Climate Change

[Skrilla Gorilla]

That said, THERE'S NO ACTIVE PERMANAMNENT NCLEAR WASTE DEPOSITRY, at the time, fact

Got a handle on the facts, eh?

Then why does 42 U.S. Code § 10172 say what it says?

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[k2skier112]

I'm for building out nuclear, fission and fusion when it works, both create radioactive waste that needs to be put somewhere. Still, nuclear has a track record of being quite safe with only a few accidents in its history. Yes nuclear radiation is bad but yes so is pollution from your car, your power plant, your big truck that you think you need to have to haul around a bike and some skis on roads that are fine for a 2wd sedan 99.9% of the time.

I think I'd prefer to take the gamble on building out more nuclear plants with modernized, safer designs than not. Solar & wind are great but too intermittent and the batteries aren't there yet.

The exhaust from your truck want give you terminal cancer or kill you if your near it for a few hours, spent nuclear fuel rods will.
I agree with most of what you said. But we need an open and active nuclear waste site first

[k2skier112]

Got a handle on the facts, eh?

Then why does 42 U.S. Code § 10172 say what it says?

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IT'S NOT OPEN! 34 fucking years, and it's still not open

(a)In general
(1)The Secretary shall provide for an orderly phase-out of site specific activities at all candidate sites other than the Yucca Mountain site.
(2)The Secretary shall terminate all site specific activities (other than reclamation activities) at all candidate sites, other than the Yucca Mountain site, within 90 days after December 22, 1987.
(b)Eligibility to enter into benefits agreement
Effective on December 22, 1987, the State of Nevada shall be eligible to enter into a benefits agreement with the Secretary under section 10173 of this title.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/10172



https://www.nei.org/advocacy/make-re...d-nuclear-fuel

[raisingarizona13]

This is it. Homosapien 2.0 pollutes a planet PRIOR to colonization.


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Well it's totally safe so Elon should be ok with that.

[k2skier112]

NASA Satellites See Upper Atmosphere Cooling and Contracting Due to Climate Change

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard...climate-change

[nickwm21]

On a somewhat serious note regarding sending nuclear waste to space…

I’m not smart enough to know if it’s safer to bury nuclear waste in the desert or strap it to a rocket….

I’m not smart enough to know if it’s better for the environment to bury it in the desert or to burn the methane to send it to space…

However - If we are serious about space travel, using government funding to study and pilot programs for sending nuclear waste into space doesn’t seem like the worst idea. To me it lands somewhere below improving our healthcare, education, and infrastructure… but above the needless wars abroad.


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[raisingarizona13]

IT'S NOT OPEN! 34 fucking years, and it's still not open

(a)In general
(1)The Secretary shall provide for an orderly phase-out of site specific activities at all candidate sites other than the Yucca Mountain site.
(2)The Secretary shall terminate all site specific activities (other than reclamation activities) at all candidate sites, other than the Yucca Mountain site, within 90 days after December 22, 1987.
(b)Eligibility to enter into benefits agreement
Effective on December 22, 1987, the State of Nevada shall be eligible to enter into a benefits agreement with the Secretary under section 10173 of this title.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/10172



https://www.nei.org/advocacy/make-re...d-nuclear-fuel

Again, saying "lets dump our waste in Nevada so we can keep living as we have and not have to really deal with our own shit" is some serious BS. Nevada may seem like a desolate wasteland to the unfamiliar but there's plenty of people living out there that feel different or poor enough to be taken advantage of for some money.

Don't shit on Nevada.

California is fucked already. Keep it there.

[SumJongGuy]

Again, saying "lets dump our waste in Nevada so we can keep living as we have and not have to really deal with our own shit" is some serious BS. Nevada may seem like a desolate wasteland to the unfamiliar but there's plenty of people living out there that feel different or poor enough to be taken advantage of for some money.

Don't shit on Nevada.

California is fucked already. Keep it there.

Good luck with stopping eminent domain from taking more land from Native Americans for such worthy purposes. I'd bet today's Supreme Court would roll back to the Oklahoma cases as prescient to uphold more land grabs with Israel cheering us on from the sidelines.

[kamtron]

Some issues are technological problem: making fusion work. Others are political problems: putting spent fission fuel into the safest place we know of.

[neufox47]

Again, saying "lets dump our waste in Nevada so we can keep living as we have and not have to really deal with our own shit" is some serious BS. Nevada may seem like a desolate wasteland to the unfamiliar but there's plenty of people living out there that feel different or poor enough to be taken advantage of for some money.

Don't shit on Nevada.

California is fucked already. Keep it there.

