Are these two scientists right about nuclear power?

why doesn't danmark have nuclear power then

Why don't most countries? Because the so-called environmentalists fight against it, and because of the fossil fuel lobby that oftentimes indirectly funds them. They're very effective with their pseudo-science fearmongering in the general public, which affects public policy. Overregulation drives the prices into non-competitiveness, and allowing certain kinds of legal tactics by environmentalists drives up prices even further, making nuclear not economically competitive in many countries.

Also, the greens pass asinine laws like net metering, which is an unbelievably huge subsidy for solar and wind, indirectly making nuclear even less competitive, and also making the grid less and less stable over time. For example, see some of the recent blackouts in Australia.

still waiting for this human institution that will safely keep radioactive waste buried for the time span of 10 roman empires

>.> What would happen if we threw nuclear waste into a volcano?

Why should I accept your ridiculous demands. I reject them outright. Far lesser standards are appropriate, and will result in practically zero human deaths.

What happens if...we nuke the nuclear waste?
Underground?

I really hate greens. Not because I disagree with them but because they have the solution to their problems right in front of them - nuclear power - yet for absolutely ZERO reasons are against it and hate it even more than they hate coal

>"lalala waste lalalala cant hear you"
This "argument" I hate the most because the waste can be easily ejected towards the Sun in as short as 20 years for almost no cost, yet they pretend to not hear it and continue to oppose the only solution to their problem. Why?
Because they don't want the underlying problem to be solved, or at least the ones who lead the movement and are the loudest don't. They want to keep this environmentalist facade going on forever so they can stay relevant and keep hugging money and subsidies. If society stopped caring about this and if it was solved, they'd instantly become irrelevant and their "careers" would vanish. They're aware of that, hence why they oppose Nuclear.

>he waste can be easily ejected towards the Sun in as short as 20 years for almost no cost
google.com/?q=why not launch radioactive waste into space

Nuclear waste will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years and cannot be made less dangerous. The generated waste might not seem much in comparison, but it accumulates and cannot be gotten rid of. It is asinine to believe that we can safely store it for that long.

And there is also the safety concern of the plants themselves. Fukushima did happen. (Tschernobyl is a different story) Who is to say that an accident that will lead to pollution of major areas will never occur again. Whatever unlucky circumstances may lead to it. Of course you wouldn't want that anywhere near you.

>so they can stay relevant and keep hugging money and subsidies
I seriously doubt that. Seems on-par with saying that climate scientists only predict climate change to get more money.

Sage. Nuclear is good.

>Get rid of nuclear waste
Why would you ever bury or jettison nuclear waste? You're throwing away a crap ton of energy! Just recycle it.

forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/why-doesnt-u-s-recycle-nuclear-fuel/#37b5e9fe390f

nei.org/Issues-Policy/Used-Nuclear-Fuel-Management/Recycling-Used-Nuclear-Fuel

heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui

Also fuck obama for this
nature.com/news/2009/090702/full/news.2009.619.html

>nature.com/news/2009/090702/full/news.2009.619.html
that stupid nigger

It is safer than coal and more friendly to the environment than carbon fossil fuels. It has the potential to solve all energy problems for millions of years if we figure it out.

>Sage. Nuclear is good.
t. ahmed

thanks shill

>It is asinine to believe that we can safely store it for that long.
holy fuck, find old deep fucking salt mine in geologically stable area with no important ground water around, put it there and fill the fucking thing with concrete.
Done.
What the fuck is gonna happen to it?

oh yeah? find such places that all nuclear countries can access on the planet.

>places
You need exactly one, and there is a fuckton anyway.
Your requirements would be literally just:
-preferably some granite rock
-not on a goddamn fault line
-far away enough from civilization
-far away enough from ground water
IAEA can organize it.
Once we accumulate enough to fill another, they can scout for it and do it all over again.
Even if the concrete in the immediate surroundings of the stuff crumbles to dust from radiation, it won't walk away, it will still be there surrounded by perfectly fine concrete.
Tectonic moment is so slow it won't even matter in this case.

>You need exactly one
oh really? so you think the country where this place is situated will let all the other countries in the world come in and dump their nuclear waste on its territory? you're so naive it hurts, you must be underage or severely autistic

>yet for absolutely ZERO reasons are against it and hate it even more than they hate coal

Anti-nuclear groups began with this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth
Funded by this guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson
Who owned this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARCO

Greenies have long been useful idiots for corporate ends.

>oh really? so you think the country where this place is situated will let all the other countries in the world come in and dump their nuclear waste on its territory?
Yes, any country with extensive nuclear program where hippies don't hold much sway would do it for a modest fee.
Hell, Russia would do it in a fucking heartbeat.
Don't call me naive if you don't know shit.

and yet reality disagrees. you are naive and dumb.

