PDF of report done in 2013 [1] which basically says and leaks will rapidly dilute. The key to remember is the lagoon and surrounding areas are already far more polluted than what this dome may leak.
Besides, if ever want a real scare go look at the maps for all the chemical munitions dumped in our oceans that we know about [2] - does not include normal munitions and such.
So while it is a problem it is not the real problem that already exist.
”Deadly mustard gas has leaked from a First World War underwater “weapons cemetery” in the North Sea, close to the Belgian coast”
Those were trace amounts, so there is not much immediate danger, but things can get worse.
And for normal munitions, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messi... probably lists a few of the scariest (a few 10,000+ kg stashes of explosives buried in Belgium since World War One. One of them exploded in 1955 after a lightning strike, showing that they were still dangerous after fortie-is years; a few others still buried somewhere)
FTA on the town’s main drag proudly advertise fish and chips made with Baltic-caught cod on their menus.
My friends from this area generally advise against eating at any place which advertises this too strongly. To the locals it's actually a turn off to begin with.
The US needs to go in and clean up this mess and should feel very obligated to move quickly on this, but is hasn’t. See also this article from 2015 [1] and folks may enjoy this video for the visuals of it [2].
That would be a nice thing to do, but per the article in 1983 the Marshall Islands traded US liability for nuclear issues as part of their move to self-government.
That is not to say that some Federal-level support is not warranted like other Superfund sites, but that it may not be the total and complete responsibility of the US Federal government to resolve the issue, as agreed to legally by both parties.
>the Marshall Islands traded US liability for nuclear issues as part of their move to self-government.
This is classic over-the-barrel negotiating tactics used by colonizing nations over their former colonies. The Marshall Islanders had few options here. Continue to have their sovereignty dictated from and literal lands and lives ruined by a foreign nation, or take liability for the colonizer's experimentation and some control of their future back.
Just because a choice was made, doesn't make the process just or right. It may release the United States from a legal obligation, but it doesn't excuse any ethical or moral obligations of the state to the people of the islands.
It is unfortunate, however, that states do not often act out of ethical or moral obligations unless it serves some other, broader interest. It's my fervent hope the United States chooses to act on its ethical and moral obligations, but overall a regression to the mean of state behavior can also be expected from time to time.
My more cynical self sees many more pressing and dangerous environment disasters domestically that are readily apparent and not being dealt with properly - in places where people actually vote for US politicians. This indicates to me that a fix in a United States associated state will unfortunately likely not merit the expenditure for awhile unless some legal case could be brought.
Shivetya up thread posted a PDF report that's quite an interesting read, so it's not being totally ignored by the US gov.
I agree they signed an agreement, still I'd expect us to do the clean up, agreement aside, we made the mess, have what's needed to fix it. The Marshall Islander's are a poor nation that could not afford to fix this without assistance. It's the neighborly thing to do.
This is the correct thought process. The linked article from llnl [1] states that “The final plan called for (1) removing all radioactive and non-radioactive debris (equipment, concrete, scrap metal, etc.), (2) removing all soil that exceeded 14.8 Bq (400 pCi) of plutonium per gram of soil, (3) removing or amending soil between 1.48 and 14.8 Bq (40 and 400 pCi) of plutonium per gram of soil, determined on a case-by-case basis depending on ultimate land-use, and 4) disposing and stabilizing all this accumulated radioactive waste into a crater on Runit Island and capping it with a concrete dome.” It goes on to state that “A estimated total of 73,000 cubic meters of surface soil...was recovered by scapping and deposited in Cactus crater on Runit Island.”
Unfortunately, it does not provide an average specific activity for the material stored, only a lower limit threshold. If we assume it was near this lower limit of 14.8 bq threshold (could be the case depending on how often case (3) was used) and assume mostly plutonium-239. Since isotopic distribution is unknown, this is a conservative assumption because the longer half-life will yield a larger mass in the calculation. The molar density can be calculated from the specific activity listed:
Na/m = a x hl/ln(2) =
14.8[decay/s] x 23110[yrs]/ln(2)
= 1.57e13 atoms/gram
= 2.61e-11 mol/gram
The mass of the dirt collected will be assumed to be wet sand with a density of 1905 kg/m^3 [2] (note that density is actually slightly higher than this due to the plutonium contained). And finally, the volume collected is 73,000 cubic meters, or 1.39e11 grams. So the total amount of plutonium is:
2.61e-11[mol/g] x 1.39e11[g] = 3.63 mol
So our envelope calculation yields about 870 grams of plutonium. So how accurate is this? It is probably on the high side after reading the paper posted by Shivetya [3]. They cite a total inventory of 545 GBq. Using the assumptions above, one would expect an inventory of 2058 GBq.
As for the effects, that’s difficult to tell. Really the two scenarios that come to mind are a constant leaching into the environment or a disaster that results in the total mass being dumped. In the latter case a disaster of that magnitude would likely disperse the material in a biased direction. In this case it would dilute relatively quickly. Impacts from the radiation would probably be apparent close by in the biased direction. A constant leak would depend on the leach rate and leak locations. The NRC defines monthly sewer release limits of material in Table 3 of 10 CFR Part 20 Appendix B - standards for protection against radiation. The number given for Pu is 84 uCi or 3.108e6 Bq. Based on the plutonium inventory calculated and neglecting material decay, the material could leach out within NRC limits over a period of 55 thousand years (2058e9/3.108e6/12). Note that this number is likely highly inflated given the assumption that all radioactive material is Pu-239 and the comparison in [3]. Using the number from [3] and assuming all activity is Pu, the duration would be 14 thousand years. However this is a rough analysis that does not account for isotopic distributions, so please take the results with a grain of salt.
Just wanted to add that the mass leakage rate to remain under NRC limits would be 1.39e11 [g] / 55000 [yrs] = 2527 [kg/yr] = 7 [kg/day]
Put into that context, it might not be too absurd to think leakage would remain under NRC limits if only small cracks were present (assuming those limits are actually applicable to this scenario)
One "meta" way of looking at things like this is that it represents a part of the technical debt left behind by the industrial revolution. Eventually we have to go back and fix this stuff, but as with technical debt in most code bases we tend to ignore it. Unfortunately technical debt is subject to compound interest, so the longer we ignore it the more costly it is to eventually deal with.
Some messes are just too big to clean up. They knew going into the testing that it was going to kill thousands and thousands of natives and effect native people in a terrible way for generations to come but they didn't give a shit then and they dont give a shit now. That's why most of the natives have 6 fingers and 4 toes, are sterile and the land is poisoned and will stay poisoned. You can deny it all you want but if it was not true shit like this wouldn't be so common place. We aren't the only ones and this isn't the only site and it's not just radiation, its carbon, its carcinogens, it's plastic... there is a whole boat load of shit like this that everyone pretends to care about when their talking about it with their husband or best friend but seems to have no trouble sleeping off the next day. What makes us think we can all just act like animals one day and civilized humans that next... I have no clue but that's reality. People ask: "Oh what can I do, I am so small and the problem is so big!" idk but I do know this if you ACTUALLY cared you would figure out some way to help. What's the difference between pretending to care and actually caring you ask? It's simple, doing something about it versus talking about doing something about it, it's that simple, that's the difference. Write your governor, send some money, do anything or just admit you don't care, and do nothing. That's what the US government is counting on you to do and that's why they got away with this and that's why they will get away with similar shit in the future.
I see the point, without centralized power you wouldn't have messes at this scale, there would be local messes that local power would be incentivised to clean up because it's in their backyard and it stinks.
How about it's never too late to work to rectify the mistakes of the past. We at least have to do our best as human beings. I can't do anything about something 1000 years ago, but I can help that person I saw on the street maybe, or I can add my voice to those who decry some terrible behavior of the government. I can vote. I can go to city councils and speak out.
Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives.
I can literally think of no one I know who wouldn’t respond to me telling them “hey you should stop implicitly trusting central power” by asking what drugs I’m on if I think they implicitly trust central power.
I guess this straw man is necessary to create so some can beat it down, but as far as I can tell such people don’t actually exist.
> Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives.
It's required for the government to provide a "social safety net" and more broadly for the Progressive vision of society. That includes Progressive-era reforms in education and retirement, as well as Progressive inspired reforms in healthcare and welfare, esp. the Great Society.
These reforms are predicated on the notion of a government agency collecting statistical data and reviewing comments from the public to determine policy that provides baseline services and acts as a buffer to economic variance.
Note also "implicit" trust. Trust is transitive: you might trust in some service the government provides without necessarily understanding that the service relies on some centralized power. Thus you might not explicitly trust a central authority, but because you rely on the services it provides you may be implicitly trusting it.
None of that stuff really requires any great level of centralization at all. Many components, like social security, are effectively mandatory requirement savings and could be replicated at the level of an individual if they didn't exist, simply by using the money not paid in social security tax to buy an annuity.
The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that still doesn't require uniformity of centralization. We don't even have it as it is -- the Saudis are some of the richest people in the world, they make most of their money from the US and Europe, yet they pay no income tax to either region.
Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city. There is nothing stopping New York City from imposing a land value tax and using the money to fund a UBI, if that's what they want to do.
Centralized government actually interferes with this significantly, because San Francisco or the state of California can't implement its own healthcare policies when they have the US government overriding them, and hoovering up the state's money and sending it to other states, using it for military spending or sending it back with strings attached that require it to be spent on less efficient or less appropriate programs than the state would choose to fund for itself.
To be clear, I wasn't arguing whether policy should be one way or the other or what anyone should do, just whether or not people do commonly trust central authority.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
> Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.
Plenty of people will offer things you can do, but really they're only things that will treat your feeling of helplessness and not things that have any significant chance of improving these scenarios.
Voting is a blunt instrument; it's effective, but it's a poor signal. It says only one thing: I want this entity to wield power. If you want to sue someone, you don't become a judge, you bring a lawsuit.
If you want to cause political change, you need to bring something into the public discourse; make it known to the politicians and the electorate. People do this by writing their politicians, getting media attention, organising or joining political action groups, backing candidates, or even going into politics themselves.
It is futile because you think that the only country with this issue is the US.
I can guarantee that China and Russia have similar if not worst storage problem - the difference is that the US allows this information to exist in the public. Even if those governments allowed the information to be public, what are you going to do, not for the Party/Putin? That sounds like a great way to win a free trip to Siberia or the re-education camp.
Democracy is the only system that has ever served any kind of majority of the population. Ours may be in rough shape right now, but burning it all down instead of fixing it helps no one.
> Democracy is the only system that has ever served any kind of majority of the population.
I disagree. Sortition / demarchy, which is the selection of officials randomly from the population (much like a grand jury), has been used throughout history, and is a strong contender. It's exponents tend to state diversity of representation, anti-corruption, and the minimisation of factionalism as advantages.
So that's what it's called. An appointed Senate and demarchist House would be ideal. An interesting advantage is courts can readily convene a committee to clarify the meaning of legislation, which is largely impossible with a fixed number of reps in the House. This removes the specter of a handful of justices legislating from the bench.
Plus, surely we'd need some kind of way to decide which of our current leaders get the guillotine... maybe by asking everyone to write down their opinion, and counting up the results...
without question the lack of overfishing in these waters, like in chernobyl ensures that if you did a real study on the health of this area, biodiversity is thriving, because people and development are lacking. it's amazing how much nuclear fear mongering there is , persistenly. with all the idiots listening to washington post and other venues about shutting down nuclear power , by fear mongering it with nuclear weapons.
alas, this is how progress dies, and artificial scarcity is imposed, no less of a low c02 and zero emission source of energy.
I hear things like "we should go full nuclear, modern nuclear reactors are safe" all the time, yet this ignores externalities, unknown unknowns, human incompetence, and the unexpected. Who would expect the ocean to rise over your nuclear waste dome? Have people suggesting this forgotten the allegory of the unsinkable ship the Titanic? Entropy always wins in the end.
Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles.
Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100."
I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while paying a lip service saying "Oh don't worry, in 30 years maybe we will switch to renewables."
I can't see why solar isn't now the leading candidate. Nuclear is cool and all, but the simplicity of a butt-tonne of solar in a field can't be overlooked. It's not likely to fail catastrophically, maintenance is modular and low-impact. The skills needed are trades not degrees and if we can get the power output/battery/backup balance right, as a society we have clean, reliable energy indefinitely.
I say that knowing we are barreling toward fantastic solar participation in the grid in many countries, and I feel it's just a matter of time before it becomes the dominant source of our energy, especially as battery solutions come into play. It's also not the end of the world to have some backup gas generators that fire up once in a blue moon. Compared to 100% fossil fuels, the occasional gas turbine firing up on a stormy week would be negligible. Alternatively, novel storage methods such as hydro storage could make even backup energy green.
There are probably cities where it wouldn't work right now, but I can't imagine there being many places where it couldn't work at all.
Solar and nuclear are complementary technologies. Nuclear produces power at night when solar doesn't, solar produces power during the day when the demand is higher. It significantly reduces the amount of storage batteries you need, which is the primary impediment to using solar exclusively.
Solar is also problematic during winter. We need to replace fossil fuels as a heat source, but when heating with electricity at scale during winter, the demand rises at night meanwhile the days are shorter and solar generates less. Heating New York and Chicago in winter using solar and batteries doesn't have promising economics.
Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
> Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
By the time you generate power from some actual generation source, pay the conversion losses both ways and then pay the equipment, land and maintenance costs of the storage technology, it isn't cost-competitive. And then people keep burning carbon.
> In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
Wind is regionally intermittent. If it's a still night in one place there is a significant probability that it will also be a few miles from there. But transmitting power over a thousand miles isn't cost-competitive. Both the infrastructure cost and the transmission losses scale with the distance, making the cost quadratic with the transmission distance. On top of that, it multiplies your costs for the generation, because if you're not going to use storage you need enough generation in Region A to power both Region A and Region B when it's a still night in Region B, but you also need that much in Region B for when it's still in Region A. Even if that only happens one night out of five.
There are also national security implications. For all but a small handful of countries "1000 miles away" is in another country. Who does Israel connect its grid to? Or Japan? Does Germany enjoy buying power from France? What do you do when your neighbor raises the price?
Then everyone, including the bigger countries, takes on a large-scale dependency. Lose the long-distance transmission lines and the brownouts aren't just regional, it's the whole continent. There are ways to harden against that but then we're raising the cost even more.
Nuclear is a poor complement to solar. To compensate for solar's fluctuations, you need anti-corelated and throttable power sources as well as storage.
You need a mix. Solar is great during the day in nice weather. It's useless at night, it's significantly reduced in bad weather, and it's completely inelastic to demand. If the population of a large metropolitan area turns on their air conditioner for an unexpectedly hot (but cloudy) day, you can't just generate more solar power. Pumped storage reservoirs can alleviate that demand to some degree, but we would need to flood significant new chunks of land and invest in relocation of humans/wildlife and construction of new dams and hydro plants. Combining solar with wind power, geothermal, and biomass can help to mitigate the issues of each solution alone. It's also just a good idea to have multiple systems in place as it makes the entire thing less prone to catastrophic failure.
I basically agree, but it’s the current cost of storage (or, equivalently, global high-tension interconnects) that’s keeping it from being a no-brainer. I’m confident solar will take over in the next decade.
I can’t say I agree with you there. Worst case for nuclear power is highly contaminated local areas (highly unlikely with modern designs), whereas the worst case for climate change is global environmental collapse.
I'm a nuclear proponent, but this ignores airborne particles and ecological collapse which can propagate and have very broad effects. Those things can be managed, but the 'worst case' of nuclear is not negligible.
Though even poor management of nuclear materials very quickly eliminates the worst cases.
You’re very much correct, although I think the reality of the threat of wide scale contamination is often overstated.
To use Chernobyl as an example, since that’s the worst case of an airborne release from a nuclear plant that I know of, the absolute worst case in the case of a steam explosion breaching the other reactors’ containment was contamination of a significant portion of Europe.