We are talking about something so benign a passerby wouldn’t even know they were near it but for the signs. Truck the waste there in the super safe containers that are purpose built just for this and able to withstand a 80 mph crash. I’ll take the odd nuclear waste cleanup every 100 years over constant pollution from coal, natural gas, batteries etc.

[SumJongGuy]

We are talking about something so benign a passerby wouldn’t even know they were near it but for the signs. Truck the waste there in the super safe containers that are purpose built just for this and able to withstand a 80 mph crash. I’ll take the odd nuclear waste cleanup every 100 years over constant pollution from coal, natural gas, batteries etc.

cough cough Japan cough cough cough. It's only as safe as our ability to predict and prevent earthquakes..

[raisingarizona13]

We are talking about something so benign a passerby wouldn’t even know they were near it but for the signs. Truck the waste there in the super safe containers that are purpose built just for this and able to withstand a 80 mph crash. I’ll take the odd nuclear waste cleanup every 100 years over constant pollution from coal, natural gas, batteries etc.

So what are you? A nuclear waste management expert? I doubt it.

Why not store that shit in your home town? Nevada has all kinds of geo-thermal and earthquake activity.

Don't try to bullshit a bullshitter son. You don't know anything more than the rest of us on how safe nuclear really is or what possible catastrophic disaster may or may not occur going all in with nuclear.

My gut says fuck that. Humans screw things up regularly, it's part of being human. Nuclear fuck ups aren't easily fixable.

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

[k2skier112]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/f...unnel-n1277630

[PB]

That tunnel actually crosses the entire Pacific and pops up in Utah, refilling the GSL.

[d542east]

Fun fact, coal plants release at least 100 times more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants for the same amount of energy.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...nuclear-waste/

[SumJongGuy]

Fun fact, coal plants release at least 100 times more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants for the same amount of energy.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...nuclear-waste/

By design, absolutely... Ask Chernobyl and Fukushima about when it doesn't go as planned..

[MultiVerse]

It's strange that Fukushima still receives so much attention since not one death can be attributed to the nuclear accident.

Whereas the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed +20,000 people cost billions in damage and displaced more people than the radiation leakage. Yet, people still rebuild in tsunami zones, earthquake zones, and flood plains.

Of course the obvious problem with Fukushima is the same as the long term waste disposal problem. Let's not be dismissive of that. But let's also keep it in perspective. Research shows fossil fuel air pollution causes nearly 1-in-5 deaths worldwide each year. More than 8 million people worldwide die each year from breathing polluted air containing particulates from burning fossil fuels.

[SumJongGuy]

It's strange that Fukushima still receives so much attention since not one death can be attributed to the nuclear accident.

Whereas the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed +20,000 people cost billions in damage and displaced more people than the radiation leakage. Yet, people still rebuild in tsunami zones, earthquake zones, and flood plains.

Of course the obvious problem with Fukushima is the same as the long term waste disposal problem. Let's not be dismissive of that. But let's also keep it in perspective. Fossil fuel air pollution causes nearly 1 in 5 deaths worldwide each year, research shows. More than 8 million people worldwide die each year from breathing polluted air containing particles from fossil fuel emissions.

Short of worst case scenario nuclear is the cleanest of everything.. Problem is worst case disaster movie bad. I'm still down with having Musk and Bezos send the nuclear waste to Mars There's a nuclear plant about 30 miles from my house. I keep some potassium iodine pills tucked away in the prepper stuff but there have only been a few minor ALMOST incidents there. No actual issues ever..

[MultiVerse]

Problem is worst case disaster movie bad.

Is it that bad in reality? The media made Fukushima look bad and HBO put together an excellent miniseries on Chernobyl, both captured popular imagination. But how bad is nuclear power compared with the alternatives given otherwise safe nuclear power continually generates around 10% of the world's electricity?

It seems like anti-nuke sentiment is ideologically motivated, like most bad ideas in politics. I don't know, maybe you're right, maybe Hollywood scared the hell out of everyone because otherwise it doesn't make sense.

[SumJongGuy]

Is it that bad in reality? The media made Fukushima look bad and HBO put together an excellent miniseries on Chernobyl, both captured popular imagination. But how bad is nuclear power compared with the alternatives given otherwise safe nuclear power continually generates around 10% of the world's electricity?

It seems like anti-nuke sentiment is ideologically motivated, like most bad ideas in politics. I don't know, maybe you're right, maybe Hollywood scared the hell out of everyone because otherwise it doesn't make sense.

I could toss out the same argument for having a handgun in a household with toddlers. If it's properly managed and secured what's the problem??



You have way more faith and confidence in the Antivaxer and Q'Anon rich human race society can ensure this is done safely than I do..

[k2skier112]

If a forest fire hit the fallout zone in Chernobyl, the radiation release would be almost as bad as the original
https://www.mic.com/impact/a-forest-...there-22811922

[MultiVerse]

Who said anything about perfectly safe?

