Hacker News Reader

Comment by explaininjs | Hacker News Reader

This is the site I always point to when the pro-nuc crowd likes to tout how safe nuclear energy is. Sure this is weapons, but I’d be a whole lot more confident in our ability to handle nuclear waste if we didn’t have a ~100 year old active ongoing nuclear disaster that we can’t manage to fix and we don’t even know the full extent of.

Once we demonstrate ability to clean this mess up, maybe then we might be able to trust ourselves with future nuclear projects.

View on HN

I think that safety claims re: nuclear are a bit oversold by some, but when the alternative is increased deaths from particular emissions from burning fossil fuels I still find myself leaning nuclear.

e.g. Germany having decided to accelerate its nuclear powerplant shutdowns gets estimated (https://www.nber.org/papers/w26598) at leading to around 1100 additional deaths per year.

You also need to note that the same government at the same time decided to decelerate the growth of renewable energies that were supposed to replace both nuclear and fossil plants. It’s not a choice between nuclear and fossil.

What does a spill of cesium and strontium at a research site have to do with nuclear power generation?

The research that caused the spill was in support of nuclear power generation—for testing vitrification of spent nuclear fuel for geologic burial. From OP:

- "In the 1980s one of the building’s six hot cells was being used to prepare concentrated radioactive cesium and strontium from Hanford plutonium-production waste for Germany to use for testing of a repository for radioactive waste."

(And speaking generally, it's a type of work that's representative of closed nuclear fuel cycles: a type of work that'd you want to see a lot *more of*, if you want seriously to expand the nuclear fission economy. I'm no flavor of anti-nuclear; but let's not reflexively dismiss interesting discussions of technological risk—let's not fall into that polarization trap).

I mean, it’s research. Expect fuckups.

I think the poster is very clear that their objection is about how nuclear waste is handled, not where it came from.

I think the reply was very clear that it's not a given that the way a research site handles nuclear waste would be the same way as an actual power plant

The same government is responsible for managing the nuclear waste at both of them, and they’ve clearly demonstrated they are unwilling and/or unable to do so.

I don’t support giving the government any more nuclear waste to manage until it can finish what is already on its plate, so to speak.

This site was used to create weapons-grade fuel, which has an order of magnitude more fissile isotopes than anything a civilian reactor uses. The dangers are not comparable

If the government is unwilling/unable to dedicate sufficient resources to clean up this 10x mess, why should we expect them to do so for a future 1x mess?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com