Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.
On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.
I have a fundamental mistrust of the industry and our government's ability to properly regulate it. That mistrust is based on historical facts.
Even with newer designs, I think human error and regulatory capture is too dangerous to make nuclear viable.
What historical facts would those be? Historically nuclear has been about the safest form of mass power when looking at accidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
Anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than the reality. A recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. Can you imagine the type of coverage the media would have given if 200,000 people had to be evacuated near a nuclear power plant?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/12/us/california-oroville-dam-fai...
NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by coal/gas: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much less health consequences than the other.)
Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years?
How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disasters kill over the next ~100 years? Because that's the alternative we're looking at.
If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital on the planet, solar will still kill more people than nuclear would under those circumstances.
So the reasoning here eludes me: perhaps it's that people don't understand nuclear so it must be bad ? It's how we got to Trump ...
TLDR: public opinion takes an idea. It declares it a bad idea. Comes up with much worse ideas for it's given criteria and enforces conformance to those ideas. Solar and wind both kill more people than nuclear, short term and long term.
There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.
Also, it is not true you can't safely go there now. In fact you can go there for a vacation trip: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrain... "More than 10,000 tourists now explore the disaster site every year."
The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...
For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.
The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.
e.g. https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/chinas-solar...
We're close to capacity for the world's utilization of hydro. It can only grow ~20% in the next 30 years - which would let it... Take ~10% of coal's contribution to power generation.
Hydro power is generally cheaper then coal. If we could use more of it, we would be.
>...when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet.
Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
(Funding for the integral fast reactor was killed by Bill Clinton, but there is no reason that the US or some other country couldn't fund this or any of the other 4th gen designs.)
>...That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
Right now nuclear waste is a very manageable problem and relatively soon the waste could be used to produce electricity if we so desire. Considering that no one of the general public has been killed from nuclear waste (and tens of thousands die each year from burning coal) why would someone consider nuclear waste a "massive problem"?
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
The practical barrier to reprocessing and burning spent fuel isn't technical or political: it's economic. Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
Yes a breeder reactor was one of the first electricity-generating nuclear power plants, but that doesn't mean we need to rush. We have enough storage capacity for decades before we need to worry about the level of high level waste.
>...Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
At the present time. Even if plans like getting uranium have sea water work out, we might start burning high level at some point just to deal with the high level waste if we run out of room. It makes a lot more sense to burn waste for electricity than to spend millions to bury it in the ground for millennia.
Soon is relative. Nuclear power has only existed for just over 70 years. These things take time, and progress is intensely stagnated because of the fear and regulation involved.
I thought the problem was solved:
1. Dig hole.
2. Put it in hole.
3. Guard hole.
I can imagine some sort of post-apocalyptic copper age religion where the religious brotherhood exist to guard the 'cursed caves', without understanding why. But everyone knows that people who enter the caves either die at the hands of the strangely deformed beasts who live there, or of a mysterious sickness sometime afterwards.
Yeah, I probably played too much D&D as a child :)
The argument that we need to do something about this waste beyond the timeframe of our civilisation is mind boggling to me. This is the only risk we seem to take this seriously - in no other arena can I recall people arguing about what something will look like in 10,000 years. What about war between America and China? >1% chance, massive potential for death and destruction. Who cares if some poor person digs into an old nuclear waste dump in 500 years compared to that?
We can leave this problem to the future. If they have regressed so far that they can't detect nuclear then they have bigger problems than radiation poisoning.
Threats to energy security are so much more of a threat than potentially maybe not being able to figure out how to reprocess spent fuel until it isn't a health hazard.
The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.
> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet
Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.
> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.
Strangely it seems to be considered a problem by those who are actually working in the field.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/...
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...
So what does that tell you about the motivations of much of the movement that opposes nuclear and fossil fuels? They're not motivated by continued human flourishing, that's for sure.
Note the change from nuclear to coal.
Just so you know, you get more radiation from coal burning plants than nuclear plants.
Don't believe me: http://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-us...
Original paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422.abstract
tl;dr: Fukushima radioactivity measurements regularly get swamped by radioactive sulfur from coal burning plants in China.
