demonstrate an absolutely "never can fail" system, which is an impossibility because all systems fail at some point, and can demonstrate safe "never to be a risk" disposal of the waste then and only then should the world embrace nuclear power on a large scale.

Three Mile Island was safe. Until it wasn't. Chernobyl was safe. Until it wasn't. Fukushima was safe. Until it wasn't. The SL-1 reactor was safe. Until it wasn't. Windscale, Kyshtym and on and on. We have been fortunate so far that only tens of thousands of square miles of land has been contaminated and only hundreds of thousands of people having to be evacuated. That is with the limited population of reactors so far. Dramatically increasing that population, along with the certainty of accidents being when not if, is a foolhardy endeavor and all the economic calculations about energy production costs don't take into account the estimated costs for future "oops" occurrences both in immediate and long term damage consequences.

Anything packing energy is dangerous. Petroleum refineries catch on fire and explode with some regularity, as do underground gas lines. Electric lines spark fires and heat the atmosphere, and people do get electrocuted on a fairly regular basis. Dams collapse, windmills disintegrate -- nothing is perfectly safe, and the more energy it handles the harder it is to minimize the danger. That just a fact of life, for all energy technologies.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good -- and certainly not the best candidate we have at present.

contaminate thousands of square miles of land and water.

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...of wilderness for no good purpose other than to entrench the use of fossil fuels, access to which the useless solar and wind industries depend.

Arguably, one could state, if one is educated and knows how things work - something notably missing from antinukes in general - that the toxic lake at Baotou is related to the wind scam, for example.

The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust

unfettered reckless deployment of nuclear power and the resulting waste problem to be shoved off on the coming generations, as is a habitual stand by pro-nuke people, think that somehow solar and wind are in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry, as we see currently, is absolutely giddy over the ending of the US push for solar, wind and electric vehicles. But I have no doubt that level of ignorance might come from a certain amount of NIMBY ism because not one proponent has come forward to advocate for living next to the uranium mines or having the nuclear waste stored in their neighborhood. For the record the next time you look down your nose at me and what my education is or what my work experience and knowledge is you need to remember that you don't so stick that in your ear pal.

Last edited Sat Aug 16, 2025, 09:40 PM - Edit history (1)

...and the radioactive thorium, a naturally occurring side product that is currently dumped for lanthanide mines like those at Baotou is a useless exercise, even more useless than the wind industry is in addressing the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, about which antinukes, again, couldn't care less. I have never met one with even a shred of scientific depth or education about the thing they hate, nuclear energy, through their rote sloganeering and chanting.

It is easy to show to a person educated say, in high school physics in a good high school, or in introductory college level physics course, that the energy density of a kg of plutonium is roughly 8.0 X 10¹³ Joules of recoverable energy, excluding neutrinos. (Note that I have used the unit of energy, the Joule, not the Watt, which supporters of the failed and useless fossil fuel dependent so called "renewable energy" scam use to obscure its lack of reliability. In order to calculate this energy value, one would need at least a high school science education - to convert the energy unit, the electron-volt, to the SI unit Joule, familiarity with the constants Avogadro's number and the charge on an electron, and the ability to do high school level calculations of atomic weight. One should not be confident that anti-science antinukes can grasp these simple calculations. Every time they open their mouths the demonstrate as much.)

I have recently wrote about the uranium found in used nuclear fuel which in the antinuke cults call "nuclear waste," since, just as they can't imagine the cost of destroying the planetary atmosphere with infinitely more dangerous fossil fuel waste, since the latter kills people and the former doesn't, they lack the imagination (education and scientific knowledge) to understand the value of used nuclear fuels.

Effects of reprocessed uranium multi-recycle on proliferation resistance of plutonium and uranium.

In the United States, we are blessed with having about 80,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel, a valuable resource for future generations that are not trammeled with the selective attention of antinukes.

About 95% of used nuclear fuel is unreacted uranium, with an excellent isotopic vector, as it contains the unnatural isotope ²³⁶U. Converted to plutonium, it follows - if one can do math, something antinukes at which are generally incapable - is that that .95 X 80,000 tons X 1000 kg/ton X 8 X 10¹³ Joules/kg = 60 EJ of energy, about 60% of the energy consumption of the United States in a year if subject, as it should be, to full fission.