Modern reactors are designed so that such things are almost impossible, even without competent operators.
The worst case for climate change is a mass extinction event. So while I agree with you that the worst case of nuclear is non negligible, the probabilities and scale of such events push me towards the opinion that nuclear energy is an extremely good option for limiting our use of fossil fuels in the near future.
Of course a serious nuclear incident may cause a reversion to fossil fuels. That may not be rational but that is human nature. Not much you can do about that.
So the worse case of nuclear power is actually global warming caused by fossil fuels. And an eye watering San up bill that has opportunity costs for decades.
Chernobyl made around 1,000 sq mi 'uninhabitable' for around a century. (Some of the area will be safe to occupy in far less time, some in far more) If we learned nothing from that accident and had one such accident per decade while providing all the world's electricity, we would lose about 10,000 square miles of land to radioactive contamination.
Those assumptions seem extremely unfavorable to me - accidents should be less frequent and less severe with modern reactor designs and sane operating procedures. But yet, powering the US alone with solar would take approximately 17,500 square miles - and irradiated zones from nuclear accidents are less damaging to the environment than solar panels are.
Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky. If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
> Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles is the total from one accident per decade and an average exclusion zone duration of 100 years.
> If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
It would have made a large part of the continent have higher radiation doses, but even with linear-no-threshold I don't think that France/UK/Spain/Italy would have been uninhabitable. Or even close to that. And the point was, even with the most incompetent leadership we've seen at a nuclear power plant, that didn't happen.
> Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
Well, sure - you can take the solar panels and move them somewhere else if you want. But if you're using solar for power, you can't really get rid of them - just move them around.
> it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable
Some details and references for this would be nice. I find it hard to believe, though of course sometimes things I find hard to believe turn out to be true :-).
The area under the reactor core was filled with water, and if the corium (molten core material) had contacted that water it would have caused a steam explosion and launched additional material outside of the reactor building.
There's an interesting StackOverflow post relating to this here: [0] That just deals with the size of the steam explosion though, not the potential effects. (And for reference, I've seen the largest explosion that did occur listed as ~10T equivalent)
The thing I'm skeptical about is the claim that this would have rendered a large part of the continent uninhabitable. The Stack Exchange discussion is interesting but (as you say) doesn't really bear on that.
Yeah - worst case was 20x more radioactive material (well, I suppose no-seriously-wtf case would be 80x, but that requires the other three active reactors to have gone up as well) since at least 5% of the reactor core was released.
Proponents: Newer reactors are safer than older designs. The old designs are still safer than any other alternative and much safer than fossil fuels, but the newer designs are even better and we should build those.
Opponents: Don't build new reactors.
<older designs have problems that still kill fewer people than any other alternative>
Opponents: See? See? You said...
Proponents: ...that newer designs are safer than older ones and even older ones are safer than alternatives. Which remains true.
...
Politics occurs here. When you ask whether something is safe, in practice what you're asking is if it's safe relative to alternatives. So solar is safe because it's safer than coal, and nuclear is safe because it's safer than solar.
But there is also an absolutist definition of safe which requires an inhuman perfection that no real technology could ever meet. Not solar, not nuclear, not biofuels, it's just an unattainable standard.
So you ask if something is safe, people say yes (meaning it's safe relative to alternatives), then you apply the impossible standard and claim that they're lying.
If you want to stop nuclear over safety with any credibility you would also have to be willing to stop everything with a worse safety record. But that's every known alternative whatsoever.
Not the case. The worst case with nuclear is much worse than with solar, even if the possibility is unlikely. We expect insanely high standards for airplanes and the standards should be even higher for nuclear plants. We should account for the possibility that civilization collapses or an unexpected event reduces a plant to rubble. In both of those cases solar is fine but nuclear is not.
> The worst case with nuclear is much worse than with solar
It isn't. The worst case with solar is that they're manufactured with lead, cadmium and other toxic substances that pollute the environment if they're improperly manufactured or disposed of. If you abandon a solar farm, the panels get damaged by weather and then the heavy metals leech into the ground. The environmental impact of that for a solar farm with power output equal to a nuclear reactor would be as bad or worse than a nuclear meltdown.
On top of that, the real worst case for solar is that the storage technology it needs to replace carbon energy sources never becomes economical, and then without having built nuclear today, we get a level of climate change that causes human extinction.
This is not a matter of faith in some group of people ("them"). What's your point? That the whole nuclear industry, full of scientists and engineers can't be trusted with their studies?
All it takes is a single point of failure, one scientist that got the calculations wrong. That's what happened with Meltdown/Spectre vulnerability. An academic paper that many chip manufacturers based their designs on turned out to be flawed, causing a vulnerability across architectures. The nuclear industry isn't any different. Ironically the Meltdown vulnerability could have potentially been used by bad actors to hack and take out a nuclear reactor.
To use one example: Nuclear fuel is in liquid form, in a vessel that has a frozen plug of material being actively cooled at the bottom. If the reactor ever loses power, the plug melts, and the fuel drains into a collection pool, where due to simple geometry it cannot reach criticality.
Something bad (earthquake, tsunami, etc) could still happen that causes a plant shutdown. But there's no pressure vessel (other than regular steam on the generating side) to worry about breaching. And unlike current generation reactors, where even a full scram of control rods still requires some hours of active cooling to prevent core meltdown, if the liquid-type loses power, the core drains, and that's the end of it in terms of potential radiological release. That doesn't mean it isn't a complex, difficult system to design and operate. But it's a much, much safer design by its very nature.
I'm sure there was some explanation as to why superscalar CPU architectures were secure and foolproof as well. The point is that no human mind is capable of simulating reality and accounting for every single possibility. There are design flaws and unexpected surprises that make even the most well thought out plans and explanations seem foolish in retrospect. The point is determining the worst case and assuming it will happen.
You are correct that flaws and surprises lurk in all human endeavors. But that does not mean that all potential errors are in the same scale or class. We do not know everything, but we know far more than nothing!
This is waste from nuclear weapons testing, it was concreted over as a "temporary measure" and now it seems like a more permanent solution needs to be found.
Unclear why you believe nuclear energy (by which I assume you mean nuclear power generation) is relevant.
For the same reason many readers will assume this headline is about power: "nuclear waste" is a term generally associated with reactor byproducts or weapons decommissioning.
Previous articles about this dome have used terms like "radioactive contamination" or "fallout-contaminated soil" instead, which does not have the connotations of nuclear reactor programs. I suppose those terms don't "pop" as well in headlines.
I've sorta reached the conclusion that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy if everyone is well behaved and disciplined about it.
On the other hand, given the wrong incentives, you might just stow nuclear waste where it's cheapest and where you can get away with it, and then not be penalized when the containment mechanism you cheaped out on fails... or maybe you just conveniently forget to do maintenance on it as the responsibility for doing maintenance somehow conveniently evaporates due to some bureaucracy.
I think the debate isn't over whether or not nuclear power itself is safe, it's the debate over whether or not humans under capitalism are to be trusted to behave responsibly with this technology. Nuclear power isn't just the technology in isolation... humans are an intrinsic part of it.
I think that nuclear power generation has been relatively safe over almost a century exactly due to systems engineering, incorporating procedures and the potential for human error.
I also think that you are right that some of the systems surrounding nuclear energy are suboptimally managed in places (and are often intransparent for the public, which I think is one of the factors why people are still afraid). And I think it's because nuclear power generation is a social commitment on a very long time scale - and humans aren't very good at dealing with cause and effect over long time scales.
While there is, just like in aeronautics, a paper trail connecting to each engineer and expert working on a system, it does not matter whether society can identify a person that is responsible for a decision made half a century ago. Think about leaky permanent[0] waste storage close to densely populated areas (like in Germany). Analyzing what went wrong is suddenly a task for historians, not for engineers. And history is of course necessarily colored in perspective - politicans can point to an expert who was wrong half a century ago.
In engineering and safety culture, iteration is necessary to approach an optimal system - the problem is here: How can we learn from what happened decades ago when the cause wasn't a part, a design or a process, something that can be simulated with a high degree of confidence? But a decision necessarily based on lots of unknowns? What can we do to be able to learn from it next time?
