LastWeekTonight
9 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2017–2021
18:17 · 12M views · Aug 21, 2017
A Last Week Tonight segment in which John Oliver explains the US nuclear waste storage problem, including the Yucca Mountain politics. It argues the country needs a safe place to store waste.
Linked in nuclear power debates as a counterargument that the waste problem is unsolved.
9 comments from Hacker News
The problem with nuclear isn't whether you can build a safe plant, you can. The problem with nuclear is all the assumptions under which a perfectly safe plant is actually perfectly safe (proper maintenance, training, etc.). I don't believe those assumptions always hold in practice. At the end of the day, these plants are operated by people, and private companies, who have many interests beyond keeping the plant "perfectly safe" (like making money) and also operate under constraints that prevent them from actually keeping the plant "perfectly safe" even if they wanted to (like lack of money). The problem with nuclear isn't technological, but social. It allows a relatively small bunch of shitty people and companies to cause tremendous amounts of devastation. Remove people from the "nuclear energy safety equation" and I'm all in with nuclear. Telling me that new plants are perfectly safe as long as people and private companies don't do shit, reads like these plants aren't safe at all to me. --- And this is without taking into account all the unknown unknowns, like all the natural disasters we can't even predict or imagine, which all plant designs just assume cannot happen. Just claiming that modern nuclear plants are safe, for all potential world states is BS, because nobody can imagine, much less know, what all those potential world states are. Sure coal kills people, but what makes many think its safer than nuclear is that we understand how that happens, we understand where co
"a Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources" Since when are Pulitzer prize winners experts on nuclear energy? A sentence like this is shows he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about: "Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem in the U.S., is not any longer a technological problem." see this video "A final complaint against nuclear power is that it costs too much. Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide, but there is no question that a full accounting of the external costs of different energy systems would find nuclear cheaper than coal or natural gas. " Ok, see here [LINK] Nuclear is already the most expensive solution to produce electricity. Also we don't need artificial nuclear energy here on Earth. There is plenty of nuclear energy available for free from the sun.
> We never found a way to deal with the radioactive waste that coal plants emit into the air Sure we did. We close them down where ever it's possible. Just like we should do and do with nuclear power plants. > Nuclear is safer and better in every way even if you multiplied all the past disasters by ten. There really is no comparison. What a brilliant argument you have there. Oh wait. No it's not. You actually did not bring anything up to counter the problem caused by nuclear plants: nuclear waste. Just some juicy whataboutism. > its a political problem because humans have no sense of scale. People have enough sense of scale to realize that the waste will be there forever and while some are safely away from it, others can watch your rusty barrels go to hell and pollute the environment. Funny because John Oliver had a piece about that just last week: this video What's good about that at all?!
Funny how everyone is able to talk so much shit about nuclear being amazing and safe and all that, yet we've STILL not cleaned up the monstrous amount of TOXIC trash that has been produced by these plants. We have done nothing to stop creating more waste, and we have done nothing to deal with the toxic waste we have right now. To be honest I don't CARE if you want to call it safer when there is no direct proof of that, only proof of the contrary. There are hundreds of thousands of people still affected by major accidents, and the waste leftover from them worldwide. Trying to keep pushing nuclear for anything is an ignorant shortsighted choice. [1] [LINK] [2] this video [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]
Re the waste problem being overstated: this video [LINK] Interesting tidbit: "The German Atom Forum, comprised of all German nuclear power plant operators, intends to pay as little as possible for storage and rejected shouldering costs for the new site search. In their opinion´”there is no legal basis" for them to pay and all costs should be "financed by taxpayers." Also, how long did it take to clean up after Three Mile Island? (hint: the cost was estimated at $1b) Yes, Nuclear power plants for commercial power generation are done for and rightfully so. Too dangerous, too expensive. Not only building them but de-constructing them and dealing with the waste.