I’ve not watched the video—i find video too slow for passing non-emotional content—but i did study nuclear power in grad school some years back. Even then, the issue was less about the long term...
I’ve not watched the video—i find video too slow for passing non-emotional content—but i did study nuclear power in grad school some years back.
Even then, the issue was less about the long term stability of nuclear waste by itself. Vitrified waste in line containers is very stable, if left undisturbed. The problem here is at least two-fold. First, transport is an issue. Even one bad accident could have practically permanent and catastrophic consequences for an entire region. Plant operational security in terms of fatalities may be solid. But there are trucking accidents happening all the time.
Two, the stuff has to remain undisturbed a very long time. geological scale. So sure, that former salt mine effectively sequesters the waste. But we can’t guarantee its geological or hydrological stasis for hundreds of thousands of years. And if there’s a problem? Again, an effectively permanent and potentially catastrophic outcome for a very large area.
I watched the video. Transportation - One solution for that is to drill 18" holes thousands of feet underground right on the site of the nuclear reactor. One reactor would only need 20 such holes....
I watched the video.
Transportation - One solution for that is to drill 18" holes thousands of feet underground right on the site of the nuclear reactor. One reactor would only need 20 such holes. This also solves the problem of public backlash to nuclear storage sites. Nuclear reactors already store spent fuel on site - just above ground.
What happens after millions of years? - The video mentions a "natural" nuclear reactor in Africa where rich uranium ore underwent fission deep underground for millions of years. Studies showed that the radiation hadn't leaked more than 20 ft from the site.
Not saying I'm 100% on board with those arguments. But that's how the video covers those topics.
On transportation, when we receive spent fuel, it comes in very robust shipping containers, usually by truck. The drivers receive special training (and more stringent background checks), routes...
On transportation, when we receive spent fuel, it comes in very robust shipping containers, usually by truck. The drivers receive special training (and more stringent background checks), routes are monitored from end-to-end, and maintenance is done more thoroughly (e.g., instead of receiving retread tires, the trucks receive brand new ones).
On repositories, you cannot 100% guarantee geology will remain stable, but you can extrapolate based on the previous timeframe, and choose locations with specifically stable formations (salt domes, as you mentioned, along with granite formations like the Canadian Shield) where there is a 99.999999% chance the geology will remain the same.
It is hubris to think we can extrapolate geological stability with such precision 1000 years into the future, let alone 100,000. We can’t even predict earthquakes. And that assumes only non...
It is hubris to think we can extrapolate geological stability with such precision 1000 years into the future, let alone 100,000. We can’t even predict earthquakes.
And that assumes only non anthropogenic, terrestrial events.
There is a normative question, too. How do we properly qualify a small, but definitely non-zero, and ultimately unknowable chance for catastrophe?
Transport issues are even more risky, especially using trucking. There are so many variable risks that even perfect trucks can’t prevent.
This was briefly covered in the video above, but these casks have been engineered to withstand considerable forces. Even if they were in an earthquake or vehicle collision, I expect the cask would...
This was briefly covered in the video above, but these casks have been engineered to withstand considerable forces. Even if they were in an earthquake or vehicle collision, I expect the cask would hardly notice.
Sure, they may be well prtected from defined calamities. But even with state of the art manufacturing, there is no way to completely exclude a chaotic event such as a chance manufacturing defect....
Sure, they may be well prtected from defined calamities. But even with state of the art manufacturing, there is no way to completely exclude a chaotic event such as a chance manufacturing defect. And even a small failure could spell eons-long catastrophe.
It's never going to be a 0% risk factor, but it really doesn't need to be. It only has to be better than the alternatives. Oil and coal are burning up our planet while we discuss the problem. I'm...
It's never going to be a 0% risk factor, but it really doesn't need to be. It only has to be better than the alternatives. Oil and coal are burning up our planet while we discuss the problem.
I'm not a nuclear engineer (defer to nukeman for that), but from all I've read I do feel confident that modern nuclear plant designs are safe and effective. Techniques such as using the output steam as the moderator eliminate the risk of a runaway reaction, and concrete domes over the reactor are a baseline safety feature of US-run reactors.
Waste is minor issue which has dominated public discourse. Imagine if instead of collecting waste into discrete casks, we instead vented everything into the air. That's essentially how oil and coal solve the problem. Storing everything in dry casks isolates the waste so it doesn't harm our planet. But as the video outlines, the majority of waste isn't even high-level waste (eg. spent fuel rods). A leak would be... pretty minor. It's not like Chernobyl where an active reactor would continue to pump radiation into the air for days on end.
I believe the risks are considerably overstated, and the safety precautions are understated. There's few industries as regulated as the nuclear industry. And frankly it may be to a fault, as we have so many requirements that plants are prohibitively expensive to build.
