Germany Looking for Nuclear Graveyard to last One Million Years.

[Angra Mainyu]

I take it from that question that you are entirely ignorant of both the process of evolution and the theory that describes that process.

Your conclusion is false

OK. You are well-studied in evolutionary theory and the evidence of precursors to HSS. Not sure how you know the same about B20, to whom I was replying.though. I take it that you simply choose to ignore/deny it. I hate to say it, but ... case in point re conservatives rejecting science.

I already told you that your conclusion about B20 is false as it should be obvious if you take a look at some of his posts on the matters. But here, you again reply " I take it that you simply choose to ignore/deny it." That assessment mirrors your reply to B20 (i.e., "I take it from that question that you are entirely ignorant of both the process of evolution and the theory that describes that process."). In both cases, what you "take it" is false, but that is not the main problem. The main problem is that it is unwarranted - i.e., it is epistemically irrational on your part to have the belief you have.

By the way, when they learn about some of my views, right-wingers general call me a left-winger, whereas left-wingers generally call me a right-winger. Those people are all mistaken, but worse, they are holding unwarranted beliefs. Epistemic irrationality is also at the heart of science denialism.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

In recent years I have met quite a few conservative republican voters who when they look at history, point to a clearly liberal development and claim it to be conservative. The best example of this is to claim that the founding of the U.S and it's break with European Monarchy was a conservative event. They will also claim that voting and self-government are conservative inventions. They will also claim that racism is a liberal problem because the southern states were democratic and against civil rights. The KKK is a liberal phenomenon because of southern democrats. Their science and grasp of history would obviously fail examination.

On one occasion I nearly got into a shouting match with a very conservative workmate who adamantly maintained that using a programmable thermostat to turn down the heat overnight caused a person to use more energy to heat their home. I tried all manner of analogies but nothing would convince him that he was incorrect. When I came back to my desk hours later he had checked me against the internet and apologized, admitting that he was incorrect but preferring not to use a programmable thermostat because the furnace had to run too long to bring the temperature back up in the morning. Duh!

It was a good example of Dunning Kruger in action. But interestingly there was nothing I being liberal and democratic could tell him about programmable thermostats and scientific fact.

/derail

 

[fromderinside]

How is identifying liberalism with science letting liberal science deniers off the hooK of being science deniers? On nuclear power in the hands of man, particularly man with a profit motive, I'm absolutely denying science has anything to do with whether nuclear power should be used for energy production. It is the greed and power based attitudes of those who gravitate to profit and control that tip my dials toward "DON'T DO IT" even in Germany.

So as well reasoned and cogent as bilby's positions be they can't win the argument about whether man should use nuclear power for energy production.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

How is identifying liberalism with science letting liberal science deniers off the hooK of being science deniers? On nuclear power in the hands of man, particularly man with a profit motive, I'm absolutely denying science has anything to do with whether nuclear power should be used for energy production. It is the greed and power based attitudes of those who gravitate to profit and control that tip my dials toward "DON'T DO IT" even in Germany.

But why would you say that?
The safety track record of the nuclear industry is better than the others?

Sure, bad things can happen. The same goes for other energy production industries. But as it happens, worse things happen (overall) with any other one.

 

[steve_bank]

I thought Germany's alternate energy program failed

What will they do for heavy industry like automotive?

 

[skepticalbip]

I thought Germany's alternate energy program failed

What will they do for heavy industry like automotive?

There is a European power grid. Germany buys power generated in France, Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, etc. and they buy power generated in Germany.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That's misleading. Yes, nuclear plants during normal operation leak much less radioactivity than coal plants. keywords here are "normal operation" and "leak", cause amount of radioactive waste (not leak) is obviously orders and orders magnitude higher for nukes.

Note, however, that coal plant emissions kill far more than nuke plant emissions even when you count accidents.

Also, an interesting bit regarding the waste.

You have x watts of nuke plant and x watts of coal plant. The waste from the nuke plant is reprocessed so only the useless stuff goes in the waste stream.

At the end of the year you prepare two storage vaults of the same size. One will hold the ash from the coal plants, one will hold the waste from the reactor. Next year, you have a new supply of waste--and you need to prepare another vault for the coal ash. The nuke waste fits in the original, though. Rinse and repeat. 10,000 years from now you have 10,000 vaults for the coal ash, but still only one vault for the nuke waste--and when you're depositing the waste for year 10,001 you pull out the waste from year 1 because it's now no longer any more radioactive than the environment. The coal ash is just as dangerous as it was the year it was put there, however. A million years from now you have a million vaults for the coal ash--but still only one for the nuke as you've removed 99% of it as the years went by.

