74 points

Fossil fuels produce terrible waste we store in the air that we breathe.

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24 points
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Terrible waste that we store in our lungs

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-3 points

Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.

We can’t run a regular coal or natural gas power plant here without fucking it up and getting people killed. Despite the safety of modern plant designs, I do NOT trust the people in charge here with fissile material.

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13 points

Go lookup CANDU reactors, we have designs already that can’t steam explode themselves and instead will fail safe. Also just to be clear nuclear reactors don’t perform a nuclear explosion if they fail, the Chernobyl explosion was a steam explosion that threw nuclear material into the air.

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5 points

The level of incompetence I’ve grown to expect of my state government would suggest that they’d have fissile material delivered and stored in a leaky shed, where it will create runoff which contaminates the local reservoir, before a crackhead steals it, takes it to the scrapyard, and it is never seen again.

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2 points

Or we could just use solar with none of those risks but still using the largest nuclear reaction around.

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-1 points

…and rendered an area the size of a county unsuitable for humans for hundreds of generations.

You’re going to have to show me a government that isn’t half-full of people who hate education, who hate science, and most of all who hate accountability before I vote for more nuclear power.

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6 points

You know, the beautiful thing about being a society is we can all just agree to regulate them. I think that’s called a government.

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2 points

Like I said, we can’t/won’t effectively regulate the power plants we have now.

Our government is only good for generating moral panics and building roads. I hope that changes one day, but it has been getting worse for a long time, so I won’t hold my breath for it to all be fixed tomorrow.

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4 points
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Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.

Not so: https://daily.jstor.org/the-tragedy-at-buffalo-creek/

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4 points

That’s why people prefer driving over flying, right? If something goes wrong, the boom is small and contained.

Never mind that planes are much safer and efficient at travelling long distance.

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2 points
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When things go wrong? When things go right for coal and gas plants, the “boom” is a humanity-threatening event that already in its extremely early stages has been named the Holocene Extinction.

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45 points

I don’t think even one of those fast fission reactors is still in operation. Wonder why that is.

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35 points

Because, it does not destroy all waste, despite a cartoon claiming as such and gullible people falling for it? Even “short-term” waste needs to be stored somewhere for about 500 years. Sure, it ain’t like the others in terms of length of time but anyone who thinks that is a cheap fact or trivial is an idealogue. Since they can exist at both extremes.

So the issue of the water table or general environmental contamination is not addressed the way OP claims. There are also higher costs and higher grade fuel is required. Not to say that there are not some advantages but the cartoon is just plain incorrect and taking a toodler’s view on some serious concerns. The Wikipedia article has a list of disavantages for anyone to look into.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor

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34 points

They’re politically unpopular, more expensive than fossil fuels, and most of them are prototypes.

India and China each have one. Russia has 3.

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27 points

I blame Nixon for why nuclear power in the US sucks. He axed research on any reactor types that didn’t produce plutonium for weapons, including thorium reactors. Hope he’s rotting in hell.

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12 points

According to the future-documentary Futurama, his head is in a jar somewhere, waiting to assume the presidency once again with the headless body of Spiro Agnew.

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4 points

Nah, they also depict Henry Kissinger that way, but we all know he’s dragging what’s left of his body across a minefield in hell.

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9 points

According to Wikipedia there are a few, with more planned. But not nearly enough. IMO, we should switch over to Fast Reactors as standard.

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8 points

Canada has CANDU breeder reactors, still in use. They also produce the majority of medical isotopes.

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3 points

CANDU reactors are pressurized heavy-water reactors not Fast-neutron reactors.

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1 point

Yeah, I thought about it after and realized it was probably a different tech, but the point is reliable breeder reactors are possible, and certain medical tech is reliant on their existence.

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4 points
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Since there are economic, ecological, conceptual and engineering problems, only five Fast-neutron reactors are operational at the moment. Three in Russia, one in India and one in China. Not surprisingly these are countries that also have an interest in producing weapons grade Plutonium, which FNRs are capable of.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-breeder-reactor
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs15glaser.pdf
https://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/report/

And while nuclear energy production peaked 1996 at 17% and was nowhere near overtaking fossil energy production in it’s 70(!) year long existence, Renewables will overtake fossil fuel power production in 2025, with only minute risks for the biosphere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/
https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_NuclearReport_201902_EN.pdf

So why cling to an outdated technology when there are viable solutions at hand, which are nowhere as complicated and dangerous as nuclear fission? It’s the monetary interest of a dying nuclear industry and its lobbyists.

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3 points

It’s not really needed. Waste is a boogeyman, but not really a problem. It takes an incredibly small volume to store the waste, and it can be reduced with reprocessing to run in the exact same reactors.

At some point in the future when there actually is a huge amount of waste causing issues, then it might make sense to build a reactor to use it.

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2 points

when there actually is a huge amount of waste

Over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia), most of which in France (Table 1). Within the EU, France accounts for 25 percent of the current spent nuclear fuel, followed by Germany (15 percent) and the United Kingdom (14 percent). Spent nuclear fuel is considered high-level waste. Though present in comparably small volumes, it makes up the vast bulk of radioactivity.

~ 2019 https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/

Last “brilliant” plan I heard was dumping it in a hole deep enough we’d never need, nor be able to recover it.

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4 points

A quick question . Other than a suprisingly lot of complexity involved in diggin the hole of sufficient size and depth why wouldnt it work ( or is that the reason )?

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-1 points

Weight is a way to make the problem sound worse than it is, because nuclear waste is so incredibly dense. It’s not enough to be a big deal yet. Dumping it deep into the ocean is an option, but it’s only going to happen to waste that doesn’t have potential uses first.

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2 points

Have a look at the size of the Finnish waste repository.

“They’ll hold a total of 5,500 tonnes of waste,” says Joutsen. “So Onkalo will take all the high-level nuclear waste produced by Finland’s five nuclear power plants in their entire life cycles.”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finland-found-the-answer-to-spent-nuclear-fuel-waste-by-burying-it

The Finnish repository is designed with a life of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens (i.e us) have existed for about 300,000 years.

Article about the problems warnings that will comprehensible in 10,000 years https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time

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28 points

So nuclear plants of the future won’t be run by companies who cut important corners on safety to maximize shareholder profits while offloading the consequences to the government and public?

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12 points

I hear the argument being made that companies shouldn’t be allowed to run a nuclear power plant, or any infrastructure for that matter.

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5 points

I mean that’s how things work in China with state owned companies. I don’t see why everybody shouldn’t be doing that.

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6 points

Good news: America already does it too!

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-7 points

No they’ll be run by companies that own everything around them as well, and are naturally incentivized to avoid failures.

Government subsidizing this crap is why it’s built so cheap.

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The problem with Nuclear Power is that people with strong opinions about it either way are some of the most annoying you’ll ever see.

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2 points

The trick is to force them really close to one another.

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19 points

Or just bury it miles underground in the desert, but for some fucking reason a state is as likely to store it upstream in a concrete shack as they are to ship it to the mojave where the pit is literally already dug out and designated.

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1 point

Legal says don’t touch the nuclear waste

You don’t want to be the guy who fucks that up

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2 points
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The fact that any nuclear power plant has ever ran anyways is because unspent nuclear materials were transported to the facility. We as a society should have the means to transport these things safely in large sealed containers. The only feasible downside to this idea is that the containers will eventually heat up, so chop fucking chop mates. Get it there.

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