This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").
Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.
It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.
Long-term effects on health are disputed: http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor... http://www.fukushima-disaster.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/e... https://apjjf.org/thierry-ribault/4761/article
The nuclear accident cleanup cost is very high ad raising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
The primary source for that wikipedia quote argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.
Over 65,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity. One such death, for example, was 102 year old Fumio Okubo who lived 30 km inland and hanged himself after being forced to move for no good reason.
There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima\*, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide; so far, there has not been a single case of cancer linked to radiation from the plant.
That is prompting a shocking reassessment among some scholars: that the evacuation was an error. The human cost would have been far smaller had people stayed where they were, they argue. The wider death toll from the quake was 15,895, according to the National Police Agency.
Of the disaster-related deaths, 1,984 were people over the age of 65.
\* technically not "in Fukushima" but any deaths over the following seven years in the group evacuated from Fukushima.
During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ).
This is biz as usual: after a war many armchair experts, especially those acting upon one of the parties, are quite sure that "tackling this was easy". During the event, they are nowhere to be found.
It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue.
Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable, due to extreme bushfires destroying every building, would the stress on the elderly be any less?
An evacuation triggered by a nuclear major accident seems specific to nuclear to me, in the sense: if, instead of this nuclear plant, some field occupied by wind turbines or solar panels were build, there would be no need to evacuate.
> Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable
No human being can control nor counter this sort of event. We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.
Or add passive safety measures to nuclear power plants. Fukushima failed because it was still generating too much heat, but that excessive heat couldn’t power a turbine to cool itself down.
After such an accident some armchair experts are quite sure that it "could have been easily predicted". Before the accident (to "easily" prevent it) or during it they are nowhere to be found.
They knew. Especially after Forsmark, 2006 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... ), which was a major subject for the industry. The first stages of a similar incident happened in France decades before.
... and it didn't change anything.
Everything is easy, nothing is perfect.
That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)
No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.
So let's see :
- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).
- They don't want nuclear because politics.
- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")
- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.
The two main end results of this policy are :
- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...
Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?
Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.
No. Because Fukushima. At the end of 2010 Germany enacted a law extending the operating life of nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened and all political parties in Germany closed nuclear reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
> sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated
Facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy
> The only other solution left is coal,
Facts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41768679
Yes, coal is a disaster. Nuclear risks (major accident, waste, proliferation...) is a potential disaster.
> deaths in neighbouring countries, every year
True, and quite sad. No nation yells because each is a culprit: emissions caused by France's fossil fuels (transportation, industry...) is far superior to those of the German gridpower system. We can agree that all this is a catastrophic state of affairs. Germany's nuclear phaseout is a drop in the sea and wasn't conducted due to some whim.
> Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer
The amount of victims of past accident is controversial, therefore this is controversial.
We'll never know. Doing history fiction, a more probable outcome would be a lot of people dying by "natural causes" in the next months. We talk about places that were mostly ghost cities for a decade, for some reason.
This common discourse of "but nobody died ever by the direct impact in the left eye, of a radioactive atom called John, on a Thursday", seems a little ridiculous frankly. If we have a pool of people that died, and we dismiss all this people one by one with different tricks and shades of "can't prove, not my fault", yes, of course, "nobody" died.
And Santa Cancer doesn't exist, is the parents.
They know that is false, we also know that is false, and they know that we know it, so what's the point of keeping saying that?
What is questionable, as you point out, is the application of different tricks and shades of "can't prove, must be nuclear" to claim all deaths in the pool as a direct result of nuclear.
As others have pointed out there are similar yearly figures for tenuous "coal deaths" as there are here for seven years of post disaster "evacuation deaths".
If we review average annual percent change on Thyroid cancer incidence, there was a more or less stable value between 2008 and 2011. Then in 2012 there is a sudden increase of 10,8% on Fukushima, versus a 3,7% for the whole Japan in the same year [1]. Some increase is normal in a population that is growing and aging but a jump, not so much.
We even have a control population: The Tochigi prefecture (at the South of Fukushima and bordering it). This landlocked prefecture has a big industrial complex, including a strong sector of X-ray machines makers. Tochigi has the lower increase on Thyroid cancer of the three between 2011 and 2012 (3,2% increase). [1]
The death ratio didn't changed, but people that is diagnosed with cancer does not die immediately, so just looking for mortality increase that year is a deceptive measure.
So, something happened in 2012 that increased Thyroid cancer on Fukushima more than in the rest of Japan.
Lets assume that we forget all about the elephant in the room, and past experiences where radioactivity accidents typically increased thyroid cancers. How would you explain that? Any alternative hypothesis?
-----------------
[1] Shibata A, Saji S, Kamiya K, Yasumura S. Trend in Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Fukushima From 2008 Through 2015. J Epidemiol. 2021 Dec 5;31(12):653-659
(The article covers only up to 2015 to remove artifacts from 2016 when the way to report cancer changed, causing another increase on the registers).
The obvious answer would be that radioactive iodine-131 entered the food chain and that strontium-90 also was being ingested by dairy cattle and was being concentrated (biologically magnified) in cow’s milk.
As demonstrated in Australia by Hedley Marston.
This seems unrelated to what was being discussed .. the direct attribution of deaths amoung the excavated cohort to nuclear causes.
Compiling statistics about a population is more difficult than doing so for a well-specified group of workers, and given the treatment of workers... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/special-report-he...
Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?
> Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?
This is a matter of debate. During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ). The extent of the implemented evacuation was considerably inferior. Nowadays, after the battle, according to some pro-nuclear no evacuation was necessary.
Much of the damage caused by natural events can be avoided with proper planning and prevention, but they cost money. Most natural defenses against extreme weather are also removed in order for developing land or extracting natural resources.
Is there a debate about those raw facts?
https://damfailures.org/case-study/oroville-dam-california-2...
> handled with care > proper planning and prevention
I agree. Everyone can fail. Letting very dangerous tiny material undetectable without a complex equipment and active for years getting out then be dispersed on huge areas by wind/rain/... is a nuclear exclusive. Moreover the most risky type of renewables (dams) has more inertia (it cannot trigger an accident in mere minutes, it is more robust). As we now have industrial renewables there is no reason to deploy nuclear anymore.
Come on.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_c...
Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths are the only dimension people use to compare with other electricity sources. You can't just put on a blindfold and ignore all of the other factors. Just because only a handful of deaths can be directly attributed, doesn't mean nuclear isn't an absolute nightmare when it goes wrong.
The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759 people. The earthquake was a terrible tragedy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it. Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted, always safely enclosed within the vessel.
Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon, etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless. See the section "Radionuclide release" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident