Unplanned exposure during diving in the spent nuclear fuel pool (2011)
isoe-network.net
isoe-network.net
Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!
Neutrons make hardware radioactive.
Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."
Oh, and also, the fuel types that do produce a usefully lower level of neutron radiation are absurdly hard to get to fuse. We're talking 100x harder than the "easy" D-T fusion... which in turn is five decades of technology development away from producing useful amounts of power.
Aneutronic fusion reactors will be used on interstellar craft... in the 2100s.
See the "residual radiation" section in the same article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Residual_rad...
In any case, setting the fuel disposal cost to zero still leaves fission uncompetitive, given the cost of building new nuclear power plants. This is especially the case if one imagines a nuclear powered world economy, which likely would have to resort to some flavor of breeder reactors. Reprocessing would be necessary for breeders, but that wouldn't make breeders cheaper than current burner reactors.
We also don't know how to deal with lead and it will be poisonous until we figure out how to biologically re-engineer the human species. So far so good, we still use lead, you can buy the stuff by the kilo. This is a minor problem to the point where the people bringing it up aren't taking the situation seriously. The volumes are tiny and we can just dump it somewhere.
I do think there are ways to manage the problem, but tiny isn’t the word I’d use.
That is around 3 shipping containers. There is literally a risk of losing it in transit because the volume is so small. If you see 3 shipping containers in a field somewhere that might be a year's worth of nuclear waste.
It is hard to get across how small that number is compared to 20% of the US's annual electricity production. The reason the problem hasn't been "solved" in the last however long reactors have been a thing is it is too small a problem to devote time to.
I feel ridiculous having to argue that volumes of material this small represent a real threat. If you wanted to move it we could. Split it up into little loads and put it in a stupidly over-engineered shielded truck. Goodness me this is not a real problem. They've been ignoring it for decades and the consequences are somewhere between nil and nothing interesting. There is nothing here to be honest about, there is no reasonable threat to debate. We transport explosives, we transport poison, we sometimes get massive port explosions that can level a district. Then we've got old mate claiming 2,000 metric tonnes of a relatively dangerous material represents a serious national problem. The absurdity of that is frustrating to deal with.
We should decrease our power usage as a whole planet, and reduce dependence on technology that has outsized biological risks, like nuclear and plastics, rather than rushing into some future that will only enrich the already wealthy.
The benefits of making power available are extremely (!) robust and well-understood, as are the health and safety benefits of switching from combustion-based power to non-combustion-based power.
I have yet to hear skeptics raise specific nuclear concerns that are real, consequential, and also unmanaged. For all its cost and red tape, the past 60 years’ regulatory posture of “you must identify and mitigate every risk to the absolute maximum degree physically possible, damn the cost” seems to have resulted in a system where, well… they have.
Red tape in nuclear is there for a reason. I don’t trust anyone to do nuclear without tons of red tape. The only reason it’s safe is the red tape. Take red tape away from industries that aren’t inherently unsafe, fine, but not nuclear power.
Humanity might need more power some places, but it’s uneven and that probably won’t change. Your argument is moral and right, but the capitalists that choose where power go will continue to put power plants next to where their interests lie.
Developed nations need to reduce power usage so that others who are poor may have power. That is my stance, I don’t care how unpopular.
You seem to have this silly idea that LLMs are consuming huge amounts of energy.
You’re simply avoiding my main point, where additional power isn’t going towards helping under developed countries, by trying to appeal to how great the poor downtrodden masses have it without power.
Why aren’t we building renewable power plants in rural poor areas all over the world if that’s the goal? Because it ISN’T; the wealthy capitalists simply want to expend energy and build new plants near developed areas to make themselves wealthier!
You seem to be evading this simple mathematical point.
Renewables are being installed widely around the world. This is how much of the world will be lifted out of energy poverty.
I think some of the opposition to the idea of a renewable powered world comes from some of those who realize, at some level, that this relatively disadvantages the higher latitude white countries.