[0] officially temporary but due to how it was done effectively permanent
> In engineering and safety culture, iteration is necessary to approach an optimal system - the problem is here: How can we learn from what happened decades ago when the cause wasn't a part, a design or a process, something that can be simulated with a high degree of confidence? But a decision necessarily based on lots of unknowns? What can we do to be able to learn from it next time?
The answer is that you design systems with multiple levels of redundancy, and then monitor them.
That way in order for something bad to happen, four independent things have to go wrong at once. Then you monitor if any of them ever fails. If one does, the other three prevent any catastrophe while you correct it. Then you have a new data point about how to design things better going forward.
The thing is that we have a decent idea of how to engineer things well. That's easy. Throw money and factors of 2 at it until the cows come home. That's not my concern. How do we know they'll actually do the proper engineering? How do we not have another Boeing 737 situation but for a nuclear reactor?
I know as engineers we want to turn everything into an engineering problem but sometimes there are just humans who don't understand the severity of their actions to cut costs or defer maintenance or something and I don't know if it's possible to ever fully engineer these people away or engineer away their influence or engineer away their incentive to do the wrong thing... as much as I'd love to do that.
Maybe I'm just being a naysayer. The thing is that I still believe nuclear power is the best interim solution in existence and that it's necessary to build more nuclear plants. I just don't buy the "totally safe" argument. It's like chemo or amphotericin or something. It'd be great to not have to use it... buuuuut....
Now you're asking a completely different question. It's not a matter of not knowing what to do, it's a matter of not doing it.
But nothing about nuclear is unique in that regard. If you have incompetence then we get Deepwater Horizon, Bophal, companies dumping cadmium, lead, mercury, cyanide, nitrogen, phosphorous or acid in to rivers and groundwater, mining runoff, destroying rainforest, dam failures, basically the entire list of Superfund sites in the US. Those kinds of things can be significantly worse than even a full scale nuclear meltdown. And on top of that, chemical pollutants have no half-life -- they're forever.
There is a 3700 acre coal mine fire that has been burning in Pennsylvania since 1962, causing the town to be abandoned:
It's the same problem with anything -- even solar is silicon. Take a look a the environmental history of Silicon Valley for a morbid lesson in how wrong that can go.
That is a very interesting point - would I rather live next to a DuPont chemical plant or a nuclear power plant? I think I would choose the nuclear power plant.
Edit: With the nuclear plant I at least have feasible means to monitor any danger by myself.
Humans under what, then? I wonder if you're aware that the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes.
Jeffrey Sachs has commented that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.”. Companies can be held to account (failure to do so is another story) but try that with a centrally run enterprise.
Can we ship all the nuclear waste to your house? Don't worry, it's the safest kind of energy there is.
Or maybe "safe" isn't the right term for something that also produces some of the most deadly substances that we know of? It's "safe" so long as nothing goes wrong, and everything is stored correctly. Of course, that regularly proves to not be the case: https://www.newsweek.com/ohio-school-closed-enriched-uranium...
It's very worrying to see comments like this become more and more common on HN.
Yes, I will take the waste. If it's in the containers we've developed specifically for this purpose, yes. It beats the current situation in the US where everyone stores waste on site because politicians can't decide where to put it because of people like you.
Modern waste, with proper precautions, is safe for long term disposal and storage. I cannot stress this enough.
If you don't believe me, this website has plenty of information regarding nuclear power, straight from the source. It is developed and run by the UN. Based on your misinformation, I strongly urge you to pore over this content and then attempt to reevaluate your own question.
What did I say that is even remotely misinformation?
Nuclear power is safe "with proper precautions", I completely agree. The problem is that it hasn't even been a week since we've proven proper precautions are not being taken.
There is nothing more sad out there than linking to a homepage the nuclear lobby uses to drive this artificial nuclear hype we've seen here in the last months.
My personal experience with interacting with the WNA revolves around their interactions with the WNU, which is the World Nuclear University. It's a partnership between the WNA, IAEA, and others. Their goal is to promote education in the field and having significant experience with the WNU, and having noticed no irregularities, it would be very unlikely if the WNA was simply making things up, or if they were spreading falsehoods. The WNA site is consistently pointed to as a global source of truth by the WNU and by the IAEA.
Could you enlighten me as to who would be a more reliable source on nuclear technology?
Would an organization evidently so deeply ingrained with and tied to the UN and the UN's nuclear-specific arm, backed by numerous experts, really be in the business of misleading anyone? Would you disregard a pro-climate change website for its pro-climate change bias as well?
If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.
What is "pro-climate" today if the main line of this recent out of "nothing" nuclear hype is: "It's either nuclear or coal", which is a lie painting people who don't want to have nuclear as some kind of idiots with a phobia.
> If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.
Oh please...what are the chances that the person is even close to the NCY area...? I'm from Germany. You know...the country with no nuclear issues at all anymore...besides with the waste of it of course.
That says nothing about the truthiness of the page. Let's hypothetically assume that every word on the page is true. Would one not expect the "nuclear lobby" to link to it? Let's assume every word on the page is a lie, but favorable toward nuclear energy. Would one not expect...
Assuming the alternative (which you conveniently left out) is the negative externalities of coal-fired power ending up on my doorstep? Yes, I'll take the nuke waste, thanks. Pull around on the left side of the house, please, so that you don't crush the sewer lines.
Don't worry, it's the safest kind of energy there is.
Nothing in your comment contradicts that statement.
Seal it in a lead box, and I'll put it in my basement, sure. I've already got radon leaching out of the bedrock, and a big bunch of bananas in my kitchen. I think I'm already picking up more rads from that, not to mention all the chest X-rays I had to do on a regular basis for a few years.
PDF of report done in 2013 [1] which basically says and leaks will rapidly dilute. The key to remember is the lagoon and surrounding areas are already far more polluted than what this dome may leak.
Besides, if ever want a real scare go look at the maps for all the chemical munitions dumped in our oceans that we know about [2] - does not include normal munitions and such.
So while it is a problem it is not the real problem that already exist.
[1] https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/ccc/Hamilton_LLNL-TR-648143...
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...
News from a few weeks ago https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/02/first-world-war-...:
”Deadly mustard gas has leaked from a First World War underwater “weapons cemetery” in the North Sea, close to the Belgian coast”
Those were trace amounts, so there is not much immediate danger, but things can get worse.
And for normal munitions, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messi... probably lists a few of the scariest (a few 10,000+ kg stashes of explosives buried in Belgium since World War One. One of them exploded in 1955 after a lightning strike, showing that they were still dangerous after fortie-is years; a few others still buried somewhere)
And also -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
The Doomsday Wreck.
FTA on the town’s main drag proudly advertise fish and chips made with Baltic-caught cod on their menus.
My friends from this area generally advise against eating at any place which advertises this too strongly. To the locals it's actually a turn off to begin with.
The US needs to go in and clean up this mess and should feel very obligated to move quickly on this, but is hasn’t. See also this article from 2015 [1] and folks may enjoy this video for the visuals of it [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pac...
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=autMHvj3exA
That would be a nice thing to do, but per the article in 1983 the Marshall Islands traded US liability for nuclear issues as part of their move to self-government.
That is not to say that some Federal-level support is not warranted like other Superfund sites, but that it may not be the total and complete responsibility of the US Federal government to resolve the issue, as agreed to legally by both parties.
>the Marshall Islands traded US liability for nuclear issues as part of their move to self-government.
This is classic over-the-barrel negotiating tactics used by colonizing nations over their former colonies. The Marshall Islanders had few options here. Continue to have their sovereignty dictated from and literal lands and lives ruined by a foreign nation, or take liability for the colonizer's experimentation and some control of their future back.
Just because a choice was made, doesn't make the process just or right. It may release the United States from a legal obligation, but it doesn't excuse any ethical or moral obligations of the state to the people of the islands.
I completely agree with you.