>On July 11, 2001, Russian president Vladimir Putin approved a law that clears the way for Russia to import foreign nuclear waste. The generated revenue would help the country finance its own nuclear waste disposal.

fucking faggot

that's just putin being a corrupt mafia boss. there's no guarantee any other country will do the same or that russia will remain a corrupt oligarchic shithole for thousands of years

so they're right

lmao moving the goalpost much?

if you're against nuclear you're a cuck

>this video is unavailible
:thinking:

youtu.be/PekJU6YpaNA?t=25m52s

>Other industries make toxic waste that is dangerous FOREVER!
No they don't. Either they make toxic compounds which can be reduced to safe ones, or they collect inherently toxic elements which existed before they came along, and can be returned to whatever level of dilution or non-interaction with the biosphere they were found in.

Nuclear industry is unique in producing atoms which were not present in the biosphere in significant quantities during our evolution.

The artificial radioisotopes in nuclear waste are orders of magnitude more harmful to life than the worst naturally-occurring elements.

>thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
This doesn't support your position. It acknowledges the serious hazard posed by nuclear waste, and suggests that the only way to contain it adequately is an active process requiring disciplined effort and no major fuckups or deliberate sabotage for hundreds of years.

Where it takes a flying leap into absurdity is that it presents this as if it should a reassurance to the reader, when we can't have any reasonable confidence of avoiding major fuckups or sabotage for decades, let alone centuries. A hundred years from now, there may be no continuity with current government or corporations.

It's talking about five hundred years into the future. Five hundred years in the past, Shakespeare hadn't been born. The Americas were still news, and there was no English colony in North America yet.

The last century alone featured two world wars, fascism, communism, a cold war, the discovery of fission, the invention of the computer, the discovery of DNA, the first space travel. We can't make plans hundreds of years in advance with any confidence they'll be followed.

You're responding to the tone and not the content.

>The artificial radioisotopes in nuclear waste are orders of magnitude more harmful to life than the worst naturally-occurring elements.
No this is just incredibly incredibly false. There are far more dangerous, lethal substances than nuclear waste that occur naturally.

Please stop making shit up.

>Nuclear industry is unique in producing atoms which were not present in the biosphere in significant quantities during our evolution.
Protip: There's a lot more radiation in the ground, than humans have ever generated.

>
No they don't. Either they make toxic compounds which can be reduced to safe ones, or they collect inherently toxic elements which existed before they came along, and can be returned to whatever level of dilution or non-interaction with the biosphere they were found in.

No. For example, coal ash. That contains a shitton of toxins. They don't do anything with that shit, except put it in a hole, and not a very good one.

> The artificial radioisotopes in nuclear waste are orders of magnitude more harmful to life than the worst naturally-occurring elements.

Also false. The LD50 of many radioactive elements is comparable to the LD50 of other toxins. Give me a moment to post some comparisons. This is the fundamental problem: You believe that it's magically super-dangerous in the case of leaks into the groundwater or something, but it's not.

Let's do some halfass calculations. Consider Connecticut Yankee over its whole lifetime, and a hypothetical coal power plant that produced the same total energy.
thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

Let's say 3% of the spent nuclear fuel is fission products, and for the sake of argument all of that is Cs-137. Ingested Cs-137 has a activity of 3.215 TBq / kg, an ingested dose factor of 13 nSv / Bq. Let's pretend 1 Sv is LD50. Thus, the LD50 of Cs-137 is:
(1 Sv) (1 Bq / 13 nSv) (1 kg / 3.215 terabecquerel)
= 23.9 mg
How much Cs-137 do we have in the spent nuclear fuel, as a multiple of the LD50?
(1020 tons) (5%) (1 / 23.9 mg)
= 1.94e9 approx

A similar coal power plant would have produced about 4,500,000 tons of coal ash over its lifetime. Coal ash contains about 320 ppm arsenic. Metallic arsenic has a LD50 of 13 mg/kg. How much arsenic do we have in the coal ash, as a mulitple of the LD50, for a 100 kg person?
(4,500,000 tons coal ash) (320e-9 kg arsenic / kg coal ash) (1 / 1300 mg arsenic)
= 1e6 approx

It's in the same ballpark. And I only looked at one toxic compound of coal ash. I'm betting coal ash is a lot worse. Also, we take practically no precautions for the disposal of coal ash, relative to nuclear waste. It's a lot easier to store nuclear waste, because it's so compact, compared to coal ash. For coal ash, we just dump it in a landfill.

Again, we have to look at this with the proper perspective, with understanding about other forms of toxic waste, that practically no one is concerned about. Nuclear waste is not some magical substance that is infinitely dangerous that if it escapes containment, then everyone on the planet will die. Please.

