Oh I didn't personally mind, I am glad the story got attention because nuclear is so popular around here without discussion of the hidden massive consequences.
I just found it weird the code didn't catch the dupe from 24 hours ago because it always redirects me when I submit a link that was posted the previous day and pushed off the page.
Not to downplay the significance of this disaster, but this is one of the worst nuclear accidents we know - yet "It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal". Not all dams are used for power, of course, but the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam[0] is estimated to have killed 171 000
I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health
I think a big part of what makes people so afraid of radiation is how easy it is to detect. Imagine if you had a geiger counter that detected Dioxin, Benzine, or PFAS contamination? It would be going off pretty much constantly. You can detect radioactive materials with a cheap detector, where you need an entire lab to find regular poisons, which doesn't help with our lack of ability to assess risk.
For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware.
It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
It is not easy to detect UNLESS you have a geiger counter. Those Russian soldiers dug trenches around Tchernobyl blissfully unawhere of any problems. They carried the dirt into the dwellings and labs where people still have to work, causing ongoing problems.
If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
Except, of course, that the story about the Russian soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up.
> any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time
If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless. It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario, you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad but that's also very far from the made up stories about soldiers' acute irradiation).
The made up story was talking about those soldiers getting radiation sickness (which requires radiation levels millions time higher than the one you'd find there).
If the Russian soldiers get problems from their trench digging endeavor, it won't be seen before many years, when a small percentage of them starts getting cancer. (needless to say, the increases mortality from the said cancers will be negligible compared to the mortality induced by being invading soldiers in Ukraine).
Your blazée atittude on radiation safety reminds me of Homer Simpson.
There is no way to know what radiation dose they got. Their activities increased the ambient radiation levels, but not extremely. But the soldiers themselves probably got quite a bit more since they came into direct contact with contaminated material. A few of them almost certainly got non-trivial doses on parts of their bodies. We don't know if any got radiation sickness, and I don't know of any source that said so. If they did, Russia would keep it quiet.
The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention. If you don't want the dirt to travel further, you have to somehow remove it and store it more safely to keep it from circulating. That's what they are doing in Fukushima because they can't afford the same size of permanent exclusion zone.
Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
> There is no way to know what radiation dose they got. […] We don't know if any got radiation sickness
We cannot know an exact figure for that, but we know they cannot by any means get radiation sickness, because the radiation level that it would have need is many orders of magnitude higher than what can be found there.
You have no idea of how tall I am, but you can be 100% certain that I'm lying if I pretend I'm two thousand kilometers tall! (that's the order of magnitude we're talking about)
> The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention.
This sentence is still wrong. Cesium 137 half-life is around 30 years. In 300 years, the amount remaining would be 1000 times lower than it currently is. In 900 years, that's 1 billion lower, which means that almost every single atom will be gone.
> Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
Obviously nobody wants to destroy a nuclear plant, and no-one said a nuclear plant accident wasn't bad, it's just far from the pop-culture depiction of it. It doesn't last for millennia and doesn't cause a mushroom cloud either.
Talking about artillery, you know what last for millennia, leaving empty exclusion zones no-one talks about? Contamination from artillery shells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
Given that both sides are using uranium-based APFSDS munitions, we'll more likely see more radiation-induced casualties from exposure to depleted uranium than from people digging in the red forest, or even maybe more than from the fallout of Chornobyl.
Most people are not aware that carbon, potassium and calcium are radioactive elements.
Despite that, our body contains large quantities of them.
Like also for the chemical toxins, the dangers of radiation depend on the dose, and we should not worry when it is low enough.
Also platinum is a radioactive element, but those who wear platinum jewelry are seldom aware of this.
All computer displays are slightly radioactive, because the ITO transparent electrodes contain indium, which is a radioactive element too.
The ceramic kitchen knives are slightly radioactive, because their blades are made of zirconia, and both zirconium and hafnium are radioactive elements (all Zr, unless specially purified for nuclear reactors, contains Hf).
Someone has downvoted this, but I cannot understand the reason, unless it was due to ignorance.
Everything written above are facts, not opinions.
They are little known facts, which is why I have mentioned them. Uranium and thorium are the most radioactive among the elements that have survived since the creation of the Solar System, but they are not the only radioactive primordial elements, there are many others.
Most people who are afraid of radiation do not realize how many of the surrounding objects are radioactive, without being dangerous because of that.
Typically, when one refers to an element as "radioactive" one is either referring to a particular isotope that is radioactive (e.g., C14) or an element in which the most abundant naturally occurring isotope(s) are radioactive (e.g., U). To call "carbon" radioactive, is technically true I suppose depending on your view but the level of radioactivity in natural carbon is so low that it is an almost meaningless truth. Potassium and calcium have a bit more natural radioactivity, but still it poses no health issues. The other elements you list are essentially the same, except perhaps Halfnium (have not checked). Heck by the definition you seem to be using of the term "radioactive element", I do not think there exists a non-radioactive element.
Of course, you are correct that the dangers of radioactivity depend on the dose. But your message is diminished by overly emphasizing the radioactivity in carbon and other naturally occurring elements that pose zero health risk and frankly are so very non-radioactive in a relative sense.
A chemical element is called "radioactive" whenever at least one of its naturally occurring isotopes is radioactive.
Whenever at least one isotope is radioactive, anything containing that element is radioactive, but with a lower activity, proportional with the natural abundance of the radioactive isotope. Because the isotopic abundance also matters, elements like carbon and potassium have very low activities even if their radioactive isotopes have high activities, because the abundance of their radioactive isotopes is very low.
The majority of the naturally occurring chemical elements, i.e. about three quarters of them, are non-radioactive.
Even if the naturally occurring chemical elements either are non-radioactive or have low radioactivity, otherwise they would have disappeared since the formation of the Solar System, their radioactivity is non-negligible due to the huge number of atoms that exist in every gram of substance.
Inside a human body, during each second, thousands of atoms disintegrate, emitting radiation.
However, almost all damage caused by the natural radiation is repaired, because all living cells have very efficient mechanisms for this. Only at higher doses those are overwhelmed.
There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity, short of placing it inside a nuclear explosion or inside a high-energy particle accelerator.
Nevertheless, most naturally occurring radioactive elements have a radioactivity that is low enough to not pose any danger.
> There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity
False and false. Elements are not radioactive per se. Only some isotopes of those elements are, and some are more frequent than other. Just because you have some carbon in your body does not mean that is radioactive. (In some cases metabolism even evolved to favor some kind over the other).
Time can and will influence radioactivity, so any radioactive element is -not- always radioactive. This is false.
Location is also very important. The background radioactivity of a granite mountain is not included in the body as atoms. It does not pass the outer skin barrier, that is shedding a layer of dead cells all the time in any case.
You were downvoted because, whether or not they understand the numbers or know the names, most people understand that long lived bioaccumulative high activity alpha emitters like Tc99, Cs137 or Pu240 are really, really bad.
Obvious half truths and misdirections told in a really arrogant way then re-enforce the idea that anyone telling them any amount of radiation is safe is deliberately trying to mislead them, and so they wind up trusting nobody.
They then correctly infer that the liar is malicious and trying to scam them. So all in all they get to the right place even if it is for the wrong reasons.
In general people build dams to #1 store water, #2 save lives, and only a distant 3rd generate power.
Most of the 62 dams that collapsed in that hurricane where not hydroelectric dams. And it’s not clear the existence of these dams played that significant role in the death total considering China’s history with even more devastating floods.
Dams have the side effect of making huge swaths of land uninhabitable automatically as soon as they start filling.
From the Three Gorges Dam
> China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir
Planned and managed operational characteristics are not sudden-onset, unanticipated, and highly-disruptive catastrophes. They're fully-anticipated side-effects.
Your comment really doesn't speak to the nature of the phenomenon.
Dams do not make land uninhabitable. Dams use land for a productive purpose. Do railroads make land uninhabitable? I would say that land with railroad tracks should still be considered habitable, even though you'd die should you choose to live on the railroad tracks. The land itself is still habitable, you'd just need to remove the dam to live there. Just as you might need to remove the railroad tracks.
The «inhabitable for thousands of years» is a myth. Do you know how many people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today?
Poeple vastly overestimate the dangerous of this stuff after a few years. Fukushima and Prypiat are probably safer to live than the average Asian city center due to air pollution, or even the Midwest due to pesticide exposure…
How many people live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone? Svetlana Alexievich interviewed some of “The Zone’s” residents in her excellent book Voices From Chernobyl. It’s not a fun place to live, unless having all your teeth fall out is fun.
