- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
Nuclear is the best btw.
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As a Geologist the idea that there are seismically inactive magic rocks that will sit there and not change shape or be affected by anything for eternity and that we can assume placing radioactive waste in them will be fine for an indefinite amount of time is honestly hilarious.
I’m kind of concerned that somebody who calls himself a geologist doesn’t understand radiation. The time scales involved are just not compatible. The rock is geologically inactive over the time scales that you need to store radioactive material which is at most maybe a few thousand years.
I understand your point. But also, not really the point. I’d rather have barrels of waste that I can point to, then to pump it into the air for everyone to breath.
The barrels are very much in our face, we need to pay attention to them. The air… well that’s someone else’s problem…
Rocks being stored underground sounds like they belong there.
Radioactive materials come from the earth. It’s only reasonable that they can be put back there.
Then why do they have to be enriched after we take them out of the earth in order for us to draw power from them?
Good fucking lord. I’m tired of seeing your pro oil propaganda. You’re arguing that it’s bad to be able to control where hazardous materials are stored. I mean here’s a fucking crazy question I’m sure you won’t even respond to, but why don’t we just utilize more of the damn “spent fuel”? It’s possible, there’s been research on the topic. Big oil stopped that development. Go ahead what else is there to say?
Nope I am not advocating for the use of fossil fuels.
You don’t need it for an eternity, though. Just the half-life of the waste product. Also, you can just dig a hole away from any major fault lines and you’ll be reasonably safe for an indefinite period. The plan to put nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain was about as good as anything we’ve come up with, give or take the need to win Senate races and Presidential ECs in a pivotal swing state.
You don’t need it for an eternity, though. Just the half-life of the waste product.
???
You don’t know what half life means, lol.
Just the half-life of the waste product.
half-life
half
Bruh
You don’t need it for an eternity, though. Just the half-life of the waste product
More like 10 half lives before its safe
A big cement hole under a geologically stable rock formation provides that time.
Also, you can just dig a hole away from any major fault lines and you’ll be reasonably safe for an indefinite period.
Are you a geologist? How can you say that confidently?
How can you say that confidently?
I’m taking the word of the Department of Energy, which employs an abundance of geologists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Earthquakes
Look at it from a risk assessment standpoint.
The barrels will be made.
You can put them in the deep ocean in the Marianas trench, they will degrade immediately and leak quickly. they will be diluted enough to make the leakage relatively safe. most of the upper foot chain doesn’t get to eat those creatures down there. But bad optics and enivonmentally unreasonable.
You can surface warehouse them. They can be regulary check for leaks, but can be struck by terrorists, meteors, airplanes, capitalism. Still bad optics.
You can bury them outright. can’t check for leaks, they might make it into the water table. bad for animals which might enter the food chain.
You can put them inside a tunnel/vault. You can, until there is an event (and maybe afterward) check for them for leaks. move them to somewhere else, maybe even use them for other things if you find ways to do that.
Nothing is indefinite. But of all the places we can put them, a maintainable underground vault is less likely to get fucked then we as human are at fucking them up.
The only reason the landscape is a static unchanging thing to you is because you haven’t been taught that nothing could be further from the truth by a healthy culture, there is no easy place to put these barrels, most people who aren’t Geologists prescribe most of the Earth’s surface to being a passive background that things happen to and in not a character itself that acts sometimes over great lengths of time and sometimes over shockingly small lengths of time.
That is what people who aren’t Geologists really have a hard time understanding who aren’t leftists or haven’t been raised with Indigenous culture, the landscape is a verb not a noun and this idea there are caverns underground that will be forgotten by the movement above and rest safe for eternity is a fantastical way of thinking of the Earth System. It is a devastatingly incomplete way of seeing the world that sets up future generations to be screwed over by our hubris and lack of understanding of the dynamics we live within.
I am not entirely against Nuclear Power, but I refuse to have people explain to me Geologic lengths of times and contexts who have spent no amount of practical time actually learning how landscapes even far from active fault lines can change radically over time.
As a geologist myself, it doesnt sound like you are well informed. There are plenty of regions on the globe that haven’t exhibited any real geological activity for billions of years. The places that deep geological repositories are proposed are very deep as in far below the water table and in impermeable rock. Erosion is neglible in these areas, and there are very few geological processes that could conceivably change that. The waste itself is to be stored in multiple layers of protection, right down to the material the waste is composed of, which has a low water solubility.