If I've made any mistakes in this post, please let me know and I'll edit a correction.
There’s a fundamental safety difference between fossil fuels and nuclear (fission). Fossil fuel externalities can end most human life. A catastrophic nuclear accident can end all life. I bristle...
There’s a fundamental safety difference between fossil fuels and nuclear (fission). Fossil fuel externalities can end most human life. A catastrophic nuclear accident can end all life.
I bristle at referring to nuclear waste as a “minor” problem. Whatever risk it poses, it poses for a very long time once generated. My probability theory is rusty, but it seems reasonable that the longer time a random event has to occur, the more likely it will occur.
Also, the perfect engineering solution can only protect against known liabilities, and not at all against larger human failings. This is, as I understand, the problem with Fukushima. Human foibles reduced necessary maintenance, and now disaster, the extent and harms of which we still don’t even know.
We can definitely predict earthquakes. Perhaps not to the degree that you'd like, but certainly effectively. Even from a pop-science perspective, I can say with great certainty that there will be...
We can definitely predict earthquakes. Perhaps not to the degree that you'd like, but certainly effectively. Even from a pop-science perspective, I can say with great certainty that there will be measurable earthquakes along the San Andreas fault in California over the next 12 months. Prediction of location is exceptionally useful when making this sort of decision.
That’s a prediction i suppose, but not a meaningful one. We can’t predict where, beyond “somewhere along this very active fault line,” or when, within the next 12 months. It’s like predicting that...
That’s a prediction i suppose, but not a meaningful one. We can’t predict where, beyond “somewhere along this very active fault line,” or when, within the next 12 months. It’s like predicting that it will snow in maine sometime nect winter.
On the timescale that we're worried about with respect to the engineering, it's plenty though. Here's an example using the same logic that might be easier to get your head around. If I'm building...
On the timescale that we're worried about with respect to the engineering, it's plenty though.
Here's an example using the same logic that might be easier to get your head around. If I'm building a house in Miami and trying to decide if it's more important to have heat or air conditioning, I don't need to predict the weather every day for the next 10 years. I just need to look at the climate data and see that there are many months with average high temperatures above 85 F and no months with average low temperatures below 60 F ((Source)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Miami]). Would it be nice to know for sure which days will be hot and how hot they'll be? Certainly. Do we need to know in order to make the appropriate decision? Not at all. It's easy enough to make a decision with incomplete information.
Transitioning back to the earthquake example. Since we know that some areas are more geologically stable than others, we can make an informed decision with the information we have and decide that some places will be better than others.
I don’t disagree with the notion that some places are better than others. Rather, I challenge the notion whether it is possible to know if any location is good enough. I also challenge the notion...
I don’t disagree with the notion that some places are better than others. Rather, I challenge the notion whether it is possible to know if any location is good enough. I also challenge the notion that times ale makes things better. The longer out into the future we go, the less precise our prediction can be. This is necessarily so, because we lack perfect information-far from it. Intracontinental subduction is one poorly understood possibility, for example.
And again, one chaotic event could lead to instantaneous catastrophe.
Weather prediction 10 years out is not at all analogous. Really, weather and climate are not analogous generally except in this one way: climate is in such flux that historical data do not predict future trends. We can model some broad scale trends, bit we cannot predict specific events in time and space with any useful degree of accuracy. We know climate warming will induce bigger hurricanes, but we can’t say how many hurricane’s will appear, where they will make landfall, or how much more intense any particular hurricane will be.
Neither is earthquake prediction terribly analogous for that matter, I only brought it up to show how imprecise are geological understandings.
We can only predict the approximate location of future quakes because it’s where we have already observed them and we have some understanding of the causes of the ones we have observed. We have not determined all causes for all earthquakes and are completely inept at prediction in less active zones that match our causal theories, let alone those that don’t.
The bottom line is this-beyond say a century, there is an almost unknowable degree of risk of a sufficiently disruptive geological event, probably less time for a hydrological one, and the result of that event would be permanent end of life in a large area.
I misunderstood your understanding. I still disagree, but it seems clear this is a disagreement based on differing risk tolerance, so I'm going to call this done. Hope the rest of your weekend...
I misunderstood your understanding. I still disagree, but it seems clear this is a disagreement based on differing risk tolerance, so I'm going to call this done. Hope the rest of your weekend goes well.
You don't need to know what day it's going to snow next winter to know you'll need a coat that'll tolerate however chilly it gets there. And if you know that the coldest it has ever been in...
You don't need to know what day it's going to snow next winter to know you'll need a coat that'll tolerate however chilly it gets there. And if you know that the coldest it has ever been in recorded history is -20°F and you set yourself up to be comfortable even in -80F°, you just beat winter. You've stacked the deck in your favor to the point where drawing a losing hand doesn't even matter cause the rest of society is living their best lives as popsicles.
