Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected.
And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled:
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
> Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
Asse isn't a storage for high-level waste. It contain low-level waste that can also come from hospitals and such. Germany has no storage for high-level waste yet.
Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
Just look at this photograph, it shows all of the French nuclear waste accumulated in decades:
> https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was.
I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after decommissioning. You have a lot of shielding material (i.e. the other 99% of reactor waste that is mostly concrete) to protect a very small amount of radiation and keep the material distributed, which has some security benefits. Not having a centralized location doesn't seem like an issue. It isn't like humans are going anywhere anytime soon and we're going to lose information about where waste is stored. We have plenty of time to figure out a long term storage system that is still safe if the entirety of human information is lost. It's a great goal, but if that's our concern we should talk about deep geological repositories for a lot of other waste that we have that doesn't degrade overtime.
I think you underestimate how 'temporary' many seemingly strong structures are and how high the temptations to cut costs are. Its very easy to be like "welll...this'll probably hold. I'm sure of it."
So a terrorist just gets a slight increase in fear factor, but it doesn't increase deadliness of the weapon, requires a lot more work, greatly increases the chance that they get caught, puts them in more danger, and so they just don't do it. There's too many downsides for only a minor upside. Why do it when you could just make a dozen pipe bombs and put them in trash cans around the city?
Really just think if you were a terrorist and wanted to do damage. There's a lot of things you could do (bunch of rusty nails on the I-5) that just don't happen. They are easy to accomplish, can do a lot of damage, but just don't. Why? Different objectives and just terrorism is extremely rare in the first place. And I'm pretty sure a drilling through feet of concrete and metal in a likely highly monitored site is too big of a hurdle when you can just go to home depot and get some stump remover and some steel pipes.
The current trend in Kabul are bombs that get stuck onto vehicles by passing motorcyclists using magnets. It’s quite terrifying, since the ease essentially allows terrorists to enact a widespread campaign against civil service and civil society. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/asia/afghanistan-ma...
General population thinks anything with radiation is panic worthy, even though there isn't that big of a deal.
godelski is arguing that terrorists who can be convinced to try and use dirty bombs will be less effective than if they had chosen other, more damaging, options.
Sounds they better write blog posts about google and facebook tracking
These people are smart, but are still indoctrinated. Despite the “religion of peace” propaganda, a clear reading of the Koran shows certain duties that cannot be avoided if you accept the premise that (unlike most of the Bible) it God’s exact words and also the final truth. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the smarter the reader, the more inescapable those conclusions become.
It’s also not a fringe idea. Imagine if everyone in the US or everyone in the EU suddenly started believing suicide bombings of civilians is at least sometimes justified. That’s around the total number of people who actually believe that across the globe (even more believe in terrorism when targets and/or methods are changed).
More generally though, lots of very smart people get indoctrinated into cults every day. If our life history were just a bit different, you or I probably would have joined one too no matter how smart we are.
Terrorists want blood and guts on national TV, not a statistical raise in cancer over 30 years.
for some reason I find it funny to imagine a terrorist pondering about his long term career plans and prospects.
do they also have stuff like resume driven development?
the terrorist might find some operation ridiculous but does it anyway to make his resume better, that way he can get hired into the FAANGs of the terrorism sector.
Executive Orders.
IilIRC his last actual book.
Groups that have the expertise to covertly retrieve spent fuel could probably just buy guns and shoot up a stadium. And that would cause more damage. The relative risk presented by nuclear waste is trivial.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File...
The only reason I can see why no one has used that already is that chemical weapons designed for the purpose are more effective.
But even chemical weapons aren't used that often. We rarely hear about anthrax letters and we never hear about terrorist attacks that used bleach and ammonium even though practically everyone knows about this reaction and the materials are cheap, easy to obtain, and don't raise suspicion. (Side note: we do hear about people accidentally creating this mixture fairly frequently. Enough that almost everyone knows someone that did it)
Chemical/biological/nuclear weapons are just not worth it to terrorists. If they were we'd have seen them and if we're being honest the dirty bomb is the hardest out of all of them.
To me, it's like someone asking where me to choose which part of my house to infect with wood rot:
1. A single scrap of wood, extremely badly affected, stored in a sealed box under the stairs
2. My entire roof mildly affected by rot.
I'd take the box under the stairs.
Asbestos is naturally occurring and incredibly dangerous. "natural" has nothing to do with risk to human life.
Not sure who you think you're disagreeing with? Nobody said otherwise if you read the thread.
