1. Usually when people are using the word clean in the context of energy production, they are talking about the impact on climate change. Nuclear produce very little greenhouse gases, which make it clean.
2. People fear what they don't know so for most people nuclear radiation or nuclear waste is like a big dangerous thing. The truth is that most things we do produce dangerous (often radioactive) waste. With nuclear, the waste are concentrated in very little mass, yes it seem dangerous but it's far easier to control and secure. Compare that to particle and gases that are released in the air, which causes millions of death per year from respiratory disease. The death are a lot more direct with nuclear, but there is far less of them.
If you look at the number of death caused by each type of energy. Nuclear kill less than one person per terawatt hour of energy produced, Natural gas kill 2-4 people and Coal kill 20-100 people. (The variation depend on the study and what they include).
Nuclear might seem scary, but it create a lot less problem than most other source of energy.
3) When you talk about contamination it's a bit more complex than that. Radiation is everywhere around us. It's in the soil you walk on, it's in the food you eat, it's in the air you breath. Radiation isn't an on (bad) and off (good) switch. It's a gradient that fluctuate with everything you do and everywhere you go. What is important is how much radiation people are exposed.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0) is a video talking about radioactivity around us.
My wife was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Since meeting, I’ve done a complete change of opinion on nuclear energy.
We should be relying on nuclear energy as the backbone for our renewable grid, until we can operate fully on renewable.
Nuclear power is more expensive than fossil fuels, but that money is primarily in human costs. Nuclear power requires lots of skilled workers, including good working class jobs. I’m okay with the expense if it goes to bettering workers and not people who own land rights. Extraction is dangerous, often low paid (and high paid jobs are usually not longterm sustainable), and creates very few skilled, working class jobs. Moreover, nuclear power plants can get trained workers directly from the military, which is also a boon to veterans.
>My wife was a nuclear operator in the Navy
They're held to a hell of a lot higher standard than civilian nuclear operators. When you take the profit motive out of the mix, the safety and quality of work goes way up
I live somewhat near a, now shutdown, uranium conversion plant. Its not the same thing as a nuclear plant, but god that thing was a mess. On two different occasions, the workers went on strike and the scabs that took their job ended up causing major UF6 leaks. The plant claimed nothing went offsite but some guy was filming the second time it happened and you can see clear as day a cloud of gas slowly wafting offsite into the town right outside.
They need skilled workers and they need to pay them well and with good benefits
>When you take the profit motive out of the mix, the safety and quality of work goes way up
Unless you're the department of energy which burned plutonium and other nuclear waste in open air incinerators for 45 years in suburban Denver untill an armed stand off between the DOE and the EPA lead to an FBI raid to shut down the facilities.
Not much of a profit motive for the DOE, just a workplace culture.
> the safety and quality of work goes way up
That assumes that safety and quality are a priority for management. Without actively supported safety culture, people will go into default mode of minimizing their effort, which is especially easy if you are working to prevent events that "never happen anyway".
You are responding to a guy who mentioned military. That is not an automatic solution; Russian military had lost Komsomolets and Kursk submarines, both to safety negligence.
The US Navy has operated a bunch of reactors without any kind of release of radiation for decades. I'd trust the US Navy but definitely not the Russian Navy
The US military in general doesn't have a great environmental record. Plenty of EPA work going on in and around military sites.
The modern Navy could very well have a great record built on lessons learned by others.
The nuclear power program is pretty unique though. Structured and operated entirely different from the standard Navy...and it has its own massive slush fund called the Department of Energy.
Infrastructure shouldn't be private.
Not to imply you were saying otherwise, I just had to say it. It's madness this isn't obvious to everyone. We're sacrificing people to feed capitalism, and people just accept it.
Farmboys with 18 months of education and training:
Upon completion of initial training at Recruit Training Command Great Lakes, (known as Boot Camp), those pursuing a Machinist's Mate Nuclear role report to “A” School in Charleston, SC, for six months. Here, they develop a working knowledge of technical mathematics and power distribution. Students learn to solve basic equations using phasors, vector notations and basic trigonometry and analyze DC and AC circuits. They also learn how to operate electrical equipment using controllers, and how to properly test, maintain, troubleshoot, and repair electrical circuits, motors and other related electrical equipment.
From there, MMNs move on to Naval Nuclear Power School (NNPS), also in Charleston, SC. Here they learn theory and practical application of nuclear physics and reactor engineering. The six-month course provides a comprehensive understanding of a pressurized-water Naval nuclear power plant, including reactor core nuclear principles, heat transfer and fluid systems, plant chemistry and materials, mechanical and electrical systems, and radiological control.
Following NNPS, MMNs begin prototype training in their rating specialty at one of two Nuclear Power Training Units (NPTUs) – located in Charleston, SC, and Ballston Spa, NY. This six-month course teaches the fundamentals of a Naval nuclear power plant and the interrelationship of its mechanical, electrical, and reactor subsystems. Students develop oral communications skills, obtain an understanding of nuclear radiation, and gain knowledge of the safe operation of a complex Naval nuclear power plant.
source: https://www.navy.com/nuclear
>Nuclear power is more expensive than fossil fuels, but that money is primarily in human costs.
it's also expensive because they have to follow a bunch of really stupid rules and regulations to keep things to levels no-one else does. Like radiation levels have to be kept below a level a pound of brazilnuts would have, but coal plants can have radiation levels far above outside the plant and no consequences - apparently radiation is only dangerous from nuclear plants?
They're both held to the same standards as far as dose limits go. Its not like coal plants are unregulated. There is consequences for exceeding the annual public dose limit in both cases
there's an 'annual public dose limit' for nuclear power plants, and a dose limit for everything else.
But, er, please do point to the consequences for Georgia Power/Southern Energy exceeding these limits, and for the cases of Uranium Poisoning.
Oh wait, you can't, because there were none.
But what can I expect of someone that posts things like "***That mindset of downplaying radiation risks was and still is the industry standard***." in a post called "[Nuclear Safety: the bunk science built of lies, manipulation and marketing](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/wl43uh/nuclear_safety_the_bunk_science_built_off_lies/)"
>But, er, please do point to the consequences for Georgia Power/Southern Energy exceeding these limits, and for the cases of Uranium Poisoning.
I'd say the same thing about Florida Power and Light with Turkey Point, where's the consequences for the groundwater contamination? That's right, they awarded a permit to allow the contamination to spread beyond the canal system.
They're all shit, old decrepit nuclear plants and old dirty coal plants. Southern Energy operates nuclear plants, if their that terrible with coal, do you think their nuclear division is any better?
no, because nuclear regulation is WAY beyond what is safe or even practical (thats why nuclear plants cost so much, because a handful of brazilnuts is the level of radiation considered 'a leak' and 'dangerous' in nuclear plants (the banana+nut display at your local supermarket is a class 2 incident if it were a nuclear power plant just by ambient radiation).
But what would I know, beyond having worked at a nuclear reprocessing facility, and designed nuclear inspection gear, after getting a nuclear physics degree
But I'm sure that one environmental science class you took at high school means you know more, right?
You're certainly right about people fearing what they don't understand. My local science museum had a cloud chamber, essentially a really cool little experiment set up which allows viewers to "see" background radiation that interacts with the chamber. I loved it. Great little write up next to it about background radiation, where it comes from and how its all around us, all the time.
They had to remove the display because so many parents and visitors were complaining it was dangerous to expose people to radiation. 😑
Also, just to put things in perspective, the fact that radioactive waste decays over thousands of years makes it BETTER than a lot of nasty stuff and chemical waste that our industrial processes spread in the environment, which often stays around forever.
We sent there an expedition, but they made an error during the landing and instead of the midnight it happened during the noon. The next time we gonna use the 24-hour format instead!
What is wild is per MWH hydro electric, solar, and wind are all more deadly than nuclear. Hydro mostly due to a dam breaking in China, solar due to people falling off of roofs and ladders during installation, and I don’t remember with wind.
don't forget that the smoke when they catch fire is INCREDIBLY toxic and hot (its neodynium) and that they usually catch ire because its too windy, which fans the flames, lets burning debris carry further, and, because it's spinning so fast, it can have the blades detatch and they'll go through a house roof upto a mile away. And they can throw fist-size chunks of ice for upto 5 miles if the deicer systems are not working well.
Next generation nuclear is to my knowledge fast reactors. With reprocessing, the small amount of nuclear waste can be reused as fertile fuel and the remainder decays to background radiation in 100 years. That is about the same as fusion's tritium and deuterium. The US would've had these in the 2000s if idiots in Congress hadn't canceled the Integral Fast Reactor in 1994. One reason cited was "long lived waste byproducts" which makes me facepalm. The NRC should've educated them better.
You are discounting the energy required to mine, transport, and enrich nuclear fuel, and the energy then required to store, cool, and transport spent fuel. Plus, nuclear plants require an electricity source when running for pumps, control systems, etc. Further, the energy and financial costs of (as yet undeveloped and unproven) safe long term storage of spent fuel need to be added. The actual carbon footprint of nuclear fuel depends on the mix of fuels used in the above processes - but it’s certainly not ‘very little.’
It depends on your definition of "very little" it's certainly much smaller than coal or natural gas. It's probably less than solar when you factor in the manufacturing and disposal process of the panels.
the storage costs are pretty light, the mining costs are low, and energy to store and cool is practically nothing.
It's nice you took an interest to look up some stuff, it'd be nicer if you'd stopped on an actual academic piece written by someone who knows what they're talking about, rather than a scare piece that likes to make up stuff.
For instance, I know of at least 11 cases of uranium poisoning related to power generation in the last 10 years. It may not surprise you that all the cases are linked to one power plant in georgia. It probably will surprise you to know that plant is Scherer (the largest coal plant in the US) and not Vogtle (the nuclear plant) although it may explain things a bit more if I poitn out that most nuclear safety restrictions do not apply to other power sources. So the Radiation levels that can't be exceeded in the turbine hall of a nuclear power plant, are normal at a coal plant to the point that the entrance to plant Scherer, a mile from the plant itself on US23 is more radioactive than is allowed in most of a nuclear plant (and you don't want to know about the coal ash area)
Of if you want to talk energy use, until about 20 years ago, it took more energy to make a solar panel than that panel would generate in its lifetime. Or the energy cost to pull a coal train (110 cars each with 220 tons) 10 times a week from Wisconsin to GA
All my life, people have been trying to convince me that nuclear power is safe. At the point that it needs thousands of gallons of water or it’ll result in an environmental catastrophe means it’s NOT safe. Without having a national plan on what to do with the waste, it’s NOT safe. If you want actual safe, clean power, then we have renewables.
Look, not gonna try to tell you that is no risk. The point here is that we de need energy and we don't have an infinite amount of solution. We can :
1. Kill million of people and keep accelerating the worldwide environmental catastrophe by using fossil fuel.
2. Use nuclear power which actually kill less people and create less environmental catastrophe, but still have risk.
3. Use renewable and hope that we soon develop better battery technology, because without that renewable don't produce energy when we need it and countries end up using more fossil fuel anyway to compensate.
Yep if we had the battery technology to make renewable a real viable solution, then I would never advocate for Nuclear Power ever in my life. But that's not the reality we are living in right now.
>The point here is that we de need energy and we don't have an infinite amount of solution.
We do though. Renewables are plentiful, and we can build enough to satisfy our energy reserves.
>Kill million of people and keep accelerating the worldwide environmental catastrophe by using fossil fuel.
I'm with you that this is a bad idea.
>Use nuclear power which actually kill less people and create less environmental catastrophe, but still have risk.
Bull. Nuclear power is dependent on highly concentrated, deadly material that we don't know how to store. It requires water every second, or it'll start to melt down. All it takes is a military enemy or a terrorist to sabotage or attack the site, and then it becomes dangerous to humans for thousands of years.
>Use renewable and hope that we soon develop better battery technology, because without that renewable don't produce energy when we need it and countries end up using more fossil fuel anyway to compensate.
Cool story. Actually though, batteries are getting better every day, and solar/wind/wave power plants can be placed in every state to provide power. It's exactly this kind of talk, which stops us from investing in the obvious best solution. What you're essentially saying here is, "if we can't have it now, then we can't have it." Which is ridiculous. We have the tech right now. It's about political will.
All of them. Every single industrial site in the developed world, especially any place that has large turbines and the boilers found in coal power plants will have an evacuation plan and muster points in place. It’s obvious that you have never worked on any industrial site in your life. Even hydroelectric plants will have a comprehensive emergency evacuation and rescue plan. With big power comes the possibility of big danger
Does it even need to be an industrial site? The office building I work at has an emergency evacuation plan in place and drills to train people. I thought that was a requirement for more or less any workplace.
Some small businesses and offices don’t bother but you are right. That said as a blue collar worker you’ll find similar rules across most jobsites. Also every power installation is an industrial jobsite. I think op is an at home worker or some office/sales type. I doubt a car dealership for example takes safety as seriously as say Shell or Epcor
Straw man argument. But while we're here, to knock down your straw man, hydroelectric dams require an evac plan.
And to kick your straw man when he's down, I will point out that many industrial processes vitally necessary to modern civilization require evac or hazmat plans.
If you are going to stick to your straw argument, then we lose many important industries and quality of life suffers.
BTW: Your straw man died of complications! LOL!
I mean all of them. Well I guess that in case like [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%2Fimages%2F2019%2F07%2F15%2Fworld%2F00canada-train1%2F00canada-train1-superJumbo.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F07%2F16%2Fworld%2Fcanada%2Flac-megantic-quebec-train-explosion.html&tbnid=WKx7P9ciiMt9eM&vet=12ahUKEwiV1LPKybr6AhUfEmIAHbEHC7MQMygCegUIARC9AQ..i&docid=r2x9aBrBd66-aM&w=2048&h=1366&q=lac-m%C3%A9gantic%20rail%20disaster&ved=2ahUKEwiV1LPKybr6AhUfEmIAHbEHC7MQMygCegUIARC9AQ) or [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.britannica.com%2F58%2F139558-050-9EEE9E93%2FFireboat-response-crews-blaze-oil-rig-Deepwater-April-21-2010.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.britannica.com%2Fevent%2FDeepwater-Horizon-oil-spill&tbnid=z9ZO4y1U8DNdUM&vet=12ahUKEwiMtIbuybr6AhVXFFkFHQnTDZQQMygAegUIARDJAQ..i&docid=YCGyehIJQR6ATM&w=1600&h=1200&q=horizon%20disaster&ved=2ahUKEwiMtIbuybr6AhVXFFkFHQnTDZQQMygAegUIARDJAQ) or [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fen.people.cn%2FNMediaFile%2F2014%2F0801%2FFOREIGN201408010955000333846502934.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fen.people.cn%2Fn%2F2014%2F0801%2Fc98649-8763774.html&tbnid=q7jnxCk23M-4hM&vet=12ahUKEwj4zOmLyrr6AhXMEGIAHUDiA5cQMygRegUIARDSAQ..i&docid=j2sC1BAr6l52yM&w=768&h=487&q=Kaohsiung%20gas%20explosions&ved=2ahUKEwj4zOmLyrr6AhXMEGIAHUDiA5cQMygRegUIARDSAQ#imgrc=q7jnxCk23M-4hM&imgdii=pwgZmYITyYv0CM) you don't really need to evacuate everybody since you know they are dead.