In addition, the United States has an inventory of 770,000 metric tons of depleted uranium in the form of UF₆. In the fast neutron spectrum, this material (as a plutonium intermediate), it follows, from a similar calculation, has an energy value of 5600 EJ, enough to supply 100% of the United States' current energy demand for over 50 years, without a single fucking coal mine (about which antinukes couldn't care less), without a single fucking gas plant (about which antinukes couldn't care less), without tearing the shit out of thousands of square miles of wilderness for wind turbines, which, in California alone, is unable to produce as much energy as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant produces on a 12 acre foot print.

It can be shown, and I have done this many times in many places, that the 4.5 billion tons of natural uranium found in seawater, part of the mantle based uranium cycle, means that uranium reserves can never be depleted, and trust me, there are people called "scientists" who know all about that and have written literally thousands of scientific papers on precisely this subject.

I would note that I have not included the energy value of the dumped radioactive thorium from lanthanide mines like those at Baotou, about which the antinuke assholes who want to tear the shit out of the planet couldn't care less.

It is clear to me that by the right application of knowledge, we could shut every damned energy mine on the planet for centuries with these considerations, using the uranium and thorium already mined.

You know, my son is approaching the end of his Ph.D graduate program in nuclear engineering, after which I assume he will do post docs and perhaps become an academic or industrial nuclear engineer. When he joined to program he chose, during the orientation, the faculty member in charge of the presentations being given, asked those students joining the program how many of them were there because of "climate change" (which I contend should be called "extreme global heating" given that it's already here). Three quarters of these fine young rising nuclear professionals raised their hands.

I assure you they are completely disinterested in the tiresome bullshit of the antinuke class, a bunch of malcontents picking lint out their navels and whining insipidly about things they are incompetent to understand while the planet burns. These fine young nuclear professionals are doing something other than chanting bullshit, which is precisely, and without question, what the antinuke class of remedial education does. They are doing the hard work, and they are here to save what is left to save, and perhaps restore that which can be restored. They don't give a rat's ass about antinukes and their poor educations. They have work to do.

Of course, again, antinukes are very bad at math and very bad at understanding the health consequences of opposing nuclear energy, which are enormous. Their lack of education, their paranoid fear of radiation, their contempt for mathematics and all of their insipid whining and moaning, kills people in vast numbers, as the fine young authors of the fine paper referenced in the OP have shown, convincingly in my view, about 2.3 million Americans since the Three Mile Island hoopla and ignorance fest.

Professionally, I work a great deal in molecular biology, and as such, I am educated enough to understand how supercilious badly educated idiots like Robert F. Kennedy Junior who claims to know something about vaccines without even a shred of education, without ever having passed a college level class in immunology, will be killing people, perhaps in the millions, by the application of pure ignorance.

From my perspective, antinukes are entirely and completely in the same class as that ass, RFK Jr., ignoramuses who by application of the Dunning-Kruger effect, manage to kill people out of sheer stupidity and a complete lack of education.

It is laughable, or would be laughable if their selective attention wasn't killing people, to hear members of such a set evoke the alleged "ignorance" of others, particularly since they clearly can't make a distinction between shit and shoe polish.

Have a wonderful weekend.

spew don't address the overall general issues. By the way your spelling and grammar lag the rest of your apparent scientific education but I find that to typically be the case with most STEM education today. In my experience some of the best engineers, from a numbers standpoint, couldn't get spelling, grammar and paragraph construction correct when I would receive their work for review and assessment. The vast majority of STEM colleges turn out robotic numbers people who know little to nothing of philosophy, art, literature, sociology, history beyond their field of study, ethics etc.

It is a major reason we end up with people in science, engineering and technology fields who charge ahead without any deeper understanding of larger ramifications and impacts. They are positive that they are smarter than anybody else about the subject while never understanding that some of the smartest people can also be some of the least in ability when it comes to wisdom. Knowledge and technology without wisdom about the broader issues is a major problem in the world and leads into the discussion of what is known as "dangerous knowledge" and an issue for another time.

Have a jolly weekend.

The reactors you mention used what would today be considered obsolete technology (like virtually all of the reactors in use today.) It is possible to create a reactor which will not "melt down” as they did. However, all complex systems are prone to failure. So, power outages (both planned and unplanned) will occur. “Meltdowns” should not.

