Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

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Well, civilian reactor "waste" is potentially very valuable stuff, but we're rather stupid in our approach towards it. And the "tens of thousands of years" is grossly overstated, at least if you apply the metric that after 600 years it'll be no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.

The Chernobyl RBMK design is criminal, and literally so in the US, where Edward Teller made sure reactors with positive void coefficients were outlawed (one reason we don't do CANDU, although the proposed Advanced CANDU reactor addresses this). The Japanese demonstrated long before Fukushima Daiichi that they don't have a nuclear safety culture at the level they should be allowed to run serious reactors, and that incident prompted me to look at boiling water reactor designs for the first time, and I don't like them at all.

Yeah, the above is in danger of the No True Scotsman fallacy, but we have heck of a lot of counter experiences, including the pressurized water reactor worst case incident at Three Mile Island which harmed no one and was never in serious danger of doing so.

As for what you poise as a bizarre focus, every coal plant in the world is pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they're inherently dirty, and totally cleaning them up is not in the cards. As in, right now, every day one is running, it's potentially doing harm....

> The Chernobyl RBMK design is criminal

Indeed - it was considered so poor that the European Union required closure of RBMK-type reactors as a precondition for EU membership.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety...

And the "tens of thousands of years" is grossly overstated, at least if you apply the metric that after 600 years it'll be no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.

http://www.ccnr.org/hlw_graph.html#gr

EDIT: Some have penalized me under the notion that hga's "apples and oranges" comment was a retort (despite the fact that the chart also has concentrated uranium near the bottom). It is not. HGA is apparently unaware that uranium tailings are effectively worse than uranium ore, containing 85%+ or the original radioactivity of the ore, but concentrated and exposed. If you had the choice between holding a handful of uranium ore or uranium tailings, you'd do better to choose the former.

There are a lot of grossly misleading claims from the pro-nuclear lobby, one of which is that if you only count the product of fission (and not the actinides), and you compare it against post-processed yellow-cake, it's all the same.

In no universe is it equivalent to naturally existing uranium after 600 years.

every coal plant in the world is pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they're inherently dirty

But despite the ridiculous lead-in to the linked article (no, the common notions of nuclear power does not come from the Simpsons), everyone knows that coal is dirty. Most areas are phasing it out (here in Ontario we have effectively eliminated coal power, from it comprising 25% of our power not too many years ago). Is nuclear power the best alternative? That's dubious, not only because of "exceptional" events that yield enormous ecological damage, the waste product that we just push to future generations, and economics that seldom make sense over the life of the project.

Bzzzt: Apples and Oranges, I'm talking about the original ore, that chart uses ore tailings, which are certainly not benign (I grew up in an area where mass quantities of lead and zinc were mined until the end of WWII), but they're very much not the same thing. Especially if the refining process also seperates some of the nastier things you'll find along with the uranium.

Find some references with the ore and perhaps we can have a discussion.

'"exceptional" events that yield enormous ecological damage'

Which would total Chernobyl, which I've already pointed out a direction of some of its many problems.

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