Do you mean that Chornobyl resident don't get enough vitamin C? Because I can't think of a link between exposure to radio-elements and losing your teeth…
Ironic as it sounds, nuclear weapons in many ways have far shorter-term impacts than nuclear reactors.
The Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb contained 64 kg of highly-refined uranium, of which less than 1 kg fissioned, the remainder being vapourised in the ensuing blast and distributed over a wide area. That dispersal in large part reduces the risk of radioactivity as it is so highly diluted. The rule of thumb for nuclear blasts is the "seven-ten rule": every sevenfold increase in hours from the blast reduces residual radiation by a factor of 10. That rule-of-thumb is an approximation, but with nearly 7^7 hours since the blast, radiation by that rule would be one ten-millionth the level 1 hour following the blast.
It's also worth noting that Chernobyl, and several other presently-operating nuclear power plants are in the middle of a war zone and have been the site of active fighting, bombardment, and missile strikes.
I don't find a figure for the mass of the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl, though it's clearly many tonnes of matter.
In the case of Fukushima, the total reactor core and fuel waste on site is measured in hundreds of tonnes, with 560 tonnes of reactor fuel, from melted-down reactors, on site.
(There's another 680 tonnes of spent waste fuel, presumably in containment, on site. I'm excluding that from this discussion as that happens to be a managed waste stream.)
The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.
Your elephant foot argument is a good summary of what you get wrong: in a nuclear plant there are tons of radioactive material, but even in the scenario of an accident, most of it stays inside the plant, and only the elements that are light enough to get vaporized by the accident's temperature are actually going to the atmosphere. In a nuclear bomb detonation, even the uranium or plutonium itself is vaporized and spread over the area. And the heavy material falls out much more quickly than the light one, so the dispersal is actually lower than the small fraction that leave the site in a nuclear accident. That doesn't mean nuclear accident are harmless, quite the contrary, because iodine for instance is being spread very far away from the plant and it has the nasty effect of being at the same time very radioactive, and very easily metabolizable.
Also, you're confusing radiation (rays hits you when you just stays here) with contamination (you've ingested a radioactive particle and now it's going to release it's rays inside of your body, eventually causing cancer). Radiation is really unlikely to cause trouble unless you're really close to a highly radioactive source (next to nuclear bomb detonation, inside a criticality incident, or a few very rare scenarios like that). That's a common mistake to make but that highlights your misunderstanding of the topic.
> The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.
Maybe the few square kilometers around it, but this is also the case for most heavy industrial activities (heavy metal levels are typically way off limits in these places) but the exclusion zone as a whole will not.
In fact, in Fukushima it was already safe enough back in 2016![1], and in fact it has been slowly re-opened for people to live in, Futaba[2] being the last city to reopen[3] in 2022. So much to the thousands of years! And you can even visit the Fukushima Daiishi power plant itself today[4]. Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137.
The two reasons why it stays restricted for longer than needed are:
1. nuclear inspires a deep irrational fear that other carcinogenic pollutants do not, even when they are in fact much more dangerous.
2. Neither Japan nor Ukraine really have need for these land since they've had an anemic demography for decades, unlike in 1945 where abandoning the land of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been impossible.
"Most" measured in hundreds of tonnes leaves a lot of "some" that does not in fact remain in or near the plant, including daughter-elements which are themselves highly bioactive, notably iodine, cesium, and carbon. Uptake of these results in embedded radioactivity within an individual.
Of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically:
Among some there is the unfounded fear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive; in reality, this is not true. Following a nuclear explosion, there are two forms of residual radioactivity. The first is the fallout of the nuclear material and fission products. Most of this was dispersed in the atmosphere or blown away by the wind. Though some did fall onto the city as black rain, the level of radioactivity today is so low it can be barely distinguished from the trace amounts presents throughout the world as a result of atmospheric tests in the 1950s and 1960s.
Possibly more applicable to your assertions is the story of "Downwinders", in the US and elsewhere, who lived, and live, downwind of atmospheric testing sites. In the case of Southeastern Utah, particularly the community of St. George, this included some 330 atmospheric nuclear blasts conducted on the Nevada Test Range from 1951--1962. (Similar or larger instances of testing occurred elsewhere, notably in the former Soviet Union, were either less studied or studies are not as publicly available.) Whilst there were definitely health outcomes, those are largely attributable to the immediate and near-term exposure to radioactive fallout, largely in days and months following the blasts. I'm not aware of any significant long-term residual radioactivity in the region, and the Wikipedia article on the subject mentions none:
Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.
The WHO's assessment of present risks at Chernobyl:
Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.
About nuclear testings, from time to time Western Europe still receive radioactive materials from the French nuclear test in the Sahara 60 years ago[1]. That being said, I don't really understand why you seem to be very aware of the effect of radioactive decay and dilution when it comes from atomic bomb fallout, but seems to be absolutely oblivious to the exact same effects for nuclear accidents, even though the nature of the materials involved makes the same effects much stronger in the case of a nuclear accident (because you mostly have light elements leaving, and not the heavy actinides).
> Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.
The story about Russian soldiers getting radiation sickness was a hoax that have been debunked many times though…
> Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.
You haven't really read that paragraph have you? Because it says exactly the same thing as I did in the comment you answer to: “Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137”. There's an enormous margin between “you can farm milk in the area for a few decades” and “will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years”.
Fortunately, the director of Britain's Atomic Energy Research Establishment, John Cockcroft, insisted on filters being retrofitted to the cooling air exhaust stacks (not specifically out of concerns for a fire.) This expensive and time-consuming addendum was ridiculed as "Cockcroft's Folly" until the fire, when they captured ~95% of the discharge.
I wondered for years what the big towers were for and what the odd looking bits on top were - was amazed to find out that they were chimneys and the bits on top were filters!
Not ideal in terms of radionuclide release. Also not a great coolant due to the ridiculously small heat capacity. Also, these reactors had no other purpose than producing plutonium for weapons and the design is completely useless for anything else.
They are referring to Mayak, and however ugly you're picturing, it's probably worse: a Chernobyl-level radiological release, but on deliberate as operational procedure.
Holy crap, I never knew about this. Wow. That's a level of irresponsibility that I did not think would exist even in that part of the world. Incredible.
To add context, the described plant was a weapons programme that predates any civilian nuclear energy. In fact it also predates the hydrogen bomb, so that war planners vastly overestimated the amount of plutonium needed.
This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates:
> Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.
Example:
> The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m.
Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
> The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that.
The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2].
With radiation, people often conflate measureable with hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them.
Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them are borderline meaningless.
Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel.
That's why lots of people like nuclear.
Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about that.
The problem with all those assumptions is that the "radiological harm" is cumulative and it can accumulate in unexpected ways which aren't random.
For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then do their damage for a long time. And there's no good framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year. Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out, because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose.
And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions, but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget that while not that many people die even in major accidents, that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up. At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a trillion Dollar in cost, btw.
Actually it's the anti-nuclear crowd that frames pro-nuclear people in a way that pretends it's only coal or nuclear. The reality is that we are 80% fossil and biofuel and need everything that is at least 10x better on climate and health, which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal.
The amount of energy transition we need is nearly unfathomable. To tie our hand behind our back because we are afraid of nuclear in this race is unwise.
Antinuclear scare mongerers are forcing the Fukushima people to purify water so far below the natural radioactivity of seawater (which does contain slightly radioactive potassium and uranium) that it's truly ridiculous. That drives up costs unecessarily.
Anyway what's the cost of failing to solve climate change or the cost of killing 8 million people per year with combustion?
Now it sounds like "fossil and biofuel" is only coal. Not quite getting this.
We should all be afraid of nuclear power. The risks are uncalculateable. Whoever thinks he can calculate the risks is delusional. It's not just that "impossible" accidents have happened a bit too often in the past. The bigger problem is that Humans are not that predictable and any nuclear waste stored is in danger of getting blown up by some army or warlord in the next few milennia. Same for active power plants, though for a shorter period.
Ukraine is having this problem right now. What are the chances that Putin causes an incident with one of their plants? You can never say zero, and the situation is very fluid. For any reasonable estimation of risk, you'd have to assume a couple of decades of peace in your region: No war, civil war or major political upheaval. Some are willing to make that bet. I'm not, for any country.
