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Comment by maybewhenthesun | Hacker News Reader

The engineering side might be a theoretically solved problem, anybody looking at belgium's crumbling nuclear powerplants can help but feeling slightly nervous!

I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens.

On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.

All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.

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> the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem.

Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

- https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

Nuclear waste is small and solid

That would depend on the category of the waste:

- High level waste - Transuranic waste - Low level waste

where high level waste comes in two classes: spent fuel and reprocessing waste, the latter being liquid (possibly not green).

https://ieer.org/resource/classroom/classifications-nuclear-...

You can just bury it deep in a mountain

Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nuclear waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:

https://www.nirasondraf.be/

As for the article by Shellenberger you linked, please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism etc, who claims eternal growth can continue like until now without ecoogical impact

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

Edit: I just found out that Shellenberger now works on finding the Aliens:

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)

Same wiki.

> please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism

Ad hominem. Criticize the argument. Your opinion about Shellenberger or even his other opinions are irrelevant.

I don't particularly like him, but that does not mean all his points are invalid.

This is not my opinion, I just paraphrased the wiki. From wokeism to the quote about aliens, it's all in there.

As for the validity of his statements, please read his Congressional Testimonies in said wiki and see if that changes your mind.

It is your opinion that it is a bad thing and that it affects all his other points. That's why you felt the need to cite those points. And you did the same in this comment, which is again an ad hominem.

When a debater makes a lot of bad points, extrapolating to be suspicious of any point he makes is not and ad-hominem.

And ad hominem is when you dismiss his points because he might have done something immoral in a completely unrelated field.

I know it's not a green ooze. But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking. The waste is a lot more dangerous than the uranium we dug out and packaging it in a way where you are sure it won't surface for sure is really not a solved problem.

> Nuclear waste is small and solid

As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.

I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.

> But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking.

> Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore.

Things obviously need to be weighed against each other. Burying it in a mountain does make it safe to store indefinitely, but obviously not easily accessible. It can be dug out again, however, if it becomes useful again. It's going to be more expensive, but you pay for the safety.

> As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

One of the articles I linked makes the argument that Fukushima is not as tragic as people think.

Quote:

> But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.

what has fukushima to do with storing nuclear waste. I'll go further and ask how many did fukushima kill with radioation or will kill per unscear?

Better reactors were already invented (superphenix, snr300). Both killed by greens.

> what has fukushima to do with storing nuclear waste.

They had (still have I think) a rather nasty problem with storing lots of contaminated water in leaking containers on the Fukushima site. Storing nuclear waste might be 'easy' when stuff goes as planned. I still think it's completely unrealistic to think you can store something for thousands of years. I'm quite glad the ancient egyptians didn't stash caches of plutonium in various places, for example.

>Better reactors were already invented

Better reactors are invented. But as Belgium's crumbling reactors show (and Fukushima, obv.), people are hesitant to spend money on actually building those.

A theoretical better reactor is nice, but you can't just handwave reality away. And the reality is that there are lots of practical risks in the practical application of nuclear power. Mainly because of politics, maybe. But still that's reality.

We need nuclear, but we should strive to use something better in the end.

Just to highlight: in contrast with fossil fuels, at least nuclear waste is something we can capture, creating a storage problem.

*if everything works as planned

If everything works as planned fossil fuel power plant emmits CO2 and pollutants.

Gladly, you don't need to use them

not if you read fraunhofer ise decarbonization pathways report. If you dont like nuclear and have no hydro, it basically means fossils

I don't know how you read this out of the report

When we already talk about Fraunhofer, they with a few other institutes, have been sketching out various pathways over the years for Germany for transitioning to a renewable energy system multiple times, see https://langfristszenarien.de/enertile-explorer-wAssets/docs...

While Germany has some hydro, it's just a tiny amount

I'm talking about this one https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-...

In pessimistic economy growth scenario about 80GW of gas are needed or more otherwise. The hope is to sometime replace it with hydrogen which looks like a gamble https://ieefa.org/resources/germanys-gas-and-hydrogen-gamble

> I'm talking about this one https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-...

again my remark: I don't know how you read this out of the report:

> If you dont like nuclear and have no hydro, it basically means fossils

The report doesn't even aim to make claims about feasibility of energy systems without nuclear, natural gas and hydro power.

> In pessimistic economy growth scenario about 80GW of gas are needed or more otherwise.

1) during the specific paths of which there are infinitely many ... (including the ones I linked)

2) seldom usage

3) replaced over time (when extrapolating there would be no natural gas usage )

The ones you linked too do use gas firming... And the goal there too is to sometimes replace it with hydrogen if ever possible which is more a pipedream than doing a messmer plan over entire EU today

natural gas usage is or is almost (used for a tiny amount of heating) non-existent in the scenarios

Given the actual build times of nuclear plants in Europe, vs the renewables build out rate, we need solar and wind to tide us over for a decade or more before the nuclear plants come on line.

Solar and wind cannot do that. We'll need oil and gas to tide us over for that decade or more.

Some gas, but we can reduce it by an order of magnitude. Either way nuclear is not coming online quickly.

Solar and wind are scaling much faster than gas and oil right now. After the recent Iran war I think it would be insane to rely on new oil or gas. Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.

>Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.

Don't talk about Americans that way!

We aren’t making a very good case for ourselves on the world stage are we…

> and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.

More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.

My experience is that politicians tend to hand-wave this problem away, while physicists and geologists acknowledge the problem and actually think about it.

So imo not really a political problem.

Belgian plants arent crumbling, they just need refurbs to have higher CF.

Uranium is sufficient to outlive the sun. Nuclear requires least amount of materials and mining. Uranium mining is nowadays mostly in situ which is environmentally fine vs say lithium mining.

"Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever." - so you say the same nonsense about storing arsenic/cadmium/lead waste from copper mining for eternity? Storing nuclear waste isnt much different from say Herfa Neurode. An example is onkalo. Soon others will appear, like Fosmark.

FFS you just thrown a bunch of fossil propaganda nonsense

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