Is it possible that a mid contental rift will open up near one of these and result in processes that ruin the storage site? Sure, but thats so unlikely that we might as well start talking about a big meteor crashing into the site and spraying nuclear fallout across the planet (which would kind of happen anyways with a meteor that large). Point is, the risk of that happening even on geological timescale is pretty low. There are larger risks associated with natural uranium deposits or even regions with large amounts of granite.
The biggest risks of DGRs is that some time in the future, humans forget about where they are or cant understand the warnings placed on them and accidentally dig them up before they decay enough.
The point is the idea that we assume we can gurantee something we absolutely cannot, it is hubris.
Thats extremely reductive and not an all a fair characterization of DGRs. Everything comes with some risks, the risks associated with DGRs are extremely small. As an educated geologist who claims to be familiar with this topic, maybe you could share what risks you are concerned about rather than broadly claiming that it is impossible to guarantee against any risks on the timescale required for neutralization of radiation hazard.
The only reason the landscape is a static unchanging thing to you
Try again boss. I didn’t say that.
I mean, it depends. If you’re storing cesium, it’s a fine assumption. Iodine though…
Well you certainly aren’t lmao.
It always amazes me how many people lack basic reading comprehension.
Yes I am?
My condolences for your advanced case of retrograde amnesia.
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Nuclear waste sounds scary because you can point to it. Fossil fuel waste is just everywhere, quietly speedrunning the atmosphere.
Just the lead in gasoline kills around 5 million people a year. That is just scratching the surface of the problems oil and gas cause.
Plus the millions of people that coal plant’s smoke kill…with radiation. Coal has killed more people by radiation in the US alone than nuclear accidents all over the world, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined.
Wow, that sounds so wild to think that exposure to coal related radiation has killed way more people than every man made radiation exposure ever (if your not counting fallout from nuclear arms testing).
deleted by creator
Hasn’t gasoline been leadfree for quite a while now?
It was supposed to be phased out of regular gasoline in 2021. It will still be used in airplane fuel. It will take decades before it isn’t present in large quantities though. That much lead in the environment doesn’t just disappear.
A poisonous and heavy metal just spewing everywhere in the sky. And the conspiracy theorists ignore that and fall for fake bullshit.
For sure, not that I doubt things like global warming. The reality is oil and gas kill many millions every year. So much focus only on global warming is almost a red hearing when it already causes so much death.
I think the problem is, or at least one I see a lot, is that climate change is already happening, but because it’s gradual and there’s already so much unpredictability you can rarely just point at something specific and say “that’s because of climate change.” And the constant naming of it as “global warming” has done so much damage too, because now when the new weather is cold you still have skeptical conservatives saying things like “global warming my ass!”
I agree, that is why we should just point out that it kills millions every year. Even without global warming we should have moved to phase out oil and gas wherever possible several decades ago. Now is the next best time I suppose.
The biggest issue is that people don’t understand that the shit that will kill you Chornobyl dead burns itself out relatively fast. Sushi grade polonium is only spicy for a couple of weeks.
The “it’s radioactive for zillions of years” stuff is typically a heavy metal hazard far more than a radiation hazard.
If it’s decaying for a zillion years a gram might be popping off a few sextillion gamma rays a second, insignificant.
Jimmy Carter, by shutting down the reprocessing industry, fucked the whole thing sideways.
You’re right, and it’s even less dangerous than you’re saying.
If each gram was emitting a few sextillion gamma rays per second you’d be able to harness it as a power source, it would be producing megawatts per gram (I did do the math!). The rate of decay is years /decades per atom. One gram of Plutonium 239 would only give off a few hundred thousand gamma particles per second near the start of its decay.
Sorry if this comes off as me correcting you, I just read your comment and got curious so I did some calculations and wanted to share. If anything, I’m extra-agreeing with you.🤗 check me, love it
Thanks🤗.
I don’t usually get the chance to do interesting maths anymore. As soon as you’re done with uni it’s just Excel innit.
I’d argue that the rate of decay per atom is actually random, except that the probability per unit time is scaled according to how long the half life is.
You need a shitton of atoms so that you can average out all that randomness and find the emergent property that is half life.
Fortunately, any amount of radioactive material large enough for us to do anything with it does indeed have a shitton of atoms! Avogadro’s number is one of my favorite scientific constants because it reveals the crazy scale of the atoms we take for granted.
