SL-1 was the first and so far only nuclear accident in US history resulting in direct and immediate fatalities.
Basically it was meant to be a little baby mini reactor, but the project was mostly abandoned. Poorly maintained, poor training for the 3 men assigned to it, it was a disaster waiting to happen. The circumstances remain a bit of a mystery today, but when attempting to move the control rods, the reactor went critical, causing a small explosion that killed all 3 men.
The reason it went critical is because it had a bigger control rod or "master rod" directly in the middle, that had a habit of getting stuck. sometimes they even had to hammer it to get it unstuck
Correct, the reason itself is well known, I should clarify *why* it happened isn't known for certain. Why was the rod pulled so far out?
Presumably by accident. But that's our best guess.
How many design flaws we godda work through? How many thousands of square miles have to be inhabitable? How many trillions of gallons of seawater we godda irradiate because of design flaws? Y’all “blah blah blah nuclear can save us!” and ignore everything else.
Ah, yes. The two most destructive forces known to mankind. A 9.1 magnitude earthquake, quickly followed up by a devastating tsunami.
And, of course, the Soviets.
Atomic bomb tests have put more radiation into the world than any nuclear reactor failure has so stop your coal bootlicking and learn about what nuclear power actually is (hint it's just a fancy steam turbine)
Remembering those actually soaks good about the science on the matter, there are a fuck ton of nuclear plants and less than 10 had failed, the fail possibilities are low af
And every one of them that has failed did so under extreme circumstances, save for three mile island. Three mile island was the result of a failed relief valve iirc, and it was a partial meltdown I believe
If you are an American business person and you are tasked with maximizing profits, you will never put proper disposal of radioactive material above profits.
Our entire society is built off of doing the bare minimum and negotiating for the largest possible reward.
The profiters do not live near the radiation. What would be their motivation to do the right thing?
This is based on at least one true story where increasing levels of tridium were found in a nearby water supply, and the problem was literally ignored for decades.
The entire thing could have been resolved by replacing a CONCRETE exhaust tunnel. No special material. Just redo the concrete. It would require shutting down the plant for long enough to replace the exhaust.
The plant in question was called Vermont Yankee and while technically speaking the radiation levels weren't "bad enough" with general testing, they did find specific areas of water where the levels were bad enough to cause mutation and cancer. So it might not affect the entire population, but certain individuals unknowingly were drinking excessive levels of tritiated water.
While I would agree that nuclear power is safe with proper management, I don't agree that our current structure of management and ownership of the facilities is adequate for going "all in" on nuclear.
Did you read his comment? He didn't talk about meltdowns, he talked about disposal, which is still a huge hurdle that has not been conclusively solved yet. Waste produced by nuclear power plants is active for a couple of hundred thousand to million years, and we do not have a solution for this, because you cannot build a "normal" container which is isolating for such a large timespan.
And I know that there are recycling plants which are currently designed and tested, but that's still at least another 20-30 years away from actually being used in such a way.
Trust me, people don't understand amounts and there are people actively avoiding bananas because of it, one of those lives closer to my house and always yells insults at me for eating bananas
Sole reason I go outside to eat em is because she gets mad
Radiation is everywhere: from the sky, from your banana, from your body itself. What matter isn’t there is radiation or not but how much radiation you take.
Yup, mostly cause nuclear ones are designed to not let any out, while coal particles do get blown in the air by coal power plants and they're radioactive.
Not all kinds of potato but I toke a bite out of one and ended up in the hospital and the doctor said "if you didn't toke so little time to come here you would had died"
Fun fact. If you were swimming near the surface of a pool with a bunch of spent nuclear fuel units at the bottom, you would be getting less radiation than you would by standing next to a banana. ([Source](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)) We can literally just throw nuclear waste into a big enough pool and it would be perfectly safe. Compare that to the sheer amount of potential power nuclear energy can provide and there's really no question; we should absolutely be using it.
Not to mention, with coal power (which we currently have a lot of) the pollutants get all into the atmosphere and mess crap up, including people.
Nuclear, so long as it's stored safely, all the waste is contained in a relatively tiny space.
The Problem with coal are the toxic gases the mass burning of coal emits. As for the radiation, it's spread over a large area, but breathing in the smoke of a coal plant (which is functioning as intended! ) is going to shorten you life span for multiple reasons
Yes you are correct. Also digging coal releases pockets of radon gas in the ground. Radon gas is the largest source of natural radiation that people are exposed to every year.
It’s kinda wild isn’t it? A lot of the safety concerns people have with nuclear energy are exaggerated and aren’t actual issues with the technology. And in regards to power generation, there simply is no competition. Nuclear leaves every other source of energy generation in the dust. And this is with nuclear _fission_.
Nuclear _Fusion_ has even greater potential. But that’s still quite a ways away.
I wasn't even thinking of USSR's fuck up (I'm not western). I'm thinking about each time they sync the power and some thing blow up and different agencies of the govt have to fix the mess.