That number is not actually supported by your source, as a matter of fact, your source points out that the US it not recycling any of the fuel at all.
> Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste
Sorry, but I don't see the argument there? Just because there's already toxic waste, does not mean that more toxic waste wouldn't change anything. Or are you suggesting the nuclear waste should just be thrown into Herfa-Neurode with all the chemical waste?
> Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
Germany also has quite a high population density, it doesn't have the luxury of large swats of unpopulated land where it could build it's "nuclear waste storage hall", and that's assuming that "just store it in a hall" is actually a good way to store it.
If it really was as simple as that, then why did Finland spend billions on building their Onkala deep geological repository? Which is the only installation of that kind on the whole planet. Not even in the US a proper storage location has been found yet, as Yucca Mountain was not deemed suitable.
The best answer anybody can currently give to that is "Just store it on site", which isn't a solution, it's the temporary band-aid for a rather permanent problem that's not actually solved.
You can't just hand-wave that away by claiming it ain't a problem and allegedly never was.
> That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
All it states is that "it can be recycled" and how "90% of its potential energy still remains", which is about as useful as declaring the plastic problem as solved because "plastic can be recycled".
That makes the 95% number an assertion without evidence, as such, it can be dismissed without evidence.
If its so easy as you say, why doesn't every country have a small room to keep all the waster?
Why do we often "just" throw it in the ocean instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
Why do these "so easy to maintain rooms" leak?
https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-st....
Why do managers of nuclear reactos "loose" all the waste?
https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/missing-german-nuclear-mater...
Etc.
> https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio...
It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie factory.
The reality is that the French try hard to put high-level waste deep in under the ground. After more than 50 years of atomic plants and nearly 80 of lab reactors the French haven't a single adequate repository.
The most advanced project may open in 2025. An English concise description is already amusing, please read it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_...
A more complete version, in French: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o
The Marcoule site where MOX fuel is manufactured had an explosion in 2011, which did result in a fatality.
You are right that we have a lot of plutonium that we can not use. The intent of superphenix was to use this plutonium. It failed.
Pity that it got closed, I hope technical issues are fixed and a new device based on better understanding replaces it.
That would be a long pipeline, because La Hague is facing the channel, not the north sea.
Are you kidding? What kind of nuclear waste has even the remote possibility to go critical that is produced by a VVER reactor that is pretty common?
Other forms of recycling are very viable and have much less problems and much less side streams.
The problem is of course that anti-nuclear crowed have stopped practically all technology development so they can claim all problems are solvable and nuclear should be abolished.
As everything with nuclear, we as a society barley got to first generation technology and then halted all development.
Canada is doing some create work with recycling of CANDU fuel, Moltex Energy is in development of a reactor to use that fuel and its a much better process then what the french use.
Nuclear energy is still a fantastic, dense source of energy. I would much,much prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than a coal or similar one.
If there was a way to generate even cleaner power with such efficiency then great. 25 years ago we had that hope for a few weeks with cold fusion.
They are now stored in the "yard" at the different nuclear powerplant
Decades of fighting has eventually killed every attempt because people do not want it.
I am always curious about people who say not to mind the waste, if it would be ok to store them in their yard?
Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just extremely dense.
The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel reprocessing on site:
That c² factor in E = m c² is huge (9 * 10¹⁶).
It is really hard for humans to intuit about factors of ten to the power of 16 or 17.
In this case the units (for speed²) you want are m²/s² = J/kg
Your face #2 when people realise that this nuclear waste goes to the environment unfiltered.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...
The main pertinent local project is an utter disaster, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_3
All possible thanks to Nuclear!
In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US, but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your problem, someone elses problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Han....
I can play the environmentalist on the backs of other people as well. Super easy.
Also, 17% of France's energy comes from recycled nuclear (70% from nuclear)[0]
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
Though the more honest answer is closer to "mostly not recyclable, a bit not economically viable". But that also depends what we mean by "economically viable". If we're using it in the typical sense of "slightly more expensive for producers" then a small percentage increase. But if we're talking about "if producers had infinite resources" then well still no, but we'd be able to recycle a bit more (we're still not talking much more). I'm assuming the former because the latter is an absurd position.
You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the same carbon.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-ch...
In any case, current facts do not align with the narrative that nuclear waste management is a solved (technically & economically) problem.
Also x-ray technicians stand behind a shield, because x-rays are still dangerous.
Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without creating waste for future generations, we should go without the power.
Seriously, we don't need it.
However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future.
Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know.
I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
That claim is simply plain misinformation.
For the import vs export of energy you find that here:
http://media.matochklimat.nu/2021/02/image1.jpg
Sweden import much more coal energy when Barsebäck and Ringhals was up and running.
Source for graph: http://matochklimat.nu/analys-svensk-el-fortsatter-att-trang...
The Swedish ethos is “we are green. It was the other guys!”
http://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downloa...
If you follow the flow from: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ you see that most of those countries primarily generate electricity using Oil, Gas and especially coal. (Latvia, Lithuania and to a lesser extent: Estonia)
Some import from Denmark and Norway. Negligible from Poland, Germany, Lithuania. Net is export to all, which means Swedish clean power is actually displacing dirtier sources, except in Norway which is full on hydro.
1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.
2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-capture forest, indefinitely.
3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to continually grow the amount of forested land just to follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil fuels.
But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to allow for population growth, or the large land area needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge surplus of not-yet-forest land — can't grow trees in deserts.
Is wood not a carbon store?
In 2014, use of wood products in all notable categories combined was about 1.25 billion tons [3]. Including just sawnwood and wood paneling, it was 0.827 billion tons. Since there's no plausible way to use 2500% as much lumber for structural purposes as we do now, and just harvesting wood and leaving it outdoors will lead to decomposition on short (decades) time scales, people consider charring it and/or burying it underground. Just building more structures out of wood is barely going to put a dent in the problem.
Likewise, dynamically shifting the equilibrium toward wood from CO2 doesn't help much if the wood persists for only decades. The time scale for CO2 to naturally return to its pre-industrial equilibrium is more like 100,000 years [4]. We need sequestration measures that prevent CO2 from returning to the atmosphere over longer time periods than wood takes to decay naturally.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose
[3] https://www.forest2market.com/blog/fao-report-highlights-res...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Princeton/...
The weird thing is that you're taking a shit in your neighbor's yard. I mean if they do it in their own yard it's weird, but there's nothing wrong with it. I mean this is what we do with dog shit.
The problem is that everyone shits. Sure, nuclear shit smells a lot more than solar shit or coal shit, but there's a hell of a lot less of it. We're talking a cat vs herd of rhinos. If I had to clean up one of the two I honestly don't care how much that cat's shit smells, I'm picking that job every single time. And you know what, the researchers seem to agree
> The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies
Some mines use ISL techniques which is similar to fracking. Canada does have Cigar Lake, the highest grade uranium mine in the world (15%), but due to the dangers of high uranium concentrations and the challenging geology, it has not been the easiest to extract.
This is to say, you don't just dig up some ore and stuff it in a reactor(it takes a lot of ore to power a reactor), nor is uranium mining a clean process.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Garzweiler#/media/Date...
and are planned to become lakes (but at least in Germany nobody knows where the water is supposed to come from).
The places where coal is mined under ground need to run pumps forever or the surrounding cities are destroyed. The pumps in Germany's Ruhrgebiet consume about 70MW continuously. In a couple of decades the pumps will have consumed more energy than we got out of the coal.
And, of course, if we continue to burn coal in a couple of decades largeish parts of the globe might become uninhabitable to humans.
Saying we should only use methods that don't provide waste is saying we should reduce energy consumption to 1-5% of current global and ditch all cars, ships and airplanes. Even if you are 100% morally right you're never going to convince humanity of that.
The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards.
The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distribution of that food to where the people are.
Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the fertilizer needed to support the food. You could argue that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the population to die, but that would similarly require some sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there and keep us there.
At this point, we do need the energy. The only way to maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version of Stalin in a position of absolute power.
Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest dangers in our current political debate about what should come next.
I agree that we should have food security for everybody, and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with power for heating and cooking they will just start burning things again which would create a bigger disaster.
But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste in every sector because electricity is so cheap.
Update: Thankfully, it looks like it has started to slow. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
And nuclear is the safest power source (measured in deaths/twh) which humans have been using for decades.
The thing is, we don't have a long term solution for storing CO2 either.
The thing I like about nuclear waste is is it's obvious, its tangle and it sits around in sinister looking containers.
As opposed to CO2.
There's other ways, of course, but this was the best one I remember reading about; it's expensive but less so than the incidentals of CO2 and particulate release.
That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.
Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast...
Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear.
Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates.
Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons".
Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not).
Etc. Etc.
I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.
