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The political problem with Nuclear shows one of the main problems with democracy.
When downside risk is a single major event, and not lots of spread out minor events than it becomes a lot more important in people's minds. Even when the costs of the minor events adds up to more than the costs of the major event.
This is clear on a bunch of metrics with nuclear, where the radiation released from a nuclear plant is less than the radiation released by a typical coal fired plant. Other metrics like deaths, safety incidents, spills, and particulate pollution are all the same.
I think this is true.
The anecdote above about Microsoft restarting 3 Mile Island is evidence for it as well.
When one party (Microsoft) gets the benefits of nuclear power, then they have an incentive to use it. But when the benefits are spread out over the population, there isn't the same incentive.
Tragedy of the commons, I suppose.
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I'm generally pro nuclear and think it should be persued as an energy source, but I recall a friend who was anti nuclear saying that there are issues with long term storage of nuclear waste. I'm not by any means an expert, but if we ramped up nuclear production could this be a long term problem?
There were like 40 years ago. These days we have ways of "recycling" the "spent" fuel.
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Exactly how long-term?
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No. The waste byproducts of nuclear energy are, by both volume and mass trivially small. You will see about 1/4 of the way down that link the waste products of 28 years of commercial reactor operation, this is immediately followed by the note that 97% of those waste products are recyclable. You can also see the lifespan of the remaining 3%, the truly nasty stuff that spews hard gamma radiation- 600 years. In 600 years, the nastiest, most lethal chunks of spent nuclear fuel have decayed to a sufficient degree that by current federal law you would require no protection to handle them, you could simply pick them up with your bare hands.
So, while 600 years is not nothing, its also not the "millenia and millenia" of danger that alarmist propaganda spews.
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You can just put it in a secure compound in the middle of nowhere. Places like Russia manage to do this correctly, the US can do it easily(we do not have a shortage of middle of nowhere).
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There was at some point issues like that. Nowadays its more true that if something is releasing radiation, it can be used as a nuclear fuel source.
Similar concept with engines and biofuels. Early engines and modern hyper focused engines need clean perfect fuel for burning. Then along comes the diesel engine, and the fuel requirement is instead more like "will it burn". My loose understanding is that modern nuclear plant designs are closer to diesel engines.
Storage of nuclear waste fuel is not difficult, unless you choose to make it difficult. Which is what the environmental lobby has been trying to do for a long time.
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But even nuclear disasters aren't that bad. Chernobyl killed a number of people somewhere in the double digits - easily within the bounds of disasters people consider perfectly tolerable for other things.
Nuclear power is the victim of bad vibes, not of anything so legible as its downside risks being localized rather than diffuse. Those bad vibes lead to insanity like the Linear No Threshold model of radiation injury that get you the "thousands dead" headlines - even though that model is, frankly, utter bollocks.
Also, Chernobyl, due to cost, used channel reactors that the West was already avoiding due to safety issues inherent to their design. The most-famous nuclear disaster was entirely avoidable when it occurred. Though I suppose political and economic pressures and human error pose some level of risk anywhere.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I've also heard it suggested that the RBMK reactors were distinctly designed to be dual-use for plutonium (weapons) production. I'm not sure if that is somehow more difficult in a Western-style PWR, though. I know some of the (early) Western weapons projects (Oak Ridge, Windscale) used similar unpressureized reactors.
Being able to do partial replacement of fuel rods without shutting down a reactor is critical for bulk weapons-grade fuel enrichment, both to avoid the long cooldown processes from waiting for xenon poisoning to burn off, and because of increasingly bad plutonium isotope ratios caused by continued neutron flux exposure after a critical phase. RBMKs can do that, in ways that most other commonly-used reactor designs can't (while still having enough water pressure to generate industrially useful power, unlike the fully air-cooled Windscale and air-cooled-in-all-but-the-technical-sense X-10). See the Canadian CANDU reactor for a high-pressure variant of enrichment reactor.
While the RBMK wasn't finalized until after the USSR had started scaling back plutonium production, it's very plausible that the administration wanted to keep it as an option, especially as a 'deniable' option. That said, hot-fuel cycling does also have industrial and civil benefits, most directly in being able to provide slightly better uptime even with traditional fuel life cycles. And while some of the necessary compromises (most overtly the minimal secondary containment vessel aka building roof) probably made the disaster worse, most of them didn't make it happen to start with.
On the flip side, it was also much cheaper, and further corners were cut beyond the necessary minima for the design. Chernobyl's best known for the lackluster control rod design, but the extremely high void coefficient was entirely a cost-cutting measure and played a bigger role in the disaster starting. The physical containment being a simple generic building was unavoidable given the requirement for a big refueling crane, but it didn't need to be a glorified warehouse roof. The sketchy SCADA system was a matter of construction and development speed. So on.
If I had to bet, I'd say the costs (and speed of construction) were a bigger driver, but may not have been the only one.
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I am trusting Serhii Plokhy‘s book on Chernobyl regarding the USSR’s preference for cheaper reactors being the deciding factor. I’m not a nuclear engineer, either, so happy to consider additional aspects.
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Yeah I can see this. It's similar to the idea of optics in environmental stuff. If an animal is cute they get orders of magnitude more attention and funding to help preserve them even if they aren't nearly as important to the environment as some ugly bug.
When emotions come into play over large numbers of people things can get pretty wonky.
The US just fed 5 trillion dollars to the fire because of mass hysteria over an uncommon cold and only suffered 20% inflation as a consequence.
If we actually wanted to build out nuclear, we would. We don't, because we can afford not to, and by the time we can't afford not to the US will be sufficiently Brazilified/South Africanized that it won't matter anyway.
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