
Bags of debris from Fukushima disaster swept away in typhoon - kscarlet
http://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/AJ201910140036.html
======
pgt
I'm sure this washed away debris will have a minimal effect on humanity
overall, but for some people and animals, it might be a life-changing event.

I really want to be a proponent of nuclear, but I don't see how any country
can guarantee political stability for 100+ years. Here in South Africa, the
state-owned Eskom power utility can't even keep our coal plants running for 12
months at a time. With re-election every 4 years and rampant corruption, it
feels like we'll need a new set of laws to govern nuclear power that operates
on longer time scales.

~~~
patio11
This should be a fairly simple calculation: coal kills a lot more people than
nuclear. It has also, over the course of the last 100 years, produced far more
nuclear waste exposed to the environment than nuclear power has (including if
you normalize for power contribution, etc; the numbers aren't close).

~~~
cletus
> coal kills a lot more people than nuclear.

There's so many problems with this statement I barely know where to begin.

1\. Are we talking total or per kWH of generated power?

2\. "Deaths" is a questionable measure. One should look at the environmental
impact of digging up, processing (enriching in the case of nuclear),
transporting and the storage of byproducts from processing (eg UrF6) as well
as spent fuel.

3\. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants
pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to
the point where it's made 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades
(to compare, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is 1000 square miles).

4\. Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument. Coal is terrible. Everyone knows
this. Coal is becoming the power source for the developing world as it is
naturally dying in the developed world, being replaced by renewables and
fossil fuels that while not great, are at least better than coal (eg natural
gas).

5\. How many of the externalities of nuclear power aren't factored into the
price? Like the cost of storage and clean ups. These seem to be borne by
governments not the companies profiting from the power (of course, some
nuclear power in some countries is state-owned and run; depending on the
country I'm not sure if this is better or worse).

Personally I find the apologism on HN about nuclear to be disingenuous,
exhausting and naive.

~~~
kbutler
1\. per kWH. Nuclear is very, very safe. Global avg 90 deaths per trillion
kwh, vs coal 100,000 deaths per trillion kwh.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-
deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#31d9a269709b) If you really want to be
surprised, nuclear is even safer than solar
[https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...](https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf)
(Note that residential rooftop solar is crazy risky as well as inefficient -
all those installers up on random roofs...)

2\. Coal requires lots more fuel so lots more digging up and transportation,
spent fuel is dissipated via atmosphere, as well as solid ash.

3\. Concentrated harm vs dispersed harm. still coal. Note that the Chernobyl
Exclusion Zone is _great_ for wildlife - it is basically an environmental
preserve, since humans (the largest impact on wildlife & environment) are
largely excluded.

4\. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear
is the only viable technology.

5\. Storage and cleanups - there's a lot more for coal than you think. Coal
byproducts are one of the largest industrial waste streams.
[https://www.epa.gov/coalash/frequent-questions-
about-2015-co...](https://www.epa.gov/coalash/frequent-questions-
about-2015-coal-ash-disposal-rule)

Nuclear vs coal is like airplane crashes vs car crashes. Airplane accidents
make the news because they are unusual and affect many people in a single
incident, even though car crashes kill (and injure) far more people every year
(per mile traveled).

The fact that you know the names Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island
(probably?) should help you realize how SAFE nuclear is - the exceptions
become scare stories for decades.

~~~
buboard
> per kWH. Nuclear is very, very safe

Then again, per land area wasted , nuclear is 23 Km2 per year vs ... something
tiny? Plus the comparison with coal only is unfair.

> 4\. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming,
> nuclear is the only viable technology.

Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of
the planet.

~~~
rwmj
A lot of coal is strip-mined, which damages large amounts of land.

~~~
ryanmercer
And let us not forget about towns like Centralia which had to be abandoned (by
nearly all residents) due to an underground coal fire that has now been
burning for 57 years.

