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.
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.