That doesn't map perfectly, but point I'm shooting for is that factors of safety exist and (cost permitting!) can be pushed to the point where by the time you have a problem, you've got bigger problems.
This doesn’t map at all. Maybe if preparation for the -80 day included a risk that if it fails, it suddenly causes the weather to be -400 for all the northeast for the next 500,000 years.
This doesn’t map at all.
Maybe if preparation for the -80 day included a risk that if it fails, it suddenly causes the weather to be -400 for all the northeast for the next 500,000 years.
That maps even less! Your idea of the failure mode for these things seems to be severely warped. We're not stashing bombs here. We're locking stable waste inside fortified rocks capable of...
That maps even less!
Your idea of the failure mode for these things seems to be severely warped. We're not stashing bombs here. We're locking stable waste inside fortified rocks capable of withstanding intense destructive force that are themselves locked inside fortified bunkers and monitored and maintained.
I'm not arguing that bad things won't happen if nuclear storage fails, only that risk is manageable and you don't need to wait around for a housefire to happen on its own to figure out how to build a fireproof safe. We can extrapolate usefully from past information.
I'm not anywhere near done (5 minutes in) but I think this might end up being another pro-nuclear take that assumes anti-nuclear people are completely uninformed luddites. He's tried twice now...
I'm not anywhere near done (5 minutes in) but I think this might end up being another pro-nuclear take that assumes anti-nuclear people are completely uninformed luddites. He's tried twice now ("this is not what nuclear waste looks like, this is", and "here's the empty list of accidents related to on-site dry cask storage") to wow people like me with how different nuclear waste is from my mental model. It's not. I know current above-ground storage is a non-issue; I know nuclear waste is not green goo. I can only hope he'll get to some actual concerns.
"Properly managed nuclear waste has no knownwidespread environmental or public health effects" - I'll take weasel words for 500.
Next, we'll compare "properly managed nuclear waste", i.e. no effects, to "properly managed fossil fuel waste", e.g. Deepwater Horizon. I'm sorry, what? Deepwater horizon is neither an example of fossil fuel waste, nor is it an example of proper management. Don't think I'm defending fossil fuels here, I'm attacking the dis-ingenuity of this piece. I could put Chernobyl here as an example of properly managed nuclear waste, and it would make about as much sense. I'm sorry, I'm out. I'm sure I could go on, but I don't want to, at this point.
I'd also like to establish that I'm not exactly pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. Call me a skeptic. I'm not part of the hype squad by any means - except if you count fusion I suppose, it'll be ready in 50 years forever, baby. But I'm also not an absolutist abolishment kinda person. I'm skeptical of the de-facto security of our plants, I'm skeptical of the timeline to get new nuclear plants online in time for decarbonisation and I'm extremely skepticcynical of the potential of future fission plant types to deliver on their promises; LFTR in particular. Ready in 30 years forever, baby. Go square that circle of non-proliferation, walk-away safety and nuclear-waste burning, I'll wait. On the pro-nuclear side I'll put that I think we should probably have built a few more once we started realizing that climate change was going to be a thing, and that we should probably continue to use the infrastructure that we have, as far as it is safe to do so.
I suspect the video isn’t aimed at more-informed critics like yourself, rather, it’s targeted at folks who get their info from Chernobyl and The Simpsons (the latter definitely portraying nuke...
luddites
I suspect the video isn’t aimed at more-informed critics like yourself, rather, it’s targeted at folks who get their info from Chernobyl and The Simpsons (the latter definitely portraying nuke waste as glowing green goo in 55-gallon drums).
I'm not exactly pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear
(I’m going to try to write this without coming off like a duck. I apologize if it comes off as being rude.) I would consider thinking about your unconscious bias here. Since you are German, your views would be influenced by German society, which is one of the most anti-nuclear societies in the world. I suspect there are a few reasons for this:
Germany is generally anti-militarist, and nuclear power does have an origin in the development of nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, Germany was on the front line, and would’ve been hit with nuclear weapons, even during the 1950s, when the Soviets generally lacked the means to deliver them to the United States.
Police brutality and very poor handling of public relations during protests surrounding the Wackersdorf Reprocessing Plant and the Wyhl Nuclear Power Plant.
The straw that broke the camels back: the Chernobyl disaster. Especially with the closed nature of the Soviet Union, it created a lot of fear and uncertainty within Europe. I’ve heard anecdotes about mothers dragging their kids inside due to fears of fallout.
That definitely plays a role in my sentiment, I suppose. Flipside though, consider for example the geological challenges I outlined elsewhere of finding a underground storage site in Germany,...