Like with U238 and its 4 billion year half life, one mole of just that atom would weigh 238 grams and have 6.022x10^23 atoms. A half-pound or quarter-kilo chunk of very heavy metal that fits in the palm of your hand contains over 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.
Some of those atoms are going to decay today, and some of them will still be radioactive in 100 billion years.
Yep, once you know the half life, you can use that figure to work out the mean lifetime: the average time you’d expect to be looking at once nucleus before it decays. It works out to be 1.4x the half life of the material. You’re right though, it is random, and you could be waiting three nanoseconds or three million years.
Solar/wind are best. Nuclear has serious practical issues (slow to spin up and down, thus requiring either fossil fuels or batteries) and financial issues (the return on investment just doesn’t beat renewables and the batteries they need anymore). It’s also extremely slow to build nuclear so by the time you’re splitting atoms renewables and batteries will be even better.
Nuclear has one major benefit though, it’s a peaceful means to maintain the capacity for nuclear second strikes. Countries like France can’t completely abandon it without leaving themselves vulnerable in a way that Ukraine has learned isn’t wise.
But nuclear compared to fossil fuel? Yeah split those atoms.
Countries like France can’t completely abandon it without leaving themselves vulnerable in a way that Ukraine has learned isn’t wise.
The “Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons” line always neglects to include how the weapons were under the authority of the military of the USSR. Not the Ukrainian local militia.
It’s akin to saying “Fidel Castro shouldn’t have surrendered nukes for Cuba”. They weren’t his to surrender. They were Khrushchev’s. And he traded the missiles in Cuba to get American missiles out of Turkiye, which moved us away from nuclear war over the long run and benefited civilization universally.
France’s nuclear program is owned and operated by the national government. This is comparatively not true of the UK and Germany, whose nukes are owned and operated by the US. And given the history of France, Germany, and Russia, I would argue that Germany posses the bigger historical military threat than Russia every did. With the rising popularity of the AfD in Germany, this threat may become existential far sooner than anyone in Europe wants to admit.
But nuclear compared to fossil fuel? Yeah split those atoms.
What’s crazy about nuclear power relative to coal power is how much we’ve invested in optimizing the latter since the 1980s relative to the former. Fourth and fifth generation nuclear reactors don’t exist outside of France and China in the modern day. Meanwhile, the juice coal plants can squeeze out of tree-fossils and tree-fossil farts is truly remarkable.
Nuclear should be the obvious alternative, but we’ve let the science atrophy for decades. That’s why countries across the Pacific continue to build new coal plants at a rapid clip, while nuclear new-start construction languishes.
I’ve always wandered that instead of trying to spin down or spin up reactors based on demand, if we could scale the demand instead.
Like when power Usage is low dump all that energy into massive desalination plant or CO2 reclamation machine or something
Why not neither?
Nuclear is best.
The problem is, that unless you cut corners somewhere between mining uranium and electricity comes out, it’s also the most expensive way to make electricity known to mankind.Most expensive upfront cost, but doesn’t that get balanced by how much you get out of it?
Solar, wind and hydro power is faster and cheaper to build and operate. The only advantage of nuclear is the constant power output. However, we are constantly getting better at efficiently storing energy.
They watched shit on you tube like the scrappers that found the strontium 90 sources in Georgia and used them for warmth.
There’s no amount of it’s not the same that will make them unsee it
Trees clean the air
Algae does that better than trees.
Trees, on the other hand, are natural climate control. They break up wind, cool the immediate air, and if enough of them are around, augment the local weather.
iNdEsTrUcTiBlE
He really said “indestructible”
He really said it
Guys guys guys
He said the word
This is why no sane person takes nuke fans seriously. They have to literally lie and be dumb
The “seismologically inactive rock” part is now gaslighting, because we’ve relocated sooo many cubic kilometres of landlocked-ice to mobile-water, redistributing tectonic-forces to such a great degree, that there’s a new fault-line now appearing in the California-Nevada region, & there are multiple volcanoes firing right now, some of whom hadn’t been active for a long time.
IF a hard-egg-shell forms with a particular pattern of forces on it, & keeps building to fit that pattern-of-forces,
… & then you suddenly change the pattern-of-forces…
THEN you get cracking.
We’ve altered the distribution-of-surface-weight sooo significantly, that “seismologically inactive rock” is a lie.
The reason that this particular gaslighting bugs me so much, is that there was a plan, being implimented in the US’s southwest, to bury nuclear-waste in a desert-region, because then water wouldn’t be able to get it…
OK, so WAS it desert a few millenia ago?
