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More FUD. Nuclear energy is the safest energy.

This is waste from nuclear weapons testing, it was concreted over as a "temporary measure" and now it seems like a more permanent solution needs to be found.

Unclear why you believe nuclear energy (by which I assume you mean nuclear power generation) is relevant.

For the same reason many readers will assume this headline is about power: "nuclear waste" is a term generally associated with reactor byproducts or weapons decommissioning.

Previous articles about this dome have used terms like "radioactive contamination" or "fallout-contaminated soil" instead, which does not have the connotations of nuclear reactor programs. I suppose those terms don't "pop" as well in headlines.

Maybe they need to learn how to blow up their weapons all the way so that no radioactive waste is left (for testing)

I've sorta reached the conclusion that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy if everyone is well behaved and disciplined about it.

On the other hand, given the wrong incentives, you might just stow nuclear waste where it's cheapest and where you can get away with it, and then not be penalized when the containment mechanism you cheaped out on fails... or maybe you just conveniently forget to do maintenance on it as the responsibility for doing maintenance somehow conveniently evaporates due to some bureaucracy.

I think the debate isn't over whether or not nuclear power itself is safe, it's the debate over whether or not humans under capitalism are to be trusted to behave responsibly with this technology. Nuclear power isn't just the technology in isolation... humans are an intrinsic part of it.

Humans under what, then? I wonder if you're aware that the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes.

Jeffrey Sachs has commented that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.”. Companies can be held to account (failure to do so is another story) but try that with a centrally run enterprise.

"failure to do so is another story" How is that 'another story?' It's THE story.

I think that nuclear power generation has been relatively safe over almost a century exactly due to systems engineering, incorporating procedures and the potential for human error.

I also think that you are right that some of the systems surrounding nuclear energy are suboptimally managed in places (and are often intransparent for the public, which I think is one of the factors why people are still afraid). And I think it's because nuclear power generation is a social commitment on a very long time scale - and humans aren't very good at dealing with cause and effect over long time scales.

While there is, just like in aeronautics, a paper trail connecting to each engineer and expert working on a system, it does not matter whether society can identify a person that is responsible for a decision made half a century ago. Think about leaky permanent[0] waste storage close to densely populated areas (like in Germany). Analyzing what went wrong is suddenly a task for historians, not for engineers. And history is of course necessarily colored in perspective - politicans can point to an expert who was wrong half a century ago.

In engineering and safety culture, iteration is necessary to approach an optimal system - the problem is here: How can we learn from what happened decades ago when the cause wasn't a part, a design or a process, something that can be simulated with a high degree of confidence? But a decision necessarily based on lots of unknowns? What can we do to be able to learn from it next time?

[0] officially temporary but due to how it was done effectively permanent

Edit: Markup

> In engineering and safety culture, iteration is necessary to approach an optimal system - the problem is here: How can we learn from what happened decades ago when the cause wasn't a part, a design or a process, something that can be simulated with a high degree of confidence? But a decision necessarily based on lots of unknowns? What can we do to be able to learn from it next time?

The answer is that you design systems with multiple levels of redundancy, and then monitor them.

That way in order for something bad to happen, four independent things have to go wrong at once. Then you monitor if any of them ever fails. If one does, the other three prevent any catastrophe while you correct it. Then you have a new data point about how to design things better going forward.

The thing is that we have a decent idea of how to engineer things well. That's easy. Throw money and factors of 2 at it until the cows come home. That's not my concern. How do we know they'll actually do the proper engineering? How do we not have another Boeing 737 situation but for a nuclear reactor?

I know as engineers we want to turn everything into an engineering problem but sometimes there are just humans who don't understand the severity of their actions to cut costs or defer maintenance or something and I don't know if it's possible to ever fully engineer these people away or engineer away their influence or engineer away their incentive to do the wrong thing... as much as I'd love to do that.

Maybe I'm just being a naysayer. The thing is that I still believe nuclear power is the best interim solution in existence and that it's necessary to build more nuclear plants. I just don't buy the "totally safe" argument. It's like chemo or amphotericin or something. It'd be great to not have to use it... buuuuut....

Now you're asking a completely different question. It's not a matter of not knowing what to do, it's a matter of not doing it.

But nothing about nuclear is unique in that regard. If you have incompetence then we get Deepwater Horizon, Bophal, companies dumping cadmium, lead, mercury, cyanide, nitrogen, phosphorous or acid in to rivers and groundwater, mining runoff, destroying rainforest, dam failures, basically the entire list of Superfund sites in the US. Those kinds of things can be significantly worse than even a full scale nuclear meltdown. And on top of that, chemical pollutants have no half-life -- they're forever.

