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Nuclear power is too safe

jackdevanney.substack.com

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Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#131

Post by Schroedingersat »

illiarian wrote: post #128
Schroedingersat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't your statement. It's real weird how any pro nuclear argument always seems to be followed up by this exact same slimy deflection tactic and a never ending stream of lies.

This is my statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35383560 This applies to the whole fearmongering about nuclear energy with actual slimy tactics.

Implying that the evacuation was unnecessary.

Either you have no idea what short lived fission prpducts are or you're actively lying.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#132

Post by Schroedingersat »

Ah the old "it'd be cheap if you'd just let us try and kill you".

If your business model requires hundreds of emergency workers to heroically dive on the grenade once every couple of years to stop the disaster getting orders of magnitude worse than merely destroying a country's economy for decades, then it's going to start getting very hard to find people to keep diving on the grenade.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#133

Post by illiarian »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #131
illiarian wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35383560 This applies to the whole fearmongering about nuclear energy with actual slimy tactics.

Implying that the evacuation was unnecessary. Either you have no idea what short lived fission prpducts are or you're actively lying.

> Implying that the evacuation was unnecessary.

Implying that overall dangers spouted by fearmongers are overrated given the context of the discussion.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#134

Post by Schroedingersat »

illiarian wrote: post #133
Schroedingersat wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implying that the evacuation was unnecessary. Either you have no idea what short lived fission prpducts are or you're actively lying.

> Implying that the evacuation was unnecessary. Implying that overall dangers spouted by fearmongers are overrated given the context of the discussion .

Again, the straw man you fell back to was not your initial statement.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#135

Post by Gwypaas »

illiarian wrote: post #123
Gwypaas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's ignore the earthquake and tsunami that happened and pretend that all that cleanup is only due to Fukushima. Typical nuclear proponents, trying to shift blame. The $2T is for the nuclear side of things.

Typical nuclear fearmongers throwing nonsensical number about. "Japan has spent roughly 1 trillion yen ($7.3 billion) annually on the damage caused by the meltdowns at the Fukushima " That amounts to 84 billion dollars. That includes everything, including compensations and decomissioning. The cleanup itself is roughly 30 billion dollars. While the costs are still huge, note: this is for a plant that was both hit by a…

Lying with numbers? We should rely on the Japanese government instead of random HN:ers defending their pet technology.

> The cost of dealing with the aftermath of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will reach 21.5 trillion yen, roughly double the government's initial prediction of 11 trillion yen, preliminary calculations released on Dec. 8 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have shown.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20161209/p2a/00m/0na/00...

> While the costs are still huge, note: this is for a plant that was both hit by an earthquake and flooded by unprecedented tsunami.

Read again what I said. The cause was special, while the risk was systemic. All western countries require independent core cooling today because there have been too many near-misses with causes related to power failures.

> Also note: even with all that in mind only one person died as the result of direct radiation exposure, and radiation levels in Fukushima region are normal or below average levels.

Who said anything about radiation? We are talking about cost. The alternative is renewables, which are vastly safer and more economical than nuclear.

Again, typical blame shifting. You are not doing nuclear power any service with coal based whataboutism.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#136

Post by mpweiher »

piva00 wrote: post #118
mpweiher wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come. No it's not. For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation. Another example: the fishermen of the Fukushima prefecture are suffering. But not because there's anything wrong with the fish, it's that people are afraid. Fear of nuclear kills far more people than nuclear does.…

> For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation. Can you provide sources for this claim? > Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning". There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ [0]. You have an opinion but we still haven'…

The basis of the cleanup and evacuation requirements is the Linear No Threshold model, which assumes that even the tiniest amount of radiation has adverse health effects. There is no empirical basis for the LNT model at very low doses, so it's essentially made up.

And in fact, the LNT model greatly overestimated the casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There's tons of references for this on the web, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...

Also from there:

"It is believed that the health effects of the radioactivity release are primarily psychological rather than physical effects. [..] However, people who have been evacuated have suffered from depression and other mental health effects."

The same was true in Chernobyl, check the WHO reports that came out every decade. Each subsequent report reduced the estimated number of casualties linked to radiation by an order of magnitude, while the psychological impact increased.

> There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ

While there is no scientific consensus on the details, there is consensus that the red zone is not the poisonous wasteland you claimed. The wildlife has absolutely thrived.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/chernobyl-animals

https://www.wired.com/story/chernobyl-exclusion-zone-rewildi...

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#137

Post by credit_guy »

A bit tangential, but this week I discovered an interesting tidbit about nuclear waste.

We keep hearing that nuclear waste is an intractable problem, that the Yucca Mountain repository could never be approved, and there is no alternative, etc.

What I learned this week is that in the US (and worldwide) more waste was produced by weapons programs than by the civilian reactors. Roughly speaking the civilian reactors have produced about 120k tons of spent fuel in the US. Weapons programs created 100 million gallons of waste [1], which is in liquid form. I can't find the density, but I doubt is lower than that of water, and most likely it is much higher (Uranium is an extremely dense metal). In any case, at a minimum this is 380k tons, which dwarfs the waste from civilian sources.

All this waste was or will be stored at a facility similar to the one envisioned for Yucca Mountain, called WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) [2], located in the desert in New Mexico. By a law passed by Congress, only waste from the weapons programs is eligible to be stored there, but there's no technological reason to not add civilian waste to the program.

WIPP is an underground long term storage facility in a massive salt mine. The video in link [2] is quite informative.

My personal conclusion is that nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem, both from the technological point of view and the political one.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/nuclear-weapons-production-waste

[2] https://www.wipp.energy.gov/

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#138

Post by bottlepalm »

eddyg wrote: post #125
bottlepalm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if it were designed today they wouldn't stop at 'good enough' and actually commercialize a design that is fail safe. Current reactors around the world only have a limited amount of backup time, days/weeks, before the spent fuel pool boils off and the fuel burns resulting in a massive disaster spreading radioactive ash across wide swaths of land.

Passive “fail safe” designs have been around for quite a while, like the GE ESBWR, which is a Gen III reactor. This[1] data sheet is from 2011. Newer reactors, like the pool-type, metal-fueled, small modular Sodium Fast Reactor [2] are significantly more efficient, are air-cooled, automatically shutdown without human, electronic or mechanical intervention, and by using electro-metallurgical separation, can recycle up…

Fail safe designs have been around for decades, but they never built them. At this point it doesn't matter. We have 400 non-fail-safe reactors out there. Either shut them down, or replace them with fail safe ones.

The fact fail safe designs 'exist' isn't an argument for continuing to operate the ones we have. Or building more of those non-fail-safe designs which is what's currently happening around the world right now.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#139

Post by bottlepalm »

mpweiher wrote: post #117
bottlepalm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says 'only' 26 more Fukushima/Chernobyl type accidents. Exclusion zones all around the world. Not many people died hopefully, but you can't go back to your home either.

Actually you can, most of the evacuations were unnecessary and killed significantly more people than the radiation.

I guarantee you after 26 disasters the numbers will catch up.

Re: Nuclear power is too safe

#140

Post by piva00 »

mpweiher wrote: post #136
piva00 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation. Can you provide sources for this claim? > Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning". There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ [0]. You have an opinion but we still haven'…

The basis of the cleanup and evacuation requirements is the Linear No Threshold model, which assumes that even the tiniest amount of radiation has adverse health effects. There is no empirical basis for the LNT model at very low doses, so it's essentially made up. And in fact, the LNT model greatly overestimated the casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's tons of references for this on the web, see…

Wildlife has thrived due to a lack of humans, not because radiation isn't dangerous. There are mutations abound in animals from the CEZ.

A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?

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