar thing happened in East Palestine derail, mortality is 0 by the accident itself and the long-term consequences are ignored. I guess you cannot produce an argument in favor of just not maintaining rail tracks just because nobody dies from those accidents...
But I guess all of that tends to be forgotten by the media.
But not by scientific community. Because what you are parroting is exactly what the media is saying.
30 years after Chernobyl https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4899336/
Most affected are the crews on site.
Even people in the evacuation zone "received low radiation doses equivalent to approximately one whole-body computed tomography (CT) scan". The rest of Europe? "in Europe number almost 600 million people, with radiation exposure doses comparable to one annual background radiation dose"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tōhoku_earthquake_and_tsu...
"In February 2019, there were 42 operable reactors in Japan. Of these, only nine reactors in five power plants were operating after having been restarted post-2011"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan
"All of Japan's nuclear plants were closed, or their operations were suspended for safety inspections. The last of Japan's fifty-four reactors (Tomari-3) went offline for maintenance on 5 May 2012,[8] leaving Japan completely without nuclear-produced electrical power for the first time since 1970."
"The total cost of implementing safety measures, maintaining facilities, and decommissioning of commercially operated nuclear power plants in Japan is estimated at ¥13.46 trillion ($123 billion)"
I still remember the viral video of cleaning up and restoring the roads.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
We keep hearing that nuclear waste is an intractable problem, that the Yucca Mountain repository could never be approved, and there is no alternative, etc.
What I learned this week is that in the US (and worldwide) more waste was produced by weapons programs than by the civilian reactors. Roughly speaking the civilian reactors have produced about 120k tons of spent fuel in the US. Weapons programs created 100 million gallons of waste [1], which is in liquid form. I can't find the density, but I doubt is lower than that of water, and most likely it is much higher (Uranium is an extremely dense metal). In any case, at a minimum this is 380k tons, which dwarfs the waste from civilian sources.
All this waste was or will be stored at a facility similar to the one envisioned for Yucca Mountain, called WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) [2], located in the desert in New Mexico. By a law passed by Congress, only waste from the weapons programs is eligible to be stored there, but there's no technological reason to not add civilian waste to the program.
WIPP is an underground long term storage facility in a massive salt mine. The video in link [2] is quite informative.
My personal conclusion is that nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem, both from the technological point of view and the political one.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/nuclear-weapons-production-waste
Waste is more than spent nuclear fuel, that is true. But the long-lived waste that people worry about is either spent nuclear fuel, or processed spent nuclear fuel.
Nuclear weapons are made with Plutonium-239, which is created by running a regular reactor that burns U-235 and U-238. U-238 can capture one neutron and become Pu-239, but that can capture one more neutron and become Pu-240, which is not good for weapons. So, to produce weapons-grade Pu-239 you need to run a reactor for very little (in technical terms the burnup is ultra low), take the Uranium rods out of the reactor and dissolve the in some chemicals and extract Pu-239 out of that liquid. The remaining liquid is the one that's being disposed at the WIPP facility.
What exactly is bothering you in this description?
And the exact same thing happening in mox facilities (but at far greater volume) doesn't count why?
It's so stupid one would think you're actively trying to discredit sane nuclear proponents by associating them with you.
So, in your opinion, if we look at long lived nuclear waste, did the weapons programs produce more such waste than the civilian reactors, or less?
Also, I'm saying it would make sense to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel produced by the civilian reactors at the WIPP repository? Are you saying this does not make sense? Why?
You're also now asserting that weapons waste is handled in a perfectly fine way suitable for orders of magnitude more long lived waste in the same breath you imply they're far more irresponsible.
During the Cold War, the US has produced about 100 tons of Plutonium for weapons purposes.
Here's the quote from [1]
> Between 1944 and 1988, the United States built special reactors to make about 100 metric tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons. The reactors created the highly radioactive plutonium by bombarding uranium fuel rods with neutrons. Each time a uranium atom changed to a plutonium atom, more neutrons were released, causing a chain reaction. The process continued until the majority of the uranium atoms were converted to plutonium, thus ending the chain reaction. At this point, the fuel rods are said to be spent (used up) and they were removed from the reactor.