Everyone? A vocal group of activists, perhaps.
The same could be said for transport of chemicals by rail; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de... and still that goes on.
> Dry cask storage is a method of storing high-level radioactive waste, such as spent nuclear fuel that has already been cooled in a spent fuel pool for at least one year and often as much as ten years. Casks are typically steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed. The fuel rods inside are surrounded by inert gas. Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel. Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding to workers and members of the public.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage
There’s also a lot of low level nuclear waste which is a pain to deal with (make sure you pick the right brand of kitty litter…)
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/26/395615637...
I would certainly agree that nobody should actually try to put a year's generation of dangerous nuclear waste in 3 shipping containers. It'd be hazardous and the shipping containers couldn't be moved without breaking (probably do some damage to them even without moving them). The point is more that we're dealing with a volume of material that is - for an industrial society - tiny. There is a reason that in practice it is ignored it despite the braying crowd of people insisting that it is an unsolved problem that we can't ignore. It is an extremely ignoreable problem on the scale of benefits that nuclear power provides.
You may dedicate whole container to transport just a few kg of highly radioactive items.
Also, there are many things much more poisonous than radionuclide you can use to make terror weapons that are easy to get (take ricin, for instance)
I guess that the effectiveness of terror weapons has nothing to do with how many people are directly harmed.
> You can build a dirty bomb from the activated wastes of a fusion plant though so the original point stand still.
Even simpler would be to find a radioactive source (medical, irradiation, industrial radiography). Small quantities, in a portable package, but geiger detectors would definitely be able to detect the fallout.
I don't think he would even call himself a game designer. He's a programmer and engine builder and rocket scientist and overall deep general nerd.
Fundamentally: fission fuels are limited, particularly uranium. If humans were to run current energy demands 100% on uranium-based nuclear power, we'd burn through reserves in about two decades.[1]
Breeder reactors and thorium fusion change that calculus, as might viable uranium recovery from seawater. (Uranium, unlike thorium, dissolves in seawater, though the quantities of water which would have to be processed would be absolutely immense and nontrivial on multiple grounds.)
Fusion is based on hydrogen and a few other light elements, which are vastly more prevalent, most notably as water found on Earth (and elsewhere in the solar system should we use so much hydrogen that net water prevalence is affected).
The slight hitch in the scheme is that whilst fission is so simple an untrained janitor can achieve it,[2] or even plain old dumb rocks,[3] fusion turns out to be fiendishly difficult on Earth / at terrestrial conditions.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Based on a 200 year supply at ~10% of total energy supply presently, which scales to ~20 years at 100%: <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...>.
2. For example: Oak Ridge prodcedures / Feyman (~1945) <https://robertlovespi.net/2014/09/07/how-richard-feynman-sav...>, Cecil Kelley (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accid...>, Y-12 plant (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-12_National_Security_Complex...>, Vinča Nuclear Institute (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_Nuclear_Institute#1...>, Wood River Junction (1964) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_River_Junction,_Rhode_Isl...>, Mayak (1968) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak#1968_Criticality_Inciden...>, and Tokaimura (1997) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents> being just a few. Wikipedia has a more comprehensive listing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc...>. My point isn't that the perpetrators were necessarily janitors, or untrained (though some effectively were), but that criticality was achieved entirely unintentionally. Accidental fusion criticality incidents are far less frequent.
3. "Natural fission reactors" are a thing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...>. To be fair, so are natural fusion reactors, though few have yet been discovered on Earth: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star>.
It mentions estimates of undiscovered uranium and also multiple pathways to extend that estimate if there was demand to improve the technology or increase our supply. It sounds like realistically we could find the material for powering all of our energy using fission if we had the demand to do so.
> It sounds like realistically we could find the material for powering all of our energy using fission
For a while
> if we had the demand to do so.
Maybe two decades isn’t spot on, but come on, you’re really grasping at straws.
It’s fundamentally less abundant.
20 years? 50 years? 100 years.
