
Please, John Oliver, Please Talk to a Real Nuclear Scientist - BerislavLopac
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/08/24/please-john-oliver-please-talk-to-a-real-nuclear-scientist/
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saurik
John Oliver's point--which I will note had absolutely nothing to do with the
safety of nuclear sites despite this article going off the path to defend them
--is that while we have a strategy to store nuclear waste (with a designated
national site for doing so), we haven't actually executed on that plan after
many decades. His piece was not "anti-nuclear", and if someone wants to show
that his arguments are wrong they also would be flying in the face of the
scientists who put together the national plan.

Regardless, this author claims "please talk to a real nuclear scientist" and
then provides not a single statement from a nuclear scientist on any topic at
all, much less on the topic of "should we execute the national nuclear waste
storage plan and how bad is it that we aren't making progress?"... this is
essentially "trust this random reporter", and I personally do not think
reporters are to be trusted sources with respect to science: that's how we
have gotten into so much trouble to begin with :/. To put this another way:
this article is, in my mind, even less scientific than John Oliver's skit, so
I am flagging it for not being appropriate on this website.

~~~
jsjohnst
First off, I emphatically agree with the top paragraph, but I'm not sure I
would so quickly write off this guy's credentials. Not saying his background
is unquestionable, but it does seem to deserve some credit.

> Dr. James Conca is an expert on energy, nuclear and dirty bombs, a planetary
> geologist, and a professional speaker.

~~~
jolux
He also works for a company in the nuclear industry and frankly that byline is
not all that impressive to me. "Professional speaker" is not a qualification,
and "expert" is suitably wishy-washy at this point that it's nearly
meaningless, especially when one uses it to describe oneself.

------
bad_alloc
> It’s one of the least threatening issues facing our country, the one with
> the lowest risk factors of any environmental threat. It’s safer to work at a
> nuclear site than to sit at a desk trading stocks

The relative safety is often brought up in this debate. It's technically
correct, but fails to account for just how much damage a single incident can
do. Chernobyl had 31 "direct" deaths and several hundred more due to radiation
poisoning.

That looks good on paper, but does not account for the radioactive plume that
has spread all over Europe. To this day I can find contaminated mushrooms and
areas of increased radioactivity in Germany, about 1500km away from the
reactor site. 30km around Pripyat are considered uninhabitable for 20000 years
and cancer rates in Belarus and Ukraine are still way higher than elsewhere.
The Dniepr is contaminated and the flow went all the way to the black sea.

It looks similar in Fukushima: Few direct deaths, a small exclusion zone, but
the effects can be measured in the entire Pacific.

We must realize that even if nuclear power works out well w.r.t. Co2 and
direct death count, it is fundamentally impossible to rule out the occurance
of a catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima. If something like that
occurred in central Europe, mainland China or one of the US coasts, highly
developped regions would be rendered partially uninhabitable and largely
undesirable. This kind of damage is not accounted for in these kinds of
articles.

~~~
justicezyx
Sure.

However, you are exactly falling victim of the illusion.

When you say "contaminated mushrooms and areas of increased radioactivity", do
you have any idea how much damage such radio activity can cause? Is it really
that serious at all?

When you say "catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima", what exactly is
the catastrophe? How can you quantify it? Is there any informed discussion?

Then go back to the point of the article: Talk to an expert... Stop acting
like a manipulated mindless person...

------
orwin
Disclaimer: while i'm not a physicist, i happen to date one working for plant
security/contamination at Areva.

The claim about 70k tons of nuclear waste being uranium is frankly misleading.
The author have to be aware of this, so i will not expand the discussion
(because it could give him credit), but please be aware that the main part of
nuclear waste is contaminated equipement, so very much not uranium.

In France, we consume several tons a year of screwdrivers hand hammers, and
while our yucca montain equivalents are working, this is still a pain in the
ass to get rid of this stuff. Maybe someone can explain how John Oliver is
wrong, but please don't trust anything this guy write. i don't know much about
nuclear waste, but if i am aware of this, there is no way a "specialist" is
not.

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jolux
You can call it ad hominem and poisoning the well all day, and it is, but at
the end of the day this dude backs up everything he says by linking to himself
and doesn't even begin to talk about the biggest barrier to new plants
(money). I can't figure out exactly where he works but the whole article
smells fishy to me.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
He doesn't even describe Oliver's claims in enough detail (let alone directly
quote the segment) to make it especially clear what he's taking issue with. I
watched that segment, and as far as I remember Oliver was talking about the
risks of containment failure if we don't proceed with a long-term solution
like Yucca Mountain, not just vaguely casting aspersions on nuclear power or
even nuclear waste.

------
andy_ppp
The article apear to fight non scientific claims on a comedy show with non
scientific claims in a news site! Where is the science here? And 70000 tonnes
of nuclear waste sounds like a lot to me? The claim that no one has ever died
from nuclear waste also sounds suspect. Can anyone fill in the actual science
behind this article?

