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Comment by Kon5ole | Hacker News Reader

Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do. This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.

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Negative industrial byproducts creating costs for future generations is an unique challenge? Have you heard of climate change?

Your argument would be valid if nuclear power would be the only option to prevent climate change. But there are other options: the various renewables, most importantly solar and wind. So it is not nuclear vs. climate change, but nuclear vs. solar/wind.

Any one power plant has no measurable effect on global climate. (All fossil power plants combined worldwide have about the same emissions as all cars; about 1/6).

So, if your fathers started coal plants, you close them, stop paying for them and can forget about them. this is not at all the case if your fathers started nuclear plants, not only do you have to pay, your children have to pay, all their lives, and all your grandchildren, and so on.

What bugs me is the tendency of proponents to pretend that the decision is no biggie. It is a biggie. At least understand that, then we can have a rational discussion about it!

Energy storage solutions and infrastructure for generating synthesized fuels (hydrogen and others) will require investments, but those investments will be a gift to the future. We will bear the burden of building the infrastructure now, but future generations will benefit from what we have built.

Nuclear is the opposite, we get the benefits and the future gets the burden.

So basically you’re so caught up in this infighting between two carbon neutral energies that you’d rather spread disinformation about climate change and the negative effects of coal…

I have spread no disinformation. Seems to me you fail to come up with arguments against what I actually said so instead you create a strawman.

Nuclear costs are way higher than anyone has ever accounted for and they are kicked to future generations. This is a fact and we can do better.

The right thing to do is surely to spend now on tech that continues to pay dividends in the future. Maybe we ourselves won't see the benefits directly in our wallets but the future will.

> So, if your fathers started coal plants, you close them, stop paying for them and can forget about them.

I suspect you don't live in e.g. Tuvalu? Or in a country experiencing desertification like Spain?

You misunderstood the point: yes, burning coal is bad. The argument is that once you stop doing that, it’s over. I don’t think that’s completely true - the impact of mining and ash won’t instantly disappear - but if the question is whether we should switch from one thing which has significant environmental hazards to another which poses significant risks or alternatives which do not, that past example suggests that we should be having that conversation about how realistic it is to assume that a multi-century mitigation effort will be effective. Coal is especially interesting as an example because we’ve seen how the mining side of it became a powerful political force where even people whose families were negatively impacted by the pollution still lobbied for its preservation. Nuclear would be smaller but still likely to have that factor to account for as we’ve seen with “temporary” storage becoming de facto permanent.

> The argument is that once you stop doing that, it’s over.

My issue is that this statement is wrong, though. All the greenhouse gas from coal that was burned in the past, and all the coal we're still burning, will still be around and is still going to slowly bake the planet we live on for the next millenia [1].

Effectively, coal emissions are only considered this way because, after we stop producing, we stop seeing the smokestacks and we forget that the byproducts are still there. This is also true for most other pollution sources: industrial sites with heavy metal pollution don't magically clean themselves when the factory closes. WW1 battle areas are still deeply polluted and some are still unfit for agriculture. "Eternal" chemicals are never going back to the oil well. And, for us technologists, ewaste does not magically disappear [2].

It's really maddening that some people develop an acute perception that radioactive waste is "forever", but somehow fail to understand that the same is true for a very large part of the waste we create now, for which nature hasn't (over millions of years) evolved organisms able to eat them.

[1]: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41765334

This also unfortunately makes a case against nuclear. For instance the worst coal burning country in Europe is Poland, which 5 years ago decided to build nuclear plants. They are set to break ground in a couple years and the first plant will be finished 2033 or so. The last ones 2040. And this all if it goes according to plan, which it won't. And even then they will be left with a significant amount of coal burning plants in the system.

So at least 15 years of effort to get one plant online during which time the country will continue to pump CO2 to the tune of 70% coal in their electricity mix. CO2 that will, as you say, continue to bake the earth. Nuclear is a terrible choice for decarbonization.

Only really true for gev iii reactors. Gen iv reactors don’t have any of the challenges you mention. It’s almost as if you don’t have any faith on the human race’s ability to creatively problem solve and are assuming nuclear technology needs to be stuck in time from designs of the 1960s.

> ...centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what...

OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.

Barrels don't last when filled with nuclear material. The radiation embrittles the materials over time, they wouldn't last 100 years. And then all that crap will be released into the ocean and swerve all over the world.

Assume that the folks building the barrels know about the embrittlement, and have both a decent budget and some experienced engineers to mitigate the problem.

Also note my phrase "bury them". Radwaste is not some magical Sealed Evil in a Can. If bound in compounds with substantially higher density that the ocean sediments, and emplaced a few tens of meters below the sea floor, then gravity will quite strongly discourage its upward migration.

Four decades of studies by experienced engineers and a very decent budget to figure out how to store US nuclear waste has resulted in 0 solutions so far. I think we can safely assume that dumping it at sea is not an option.

We have solutions in the US, but politicians keep playing games. Yucca mountain has been authorized and de-authorized back and forth for decades. It isn't an engineering problem at all.

True-ish - but those game-playing politicians don't have much freedom of choice, if they want to keep their jobs. The US nuclear establishment has earned itself a "bungling pathological liars" reputation with the public. Why would the average voter react well to any "we'll store a whole lotta Bad Stuff near you" plan?

Nuclear material is put in glass which can last many thousands of years.

Geological studies of the locations where the nuclear waste is burried show that it would take millions of year for the isotopes to escape.

Meanwhile, the effects of low dose radiations on health are vastly exaggerated. Every industry is releasing pollution in the ecosystem that are way more toxic and dangerous. And these get barely any attention for some reasons.

Indeed, officially the casks conceived during the 1980's are OK, however in 2011 the MIT discovered that "Cracking related to corrosion could occur in 30 years or less, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is studying whether the casks can be used for 100 years as some hope."

https://archive.nytimes.com/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/...

People keep proposing that nonsense from 70's but can be cured studying some really basic biology and oceanography. In 2024 is at a level similar than saying that smoking is good for your children. Is not even funny as a joke.

> Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up

Read about the concept of vertical migration

Are you referring to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diel_vertical_migration

If so, Wikipedia's first para makes it clear that that migration occurs at vastly shallower depths than an ocean trench.

Why do you think that people spend decades studying and mastering a field where they could just instead read a page of Wikipedia? There are hundreds of entire books about marine ecology and sea physics. Thick books with entire chapters about how energy/matter moves up and down in the ocean. There are more than one type of migration and we don't still know a lot of things about the sea. Physics tell us also that warm water tend to ascend over cold water, and that the water is moved from very deep areas to some coastal areas just because the shape of continents.

To achieve the same effect of leaving a barrel of nuclear waste in the middle of the sea (hoping in vain that nothing will move from there) we could better to put nuclear dust in the way of a stampede, or leave the barrels in the beach before the tornado season. Would achieve the same effect but saving much more money.

(Sadly, it feels like my use of the colloquial term "barrel" has triggered a "proclaim authority, dismiss straw man" reflex.)

If its makes you feel better, that word never supposed any problem. For me, is just a synonym of container here

why bury precious fuel? Use purex or fast reactors, vitrify rest, put in casks and deal with it at least till transmutation research advances

My understanding is that the anti-proliferation lobby* is intensely allergic to several of the technologies involved in doing that.

*EDIT - I'm referring to the US-centered anti-proliferation lobby. Though "national security establishment" might be a better term. And yes, its ability to influence French, Japanese, etc. domestic nuclear power policy is much more limited.

i mean, france does purex, japan too, soon us too. fast reactors are slowly rolling out in some countries like india, china, russia, even eu has some projects in mind

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