It is unfortunate, however, that states do not often act out of ethical or moral obligations unless it serves some other, broader interest. It's my fervent hope the United States chooses to act on its ethical and moral obligations, but overall a regression to the mean of state behavior can also be expected from time to time.
My more cynical self sees many more pressing and dangerous environment disasters domestically that are readily apparent and not being dealt with properly - in places where people actually vote for US politicians. This indicates to me that a fix in a United States associated state will unfortunately likely not merit the expenditure for awhile unless some legal case could be brought.
Shivetya up thread posted a PDF report that's quite an interesting read, so it's not being totally ignored by the US gov.
I agree they signed an agreement, still I'd expect us to do the clean up, agreement aside, we made the mess, have what's needed to fix it. The Marshall Islander's are a poor nation that could not afford to fix this without assistance. It's the neighborly thing to do.
There also the ~900 Tbq disposed by the then USSR in the Baltic, not to mention the vast quantities that ended up in the Arctic Ocean.
But definitely the US should improve that encasement or otherwise minimize the dangers.
"The US needs to go _____ and should feel very obligated to move quickly on this, but it hasn't."
Same old story. I think most of the world has given up expecting the U.S. to be any kind of responsible world citizen.
They should also clean it up in my hometown's backyard:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/23/what-lies-beneath-numec...
Pretty bad reporting. OK, it contains Pu-239, but how much? If it leaks, what effects will that have?
This is the correct thought process. The linked article from llnl [1] states that “The final plan called for (1) removing all radioactive and non-radioactive debris (equipment, concrete, scrap metal, etc.), (2) removing all soil that exceeded 14.8 Bq (400 pCi) of plutonium per gram of soil, (3) removing or amending soil between 1.48 and 14.8 Bq (40 and 400 pCi) of plutonium per gram of soil, determined on a case-by-case basis depending on ultimate land-use, and 4) disposing and stabilizing all this accumulated radioactive waste into a crater on Runit Island and capping it with a concrete dome.” It goes on to state that “A estimated total of 73,000 cubic meters of surface soil...was recovered by scapping and deposited in Cactus crater on Runit Island.”
Unfortunately, it does not provide an average specific activity for the material stored, only a lower limit threshold. If we assume it was near this lower limit of 14.8 bq threshold (could be the case depending on how often case (3) was used) and assume mostly plutonium-239. Since isotopic distribution is unknown, this is a conservative assumption because the longer half-life will yield a larger mass in the calculation. The molar density can be calculated from the specific activity listed:
Na/m = a x hl/ln(2) = 14.8[decay/s] x 23110[yrs]/ln(2) = 1.57e13 atoms/gram = 2.61e-11 mol/gram
The mass of the dirt collected will be assumed to be wet sand with a density of 1905 kg/m^3 [2] (note that density is actually slightly higher than this due to the plutonium contained). And finally, the volume collected is 73,000 cubic meters, or 1.39e11 grams. So the total amount of plutonium is:
2.61e-11[mol/g] x 1.39e11[g] = 3.63 mol
So our envelope calculation yields about 870 grams of plutonium. So how accurate is this? It is probably on the high side after reading the paper posted by Shivetya [3]. They cite a total inventory of 545 GBq. Using the assumptions above, one would expect an inventory of 2058 GBq.
As for the effects, that’s difficult to tell. Really the two scenarios that come to mind are a constant leaching into the environment or a disaster that results in the total mass being dumped. In the latter case a disaster of that magnitude would likely disperse the material in a biased direction. In this case it would dilute relatively quickly. Impacts from the radiation would probably be apparent close by in the biased direction. A constant leak would depend on the leach rate and leak locations. The NRC defines monthly sewer release limits of material in Table 3 of 10 CFR Part 20 Appendix B - standards for protection against radiation. The number given for Pu is 84 uCi or 3.108e6 Bq. Based on the plutonium inventory calculated and neglecting material decay, the material could leach out within NRC limits over a period of 55 thousand years (2058e9/3.108e6/12). Note that this number is likely highly inflated given the assumption that all radioactive material is Pu-239 and the comparison in [3]. Using the number from [3] and assuming all activity is Pu, the duration would be 14 thousand years. However this is a rough analysis that does not account for isotopic distributions, so please take the results with a grain of salt.
[1]:https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/enewetak.php#cleanup
[2]:https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/amp/dirt-mud-densities-d_...
[3]:https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/ccc/Hamilton_LLNL-TR-648143...
Just wanted to add that the mass leakage rate to remain under NRC limits would be 1.39e11 [g] / 55000 [yrs] = 2527 [kg/yr] = 7 [kg/day]
Put into that context, it might not be too absurd to think leakage would remain under NRC limits if only small cracks were present (assuming those limits are actually applicable to this scenario)
One "meta" way of looking at things like this is that it represents a part of the technical debt left behind by the industrial revolution. Eventually we have to go back and fix this stuff, but as with technical debt in most code bases we tend to ignore it. Unfortunately technical debt is subject to compound interest, so the longer we ignore it the more costly it is to eventually deal with.
Some messes are just too big to clean up. They knew going into the testing that it was going to kill thousands and thousands of natives and effect native people in a terrible way for generations to come but they didn't give a shit then and they dont give a shit now. That's why most of the natives have 6 fingers and 4 toes, are sterile and the land is poisoned and will stay poisoned. You can deny it all you want but if it was not true shit like this wouldn't be so common place. We aren't the only ones and this isn't the only site and it's not just radiation, its carbon, its carcinogens, it's plastic... there is a whole boat load of shit like this that everyone pretends to care about when their talking about it with their husband or best friend but seems to have no trouble sleeping off the next day. What makes us think we can all just act like animals one day and civilized humans that next... I have no clue but that's reality. People ask: "Oh what can I do, I am so small and the problem is so big!" idk but I do know this if you ACTUALLY cared you would figure out some way to help. What's the difference between pretending to care and actually caring you ask? It's simple, doing something about it versus talking about doing something about it, it's that simple, that's the difference. Write your governor, send some money, do anything or just admit you don't care, and do nothing. That's what the US government is counting on you to do and that's why they got away with this and that's why they will get away with similar shit in the future.
Great documentary on this, free to watch. [0]
[0] https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/dome/
Does anyone else feel helpless when reading stuff like this? Is there anything I can do to make things better in these scenarios?
I think this event sounds far worse than it is. The site is contaminated already worse than any leak would cause.
That's not good, but it's not some sort of catastrophic event here.
Tell people around you to stop implicitly trusting centralized power.
But whom has the power to clean something like this up except for centralized power?
"The market."
Just kidding.
The market is irresponsible.
Not kidding.
I see the point, without centralized power you wouldn't have messes at this scale, there would be local messes that local power would be incentivised to clean up because it's in their backyard and it stinks.
The people that created it.
This mess was created by the US government.
How about it's never too late to work to rectify the mistakes of the past. We at least have to do our best as human beings. I can't do anything about something 1000 years ago, but I can help that person I saw on the street maybe, or I can add my voice to those who decry some terrible behavior of the government. I can vote. I can go to city councils and speak out.
Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives.
I can literally think of no one I know who wouldn’t respond to me telling them “hey you should stop implicitly trusting central power” by asking what drugs I’m on if I think they implicitly trust central power.
I guess this straw man is necessary to create so some can beat it down, but as far as I can tell such people don’t actually exist.
> Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives.
It's required for the government to provide a "social safety net" and more broadly for the Progressive vision of society. That includes Progressive-era reforms in education and retirement, as well as Progressive inspired reforms in healthcare and welfare, esp. the Great Society.
These reforms are predicated on the notion of a government agency collecting statistical data and reviewing comments from the public to determine policy that provides baseline services and acts as a buffer to economic variance.
Note also "implicit" trust. Trust is transitive: you might trust in some service the government provides without necessarily understanding that the service relies on some centralized power. Thus you might not explicitly trust a central authority, but because you rely on the services it provides you may be implicitly trusting it.
None of that stuff really requires any great level of centralization at all. Many components, like social security, are effectively mandatory requirement savings and could be replicated at the level of an individual if they didn't exist, simply by using the money not paid in social security tax to buy an annuity.
