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Air cooled nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it turns out:
Fortunately, the director of Britain's Atomic Energy Research Establishment, John Cockcroft, insisted on filters being retrofitted to the cooling air exhaust stacks (not specifically out of concerns for a fire.) This expensive and time-consuming addendum was ridiculed as "Cockcroft's Folly" until the fire, when they captured ~95% of the discharge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Fol...
I do hope he spent the rest of his life on a big "I told you so" tour to anyone who had uttered 'Cockcroft's Folly' before the accident.
I wondered for years what the big towers were for and what the odd looking bits on top were - was amazed to find out that they were chimneys and the bits on top were filters!
Not to downplay the significance of this disaster, but this is one of the worst nuclear accidents we know - yet "It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal". Not all dams are used for power, of course, but the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam[0] is estimated to have killed 171 000
I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health
I think a big part of what makes people so afraid of radiation is how easy it is to detect. Imagine if you had a geiger counter that detected Dioxin, Benzine, or PFAS contamination? It would be going off pretty much constantly. You can detect radioactive materials with a cheap detector, where you need an entire lab to find regular poisons, which doesn't help with our lack of ability to assess risk.
For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware.
It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
The eye opener for me was, when i read that one overheated teflon cookware kills all birds in a whole area. https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/teflon-polytetrafluor...
Its like a trenchwarfare coated nightmare.
Most people are not aware that carbon, potassium and calcium are radioactive elements.
Despite that, our body contains large quantities of them.
Like also for the chemical toxins, the dangers of radiation depend on the dose, and we should not worry when it is low enough.
Also platinum is a radioactive element, but those who wear platinum jewelry are seldom aware of this.
All computer displays are slightly radioactive, because the ITO transparent electrodes contain indium, which is a radioactive element too.
The ceramic kitchen knives are slightly radioactive, because their blades are made of zirconia, and both zirconium and hafnium are radioactive elements (all Zr, unless specially purified for nuclear reactors, contains Hf).
Someone has downvoted this, but I cannot understand the reason, unless it was due to ignorance.
Everything written above are facts, not opinions.
They are little known facts, which is why I have mentioned them. Uranium and thorium are the most radioactive among the elements that have survived since the creation of the Solar System, but they are not the only radioactive primordial elements, there are many others.
Most people who are afraid of radiation do not realize how many of the surrounding objects are radioactive, without being dangerous because of that.
It is not easy to detect UNLESS you have a geiger counter. Those Russian soldiers dug trenches around Tchernobyl blissfully unawhere of any problems. They carried the dirt into the dwellings and labs where people still have to work, causing ongoing problems.
If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
Except, of course, that the story about the Russian soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up.
> any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time
If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless. It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario, you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad but that's also very far from the made up stories about soldiers' acute irradiation).
The current proposed sample size is small in comparison to the required waste storage lifetime ….
Yes - I've got the book "Atomic Accidents" and it starts with a description of a disaster at a Russian hydro plant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_stat...
In general people build dams to #1 store water, #2 save lives, and only a distant 3rd generate power.
Most of the 62 dams that collapsed in that hurricane where not hydroelectric dams. And it’s not clear the existence of these dams played that significant role in the death total considering China’s history with even more devastating floods.
But the nuclear power plant has the potential to make large swaths of land uninhabitable for thousands of years. There’s clearly a difference.
Dams have the side effect of making huge swaths of land uninhabitable automatically as soon as they start filling.
From the Three Gorges Dam
> China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir
The «inhabitable for thousands of years» is a myth. Do you know how many people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today?
Poeple vastly overestimate the dangerous of this stuff after a few years. Fukushima and Prypiat are probably safer to live than the average Asian city center due to air pollution, or even the Midwest due to pesticide exposure…
Large? Fossil fuels are making significant parts of earth inhabitable.
Not ideal in terms of radionuclide release. Also not a great coolant due to the ridiculously small heat capacity. Also, these reactors had no other purpose than producing plutonium for weapons and the design is completely useless for anything else.
To add context, the described plant was a weapons programme that predates any civilian nuclear energy. In fact it also predates the hydrogen bomb, so that war planners vastly overestimated the amount of plutonium needed.
Beats river cooled reactors..