That definitely plays a role in my sentiment, I suppose. Flipside though, consider for example the geological challenges I outlined elsewhere of finding a underground storage site in Germany, compared to for example Finland, US or Canada. Unless y'all are taking our trash, we've got reason to be worried there. In general, the fact that my society affected my view doesn't mean my view is wrong; especially considering everyone else's society did the same.
And no, I don't read your reply as rude. Though you might (or might not be, you don't expose enough surface area to say) be mistaken about my views on nuclear power. I'm convinced of the engineering side of safety of reactors, for example. I'm convinced that waste can be safely handled. Super pro fusion power. Keep in mind I wrote this to contrast against a (imo shitty) pro-nuclear piece.
I do have a feeling that relative to most Germans, you are pretty pro-nuclear. One thing that I think hinders nuclear power in Europe is the lack of a multinational repository. I’m surprised...
I do have a feeling that relative to most Germans, you are pretty pro-nuclear.
One thing that I think hinders nuclear power in Europe is the lack of a multinational repository. I’m surprised Euratom hasn’t put forth a plan for a Pan-European repository. It would solve the geologic issues relatively speaking, although politics could definitely be an issue.
I count small modular reactors right in with the "30 years forever, baby" bunch. They might happen, and they will undoubtedly have the potential to realize economies of scale we haven't seen. But...
I count small modular reactors right in with the "30 years forever, baby" bunch. They might happen, and they will undoubtedly have the potential to realize economies of scale we haven't seen. But they will also make safety checks and approval processes sooooo much worse. Imagine having to get approval for 10-100x as many reactors. NIMBYs are going to have a field day, because this is a "in everyone's back yard" kind of scenario.
Ok, maybe "30 years forever, baby" is a bit harsh. But last I checked, as far as actually developing this tech, we're still nowhere.
Could you share your sources that have informed your model of nuclear energy and waste safety? I'm curious how they compare and if the facts are much different from the input of my own model...
[...]people like me with how different nuclear waste is from my mental model. It's not.
Could you share your sources that have informed your model of nuclear energy and waste safety? I'm curious how they compare and if the facts are much different from the input of my own model (which is more pro-nuclear).
Ohh, that's kind of hard to do, you know that? I'm not exactly treating this as my scholarly research subject, so I don't keep track of sources. I'm going to summarize my mental model here On the...
Ohh, that's kind of hard to do, you know that? I'm not exactly treating this as my scholarly research subject, so I don't keep track of sources. I'm going to summarize my mental model here
On the topic of waste, I'm not even as critical as displayed above - I'm attacking shitty arguments that go in favor of points I more or less support. Yes, I do that kinda stuff; I think it's necessary. I'm skeptical of our ability to guarantee stability of underground storage for the timescales required; that might go less so for the US, but here in Germany it's much more difficult to find and validate such a site, considering the denser population and smaller overall area. Nuclear waste that is being handled well in properly maintained containers is pretty damn safe. What happens if in 200 years no one shows up to maintain those containers? The problems of nuclear waste will almost certainly only ever happen on very long timescales. Humans are terrible at risk assessment for these timescales, not only because we're emotional and "fuck you, I got mine", but also because our models for failure probabilities are only ever approximations. The video didn't go into that (until I lost interest) because Kyle figured it's better to wow the incompetent audience with strawmen; hence my snark.
As for reactor safety, I'm confident in the ability of our engineers to design very safe plants if you let them. I'm not so confident in our managers and their dedication to upholding proper maintenance standards. A constant trickle of spooky reports from relatively nearby reactors informs this; quite possibly more than it should, considering it's anecdata at best. However, we've had a good few near-misses and a few more cases that illustrate the potential if things go really bad.
In general though, I think my thoughts on both subjects (reactors and waste) is that we have razor thin intellectual margins. We can't afford a "black swan" event, where a reactor we previously thought safe blows up catastrophically because of a failure mode we hadn't even conceived of yet, or where a geological event we previously considered sufficiently unlikely digs up our refuse and conveniently unscrews the lids or whatever. We have not the statistical support to rule out unknown unknowns and not the resilience to tolerate them. Compare the alternative of renewables like wind and solar(let's not talk about hydro, even though safe and eco hydro can exist): We have enough deployed units to properly measure risks, and we can much more confidently provide upper bounds for the damage of a single failure, including in the risk assessment. Heck, compare to fossils, and we have a much better notion of the expected damage. It's still shit, but we know how shit it is quite well.
In other words, the error bars on the risk assessment of nuclear are too big for my liking, generally. Historically, any time you hear of large error bars on a risk assessment, it's because it went to shit big time.