Dude, I have PhD in physics, no need for this manspaining, especially when you are wrong.
Coal Ash is only dangerous when it gets into the air, flies away, and precipitates somewhere where food is grown or water is collected. Ash is essentially very finely milled stone and its radioactivity is equal that of stone, problem is with the fact that it's in the form of fine particles which leach into environment.
Buried ash is not really dangerous but you have to capture it first, It's possible to capture it and I am not sure nukes would win in this case.

Radioactivity of concentrated nuclear waste will not fall to the ambient level for millions and millions of years, so your math about amount of space is wrong too. You either have to dilute it in some inert and stable substance and use a lot of space, or you can keep it in concentrated form but make sure nobody disturbs it for millions of years. Germans are not wrong.

The fly ash has has a lot of heavy metals.

And note that I specified that the waste was properly reprocessed. Said waste decays to ambient in 10,000 years--those long-lived isotopes with a reasonable amount of radioactivity went back into the fuel supply, not into the waste. And like the fly ash, it's completely harmless unless it gets loose somehow.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Great, tell that to Germans and Japanese.

When has spent fuel ever caused harm to anyone?

The Germans and Japanese are not fucking interested in hearing it, but it's true - spent fuel from nuclear power stations hasn't harmed a single person in the sixty five year history of the technology.

Nuclear power is the only technology for generating electricity that completely and diligently manages its waste streams, to the point where these materials have never caused harm to any person or external environment. No other technology for generating electricity comes close to being as effective in managing its wastes safely - and most don't even bother trying, or make the most cursory of efforts with no long-term plans or considerations.

No--it scared Japan into killing a lot of people.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The concentration of radiation at nuclear facilities is the issue, not the radiation itself. Kilowatt for kilowatt, nuclear power is less radioactive than coal in terms of pollution and danger to the environment. The reason for government's heavy hand is because that radiation is so concentrated, not because radiation is something uncommon or special. This is true in lots of cases, not just for radiation.

Except radiation risk modeling is based on linear-no-threshold. Under that model radioactivity is just as dangerous if dispersed than when concentrated, it's just the harm shows up as a lower risk to more people. Maybe you can hide it in the noise but you don't get rid of it.

(Now, I have a lot of problem with the LNT model and lean much more towards radiation homeostasis. In that case dilution actually is a help.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I love how the measure is always against the other things that are toxic. It's no more dangerous than a bullet to the brain. Oh, ok. Well great then!

Power will come from somewhere. Thus we should be comparing nuke to other forms of power generation, not to a fantasyland where no power is needed.

 

[bilby]

I love how the measure is always against the other things that are toxic. It's no more dangerous than a bullet to the brain. Oh, ok. Well great then!

Well given that absolutely everything is toxic, and that as a result the dose makes the poison, the ONLY non-insane way to discuss toxicity is in relative terms.

So I genuinely do love it when the measure is against other things - but all too often, it's not. People say dumb shit like "nuclear power is dangerous - just look at Chernobyl", when they should be saying "nuclear power is incredibly safe - the only fatalities in its sixty five year history were at Chernobyl, and they were few in number relative to other industrial accidents, and mostly caused by circumstances that no longer exist".

But most people are not sane. They see airliners crashed into buildings, and decide that it's safer to drive across the USA than it is to fly - because they irrationally look at risk as isolated to the subject of their fears, and fail to account for the far larger risks of the alternatives.

Nuclear power is the most dangerous way to generate electricity, apart from ALL the others.

Nuclear power has killed hundreds, and saved millions.

 

[bilby]

How is identifying liberalism with science letting liberal science deniers off the hooK of being science deniers? On nuclear power in the hands of man, particularly man with a profit motive, I'm absolutely denying science has anything to do with whether nuclear power should be used for energy production. It is the greed and power based attitudes of those who gravitate to profit and control that tip my dials toward "DON'T DO IT" even in Germany.

So as well reasoned and cogent as bilby's positions be they can't win the argument about whether man should use nuclear power for energy production.

Sure - but energy must be produced. So how would you have profit driven humans do that? Given that every single option that's ever been tried that's not nuclear fission has led to more deaths and injuries, and more environmental damage, than nuclear fission power has.