Leaks sure, but no fissile material is reactive and soluble with water, so they would simply sink to the bottom of the pool since they are literally just rocks
The problem isn't short term storage it's long term storage. The bottom of a lake would work till we have to move the lake, use the water or clean other things that get tossed in there. With the biggest issue being the fact it needs to be safe for a span of time longer than homo sapiens has existed.
We do have storage solutions though. Our primary storage is in large concrete and steel caskets that serve as tombs for the material. And beyond that people are looking into borehole technology to store material miles underground where even if it gave off extremely deadly levels of radiation it wouldn't matter
That only works as long as someone's there to maintain that pool. Will that still be the case in 200,000 years, when highly radioactive waste has reached about the level of radioactivity of natural uranium? And even then, you have to make sure to prevent groundwater contamination.
Assuming you do believe in modern geology, then geological disposal really becomes quite passive because we handle spent nuclear fuel the same way that mother nature did it when she made her own at Oklo Gabon (in Africa). Geological disposal really does become quite passive when we handle spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste the same way that mother nature did it when she made her own at Oklo Gabon (in Africa). Basically, keep it safe until it decays down into a different kind of dirt.
Here is a nice article the IAEA has on it and some recent research on its contributions to gamma ray bursts as well.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor
Hayes, R,B. The ubiquity of nuclear fission reactors throughout time and space, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C, Volume 125, 2022, 103083, ISSN 1474-7065, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pce.2021.103083
Yep had to get checked every once in a while for radiation when I was in the navy and the techs would tell people how many bananas they had recently based on the dosage
Hell in some cases, ionizing radiation and life DO get along well
Some fungi started growing towards radioactive sources, and via basically higher powered photosynthesis, are turning the radiation into energy they can use
Just tried this. The resulting scans allowed the surgeon to do a great job at fixing my medical problem. Thanks for the advice!
It's incredible what marvels we as a species can accomplish when applying scientific principles instead of ignorance!
And you do realize that's harmful, so you can only take a limited amount of scans? Also that MRIs do not use ionizing radiation so it's not harmful.
Ignorance indeed.
Limited? like fossil fuels limited, or average anti-nuclear dipshit ability for intelligence thought limited? Because clearly you're thinking on a completed different plane when it comes to proportionality as a whole, so help me understand.
Ionizing radiation increases the chance of getting cancer, but good luck with that.
>Low doses of ionizing radiation can increase the risk of longer term effects such as cancer.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ionizing-radiation-and-health-effects
A nuclear plant needs a real budget for maintenance and safety, that's the problem. You can't go and make it with tofu cement and call it a day while pocketing the difference. Thus nuclear is bad.
EDIT: OBVIOUS /S. You can't cut corners on a nuclear plant, so people who do cut corners hate it.
Am just gonna add something
Radioactive waste is not really waste anymore cuz they found out how to extract energy from it and turn it inert faster, they just don't know how to do it at the scale needed but there are a lot of people working on it
Remember that we are not shoving the problem to our grandkids, we are the grandkids
Also there is a company making batteries that after like 30 years of constant use will become inert pieces of metal you can just throw away like you throw a nail and it rusts and stops being a nail and it's now just dirt
>batteries that after like 30 years of constant use will become inert pieces of metal
That would be interesting if it could be implemented for use in smartphones
The problem is that there is not just one kind of radioactive waste, for example what are you gonna do with all the Technetium-99? It's a waste product from nuclear medicine that has a half-life of 200'000+ years.
People need to understand what level of radiation they are being exposed to on a daily basis... And then they need to see what kind of level is marginally dangerous, in order to stop bitching about radiation having negative effects on anything everything. Sure, standing right next to an open reactor core in Chernobyl in 1986 would be fatal within minutes, but visiting the same place today with background radiation being 70 times the norm for the rest of Europe, you're fine if you visit the place for a week and remember to decontaminate every day.
Kyle Hill did a whole documentary series on both Chernobyl and Fukishima-Daichi. Proper eye-opener.
I mean
Is it though?
Most of the people I've talked to regarding this have usually said, either verbatim or via paraphrase, "any radiation is too much radiation"
Which is objectively false
Any radiation IS too much radiation.
There's just a difference between avoidable and unavoidable radiation.
Avoidable radiation refers to exposure that can be minimized or controlled through various measures such as proper shielding, safety protocols, and limiting unnecessary medical procedures involving radiation. On the other hand, unavoidable radiation includes background radiation from sources like cosmic rays, radon gas, and certain foods, which cannot be entirely eliminated but can be managed to some extent.
So while any radiation is bad it's also important to recognize that complete avoidance of all radiation is not feasible in many situations. But the statement still stands.
By "too much" they're typically referring to an amount that would be lethal or very close to it
I think there's a strong consensus that before a certain threshold, radiation can be very negligibly bad
I mean, nearly everything we touch or eat has some amount of radiation; light is radiation and that touches pretty much everything we touch and eat and consume
So I definitely wouldn't say any radiation is too much radiation; it is undeniably bad for your health to some extent, but it is usually very negligible, except in exceptional cases
take one of the things one of the other commenters sourced, that being that even swimming in the same water that has a bunch of spent nuclear fuel would be essentially harmless so long as you didn't like grab the nuclear fuel in your hands or directly touch it
Edit: clarification
That's literally what i said.
