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Last week, the subject of nuclear power came up on the culture war thread. As with all my other online places, all the comments when I looked were pro-nuclear. It seems that every place I see online has a pro-nuclear community.
I'm more of a fence-sitting non-expert, so I thought I would take this opportunity to ask about the give the anti-nuclear concerns that I don't usually see the pro-nuclear community addressing.
First off, safety: it's true that nuclear has a much better safety record so far, but nuclear seems to have the potential for black swan disasters in a way that coal is not. Is this true? If so, the record so far is not a good way to analyze risk. If nuclear power comes into common use, we should expect to have the power plants occasionally sabotaged or targeted in war and frequently run under oversight even less competent than the Soviet Union was, among other things. To bring me away from fence-sitting towards pro-nuclear, I would need to see a safety argument that addresses the disaster possibilities both accidental and intentional.
Second, what's up with nuclear waste? Specifically, if the waste is really a nothing burger, as I see argued often, why do I see (other) experts talking about how to communicate how bad it is to people ~10k years in the future. What are those other experts thinking and why are they wrong?
Here you go: https://gordianknotbook.com/download/why-nuclear-power-has-been-a-flop/.
The guy also runs a substack that has the same information in easier bite-sized pieces: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/.
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Safety: The Chernobyl reactor was an ancient Soviet design. Modern designs are much safer and more resistant to human error. With a failsafe design, there is no possibility of a black swan event. A black swan event is by definition unpredictable, but for a reactor it is in fact possible to predict and account for all possible failure modes.
As for military attacks on nuclear plants, the very worst that could happen is a Chernobyl-type scenario where a city-sized area is contaminated. There is no global risk. Most likely, even in a direct strike on a reactor, the contamination wouldn't be nearly as bad. Nuclear plants have insane security, so a terrorist attack or sabotage couldn't do very much. And it should be noted that hydro plants are also vulnerable to attacks (and even random failures) that could result in large-scale destruction, including thousands of direct and immediate deaths.
Waste: The warnings for people 10,000 years in the future are in case civilization collapses and humans basically revert to the bronze age. I don't know why anyone would take this seriously.
Nuclear waste is only considered extremely dangerous because of double standards. Burning coal produces radioactive ash. If the same standards were applied to coal as are applied to nuclear energy, the ash would be classified as low-level radioactive waste and would need special procedures to dispose of it. In reality, it is mixed into cement to build roads. High-level waste, which actually is dangerous, exists, but there is so little of it that it can just be stored somewhere securely.
Does that "worst that could happen" include the scenario of using a nuclear bomb against a nuclear reactor? That seems to me like it would produce a substantial jump in global background radiation, although of course nowhere near enough to actually give everyone radiation sickness.
Like, obviously this is out of reach for a terrorist, because lol terrorists don't have nukes, but it stuck out to me as one of two obvious ways to raise global background radiation by a lot (the other being "have WWIII in which thousands of nukes get used") and I'd be interested to know whether I was mistaken.
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I think the main rebuttal against all of the arguments against nuclear is that it would most likely be an intermediate step which allows bootstrapping to other methods of power generation. So we'd only be 'exposed' to the tail risks for like maybe a century at most before we have e.g. fusion energy (a guy can dream), orbital solar collection, some really ambitious geothermal energy projects, or if we're really lucky we jump towards becoming Kardashev II.
We need a surplus and absolute abundance of cheap energy to get other methods of energy production off the ground and towards the scale necessary to replace ALL of the messy, less efficient sources we've relied on and built infrastructure around.
There's no version of this where we get to decent outgrowth of renewables without burning FUCKTONS of fossil fuels or have abundant nuclear.
Nuclear is currently our only attainable way to get such an abundance.
Perhaps the bigger risk to consider is how having more nuclear reactors around starts to increase the chances someone intentionally sabotages one in a way that can't be easily undone.
I don't even have a solid answer, because we can secure these things heavily but the more they proliferate the greater an 'attack surface' they present.
Why do you dream of fusion? My understanding is that it has similar characteristics to fission as an energy source - high capex, low fuel costs.
It's not quite proven that we can sustain a fusion reaction AND get net-positive energy out of it.
I mean, I think we'll crack it, that's why I dream of it, but until then we're stuck with what we have.
I'm saying, even if we get fusion working, my understanding is that it won't have any major advantages over the kinds of fission reactors we have today already.
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Here's my counter question: why do people talk about nuclear waste having a half-life as if it's a bad thing? Unlike basically every other toxic waste generated by things that don't get a second glance, it actually becomes less dangerous over time.
I think most pesticides we use now break down much faster than old arsenic and lead based pesticides that left trace amounts in the soil and water.