The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that still doesn't require uniformity of centralization. We don't even have it as it is -- the Saudis are some of the richest people in the world, they make most of their money from the US and Europe, yet they pay no income tax to either region.
Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city. There is nothing stopping New York City from imposing a land value tax and using the money to fund a UBI, if that's what they want to do.
Centralized government actually interferes with this significantly, because San Francisco or the state of California can't implement its own healthcare policies when they have the US government overriding them, and hoovering up the state's money and sending it to other states, using it for military spending or sending it back with strings attached that require it to be spent on less efficient or less appropriate programs than the state would choose to fund for itself.
To be clear, I wasn't arguing whether policy should be one way or the other or what anyone should do, just whether or not people do commonly trust central authority.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
> Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.
People trust centralized power because there is no viable alternative to trusting the centralized power and hoping for the best.
Yes.
Plenty of people will offer things you can do, but really they're only things that will treat your feeling of helplessness and not things that have any significant chance of improving these scenarios.
Vote. As futile as it feels, that's all any of us can do.
Voting is a blunt instrument; it's effective, but it's a poor signal. It says only one thing: I want this entity to wield power. If you want to sue someone, you don't become a judge, you bring a lawsuit.
If you want to cause political change, you need to bring something into the public discourse; make it known to the politicians and the electorate. People do this by writing their politicians, getting media attention, organising or joining political action groups, backing candidates, or even going into politics themselves.
Sure; I meant "vote" more as "participate in your democracy".
It is futile because you think that the only country with this issue is the US.
I can guarantee that China and Russia have similar if not worst storage problem - the difference is that the US allows this information to exist in the public. Even if those governments allowed the information to be public, what are you going to do, not for the Party/Putin? That sounds like a great way to win a free trip to Siberia or the re-education camp.
> guarantee that China and Russia > for the Party/Putin
This thread has nothing to do with China/Russia/Putin etc. And yet, still somehow every discussion of US always requires criticism of Russia.
> trip to Siberia or the re-education
Please remember that USSR no longer exists.
That's exactly the belief those in power most want you to hold on to. Elections are a cruel joke. Build guillotines.
Please don't do this here.
And replace elections with what?
Democracy is the only system that has ever served any kind of majority of the population. Ours may be in rough shape right now, but burning it all down instead of fixing it helps no one.
> Democracy is the only system that has ever served any kind of majority of the population.
I disagree. Sortition / demarchy, which is the selection of officials randomly from the population (much like a grand jury), has been used throughout history, and is a strong contender. It's exponents tend to state diversity of representation, anti-corruption, and the minimisation of factionalism as advantages.
So that's what it's called. An appointed Senate and demarchist House would be ideal. An interesting advantage is courts can readily convene a committee to clarify the meaning of legislation, which is largely impossible with a fixed number of reps in the House. This removes the specter of a handful of justices legislating from the bench.
Plus, surely we'd need some kind of way to decide which of our current leaders get the guillotine... maybe by asking everyone to write down their opinion, and counting up the results...
Once the mob gets blood lust, any kind of system or thought goes out the window and everyone will be desperate to put the brakes on.
Help stopping that currently wide spread nuclear hype and escort this technology to it's final retirement.
HN caveman hivemind: hooga hooga, nuclear good! GMO feed world!!
Could you please not post like this here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tangentially related: What ever became of Taylor Wilson? > https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-wilson-taking-the-ene...
The people who designed it have now passed on so it has met its designed lifetime.
without question the lack of overfishing in these waters, like in chernobyl ensures that if you did a real study on the health of this area, biodiversity is thriving, because people and development are lacking. it's amazing how much nuclear fear mongering there is , persistenly. with all the idiots listening to washington post and other venues about shutting down nuclear power , by fear mongering it with nuclear weapons.
alas, this is how progress dies, and artificial scarcity is imposed, no less of a low c02 and zero emission source of energy.
Sounds like typical thing U.S. would do
so we just have to go in and fix it up. No big deal.
Paywalled so I cant read but that dome in cover something with a porous bottom and rising sea level isn't helping either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=autMHvj3exA
Clear site cookies and local storage, or open in private session.
I don't think there's so much activity left after so many years
Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years. Source: Wikipedia.
I hear things like "we should go full nuclear, modern nuclear reactors are safe" all the time, yet this ignores externalities, unknown unknowns, human incompetence, and the unexpected. Who would expect the ocean to rise over your nuclear waste dome? Have people suggesting this forgotten the allegory of the unsinkable ship the Titanic? Entropy always wins in the end.
Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles.
Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100."
I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while paying a lip service saying "Oh don't worry, in 30 years maybe we will switch to renewables."
I can't see why solar isn't now the leading candidate. Nuclear is cool and all, but the simplicity of a butt-tonne of solar in a field can't be overlooked. It's not likely to fail catastrophically, maintenance is modular and low-impact. The skills needed are trades not degrees and if we can get the power output/battery/backup balance right, as a society we have clean, reliable energy indefinitely.
I say that knowing we are barreling toward fantastic solar participation in the grid in many countries, and I feel it's just a matter of time before it becomes the dominant source of our energy, especially as battery solutions come into play. It's also not the end of the world to have some backup gas generators that fire up once in a blue moon. Compared to 100% fossil fuels, the occasional gas turbine firing up on a stormy week would be negligible. Alternatively, novel storage methods such as hydro storage could make even backup energy green.
There are probably cities where it wouldn't work right now, but I can't imagine there being many places where it couldn't work at all.
Solar and nuclear are complementary technologies. Nuclear produces power at night when solar doesn't, solar produces power during the day when the demand is higher. It significantly reduces the amount of storage batteries you need, which is the primary impediment to using solar exclusively.
Solar is also problematic during winter. We need to replace fossil fuels as a heat source, but when heating with electricity at scale during winter, the demand rises at night meanwhile the days are shorter and solar generates less. Heating New York and Chicago in winter using solar and batteries doesn't have promising economics.
Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
> Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
By the time you generate power from some actual generation source, pay the conversion losses both ways and then pay the equipment, land and maintenance costs of the storage technology, it isn't cost-competitive. And then people keep burning carbon.
> In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
Wind is regionally intermittent. If it's a still night in one place there is a significant probability that it will also be a few miles from there. But transmitting power over a thousand miles isn't cost-competitive. Both the infrastructure cost and the transmission losses scale with the distance, making the cost quadratic with the transmission distance. On top of that, it multiplies your costs for the generation, because if you're not going to use storage you need enough generation in Region A to power both Region A and Region B when it's a still night in Region B, but you also need that much in Region B for when it's still in Region A. Even if that only happens one night out of five.
There are also national security implications. For all but a small handful of countries "1000 miles away" is in another country. Who does Israel connect its grid to? Or Japan? Does Germany enjoy buying power from France? What do you do when your neighbor raises the price?
Then everyone, including the bigger countries, takes on a large-scale dependency. Lose the long-distance transmission lines and the brownouts aren't just regional, it's the whole continent. There are ways to harden against that but then we're raising the cost even more.
Nuclear is a poor complement to solar. To compensate for solar's fluctuations, you need anti-corelated and throttable power sources as well as storage.
You need a mix. Solar is great during the day in nice weather. It's useless at night, it's significantly reduced in bad weather, and it's completely inelastic to demand. If the population of a large metropolitan area turns on their air conditioner for an unexpectedly hot (but cloudy) day, you can't just generate more solar power. Pumped storage reservoirs can alleviate that demand to some degree, but we would need to flood significant new chunks of land and invest in relocation of humans/wildlife and construction of new dams and hydro plants. Combining solar with wind power, geothermal, and biomass can help to mitigate the issues of each solution alone. It's also just a good idea to have multiple systems in place as it makes the entire thing less prone to catastrophic failure.
I basically agree, but it’s the current cost of storage (or, equivalently, global high-tension interconnects) that’s keeping it from being a no-brainer. I’m confident solar will take over in the next decade.
> Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen
Unlikely. I think the consensus is that the globe was already warming, humanity may have just sped it up.
By many orders of magnitude, so the rise of the ocean would have been negligible by human scales.
its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100."