There is nothing where the risk is zero. Existence is inherently risky. The idea that something is only a good idea, or can only be done, if the risk is zero isn't an argument; it's an attempt to shut down the conversation by demanding an impossible standard.

In reality nuclear power, even when you consider the handful of disasters, is remarkably safe compared to other forms of electricity production.


Take for example k2skier112's article above: "Air pollution was already a growing issue in Kyiv long before the latest spate of fires started near Chernobyl. Last summer, the country's emergency service reported that air pollution had exceeded five times its normal levels — the result of burning fossil fuels, along with the city's hot weather and lack of wind. The situation got so bad last fall that smog caused extremely low visibility and forced flights to be delayed out of the city's Boryspil International Airport"

Now there's also potential increased risk from radionuclides but Kyiv, along with the rest of the world, is already suffering very hazardous levels of air pollution. So isn't the biggest health problem in Kyiv still air pollution in spite of the fact the city is downwind from a forest fire near Chernobyl?

[d542east]

Something getting lost in this discussion is that reactor design is several orders of magnitude safer now than it was when the vast majority of the currently operational plants were built.

They never even used concrete containment for the RBMK reactors like Chernobyl. Nuclear accidents look and sounds scary because it's alien to our understanding. Chernobyl was undeniably horrific, but is statistically impossible with current reactor design.

Category 6+ hurricanes and the other shit coming down the pipeline from climate change will cause mass death and suffering on a scale that should scare us far more than it does, but one radioactive frog is scarier than millions of slowly boiling ones.

Another thing getting lost in this discussion is that it will take too long to build nuclear plants to make the kind of difference we need right now.

Mass scale wind and solar can be done now. The factories aren't hard to build, the machines aren't hard to build and maintain, the workforce can be easily trained, we can build enough transmission lines to move all the power where it needs to go. We can implement demand based power pricing where it's cheaper to charge your Tesla when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. What's stopping us is that there needs to be a big tax put on fossil fuels phased in starting twenty years ago. The externalized cost of releasing CO2 needs to stop.

All of the things we like that use a lot of petroleum and coal to make are going to get more expensive, and that's unfortunate, but it's a lot less unfortunate than what's coming without a big change.

[k2skier112]

Who said anything about perfectly safe?

There is nothing where the risk is zero. Existence is inherently risky. The idea that something is only a good idea, or can only be done, if the risk is zero isn't an argument; it's an attempt to shut down the conversation by demanding an impossible standard.

In reality nuclear power, even when you consider the handful of disasters, is remarkably safe compared to other forms of electricity production.


Take for example k2skier112's article above: "Air pollution was already a growing issue in Kyiv long before the latest spate of fires started near Chernobyl. Last summer, the country's emergency service reported that air pollution had exceeded five times its normal levels — the result of burning fossil fuels, along with the city's hot weather and lack of wind. The situation got so bad last fall that smog caused extremely low visibility and forced flights to be delayed out of the city's Boryspil International Airport"

Now there's also potential increased risk from radionuclides but Kyiv, along with the rest of the world, is already suffering very hazardous levels of air pollution. So isn't the biggest health problem in Kyiv still air pollution in spite of the fact the city is downwind from a forest fire near Chernobyl?

My point of the article had NOTHING to do with pollution.
it was about the increase in radiation
How many have been killed by wind farms, hydro damns, solar collectors?
Until we have a usable permanent nuclear storage facility, nukes should be off the table, period!!!
PS-ask some folks in the Fukushima prefecture how harmless the meltdown was. Maybe no one was killed directly from the meltdown, but how about displacement, mental and physical issues

The Chernobyl nuclear accident happened 34 years ago this month, and now a new disaster could be bearing down on the region. A few weeks ago forest fires started burning inside the exclusion zone, and the flames are burning dangerously close to the abandoned nuclear plant. Radiation in the area has already skyrocketed due to the fires, prompting considerable concerns about what might happen if they continue to progress toward the most radioactive regions of the disaster site.

[k2skier112]

My point of the article had NOTHING to do with pollution.
it was about the increase in radiation
How many have been killed by wind farms, hydro damns, solar collectors?
Until we have a usable permanent nuclear storage facility, nukes should be off the table, period!!!
PS-ask some folks in the Fukushima prefecture how harmless the meltdown was. Maybe no one was killed directly from the meltdown, but how about displacement, mental and physical issues

The Chernobyl nuclear accident happened 34 years ago this month, and now a new disaster could be bearing down on the region. A few weeks ago forest fires started burning inside the exclusion zone, and the flames are burning dangerously close to the abandoned nuclear plant. Radiation in the area has already skyrocketed due to the fires, prompting considerable concerns about what might happen if they continue to progress toward the most radioactive regions of the disaster site.

