Hacker News Reader

Comment by foxyv | Hacker News Reader

To add to your point. Disposal of nuclear waste at sea was common up until 1993. There is still a couple hundred thousand tons of such waste sitting in the ocean right now. In addition, about 214 times as much radioactive material was generated by nuclear testing than the Chernobyl breach. Fukushima wouldn't even come close to the waste that has already been released prior to the 1994 ban on Oceanic dumping.

View on HN

What is the point ? That we dumped so much crap into the ocean a little more won’t hurt?

And then you have to read about how expensive nuclear is today compared with a few decades ago because of the excesive regulations. Regulations that pro-nuclear usually want to relax, to make nuclear more economically viable.

No wonder that dumping nuclear waste to river and oceans is cheaper than having to safely store it for at least a couple of centuries.

Rivers are a bad idea because they change course, get dredged, dammed, etc. Into the ocean is best, preferably somewhere deep and remote (simply to reduce the risk of people messing with it.) Deep trenches that would fuck with fish nets anyway are a good place for it.

Sure, but who defines "remote"? We've explored a small percentage of the ocean [1] and most of the places we have explored we've been surprised to find life. In fact NOAA estimates that 91% of species in the ocean have yet to be classified [2]. We'd be dumping what is basically a forever chemical into places that we don't understand.

If we can't responsibly keep track of the waste we're producing then we shouldn't produce it. I'm pro-nuclear, and I think we can do it, but we need to be the kind of civilization that can plan beyond the next quarter first.

[1] https://oceanliteracy.unesco.org/ocean-exploration/, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/exploration.html

[2] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-species.html

Also, there’s the Godzilla factor you’d need to consider. It’s cheap to dump radioactive material near a deep-ocean vent until something decides to grow and destroys Tokyo. Again.

Now, seriously, screwing with ecosystems we know nothing about is a very bad idea, even if for no other reason than we being unable to study them after we turn them into radioactive deserts.

Regulations don’t change the cost that much. Yes, you can save money by not having a containment vessel around your nuclear reactor but that’s a major risk which has inherent costs. On net it’s cheaper to have that containment than not irregardless of regulations.

Dig into the rising costs, and you find root causes like 3 mile island showing the industry it needed to increase maintenance spending. It wasn’t some arbitrary overreaction but simply the damage accumulated enough to cost a billion+ dollar asset. Thus much of that “increased” spending is simply asset preservation.

Most of the regulations nuclear proponents want relaxed are around plant construction, not waste disposal. The older generations of western nuclear plants have a strong track record. The justification for regulation need to be weighted against the damage of continued carbon emissions due to higher plant costs.

Indeed, it can be interpreted as "we didn't knew and made huge mistakes, therefore it seems OK to do so", which seems... let's say 'weird'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

Spending nearly 1/6th of Japan's GDP to clean up 0.45% of the nuclear waste dumped into the ocean is worth consideration. If the earthquake had happened 20 years earlier (nothing on tectonic timescales) this wouldn't be up to much discussion.

If you were to commit such a large amount of cash - a reparation for the disaster - would you spend it all on this?

> 0.45% of the nuclear waste

Do you mean that the Fukushima nuclear accident dumped locally in a few days 0.45% of all dumped nuclear waste during the last ~80 years?"? If so it seems non-negligible to me.

> 20 years earlier (nothing on tectonic timescales) this wouldn't be up to much discussion

Not sure about this. Maybe ~50 years ago, and even so the accident at Three Mile Island (1979) didn't pollute much but triggered quite a bunch of discussions.

> would you spend it all on this?

Yes, because there is no other realistic way: it is about losing citizens' trust and having to cope with other nations' claims, whatever the real risk. Associations of women were created to periodically measure radioactivity in various areas! In Japan! No government exposed to such distrust can decide to ignore it. A stain was made, it has to be cleaned.

Feels like the question here is, is the point of the government primarily to govern well or to make voters happy?

Indeed, in more than one way.

AFAIK in theory the people knows what is good for itself, and therefore making voters happy is governing well.

ObQuote: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

"Triggered quite a lot of discussions" is an ultra-low bar. Lots of hysterical bullshit triggers a lot of discussion. Aliens, puzzagate, etc.

TMI was an expensive mistake but the public wasn't at risk.

... thanks to sheer luck as, AFAIK, no-one knows exactly why the reactor didn't completely melt, threatening the vessel and therefore containment.

> That we dumped so much crap into the ocean a little more won’t hurt?

Something I found out recently was that the city of Brussels discharged raw sewage into the rivers until 2007. This from a wealthy city at the heart of the European project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...

Radioactive waste disposal is seldom paired with a cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps this is because the benefits are harder to quantify.

Does anyone know how many lives will be saved by spending an estimated 4.7B EUR to commence retrieval of the low and intermediate level waste from the Asse II mine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

4.7B EUR could provide humanitarian aid to many around the world, saving lives and enabling yet more to more fully reach their potential.

Everyone has consistently treated mining waste as an unavoidable side effect of mining, which only economical solution is to dig a whole in the ground and put it there. The only minimum standard that get enforced is that the waste should not leak into the ground water.

> The only minimum standard that get enforced is that the waste should not leak into the ground water.

In the case of the Asse II mine it is not clear how strongly connected the water at the mine is to water at the surface. Given it is a salt mine I would not expect a strong connection.

> Everyone has consistently treated mining waste as an unavoidable side effect of mining

Yes, there are better and worse ways to dispose of it. Tailings are a huge problem and have caused many a dam disaster. Plainly Difficult Youtube channel dam disasters makes for sobering viewing. https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/playlists

While intuitively dumping nuclear waste on the ocean seems like a terrible idea, if one actually does a cost benefit analysis of dumping glassed and cannistered nuclear waste on the abyssal plane it becomes tricky to find downsides.

The ocean already contains a billion tons of uranium and is mildly radioactive, the cannister and components are far too heavy to float or get carried much by currents, water is a fantastic radiation blocker (a few meters away and you're quite safe) and carries away exces heat and there's almost no life on the abyssal planes.

I really should get around to properly writing up all the details and background knowledge in a blog post at some point... (the above is missing a lot, including references, common objections and numbers)

We could just trash it between two tectonic plates, so it gets eaten up by earth. It will take some time, but it would be perfectly safe. Somewhere very deep in the ocean.

The point is, if we cannot responsibly dispose of waste, we should not be creating it in the first place.

Yes. We've dumped tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste into the ocean, with no observed ill effects. This is very strong evidence that another 900 tons will have no effect either.

I don't think that's how it works. For all we know, in ten years, parts of the Atlantic Ocean could become uninhabitable by marine life due to radioactive plumes. Or not. The history of radioactive waste disposal is very short. Dumping further could exacerbate future problems. That's kind of why we banned it.

Personally I think deep bore hole disposal in geologically inactive regions makes the most sense.

The areas around the nuclear waste disposal sites are monitored for radioactivity. Radiation drops to ambient levels very sharply. Radioactive material decays over time - it'll get strictly less radioactive as time goes on.

Radiation levels at such sites generally drops due to dilution. As we have seen in the case of other wastes like mercury and dioxins, you can get bioaccumulation of this waste in the food chain causing environmental damage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com