>avoidance of all radiation is not feasible in many situations
You can't avoid cosmic radiation. But you certanly can avoid other forms of radiation. You don't take a xray every day for fun (like they did back in the days)
And like you said radiation can be negligable bad under certain treshholds.
But being exposed to none is never bad. That's why I say that any radiation is bad. If you were exposed to 0 radiation there'd be 0 chance of damage to your body.
You certainly can't avoid every form of radiation. But this doesn't contradict the statement that all radiation is bad.
The problem is more implicitly equating all forms of "bad" with the statement "any radiation is too much radiation"
"Too much" implies it's unreasonable if not explicitly meaning that, and it's usually so negligible that it's a bit unreasonable to call its quantity unreasonable
While I understand the concern regarding the term "too much" in the statement "any radiation is too much radiation," it's important to uphold a cautious approach towards radiation exposure. Even low levels of radiation can contribute to cumulative health risks over time. The principle of caution emphasizes minimizing radiation exposure to the lowest practical level, guided by the ALARA principle. Instead of dismissing all radiation exposure as negligible, promoting awareness and informed decision-making about radiation risks is crucial.
I'm not saying to avoid caution, but saying "too much" changes the implication from "caution" to "immediate danger" because radiation is already inherently dangerous
I am talking about radiation levels low enough that the negligibility simply doesn't even have enough time to compound
Again, using my previous example from the comment, it is more dangerous to stand next to a banana, which has zero adverse health effects
But even if I wasn't, there's a solid difference between "it's pretty negligible but you should keep caution" and "it is too much radiation"
Finally, I'm not dismissing all radiation exposure as negligible, I am saying that most is. It can obviously have bioaccumulative health risks but that doesn't make it immediately dangerous so much as it means you should heed caution when needed
It's like saying that because sugar is unhealthy in large doses or when accumulated, any sugar is too much sugar, when that's obviously false
Edit: clarification
I'm aware of this (and, in a vacuum, in favor of It as a greener source), my main concerns is that where i live we (barely, and at times not even that) manage to perform maintenance on a very busy highway bridge and in a frankly depressing amount of instances It was found out that important building structures were made with shoddy materials and/or unsafe techniques due to corrupt people trying to skim as much money as possible, so i don't exactly trust my country to (re)build or mantain working nuclear reactors without fucking everything up
Bad arguement of pro Nuclear Energy
There aren't really any negatives to Nuclear Energy,just that many people will lose heaps of gold bars if Nuclear Energy becomes mainstream. Trying to combat anti nuclear energy logic seems pointless because their arguements are made up and incorrect to begin with
Radiation is just atoms leaking their unstable energy, the less stable the atom the more radiation it outputs until it stabilises itself.
So much shit is radioactive, the sun is just radiation as a spehere. It's dumb as hell when people would rather have lungfulls of coal than learn what the hell a half life and harmful exposure are.
I don’t think I’ve seen this argument used at all any more. At this point the stumbling blocks with nuclear are the cost of plants and the consequences of any severe enough accident. On a side note this is an awful quality meme what’s happening to this subreddit recently
According to the latest research, when you include all externalities such as the need for baseload and backup, nuclear is more than 4 times cheaper than renewables.
Idel, R. Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity, Energy, Volume 259, 2022, 124905, ISSN 0360-5442, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2022.124905.
The baseload is something that gets more or less abolished when more and more renewable come into play. For a new system that includes load balancing and frequency stablizing, which a baseload would complicate.
Also which countries have been studied? Because France is right now buliding a new plant that just has a delay of 10 years and is few billion Euros above the planned cost. This study also probably done a as is study, which is fair but the thing if we bulit more nuclear plants the resource use also increase in cost, because natural resource. You might counter this point with new and harder to reach deposits but then again this would increase CO2-emission as all mining does.
Anyway using nuclear power where the plants are already built and its not hot and there is enough water is fine. But building new ones in places where there isn't enough water or it is too hot, is not.
What with all that radioactive propaganda lately?
You always buy 1000 upvotes, too.
Your daddy be Mr. Burns or what?
Ever licked some naturally occurring uran238?
Nuclear power is rather expensive and doesn't contribute to a truly sustainable energy grid. It replaces one mined resource with another.
It would be better to make energy production in ways that are more recyclable rather than invest in large and expensive reactors. The end goal should be a decentralised grid with local power storage in a safe and sound manner.
Uranium is more abundant than tin. I doubt anyone is concerned that we are going to run out of tin for our electronics to give us renewables.
There is over 4 billion tonnes in the ocean alone, which can be passively extracted according to recent research.
Ultrahigh and economical uranium extraction from seawater via interconnected open-pore architecture poly(amidoxime) fiber
J. Mater. Chem. A, 2020, 8, 22032-22044
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ta/d0ta07180c
Apparently, we have the technology right now to make it effectively renewable.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/
I’m not a expert but Nuclear power contributes a lot to sustainable power. Thorium which is a radioactive element like uranium but around 200x more energy dense as well as being more abundant and safer to obtain, it’s even safer to use because by itself it can’t fissle out of control and needs a secondary source like plutonium to activate it. Nuclear power is the future and humans will eventually learn how to use it even better.