There is a 3700 acre coal mine fire that has been burning in Pennsylvania since 1962, causing the town to be abandoned:

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

It's the same problem with anything -- even solar is silicon. Take a look a the environmental history of Silicon Valley for a morbid lesson in how wrong that can go.

That is a very interesting point - would I rather live next to a DuPont chemical plant or a nuclear power plant? I think I would choose the nuclear power plant.

Edit: With the nuclear plant I at least have feasible means to monitor any danger by myself.

Can we ship all the nuclear waste to your house? Don't worry, it's the safest kind of energy there is.

Or maybe "safe" isn't the right term for something that also produces some of the most deadly substances that we know of? It's "safe" so long as nothing goes wrong, and everything is stored correctly. Of course, that regularly proves to not be the case: https://www.newsweek.com/ohio-school-closed-enriched-uranium...

It's very worrying to see comments like this become more and more common on HN.

Yes, I will take the waste. If it's in the containers we've developed specifically for this purpose, yes. It beats the current situation in the US where everyone stores waste on site because politicians can't decide where to put it because of people like you.

Modern waste, with proper precautions, is safe for long term disposal and storage. I cannot stress this enough.

If you don't believe me, this website has plenty of information regarding nuclear power, straight from the source. It is developed and run by the UN. Based on your misinformation, I strongly urge you to pore over this content and then attempt to reevaluate your own question.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/Information-Library.aspx

> world-nuclear.org

There is nothing more sad out there than linking to a homepage the nuclear lobby uses to drive this artificial nuclear hype we've seen here in the last months.

That says nothing about the truthiness of the page. Let's hypothetically assume that every word on the page is true. Would one not expect the "nuclear lobby" to link to it? Let's assume every word on the page is a lie, but favorable toward nuclear energy. Would one not expect...

There is nothing more sad...

I can think of two things:

1. A lack of second order thinking.

2. Dead puppies.

> That says nothing about the truthiness of the page

It says /a lot/ about the truthiness of it, actually

The page is run by the UN. Who, in your opinion, would be a more reputable source?

What makes you think this site would be "run by the UN"? The WNA is a nuclear industry lobbying organization. Nothing more, nothing less.

My personal experience with interacting with the WNA revolves around their interactions with the WNU, which is the World Nuclear University. It's a partnership between the WNA, IAEA, and others. Their goal is to promote education in the field and having significant experience with the WNU, and having noticed no irregularities, it would be very unlikely if the WNA was simply making things up, or if they were spreading falsehoods. The WNA site is consistently pointed to as a global source of truth by the WNU and by the IAEA.

Could you enlighten me as to who would be a more reliable source on nuclear technology?

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

http://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/what-we-do/worl...

https://www.iaea.org/services/technical-cooperation-programm...

Would an organization evidently so deeply ingrained with and tied to the UN and the UN's nuclear-specific arm, backed by numerous experts, really be in the business of misleading anyone? Would you disregard a pro-climate change website for its pro-climate change bias as well?

If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.

What is "pro-climate" today if the main line of this recent out of "nothing" nuclear hype is: "It's either nuclear or coal", which is a lie painting people who don't want to have nuclear as some kind of idiots with a phobia.

> If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.

Oh please...what are the chances that the person is even close to the NCY area...? I'm from Germany. You know...the country with no nuclear issues at all anymore...besides with the waste of it of course.

What did I say that is even remotely misinformation?

Nuclear power is safe "with proper precautions", I completely agree. The problem is that it hasn't even been a week since we've proven proper precautions are not being taken.

https://www.newsweek.com/ohio-school-closed-enriched-uranium...

And anti-nuclear sentiment isn't something new, don't pretend like it's some kind of worrying trend.

Can we ship all the nuclear waste to your house?

Assuming the alternative (which you conveniently left out) is the negative externalities of coal-fired power ending up on my doorstep? Yes, I'll take the nuke waste, thanks. Pull around on the left side of the house, please, so that you don't crush the sewer lines.

Don't worry, it's the safest kind of energy there is.

Nothing in your comment contradicts that statement.

Seal it in a lead box, and I'll put it in my basement, sure. I've already got radon leaching out of the bedrock, and a big bunch of bananas in my kitchen. I think I'm already picking up more rads from that, not to mention all the chest X-rays I had to do on a regular basis for a few years.

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