Sooner or later you’re going to run out, and not on geological timescales.
Tell me it ain’t so?
There are reasons to prefer fission, but “we have plenty of uranium” isn’t one of them.
The general point is that uranium ore is not especially abundant, and tends to be highly localised, which suggests a reprise of petroleum-induced geopolitics.
(Uranium in seawater is far more prevalent, but quite difficult and expensive to access.)
I'm also familiar with the long and tedious discussion of just what "resources" and "reserves" constitute. I'd suggest briefly that much of that discussion fails to reflect that the true benefit of energy resources is the surplus EROEI (energy return on energy input) which results from their use, and that whilst it's often possible to increase the total resource quantity that comes with a corresponding decrease in resource quality in the sense of a far lower EROEI.
Early petroleum finds featured EROEI of 200:1 or greater. That is, 1 unit of energy invested returned 200 units returned. Present finds are closer to 10:1 to 20:1. I'm not as versed on uranium, though I'm finding indications that current ore-based finds are ~10:1 to 60:1. Seawater extraction is all but certainly far lower than that. Generally I'm somewhat suspicious of casual claims that we could vastly increase our uranium supply.
Thorium's a somewhat different animal (or mineral, definitely not vegetable) in that it's 3--4 times more abundant than uranium, and if I recall correctly can be "bred" into fissionable forms more readily. Non-thorium breeder reactors rely on a plutonium cycle, which introduces numerous other concerns (weapons, terrorism, etc.).
Moreover, liquid hydrocarbon is fantastically useful stuff and can be stored, transported, and utilised with immense flexibility and (comparative) safety. Nuclear energy must be converted to other forms, at considerable loss, to be utilised. Grid mains current is useful, but nuclear power plant output isn't especially flexible, and transition to storable forms comes at high costs, limited capacity, or high conversion losses (e.g., synfuel production). Hydrocarbon-powered automobiles, lorries, aircraft, construction equipment, hand tools, portable generators, etc., are all readily produced and utilised. Their nuclear variants not so much.
(I'm specifying hydrocarbons rather than petroleum to note that it's the chemical constitution rather than the origin or creation process which is significant here. I'm something of a fan of hydrocarbon fuels, somewhat less so of fossil fuels, despite their past utility.)
With a neutron source we can control what the isotopes will be by choosing the appropriate metals for construction.
In fission you get, more or less, all the isotopes you can. fission doesn't split U235 into the same parts every time - its a random process and broad distribution of daughter fission isotopes are produced.
But I still agree. We should go with breeder reactors and call it a day
One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of it. People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy, so everything that might be used to make nukes are insanely regulated. This have downstream effects that make nuclear fission hard and expensive:
- With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security. With nuclear fusion power plants, stealing a big tokamak wall to make dirty bomb is hard, so you can still use normal security. With fission power plants you need special armed security
- You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes. This affects the nuclear power plant design, as you don't want to have any blind spot where the operator can smuggle the nuclear material away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HHMAht3gSg
- Some countries ban nuclear waste reprocessing because they don't want someone using the plutonium from reprocessing process to make nukes. This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste. Similar story with breeder reactors
With meltdown risk at least its solvable by safer reactor design, but there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards.
Are you talking about a dirty bomb? Spent nuclear fuel from PWR/BWR do not contain the right isotopes of Plutonium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium
> People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy
This looks like a false-choice. A choice between the presence of nuclear weapons vs unlimited fission energy might be slightly fairer, but many countries have a civil nuclear program without nuclear weapons.
> With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security
Non-"normal security" is not a great cost for a nuclear power station (1+ GW). 50 extra staff might be 5M USD a year extra, so 0.60 USD/MWh more. Scaling to more reactors per site would give economies of scale.
> You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes.
Accountability is good; tracking where each fuel bundle is and goes is fairly standard practice (at least nowadays), no? Audits don't have to be a pain if their requirements mesh with the business processes.
> This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste.
