John Oliver's point--which I will note had absolutely nothing to do with the safety of nuclear sites despite this article going off the path to defend them--is that while we have a strategy to store nuclear waste (with a designated national site for doing so), we haven't actually executed on that plan after many decades. His piece was not "anti-nuclear", and if someone wants to show that his arguments are wrong they also would be flying in the face of the scientists who put together the national plan.
Regardless, this author claims "please talk to a real nuclear scientist" and then provides not a single statement from a nuclear scientist on any topic at all, much less on the topic of "should we execute the national nuclear waste storage plan and how bad is it that we aren't making progress?"... this is essentially "trust this random reporter", and I personally do not think reporters are to be trusted sources with respect to science: that's how we have gotten into so much trouble to begin with :/. To put this another way: this article is, in my mind, even less scientific than John Oliver's skit, so I am flagging it for not being appropriate on this website.
First off, I emphatically agree with the top paragraph, but I'm not sure I would so quickly write off this guy's credentials. Not saying his background is unquestionable, but it does seem to deserve some credit.
> Dr. James Conca is an expert on energy, nuclear and dirty bombs, a planetary geologist, and a professional speaker.
He also works for a company in the nuclear industry and frankly that byline is not all that impressive to me. "Professional speaker" is not a qualification, and "expert" is suitably wishy-washy at this point that it's nearly meaningless, especially when one uses it to describe oneself.
> It’s one of the least threatening issues facing our country, the one with the lowest risk factors of any environmental threat. It’s safer to work at a nuclear site than to sit at a desk trading stocks
The relative safety is often brought up in this debate. It's technically correct, but fails to account for just how much damage a single incident can do. Chernobyl had 31 "direct" deaths and several hundred more due to radiation poisoning.
That looks good on paper, but does not account for the radioactive plume that has spread all over Europe. To this day I can find contaminated mushrooms and areas of increased radioactivity in Germany, about 1500km away from the reactor site. 30km around Pripyat are considered uninhabitable for 20000 years and cancer rates in Belarus and Ukraine are still way higher than elsewhere. The Dniepr is contaminated and the flow went all the way to the black sea.
It looks similar in Fukushima: Few direct deaths, a small exclusion zone, but the effects can be measured in the entire Pacific.
We must realize that even if nuclear power works out well w.r.t. Co2 and direct death count, it is fundamentally impossible to rule out the occurance of a catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima. If something like that occurred in central Europe, mainland China or one of the US coasts, highly developped regions would be rendered partially uninhabitable and largely undesirable. This kind of damage is not accounted for in these kinds of articles.
However, you are exactly falling victim of the illusion.
When you say "contaminated mushrooms and areas of increased radioactivity", do you have any idea how much damage such radio activity can cause? Is it really that serious at all?
When you say "catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima", what exactly is the catastrophe? How can you quantify it? Is there any informed discussion?
Then go back to the point of the article:
Talk to an expert...
Stop acting like a manipulated mindless person...
With comments here, I try to maintain an assumption of good faith as often as possible. Meaning I have to allow and even assume that you're sharing these concerns because you honestly think that the risks are serious enough to justify discouraging any use of this technology.
But even though I will assume this, I still think that your information comes from a pipeline with a bad actor somewhere. The omissions and the hyperbole are just too consistent.
A while ago I realized that these bad actors have (consciously or unconsciously) stopped arguing as engineers, and that this might be because the "fission answer" is simply one that they do not want to hear. It's a classic case of begging the question - either the answer is a combination of windmills and solar panels, or it can't possibly be an answer.
Seeing the same reaction to a random post about an idea for super-tall chimneys really cemented this idea for me:
Disclaimer: while i'm not a physicist, i happen to date one working for plant security/contamination at Areva.
The claim about 70k tons of nuclear waste being uranium is frankly misleading. The author have to be aware of this, so i will not expand the discussion (because it could give him credit), but please be aware that the main part of nuclear waste is contaminated equipement, so very much not uranium.
In France, we consume several tons a year of screwdrivers hand hammers, and while our yucca montain equivalents are working, this is still a pain in the ass to get rid of this stuff. Maybe someone can explain how John Oliver is wrong, but please don't trust anything this guy write. i don't know much about nuclear waste, but if i am aware of this, there is no way a "specialist" is not.
You can call it ad hominem and poisoning the well all day, and it is, but at the end of the day this dude backs up everything he says by linking to himself and doesn't even begin to talk about the biggest barrier to new plants (money). I can't figure out exactly where he works but the whole article smells fishy to me.
