I think this is not an argument against nuclear power, but an argument against the very complicated reactor designs that are in widespread use. Because they start with an inherently unsafe design, they can only be made safe with many layers of protective measures.
Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.
On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.
Anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than the reality. A recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. Can you imagine the type of coverage the media would have given if 200,000 people had to be evacuated near a nuclear power plant?
(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much less health consequences than the other.)
It's a little dishonest to state a casualty rate when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet. That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
It's also dishonest to claim (Without any qualifications) that spent nuclear fuel will be deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years?
How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disasters kill over the next ~100 years? Because that's the alternative we're looking at.
Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet.
If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital on the planet, solar will still kill more people than nuclear would under those circumstances.
So the reasoning here eludes me: perhaps it's that people don't understand nuclear so it must be bad ? It's how we got to Trump ...
TLDR: public opinion takes an idea. It declares it a bad idea. Comes up with much worse ideas for it's given criteria and enforces conformance to those ideas. Solar and wind both kill more people than nuclear, short term and long term.
Solar and wind have a rate of zero nuclear accidents per install, and as that seems to be the only kind of accident you or anyone else counts towards nuclear power's total they're clearly better than nuclear in that regard.
Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.
> It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.
There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.
Even from those 50, a number died due to the physical effects of walking into vapor that was several thousand degrees. Yes, they would likely have died of radiation exposure, but they survived nowhere near long enough for that to occur. It is a VERY bad idea to spray water on something that is being fed with tens of megawatts of power. This is what happens, of course, when the government orders workers into a reactor they know nothing about. Of course those were also nuclear related deaths, but ... At Chernobyl at least the radiation death toll can realistically be claimed to be nonzero, but people dying from a direct consequence of the disaster, and actually dying from radiation exposure is low double digits. People affected by it, and having worse health as a result of it MAY be in the thousands. However, after decades of tracking, it will probably rather be in the hundreds.
The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...
For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.
The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.
Furthermore, people don't understand that decommissioning coal reactors is also time consuming and dangerous. Here in Toronto, the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station was decommissioned in 1983 and remains quite radioactive, despite not even burning coal in its later years. There is a 24 hour guard presence.
Is there dispute over the long term toxicity of nuclear waste? It's not hard to find numerous toxic, long lived isotopes. The world has no shortage of waste and the volumes are growing, not shrinking.
Im not a proponent of coal, and at the scales my part of the world needs, hydro fills most the need. Yeah, it needs maintaining but that's unlikely to be more costly than nuclear.
No, but there is a dispute over how dangerous it is - or more specifically, how many people it's likely to kill.
We're close to capacity for the world's utilization of hydro. It can only grow ~20% in the next 30 years - which would let it... Take ~10% of coal's contribution to power generation.
Hydro power is generally cheaper then coal. If we could use more of it, we would be.
The original poster was talking about the possibility of human error (particularly the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) so it was not "a little dishonest" to focus on the deaths from power sources that one could attribute to human error.
>...when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet.
Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
(Funding for the integral fast reactor was killed by Bill Clinton, but there is no reason that the US or some other country couldn't fund this or any of the other 4th gen designs.)
>...That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
Right now nuclear waste is a very manageable problem and relatively soon the waste could be used to produce electricity if we so desire. Considering that no one of the general public has been killed from nuclear waste (and tens of thousands die each year from burning coal) why would someone consider nuclear waste a "massive problem"?
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
The practical barrier to reprocessing and burning spent fuel isn't technical or political: it's economic. Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
>...The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
Yes a breeder reactor was one of the first electricity-generating nuclear power plants, but that doesn't mean we need to rush. We have enough storage capacity for decades before we need to worry about the level of high level waste.
>...Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
At the present time. Even if plans like getting uranium have sea water work out, we might start burning high level at some point just to deal with the high level waste if we run out of room. It makes a lot more sense to burn waste for electricity than to spend millions to bury it in the ground for millennia.
> Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
Soon is relative. Nuclear power has only existed for just over 70 years. These things take time, and progress is intensely stagnated because of the fear and regulation involved.
It's totally solved from a technical standpoint. Dig a hole half a mile deep in bedrock in a tectonically stable area, and whatever you put in that hole is safe forever. But that's kinda expensive, so we keep burying it in people's backyards and then going "gosh, this is hard!" when it bites us in the ass.
There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years. And if you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human from 10000 years ago, you'll realize how non-trivial that is - no language, culture or knowledge capture system would survive for this long intact. There is a fascinating body of research about how to solve this problem (with no definite answer). E.g. see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...
> There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years.
I can imagine some sort of post-apocalyptic copper age religion where the religious brotherhood exist to guard the 'cursed caves', without understanding why. But everyone knows that people who enter the caves either die at the hands of the strangely deformed beasts who live there, or of a mysterious sickness sometime afterwards.
Yeah, I probably played too much D&D as a child :)
The argument that we need to do something about this waste beyond the timeframe of our civilisation is mind boggling to me. This is the only risk we seem to take this seriously - in no other arena can I recall people arguing about what something will look like in 10,000 years. What about war between America and China? >1% chance, massive potential for death and destruction. Who cares if some poor person digs into an old nuclear waste dump in 500 years compared to that?
We can leave this problem to the future. If they have regressed so far that they can't detect nuclear then they have bigger problems than radiation poisoning.
Threats to energy security are so much more of a threat than potentially maybe not being able to figure out how to reprocess spent fuel until it isn't a health hazard.
This stupidly assumes that the people that dig the hole won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
> won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.
> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet
Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.
> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.
One can at least hope that humanity's level of technology does not regress. So then there is at least the fact that the radioactivity can be detected even after the signs have long gone.
