Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 120 posts

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#71

Post by ccffph »

Rockslide wrote: post #56
ccffph wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#72

Post by DuskStar »

asp12357 wrote: post #51
yongjik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles. Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100." I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while pa…

its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100." I'm fairly certain nuclear catastrophe is far worse than global warming.

Chernobyl made around 1,000 sq mi 'uninhabitable' for around a century. (Some of the area will be safe to occupy in far less time, some in far more) If we learned nothing from that accident and had one such accident per decade while providing all the world's electricity, we would lose about 10,000 square miles of land to radioactive contamination.

Those assumptions seem extremely unfavorable to me - accidents should be less frequent and less severe with modern reactor designs and sane operating procedures. But yet, powering the US alone with solar would take approximately 17,500 square miles - and irradiated zones from nuclear accidents are less damaging to the environment than solar panels are.

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#73

Post by gtirloni »

colordrops wrote: post #69
gtirloni wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say that about anything humans have ever built.

Exactly, so how is everyone so sure that "modern nuclear reactors" will encounter no problems?

I have never read anyone say that ever.

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#74

Post by spraak »

mikestew wrote: post #40
Krasnol wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#75

Post by sq_ »

eximius wrote: post #66
sq_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t say I agree with you there. Worst case for nuclear power is highly contaminated local areas ( highly unlikely with modern designs), whereas the worst case for climate change is global environmental collapse.

I'm a nuclear proponent, but this ignores airborne particles and ecological collapse which can propagate and have very broad effects. Those things can be managed, but the 'worst case' of nuclear is not negligible. Though even poor management of nuclear materials very quickly eliminates the worst cases.

You’re very much correct, although I think the reality of the threat of wide scale contamination is often overstated.

To use Chernobyl as an example, since that’s the worst case of an airborne release from a nuclear plant that I know of, the absolute worst case in the case of a steam explosion breaching the other reactors’ containment was contamination of a significant portion of Europe. Modern reactors are designed so that such things are almost impossible, even without competent operators.

The worst case for climate change is a mass extinction event. So while I agree with you that the worst case of nuclear is non negligible, the probabilities and scale of such events push me towards the opinion that nuclear energy is an extremely good option for limiting our use of fossil fuels in the near future.

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#76

Post by linuxftw »

yongjik wrote: post #47
colordrops wrote: post #43

I hear things like "we should go full nuclear, modern nuclear reactors are safe" all the time, yet this ignores externalities, unknown unknowns, human incompetence, and the unexpected. Who would expect the ocean to rise over your nuclear waste dome? Have people suggesting this forgotten the allegory of the unsinkable ship the Titanic? Entropy always wins in the end.

Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles. Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100." I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while pa…

> Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen

Unlikely. I think the consensus is that the globe was already warming, humanity may have just sped it up.

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#77

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Dduuggrr wrote: post #45
colordrops wrote: post #43

I hear things like "we should go full nuclear, modern nuclear reactors are safe" all the time, yet this ignores externalities, unknown unknowns, human incompetence, and the unexpected. Who would expect the ocean to rise over your nuclear waste dome? Have people suggesting this forgotten the allegory of the unsinkable ship the Titanic? Entropy always wins in the end.

That's true. They used same words before... But after Chernobyl and Fukushima... How they can expect we believe them?

Proponents: Newer reactors are safer than older designs. The old designs are still safer than any other alternative and much safer than fossil fuels, but the newer designs are even better and we should build those.

Opponents: Don't build new reactors.

Opponents: See? See? You said...

Proponents: ...that newer designs are safer than older ones and even older ones are safer than alternatives. Which remains true.

...

Politics occurs here. When you ask whether something is safe, in practice what you're asking is if it's safe relative to alternatives. So solar is safe because it's safer than coal, and nuclear is safe because it's safer than solar.

But there is also an absolutist definition of safe which requires an inhuman perfection that no real technology could ever meet. Not solar, not nuclear, not biofuels, it's just an unattainable standard.

So you ask if something is safe, people say yes (meaning it's safe relative to alternatives), then you apply the impossible standard and claim that they're lying.

If you want to stop nuclear over safety with any credibility you would also have to be willing to stop everything with a worse safety record. But that's every known alternative whatsoever.

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#79

Post by keypusher »

ehnto wrote: post #61
yongjik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles. Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100." I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while pa…

I can't see why solar isn't now the leading candidate. Nuclear is cool and all, but the simplicity of a butt-tonne of solar in a field can't be overlooked. It's not likely to fail catastrophically, maintenance is modular and low-impact. The skills needed are trades not degrees and if we can get the power output/battery/backup balance right, as a society we have clean, reliable energy indefinitely. I say that knowing…

You need a mix. Solar is great during the day in nice weather. It's useless at night, it's significantly reduced in bad weather, and it's completely inelastic to demand. If the population of a large metropolitan area turns on their air conditioner for an unexpectedly hot (but cloudy) day, you can't just generate more solar power. Pumped storage reservoirs can alleviate that demand to some degree, but we would need to flood significant new chunks of land and invest in relocation of humans/wildlife and construction of new dams and hydro plants. Combining solar with wind power, geothermal, and biomass can help to mitigate the issues of each solution alone. It's also just a good idea to have multiple systems in place as it makes the entire thing less prone to catastrophic failure.

Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

#80

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wnkrshm wrote: post #55
gaze wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 thi…

> 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.

Post reply on HN