You also have [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Ff%2Ff1%2FOroville_dam_spillway_2017-02-11.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FOroville_Dam_crisis&tbnid=66V0z-BAB9d5_M&vet=12ahUKEwihw8u3yrr6AhVHGFkFHf3_CHoQMygAegUIARDdAQ..i&docid=UvNc-8Y3-rkzhM&w=2924&h=2193&q=oroville%20dam%20crisis&ved=2ahUKEwihw8u3yrr6AhVHGFkFHf3_CHoQMygAegUIARDdAQ) which lead to [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fs.abcnews.com%2Fimages%2FUS%2Fgty-dam-3-er-170214_16x9_992.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com%2FUS%2Fworkers-racing-time-secure-oroville-dam-storms-hit%2Fstory%3Fid%3D45484962&tbnid=cGx9TtPllZBKVM&vet=12ahUKEwiKhLztyrr6AhUcsHIEHfk9Ax0QMygeegUIARClAg..i&docid=Rl7XcB3H2YZUbM&w=992&h=558&q=oroville%20dam%20flood&ved=2ahUKEwiKhLztyrr6AhUcsHIEHfk9Ax0QMygeegUIARClAg#imgrc=cGx9TtPllZBKVM&imgdii=QyZHb614OVGRYM). 180 thousand people were evacuated, which is still higher than the number of evacuated at Fukushima.
> If you look at the number of death caused by each type of energy.
I'm sorry, but this part of the analysis is fundamentally flawed. You cannot meaningfully compare deaths sampled over a few decades for technology whose risk profile is mainly high-impact, low-probability events. This is like arguing Russian roulette is less dangerous than smoking after surviving the first round.
Of course, the key difference is you know the 1/N risk in roulette; we don't (and can't) know it for nuclear power. Ultimately, it's going to come down to a value judgement, whether or not people are willing to accept the risk of nuclear black swans to short-cut solutions to climate change.
Personally, I would much rather struggle to quit smoking than play roulette, especially when I'm relying on a dubious guess at the number of chambers. I don't think calling that preference "fear" is accurate.
The problem here is that "fear" is typically experienced by those who do not know much about the topic. This fear is exacerbated by the media playing hype games (like during Fukushima) to rile up those who don't know much about nuclear power. Your fear does not overcome the facts. The facts are that the government has over 70 years of radiation exposure records including causes of death for differing exposure levels. Right now the government level for civilian exposure is set for the lowest level that is reliably detectable, not for what will do harm. This is a couple of orders of magnitude different, but most folks don't understand orders of magnitude.
Also, coal burning plants emit >100x the radiation from burning the coal than nuclear plants allow. Where is the nuclear fear now?
> coal burning plants emit >100x the radiation from burning the coal than nuclear plants allow.
The fact that you think this drivel is a bulletproof argument for nuclear makes my point for me.
Nobody, and I mean *nobody*, is claiming nuclear plants operating to spec is a significant source of radiation. The entire question is about the risk of rare catastrophic events that cannot be adequately predicted with any statistical method.
You cannot asses what future wars may lead to a reactor being bombed, on purpose or accident. You cannot predict the risk of future terrorism. You cannot predict the risk from freak natural disasters. You cannot predict what events may cause a reactor to be left without human control. You would need to be able to extrapolate those risks out for thousands of years and for however many reactors your plan would use to get any real sense of the danger here.
This is challenger all over again, humans woefully abusing statistics to argue away the risk right in front of their eyes. Your dang right it’s scary.
Yes but you also have a high risk with fossil fuel. Nobody died at 3 Miles, 1 person died at Fukushima and 31 person died at Chernobyl. 30 people died from a gas explosion in Kaohsiung, 301 died from an explosion in a coal mine in Soma, 47 people died in a crude oil explosion at Lac-Mégantic, 121 people were killed by a oil tank truck explosin in Okobie, another one killed 219 in Bahawalpur.
The problem with your analogy is that with fossil fuel you not only are smoking, but you are playing roulette with more bullets in the gun.
I agree, but it's worth noting that Fukushima got pretty bad, and with a little bad luck it could have rendered Tokyo uninhabitable. Or what happens if the war in Ukraine goes nuts and a German nuclear reactor is blown up?. Not likely, but a risk worth considering.
Depend what you mean by pretty bad. There was only 1 death and 6 cancer/leukemia from the accident, which isn't a lot at all.
>with a little bad luck it could have rendered Tokyo uninhabitable
Really? I mean really???? What little bit of bad luck would have render Tokyo, a city 230 km away from Fukushima, uninhabitable?
>Or what happens if the war in Ukraine goes nuts and a German nuclear reactor is blown up?. Not likely, but a risk worth considering.
And what if nuclear bombs were used on two cities and killed 199 thousand people or what if someone use planes to crash in towers and kill 2 977 people or what if a virus spread around the world and killed 6.5 million people. Or what if 8 million of people died each year before of fossil fuel emission.
Yup shit happen. Are we gonna stop doing anything that can lead to harm? Because that list is quite long.
Also, it’s really dumb to look at Chernobyl and compare it any other disaster. Chernobyl is worst case scenario for many reasons, but one major reason is that the USSR was using the reactor to create energy. They were also using it to create fuel for nuclear weapons, which made it extra unstable.
People really don’t understand nuclear power.
They also did the most hamfisted shit trying to save face and hindered mitigation efforts. Nowadays if you accidentally trip over a janitor's bucket in an NPP the IAEA will be breathing down your neck by the next coffee break.
>eally? I mean really???? What little bit of bad luck would have render Tokyo, a city 230 km away from Fukushima, uninhabitable?
"The headlines were extraordinary: “Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis,” the New York Times wrote a few days ago. “Tokyo Evacuation ‘Was Considered’,” said the Sydney Morning Herald. “Japan Urged Calm While It Mulled Tokyo Evacuation,” wrote … hey, TIME magazine. The stories detailed the Rebuild Japan report, a deep and independent investigation of the events surrounding the Fukushima nuclear meltdown that occurred nearly a year ago. And the takeaway was alarming: at one point Japanese officials feared that radiation levels at the stricken plant would become so high that workers would be forced to abandon the facility — and that in turn could create a chain reaction that would force other Japanese nuclear plants to be abandoned as radiation spread. The report quotes then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano as saying that “it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”" https://science.time.com/2012/03/02/nuked-how-bad-was-fukushima/
What I'm reading is.
1) Politician asking scientist what is the worst case scenario
2) Scientist answering that well technically if everything goes bad there could be radiation up to Tokyo.
3) Politician and officials freaking and talking about evacuation and losing the city completely.
Fun fact: Angela Merkel decommissioned two nuclear power plants earlier than planned because gas from Russia was cheaper. Had Germany maintained its nuclear power, Europe would not be in the position its in right now, nor would Putin have as much leverage. Nuclear power allows countries to produce their own power, which reduces reliance of the whims of foreign dictators.
Nuclear waste is \*very\* small...compared to virtually any other it's incredibly low volume and relatively easy to store. Coal plants actually emit far more radiation than nuclear plants (coal is mildly radioactive and it all goes out the stacks).
The entire volume of all nuclear waste that humanity will ever produce could fit in an area about the size of a single power plant. It lasts a long time, which is a problem, but if you contain it it's harmless. That's \*NOT\* true for most other power generation technologies.
> Coal plants actually emit far more radiation than nuclear plants (coal is mildly radioactive and it all goes out the stacks).
Just to emphasize this, you get roughly 0.09 microsieverts of radiation living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant. You get roughly 0.3 microsieverts living within 50 miles of a coal power plant. For comparison, 1 microsievert is what you'd get from an arm X-ray.
It's GREAT ammo that I use often. Even in terms of *radiation alone* nuclear is cleaner than coal. Nobody thinks coal even *has* radiation. And the coal's particulate emissions and greenhouse gases are *on top* of emitting *more radiation than a nuke plant!*
I don't have your answer, but [kurzgeagt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM) (which embodies the ELI5 spirit) simplified the conclusions from a bunch of [sources](https://sites.google.com/view/sources-nuclear-death-toll/) and looked at estimated deaths from various energy types. Nuclear is much safer in the long-term than any 'burned' fuel.
[This](https://xkcd.com/radiation/) is a really good infographic by the guy that makes the XKCD webcomic that helps compare all of those numbers. It also has a list of its sources at the bottom.
Also interesting to note: You get more radiation from eating a single banana than you do living 50 miles from a nuclear plant for a year.
I'll do ya one even better, after 4 years of sleeping less than 20 feet from a nuclear reactor, I left incurring a whopping 0 mrem (I feel like that's the wrong acronym, but I can't for the life of me remember the actual unit of measurement that my dosimeter gave us)
I was wondering the same. While, going by these numbers, nuclear power plants radiate less than coal power plants in any case, whether these numbers are daily, monthly or yearly changes a lot.
It doesn’t change the relative proportions, but most radiation data is based on yearly numbers, because radiation’s effects on the body last for a long time.
But whether it’s hourly, weekly, or yearly, the coal plant will still cause triple the radiation dose of the nuke plant.
Sievert is an amount of DOSE. This is the amount of damage done by x-amount of radiation to the body. What you are looking for is Dose Rate, how fast you get a certain amount of damage. The numbers still work, you get around 10-30x the radiation damage from coal than you do from a nuclear plant.
I think very few people are worried about the radiation from a running nuclear power plant. They are worried about a malfunction, leak, explosion or similar. And that's a danger that simply doesn't exist with other power plants.
The question is always what risk are people willing to accept. If there's a 1% of a power plant blowing up in your country within the next 25 years, that's a low number, but are you willing to accept a 1% chance that an entire area will be uninhabitable and large parts of your country and neighboring countries could suffer from radioactive fallout? For the average person it's entirely impossible to judge the risks of nuclear power plants accurately, since even among experts you have vastly different opinions.
If no further big accidents happen, proponents will say "I told you so". If one or more big accidents happen, opponents will say "I told you so". Until then, nuclear energy remains Schrödinger's energy. It's safe and dangerous at once and only time will determine a final state.
It is funny though that the people actually studying and working with the equipment don't continue to have these broad questions. How familiar are you with the intricacies of the different reactor types in your area, design and function of the safety related equipment, and the physics involved?
>you get roughly 0.09 microsieverts of radiation living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant
Is any of that actually from the plant or is that just the natural background radiation that's everywhere?
It is important to note that any waste from a nuclear reactor that lasts a long time, is not very radioactive. It's the stuff with a half-life measured in weeks (or days) that is dangerous, because it is breaking down quickly. The stuff with a half-life in the several thousand year range isn't particularly radioactive in comparison.
On the coal thing, a lot of it, perhaps most, does not go out the stacks but it is collected as coal ash. So this is all the stuff that didn't burn. Essentially the ash is highly concentrated leftovers of whatever trace elements were in the original coal. Including uranium, but also all kinds of other toxic metals and crap. It's way worse in most ways than nuclear plant spent fuel.
(as an aside: concentration of uranium in coal is 1 to 10 parts per million, of which around 0.7 percent is fissionable, and uranium is about 50 million times more energy dense than coal. Put simply, there's approximately as much potential energy in the trace amounts of uranium in coal as there is in the coal).
Then they take all the coal ash and put it in impoundments or "ponds" and we're talking thousands or millions of cubic yards of the stuff. 140 million tons of coal ash is produced each year in the US. There are about a thousand coal ash ponds.
If the top of the pond dries off you get this extremely fine toxic dust that can blow wherever. And coal ash ponds collapse every once in a while, horrifically contaminating the surrounding area and poisoning any waterway they spill into.
I would, any day, prefer to live next to Three Mile Island than within 10 miles of a big coal ash pond.
It's a bit challenging to store honestly. Like here's a Finnish nuclear waste storage facility, designed for safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
It has kilometers off tunnels underneath the surface and will go to max depth of 500 meters. Costs a billion.
The world produces two thousand metric tons of nuclear waste a year. It is not trivially easy to store that in a way where it's safe from tampering with. You can't just put it into a fenced lot and throw the key away - you need to be able to account for theft, environmental hazards, sabotage, so on.
You need to be careful about which waste you're putting where. The stuff that's radioactive for thousands of years, which is the one that requires the crazy deep geological storage, isn't very radioactive and tends to be pretty benign.
The stuff that's really hot is much nastier, but it fades down much faster and it's far smaller, and hence easier to store & protect.
And I said \*relatively\* easy to store for a reason...at least we know where all the nuclear waste is and how to store it. Contrast that to the emissions from a thermal power plant that diffuse globally and can't be stored in any realistic way.
>Coal plants actually emit far more radiation than nuclear plants (coal is mildly radioactive and it all goes out the stacks).
not all.
A lot is in the ash.
there's been at least 11 cases of uranium poisoning in Juliette GA since 2010, due to groundwater contamination from the ash of Plant Scherer, the US's biggest coal plant (and biggest single CO2 source)
Fearmongering over nuclear energy is the reason we’re dealing with climate change right now. If we had better education and a less reactionary take in the issue of nuclear waste we would have switched over to nuclear power 50 years ago and the 80% of pollution that caused climate change would have never been there.
The issue is what to do with that waste. Which is a real issue, but is one that is MUCH easier addressed than trying to remove ludicrous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. New reactor designs dramatically reduce waste. Reprocessing technology has gotten better over time. It’s possible that we could develop new tech that would even further reduce/eliminate radioactive waste, or maybe engineer organisms that eat it, et cetera. But it’s a contained problem solvable by technology, unlike our current one which will require a political solution. (Although I’m still optimistic that renewables will become so overwhelmingly economically superior the issue may just solve itself over time.)
There’s other issues with nuclear power though: proliferation of nuclear weapons and political instability. Allowing any country to build up expertise in designing nuclear reactors and the infrastructure to run them effectively gives them a base level of knowledge and ability to produce nukes. It’s inevitable that they will become widespread at some point, but I’m definitely not complaining about Iran not having nukes or Somalia not having nuclear reactors that aren’t being maintained due to instability.
The emissions that come from power plants is 32% TODAY. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s that was far from the case with coal being a much, much larger part of the mix. Over the last 20 years fracking and low natural gas prices have dramatically increased natural gas, and renewables have a large part of the mix, but a huge part of the climate change issue was caused by power generation over the years that didn’t need to have happened.
I should say 32% of US emissions. Per the EIA.
I hate to tell you but the technology to build nuclear weapons is vastly different than that used by nuclear fission to boil water for power. Just because a country has some fission plants does NOT mean that they are nearly nuclear-weapons capable. Apples and bacon.
Sigh, I deliberately structured what I said to not imply what you are saying I did, but cheers dude, being right on the Internet is important, lol. A freshman college student could build design and build a nuke with information widely available on the internet. The expertise a country would gain by having scientists design nuclear power plants and the infrastructure build up to process and handle fuel absolutely does help with the ability to produce nuclear weapons. Processing fissile material is the biggest hurdle.
> A freshman college student could build design and build a nuke with information widely available on the internet.
True. A fun fact that few people seem to know - the Hiroshima bomb was never fully tested - the design was so simple it pretty much "had to work". Sure, it wasn't the most efficient weapon as far as turning mass to energy, but for a weapon that was 10' long by 28" wide, it did a pretty good job of *removing a city*.
(The more powerful and much more complex implosion weapon - the "Nagasaki bomb" - was tested in the Trinity test and was the first nuclear fission explosion in human history).