~~~
DannyBee
Assuming the data given is correct:

The article seems to assume the waste is uranium, with a density of
19.1g/cubic centimeter.

That's roughly 3.325×10^9 cubic centimeters of waste (70000 tons / 19.1grams)
in cubic centimeters, or 117421 cubic feet

1 acre, 10 feet high, is 435602 cubic feet.

So it's a little more than 1/4 acre, 10 feet high, filled with uranium.

IMHO, that is not a lot especially over 60 years.

~~~
jessaustin
Can one actually stack nuclear waste like that? It's my impression that some
nuclear material cannot be stored too densely, otherwise it "goes critical"
i.e. sustains an ongoing nuclear reaction.

~~~
jsjohnst
Correct, you wouldn't be able to pack it that tightly together for the reason
you theorized, but the point is it doesn't take a lot of space for the fuel
itself. Radioactive waste is far more than just used fuel though as another
person here has repeatedly pointed out.

------
bryananderson
I don't think people comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe we are facing
from climate change. Even if nuclear is just as bad as the most hysterical
critics say, it is peanuts compared to the alternative. We need to invest
heavily in it, now.

Unfortunately I don't see the public changing its mind, so we will probably
have to work with alternatives like wind and solar. But if the public embraced
nuclear when it should have, we would be much further along.

------
tptacek
It's obviously the other extreme of this spectrum from Oliver's waste bit last
week, but that doesn't make it useless. And yes, a lot of it addresses
concerns with arguments Oliver didn't make.

On the other hand, the point about the volume of waste coal generates is
probably well taken (though I'm guessing the numbers are hyperbolized,
extrapolating from plants with outmoded scrubbing tech).

------
NuSkooler
Signed, a guy who makes his living pushing nuclear.

------
featherverse
Yes his segment was extremely disappointing. It amounted to a lot of fear-
mongering, and I have to wonder why they wasted an episode on this when there
are so many more real issues they could have discussed.

This is not the first time.

------
coldtea
> _I am hurt, though, that climate scientists get on all the cool shows, but
> nuclear scientists just get dissed_

Perhaps that's because the former are actually fighting for science against an
aggressive polluting industries and interests, whereas the other are mostly
employed by, and often shill for, aggressive polluting industries and
interests, science be damned.

> _It’s one of the least threatening issues facing our country, the one with
> the lowest risk factors of any environmental threat. It’s safer to work at a
> nuclear site than to sit at a desk trading stocks._

Taleb: "As we saw, a situation is deemed non ergodic here when observed past
probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere,
an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging
from it –and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these
situations “ruin”, as the entity cannot emerge from the condition. The central
problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are
no longer possible".

~~~
kedean
This comment is like...the definition of an ad-hominem attack.

~~~
coldtea
Or, you know, the definition of an empirical observation. Which of the two, we
will never know!

Besides, I find fallacies useful. In real life it is often beneficial (to the
point of survival) to depend on some fallacy or another for course correction
or quick decision making, and the naive "avoid fallacies at all costs"
believer would end hurt more often than not.

In lots of cases, who says something is more important that what they say --
like when you don't have all the information on something, and don't have
access or any way to check the numbers and run the tally by yourself, but are
relying on information that people who have huge interests (and people who
work for them) control.