[https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-
more-50-years...](https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-
more-50-years-ghost-town)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania)

~~~
derefr
That had nothing to do with coal _mining_ , per se, though. The spark was set
off in a hole in the ground made by previous mining, yes, but it was an
entirely-untapped coal vein that caught fire, and basically anything could
have caught it on fire if it was ever exposed to surface air. (A meteorite
impact, or earthquake fissure, or sinkhole collapse, could have made a similar
crater and exposed the coal vein, for example.)

Centralia is more of a weird natural disaster. It's essentially a slow-motion,
underground forest fire. And, like most forest fires, while usually a human
with a match is the proximal cause, if the human _wasn 't_ there, nature would
still have supplied a spark eventually.

~~~
saalweachter
Coal seam fires aren't particularly rare, and while they can occur
"naturally", almost all of the thousand or so burning around the world at any
given time (some for months, some for centuries) are explicitly linked to
mining.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-
seam_fire](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire)

~~~
derefr
Sure, all the ones we know about today. It's a bit of an anthropic argument,
though. We only know about the coal seams that have survived long enough for
us to find them; and, almost universally, we've chosen to exploit the seams
we've found. That leaves two questions unanswered:

• What would the statistical yearly probability of a coal-seam fire be for
seams we find, check up on, but never mine? (We know of _a few_ seams in
protected areas, but I don't think we know of _enough_ to have any statistical
power. Also, the natural catching-fire rate might be, say, one per thousand
years, which would be a bit like the pitch-drop experiment in its
requirements, yet would still mean that coal seams catch fire pretty much "as
soon as" they reach the surface, in geological time.)

• More interestingly: how many coal-seam fires have happened historically in
the Earth's 4.2 billion years being around, that _finished_ and burned out all
the coal, and now there's just a cave there? Or ex-cave sedimentary layer,
given that these caves tend to collapse? Can we _tell_ when such a cave/layer
was previously a coal seam? (I assume so, because soot, but can pressure-
treated soot be differentiated from other kinds of naturally-occurring mineral
striae?)

------
est31
Note that there wasn't a roof over these bags. Understandable 1 year after the
catastrophy but not now, almost a decade later. The typhoon didn't even have
to blow off the roof.

This isn't an engineering problem. The art to build roofs is wel researched.
It's a human problem. That nuclear is only "cheap" if you aren't building
roofs over little/medium radioactive waste storage sites, or don't design
reactors to be as safe as possible. More safe == more expensive.

I wonder what happens the next time a tsunami similar to the one from 2011
hits the fukushima site. How much better prepared are they now?

~~~
bamboozled
Quite clearly, very underprepared ?

------
Donald
Japan has been struggling to deal with the scope and cost of their disaster.

From last month:

> The operator of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will have
> to dump huge quantities of contaminated water from the site directly into
> the Pacific Ocean, Japan’s environment minister has said

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/10/fukushim...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/10/fukushima-
japan-will-have-to-dump-radioactive-water-into-pacific-minister-says)

~~~
Grue3
That's established way to deal with tritium-contaminated water. It's done in
many places around the world. There's natural tritium in the ocean, once the
water is diluted to this level it's perfectly safe.

------
Jeff_Brown
This bears to me a striking resemblance to maintaining software. The
temptation is to think, "Right, that solution works, now our work is done."
But no, maintenance is a job that never ends.

------
magwa101
Nuke is too dangerous and can't be deployed everywhere. Solar and wind is much
lower cost to install and operate. Plus, low risk. The more distributed
solutions will win.

~~~
hokkos
Japan is the worst place for renewable. Very limited surface with a very high
price for solar. For onshore wind japan is too densely populated, or too
hilly. And for offshore wind the coast sink too quickly to be feasible except
floatable except it is largely unproven and not a good match with typhoon in
Japan. Nuclear is still the best hope for a decarbonized electricity
generation in Japa.

~~~
downrightmike
Does Japan have Eminent Domain? Besides that Japan is also facing a problem
where they have most of their population already lives in urban areas, with
rapid depopulation of rural areas. Realistically the ability to build wind and
solar farms as they age should get easier and easier as the land depopulates.

