I'll do my best to answer. I've worked on rad shielding, but that is a different side. If acidburnNSA (a reactor scientist) shows up, ask him, he frequents nuclear posts. These will be basic answers so I hope they help and I'll expand on them if you want to follow up, but there's a lot to cover just in the first paragraph.
> What's the long term storage costs for spent fuel rods?
Not too much. Frankly because the quantity is low. This is one of the things people don't realize, while the waste is highly contaminated there's REALLY small quantities. We're talking about less than a coke can of waste per person per year. (that's not per reactor, that's ALL reactors) It is expensive though. The cost of nuclear is from construction and decommissioning. Operating costs are extremely low.
> Is this factored into the price?
Yes (mostly)
> Is post plant cleanup factored into generation costs (we're paying for a nuclear plant closing nearby in our electric bills now on top of generation costs)?
Yes (mostly)
Mostly means that it is supposed to be factored in. But those are of course estimates. I'll also be honest that sometimes people cheat.
> Can we possibly reuse those spent fuel rods for something else useful?
They already are. 17% of France's electricity is from recycled nuclear. That's not 17% of France's nuclear energy, that's 17% of TOTAL energy. Additionally most of these materials are used for a lot of other things. A lot goes to medical.
> Can we prevent disasters like Fukishima?
Yes, actually Fukushima is a great example of how to prevent disasters like Fukushima. The reactors that didn't fail had their backup generators on higher ground. There were also better safety factors and I'm over simplifying things, but the reactors that failed had sub par safety factors. We've had much better designed reactors for awhile, but that's a longer conversation and extremely convoluted (you'll commonly see it expressed simpler, but nothing is simple).
> Can we prevent every single disaster?
No. Such a notion is really unrealistic. I'd rephrase it as "Can we reduce danger to an acceptable risk?" Which I'd say the answer is yes. I'd even say we've been there for awhile. Nuclear fission is, next to hydro, the safest form of electricity we have, even when you include predictions of future deaths from past events (Chernobyl and Fukushima).
> (an implied one) Can we reduce environmental damage from meltdown events?
Yes! Actually this is super interesting. Chernobyl has turned into a really big nature preserve. Wildlife is thriving there. It is interesting to also look at radiation maps of Japan [0]. For context to this map, all measurements are in nSv (1e-9Sv). 1Sv within a year equates to a 5.5% increase in chance of cancer over your lifetime. But 20mSv is the max allowed dosage to a radiation worker. You'll notice that the vast majority of places is WELL below the 20mSv mark. Max value I found was 8,528nSv/hr (82528nSv/hr1e-9(Sv/nSv)24(hrs)*365(days) = 74.7mSv/yr). The point of this last part isn't to say something like "oh well humans can live here hur dur dur", but rather to illustrate why Fukushima is turning into a nature preserve. But I do also want to acknowledge that many people did lose their homes and have been permanently displaced. Again, I believe that we should be honest.
> Thorium reactors...
This is a convoluted subject. I'll leave it for another post. There's (a lot of) potential but we definitely need to do more research and testing.
> Fusion reactors...
Are a completely different beast. They don't have the same radiation concerns. Their waste product is mostly Helium (a resource we are in short supply of). While fission and fusion are both nuclear based there are more differences than similarities (including power output, by orders of magnitude). Think like the difference between nuclear and coal. Both heat water to turn turbines (this is how almost all electricity is generated actually), but they're very different in most aspects.
> We already had one problem by not thinking about long term negatives...
Honestly this is why I'm PRO nuclear. Sure it has negatives, and I'm not going to try to deny them. If we're considering human lives then consider that coal kills an order of magnitude more Americans per year than have ever died from Chernobyl (several orders when you consider the world). We also have to consider the places that have become uninhabitable because of mining and other things that humans have done. Everything has negatives, I think we're just more aware of nuclear's (fission's). It is about the exchange of good and bad and if we net more good than bad. It is also about comparing to our other options. (If we're in a negative sum game we are trying to get the least negative, but we're still getting negative utility) I won't dive into this because it seems you're aware of this. It is honestly complicated and a difficult subject. It takes a lot of research. But there's a saying "When it comes to nuclear, those that know the most fear the least." There's a reason that the majority of climate researchers are pro nuclear, there's a reason the UN Climate Committee endorses nuclear.