An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
"The data on nuclear power was taken from Lenzen (2008) and Warner and Heath (2012)."
"Photovoltaic power: Ranges are based largely on the reviews of Hsu et al. (2012) and Kim et al. (2012)."
"Wind power: The data is based on the review of Arvesen and Hert-wich (2012) and has been cross-checked with Dolan and Heath (2012) and Hertwich et al. (2013)"
Let's go back to the Hsu review cited for photovoltaic generation.
"Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic Electricity Generation: Systematic Review and Harmonization"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1530-9290....
If you look at tables 1 and 2, it's aggregating studies from the years 2000-2009. Most are from 2006 or earlier. Solar manufacturing has improved a lot and costs have fallen dramatically since 2006. At the same time, nuclear projects under development since 2006 in Europe or the USA have cost much more than originally planned.
China continues to build new reactors; it's an existence proof that new reactors can be built. But China also builds wind and solar farms cheaper than Europe or the USA. You can't get a Chinese energy project at Chinese domestic prices in either the USA or Europe.
The EU or the US should announce that it's going to order 100+ plants. Completely different game. There's no point in competing with solar or wind otherwise.
Sure, this is politically untenable. :|
I mean don't get me wrong offshore wind power is always expensive but enough sources list solar, on-shore wind power as cheaper. Hydro power as comparable and Geothermal power as much cheaper.
I did pick the IPCC reports because those are usually regarded as being careful amalgamations of the available scientific data. Since there are lots of eyes on those reports, larger mistakes should have been pointed out already.
But you are right that there is contradictory information out there, and I don't really have the perfect authoritative source either.
That is as dishonest a take as it gets.
First, the "rescued from bankruptcy every few years" is simply not true. The company has been paying dividends every year for decades, and I can't think of a bailout of company debt in recent years.
Second point: Like most french state-owned companies, EDF is a vessel of "creative" accounting from politicians, but you'll find out that it's not tied to operating nuclear plants specifically. It's just that as a public-owned company, EDF is a tool for public policy. Sometimes it takes on debt to do so.
For instance, EDF is legally forced to buy back green energy at fixed rates as part of a package to help develop green energy. EDF is also forced to sell nuclear power to its competitors (ARENH policy) at fixed price, when they ask it. This means EDF competitors can arbitrage this agreement by buying nuclear power below market at times, and selling green power when market is saturated at other times. From the state's perspective, it's an OK thing to open the market and promote renewables, but from the company perspective it makes no sense. Thus, the company "pays" for a public policy.
This kind of accounting is usual in other former public companies such as SNCF.
That being said, nuclear costs figures should be accurate, since they come from the work of the french finance watchdog, the "cour des comptes", as well as from parlementarian investigations. You're right that these figures would probably not be possible without the scale economies of the initial rollout and without state-backing, but as you cite, this is also true for renewables or any other large industrial policy.
The people involved in these plans aren't idiots, they know what the time scale of nuclear waste is and they look for sites with that in mind [0]. They appear to be considering obvious problems like earthquakes and less obvious problems like ice ages.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
it is.
drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.
It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion?
The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one.
If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.
Can you define who gets to decide whether a place is "most sensible"?
Subject-matter experts? National politicians? Regional politicians?
Or maybe it's more like: voters (nationally)? voters (regionally)? voters (locally)?
So does literally every other power source. Nuclear is, if anything, among the least bad options in this regard.
> and it just does not scale to solve the problem.
It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.
Evidently, we'd rather just keep killing ourselves with coal.
We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.
What we have achieved so far is a nuclear industry which is hardly able to keep the status quo of installed power generation, sky high rising costs for building nuclear power plants, extremely long build times, very little technological progress in the last decade, unsolved financial and technological problems, ...
If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
All the promised next-gen problem solvers like breeders, thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing industries, ... have been more costly and financially toxic.
Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California. Any nuclear development gets constant fierce pushback, and if it does somehow come to life, every last issue with it becomes yet another reason to kill it in the crib.
If we were earnestly trying to achieve energy independence, then Rancho Seco (near where I grew up) would've been done right and still operational, rather than half-assed and doomed to fail.
> If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
Ah yes, the "two economists walking down the street and there's a dollar bill on the sidewalk" argument. Never heard that one before.
The US had been one of THE major proponents of nuclear technology. If the country lost interest, there must be a deeper reason than 'we did not try hard enough'. I would guess that the US invested more than a trillion dollar (in todays money) in its nuclear industry.