The Plutonium is good stuff for breeder reactors. The depleted Uranium bulk is less useful, as we have thousands of tonnes already sitting around. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of reprocessing is the extraction and vitrification of fission products. Less bulk, splitting the higher activity products out of the bulk, reducing the storage requirements.
> there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards
Rules can be changed. De-escalation is possible!
Consider Helion's design. This reactor will produce copious excess neutrons and tritium from DD fusion. A single 50 MW (average) Helion reactor would produce enough neutrons in a year to make half a ton of plutonium in a fission-suppressed blanket. It would also produce more than enough tritium to enable all the bombs made from the plutonium to be boosted. And this is a single, rather small fusion reactor!
Cheap neutrons would be a proliferation nightmare.
Since it's so dangerous and rife for abuse, we shouldn't allow anyone to use it despite the obvious benefits, right?
This is fear mongering and nothing more.
The "nuclear would have worked except for the meddling kids" theory needs to explain why all sorts of other destructive technologies plow right along, even in the face of massive campaigns against them. The distinguishing feature is those technologies are economic winners. Large profit flows trump activism. Unprofitable technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend them.
I said my country effectively banned nuclear power with a popular referendum that was completely biased by the aftermath of Chernobyl [1], economics hardly played any role in it. This is a fact. Similar referenda were also held (or tried to be held) in other countries like Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, and if you look you'll find the concerns were not economical, but about the safety and waste management.
So, your pointing to the ban is just dishonestly trying to connect the dots without actually connecting any dots.
Me, I think the raw cost figures speak for themselves. Even if nuclear had not been banned, it would have failed, although perhaps lots of money would have been wasted trying to maintain the pretense it wasn't a failure.
I never said that, I said I think economics have little to do with the downfall of nuclear power. At least in most european countries, nuclear was banned or phased out for other reasons.
> I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations.
That is, you are claiming that the CAUSE of nuclear's state is the public reaction, not economics. If nuclear would have failed anyway, how can that "because" be valid?
I think carbon should be taxed and the externality should be moved to balance sheets, but that's another discussion.
France didn't solve the problem of cost-effective nuclear power.
I think this is the key observation. I have no doubt that the referendum mentioned in this thread was unfairly biased by Chernobyl. But if nuclear were a trillion dollar industry, such a referendum would never have been allowed to take place. Nobody was holding referendums to ban oil after Exxon Valdez.
But I think it's also worth mentioning that a big part of the reason that nuclear is difficult to turn a profit with is regulation (and public opinion) that unfairly holds nuclear to a much higher standard than fossil fuels. In a "nuclear context", any radiation is seen as an environmental catastrophe. Meanwhile coal plants belch radioactive waste out of their smokestacks and nobody bats an eye. Why, just a few days ago an article hit the front page about the US Army burying store bought tape dispensers in 55 gallon drums as hazardous waste, because they contained a small amount of a certain type of beach sand with radiation oh-so-slightly above background. All that pointless burying of harmless crap has got to cost!
I just saw an article about financiers not being willing to invest in current fission plant construction, because they don't make business sense - they are not profitable.
Any technology that predicates its economics on paying out over 40+ years doesn't make sense in an environment of rapid technoeconomic change. Renewables have accelerated the rate of change in the electrical power industry to a rate not seen since the early 20th century.
It's a bit of a "why invent wheels when cows already have legs" kind of question.
(Also "why learn to do anything on your own when you have rich parents that provide?")
It’s ultimately more about unit cost of power than total available power.
"Because batteries are expensive"
Are they? It would only take 4000 copies of the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility to store all the electricity we currently use in a day.
Some back of the napkin math says it would cost $2 Trillion, which is only double the amout we subsidized the fuel industry last year
Technically yes, but that's a bad idea: ocean environment is very unforgiving, and has more clouds than land has. It also has more (and more reliable) wind and fewer people complaining about the very large turbines, which is why it works for wind.
