Hacker News Reader

Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

I understand and kind of agree with your general point. But nuclear fission accudenta have the potential to render large (on a human acale) areas of land uninhabitable. However unlikely, thats a problem. And we still dont have a good, proven solution to nuclear waste disposal.

(And yes, I understand that carbon-based fuels produce waste too.)

View on HN

AFAIK, hydroelectricity holds the record on largest area rendered uninhabitable (and largest, most impactful accident), but I guess that's because nobody counts the chemical industry and mining ones correctly.

Seems like the real choice here is to perish via climate change caused by burning fossil fuels - OR - embrace the non-guaranteed but certainly possible dangers of nuclear power. Its a lousy decision to have to make but in my mind it comes down to this.

Its not so much the US and EU that I worry about; Its the less developed nation states. Plenty of potential for F-ups all around but at least we've been doing it successfully for some time in the US/EU.

We should obviously be building nuclear plants as fast as possible while recognizing that they present outsize risks.

I want more nuclear plants, but not if they are run by the same myopic system that gave us Deepwater Horizon.

> And we still dont have a good, proven solution to nuclear waste disposal.

I hear this all the time and I don't get it.

What is bad or unproven about burying the waste in concrete?

I'm in the state where all other US states want to ship their waste. We don't want it. What's wrong with burying it in your state? A few years back, there was an underground fire of this stuff. Your asking "what's so bad" as a non-rhetorical question is a BAD sign of what's so bad...

But carbon-based power generation is actively rendering large areas of land uninhabitable. Global warming isn't an outcome from accidents, that's just what it does. The difference is the plausible deniability and degrees of separation. A wave of heat deaths doesn't look like it's related to the coal mine in the next state over, but it is.

That isn't unique to nuclear power. Coal seam fires can also render larges areas uninhabitable, and they can burn for hundreds if not thousands of years.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

The silver lining is we got the Silent Hill games.

We do have a solution - just bury it underground. And the best part is: it gets safer with time!

The trick is picking a place to bury it; apparently all the US states with suitable locations for nuclear plants somehow lack suitable locations for waste storage, or else they wouldn't insist on shipping it to a state without any nuclear plants at all (oh but it was also the one state that got repeatedly nuked during tests, so I guess that makes it okay).

I remember an anti-nuclear talking about the Finnish project for long term storage.

He was depicting the project cost (4 billions) as ridicolously high and therefore unfeasible. Interesting that each plant (around 10 billions?) of Finland could use it for 100 years... seems like a no brainer to me!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com