He doesn't even describe Oliver's claims in enough detail (let alone directly quote the segment) to make it especially clear what he's taking issue with. I watched that segment, and as far as I remember Oliver was talking about the risks of containment failure if we don't proceed with a long-term solution like Yucca Mountain, not just vaguely casting aspersions on nuclear power or even nuclear waste.
The article apear to fight non scientific claims on a comedy show with non scientific claims in a news site! Where is the science here? And 70000 tonnes of nuclear waste sounds like a lot to me? The claim that no one has ever died from nuclear waste also sounds suspect. Can anyone fill in the actual science behind this article?
The claim that no one has ever died from nuclear waste also sounds suspect.
That's an unreasonable standard to hold anyone to. Can you imagine what the news stories would look like if this horrific incident ( http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/investigation-cont... ) had involved nuclear waste instead of plain old slag? Yet it's safe to say you've never even heard of it.
This double standard kills people every day. Over and over, nuclear power projects have been shut down for being "scary" and "dangerous" while new coal plants were built in their place. As a result we have thousands of premature deaths and disabilities that don't make the news because they're not dramatic enough. These deaths don't happen in reactor vaults or control rooms, they happen quietly in ICUs and nursing homes and cancer wards... and sometimes not so quietly in coal plants.
Yes, but most of nuclear waste is metal and plastics. Screwdriver and stuff. The guy that wrote the article either don't know anything about nuclear plants (well, less than me so almost nothing) or is misleading everybody on purpose. Either way, wait until someone reliable and knowledgable talk about this to forge an opinion, this is bullshit to me (and im a pro-nuclear guy)
Can one actually stack nuclear waste like that? It's my impression that some nuclear material cannot be stored too densely, otherwise it "goes critical" i.e. sustains an ongoing nuclear reaction.
Correct, you wouldn't be able to pack it that tightly together for the reason you theorized, but the point is it doesn't take a lot of space for the fuel itself. Radioactive waste is far more than just used fuel though as another person here has repeatedly pointed out.
At first blush this calculation may seem to placate some concern, but on second thought it's mostly worthless without any discussion of the current dispersal of the waste and it's "potency," i.e. the potential harmful effects of a given quantity.
"At first blush this calculation may seem to placate some concern, but on second thought it's mostly worthless without any discussion of the current dispersal of the waste and it's "potency," i.e. the potential harmful effects of a given quantity.
"
Sure, but you'd have to do the same for every other power source as well.
Even making solar panels currently generates toxic waste ...
I wasn't talking about comparing the toxic byproducts of various forms of energy production, although that would be an illuminating exercise.
I was simply pointing out that when talking about potential danger from a given substance, the absolute amount, X ft^3, doesn't tell us much with knowing more about the substance's potential for deleterious effects at a given quantity of the substance.
If deleterious effects start at X * 4, X is less concerning. If deleterious effects start at X * .0000000004, X is more concerning.
I've got this little thimble full of material, just a small thimble. No big deal right? I'll just leave it laying somewhere around your house.
Would your assessment of this situation change if you knew it was a thimble full of cyanide?
P.S. I didn't mean for my original post to sound hostile, though with it's conciseness and using 'worthless,' I could understand such an interpretation. I have no problems with this line of analysis, I'm a fan and found the visual it provided interesting. I just intended to point out that if the intention was to give a sense of the danger posed by nuclear waste produced over the past 60 years, then the analysis was incomplete for the reasons stated above.
P.P.S Is the amount of toxic waste produced by solar vs nuclear per unit of energy produced in any way comparable? If so that would no doubt be of interest to the world at large.
"I was simply pointing out that when talking about potential danger from a given substance, the absolute amount, X ft^3, doesn't tell us much with knowing more about the substance's potential for deleterious effects at a given quantity of the substance.
"
Of course.
Someone just asked "is 70,000 tons a lot", and I was just doing the math to show how much it is in measures people might understand a little better.
I make no claims as to the danger represented by that amount, only "is it a large amount".
IE it may be a small amount, and totally and completely horrible.
"P.P.S Is the amount of toxic waste produced by solar vs nuclear per unit of energy produced in any way comparable? If so that would no doubt be of interest to the world at large.
"
I actually don't know, but i may go try to figure it out.
TL;DR: He did the anti bits quite well, but didn't explicitly state the pros explictitly. Which might me understandable, given the format, but he usually does state at least a few "however"'s or "but"'s, etc.
I don't think that instantly makes him a shill, FWIW.