> Some back of the napkin math says it would cost $2 Trillion, which is only double the amout we subsidized the fuel industry last year
Napkin maths also says that a global power grid would be 10% of that price. By coincidence, it takes a cross section of almost exactly 1m^2 to make a 40,000 km long line have a resistance of 1 Ω.
Further investigation said that literally only China has that much spare capacity for aluminium production, but still.
That kind of scale of battery production is still needed for the cars, though.
We still don't know how to build fission power plants cost-effectively. In the last week I saw an article saying that projects can't get financing in the marketplace.
If we still don't after 70 years, it seems doubtful that it will work.
If we can find a cheaper way - even if we could build fission plants cost-effectively now - we should probably do it?
> Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!
> Neutrons make hardware radioactive.
> Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
> If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
What do you mean by 95% efficiency? Fission reactors are heat engines, their efficiency is much lower typical reactors are 35% while modern designs can reach up to 45%. That's the thermal efficiency, if we consider the energy stored inside the fission material it's much lower still.
Apart from the fact that those two are two completely different measures, nuclear power plants also don't have capacity factors of 95% (80-85% is more typical).
Edit: While the above link works for me, this link might work better for some: http://web.archive.org/web/20240402165313if_/https://isoe-ne...
In Russia today - just outside St Petersburg, a stones throw from Finland and Estonia - they still operate reactors of the same design as Chernobyl (with retrofits) and don't plan to shut them down for at least another decade.
Are you sure the other reactors were not upgraded, the procedures were not updated, the operators were not better trained?
> cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor
Considering the reactor operators didn't work from home it suggests there was not a great risk in living on a continent with these reactors. Plus why stop at "on a continent" ... this is one world, no planet B etc.
In real world, one nuclear country invaded another nuclear country, shelled and then captured two nuclear stations, and use one of them as shelter for soldiers and as ammo depot, while openly claims that they will bomb other nuclear stations in month or two.
If a experienced operator of a nuclear station will want to make harm to another nation, can it use a RBMK-1000 type reactor to repeat Chornobyl? It's not a theoretical question any more, because Russians forcefully migrate operators from Ukrainian nuclear station to RF stations and from RF to Ukrainian station.
I was commenting on a statement you made about the cost of upgrade. Somehow you've found a linkage (or absence of a linkage) to war in your response.
> In real world, one nuclear country invaded another nuclear country
Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...
> can it use a RBMK-1000 type reactor to repeat Chornobyl?
The captured power stations are not of this kind; they are all VVER. There is also the small matter of Ukraine wanting to build more nuclear power stations.
My comment is about danger of RBK-1000 in real life, which cannot be upgraded to a safe reactor type, because of huge cost of upgrade.
> Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union
Ukraine can produce more at any time. It's not a hard problem for the country, which developed nukes and missiles for Soviet Union and RF. Currently, the main problem is that Ukraine cannot produce long-range missiles fast enough.
> The captured power stations are not of this kind; they are all VVER.
Yes, but Russia has RBK-1000 type nuclear reactors in production and they hire former Ukrainian operators to operate their nuclear stations. Do you see a problem here?
> Ukraine can produce more at any time The question of getting appropriate nuclear materials looms large. Also all the Atomgrad appear to have all been in Russia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project)
> The question of getting appropriate nuclear materials looms large.
Ukraine has nuclear reactors. It's not a problem for a nuclear country.
Absolute safety is not achievable. Crossing the road is not safe. Going down the stairs is not safe.
> nuclear reactors Reactor plutonium != bomb grade plutonium. The Uranium supply used to be enriched by Russia.
> nuclear reactors
Reactor plutonium != bomb grade plutonium. The Uranium supply used to be enriched by Russia.
Worker touches something he shouldn't. Unlike in Los Alamos he survived though, and didn't loose his hand. With higher voltages such incidents are usually deadly, that's why we were explicitly trained to NOT touch anything, and put our hands behind our back.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibstadt_Nuclear_Power_Plant>