> Workers used strong acids to dissolve the plutonium from the fuel rods. This process left behind more than 100 million gallons of hazardous liquid waste. It is called mixed waste because it contains both hazardous chemicals and radioactive materials. The Department of Energy is working to safely cleanup and dispose of these nuclear weapons production wastes
Although this "mixed waste" is not identical with the civilian spent nuclear fuel, the problem of long lived radionuclides is the same. If this waste can be disposed at the WIPP facility, then the spent fuel can too.
Did I satisfy your high standards of debate?
[1] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/nuclear-weapons-production-waste
It's like comparing a charcoal burning pit to the entire coal industry.
We found a technological and political solution to the mixed waste. It is being buried in a very deep salt mine in New Mexico. The amount of mixed waste dwarfs the amount of civilian spent nuclear fuel. Therefore we could bury the SNF in the same place.
What of these things are you denying?
Learn the basics of what your spruiking before vomiting ignorance into the world.
You are getting a bit agitated. I don't want you to get a stroke or something. Maybe you should take a few deep breaths, count to one hundred, go for a walk.
> having leaked once and not being properly isolated
With deep burial sites there are two problems: technological and political. You are claiming here that WIPP does not solve the technological problem. I prefer to trust the EPA and DOE on that, rather than some random dude on the internet.
Regardless, my point is that without a doubt, the WIPP has solved the political problem. For the simple reason that it exists. Congress has passed an act, the facility was funded, it was built, and is in operation.
Ah, the song of the concern troll everywhere, projecting your own cult-like attachment to nuclear power on others. Slimy and pathetic tactic. Calling out your idiocy isn't getting emotional, but it does seem like I've touched a nerve.
> With deep burial sites there are two problems: technological and political. You are claiming here that WIPP does not solve the technological problem. I prefer to trust the EPA and DOE on that, rather than some random dude on the internet.
Then trust their opinion that it's not suitable for SNF. Also the US government (including after the EPA and DOE were formed) signed off on cotter mill and countless oil pipeline projects which later did massive ecological harm. They are not really great at saying no to ecological danger.
> Regardless, my point is that without a doubt, the WIPP has solved the political problem. For the simple reason that it exists. Congress has passed an act, the facility was funded, it was built, and is in operation.
The military getting away with half assing solving a much smaller problem isn't solving the political problem.
Or is (a) that the extra volume required to safely store spent fuel is larger than for this liquid waste?
If it's true that the liquid waste need to be processed before storage, it seems to me to increase the risk of leaks during handling compared to spent fuel which is already concentrated(?)? IIRC spent fuel is already stored as very robust concrete slabs at the power stations.
Nitpick:
> The cost of the 2014 accident was expected to exceed $2 billion and disrupted other programs in various nuclear-industry sites.[44] On January 9, 2017, the plant was formally reopened after three years of cleanup costing $500 million, which is significantly less than forecasted
Interesting:
> The source of contamination was later found to be a barrel that exploded on February 14 because contractors at Los Alamos National Laboratory packed it with organic cat litter instead of clay cat litter.
SNF is also a very small fraction of the intermediate and long lived waste generated by a nuclear plant.
Currently TFA links to some interesting arguments in favor of a time-rate dependent factor that incorporates cellular repair mechanisms. At first glance that seems plausible, especially below a certain threshold. There appears to be no statistical evidence of higher cancer rates around many nuclear areas, etc. LNT is not a topic I've dived into but seen pop up a few times so I'm curious why LNT is considered unassailable.
Finally, one can also observe that some of the most prominent critics of LNT are connected to industry lobbyism. We have seen this before also in the tobacco industry who downplayed the risk of smoking, sometimes even the same persons appear in this context. Terminology such such "LNT worshipping" is a clear tell sign where this is coming from. Similar to all pseudoscience it has to come with a theory how established science is wrong because scientists are stupid, corrupt, worshipping some dogma, etc.
