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I changed my mind about nuclear waste

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Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#251

Post by godelski »

whatshisface wrote: post #35
LarryMullins wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases Even they will be hard pressed to detect chemical polutants at the extremely low concentrations that radiation can be trivially detected. But also, they know what to look for. What about everybody else in the area who don't even know what they should be looking for in the first place? With radioactive leaks it's easy, but DOW's chemic…

I'm not sure what you're saying - people living in towns near military bases do not* walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals. Maybe they should start, but I mean, that's not a good normal. *Edit: Except when they do.

> people living in towns near military bases do not walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals

Not quite true. There are pretty big and active citizen based radiation detection projects [0,1,2,3]. The reason for this is that radiation monitors are quite cheap now and the same people who build weather systems often connect a geiger counter. They're cheap and sensitive since the gov spent so much money trying to detect radiation from space, across borders, and even the smallest traces on people (to detect spies, scientists, etc) all from the Cold War. There are also citizen based communities monitoring water and soil, but this does require more work from the participant. They have to go out and collect samples. Processing can be both expensive and quite a bit of work. This isn't the same as hooking up a $100 device to your weather station, which is a leave and forget type system.

We should note that both these communities are far more active in regions where there are greater dangers (history of nuclear sites/projects, oil facilities, military bases, etc). I'd also like to thank both these communities and others like them. They're all doing important work.

[0]https://www.radiationnetwork.com/

[1] https://jciv.iidj.net/map/

[2] https://cemp.dri.edu/cemp/

[3] https://www.epa.gov/radnet/near-real-time-and-laboratory-dat...

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#252

Post by Aloisius »

photochemsyn wrote: post #96

Just on technical grounds, this is just not a very educational article. Any discussion of waste from the nuclear fission process should begin with an image of the periodic table and a chart of the curve of binding energy (whose peak, or trough, sits on Iron, which the most stable nuclei relative to fusion or fission processes). From there we can take a look at thermal fission product yield: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

> The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice about flying

I'm not sure we would if planes only crashed once a thirty years. Especially if crashes were limited to experimental or old planes with known design flaws.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#253

Post by depr »

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…

Turbine blades at least can't really be recycled, just search for "turbine blade landfill".

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#254

Post by gwbas1c »

phs318u wrote: post #149

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Until the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act gets repealed, the nuclear industry can take a hike. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...

> constructed in the United States before 2026

Looks like it's going to expire soon anyway.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#255

Post by mikojan »

robertlagrant wrote: post #128
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…

You wouldn't have thought that unless you thought France had capacity to power Germany just lying around.

Apparently Germany had capacity to power France just lying around.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#256

Post by goatlover »

Krasnol wrote: post #243
JohnBooty wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is only "5x" higher cost if you utterly ignore the environmental catastrophe of fossil fuels. Global warming will cost countless trillions and displace, sicken, and/or kill billions in the coming centuries.

I'm quite sure op meant 5x higher than certain renewables not fossil. Nobody is talking about fossil anymore. It's on the way out just like nuclear.

At some point it will, but has fossil fuel use actually declined so far? From what a I’ve read, the Arctic is being looked at as a new frontier for oil and gas exploration as the ice retreats.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#257

Post by Accujack »

denton-scratch wrote: post #228
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…

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

Yes, and the word is being used correctly here.

>Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons production since the very beginning.

No, they have not. While it's possible to get civilian power plants to produce (breed) nuclear materials, they aren't designed for it. Almost all weapons production at places like Savannah River and Hanford was done with purpose specific plants that created plutonium and U-235 by design.

Iran is under sanctions not because it's feared they'll use power plants to make warheads but because they are working on enriching nuclear fuel to a level useful for weapons. IE, they're taking the same stuff that powers power plants and trying to concentrate it so they can make a weapon.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#258

Post by chinchilla2020 »

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…

This is definitely the reddit or twitter style take I would expect from someone outside the industry.

I worked in the industry for about a decade on nuclear, solar, wind, coal, and natural gas. I mostly worked in capacity planning and did some light industrial engineering.

There is not some massive split between 'Big fossil fuel' and 'big renewable'. Most of the generators are diversified in a blend of all different types of power plants. It's ridiculous to advance these conspiracy theories about companies running marketting campaigns against themselves.

This claim that every statement about nuclear power is some 'industry shill' narrative is really ignorant and misinformed. Then there is the lines-on-the-corkboard about what organizations they belong to... trying to infer that this is some sort of nefarious pysop.. when in reality most people in the industry are part of organizations that span every power source.

I did alot of work with SCE and Nextera which are both incredibly diversified and have a variety of power plants.

Even the infamous Duke (typically considered heavy on fossil fuels) has plenty of renewable and nuclear generation.

There is also a complete lack of knowledge about base load versus peak load, and other aspects of power generation in the thread below. The commenter in the thread claiming that 'Renewables are ALWAYS cheaper' is not correct and is running an interesting theory that energy companies want to create pollution so badly that they will throw away potential profits and lose money.

This entire discussion is pretty much the peak of software engineers who can't tell the difference between a crescent and a ratchet weighing in expertise about an industrial field they do not comprehend.

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#259

Post by denton-scratch »

quotemstr wrote: post #203
evolve2k wrote: post #178

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. We can’t manage shit that needs a few years of care unless it continues to make profits right now. It’s a fucking joke. So your local government is recommending a nuclear waste dump, as mine is. Here’s basic maths to know if your getting screwed or if they’ll be doing…

> 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 subs…

> The most radioactive substances decay in years or decades, not millennia.

s/decay in/have half-lives of/

Some of the stuff made in a nuke is not made by any other earthbound process, and even a tiny amount of it is dangerous. Plutonium has a half-life around 20,000 years. At a stretch, European civilization is 10,000 years old (and we generally struggle to read texts that old - when they exist at all).

Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste

#260

Post by throwaway744678 »

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…

This comment, and a few of its siblings, kind of smell like: "Look, I'm not racist, but can we trust these guys with this technology?" Some of them can read, you know. Event count.
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