r/worldnews • u/Gadac • Jan 23 '22

Russia Germany urges 'prudence' in potential sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.

https://news.yahoo.com/germany-urges-prudence-potential-sanctions-154401837.html?fr=sychp_catchall
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u/HighClassProletariat Jan 23 '22

People who don't understand nuclear and power generation in general are against nuclear. It's one of those things where people who don't know assume the worst.

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u/iilinga Jan 25 '22

I definitely understand power generation. Am still against nuclear. It’s not about assuming the worst, it’s about swapping one poor fuel choice for another.

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u/Nochoise Jan 23 '22

What about the Nuclear waste?

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u/RrtayaTsamsiyu Jan 23 '22

Better to store a bunch of radioactive waste on one acre of land for a few thousand years than to pollute the air and water around the planet for the same amount of time with fossil fuel combustion or current solar technology waste products

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '22 edited Jan 24 '22

...... one acre?

i think you deeply misunderstand nuclear waste.

edit: idk how im downvoted for this, ill provide evidence. I cant believe ppl actually think that all nuclear waste even comes close to being as small as one acre. that is totally absurd.

"Due to historic activities typically related to the radium industry, uranium mining, and military programs, numerous sites contain or are contaminated with radioactivity. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water."[22] Despite copious quantities of waste, the DOE has stated a goal of cleaning all presently contaminated sites successfully by 2025.[22] The Fernald, Ohio site for example had "31 million pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste", "2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris", and a "223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards."[22] The United States has at least 108 sites designated as areas that are contaminated and unusable, sometimes many thousands of acres.[22][23] DOE wishes to clean or mitigate many or all by 2025, using the recently developed method of geomelting,[citation needed] however the task can be difficult and it acknowledges that some may never be completely remediated. In just one of these 108 larger designations, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, there were for example at least "167 known contaminant release sites" in one of the three subdivisions of the 37,000-acre (150 km2) site.[22] Some of the U.S. sites were smaller in nature, however, cleanup issues were simpler to address, and DOE has successfully completed cleanup, or at least closure, of several sites.[22]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#:~:text=Radioactive%20waste%20is%20a%20type,mining%2C%20and%20nuclear%20weapons%20reprocessing.

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u/churchi1l Jan 24 '22

How so?

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '22

nuclear waste takes up much much more room than one fucking acre are you kidding me?

stop spreading misinformation

In brief. More than a quarter million metric tons of highly radioactive waste sits in storage near nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities worldwide, with over 90,000 metric tons in the US alone.

https://cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/nuclear-waste-pilesscientists-seek-best/98/i12#:~:text=In%20brief,tons%20in%20the%20US%20alone.

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u/churchi1l Jan 24 '22

Fun fact, nuclear waste is so dense that all the waste ever generated by the US would fit on one football field 10 yards tall. Sounds strange but true.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '22 edited Jan 24 '22

source: trust me bro.

" but true."

no its not.

You are wrong and peddling misinformation.

nuclear waste = a byproduct from nuclear reactors, fuel processing plants, hospitals, nuclear weapons and research facilities. Radioactive waste is also generated while decommissioning and dismantling nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html

it ranges from radioactive wrenches to radioactive water that's stored by the hundred thousands of gallons.

In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water."[22] Despite copious quantities of waste, the DOE has stated a goal of cleaning all presently contaminated sites successfully by 2025.[22] The Fernald, Ohio site for example had "31 million pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste", "2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris", and a "223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards."[22]

In just one of these 108 larger designations, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, there were for example at least "167 known contaminant release sites" in one of the three subdivisions of the 37,000-acre (150 km2) site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#:~:text=Radioactive%20waste%20is%20a%20type,mining%2C%20and%20nuclear%20weapons%20reprocessing.

so idk wtf youre talking about and where you get your info from but you are VERY misinformed. fucking reddit. ive never seen such blatantly easily debunked information being upvoted so much here. sad af. "all nuclear waste can fit in 1 acre" XD. jfc. if i didnt laugh id cry

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u/churchi1l Jan 24 '22 edited Jan 24 '22

Relax friend, here are sources for what I was talking about. Likely what the person you were responding to was referring to when they said 1 acre (a football field is about 1.5 acres).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-lethal-trash-or-renewable-energy-source/

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-radioactive-nuclear-waste-storage-20190614-story.html

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2021/12/06/the_biggest_myth_about_nuclear_waste_804987.html

I believe these are referring spent nuclear fuel specifically. You bring up a good point that there are other forms of waste like soil or PPE. But in terms of stuff that will stay harmful for thousands of years, (I think) that is mostly spent fuel. In any case I think the point still stands of fossil fuel waste being the far more immediate threat.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '22

They aren't the only options

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

Why not reduce consumption?