Death tolls aren't the only impact of a nuclear disaster. Denial of land use for tens to hundreds of years, cleanup costs, mutations, denial of water supplies if it reaches ground water (the prevention of which was one of the things that did work out well at Chernobyl). All with cleanup costs a magnitude higher than those of industrial spills.
We're all going to die eventually of something and of those 8M many would have died soon after of other causes. Look at how many people still smoke packets full of hazardous fume sticks on a daily basis. That's how much we care about that risk.
The difference being that smoking is a personal decision and living near a nuclear power plant isn't. Especially if we were to scale it up to replace fossil fuels. which would mean on the order of ten times as much sites and risk.
> which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal.
So why should we invest money into nuclear, which has the downsides of clean-up costs that literally never end, with the burden of having to communicate the risk to every human generation as long as humanity exists?
Instead of untying our hand behind our back and simply invest massively in renewables, which have a lifecycle cost profile and risk profile that is much more predictable?
Nuclear is unique due to its physics advantage in being able to run 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. A good nuclear fleet doesn't need backup or storage. Nuclear plants can follow load to the tune of 2-5% full power per minute, rain or shine, without depending on regional weather or seasonal rainfall.
Furthermore we know the overall risk profile after operating them for 70 years. The numbers are in and they're excellent.
Even on the worst year of nuclear for France, the renewables still have a worse output than that. This month it's been ~10% of the installed capacity for wind turbines and 3% of the installed capacity for solar.
I don't know why it's not on the news either, there's seems to be a massive bias in reporting where nuclear is expected to have a 100% uptime but renewables nobody cares, whatever it produces is ok even single digits is fine.
I can tell you why: For nuclear you calculate with a near 100% uptime, for renewables there was always variability calculated.
You people talk like nobody knew the sun don't shine all day or that wind isn't entirely predictable. Yeah, people know, including the engineers who plan and build such projects...
I'm going to say some hard truth here that nobody really plans for it (as seen as what's happening in Europe this month) and the companies really don't care as long as the renewables are sold, it's not even counted in the price per kwh either.
Bullshit, it's in all the plans. You are completely misconstrueing European energy policy.
Of course renewables don't replace all the fossil fuels right now. This may happen eventually with storage technology, but nobody is planning with that. Of course the slack is taken up by burning fossil fuel which reduces the overall replacement factor by a certain amount. That was the plan all along, not some evil bait-and-switch. Nobody ever calculated or promised those energy sources producing all the time. You are either completely ignorant or purposefully lying.
You're wrong here and it's even written on paper, there's even a date being set, 2038 for phasing out coal. So yes people do plan for phasing out fossil fuels thanks to renewables, despite having no technology which exist which can achieve that.
Phasing out coal does not mean phasing out all fossil fuels. Isn't that obvious to you or are you intentionally lying and trying to mislead?
2038 is quite a few years in the future. Your blanket statement of "there is no technology which can achieve that" is just not plausible. Of course, when you conflate coal with fossil fuels, if you confuse short-term and long-term plans however you please, you can find a lot of inconsistencies to attack.
Thinking we know the future risk profile of nuclear power from their past history is a dangerous fallacy.
Apart from the obvious "black swan" problems with that fallacy, so far nobody actually tried to cause incidents intentionally. And expanding nuclear power means scaling up access to nuclear material rapidly and massively. Including in countries with less stable prospects.
The "past risk profile" is worth nothing in that context.
Not true. Development countries are massively expanding their energy usage.
You can handwave around and say they are outsourcing whatever, but in reality, it is much safer to help them transition to renewables or even leave them on fossil fuels rather than give them access to nuclear technology and nuclear material and build nuclear plants were bad shit can happen.
Come to think of it, with the lifespan of a nuclear plant, or worse the nuclear waste, there aren't a lot of regions left you would trust to stay completely safe from war, civil war and political upheaval.
Again I'm not saying they have to manage it themselves. Those developing countries don't manage petrol refineries and transportation either and would be incapable of insuring it in case of having an issue.
That's a particularly ignorant statement, but I get where you are coming from now.
Developing countries and those on the verge of becoming industrialized nations, are quite capable of handling complex technology. India and Pakistan have their own nuclear industry complete with nuclear weapons, mostly driven by indigineous efforts.
And foreigners running a nuclear plant in such a country does absolutely nothing to the security risks from wars and political unrest. ISIS tried to find material for dirty bombs in Mossul for example. The only reason they didn't find anything was that they were looking in the wrong places. If you start putting that stuff in countries were you can't be sure if the government stays stable for the next five years, much less fifty years or even multiple centuries if they don't manage to store the waste securely, that's a recipe for desaster.
That argument is completely moot though since there's absolutely no viable infrastructure you can make in countries which is ran by terrorists. It's not only an issue with nuclear but absolutely everything, you can't build dams, maintain a petrol or a gas infrastructure, water, bridges... Nothing will work, not even the wires for the grid itself.
You can build plenty of infrastructure in countries that are currently NOT run by terrorists but may be some time in the next fifty years. The point being that a large fraction of the earth just isn't stable enough to rely on fifty to a hundred years of total peace, stability and reliability. Which is the prerequisite for all the safety assumptions around nuclear power.
Dams are actually less dangerous, because the potential area of damage is more limited, whereas a dirty bomb may be used quite some distance away and radioactive fallout also isn't that localized. Also most "conventional" infrastructure just degrades and becomes useless when not properly maintained. Can't say that about nuclear infrastructure (besides power plants you need mines, processing and research facilities and waste storage). And even with things like river dams people do ask questions about political stability and who gets the short end of the stick when the dam breaks, intentionally or unintentionally.
Just because you don't like an argument doesn't make it "moot". I think I'm not alone in not being comfortable with new nuclear projects going up in eastern Europe... The political situations are relatively stable apart from Ukraine, but I wouldn't bet my life on it staying that way for the next fifty years. Don't even ask about Africa or most of Asia....
Dams have the most catastrophic failure of all the energy supplies, millions of people can lose their home instantly and tens of thousands will die, a dam breaking is one of the worst things which can happen to a country. It's hard to take this comment seriously after that...
Those numbers could have changed a lot this year if Russian shelling at Zaporizhzhia had worked out a bit differently.
And this was a military adversary that wasn't explicitly trying to cause nuclear damage here. The next one might go all out or try something as a false flag.
Those 70 years have been in relative peaceful times. And they don't include the 200 years of cleanup we've externalised to the future. We just learned a very painful lesson what externalisation to the future can lead to with global warming.
Because that's the only clean energy source working 24/7 reliably and large scale electricity storage options are pretty much all terrible.
Additionally the usage spikes are in winter where solar production is at the lowest of the year and it's not like you can gamble the electricity grid on having wind or not.
Saying nuclear energy is 'clean' because it doesn't cause CO2 emissions is like saying arsenic is the only healthy food because it doesn't contain sugar.
You set up a false dichotomy between nuclear energy and "solar and wind", as if that's the only possible renewable energy source.
My point is: Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy you can produce, no other energy source has you paying for waste management for 20000+ years.
Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions so that we
a) smooth out spikes
b) have simple energy storage solutions
c) don't have to pay the guy printing new signs saying 'caution, radiation, don't enter this cave and please don't hold this site hostage in case of civil war' for some 20000+ years.
You can have other metrics if you want like human deaths / kWh but again nuclear also has the best metrics here. Additionally, climate change is the biggest threat to humanity, there's no denying that.
> Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions
Like what others? There's none. (If you care about CO2 pollution of course)
> b) have simple energy storage solutions
Have you missed the part where I said that this storage tech doesn't exist?
You can't mention technologies which don't exist and claim that we should use them. Deployment of tech isn't R&D.
As an example, the solution being used in the real world seems to be an increase of coal and gas if you look at what Germany has done on the past month
Bullshit metrics calibrated on a past that doesn't matter. The past risks don't predict the future risks, especially not if the intention is to scale up nuclear power by a factor of ten or so. I don't even think the risks will scale linearly, because that scale-up is impossible with the current regulatory posture that is keeping the risks down.
There are already energy storage solutions. To ignore those, to claim categorically those will not improve, seems to be a particularly "convenient" argument.
Storing energy for the winter will only be a problem at the very end of phasing out fossil fuels. At some point some gas plants may only run during the winter. But there are also biofuels for example.
And there are for example solutions around pumping water into a lake. That sounds like it will work long-term. You make an abysmal job argueing for nuclear power just because not everything works perfectly already. Scaling up nuclear power to the scale required to replace fossil fuels would take decades. Unless the risks are ignored and enhanced extremely, like you seem to be proposing. But there is zero political appetite in the electorates of the world to invest billions into a technology that takes decades to come to fruition, takes more decades to recuperate the investment and can literally blow up in your face any time, especially when some neighbor is angry at you.
