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I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
I'm not accusing you of any personal ideological hypocrisy of not being against mining pollution enough. It's just that the theoretical possibility of some post-civilizational-collapse humans being poisoned two hundred years from now, because the concrete box, that we store spent fuel in, eroded away is a laughably insignificant concern. Where are the policy initiatives for deep geological storage of solar panels and solar panel production waste that guarantees no environmental damage for the next X thousand years? Why is nuclear power singled out as the one human activity where we have to spend billions to make sure that no living being in any possible future timeline thousands of years in the future is harmed by some byproduct? Why do we not simply accept that in every country there is one warehouse that requires some minimal continued maintenance effort to remain safe to people in the immediate surroundings? Remember, numerous other such buildings exist right now. Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
The environmental damage from the creation of solar panels comes from the mining of the components used to create them as well as their manufacture. They are mostly made out of glass and aluminum which doesn't actually cause any serious environmental damage, though there are some trace amounts of nasty chemicals. If every single solar panel in use today was abandoned after humanity got wiped out in a second, the environmental damage would be minimal. The two problems just aren't really that comparable.
Because nuclear waste remains dangerous for that long. But moreover, it isn't - if we were actually being rational, global warming and the flooding of the atmosphere with the byproducts of fossil fuels would demand even more attention. But we're not going to care until it is too late, because the consequences of global warming will come after the people currently making decisions are long dead - you, me and our descendants will have to deal with those problems but the people in power right now won't.
Let's go with these numbers: https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-of-toxic-materials-like-cadmium-and-lead/
this says 4400 tons of lead are contained in 92GW of solar panels. So that is roughly 4400 tons of lead for 30*years*92GW of energy. I assume this is peak capacity, so at a capacity factor of around 20% we get 4400 tons of lead for 0.6TWy.
Wikipedia says:
Which gives 15000-18000 tons of HLW for 0.6TWy or about 4x the amount. The numbers are very much comparable, and I think I was pretty fair to either technology. Presumably, PV has more production waste due to the much larger volume of stuff and I don't care enough to research things like the impact of mining waste for things like the copper content in PV modules vs. Uranium mining. If we also, say, limit the analysis to Germany where the PV capacity factor is 10% or bias our valuation of baseload energy production more highly, or we include battery waste it's not too hard to get numbers where Nuclear comes out on top.
I feel like you're refusing to engage with the argument. Lead and spent nuclear fuel have pretty much identical environmental risk profiles after a few decades. It's just that the other energy technologies are much better at diluting their waste throughout the environment.
Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
Lead is actually substantially easier to safely re-use than spent nuclear fuel - to the best of my knowledge, solar panels don't actually do anything to the lead which renders it irreversibly unusable. If you have evidence that you can't actually reuse the components or materials placed into solar panels I'd love to see it.
Except nuclear waste is more dangerous for far longer and less re-usable, which makes the comparison pointless.
What argument? I'm unfamiliar with any scientific literature that makes the case spent solar panels are as environmentally damaging as nuclear waste. Nuclear waste continues to irradiate anything around it for an incredibly long time, while lead...well, I wouldn't want to drink it or use it in my pipes, but lead is actually a useful metal that can be repurposed safely.
Collapse doesn't actually take place overnight - the US and Europe are collapsing right now, and the collapse of the Roman empire took hundreds of years to play out fully. But this question doesn't mean terribly much because you wouldn't be safe anywhere if civilisation collapsed overnight. If you want to talk specifically about the dangers of chemical storage, then it depends on exactly what's stored there and how. I personally wouldn't want to start growing crops on a chemical storage facility, but I think the bigger danger from a chemical storage area at a port would be that it gets into the ocean after sea levels rise... but that's going to be significantly delayed if civilisation collapses and we stop burning fossil fuels anyway.
This is meaningless without quantities though. Everything is irradiated at all times from ordinary nuclear decay, cosmic rays, and solar radiation. It is a manageable hazard. After a long time, the quantity of radiation emitted is going to flatten out to a hazard lower than the chemical toxicity you dismiss.
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If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.
I'd feel ashamed if I ever said that about my descendants. I think this might be a case of differing moral frameworks - I really can't relate to this perspective.
What snark?