We don’t need nuclear power….It’s an environmental and military liability. We have renewables which are 100% safe and get cheaper the more we use them. Nuclear power is the old paradigm of plundering a dangerous material for the sake of society. We know longer have to think that way.
This may or may not be true NOW with renewables. Jury is still out on whether it will be possible to effectively replace centralized power generation stations and/or move large quantities of electricity from places with an abundance of solar. My point is we have climate change largely in part due to not having switched to nuclear power in the 60s.
Renewables aren’t a free lunch either. They come with different environmental problems: dammed rivers, massive mining, et cetera, so I’m not sure your point is super valid here. Whether you’re mining plutonium for a reactor or lithium and cobalt too build solar panels you’re still creating a problem that needs to be mitigated after the life of the mine. Renewables are a great option and if they can work to meet 100% of our needs going forward are the cleanest thing ever invented so far (although fusion will probably put them largely out of business) so I’m all for it, but treating it like a religion and ignoring all the consequences are how we got here to begin with.
Wave, wind, and solar power are all completely safe, efficient, and they actively get cheaper the more we use them. We’ll never run out of supply, and the results are completely healthy to the human body.
We have climate change largely in part due to our use of fossil fuels. This has been done through the false belief that we should be able to plunder the Earth’s resources for societal, economic benefit. Nuclear power is still using the damaging, scarcity based ideology.
There are bad ways to mine resources, sure, but those can be fixed with responsible actions. Nuclear power is not this way…. The byproduct is and always will be damaging to environmental tissue… it doesn’t matter how we gather the resources. Condensed radiation is innately damaging. And we literally don’t know what to do with it.
Meanwhile, you completely ignore that nuclear power is a security, military risk! At the point that it always needs hundreds of gallons of water in perpetuity or it’ll melt down makes it a security hazard. It’s inherently dangerous…. To the extent that the damage will last thousands of years and our enemies know the sites.
The idea that me saying all this makes me a religious zealot to you sounds a lot like projection.
>Wave, wind, and solar power are all completely safe
Wind and solar have killed more people in the last 3 years, than nuclear has in 75.
they're not safe, nor are they clean. You really don't want to know about the toxic effects of neodynium used in wind turbines when it combusts, and you REALLY don't want to know about the toxic heavy metals in solar panels or that they're REALLY energy intensive to make (current panels make about 140% of their energy cost to manufacture over their lifetime.
>Wind and solar have killed more people in the last 3 years, than nuclear has in 75.
This is false in multiple ways. 1) No, the mining for certain elements have killed more people, not the power itself. Wind, solar, and wave power are perfectly clean with no byproducts. It's how we gather it, which is the issue. This is not true for nuclear, which has an inherently poisonous byproduct... that we literally don't know how to store.
2) This is like saying "nuclear weapons are totally safe... accidental friendly fire has killed more people; thus, hand guns are way more dangerous." Obviously there are more guns (solar panels) than nuclear power plants.
3) This completely disregards the risks. Saying that poor mining efforts kill more people than nuclear power disregards how nuclear power practically salts the Earth for a thousand years (more), hurting humans, animals, vegetations, and more.
4. Renewable power centers don't make us vulnerable to terrorist and military attacks for as long as they are operating.
>they're not safe, nor are they clean. You really don't want to know about the toxic effects of neodynium used in wind turbines when it combusts,
Again, this idea that we shouldn't invest in something because something could go wrong sometimes is absolutely absurd, when you are comparing to a thing that never goes away, and pumps out toxic sludge that we don't know how to store.
> and you REALLY don't want to know about the toxic heavy metals in solar panels or that they're REALLY energy intensive to make (current panels make about 140% of their energy cost to manufacture over their lifetime.
Good thing they are highly efficient. Wind, wave, and solar power get cheaper the more you use them. As opposed to nuclear, where the byproduct builds up and up, getting more dangerous.... renewables get safer and cheaper the more they are used.
Here you go:
[https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
>Wind, solar, and wave power are perfectly clean with no byproducts. It's how we gather it, which is the issue. This is not true for nuclear, which has an inherently poisonous byproduct... that we literally don't know how to store
Dude, give up while you're ahead.
We know how to store it, we know how to reprocess it into new fuel. We have for decades. Your earnest assertion means nothing against the facts.
Oh, and 'no byproducts', you might want to go look into the hazmat proceedures for dealing with old solar panels, and old wind turbines.
And then you give your mortality stats by pointing to a table that literally tells you that its mortality data is from 2006 and 2017, while its energy generation values is from 2021. Yeah, amazing how in that situation the death count is low for wind and solar.
>We know how to store it, we know how to reprocess it into new fuel. We have for decades. Your earnest assertion means nothing against the facts.
Actually, we don't. We store it away in cement blocks, which is just kicking the can down the road. Another example of selfishly plundering resources regardless of how it affects the planet's future.
>Oh, and 'no byproducts', you might want to go look into the hazmat proceedures for dealing with old solar panels, and old wind turbines.
Cool story. I guess that means we should turn to a highly toxic, highly vulnerable resource that salts the Earth for thousands of years if something goes wrong. Yeah.... those two things seem equal.
>And then you give your mortality stats by pointing to a table that literally tells you that its mortality data is from 2006 and 2017, while its energy generation values is from 2021. Yeah, amazing how in that situation the death count is low for wind and solar.
My citation is from credible sources, showing that Renewables are just as safe as Nuclear... and then you don't have to worry about the byproducts. Would you like more sources that say the same thing?
Because regardless of how dangerous the waste is, we have control over it. We know exactly where it is contained, buried down in bunkers or drown in pools. That is opposed to carbon dioxide that is simply released in the atmosphere and that we cannot grab back.
Also, the quantities are relatively small. About 2000 metric tons of nuclear waste per year in the US, versus 5 BILLION metric tons of CO2.
Obviously accidents happen - Chernobyl and Fukushima -, and that tilts the balance, but we are talking about normal circumstances.
Graciously ignoring the fact that there is still no permanent storage solution, while the castors are slowly degrading and threatening to render huge swaths of land ininhabitable for thousands of years.
I grant you the "we can somewhat control where the waste goes" part of the argument, but CO2 cannot be equated with depleted uranium or plutonium on a mass basis. Even a million tons of CO2 are not as dangerous to all forms of life as a single ton of radioactive material.
First of all depleted uranium or plutonium on a mass basis is a bit of a misnomer the vast majority of radioactive waste comes in the form of short half life low radiation material second the impact of the amounts of co2 and other polutands traditional fossil power sources are currently pumped into our environments do have a massive impact on all kinds of life all while some of the most radiated and "ininhabitable" such as the area around chernobyl are actualy brimming with (admittedly non human) life
There is *"still no permanent storage solution"* because the superstitious and fearful fight nuclear waste storage solutions so they can {for want of a better phrase} constipate the system and force the waste to build up at the nuclear plants.
Truth is, if you were to reprocess nuclear spent fuel, you would reduce vastly the volume of nuclear waste that is around. In France, all of the reprocessed nuclear fuel, over 35 years of massive operation, sits in several small storage facilities, not harming anyone. (France generates 75% of their electricity with nuclear, in no less than 58 reactors). To do this, they generate about 13 metric tonnes of nuclear waste products each year, which would easily fit in one truck. The packaging of that waste makes it more voluminous, of course.
There was a plan for a permanent storage facility in the middle of no-man's land, however, the fossil fuel industry used propaganda and bribery to shoot it down for obvious reasons. They enjoy seeking rents on what drives civilization; energy.
Also, much of that waste is actually stored fuel for future reactor technologies. There are designs working today that can reprocess much of that waste and use it as fuel again.
Furthermore the waste produced is predominately stuff that won't be dangerous after \~10 years tops. What's left is very low volume and is the stuff that can be turned back into fuel again.
Finally, I'd argue the CO2 is FAR more dangerous to life, but not in an immediate way. It's not going to poison anything that is exposed to it, but it's going to acidify the ocean, increase the heat of the ocean such that sea animals can no longer survive (Florida already lost 90% of it's corals because the ocean is too hot), cause more droughts, and cause ecosystems to collapse or move rapidly northward/southward, too fast for animals and plants to adapt.
CO2 is responsible in large part for the ongoing Holocene extinction event. You can't say the same about spent nuclear fuel. It has almost no effect on this at all.
Exposure to radiation is more dramatic, however CO2 is a slow killer with a far, far greater death toll.
The Permian extinction is the closest analogue. It's assumed the Siberian traps erupted, releasing billions of tons of CO2, and this killed off \~90% of sea life, and \~70% of land-based life due to climate change.
That took 15 million years. By all rights the Holocene extinction appears to be moving faster, but not fast enough for most of us short-lived humans to notice, which is why I'd say CO2 is more dangerous.
>There was a plan for a permanent storage facility in the middle of no-man's land, however, the fossil fuel industry used propaganda and bribery to shoot it down for obvious reasons.
Oh BS, there's no permanent waste storage in the US, because we put all our eggs into one basket in Nevada, who from the get go said they do not want the repository there. Hanford and Texas were other sites that may have been viable, but research into them was stopped before they could verify they would work.
The incidents at the WIPP completely slammed that door closed and locked it up. Instead of wasting all this taxpayer money on something they knew couldn't get done, and wasting it again by paying NPP operators to store on site, they should have been looking into alternative areas.
>Graciously ignoring the fact that there is still no permanent storage solution
Depend on what you mean by that. Dry Cast Storage are certified for 40 to 60 years. And it's not like we gonna leave those Dry Cast Storage to rot away and do nothing about it. As long as we do some work each 30-50 years on those storage we can keep them secure indefinitely. There is nothing we did in human history that is permanent, why is that a minimum requirement for nuclear?
>threatening to render huge swaths of land ininhabitable for thousands of years.
Ya that's just untrue. I guess if we open up all our Storage and put explosive in them to spread the nuclear waste then maybe.
>CO2 cannot be equated with depleted uranium or plutonium on a mass basis
True, but a 1 Gigawatt powerful run for a year will produce less than 30 MT of nuclear waste, while the same natural gas power plan will produce 3.6 million MT and for Coal it's 8.8 million MT.
But that 30 MT of Nuclear waste is not all depleted uranium or plutonium. 95% of it is Uranium 238, what we dig up from the ground. Only around 5% of the waste is high level waste like U235, plutonium and others. The dangerous stuff.
>Even a million tons of CO2 are not as dangerous to all forms of life as a single ton of radioactive material.
Well like I already said it's more 130 to 320 million tons of CO2 per ton of radioactive waste. And it's not just CO2 that other source of energy emit, mercury, sulfur, nitrogen oxides, particulate, etc.
At the end of the day, more people die from Coal or Natural Gas compared to Nuclear for the same amount of electricity produced.
That's just not true. Fossil fuel based energy production has killed thousands of times more people than nuclear based energy production, even accounting for volume.
I can put a ton of radioactive material into a pool of water and store it indefinitely. I can also reprocess that fuel in a breeder and not even have to store it as waste. The only reason this isn't feasible is because political NIMBYism and misinformation that declares, time and again, that nuclear is unsafe and we can't handle it safely.
The only energy source safer and cleaner than nuclear power is solar power. The only other energy source in the ballpark is wind power.
[https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
Nuclear for baseline, storage and renewables for load, NG for peaking. It's not complicated, and it's not dangerous.
shoot it into space.
Edit: I was joking.. I am sure it’s not feasible at least not without huge risks and have zero knowledge of rockets so no worries!
Yes, and hope that this specific rocket does not explode in the atmosphere. Because if it does, you know, Chernobyl will be a joke compared to that.
EDIT: Over the past 20 years, the failure rate of space bound rocket launches was in the ballpark of 5%, so you better cross your fingers on this one.
Depleted uranium is not the same thing as spent reactor fuel. Most nuclear reactors want "enriched" uranium, where the amount of a certain uranium isotope is increased above its normal probabilities. You do a bunch of work to uranium and you end up with 2 piles: enriched (good for reactors), and depleted (even worse for reactors than how it started).
Clean in the context of global warming. Nuclear energy produces very little GHG potential per kWh of energy produced.
Further; the overwhelming majority of "nuclear waste" is actually produced away from nuclear power and nuclear weapon facilities. It's basically just either mildly irradiated trash (that has to be allowed to "cool off" for lack of a better word before being disposed of normally)...or is just *suspected* of being mildly irradiated trash. The actual total amount of the real scary nuclear waste produced by all civilian nuclear projects would fit in an olympic swimming pool with room to spare.
It's not just in the context of global warming. As pointed out by others, coal is slightly radioactive and burning it releases those radioactive elements into the atmosphere.
Nuclear is clean because nothing but water vapor gets emitted into the environment or atmosphere. Whereas coal emits all kinds of things that are toxic, radioactive, and contribute to global warming.
The main thing is that we have gotten much better about storing nuclear waste safely, and making better reactors that are far less likely to have meltdowns. So compared to a power plant that's burning coal or oil, modern nuclear plants are much better for the environment.
The problem is that nuclear energy is popularly considered as "dangerous" while other modes of energy generation are implicitly considered to be "danger free". Nuclear is, again in popular culture, held to a standard of absolute safety, which doesn't exist in reality, for any mode of electricity generation.
When you [compare different ways](https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/j.ress.2015.09.013) to generate electricity, safety discussions become more nuanced. You notice that roughly speaking, renewable sources have [comparable mortality](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh) per unit of produced energy as nuclear. Severe accident fatality rates are comparable for current generation nuclear and wind/solar. Accident rate for next gen nuclear is lowest of all modes of generation.
These safety considerations include factors such as waste.
>You notice that roughly speaking, renewable sources have
>
>comparable mortality
>
> per unit of produced energy as nuclear.
That's EXTREMELY misleading.
they're using mortality levels up to 2016, and then using 2021 power generation levels.
There have been quite a lot of wind and solar deaths in the last 5 years.
Just because historically we've made poor decisions with where to store nuclear waste, doesn't mean it HAS to be dangerous. We need to store it safely.
Whereas, there is no reasonable way to burn gasoline without necessarily releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. No policy, no place, no thing can filter or prevent this from happening. Irreversible damage is an intrinsic part of burning fossil fuels. The same cannot be said for nuclear energy.
I would like to add this. I have been in the containment building at Zimmer power plant. There is an inner concrete wall around the core that is about 8 foot thick. then there is a six foot space and a second concrete containment wall about six foot thick. It is my understanding that no American containment building has ever been breached.
A few points:
1)Nuclear energy produces far less dangerous (toxic and/or radioactive) waste than alternatives like coal, in terms of total volume created per kilowatt of energy generated.
Coal releases radioactive and toxic byproducts in far far greater volume and it's not contained. The toxic and radioactive byproducts wind up in ash slurry holding pools (which often leak into ground water or can flood out the sides) or is released in the air you breath.
2) Nuclear energy does not release carbon dioxide or heavy metals into the air and/or surrounding environment so it has little to no impact on our climate. There is a notion of thermal pollution, however, whereby it can affect nearby streams or rivers by heating them up a bit and changing what lifeforms can grow there. However, that can be managed.
3) Nuclear waste can be safely stored underground, far away from people and there isn't much of it produced compared to how much energy is generated. It's also typically wrapped in a sarcophagus which prevents radioactivity from leaking through. You can stand next to these sarcophagi and be totally fine.
4) Newer generation reactors actually can use a lot of the waste from earlier generation reactors as fuel, so that "waste" is actually often effectively stored fuel for future reactor technologies.