PPS-the article is mainly about radiation releases. one paragraph mentions pollution
and that's your focus. too many other options out there to put all your energy eggs into 1 basket, especially one with catastrophic consequences if something goes wrong



According to a report from CNN, the fire first started near the village of Vladimirovka on April 4, believed to be lit by a single suspect who set grass on fire "for fun" but lost control of the flame. While fires in the region are relatively common, this one poses a unique threat as it burns closer to the radioactive areas near Chernobyl’s former plant and nuclear waste sites. The wildfire started to spread quickly, aided by winds that carried it into the exclusion zone. Nearly two weeks later and the flames have yet to be put out, despite messaging from the Ukrainian government suggesting the situation was under control.

Ukraine's emergency services claimed to have contained the main fire just one day after it began, but the flames have scorched more than 8,600 acres of land since then. Kateryna Pavlova, the head of an organization that oversees Chernobyl, told the New York Times over the weekend, “At the moment, we cannot say the fire is contained.” As the fire has burned, it has set off fear about increased radiation levels in the region. A video posted on social media by Yegor Firsov, the head of Ukraine’s state ecological inspection service, showed radiation at 16 times above normal levels near the fire.

The initially optimistic interpretation of how well the fire has been controlled has created a standoff between activists and concerned citizens who are watching the flames press dangerously closer to areas central to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which remains highly radioactive over three decades after the disaster occurred. Environmental watchdogs tracking the fire, including Greenpeace, warn that the flames are now just over one mile away from Pripyat, an abandoned town that once served the plant and stored dangerous waste, and is moving “rapidly,” according to experts in the region. A second fire that splintered from the original as winds carried the flames is also believed to be within about a half-mile of the defunct plant itself. According to a report from Reuters, others in the region — including a Chernobyl tour operator — have also described the situation as harrowing, claiming the fire is rapidly expanding and pushing closer to “the most highly active radiation waste" found in the exclusion zone.

As the fires continue to push toward the radioactive landmarks, the Ukrainian government has told its citizens not to worry. "There is no threat to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, waste fuel storage or other critical facilities," Volodymyr Demchuk, a senior official in Ukraine's emergency service, said in a video statement Monday. Despite these assurances from the government, experts are less convinced that the fires and potential radiation has fully been contained.


"I suspect the radiation levels may be raised mostly locally due to the responded residual radioactivity," Shih-Yew Chen, of the Master's Health Physics program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, tells Mic. He notes that it's unclear if radiation will spread over a "large area" far beyond the areas surrounding Chernobyl — though there are heavily populated cities that could potentially be at risk.

Tim Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, tells Mic that people living south of Chernobyl, including the nearly three million people living in Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv, could experience air pollution and potentially be exposed to radioactive contaminants. "Given prevailing winds ... Kyiv is suffering very hazardous levels of air pollution in addition to any risks associated with the radionuclides that are undoubtedly also being blown towards populated regions," he says.

Air pollution was already a growing issue in Kyiv long before the latest spate of fires started near Chernobyl. Last summer, the country's emergency service reported that air pollution had exceeded five times its normal levels — the result of burning fossil fuels, along with the city's hot weather and lack of wind. The situation got so bad last fall that smog caused extremely low visibility and forced flights to be delayed out of the city's Boryspil International Airport. Mousseau notes that because of the poor air conditions in the city, "N95 masks were rarely available even before the COVID-19 pandemic," so new concerns about air pollution resulting from the Chernobyl fires are likely to put people even more at risk. "Air quality in the city has become dangerous to anyone with any kind of lung issues and could be extremely hazardous for anyone infected with the SARS-Cov-2 virus," he says.

The ongoing attempts to deal with coronavirus may also hamper the ability to fully address the fires, according to Mousseau, who explains that the pandemic "has paralyzed much of the country's infrastructure." He says it's "unclear what impact ongoing self-quarantine and sheltering-in-place policies have had on the already short-staffed Chernobyl fire fighting infrastructure," though notes that firefighters are likely to experience more hazards than others, potentially "inhaling the radioactive contaminants" as they are tasked with fighting the flames.

Mousseau notes that the current fires pressing toward the abandoned Chernobyl power plant "pose an especially dangerous threat" because of events from previous years, including other fires, large fuel loads present in the region, and dry winters that have created conditions that make it easier for the fire to spread. Professor Chen warned that even if these fires are contained, they are unlikely to be the last. "In general, the unfinished cleanup areas from a nuclear disaster tend to be forgotten by the society until something stirs it up again to serve as an unpleasant reminder," he says. "These cases including the Chernobyl fire likely will recur repeatedly over time. Not sure what the authorities can or will do."