Stop Letting Your Ridiculous Fears of Nuclear Waste Kill the Planet (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Stop Letting Your Ridiculous Fears of Nuclear Waste Kill the Planet (2018)

forbes.com

44 pointsnoch22 comments

This is denial of basic spreadsheet realities. Solar and wind power generation are already cheaper than nuclear and much easier to build and expand. Not only are nuclear plants more costly to build and operate, but the nuclear waste is piling up and will need to be dealt with in some way eventually which will cost a significant amount of money.

Nuclear is not the solution to getting off fossil fuels primarily because it is too expensive but also because confidence has been lost. The public were promised power too cheap to meter and ended up with a mess of unknown expenses and risks. If nuclear advocates had been more cautious and careful then public opinions would be more reasonable but that is not what happened and we have to be realistic and move forward now as quickly as possible with the tools we have.

You shouldn't compare nuclear power to solar and wind but to gas, coal and oil.

> Not only are nuclear plants more costly to build and operate, but the nuclear waste is piling up and will need to be dealt with in some way eventually which will cost a significant amount of money.

You could just put it in a stable place and that's it. People seem to forget that the worst case with nuclear waste is that they "spill", doing exactly what the other fossile fuels are doing in the first place (poisoning everyne that's breathing them).

> If nuclear advocates had been more cautious and careful then public opinions would be more reasonable but that is not what happened and we have to be realistic and move forward now as quickly as possible with the tools we have.

I think it's mostly due to unreasonable people that always had an axe to grind against nuclear power for some reason, probably because of the intersection between ecologists and pacifists/people against nukes.

“For some reason”

I can tell you the reason.

The larger problem with nuclear is that it is prone to central control, taking away self determination and individual freedom of ordinary citizens in how energy is produced and paid for.

Other options like fossil fuels (gasoline, propane, etc.) but even more so solar, wind, and small scale hydro, all coupled with batteries as needed, offer much more freedom and personal choice about how people get their energy and how they pay for it.

The nuclear industry has lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and large corporations all enlisted for profit and control. These players colluding together have even managed to get the government to make the industry and exempt from liability for nuclear accidents!

As I see it, nuclear projects tend to be magnets for corruption, huge boondoggles, and don’t account for, much less pay, their full long term costs. And on top of that they force consumers to bear the cost in many ways, through taxes, lost property values, capture of government, and resulting opportunity costs.

The topic of waste is important, but it’s almost a red herring compared to the scale of the above control problems.

> nuclear projects tend to be magnets for corruption, huge boondoggles, and don’t account for, much less pay, their full long term costs

This is the point for me. Capital intensive projects with massive safety concerns and massive environmental liabilities are a recipe for regulatory capture and corruption, because they need to work hand-in-glove with the state to succeed. This is the formula that has led to accident after accident at chemical plants all over the world, some of which have been far more deadly than even the worst nuclear accidents. Civil servants need to be on board, or the project fails, and once they're on board, they tend to overlook malpractice.

That's a really good point that I never though about, thanks for bringing it up. That's one more thing to like about solar power, wind and hydro, or even gasoline in case of emergency. But my problem with fossile fuel is the large scale like coal burning plants. There is also the problem of cars, but I think you could find a middle way by forbidding gas-powered cars in the cities. If we're going to have something large-scale, I'd prefer it to be nuclear than other fossile fuels, and I'd prefer it to be renewable than nuclear. Consumers are already paying the cost of fossile fuels by dying of air pollution every year.

Hmm, surely the oil industry has more and better lawyers and lobbyists? Generally the problem with nuclear has been that building old-style reactors is expensive and unattractive, while trying new approaches is caught between regulation that wasn't designed for them, and popular opinion that wants everything to be better without actually making any changes (at the level of power generation or personal reduction, really).

> Hmm, surely the oil industry has more and better lawyers and lobbyists?

True but the distribution of energy and the whole setup is entirely different as related to the issues I mentioned.

Regulations surely have held back updated nuclear tech, I agree, and some of this may have been inflicted by the older entrenched owners of the older tech, and their lawyers and captive politicians, at the expense of newer nuclear startups.

If I had to rank things I’d say that solar, although not viable everywhere, is my favorite.