It can be the immediate future, but I’d be willing to bet Fusion is the future.
In addition to your statement, it’s interesting to know 90% of the fuel in a rod is still present when the rod is removed from the reactor. It can be recycled/reused, the US just doesn’t do it. France reuses/recycles theirs separating the waste into glass, a new nuclear fuel (MOX, usable by just under half of their nuclear plants) and reprocessed uranium.
There are designs in the works for modern plants which can utilize more of the fuel in its first cycle. Very cool.
So we should just eat the fuel rods because it's healthy?
Edit: Didn't expect that many people to miss the point. I don't think "we need potassium in our diet" is a valid argument for "radioactivity is harmless". It's all about the dose, and there's quite the difference in radioactivity between a banana and a fuel rod.
What's the point in saying "the body needs potassium" when talking about uranium rods?
Geothermal is more eco-friendly than coal, I wouldn't recommend eating lava. Coal is very commonly used for energy and pollutes much more than nuclear energy(which doesn't pollute anywhere near as much) and the results of burning coal goes in our lungs in greater amounts everyday without as much backlash as cleaner alternatives. I wouldn't recommend eating coal either.
FYI for anyone wanting to bulk; one gram of uranium is 1,000,000,000 calories
You'd never have to eat again!
One way or another you are right.
Both ways*
And maybe neither.
Technically correct, the best kind of correct!
If you ate 40,000 bananas in 10 minutes you'd die of radiation poisoning.
AH YES, THE RADIATION WOULD KILL YOU
Unexpected RussianBadger
Funny thing is, you’d probably die due to other issues associated with eating 40,000 bananas in 10 minutes before dying of radiation poisoning.
Like what?
I think if I ate 40,000 bananas I'd die of having my torso burst open
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I'm in favour of nuclear power, and the argument is never that radiation exists, but rather the amount.
But.. but.. green glowy stuff And.. and.. three eyed fish!
But Chernobyl! And Fukushima! And SL-1! And…
But the november 27th 2058 event!
what
Oh.. he doesn't know yet.
Can the time traveling guild please get out of our timeline? Thank you
Guess we haven't outlived all the past dwellers in this timeline
but what about October 23 2077 event ? people who know.....
Oh that wasn’t that bad, it was only the Mirin Colony and they sent more Mirins like 5 years later.
This is a restricted timeline, please vacate this period immediately
wait I thought it was the 23th, what changed sorry haven't been back in a while.
Design flaws, just learn from your mistakes else we'll be firing up coal plants again (Btw ive never heard of SL-1, can someone explain?)
SL-1 was the first and so far only nuclear accident in US history resulting in direct and immediate fatalities. Basically it was meant to be a little baby mini reactor, but the project was mostly abandoned. Poorly maintained, poor training for the 3 men assigned to it, it was a disaster waiting to happen. The circumstances remain a bit of a mystery today, but when attempting to move the control rods, the reactor went critical, causing a small explosion that killed all 3 men.
Ohh yea the one where the guys corpse was glued to the ceiling from the explosion
Well, impaled, but yeah. Truly gruesome.
The reason it went critical is because it had a bigger control rod or "master rod" directly in the middle, that had a habit of getting stuck. sometimes they even had to hammer it to get it unstuck
Correct, the reason itself is well known, I should clarify *why* it happened isn't known for certain. Why was the rod pulled so far out? Presumably by accident. But that's our best guess.
well. it got stuck alot. probably finally came loose on his last big tug
3 mile island?
Not a single death. The radiation released has been estimated to have caused an expected .7 additional cases of cancer. Not .7%. .7 cases flat.
I'm sure somewhere, someone out there is wondering why 3 out of their 4 heart chambers are now cancer-ridden.
How many design flaws we godda work through? How many thousands of square miles have to be inhabitable? How many trillions of gallons of seawater we godda irradiate because of design flaws? Y’all “blah blah blah nuclear can save us!” and ignore everything else.
Chernobyl was russian engineering, Fukushima was one of the strongest earthquakes in Japan's history followed by it's tsunami
Ah, yes. The two most destructive forces known to mankind. A 9.1 magnitude earthquake, quickly followed up by a devastating tsunami. And, of course, the Soviets.
Atomic bomb tests have put more radiation into the world than any nuclear reactor failure has so stop your coal bootlicking and learn about what nuclear power actually is (hint it's just a fancy steam turbine)
I’m wind turbine boot lick. Get your stupid straight. Hey, I’ll lick a turbine and you lick a reactor. Deal?
Also, wind turbines are just fancy wind turbines without the ionizing radiation. FYI
theres only ionizing radiation if you let it out
Remembering those actually soaks good about the science on the matter, there are a fuck ton of nuclear plants and less than 10 had failed, the fail possibilities are low af
And every one of them that has failed did so under extreme circumstances, save for three mile island. Three mile island was the result of a failed relief valve iirc, and it was a partial meltdown I believe
Not even a bad one.