Don't take that as the stark dismissal of nuclear that it might be at the surface. This is written to display the contrast to the yay-nuclear crowd. I still think we should've built a few more reactors in the 90s and 2000s, and I still think e.g. the reactors Germany has, could be operated longer, given case-by-case safety evaluations.
Also relevant, we had a post about high-level nuclear wastes that was very informative, and more technically-oriented about nuclear storage casks, what's in them, and how they're constructed. A...
A lot of the arguments I generally see against nuclear power are these extreme fear-based situations that are exceptionally rare, and even limited in effect. The rest of the issues, some of which are my concerns like running plants for too long past their lifetimes like San Onofre (IIRC was shut down because they couldn't maintain it), and not pushing the deployment of newer reactor types, are due to bureaucratic issues caused by acceptance issues. I could quote from Wikipedia's list of nuclear power station accidents all day, but if we consider how many plants there are, and how long they've been continuously operating, these are just the exceptional cases. Even looking at that list, 5 out of 120 recorded incidents were deaths specific to nuclear power (radiation exposure), and the big numbers were Khystym (~200 cancers), Chernobyl (~4,000 cancers), Fukushima (~250) and Sellafield (~240 cancers). If we consider the service and potential damage areas, these fatalities, while tragic, are incredibly small numbers. A sixth fatal incident that could have a nuclear-specific component was a concussive explosion that exposed the deceased to enough radiation to warrant being buried in coffins, but it was pressure that killed them. I'm hoping to use this as an example of how the risks are over-reported and easy to get stuck on, more than anything.
I always look at the "soft problems" for these things, too, that aren't all numbers and statistics. The "unknown silent killer" factor of radiation makes for compelling fiction, and even easy to fear. I'm even living proof of it having some form of radiophobia that is specifically concentrated around nuclear disasters, I think from watching K-19: The Widowmaker at a young, scaredy-cat age (even writing this comment has me a little shaky). It sure made the Fallout games I've played hit different. While I've always been in favor of nuclear power, learning more about how we prevent things from going wrong, and even the reality of what happens when things go wrong, does a lot in helping me deal with the phobia, even as triggered by obviously exaggerated fiction.
I’ve not watched the video—i find video too slow for passing non-emotional content—but i did study nuclear power in grad school some years back.
Even then, the issue was less about the long term stability of nuclear waste by itself. Vitrified waste in line containers is very stable, if left undisturbed. The problem here is at least two-fold. First, transport is an issue. Even one bad accident could have practically permanent and catastrophic consequences for an entire region. Plant operational security in terms of fatalities may be solid. But there are trucking accidents happening all the time.
Two, the stuff has to remain undisturbed a very long time. geological scale. So sure, that former salt mine effectively sequesters the waste. But we can’t guarantee its geological or hydrological stasis for hundreds of thousands of years. And if there’s a problem? Again, an effectively permanent and potentially catastrophic outcome for a very large area.
I watched the video.
Not saying I'm 100% on board with those arguments. But that's how the video covers those topics.
On transportation, when we receive spent fuel, it comes in very robust shipping containers, usually by truck. The drivers receive special training (and more stringent background checks), routes are monitored from end-to-end, and maintenance is done more thoroughly (e.g., instead of receiving retread tires, the trucks receive brand new ones).
On repositories, you cannot 100% guarantee geology will remain stable, but you can extrapolate based on the previous timeframe, and choose locations with specifically stable formations (salt domes, as you mentioned, along with granite formations like the Canadian Shield) where there is a 99.999999% chance the geology will remain the same.
It is hubris to think we can extrapolate geological stability with such precision 1000 years into the future, let alone 100,000. We can’t even predict earthquakes.
And that assumes only non anthropogenic, terrestrial events.
There is a normative question, too. How do we properly qualify a small, but definitely non-zero, and ultimately unknowable chance for catastrophe?
Transport issues are even more risky, especially using trucking. There are so many variable risks that even perfect trucks can’t prevent.
This was briefly covered in the video above, but these casks have been engineered to withstand considerable forces. Even if they were in an earthquake or vehicle collision, I expect the cask would hardly notice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu1YFshFuI4
And that's stuff from '78. It would take multiple consecutive acts of god to breach a cask.
Sure, they may be well prtected from defined calamities. But even with state of the art manufacturing, there is no way to completely exclude a chaotic event such as a chance manufacturing defect. And even a small failure could spell eons-long catastrophe.
It's never going to be a 0% risk factor, but it really doesn't need to be. It only has to be better than the alternatives. Oil and coal are burning up our planet while we discuss the problem.
I'm not a nuclear engineer (defer to nukeman for that), but from all I've read I do feel confident that modern nuclear plant designs are safe and effective. Techniques such as using the output steam as the moderator eliminate the risk of a runaway reaction, and concrete domes over the reactor are a baseline safety feature of US-run reactors.