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all. Assuming I misunderstood what you meant here... If nuclear power actually did provide clean, cheap power that was too cheap to meter then there would actually be a real discussion to have here but it doesn't! It has failed to do so for decades, and I see no signs that this will change in the near future. What we actually get is power that is more expensive than fossil fuels or renewables and creates a huge waste problem on top of that. My government's chief scientific body recently produced a report on the relative cost of different energy sources, and nuclear ended up being roughly twice as expensive as solar/wind (https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2025/July/2024-25-GenCost-Final-Report).
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025. Yeah, I care somewhat about these hypothetical people, but not so much that I would sacrifice real gains for my children and grandchildren because someday, in a scenario of civilizational collapse where they're all fucked anyway, one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it. The reality is, either we keep going along the trajectory of technological progress, or life for our descendants will be so much worse that nuclear waste will be the least of their troubles, and I'm happy to judge them for failing the project of human civilization.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants. Come on, man, you knew exactly what you were saying when you wrote that sentence.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters - even if I disagree with your position, seeing you argue that will be productive and we can learn new things. I'm saying that the long-term waste storage argument is an irrelevant distraction from the cost argument.
I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.
Except that nuclear waste runoff won't be limited to that stream. What bodies of water will that stream feed into? What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future. That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain. Nature will adapt, for sure, but humans don't evolve nearly as quickly as wolves or bacteria - and the evolution of radiation resistance via natural selection would involve incredible amounts of human suffering and pain.
I don't think that qualifies as snark - not caring about the fate of the Earth is a fairly common position among a lot of rationalist circles, especially ones who believe we will colonise space or discover AGI in short order.
Sure, here's the debate: Barring a dramatic increase in EROEI, nuclear power is uncompetitive with solar and other renewables. While it is the appropriate solution for some limited circumstances (nuclear submarines, having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium, etc), it is no way an actual answer to the energy crisis rapidly approaching the world.
Far from being an irrelevant distraction from the argument, nuclear waste and the proper safekeeping/disposal of it is one of the bigger contributors to the EROEI problems of nuclear power. When the final accounting is done, the costs of that storage could leave nuclear power with a negative EROEI - we would have been better off simply not doing it at all save for the generation of certain medically and scientifically useful isotopes.
I get that. But, as a modern man, I would have no similarity to descendants a thousand years in the future who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste. Maybe they've regressed to feudal peasantry, maybe they're killing each other over the last hydrocarbons - it doesn't matter. They might as well be animals. To share values with us as modern men is to move forward and overcome problems, not to stagnate and regress. I would have nothing but contempt for my descendants if they're mindlessly drinking the runoff from a nuclear waste dump, dressed in furs and oxhide; let the dying sun swallow them.
Please, tell me what dreadfully important ecosystems draw on the western Nevada desert for water? It's a desert for a reason. We have an awful lot of waste land going, and we could easily find the most useless parts of it and drill deep holes, if it wasn't for the eternal whining of the native bitter-enders still living out there. We can also just bury it in the Canadian Shield in some area where the watershed drains north, I'd assume the post-apocalyptic Inuit would be happy to hunt walruses that glow in the dark.
At this point I'm starting to take you less seriously. Do you actually believe that the storage of depleted nuclear waste deep underground, leaching through the groundwater to aquifers over the centuries, and then to the ocean, diluted in billions of gallons of water, is going to turn into radioactive rain?
Raw Uranium is currently $75/lb after China's big buildout has been priced in. Double or triple that to get it in the reactor, and it's still not a major cost in nuclear's economics. It's all capital costs for building and decommissioning, running costs are a rounding error. I'm very open to the argument that the cost of building nuclear power isn't due to excessive regulation, but due to the inherent difficulty of containing a nuclear reaction in a safe vessel. But if your argument for why France's program is cheaper is because the least economically important input is slightly cheaper than getting it from Australia, I think you need better arguments.
How exactly would you have no similarity to people who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste when YOU haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste?
The USA is currently stagnating and regressing right now. Manufacturing capacity and the real economy has been completely hollowed out and sold to China, and political gridlock means you can't even successfully set up advanced chip fabrication technology - ever read about the troubles TSMC has had getting set up in America? American infrastructure is falling apart, the political system is unable to meaningfully address any real problems (Israel not having enough money doesn't count as a real problem) and levels of societal cohesion are in the toilet compared to 70 years ago. Is there any serious analysis which doesn't identify the US as in decline?
Do you know what the climate of the western Nevada desert is going to look like in a thousand years? At current levels of global warming, there's a decent chance that the desert could actually be green in a thousand years. My paleoclimatology knowledge of America isn't the best because I don't actually live there, but I don't think there's anything implausible about places like that turning into more human-useful environments in the future.