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Western Europe's track record on nuclear power is very safe. But America's obsession with diversity and overall failing infrastructure makes me hesitant to embrace the idea full-on. DEI is not a risk to society if your business is involved with tech widgets, but a nuclear reactor? Maybe not. Perhaps Elon Musk would pull it off if he were in charge.
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There are three broad classes of radioactive nuclear waste (as opposed to material only relevant in the context of process accidents, such as Iodine-131), and one other class that's kinda been stuffed into the edge sideways.
Random garbage that has been somewhere near an NRC regulated environment. Mine tailings, spilled coolant fluids, used safety gear, so on. They're regularly bad stuff for other reasons, like lead or other heavy metal poisons, but in terms of radiation they're not very radioactive and sometimes not radioactive at all. Were they are radioactive, they have very low bioavailability and short half-lives. Most (though not all!) low-level waste falls into this category, including all Class A and nearly all Class B in the United States, there's a variety of EU classifications.
Very slightly radioactive stuff. Most class C or more-than-C (in the US) and intermediate waste (in EU) falls here, as do a few other industrial process stuff. This is generally actually radioactive and can have either very long or very short half-lives, but by definition it is not at risk of thermal runaway or criticality incident in any situation, and lacks other traits making it particularly dangerous to humans (ie, not very bioavailable). You don't actually get that much from nuclear power plants, so a lot of this is the aftermath of plutonium weapons production, but some amount is unavoidable. This stuff shouldn't be mixed into paving cement or pipe metal, but it's still generally pretty uninteresting.
Ultra-long-term waste. This mostly comes directly from 'spent' nuclear fuel, though there are some research and industrial sources, or production during criticality incidents. This is the stuff that could last hundreds of thousands of years and be meaningfully radioactive at the end of it, and it has some special safety concerns for storage as putting too much in one place can cause critical events. The good thing is that this stuff is as much an opportunity as a problem: it's mostly made of still-usable fuel, or material with other common uses (eg fuel for radiothermal generators, smoke detectors, food radiopastuerization, some industrial processes). Only a very tiny minority are genuine waste and these are generally pretty easy to isolate and store; we just don't separate them right now for political reasons. (Though there are some complicated parts to doing so: among other things, they come out of the 'oven' very hot and stay hot for years afterward, and by definition have a high risk of criticality incident if not stored well during processing.)
The actually hard one: material with moderate half-lives (10-100 years), high bioavailability, and moderate production amounts. For uranium-fueled plants, think Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, with a small scattering of other chemicals. Like the ultra-long-term waste, this mostly comes from spent fuel. These materials aren't readily useful for further fuel cycles, and aren't economical to use industrially (or don't have enough demand), and while they technically can be transmuted into other materials that are less obnoxious there's no practically economical way to do so that's been demonstrated. Deep geological storage is overkill -- the same thing that makes them dangerous means that they burn out faster -- but it does need further storage and constraints than normal industrial waste.
The steelman for anti-nuclear activists largely highlight two of these four categories. The ultra-long-term waste has special safety concerns and could be used in a matter of dangerous ways, and anti-nuclear activists regularly operate under the assumption that we would not reprocess or reuse it (tbf, we aren't right now!). Meanwhile, strontium-90 and cesium-137 are genuinely bad stuff, and while mixing it into glass works okay, we're not doing that very well either; that most of the radioactivity only lasts a few hundred years or so isn't actually that reassuring for people alive today.
((To be less charitable, some anti-nuclear activists lump all four together, so they can use the volume or mass amounts for the piles of scrap lead shielding or precautionary-principled dirt as if it were glowing corite.))
On the flip side, from the pro-nuclear perspective the reasons we're not solving these problems right now largely revolve around political decisions and simply not needing to solve any. All of the spent fuel ever produced could fit volumetrically into a football field and not even get that deep (though this would be a very bad idea!). As it is, we've sat it in a few dozen ponds across the planet, instead, none of which have gotten very full. Even including the nasty intermediate waste still just isn't that much material, and it's very easy to keep it away from any place people go. That's especially true given the security situation around these plants: there's an old joke about how unsafe waste fuel cooling ponds can be to swim in, because you'd be filled with bullets before you reached the water.
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Nuclear waste isn't really a "nothing burger", but the stuff that they claim we'd need to warn people 10k years in the future about is about as dangerous as many toxic but non-radioactive industrial chemicals that we use all the time (ie, ingestion or long-term exposure is bad, but just being around it isn't too dangerous) without worrying about such long-term disposal. Focusing on radioactive waste is therefore special pleading. They will also usually not make this clear to people, letting their audience infer that the long-lived waste is actually much more dangerous than it is by emphasizing the more severe dangers of short-lived waste products.