Waste is minor issue which has dominated public discourse. Imagine if instead of collecting waste into discrete casks, we instead vented everything into the air. That's essentially how oil and coal solve the problem. Storing everything in dry casks isolates the waste so it doesn't harm our planet. But as the video outlines, the majority of waste isn't even high-level waste (eg. spent fuel rods). A leak would be... pretty minor. It's not like Chernobyl where an active reactor would continue to pump radiation into the air for days on end.
I believe the risks are considerably overstated, and the safety precautions are understated. There's few industries as regulated as the nuclear industry. And frankly it may be to a fault, as we have so many requirements that plants are prohibitively expensive to build.
If I've made any mistakes in this post, please let me know and I'll edit a correction.
There’s a fundamental safety difference between fossil fuels and nuclear (fission). Fossil fuel externalities can end most human life. A catastrophic nuclear accident can end all life.
I bristle at referring to nuclear waste as a “minor” problem. Whatever risk it poses, it poses for a very long time once generated. My probability theory is rusty, but it seems reasonable that the longer time a random event has to occur, the more likely it will occur.
Also, the perfect engineering solution can only protect against known liabilities, and not at all against larger human failings. This is, as I understand, the problem with Fukushima. Human foibles reduced necessary maintenance, and now disaster, the extent and harms of which we still don’t even know.
We can definitely predict earthquakes. Perhaps not to the degree that you'd like, but certainly effectively. Even from a pop-science perspective, I can say with great certainty that there will be measurable earthquakes along the San Andreas fault in California over the next 12 months. Prediction of location is exceptionally useful when making this sort of decision.
That’s a prediction i suppose, but not a meaningful one. We can’t predict where, beyond “somewhere along this very active fault line,” or when, within the next 12 months. It’s like predicting that it will snow in maine sometime nect winter.
On the timescale that we're worried about with respect to the engineering, it's plenty though.
Here's an example using the same logic that might be easier to get your head around. If I'm building a house in Miami and trying to decide if it's more important to have heat or air conditioning, I don't need to predict the weather every day for the next 10 years. I just need to look at the climate data and see that there are many months with average high temperatures above 85 F and no months with average low temperatures below 60 F ((Source)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Miami]). Would it be nice to know for sure which days will be hot and how hot they'll be? Certainly. Do we need to know in order to make the appropriate decision? Not at all. It's easy enough to make a decision with incomplete information.
Transitioning back to the earthquake example. Since we know that some areas are more geologically stable than others, we can make an informed decision with the information we have and decide that some places will be better than others.
I don’t disagree with the notion that some places are better than others. Rather, I challenge the notion whether it is possible to know if any location is good enough. I also challenge the notion that times ale makes things better. The longer out into the future we go, the less precise our prediction can be. This is necessarily so, because we lack perfect information-far from it. Intracontinental subduction is one poorly understood possibility, for example.
And again, one chaotic event could lead to instantaneous catastrophe.
Weather prediction 10 years out is not at all analogous. Really, weather and climate are not analogous generally except in this one way: climate is in such flux that historical data do not predict future trends. We can model some broad scale trends, bit we cannot predict specific events in time and space with any useful degree of accuracy. We know climate warming will induce bigger hurricanes, but we can’t say how many hurricane’s will appear, where they will make landfall, or how much more intense any particular hurricane will be.
Neither is earthquake prediction terribly analogous for that matter, I only brought it up to show how imprecise are geological understandings.
We can only predict the approximate location of future quakes because it’s where we have already observed them and we have some understanding of the causes of the ones we have observed. We have not determined all causes for all earthquakes and are completely inept at prediction in less active zones that match our causal theories, let alone those that don’t.
The bottom line is this-beyond say a century, there is an almost unknowable degree of risk of a sufficiently disruptive geological event, probably less time for a hydrological one, and the result of that event would be permanent end of life in a large area.
I misunderstood your understanding. I still disagree, but it seems clear this is a disagreement based on differing risk tolerance, so I'm going to call this done. Hope the rest of your weekend goes well.
You don't need to know what day it's going to snow next winter to know you'll need a coat that'll tolerate however chilly it gets there. And if you know that the coldest it has ever been in recorded history is -20°F and you set yourself up to be comfortable even in -80F°, you just beat winter. You've stacked the deck in your favor to the point where drawing a losing hand doesn't even matter cause the rest of society is living their best lives as popsicles.
That doesn't map perfectly, but point I'm shooting for is that factors of safety exist and (cost permitting!) can be pushed to the point where by the time you have a problem, you've got bigger problems.
This doesn’t map at all.
Maybe if preparation for the -80 day included a risk that if it fails, it suddenly causes the weather to be -400 for all the northeast for the next 500,000 years.