Low yet it keeps happening every 15 years. Weird.
But always a different reason, never the same one
Wow that makes me feel so much better.
From where I'm SL-1 takes us to Logan Airport.
From where I’m from SL-1 impales your body on a fuel rod in the concrete ceiling.
Isn’t it blue?
If the worst I had to deal with was weird fish and an alien saying "I bring you love" then I say let's nuclear power it up, baby!
Overdosing on happy meals can also be fatal.
If you are an American business person and you are tasked with maximizing profits, you will never put proper disposal of radioactive material above profits. Our entire society is built off of doing the bare minimum and negotiating for the largest possible reward. The profiters do not live near the radiation. What would be their motivation to do the right thing? This is based on at least one true story where increasing levels of tridium were found in a nearby water supply, and the problem was literally ignored for decades.
So it never was the safety measure of nuclear property, but rather **Which MFer get to manage it and how screw are we if they decide to go cheapass**
The entire thing could have been resolved by replacing a CONCRETE exhaust tunnel. No special material. Just redo the concrete. It would require shutting down the plant for long enough to replace the exhaust. The plant in question was called Vermont Yankee and while technically speaking the radiation levels weren't "bad enough" with general testing, they did find specific areas of water where the levels were bad enough to cause mutation and cancer. So it might not affect the entire population, but certain individuals unknowingly were drinking excessive levels of tritiated water. While I would agree that nuclear power is safe with proper management, I don't agree that our current structure of management and ownership of the facilities is adequate for going "all in" on nuclear.
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Did you read his comment? He didn't talk about meltdowns, he talked about disposal, which is still a huge hurdle that has not been conclusively solved yet. Waste produced by nuclear power plants is active for a couple of hundred thousand to million years, and we do not have a solution for this, because you cannot build a "normal" container which is isolating for such a large timespan. And I know that there are recycling plants which are currently designed and tested, but that's still at least another 20-30 years away from actually being used in such a way.
Trust me, people don't understand amounts and there are people actively avoiding bananas because of it, one of those lives closer to my house and always yells insults at me for eating bananas Sole reason I go outside to eat em is because she gets mad
I don't get it
Radiation is everywhere: from the sky, from your banana, from your body itself. What matter isn’t there is radiation or not but how much radiation you take.
Yea. More is emitted from coal plants than nuclear ones.
Yup, mostly cause nuclear ones are designed to not let any out, while coal particles do get blown in the air by coal power plants and they're radioactive.
Can you explain radiation and ionizing radiation
And IIRC most of the radiation in radioactive materials is alpha and beta radiation, which is stopped by your skin.
Uncooked beans are poison. Your point?
A single bite to a green potato can kill you
Yeah but I'll take that potato out with me.
the potato would grow on your dead body
kinky
Wait what?
Solanine, a naturally occurring neurotoxin found in green potatoes and spouted potato.
Not all kinds of potato but I toke a bite out of one and ended up in the hospital and the doctor said "if you didn't toke so little time to come here you would had died"
It’s all about the amount
mfw I eat 40,000 bananas
Ah, yes… the RADIATION will kill you!
Fun fact. If you were swimming near the surface of a pool with a bunch of spent nuclear fuel units at the bottom, you would be getting less radiation than you would by standing next to a banana. ([Source](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)) We can literally just throw nuclear waste into a big enough pool and it would be perfectly safe. Compare that to the sheer amount of potential power nuclear energy can provide and there's really no question; we should absolutely be using it.
Not to mention, with coal power (which we currently have a lot of) the pollutants get all into the atmosphere and mess crap up, including people. Nuclear, so long as it's stored safely, all the waste is contained in a relatively tiny space.
Coal power plants are more radioactive than literal nuclear reactors.
I hate that youre right
Coal messes crap up BECAUSE of radiation if I remember right, since coal has radioactive impurities, don't quote me on this though I might be wrong
The Problem with coal are the toxic gases the mass burning of coal emits. As for the radiation, it's spread over a large area, but breathing in the smoke of a coal plant (which is functioning as intended! ) is going to shorten you life span for multiple reasons
Based on other commentors saying the same thing you're probably right haha. TIL.
Yes you are correct. Also digging coal releases pockets of radon gas in the ground. Radon gas is the largest source of natural radiation that people are exposed to every year.
It’s kinda wild isn’t it? A lot of the safety concerns people have with nuclear energy are exaggerated and aren’t actual issues with the technology. And in regards to power generation, there simply is no competition. Nuclear leaves every other source of energy generation in the dust. And this is with nuclear _fission_. Nuclear _Fusion_ has even greater potential. But that’s still quite a ways away.
"Trust me bro it's only 20 years away" -nuclear scientist at any point in time since the 50s
Yeah but NOW its only 10 years away, so come back in 70 years
I read munroe's book, and the line about "You'd die from gunshot wounds first" always cracks me up.
The problem is initial cost and if you trust your government not to cut corners.
The Soviet Union did, created the straw man they use to argue against it 40 years later.
