France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!).
Even when I was an intern at a power company, the leaders there saw the nuclear power plant the company owned as an "albatross around their neck".
Even just trying to ship it elsewhere for processing gets blocked by other states and cities.
There is so much fear around this stuff, but it's usually based on the incorrect notion that radioactive wastes is both super dangerous, and lasts forever. But this is not true. The super dangerous stuff doesn't hang around that long, whilst the stuff that does isn't that dangerous.
The super-duper dangerous radioactive waste has a relatively short half-life, and volume. The vast amount of waste is fairly benign.
It's a solvable problem.
The fact that the problem still exists at all should cause optimists to pause and consider what factor they may have missed.
Wish I saved the quote, but I remember reading something to the tone of "Everybody across all lines wants healthcare. But 8 rich people disagree, so it's complicated".
Like with any risk, there should be appropriate and proportional risk mitigation strategies put in place. Current strategies are outsized compared to the risk.
The anti-nuclear environmental movement will go down in history as one of the biggest own goals. If nuclear power had have had continued investment into engineering improvements, the world would be in a much better place WRT climate change.
It's not the outsized risk of lead levels people are necessarily worried about. It's the outsized risk of some health risk that gets covered up, lied about, or dismissed by those in charge. There appears to be a high correlation between nuclear accidents and government and political coverups.
Nuclear has one of the lowest mortality rates per megawatt hour. It would be even better if only modern reactor designs were considered.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Thats the thing though, its already been the titanic. People have seen the ship sink, and the promised engineering improvements didn't make up for the fact that it was not only an engineering problem but a human one. Some human somewhere is going to fail the system catastrophically, inevitably. If not an operator, then perhaps some day in the future someone else will gain control of it, or damage it, or make something happen that is out of the range of possibility with even moderately responsible engineering. Maybe its all solved now, I heard nice things about thorium reactors properties, but thats the echo of the fear of nuclear power. Be interesting to see what the generational breakdown is there.
That is a strange statement.
There is no place in the world geologically stable for the required period (we have no way to know)
We have no way to communicate with people about the dangers for over 100_000 years.
Those are technical problems.
The political impetus is to get future generations to pay for our current consumption
> There is no place in the world geologically stable for the required period (we have no way to know)
This can be said of anything, which is IMO a defeatist attitude. Nothing we do is guaranteed to not cause harm. Likewise, our inaction could also cause harm.
For the specific question of stable geology, past performance can help predict future performance. We can make educated guesses. If it has been stable for the last million years, it's a good be it will be stable for the next 10,000.
> We have no way to communicate with people about the dangers for over 100_000 years.
The need to communicate the dangers over vast timeframes presupposes that society has fallen into ruin, and our record keeping has been destroyed. I will argue that if that has happened, it means countless billions will have perished, and people+or lizardmen) living primitive lifestyles will have far bigger worries than and increased cancer risk.
> The political impetus is to get future generations to pay for our current consumption
We are paying for our current consumption of fossil fuels right now. How many deaths from climate change over the next 200 years are appropriate to ensure the safety of an unknown number of people thousands of years from now?
No. It is a way of loosing it and leaving it around for someone to dig it up and become very sick
Remember, it is hundreds of thousands of years
Remember that I have already said I disagree with this as something we should be worried about.
And I said "making future generations pay for our current consumption"
Surely that is shameful?
That is shameful, and the anti-nuclear crowd can take responsibility for that.
I'd be more concerned about the next 100 years, than pretending we can predict what things we do today will be a positive or negative for 200 years from now, let alone 1000s.
And anyway. If you bury this stuff deep enough, encase it in glass, it's going to take a fairly advanced civilization to get at it. They'll quickly work out the risks involved after playing too much with their newly found treasure. Then they can decide whether to leave it be, or whether it's a boon.
I kinda want to get this Simpson's Jersey with a 3-eyed fish as the mascot that says Hanford or something on the back of it. I was thinking it should say maybe CESIUM 137 on the back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation
* You start from coal which has more carbon than oil in any grade you choose, and then add the extra inefficiency of the process so you need more coal than had you burnt it directly. It's like burning coal in a super inefficient manner.
Socialism is a red herring. 3 mile island and Chernobyl showed that state owned and private owned can equally be fucked up.
France owning their plants is completely orthogonal to safety.
The problem with regulatory agencies in the US are, they're not directly voted in by the public and they can be corrupted by bribery or regulatory capture.
Further violating regulations results in monetary fines or maybe getting their license revoked, but not jail time for the bad actors.
With very good reason.
Nuclear power leaves a 200,000 year head ache.
Climate change is a mild problem in comparison, it will correct itself in centuries (taking most of civilisation with it, but mēh!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Regulatory_Poli...
This flooded the power markets in the US with new, non-utility sources, while at the same time it helped reduce growth in demand by encouraging efficiency. Together, these squeezed out any prospect for starting new nuclear construction projects.
But the press spun it as hate towards nuclear power. So that put a big black mark on the industry, maybe even more so because both Liberals and Right Wing people came out against it.
The problem is, that nobody really trusts nuclear, or more specifically nobody really trusts corporations with nuclear power. I will point out there's a high correlation between a given nuclear accident and a coverup of that nuclear accident.
In the summer the population of that area grows to hundreds of thousands. That area is by far the worse area for a plant. There are no evacuations signs there because there is only 1 way in and out.