All the water storage options are pretty much at full capacity everywhere in the world and for a good reason, it's relatively effective, easy to build and the tech is old, that won't help for renewable deployment because you can't build it much further.
I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have its downsides, it's just that it's one of the only realistic option with the current tech. Renewables really aren't up to the task as we see it now in Europe.
Additionally since you're talking about finance, usually external costs aren't counted in renewables that's why they falsely appear cheaper, Germany for example already spent around ~2x the cost of the whole French grid and is still very far from the transition from what France achieved.
Biofuel is actually a good example, since you mention biofuel as a potential backup strategy (I don't think it will work just because of the scale anyways but that's beside the point, let's imagine that in theory it could work). The costs of creating all this additional infrastructure isn't usually factored in the renewable strategy either, but it should.
> can literally blow up in your face any time
I don't think you have an understanding on how it really works, it's not a bomb...
> All the water storage options are pretty much at full capacity everywhere in the world and for a good reason, it's relatively effective, easy to build and the tech is old, that won't help for renewable deployment because you can't build it much further.
> I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have its downsides, it's just that it's one of the only realistic option with the current tech. Renewables really aren't up to the task as we see it now in Europe.
It really isn't because every potential Uranium mine on the planet would have to be under development right now for it to be remotely relevant. And even then it would take far longer.
> Additionally since you're talking about finance, usually external costs aren't counted in renewables that's why they falsely appear cheaper, Germany for example already spent around ~2x the cost of the whole French grid and is still very far from the transition from what France achieved
Citation needed. Be sure to include the costs of enrichment, reprocessing, and colonial mining activities. Additionally Germany ate a bunch of the first mover costs. For a valid comparison you'd include the manhattan project.
You got to be joking here, look at the very few ones "under construction" ones in Europe and their actual capacity, that's pretty much what I said. Nothing here will help for a winter spike, those won't even cover a full day of bad production.
> It really isn't because every potential Uranium mine on the planet would have to be under development right now for it to be remotely relevant. And even then it would take far longer.
That's kind of taking the consumption of a 60s car with the known petrol fields of the time and doing a multiplication, it's bad maths and bad economics.
> Citation needed. Be sure to include the costs of enrichment, reprocessing, and colonial mining activities. Additionally Germany ate a bunch of the first mover costs. For a valid comparison you'd include the manhattan project.
Those costs are included in the nuclear but not on the renewable part sorry, to get a full comparison you would need to add maintenance, waste management, backup costs and diplomatic & environmental costs for renewables which I don't think anybody is counting now.
> You got to be joking here, look at the very few ones "under construction" ones in Europe and their actual capacity, that's pretty much what I said. Nothing here will help for a winter spike, those won't even cover a full day of bad production.
It's still doubling in under a decade. And that's just the pumped storage. Not all hydro. "You might need backup 5% of the time, stop and wait 30 years instead" isn't the slam dunk you think it is. Weirdly it would be the optimal thing for the fossil fuel industry though.
> That's kind of taking the consumption of a 60s car with the known petrol fields of the time and doing a multiplication, it's bad maths and bad economics.
That's assuming modern 65MWd/kg reactors. And that's just to meet the first one or two fuel loads. It's not some far future scenario where exploration has time to pay off -- the mines need to be being developed today. At the tail end of those reserves, the raw Uranium alone costs more than half the present day all-in cost for solar or wind.
> Those costs are included in the nuclear but not on the renewable part sorry, to get a full comparison you would need to add maintenance, waste management, backup costs and diplomatic & environmental costs for renewables which I don't think anybody is counting now.
Waste management, backup, diplomatic, and environmental costs are not included on the nuclear side either. And O&M alone is enough to pay for the renewable generation in a good area and a backup gas plant to sit idle.
>with the burden of having to communicate the risk to every human generation as long as humanity exists?
We already have many industrial disasters with dangers that need to be communicated to every human generation to come in the form of acid mine drainage and whatnot. Those releases (which would happen absent human upkeep of dams and tailings ponds) are also things that would absolutely wreck environments for hundreds to thousands of years if released.
Every mine you open has clean-up costs that never end; it would be wiser to minimize the amount of new ones. You'll need more of them if you go with the intermittent sources of power because renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required (and because they inherently don't produce power constantly).
All of them due too fossil energy. Hence the call to invest in already available renewable energy sources.
We don't need even more potential disasters.
> renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required
Nuclear energy needs uranium mines which by the way happen to be in countries that are, let's say, politically unstable.
The astronomical cost of nuclear waste management is killing any and all attempt to render the TCO of a nuclear plant in a good light, if done honestly.
> they inherently don't produce power constantly
Are you thinking of solar and wind?
When we talk about renewable, we mean geothermal plants, biomass energy and what not. And of course water, wind and solar - the mixture is important so that we can smooth out spikes with those renewables which don't produce power constantly, just as you build multiple nuclear plants, because one plant doesn't produce power constantly.
The question is: Why should the money go into ramping up a very expensive technology with lots of risks, when we could invest in better, safer and cleaner tech?
It just doesn't work, you can't "smooth-out" renewables no matter what they try to make you believe. This month, in the EU, solar production was at around 3% of the capacity and wind less than 10% of the capacity, there's nothing you can do to counterbalance that.
Just repeating the same falsehoods doesn't make them true. Nobody ever said solar energy is supposed to be a major energy source in winter. However, solar power reduces the fossil fuel consumption over the year, significantly so.
Smoothing out currently requires burning fossil fuel. Over time that need will decrease, for one because of a build-up of capacity in solutions that complement each other, and partly because of storage solutions. Reducing fossil fuel dependence - measured over a year - is achievable and will reduce climate change. And this will actually work faster than a somewhat responsible buildup of nuclear power would.
I'm going to say another hard truth additionally to the previous one, the grid has to meet all the demand on the spot, every day of the year, on every hour of the year, on every minute of the year, it's not a supermarket. You can't just say essentially "we'll burn whatever coal and gas for a few months to make it work", that's not a viable solution and that's never been one regarding to climate change and fossil fuel dependence.
Additionally fossil fuel dependence isn't "per year" but every time you need the grid reliably, that's how an electric grid work.
And again, those storage options viable for that purpose might never exist for all that we know, it's in R&D stage. If you want to add R&D tech into the mix, I have even better than the magical storage, I could bring fusion tech and say that all our problems will be solved magically. Except I don't because it's not ready, exactly like the magical storage tech.
If people don't understand that that it's not a viable option anymore with climate change, the Ukraine war plus the Qatar & Moroccan scandals now, I don't know what else will. That's starting to sound like a religion-level of closing eyes at some point. Every time this renewable strategy fails, it seems everybody is doubling down instead of taking a step back.
Even if you are right (spoiler: you're just lying). Building out wind and solar is still optimal for the 90% of electricity emissions it can replace while we wait 30 years for imaginary nuclear reactors with imaginary fuel mined from imaginary mines enriched in imaginary centrifuges built in imaginary heavy casting facilities to save the day. Feel free to fund said reactors in addition to the renewables which can then be relegated to EV charging and electrolysis, but only after doing the thing that solves 90% of the problem in a third of the time for a fifth of the cost.
By using imaginary reactors to attack renewables instead you reveal your very obvious intent of delaying decarbonization.
You are shifting your arguments whenever convenient... Replacing fossil fuels is mostly to reduce emissions from energy production, not for geopolitical reasons.
Gas power plants are plenty reliable. And you can source your gas from multiple sources. Nuclear fuel isn't entirely without sourcing problems, either...
> Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time.
Waste from fission plants and incidents is hard to estimate for a variety of reasons. It tends to be incredibly long-lived. Small non-lethal (even non-harmful) amounts can accumulate in animals and plants to the point where there's still an impact from Chernobyl on widespread populations decades later [1]:
> The German boars roam in forests nearly 950 miles (1,500 kilometers ) from Chernobyl. Yet, the amount of radioactive cesium-137 within their tissue often registers dozens of times beyond the recommended limit for consumption and thousands of times above normal.
It's worth noting that not all toxic byproducts are radioactive. Cesium is toxic on its own. The Uranium and Plutonium decay chains include a lot of metals that even if you ignore the radioactive element, they're toxic, sometimes incredibly so.
> ... 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion.