Sure, it might be that some new and unforeseen disaster could befall a nuclear plant; But we can see from Chernobyl that this is both unlikely (one in forty years across a fleet of poorly designed and run Soviet reactors; or one in sixty five years across the worldwide fleet) and not hugely disastrous - Chernobyl killed at most a couple of hundred people. And it's hard to see how some future accident could do more to expose the public than a completely uncontained core fire that spread half the reactor's nuclear inventory across the surrounding countryside while officials chose to do nothing at all to protect the locals because they were still trying to deny anything was wrong.

I mean, seriously, any other industry would absolutely love to have such an exemplary record over more than six decades.

Contemporary with Chernobyl, we have the Piper Alpha gas pumping platform fire and explosion, which killed more people than Chernobyl, and which was the largest insured loss due to a single accident in history. By using nuclear, instead of gas, we could have saved a lot of lives, even if Piper Alpha was (like Chernobyl) a one in many decades kind of thing. But deadly gas explosions and/or fires are not rare. They happen all the time.

And coal power kills so many people in the normal course of operations (not when there's an extraordinary accident), that to match coal power for deadliness, there would need to be a Chernobyl more than once a week, somewhere in the world.

If mankind cannot be trusted with nuclear power, they sure as shit can't be trusted with any other way of making electricity. And not having electricity at all would kill billions in fairly short order, so that's not an option either.

Nuclear fission is by far the least worst option. No matter how many tales you can find of actual or potential accidents in the nuclear power industry, they are dwarfed by the number of fatalities and potential fatalities in other generation technologies. Even wind and solar lead to more deaths per unit of power generation than nuclear. In the real world. Where those untrustworthy humans fuck shit up and fight for profits with worker's and third party's lives.

You are simply applying a double standard - nuclear power must be perfect, and cannot be; But you don't demand perfection from the alternatives - and if you did, you would see that they are even worse.

 

[barbos]

Dude, I have PhD in physics, no need for this manspaining, especially when you are wrong.
Coal Ash is only dangerous when it gets into the air, flies away, and precipitates somewhere where food is grown or water is collected. Ash is essentially very finely milled stone and its radioactivity is equal that of stone, problem is with the fact that it's in the form of fine particles which leach into environment.
Buried ash is not really dangerous but you have to capture it first, It's possible to capture it and I am not sure nukes would win in this case.

Radioactivity of concentrated nuclear waste will not fall to the ambient level for millions and millions of years, so your math about amount of space is wrong too. You either have to dilute it in some inert and stable substance and use a lot of space, or you can keep it in concentrated form but make sure nobody disturbs it for millions of years. Germans are not wrong.

The fly ash has has a lot of heavy metals.

And note that I specified that the waste was properly reprocessed. Said waste decays to ambient in 10,000 years--those long-lived isotopes with a reasonable amount of radioactivity went back into the fuel supply, not into the waste. And like the fly ash, it's completely harmless unless it gets loose somehow.

Isotopes of plutonium have a half-life up to 25,000 years, and some elements have half-life into millions of years, So, no, nuclear waste will not become ambient.
And from a practical point of view 10,000 is the same as 1 mil. You can't keep it stored in some facility, you have bury it deep under ground.
Reprocessing/recycling can only reduce amount of waste it does not eliminate it.

Nuclear waste IS a problem.

The ongoing controversy over high-level radioactive waste disposal is a major constraint on the nuclear power's global expansion.[40] Most scientists agree that the main proposed long-term solution is deep geological burial, either in a mine or a deep borehole.[

 

[skepticalbip]

But the longer the half life the less dangerous it is. Protons have been calculated to have a half life of 10³² years and no one is concerned about being exposed to radiation from decaying protons that are everywhere. It is the short half life shit that poses the greatest threat, at least until they decay.

 

[barbos]

But the longer the half life the less dangerous it is.

Actually it's opposite in practice. Short lived isotopes are less dangerous because you can simply wait until they decay.
Long lived, even very long lived ones are active enough to kill you instantly if you have enough of it.
For example, 1 micro-gram of of some isotope with mass=100 and half-time 100 years will have :
6e23*log(2.)/(100.*365*24*3600)/100./1e6 = 1318773.17458133 decays per second
That's 1.3 million decays per second, typical background radiation count is 1 hertz.
so even with half life 100,000 years 1ugram would still be 1300 times above background.

 

[skepticalbip]

so even with half life 100,000 years 1ugram would still be 2000 times above background.

