Anti-nuclear power idiots

The BBQ Pit
1

If aliens landed tomorrow and told us: “We bring you a new way to generate power. It will not release pollution into your atmosphere, it will not generate greenhouse gasses, you have enough fuel for it to last hundreds of years, and even longer if you recycle that fuel, it’s not significantly more expensive than the way you currently generate energy, and it can be made to be perfectly safe.”

We’d say “Wow! Thank you for this nearly magical source of energy you’re giving to us! This will help us tremendously!”

And then they’d say “yes, it’s harnessing the power of splitting the atom, and…”

“Oh! NUCLEAR??? LIKE… RADIATION AND STUFF? FUCK YOUR ANAL PROBING WAYS YOU LITTLE GREEN ASSHOLES”

I’ve been working myself into a rage over the last few weeks since this thread got me thinking about nuclear power again.

It seems that all that stands between us and a vastly superior way to generate power is essentially hysterical idiots that think “nuclear…radiation… doesn’t that mean like giant 50 foot ants and 3 headed babies!!! Chernobyl!!!”

The lawsuits these idiots file keep plants from being built on a reasonable schedule, raise the costs both due to delay of construction and needing an army of lawyers to work for years, an onerous approval process, etc. Then they point to the hassle they’ve caused and say “see! nuclear really isn’t affordable anyway!” - yeah, well maybe if someone cut your brake lines they could stand over your burning wreck of a car and say “see! I told you car travel wasn’t safe!”

The main downside in the public mind seems to be nuclear waste. MY GOD, A METHOD OF POWER GENERATION PRODUCES WASTE. A point I made in that thread was that coal plants generate a massive amount of waste - some of it radioactive due to radioactive isotopes in the coal - and just dumps it into the atmosphere. People don’t care about that because apparently waste is only a concern if you have to do something with it - if you just dump it into the public air or water then you can forget about it.

They actually view the fact that nuclear waste can be collected in its entirety and stored as a DISADVANTAGE, beacuse you have to worry about how you deal with it. And hence, coal dumping pollution into the atmosphere is an advantage, because then you don’t have to think about what you’re doing with it anymore. My facetious solution? Just take the nuclear waste and dump it into the atmosphere. Problem solved. But that’s actually logical when working within the logical constraints of these idiots.

And a lot of it is simple NIMBYism. Sure, I want to benefit from what a society has to offer as long as I don’t have to contribute in any way! Give me nuclear power but let someone else deal with the waste! This is just selfish assholery. But not even really enlightened selfish assholery. Personally, I would be fine have them take a drum of nuclear waste, and store it in my back yard, so long as they stored it properly. Why? It doesn’t hurt me at all to be somewhere near properly stored nuclear waste. What does hurt me is that every time I take a breath some remnant of the billions of tons of coal we’ve burnt enters my lungs. Even if the damn nuclear waste was buried in my back yard, I still suffer more from coal than nuclear. So not only are they selfish assholes, they’re idiots who don’t even know how to be intelligently selfish.

They’ll point to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Valid concerns on the surface. But the reality is that Chernobyl had to do about 9 things wrong, none of which would ever happen in a US commercial plant. Three Mile Island didn’t kill anyone. No one died and no radiation was released and no one will suffer for it in the future - so even our worst case scenario wasn’t even a disaster. And nuclear plant design has advanced since then - we can build reactors that are inherently free of meltdowns because the reaction stops if the conditions for criticality aren’t just right.

And with every attempt at criticism of nuclear, there seems to be essentially the argument “well it’s not perfect, so let’s not do it” which ignores that our current solution is far less perfect. One day stuff like solar energy will be a bigger deal - but we’re probably decades away from solar being able to do the heavy lifting. The reality is that for now, we have to go with nuclear or coal and nuclear is so clearly the winner it’s absurd.

Now that plug-in hybrids are becoming practical, we could essentially solve our energy problems and become energy independent. Nuclear power is nearly magical in what it offers versus what it costs. It’s such a no brainer that if the same technology somehow came in a form that the public wasn’t hysterically stupid about, we’d all be thinking it was one of the greatest things ever to happen to civilization. But instead, because of idiots who really haven’t thought it through, we actually shun and fail to utilize this nearly magical technology.

The people who can’t think beyond superficial reactions ruin it for us again.

Fuck.

2

No giant 50 foot ants? Fuck that, then.

3

There was a coal station in my hometown. They dumped the flyash behind by elementary school.

I found out a few years ago that they dumped industrial waste from a resin plant there as well. My old school had to be cleaned under Superfund.

All in all, it would have been better had the place been next to TMI.

4

If you manage to remove any hint of human error, then Neuclear is the way to go.

5

Increase the demand for uranium, Russia has a greater incentive to increase uranium mining…not exactly energy independent.

6

Why would the United States be obliged to purchase uranium from Russia?

7

Exactly. Problem is, you can’t remove human error from the equation.

I grew up a couple miles from the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station in Shoreham, NY. Thank Og that place never opened under full power. The shoddy workmanship alone would have caused that place to melt down in a jiffy.