Well, no: it had been jungle.
IT ISN’T STABLY DESERT, THEN, IS IT??
They ignored that, & kept on with their “safe for millenia” operation.
Neither the climate nor the plate-tectonics are stable, when many cubic-km of ice are either forming on land, or disappearing from land, during any ClimatePunctuation.
There’s another gaslighting that some, also in this discussion, have called-out: halflife isn’t “when it becomes safe”, it’s just when it’s 1/2 as radioactive as it was when stored.
Some Korean researcher, iirc, did a simple multi-generation experiment, with mice:
Put a single atom of plutonium in some mice, but not others ( don’t know which isotope they were using, sorry ).
Have them reproduce, have them reproduce, & so-on, through 7 generations…
Measure the cancer-rate of the 7th-or-so generation.
it was measurably higher among the single-plutonium-atom-recipient lineages.
Obviously, nobody’s going to replicate that, if they want to have a career afterwards: it’d cost too-much-establishment too-dearly, & therefore they’d be torpedoed/blacklisted/smeared/whatever.
That’s how politically-formed “science” works.
( ask all the vaccination-researchers under RFK Jr’s rule )
The problem is that if we’ve unleashed sooo much needless nuclear-radioactive-materials into our ecologies that we’ve guaranteed higher-cancer-rate ( I’ve also read that there’s no-such-thing as a cancer-free end-of-life/old whale, nowadays … which may be evidence if that isn’t entirely-caused by chemical-pollution ) for … pretty-much all species, globally?
It isn’t possible to buy new radioactive-free steel for making scientific detectors:
they buy WW2-and-earlier sunken-ship steel, because it’s meaningfully less radioactive…
So, our carelessness limits our ability to do science.
So EACH plutonium-atom can, on average, increase the cancer-rate of that-mouse’s descendant-line…
& we WON’T know the evidence?
I know that nuclear is much less greenhouse-gasses ( mining isn’t zero, hence the “less” ) than other kinds of power.
I used to be all-in on it.
But the gaslighting, the blatent lies, the corruption, the … intentional-incompetence in managing such projects & such installations … Chernobl’s graphite-cooled reactor left blast-marks at the site’s top-level, SHOWING it blew-up ( a 2nd time ) while in the air, yet the Official Position is that that didn’t happen??
& implimenting a prevent-fire-by-cooling-it-with-flammable-graphite “genius design” is what made it self-destructable, in the 1st place…
Take Thorium SMNR’s: the “you can’t make weapons-fuel in them” is a lie: you CAN make weapons-grade fuel in them.
Fusion’s “it’s inherently clean” isn’t true either: the lining of the reactor gets neutron-enriched so that IT is nuclear-radioactive waste, after awhile…
( don’t bother trying to convince me that “clean coal” is anything other than gaslighting: I’ve seen too much evidence that it’s propaganda, not actual-engineering’s-results: capture isn’t perfect, & the mercury & greenhouse-forcing both remain problems )
When a single ATOM of plutonium is sufficient to measurably increase the cancer-rate in a lineage-of-mammals…
then your halflife has to bring the material down to zero.
So, getting the 500 TONNES of plutonium currently existing in our world ( it is naturally produced in uranium-reactors ) down to 1-atom-per-each-person, would require about 78 times its halflife & that’d be about 40 times as long it has been since the Ice Age, IF it were all plutonium-240 ( plutonium-239 takes much longer to decay-down )…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Cold_War_use_and_waste
& I got the half-life values from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Bare_sphere
Ideologically-convenient, what the meme pushes, but as they have said “the devil is in the details”, and those details matter.
Both in radioactive waste AND in the still-accelerating ClimatePunctuation we’re in.
BOTH involve concerted-ignoring, BOTH produce nightmare-consequences at global-scale, resulting from that convenient-ignoring.
How I wish there was a true+accurate+current+correct site where every kind of power-generation can be CORRECTLY compared.
Instead of this trying-to-discern-truth-through-the-firehose-of-lies/propaganda scam.
_ /\ _
This reads like the ramblings of a madman and I could not spend the time going through it so I will just address the claim of the “one atom causing cancer in a lineage of animals” as a bold, bold lie. A single atom of any heavy element does not produce any amount of energy that would cause cancer risk in humans. Even accounting for the entire decay chain. Humans are also the most at risk due to our complex DNA.