Instead lately the US invested in fracking with huge climate impact and President Trump was supporting coal mines...
We are literally ruled by oilmen so this should not be a surprise lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRG_Group#Early_business_histo...
What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas, which is used for electricity production in the US. It has a share of roughly 40%. Coal adds roughly another 20%. That makes around 60% gas + coal in the US for electricity production.
For Germany gas + coal has 40% share in electricity production (2020).
The overwhelmingly vast majority of American transportation gets its power from oil. Anything that could disrupt that - like, say, nuclear power making electricity sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap to make electric vehicles practical - is a threat to the oil industry. Further:
> What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas
Which (as the name "fracking gas" would suggest) derives specifically from fracking as a means to extract oil from deposits otherwise inaccessible. That is: gas and oil come from more or less the same place, sold by more or less the same people with the same reasons to want to suppress alternative energy sources like nuclear (and solar, and wind, and geothermal).
And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them.
Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths.
I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of which are far more dangerous.
The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people than nuclear ever has.
Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy. That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its electricity landscape goes over many decades.
By investing many many billions into renewables, instead of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to kickstart the renewable energy industry, which will over a long period of time be much more successful replacing fossil fuels, than nuclear ever did or will do.
Just building a nuclear power plant here and there will not solve the CO2 problem. Scaling renewable to make it cheap and able for large scale distributed deployment is the way forward.
Anyway, the argument is that instead of panic-closing nuclear power plants requiring more gas and coal plants being run in their place, they could have instead ran them as long as possible while building up the renewables.
Germany was not 'panic closing' nuclear. The nuclear exit was hotly debated for decades and decided long before Fukushima.
Germany was doing a lot more than just closing 'some' of its nuclear reactors and setting a timeline for closing the rest. Germany also removed the centralized monopoly business model around the big nuclear&coal-based electricity companies. The electricity production was in the hand of four large companies who had divided Germany into four monopolistic regions. These large companies had zero intention investing into renewable, since that already owned all the market and were free of competition. The government opened up the market and reduced the influence of the companies.
Germany has in sum now not more coal power than in had then. It has less coal capacity.
Nobody here that I can see are saying not to invest in renewables. But the extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering is as harmful to society as anti-vaxxer propaganda. It's causing real harm and real lives lost.
That's completely ignoring the history. The nuclear industry was started top down by the German government and the big utilities. The WHOLE electricity market (production and distribution) was in the hand of only a tiny few monopolistic companies, with deep ties into politics.
The anti-nuclear movement started as a grassroots movement against this corrupt systems, which forced their energy politics upon the country.
None of these former monopolistic companies had ever invested in renewable energy or had any interest in it. They were sitting on multi-billion Deutsche Mark businesses which were like printing money. The risks for the nuclear technology was even nicely taken up by the state.
Breaking up these monopolistic markets against their will and against the will of many well-earning politicians which after their political career were moving into these big utilities took roughly three decades.
Thus breaking up the market, getting rid of these huge obstacles to a new distributed / decentralized energy landscape was one of the key achievements.
> extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering
The anti-nuclear movement is not anti-science. The nuclear industry has time over time shown its incompetence. Fukushima has exposed how it worked in Japan: the reactor fleet had multiple technical problems (technical designs, systemic underestimated risks, too expensive to fix problems, ...). Many of these problems were technical and many were political problems. The height of a Anti-Tsunami wall is depending on both a risk calculation and a cost problem. These are not independent in a corrupt industry&politics. Companies and regulation authorities will not cause costs (which were needed to upgrade the site) and thus the risk calculations will be down in a way, that the company will not carry extreme costs, which might have had negative effects on its profitability. The tsunami risk will be calculated as so unlikely that the existing installation looked safe - even though Japan is known for strong earth quakes.
Also: the dismantling of a nuclear installation on an Earth Quake fault line is both a problem of determining the risk and a cost problem. In the end the costs and the hope, that nothing will happen, were the reason that no actions were taken. A single earth quake showed for multiple nuclear installations that the risk calculations were wrong. Thus we have the effect that in Japan the majority of nuclear power plants is still offline and the technical problem of reactors with their meltdown is still for a few decades unsolved.
It's not anti-science to break up corrupt and dis-functional energy monopolies.
