Oposition to nuclear is much older, it started is oposition to nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon tests and in generation was part of the global peace movements and anti-cold war and anti-Vietnam war movements.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
Degrowthers just believed climate scientists that there is a problem and then believed climate deniers when they said none of the solutions work.
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
The solution was, is and always will be nuclear power. Electrification is a misdirection so you won't support actual solutions. For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear. And without ammonia in industrial quantities we can't feed everyone because its used to make fertilizer. This is one of several things we get from fossil fuels (and could get from nuclear) but we can't get from electricity alone. Then there is the extra inefficiencies from electricity for things we do with power that aren't kinetic.
Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.
> For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear.
This is wrong for two reasons.
One: you can make heat with electricity from renewables sources, if that were necessary.
Two: you don't need heat because you can make ammonia with green hydrogen from electrolysis then follow the standard Haber-Bosch process. The normal fossil route does this too but gets the hydrogen by splitting fossil gas and vents the waste CO2.
Nuclear power is inherently part of the electric spectrum. I really hope you're not arguing with me on that. Solar and wind are as well, but we will need plants and physical batteries, and nuclear is a big part of that base power to pull from.
Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.
Less doesn't have to mean less comfort. There's a lot of unnecessary consumption these days. People buying stuff they never use. Stuff that breaks and can't be repaired even though the owner would prefer that.
And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.
It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.
It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?
PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.
It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
> if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
It's not objectively bad, but so unpopular that it would require tyranny to implement. Living fully cleanly and like a monk makes a few people very happy with a sense of purpose, but it gets in the way of everyone else's priorities, which is to survive day-to-day.
Living without AC in a warm summer is one example. It feels like a first world inconvenience to the Green types, that we should all learn to accept. Good luck with democratically convincing everyone else - you'd need authoritarian for a true success in keeping everyone "living with less."
> I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
It's perfectly understandable, if you allow that most peoples' understanding of nuclear safety is not perfect. Chernobyl and 3 mile island, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki- atomic power's dangers get a lot more press than when it works quietly and reliably.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.
Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
This revisionist history about military and civilian nuclear being two completely different spheres is getting tiresome.
They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.
There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.
Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.
It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.
China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.
It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.
I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.
Reading down through that, there are exceptions built in already for research waste, medical waste, waste from "a nuclear vessel" (ie. submarines), and generic "waste that needs to buried for safety reason".
Would indigenous Australians living near proposed sites object to this plan? Are there areas of Australia with no human population? My impression is that nomadic indigenous groups used a lot of land in Australia even far from permanent settlements.
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.
That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
Well, if we extract the energy from the spicy rocks today through fission then on a time scale of over hundreds of millennia you actually end-up with less radioactivity on earth! (After 300 000 years to be accurate, and the figure I have is based on low enriched uranium based fuel as typically used in a light water reactor).
You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?
I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…
>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Its also the source of the majority of human caused exposure to ionizing radiation. Coal dust has a small amount of radioactivity (from literally the least radioactive element) and there is an amazingly large amount of coal dust.
It doesn't have to be and probably isn't. That's only because of the fear mongering you are doing. At the behest of and to the benefit of the fossil fuel extractors ironically.
Again, simple ignorance. The reason it lasts so long is that we aren't allowed to reprocess it for rather illogical reasons. Also, most of the "waste" from the reactor are either rare earths or silver (which is stable from the moment it is created) or valuable and useful gases. It can also be reprocessed and the nuclear fuel can be put into another reactor. We don't do this because of the absurdly small chance someone could get some Pu-239 (which would still require very advanced and noticeable processing). Basically things that only happen in James Bond movies and because some politician without any scientific knowledge can imagine it, it gets banned.
Climate change is a consequence of fearmongering against cleaner solutions. We have methods for handling radioactive waste safely- whether it's vitrification and dropping it in subduction zones, or just putting it deep underground in wastelands, there are lots of solutions that are infinitely better than the status quo.
Reposting a comment I read on the internet once and thought was the best answer coming from a pro-nuclear person:
> I've said this before and I'll say it as many times as is needed.
> The problem with the waste (and nuclear and radioactivity in general) is the messaging coming from those who do understand it. That is what solidifies misconceptions and fear, just as much as what anti-nuclear activists fearmongering may contribute.
> The average person believes that the mere existence of nuclear waste is an existential threat. That it's like a monster trying to break free from its container, and if it does, or if someone lets it out, it will wreak absolute devastation on the biosphere of potentially the entire Earth.