Edit: since I had done some more research I’ll edit to show that human are among the most susceptible to radiation causing cancer and immediate effects. While plants are the more susceptible and some animals due to their cell make-up and reproduction speed and many other factors (again I’m no biologist) they can be more susceptible, but humans are typically the most at risk when looking at effects of radiation. Either way, a single plutonium atom has an activity level of 1.4x10^-24 curies. We probably couldn’t detect this with our most sensitive equipment if we tried as it would be washed away with background radiation. It will certainly not harm anything.
How can our DNA be “complex” when it is 9X% of the DNA of a banana?
That claim doesn’t make sense to me
I’m a nuclear physist not a biologist, so I don’t know the main differences between genetic makeup between species. The “fun fact” about being genetically close to a banana is mostly just a fun fact and doesnt mean anything when it comes to cell production/reproduction.
When it comes to interactions with nuclear forces, our cells and DNA are more complex than any animal that we’ve studied. This is why dogs can exist within Chernobyl’s radiation zone and live very normal lives. Their DNA can withstand the higher levels of particle bombardment and not have higher risk of cancer or deformities.
This is false. Dogs are no less no more complex than humans. Tons of dogs got cancer and died. Just like everything, this is survivorship bias. The dogs of Chernobyl are simply the descendants of the dogs that didn’t die.
They are particularly hardy at withstanding radiation … because they are the descendants of the dogs that didn’t die. And even then it is not a massive genetical difference, it’s mostly about epigenetic adaptations. It’s why they are being studied for better understanding of radiation and cancer. They also still die more than dogs who are not constantly being bombarded by radiation.
The same is true for almost all of the fauna around the incident site, dogs are just cuter and easier to make fun journalist pieces and nicer to work with in labs. And also plants and fungi show the same hardiness. There’s nothing special about specifically the dogs.
This is actually completely false. Go ahead and find me a peer reviewed article that shows dogs of Chernobyl having higher cancer rates than other dogs. Here is an article that says otherwise https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10358910/
We have no evidence that proves hormesis and you are suggesting with no evidence that the dogs we study now, after 50 years have undergone evolution to no longer have cancer.
If you don’t understand radiation, contamination, and dose, that is OK. It is a huge subject that takes years of understanding and I think is the main reason we have this fear of nuclear, because as a whole we don’t understand. Yes the dogs are contaminated but because of their genetic make up, the amount of contamination they have does not give them an appreciable dose. That some contamination would be enough to want to consider cancer risk in humans, even though it is still extremely minimal. Dogs do get cancer, but it is unproven if that is due to radiation completely, because dogs get cancer just like we get cancer for many reasons.
I wish people on the internet that adamantly want to argue would stop to actually read the shit they quote, instead of pretending that a half assed google search is some kind of gotcha. Your peer reviewed article that says otherwise actually doesn’t mentions cancer, not even once. It is about external and internal contamination. It doesn’t assign causality between contamination rates and dogs genetic makeup, whatsoever (it might actually be due to human intervention, feeding them with clean food). I also used cancer just as one example of the effects of radiation, it is not the only way that radiation kills. (I also fail to see what hormesis have the fuck to do with any of the discussion, but I guess you find it a fun scientificoid word that makes you sound smart).
I never said it was a genetic change, but epigenetic adaptation. As in, the things that are not in the genome but affect genome expression and are inherited. There’s a ton of studies on these dogs, they all point to a higher rate of genetic differentiation and fast adaptation due to environmental pressure factors like isolation and inbreeding. It’s not just the radiation, it’s what happens when you let a bunch of domestic animals back into nature.
They are surviving in big part due to human care, which is the only thing protecting them from other stuff like hypothermia during winter and parvovirus. That kills them at a higher rate than radioactive contamination. Yet they still seem to be breeding so fast that neutering them is a perfectly valid option.