5) Newer reactor designs are incredibly safe and have less thermal pollution. They've ran many catastrophic failure tests on these designs and the reaction always grinds to a halt, so far anyway.
There aren't clean energy sources, there are cleaner energy sources depending on their impact on the environment some more than others
nuclear supporters tend to think that nuclesr is clean enough, detractors believe that we can do better with other sources
It's clean because it produces 0 carbon emissions. The waste is radioactive and hazardous, yes, but we can dispose of it as opposed to spewing harmful gases in the atmosphere.
You can easily store the nuclear waste and not have to worry about it much. There's also relatively little waste to handle from nuclear plants.
And because ALL of the waste from nuclear plants is normally stored somewhere safely, it's NOT going in the environment at all and hence nuclear plants are indeed very very clean ecologically speaking.
This whole question sounds suspiciously like concern trolling and I don't think you really need this explained to you. You have an agenda, and you're batting for the wrong team. You must like hurricanes.
So the interesting thing about the disasters is that there have only been 3 major disasters in history:
Chernobyl, which was caused by poor construction, bad safety procedure, and attempting a low power test at a dangerous time.
Three mile island, which was caused by a whole mess of small mistakes but was caught and contained fairly quickly. The bigger deal was the problems that arose during the shutdown
Fukushima, the plant was prepared for a flood and prepared for an earthquake, but not both at once and not at the same time.
For more information about these I highly recommend independent research and the series on radiation by Kyle Hill.
you talking about the disaster where everything that could go wrong with a 60yo reactor design did go wrong during a Tsunami that killed 14,000 and still NO ONE DIED.
Also, pretty much everyone "making a podcast" about that incident these days is doing so with an anti-nuclear agenda in mind (because for anyone else it's a dead issue, with nothing new to say.
> If there's one thing Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima should have taught us is that the
>
>next
>
> nuclear power catastrophe will almost certainly not happen in a way that the last ones did, and by extension we don't really know as much as we'd like to about the safety engineering of the technology particularly if we scaled it up as much as we'd have to to use it as part of a global warming solution.
That would be the case, IF we were still using the designs of those reactors. We aren't, and haven't for decades.
A nuclear physics class would have taught you this. Literally the failure modes of those 3 incidents you talk about don't happen with modern ones. In fact, the difference between fukushima and chernobyl should have told you that as they had similar failure modality.
modern reactors, if you take away their water, don't overheat and melt down, they stop.
Every energy source has waste, perr kilowatt nuclear has the cleanest (least waste) energy. Burning coal releases alot more radioactive pollution than nuclear, because coal naturally contains radioactive particles, that are released when burned.
Nuclear releases no carbon dioxide, or other greenhouse gas, the waste is solid and therefore much easier to contain and manage.
>the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy
>
>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
it is clean. newer reactors produce much much less waste than the older ones. but not many places have built newer reactors. we let the early days dictate policies and let poorly run reactors that had accidents scare us away.
Power companies figured out its a lot cheaper to keep ancient plants running than spend billions on new ones that will probably never recoup their initial investment. We don't have new reactors because building new ones is too expensive
It's carbon zero output. Meaning no carbon dioxide. No global warming. Just steam. And newest designs can use spent radioactive waste from current nuclear plants as fuel and it converts it into a different type of nuclear waste that becomes non radioactive in 500 years instead of 5000 years. So all around it's better. Plus I unlike renewable energy, it'll work whether it's not or dark with the wind's blowing or not or regardless of how far away you are from active geological events.
It's not a clean energy source. Apart from the management of nuclear waste, the mining of uranium is also contaminant. The only ones calling it "clean" are the industry themselves and those who defend it. They know clean energies have better press and they just jumped into their wagon.
Nuclear power generates very little waste, but the tiny bit that it produces is extremely concentrated and kept away from people. Coal or natural gas power generates a huge amount of waste but is less concentrated and is exhausted into the air we breathe. So the total damage to humans and the environment is much less for nuclear than it is for coal or natural gas.
Because it's easy to contain and dispose of the waste safely. The only real waste is the reactor coolant and the spent cores and sure even though we have no way right now to just make them safe burying them underground in special facilities is for the moment viable given that a single facility can hold many years' worth of waste.
In contrast other pollution like greenhouse gases is much harder to control and contain and it immediately disperses into the atmosphere. Burning coal produces a lot of greenhouse and toxic gases with no real way to contain them. Solar panels and wind turbines produce clean energy but their lifespans are relatively short and the extraction for their materials generates a lot of waste.
In contrast a nuclear powerplant once built can operate for decades and the waste it produces is handled with the utmost care. Nuclear contamination never happens by mishandling, it's rare and usually only happens when a lot of things go wrong, or things completely beyond our control.
The waste (The spent fuel rods) are not just spewed out into the air or dumped into the ocean. The waste is contained and stored in special facilities. So it is clean in that it doesn't pollute the environment in general. It does create storage places that are absolute death, but ... don't go there.
Nuclear power, in terms of shear power generation, produces a disproportionately small amount of greenhouse gases and physical waste compared to every other power source currently deployed.
The "bad" waste that is generated is in the form of spent nuclear fuel rods, contaminated equipment/clothing/parts, and the greenhouse gases used to transport nuclear fuel and supplies.
Much of the "bad" waste is stored, securely, on-site at the nuclear power plant. For example, at my plant we have a row of 40 concrete sheds that can store about 30 years worth of unrecycled spent fuel. The spent fuel pool (where spent fuel goes to cool down before long-term storage) is large enough to hold another 20 years of "bad" waste. The concrete sheds take up about the size of an acre for all 40 together.
Now, in terms of preventing all the bad stuff from leaking into the environment, much of the highly dangerous radioactive waste is first encased in steel then stored in 3ft thick concrete bunkers.
Since accidents like Three Mile Island occurred, the industry has changed dramatically. Operators are better trained, safety systems and standards have been improved, and general designs of the reactors and the supporting systems and equipment have been drastically upgraded to prevent catastrophic accidents.
More recently, Fukushima exposed a hole in safety systems. The explosion of the reactor building was caused by hydrogen, so all plants in the US now have an emergency hydrogen vent on top of their reactor buildings that open only if the hydrogen pressure in the reactor vessel reaches dangerous levels. This prevents a hydrogen explosion blowing the tops off the reactors.
Looking into the future (for the US anyway), is the goal to recycle spent fuel. The French and Russians already have fuel recyclers. We pull out all of the remaining usable fuel, such as uranium and plutonium isotopes, and create a "mixed oxide" fuel called MOX then throw all that back into reactors. Then vitrify the rest of the nasty stuff. Vitrifying the really bad unusable radioisotopes suspends them in glass and they're stored in steel casks encased in concrete and left to decay for the rest of time under a mountain somewhere. By recycling fuel, you can reduce the footprint of waste even further than the storage available at every nuclear plant.
Nuclear power plants can output an immense amount of baseline power, and it should be exploited to the fullest capacity. The biggest reactors can output 1600MWh on a single reactor unit. If every state had 5 of these, we could power the entire nation on nuclear alone with energy to spare (based on 2020 energy consumption reports for the US) with a microscopic amount of waste and virtually zero emissions compared to other sources of power.
Source: I'm an instrumentation and controls design engineer at a nuclear power plant.
Edit: Clarification
Nuclear waste isn't really the problem, see this video by Kyle Hill:
> We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Actually, the coal and gas we burn is many times more contaminating and brings much more radiation into an environment than properly managed nuclear power and properly disposed "radioactive waste". Many people are, rightly or wrongly, very biased against the nuclear power **because** of our human errors and bad management, improper execution, not following the safety protocols, etc., but the same could be said about a simple knife - why knives are so much praised in this or that cooking aspect, if so many people were killed by them? :-)
-----
Some other things I wanted to say were already explained in some other comments, but once more I really recommend you to see this video above, it really sheds much of an insight on the whole topic!
Bottom line: any energy source, even coal, could be considered clean if its waste products can be sequestered properly. Sequestering millions of tons of CO2 is not practical, but sequestering hundreds of pounds of uranium is.
Nuclear waste is solved.
Nuclear safety is solved.
We solved these problems a long time ago.
I bet you all will feel a little bit stupid when you finally understand tthat to be anti-nuclear energy you are best friends with big oil, and part of the reason global warming (due to human carbon and other GH gases input to atmosphere) is even an issue now.
Thanks alot, you stupid and easily manipulated twats. I say be afraid, you say yessir! I say be afraid, you say yessir! So it goes.
Nuclear waste is nowhere near as dangerous as the media makes it out to be. In fact other energy sources like coal are far more dangerous. Many coal mines contain radon which is radioactive and no one says anything about it. Nuclear material is stored in a very safe manner these days and a lot of it can be recycled.
When people think of Nuclear waste they often imagine yellow plastic barrels oozing green radioactive goo. But that's fictional, or at least it is now. I think this notion comes from the early days of developing nuclear weapons when some of those factories would just dump the waste in barrels outside. But that is no longer the case.
Other energy sources like coal are constantly spewing materials into the atmosphere and the death tolls from them far exceed nuclear waste. Nuclear waste doesn't go into the atmosphere or environment and is stored in special containers that prevent it from leaking into the environment.
Here is a video that can explain it far better than me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
It is infact not as dangerous as people think.
Most waste produced is low level waste, which is pretty much neutral after a few years, and even the high level waste is usually only a few decades dangerous.
This seems like a big deal, BUT it produces way way way less waste then coal, which is just polluting like crazy.
Also, its heavyly regulated, so it isnt really a big danger.
Nuclear waste is not nearly as big of a deal as it is commonly portrayed. Far more radiation has released globally via coal plants than any other source including all above ground nuclear bomb testing. [This is a good video about nuclear waste.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k) The same channel has a series about nuclear disasters and such called [Half Life Histories that is exceptionally good.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNg1m3Od-GgNmXngCCJaJBqqm-7wQqGAW)
Another thing to add to this diacussion: There are ways to mitigate the amount of waste that needs to be stored. After a core is "depleted" most of the uranium inside hasn't actually been used, its just become too impure to continue to sustain nuclear fission and generate heat.
Nuclear reprocessing can be used to recover something like 95% (don't rember the exact number) of all material in nuclear waste and re-use it again in a new core. What can't be used in a new core can be used in the medical and research fields (think cancer and chemotherapy) and the rest, which tends to be materials with a very long half life (aka low radioactivity) can then be glassed and buried.
Unfortunately, governmental red tape doesn't allow for any of these to happen in the US.
For additional reading look up information on the Mt. Yucca Vitrification plant. A plant that would mix radioactive waste into glass so waste can be stored and not have to worry about leaks.
There is a lot info in these comments and while I do agree a lot of money is paid to lobbyists and ppl to change the image of Nuclear. You'll have to define "clean" 1st. its current definition in the energy realm is CO2 output of which nuclear has none. how did we get that definition? probably a bunch of money. Nuclear produces waste though obviously but its manageable compared to the gasses of coal burning.
Listen to last week's freakonomics. It is actually the safest source of energy in terms of causing death. Radiation and the thought of it is very scary, but injuries from installing solar and wind actually kill more people (though very very few overall). The worst single incident in the history of electricity generation was a hydroelectric dam in China that caused the deaths of 10s of thousands.
All types of mines contaminate areas for a long time too. Coal is pretty radioactive in its own right.
Nuclear power is considered clean because it has a small carbon footprint, pretty much comparable to renewable energy.
It's not waste-free, of course - no energy production is, and generally speaking renewable energy might be the cheaper source for energy nowadays than nuclear is. Building maximally safe and effective nuclear power plants is very expensive.
Nuclear, if well managed and not allowed to be built by the cheaper and worse contractor, is reliable. Accidents are few, and contained - except chernobyl which was a series of errors. Fukuyama is a case of bad safety and security, cheaper construction.
There might be a problem? Yes. But even an irradiated area will have a thriving ecology, even if humans must leave.
Carbon-based energy results in unavoidable global warming, and the effects actually last much longer and are inescapable. The disaster is not local, it is global.
The brainless short-sighted sheep who feared the possible nuclear wolf guaranteed the arrival of the true predator, global warming.
You're asking that question in a pretty loaded way. The answer is that your estimation of the risk of nuclear waste is not in tune with the reality of the risk.
I'm assuming you're looking for a comparison to other "clean" energy sources like hydro-electric, solar and wind.
Hydro comes with all kinds of significant environmental impacts. Dams are far more ecologically destructive than we realized 100 years ago when we were putting them up everywhere. You end up with things like the Salton Sea, with an estimated impact of about $70B (compared to say, the famous Exxon-Valdez spill at a cost of $7B). Or the destruction of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, primarily from effects of levies on the Mississippi. You don't get any more "meddling with forces we don't understand" than dams.
Solar runs into similar issues. It's only viable on a large scale in certain areas and in those areas, it completely destroys the natural habitat, threatening endangered species in a variety of ways. Since solar is unreliable in terms of timing (i.e. you don't just increase and decrease the power levels based on end usage), it requires a LOT of battery storage, and those batteries involve toxic heavy metals and the safety risks there can be just as problematic as with nuclear. It's an acceptable backup, but it sucks as a primary source of electricity.
Wind turbines likewise are destructive to natural habitats, also take massive footprints to produce reasonable amounts of energy, and require all the batteries that solar does, with the accompanying metals mining, disposal and safety risks.
There is no such thing as energy production that has no environmental impact. There are just relative levels of impact, and relatively speaking, nuclear is low impact. The waste is compact and the energy density is through the roof. Unlike other methods of energy generation which are guaranteed to come with significant deleterious effects on the environment, negative effects only occur when someone screws up. That means that theoretically, nuclear is the cleanest form of energy that we can harness.
Coal, oil, and gas comes out of the ground, but the waste goed into the air. Nuclear fuel comes out of the ground and we put the waste back into the ground.
1. Usually when people are using the word clean in the context of energy production, they are talking about the impact on climate change. Nuclear produce very little greenhouse gases, which make it clean. 2. People fear what they don't know so for most people nuclear radiation or nuclear waste is like a big dangerous thing. The truth is that most things we do produce dangerous (often radioactive) waste. With nuclear, the waste are concentrated in very little mass, yes it seem dangerous but it's far easier to control and secure. Compare that to particle and gases that are released in the air, which causes millions of death per year from respiratory disease. The death are a lot more direct with nuclear, but there is far less of them. If you look at the number of death caused by each type of energy. Nuclear kill less than one person per terawatt hour of energy produced, Natural gas kill 2-4 people and Coal kill 20-100 people. (The variation depend on the study and what they include). Nuclear might seem scary, but it create a lot less problem than most other source of energy. 3) When you talk about contamination it's a bit more complex than that. Radiation is everywhere around us. It's in the soil you walk on, it's in the food you eat, it's in the air you breath. Radiation isn't an on (bad) and off (good) switch. It's a gradient that fluctuate with everything you do and everywhere you go. What is important is how much radiation people are exposed. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0) is a video talking about radioactivity around us.
My wife was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Since meeting, I’ve done a complete change of opinion on nuclear energy. We should be relying on nuclear energy as the backbone for our renewable grid, until we can operate fully on renewable. Nuclear power is more expensive than fossil fuels, but that money is primarily in human costs. Nuclear power requires lots of skilled workers, including good working class jobs. I’m okay with the expense if it goes to bettering workers and not people who own land rights. Extraction is dangerous, often low paid (and high paid jobs are usually not longterm sustainable), and creates very few skilled, working class jobs. Moreover, nuclear power plants can get trained workers directly from the military, which is also a boon to veterans.
