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I changed my mind about nuclear waste

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Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#221

Post by fumeux_fume »

rayiner wrote: post #87
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #18

The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry, founded an activist group that claims: > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science. Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science". edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting. I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and Shellenberger…

> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby. At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today…

General nuclear paranoia stemming from Cold War M.A.D., Chernobyl and Three Mile Island seem to spring to my mind. Not so much your naked tree-hugger in a historical vacuum theory.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#222

Post by dauertewigkeit »

I wonder how much The Simpsons contributed to nuclear fear.

No, but seriously, I only have one criticism. What about all the rest of the world? The developed world and the big developing countries might be trusted with nuclear fission, but there are still a whole bunch of countries who cannot be. So in some sense this debate is stupid. Deploy nuclear were it makes sense, but there are definitely places where renewables are their only green option. Luckily lots of those places have plenty of sun and wind.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#223

Post by josephcsible »

Adraghast wrote: post #23

[flagged]

From the guidelines:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#224

Post by troupe »

rndmize wrote: post #58

While it's good the author has gained a better understanding of nuclear waste, I feel that they're almost repeating their mistakes in their discussion of renewable waste. I'm fairly sure that everything they listed - solar panels, turbines, batteries - can be recycled; the question generally is whether its cost-effective to do so. (Another important question is probably on whether we want to spend the money on develo…

Saying that a turbine can theoretically be recycled, but at such a high cost that people simple bury them in a field is pretty much the same as saying they can't be recycled.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#225

Post by tcmart14 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #157
tcmart14 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or more importantly, would the same motivators for the military exist for private industries. My example would not be nuclear, but waste in general. I did 5 years in the Navy. Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food waste. Plastic can't, batteries cant, etc. Do b…

Do you mean to imply that you're not supposed to throw your dead car batteries into the ocean to help charge the electric eels?

That is a good one. xD

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#226

Post by rmujica »

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #222

I wonder how much The Simpsons contributed to nuclear fear. No, but seriously, I only have one criticism. What about all the rest of the world? The developed world and the big developing countries might be trusted with nuclear fission, but there are still a whole bunch of countries who cannot be. So in some sense this debate is stupid. Deploy nuclear were it makes sense, but there are definitely places where renewabl…

I learned that Core Temperatures must be checked, and that Venting Gas Prevents Explosion

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#227

Post by jchw »

mikeyouse wrote: post #107
jchw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but consider a place like Japan. That strategy is probably not viable everywhere.

It'll be interesting to see how everything develops but Japan has an absurd amount of offshore wind potential. Their country is set up perfectly to take advantage of it given their major cities are all up and down the coast, they're also ~100 miles from mainland Korea which has plenty of wind and solar potential as well. There are geopolitical concerns to relying on your neighbors for energy transmission, but it's ha…

I agree that it'll be interesting to see. A primarily-wind Japan would be cool if it could be done, and it seems like a win/win.

I wonder if it still makes sense to keep nuclear energy around in the mix as a sort of backup, though. We've already got a ton of plants that could probably last more decades with proper maintenance to my understanding, and despite making up a small number of energy production facilities they make up a huge mix of the energy in the world, so it seems like it could be a solid backup plan in a primarily wind and solar world.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#228

Post by denton-scratch »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #88

I grew up very anti-nuclear, but a lot of it was conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons which, back in the 80s, felt like they could fall any moment. But the technology has changed (though most reactors are not new), and more importantly, when compared with the effects of fossil fuels on climate, nuclear is by far the lesser evil. Sure, solar/wind/hydro renewables are important but they're not practical or…

> conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons

"Conflation" means (or at least implies) that one thing has been mistaken for the other.

Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons production since the very beginning. The British MAGNOX reactors were designed (and used) to produce warheads as well as energy. Iran is under sanctions partly because it's feared they'll use any reactor they build to make warheads.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#229

Post by Accujack »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #97
whatshisface wrote: post #6

> I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons. That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the…

Nuclear reactor fuel is pre-assembled. There are licenses to produce/consume/export/import/store/dispose the fuel assemblies, with the quantities and weights being an exactly known scientific fact. Everything is meticulously recorded and tracked from source to destination, with stringent security measures. Local, international and inter-governmental regulators monitor, inspect and verify; penalties are serious. Why w…

>Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production to the military scenarios, which have a completely different legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?

Because the article took away their usual talking points regarding "nuclear waste bad" and "dangerous for 10,000 years!".

They're moving the goalposts to "You can't argue that nuclear waste disposal from power plants wouldn't cause a problem because the military doesn't dispose of most things correctly and private companies are probably just as bad or worse than the military, therefore you're wrong."

Which doesn't make much sense.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#230

Post by [deleted] »

somethoughts wrote: post #181
Eisenstein wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is rather a silly thing to be concerned about given the consequences of the world either running out of cheap energy or continuing to dump huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. I will roll the dice on your crystal ball being defective rather than the alternative.

My hot take, pretending I was an environmentalist, is that fossil fuel/climate change is the object d'ire for environmentalists only because nuclear ended up not gaining traction. The masses of environmentalists have moved on to a different front of the battlefield for protecting the earth but would return if nuclear gained traction. It's kind of like now that humans conquered polio and smallpox, the next challenge t…

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