But anyways, back to the main point. Here’s the main reason they are good for genetic studies:
Our examination of dogs from Ukraine and neighboring countries in Eastern Europe revealed that both the Chernobyl City and CNPP populations have a similar genetic structure to free-breeding dog populations, reflecting a history of admixture, indicating that dogs have existed in the Chernobyl region for a long period of time, potentially since the disaster, or even earlier. Genetic differentiation from other purebred and free-breeding dogs suggests that the Chernobyl populations have a unique genomic signature, supporting their utility in further genomic studies – The dogs of Chernobyl: Demographic insights into populations inhabiting the nuclear exclusion zone
They seem to be genetically distinct enough that they might have some adaptations:
We detected a significant degree of genetic differentiation between the two populations of dogs sampled at the Nuclear Power Plant and in Chernobyl City, along with almost complete clustering at the population level through the DAPC and PCA, corroborating trends that were seen in identity by state clustering analyses in Spatola et al. (in press). […]
we identified genomic regions that have diverse allele frequencies between the populations, including candidate genes such as xrcc4 and cntnap2. Our findings are likely to inform future studies, where we intend to search these genomic regions and candidate genes for variants, novel and previously documented, to further evaluate the degree of local adaptation within the Nuclear Power Plant and Chernobyl City populations. – Population dynamics and genome-wide selection scan for dogs in Chernobyl
So, in summary, the current consensus is:
It’s possible that the dogs that survived long enough to breed already had genetic traits that increased their ability to survive. So perhaps there was extreme selective pressure at the start, and then the dogs at the power plant just remained separate from the city population. Investigating that question is an important next step that we are now working on. – Deep Dive Into Genome of Dogs Within Chornobyl Exclusion Zone Shows Genetic Differences Are Not Due to Mutations
So I reiterate my point. Dogs are no less no more complex than humans. Just like everything, this is survivorship bias. The dogs of Chernobyl are simply the descendants of the dogs that didn’t die. It’s ok to not be an expert at something, I’m not a biologist either (nor a nuclear physicist). But at least I bother to read sources before spouting BS on the internet. Shout out to my bro who actually is a biologist and taught me this factoid and shared the links to these studies.
Also, are you really suggesting that evolution doesn’t occur in small scale? 50 years is 30 generations of dogs, that’s a shit ton of breeding.
I see what the issue is here, is that you are upset with me saying that humans have a more complex genome, and not about the discussion of radiation effecting different species of animals, I see. Yes I will concede that the term “complex” for genome is not a good descriptor. There are a lot of reasons why humans are mor susceptible to radiation with immediate effects, and that is not due to “complexity.” However, it is still true that we are more susceptible than dogs, and it is still true that the dogs of Chernobyl are better at handling radiation than humans and generally are OK with the fallout there.
However go fuck yourself for the introduction to your comment. “Don’t read the shit they quote” when the paper we both cited proved our points that we were making.
What is a “graphite cooled reactor”? Chernobyl’s RMBK is water cooled. As are the vast majority of them (one notable exception being the UK AGRs cooled by CO2). The RMBK is graphite moderated but that is very different to being cooled.
And we know there were two explosions in the accident… I don’t understand why you are acting like its a big secret?
And you can’t keep going on about the ‘single atom of plutonium’ stuff without providing evidence. Because even if it is even slightly credible I’ll wager that the effects seen aren’t quite what you are making them out as.
I don’t think it would be any kind of shock to find out governments and the USSR in particular would be not entirely truthful about stuff but the majority of this… ramble… is all conspiracy theory and making weird conclusions based on a statement with no source.
People when they hear nuclear industry propaganda.
People when they hear fossil fuel industry propaganda.
Dont touch my propaganda 😡
Mom says it’s my turn on the propaganda.
-“But solar panels destroy the environment!!1!”
Nuclear industry propaganda? Lol, lmao even
Outside a few specialized company, nuclear industry doesn’t even exist
https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/nuclear-energy-market-40848
As per Market Research Future analysis, the Nuclear Energy Market Size was estimated at 234.09 USD Billion in 2024. The Nuclear Energy industry is projected to grow from 245.38 USD Billion in 2025 to 392.9 USD Billion by 2035, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.8% during the forecast period 2025 - 2035
Where else does the utterly false idea that nuclear waste is a solved problem come from, then?
Exactly. As if a poison that last longer than humans can plan for - or even realistically imagine - could ever be a solved problem.
indestructible
Yeah, I think I’ve heard that claim before. It seems like every time that claim was made something came along to prove it wrong.
Indestructible cask underground is for cowards. In the US we don’t have a long term storage site, so we just ship it around to different temporary sites.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution
As far as I am aware there is no final storage for atomic waste anywhere. France wants to build one in 2030 but we’ll see then I guess.
2 just from tom scott
https://youtu.be/aoy_WJ3mE50
https://youtu.be/PB7HT3BZLzMAccording to Wikipedia the first site goes live somewhen this year running for 70 years and the second one was a major groundwater breach that has been cleaned up and is being monitored.
I’d hardly call these success stories. I love nuclear but it’s hard to sugarcoat the long standing issues.