[citation needed]
This study [2] argues 1M/year, most of those concentrated in SE Asia (due to lack of regulation combined with coal use) and it's predominantly coal. For the US it's around 20,000. It's also not clear to me if this study includes emissions from automobiles.
> ... nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel.
The Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone, decades later, still stands at (literally) a thousand square miles.
Nuclear advocates always bring up coal (as a false dichotomy and it paints nuclear in the best light) and deaths because it's in many ways the least impactful dimension for nuclear. Likewise, they always talk about operational costs while brushing over capital costs (and thus the total cost of ownership) and the costs of waste handling and storage and ultimately the site cleanup costs. As the article notes here the current estimate for this one site sits at 121 billion pounds and will likely rise and take a century or more.
I am confused because you're mixing things from UK, US and russia in this post which obviously all have different laws. I'm not sayig you're wrong it's just confusing beause the situations from different countries aren't always comparable unless you explicitly establish that they are, it would be better to just stick to examples from the same country.
> This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates:
For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better knowledge and engineering expertise to build safer, better, more efficient, less "polluting" (for some definition of the word) reactors.
FWIW, this week in the cold snap in the UK, we've relied on good old fossil fuel and... nuclear, because the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining.
Also, being old enough to have lived through the press-hysteria of Chernobyl: "we're all going to die or have babies with 3 arms", we ended up with maybe 4000 deaths over 50 years, and an area now rich with wildlife. And that's an uncontrolled nuclear accident.
Compare that to the number of people that die through coal mine accidents a year and air pollution and so on. Then there's oil slicks killing wildlife, rig accidents, pipelines hundreds, if not thousands of miles long and so on. Or natural gas, with explosions and so on. Plus all the carbon emissions for transporting millions upon millions of tons of the stuff.
The world wide number of deaths due to nuclear in its entire history adds up to less deaths than there are probably in a typical week for fossil fuels (deaths mining, transporting, building, and deaths to the general population breathing it in, and let's add deaths from climate change in there, since that's literally what fossil fuels have caused).
I'd go further and say the deaths worldwide per day directly (accidents) or indirectly (climate change + pollution) due to fossil fuel usage is more than all deaths ever due to nuclear in its history.
I live near a nuclear power station, and I'm comfortable with that. In fact, where I live, there's approximately 1.5m living within 30 miles, and just beyond that... London.
On balance, I'd take a fleet of new nuclear power stations over the absolute disaster that is fossil fuels and the days there's no sun or wind.
Back to: 'oh but what about waste?'
Bury it, with signs. If we've gotten too stupid to read in 500 years, we're likely too stupid to know how to dig down several thousand feet, and are probably banging rocks together and saying 'ug' to each other. It's really not a problem. I can't recall the last time someone stupidly went into an _existing_ nuclear waste dump anywhere in the world and then died. And if they have it's, what, 1 person out of 7 billion.
> Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
Well, of course. Because, built in the right way, you use nuclear reactors to breed weapons grade fuel. So governments are always involved. In turn this means that governments never let market forces, and hence private companies build competing nuclear reactors which would drive down costs because the government won't step out of the way. The UK pretty much had a choice of EDF or EDF to build a new nuclear reactor.
My naive solution is to actually double down. The site is "toxic", the community (and the grandchildren of those working on site) are entirely dependant upon the plant. Build more plants on site - you have the waste, but also the knowledge and the one community that is happy to have it in their back yard.
As toxic as the waste in the pools out back is the last 20 years of will they wont they attitude towards not just further nuclear builds but hand wringing over paying to cleanup the experiments of the past which is where much of the waste comes from.
Often in part because people conflate measurable with hazardous with radiation. If the goal was to allow double the natural dose rates then it would be a lot easier. You need about 20x the natural dose rate for a year before you see an increase in cancer incidence from 42% baseline to 43%.
There is no meaningful difference between measurable and hazardous radiation.
You never know where the stuff builds up. Some isotopes get enriched in some organs and do damage over a long time. Depending on what the material actually is, it can get into unfortunate places and stay there for a few years, irradiating someone. It can get into the food supply doing some more damage than anticipated.
None of that is calculateable, so it is better to treat every radiation as a risk. You also forget that workers may be wearing a dosimeter, but average people don't. They'd never know. You can easily reach the 20x increase if you have a contaminated object in your home or car or whatever, even if that contamination isn't that strong.
If you think this disproves my point, it doesn't. They say there is no minimum dose level for damage, even though the "damage" at common doses may sound acceptable.
The biggest problem people forget is time: If people stay in contact with contaminated material, especially if they ingest some, then it really doesn't matter that much how low the radiation is. That's why radioactive material is treated the way it is. As long as you have dosimeters and geiger counters and hazmat suits you have a calculateable risk. With even some of those assumptions broken, there is no calculation.
Given that the goal is 0 and there are plenty of ongoing activities, poorly cleaned up spills, contaminated mining towns, and legacies of carelessness related to the nuclear sector that result in 2-200x background in various pockets, it seems like 0 was a pretty good benchmark and should maybe be reduced a little.
Tangentially related, but as everyone here seems to enjoy talk of nuclear [things], it’s worth a recommendation:
Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel ‘On the Beach’.
If you want high-level spoilers, Wikipedia is your friend. I shan’t say a word other than that it’s a terrific little book that I can’t believe I’d never heard of. I just read it last week.
119 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34003392
Even the target url is the same?
> Are reposts ok?
> If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
I just found it weird the code didn't catch the dupe from 24 hours ago because it always redirects me when I submit a link that was posted the previous day and pushed off the page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_stat...
For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware.
It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
> any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time
If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless. It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario, you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad but that's also very far from the made up stories about soldiers' acute irradiation).
There are satellite photos of trenches dug around the red forest where Russian soldiers had deployed?
If the Russian soldiers get problems from their trench digging endeavor, it won't be seen before many years, when a small percentage of them starts getting cancer. (needless to say, the increases mortality from the said cancers will be negligible compared to the mortality induced by being invading soldiers in Ukraine).
There is no way to know what radiation dose they got. Their activities increased the ambient radiation levels, but not extremely. But the soldiers themselves probably got quite a bit more since they came into direct contact with contaminated material. A few of them almost certainly got non-trivial doses on parts of their bodies. We don't know if any got radiation sickness, and I don't know of any source that said so. If they did, Russia would keep it quiet.
The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention. If you don't want the dirt to travel further, you have to somehow remove it and store it more safely to keep it from circulating. That's what they are doing in Fukushima because they can't afford the same size of permanent exclusion zone.
Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
We cannot know an exact figure for that, but we know they cannot by any means get radiation sickness, because the radiation level that it would have need is many orders of magnitude higher than what can be found there.
You have no idea of how tall I am, but you can be 100% certain that I'm lying if I pretend I'm two thousand kilometers tall! (that's the order of magnitude we're talking about)
> The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention.
This sentence is still wrong. Cesium 137 half-life is around 30 years. In 300 years, the amount remaining would be 1000 times lower than it currently is. In 900 years, that's 1 billion lower, which means that almost every single atom will be gone.
> Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
Obviously nobody wants to destroy a nuclear plant, and no-one said a nuclear plant accident wasn't bad, it's just far from the pop-culture depiction of it. It doesn't last for millennia and doesn't cause a mushroom cloud either.
Talking about artillery, you know what last for millennia, leaving empty exclusion zones no-one talks about? Contamination from artillery shells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
Given that both sides are using uranium-based APFSDS munitions, we'll more likely see more radiation-induced casualties from exposure to depleted uranium than from people digging in the red forest, or even maybe more than from the fallout of Chornobyl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Iraqi_populat...
Despite that, our body contains large quantities of them.
Like also for the chemical toxins, the dangers of radiation depend on the dose, and we should not worry when it is low enough.
Also platinum is a radioactive element, but those who wear platinum jewelry are seldom aware of this.
All computer displays are slightly radioactive, because the ITO transparent electrodes contain indium, which is a radioactive element too.
The ceramic kitchen knives are slightly radioactive, because their blades are made of zirconia, and both zirconium and hafnium are radioactive elements (all Zr, unless specially purified for nuclear reactors, contains Hf).
Everything written above are facts, not opinions.
They are little known facts, which is why I have mentioned them. Uranium and thorium are the most radioactive among the elements that have survived since the creation of the Solar System, but they are not the only radioactive primordial elements, there are many others.
Most people who are afraid of radiation do not realize how many of the surrounding objects are radioactive, without being dangerous because of that.