Rivers can and do dry up or reduce significantly in flow.
I ment the first sovjet reactor, were they literally diverted a river through the reactor core. Polluting all villages and a sea down stream forever.
I think the first US plutonium producing reactors at Hanford also used direct cooling by river water.
Oh that's really ugly, do you know which reactor this was?
Tangentially related, but as everyone here seems to enjoy talk of nuclear [things], it’s worth a recommendation:
Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel ‘On the Beach’.
If you want high-level spoilers, Wikipedia is your friend. I shan’t say a word other than that it’s a terrific little book that I can’t believe I’d never heard of. I just read it last week.
This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates:
> Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.
Example:
> The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m.
Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
> The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that.
The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2].
[1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
Nuclear advocate here.
With radiation, people often conflate measureable with hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them.
Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them are borderline meaningless.
Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel.
That's why lots of people like nuclear.
Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about that.
The problem with all those assumptions is that the "radiological harm" is cumulative and it can accumulate in unexpected ways which aren't random.
For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then do their damage for a long time. And there's no good framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year. Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out, because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose.
And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions, but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget that while not that many people die even in major accidents, that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up. At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a trillion Dollar in cost, btw.
Actually it's the anti-nuclear crowd that frames pro-nuclear people in a way that pretends it's only coal or nuclear. The reality is that we are 80% fossil and biofuel and need everything that is at least 10x better on climate and health, which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal.
The amount of energy transition we need is nearly unfathomable. To tie our hand behind our back because we are afraid of nuclear in this race is unwise.
Antinuclear scare mongerers are forcing the Fukushima people to purify water so far below the natural radioactivity of seawater (which does contain slightly radioactive potassium and uranium) that it's truly ridiculous. That drives up costs unecessarily.
Anyway what's the cost of failing to solve climate change or the cost of killing 8 million people per year with combustion?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-reall...
> Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time.
Waste from fission plants and incidents is hard to estimate for a variety of reasons. It tends to be incredibly long-lived. Small non-lethal (even non-harmful) amounts can accumulate in animals and plants to the point where there's still an impact from Chernobyl on widespread populations decades later [1]:
> The German boars roam in forests nearly 950 miles (1,500 kilometers ) from Chernobyl. Yet, the amount of radioactive cesium-137 within their tissue often registers dozens of times beyond the recommended limit for consumption and thousands of times above normal.
It's worth noting that not all toxic byproducts are radioactive. Cesium is toxic on its own. The Uranium and Plutonium decay chains include a lot of metals that even if you ignore the radioactive element, they're toxic, sometimes incredibly so.
> ... 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion.
[citation needed]
This study [2] argues 1M/year, most of those concentrated in SE Asia (due to lack of regulation combined with coal use) and it's predominantly coal. For the US it's around 20,000. It's also not clear to me if this study includes emissions from automobiles.
> ... nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel.
The Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone, decades later, still stands at (literally) a thousand square miles.
Nuclear advocates always bring up coal (as a false dichotomy and it paints nuclear in the best light) and deaths because it's in many ways the least impactful dimension for nuclear. Likewise, they always talk about operational costs while brushing over capital costs (and thus the total cost of ownership) and the costs of waste handling and storage and ultimately the site cleanup costs. As the article notes here the current estimate for this one site sits at 121 billion pounds and will likely rise and take a century or more.
[1]: https://phys.org/news/2011-04-germany-radioactive-boars-lega...
[2]: https://www.healtheffects.org/publication/global-burden-dise...
Do you know the dose rates from the boar in mSv/yr, and how it compares to background? Lol. See this is exactly what I'm talking about! Thank you.
As for air pollution citation, here: https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
It's estimated that coal use in the US costs $345 billion a year in hidden expenses (health problems and pollution etc) https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-study-idUSN16283662...
Which are all paid by the public and government.
My naive solution is to actually double down. The site is "toxic", the community (and the grandchildren of those working on site) are entirely dependant upon the plant. Build more plants on site - you have the waste, but also the knowledge and the one community that is happy to have it in their back yard.
As toxic as the waste in the pools out back is the last 20 years of will they wont they attitude towards not just further nuclear builds but hand wringing over paying to cleanup the experiments of the past which is where much of the waste comes from.