Yeah, but at least everyone else has long term storage solutions even if it’s not permanent. The US just has short term storage where you can only keep it for a number of years before having to shuffle it to a different short term storage facility via train or semi truck.
Huh. We don’t either in Germany, but I assumed, it was largely because the whole place is inhabitated. Is there not some desert or Alaska or something in the US, where no one minds?
We actually have a perfect place for it in the yucca mountains that was designated in the 1980s, but the actual construction of it has been held up since then thanks to nimby shit.
I would love to see the US head towards nuclear power, but I’m not hopeful it’s ever going to happen. By design the federal government just doesn’t have the power to mandate a state to do anything it doesn’t want too, and a functional electric grid powered by nuclear would require more federal control than what is possible in the foreseeable future.
Our government was designed to grant corporations and the aristocratic class to be able to exert a huge amount of influence over the government. They have decided that it’s a lot more profitable to not progress past fossil fuels.
Well, nuclear power, at least for now, is quite expensive. As long as no new technological breakthrough comes along, it’s simply cheaper to use wind and solar as main power producers. Of course, this has its own problem in the form of power storage, but at least we already have the technology for this.
Power storage is only half of it. Most grids transmit AC power, and in order for that you need SOMETHING in the grid that provides a stable frequency aka a stable prime moves whose speed is unaffected by changes in load. That can be provided by fossil fuel plants, nuclear plants, or hydropower (as long as shifting climate patterns continue to keep reservoirs full).
Wind turbines don’t have a consistent enough prime mover (the wind, so unreliable that it’s a metaphor for constant, rapid change). Solar panels supply DC power, so another option is figuring out long range DC power transmission, which is what China is doing I believe. It’s an incredibly costly and resources intensive solution though.
Power generation is more complicated than just making something spin. You have to consider loading, reactive load, what to do with excess power during off peak hours, balancing load between multiple power sources. Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis is going to take more than “just build renewable sources”.
It also doesn’t help that our infrastructure is out of date due to refusing upgrades because they included green sources (Trump preventing off hore wind farms, for example, also prevents infrastructure upgrades) and/or NIMBYism.
Source: I work in nuclear power.
I didn’t want to trivialize the problems with switching to greener alternatives; I just wanted to say that we don’t need some ‘future tech’ to get it done. All we need is what is already known and implemented somewhere in the world.
Also building more nuclear facilities - without any groundbreaking new improvements - is more expensive than the alternative.
Hey I agree with you, but,
The last nuke plant we built in the US was designed in the 1980’s thought, so those ground breaking improvements are here.
Still better than coal
At least we can trust the fossil fuel industries storage place.
A warehouse in the Ohio River valley’s flood zone?
Well, it’s actually worse… They store it in the air we breathe.
It’s both actually.
Indestructible is a keyword in Magic the Gathering. I do not see it working the same way in engineering.
In Australia, all the people who were vehemently against solar and were calling for building of more coal fired power plants have lately shifted to saying, that Australia needs multiple nuclear power plants.
Whilst I don’t doubt it probably wasn’t a good thing to have around 20 years ago, solar and wind are so much cheaper and I know a good percentage of homes have made the switch to solar in recent years.
The only politicians I’m seeing which are calling out for nuclear seem to be very closely aligned with resources companies.
Mining shills who want to spend $10b on concrete manufacturing and uranium mines.
What makes me laugh is that we could still invest that into mining, get the resources to make solar panels and batteries, then stop because battery recycling is a thing. They can still get rich off it. They just have a set period the mining is necessary while we get the amount required. But by then they could buy the solar farms and generate infinite income from the power generation… Are they all just bad at capitalism or something?
Dunno if we should be making any broad conclusions about solar based off Australia
Nuclear isn’t the best anymore. Batteries, solar and wind are cheaper and take way less time to build
Nuclear isn’t the best anymore.
By $/kwh, green energy is some of the most efficient on the plant. By $/sqft, nothing tops nuclear. That’s why we’re not throwing sails and solar panels up on aircraft carriers.
Transitioning from bunker fuel to nuclear batteries on commercial ships would be a huge improvement to the global fleet. That’s something we can’t expect solar/wind to match.
That’s why we’re not throwing sails and solar panels up on aircraft carriers.
Ok, but these are things that we don’t need, that are literally murdering people and destroying the planet.
