181–190 of 679 posts
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We should shoot the waste into to sun.
That is hard (there was an article on HN about exactly this a while ago). You need a large amount of energy to cancel out our orbit or you just end up sending it into its own solar orbit (which will intersect with ours, to boot).
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Breeder reactors have been around since the dawn of nuclear energy and are extremely efficient, re-using the bulk of harmful waste material as fuel. If we built more of those waste would be far less of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet suppo…
Exactly - at which point I love to mention Thorcon Power and the amount of obstacles that they faced in the US only to have to go abroad and start building their absolutely incredible design and test reactor in Indonesia. Sad.
Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced? When I was reading about this IIRC all of the nuclear waste we have produced in the US over the life of our nuclear programs could be stored in an area the size of a football field. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But in the industrial meaning nuclear waste also includes various stuff that can not (or could not at the time) be economically separated from the waste althought it is either not dangerous at all or useful as nuclear fuel. And also stuff that is simply radioactive and has nothing to do with nuclear reactors per se.
This is the year 2017 - This article deliberately skips over any consideration to Wind, Solar, etc. What kind of BULLSHIT excuse for journalism and scientific study is this? Who in the nuclear industry paid for this? I only read the first 3 paragraphs but I can already tell you this article is not worth your time. The article compares the statistics of energy sources, but all of the charts focus on fossil fuels. This…
You can't have a informed conclusion without reading the entire article. That said, it clearly states in the 2nd paragraph that the assessment is for energy types with the lowest negative health impact, with comparison limited to currently dominant sources including nuclear and not renewable types like wind or solar.
Nuclear power has extreme tail risk that is hard to quantify based on the few examples of it happening. For the thee major events we can reference how do we know we didn't simply get lucky?
With fukushima for example, "Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people." [1]
Clearly the lack of deaths directly attributable to nuclear accidents does not accurately capture the risks.
So what exactly is the risk of a catastrophic event that has thankfully never happened but could? Its not clear but rather than rolling dice with those risks we can actually make better systems without those unquantifiable risks in the first place. That takes us to the tradeoff calculus.
Just in the realm of nuclear power there are far better approaches we should be investing in as opposed to traditional plants such as LFTR [2] which does not have proliferation, waste or meltdown risk.
Picking on coal is a little unfair at this time because coal is being supplanted by much cleaner natural gas purely on market forces and solar and wind are growing dramatically. Of course there are issues with these as well, scaling issues and their own kind of impacts but they do not harbor the same kind of unquantifiable massive tail risk of traditional nuclear.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1218411...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…
You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the risks of global warming and greenhouse gasses back in the heyday of nuclear power, i.e. the 1970's. The last nuclear power plant in the US was built in the 1970s, which was when the last major accident that happened in the US (3 mile Island). That's not even considering Chernobyl.
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Solar and wind has a lot of 'negative externalities' though that are generally borne by the grid or other operators. I think the economics really work against it at high% penetration (30-40%+). The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas. This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar bli…
> Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out) If we're talking about problems that show up when wind/solar becomes an order of magnitude more prevalent than it is now, why would you care about the cost of retrofitting anything?
The public's nuclear acceptance is not about day to day death toll. It's about broken promises and Armageddon. Looking at the chart, I'd take gas over nuclear in a heartbeat thinking of what nuclear has done to Japan. Nuclear can both power and destroy a country. Gas and other options do not. Neither does solar or wind which are not even in that chart. Say we have a new technology that is safer than nuclear, but had…
Fukushima made a few hundred square kilometers briefly unsafe, and some tens of square kilometers temporarily uninhabitable. (Or really, inhabitable but slightly unhealthy.) Fossil fuels are wrecking the entire planet.
It's interesting that Fukushima seems to be all people remember about the Tohoku earthquake. 16,000 people died (for comparison the worst natural disaster in the US, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, killed 6,000-12,000), hundreds of thousands were displaced, and many towns were destroyed, but nobody remembers that. A dam failure triggered by the earthquake killed 12 people but nobody uses this to argue against dams.
Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
Since the containers would be very dense, they'd embed deep into the sediment, many thousands of feet underwater. Over geologic time, subduction would draw them deeper and deeper, eventually into the Earth's mantle.
Problem solved, if permanent disposal is truly the goal.