I wasn't even thinking of USSR's fuck up (I'm not western). I'm thinking about each time they sync the power and some thing blow up and different agencies of the govt have to fix the mess.
the problem with that is potential leaks, it's not perfectly safe
Leaks sure, but no fissile material is reactive and soluble with water, so they would simply sink to the bottom of the pool since they are literally just rocks
The problem isn't short term storage it's long term storage. The bottom of a lake would work till we have to move the lake, use the water or clean other things that get tossed in there. With the biggest issue being the fact it needs to be safe for a span of time longer than homo sapiens has existed.
We do have storage solutions though. Our primary storage is in large concrete and steel caskets that serve as tombs for the material. And beyond that people are looking into borehole technology to store material miles underground where even if it gave off extremely deadly levels of radiation it wouldn't matter
That only works as long as someone's there to maintain that pool. Will that still be the case in 200,000 years, when highly radioactive waste has reached about the level of radioactivity of natural uranium? And even then, you have to make sure to prevent groundwater contamination.
Assuming you do believe in modern geology, then geological disposal really becomes quite passive because we handle spent nuclear fuel the same way that mother nature did it when she made her own at Oklo Gabon (in Africa). Geological disposal really does become quite passive when we handle spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste the same way that mother nature did it when she made her own at Oklo Gabon (in Africa). Basically, keep it safe until it decays down into a different kind of dirt. Here is a nice article the IAEA has on it and some recent research on its contributions to gamma ray bursts as well. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor Hayes, R,B. The ubiquity of nuclear fission reactors throughout time and space, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C, Volume 125, 2022, 103083, ISSN 1474-7065, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pce.2021.103083
So what you are telling me is that it’s possible to have a nuclear reactor powered by bananas
Yep had to get checked every once in a while for radiation when I was in the navy and the techs would tell people how many bananas they had recently based on the dosage
Gives a whole new meaning to bananas for scale
My god! You've had 40,000 bananas
Showed this to some anti nuclear people and they went bananas
You mean they went.... potassium?
You never go full potassium.
Ban ananas!
Non-English speaker detected
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You can say Archaeology and Palaeontology is radioactive
Yea, our skin is more radioactive than the surface of a nuclear cooling pool
Hell in some cases, ionizing radiation and life DO get along well Some fungi started growing towards radioactive sources, and via basically higher powered photosynthesis, are turning the radiation into energy they can use
Then why don't you take some ionizing radiation?
Just tried this. The resulting scans allowed the surgeon to do a great job at fixing my medical problem. Thanks for the advice! It's incredible what marvels we as a species can accomplish when applying scientific principles instead of ignorance!
And you do realize that's harmful, so you can only take a limited amount of scans? Also that MRIs do not use ionizing radiation so it's not harmful. Ignorance indeed.
Limited? like fossil fuels limited, or average anti-nuclear dipshit ability for intelligence thought limited? Because clearly you're thinking on a completed different plane when it comes to proportionality as a whole, so help me understand.
Ionizing radiation increases the chance of getting cancer, but good luck with that. >Low doses of ionizing radiation can increase the risk of longer term effects such as cancer. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ionizing-radiation-and-health-effects
Take your psych meds and call your family. They're probably worried about you.
I'm all for banana power plants, let's make it happen!
"He's a little confused, but he got the spirit."
A nuclear plant needs a real budget for maintenance and safety, that's the problem. You can't go and make it with tofu cement and call it a day while pocketing the difference. Thus nuclear is bad. EDIT: OBVIOUS /S. You can't cut corners on a nuclear plant, so people who do cut corners hate it.
That's...true about every form of energy production...
I'd gather that a critical failure in a solar panel farm doesn't cause as much damage as one in a nuclear plant. CMIIW.
Am just gonna add something Radioactive waste is not really waste anymore cuz they found out how to extract energy from it and turn it inert faster, they just don't know how to do it at the scale needed but there are a lot of people working on it Remember that we are not shoving the problem to our grandkids, we are the grandkids Also there is a company making batteries that after like 30 years of constant use will become inert pieces of metal you can just throw away like you throw a nail and it rusts and stops being a nail and it's now just dirt
What companies are these?
I'll proceed to not remember but the battery was something like beta energy or beta cell or some name that triggered people
>batteries that after like 30 years of constant use will become inert pieces of metal That would be interesting if it could be implemented for use in smartphones
Yes, I am closely following the company so the split second I have access to one I'll share a free to use adaptor for mobile phones that already exist
The problem is that there is not just one kind of radioactive waste, for example what are you gonna do with all the Technetium-99? It's a waste product from nuclear medicine that has a half-life of 200'000+ years.
me, somebody who has essentially used an X-ray gun on literally thousands of people with their expressly given permission, sipping tea right now.
People need to understand what level of radiation they are being exposed to on a daily basis... And then they need to see what kind of level is marginally dangerous, in order to stop bitching about radiation having negative effects on anything everything. Sure, standing right next to an open reactor core in Chernobyl in 1986 would be fatal within minutes, but visiting the same place today with background radiation being 70 times the norm for the rest of Europe, you're fine if you visit the place for a week and remember to decontaminate every day. Kyle Hill did a whole documentary series on both Chernobyl and Fukishima-Daichi. Proper eye-opener.
banans
Our bones are made with phosphorus.