> This is denial of basic spreadsheet realities.

the people who make this argument seem to always leave out that we don't have cheap (and clean) battery technology capable of sustaining entire grids for days at a time.

When you sustain entire grid, you don't need batteries.

We didn't use to have batteries, yet we use electricity - yes, over grids - all the time. When we add to always-on generators (fossil, hydro, nuclear) sometimes-on ones (solar and wind), we employ the fact that for large grids it doesn't happen that Sun is not shining everywhere at once and wind doesn't blow everywhere at once - at least this is a reasonable model, continent being at night notwithstanding.

The bigger you have a grid - and you can get effects from relatively small ones - the less batteries you need.

Won't nuclear waste decay to safe levels long before the fiberglass windmill blades that last twenty years break down into something that no longer takes space in a landfill? Not to mention the significantly lower volume of waste.

This is like saying I don’t need an apartment because i can cheaply live at the office during weekdays 9-5.

> because it is too expensive but also because confidence has been lost. The public were promised power too cheap to meter and ended up with a mess of unknown expenses and risks.

1) Newer reactor designs are less expensive, especially small modular reactors

2) The promises you're talking about were made to the public in the 1950s, and those people are now so old they won't see the results of deciding whether to use nuclear power more or not, anyway. The people whose "confidence has been lost" are rapidly dying off of old age. Younger people have in general a more realistic view of nuclear power. It's not perfect, but it's not the boogeyman that hippies were taught to fear.

>we have to be realistic and move forward now as quickly as possible with the tools we have

Exactly! And the only carbon neutral tool that we can use that is sufficiently powerful technology to power our industries at their current level is nuclear. So, we have to move forward with it.

The problem I see with nuclear proponents is that Internet, for all it vastness, lacks a kind of objective consideration of nuclear pro and contra. Instead of ridiculing nuclear opponents, a good description of nuclear waste question is needed - but most I can see is praises without arguments.

How much waste is produced? What's the waste content? How it could be dealt with? How long this waste represents a problem? What is actually done, and why's the difference? Questions like that aren't that easy to answer - nuclear waste discussions rarely talk about it.

Literally gets discussed every time this topic comes up. Nuclear fuel is 10^5 more dense than carbon fuels, so the actual amount of waste is small, and it can largely be recycled if we design facilities for it.

"2. The U.S. generates about 2,000 metric tons of used fuel each year.

This number may sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite small. In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."

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

You're probably talking about different level of details.

What's the isotope composition of waste? What are the half-life periods for them? What are the possibilities of remaining radioisotopes to contaminate water/air/soil? I'm watching nuclear arguments quite a bit and don't see this level of details, which would allow making a decision. I've studied physics, yet I should admit I can't see the rational argument for nuclear industry - not yet, I only see declarations "it's safe".

How can those waste products be processed? How they can be stored? What are the supposed difficulties? Costs? What we have learned so far? All of this matter is nowhere to be seen in discussions about waste. Those 83,000 tons you mention - what's that? Can we use it somehow? Can we separate it into less problematic and, say, more energetic material? Can we put it into reactors? What have been tried?

The rational argument is that it can provide carbon-free electricity for the entire planet with today's technology. All the information you are asking about is readily available on the internet if you are genuinely interested.

I do think it's amusing that anti-nuclear folks are so worried about waste issues when the current solution for carbon fuel waste is "dump it in the environment and let the kids deal with it". With nuclear fuel the waste is solid and in small enough quantities that it can be managed.

You're making statements, and I would like to check them. Unless I'm able to - and it takes enough of efforts to find this information on the Internet, I've tried - I'm not convinced, despite of, or maybe because of, all knowledge that I have, and I can't recommend it.

If that would be trivially available, surely there would be some page which can be easily linked to with all answers to questions like these?

Go nuts. I already linked the DOE page, and here is another useful one - https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

It’s not just about waste. It’s about control. See my other comment in this thread.

The minute someone steps up to actually deal with the nuclear waste we have, we can talk about making more. While it's sat in rusting drums on the same sites that produced it, because no one will offer their back yard or their cash, making more is a non-starter.

That's waste from bomb making, not power plants. Different subject. We're not producing any more of that, or proposing to.

Im generally for nuclear power, but nuclear waste at fukushima seemed to be a big deal

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