Of course, you are correct that the dangers of radioactivity depend on the dose. But your message is diminished by overly emphasizing the radioactivity in carbon and other naturally occurring elements that pose zero health risk and frankly are so very non-radioactive in a relative sense.
Whenever at least one isotope is radioactive, anything containing that element is radioactive, but with a lower activity, proportional with the natural abundance of the radioactive isotope. Because the isotopic abundance also matters, elements like carbon and potassium have very low activities even if their radioactive isotopes have high activities, because the abundance of their radioactive isotopes is very low.
The majority of the naturally occurring chemical elements, i.e. about three quarters of them, are non-radioactive.
Even if the naturally occurring chemical elements either are non-radioactive or have low radioactivity, otherwise they would have disappeared since the formation of the Solar System, their radioactivity is non-negligible due to the huge number of atoms that exist in every gram of substance.
Inside a human body, during each second, thousands of atoms disintegrate, emitting radiation.
However, almost all damage caused by the natural radiation is repaired, because all living cells have very efficient mechanisms for this. Only at higher doses those are overwhelmed.
I think you the defintion is the opposite, ie that an element is considered radioactive if NO isotopes are stable (ie ALL are radioactive).
https://www.thoughtco.com/list-of-radioactive-elements-60864...
Huh? Care to name 5 non-radioactive elements according to your definition?
> [we have it in our body], so... [we all are radioactive]
can be radioactive in some circumstances, does not mean they are always radioactive. Is a non-sequitur.
There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity, short of placing it inside a nuclear explosion or inside a high-energy particle accelerator.
Nevertheless, most naturally occurring radioactive elements have a radioactivity that is low enough to not pose any danger.
> There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity
False and false. Elements are not radioactive per se. Only some isotopes of those elements are, and some are more frequent than other. Just because you have some carbon in your body does not mean that is radioactive. (In some cases metabolism even evolved to favor some kind over the other).
Time can and will influence radioactivity, so any radioactive element is -not- always radioactive. This is false.
Location is also very important. The background radioactivity of a granite mountain is not included in the body as atoms. It does not pass the outer skin barrier, that is shedding a layer of dead cells all the time in any case.
Obvious half truths and misdirections told in a really arrogant way then re-enforce the idea that anyone telling them any amount of radiation is safe is deliberately trying to mislead them, and so they wind up trusting nobody.
They then correctly infer that the liar is malicious and trying to scam them. So all in all they get to the right place even if it is for the wrong reasons.
Its like a trenchwarfare coated nightmare.
Most of the 62 dams that collapsed in that hurricane where not hydroelectric dams. And it’s not clear the existence of these dams played that significant role in the death total considering China’s history with even more devastating floods.
From the Three Gorges Dam
> China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir
Your comment really doesn't speak to the nature of the phenomenon.
Poeple vastly overestimate the dangerous of this stuff after a few years. Fukushima and Prypiat are probably safer to live than the average Asian city center due to air pollution, or even the Midwest due to pesticide exposure…
The Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb contained 64 kg of highly-refined uranium, of which less than 1 kg fissioned, the remainder being vapourised in the ensuing blast and distributed over a wide area. That dispersal in large part reduces the risk of radioactivity as it is so highly diluted. The rule of thumb for nuclear blasts is the "seven-ten rule": every sevenfold increase in hours from the blast reduces residual radiation by a factor of 10. That rule-of-thumb is an approximation, but with nearly 7^7 hours since the blast, radiation by that rule would be one ten-millionth the level 1 hour following the blast.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_seven-ten_...>
Chernobyl put 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb:
<https://www.scifacts.net/earth/chernobyl-400-times-more-radi...>
It's also worth noting that Chernobyl, and several other presently-operating nuclear power plants are in the middle of a war zone and have been the site of active fighting, bombardment, and missile strikes.
I don't find a figure for the mass of the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl, though it's clearly many tonnes of matter.
In the case of Fukushima, the total reactor core and fuel waste on site is measured in hundreds of tonnes, with 560 tonnes of reactor fuel, from melted-down reactors, on site.
<https://www.citizen.org/news/how-much-radioactive-material-i...>
(There's another 680 tonnes of spent waste fuel, presumably in containment, on site. I'm excluding that from this discussion as that happens to be a managed waste stream.)
The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.
Also, you're confusing radiation (rays hits you when you just stays here) with contamination (you've ingested a radioactive particle and now it's going to release it's rays inside of your body, eventually causing cancer). Radiation is really unlikely to cause trouble unless you're really close to a highly radioactive source (next to nuclear bomb detonation, inside a criticality incident, or a few very rare scenarios like that). That's a common mistake to make but that highlights your misunderstanding of the topic.
> The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.
Maybe the few square kilometers around it, but this is also the case for most heavy industrial activities (heavy metal levels are typically way off limits in these places) but the exclusion zone as a whole will not.
In fact, in Fukushima it was already safe enough back in 2016![1], and in fact it has been slowly re-opened for people to live in, Futaba[2] being the last city to reopen[3] in 2022. So much to the thousands of years! And you can even visit the Fukushima Daiishi power plant itself today[4]. Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137.
The two reasons why it stays restricted for longer than needed are:
1. nuclear inspires a deep irrational fear that other carcinogenic pollutants do not, even when they are in fact much more dangerous.
2. Neither Japan nor Ukraine really have need for these land since they've had an anemic demography for decades, unlike in 1945 where abandoning the land of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been impossible.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba,_Fukushima [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/16/futaba-last-fu... [4]: https://blog.japanwondertravel.com/fukushima-exclusion-zone-...
Of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically:
Among some there is the unfounded fear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive; in reality, this is not true. Following a nuclear explosion, there are two forms of residual radioactivity. The first is the fallout of the nuclear material and fission products. Most of this was dispersed in the atmosphere or blown away by the wind. Though some did fall onto the city as black rain, the level of radioactivity today is so low it can be barely distinguished from the trace amounts presents throughout the world as a result of atmospheric tests in the 1950s and 1960s.
<https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki>
Possibly more applicable to your assertions is the story of "Downwinders", in the US and elsewhere, who lived, and live, downwind of atmospheric testing sites. In the case of Southeastern Utah, particularly the community of St. George, this included some 330 atmospheric nuclear blasts conducted on the Nevada Test Range from 1951--1962. (Similar or larger instances of testing occurred elsewhere, notably in the former Soviet Union, were either less studied or studies are not as publicly available.) Whilst there were definitely health outcomes, those are largely attributable to the immediate and near-term exposure to radioactive fallout, largely in days and months following the blasts. I'm not aware of any significant long-term residual radioactivity in the region, and the Wikipedia article on the subject mentions none:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders>
Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.
<https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol...> Archive: <https://archive.vn/aeIix>
The WHO's assessment of present risks at Chernobyl:
Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.
<https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/rad...>
> Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.
The story about Russian soldiers getting radiation sickness was a hoax that have been debunked many times though…
> Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.
You haven't really read that paragraph have you? Because it says exactly the same thing as I did in the comment you answer to: “Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137”. There's an enormous margin between “you can farm milk in the area for a few decades” and “will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years”.
[1]: https://www.lexpress.fr/sciences-sante/sciences/nucleaire-de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Fol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak
> Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.
Example:
> The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m.
Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
> The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that.
The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2].
[1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
With radiation, people often conflate measureable with hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them.
Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them are borderline meaningless.
Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel.
That's why lots of people like nuclear.
Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about that.
For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then do their damage for a long time. And there's no good framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year. Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out, because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose.
And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions, but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget that while not that many people die even in major accidents, that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up. At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a trillion Dollar in cost, btw.
The amount of energy transition we need is nearly unfathomable. To tie our hand behind our back because we are afraid of nuclear in this race is unwise.
Antinuclear scare mongerers are forcing the Fukushima people to purify water so far below the natural radioactivity of seawater (which does contain slightly radioactive potassium and uranium) that it's truly ridiculous. That drives up costs unecessarily.
Anyway what's the cost of failing to solve climate change or the cost of killing 8 million people per year with combustion?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-reall...
We should all be afraid of nuclear power. The risks are uncalculateable. Whoever thinks he can calculate the risks is delusional. It's not just that "impossible" accidents have happened a bit too often in the past. The bigger problem is that Humans are not that predictable and any nuclear waste stored is in danger of getting blown up by some army or warlord in the next few milennia. Same for active power plants, though for a shorter period.