Running Fukushima as it was designed (and paid for) was 'anti-science' and politically corrupt. Just before the Fukushima accident happened, there were safety inspections and they found nothing of these problems, which later killed the Fukushima site. After the tsunami there were multiple events which early were described as completely unlikely: loss of outside power, loss of emergency power, reactor meltdowns, hydrogen explosions, heating-up spent fuel pools, completely useless emergency plans, need for additional cooling via pumping sea-water damaging the buildings, fear of additional earthquakes hitting structurally weak buildings, radioactive water exiting the building, ...
The whole scale of the Fukushima ebents exposed the anti-science, design-to-cost philosophy of the nuclear industry and its political proponents.
That is, of course, presuming civilization does no collapse because of climate change. Fingers crossed!
The 2020 National People's Congress reportedly supported aiming for 6-8 new reactors a year, which would double the existing deployment in 6-8 years, and the aim is to not just increase the number of reactors but doing so at a pace that will increase the overall proportion of electricity from nuclear.
It’s just frustrating to see energy programs fail due to public opinion shift brought on by random perfectly-timed coincidence since there’s not really anything to blame or at fault. Like how The China Syndrome talks about “an area the size of Pennsylvania” and came out exactly twelve days before the actual Three Mile Island accident lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Deta...
Like: 'On August 26, 2010, a 3.3-tonne "In‐Vessel Transfer Machine" fell into the reactor vessel when being removed after a scheduled fuel replacement operation.'
Plus the Fukushima earthquake (and the following tsunami) showed that a lot of Nuclear installations in Japan were not safe against heavy earthquakes.
And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up.
And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands.
Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities?
East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.
Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it.
This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.
Ancient Egypt was a super advanced civilization continuously existing for 4000 years! Yet shortly after the decline nobody could read Hieroglyphs anymore.
We don't know what the future holds. Lets say in 50 years a low intensity Gamma Ray Burst hits earth and destroys all digital information but fries only half of all living creatures. The survivors dig trough the trash of the past to get to the rare earth metals they need to rebuild their civilization and find this really neat bunker with those funny signs...
That is a ridiculously strong statement.
> However, even a storage space hundreds of meters below the ground might not be able to withstand the pressures of one or more future glaciations with thick sheets of ice resting on top of the rock, deforming it and creating internal strains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage, because the timespans involved and the potential dangers are not manageable by humans atm.
The question is do we want to put more on the pile or not? If the alternative is to destroy our planets with coal and co the answer should be clear.
But take Germany for example. We've built up wind energy from 0 to more output than nuclear energy in 15 years. I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.
When we look at global warming there are two nations that need to act. China and the US, producing around 50% of Green House Gases. Both have more wind, way more space and potentially more money than Germany (China announced last year that they are gonna spend 1.5 Trillion USD in the next decades to become greener).
> glaciation
Seems like a very future problem. If humans are around by then, we can move the stuff easily.
> We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage
Agreed.
But this is not exactly a problem for nuclear power. (Even if it has become a talking point.) Nuclear waste storage is a boring and simple problem. (It needs cooling and physical security.) It should be put simply on a big remote boring military base - plenty of them in Nevada - so people don't worry about it being close to where they live.
Long term storage is a long term problem it needs basic research, and simply the continuation of our civilization, which then puts the waste where currently it thinks it should be.
Eg. it's completely possible that 500 years from now we'll finally recycle it, and then dump the rest into the Sun just for the lulz. (Or put it on an inert rock.)
Though I think we should build the amazing big spikes someone proposed to mark the site as "bad": https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/temple-of-doom-...
> I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.
Agreed!
No, we absolutely are not.
"Long half-life" = "less radioactive". By definition.
Do you know what the half life of CO2 is? Infinity.
CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.
Nuclear fuel itself isn't radioactively dangerous, it's dangerous because it's a heavy metal (like lead).
After nuclear fuel is reacted, it produces a bunch of nuclear decay products. Some of these decay products have a half-life of 10s of years, which are the problems: they're short enough to be dangerously radioactive, but long enough that they need to be handled carefully for a long time. But not for 10s of thousands of years.
Most of what you've read about plutonium is patent nonsense. For one, it isn't even close to being the "most toxic substance known". You can pick up a lump of it and hold in in your hand. You'll be fine. Really. It is an alpha emitter, and alpha radiation can be stopped by your skin or even a piece of paper. You'd have to eat it before you saw any ill effects.
Not to mention that plutonium is a useful nuclear fuel. It's not going to be left lying around.
You do know that the ocean has megatons of uranium in it? Why aren't you concerned about that?
For that matter, we could grind up all the nuclear waste ever produced and disperse it in the ocean. It wouldn't change the radioactivity of sea water by any significant degree.
