[HN Gopher] A tale of two particles: Not all radioactivity is ri...
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A tale of two particles: Not all radioactivity is risky or harmful
Author : jseliger
Score : 30 points
Date : 2022-12-05 21:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (worksinprogress.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worksinprogress.substack.com)
| [deleted]
| whycome wrote:
| the spent fuel still produces a lot of heat. have there been
| examples of somehow utilizing the waste while it degrades?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| That is called a "Radioisotope thermoelectric generator" but
| it's not the magic bullet that it appears to be. Depending on
| the isotope, you either get a very tiny amount of power (far
| less than you'd get from a solar array), or a very short half
| life.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
| paulkrush wrote:
| Two points really stand out here. 1.) Nuclear waste can be
| handled by hand after 600 years. 2.) Coal plant: 3-6 Million tons
| of toxic ash in its operating life, not to mention 110 million
| tons of CO vs 1000 tons of nuclear waste.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| Two things that are glossed over are "Others can be processed
| into excellent nuclear fuel, although currently this is not
| quite economic, in part because the fission product decay makes
| handling the used fuel so difficult." So we don't know how to
| do this yet, and processing spent fuel rods also produces a lot
| of toxic and radioactive byproducts that are also difficult to
| handle, take a look at this Superfund site:
|
| https://nmisite.org/site-history/
|
| The other thing the article does not even mention is meltdowns
| of operating plants and attacks on or natural disasters
| affecting dry cask storage and reprocessing plants. Sure, you
| have to eat or breath the material for it to be dangerous after
| 600 years, but if a plant melts down or an idiot blows up the
| spent fuel then it gets into water, food, soil and the air and
| everyone ingests it, for a very long time thereafter, BEFORE
| the 600 years is up. Also, keeping something safe for 600 years
| is something nobody has ever done. Most societies don't even
| last 600 years. Look at what a mess we made of it just 50 years
| ago:
|
| https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-07-01/us-says...
|
| And here is a list of how well we've handled nuclear materials
| so far:
|
| "11 Nuclear meltdowns and Disasters"
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2011/03/16/11-Nuclear-Meltdowns-and-Dis...
|
| The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine is currently being
| shelled. Again. So it seems world peace is a prerequisite, I'd
| like to see the plan for that. After we've achieved world peace
| then the 600 year containment experiments can start and we can
| figure out how to get our engineering to 99.99999% reliability.
| Smaller, less dangerous, and inherently safer reactor designs
| are being tried, maybe one of those will work well enough to be
| able to ramp up nuclear power, but the technology in current
| use is not good enough.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Aqueous reprocessing of nuclear fuel is a technology that's
| been mastered by many nations. Fabricating quality MOX that
| be fed back into reactors is something that France and Russia
| have succeeded at and the US and UK have failed at.
|
| That said, there might be some other way to make MOX, or some
| other fuel formulation based on molten salts, metal fuel,
| nitrides, carbides, etc.
|
| As for economics a big problem is that the LWR works at low
| temperatures and requires a huge steam turbine and huge heat
| exchangers. This is apart from the problem that large LWR
| construction projects frequently go over schedule and budget
| by a large margin. There is some hope that a smaller reactor
| like China's ACP-100 can find some simplification at small
| scale that makes up for the diseconomies of small scale and
| avoids the project management problems but it will take some
| kind of water-free reactor that operates at higher
| temperatures for nuclear to be competitive with natural gas.
| sneakerblack wrote:
| Something that the article didn't mention is that coal plants
| also produce radiation, and because of the lack of protection
| against it, the average dose of yearly radiation you get living
| near a coal plant is actually higher than living near a nuclear
| plant. That said, the repercussions of a major disaster are a
| lot lower with a coal plant than with a nuclear plant.
|
| And, as always, relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
| fsh wrote:
| This factoid about coal power plants is often repeated, but I
| have my doubts about the accuracy. It seems to be based on a
| 44 year old paper [1] which comes to the conclusion that the
| radiation dose you get from living near a coal plant is on
| the same order of magnitude as the one from living near a BWR
| or PWR (Table 5 in the reference). However, emissions
| regulations for power plants (fossil or nuclear) are surely
| very different in 2022 than they were in 1978.
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045
| ArnoVW wrote:
| 1) makes the same mistake as the author.
|
| Yes, after 600 years you can hold it in your hand for a brief
| moment without dying. You have to swallow, or be in contact
| 24/7.
|
| But if you live in an area with contaminated air or water,
| you're going to swallow, and on a daily basis.
|
| The difficulty of nuclear storage is not guarding highly
| radioactive stuff the first 100 years. It's the medium and low
| radioactive stuff that you need to keep out of the water and
| air the next 10,000.
|
| Also, even if you don't drop dead straight away, if your life
| is shortened by 10 years, that sort of sucks too.
|
| Of course, that means you need to concern yourself with the
| people will live then. And since we are already having great
| difficulty keeping our place in the universe habitable for our
| children...
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > And since we are already having great difficulty keeping
| our place in the universe habitable for our children...
|
| You must be joking.
|
| We'll figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste safer as we
| go. For now, it's the best thing we've got to combat fossil
| fuel dependency.
|
| > But if you live in an area with contaminated air or water,
| you're going to swallow, and on a daily basis.
|
| There is no "safe enough to lick it" industrial process.
|
| Humans figured out how to build pyramids millenia ago with
| hand tools. We will figure it out.
| chasil wrote:
| Contrast this with the dangers to humanity inherent in other
| forms of power generation.
|
| Hydropower has, thus far, proven far more dangerous. The
| collapse of the Banqiao dam in China led to between 26,000 to
| 240,000 estimated fatalities that impacted 30 cities.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
|
| Coal, of course, exceeds this by orders of magnitude.
| rolph wrote:
| a dam collapsing due to crappy engineering practice, isnt a
| property of hydro electric power, but the risk of such is
| perhaps 2nd or third order consequence of a dams existence,
| alongside orthagonal circumstances.
| arcticbull wrote:
| And nuclear waste getting out (which has to my knowledge
| never happened and caused harm) is also a result of
| crappy engineering practice and isn't a property of
| nuclear power. The risk of such is similarly a 2nd or
| third order consequence of a nuclear power plant's
| existence, alongside orthagonal circumstances.
| simlevesque wrote:
| > The collapse of the Banqiao dam in China led to between
| 26,000 to 240,000 estimated fatalities that impacted 30
| cities
|
| Not downplaying those deaths, but at least you can rebuild
| on the land right after. Seems way different than having
| some part of the world off limit for 10,000 years.
| chasil wrote:
| I would not assume that to be the case.
|
| Thirty cities were hit by flood waters that were moving
| at 50 km/hr. This likely involved many, many industrial
| chemicals, solvents, waste, and other harmful elements
| that were generally disbursed.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated (vs 0.03 for
| Nuclear, somewhere between window and solar). Coal deaths
| translate to about 5 Chernobyl's per year (assuming the
| UNSCEAR 4000 deaths number) in the United States alone. It
| is also responsible for spreading nuclear waste around
| because coal contains uranium and thorium that's
| concentrated in the fly ash left over after burning it.
|
| Waste from nuclear plants is nice and contained in neat
| little bundles that are monitored, safe and if you're
| worried, can be put into yucca mountain.
|
| However, nuclear waste is very much a non-issue.
| pydry wrote:
| Wind, solar, batteries and pumped storage have yet to kill
| 240,000 people and are cheaper than nuclear power. It's not
| 1980 any more.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear has yet to kill 240,000 people as well. Fossil
| and biofuel normal-operation particulates kill a high-
| ball long-term Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours.
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