And if it had a shorter half life of 10,000 years, the radiation would be much, much higher.

 

[bilby]

But the longer the half life the less dangerous it is.

Actually it's opposite in practice. Short lived isotopes are less dangerous because you can simply wait until they decay.
Long lived, even very long lived ones are active enough to kill you instantly if you have enough of it.
For example, 1 micro-gram of of some isotope with mass=100 and half-time 100 years will have 6e23/(100.*365*24*3600)/100./1e6 = 1902587.51902588 decays per second
That's 2 million decays per second, typical background radiation count is 1 hertz.
so even with half life 100,000 years 1ugram would still be 2000 times above background.

The Bq is so insignificant that it's widely called the 'Buggerall'

A typical adult human has a radioactivity of about 8,000 Bq (or Hz, if you prefer).

And if you're interested in the impact on human health, you need to talk Sv; The raw decay rate is pretty uninformative.

You need to be exposed to at least 100mSv/year to show any detectable health risk. This is not particularly easy to arrange, particularly not via spent nuclear fuel.

 

[barbos]

But the longer the half life the less dangerous it is.

Actually it's opposite in practice. Short lived isotopes are less dangerous because you can simply wait until they decay.
Long lived, even very long lived ones are active enough to kill you instantly if you have enough of it.
For example, 1 micro-gram of of some isotope with mass=100 and half-time 100 years will have 6e23/(100.*365*24*3600)/100./1e6 = 1902587.51902588 decays per second
That's 2 million decays per second, typical background radiation count is 1 hertz.
so even with half life 100,000 years 1ugram would still be 2000 times above background.

The Bq is so insignificant that it's widely called the 'Buggerall'

A typical adult human has a radioactivity of about 8,000 Bq (or Hz, if you prefer).

And if you're interested in the impact on human health, you need to talk Sv; The raw decay rate is pretty uninformative.

You need to be exposed to at least 100mSv/year to show any detectable health risk. This is not particularly easy to arrange, particularly not via spent nuclear fuel.

Yes, human body is big enough and have enough radioactive elements to have 8000 decays per second.
But I can assure you that beta source which can do 2000 Hz are tightly controlled and accounted.
And again, this is 1 ugram of HL=100,000 years, 100 years will be 250x normal level human body gets.

 

[barbos]

so even with half life 100,000 years 1ugram would still be 2000 times above background.

And if it had a shorter half life of 10,000 years, the radiation would be much, much higher.

10 times higher. The point is, from a point of view of waste management there is no difference between 100,000 and 1000.
Both are deadly and in both cases you can't wait for it to decay.

 

[fromderinside]

Nuclear fission is by far the least worst option. No matter how many tales you can find of actual or potential accidents in the nuclear power industry, they are dwarfed by the number of fatalities and potential fatalities in other generation technologies. Even wind and solar lead to more deaths per unit of power generation than nuclear. In the real world. Where those untrustworthy humans fuck shit up and fight for profits with worker's and third party's lives.

You are simply applying a double standard - nuclear power must be perfect, and cannot be; But you don't demand perfection from the alternatives - and if you did, you would see that they are even worse.

First energy need not be produced. Billions of people are 'living' without benefit of it.

I don't give a rat's shit if it is the only solution. Man simply can't avoid fearing it more than he can appreciate benefiting from it. It's not about objective criteria at all. It's about human nature, which as an evolved being, I can assure you, is suicidal. As for double standards ask yourself why you insist on an objective answer when you clearly know humans are not objectively oriented.

Ask yourself this simple question. Why did philosophy not build upon objective observation and material manipulation when it is obvious humans were using both to great benefit thousands of years prior to Philosophy's founding fathers laying out rational argument. It's obvious. Objective argument was not what powered humans intellectual pursuits. That was Business and Engineering stuff that spoke for itself, was routine, was unworthy of systematizing at the time.

Things are no different now even though we have the scientific method front and center to some. The method is known to a miniscule minority of humans and it is of almost no value when making portentous decisions about society. How do people feel is operative. What can be objectively demonstrated is not so much.

As example: How does one explain liberal medicine deniers, One doesn't. Their fear of unknowns and their ability to insert bogus 'reasons' exceed their ability to make objective judgements. It's been obvious to me that I am not being objective when I throw up argument off point, out of fear from experiences, make special pleadings. I do this from fear and I know that fear is operative when considering political decisions.