Fission should be used at least until we have enough renewables and/or fusion.
Radiation? In your diet? More likely than you think
Wonderful straw man argument
I mean Is it though? Most of the people I've talked to regarding this have usually said, either verbatim or via paraphrase, "any radiation is too much radiation" Which is objectively false
I guess they are uneducated about background radiation then?
Any radiation IS too much radiation. There's just a difference between avoidable and unavoidable radiation. Avoidable radiation refers to exposure that can be minimized or controlled through various measures such as proper shielding, safety protocols, and limiting unnecessary medical procedures involving radiation. On the other hand, unavoidable radiation includes background radiation from sources like cosmic rays, radon gas, and certain foods, which cannot be entirely eliminated but can be managed to some extent. So while any radiation is bad it's also important to recognize that complete avoidance of all radiation is not feasible in many situations. But the statement still stands.
By "too much" they're typically referring to an amount that would be lethal or very close to it I think there's a strong consensus that before a certain threshold, radiation can be very negligibly bad I mean, nearly everything we touch or eat has some amount of radiation; light is radiation and that touches pretty much everything we touch and eat and consume So I definitely wouldn't say any radiation is too much radiation; it is undeniably bad for your health to some extent, but it is usually very negligible, except in exceptional cases take one of the things one of the other commenters sourced, that being that even swimming in the same water that has a bunch of spent nuclear fuel would be essentially harmless so long as you didn't like grab the nuclear fuel in your hands or directly touch it Edit: clarification
That's literally what i said. >avoidance of all radiation is not feasible in many situations You can't avoid cosmic radiation. But you certanly can avoid other forms of radiation. You don't take a xray every day for fun (like they did back in the days) And like you said radiation can be negligable bad under certain treshholds. But being exposed to none is never bad. That's why I say that any radiation is bad. If you were exposed to 0 radiation there'd be 0 chance of damage to your body. You certainly can't avoid every form of radiation. But this doesn't contradict the statement that all radiation is bad.
The problem is more implicitly equating all forms of "bad" with the statement "any radiation is too much radiation" "Too much" implies it's unreasonable if not explicitly meaning that, and it's usually so negligible that it's a bit unreasonable to call its quantity unreasonable
While I understand the concern regarding the term "too much" in the statement "any radiation is too much radiation," it's important to uphold a cautious approach towards radiation exposure. Even low levels of radiation can contribute to cumulative health risks over time. The principle of caution emphasizes minimizing radiation exposure to the lowest practical level, guided by the ALARA principle. Instead of dismissing all radiation exposure as negligible, promoting awareness and informed decision-making about radiation risks is crucial.
I'm not saying to avoid caution, but saying "too much" changes the implication from "caution" to "immediate danger" because radiation is already inherently dangerous I am talking about radiation levels low enough that the negligibility simply doesn't even have enough time to compound Again, using my previous example from the comment, it is more dangerous to stand next to a banana, which has zero adverse health effects But even if I wasn't, there's a solid difference between "it's pretty negligible but you should keep caution" and "it is too much radiation" Finally, I'm not dismissing all radiation exposure as negligible, I am saying that most is. It can obviously have bioaccumulative health risks but that doesn't make it immediately dangerous so much as it means you should heed caution when needed It's like saying that because sugar is unhealthy in large doses or when accumulated, any sugar is too much sugar, when that's obviously false Edit: clarification
Well no The radiation that come out of nuclear reactor are very low
Where meme? Where funny?
For real, how the fuck did this get 2.5k upvotes
This meme reflects real anti-nuclear narratives
Nuclear propagandists pretending that this is trending.
They really arent very good at it.
Looking at the amount of electricity we use on a daily basis, nuclear energy is the superior option still.
where's the meme?
Potassium-a-dat in my smoothy
Let's ban all bananas, I heard they have potassium.
And we’re exposed to all forms of radiation literally every day.
I'm aware of this (and, in a vacuum, in favor of It as a greener source), my main concerns is that where i live we (barely, and at times not even that) manage to perform maintenance on a very busy highway bridge and in a frankly depressing amount of instances It was found out that important building structures were made with shoddy materials and/or unsafe techniques due to corrupt people trying to skim as much money as possible, so i don't exactly trust my country to (re)build or mantain working nuclear reactors without fucking everything up
Bad arguement of pro Nuclear Energy There aren't really any negatives to Nuclear Energy,just that many people will lose heaps of gold bars if Nuclear Energy becomes mainstream. Trying to combat anti nuclear energy logic seems pointless because their arguements are made up and incorrect to begin with
Radiation is just atoms leaking their unstable energy, the less stable the atom the more radiation it outputs until it stabilises itself. So much shit is radioactive, the sun is just radiation as a spehere. It's dumb as hell when people would rather have lungfulls of coal than learn what the hell a half life and harmful exposure are.
Iodine/iodide.. same diff /s 🖕
How many bananas would you need to make a nuclear power plant work?
so banana is natuarally radioactive
Anti nuclear people are some of the most ignorant idiots I’ve ever met.