> I really want to avoid contamination of the only planet we can currently live in as a species.
I'm with you there. 110%. We're hundreds of years from being able to live somewhere else. We must do everything we can to protect THIS planet.
Again, I'm happy for a follow up and I will do my best to answer.
> Chernobyl has turned into a really big nature preserve. Wildlife is thriving there.
To give this more perspective:
For the last several years, I have spent many months each year in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Most of that time is not in Pripyat, or at the extant plants being decommissioned, it's in the nature areas throughout the zone.
My observations: birds are rare. I've seen an eagle once, and some other smaller birds occasionally. In Pripyat, I've never seen a bird. Insects are also rare - I once saw a swarm of flies inside a building at the Duga Radar facility, but never any bees, cockroaches, or other insects. Not even mosquitoes. I've seen moose, once. Horses several times (Mongolian horses been introduced to the area post-disaster). There are foxes, but they're often the same foxes I see time and time again. Dogs are probably the most common animal, I would estimate I've seen 30 - 50 different dogs, always hanging around where humans are. The catfish in the cooling pond canals are enormous, and plentiful.
Although parts of the Exclusion Zone are exceptionally green, such as Pripyat itself, much of the zone has a feeling of unhealthiness. Infamous areas such as the Red Forest remain too high in radiation to spend any amount of time in. The areas around the cooling ponds (which are large enough to appear like lakes) look like what you imagine an environmental catastrophe would look like - grey and barren.
I see more wildlife in any major city - and would be reluctant (and that's an understatement) to call wildlife "thriving".
Aside:
As you point out, human lives lost were relatively few. However, this place will be an ongoing disaster for many thousands of years to come. There will be ongoing huge expenses (the most recently installed containment structure will only last another century). Reactor four needs to be contained for thousands of years, and the other reactors will require another sixty years to be decommissioned.
And after all that, the main danger, deep inside the debris of reactor four, will remain an enormous danger to the planet for any foreseeable future.
In general, the radiation levels throughout the Exclusion Zone are low, comparable to many cities. I have many scheduled visits upcoming, the next being in August.
BTW, I'm not taking a stance here on pro or anti-nuclear, just trying to add some context from someone who has seen this place, up close, many times.
Wikipedia claims that biodiversity in the exclusion zone is pretty good.[1] Are you part of a science team observing wildlife, or what brings you to the area so frequently?
Thank you for your comment. I haven't been to the area but have just read. Similar to what the other user commented. I don't want to call you a liar but I definitely see some differences in point of view (between your comment and other things I've read). But since you spend much time there maybe you can expand on some of the nuances that one might not be aware of when just reading reports.
Perhaps the "good news" reports get more attention? You can find reports that agree with my observations. There's not a consensus on this - perhaps due to lack of evidence.
My comments are based upon observations of several years of visiting, and speaking with scores of people that work/live in the Exclusion Zone. Anecdotally, large Animal sightings of things like Moose are rare enough that even people who have visited hundreds of times, over decades, will stop, get very excited, take photos, and then chat about the last time it happened.
Edit: this report agrees with what I have found (in real life)
"All major taxonomic groups investigated (i.e., birds, bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies, spiders, mammals) displayed reduced population sizes in highly radioactive parts of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone."
> Anecdotally, large Animal sightings of things like Moose are rare enough that even people who have visited hundreds of times, over decades, will stop, get very excited, take photos, and then chat about the last time it happened.
Isn't this what should be expected? Even in ordinary wilderness like Maine or Canada where moose are indigenous, you could spend a year in the woods and never see one.
I spend a lot of time outdoors and while I partially agree with you it was the comment about birds and insects that piqued my interest and suggested that maybe what I read wasn't all there was. Because while larger animals may hide, insects and birds don't.