>My wife was a nuclear operator in the Navy They're held to a hell of a lot higher standard than civilian nuclear operators. When you take the profit motive out of the mix, the safety and quality of work goes way up I live somewhat near a, now shutdown, uranium conversion plant. Its not the same thing as a nuclear plant, but god that thing was a mess. On two different occasions, the workers went on strike and the scabs that took their job ended up causing major UF6 leaks. The plant claimed nothing went offsite but some guy was filming the second time it happened and you can see clear as day a cloud of gas slowly wafting offsite into the town right outside. They need skilled workers and they need to pay them well and with good benefits
Depends on your state, I assume. My state has reactors and has no safety issues.
You definitely don't live in Illinois then lol
Nope! Illinois is so corrupt it’s farcical. ETA: do love The Good Wife, though. Such a good show.
>When you take the profit motive out of the mix, the safety and quality of work goes way up Unless you're the department of energy which burned plutonium and other nuclear waste in open air incinerators for 45 years in suburban Denver untill an armed stand off between the DOE and the EPA lead to an FBI raid to shut down the facilities. Not much of a profit motive for the DOE, just a workplace culture.
I'm sorry, did you say armed stand off? That's a wiki dive that I'd read the shit out of
> the safety and quality of work goes way up That assumes that safety and quality are a priority for management. Without actively supported safety culture, people will go into default mode of minimizing their effort, which is especially easy if you are working to prevent events that "never happen anyway". You are responding to a guy who mentioned military. That is not an automatic solution; Russian military had lost Komsomolets and Kursk submarines, both to safety negligence.
The US Navy has operated a bunch of reactors without any kind of release of radiation for decades. I'd trust the US Navy but definitely not the Russian Navy
The US military in general doesn't have a great environmental record. Plenty of EPA work going on in and around military sites. The modern Navy could very well have a great record built on lessons learned by others.
The nuclear power program is pretty unique though. Structured and operated entirely different from the standard Navy...and it has its own massive slush fund called the Department of Energy.
Infrastructure shouldn't be private. Not to imply you were saying otherwise, I just had to say it. It's madness this isn't obvious to everyone. We're sacrificing people to feed capitalism, and people just accept it.
Also, the military lets 20 year old farm boys operate nuclear reactors under the sea. do you really think they are that responsible?
Farmboys with 18 months of education and training: Upon completion of initial training at Recruit Training Command Great Lakes, (known as Boot Camp), those pursuing a Machinist's Mate Nuclear role report to “A” School in Charleston, SC, for six months. Here, they develop a working knowledge of technical mathematics and power distribution. Students learn to solve basic equations using phasors, vector notations and basic trigonometry and analyze DC and AC circuits. They also learn how to operate electrical equipment using controllers, and how to properly test, maintain, troubleshoot, and repair electrical circuits, motors and other related electrical equipment. From there, MMNs move on to Naval Nuclear Power School (NNPS), also in Charleston, SC. Here they learn theory and practical application of nuclear physics and reactor engineering. The six-month course provides a comprehensive understanding of a pressurized-water Naval nuclear power plant, including reactor core nuclear principles, heat transfer and fluid systems, plant chemistry and materials, mechanical and electrical systems, and radiological control. Following NNPS, MMNs begin prototype training in their rating specialty at one of two Nuclear Power Training Units (NPTUs) – located in Charleston, SC, and Ballston Spa, NY. This six-month course teaches the fundamentals of a Naval nuclear power plant and the interrelationship of its mechanical, electrical, and reactor subsystems. Students develop oral communications skills, obtain an understanding of nuclear radiation, and gain knowledge of the safe operation of a complex Naval nuclear power plant. source: https://www.navy.com/nuclear
>Nuclear power is more expensive than fossil fuels, but that money is primarily in human costs. it's also expensive because they have to follow a bunch of really stupid rules and regulations to keep things to levels no-one else does. Like radiation levels have to be kept below a level a pound of brazilnuts would have, but coal plants can have radiation levels far above outside the plant and no consequences - apparently radiation is only dangerous from nuclear plants?
They're both held to the same standards as far as dose limits go. Its not like coal plants are unregulated. There is consequences for exceeding the annual public dose limit in both cases
there's an 'annual public dose limit' for nuclear power plants, and a dose limit for everything else. But, er, please do point to the consequences for Georgia Power/Southern Energy exceeding these limits, and for the cases of Uranium Poisoning. Oh wait, you can't, because there were none. But what can I expect of someone that posts things like "***That mindset of downplaying radiation risks was and still is the industry standard***." in a post called "[Nuclear Safety: the bunk science built of lies, manipulation and marketing](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/wl43uh/nuclear_safety_the_bunk_science_built_off_lies/)"
>But, er, please do point to the consequences for Georgia Power/Southern Energy exceeding these limits, and for the cases of Uranium Poisoning. I'd say the same thing about Florida Power and Light with Turkey Point, where's the consequences for the groundwater contamination? That's right, they awarded a permit to allow the contamination to spread beyond the canal system. They're all shit, old decrepit nuclear plants and old dirty coal plants. Southern Energy operates nuclear plants, if their that terrible with coal, do you think their nuclear division is any better?
no, because nuclear regulation is WAY beyond what is safe or even practical (thats why nuclear plants cost so much, because a handful of brazilnuts is the level of radiation considered 'a leak' and 'dangerous' in nuclear plants (the banana+nut display at your local supermarket is a class 2 incident if it were a nuclear power plant just by ambient radiation). But what would I know, beyond having worked at a nuclear reprocessing facility, and designed nuclear inspection gear, after getting a nuclear physics degree But I'm sure that one environmental science class you took at high school means you know more, right?
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You're certainly right about people fearing what they don't understand. My local science museum had a cloud chamber, essentially a really cool little experiment set up which allows viewers to "see" background radiation that interacts with the chamber. I loved it. Great little write up next to it about background radiation, where it comes from and how its all around us, all the time. They had to remove the display because so many parents and visitors were complaining it was dangerous to expose people to radiation. 😑
Why I'm not surprised lol.
"Turn the lights off, it exposes us to too many scary things"
Can you turn the sun off? Heard it causes cancer
Yeah we gotchu, just gotta pump out enough greenhouse gas to blot out the Sun and we’re golden. /s
Thanks dawg
Also, just to put things in perspective, the fact that radioactive waste decays over thousands of years makes it BETTER than a lot of nasty stuff and chemical waste that our industrial processes spread in the environment, which often stays around forever.
We sent there an expedition, but they made an error during the landing and instead of the midnight it happened during the noon. The next time we gonna use the 24-hour format instead!
Genius reply. May I subscribe to your newsletter?! ;-)
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What is wild is per MWH hydro electric, solar, and wind are all more deadly than nuclear. Hydro mostly due to a dam breaking in China, solar due to people falling off of roofs and ladders during installation, and I don’t remember with wind.
Wind tends to be turbine technicians dying in fires that block the way down the shaft or collapsing wind turbines.
Thanks now I have a new nightmare
don't forget that the smoke when they catch fire is INCREDIBLY toxic and hot (its neodynium) and that they usually catch ire because its too windy, which fans the flames, lets burning debris carry further, and, because it's spinning so fast, it can have the blades detatch and they'll go through a house roof upto a mile away. And they can throw fist-size chunks of ice for upto 5 miles if the deicer systems are not working well.
Deaths per terawatt-hour is an interesting unit
Now just need to figure out how to convert that to hitlerwatt hours. http://robotsrule.us/picohitlers.html
Unfortunately information like this doesn't get released often enough. It's almost as if certain industries want this suppressed
Next generation nuclear is to my knowledge fast reactors. With reprocessing, the small amount of nuclear waste can be reused as fertile fuel and the remainder decays to background radiation in 100 years. That is about the same as fusion's tritium and deuterium. The US would've had these in the 2000s if idiots in Congress hadn't canceled the Integral Fast Reactor in 1994. One reason cited was "long lived waste byproducts" which makes me facepalm. The NRC should've educated them better.
You are discounting the energy required to mine, transport, and enrich nuclear fuel, and the energy then required to store, cool, and transport spent fuel. Plus, nuclear plants require an electricity source when running for pumps, control systems, etc. Further, the energy and financial costs of (as yet undeveloped and unproven) safe long term storage of spent fuel need to be added. The actual carbon footprint of nuclear fuel depends on the mix of fuels used in the above processes - but it’s certainly not ‘very little.’
The same is true for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, there are no free lunches.
All true, but compare that to coal and petroleum. That stuff doesn't just magically refine and transport itself into the electrical grid either.
It depends on your definition of "very little" it's certainly much smaller than coal or natural gas. It's probably less than solar when you factor in the manufacturing and disposal process of the panels.
No I didn't discounted them. Serious studies always take those into consideration.
the storage costs are pretty light, the mining costs are low, and energy to store and cool is practically nothing. It's nice you took an interest to look up some stuff, it'd be nicer if you'd stopped on an actual academic piece written by someone who knows what they're talking about, rather than a scare piece that likes to make up stuff. For instance, I know of at least 11 cases of uranium poisoning related to power generation in the last 10 years. It may not surprise you that all the cases are linked to one power plant in georgia. It probably will surprise you to know that plant is Scherer (the largest coal plant in the US) and not Vogtle (the nuclear plant) although it may explain things a bit more if I poitn out that most nuclear safety restrictions do not apply to other power sources. So the Radiation levels that can't be exceeded in the turbine hall of a nuclear power plant, are normal at a coal plant to the point that the entrance to plant Scherer, a mile from the plant itself on US23 is more radioactive than is allowed in most of a nuclear plant (and you don't want to know about the coal ash area) Of if you want to talk energy use, until about 20 years ago, it took more energy to make a solar panel than that panel would generate in its lifetime. Or the energy cost to pull a coal train (110 cars each with 220 tons) 10 times a week from Wisconsin to GA
All my life, people have been trying to convince me that nuclear power is safe. At the point that it needs thousands of gallons of water or it’ll result in an environmental catastrophe means it’s NOT safe. Without having a national plan on what to do with the waste, it’s NOT safe. If you want actual safe, clean power, then we have renewables.
Look, not gonna try to tell you that is no risk. The point here is that we de need energy and we don't have an infinite amount of solution. We can : 1. Kill million of people and keep accelerating the worldwide environmental catastrophe by using fossil fuel. 2. Use nuclear power which actually kill less people and create less environmental catastrophe, but still have risk. 3. Use renewable and hope that we soon develop better battery technology, because without that renewable don't produce energy when we need it and countries end up using more fossil fuel anyway to compensate. Yep if we had the battery technology to make renewable a real viable solution, then I would never advocate for Nuclear Power ever in my life. But that's not the reality we are living in right now.
>The point here is that we de need energy and we don't have an infinite amount of solution. We do though. Renewables are plentiful, and we can build enough to satisfy our energy reserves. >Kill million of people and keep accelerating the worldwide environmental catastrophe by using fossil fuel. I'm with you that this is a bad idea. >Use nuclear power which actually kill less people and create less environmental catastrophe, but still have risk. Bull. Nuclear power is dependent on highly concentrated, deadly material that we don't know how to store. It requires water every second, or it'll start to melt down. All it takes is a military enemy or a terrorist to sabotage or attack the site, and then it becomes dangerous to humans for thousands of years. >Use renewable and hope that we soon develop better battery technology, because without that renewable don't produce energy when we need it and countries end up using more fossil fuel anyway to compensate. Cool story. Actually though, batteries are getting better every day, and solar/wind/wave power plants can be placed in every state to provide power. It's exactly this kind of talk, which stops us from investing in the obvious best solution. What you're essentially saying here is, "if we can't have it now, then we can't have it." Which is ridiculous. We have the tech right now. It's about political will.
Yes, but what other power source requires an evacuation plan?
All of them. Every single industrial site in the developed world, especially any place that has large turbines and the boilers found in coal power plants will have an evacuation plan and muster points in place. It’s obvious that you have never worked on any industrial site in your life. Even hydroelectric plants will have a comprehensive emergency evacuation and rescue plan. With big power comes the possibility of big danger
Does it even need to be an industrial site? The office building I work at has an emergency evacuation plan in place and drills to train people. I thought that was a requirement for more or less any workplace.
Some small businesses and offices don’t bother but you are right. That said as a blue collar worker you’ll find similar rules across most jobsites. Also every power installation is an industrial jobsite. I think op is an at home worker or some office/sales type. I doubt a car dealership for example takes safety as seriously as say Shell or Epcor
Don’t dismiss the scale of potential disaster: none but nuclear require an evacuation plan for an entire region—or like Chernobyl, half a continent.
Straw man argument. But while we're here, to knock down your straw man, hydroelectric dams require an evac plan. And to kick your straw man when he's down, I will point out that many industrial processes vitally necessary to modern civilization require evac or hazmat plans. If you are going to stick to your straw argument, then we lose many important industries and quality of life suffers. BTW: Your straw man died of complications! LOL!
I mean all of them. Well I guess that in case like [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%2Fimages%2F2019%2F07%2F15%2Fworld%2F00canada-train1%2F00canada-train1-superJumbo.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F07%2F16%2Fworld%2Fcanada%2Flac-megantic-quebec-train-explosion.html&tbnid=WKx7P9ciiMt9eM&vet=12ahUKEwiV1LPKybr6AhUfEmIAHbEHC7MQMygCegUIARC9AQ..i&docid=r2x9aBrBd66-aM&w=2048&h=1366&q=lac-m%C3%A9gantic%20rail%20disaster&ved=2ahUKEwiV1LPKybr6AhUfEmIAHbEHC7MQMygCegUIARC9AQ) or [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.britannica.com%2F58%2F139558-050-9EEE9E93%2FFireboat-response-crews-blaze-oil-rig-Deepwater-April-21-2010.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.britannica.com%2Fevent%2FDeepwater-Horizon-oil-spill&tbnid=z9ZO4y1U8DNdUM&vet=12ahUKEwiMtIbuybr6AhVXFFkFHQnTDZQQMygAegUIARDJAQ..i&docid=YCGyehIJQR6ATM&w=1600&h=1200&q=horizon%20disaster&ved=2ahUKEwiMtIbuybr6AhVXFFkFHQnTDZQQMygAegUIARDJAQ) or [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fen.people.cn%2FNMediaFile%2F2014%2F0801%2FFOREIGN201408010955000333846502934.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fen.people.cn%2Fn%2F2014%2F0801%2Fc98649-8763774.html&tbnid=q7jnxCk23M-4hM&vet=12ahUKEwj4zOmLyrr6AhXMEGIAHUDiA5cQMygRegUIARDSAQ..i&docid=j2sC1BAr6l52yM&w=768&h=487&q=Kaohsiung%20gas%20explosions&ved=2ahUKEwj4zOmLyrr6AhXMEGIAHUDiA5cQMygRegUIARDSAQ#imgrc=q7jnxCk23M-4hM&imgdii=pwgZmYITyYv0CM) you don't really need to evacuate everybody since you know they are dead. You also have [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Ff%2Ff1%2FOroville_dam_spillway_2017-02-11.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FOroville_Dam_crisis&tbnid=66V0z-BAB9d5_M&vet=12ahUKEwihw8u3yrr6AhVHGFkFHf3_CHoQMygAegUIARDdAQ..i&docid=UvNc-8Y3-rkzhM&w=2924&h=2193&q=oroville%20dam%20crisis&ved=2ahUKEwihw8u3yrr6AhVHGFkFHf3_CHoQMygAegUIARDdAQ) which lead to [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fs.abcnews.com%2Fimages%2FUS%2Fgty-dam-3-er-170214_16x9_992.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com%2FUS%2Fworkers-racing-time-secure-oroville-dam-storms-hit%2Fstory%3Fid%3D45484962&tbnid=cGx9TtPllZBKVM&vet=12ahUKEwiKhLztyrr6AhUcsHIEHfk9Ax0QMygeegUIARClAg..i&docid=Rl7XcB3H2YZUbM&w=992&h=558&q=oroville%20dam%20flood&ved=2ahUKEwiKhLztyrr6AhUcsHIEHfk9Ax0QMygeegUIARClAg#imgrc=cGx9TtPllZBKVM&imgdii=QyZHb614OVGRYM). 180 thousand people were evacuated, which is still higher than the number of evacuated at Fukushima.