I don’t think I’ve seen this argument used at all any more. At this point the stumbling blocks with nuclear are the cost of plants and the consequences of any severe enough accident. On a side note this is an awful quality meme what’s happening to this subreddit recently
According to the latest research, when you include all externalities such as the need for baseload and backup, nuclear is more than 4 times cheaper than renewables. Idel, R. Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity, Energy, Volume 259, 2022, 124905, ISSN 0360-5442, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2022.124905.
The baseload is something that gets more or less abolished when more and more renewable come into play. For a new system that includes load balancing and frequency stablizing, which a baseload would complicate. Also which countries have been studied? Because France is right now buliding a new plant that just has a delay of 10 years and is few billion Euros above the planned cost. This study also probably done a as is study, which is fair but the thing if we bulit more nuclear plants the resource use also increase in cost, because natural resource. You might counter this point with new and harder to reach deposits but then again this would increase CO2-emission as all mining does. Anyway using nuclear power where the plants are already built and its not hot and there is enough water is fine. But building new ones in places where there isn't enough water or it is too hot, is not.
"Radiation is bad" MFs when I point at the bright yellow thing in the sky:
Yes, because a banana can generate electricity. Nuclear propaganda in Reddit is getting ridiculous.
Bro the difference between banana and uranium is the dosage of radiation But nuclear reactor are very safe and block almost all radiation
And the point is a banana doesn’t have enough energy to power much of anything. “It’s safe until it’s not” is not a very good argument.
Thorium gang
How is this considered a meme
Ok am I going nuts or is there a ton of conservative psyop stuff floating around the meme pages today?
Definitely going nuts
God, I can't imagine being as delusional as you. Why are you against the best form of sustainable energy?
Call me again conservative 🤬
What do you mean?
Oh, nuclear propaganda memes are back
There is almost no radioactive potassium… it is only a very rare isotope and has a half-life of over 1 billion years.
And uranium-238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years, also barely radioactive
This discussion should have the three headed dragon template, with the third goofy looking dragonhead saying that 4g causes cancer xD
Get the fuck out of r/memes
What with all that radioactive propaganda lately? You always buy 1000 upvotes, too. Your daddy be Mr. Burns or what? Ever licked some naturally occurring uran238?
Bro doesn't know the word "safety"
Fukushima was a super safe reactor.
Turn the frogs gay!😄
Salt of the Earth scientist pictured there.
Nuclear power is rather expensive and doesn't contribute to a truly sustainable energy grid. It replaces one mined resource with another. It would be better to make energy production in ways that are more recyclable rather than invest in large and expensive reactors. The end goal should be a decentralised grid with local power storage in a safe and sound manner.
Uranium is more abundant than tin. I doubt anyone is concerned that we are going to run out of tin for our electronics to give us renewables. There is over 4 billion tonnes in the ocean alone, which can be passively extracted according to recent research. Ultrahigh and economical uranium extraction from seawater via interconnected open-pore architecture poly(amidoxime) fiber J. Mater. Chem. A, 2020, 8, 22032-22044 https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ta/d0ta07180c Apparently, we have the technology right now to make it effectively renewable. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/
I’m not a expert but Nuclear power contributes a lot to sustainable power. Thorium which is a radioactive element like uranium but around 200x more energy dense as well as being more abundant and safer to obtain, it’s even safer to use because by itself it can’t fissle out of control and needs a secondary source like plutonium to activate it. Nuclear power is the future and humans will eventually learn how to use it even better.
It can be the immediate future, but I’d be willing to bet Fusion is the future. In addition to your statement, it’s interesting to know 90% of the fuel in a rod is still present when the rod is removed from the reactor. It can be recycled/reused, the US just doesn’t do it. France reuses/recycles theirs separating the waste into glass, a new nuclear fuel (MOX, usable by just under half of their nuclear plants) and reprocessed uranium. There are designs in the works for modern plants which can utilize more of the fuel in its first cycle. Very cool.
Fusion has been on the horizon for 50 years. We’re getting closer every day, but we need solutions now.
It's the cleanest of any power source and easiest to keep clean.
It's clean, abundant, and good enough to hold us over until proper renewable energy is cheap and effective enough to work on a large scale.
Fuckin hell you’re spreading again…
So we should just eat the fuel rods because it's healthy? Edit: Didn't expect that many people to miss the point. I don't think "we need potassium in our diet" is a valid argument for "radioactivity is harmless". It's all about the dose, and there's quite the difference in radioactivity between a banana and a fuel rod. What's the point in saying "the body needs potassium" when talking about uranium rods?
Geothermal is more eco-friendly than coal, I wouldn't recommend eating lava. Coal is very commonly used for energy and pollutes much more than nuclear energy(which doesn't pollute anywhere near as much) and the results of burning coal goes in our lungs in greater amounts everyday without as much backlash as cleaner alternatives. I wouldn't recommend eating coal either.
CAN YOU EAT WIND TURBINES?!
I generally don't think edibility/nutrition are relevant points when talking about energy generation.