First time chiming in on Veeky Forums!

An important point I never see brought up is that even though spent fuel seems to have a large negative value now, there is no rational reason to believe it will not have a positive value in the future, as a plentiful source of otherwise rare radioactives, or mixed or reprocessed fuel for other types of reactors. Next gen breeders or even an add-on to some future neutronic fusion reactor would be able to utilize the "waste" and make it quite valuable. Although I have my doubts about TerraPower specifically. Spent fuel rods are quite benign, all things considered, and Yucca is one hell of a solution that would allow the US to store spend fuel and later remove it for use.

Also, the more dangerous a radioactive element is to be near, the less time it lasts. The power side of things has such a good track record in the US, and has displaced so much coal (which is categorically worse on all accounts) that to call it bad is to show true ignorance. This is also why I rarely get along with environmentalists.

Why don't we drop nuclear waste into the mariana trrench?

Why don't we launch it into outer space?

Why don't we use it for lower yield energy?

There is a treaty or some other intenational agreement that prevents attempts at underwater dumping, so at least the US can't attempt that until the provision expires.

Launching into space/sun is actually a bad idea, at least for now. Trust me on this one, I'm an engineer in the space industry.

Lower yield energy is a great option, but the reactor does need to be engineered for it and it's not worth doing until it actually becomes a problem, which it isn't. Of course, extensive reprocessing should make it more viable, but that's additional designing of plants, etc. Japan is still working on this tech, though, so the US could probably get it from them.

Just fucking recycle it.

Id be concerned if people had created more radiation than the thermal energy in the core

Lethal dose is a bit of a cop-out if 1/100 or less may still cause cancer etc

> Lethal dose is a bit of a cop-out if 1/100 or less may still cause cancer etc

I'm comparing like to like. I did the LD50 of arsenic, but even lesser doses of arsenic will do significant harm.

>No they don't. Either they make toxic compounds which can be reduced to safe ones, or they collect inherently toxic elements which existed before they came along, and can be returned to whatever level of dilution or non-interaction with the biosphere they were found in.
do people actually believe this? they dump shit willy-nilly all day every day, most of which is of an essentially unknown level of toxicity (i.e. some of it is toxic as shit)

the law might stop them in sweden or some shit (idk), but it sure as hell doesn't in the USA, or pretty much anywhere outside of Europe

>but it sure as hell doesn't in the USA, or pretty much anywhere outside of Europe
so it's none of my problem

yeah i'm sure everything will be just fine lol

Nuclear power is a dangerous scam promoted by Republican lobbyists for the sole purpose of acquiring large contracts for their districts.

As we speak, MILLIONS of BTUs of radiation are pouring into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled Fukushima power plant; and yet, the "cleanup" continues at an excruciatingly slow pace.

1 or two accidents like this in the US will render our continent uninhabitable. FACT.
Nuclear power needs to be shut down.
I am now a /berniemissile/

>1 or two accidents like this in the US will render our continent uninhabitable. FACT.
lols

This.

The only ones interested in nuclear power are the army and the military industrial complex for reasons far different than "clean energy" and helping humanity.

Nuclear weapons and research should have been internationally banned by now.

It makes me sad that people have so hard rageboners against nuclear. Nuclear is the closest we'll get to pure energy in our lifetimes. There's enough extractable uranium in earth to conquer the solar system and to power the world for multiple millenia. Most radioactivity from ingested particles will always be from background radon and not from human action. Yet it seems easier to pollute the breathing air with lead and cadmium and other toxins from combustion of fossile fuels than to endorse nuclear energy.

I know it's bait, but do people look up the units of things before making claims. BTUs are units of energy. So the ocean is gaining heat?

Yep. In my ineptitude I skipped past your post.

That is of course what I mean by extensive reprocessing. We can thank President Carter for the original lack of "recycling" and Obama for the incredibly stupid current lack, and for letting Yucca mountain be closed.

you recycle the high grade waste. there are a lot of valuable isotopes in that waste.

the low grade stuff. you can vitrify it and make it inert glass. then you bury it in a normal land fill.

the little bit of high grade waste that cannot be recycled. you bury thousands of feet below the ground. using old abandoned mines.

Nope. Since weapons production ended, the military industrial complex has had no real interest in fission power.

And yet, people from all over are trying to start a nuclear power renaissance. It's the only feasible way to both cut into coal use and to properly prepare the US for significant electric car use, without using gas. Nuclear power development is most certainly worth our time, even if we had to wait for only Gen 4 and better reactors to really start ramping up.

so much for nuclear being clean, it's actually contributing to global warming

>I'm all for Bill Nye
>Bernie is also similarly great
Please don't call yourself intelligent. thanks.