There must be a better example.
these are things that we don’t need
These are big boats that need large amounts of power to cross vast oceans. You could say the same about any number of merchant vessels, which primarily consume bunker fuel. If you could operate an oversized sailboat to manage bulk shipping cheaper than the current models, people would do it in a heartbeat.
There must be a better example.
Take your pick.
That’s true, aircraft carriers and stealth submarines use nuclear power, but still prohibitively expensive for the shipping industry. Commercial shipping is picking up on wind with flettner rotor systems, sails and kites, it’s still only modestly decreasing fuel use but future ships could take more advantage of wind.
Not sure what the future will look like but it could be that some type of redux flow battery and electricity could be used to power commercial ships. I’m pretty sure at some scale the redux flow system could save costs after energy prices drop.
Don’t forget, that they produce immediately useable energy. No heat loss, due to steam turbines.
And then there is the timespan that nuclear waste stays harmful. OPs “indestructable” container have to stay indestructable for millions of years.
If we assume 40 years as a generation, that will be 50,000 generations. The whole history of mankind is only 400 generations.
Edit: Added sources for everyone unable to use the Internet for its intended use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#cite_note-3
Half lifes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_uranium
Estimating a generation of 40 years was generous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_time
History and pre history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history
And then there is the timespan that nuclear waste stays harmful. OPs “indestructable” container have to stay indestructable for millions of years.
More like between 30 and 1000 years. Still a long time but you’re being pretty hyperbolic suggesting millions.
The time radioactive waste must be stored depends on the type of waste and radioactivity.
The back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, mostly spent fuel rods, contains fission products that emit beta and gamma radiation, and actinides that emit alpha particles, such as uranium-234 (half-life 245 thousand years), neptunium-237 (2.144 million years), plutonium-238 (87.7 years) and americium-241 (432 years), and even sometimes some neutron emitters such as californium (half-life of 898 years for californium-251). These isotopes are formed in nuclear reactors.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#cite_note-3
have to stay indestructable for millions of years.
If we assume 40 years as a generation, that will be 50,000 generations. The whole history of mankind is only 400 generations.
Talk about pulling numbers out of your ass…
Half-life refers to the time it takes for a radioactive isotope to decay to half its original quantity. This process is not linear but exponential, 10 half lifes are necessary to reach only 0,1% of radioactivity.
Plutonium-239, a highly toxic isotope with a half-life of 24,100 years. Plutonium-239 would still retain 12.5% of its radioactivity after 72,300 years.
Uranium-235: has a half life of 703.8 million years.
All these isotopes are byproducts of nuclear energy production.
These timespans are geologically relevant. There cannot be an estimation about the changes that occur in these.
Sources: Half lifes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_uranium
Estimating a generation of 40 years was generous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_time
History and pre history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history
q. e. d.
And they already exist in the planet. It’s not like these materials are magicked into existence. They’re already here.
We refine it. We use it. Then we put the used material back into the ground, in a place that’s probably safer and more out of the way than it was before it got mined.
We purify the material, yes.
If the ore grade is lower (e.g., 0.05%), you’d need ~280–300 kg of ore per kg of U-235.
When a hypothetical water contamination would occur in a natural deposit with a 0.05% density, it would contaminate water less than if it would occur with a purified source.
“The dose makes the poison.” You may have heard the proverb.
The higher the dosage, the higher the potential health risk. Which is exactly why the purified material is so much more dangerous than the natural occuring sources.
You also assume controlled environments, deep in old salt mines. Have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#cite_note-VCR_2003-02-19-33
“Lopez described the cleanup of the heavily polluted sodium burn pit, a six-acre site where Rocketdyne disposed of massive amounts of radioactive waste. The modus operandi included chucking barrels of radioactive sodium into the sludgy pond and firing a gun at the canisters, which would then explode, releasing radioactive contaminants into the air.Lopez said that the pit has now been excavated ten to 12 feet down to the bedrock, resulting in the removal of 22,000 cubic yards of soil.”
They did so, because the barrels wouldn’t sink to the ground of the pond.
There isn’t even a guarantee, for correct disposal. One could pocket life changing money by chucking barrels into the sea, today.
But that was not my point, my point was we cannot assume a controlled environment, even to the best of our abilities and knowledge, in timespans we haven’t even been able to measure our own history in.
I am not totally against nuclear energy, it has the highest energy density possible. Heavier atoms aren’t stable enough. The periodic table ends with these elements for a reason.
But the potential dangers, stemming from them are unimaginable. Because they exceed our very own existence as a species.