Doubly so when you consider there are already ticking time bombs for the assumed paleofuturistic tribes in the form of mining after-effects- there are lots of earthen dams holding back toxic waste that without maintenance will eventually let go (to say nothing of leach into groundwater) that are probably going to be more of an obstacle to future Fred Flintstone than a landfill inaccessible without a technology level capable of detecting radiological hazards in the first place.
It's partially nerd sniping, but this "what if" is so completely ludicrous that it isn't worth the time thinking about.
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The waste that is a problem in an eon is about as much as a problem as many other compounds that have different mechanisms of action but are far more common. Half-life is half-life and there is only so much energy stored.
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It feels like that, but the number of direct, identifiable deaths from nuclear power plant accidents is tiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
Fukushima, which is the big one in living memory for most people, killed, directly…one person. Maybe. Arguably.
Now, scale that way up, and who knows. Maybe there is a big black swan lurking out there, but it’s hard to predict that…and it’s hard to predict how a more mature nuclear reactor industry could design systems that are much more fault tolerance.
It may only be "in living memory" for us geriatrics, but there's another one that you probably should know of, since HBO made a miniseries about it which was released shortly after the Game of Thrones final episode. You may have heard of "Chernobyl".
(some extreme geriatrics such as myself also remember Three Mile Island, but it killed nobody)
How many people has Chernobyl killed? Hydroelectic dams have killed many thousands:
St. Francis Dam, 1928, 431 people
Dnipro Dam blown up by RKKA, 1941, 3000 people? 20000 people? (no one counted Soviet civilians during WWII)
Möhne Reservoir bombed by RAF, 1943, 1579 people
Vajont Dam, 1963, 1917 people
Banqiao Dam, 1975, 26000 people killed directly (PRC number one!)
Machchhu Dam, 1979, at least 1800 people killed
Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam, 2009, 75 people killed
I think the argument, at least as presented in the Miniseries, is that without the massive sacrifices of the people responding to the Chernobyl disaster the actual impact would have been cataclysmic.
So its one of those "it only turned out okay because a lot of people were aware of the danger and worked hard to prevent it" things.
Unfortunately, a lot of the responses were... completely pointless. One example is the... boron? (I forget) they tried to dump via helicopter onto the core. Almost all of it missed the core entirely, and did nothing.
My understanding is a lot of the higher-ups knew their efforts were doing nothing, but that people had to see them at least pretending that they were doing something that worked.
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That part was a lie/fantasy. Maybe plausible in story-lie but not describing reality at all.
Even intentional release of all irradiated material directly into atmosphere by deliberately mixing it with flammable material and burning it would not cause what was described there.
Not doing anything with burning power plant would be even less problematic.
(yes, it would kill many people - but would be nowhere close to various fantasy stories about irradiated magical ghouls roaming Europe that some present as actually likely)
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Ha, I knew I was risking that comment…but I am about to turn 40, and I don’t remember Chernobyl, so I think it’s right up there with dancing the Charleston now.
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Nuclear does have tail risks, but those tail risks are not really that significant. On the whole, you probably get more exposure to radiation through breathing in slightly radioactive particulates from coal burning and mining than you do from nuclear power. The fact is, there is no such thing as perfectly safe power. People die from air pollution, they die from mining rare metals for solar power, they die in steel mills making wind turbines, they die on oil rigs and on dams. And, if the predictions regarding climate change are credible, many people will die from that too.
Because this is what politicians and environmentalists demand as a way to make nuclear power uneconomical. But the fact is that even if we decided to cordon off a few square kilometers of some worthless desert, that would be nothing compared to the huge areas that need to be mined to supply coal, or the areas needed to generate substantial amounts of solar power, or the land flooded when dams are built.
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As someone who's pro-nuclear, the best argument I've heard against it is that we have lost the expertise at the state level to build these, and we can't trust corporations to handle something with such a significant downside risk.
My understanding is that yes it's gonna be radioactive for a while, but if you stick it in the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, it's not going to spread very far. And we have a loooot of space, at least in the U.S.
...
Did Oak Ridge National Lab build production plants before? Generally I am certain most people doing the construction were privately owned.
Most Western PWRs were built by General Electric and Westinghouse, and while the meme is hilarious, several of the machining and construction constraints for nuclear plants are rather specialized engineering, including to Westinghouse's recent troubles.
I don't think that's an unsolvable problem -- demonstrably, it wasn't before, and modern metallurgy has progressed tremendously -- but there's some annoying logistics and processes problems.
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If we let corporations could build nuclear plants, but make it mandatory for all the executives to live next to the plant, you may be able to get them to build it with significant safety features in place.
My understanding is that people who work in nuclear plants are a lot less worried about them than the general populace. And to a lesser extent, most people who live near them as they are now aren't that worried, either.
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I like this plan. Hell make all the important employees live next to it.
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