I'm fairly certain nuclear catastrophe is far worse than global warming.
I can’t say I agree with you there. Worst case for nuclear power is highly contaminated local areas (highly unlikely with modern designs), whereas the worst case for climate change is global environmental collapse.
I'm a nuclear proponent, but this ignores airborne particles and ecological collapse which can propagate and have very broad effects. Those things can be managed, but the 'worst case' of nuclear is not negligible.
Though even poor management of nuclear materials very quickly eliminates the worst cases.
You’re very much correct, although I think the reality of the threat of wide scale contamination is often overstated.
To use Chernobyl as an example, since that’s the worst case of an airborne release from a nuclear plant that I know of, the absolute worst case in the case of a steam explosion breaching the other reactors’ containment was contamination of a significant portion of Europe. Modern reactors are designed so that such things are almost impossible, even without competent operators.
The worst case for climate change is a mass extinction event. So while I agree with you that the worst case of nuclear is non negligible, the probabilities and scale of such events push me towards the opinion that nuclear energy is an extremely good option for limiting our use of fossil fuels in the near future.
Of course a serious nuclear incident may cause a reversion to fossil fuels. That may not be rational but that is human nature. Not much you can do about that.
So the worse case of nuclear power is actually global warming caused by fossil fuels. And an eye watering San up bill that has opportunity costs for decades.
Chernobyl made around 1,000 sq mi 'uninhabitable' for around a century. (Some of the area will be safe to occupy in far less time, some in far more) If we learned nothing from that accident and had one such accident per decade while providing all the world's electricity, we would lose about 10,000 square miles of land to radioactive contamination.
Those assumptions seem extremely unfavorable to me - accidents should be less frequent and less severe with modern reactor designs and sane operating procedures. But yet, powering the US alone with solar would take approximately 17,500 square miles - and irradiated zones from nuclear accidents are less damaging to the environment than solar panels are.
Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky. If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
> Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles is the total from one accident per decade and an average exclusion zone duration of 100 years.
> If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
It would have made a large part of the continent have higher radiation doses, but even with linear-no-threshold I don't think that France/UK/Spain/Italy would have been uninhabitable. Or even close to that. And the point was, even with the most incompetent leadership we've seen at a nuclear power plant, that didn't happen.
> Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
Well, sure - you can take the solar panels and move them somewhere else if you want. But if you're using solar for power, you can't really get rid of them - just move them around.
> it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable
Some details and references for this would be nice. I find it hard to believe, though of course sometimes things I find hard to believe turn out to be true :-).
The area under the reactor core was filled with water, and if the corium (molten core material) had contacted that water it would have caused a steam explosion and launched additional material outside of the reactor building.
There's an interesting StackOverflow post relating to this here: [0] That just deals with the size of the steam explosion though, not the potential effects. (And for reference, I've seen the largest explosion that did occur listed as ~10T equivalent)
0: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large...
The thing I'm skeptical about is the claim that this would have rendered a large part of the continent uninhabitable. The Stack Exchange discussion is interesting but (as you say) doesn't really bear on that.
Yeah - worst case was 20x more radioactive material (well, I suppose no-seriously-wtf case would be 80x, but that requires the other three active reactors to have gone up as well) since at least 5% of the reactor core was released.
Unless your idea of a "nuclear catastrophe" includes a global thermonuclear war, no, it really isn't.
Also the costs of disassembly are insane, hidden and have proven to multiply once underway by many many times.
That's true. They used same words before... But after Chernobyl and Fukushima... How they can expect we believe them?
Proponents: Newer reactors are safer than older designs. The old designs are still safer than any other alternative and much safer than fossil fuels, but the newer designs are even better and we should build those.
Opponents: Don't build new reactors.
<older designs have problems that still kill fewer people than any other alternative>
Opponents: See? See? You said...
Proponents: ...that newer designs are safer than older ones and even older ones are safer than alternatives. Which remains true.
...
Politics occurs here. When you ask whether something is safe, in practice what you're asking is if it's safe relative to alternatives. So solar is safe because it's safer than coal, and nuclear is safe because it's safer than solar.
But there is also an absolutist definition of safe which requires an inhuman perfection that no real technology could ever meet. Not solar, not nuclear, not biofuels, it's just an unattainable standard.
So you ask if something is safe, people say yes (meaning it's safe relative to alternatives), then you apply the impossible standard and claim that they're lying.
If you want to stop nuclear over safety with any credibility you would also have to be willing to stop everything with a worse safety record. But that's every known alternative whatsoever.
> impossible standard
Not the case. The worst case with nuclear is much worse than with solar, even if the possibility is unlikely. We expect insanely high standards for airplanes and the standards should be even higher for nuclear plants. We should account for the possibility that civilization collapses or an unexpected event reduces a plant to rubble. In both of those cases solar is fine but nuclear is not.
> The worst case with nuclear is much worse than with solar
It isn't. The worst case with solar is that they're manufactured with lead, cadmium and other toxic substances that pollute the environment if they're improperly manufactured or disposed of. If you abandon a solar farm, the panels get damaged by weather and then the heavy metals leech into the ground. The environmental impact of that for a solar farm with power output equal to a nuclear reactor would be as bad or worse than a nuclear meltdown.
On top of that, the real worst case for solar is that the storage technology it needs to replace carbon energy sources never becomes economical, and then without having built nuclear today, we get a level of climate change that causes human extinction.
This is not a matter of faith in some group of people ("them"). What's your point? That the whole nuclear industry, full of scientists and engineers can't be trusted with their studies?
All it takes is a single point of failure, one scientist that got the calculations wrong. That's what happened with Meltdown/Spectre vulnerability. An academic paper that many chip manufacturers based their designs on turned out to be flawed, causing a vulnerability across architectures. The nuclear industry isn't any different. Ironically the Meltdown vulnerability could have potentially been used by bad actors to hack and take out a nuclear reactor.
You can say that about anything humans have ever built.
Exactly, so how is everyone so sure that "modern nuclear reactors" will encounter no problems?
To use one example: Nuclear fuel is in liquid form, in a vessel that has a frozen plug of material being actively cooled at the bottom. If the reactor ever loses power, the plug melts, and the fuel drains into a collection pool, where due to simple geometry it cannot reach criticality.
Something bad (earthquake, tsunami, etc) could still happen that causes a plant shutdown. But there's no pressure vessel (other than regular steam on the generating side) to worry about breaching. And unlike current generation reactors, where even a full scram of control rods still requires some hours of active cooling to prevent core meltdown, if the liquid-type loses power, the core drains, and that's the end of it in terms of potential radiological release. That doesn't mean it isn't a complex, difficult system to design and operate. But it's a much, much safer design by its very nature.
I'm sure there was some explanation as to why superscalar CPU architectures were secure and foolproof as well. The point is that no human mind is capable of simulating reality and accounting for every single possibility. There are design flaws and unexpected surprises that make even the most well thought out plans and explanations seem foolish in retrospect. The point is determining the worst case and assuming it will happen.
I think Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong applies here.
( https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht... , it is an enjoyable essay to read. )
You are correct that flaws and surprises lurk in all human endeavors. But that does not mean that all potential errors are in the same scale or class. We do not know everything, but we know far more than nothing!
I have never read anyone say that ever.
More FUD. Nuclear energy is the safest energy.
This is waste from nuclear weapons testing, it was concreted over as a "temporary measure" and now it seems like a more permanent solution needs to be found.
Unclear why you believe nuclear energy (by which I assume you mean nuclear power generation) is relevant.
For the same reason many readers will assume this headline is about power: "nuclear waste" is a term generally associated with reactor byproducts or weapons decommissioning.
Previous articles about this dome have used terms like "radioactive contamination" or "fallout-contaminated soil" instead, which does not have the connotations of nuclear reactor programs. I suppose those terms don't "pop" as well in headlines.
Maybe they need to learn how to blow up their weapons all the way so that no radioactive waste is left (for testing)
I've sorta reached the conclusion that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy if everyone is well behaved and disciplined about it.