The problem with this is we have many data points for lower level exposure that seem to almost all lie well below the line, but none have the statistical power to prove it even with very large sample sizes. Even the hottest of these data points shows nothing--why isn't there a cancer cluster in the people who live the lives in 20 rem/year??
And note that we aren't dismissing the LNT out of hand, we are questioning it in a certain realm. While I question the homeostasis argument it seems completely reasonable that the rate has something to do with it. In chemistry the norm is the dose makes the poison (you can breathe 3 psi of oxygen for a lifetime, 30 psi of oxygen and you'll be in trouble in less than an hour), what's so unreasonable about thinking that it might apply in this case? (And note that I don't think it applies much in your realm--while medical imaging isn't all that much radiation it's delivered quickly. Other than my one encounter with Tc-99m everything I've encountered has been in hold-your-breath type times.)
There's also the possibility the true line is a parabola. We have so few data points at the high end that the current data is completely incapable of excluding this case and it would fit the low data points better.
So, even though reactor prices seems to have tripled, cleanup costs seems to have no upper limit.
There's a lot to be said for a big, strong containment vessel. That's why the Three Mile Island meltdown was an expensive accident but didn't injure anyone. Maybe if the industry just got better at big, strong containment vessels cheaply...
Evacuation killed more people.
This applies to the whole fearmongering about nuclear energy with actual slimy tactics.
Either you have no idea what short lived fission prpducts are or you're actively lying.
Implying that overall dangers spouted by fearmongers are overrated given the context of the discussion.
https://blog.japanwondertravel.com/fukushima-exclusion-zone-...
Which is a handy counter to claims of it being off limits for centuries.
Also, meltdowns are bad, but they are accounted for, even in most of those old designs.
Just like the (vast) majority of negative health effects from both Chernobyl and Fukushima were from the evacuation, not from the radiation.
Fear of nuclear is far deadlier than nuclear.
Let's see about "Fukushima disaster".
Built in 1982. In 2012 was hit by a 9.0–9.1 undersea megathrust earthquake (preceded by a 7.2 foreshock two days before, three 6 earthquakes on the same day, and hundreds of aftershocks in the next days) and immediately after by a 14-meter-hight tsunami.
The earthquake exceeded plant tolerances (ground g-forces of 0.56, 0.52, 0.56 vs the seismic reactor design tolerances of 0.45, 0.45, and 0.46) and the tsunami (built to withstand 10-meter tsunamis, tsunami was 14 meters high).
So, the disaster is literally a black swan by definition. The aftermath is: 1 person dead due to actual incident, 2000 dead due to evacuation.
Now imagine if some other power sources were approached this way: Th Banqiao and Shimantan Dams disaster of 1975 killed at least 240 thousand people. We should never build another dam again, it's too dangerous.
Nuclear triggers some primal fear. The safety regulations have become table stakes, unfortunately.
Rightfully so.
Nuclear can be safe, cheap and built quickly. Pick two at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
The chart is clear. Nuclear is in no way competitive. Not to mention all the other issues around nuclear proliferation, centralization of power, risks in case of war and terrorism. And lack of cooling water due to climate change etc.
And nuclear proliferation would be a good thing. More nations have nukes the more peaceful world would be. Only those who want to invade other countries are against it.
Also a unicorn, pretty reasonable.
> More nations have nukes the more peaceful world would be.
Yeah sure, look how well it's been working.
Horribly badly, just look at countries like USA, Britain, France invading countries like Afganistan and Iraq. Just imagine if either of those could have delivered nukes to NYC or Washington DC.
Many of the invasions might not have happened if the countries had realistic and effective tools to fight against the bad guys and cause considerable combatant losses at their home soils.
It doesn't. In the 50s-60s people were happily imagining everything nuclear: from kitchen robots to interplanetary travel. "Primal fear" is the result of longtime negative portrayals in the media and by politicians.
