Comments by "David Ford" (@davidford3115) on "How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment | Michael Shellenberger" video.

@ADCFproductions Actually, we already had one built in Nevada: Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository. It was suppose to come online and accept its first shipment of waste in 1998. But Dingy Harry Reid along with Dan Coats killed it. Fortunately, Trump has reactivated it. A little side note, most nuclear waste in the West is stored on site at the plant. Fukushima's leak was mostly from those storage pools. Why is this important? Before Yucca Mountain was closed, the Japanese were going to pay us to store their waste. The leak from Fukushima would not have been as severe if Harry Reid and Dan Coats had not killed the storage facility.
11
The nuclear accidents in the West are overblown. Not a single person has died from Fukushima or 3 mile Island. In fact, the worst nuclear disaster in the West was the Windscale Fire. That was a graphite reactor similar to Chernobyl. Boiling Water and pressurized water reactors almost automatically cease fission reactions when the water is removed because it is the water that makes those reactions possible. In the graphite design, you remove the water and the reactions go prompt-critical(Nuclear Fizzle).
6
Indeed. They love to point at the two major accidents in the West: Fukushima and 3 Mile Island while ignoring the fact that the safety systems in both work EXACTLY as designed an there is not a single fatality connected with those two incidents.
3
@chatteyj The problem is still the same: mass. The waste products still have the same mass as the original unspent fuel. And remember, both Uranium and Plutonium have more mass than lead. The Plutonium cores in NASA spacecraft are small, but still account for a significant portion of the mass and hence the Delta-V.
2
Except the delta-velocity required to do that is extremely high. Easier to simply shoot it out of the solar system or crash it into Jupiter.
1
@derkleebaum Yea, because Dingy Harry Reid was virtue signaling. Yucca Mountain is in the middle of the Nevada Test Range which is already contaminated and has restricted access. And then you have the fact that security is provided by the USAF. You know Groom Lake/Area 51? That is close by Yucca Mountain. So before you try and get all high and mighty, do your due diligence and research before you fire off in ignorance.
1
@arthurdent6256 The problem is controlling it. We can already create a fusion of Hydrogen into Helium by using a fission bomb as the kick-start. In both of those cases, it is an UNCONTROLED reaction. Controlling that amount of energy is currently beyond our capacity. The materials sciences have not reached that level of engineering to harness so much power at once.
1
The difference between the Western Boiling and Pressurized Water moderated reactors vs. the graphite moderated reactors. One goes promp-critical (nuclear fizzle) when you remove the water, while the other automatically shuts down due to the particle physics involved. Also, Admrial Hyman Rickover, father of Nuclear Navy Program set such exacting standards that the US Navy have NEVER had a reactor related incident. There is a VERY good reason why civilian nuclear agencies in the West take their cues from the US Navy Nuclear program.
1
@ivanmonahhov2314 Actually, it is cheaper now than it ever has been. The estimated costs given for building a new one assume you build the reactor first, then re-fit it with modern safety and containment features which is how they tabulated the cost for nuclear in the past. It is an apples to oranges analogy as the US Navy can bring a nuclear reactor for a ballistic submarine or an aircraft carrier for very cheap.
1
@ivanmonahhov2314 Somehow I seriously doubt your claim. While the power needs of a Nuclear Boomer or an Aircraft carrier may be smaller, that doesn't change the PHYSICS. Reactors large or small still need the minimum necessary to sustain a reaction. That value can be lowered by the use of neutron reflectors to make the neutron emissions more efficient, but it does not change minimum values for criticality. If anything, enriched fuel means smaller fuel rods, and hence a smaller safety margin. The point still stands that if you can create a small reactor for a Naval ship, you can easily repurpose it for civilian use.
1
@Arcayenneist Really? Because the release of diatomic hydrogen is one of the byproducts of the reactor fuel chemically bonding with the casing and rendering the fuel inert. Basically a conventional hydrogen explosion was evidence of the safety designs preventing a nuclear fizzle. I am not disagreeing that the Japanese are notorious about violating established protocols. Hisashi Ouchi's tragic example is case in point. But don't feed into the hysteria and misinformation that Fukushima was anywhere near as bad as either Windscale Fire the Kyshtym Disaster, or even Chernobyl. In a side by side, it is worse than 3 Mile since there was a leak from the storage pools. But it didn't release nearly the level of radiation that Windscale did.
1