On the other hand, given the wrong incentives, you might just stow nuclear waste where it's cheapest and where you can get away with it, and then not be penalized when the containment mechanism you cheaped out on fails... or maybe you just conveniently forget to do maintenance on it as the responsibility for doing maintenance somehow conveniently evaporates due to some bureaucracy.
I think the debate isn't over whether or not nuclear power itself is safe, it's the debate over whether or not humans under capitalism are to be trusted to behave responsibly with this technology. Nuclear power isn't just the technology in isolation... humans are an intrinsic part of it.
I think that nuclear power generation has been relatively safe over almost a century exactly due to systems engineering, incorporating procedures and the potential for human error.
I also think that you are right that some of the systems surrounding nuclear energy are suboptimally managed in places (and are often intransparent for the public, which I think is one of the factors why people are still afraid). And I think it's because nuclear power generation is a social commitment on a very long time scale - and humans aren't very good at dealing with cause and effect over long time scales.
While there is, just like in aeronautics, a paper trail connecting to each engineer and expert working on a system, it does not matter whether society can identify a person that is responsible for a decision made half a century ago. Think about leaky permanent[0] waste storage close to densely populated areas (like in Germany). Analyzing what went wrong is suddenly a task for historians, not for engineers. And history is of course necessarily colored in perspective - politicans can point to an expert who was wrong half a century ago.
In engineering and safety culture, iteration is necessary to approach an optimal system - the problem is here: How can we learn from what happened decades ago when the cause wasn't a part, a design or a process, something that can be simulated with a high degree of confidence? But a decision necessarily based on lots of unknowns? What can we do to be able to learn from it next time?
[0] officially temporary but due to how it was done effectively permanent
Edit: Markup
> In engineering and safety culture, iteration is necessary to approach an optimal system - the problem is here: How can we learn from what happened decades ago when the cause wasn't a part, a design or a process, something that can be simulated with a high degree of confidence? But a decision necessarily based on lots of unknowns? What can we do to be able to learn from it next time?
The answer is that you design systems with multiple levels of redundancy, and then monitor them.
That way in order for something bad to happen, four independent things have to go wrong at once. Then you monitor if any of them ever fails. If one does, the other three prevent any catastrophe while you correct it. Then you have a new data point about how to design things better going forward.
The thing is that we have a decent idea of how to engineer things well. That's easy. Throw money and factors of 2 at it until the cows come home. That's not my concern. How do we know they'll actually do the proper engineering? How do we not have another Boeing 737 situation but for a nuclear reactor?
I know as engineers we want to turn everything into an engineering problem but sometimes there are just humans who don't understand the severity of their actions to cut costs or defer maintenance or something and I don't know if it's possible to ever fully engineer these people away or engineer away their influence or engineer away their incentive to do the wrong thing... as much as I'd love to do that.
Maybe I'm just being a naysayer. The thing is that I still believe nuclear power is the best interim solution in existence and that it's necessary to build more nuclear plants. I just don't buy the "totally safe" argument. It's like chemo or amphotericin or something. It'd be great to not have to use it... buuuuut....
Now you're asking a completely different question. It's not a matter of not knowing what to do, it's a matter of not doing it.
But nothing about nuclear is unique in that regard. If you have incompetence then we get Deepwater Horizon, Bophal, companies dumping cadmium, lead, mercury, cyanide, nitrogen, phosphorous or acid in to rivers and groundwater, mining runoff, destroying rainforest, dam failures, basically the entire list of Superfund sites in the US. Those kinds of things can be significantly worse than even a full scale nuclear meltdown. And on top of that, chemical pollutants have no half-life -- they're forever.
There is a 3700 acre coal mine fire that has been burning in Pennsylvania since 1962, causing the town to be abandoned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
It's the same problem with anything -- even solar is silicon. Take a look a the environmental history of Silicon Valley for a morbid lesson in how wrong that can go.
That is a very interesting point - would I rather live next to a DuPont chemical plant or a nuclear power plant? I think I would choose the nuclear power plant.
Edit: With the nuclear plant I at least have feasible means to monitor any danger by myself.
Humans under what, then? I wonder if you're aware that the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes.
Jeffrey Sachs has commented that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.”. Companies can be held to account (failure to do so is another story) but try that with a centrally run enterprise.
"failure to do so is another story" How is that 'another story?' It's THE story.
Can we ship all the nuclear waste to your house? Don't worry, it's the safest kind of energy there is.
Or maybe "safe" isn't the right term for something that also produces some of the most deadly substances that we know of? It's "safe" so long as nothing goes wrong, and everything is stored correctly. Of course, that regularly proves to not be the case: https://www.newsweek.com/ohio-school-closed-enriched-uranium...
It's very worrying to see comments like this become more and more common on HN.
Yes, I will take the waste. If it's in the containers we've developed specifically for this purpose, yes. It beats the current situation in the US where everyone stores waste on site because politicians can't decide where to put it because of people like you.
Modern waste, with proper precautions, is safe for long term disposal and storage. I cannot stress this enough.
If you don't believe me, this website has plenty of information regarding nuclear power, straight from the source. It is developed and run by the UN. Based on your misinformation, I strongly urge you to pore over this content and then attempt to reevaluate your own question.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/Information-Library.aspx
What did I say that is even remotely misinformation?
Nuclear power is safe "with proper precautions", I completely agree. The problem is that it hasn't even been a week since we've proven proper precautions are not being taken.
https://www.newsweek.com/ohio-school-closed-enriched-uranium...
And anti-nuclear sentiment isn't something new, don't pretend like it's some kind of worrying trend.
> world-nuclear.org
There is nothing more sad out there than linking to a homepage the nuclear lobby uses to drive this artificial nuclear hype we've seen here in the last months.
The page is run by the UN. Who, in your opinion, would be a more reputable source?
What makes you think this site would be "run by the UN"? The WNA is a nuclear industry lobbying organization. Nothing more, nothing less.
My personal experience with interacting with the WNA revolves around their interactions with the WNU, which is the World Nuclear University. It's a partnership between the WNA, IAEA, and others. Their goal is to promote education in the field and having significant experience with the WNU, and having noticed no irregularities, it would be very unlikely if the WNA was simply making things up, or if they were spreading falsehoods. The WNA site is consistently pointed to as a global source of truth by the WNU and by the IAEA.
Could you enlighten me as to who would be a more reliable source on nuclear technology?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Nuclear_University
http://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/what-we-do/worl...
https://www.iaea.org/services/technical-cooperation-programm...
Would an organization evidently so deeply ingrained with and tied to the UN and the UN's nuclear-specific arm, backed by numerous experts, really be in the business of misleading anyone? Would you disregard a pro-climate change website for its pro-climate change bias as well?
If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.
What is "pro-climate" today if the main line of this recent out of "nothing" nuclear hype is: "It's either nuclear or coal", which is a lie painting people who don't want to have nuclear as some kind of idiots with a phobia.
> If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.
Oh please...what are the chances that the person is even close to the NCY area...? I'm from Germany. You know...the country with no nuclear issues at all anymore...besides with the waste of it of course.
That says nothing about the truthiness of the page. Let's hypothetically assume that every word on the page is true. Would one not expect the "nuclear lobby" to link to it? Let's assume every word on the page is a lie, but favorable toward nuclear energy. Would one not expect...
There is nothing more sad...
I can think of two things:
1. A lack of second order thinking.
2. Dead puppies.
> That says nothing about the truthiness of the page
It says /a lot/ about the truthiness of it, actually
Can we ship all the nuclear waste to your house?
Assuming the alternative (which you conveniently left out) is the negative externalities of coal-fired power ending up on my doorstep? Yes, I'll take the nuke waste, thanks. Pull around on the left side of the house, please, so that you don't crush the sewer lines.
Don't worry, it's the safest kind of energy there is.
Nothing in your comment contradicts that statement.
Seal it in a lead box, and I'll put it in my basement, sure. I've already got radon leaching out of the bedrock, and a big bunch of bananas in my kitchen. I think I'm already picking up more rads from that, not to mention all the chest X-rays I had to do on a regular basis for a few years.