I am confused because you're mixing things from UK, US and russia in this post which obviously all have different laws. I'm not sayig you're wrong it's just confusing beause the situations from different countries aren't always comparable unless you explicitly establish that they are, it would be better to just stick to examples from the same country.
Sellafield is decommissioning in large part a plant designed to any% speedrun weapons grade material, not power.
> This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates:
For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better knowledge and engineering expertise to build safer, better, more efficient, less "polluting" (for some definition of the word) reactors.
FWIW, this week in the cold snap in the UK, we've relied on good old fossil fuel and... nuclear, because the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining.
Also, being old enough to have lived through the press-hysteria of Chernobyl: "we're all going to die or have babies with 3 arms", we ended up with maybe 4000 deaths over 50 years, and an area now rich with wildlife. And that's an uncontrolled nuclear accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Compare that to the number of people that die through coal mine accidents a year and air pollution and so on. Then there's oil slicks killing wildlife, rig accidents, pipelines hundreds, if not thousands of miles long and so on. Or natural gas, with explosions and so on. Plus all the carbon emissions for transporting millions upon millions of tons of the stuff.
The world wide number of deaths due to nuclear in its entire history adds up to less deaths than there are probably in a typical week for fossil fuels (deaths mining, transporting, building, and deaths to the general population breathing it in, and let's add deaths from climate change in there, since that's literally what fossil fuels have caused).
I'd go further and say the deaths worldwide per day directly (accidents) or indirectly (climate change + pollution) due to fossil fuel usage is more than all deaths ever due to nuclear in its history.
I live near a nuclear power station, and I'm comfortable with that. In fact, where I live, there's approximately 1.5m living within 30 miles, and just beyond that... London.
On balance, I'd take a fleet of new nuclear power stations over the absolute disaster that is fossil fuels and the days there's no sun or wind.
Back to: 'oh but what about waste?'
Bury it, with signs. If we've gotten too stupid to read in 500 years, we're likely too stupid to know how to dig down several thousand feet, and are probably banging rocks together and saying 'ug' to each other. It's really not a problem. I can't recall the last time someone stupidly went into an _existing_ nuclear waste dump anywhere in the world and then died. And if they have it's, what, 1 person out of 7 billion.
> Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
Well, of course. Because, built in the right way, you use nuclear reactors to breed weapons grade fuel. So governments are always involved. In turn this means that governments never let market forces, and hence private companies build competing nuclear reactors which would drive down costs because the government won't step out of the way. The UK pretty much had a choice of EDF or EDF to build a new nuclear reactor.
Somehow this is rarely as fast or cheap as planned.
Often in part because people conflate measurable with hazardous with radiation. If the goal was to allow double the natural dose rates then it would be a lot easier. You need about 20x the natural dose rate for a year before you see an increase in cancer incidence from 42% baseline to 43%.
There is no meaningful difference between measurable and hazardous radiation.
You never know where the stuff builds up. Some isotopes get enriched in some organs and do damage over a long time. Depending on what the material actually is, it can get into unfortunate places and stay there for a few years, irradiating someone. It can get into the food supply doing some more damage than anticipated.
None of that is calculateable, so it is better to treat every radiation as a risk. You also forget that workers may be wearing a dosimeter, but average people don't. They'd never know. You can easily reach the 20x increase if you have a contaminated object in your home or car or whatever, even if that contamination isn't that strong.
This might be a good read for you.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_fi...
Given that the goal is 0 and there are plenty of ongoing activities, poorly cleaned up spills, contaminated mining towns, and legacies of carelessness related to the nuclear sector that result in 2-200x background in various pockets, it seems like 0 was a pretty good benchmark and should maybe be reduced a little.
This is notably one of the locations mentioned in Kraftwerk's "Radioactivität" lyrics.
Weird I submitted this yesterday
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34003392
Even the target url is the same?
according to the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), reposting is allowed:
> Are reposts ok?
> If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Oh I didn't personally mind, I am glad the story got attention because nuclear is so popular around here without discussion of the hidden massive consequences.
I just found it weird the code didn't catch the dupe from 24 hours ago because it always redirects me when I submit a link that was posted the previous day and pushed off the page.
The submission queue is fickle.