Comment by mgfist
12 hours ago
> 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.
60 deaths attributed to Chernobyl.
1 death attributed to Fukushima.
0 deaths attributed to Three Mile Island.
Meanwhile, deaths in the fossil fuel industry total hundreds to thousands every year.
Now before you say "but wait, I've seen estimates of thousands of deaths linked to Chernobyl" - then we must also include all the deaths caused from fossil fuel carbon emissions and radiation emissions, which total in the hundreds of thousands every year.
> You argue it is safe
I do! The fact that a nuclear plant was struck by a tsunami and yet just 1 person died from the radiation fallout is pretty damn amazing. That's about as bad as it gets and yet the result was the same as an oil well accident.
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.
Those numbers are still in the single digit thousands. Meanwhile how many deaths have been caused by fossil fuel emissions (both carbon, and local, and radiation). Very very hard to predict, but you see estimates going up to the many millions.