261–270 of 428 posts
I like how he says there is no radiation leaking out of those dry casks. That sounds like obvious nonsense to me. There’s radiation, it’s just not significant. It’s like saying an x-ray has no radiation when you compare it to a CT scan.
For that matter, you are emitting some radiation right now from radioactive potassium in your body. Everyone is.
Re: nuclear waste, I'm sure there is a perfect way to handle it. But look up "Asse" for how it works in the real world. Also look up how long Germany has been searching for a final burial ground. I'm confident if we made the author an absolutist ruler he would find a way that's better than what we have. We just have this nasty thing called democracy, and citizens' initiatives and huge protests and so on. And that's t…
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…
Quite the contrary; they oppose it. Windscale/Sellafield has been the target of protests for decades. The problem is, to extract and concentrate the stuff you want to output, you create a greatly increased volume of stuff that you don't want/can't sell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know people who were so sick and tired of trying to figure out where to dispose of their fluorescent light bulbs that they just threw them to the side of the road on the highway at night. It’s completely undetectable.
Yup, same issue with e-waste. It can be a pain to properly dispose of your broken 10 year old laptop. So many people don't do it. It just does in the trash can with everything else. Make it easy, people do it, minus a few edge case shitheads. But I'd rather 75 out of 100 people do it right and have 25 shit heads than 75 shit heads and 25 people doing it right.
> 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 foss…
However, the greater point is that although nuclear power is dangerous by default because of the waste and risks of meltdowns it can be made very safe with engineering and still be a cheap generation method. By all accounts I'm familiar with fossil fuels cannot be made safe for either the environment or people while still being cost-effective.
A major issue in the nuclear vs fossil fuels argument is perceived vs actual risk. I don't have the numbers, but even though Fukushima was a huge disaster, the death toll is officially 1. But the cleanup has been very expensive and very visible. Meanwhile, coal/gas/oil plants deflect the equivalent costs of their cleanup onto workers and people in the communities in increased mortality and healthcare costs.
More succinctly, nuclear can be safe with effort, but fossil fuels seemingly can't be safe, no matter how much effort.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't believe you're blaming "tree huggers" for this, when the clear beneficiary is the global fossil fuel industry, who've been lobbying against nuclear power since the 50s. Shit, many anti-nuclear groups have been funded by fossil fuel industry for decades. At best, their protests were political cover for governments to do what the oil industry paid them to do.
Do you have sources for these claims?
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…
A few years ago I had the same experience. It cost me $30 and 10 minutes to replace the subwoofer speaker in my 20 year old Mission home theatre, but finding the right speaker was quite difficult. I trawled forums and ended up ordering a speaker from a German manufacturer that had all sorts of speakers for specialised applications.
Most people would have just thrown out the entire setup and bought a new one, expensive and wasteful. Yet it was so trivial to fix with the right knowledge. And it sounded great, better than most setups I hear today.
It makes me wonder whether home theatres bought today will still be functioning in the 2040s. It seems unlikely as soundbars are all the rage these days which communicate over bluetooth/hdmi protocols that get superseded every few years, forcing you to constantly upgrade. Makes me appreciate the “dumb” aspect of that old setup I had.
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".
"Vestas unveils circularity solution to end landfill for turbine blades"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minuscule tritium emissions are detected around nuclear power plants all the time, far below the level at which anybody should be concerned. There was even a case where alarms were sounded when a power plant worker was found to be radioactive due to radon in his home, which triggered detectors at work. The general chemical industry doesn't operate with anything even remotely close to this degree of care.
That's a gas, making it the easiest possible case. I think a more plausible threat are the decaying temporary storage containers that a lot of low-grade waste is sitting in because nobody can find a permanent location for it. (Yes, that's largely due to political reasons, but political reasons are real!)
Anything like that radioactive source from Australia would set of tons of alarms in a nuclear power plant. You wouldn't get it out the door. Incidents like that missing radioactive source in Australia happen where there are far fewer safeguards than at a nuclear power plant. Those sources generally go missing from abandoned medical equipment, food irradiation facilities, and that sort of thing. You'd be hard pressed to smuggle (let alone accidentally convey) something like a spent nuclear fuel pellet out of a power plant.