Meanwhile how many people have died in propane bottling plant explosions? In coal mining? In off-shore drilling incidents?
It's not perfectly safe, not even close, but it's statistically one of the least dangerous power generation methods.
A lot of stuff that is theoretically guaranteed to be a disaster looks very safe and profitable until shortly before disaster strikes.
Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
The worst case is probably like Chernobyl but involving multiple reactors. The probability of that is pretty low not only because Chernobyl served as a wake-up call, but because what happened at Chernobyl was an unfortunate chain of events that focused on only one reactor.
So in the worst case secnario you have a disaster which creates a new national park-sized area you can't live in. Compared with coal plants which used to render large portions of the continent unlivable for the hottest, haziest, smoggiest days in the summer, that's an acceptable risk.
It isn't as simple as that, with a lot of reactors. The ones at Fukushima were SCRAMmed. A running nuclear reactor will build up a collection of fission products that have various half-lives that can cause problems. In Fukushima's case, these fission products continued to decay and produced lots of heat (about 6.5% of the heat produced during normal operation, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). It was this heat that raised the temperature of the fuel and boiled off the cooling water and caused the disaster.
So basically, with lots of reactors, SCRAMming is not enough - you need to maintain cooling for quite a long time afterwards. It is entirely possible to build reactors where this is not the case.
An appropriate response to the turkey statement along these lines is to ask where the farm is and what people it serves. There are many farms in the world where statistically, Thanksgiving makes no difference to the mortality of the Turkeys.
Accounting for Murphy's law, and that the worst case is always x% below your expectation (even after accounting for Murphy's law).
People are worried about automation, the nation that can cheaply power automated factories and server farms in the future will prosper.
They don't have the "nuclear" tag scaring people away, but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
[0]: http://www.powermag.com/let-gravity-store-the-energy/ [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/energy-storage-hi...
Yes.
> but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
This is just absurd compared to handling nuclear fuel and waste.
https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test-saf...
"Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to test its safety features – the results are impressive"
This is cherrypicking to make a point. The batteries still contain chemicals which are toxic to life and environment. There will come a time when those batteries are "consumed" and the chemicals within them need to be dealt with in some safe manner. As far as I know, there's no battery technology with any side effects.
Tesla's batteries are well designed and engineered. Batteries before them have exploded, caused fires and loss of life and property. As long as the nuclear plant was also well designed I can say
"I set fire to a nuclear plant to test its safety features. The plant shut down automatically – the results are impressive"
I agree many won't be recycled, but until we snag ourselves and asteroid, we have a finite supply of lithium. People will do their best to not lose something worth money.
1. How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process? Aren't we talking creating more batteries than we ever have before by several orders of magnitude here? We send most of our ewaste to the third world to be burned currently, this sounds like an ecological disaster.
2. Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun? A big project for sure but the reward is virtually unlimited, virtually free energy.
It doesn't matter. It can all be recycled.
> Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun?
I don't believe we're competent enough to manage nuclear waste in any form.
It can be, it isn't happening currently: "As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.[6] Another reason why it isn't being done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive as mined lithium"
Even so when recycled it still creates toxic waste in large quantities. What shall we do with that?
there was talk in this thread about how the engineers that designed the systems in use are the ones servicing them and have been for 20-30 years or so.
It's only recently that renewables have become a realistic alternative in some (but not all) cases, but for decades we've had people dropping like flies due to coal, entirely because the public is too science illiterate to understand that nuclear isn't anywhere as big of a deal by comparison.
1. https://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/...
1. http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan...
The jury is still out on which will kill more in the end. Though so far nuclear is looking really, really good.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... for some statistics on how dangerous things are so far.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul. Coal plants release 100x more radioactive material than any other source in the world.
And that's not even to mention the operating dangers, from poor work environments to accidents. And that's not even mentioning the environmental disasters. Fossil fuel accidents have routinely devastated entire ecosystems, from Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon.
Nuclear power has the 'airplane safety' problem, people are terrified of air travel despite repeatedly being proven to be the safest form of transportation. The same is true for nuclear power. It is by far and away the safest form of energy generation, with the common myths repeatedly debunked time after time.
