Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 166 posts

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#151

Post by belorn »

pvaldes wrote: post #145
sesuximo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you show me where to put all the carbon waste before we build another car/gas plant? Making orders of magnitude less waste that stays in one place seems obviously better... it’s in parking lots because there isn’t much of it

> where to put all the carbon waste Trees have been extensively proven and are reliable. Human body stores also a lot of carbon.

Im game. For the same amount of fossil fuels being burned a power plant need to plant and then for all future stored so the tree won't be burned or decomposed.

Basically for ever bit of fuel burned we expand a ever expanding area of nature reserves which carbon is forbidden to be touched until it return itself as fossil fuels. It would gloriously make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive to the point where any other energy should would be more commercial viable.

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#152

Post by sesuximo »

pvaldes wrote: post #145
sesuximo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you show me where to put all the carbon waste before we build another car/gas plant? Making orders of magnitude less waste that stays in one place seems obviously better... it’s in parking lots because there isn’t much of it

> where to put all the carbon waste Trees have been extensively proven and are reliable. Human body stores also a lot of carbon.

I don’t think this is really practical or actual (isn’t tree coverage decreasing?) but I’m all for planting trees

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#153

Post by makerofspoons »

stallmanite wrote: post #129
StreamBright wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are discounting cave man with camp fire. Also nuclear _technology_ as of being controlled by humans is not as old.

I’m pretty sure the parent is pointing out that the chemical combustion in eg a caveman’s campfire required many millions of years of stars performing nuclear fusion to create any elements with higher atomic numbers than 2, oxygen included.

Oh, I read it as a reference to natural fission reactors, like the one found at Oklo.

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#154

Post by mint2 »

ysleepy wrote: post #6

Ah yes, decidedly pro-nuclear stance here. The first obvious omissions that come to mind are: 1. The evacuations took place while the meltdown was ongoing, evacuating was the sane choice given the available knowledge at the time. 2. There is no data on how not evacuating would have affected the people, since that was not done, making that comparison with such certainty seems a bit overconfident. Nuclear in general: H…

Please note the metal can parking lots is a USA thing. Other countries are actually building long term repos.

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#155

Post by kernaussage »

indymike wrote: post #96
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #51

Not sure I've seen a HN post before where so many people in the comments have clearly not read the article. Not even the summary of key points right at the top. The piece is not anti-nuclear. Also, risk is not binary. Finding out the true risk of something does not mean it's high risk and therefore negative. You can assess the risk of something and conclude that the risk is low and generally overblown, which is the p…

Perhaps because you have to have a Medium account to read the article? I'd love to read it, but I don't love the idea of logging in to Medium to do so.

Just clear your medium cookies, there is a limit on how many articles you can read per month.

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#156

Post by indymike »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #136
indymike wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because you have to have a Medium account to read the article? I'd love to read it, but I don't love the idea of logging in to Medium to do so.

> Perhaps because you have to have a Medium account to read the article? I'm anti-Nuclear (On Earth), but would prefer most people read it before commenting on it. So, I archived it. http://archive.vn/OmALl

Thank you. A pretty good read, and honest.

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#157

Post by rhn_mk1 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #123
SCAQTony wrote: post #115

I read the article, and looked at his bio. He is not a nuclear scientist nor a analytics professional. His previous articles are pro nuke, which is fine, but to take his words wholesale with no bibliography or links is asking too much for this reader. Most of all, he quantifies stress and exhaustion as a primary cause of death for those evacuated. How did he figure that out?

Yeah, I thought this article was decent in some respects, but the larger issue was that it completely ignored human nature when it comes to risk assessment. Does he honestly think it would have worked to tell those living near Fukushima, "Don't worry, on average you'll only lose about 3 weeks of life, so don't worry about it!" Of course, very few people are hit by the "average": most people have no I'll effects while…

The analysis was related to both sides of the coin. I imagine the presentation would offer alternatives: stay and lose 3 weeks, evacuate and lose 4 weeks, so which one do you worry about more?

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#158

Post by ryosuke »

This article set off a number of red flags for me, and by the end I found it very hard to believe that this was done by a group of impartial researchers.

And sure enough, Phillip Thomas, the lead researcher for this study, comes from a 20+ year career with the chemical and nuclear industries. I would take everything in this article with a grain of salt.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/engineering/people/philip-j-thomas/...

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#159

Post by belorn »

raxxorrax wrote: post #148
andbberger wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste was never really a problem and has been definitively solved. You bury it in a deep unmarked hole. [1] Go ahead and keep arguing about whether or not nuclear is a good idea. Earth doesn't care. The water will be lapping at your feet soon. How's that for externalizing a cost to future generations? I am, and will continue to be blown away that the world found out how to make rocks so spicy they can power our civil…

With all security measures and the problem with storing waste, nuclear is just very expensive, at least for many countries with a high population density. Europe doesn't have that many vast uninhabited landscapes for example. That Canada can just dump it beyond the polar circle is another thing. Uranium isn't endless. With the current rate of consumption, it would last ~80 years. Sure, there are ideas to extract it a…

Nuclear can not compete against cheap renewable for dynamic power load and cheap fossil fuel for base load. For base load in particular the convenience and agility to spin up more gas burning power plants based on weather conditions and demand is impossible to beat, and as a resource, natural gas can be found in many geographical places and gathered through multiple different methods.

We will not see nuclear plants in the future as long as fossil fuels are burning to power up the energy grid and warm up homes. Maybe when the coral reefs are all gone in 20-30 years, water levels has increased a bit to be inconvenient enough, and enough people are displaces because of drought and other humanitarian disaster, then maybe the cost of burning fossil fuels will finally be applied to the operators of such power plants and alternative sources become more competitive when the sun is down and the wind is not blowing.

I do judge people for burning fossil fuels. That my country has a set date when nuclear should be all gone but no date when fossil fuels can be banned is a pretty good sign how bad the priorities are.

Re: Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

#160

Post by AnthonyMouse »

verall wrote: post #140
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Problem is ... it creates weapons grade Plutonium as the product, out of Depleted Uranium(stuffs so safe US military puts into tank shells as weights). Calling this the problem is just more fear mongering. The hard part about building a uranium-based bomb is getting weapons-grade uranium, because the bomb is simpler but U-235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium and is hard to separate from U-238 because they're chemica…

It sure makes an easy dirty bomb when stuck on a regular bomb though.

Dirty bombs are, to begin with, Hollywood movie plot nonsense.

But long-lived isotopes aren't even what you would use because they're only mildly radioactive.

Post reply on HN