One of the things which concerns me is the fact that almost all nuclear reactors in use today would be called “Generation II Reactors,” designed to be used for years even decades less than their current life-spans. In my opinion, those old reactors should be shut down, but we must not replace them with fossil fuel, and “renewable energy” has significant challenges.

In 2022, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory produced a study, Examining Supply-Side Options To Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035. The scenarios they look at include maintaining or increasing current levels of nuclear generation (remember, these people have been studying renewable energy since Gerald Ford was president.) I highly recommend the study to anybody who is not locked into a dogmatic position (either “No Nukes” or “No Renewables.”)

The key is, we need to dramatically cut emissions almost immediately (we should have done it decades ago.)

Proposed new fission reactors are generally classified as “Generation IV Reactors.” (There were few “Generation III Reactors” built.) There are a number of different proposed “Gen IV” reactor designs. Really, “Gen IV,” means “a newer design than “Gen III.’” Although there are a number of plans, they must go through a lengthy review process. (The lessons of the meltdowns you cite are not lost on government regulators.)

Personally, I prefer nuclear fusion. Fusion reactors (by nature) will be extremely safe. It’s difficult to get fusion going, and keep it going, and (with one notable exception) it currently takes more energy to fuse atoms than the reaction produces. Timelines call for practical nuclear fusion in as few as 5 years, and the approval process will be much faster than for nuclear fission reactors. (Deploying hundreds of new reactors, whether “fusion” or “fission” will take several years.)

Wind (and increasingly) solar are relatively inexpensive, and relatively quickly deployed. Their challenges are not insurmountable, however, a 100% renewable grid just isn’t in the cards at this time.

there is no such thing as a complex system that will never fail. Even if that failure doesn't happen for 100 years the fact is it will happen. Catastrophic floods for example can be 100 year events but they will happen. All mechanical, electrical and chemical plants have the potential for catastrophic failure and some do. Nothing lasts forever. Things wear out and things go wrong. Nothing is built perfectly.

Because of this fact and the awful result when a nuclear plant fails having them increased in number by leaps and bounds is simply madness because while we in the present may very well reap benefits without incident for awhile we will be saddling the future populations of the world with a massive catastrophe. Thinking that technology will be developed in the future to take care of it is foolhardy thinking and a clear demonstration of how we have become delusional in thinking "someone" will always be able to do something.

The climate change has really shot past what feeble attempts governments have been willing to implement to make changes. That problem of human greed and ignorance is one of the most critical problems in trying to employ and control technology that has high risk factors. They will cut corners, refuse to spend money on safety etc. and as we see even when change can be made that can have an immediate impact, like wind and solar, you get greed and ignorance that gets into power politically and puts on the brakes. You cannot risk people cutting corners or refusing to spend the money on safety if you are dealing with systems that carry a very high risk for catastrophic impact when things go wrong.

That is why I said show me a system that will never fail and an absolute never fail safe answer for the waste and I'll be on board. But all systems fail. It is a fact of engineering life. Some sooner and some later and sometimes it's people who fail in their interactions with the system or in it's construction. It is all an undeniable sad fact that we see over and over no matter whether it's a factory, a mill, a foundry, a nuclear plant, a bridge, a ship etc. and the list goes on.

However, consider the fundamental difference between Reactor 2 at Three Mile Island.and a "Pebble-Bed Reactor.”

At Three Mile Island, the reaction was meant to be moderated by a combination of “control rods” and circulating water. When the water stopped circulating, stopped cooling the reactor, it overheated.

In the Pebble-Bed reactor, instead of having “control rods” the fuel is encased in spheres of graphite. The reactor is cooled by gas. If the gas stops circulating, it will get very hot, but it will not "melt down."

and not about a specific design. As a matter of fact whatever design is in use at any given time simply is what it is. It is not about the specific reason for a failure at one or another but rather that the failures do occur and will occur as failures do in all complex systems.

Frankly, pools of radioactive material stored on-site, are less of a threat at this point than the increase in carbon emissions which would almost certainly result from taking nuclear plants off-line.

Among the reasons I prefer nuclear fusion:
https://www.nrc.gov/materials/fusion/fission-vs-fusion.html

withered amoral (or worse) immoral perceptions of antinukes.

I frequently point out in this space how many people are killed by fossil fuels each year by reference to the prestigious medical journal Lancet.