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Comment by NotAnOtter | Hacker News Reader

People are broadly misinformed. Nuclear plants release significantly less radiation than coal based plants, as an example. They do create a lot of waste that we currently don't know how to process, but the quantity is actually shockingly small in the context of a global issue. We're talking several warehouses. Not millions, not all of California. We can just pick some cave in northern Canada or central sahara and bury it there, it seriously isn't that much. It's better than where we currently store the waste which is basically the ocean & clouds.

Meltdowns are tragic when they occur - but rare. It just gets a lot of press when a city of 50k gets deleted than when global ecosystems fail or a billion people die a decade earlier than they otherwise would due to pollution related helath issues.

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While all that is true, the problem is specifically how much it can cost in the worst case. There's only been one Chernobyl out of about 400 reactors, and its cleanup cost amortised over all those reactors makes a surprisingly small difference to the cost of electricity, but also Chernobyl was bad enough to be considered a significant part of the collapse of the USSR.

Likewise, although it's absolutely true we're only talking about a few football fields of even the more voluminous low-level waste (high-level is about the size of one small block of flats), this is difficult to collect when it's a layer of dust spread over a few hundred square kilometres or dissolved in the seawater.

If one of the UK reactors had gone up like Chernobyl, the UK would have ceased to exist, not because of the radioactive kind of fallout but simply the economic fallout would have done it in.

It's a massive stretch to think one poorly placed meltdown somewhere in the UK would lead to the UK collapsing. I suspect it would be visible on a 10 year GDP chart but not "trending towards 0" levels of economic fallout.

Also I might just be misinformed but I thought nearly all of the radioactive waste from nuclear plants is already collected. It's not a collection problem, it's a storage problem. And a "what do we do when the energy company shuts down and stops maintaining their storage yard" problem.

If any of the Hinkley Points, Berkeley, Oldbury had an exclusion zone like Chernobyl's, Bristol and half the Bristol Channel would have been in the exclusion zone. (Berkeley, Oldbury would also have forced evacuation of GCHQ).

Dungeness, would have included Dover.

Bradwell, the Thames. The Sizewells, it would have been Lowestoft and Harwich.

Torness, the Firth of Forth, blocking sea access to Edinburgh.

While this is not an exclusive list, and also I grant I'm not actually modelling what the fallout zone might look like when there's a coastline involved (is it better or worse? IDK), I ask you: which major international transit hub can the island of Great Britain do without? I'm sure they can be rapidly evacuated (being transit hubs), but how fast can the capacity be replaced elsewhere, how fast, and at what cost?

Consider that the UK barely had enough stuff in place just for the Brexit-related customs checks, which it saw coming, even though there was a global pandemic at the time that reduced/zero passenger on the same hubs. How much worse if any of these hubs becomes completely off-limits?

That plus the chronic[0] extra demand on the rest of the power grid. Ukraine had to keep the other reactors at the Chernobyl power plant itself running after the incident, just to avoid shortages.

A 2016 estimate said the overall cost of the Chernobyl disaster was US$700 billion, which is approximately [EDIT: not 97%, mixing dollars and pounds, see [3]] 72% of the tax revenue the UK collected in the tax year starting about when that report was published[1][2][3].

Regarding your point about collection of radioactive waste from nuclear plants, that's only the case for correct operations, not when they leak — or, in the case of Chernobyl, explode.

[0] the acute (sudden) part is fine as shutdowns happen at random anyway; chronic is the long-term.

[1] https://globalhealth.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_the_United_Kingdom

[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=700USD+in+GBP+in+2016

> A 2016 estimate said the overall cost of the Chernobyl disaster was US$700 billion ...

You're taking 30 years worth of expenses and comparing them to the UK tax intake for one year. I am pretty certain the USSR didn't pay for all that up-front.

So $700b over 30 years is about $23b/year. The UK gov budget for the year you selected was about $1045b[1]. So if we are to take your Chernobyl example, it's about 2% of GDP per year. That is roughly half of what was spent on the second-smallest sector of the budget - "Public order and safety". That is a lot of money! But you're implying it would cause the collapse of the UK altogether.

As a comparison, during the 07/08 financial crisis the UK government bailed out the banks to the tune of $185b and managed to not collapse...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/budget-2016-docum...

> You're taking 30 years worth of expenses and comparing them to the UK tax intake for one year. I am pretty certain the USSR didn't pay for all that up-front.

Didn't pay all of it ever, that's also the damages of other affected nations after the collapse of the USSR.

So, there was a de-facto if not de-jure default on that cost.

> As a comparison, during the 07/08 financial crisis the UK government bailed out the banks to the tune of $185b and managed to not collapse...

It also owned some of the banks as a result (I was personally affected by this, LLOY shares), it wasn't just a pure cost.

I note that neither of those comments invalidate my point that this would not cause the collapse of the UK ...

They are only intended to show that it is a real possibility by analogy with what happened to the USSR following Chernobyl. It would require a detailed simulation to elevate this from "vibe" to "a clear risk percentage".

I do not have sufficient grounding in any of the relevant fields to create such a simulation, so I'm limited to drawling circles on a map around the reactors, seeing what's inside, and making a best-guess as to the consequences informed more by world news than anything more precise.

You can just say "my bad, I made a mistake by comparing the 30-year cost of Chernobyl cleanup to the annual budget. I was probably wrong on that part"

The weirdly evasive language just undermines the rest of your points and makes you look a bit ... dishonest?

Noted, but I sincerely don't think this changes my point.

Depends on the radius, but it would wreck agriculture and tourism.

> We can just pick some cave in northern Canada or central sahara

You make that sound easy. Finnland did it, France did it.

But for example Germany started to look for one in 1976, failed, rebooted in 2017 and the current estimate is we might one one in 2060.

Isn’t GP’s point, that it’s already enough for those two to have solved it? Not every country with a civil nuclear program needs its own waste containment, it’s just such a small absolute quantity.

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