8

Because we’re already purchasing uranium from Russia?

FTR, I am all for nuclear power; I just understand where people are coming from when they’re not. The government/AEC have proven several times that they just aren’t very good at keeping radioactive waste out of our groundwater/food supply/kids’ hair.

9

It’s not obliged to purchase oil from Venezuela, either. When less-than-friendly countries are major players in the supply of the fuel, it’s ridiculous to talk about energy independence.

10

Well, uranium is fungible, same as oil. And in the case of Russia I’m glad they’re selling it to us and not some other people. They’re actually obligated by contract to provide us with more than they’re producing now.

I agree that energy independence might be a false goal - but ensuring that you’re not stuck with a single source isn’t. And the two largest producers of uranium are Canada and Australia - two countries we have quite good commerce with.

11

Pebble bed reactors won’t meltdown no matter who screws up.

12

Just to be clear, I’m not against nukes in general. I was against the Shoreham Plant. And before anyone gets suspicious that I might be a NIMBYist, check out the Wikipedia entry: Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant - Wikipedia

13

The government building the plants would be helpful. As long as profit is involved, corner cutting will follow. Cutting corners can have terrible results when you are dealing with power plants.

14

I have no worries about 50 foot ants (although I did see an exciting film about THEM once)

  1. However you can’t treat nuclear waste like any other:

Nuclear power plants and weapons have left the UK with a radioactive legacy which presently has nowhere to go.
There will be yet more waste when nuclear stations are decommissioned.
…
The total volume of nuclear waste in the UK is 470,000 cubic metres when conditioned and packaged - enough to fill the Albert Hall five times over.
…
A recent study found that, on average, people in Britain live about 42km (26 miles) away from one of more than 30 radioactive waste sites, including power plants and military bases, in the UK.

  1. Here is a look at costings.
    According to the report, electricity generated by a nuclear plant in 2003 was significantly more expensive - about 60% more pricey - than power from traditional gas and coal-driven plants.
    However - and this is a big however - there are number of additional factors that need to be taken into account.
    …
    Friends of the Earth reckons that UK taxpayers are facing a bill of more than £50bn to clean up the nuclear material that has already been created.
    …
    According to the New Economics Foundation, a think-tank based in London, the industry-estimated costs of shutting down nuclear power plants and dealing with nuclear waste are only half of what they should be.

  2. The Chernobyl disaster was world-wide and the effects will be felt for centuries.

The Chernobyl ghost will not be laid to rest until the plant has been transformed into an “ecologically safe system”, as Ukrainian officials put it, and that will not be for a very long time.
There are currently three main obstacles on the path towards this goal:
the lava-like remains of the melted-down reactor
the spent fuel from the other three reactors
hundreds of leaking nuclear waste dumps
…
To get the spent fuel out of the reactors, a decision was finally taken to make space in a Soviet-era wet fuel storage facility, by packing its contents more tightly.
But this alarms some observers, such as Mykola Karpan, a former safety official at the plant.
He points out that the Soviet-era facility comes to the end of its life in 2016 - and that the question of what to do then with the wet and cracked fuel assemblies has not yet been answered.
He also argues that it could be risky to pack the damaged fuel assemblies more tightly, and claims an identical facility in St Petersburg has sprung alarming leaks.
…
“We know the graveyards are in these areas, but exactly where - so as not to step on them - we cannot be sure,” says Mr Antropov, a senior member of a waste and decontamination unit known as “Complex”.
Some of the trenches closest to the Pripyat river have been partly washed away by spring floods, others are slowly seeping radionuclides into ground water.
Mr Antropov is also worried by two repositories built hastily in 1986 for severely contaminated waste, for example graphite blocks thrown out of the reactor in the explosion.
Neither was properly built, he says, one is too close the river, and the contents of both should really be somewhere deep underground.
“Where to store highly radioactive and long-lived waste is a huge problem,” he says.

  1. Solar power is supplied free and will last longer than nuclear waste. There is zero pollution. All we have to do is figure out how to collect it at a reasonable price.
15

I really do not understand why people (like the President) are opposed to Yucca Mountain. Screw a million years, in only 10,000 years this stuff will be at only 1/15,000 of present radioactivity. The mountain can handle ten thousand years. Good enough for me.

16

The government would not be building the plants themselves, any more than the government would build a figher jet, space station, or office building. The government would contract the work out to private companies. That’s how most things are done. The company/companies do the work, the government performs oversight.

17

Really, there is zero pollution involved in creating solar panels? Really?

18

Cadmium, boron and phosphorus emissions need to be tightly controlled during solar cell production. Cadmium is especially problematic since it is a heavy metal that accumulates in tissue.

19

Or insurance companies.

20

You do realize, of course, that it was a government that built Chernobyl.

The well-regarded power plants of the Navy’s nuclear fleet were built by an American company - Westinghouse - under contract. No corners were cut, a decent profit was made and the government got good value for their money.

I don’t think your argument holds up.