You have a rather large flaw in your logic.
The statement that you are quoting is directly supported by the data in my link. Fatality rates in the US are generally an order of magnitude lower than in the rest of the world, because of US regulations. This is a statement of fact, and not an argument for any random regulations that you just thought up.
On your statement about radioactivity, coal plants distribute more radioactive material than nuclear, but nuclear produces more nasty waste per gigawatt than coal. So far nuclear has been astoundingly safe, but the eventual damage from nuclear depends on our ability to safely store that waste for longer than human history.
What really brings it home for me are the warnings to limit seafood consumption for pregnant women, children, and other vulnerable populations due to mercury contamination. About half of that contamination comes from coal power. Coal is so dirty that it has made an entire type of food dangerous to consume!
The costs of creating and staffing a secure storage facility would not be trivial, but then, nothing else about energy production is.
The main concern with facilities like WIPP isn't so much security against dedicated assaults, but keeping future subliterate humans from stumbling across the material for the next 10,000 years or so. Antarctica solves that problem nicely. No one who isn't equipped to deal with hazardous technology is ever going to visit Antarctica.
The economic value of nuclear waste is basically zero, so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism. And even if somebody does break into your secure facility, it's hard to imagine an easy way for them to get significant amounts of material out. Seems to me that you wouldn't have to try very hard to make a storage facility more secure than the nuclear plants themselves. Probably the biggest obstacles would be political, not technical.
That's a pretty big worry. This stuff is super dirty and in the wrong hands could cause a lot of problems. Unlike a pressure cooker bomb which either kills you, maims you, or doesn't do anything to you, a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
The smarter thing is to come up with better ways of reburning the fuel and storing it long-term on-site at the reactor which is already a secure facility. The total amount is small. They don't need tons of space to deal with it. The less you move this stuff around the better.
The risks there are more Fukishima in nature where if they lose power (at a power plant!) then they need some mechanism to circulate water in the cooling tanks to prevent a boil-off.
I feel obligated to point out that this also applies to things like lead paint, mercury (got any CFL bulbs?), red meat, burnt toast, gasoline vapors, asbestos, new car smell, and sunlight.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but not outrageously so. It's treated with a deference far beyond what's given to other stuff that kills us regularly.
Science illiteracy has nothing to do with it. The industry has a history of non-trivial reasons for mistrust.
Regarding coal plant deaths, I'm not in favor of coal either. The sooner we can move away from fossil the better.
It's arguably the most harmful kind of science illiteracy because it has the biggest impact on public policy. Everything from people opposing mandatory seat belt laws, to being overly concerned about e.g. genetically modified food or cell phone tower radiation.
I'm sure you mean well, but really, people who hold exactly the opinion you hold are in the aggregate the reason for literally millions of deaths that didn't need to happen worldwide since WWII.
We had all the data to indicate that burning fossil fuels was causing massive diffuse harm, nuclear was realistically the only alternative in most cases, but people didn't go for it because they were afraid, even though all the science showed that there was little to worry about in comparison to what we were already doing.
Sure someone installed a reactor backwards, but how are minor incidents like these at all relevant compared to literally tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year because we keep using the alternative?
Regardless of the law, people are wearing seat belts at roughly the same rates. This is to say, at least in my corner of the world--seat belts save lives, but seat belt laws don't. People oppose these laws on philosophical grounds; the role of the state, acceptable levels of police discretion, etc.. Policy is messy, but at minimum must accommodate the values of those it represents.
[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...
E.g. Germany's rush towards decommissioning after Fukushima has had a massively detrimental effect in Europe for this reason.
The death toll as a direct result of fearmongering against nuclear is by this point likely to be far larger than the total death toll of all nuclear incidents. If we hadn't had nuclear in first place, the cost in lives lost to other forms of plants would have been far greater than that again.
The government official estimated cost of shutting down all German nuclear plants is 55 billion Euros over the next decade. Although the (frankly more credible) 'unofficial' estimate puts the cost at 250 billion euros over the next decade.