Possibly, though not guaranteed - we have radioactivity detectors, but not many people carry them with them and use them on everything around. We'd still need to somehow communicate that this place needs detecting - and if people there would not be using nuclear energy for some reason, they might not even think about needing to check that place for radioactivity, at least not until there is some serious trouble.
The hole is already dug. Instead of going in the hole, the waste is sitting in collecting ponds or concrete casks very, very close (100 yards) from major waterways.
if we could use nuclear power exclusive to fix carbon, I think it would be worth it. I think a lot of people would say that this is worth it, and this inequality is in favor of nuclear power over the safest possible coal power.
> And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time
So what does that tell you about the motivations of much of the movement that opposes nuclear and fossil fuels? They're not motivated by continued human flourishing, that's for sure.
This. So much this. People don't know what the hell they're talking about when it comes to nuclear power, but it doesn't stop them from talking about it as if they were experts.
Every technology is subject to human error and inherently dangerous. In fact we have many technologies that are way more dangerous to humans than nuclear - cars, chemical plants, pharmaceuticals, etc. There is no rational reason to single out nuclear technologies as being in need of unachievable absolute perfection when we are fine (not ideal, but also not so bad that it's not worth it) with many dangerous ones the way they are. I think it has more to do with irrational fears than rational risk assessments.
Statistically there are far more large-scale hydroelectric projects in the US that will kill thousands of people if they fail if those facilities are not properly maintained. A dam failure is unavoidable without lots of pre-planning, and even then, as recent events have shown, you can anticipate a problem and still not be able to deal with it.
Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
The worst case is probably like Chernobyl but involving multiple reactors. The probability of that is pretty low not only because Chernobyl served as a wake-up call, but because what happened at Chernobyl was an unfortunate chain of events that focused on only one reactor.
So in the worst case secnario you have a disaster which creates a new national park-sized area you can't live in. Compared with coal plants which used to render large portions of the continent unlivable for the hottest, haziest, smoggiest days in the summer, that's an acceptable risk.
> Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
It isn't as simple as that, with a lot of reactors. The ones at Fukushima were SCRAMmed. A running nuclear reactor will build up a collection of fission products that have various half-lives that can cause problems. In Fukushima's case, these fission products continued to decay and produced lots of heat (about 6.5% of the heat produced during normal operation, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). It was this heat that raised the temperature of the fuel and boiled off the cooling water and caused the disaster.
So basically, with lots of reactors, SCRAMming is not enough - you need to maintain cooling for quite a long time afterwards. It is entirely possible to build reactors where this is not the case.
We all know what happens to turkeys at thanksgiving, but we don't all know what the worst, or even average case is for a nuclear accident, nor how that is affected by the type of nuclear technology. This is an argument taking advantage of people's fear and ignorance.
An appropriate response to the turkey statement along these lines is to ask where the farm is and what people it serves. There are many farms in the world where statistically, Thanksgiving makes no difference to the mortality of the Turkeys.
The point being, historical statistics just don't tell you everything you need to make a decision…you need guarantees that all regimes have outcomes within acceptable parameters.
Accounting for Murphy's law, and that the worst case is always x% below your expectation (even after accounting for Murphy's law).
It's the only viable fix we have currently, and if I were elected god king of a nation I would push initiatives to build not only enough capacity with atomic power to meet demand but excess to keep costs very low.
People are worried about automation, the nation that can cheaply power automated factories and server farms in the future will prosper.
Solar and wind have no catastrophic downside, and storage is a tractable problem. A chronically small, grey-haired workforce that the population depends on both to power their lives and prevent catastrophe makes that workforce too powerful. It becomes a governance problem. I highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook for more insight on this.
Is large scale energy storage any better than just using nuclear energy?
They don't have the "nuclear" tag scaring people away, but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
Gravity based energy storage is inexpensive to construct and reliable. It is wasteful - but we're capturing an incredibly tiny proportion of the energy available from wind and solar for electricity.
> "Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to test its safety features – the results are impressive"
This is cherrypicking to make a point. The batteries still contain chemicals which are toxic to life and environment. There will come a time when those batteries are "consumed" and the chemicals within them need to be dealt with in some safe manner. As far as I know, there's no battery technology with any side effects.
Tesla's batteries are well designed and engineered. Batteries before them have exploded, caused fires and loss of life and property. As long as the nuclear plant was also well designed I can say
"I set fire to a nuclear plant to test its safety features. The plant shut down automatically – the results are impressive"
Isn't there large economic incentive to recycle large batteries?
I agree many won't be recycled, but until we snag ourselves and asteroid, we have a finite supply of lithium. People will do their best to not lose something worth money.
To be economically viable battery recycling is done in developing countries that don't enforce environmental regulations.
This is specifically talking about lead batteries, but Lithium-Ion is basically the same: http://www.okinternational.org/lead-batteries/Recycling
If you generated all of the energy you used via atomic power at the end of your life the total size of that waste is about the size of a coke can.
1. How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process? Aren't we talking creating more batteries than we ever have before by several orders of magnitude here? We send most of our ewaste to the third world to be burned currently, this sounds like an ecological disaster.
2. Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun? A big project for sure but the reward is virtually unlimited, virtually free energy.
> How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process?
It doesn't matter. It can all be recycled.
> Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun?
I don't believe we're competent enough to manage nuclear waste in any form.
It can be, it isn't happening currently: "As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.[6] Another reason why it isn't being done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive as mined lithium"
Even so when recycled it still creates toxic waste in large quantities. What shall we do with that?
I'm not sure what the comment about "grey haired workforce" is in regards too, but "storage is a tractable problem" is often said without evidence. I'd need to see a smaller nation decommission all of its base load generators before that claim can be considered valid.
there was talk in this thread about how the engineers that designed the systems in use are the ones servicing them and have been for 20-30 years or so.
Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.
On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.