>MILLIONS of BTUs of radiation
Which is absolutely nothing compared to all the radiation from coal burning we throw into the oceans.

Which is a shitton compared to real clean energy.

There's more people dead from solar energy than nuclear energy

False. There's more polar bears than ever.

Hey pay us and we'll take your waste and reprocess it or chuck it in our big pit o'waste.

Problem solved.

The thing about energy, is that we need it. We need more and more and more of it.

Doesn't matter if it's nuclear, renewable, or fossil, sooner or later it will ALL be used to make more humans.

>the waste can be easily ejected towards the Sun in as short as 20 years for almost no cost

shygddt

>a custom one time use space rocket

>filled with hazard highly radioactive waste

>which could collide with an asteroid or react into bizarre new substances in space

cheap.

pick one and only one.

Yeah... the space solution really isn't.

Of course, the problem isn't actually a problem and it would be dumb to throw it away.

Yep

That's partly why. Polar bears actually hunt people in Alaska.

...BTUs are still not a measurement of radiation. Such bait?

>BTUs

If it's not a problem -- at all -- then why do we have a bunch of nuclear waste ships going around and around in circles picking up waste and dumping it over and over again due to the fact that nobody wants that shit?

What was an isolated incident, caused by green hysteria? Green hysteria can exist, and can exert political will, and it can also be true that they're wrong, and it's not a problem. It's a collective delusion, just like religion. Green energy is a religious collective delusion.

Finland used to send all their nuclear waste to Soviet Union / Russia between 1981 - 1994. Then Finland banned exporting of nuclear waste for some unknown reason. I bet Russia would be just fine accepting it still.

read the thread moran

>measuring radiation in BTU

radioactivity and radiation dose are 2 different measurements

BTU is a unit of heat

ho is increasing heat good for global warming again?

"Millions of BTU's" isn't a relevant measurement. A hot air balloon ride take about 2 million BTUs. A person just existing puts out 200 BTUs an hour.

It'd be more efficient to change 10,000 incandescent bulbs to florescent than stop Fukashima if we're just measuring heat output.

BTUs aren't a unit of radiation. Silly statements are silly. Whoever is talking about BTUs is either parroting something idiotic or casting effective bait. Maybe you mean heat generated when water absorbs the eventual radiation? Is there some time factor or is that supposed to be total, or what?

Can't be bothered to even look up my own numbers, but "Millions of BTUs" is what, $10 of LNG? A tank of propane? Is there actually some sort of argument that Fukishima radiation is making an addition to global warming? I'll use my microwave instead of my grilling out tonight. There, now I have some green credits and we can use them to dump another 'million BTUs of radiation' into the ocean.

If you're not a nuclear engineer get the fuck out of this thread

What if I'm a mechanical engineering student aspiring to work in the nuclear industry?

>trusting nuke engineers to comment on how safe the nuke industry is
Bet you buy 'scientifically proven' dick growth hypnosis cassettes too

>trusting climate scientists to comment on the risks of climate change
Bet you trust nuclear scientists to comment on the risks of nuclear technologies, too

speaking of nuclear: this thread gave me cancer.

bump

Yeah, and surgeons on surgery, and biologists on life, and ... oh.

Yep

so 80some posts laster nobody has been able to refute the points made in the video.
nuclear is a meme

See:

see
your all argument is the way it should be vs the way it is. there's a reason licensing is so bad and takes so long and it's because people don't want it around.

...

faggot don't bring up arguments that got BTFO two weeks ago

Yes. People don't want it. That's an objective fact. They're also fucking stupid, and all of the technical arguments about safety, cost, etc., are just wrong. Nuclear is the safest, cleanest, and among the cheapest (i.e. competitive with coal and nat gas) energy supply that there is.

even assuming you're right about nuclear, what are you going to do about it? what's your solution? killing off the unwashed masses? instituting an autocratic government?

Dunno. Talking to people. One person at a time. It still seems like the easiest approach. It seems easier to change public perception compared to changing physics, or inventing magical / radical tech like cheap energy storage or fusion.

how is that working out for you?

Work on your reading comprehension, smartass.

They weren't very good points to start with, but that's to be expected from a politician and someone who plays a scientist on TV. The thread was also derailed by some idiot mentioning BTUs, which was triggering.

The only real challenge is politics. The environmentalist movement has been getting large numbers of people to be passively anti-nuclear for a long time. If they just stopped, and simply listed nuclear as the clean option that it is, that would do it. Or if they join the logical side, it would be faster. A few have! Watch Pandora's Promise, then go back and watch the abortion that is The China Syndrome, which was the big win of the environmentalists that got us into this fucking mess.

I work to convince my friends and colleagues. It's all I feel I can do, but I wish there were more.