The Soviets used to dump their scrap sub reactors in the Arctic Ocean whole. There are a bunch of them up there.
> CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.
Oh? So we can just wait until things start to get uncomfortably warm, then stop cranking out CO2 for a decade or two and everything will be better?
Good to know.
Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity.
Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the energy problems. I think we might need that time to get to full renewables, if we ever get there.
Something that takes several hundred thousand years for decay isn't actually dangerous.
Short half-life: High radioactivity.
Long half-life: Low radioactivity.
Furthermore, spent nuclear fuel can be recycled up to 95%:
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE
> https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial...
> East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.
East Germany never put any spent fuel into their own soil. They sent the spent fuel back to the USSR. Spent fuel is a resource with a market value. The GDR and the USSR didn't just threw that away.
> Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
It's actually pretty safe and has among the lowest numbers of deaths per TWh:
> https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
> So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
Actually, the worst thing is that it causes Germany to build new gas power plants and stop shutting down coal plants:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_bef...
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Nord_Stream_2
> https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizitae...
> https://www.wa.de/hamm/kraftwerk-westfalen-in-hamm-uentrop-i...
> https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.grosskraftwerk-man...
> https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-...
> https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-kohleausstieg-...
> https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht...
Compare Germany's and France's emissions in the energy sector:
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
Germany emits SEVEN(!) times as much as the French for producing electricity and heat. The nuclear phase out is causing 1100 premature death every year in Germany and causes additional costs of $12 billion per year:
> https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
And Germany has the highest electricity prices - worldwide:
> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths during the Texas blizzard because they couldn't provide enough electricity during the cold.
Including the last paragraph brings all the other points in to doubt, even though I otherwise agree with those points
Please, quit spreading this false/fake BS information. This is not what happened in Texas. You're willing to do the research on the support of your point of nuclear saftey, but then you got very lazy with this statement and did not research this clickbait level comment.
Question: in which sectors do we currently optimise for minimum deaths (above anything else)?
Texas failed to secure their electrical grid, that has nothing to do with renewables. We got renewables running in far worse weather conditions.
Capitalism and greed killed those texans.
You're making my case that people can't be trusted with nuclear, even though the tech in and of itself could be safe.
Hydro is the cause of the by far most lethal single power plant related failure (the Banqiao dam failures).
Rooftop solar causes more deaths per unit of electricity delivered from installation related accidents alone to be uncompetitive with nuclear.
Generally the more construction that is needed for a given production method, the more deaths, and that tends to go in the favour of nuclear given the sheer amount of power generated once a plant is operational.
Large solar installations may win out over nuclear in terms of safety, but it's hard to get good data.
Here is a good video explaining what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
Just FYI, Grady from Practical Engineering channel who made the video is a civil engineer. I also recommend his entire series about power grid (well, actually all his videos are great). )
The video describes what happened, and summarizes the cause as:
> Basically, the entire system was ill-prepared for a storm of this magnitude.
The video addresses only what happened, and (intentionally) does not address why it happened - why the system was ill-prepared. but it's absolutely true that there are "renewables running in far worse weather conditions" (and natural gas). all of these systems can be winterized.
j-pb thinks that the system was unprepared due to "capitalism and greed," which IMO is not an unreasonable idea. Why do you think the various Texas organizations basically ignored the FERC/NERC recommendations for cold weather preparedness from 2011?
The assumption is simply wrong.
I mean a whole lot of coal plants do pump uranium dust into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you'd pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be tiny.
https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1...
Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.
Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are high.
The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway.
Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
It doesn't really help with costs, so there's no hurry, and it's a political quagmire. So it just did not happen. (WIPP kind of happened, and is happening, but it's for non-commercial nuclear waste.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
My rational judgement is not in question here, but that of all anti-nuclear proponents should be. And you're right, I do have strong feelings. Can you really blame me? I'm inheriting a broken world that looks existential climate change in the face, shrugs, lights up a spliff and says "well solar is pretty cheap". We've had the technological solution to climate change in hand for 60+ years: rocks so spicy they'll power our entire civilization for millenia. Yet we (the people) got outplayed so hard by the oil lobby that not only is nuclear energy on the decline, threads like these where supposedly technologically literate people espouse greenpeace's old talking points abound. And while this baseless and frustrating 'debate' continues, the water rises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
[1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth
Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.
Please no. A launch failure with several tons of radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.