That maps even less!
Your idea of the failure mode for these things seems to be severely warped. We're not stashing bombs here. We're locking stable waste inside fortified rocks capable of withstanding intense destructive force that are themselves locked inside fortified bunkers and monitored and maintained.
I'm not arguing that bad things won't happen if nuclear storage fails, only that risk is manageable and you don't need to wait around for a housefire to happen on its own to figure out how to build a fireproof safe. We can extrapolate usefully from past information.
I'm not anywhere near done (5 minutes in) but I think this might end up being another pro-nuclear take that assumes anti-nuclear people are completely uninformed luddites. He's tried twice now ("this is not what nuclear waste looks like, this is", and "here's the empty list of accidents related to on-site dry cask storage") to wow people like me with how different nuclear waste is from my mental model. It's not. I know current above-ground storage is a non-issue; I know nuclear waste is not green goo. I can only hope he'll get to some actual concerns.
"Properly managed nuclear waste has no known widespread environmental or public health effects" - I'll take weasel words for 500.
Next, we'll compare "properly managed nuclear waste", i.e. no effects, to "properly managed fossil fuel waste", e.g. Deepwater Horizon. I'm sorry, what? Deepwater horizon is neither an example of fossil fuel waste, nor is it an example of proper management. Don't think I'm defending fossil fuels here, I'm attacking the dis-ingenuity of this piece. I could put Chernobyl here as an example of properly managed nuclear waste, and it would make about as much sense. I'm sorry, I'm out. I'm sure I could go on, but I don't want to, at this point.
I'd also like to establish that I'm not exactly pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. Call me a skeptic. I'm not part of the hype squad by any means - except if you count fusion I suppose, it'll be ready in 50 years forever, baby. But I'm also not an absolutist abolishment kinda person. I'm skeptical of the de-facto security of our plants, I'm skeptical of the timeline to get new nuclear plants online in time for decarbonisation and I'm extremely
skepticcynical of the potential of future fission plant types to deliver on their promises; LFTR in particular. Ready in 30 years forever, baby. Go square that circle of non-proliferation, walk-away safety and nuclear-waste burning, I'll wait. On the pro-nuclear side I'll put that I think we should probably have built a few more once we started realizing that climate change was going to be a thing, and that we should probably continue to use the infrastructure that we have, as far as it is safe to do so.I suspect the video isn’t aimed at more-informed critics like yourself, rather, it’s targeted at folks who get their info from Chernobyl and The Simpsons (the latter definitely portraying nuke waste as glowing green goo in 55-gallon drums).
(I’m going to try to write this without coming off like a duck. I apologize if it comes off as being rude.) I would consider thinking about your unconscious bias here. Since you are German, your views would be influenced by German society, which is one of the most anti-nuclear societies in the world. I suspect there are a few reasons for this:
Germany is generally anti-militarist, and nuclear power does have an origin in the development of nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, Germany was on the front line, and would’ve been hit with nuclear weapons, even during the 1950s, when the Soviets generally lacked the means to deliver them to the United States.
Police brutality and very poor handling of public relations during protests surrounding the Wackersdorf Reprocessing Plant and the Wyhl Nuclear Power Plant.
The straw that broke the camels back: the Chernobyl disaster. Especially with the closed nature of the Soviet Union, it created a lot of fear and uncertainty within Europe. I’ve heard anecdotes about mothers dragging their kids inside due to fears of fallout.
That definitely plays a role in my sentiment, I suppose. Flipside though, consider for example the geological challenges I outlined elsewhere of finding a underground storage site in Germany, compared to for example Finland, US or Canada. Unless y'all are taking our trash, we've got reason to be worried there. In general, the fact that my society affected my view doesn't mean my view is wrong; especially considering everyone else's society did the same.
And no, I don't read your reply as rude. Though you might (or might not be, you don't expose enough surface area to say) be mistaken about my views on nuclear power. I'm convinced of the engineering side of safety of reactors, for example. I'm convinced that waste can be safely handled. Super pro fusion power. Keep in mind I wrote this to contrast against a (imo shitty) pro-nuclear piece.
I do have a feeling that relative to most Germans, you are pretty pro-nuclear.
One thing that I think hinders nuclear power in Europe is the lack of a multinational repository. I’m surprised Euratom hasn’t put forth a plan for a Pan-European repository. It would solve the geologic issues relatively speaking, although politics could definitely be an issue.
I count small modular reactors right in with the "30 years forever, baby" bunch. They might happen, and they will undoubtedly have the potential to realize economies of scale we haven't seen. But they will also make safety checks and approval processes sooooo much worse. Imagine having to get approval for 10-100x as many reactors. NIMBYs are going to have a field day, because this is a "in everyone's back yard" kind of scenario.
