I changed my mind about nuclear waste • Hacker News Board

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#231

Post by Eduard » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

tcmart14 wrote: post #33

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…

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…

> 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.

So inconsistent. Literally trashy if true.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#232

Post by tcmart14 » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #92

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…

So, what you are expressing is one perspective on accidents, and it's true - the one guy who cares about cleaning up a spill is a good guy, the one guy who hoses it into a drain is a bad guy. I would like to offer another one. The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination. On t…

There definitely are roots that can be traced to institutional problems. The case with a certain DC1 who thought being a pain would make him feel better, it is an institutional problem that someone like that was able to get to a position they were in. If someone with that kind of a personality rose up to being a DC1 and supervising the trash crew (although these kinds of duties are usually when someone is sent TAD because their division doesn't want to deal with them), that is a problem. So yea, you can boil it down to institutional problems, however it can be a little tricky because those institutional problems sometimes do not correlate directly.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#233

Post by mikeyouse » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #227

mikeyouse wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Oh yeah, existing plants can be operated at very low cost -- if they're sited in safe locations, and certified / refurbished for extended use beyond their design life, it definitely makes sense to keep them running for as long as possible. If Japan overbuilds their wind resources while maintaining their nuclear fleet, they could send the nuclear electrons the other direction and power Korea with nuclear.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#234

Post by somethoughts » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:06 PM UTC

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…

To me - it seems the existential fear around climate change is the topic of the day for environmentalists only because nuclear ended up not gaining traction. Nuclear waste/proliferation is not the number one existential threat these days only because it's used so little (both because of PR issues and lack of economics/long term maintenance challenges).

The masses of environmentalists moved on from nuclear in the 80's but would surely return if nuclear regained traction.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#235

Post by Krasnol » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:06 PM UTC

ohgodplsno wrote: post #161

wirrbel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You would have thought that France would have supplied the European continent with electricity now that Russia cut its gas supply, but it turns out that France received electricity from…

France was strongarmed by Germany and by shitty election related deals to elect Hollande into massive nuclear power closures and reductions, coupled with presidents unable to see more than 5 years ahead means that nuclear plants both do not get renewed and also get closed for absolutely no reason. See Fessenheim. The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to build a safe power plant, it's that there's been no w…

Hollande wanted to diversify France because it's not and they had to pay for this stupidity and still do to this day.

Fessenheim is the perfect reason for why Hollande wanted to close some of those plants: old, accident ridden, one of those which have to be closed down in summer due to possible overheating of nearby rivers and to top that off: it's in a region which may have earthquakes for which it is not prepared...

> The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to build a safe power plant, it's that there's been no will from anyone, or active harm from incompetent shitheads.

Weird because there are plenty western countries which do have popular support for nuclear energy but still struggle with construction times and costs in astronomical ways.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#236

Post by Accujack » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:06 PM UTC

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…

>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 areas around them are contaminated.

No, it's a plain statement, not a "tactic". Power plant waste is different from weapons waste, and disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem. She's talking about power plant waste because one major barrier to replacing climate changing coal fired power plants is the usual indoctrination people face regarding nuclear waste, with no distinction drawn between power plants and nuclear weapons waste.

Talking about weapons reactors or the military not disposing of chemicals properly is entirely irrelevant to the article and the discussion at hand.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#237

Post by denton-scratch » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:07 PM UTC

yCombLinks wrote: post #25

pflenker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s condescending to claim that environmentalists are guided mainly by emotions and people who share your view are guided by science. The problems surrounding nuclear waste is not as clear cut as the article suggests.

The condescension is deserved. The green movement has done more harm than help to clean energy by blocking nuclear power trying to push energy sources that were not economically viable. This was mainly due to emotional backlash against nuclear energy.

Condescension is actually rude, and for that reason not a smart way to persuade people you're right. It gets you upvotes on Twaddle or whatever, but only from people who already agree with you.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#238

Post by wcerfgba » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:07 PM UTC

> But radiation hasn’t harmed anywhere near as many people as fossil fuels.

The implication with both this statement and the map is that we should be comparing the total number of people who died from radiation, and the total from fossil fuels, and see which is bigger, but there are other ways of evaluating (potential) harms.

Nuclear power and other radtech is not equally common around the world, and neither are fossil fuels. In the context of promoting transition from one to the other, the important question is the relative harm of these two choices as a function of their deployment over time. There have been events from minor leaks to world-changing disasters, all of which are contingent on human factors which vary widely across time and space. So it's not clear that increasing global rollout of nuclear power will be as consistently safe in the future as it has been in the recent past.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#239

Post by Eisenstein » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:07 PM UTC

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…

Your baseless theories ascribing borderline malicious intentions on the part of actors like environmentalists and nuclear construction interests are amusing, but I fail to see why they should be taken seriously.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#240

Post by connorgutman » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

Call me chicken little but my beef with nuclear has always been about the people not the science. If we paint the Earth with reactors it’s a statistical likelihood that through corruption or incompetence someone will screw up. We can’t even keep 50 year old bridges from collapsing in the U.S and meanwhile every time a republican gets into office they bleed FEMA and the EPA dry. We currently have 55 power plants total but would need about 100x that to even put a dent in our electricity bill. Who’s going to build them? Contractors? How are those F-35s Lockheed made going? Another issue is that there are significant odds that global society is on a path towards collapse or backslide due to climate change. If we entered a period of catabolic collapse and governments around the world no longer had the money or infrastructure to manage the upkeep of these facilities what would happen. You can’t just flip a switch and turn the whole thing off. I’m not someone who thinks the world is going to end in a day but look how quickly things have deteriorated in Pakistan recently. Would governments have plans in place to deal with reactors if their economy suddenly collapsed? Honestly the biggest thing to me though is that nuclear is greedy. We’re trying to find cheat codes to avoid conservation and continue consuming copious amounts of electricity. It would be vastly more cost-effective and far less time consuming to dump all that money into energy reduction measures but that would disrupt capitalism and America’s addiction to endless consumption. Residential energy usage in the U.S is higher than commercial usage. Imagine if we banned cars in cities tomorrow, dumped money into public transit and high speed rail, banned meat, built sustainable urban housing, forced tech companies to do away with planned obsolescence, stopped flying unnecessarily, and so on. We could solve climate change in a decade through conservation but that would destroy the profits of those in power. Nuclear might sound great on paper but it’s the planetary equivalence of taking tums instead of putting down the Costco hotdog.