This conversation was, in my mind at least, in the context of a polluted river - if it has already reached the surface and created an irradiated river, absolutely. If you're proposing that we replace fossil fuels with nuclear, the amount of waste created would be far higher than the relatively tiny amounts we have now, especially over hundreds of years.
France was paying roughly 2 dollars a kilo - and they still had to go through financial restructuring due to economic problems. If you want to disprove my argument, simply point to the successful nuclear program that is currently generating power at a profit healthy enough that it does not need any government subsidies. That's all you need to completely destroy my position!
You're not seeing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the essence of modern man is a commitment to moving forward, to striving for improvement, such that we can solve problems in the future we can't solve now. Without that, the only thing left for humanity is to stagnate, run out of energy, and eventually regress back into apes. I have sympathy for potential future descendants on the ape-path, but I wouldn't sacrifice even a cent of the next generation's prosperity to ease that benighted future.
We agree on this. I'm not happy about it at all. If nuclear, even financially unprofitable nuclear, would help, we should go all in on it. If it doesn't, we shouldn't.
I'm not a paleoclimatology expert, but my understanding is that it will never, ever be green, because the limiting factor isn't temperature, it's that it's a high desert where mountains on both sides intercept any humid air. A sort of double rain shadow effect. It doesn't matter. There are a lot of seismically inactive, human-worthless places we could bury waste, such that any one not working just means we find another. Put it in the Canadian Shield, far up enough that if climate change the area profitable for large-scale civilization most of the world is already screwed. Put it in Siberia. Get rid of the country of New Zealand - I never liked those hobbit bastards. Any of these options are trivial sacrifices compared to the promise of nuclear energy, if that promise is real.
I think this is where we disagree. Perhaps I haven't been clear at getting my position across, and so you see me as some generic opponent. What I want to do here is to disaggregate the arguments you're making. Here:
1 is interesting and really makes me chew on my own thinking. 2 and 3, to me, do not hold up, and I haven't heard a single argument from you that adequately reinforces them. 4 is a question of strategy that depends on 1 (but isn't entirely dependent - if nuclear power is only somewhat unprofitable, it makes more sense to subsidize it than it does solar panels). The sense I get is that you are just motivated to believe every negative thing you can find about nuclear power at once, and don't really care whether or not they fit together, and so you're not able to make a strong and focused case against it. If I'm wrong, I hope you stick around and provide an alternative perspective to the forum.
I disagree - but this is a really complicated topic that would best deserve a thread to itself and goes very far afield from the original topic of conversation. If you really want to talk about what defines the essence of humanity, that would make for a great philosophical debate, but I will have to simply agree to disagree in the context of this discussion.
At least we can be happy about finding a point of agreement.
I think that the world on the other side of climate change is going to be incredibly different - changes in climate and rising sea levels will produce an incredibly difficult to predict set of changes to the environment, especially when potential human interventions are taken into account. Of course, a thousand years is chump change when compared to the actual scale of the problem - some of the products of nuclear waste remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, substantially longer than the entirety of recorded human civilisation and potentially for longer than the existence of anatomically modern humans. I am not certain that we can actually predict exactly how the Nevada desert ends up by the time these byproducts cease being dangerous.
The main focus of my arguments on this topic is simply Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Financial viability is a fairly good proxy for whether or not a given source of energy provides enough of a return to make its exploitation viable, and the other arguments are simply pre-emptive attacks on the common means of breaking the link between energetic viability and financial viability. Point number 2? The price of uranium being rendered comically low by colonial exploitation is a way of masking the true input costs. That is only relevant in the case of France, but their nuclear power system was the most prominent example of a financially viable nuclear power system (that has since gone into restructuring - c'est la vie). Point number 3? The costs of storage and maintenance being ignored or offloaded onto the rest of society obscures the true expenses of nuclear power generation and can create a temporary illusion of profitability. Avoiding paying those costs simply shifts the burden onto others, and in many cases magnifies them.
Point number 4 does have the least substantial link to my main point, but the relevance of renewables is that they make the opportunity cost of pursuing nuclear power even starker. If we already have power systems which give us a better deal than nuclear, nuclear becomes an even worse idea.
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At that level of dilution, the radioactivity would not be detectable above background, let alone acutely hazardous.
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