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The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.

This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").

Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.

It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't that "used pizza box" fuel more or less ideal for a breeder reactor?

It could be reprocessed for use in a breeder reactor, but breeders are not attractive at present or foreseeable uranium prices. They make the expensive part of nuclear power (capital costs) even more expensive to save money on the part that doesn't cost much at all (making fuel from mined uranium). If nuclear power expanded drastically then breeders might be more affordable than exploiting really marginal uranium sources, but otherwise they make the economics of nuclear power worse.

Yeah it’s all fine, it only displaced a few thousand people from their homes and made an area an uninhabitable wasteland. It’s only going to cost ~$500 billion in total for cleanup[0]. Nevermind the capital loss from the destruction of the power plant itself. Nuclear is definitely a great idea.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_c...

Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths are the only dimension people use to compare with other electricity sources. You can't just put on a blindfold and ignore all of the other factors. Just because only a handful of deaths can be directly attributed, doesn't mean nuclear isn't an absolute nightmare when it goes wrong.

Directly attributable deaths, at that. Who knows how many equivalent nondeaths occurred by subtracting half a year from a hundred people?

Deaths (nuclear accident): 1 confirmed from radiation (lung cancer, 4 years later), and 2,202 from evacuation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

Long-term effects on health are disputed: http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor... http://www.fukushima-disaster.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/e... https://apjjf.org/thierry-ribault/4761/article

The nuclear accident cleanup cost is very high ad raising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...

> and 2,202 from evacuation.

The primary source for that wikipedia quote argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.

Over 65,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity. One such death, for example, was 102 year old Fumio Okubo who lived 30 km inland and hanged himself after being forced to move for no good reason.

    There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima\*, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide; so far, there has not been a single case of cancer linked to radiation from the plant.

    That is prompting a shocking reassessment among some scholars: that the evacuation was an error. The human cost would have been far smaller had people stayed where they were, they argue. The wider death toll from the quake was 15,895, according to the National Police Agency.

     Of the disaster-related deaths, 1,984 were people over the age of 65.

~ https://www.ft.com/content/000f864e-22ba-11e8-add1-0e8958b18...

\* technically not "in Fukushima" but any deaths over the following seven years in the group evacuated from Fukushima.

Obtaining the amount of victims of an evacuation is difficult, and official figures are conservative for many reasons, the main one being that each victim's family obtained financial reparation (see also the "Limitations" section of a pertinent study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572... ).

During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ).

This is biz as usual: after a war many armchair experts, especially those acting upon one of the parties, are quite sure that "tackling this was easy". During the event, they are nowhere to be found.

It's clear that a small number of mostly older people suffered unduly from the stress of an imposed evacuation.

It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue.

Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable, due to extreme bushfires destroying every building, would the stress on the elderly be any less?

> It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue

An evacuation triggered by a nuclear major accident seems specific to nuclear to me, in the sense: if, instead of this nuclear plant, some field occupied by wind turbines or solar panels were build, there would be no need to evacuate.

> Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable

No human being can control nor counter this sort of event. We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.

> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.

Or add passive safety measures to nuclear power plants. Fukushima failed because it was still generating too much heat, but that excessive heat couldn’t power a turbine to cool itself down.

Until the next failure comes along that we didn't predict.

Fukushima could have been easily predicted. That’s what passive safety is about.

> Fukushima could have been easily predicted

After such an accident some armchair experts are quite sure that it "could have been easily predicted". Before the accident (to "easily" prevent it) or during it they are nowhere to be found.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41774144

“What happens if we lose the generators?” is not a hard question to come up with. I have a great imagination and a long career built on, among other things, asking pointed questions. I would have asked that very same question, as well as “how unlikely?” as the next one.

> “What happens if we lose the generators?”

They knew. Especially after Forsmark, 2006 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... ), which was a major subject for the industry. The first stages of a similar incident happened in France decades before.

... and it didn't change anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41774144

It's very easy to predict something that already happened will happen again.

Maybe, however History shows that is isn't always done.

Everything is easy, nothing is perfect.

I won't try to summarize here, but long story short, the conditions which led to the Fukushima disaster were well known and TEPCO was warned as early as 2000, but they did nothing to prevent it. There a number of good sources on the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Pri...).

How do we know the next time a similar situation arises it will be dealt with in time?

> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.

That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)

No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.

So let's see :

- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).

- They don't want nuclear because politics.

- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")

- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.

The two main end results of this policy are :

- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...

Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?

Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.

> - They don't want nuclear because politics.

No. Because Fukushima. At the end of 2010 Germany enacted a law extending the operating life of nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened and all political parties in Germany closed nuclear reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561

> sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated

Facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy

> The only other solution left is coal,

Facts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41768679

Yes, coal is a disaster. Nuclear risks (major accident, waste, proliferation...) is a potential disaster.

> deaths in neighbouring countries, every year

True, and quite sad. No nation yells because each is a culprit: emissions caused by France's fossil fuels (transportation, industry...) is far superior to those of the German gridpower system. We can agree that all this is a catastrophic state of affairs. Germany's nuclear phaseout is a drop in the sea and wasn't conducted due to some whim.

> Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer

The amount of victims of past accident is controversial, therefore this is controversial.

> The source argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.