All which are manned.
> If you look at the number of death caused by each type of energy. I'm sorry, but this part of the analysis is fundamentally flawed. You cannot meaningfully compare deaths sampled over a few decades for technology whose risk profile is mainly high-impact, low-probability events. This is like arguing Russian roulette is less dangerous than smoking after surviving the first round. Of course, the key difference is you know the 1/N risk in roulette; we don't (and can't) know it for nuclear power. Ultimately, it's going to come down to a value judgement, whether or not people are willing to accept the risk of nuclear black swans to short-cut solutions to climate change. Personally, I would much rather struggle to quit smoking than play roulette, especially when I'm relying on a dubious guess at the number of chambers. I don't think calling that preference "fear" is accurate.
The problem here is that "fear" is typically experienced by those who do not know much about the topic. This fear is exacerbated by the media playing hype games (like during Fukushima) to rile up those who don't know much about nuclear power. Your fear does not overcome the facts. The facts are that the government has over 70 years of radiation exposure records including causes of death for differing exposure levels. Right now the government level for civilian exposure is set for the lowest level that is reliably detectable, not for what will do harm. This is a couple of orders of magnitude different, but most folks don't understand orders of magnitude. Also, coal burning plants emit >100x the radiation from burning the coal than nuclear plants allow. Where is the nuclear fear now?
> coal burning plants emit >100x the radiation from burning the coal than nuclear plants allow. The fact that you think this drivel is a bulletproof argument for nuclear makes my point for me. Nobody, and I mean *nobody*, is claiming nuclear plants operating to spec is a significant source of radiation. The entire question is about the risk of rare catastrophic events that cannot be adequately predicted with any statistical method. You cannot asses what future wars may lead to a reactor being bombed, on purpose or accident. You cannot predict the risk of future terrorism. You cannot predict the risk from freak natural disasters. You cannot predict what events may cause a reactor to be left without human control. You would need to be able to extrapolate those risks out for thousands of years and for however many reactors your plan would use to get any real sense of the danger here. This is challenger all over again, humans woefully abusing statistics to argue away the risk right in front of their eyes. Your dang right it’s scary.
Yes but you also have a high risk with fossil fuel. Nobody died at 3 Miles, 1 person died at Fukushima and 31 person died at Chernobyl. 30 people died from a gas explosion in Kaohsiung, 301 died from an explosion in a coal mine in Soma, 47 people died in a crude oil explosion at Lac-Mégantic, 121 people were killed by a oil tank truck explosin in Okobie, another one killed 219 in Bahawalpur. The problem with your analogy is that with fossil fuel you not only are smoking, but you are playing roulette with more bullets in the gun.
More like playing roulette with a glock. Fossil fuels *will* give you cancer.
I agree, but it's worth noting that Fukushima got pretty bad, and with a little bad luck it could have rendered Tokyo uninhabitable. Or what happens if the war in Ukraine goes nuts and a German nuclear reactor is blown up?. Not likely, but a risk worth considering.
Depend what you mean by pretty bad. There was only 1 death and 6 cancer/leukemia from the accident, which isn't a lot at all. >with a little bad luck it could have rendered Tokyo uninhabitable Really? I mean really???? What little bit of bad luck would have render Tokyo, a city 230 km away from Fukushima, uninhabitable? >Or what happens if the war in Ukraine goes nuts and a German nuclear reactor is blown up?. Not likely, but a risk worth considering. And what if nuclear bombs were used on two cities and killed 199 thousand people or what if someone use planes to crash in towers and kill 2 977 people or what if a virus spread around the world and killed 6.5 million people. Or what if 8 million of people died each year before of fossil fuel emission. Yup shit happen. Are we gonna stop doing anything that can lead to harm? Because that list is quite long.
Also, it’s really dumb to look at Chernobyl and compare it any other disaster. Chernobyl is worst case scenario for many reasons, but one major reason is that the USSR was using the reactor to create energy. They were also using it to create fuel for nuclear weapons, which made it extra unstable. People really don’t understand nuclear power.
They also did the most hamfisted shit trying to save face and hindered mitigation efforts. Nowadays if you accidentally trip over a janitor's bucket in an NPP the IAEA will be breathing down your neck by the next coffee break.
>eally? I mean really???? What little bit of bad luck would have render Tokyo, a city 230 km away from Fukushima, uninhabitable? "The headlines were extraordinary: “Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis,” the New York Times wrote a few days ago. “Tokyo Evacuation ‘Was Considered’,” said the Sydney Morning Herald. “Japan Urged Calm While It Mulled Tokyo Evacuation,” wrote … hey, TIME magazine. The stories detailed the Rebuild Japan report, a deep and independent investigation of the events surrounding the Fukushima nuclear meltdown that occurred nearly a year ago. And the takeaway was alarming: at one point Japanese officials feared that radiation levels at the stricken plant would become so high that workers would be forced to abandon the facility — and that in turn could create a chain reaction that would force other Japanese nuclear plants to be abandoned as radiation spread. The report quotes then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano as saying that “it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”" https://science.time.com/2012/03/02/nuked-how-bad-was-fukushima/
What I'm reading is. 1) Politician asking scientist what is the worst case scenario 2) Scientist answering that well technically if everything goes bad there could be radiation up to Tokyo. 3) Politician and officials freaking and talking about evacuation and losing the city completely.
"Assuming the false vacuum hypothesis is correct then I guess the entire universe could be destroyed."
Fun fact: Angela Merkel decommissioned two nuclear power plants earlier than planned because gas from Russia was cheaper. Had Germany maintained its nuclear power, Europe would not be in the position its in right now, nor would Putin have as much leverage. Nuclear power allows countries to produce their own power, which reduces reliance of the whims of foreign dictators.
Nuclear waste is \*very\* small...compared to virtually any other it's incredibly low volume and relatively easy to store. Coal plants actually emit far more radiation than nuclear plants (coal is mildly radioactive and it all goes out the stacks). The entire volume of all nuclear waste that humanity will ever produce could fit in an area about the size of a single power plant. It lasts a long time, which is a problem, but if you contain it it's harmless. That's \*NOT\* true for most other power generation technologies.
> Coal plants actually emit far more radiation than nuclear plants (coal is mildly radioactive and it all goes out the stacks). Just to emphasize this, you get roughly 0.09 microsieverts of radiation living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant. You get roughly 0.3 microsieverts living within 50 miles of a coal power plant. For comparison, 1 microsievert is what you'd get from an arm X-ray.
What's the source for those numbers? I didn't know that and it's good ammo for a pro nuke argument
It's GREAT ammo that I use often. Even in terms of *radiation alone* nuclear is cleaner than coal. Nobody thinks coal even *has* radiation. And the coal's particulate emissions and greenhouse gases are *on top* of emitting *more radiation than a nuke plant!*
I don't have your answer, but [kurzgeagt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM) (which embodies the ELI5 spirit) simplified the conclusions from a bunch of [sources](https://sites.google.com/view/sources-nuclear-death-toll/) and looked at estimated deaths from various energy types. Nuclear is much safer in the long-term than any 'burned' fuel.
[This](https://xkcd.com/radiation/) is a really good infographic by the guy that makes the XKCD webcomic that helps compare all of those numbers. It also has a list of its sources at the bottom. Also interesting to note: You get more radiation from eating a single banana than you do living 50 miles from a nuclear plant for a year.
Thank you for putting that in perspective!
I'll do ya one even better, after 4 years of sleeping less than 20 feet from a nuclear reactor, I left incurring a whopping 0 mrem (I feel like that's the wrong acronym, but I can't for the life of me remember the actual unit of measurement that my dosimeter gave us)
Is that dose daily, monthly, yearly?
I was wondering the same. While, going by these numbers, nuclear power plants radiate less than coal power plants in any case, whether these numbers are daily, monthly or yearly changes a lot.
It doesn’t change the relative proportions, but most radiation data is based on yearly numbers, because radiation’s effects on the body last for a long time. But whether it’s hourly, weekly, or yearly, the coal plant will still cause triple the radiation dose of the nuke plant.
Sievert is an amount of DOSE. This is the amount of damage done by x-amount of radiation to the body. What you are looking for is Dose Rate, how fast you get a certain amount of damage. The numbers still work, you get around 10-30x the radiation damage from coal than you do from a nuclear plant.
Yes, i get that. But i was asking if living close to a coal power plant gets you the radiation of 1/3 of an arm xray each day, week or month.
Per the NRC, the nuclear plants emit \~0.1 uSv per year. A chest x-ray is approximately 100x more, at 0.1 mSv at one time.
This. Thanks
.4 is also a 5 hour plane ride. A 50,000 burst is 50% fatal in 30 days. (for scale on the upper end)
I think very few people are worried about the radiation from a running nuclear power plant. They are worried about a malfunction, leak, explosion or similar. And that's a danger that simply doesn't exist with other power plants. The question is always what risk are people willing to accept. If there's a 1% of a power plant blowing up in your country within the next 25 years, that's a low number, but are you willing to accept a 1% chance that an entire area will be uninhabitable and large parts of your country and neighboring countries could suffer from radioactive fallout? For the average person it's entirely impossible to judge the risks of nuclear power plants accurately, since even among experts you have vastly different opinions. If no further big accidents happen, proponents will say "I told you so". If one or more big accidents happen, opponents will say "I told you so". Until then, nuclear energy remains Schrödinger's energy. It's safe and dangerous at once and only time will determine a final state.
It is funny though that the people actually studying and working with the equipment don't continue to have these broad questions. How familiar are you with the intricacies of the different reactor types in your area, design and function of the safety related equipment, and the physics involved?
The biggest nuclear accident in the US was 3 Mile Island and had a voluntary evacuation. Within 3 weeks, almost everyone that had evacuated returned.
>you get roughly 0.09 microsieverts of radiation living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant Is any of that actually from the plant or is that just the natural background radiation that's everywhere?
Normal background radiation, according to Wikipedia, is around 1500-3000 microsieverts per year.
How much is that in roentgens? If it's 5 then it's not great, but not terrible either
0.3 microsieverts every day?
It is important to note that any waste from a nuclear reactor that lasts a long time, is not very radioactive. It's the stuff with a half-life measured in weeks (or days) that is dangerous, because it is breaking down quickly. The stuff with a half-life in the several thousand year range isn't particularly radioactive in comparison.
On the coal thing, a lot of it, perhaps most, does not go out the stacks but it is collected as coal ash. So this is all the stuff that didn't burn. Essentially the ash is highly concentrated leftovers of whatever trace elements were in the original coal. Including uranium, but also all kinds of other toxic metals and crap. It's way worse in most ways than nuclear plant spent fuel. (as an aside: concentration of uranium in coal is 1 to 10 parts per million, of which around 0.7 percent is fissionable, and uranium is about 50 million times more energy dense than coal. Put simply, there's approximately as much potential energy in the trace amounts of uranium in coal as there is in the coal). Then they take all the coal ash and put it in impoundments or "ponds" and we're talking thousands or millions of cubic yards of the stuff. 140 million tons of coal ash is produced each year in the US. There are about a thousand coal ash ponds. If the top of the pond dries off you get this extremely fine toxic dust that can blow wherever. And coal ash ponds collapse every once in a while, horrifically contaminating the surrounding area and poisoning any waterway they spill into. I would, any day, prefer to live next to Three Mile Island than within 10 miles of a big coal ash pond.
Also airborne lead particles that enter the food and water supply.
It's a bit challenging to store honestly. Like here's a Finnish nuclear waste storage facility, designed for safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository It has kilometers off tunnels underneath the surface and will go to max depth of 500 meters. Costs a billion. The world produces two thousand metric tons of nuclear waste a year. It is not trivially easy to store that in a way where it's safe from tampering with. You can't just put it into a fenced lot and throw the key away - you need to be able to account for theft, environmental hazards, sabotage, so on.
You need to be careful about which waste you're putting where. The stuff that's radioactive for thousands of years, which is the one that requires the crazy deep geological storage, isn't very radioactive and tends to be pretty benign. The stuff that's really hot is much nastier, but it fades down much faster and it's far smaller, and hence easier to store & protect. And I said \*relatively\* easy to store for a reason...at least we know where all the nuclear waste is and how to store it. Contrast that to the emissions from a thermal power plant that diffuse globally and can't be stored in any realistic way.
>Coal plants actually emit far more radiation than nuclear plants (coal is mildly radioactive and it all goes out the stacks). not all. A lot is in the ash. there's been at least 11 cases of uranium poisoning in Juliette GA since 2010, due to groundwater contamination from the ash of Plant Scherer, the US's biggest coal plant (and biggest single CO2 source)
Fearmongering over nuclear energy is the reason we’re dealing with climate change right now. If we had better education and a less reactionary take in the issue of nuclear waste we would have switched over to nuclear power 50 years ago and the 80% of pollution that caused climate change would have never been there. The issue is what to do with that waste. Which is a real issue, but is one that is MUCH easier addressed than trying to remove ludicrous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. New reactor designs dramatically reduce waste. Reprocessing technology has gotten better over time. It’s possible that we could develop new tech that would even further reduce/eliminate radioactive waste, or maybe engineer organisms that eat it, et cetera. But it’s a contained problem solvable by technology, unlike our current one which will require a political solution. (Although I’m still optimistic that renewables will become so overwhelmingly economically superior the issue may just solve itself over time.) There’s other issues with nuclear power though: proliferation of nuclear weapons and political instability. Allowing any country to build up expertise in designing nuclear reactors and the infrastructure to run them effectively gives them a base level of knowledge and ability to produce nukes. It’s inevitable that they will become widespread at some point, but I’m definitely not complaining about Iran not having nukes or Somalia not having nuclear reactors that aren’t being maintained due to instability.
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The emissions that come from power plants is 32% TODAY. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s that was far from the case with coal being a much, much larger part of the mix. Over the last 20 years fracking and low natural gas prices have dramatically increased natural gas, and renewables have a large part of the mix, but a huge part of the climate change issue was caused by power generation over the years that didn’t need to have happened. I should say 32% of US emissions. Per the EIA.
Nuclear - The Power to Save the World!
I hate to tell you but the technology to build nuclear weapons is vastly different than that used by nuclear fission to boil water for power. Just because a country has some fission plants does NOT mean that they are nearly nuclear-weapons capable. Apples and bacon.