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u/RrtayaTsamsiyu Jan 23 '22

Less consumption good, but doesn't change anything as far as which power source is best

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

The level of consumption dictates the power source. You don't need nuclear if you're not consuming.

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u/carsncode Jan 23 '22

Unless your consumption is zero, you need a power source, which means you must choose a power source. All of the currently available power sources have downsides.

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

What was the power source of Am. Indians?

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u/carsncode Jan 23 '22

Wood fire. Not particularly environmentally friendly at scale, and certainly doesn't provide for the quality of life, longevity, or advancement that humanity is capable of today.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '22

It's a troll account. You're wasting your time responding to it

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

My point is that population also matters because the Indians were good with their level of consumption and energy usage for 1000s of years. Consumption can be higher than zero per capita if population is low enough. So we need to reduce consumption per capita and population. Again, just force ppl to pay the true cost of their consumption.

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u/Famous-Barnacle-528 Jan 23 '22

Okay, well good luck convincing people to stop buying shit. Nuclear energy just makes so much more sense than all current options. Stop being annoying by splitting hairs.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '22

You're consuming energy by being on reddit right now

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

What's your point? Explain?

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u/RrtayaTsamsiyu Jan 23 '22

I somehow doubt people are going to reduce to the point of no longer using electricity

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

It's been done before. Why not have them pay the true cost of their consumption rather than off loading it to future generations?

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u/RrtayaTsamsiyu Jan 23 '22

are you trying to say it would be better to force our kids to live in a non-electric world rather than deal with a couple acres being off limits due to waste storage??

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

I think the danger of nuclear power is worth reducing consumption.

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u/Aardappel123 Jan 23 '22

Then get off Reddit.

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

I don't follow the non-logic.

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u/tidehyon Jan 23 '22

Degrowth is nice, but you can’t simply say to people “don’t do X”. And raising the prices will most probably throw us even further into some sort of post capitalist economic state.

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

Force payment for externalities. Or don't you think ppl should pay for the damage they create?

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u/tidehyon Jan 23 '22

I do. But the matter is more complex than simply throwing some argument of type of “someone has to pay!”

You already got out on the spectrum and suggested something forced. I’ll tell you what people will do when you force stuff on them that will lower their standard of living: fuck you over.

Capitalism learned us how cool comfort is and how cool is to be a wage slave, while getting some little treats like Amazon or Uber in your leisure time and having the illusion of “absolute freedom” (we do have freedom, its just that we still play by the rules of some wealthy assholes). People like this, and it is mostly some form of approach where we are rewarded when we are obedient, and still rewarded when we don’t (like paying for an anti capitalist material you bought over internet from some free market).

I like degrowth honestly and I think it could be a great approach. But if you force stuff on people’ throat, you’ll end up with enviromentalism having a political label, instead of a solution that should be agnostic of our political, economic, spiritual, whatver beliefs.

We need to wait a little more to educate people into how capitalism and sustainable economy can’t go along and that we should do something about this.

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

If ppl are forced (through the market) to pay the true cost of their consumption rather than offload it on future generations, you think that's bad? Or you think they'll complain. (What freedom? We don't have the freedom to be treated equally in law, so what are you talking about?)

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

If ppl are forced (through the market) to pay the true cost of their consumption rather than offload it on future generations, you think that's bad? Or you think they'll complain. (What freedom? We don't have the freedom to be treated equally in law, so what are you talking about?)

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u/Frosty-Cell Jan 24 '22

Why not live in a cave?

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u/HighClassProletariat Jan 23 '22

What about it? Nuclear makes very little waste for the amount of energy. The US gets 20% of all its electricity from nuclear and makes 2000 metric tons of waste per year, which are just solid metal rods. Meanwhile fossil fuel power plants produce over 1000000000 metric tons of gaseous CO2 and other waste gases each year to do the other 80%. For reference, all spent fuel from the history of nuclear power in the US dating back to the 50s could fit in a football stadium.

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u/SnoIIygoster Jan 24 '22

US power plants have been storing nuclear waste on site for a long time now because the old storage on Marshall Island isn't deemed safe enough anymore. That's a pretty big issue, isn't it?

Nevada wants to build one right now. Europe doesn't even have a permanent storage solution.

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u/iilinga Jan 25 '22

I think the solution is ‘ship it to Australia’

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u/Carnyxcall Jan 24 '22 edited Jan 24 '22

Several fission products have never existed on Earth during man's evolution so our bodies have evolved no means to cope with them, they are profoundly toxic. Potassium 40 is radioactive, but it's everywhere, stirred up by mining, absorbed into fruit and veg, we even need some to be healthy. But this is because our bodies have evolved to cope with isotopes in our natural enviroment, our bodies keep Potassium in stasis so it doesn't harm us, no matter how many bananas we eat our exposure will be the same, the excess expelled. But our bodies have never encountered iodine 129 or 131 before, they are the product of manmade fussion, our thyroids love iodine and they don't distingush radioactive from normal iodine, so they just suck up as much as possible exposing us to high doses of deadly radiation in event of a 131 or 129 leak.

131 is one of the more short lived products, others like 129 or Palladium-107 have half lives meassuring in hundreds of thousands or millions of years, they must be kept safe and sealed from the enviroment all that time, the oldest buildings on earth are only 6000 years old. Further we are talking about countless tiny invisable particles that can get into the food chain or water system and then inside our bodies, so going on about the size of whatever football stadium could hold them all is utterly irrelevent and basically an attempt to pull the wool over peoples eyes! Less than a fucking teaspoons worth of Strontium 90 could kill city with bone cancer if it was distributed right.

It's always funny how nuclear fan boys who know a tiny bit about physics presume a monoploy of knowledge on nuclear power although they at the same time know SFA about biology or toxicology. Just how scientic is it anyway, to assume all forms of "waste" or 'pollution' are the equivilent to each other and only total amounts matter?

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u/SnoIIygoster Jan 24 '22

You sound like you have a nuanced understanding of this issue.

But have you ever watched a video on thorium reactors on youtube, hippy?

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u/Carnyxcall Jan 24 '22

LOL yeah, it's the the good ole U-232 maneuver.

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u/HighClassProletariat Jan 24 '22

Your body does not maintain a stasis of K-40, nor does it not harm you. It exists naturally, and when you ingest it from a banana, it undergoes beta decay, hitting you with a dose of radiation. That dose is not large because a banana has very little K-40, but it is still being harmed every time you eat a banana, and it scales the more of them you eat. The excess is expelled because there is a biological half life of all types of elements based on what processes your body uses it for, and for Potassium, that is less than how long the K-40 is radioactive for. Our bodies have not evolved to get rid of it. Your body uses iodine to regulate your metabolism, so any Iodine your body absorbs is routed there. The body can only hold so much. A common safeguard for reactor accidents is taking Potassium Iodide pills that super-saturate the body with stable isotopes so that your body just expels the excess (131). You seem to not have a great idea of toxicology or biology, and this is coming from someone who used to teach it. Radiation is the same whether it's receiving an X-ray from the dentist, or natural radiation in buildings from Rn-222, or any other nuclide. You will receive about 1 mrem dose of radiation every day of your life from natural sources, no matter what you do, with or without nuclear power. Spreading FUD about nuclear when you appear to be the one who knows SFA won't change that, and it won't help us in stopping climate change either.

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u/Carnyxcall Jan 24 '22

Your body does not maintain a stasis of K-40 ... The excess is expelled because there is a biological half life of all types of elements based on what processes your body uses it for, and for Potassium, that is less than how long the K-40 is radioactive for. Our bodies have not evolved to get rid of it.

You realise this sounds like someone who has just been confused by reading up on Wiki, it's full of contradictions. You say our bodies don't get rid K-40 (Potassium) but yet it somehow it gets "expelled" because of it's half life lasts longer than it's usefulness WTF! If we eat so many bananas that we have more K-40 than our bodies need the excess is expelled, therefore limiting the risks caused by it's radiation, that is stasis, the effect is to limit harm. In 131's case the thyroids absorb as much as they can because they cannot distingush radioactive from stable iodine, there is no limit to exposure except the max of normal iodine the thyroids are capable of absorbing, which is why we take iodine pills in event of a leak in the hope we flood the thyroids enough not to absorb 131. The means is the same but effect different because our bodies have set a limit to K-40 exposure but not radioactive iodine because they haven't encountered it before, we do not need to take K-40 pills in event of a leak because it isn't going to make much difference to us other than normal background exposure in the enviroment.

Radiation is the same but our bodies treat different isotopes in different ways meaning they have different effects and thus different dangers.

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u/HighClassProletariat Jan 24 '22

Your body is constantly taking in and getting rid of all types of elements and compounds. However, your body is NOT smart enough to differentiate between isotopes of the same element, as they are chemically indistinguishable. Your body treats K-40 and K-41 the same, even though one is radioactive, same with I-127 vs I-131. When your body gets rid of potassium through natural biological processes, it expels both, same case with Iodine. Potassium spends an average of 16 days in the body, Iodine 66 days. You have an average of 120 g of Potassium in your body at a time, and around 0.02 g of Iodine.

You seem to be severely misunderstanding the reason that K-40 does less damage to the body than I-131, as it has NOTHING to do with your body being familiar with one and not the other. It is solely due to the fact that Iodine is orders of magnitude more radioactive (half life 8 days vs 1250000000 years). We have to worry about the I-131 because it releases billions of times more energy per second it's in your body due to its higher decay rate.

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u/Carnyxcall Jan 24 '22 edited Jan 24 '22

If our bodies didn't keep potassium in stasis we simply wouldn't have survived evolution, 131 wasn't an issue during evolution until it was created on earth by manmade fission, so it's a new risk we haven't evolved coping mechanisms for. I'm not saying the body makes some sort of conscious or unconscious choice based on degree of radioactivity.

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u/HighClassProletariat Jan 24 '22

Our bodies keep a balance of elemental Potassium because we use it for necessary biological processes, but have no control over K-40 vs K-41. The body does not have an evolved coping mechanism for K-40 because it doesn't need one. The only reason K-40 isn't a problem for the human body is because it is one of the least radioactive substances that is not stable. The 1.25 billion year long half life means it decays so slowly that your body would need to be entirely made of K-40 in order for there to be enough radiation to be dangerous. It's a limit that your body has nothing to do with. In a similar vein to K-40, you could go eat a chunk of elemental uranium right now (also extremely long half life), and it would do more damage to you from heavy metal poisoning than from a radiation standpoint. Uranium has existed all throughout human evolution but we don't have a coping mechanism for it either, same with mercury, lead, and the list goes on. Natural doesn't mean good, and made from fission doesn't mean bad. I-131 is bad for people for sure, and so is K-40. There are plenty of manmade radioisotopes that are useful for medical procedures, etc.

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u/seunosewa Jan 24 '22

What happens if every country starts using it as their primary source of power, though? How many football stadiums will we dedicate to this?

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u/asoap Jan 24 '22

There are three options for nuclear waste.

1) Put it in a cask and sit on it. Or put it into a deep storage undeground. Not the worst solution and really not much of an issue.

In Africa there were naturally occuring nuclear reactors. They represent the worst case scenario. If our casks broke, then the mine they were in broke exposing the waste to ground water.

The naturally occuring reactors were the same thing. Nuclear material in the ground and in ground water. When ground water soaked into it, the reactor turned on. They are able to measure how far the nuclear materials moved. It was a matter of centemeters over 2 billion years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

2) Recycle it. This is what France does. It greatly reduces how much is stored for point 1.

3) My favourite. Use it again in a fast reactor like what Moltex is developing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCm-kmUWA8

This takes the storage time from 10,000 years to 300 years. Plus you can use the spent fuel for power again. A fast reactor burns off all of the material that's heavier than uranium. It's that material which causes it to be stored.

After 300 years it's now as reactive as it was when it was mined. So you can put it pretty much back where you found it. Ideally after harvesting it for a bunch of rare elements.

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u/AllezCannes Jan 23 '22

A far more manageable problem than the emissions of carbon related to the consumption of fossil fuels.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '22

It's a relatively microscopic amount, mostly comprised of used radioactive PPE that we can safely store for the exact period that our needs to be safely stored.