We'll never know. Doing history fiction, a more probable outcome would be a lot of people dying by "natural causes" in the next months. We talk about places that were mostly ghost cities for a decade, for some reason.

This common discourse of "but nobody died ever by the direct impact in the left eye, of a radioactive atom called John, on a Thursday", seems a little ridiculous frankly. If we have a pool of people that died, and we dismiss all this people one by one with different tricks and shades of "can't prove, not my fault", yes, of course, "nobody" died.

And Santa Cancer doesn't exist, is the parents.

They know that is false, we also know that is false, and they know that we know it, so what's the point of keeping saying that?

There is a pool of people who definitely died. That's not in dispute.

What is questionable, as you point out, is the application of different tricks and shades of "can't prove, must be nuclear" to claim all deaths in the pool as a direct result of nuclear.

As others have pointed out there are similar yearly figures for tenuous "coal deaths" as there are here for seven years of post disaster "evacuation deaths".

Invasive cancer statistics in Japan were compiled for the Fukushima Cancer Registry database and published by the National Cancer Center Japan.

If we review average annual percent change on Thyroid cancer incidence, there was a more or less stable value between 2008 and 2011. Then in 2012 there is a sudden increase of 10,8% on Fukushima, versus a 3,7% for the whole Japan in the same year [1]. Some increase is normal in a population that is growing and aging but a jump, not so much.

We even have a control population: The Tochigi prefecture (at the South of Fukushima and bordering it). This landlocked prefecture has a big industrial complex, including a strong sector of X-ray machines makers. Tochigi has the lower increase on Thyroid cancer of the three between 2011 and 2012 (3,2% increase). [1]

The death ratio didn't changed, but people that is diagnosed with cancer does not die immediately, so just looking for mortality increase that year is a deceptive measure.

So, something happened in 2012 that increased Thyroid cancer on Fukushima more than in the rest of Japan.

Lets assume that we forget all about the elephant in the room, and past experiences where radioactivity accidents typically increased thyroid cancers. How would you explain that? Any alternative hypothesis?

-----------------

[1] Shibata A, Saji S, Kamiya K, Yasumura S. Trend in Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Fukushima From 2008 Through 2015. J Epidemiol. 2021 Dec 5;31(12):653-659

(The article covers only up to 2015 to remove artifacts from 2016 when the way to report cancer changed, causing another increase on the registers).

> So, something happened in 2012 that increased Thyroid cancer on Fukushima .. How would you explain that?

The obvious answer would be that radioactive iodine-131 entered the food chain and that strontium-90 also was being ingested by dairy cattle and was being concentrated (biologically magnified) in cow’s milk.

As demonstrated in Australia by Hedley Marston.

This seems unrelated to what was being discussed .. the direct attribution of deaths amoung the excavated cohort to nuclear causes.

Most radiation-induced solid cancers develop after 10+ years, therefore studying the 2008-2015 period isn't very pertinent.

Compiling statistics about a population is more difficult than doing so for a well-specified group of workers, and given the treatment of workers... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/special-report-he...

It is a bit strange that we don't see death counts from other evacuations. It is not that uncommon to see mass evacuations from flooding, like the one we had in Europe this year or 2021, but its only death caused directly by the flooding that get reported. There the recurring hurricanes in the US and the also recurring evacuations when it happens. Taking a more direct 1:1 example, the Oroville Dam crisis in California evacuated 20,000 more people than Fukushima and to my knowledge there isn't any official numbers on attributed deaths.

Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?

A key difference is that an evacuation triggered by a major nuclear accident could have been avoided (typically: by building renewables instead of a nuclear plant).

> Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?

This is a matter of debate. During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ). The extent of the implemented evacuation was considerably inferior. Nowadays, after the battle, according to some pro-nuclear no evacuation was necessary.

The Oroville Dam crisis could have been avoided if the power plant did proper maintenance on the dam, and the power plant management was found as being the primary cause of the accident. Dams are in general man made and maintain multiple nuclear bombs in terms of energy in potential, which need to be handled with care. The crisis had as much to do with the weather as Fukushima had to do with earthquakes.

Much of the damage caused by natural events can be avoided with proper planning and prevention, but they cost money. Most natural defenses against extreme weather are also removed in order for developing land or extracting natural resources.

The Oroville Dam didn't collapse and the crisis didn't make a single victim

Is there a debate about those raw facts?

https://damfailures.org/case-study/oroville-dam-california-2...

> handled with care > proper planning and prevention

I agree. Everyone can fail. Letting very dangerous tiny material undetectable without a complex equipment and active for years getting out then be dispersed on huge areas by wind/rain/... is a nuclear exclusive. Moreover the most risky type of renewables (dams) has more inertia (it cannot trigger an accident in mere minutes, it is more robust). As we now have industrial renewables there is no reason to deploy nuclear anymore.

How can you claim that there wasn't a single victim when they evacuated 180,000 people (including hospital inpatients and elderly people)? If we use the same evacuation-to-death ratio as Fukushima, the Oroville Dam crisis caused 2416 deaths. In addition it should have costed the government hundreds of millions in evacuation costs, repairs of infrastructure, and lost revenue because of damages cause by the spillway.

Oroville: no radiation, no panic. The evacuation started on February, 12 and people were back home 2 days later. Moreover such event in the USA in 2017 caused deaths and nobody took note?

Come on.