For nuclear, it is perceived to be more of a step function - you decrease spending until something bad happens, and then it is REALLY bad. So the tendency is to spend to stay as far away from that step as possible.
Honestly, the whole thing feels like cheap propaganda.
Second, there's very little issue with nuclear waste. Way, way, way less than the media make it out to be
Did the inverse square law stop working recently or do they all take turns touching it?
So no, they do not take turns. The live 1000 km away, and just buy a fish that swam 100 km away from the fire.
It decays about 1 order of magnitude for every 7^n of time.
That’s the idea behind fallout shelters, you wait until the fallout is no longer dangerous.
The atmosphere is a very harsh place for radioactive particles. We’ve gleaned this from real world testing.
Please don’t be afraid of made up things. Be afraid of real things like climate change.
It’s not non-chalance, it’s indifference.
EDIT: the cause of the indifference is in part because it’s harder to get scared about! Our brains aren’t perfect risk estimators, especially when it comes to radiation and atmospheric dilution.
Uranium in power plants is dangerous because there are literal tons of it in one place.
Any amount that could be feasibly moved has a low overall level of radiation (uranium has a super long half life, which means pound for pound it emits very little).
Don’t people wonder how Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still cities where people live today (hint, the ~10lbs of uranium in the bombs aren’t actually that much on a time scale of years)?
As of March 2023, there are 422 operable power reactors in the world. Additionally, there are 58 reactors under construction and 104 reactors planned [1]
We've had nuclear plants for over 50-60 years now. We've also had nuclear reactors in ships, submarines etc.
How many of your amazing spy-novel-level scenarios have happened in reality?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/may/05/radioact...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-64512297
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/15/asia/missing-lost-radioac...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/16/un-nuclear-wat...
It's not fail safe.
If your business model requires hundreds of emergency workers to heroically dive on the grenade once every couple of years to stop the disaster getting orders of magnitude worse than merely destroying a country's economy for decades, then it's going to start getting very hard to find people to keep diving on the grenade.
Every few years we throw people at the disaster that is dams. And still: Banqiao and Shimantan Dams failure with 240 000 dead, Machchu-2 Dam failure with 5000 dead etc. clearly show us how dangerous this technology is, and how we should never, ever use it again.
Hiding behind victims of other disasters is absolutely disgusting.
Here are your words: "If your business model requires hundreds of emergency workers to heroically dive on the grenade once every couple of years to stop the disaster..."
I just applied that same fear-mongering reasoning to a power source whose model is quite literally what you described. Not as whatsboutism, but yo show how flawed and weak your readoning is.
Chernobyl being a disaster that was narrowly avoided by thousands of workers shortening or straight up sacrificing their lives to stop it.
You're trying to pretend that the USSR's offici numbers about deaths are the worst a disaster could ever get.
I'm completely fine with you advocating for a Hydropower Regulatory Commission that holds hydro projects to the same standards by the way, sounds great. Similar for ending coal.
You can not compare death by, say accident in building construction, with those caused by a major nuclear incident. If anything, deaths caused by such a punctual event is marginal compared to the global effect of nuclear industry, its mines, its million year wastes and the awfully embarassing target it provides in military conflicts. Find me any other industry that is comparable in term of geopolitical risks and ecological impact, and then you can maybe start to make some relevant points.
I will buy that nuclear plants are too safe when we have a tracking record of absence of any major incident for a duration of plutonium half-life period.
All the said, I'm not fundamentally against use of nuclear energy. But let's not pretend any arbitrary conclusion can be supported by flawed premises.
So making nuclear ultra-extra-special safe actually kills more people and is more costly than having slightly less safe nuclear would.
Or as I tend to put it: fear of nuclear is far deadlier than nuclear.
The point the author is trying to get accross is that nuclear is being made unnecesarily expensive. Not nececarily expensive like you seem to claim with no substantiation.
I am not making any unsubstantiated claim, it’s a fact that over the decades risk analyses have determined that such measures were necessary. You’re the ne claiming it was just tree-hugging hysteria.
