Comment by mgfist
14 hours ago
Coal power produces more radiation waste into the environment than nuclear power. That's because nuclear power has this amazing quality where all the waste is neatly packaged whereas burning coal just releases it into the air.
> requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
> I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison.
> Will it actually get encased successfully
Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades.
> will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move
What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun.
> will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on.
> The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale.
It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
You argue it is safe. When it is not (Chernobyl, Fukushima) then you argue it kills less people. That is before considering the possibility of these sites being attacked during war (see Zaporizhia in Ukraine) and how centralized they are vs solar.
Rectang explained it very well, and all their points stand imo.
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Belarus had markedly increased general cancer rate post-1986. At the time most of that was fatal. None of that naturally is included in site personnel and firefighter fatalities that IAEA recognises as the only casualties.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
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Because of anti-nuclear sentiments we are right now currently storing used nuclear waste in its most dangerous form in the most open and uncontained and open storage lots. Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me. If humans blast themselves back to the neolithic era and 5,000 years from now some dudes die from walking into some old facility die, who cares? There are masses of people dieing right now because we are still relying on fossil fuels, many of them from cancer from breathing the radioactive fallout that is downstream of every coal plant.
Seems to me that pro-nuclear sentiments have at least as much to do with ongoing accumulation of nuclear waste as anti-nuclear sentiments.
> Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me.
Blithe minimization of the problem of storing nuclear waste over millenia feels like "Peak HN". :)
("Peak HN" jabs are a cheap shot, though — so let me engage more seriously...)
First, "coal vs nuclear" is a false dichotomy. Everybody I see advocating for nuclear power in this thread is advocating for it as a permanent solution rather than an interim solution — in which case there are other competitors.
Second, if nuclear waste is too dangerous for less-than-ideal storage conditions, that speaks negatively to the viability of nuclear power — because over the long term less-than-ideal storage is guaranteed by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
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