Ok, maybe "30 years forever, baby" is a bit harsh. But last I checked, as far as actually developing this tech, we're still nowhere.
Could you share your sources that have informed your model of nuclear energy and waste safety? I'm curious how they compare and if the facts are much different from the input of my own model (which is more pro-nuclear).
Ohh, that's kind of hard to do, you know that? I'm not exactly treating this as my scholarly research subject, so I don't keep track of sources. I'm going to summarize my mental model here
On the topic of waste, I'm not even as critical as displayed above - I'm attacking shitty arguments that go in favor of points I more or less support. Yes, I do that kinda stuff; I think it's necessary. I'm skeptical of our ability to guarantee stability of underground storage for the timescales required; that might go less so for the US, but here in Germany it's much more difficult to find and validate such a site, considering the denser population and smaller overall area. Nuclear waste that is being handled well in properly maintained containers is pretty damn safe. What happens if in 200 years no one shows up to maintain those containers? The problems of nuclear waste will almost certainly only ever happen on very long timescales. Humans are terrible at risk assessment for these timescales, not only because we're emotional and "fuck you, I got mine", but also because our models for failure probabilities are only ever approximations. The video didn't go into that (until I lost interest) because Kyle figured it's better to wow the incompetent audience with strawmen; hence my snark.
As for reactor safety, I'm confident in the ability of our engineers to design very safe plants if you let them. I'm not so confident in our managers and their dedication to upholding proper maintenance standards. A constant trickle of spooky reports from relatively nearby reactors informs this; quite possibly more than it should, considering it's anecdata at best. However, we've had a good few near-misses and a few more cases that illustrate the potential if things go really bad.
In general though, I think my thoughts on both subjects (reactors and waste) is that we have razor thin intellectual margins. We can't afford a "black swan" event, where a reactor we previously thought safe blows up catastrophically because of a failure mode we hadn't even conceived of yet, or where a geological event we previously considered sufficiently unlikely digs up our refuse and conveniently unscrews the lids or whatever. We have not the statistical support to rule out unknown unknowns and not the resilience to tolerate them. Compare the alternative of renewables like wind and solar(let's not talk about hydro, even though safe and eco hydro can exist): We have enough deployed units to properly measure risks, and we can much more confidently provide upper bounds for the damage of a single failure, including in the risk assessment. Heck, compare to fossils, and we have a much better notion of the expected damage. It's still shit, but we know how shit it is quite well.
In other words, the error bars on the risk assessment of nuclear are too big for my liking, generally. Historically, any time you hear of large error bars on a risk assessment, it's because it went to shit big time.
Don't take that as the stark dismissal of nuclear that it might be at the surface. This is written to display the contrast to the yay-nuclear crowd. I still think we should've built a few more reactors in the 90s and 2000s, and I still think e.g. the reactors Germany has, could be operated longer, given case-by-case safety evaluations.
Also relevant, we had a post about high-level nuclear wastes that was very informative, and more technically-oriented about nuclear storage casks, what's in them, and how they're constructed.
A lot of the arguments I generally see against nuclear power are these extreme fear-based situations that are exceptionally rare, and even limited in effect. The rest of the issues, some of which are my concerns like running plants for too long past their lifetimes like San Onofre (IIRC was shut down because they couldn't maintain it), and not pushing the deployment of newer reactor types, are due to bureaucratic issues caused by acceptance issues. I could quote from Wikipedia's list of nuclear power station accidents all day, but if we consider how many plants there are, and how long they've been continuously operating, these are just the exceptional cases. Even looking at that list, 5 out of 120 recorded incidents were deaths specific to nuclear power (radiation exposure), and the big numbers were Khystym (~200 cancers), Chernobyl (~4,000 cancers), Fukushima (~250) and Sellafield (~240 cancers). If we consider the service and potential damage areas, these fatalities, while tragic, are incredibly small numbers. A sixth fatal incident that could have a nuclear-specific component was a concussive explosion that exposed the deceased to enough radiation to warrant being buried in coffins, but it was pressure that killed them. I'm hoping to use this as an example of how the risks are over-reported and easy to get stuck on, more than anything.
I always look at the "soft problems" for these things, too, that aren't all numbers and statistics. The "unknown silent killer" factor of radiation makes for compelling fiction, and even easy to fear. I'm even living proof of it having some form of radiophobia that is specifically concentrated around nuclear disasters, I think from watching K-19: The Widowmaker at a young, scaredy-cat age (even writing this comment has me a little shaky). It sure made the Fallout games I've played hit different. While I've always been in favor of nuclear power, learning more about how we prevent things from going wrong, and even the reality of what happens when things go wrong, does a lot in helping me deal with the phobia, even as triggered by obviously exaggerated fiction.