A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
It is still impossible to get private third party insurance for a nuclear plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
Let's ignore the earthquake and tsunami that happened and pretend that all that cleanup is only due to Fukushima.
> A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006
Severe as in: exploded? people died?
Typical nuclear proponents, trying to shift blame. The $2T is for the nuclear side of things.
"Japan has spent roughly 1 trillion yen ($7.3 billion) annually on the damage caused by the meltdowns at the Fukushima "
That amounts to 84 billion dollars. That includes everything, including compensations and decomissioning. The cleanup itself is roughly 30 billion dollars.
While the costs are still huge, note: this is for a plant that was both hit by an earthquake and flooded by unprecedented tsunami.
Also note: even with all that in mind only one person died as the result of direct radiation exposure, and radiation levels in Fukushima region are normal or below average levels.
> The cost of dealing with the aftermath of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will reach 21.5 trillion yen, roughly double the government's initial prediction of 11 trillion yen, preliminary calculations released on Dec. 8 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have shown.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20161209/p2a/00m/0na/00...
> While the costs are still huge, note: this is for a plant that was both hit by an earthquake and flooded by unprecedented tsunami.
Read again what I said. The cause was special, while the risk was systemic. All western countries require independent core cooling today because there have been too many near-misses with causes related to power failures.
> Also note: even with all that in mind only one person died as the result of direct radiation exposure, and radiation levels in Fukushima region are normal or below average levels.
Who said anything about radiation? We are talking about cost. The alternative is renewables, which are vastly safer and more economical than nuclear.
Again, typical blame shifting. You are not doing nuclear power any service with coal based whataboutism.
Ah yes. You are not a random HNer spreading FUD.
> Who said anything about radiation? We are talking about cost. The alternative is renewables, which are vastly safer
If you're talking about safer, then we need to talk about safety. And nuclear power is one of the safest we have.
> Again, typical blame shifting. You are not doing nuclear power any service with coal based whataboutism.
What?
The fact that they spent a lot of money to clean the area just proves they thought this level of investment was needed, not that it actually was. If in fact they overspent, as I believe they did, this is consistent with the idea from the article, that there is overspending on misguided levels of safety when it comes to nuclear.
It can do better than nuclear's really low death counts and cost less, leaving more money to fund vaccines etc.
Starts with an obviously ridiculous thesis, arguments with a bunch of numbers that don't quite make valid comparisons.
Cynically, I wonder if the author actually believes the thesis or is intentionally putting this forward for attention.
I don't understand the motivation of some trying to argue that nuclear is safe, while ignoring all the obvious and huge risks that must be continuously addressed either in the technology, in the procedure or even in laws (eg. trading of nuclear material).
I guess the same will argue that nuclear is as safe as solar or wind, which is like comparing apples to oranges.
There's 1 (one) death that is the direct result of the Fukushima incident.
The plant was built in 1982.
I don't think we have anything as safe as nuclear plants.
Are you in all seriousness implying it wasn't built to withstand earthquakes?
The question is to what kind of earthquake they were built to withstand and with what knowledge of earthquake risks? Also taking into account the level of corruption and the attempts to avoid extremely expensive building costs. It's a complex risk calculation - one won't build for arbitrary strong earthquakes, that would be very expensive.
The Fukushima site had inspections and was considered safe, only later being exposed to have multiple systemic risks: not enough protection from a tsunami, loss of power backup, loss of outside power, high-risk spent-fuel pools in need of extensive cooling, spent-fuel pools not being easily accessible, no cooling strategies for spent-fuel pools under loss of electrical power, building weakened due to cooling with seawater, no facility to clean cooling water, melted cores, no technology to investigate buildings with melted cores, hydrogen explosion in buildings, ... and much more.
Some of the reactors in Japan were built on fault lines with high risk of strong earthquakes. After a strong earthquake it could take many years to bring a nuclear power plant back online, if ever. This is what happened.