Ukraine is having this problem right now. What are the chances that Putin causes an incident with one of their plants? You can never say zero, and the situation is very fluid. For any reasonable estimation of risk, you'd have to assume a couple of decades of peace in your region: No war, civil war or major political upheaval. Some are willing to make that bet. I'm not, for any country.
That nice smell of wood burning in the air is pretty deadly, sadly enough.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
We're all going to die eventually of something and of those 8M many would have died soon after of other causes. Look at how many people still smoke packets full of hazardous fume sticks on a daily basis. That's how much we care about that risk.
So why should we invest money into nuclear, which has the downsides of clean-up costs that literally never end, with the burden of having to communicate the risk to every human generation as long as humanity exists?
Instead of untying our hand behind our back and simply invest massively in renewables, which have a lifecycle cost profile and risk profile that is much more predictable?
Furthermore we know the overall risk profile after operating them for 70 years. The numbers are in and they're excellent.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
It's wild to want to not use this.
I don't know why it's not on the news either, there's seems to be a massive bias in reporting where nuclear is expected to have a 100% uptime but renewables nobody cares, whatever it produces is ok even single digits is fine.
You people talk like nobody knew the sun don't shine all day or that wind isn't entirely predictable. Yeah, people know, including the engineers who plan and build such projects...
Of course renewables don't replace all the fossil fuels right now. This may happen eventually with storage technology, but nobody is planning with that. Of course the slack is taken up by burning fossil fuel which reduces the overall replacement factor by a certain amount. That was the plan all along, not some evil bait-and-switch. Nobody ever calculated or promised those energy sources producing all the time. You are either completely ignorant or purposefully lying.
2038 is quite a few years in the future. Your blanket statement of "there is no technology which can achieve that" is just not plausible. Of course, when you conflate coal with fossil fuels, if you confuse short-term and long-term plans however you please, you can find a lot of inconsistencies to attack.
> 2038 is quite a few years in the future. Your blanket statement of "there is no technology which can achieve that" is just not plausible.
We're betting on technology which doesn't exist (and might never exist for all that we know), what could go wrong here?
Apart from the obvious "black swan" problems with that fallacy, so far nobody actually tried to cause incidents intentionally. And expanding nuclear power means scaling up access to nuclear material rapidly and massively. Including in countries with less stable prospects.
The "past risk profile" is worth nothing in that context.
You can handwave around and say they are outsourcing whatever, but in reality, it is much safer to help them transition to renewables or even leave them on fossil fuels rather than give them access to nuclear technology and nuclear material and build nuclear plants were bad shit can happen.
Come to think of it, with the lifespan of a nuclear plant, or worse the nuclear waste, there aren't a lot of regions left you would trust to stay completely safe from war, civil war and political upheaval.
Developing countries and those on the verge of becoming industrialized nations, are quite capable of handling complex technology. India and Pakistan have their own nuclear industry complete with nuclear weapons, mostly driven by indigineous efforts.
And foreigners running a nuclear plant in such a country does absolutely nothing to the security risks from wars and political unrest. ISIS tried to find material for dirty bombs in Mossul for example. The only reason they didn't find anything was that they were looking in the wrong places. If you start putting that stuff in countries were you can't be sure if the government stays stable for the next five years, much less fifty years or even multiple centuries if they don't manage to store the waste securely, that's a recipe for desaster.
Dams are actually less dangerous, because the potential area of damage is more limited, whereas a dirty bomb may be used quite some distance away and radioactive fallout also isn't that localized. Also most "conventional" infrastructure just degrades and becomes useless when not properly maintained. Can't say that about nuclear infrastructure (besides power plants you need mines, processing and research facilities and waste storage). And even with things like river dams people do ask questions about political stability and who gets the short end of the stick when the dam breaks, intentionally or unintentionally.
Just because you don't like an argument doesn't make it "moot". I think I'm not alone in not being comfortable with new nuclear projects going up in eastern Europe... The political situations are relatively stable apart from Ukraine, but I wouldn't bet my life on it staying that way for the next fifty years. Don't even ask about Africa or most of Asia....
Those numbers could have changed a lot this year if Russian shelling at Zaporizhzhia had worked out a bit differently.
And this was a military adversary that wasn't explicitly trying to cause nuclear damage here. The next one might go all out or try something as a false flag.
Those 70 years have been in relative peaceful times. And they don't include the 200 years of cleanup we've externalised to the future. We just learned a very painful lesson what externalisation to the future can lead to with global warming.
Additionally the usage spikes are in winter where solar production is at the lowest of the year and it's not like you can gamble the electricity grid on having wind or not.
Saying nuclear energy is 'clean' because it doesn't cause CO2 emissions is like saying arsenic is the only healthy food because it doesn't contain sugar.
You set up a false dichotomy between nuclear energy and "solar and wind", as if that's the only possible renewable energy source.
My point is: Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy you can produce, no other energy source has you paying for waste management for 20000+ years.
Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions so that we a) smooth out spikes b) have simple energy storage solutions c) don't have to pay the guy printing new signs saying 'caution, radiation, don't enter this cave and please don't hold this site hostage in case of civil war' for some 20000+ years.
> Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions
Like what others? There's none. (If you care about CO2 pollution of course)
> b) have simple energy storage solutions
Have you missed the part where I said that this storage tech doesn't exist?
You can't mention technologies which don't exist and claim that we should use them. Deployment of tech isn't R&D.
As an example, the solution being used in the real world seems to be an increase of coal and gas if you look at what Germany has done on the past month
There are already energy storage solutions. To ignore those, to claim categorically those will not improve, seems to be a particularly "convenient" argument.
Maybe they'll improve yes (or maybe not) but that's called R&D, not an available solution and you cannot count on it.
And there are for example solutions around pumping water into a lake. That sounds like it will work long-term. You make an abysmal job argueing for nuclear power just because not everything works perfectly already. Scaling up nuclear power to the scale required to replace fossil fuels would take decades. Unless the risks are ignored and enhanced extremely, like you seem to be proposing. But there is zero political appetite in the electorates of the world to invest billions into a technology that takes decades to come to fruition, takes more decades to recuperate the investment and can literally blow up in your face any time, especially when some neighbor is angry at you.
I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have its downsides, it's just that it's one of the only realistic option with the current tech. Renewables really aren't up to the task as we see it now in Europe.
Additionally since you're talking about finance, usually external costs aren't counted in renewables that's why they falsely appear cheaper, Germany for example already spent around ~2x the cost of the whole French grid and is still very far from the transition from what France achieved.
Biofuel is actually a good example, since you mention biofuel as a potential backup strategy (I don't think it will work just because of the scale anyways but that's beside the point, let's imagine that in theory it could work). The costs of creating all this additional infrastructure isn't usually factored in the renewable strategy either, but it should.
> can literally blow up in your face any time
I don't think you have an understanding on how it really works, it's not a bomb...
Yup. Pumped hydro is aall taken and there's none under construction. Just look at this map of projects under development https://professional.hydropower.org/page/map-pumped-storage-...
> I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have its downsides, it's just that it's one of the only realistic option with the current tech. Renewables really aren't up to the task as we see it now in Europe.
It really isn't because every potential Uranium mine on the planet would have to be under development right now for it to be remotely relevant. And even then it would take far longer.
> Additionally since you're talking about finance, usually external costs aren't counted in renewables that's why they falsely appear cheaper, Germany for example already spent around ~2x the cost of the whole French grid and is still very far from the transition from what France achieved
Citation needed. Be sure to include the costs of enrichment, reprocessing, and colonial mining activities. Additionally Germany ate a bunch of the first mover costs. For a valid comparison you'd include the manhattan project.
You got to be joking here, look at the very few ones "under construction" ones in Europe and their actual capacity, that's pretty much what I said. Nothing here will help for a winter spike, those won't even cover a full day of bad production.
> It really isn't because every potential Uranium mine on the planet would have to be under development right now for it to be remotely relevant. And even then it would take far longer.
That's kind of taking the consumption of a 60s car with the known petrol fields of the time and doing a multiplication, it's bad maths and bad economics.
> Citation needed. Be sure to include the costs of enrichment, reprocessing, and colonial mining activities. Additionally Germany ate a bunch of the first mover costs. For a valid comparison you'd include the manhattan project.
Those costs are included in the nuclear but not on the renewable part sorry, to get a full comparison you would need to add maintenance, waste management, backup costs and diplomatic & environmental costs for renewables which I don't think anybody is counting now.