The thing is, these are not just straw men, but talking points frequently used by nuclear energy opponents. Along with others, like asserting that nuclear energy is a source of CO², etc.
If nuclear proponents had to focus only on reasonable, grounded talking points, they would probably be happier for it.
> for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
It's an OK point, and it's a shame that Germany seems to skip its environmental responsibilities. However, EU laws apply to all EU countries, including the ones that do a better job.
First, you could charge outrageus amounts of money for the service.
Second, you could practically ditch your defence forces simply because absolutely nobody would want anyone else to attack a country with huge amounts of radioactive waste.
Finally, after some time, you could likely sell the waste back as a fuel ingredient to new nuclear technologies.
This only slightly tongue in cheek. Of course I understand that proposing that would be a political suicide, but nevertheless, it would make sense.
Why would you think that?
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) 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:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
Deep geological storage, but not in salt beds, is a simple answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting to be inspected and repaired. I've been in deep hard-rock mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste.
The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...
Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water.
Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will. Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil.
Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I think having to store a lot of nuclear fuel is a much better problem than having to extract carbon out of the atmosphere, or building difficult to recycle chemical batteries out of scarce resources.
Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage because of several incidents of water ingress even during the time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open right there and then.
Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.
A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a radioactive isotope, often with much shorter half-lives. Some of these are even useful in industry.
There are new kinds of reactors, like the Traveling Wave Reactor (TVR) which efficiently use fuel like breeder reactors as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
There were challenges in the past with breeder reactor design (for example as this article outlines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...), but this is an area that there should be a lot more active research in. The long-term benefits of doing so would be immense.
I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed.
Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal material from the line.
"But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet, "That's a terrible idea!"
Yes, it is, but hear me out:
Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants pocket or something.
So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe) someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that: "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO 234-867-5309"
Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now what?
- You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're suddenly near the top of the suspect list.
- Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too. Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured destruction!
- Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times and we might end up with world peace.
All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the alternative right now can range from "millions of people displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my chances, thanks.
Because that scenario is very common.
Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years.
The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.
No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada):
>...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...
>...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India. It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor
Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant.
Yes we can. Case closed.
- What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build bridges, surely we can build large containers.
Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love to know why its a stupid idea.
It's actually quite fun: the theory goes that the huge mass of the pyramid was used to couple seismic vibrations into the enormous granite blocks above the King's Chamber. Being stuffed with quartz crystals, this generated a varying electric field which excited a hydrogen atmosphere (provided by a chemical reaction in the Queen's Chamber. Or the Subterranean Chamber, can't remember which). The Grand Gallery was apparently filled with Helmholtz resonators which set up a standing wave of some sort, the portcullises at the entrance of the King's Chamber being acoustic baffles to control the resonance. The net effect of all this was apparently that the comparatively thin-walled sarcophagus in the King's Chamber (also granite) would set up an appropriate vibration in the hydrogen to cause a maser-like concentration of microwave energy to be directed up one of the "air passages". Damage in the Grand Gallery is taken as evidence that there was some sort of catastrophic failure that knocked the whole thing out of commission.
It's remarkably complete, and totally, utterly bonkers. I love it.
So now that your appeal to emotion has failed, do you have any actual points?
The big boxes still need armed guards and a stable government so that it that they are not dismantled and used as weapons by future generations of extremists.
> Russia has a lot of uninhabited space
Nuclear installations are not in uninhabited space. For example the still operating (!) RMBK-style reactors are not that far away from major cities.
US irradiated large areas of Pacific Ocean and atmosphere (US) with its testing program, harming people living there and contaminating whole world with radioactive isotopes. UK dumped radioactive waste in barrels into Atlantic ocean, has bad record on nuclear safety (Windscale accidents) and continues to run old nuclear power plant that does not pass old safety tests, so they make the test less and less restrictive [1].
The lax approach to safety has been observed on all sides. It has to improve but it is no reason to stop development of nuclear power.
Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people. Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, not solely due to technology, but mainly due to incompetence and dysfunctional society. Also, the disaster wasn't as bad as people think. Few people died when you compare to other industrial accidents.
The really badly polluted installations in Russia are the military/research ones in restricted areas - Mayak, Lake Karachay.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hunterston_B_nucl...
And the need, since the baltic sea has a lot of countries which would be effected by leaking nuclear reactors.
mining, processing and 'storing' of nuclear material isn't any better in Russia.
> Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people
I think there is not much reason pretending that the russian nuclear industry is especially competent.
Yeah, except for the decades upon decades of research they've been doing on the topic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.