I don't think people comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe we are facing from climate change. Even if nuclear is just as bad as the most hysterical critics say, it is peanuts compared to the alternative. We need to invest heavily in it, now.
Unfortunately I don't see the public changing its mind, so we will probably have to work with alternatives like wind and solar. But if the public embraced nuclear when it should have, we would be much further along.
It's obviously the other extreme of this spectrum from Oliver's waste bit last week, but that doesn't make it useless. And yes, a lot of it addresses concerns with arguments Oliver didn't make.
On the other hand, the point about the volume of waste coal generates is probably well taken (though I'm guessing the numbers are hyperbolized, extrapolating from plants with outmoded scrubbing tech).
Yes his segment was extremely disappointing. It amounted to a lot of fear-mongering, and I have to wonder why they wasted an episode on this when there are so many more real issues they could have discussed.
>I am hurt, though, that climate scientists get on all the cool shows, but nuclear scientists just get dissed
Perhaps that's because the former are actually fighting for science against an aggressive polluting industries and interests, whereas the other are mostly employed by, and often shill for, aggressive polluting industries and interests, science be damned.
>It’s one of the least threatening issues facing our country, the one with the lowest risk factors of any environmental threat. It’s safer to work at a nuclear site than to sit at a desk trading stocks.
Taleb: "As we saw, a situation is deemed non ergodic here when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it –and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these situations “ruin”, as the entity cannot emerge from the condition. The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are no longer possible".
Or, you know, the definition of an empirical observation. Which of the two, we will never know!
Besides, I find fallacies useful. In real life it is often beneficial (to the point of survival) to depend on some fallacy or another for course correction or quick decision making, and the naive "avoid fallacies at all costs" believer would end hurt more often than not.
In lots of cases, who says something is more important that what they say -- like when you don't have all the information on something, and don't have access or any way to check the numbers and run the tally by yourself, but are relying on information that people who have huge interests (and people who work for them) control.
There aren't a lot of enterprises where humans deal with uncertainty in any significant way that you can't level that Taleb quote at, which is one of the things that makes Taleb quotes so frustrating. It's the "give liberty for safety deserve neither" of stochastic processes.
>There aren't a lot of enterprises where humans deal with uncertainty in any significant way that you can't level that Taleb quote at
Well, the quote is only applicable to enterprises where the uncertainty concerns a huge toll.
So, if anything, it's the opposite of being applicable to all "enterprises where humans deal with uncertainty" -- it only applies to a handful of them.
But in context, in his books, part of his point is that it can be hard to predict when uncertain processes have potentially huge tolls --- which is why he's so excited to point out that bankers have lost in financial catastrophes more than they've made over the lifetime of the field.
Which, to bring it back to my point, implies that there are lots of these processes. There are a lot of things you can say that about. It doesn't add that much to our risk calculus to observe it.
>But in context, in his books, part of his point is that it can be hard to predict when uncertain processes have potentially huge tolls
Yes, but only when those potentially huge tolls are a possible outcome.
So what one can't predict easily is their probability (or when they'll hit), not whether they are possible.
That is: it's not like there are uncertain processes that we don't know whether they can potentially have a huge toll or none at all. We do know that -- what's hard to predict is when and if they will incur that toll.
E.g. a market crash (or a war, or an epidemic) is such an "huge toll" event, where the process is uncertain (playing the stock market). But not all uncertain processes can bring forward such events (sports for example, while uncertain in their outcome, never bring any "huge toll").
As for the importance to our "risk calculus". Taleb (and others) give many examples of taking those into account on the risk calculus. Besides isn't our blatant disregard for such "huge toll" outcomes that brought us the nuclear "balance of terror" and the "global warming"?
I'm going to hazard a guess that if you think that the "huge toll" uncertainties are a small, trivially enumerable well-understood set like "nuclear balance of terror" and "global warming", you've missed Taleb's point.
I've never read Taleb pointing to all kinds of procedures as having a potential "huge toll uncertainty".
He gives quite specific examples, which one might agree or disagree with (e.g. GMOs), but which are not unbounded, nor applicable to anything and everything.
Regardless, this author claims "please talk to a real nuclear scientist" and then provides not a single statement from a nuclear scientist on any topic at all, much less on the topic of "should we execute the national nuclear waste storage plan and how bad is it that we aren't making progress?"... this is essentially "trust this random reporter", and I personally do not think reporters are to be trusted sources with respect to science: that's how we have gotten into so much trouble to begin with :/. To put this another way: this article is, in my mind, even less scientific than John Oliver's skit, so I am flagging it for not being appropriate on this website.