> You cannot appease or dispel such fears by insisting about how seriously waste is being handled and how we've gotten much better at it and that we've reduced the chances of accidents and contamination by this and that.
> Those arguments do not matter when the belief is that the threat is world-ending. People do not believe that the chances of accidents are zero - nor should they be expected to.
> What you need to tell people is that their inherent belief is wrong. Like it's absolutely, completely wrong on so many levels that it isn't even in the same ballpark as ludicrous. I know, I know, they will probably not believe you, at least it will take a lot of time for them to start believing you. But you have to say it nevertheless. Stop reinforcing their fears by always talking about how safe you've made the process, that will never work. Never.
This talks about nuclear waste but I think it applies even more to nuclear accidents. At least it applied to how I saw nuclear power before I actually decided to learn about it (after watching the Chernobyl series lol !)
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
There was no need for a mass evacuation because of Fukushima, it was a overreaction caused by irrational fear of nuclear power. The evacuation itself caused much harm. It is pretty silly to hype an incident that caused ZERO deaths as some kind of horrible nuclear disaster.
This must be peak nuclear cultism? Trying to downplay that any evacuation was needed to happen when Fukushima was out of control actively melting down and going through hydrogen explosions.
You are also missing that the evacuation was expanded in stages:
- Accident day: Loss of cooling, 3 km evacuation.
- 1 day after: 10 km. Followed by extended to 20 km when unit 1 exploded. Followed by unit 3 and 4 exploding as well.
What did Japan's nuclear regulators do after Fukushima? They expanded the emergency planning zone from roughly 8 - 10 km to 30 km.
Even if Fukushima killed tens of thousands of people, nuclear would still kill order of magnitute less people per kWh of energy produced than fossil fuels.
It was absolutely not almost a second Chernobyl. Saying this proves you understand very little of what happened in the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents.
Correct, because they managed to prevent it from becoming a second Chernobyl. At Chernobyl they failed to prevent it from becoming a first Chernobyl. But we don't want to keep rolling the dice just because the last time we got a 6.
No it was never possible for Fukushima to become a Chernobyl style disaster because it has a containment structure and the biggest difference is that Fukushima was basic overheating while Chernobyl was a complex power excursion of over 100GW. There was never a runaway nuclear explosion at Fukushima; it was a severe thermodynamic failure of cooling.
The end result can be the same. The disaster at Chernobyl wasn't the uncontrolled chain reaction - if that had been all that happened, the town of Chernobyl would still be considered inhabitable. The ionisation plume was pretty, but not dangerous to anyone who wasn't in it. The disaster at Chernobyl was that the building blew up (because of the chain reaction) and the explosion spread radioactive stuff for miles. Fukushima was also going to blow up, due to hydrogen gas IIRC, but they prevented it from blowing up.
You keep proving you don't understand what actually happened at Chernobyl or have a sense of scale of the energies involved. Hydrogen gas exploding is a completely different thing than a badly designed reactor instantly generating over 100 times its designed output and exploding. The hydrogen gas did explode at Fukushima and this damaged the outer building. Fukushima was a firecracker compared to Chernobyl being an actual nuclear bomb.
Oposition to nuclear is much older, it started is oposition to nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon tests and in generation was part of the global peace movements and anti-cold war and anti-Vietnam war movements.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace
Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
Degrowthers just believed climate scientists that there is a problem and then believed climate deniers when they said none of the solutions work.
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
The solution was, is and always will be nuclear power. Electrification is a misdirection so you won't support actual solutions. For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear. And without ammonia in industrial quantities we can't feed everyone because its used to make fertilizer. This is one of several things we get from fossil fuels (and could get from nuclear) but we can't get from electricity alone. Then there is the extra inefficiencies from electricity for things we do with power that aren't kinetic.
Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.
> For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear.
This is wrong for two reasons.
One: you can make heat with electricity from renewables sources, if that were necessary.
Two: you don't need heat because you can make ammonia with green hydrogen from electrolysis then follow the standard Haber-Bosch process. The normal fossil route does this too but gets the hydrogen by splitting fossil gas and vents the waste CO2.
Orange hydrogen is the new green is a recent thing also, for those that have an interest.
* (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01043-9
* (2026) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...
soon to be piloted .. with results expected to take a while.
Nuclear power is inherently part of the electric spectrum. I really hope you're not arguing with me on that. Solar and wind are as well, but we will need plants and physical batteries, and nuclear is a big part of that base power to pull from.
I was talking more about general decarbonization.
You say "degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less" like it's a bad thing
Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.