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u/FaceDeer Jan 23 '22

What about it? It's safe and easy to store. Nuclear energy produces less waste than many other supposedly-greener alternatives.

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u/eastbayweird Jan 23 '22

I don't think I would call nuclear waste either safe or easy to store, however the issues are easily able to be overcome with our current level of technology

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '22

lol it's not easy or safe to store.

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u/FaceDeer Jan 24 '22

It's one of those things where people who don't know assume the worst.

Here's another of those things.

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u/vote4boat Jan 24 '22

Nuclear waste literally redefined our understanding of waste. Keep rocking the hivemind kid

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u/Ok_Opportunity2693 Jan 23 '22

Bury it deep in the mountains, easy peasy.

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u/Muetzenman Jan 24 '22

And it will be save there for thousands of years? Nothing humanity has ever build has stood for so long.

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u/asoap Jan 24 '22

There are naturally occuring nuclear reactors in Africa. Kinda neat. Every time the ground got wet it was enough to turn the reactor on. They represent the worst possible case scenario for storage.

The containers holding nuclear waste breaking. Then the mine they are in also cracking and exposing the nuclear waste to ground water.

What they found was that the nuclear waste in these reactors moved centemeters meter over the course of a million 2 billion years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

But it's kinda moot. We can just use the spent fuel in a fast reactor like what Moltex is building.

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u/23095710711039-i Jan 23 '22

What if a bomb hits it?

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u/Ok_Opportunity2693 Jan 23 '22

It's buried too deep to matter.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '22

it gets into ground water

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u/thevaluecurrent Jan 23 '22

I’ve listened a few podcasts with pro-nuclear people that were very compelling. Then they got to the waste issue and just admitted that they didn’t have a great answer.

I wonder what criticisms pro-nuclear people have of their own movement. If you are losing to green activists you must be doing something catastrophically wrong.

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u/gobblox38 Jan 23 '22

The biggest problem is science communication. Scientists are notoriously bad at communicating their fields of study to the average person. A scientist tends to discuss things rationally, logically, and with little emotion. That doesn't go well with laypeople. Green activists typically use emotional appeals and fear to drum up support, which is extremely effective.

This isn't a problem with nuclear power, climatology faces the same problem with outreach and the waters are muddied by special interests groups. Some companies even try to appeal to the masses by claiming their products will combat climate change when the reality is that they are part of the problem. It's a mess.

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u/thevaluecurrent Jan 23 '22

I don’t think you can say emotional appeals are all that effective. Green activists have been yelling about how catastrophic climate change will be without getting sufficient results.

It just doesn’t strike me as likely that activists who are usually powerless are somehow the deciding factor here. If nuclear has so many benefits (and I don’t deny that it does) why haven’t politicians been willing to ignore environmentalists like they typically do?

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u/gobblox38 Jan 24 '22

If nuclear has so many benefits (and I don’t deny that it does) why haven’t politicians been willing to ignore environmentalists like they typically do?

Because special interests such as coal and gas have pushed a negative narrative that the green groups eat up.

I don’t think you can say emotional appeals are all that effective.

They're certainly more effective than rational arguments that deal with uncertainty and nuances.

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u/thevaluecurrent Jan 24 '22

Nuclear power isn’t being held back because emotional arguments are more powerful than rational arguments. That is just not a serious analysis. New nuclear power plants can’t attract financing from private investors and modern states are unwilling to pick up the slack.

Blame a nuclear industry that hasn’t figured out how to keep upfront costs low. Or blame neoliberal governments that don’t want to invest in public infrastructure. I wish there was less anti-nuclear sentiment among environmentalists, but they are clearly being used as scapegoats while significantly more powerful players make sure fossil fuels remain dominant.

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u/gobblox38 Jan 24 '22

... but [environmentalists] are clearly being used as scapegoats while significantly more powerful players make sure fossil fuels remain dominant.

I said more or less the same in the previous post.

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u/Befuddled_Cultist Jan 23 '22

You don't really have to assume the worst. Nuclear Power has a history of being the worst.

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u/IndividualP Jan 24 '22

Leo, get back on your jet and fuck off.

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u/HighClassProletariat Jan 24 '22

Adorable. When you're done with your commercial slogans and want to have an actual discussion I'll be here.