No Stupid Questions

No one changes minds on the internet but I like to yap so w/e though I did almost drop when my draft got wiped.

In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.

Lower populations are fine and plenty of undesirable villages are depopulating as young folks move to the cities and pensioners shuffle off this coil. Find one with an agreeable populace (not as hard as you think, many communities actually try to be selected for waste disposal projects and try to promote their site over others), no seismic activity of importance for a geologically sustained period of time, and impermeable clay soil far below any important aquifer. Place it there with compacted bentonite clay or similar as a liner. Insanely low hydraulic conductivity (~10^-13 m/s) through the torturous paths in the clay which also simultaneously has a strongly adsorbent effect where the solute gets scrubbed out by the clay while the water is on its long journey out means even if the cans fail and a substantial amount of material gets out it won’t be going far… not enough moving aggressively enough to impact hundreds of feet above. As it happens there was already a trial run done by Mother Nature billions of years ago in the natural nuclear reactors of Oklo, Gabon and it turned out that the fission products didn’t get very far at all even with less than ideal materials.

A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.

It’s a rare river that suddenly deletes itself with no forewarning of reduction in flow but anyway the amount of water needed for sustained cooling of fuel pools is substantially lower than that needed to support active operation at full power so if the river reroutes itself entirely or whatever you have in mind then you can scram to shut the plant down. Then your remaining needs can be handled by onsite water storage which is mandated by the regulator along with alternate flexible means of getting the water into the pools such as using firehoses. I’ve seen a site that pumped groundwater to cool the reactor and there was no concern of depletion because it was near a water source that left it constantly charged, even excessively so to the point that flooding would regularly render some of the pump stations inaccessible except by boat in the wetter seasons of the year. I was not getting at building a dam to save a nuke plant but rather pointing out that there are many different designs that can handle different environmental conditions so having hot and low flow rivers does not entirely cancel the prospects for nuclear power entirely even if some specific sites are rendered uneconomical and IF it is worth it perhaps alternatives may exist for a particular site like extending storage ponds and tanks to ride out irregularities in weather and river flow. It’s a good idea to have a mixed power grid that’s not overly reliant on one or two elements subject to shocks.

I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.

The halt on nuclear but continuing energy demand resulted in continued massive rollout of fossil fuels with all their attending health consequences and the cøimate crisis. Nuclear is right at the bottom of deaths per MW produced between solar and wind. Hydro and the natural gas are two orders of magnitude higher and coal is yet another. If people think that for their area nuclear is prudent and can convince and live up to the standards of the regulator then I see no reason to stand in their way and tell them no such that they build some way deadlier energy source. A lot of expansion is happening for nuclear, much more for solar, and I see both of those developments as really really good if they are preventing something worse like gas from coming online. For what it’s worth ithe worst of the three accidents you mentioned is not physically possible in western reactors which have a negative void coefficient of reactivity whereas Chernobyl had a positive one. In the Chernobyl reactor graphite was the moderator (slows down neutrons to a speed where they will actually interact with the fuel) and water was the coolant whereas in western reactors water is both the coolant and moderator. So at Chernobyl the water wasn’t as good at moderating as the graphite and actually acted as a neutron absorber that ate up neutrons without contributing to fission reactions. So when they heated up, the water expanded and became less good at absorbing which meant less neutrons got consumed so more flew on into the graphite to get moderated and could cause fissions which made more power which boiled more water to repeat the cycle and that’s how you got a runaway reaction at a plant that also didn’t even have a containment. In western reactors since the water is the moderator if it expands from heating then it also becomes worse at slowing down the neutrons because more are sailing through and not slowing down to interact with the fuel. So this limits how high you can get the power much more sharply, plus we have containments to keep the material there even if the vessel loses its integrity. This is part of why the deaths and radioactive releases are insanely less for the other two combined vs. Chernobyl. Those events changed how nuclear does business and inaugurated WANO and comprehensive sharing of operating experience and strategies on safely operating plants, including on beyond design basis accidents in the wake of the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami combo that took out Fukushima. Honestly for mostly safe but occasionally punctuated with insanely deadly and/or displacing tragedies hydro should be considered as scarier than nuclear, meanwhile fossil fuels are just slowly killing people everywhere to general shrugs.