Less doesn't have to mean less comfort. There's a lot of unnecessary consumption these days. People buying stuff they never use. Stuff that breaks and can't be repaired even though the owner would prefer that.
And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.
It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.
"Less doesn't have to mean less comfort."
It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?
PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.
> Less doesn't have to mean less comfort.
In a perfect world, perhaps. In the real world, it very often does.
Yeah you drank it baby!
It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
> if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
I completely agree. That still doesn’t make degrowth a sensible position.
Nuclear power for example
It's not objectively bad, but so unpopular that it would require tyranny to implement. Living fully cleanly and like a monk makes a few people very happy with a sense of purpose, but it gets in the way of everyone else's priorities, which is to survive day-to-day.
Living without AC in a warm summer is one example. It feels like a first world inconvenience to the Green types, that we should all learn to accept. Good luck with democratically convincing everyone else - you'd need authoritarian for a true success in keeping everyone "living with less."
> I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
It's perfectly understandable, if you allow that most peoples' understanding of nuclear safety is not perfect. Chernobyl and 3 mile island, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki- atomic power's dangers get a lot more press than when it works quietly and reliably.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
The safety improvements in newer plant designs happened largely because of this opposition to the earlier less safe designs and their level of risk.
Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.
Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
This revisionist history about military and civilian nuclear being two completely different spheres is getting tiresome.
They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.
There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.
Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.
It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.
China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.
It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...
Chernobyl did deposit radioactive material over Germany. Fukushima also happened, btw., and that led to an acceleration of the exit then.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.
I suspect it's coal lobby sponsoring "green" iniviatives. Then the "green" initiatives sponsored by coal are anti-nuclear.
I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.
May need to work on this bad boy, first:
https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/c...
And of course have a chat with the traditional custodians of the land, and see if they're keen.
Reading down through that, there are exceptions built in already for research waste, medical waste, waste from "a nuclear vessel" (ie. submarines), and generic "waste that needs to buried for safety reason".
Would indigenous Australians living near proposed sites object to this plan? Are there areas of Australia with no human population? My impression is that nomadic indigenous groups used a lot of land in Australia even far from permanent settlements.
They're generally not fans of being bulldozed out of the way so a mine can get slapped in wherever Kartiya want to put one.
( eg: Noonkanbah - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/30/the-d... )
They do make agreements and keep them when they are part of the discussion from the outset and consulted for advice.
ie: find a place to make a hole that is both stable and not a significant site.
It doesn't help that more recent good faith agreements have been torpedoed by, say, Rio Tinto not keeping their word going forward.
( in recent follow up news from an epic Rio FUBAR - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-25/juukan-gorge-archaeol... )
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
It was Chuck Schumer who torpedoed Yucca mt. Vegas had nothing to do with it.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.
That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
You are being silly!
You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia
Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption
Well, if we extract the energy from the spicy rocks today through fission then on a time scale of over hundreds of millennia you actually end-up with less radioactivity on earth! (After 300 000 years to be accurate, and the figure I have is based on low enriched uranium based fuel as typically used in a light water reactor).
You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?
I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…
>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
What do you base that on?
There is no place on earth that is geological stable for the required time periods
We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future
That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence
What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future
For current consumption
Unbelievable
A) This isn't true
B) We could reprocess the waste
C) There are reactors that produce 95% less waste, regulation prevents their testing and deployment
D) All the nuclear waste in the US (the country with by far the most NPPs) fits in 1 Olympic sized pool
Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Its also the source of the majority of human caused exposure to ionizing radiation. Coal dust has a small amount of radioactivity (from literally the least radioactive element) and there is an amazingly large amount of coal dust.
Oh great because the practical alternative, fossil fuels, definitely doesn't burden anyone after us.
Ten generations, maybe.
Nuclear: hundreds
It doesn't have to be and probably isn't. That's only because of the fear mongering you are doing. At the behest of and to the benefit of the fossil fuel extractors ironically.
Again, simple ignorance. The reason it lasts so long is that we aren't allowed to reprocess it for rather illogical reasons. Also, most of the "waste" from the reactor are either rare earths or silver (which is stable from the moment it is created) or valuable and useful gases. It can also be reprocessed and the nuclear fuel can be put into another reactor. We don't do this because of the absurdly small chance someone could get some Pu-239 (which would still require very advanced and noticeable processing). Basically things that only happen in James Bond movies and because some politician without any scientific knowledge can imagine it, it gets banned.