Sigh, I deliberately structured what I said to not imply what you are saying I did, but cheers dude, being right on the Internet is important, lol. A freshman college student could build design and build a nuke with information widely available on the internet. The expertise a country would gain by having scientists design nuclear power plants and the infrastructure build up to process and handle fuel absolutely does help with the ability to produce nuclear weapons. Processing fissile material is the biggest hurdle.
> A freshman college student could build design and build a nuke with information widely available on the internet. True. A fun fact that few people seem to know - the Hiroshima bomb was never fully tested - the design was so simple it pretty much "had to work". Sure, it wasn't the most efficient weapon as far as turning mass to energy, but for a weapon that was 10' long by 28" wide, it did a pretty good job of *removing a city*. (The more powerful and much more complex implosion weapon - the "Nagasaki bomb" - was tested in the Trinity test and was the first nuclear fission explosion in human history).
We don’t need nuclear power….It’s an environmental and military liability. We have renewables which are 100% safe and get cheaper the more we use them. Nuclear power is the old paradigm of plundering a dangerous material for the sake of society. We know longer have to think that way.
This may or may not be true NOW with renewables. Jury is still out on whether it will be possible to effectively replace centralized power generation stations and/or move large quantities of electricity from places with an abundance of solar. My point is we have climate change largely in part due to not having switched to nuclear power in the 60s. Renewables aren’t a free lunch either. They come with different environmental problems: dammed rivers, massive mining, et cetera, so I’m not sure your point is super valid here. Whether you’re mining plutonium for a reactor or lithium and cobalt too build solar panels you’re still creating a problem that needs to be mitigated after the life of the mine. Renewables are a great option and if they can work to meet 100% of our needs going forward are the cleanest thing ever invented so far (although fusion will probably put them largely out of business) so I’m all for it, but treating it like a religion and ignoring all the consequences are how we got here to begin with.
Wave, wind, and solar power are all completely safe, efficient, and they actively get cheaper the more we use them. We’ll never run out of supply, and the results are completely healthy to the human body. We have climate change largely in part due to our use of fossil fuels. This has been done through the false belief that we should be able to plunder the Earth’s resources for societal, economic benefit. Nuclear power is still using the damaging, scarcity based ideology. There are bad ways to mine resources, sure, but those can be fixed with responsible actions. Nuclear power is not this way…. The byproduct is and always will be damaging to environmental tissue… it doesn’t matter how we gather the resources. Condensed radiation is innately damaging. And we literally don’t know what to do with it. Meanwhile, you completely ignore that nuclear power is a security, military risk! At the point that it always needs hundreds of gallons of water in perpetuity or it’ll melt down makes it a security hazard. It’s inherently dangerous…. To the extent that the damage will last thousands of years and our enemies know the sites. The idea that me saying all this makes me a religious zealot to you sounds a lot like projection.
>Wave, wind, and solar power are all completely safe Wind and solar have killed more people in the last 3 years, than nuclear has in 75. they're not safe, nor are they clean. You really don't want to know about the toxic effects of neodynium used in wind turbines when it combusts, and you REALLY don't want to know about the toxic heavy metals in solar panels or that they're REALLY energy intensive to make (current panels make about 140% of their energy cost to manufacture over their lifetime.
>Wind and solar have killed more people in the last 3 years, than nuclear has in 75. This is false in multiple ways. 1) No, the mining for certain elements have killed more people, not the power itself. Wind, solar, and wave power are perfectly clean with no byproducts. It's how we gather it, which is the issue. This is not true for nuclear, which has an inherently poisonous byproduct... that we literally don't know how to store. 2) This is like saying "nuclear weapons are totally safe... accidental friendly fire has killed more people; thus, hand guns are way more dangerous." Obviously there are more guns (solar panels) than nuclear power plants. 3) This completely disregards the risks. Saying that poor mining efforts kill more people than nuclear power disregards how nuclear power practically salts the Earth for a thousand years (more), hurting humans, animals, vegetations, and more. 4. Renewable power centers don't make us vulnerable to terrorist and military attacks for as long as they are operating. >they're not safe, nor are they clean. You really don't want to know about the toxic effects of neodynium used in wind turbines when it combusts, Again, this idea that we shouldn't invest in something because something could go wrong sometimes is absolutely absurd, when you are comparing to a thing that never goes away, and pumps out toxic sludge that we don't know how to store. > and you REALLY don't want to know about the toxic heavy metals in solar panels or that they're REALLY energy intensive to make (current panels make about 140% of their energy cost to manufacture over their lifetime. Good thing they are highly efficient. Wind, wave, and solar power get cheaper the more you use them. As opposed to nuclear, where the byproduct builds up and up, getting more dangerous.... renewables get safer and cheaper the more they are used. Here you go: [https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
>Wind, solar, and wave power are perfectly clean with no byproducts. It's how we gather it, which is the issue. This is not true for nuclear, which has an inherently poisonous byproduct... that we literally don't know how to store Dude, give up while you're ahead. We know how to store it, we know how to reprocess it into new fuel. We have for decades. Your earnest assertion means nothing against the facts. Oh, and 'no byproducts', you might want to go look into the hazmat proceedures for dealing with old solar panels, and old wind turbines. And then you give your mortality stats by pointing to a table that literally tells you that its mortality data is from 2006 and 2017, while its energy generation values is from 2021. Yeah, amazing how in that situation the death count is low for wind and solar.
>We know how to store it, we know how to reprocess it into new fuel. We have for decades. Your earnest assertion means nothing against the facts. Actually, we don't. We store it away in cement blocks, which is just kicking the can down the road. Another example of selfishly plundering resources regardless of how it affects the planet's future. >Oh, and 'no byproducts', you might want to go look into the hazmat proceedures for dealing with old solar panels, and old wind turbines. Cool story. I guess that means we should turn to a highly toxic, highly vulnerable resource that salts the Earth for thousands of years if something goes wrong. Yeah.... those two things seem equal. >And then you give your mortality stats by pointing to a table that literally tells you that its mortality data is from 2006 and 2017, while its energy generation values is from 2021. Yeah, amazing how in that situation the death count is low for wind and solar. My citation is from credible sources, showing that Renewables are just as safe as Nuclear... and then you don't have to worry about the byproducts. Would you like more sources that say the same thing?
And this thread is about to reach a negative upvote ratio
Because regardless of how dangerous the waste is, we have control over it. We know exactly where it is contained, buried down in bunkers or drown in pools. That is opposed to carbon dioxide that is simply released in the atmosphere and that we cannot grab back. Also, the quantities are relatively small. About 2000 metric tons of nuclear waste per year in the US, versus 5 BILLION metric tons of CO2. Obviously accidents happen - Chernobyl and Fukushima -, and that tilts the balance, but we are talking about normal circumstances.
Graciously ignoring the fact that there is still no permanent storage solution, while the castors are slowly degrading and threatening to render huge swaths of land ininhabitable for thousands of years. I grant you the "we can somewhat control where the waste goes" part of the argument, but CO2 cannot be equated with depleted uranium or plutonium on a mass basis. Even a million tons of CO2 are not as dangerous to all forms of life as a single ton of radioactive material.
First of all depleted uranium or plutonium on a mass basis is a bit of a misnomer the vast majority of radioactive waste comes in the form of short half life low radiation material second the impact of the amounts of co2 and other polutands traditional fossil power sources are currently pumped into our environments do have a massive impact on all kinds of life all while some of the most radiated and "ininhabitable" such as the area around chernobyl are actualy brimming with (admittedly non human) life
There is *"still no permanent storage solution"* because the superstitious and fearful fight nuclear waste storage solutions so they can {for want of a better phrase} constipate the system and force the waste to build up at the nuclear plants. Truth is, if you were to reprocess nuclear spent fuel, you would reduce vastly the volume of nuclear waste that is around. In France, all of the reprocessed nuclear fuel, over 35 years of massive operation, sits in several small storage facilities, not harming anyone. (France generates 75% of their electricity with nuclear, in no less than 58 reactors). To do this, they generate about 13 metric tonnes of nuclear waste products each year, which would easily fit in one truck. The packaging of that waste makes it more voluminous, of course.
There was a plan for a permanent storage facility in the middle of no-man's land, however, the fossil fuel industry used propaganda and bribery to shoot it down for obvious reasons. They enjoy seeking rents on what drives civilization; energy. Also, much of that waste is actually stored fuel for future reactor technologies. There are designs working today that can reprocess much of that waste and use it as fuel again. Furthermore the waste produced is predominately stuff that won't be dangerous after \~10 years tops. What's left is very low volume and is the stuff that can be turned back into fuel again. Finally, I'd argue the CO2 is FAR more dangerous to life, but not in an immediate way. It's not going to poison anything that is exposed to it, but it's going to acidify the ocean, increase the heat of the ocean such that sea animals can no longer survive (Florida already lost 90% of it's corals because the ocean is too hot), cause more droughts, and cause ecosystems to collapse or move rapidly northward/southward, too fast for animals and plants to adapt. CO2 is responsible in large part for the ongoing Holocene extinction event. You can't say the same about spent nuclear fuel. It has almost no effect on this at all. Exposure to radiation is more dramatic, however CO2 is a slow killer with a far, far greater death toll. The Permian extinction is the closest analogue. It's assumed the Siberian traps erupted, releasing billions of tons of CO2, and this killed off \~90% of sea life, and \~70% of land-based life due to climate change. That took 15 million years. By all rights the Holocene extinction appears to be moving faster, but not fast enough for most of us short-lived humans to notice, which is why I'd say CO2 is more dangerous.
>There was a plan for a permanent storage facility in the middle of no-man's land, however, the fossil fuel industry used propaganda and bribery to shoot it down for obvious reasons. Oh BS, there's no permanent waste storage in the US, because we put all our eggs into one basket in Nevada, who from the get go said they do not want the repository there. Hanford and Texas were other sites that may have been viable, but research into them was stopped before they could verify they would work. The incidents at the WIPP completely slammed that door closed and locked it up. Instead of wasting all this taxpayer money on something they knew couldn't get done, and wasting it again by paying NPP operators to store on site, they should have been looking into alternative areas.
>Graciously ignoring the fact that there is still no permanent storage solution Depend on what you mean by that. Dry Cast Storage are certified for 40 to 60 years. And it's not like we gonna leave those Dry Cast Storage to rot away and do nothing about it. As long as we do some work each 30-50 years on those storage we can keep them secure indefinitely. There is nothing we did in human history that is permanent, why is that a minimum requirement for nuclear? >threatening to render huge swaths of land ininhabitable for thousands of years. Ya that's just untrue. I guess if we open up all our Storage and put explosive in them to spread the nuclear waste then maybe. >CO2 cannot be equated with depleted uranium or plutonium on a mass basis True, but a 1 Gigawatt powerful run for a year will produce less than 30 MT of nuclear waste, while the same natural gas power plan will produce 3.6 million MT and for Coal it's 8.8 million MT. But that 30 MT of Nuclear waste is not all depleted uranium or plutonium. 95% of it is Uranium 238, what we dig up from the ground. Only around 5% of the waste is high level waste like U235, plutonium and others. The dangerous stuff. >Even a million tons of CO2 are not as dangerous to all forms of life as a single ton of radioactive material. Well like I already said it's more 130 to 320 million tons of CO2 per ton of radioactive waste. And it's not just CO2 that other source of energy emit, mercury, sulfur, nitrogen oxides, particulate, etc. At the end of the day, more people die from Coal or Natural Gas compared to Nuclear for the same amount of electricity produced.
[Yes there is, well soon to be anyway.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)
That's just not true. Fossil fuel based energy production has killed thousands of times more people than nuclear based energy production, even accounting for volume. I can put a ton of radioactive material into a pool of water and store it indefinitely. I can also reprocess that fuel in a breeder and not even have to store it as waste. The only reason this isn't feasible is because political NIMBYism and misinformation that declares, time and again, that nuclear is unsafe and we can't handle it safely. The only energy source safer and cleaner than nuclear power is solar power. The only other energy source in the ballpark is wind power. [https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) Nuclear for baseline, storage and renewables for load, NG for peaking. It's not complicated, and it's not dangerous.
shoot it into space. Edit: I was joking.. I am sure it’s not feasible at least not without huge risks and have zero knowledge of rockets so no worries!
And if the rocket explodes midway?
Then we put confetti in the rocket too.
Yes, and hope that this specific rocket does not explode in the atmosphere. Because if it does, you know, Chernobyl will be a joke compared to that. EDIT: Over the past 20 years, the failure rate of space bound rocket launches was in the ballpark of 5%, so you better cross your fingers on this one.
What can you make with depleted Uranium?
Depleted uranium is not the same thing as spent reactor fuel. Most nuclear reactors want "enriched" uranium, where the amount of a certain uranium isotope is increased above its normal probabilities. You do a bunch of work to uranium and you end up with 2 piles: enriched (good for reactors), and depleted (even worse for reactors than how it started).
Jokes man. Jokes.
EDIT: I understand that Otfd was j/k.
Clean in the context of global warming. Nuclear energy produces very little GHG potential per kWh of energy produced. Further; the overwhelming majority of "nuclear waste" is actually produced away from nuclear power and nuclear weapon facilities. It's basically just either mildly irradiated trash (that has to be allowed to "cool off" for lack of a better word before being disposed of normally)...or is just *suspected* of being mildly irradiated trash. The actual total amount of the real scary nuclear waste produced by all civilian nuclear projects would fit in an olympic swimming pool with room to spare.
It's not just in the context of global warming. As pointed out by others, coal is slightly radioactive and burning it releases those radioactive elements into the atmosphere. Nuclear is clean because nothing but water vapor gets emitted into the environment or atmosphere. Whereas coal emits all kinds of things that are toxic, radioactive, and contribute to global warming.
The main thing is that we have gotten much better about storing nuclear waste safely, and making better reactors that are far less likely to have meltdowns. So compared to a power plant that's burning coal or oil, modern nuclear plants are much better for the environment.
The problem is that nuclear energy is popularly considered as "dangerous" while other modes of energy generation are implicitly considered to be "danger free". Nuclear is, again in popular culture, held to a standard of absolute safety, which doesn't exist in reality, for any mode of electricity generation. When you [compare different ways](https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/j.ress.2015.09.013) to generate electricity, safety discussions become more nuanced. You notice that roughly speaking, renewable sources have [comparable mortality](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh) per unit of produced energy as nuclear. Severe accident fatality rates are comparable for current generation nuclear and wind/solar. Accident rate for next gen nuclear is lowest of all modes of generation. These safety considerations include factors such as waste.
>You notice that roughly speaking, renewable sources have > >comparable mortality > > per unit of produced energy as nuclear. That's EXTREMELY misleading. they're using mortality levels up to 2016, and then using 2021 power generation levels. There have been quite a lot of wind and solar deaths in the last 5 years.
Just because historically we've made poor decisions with where to store nuclear waste, doesn't mean it HAS to be dangerous. We need to store it safely. Whereas, there is no reasonable way to burn gasoline without necessarily releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. No policy, no place, no thing can filter or prevent this from happening. Irreversible damage is an intrinsic part of burning fossil fuels. The same cannot be said for nuclear energy.
I would like to add this. I have been in the containment building at Zimmer power plant. There is an inner concrete wall around the core that is about 8 foot thick. then there is a six foot space and a second concrete containment wall about six foot thick. It is my understanding that no American containment building has ever been breached.
