I changed my mind about nuclear waste

I agree and I think the damage to humanity that the anti-nuclear movement has done is incalculable. So many years of progress have been missed out on... and while some of it was due to greed (fossil fuel industry funding), most of it was just misplaced fear, whether propaganda induced or from an inability to see the full picture.

The anti-nuclear movement is also still alive and doing well but at this point it's like arguing over spilled milk, the damage is mostly done and a lot of is irreversible. We can try to salvage nuclear but we've already regressed to further impure sources in some countries so progress seems unlikely.

> Look here’s what you want to consider. The waste needs to be stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century but for thousands of years.

I find that people making this argument always always fail to engage with at least three important considerations.

1) As a consequence of how physics works, the more dangerous a radioisotope, the shorter the period for which it is dangerous. The most radioactive substances decay in years or decades, not millennia. Anti-nuclear activists routinely engage in a form of equivocation in which they juxtapose dangerous but short lived substances (e.g. Strontium-90 has a half life of a few decades) with long-lived but low-danger substances like Uranium (with a half life of billions of years), pretending that every form of radioactive waste is as dangerous as the most dangerous form for as long as the longest-lived form survives.

2) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore the possibility of reprocessing nuclear waste into more nuclear fuel. They pretend that our only option is to store this fuel indefinitely. They also use this epistemic void where reprocessing should be to argue that we don't have enough nuclear fuel on Earth to sustain civilization. We do, and we do by several orders of magnitude if we remember that nuclear "waste" can be turned into new fuel.

3) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore how modern civilization produces non-nuclear waste products that prompt similar concerns over waste safety. (See, for example, the famous Love Canal incident.) By fixating on nuclear waste and ignoring other industrial byproducts that are at least equally as harmful, anti-nuclear activists reveal themselves as being motivated by some kind of emotional or ideological opposition to "the atom" in particular instead of, as they claim, an altruistic concern for the safety of humanity in general.

All in all, these people are Luddites, and they've set back the progress of carbon free energy by almost a century. We need to ignore people afraid of nuclear power in the same way that we ignore people who worry in public about the power of witches and Mercury in retrograde.

Until it explodes because it was filled with organic instead of clay kitty litter and costs $500 million to 2 billion and two years to clean up (this happened at WIPP in 2014)

https://theecologist.org/2016/sep/20/wipp-nuclear-waste-acci...

It seems that nobody can safely deal with nuclear material cost effectively.

From the article:

Worse still, mismanagement of the clean-up has involved poor safety practices. Last year, the DOE's Independent Office of Enterprise Assessments released a report that found that WIPP clean-up operations were being rushed to meet the scheduled reopening date and that this pressure was contributing to poor safety practices.

The report states: "The EA analysis considered operational events and reviews conducted during May 2014 through May 2015 and identified a significant negative trend in performance of work. During this period, strong and unrealistic schedule pressures on the workforce contributed to poor safety performance and incidents during that time are indicators of the potential for a future serious safety incident."

The report points to "serious issues in conduct of operations, job hazard analysis, and safety basis." Specific problems identified in the report include:

workers incorrectly changing filters resulting in five safety violations;

waste oil left underground for an extended period despite a renewed emphasis on combustible load reduction;

fire water lines inadequately protected against freezing;

inadequate processes leading a small fire underground, followed by the failure of workers and their supervisor to report the fire;

an operator improperly leaving a trainee to operate a waste hoist, the hoist being improperly used, tripping a safety relay and shutting down the hoist for hours;

an engineer violating two safety postings to remove a waste hoist safety guard;

workers removing a grating to an underground tank and not posting a barricade, causing a fall hazard;

a backlog of hundreds of preventive maintenance items; and

failing to properly track overtime such that "personnel may be working past the point of safety".

> "the Japanese government approved the dumping of radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years."

A minuscule amount of tritium, dumped into an ocean that has billions of tons of uranium dissolved in it. This Fukushima water issue is a perfect example of people letting emotions overrule rational thought.

I've worked in the energy industry. There is complete capture there. When PG&E is the "bad guy" it's because the government needs them to be. ERCOT works the same way (though is better).

If the government wanted PG&E to properly fund their line maintenance, PG&E would properly fund their line maintenance.