Climate change is a consequence of fearmongering against cleaner solutions. We have methods for handling radioactive waste safely- whether it's vitrification and dropping it in subduction zones, or just putting it deep underground in wastelands, there are lots of solutions that are infinitely better than the status quo.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
Reposting a comment I read on the internet once and thought was the best answer coming from a pro-nuclear person:
> I've said this before and I'll say it as many times as is needed.
> The problem with the waste (and nuclear and radioactivity in general) is the messaging coming from those who do understand it. That is what solidifies misconceptions and fear, just as much as what anti-nuclear activists fearmongering may contribute.
> The average person believes that the mere existence of nuclear waste is an existential threat. That it's like a monster trying to break free from its container, and if it does, or if someone lets it out, it will wreak absolute devastation on the biosphere of potentially the entire Earth.
> You cannot appease or dispel such fears by insisting about how seriously waste is being handled and how we've gotten much better at it and that we've reduced the chances of accidents and contamination by this and that.
> Those arguments do not matter when the belief is that the threat is world-ending. People do not believe that the chances of accidents are zero - nor should they be expected to.
> What you need to tell people is that their inherent belief is wrong. Like it's absolutely, completely wrong on so many levels that it isn't even in the same ballpark as ludicrous. I know, I know, they will probably not believe you, at least it will take a lot of time for them to start believing you. But you have to say it nevertheless. Stop reinforcing their fears by always talking about how safe you've made the process, that will never work. Never.
This talks about nuclear waste but I think it applies even more to nuclear accidents. At least it applied to how I saw nuclear power before I actually decided to learn about it (after watching the Chernobyl series lol !)
Already memory-holed Fukushima?
Which killed zero people
"Hey, I shot at you but I missed this time, that means this gun is perfectly safe! Let's do it again"
Thanks to the inherent safety of nuclear? Or that the wind was, by chance, blowing to the sea when the worst happened?
https://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/fukush...
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2011/...
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
There was no need for a mass evacuation because of Fukushima, it was a overreaction caused by irrational fear of nuclear power. The evacuation itself caused much harm. It is pretty silly to hype an incident that caused ZERO deaths as some kind of horrible nuclear disaster.
This must be peak nuclear cultism? Trying to downplay that any evacuation was needed to happen when Fukushima was out of control actively melting down and going through hydrogen explosions.
You are also missing that the evacuation was expanded in stages:
- Accident day: Loss of cooling, 3 km evacuation.
- 1 day after: 10 km. Followed by extended to 20 km when unit 1 exploded. Followed by unit 3 and 4 exploding as well.
What did Japan's nuclear regulators do after Fukushima? They expanded the emergency planning zone from roughly 8 - 10 km to 30 km.
There was no need for the mass evacuation of about 164,000 people.
https://theconversation.com/evacuating-a-nuclear-disaster-ar...
Even if Fukushima killed tens of thousands of people, nuclear would still kill order of magnitute less people per kWh of energy produced than fossil fuels.
Lies, dann lies and statistics.
Don't quote my ancestor's line. He never meant it to be a rejection of science that you are using it as.
Also, you can't spell.
Barely. You know it was almost a second Chernobyl, right? If you read about what happened that day it is clear.
It was absolutely not almost a second Chernobyl. Saying this proves you understand very little of what happened in the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents.
Correct, because they managed to prevent it from becoming a second Chernobyl. At Chernobyl they failed to prevent it from becoming a first Chernobyl. But we don't want to keep rolling the dice just because the last time we got a 6.
No it was never possible for Fukushima to become a Chernobyl style disaster because it has a containment structure and the biggest difference is that Fukushima was basic overheating while Chernobyl was a complex power excursion of over 100GW. There was never a runaway nuclear explosion at Fukushima; it was a severe thermodynamic failure of cooling.
The end result can be the same. The disaster at Chernobyl wasn't the uncontrolled chain reaction - if that had been all that happened, the town of Chernobyl would still be considered inhabitable. The ionisation plume was pretty, but not dangerous to anyone who wasn't in it. The disaster at Chernobyl was that the building blew up (because of the chain reaction) and the explosion spread radioactive stuff for miles. Fukushima was also going to blow up, due to hydrogen gas IIRC, but they prevented it from blowing up.
You keep proving you don't understand what actually happened at Chernobyl or have a sense of scale of the energies involved. Hydrogen gas exploding is a completely different thing than a badly designed reactor instantly generating over 100 times its designed output and exploding. The hydrogen gas did explode at Fukushima and this damaged the outer building. Fukushima was a firecracker compared to Chernobyl being an actual nuclear bomb.