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loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
Btw, the Sellafield complex has a civilian nuclear power plant – the fact that there was a military facility there in the 50s does not make that disappear?
> and this pretty much proves my original point about how incredibly uneducated people are.
Ouch.
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
The phosphate mine waste incident - while not from a power plant - is still a radioactive waste issue. (EDIT 2: I mentioned this because it was the most recent incident in my memory)
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
Radioactive isotopes used in medicine have significantly shorter half-lives than the isotopes found in fuel rods. I'm sure you can get something nasty done with them if you wanted to, and there are also enough incidents in that field, but it's not really comparable?
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
The pools aren't dangerous by themselves – I was alluding to some nuclear power plants in Ukraine seeing quite heavy fighting [1]. That's the kind of situation where your armed guards are not present to protect it from nosey civilians.
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/12/europe/ukraine-zaporizhzh...
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
Was just answering your question – it wasn't me who brought up the transport castors. Quite to the contrary, I initially wrote "[...] concerns with this stuff are not necessarily about the short term storage [...]".
> This makes little sense. First, who is taking about "background radiation"?
There's only few locations known where natural reactors formed, they were only a few centimeters in size, and were active a billion years ago. They've long gone through the main part of their decay cycle. The remainder would be considered elevated background radiation. The reason we know they were or are there is because the products of decay are still where they formed, in the rock. Not scattered around the globe. Probably not safe to cuddle with regardless. Mother nature does not give a fuck, which is why it doesn't matter.
Further, these natural reactors are not known to go critical and obliterate a city. And even if they did, that might have been millions to billions of years ago, I'm sure we weren't there to be worried about it.
Chernobyl and Fukushima are good examples not necessarily because of their reactor design, but for the understanding of risks, their mitigation, and ultimately their catastrophic failure. Also because they're the few examples that exist, thankfully we do not have more of them.
The countless hours of safe operation of nuclear power plants also does not magically offset the danger in their failures, which does not have to be – but can be – extremely catastrophic. The fact that there's an award for running a hideously dangerous machine for 3 years without it becoming more dangerous than ideal does not make it sound any better.
And yes, photovoltaic (solar) runs perfectly fine for even a decade nonstop (see almost every house in Europe with solar on their roof) – in the case of the International Space Station – for 23 years, and counting. Bonus: a panel failure does not mean you get to die.
> Wind? Solar? you cant seriously propose these sources can supply enough power can you?
Uhm, yes, believe it or not, that stuff does work. Obviously not at the moment on a country level, because we've been busy burning coal everywhere instead of investing in energy sources that make sense decades ago, but that's where we need to go.
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
And yet, not one of them has been developed into a storage facility so far. Also, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471115 – having prospective storage sites that look nice and stable is great and all, just not the current reality, and likely also not a near-future reality.
> 2. Thorium reactors can take nuclear waste products and re-process them down
Would be good to have them, not a single one commercially operating at the moment though. China has apparently built a test reactor recently – curious to see how that develops.
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
Yes, I've even seen them close up, during transport. But that's not how they're stored in the holding pools. Not sure how the minuscule amount of time the rods spend in there during transport is relevant here?
> Are you aware that in earths distant past there were natural nuclear reactors running?
Yes, also not sure how that's relevant here? It's not like we built them... Background radiation is a thing, and life has adapted to it. A nuclear accident that ends up high enough on the International Nuclear Event Scale however is something you're not going to adapt to.
> Not sure about Ukraines designs, [...]
I think we've all seen in Chernobyl and Fukushima that you don't need to breach the containment to have things go boom. The unshielded auxiliary buildings and systems are the cause of worry. You're always just one unexpected failure chain away from disaster – unless the reactors are fully shut down and without need for external cooling, there's a chance it's not going to go well.
> There are also facts to consider, coal releases more radiation vs nuclear power plants.
Sure, that doesn't somehow automatically make other things safe® though? Also, while I certainly do not like coal power plants either, that's not quite the topic.
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
I'm sure that's going to work just fine until the end of time.
[1]: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/rost-nagt-an-atommuell-f...
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
There's this mind-boggling hubris that these materials can be kept safe and controlled under all circumstances, for all of their decay time. Sure, burying it under that mountain or in a salt mine is going to help, until you find that the containers have corroded, and you've now got it in your ground- and drinking-water. [1]
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0579-x
EDIT: Missing link
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
That's never been the case, as anyone who lived at the time of the early protests can tell you (or anyone who's parents did). Even Wikipedia has a whole section on that topic [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Nuclear-...
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
I'd like to be educated about that radioactive waste lie – I've not seen it work (meaning no-maintenance, safe, long-term or permanent storage) yet anywhere. And yet, supposedly a solved problem. Waste processing & storage has a long history of irradiating, or even leaking into the environment – one that immediately comes to mind is Sellafield [1], which is a repeat offender. Gorleben [2], another more recent example of how the "solved problem" turned out to be mainly money in other people's pockets. In the US, they recently had an issue with waste stored on the surface [3]. The list is long, and growing – yet not a single storage facility exists that is deemed permanently safe? I also don't know of any such facility currently under construction.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome [3]: https://nypost.com/2021/04/03/leak-of-radioactive-wastewater...
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape
loopback_device | 3 years ago | on: How normal am I?
There's an event marker with a possible reason for it - which does make one wonder how bad the accuracy of the geolocation data is/was