It's still doubling in under a decade. And that's just the pumped storage. Not all hydro. "You might need backup 5% of the time, stop and wait 30 years instead" isn't the slam dunk you think it is. Weirdly it would be the optimal thing for the fossil fuel industry though.
> That's kind of taking the consumption of a 60s car with the known petrol fields of the time and doing a multiplication, it's bad maths and bad economics.
That's assuming modern 65MWd/kg reactors. And that's just to meet the first one or two fuel loads. It's not some far future scenario where exploration has time to pay off -- the mines need to be being developed today. At the tail end of those reserves, the raw Uranium alone costs more than half the present day all-in cost for solar or wind.
> Those costs are included in the nuclear but not on the renewable part sorry, to get a full comparison you would need to add maintenance, waste management, backup costs and diplomatic & environmental costs for renewables which I don't think anybody is counting now.
Waste management, backup, diplomatic, and environmental costs are not included on the nuclear side either. And O&M alone is enough to pay for the renewable generation in a good area and a backup gas plant to sit idle.
We already have many industrial disasters with dangers that need to be communicated to every human generation to come in the form of acid mine drainage and whatnot. Those releases (which would happen absent human upkeep of dams and tailings ponds) are also things that would absolutely wreck environments for hundreds to thousands of years if released.
Every mine you open has clean-up costs that never end; it would be wiser to minimize the amount of new ones. You'll need more of them if you go with the intermittent sources of power because renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required (and because they inherently don't produce power constantly).
All of them due too fossil energy. Hence the call to invest in already available renewable energy sources.
We don't need even more potential disasters.
> renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required
Nuclear energy needs uranium mines which by the way happen to be in countries that are, let's say, politically unstable.
The astronomical cost of nuclear waste management is killing any and all attempt to render the TCO of a nuclear plant in a good light, if done honestly.
> they inherently don't produce power constantly
Are you thinking of solar and wind? When we talk about renewable, we mean geothermal plants, biomass energy and what not. And of course water, wind and solar - the mixture is important so that we can smooth out spikes with those renewables which don't produce power constantly, just as you build multiple nuclear plants, because one plant doesn't produce power constantly.
The question is: Why should the money go into ramping up a very expensive technology with lots of risks, when we could invest in better, safer and cleaner tech?
Smoothing out currently requires burning fossil fuel. Over time that need will decrease, for one because of a build-up of capacity in solutions that complement each other, and partly because of storage solutions. Reducing fossil fuel dependence - measured over a year - is achievable and will reduce climate change. And this will actually work faster than a somewhat responsible buildup of nuclear power would.
Additionally fossil fuel dependence isn't "per year" but every time you need the grid reliably, that's how an electric grid work.
And again, those storage options viable for that purpose might never exist for all that we know, it's in R&D stage. If you want to add R&D tech into the mix, I have even better than the magical storage, I could bring fusion tech and say that all our problems will be solved magically. Except I don't because it's not ready, exactly like the magical storage tech.
If people don't understand that that it's not a viable option anymore with climate change, the Ukraine war plus the Qatar & Moroccan scandals now, I don't know what else will. That's starting to sound like a religion-level of closing eyes at some point. Every time this renewable strategy fails, it seems everybody is doubling down instead of taking a step back.
By using imaginary reactors to attack renewables instead you reveal your very obvious intent of delaying decarbonization.
Gas power plants are plenty reliable. And you can source your gas from multiple sources. Nuclear fuel isn't entirely without sourcing problems, either...
Waste from fission plants and incidents is hard to estimate for a variety of reasons. It tends to be incredibly long-lived. Small non-lethal (even non-harmful) amounts can accumulate in animals and plants to the point where there's still an impact from Chernobyl on widespread populations decades later [1]:
> The German boars roam in forests nearly 950 miles (1,500 kilometers ) from Chernobyl. Yet, the amount of radioactive cesium-137 within their tissue often registers dozens of times beyond the recommended limit for consumption and thousands of times above normal.
It's worth noting that not all toxic byproducts are radioactive. Cesium is toxic on its own. The Uranium and Plutonium decay chains include a lot of metals that even if you ignore the radioactive element, they're toxic, sometimes incredibly so.
> ... 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion.
[citation needed]
This study [2] argues 1M/year, most of those concentrated in SE Asia (due to lack of regulation combined with coal use) and it's predominantly coal. For the US it's around 20,000. It's also not clear to me if this study includes emissions from automobiles.
> ... nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel.
The Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone, decades later, still stands at (literally) a thousand square miles.
Nuclear advocates always bring up coal (as a false dichotomy and it paints nuclear in the best light) and deaths because it's in many ways the least impactful dimension for nuclear. Likewise, they always talk about operational costs while brushing over capital costs (and thus the total cost of ownership) and the costs of waste handling and storage and ultimately the site cleanup costs. As the article notes here the current estimate for this one site sits at 121 billion pounds and will likely rise and take a century or more.
[1]: https://phys.org/news/2011-04-germany-radioactive-boars-lega...
[2]: https://www.healtheffects.org/publication/global-burden-dise...
As for air pollution citation, here: https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
Which are all paid by the public and government.
For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better knowledge and engineering expertise to build safer, better, more efficient, less "polluting" (for some definition of the word) reactors.
FWIW, this week in the cold snap in the UK, we've relied on good old fossil fuel and... nuclear, because the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Also, being old enough to have lived through the press-hysteria of Chernobyl: "we're all going to die or have babies with 3 arms", we ended up with maybe 4000 deaths over 50 years, and an area now rich with wildlife. And that's an uncontrolled nuclear accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Compare that to the number of people that die through coal mine accidents a year and air pollution and so on. Then there's oil slicks killing wildlife, rig accidents, pipelines hundreds, if not thousands of miles long and so on. Or natural gas, with explosions and so on. Plus all the carbon emissions for transporting millions upon millions of tons of the stuff.
The world wide number of deaths due to nuclear in its entire history adds up to less deaths than there are probably in a typical week for fossil fuels (deaths mining, transporting, building, and deaths to the general population breathing it in, and let's add deaths from climate change in there, since that's literally what fossil fuels have caused).
I'd go further and say the deaths worldwide per day directly (accidents) or indirectly (climate change + pollution) due to fossil fuel usage is more than all deaths ever due to nuclear in its history.
I live near a nuclear power station, and I'm comfortable with that. In fact, where I live, there's approximately 1.5m living within 30 miles, and just beyond that... London.
On balance, I'd take a fleet of new nuclear power stations over the absolute disaster that is fossil fuels and the days there's no sun or wind.
Back to: 'oh but what about waste?'
Bury it, with signs. If we've gotten too stupid to read in 500 years, we're likely too stupid to know how to dig down several thousand feet, and are probably banging rocks together and saying 'ug' to each other. It's really not a problem. I can't recall the last time someone stupidly went into an _existing_ nuclear waste dump anywhere in the world and then died. And if they have it's, what, 1 person out of 7 billion.
> Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
Well, of course. Because, built in the right way, you use nuclear reactors to breed weapons grade fuel. So governments are always involved. In turn this means that governments never let market forces, and hence private companies build competing nuclear reactors which would drive down costs because the government won't step out of the way. The UK pretty much had a choice of EDF or EDF to build a new nuclear reactor.
As toxic as the waste in the pools out back is the last 20 years of will they wont they attitude towards not just further nuclear builds but hand wringing over paying to cleanup the experiments of the past which is where much of the waste comes from.
https://whatisnuclear.com/dose-calc.html
You never know where the stuff builds up. Some isotopes get enriched in some organs and do damage over a long time. Depending on what the material actually is, it can get into unfortunate places and stay there for a few years, irradiating someone. It can get into the food supply doing some more damage than anticipated.
None of that is calculateable, so it is better to treat every radiation as a risk. You also forget that workers may be wearing a dosimeter, but average people don't. They'd never know. You can easily reach the 20x increase if you have a contaminated object in your home or car or whatever, even if that contamination isn't that strong.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_fi...
The biggest problem people forget is time: If people stay in contact with contaminated material, especially if they ingest some, then it really doesn't matter that much how low the radiation is. That's why radioactive material is treated the way it is. As long as you have dosimeters and geiger counters and hazmat suits you have a calculateable risk. With even some of those assumptions broken, there is no calculation.
https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/chernobyl.h...
Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel ‘On the Beach’.
If you want high-level spoilers, Wikipedia is your friend. I shan’t say a word other than that it’s a terrific little book that I can’t believe I’d never heard of. I just read it last week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)