Earlier quoted context omitted.
What were the meltdowns?
Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Are three.
Three reactors melted down @ Fukushima Daiichi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
131–140 of 237 posts
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how most of the power plant waste in the US is "handled" right now, because it's so far been politically impossible to agree on long-term storage and transportation. It's an inferior solution, though. There are security issues, and many points of failure for environmental damage. It's particularly problematic when plants are decommissioned and the waste is still stuck there requiring indefinite security and st…
How would one transport the waste across the country? I imagine there are some security issues with that too.
Probably the same way that the nuclear fuel is transported in the first place?
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would one transport the waste across the country? I imagine there are some security issues with that too.
Very easily these days [1] Its been done since days of nuclear plants. And no - there are no security issues, since as the name indicates, its a “waste”; you can’t make a bomb out of it and spreading it would not be as efficient as some type of gas that you would have easier access to. I imagine actually officials would love just to give away that nuclear waste to ISIS, preferrably deliver it to them for further hand…
Depleted uranium is used in artillery munitions by the US since the early '90s. It is, allegedly, a cause of increased cancer rates in NATO personnel and others involved in conflicts were the US deployed heavy artillery.
If you cannot think of security issues around nuclear waste, you have no business discussing nuclear waste and you are doing your "cause" a disservice.
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#134Your periodic reminder that - despite the propaganda campaign run by nuclear advocates to make it seem like being anti-nuclear is to be anti-science - nuclear power remains massively expensive and even less safe than people think. Here's the most comprehensive peer-reviewed survey around: We summarize the results of a recent statistical analysis of 216 nuclear energy accidents and incidents (events). The dataset is t…
How many Fukushimas will we (society) accept every 150 years in order to stop climate change? That's really the only question that matters.
This attitude is what's keeping these old and less safe reactor designs running in the first place.
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many Fukushimas will we (society) accept every 150 years in order to stop climate change? That's really the only question that matters.
Both Fukushima & Chernobyl would have been essentially non-issues if built further away from population centers. I know this is Sim City logic: but my answer to that would be: quite a lot!
Where do you suggest people staffing the site should live? Chernobyl was basically a factory town around the plant.
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really not compelling. If you can't provide any more compelling evidence for nuclear vs clean energy improvements, why not gamble on the currently safer/cleaner bet?
It's not a bet or a gamble. It's always a mix. Renewables other than geothermal and solar-thermal + molten salts cannot currently provide base load power. They have something like 0.2..0.5 capacity factor, meaning that 50 to 80% of the operational lifetimes of the power generation facilities are spent idling. Those two that can provide base load power that are very location specific (volcanic area or desert). So rath…
Dispelling the nuclear ‘baseload’ myth: nothing renewables can’t do better!
https://reneweconomy.com.au/dispelling-the-nuclear-baseload-...
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope noone believes the official number of deaths from nuclear power plant accidents.
So multiply them 5. The argument vs coal still holds.
How about multiplying it by thousands?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7151231_Estimates_o...
https://www.greenpeace.org/archive-international/Global/inte...
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very easily these days [1] Its been done since days of nuclear plants. And no - there are no security issues, since as the name indicates, its a “waste”; you can’t make a bomb out of it and spreading it would not be as efficient as some type of gas that you would have easier access to. I imagine actually officials would love just to give away that nuclear waste to ISIS, preferrably deliver it to them for further hand…
You're ignoring the legitimate safety concerns over nuclear waste. It's not about an explosive nuclear device. It's about the risk of contamination, particularly of water supplies, and the psychological impact that radiation has (rational or not). There are both security concerns (preventing intentional misuse) and safety concerns (transportation accidents, leaky permanent storage). If it were harmless, we wouldn't e…
But in that respect it’s not very different from the hundreds of hazardous chemicals that are transported around the country every day.
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are important differences. We know that wastes has energy (otherwise they would not radiate), there are stored in a well specified area. Unfortunately nuclear energy had a very bad PR for past 50 years, as a result nobody wanted to do any searcher in areas related to it). It seems that it is slightly better now, environmental organizations at least are not trying to occupy nuclear reactors, unfortunatel…
> nuclear energy had a very bad PR for past 50 years There is not a positive way to tell people that will be forced to quit their homes, workplaces and properties when nuclear problems eventually arose but hide information or lie systematically about it does not help, neither does the "see no evil/ what could happen?/ but nobody died / your cancer is not my fault" permanent defensive stance deployed again and again.…
> There is not a positive way to tell people that will be forced to quit their homes, workplaces and properties when nuclear problems eventually arose ...
That is an enormous problem, but the problem there is that governments aren't being held accountable for forcing people out of their homes.
The Fukashima evacuation debatabley caused ~3 orders of magnitude more deaths than the Fukushima nuclear disaster ([0] see the sidebar for 2,000:1 figure and the opening paragraphs for the debatable part).
When the cure is that much worse than the disease, we have to ask why we are forcing people to evacuate.
Whenever the government enacts a policy there are the potential for statistical deaths. Approve a coal plant? Statistical deaths. Change safety standards? Statistical deaths. Drop speed limits? Statistical deaths. We can cope with some unidentifiable people being worse off. It happens all the time. The responses to nuclear risks are not only irrational, they are out of line with how we treat all other physical and chemical hazards.
Statistical illness and deaths from nuclear are not worse than any other health issue. This is a fantastic time to use the science to make decisions, and it isn't at all obvious to what standard the exclusion zones are being managed. When the gap in damage done by the response and the crisis is that large there is a lot of room for questions to be asked (I wish I spoke Japanese so I could look up some primary reports on the subject).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its clear that its not at an acceptable level of safety. I am no nuclear safety inspector, but I would argue that there's large variance in terms of safety in different nuclear installations. Not putting a nuclear plant next to a Tsunami-coast would be a major factor here. > Large scale disasters like Fukushima can't be hand waived away. Neither can the Bhopal disaster, yet we continue to engage in large-scale chem…
Germany is lucky they're neighbours with France, which has >70% nuclear in its power generation mix. They are planning to reduce this to 50% by 2035 and cap nuclear power in the mix, however it's not very clear what they will replace it with (renewables but no details given). https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
Yeah they are so lucky...the happiness regarding old and breaking nuclear reactors (Fessenheim & Cattenom) just behind the border is overwhelming.
Cattenom is especially great for Luxembourg as it's the only country on this planet which is threatened in it's entirety by a nuclear disaster from a single nuclear reactor.