Comment on We can do all three things at once
uzay@infosec.pub 6 months agoThe number of people who still think nuclear power is a manageable risk in any capacity is really depressing. We still have no idea what to do with all the nuclear waste we’re creating even now. And that’s not even considering the impact of having a nuclear plant when you’re in a war.
The entire French nation begs to differ. Look at that map! Power generation alllll over the country, not tucked in an unpopulated area or clustered in one spot ‘just in case’.
Then look across the border at Germany. The CND and Greens did a number on then generations ago, and Russia has kept up the fear over nuclear so they were able to keep Germany dependent on Gazprom. Until Ukraine.
The article says nothing about waste.
Russia is the biggest exporter of Uranium.
I have no idea what the CND in Germany is supposed to be and neither has Google.
France had to repeatedly power down nuclear plants and buy electricity from neighbours because they couldn’t cool their plants. Because there was so much drought in Europe there wasn’t enough water. A phenomenon that will surely never happen again in Western Europe in the next couple of decades.
This is the other issue about thermal plants including coal, natural gas, concentrated solar power (CSP), and nuclear: water cooling.
All of these plants boil water to pass over a turbine and crank a generator, but that steam needs to be cooled so it condenses and makes a closed loop. You need cooling water to do this, and a lot of it.
If water is becoming scarce, and we have other needs for it like residential or agricultural uses, then that can greatly impact thermal generators, leading to outages like you say if cooling can’t be done.
Chris Nelder with the Rocky Mountain Institute has a good podcast episode on this on his The Energy Transition Show podcast. Check it out!
France has not been at war since they started building nuclear plants and has no solid plan for dealing with nuclear waste either from what I can tell.
France comes begging across the border for coal and gas electricity in hot summers when their reactors have to lower output because river water for cooling is too hot. Then they pat themselves on the back because the CO2 is not generated within their borders.
The vast majority of “nuclear waste” is just common items that have come into contact with radiation. The really radioactive portions can be, and are safely stored within the facilities themselves.
Sure, the barely radioactive waste components do need to be buried (or it seems like that’s the current trend), but they pose no risk to anyone as long as they’re not digging them up.
And for how long to they have to be “safely stored”? For how long do they have to be buried without anyone digging them up? And where are we burying anyway where there is no risk of anyone digging them up intentionally or accidentally, no risk of natural phenomena interfering, no risk of the barrels breaking and nuclear waste seeping into our water? There is a reason why countries have been struggling to find these safe storage spaces for decades. I’d argue that is because there aren’t any.
Just because you are not smart enough to figure out a solution does not mean its impossible.
Reaching for an unproven concept of “drilling really deep holes” that’s barely a few years old to convince people there is no problem with long-term storage of dangerous waste we’ve been accumulating for decades, but sure, I’m just a NIMBY.
The architecture of the housing facilities is quite an interesting thing to look into. They’re pretty safe, other than like catastrophic tectonic activity as far as I know.
I think the more interesting part is the labelling of those sites. Well, the potential ideas to mark these areas as dangerous to dig/disturb. What I’ve seen is that it’s trying to mark them for the far future so that even if you don’t know the language, it’s (hopefully) obvious.
Why aren’t Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Chernobyl nuclear wastelands?
Forester@yiffit.net 6 months ago
Ukraine seems to be fine, beyond Russians digging up their own fuck up dirt from the past to dig trenches
uzay@infosec.pub 6 months ago
“Ukraine seems to be fine” is an odd thing to say considering what is going on there in general, but to your point, we can be glad that the fighting around Chernobyl did not do more damage. There’s also a difference in strategy when a country attacks their neighbour to annex their land. If they instead want to mess with a country further away, they can just drop some bombs on their nuclear plants and see what happens.