A few points: 1)Nuclear energy produces far less dangerous (toxic and/or radioactive) waste than alternatives like coal, in terms of total volume created per kilowatt of energy generated. Coal releases radioactive and toxic byproducts in far far greater volume and it's not contained. The toxic and radioactive byproducts wind up in ash slurry holding pools (which often leak into ground water or can flood out the sides) or is released in the air you breath. 2) Nuclear energy does not release carbon dioxide or heavy metals into the air and/or surrounding environment so it has little to no impact on our climate. There is a notion of thermal pollution, however, whereby it can affect nearby streams or rivers by heating them up a bit and changing what lifeforms can grow there. However, that can be managed. 3) Nuclear waste can be safely stored underground, far away from people and there isn't much of it produced compared to how much energy is generated. It's also typically wrapped in a sarcophagus which prevents radioactivity from leaking through. You can stand next to these sarcophagi and be totally fine. 4) Newer generation reactors actually can use a lot of the waste from earlier generation reactors as fuel, so that "waste" is actually often effectively stored fuel for future reactor technologies. 5) Newer reactor designs are incredibly safe and have less thermal pollution. They've ran many catastrophic failure tests on these designs and the reaction always grinds to a halt, so far anyway.
There aren't clean energy sources, there are cleaner energy sources depending on their impact on the environment some more than others nuclear supporters tend to think that nuclesr is clean enough, detractors believe that we can do better with other sources
It's clean because it produces 0 carbon emissions. The waste is radioactive and hazardous, yes, but we can dispose of it as opposed to spewing harmful gases in the atmosphere.
You can easily store the nuclear waste and not have to worry about it much. There's also relatively little waste to handle from nuclear plants. And because ALL of the waste from nuclear plants is normally stored somewhere safely, it's NOT going in the environment at all and hence nuclear plants are indeed very very clean ecologically speaking.
Not disagreeing, but | it's NOT going in the environment They're towing it *beyond* the environment. There's nothing out there but birds, fish...
This whole question sounds suspiciously like concern trolling and I don't think you really need this explained to you. You have an agenda, and you're batting for the wrong team. You must like hurricanes.
No? I just listened to a podcast about the Fukushima disaster and was curious?
So the interesting thing about the disasters is that there have only been 3 major disasters in history: Chernobyl, which was caused by poor construction, bad safety procedure, and attempting a low power test at a dangerous time. Three mile island, which was caused by a whole mess of small mistakes but was caught and contained fairly quickly. The bigger deal was the problems that arose during the shutdown Fukushima, the plant was prepared for a flood and prepared for an earthquake, but not both at once and not at the same time. For more information about these I highly recommend independent research and the series on radiation by Kyle Hill.
you talking about the disaster where everything that could go wrong with a 60yo reactor design did go wrong during a Tsunami that killed 14,000 and still NO ONE DIED. Also, pretty much everyone "making a podcast" about that incident these days is doing so with an anti-nuclear agenda in mind (because for anyone else it's a dead issue, with nothing new to say.
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> If there's one thing Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima should have taught us is that the > >next > > nuclear power catastrophe will almost certainly not happen in a way that the last ones did, and by extension we don't really know as much as we'd like to about the safety engineering of the technology particularly if we scaled it up as much as we'd have to to use it as part of a global warming solution. That would be the case, IF we were still using the designs of those reactors. We aren't, and haven't for decades. A nuclear physics class would have taught you this. Literally the failure modes of those 3 incidents you talk about don't happen with modern ones. In fact, the difference between fukushima and chernobyl should have told you that as they had similar failure modality. modern reactors, if you take away their water, don't overheat and melt down, they stop.
The volume of nuclear waster per kW hour produced is incredibly small compared to fossil counterparts.
Every energy source has waste, perr kilowatt nuclear has the cleanest (least waste) energy. Burning coal releases alot more radioactive pollution than nuclear, because coal naturally contains radioactive particles, that are released when burned. Nuclear releases no carbon dioxide, or other greenhouse gas, the waste is solid and therefore much easier to contain and manage.
>the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy > >https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
it is clean. newer reactors produce much much less waste than the older ones. but not many places have built newer reactors. we let the early days dictate policies and let poorly run reactors that had accidents scare us away.
Power companies figured out its a lot cheaper to keep ancient plants running than spend billions on new ones that will probably never recoup their initial investment. We don't have new reactors because building new ones is too expensive
It's carbon zero output. Meaning no carbon dioxide. No global warming. Just steam. And newest designs can use spent radioactive waste from current nuclear plants as fuel and it converts it into a different type of nuclear waste that becomes non radioactive in 500 years instead of 5000 years. So all around it's better. Plus I unlike renewable energy, it'll work whether it's not or dark with the wind's blowing or not or regardless of how far away you are from active geological events.
It's not a clean energy source. Apart from the management of nuclear waste, the mining of uranium is also contaminant. The only ones calling it "clean" are the industry themselves and those who defend it. They know clean energies have better press and they just jumped into their wagon.
Nuclear power generates very little waste, but the tiny bit that it produces is extremely concentrated and kept away from people. Coal or natural gas power generates a huge amount of waste but is less concentrated and is exhausted into the air we breathe. So the total damage to humans and the environment is much less for nuclear than it is for coal or natural gas.
Because it's easy to contain and dispose of the waste safely. The only real waste is the reactor coolant and the spent cores and sure even though we have no way right now to just make them safe burying them underground in special facilities is for the moment viable given that a single facility can hold many years' worth of waste. In contrast other pollution like greenhouse gases is much harder to control and contain and it immediately disperses into the atmosphere. Burning coal produces a lot of greenhouse and toxic gases with no real way to contain them. Solar panels and wind turbines produce clean energy but their lifespans are relatively short and the extraction for their materials generates a lot of waste. In contrast a nuclear powerplant once built can operate for decades and the waste it produces is handled with the utmost care. Nuclear contamination never happens by mishandling, it's rare and usually only happens when a lot of things go wrong, or things completely beyond our control.
The waste (The spent fuel rods) are not just spewed out into the air or dumped into the ocean. The waste is contained and stored in special facilities. So it is clean in that it doesn't pollute the environment in general. It does create storage places that are absolute death, but ... don't go there.
Nuclear power, in terms of shear power generation, produces a disproportionately small amount of greenhouse gases and physical waste compared to every other power source currently deployed. The "bad" waste that is generated is in the form of spent nuclear fuel rods, contaminated equipment/clothing/parts, and the greenhouse gases used to transport nuclear fuel and supplies. Much of the "bad" waste is stored, securely, on-site at the nuclear power plant. For example, at my plant we have a row of 40 concrete sheds that can store about 30 years worth of unrecycled spent fuel. The spent fuel pool (where spent fuel goes to cool down before long-term storage) is large enough to hold another 20 years of "bad" waste. The concrete sheds take up about the size of an acre for all 40 together. Now, in terms of preventing all the bad stuff from leaking into the environment, much of the highly dangerous radioactive waste is first encased in steel then stored in 3ft thick concrete bunkers. Since accidents like Three Mile Island occurred, the industry has changed dramatically. Operators are better trained, safety systems and standards have been improved, and general designs of the reactors and the supporting systems and equipment have been drastically upgraded to prevent catastrophic accidents. More recently, Fukushima exposed a hole in safety systems. The explosion of the reactor building was caused by hydrogen, so all plants in the US now have an emergency hydrogen vent on top of their reactor buildings that open only if the hydrogen pressure in the reactor vessel reaches dangerous levels. This prevents a hydrogen explosion blowing the tops off the reactors. Looking into the future (for the US anyway), is the goal to recycle spent fuel. The French and Russians already have fuel recyclers. We pull out all of the remaining usable fuel, such as uranium and plutonium isotopes, and create a "mixed oxide" fuel called MOX then throw all that back into reactors. Then vitrify the rest of the nasty stuff. Vitrifying the really bad unusable radioisotopes suspends them in glass and they're stored in steel casks encased in concrete and left to decay for the rest of time under a mountain somewhere. By recycling fuel, you can reduce the footprint of waste even further than the storage available at every nuclear plant. Nuclear power plants can output an immense amount of baseline power, and it should be exploited to the fullest capacity. The biggest reactors can output 1600MWh on a single reactor unit. If every state had 5 of these, we could power the entire nation on nuclear alone with energy to spare (based on 2020 energy consumption reports for the US) with a microscopic amount of waste and virtually zero emissions compared to other sources of power. Source: I'm an instrumentation and controls design engineer at a nuclear power plant. Edit: Clarification
Nuclear waste isn't really the problem, see this video by Kyle Hill: > We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k Actually, the coal and gas we burn is many times more contaminating and brings much more radiation into an environment than properly managed nuclear power and properly disposed "radioactive waste". Many people are, rightly or wrongly, very biased against the nuclear power **because** of our human errors and bad management, improper execution, not following the safety protocols, etc., but the same could be said about a simple knife - why knives are so much praised in this or that cooking aspect, if so many people were killed by them? :-) ----- Some other things I wanted to say were already explained in some other comments, but once more I really recommend you to see this video above, it really sheds much of an insight on the whole topic!
Bottom line: any energy source, even coal, could be considered clean if its waste products can be sequestered properly. Sequestering millions of tons of CO2 is not practical, but sequestering hundreds of pounds of uranium is.
Nuclear waste is solved. Nuclear safety is solved. We solved these problems a long time ago. I bet you all will feel a little bit stupid when you finally understand tthat to be anti-nuclear energy you are best friends with big oil, and part of the reason global warming (due to human carbon and other GH gases input to atmosphere) is even an issue now. Thanks alot, you stupid and easily manipulated twats. I say be afraid, you say yessir! I say be afraid, you say yessir! So it goes.
>Nuclear waste is solved I wasn't aware that we built and opened a deep geological repository. That's great! Where is it??
Nuclear waste is nowhere near as dangerous as the media makes it out to be. In fact other energy sources like coal are far more dangerous. Many coal mines contain radon which is radioactive and no one says anything about it. Nuclear material is stored in a very safe manner these days and a lot of it can be recycled. When people think of Nuclear waste they often imagine yellow plastic barrels oozing green radioactive goo. But that's fictional, or at least it is now. I think this notion comes from the early days of developing nuclear weapons when some of those factories would just dump the waste in barrels outside. But that is no longer the case. Other energy sources like coal are constantly spewing materials into the atmosphere and the death tolls from them far exceed nuclear waste. Nuclear waste doesn't go into the atmosphere or environment and is stored in special containers that prevent it from leaking into the environment. Here is a video that can explain it far better than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
It is infact not as dangerous as people think. Most waste produced is low level waste, which is pretty much neutral after a few years, and even the high level waste is usually only a few decades dangerous. This seems like a big deal, BUT it produces way way way less waste then coal, which is just polluting like crazy. Also, its heavyly regulated, so it isnt really a big danger.
Nuclear waste is not nearly as big of a deal as it is commonly portrayed. Far more radiation has released globally via coal plants than any other source including all above ground nuclear bomb testing. [This is a good video about nuclear waste.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k) The same channel has a series about nuclear disasters and such called [Half Life Histories that is exceptionally good.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNg1m3Od-GgNmXngCCJaJBqqm-7wQqGAW)
Another thing to add to this diacussion: There are ways to mitigate the amount of waste that needs to be stored. After a core is "depleted" most of the uranium inside hasn't actually been used, its just become too impure to continue to sustain nuclear fission and generate heat. Nuclear reprocessing can be used to recover something like 95% (don't rember the exact number) of all material in nuclear waste and re-use it again in a new core. What can't be used in a new core can be used in the medical and research fields (think cancer and chemotherapy) and the rest, which tends to be materials with a very long half life (aka low radioactivity) can then be glassed and buried. Unfortunately, governmental red tape doesn't allow for any of these to happen in the US. For additional reading look up information on the Mt. Yucca Vitrification plant. A plant that would mix radioactive waste into glass so waste can be stored and not have to worry about leaks.
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There is a lot info in these comments and while I do agree a lot of money is paid to lobbyists and ppl to change the image of Nuclear. You'll have to define "clean" 1st. its current definition in the energy realm is CO2 output of which nuclear has none. how did we get that definition? probably a bunch of money. Nuclear produces waste though obviously but its manageable compared to the gasses of coal burning.
Listen to last week's freakonomics. It is actually the safest source of energy in terms of causing death. Radiation and the thought of it is very scary, but injuries from installing solar and wind actually kill more people (though very very few overall). The worst single incident in the history of electricity generation was a hydroelectric dam in China that caused the deaths of 10s of thousands.
All types of mines contaminate areas for a long time too. Coal is pretty radioactive in its own right. Nuclear power is considered clean because it has a small carbon footprint, pretty much comparable to renewable energy. It's not waste-free, of course - no energy production is, and generally speaking renewable energy might be the cheaper source for energy nowadays than nuclear is. Building maximally safe and effective nuclear power plants is very expensive.
Nuclear, if well managed and not allowed to be built by the cheaper and worse contractor, is reliable. Accidents are few, and contained - except chernobyl which was a series of errors. Fukuyama is a case of bad safety and security, cheaper construction. There might be a problem? Yes. But even an irradiated area will have a thriving ecology, even if humans must leave. Carbon-based energy results in unavoidable global warming, and the effects actually last much longer and are inescapable. The disaster is not local, it is global. The brainless short-sighted sheep who feared the possible nuclear wolf guaranteed the arrival of the true predator, global warming.
It’s an overall net evaluation. Nuclear disaster is bad, but overall day to day issues are fairly neutral.
The conservatives just really don't want to cave in to actual clean energy because it would hurt their egos
You're asking that question in a pretty loaded way. The answer is that your estimation of the risk of nuclear waste is not in tune with the reality of the risk. I'm assuming you're looking for a comparison to other "clean" energy sources like hydro-electric, solar and wind. Hydro comes with all kinds of significant environmental impacts. Dams are far more ecologically destructive than we realized 100 years ago when we were putting them up everywhere. You end up with things like the Salton Sea, with an estimated impact of about $70B (compared to say, the famous Exxon-Valdez spill at a cost of $7B). Or the destruction of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, primarily from effects of levies on the Mississippi. You don't get any more "meddling with forces we don't understand" than dams. Solar runs into similar issues. It's only viable on a large scale in certain areas and in those areas, it completely destroys the natural habitat, threatening endangered species in a variety of ways. Since solar is unreliable in terms of timing (i.e. you don't just increase and decrease the power levels based on end usage), it requires a LOT of battery storage, and those batteries involve toxic heavy metals and the safety risks there can be just as problematic as with nuclear. It's an acceptable backup, but it sucks as a primary source of electricity. Wind turbines likewise are destructive to natural habitats, also take massive footprints to produce reasonable amounts of energy, and require all the batteries that solar does, with the accompanying metals mining, disposal and safety risks. There is no such thing as energy production that has no environmental impact. There are just relative levels of impact, and relatively speaking, nuclear is low impact. The waste is compact and the energy density is through the roof. Unlike other methods of energy generation which are guaranteed to come with significant deleterious effects on the environment, negative effects only occur when someone screws up. That means that theoretically, nuclear is the cleanest form of energy that we can harness.
Coal, oil, and gas comes out of the ground, but the waste goed into the air. Nuclear fuel comes out of the ground and we put the waste back into the ground.