Not to mention the fact it's resulted in their co2 emissions increasing in both 2015 and 2016 (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhou...). This also means increased deaths from air pollution. The German environment ministry now predicts they will probably not make their 2020 co2 reductions targets.
So other than the enormous cost, increased co2 emissions, and needless human deaths, good policy.
EDIT: And as for the whole "let's just replace everything with wind and solar", I'm not sure people fully appreciate what will be involved. In Germany's case, on a monthly basis, their wind plants manage an average capacity factor of ~20% (std. dev. 7.65 percentage points) and their solar plants manage an average capacity factor of ~10% (std. dev. of 6.41 percentage points). They have had months where solar only managed a measly 2% cap factor and wind 11%.
So let's say demand is 1TW/hr per month. This means they need to build about 11 times that in nameplate solar capacity, or around 5-6 times that in nameplate wind. So you also need to build 11/6 times the transmission infrastructure. And even then you will still have random blackouts due to the high variance in generation, so you also have to spend a bunch of money on grid-level storage.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f1a6d064890d67fbfc98d66dbd...
This says that German emissions from electricity generation were down, but that was offset by heating increases from a cold winter and emissions from increased good transportation:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-reiterates-g20-...
1) you can not look at Germany in isolation. You need to take into account the import/export market. Decommissioning nuclear plants at a faster schedule substantially altered that, which affected other countries dependency on fossil fuels.
2) Germany is to their credit aggressively trying to get rid of its fossil fuel dependency, but the decommissioning of nuclear meant they needed to offset a significant shortfall. To the extent that hole was plugged by new clean energy capacity, that meant delaying decommissioning of far more lethal coal plants.
Until fossil fuels is at 0, decommissioning nuclear is bad policy.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/news/2016/germa...
As I said before: Until there is 0 fossil fuels, taking nuclear offline kills people by delaying fossil decommissioning.
Also they had a fin on one of the turbines of another reactor break off and it the reactor wall in the mid-2000s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
> 1,917 deaths
> 26,000 dead from flooding, 145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics, 11 million homeless.
> 1800 - 25000 people killed
> 75 fatalities, due to turbine failure
There's also the part where we have tapped out the Earth's exploitable hydro capacity. Hydro output is expected to grow by ~20% by 2050. [1]
Unfortunately, it needs to grow by ~200%, if we want it to replace even half of the electricity currently generated by coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#Future_potent...
Dams hold back silt and sediment essential to farm land and despite everything you learned about fish ladders and salmon, they don't really work as well as the power companies say.
It's a great energy source. It's also incredibly dangerous, and cannot replace coal.
Plus carbon pollutants are known to be carcinogenic.
In a situation where something that severe (and malicious) is found, what would even be the short-term response? Are the management of the plant completely replaced?
You're saying that you trust an industry that...
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against nuclear power.
The problem with nuclear is that it is so heavily regulated that every little mistake that would fly under the radar in any other industry is instead explicitly called out, cited, and a resolution demanded. Which gives great visibility. But then some people misleadingly characterize it as "more unsafe" simply because its more visible, when really the alternative (followed by coal, natural gas, solar, wind, hydro) is to not call problems out at all in the name of "deregulation" which is an absolutely more dangerous way to go about things.
I'm more worried about the coal plants that are still spewing ash and uranium into the atmosphere and killing people by the tens or hundreds of thousands every year.
So keeping in mind that incompetence and fraud are commonplace and not something industry-specific, you have to consider what the numbers tell you about the safety of each option, and those numbers turn out to favour nuclear energy. Keep in mind that those statistics implicitly take into account all that incompetence and fraud you're worried about.
I sure as heck wouldn't try it on my 1999 Golf. I can't even change the headlight bulb.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that this history of errors and negligence is present in literally every industry. Literally all of them.
This is why I'm against nuclear power. As safe as the technology could be, it still run by humans who make errors.
If you think a bit being put in backwards isn't a big deal, check out the history of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
> The San Onofre station had technical problems over the years. In July 1982, Time wrote, "The firm Bechtel was ... embarrassed in 1977, when it installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards" at San Onofre.
Backwards. The reactor was installed backwards.
It goes on.
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...