Thank you for taking the time to write this up. I really want to be pro nuclear because it's already on the planet and it's the best solution for space travel that I can think of, I'm just really concerned like you correctly surmised about the major disasters. Like you pointed out it always seems to be human error or something that should have been avoided. To be completely fair most of the reasons I've got concerns about nuclear are the same concerns I have about fossil fuels, when things go bad, they go really, really bad and a lot of that seems to depend of the type of reactors we've built. Something that softened me a lot on nuclear was watching a movie on a nuclear test facility where they discussed testing different types of reactors. I have realized that there even were different types. Thanks so much for the info.
To address your concern you have to think about accumulation. I addressed this in some of the other comments but I'll try to tie it all in here.
When considering cleanup, there are only two events (that I'm aware of) that weren't covered by insurance: Chernobyl and Fukushima (3 mile was substantially under the maximal payout from insurance). Another user commented how they found data suggesting that the cleanup for Fukushima was 200bn. When I looked for cleanup for the total disaster (including tsunami damage) it was more than double that. When looking at natural disasters even just looking at the damage to the US in just the last year we easily went over that 200bn in cost. It is a damned if we do, damned if we don't problem. But something to look at is that even including these disasters, there have been fewer human lives lost per kWhr than (almost) any other energy source, which includes solar and wind (took me for surprise when I found out, and I already knew it was really safe. Hydro is super safe though). Climate aside, it is extremely safe. Something also to note is that much of the irradiated areas from Fukushima are now livable and more space is becoming so every year (really most places you can safely live in, but we have pretty strict standards for public rad limits. Most places there you would be under nuclear worker upper limits, which is below detectable increase in cancer rates). It isn't this "these areas are unlivable for thousands of years" scenarios that you hear. People live in areas where we had the stupid idea of dropping bombs. The difference with nuclear is that cost of damage is both temporarily and physically local, so it is much more obvious than more abstract concepts like pollution (or the 200k that die a year in the US by coal ash).
I actually think about the energy problem as a negative sum game. Hopefully one day we'll get to a positive sum game where we can make the planet better, but right now it is about doing the least damage (until we learn to terraform in a major way). When you put it in this perspective you realize that all options end up having a net negative utility, but that doesn't mean we should just give up. We need to do the best that we can till we can play a different game (a positive sum one. And we will get there). But until then we have to remember that we're humans and bad at understanding risks. So we have to use the right tools, and when looking at the evidence I think the vast majority of those that do agree.
Like I said, I want to be honest. Nuclear isn't going to save the world, I'm not sure fusion is going to either. But we have to play the game and do the least damage we can until we can play a positive sum game. Until then, no matter what we do, we do some form of damage.
There's also a few common misnomers that I want to address. People point out France reducing their nuclear load, from >80% to 50% in 2025. I honestly see this as something we should emulate. Nuclear is there for load balancing. Load balancing (see Duck Curve) is the reason we still use coal for our grid. It is all about a well diversified energy portfolio and meeting the specific criteria of where you need to provide power to. The other thing is people say that it is nuclear vs solar or nuclear vs renewables. This is laudable. We want renewables. We encourage them. It is nuclear vs fossil fuels or (the closest argument I can make) nuclear vs betting on new batteries being developed in time (which to mean "in time" means a few decades ago).
I'll leave you with a saying that is often repeated: "When it comes to nuclear, those that know the most fear the least." And I ask anyone that has concerns to not just talk to random strangers on the internet, but ask nuclear physicists why they do what they do.
And as for space travel, I did some work in that area. I'm not actually convinced that fission is the answer. If anything, maybe a stop gap, but a potentially dangerous one at that (rockets still frequently explode).
And again, I'm MORE than happy to address concerns, at least ones that I know the answers to. I speak out not because I am pro-nuclear, but pro-Earth. Frankly the reason we need nuclear is because we needed to be investing in renewables and battery tech substantially more decades ago. Until then, we can't take high risk gambles without a backup in place.
It seems you missed the whole characterization of nothing is 100% safe. At some point there has to be an acceptable loss. Or rather, we have to try to do the least damage. But yes, people will die. But because we have electricity, more people will live.
I'd been unaware of Banqiao until a few years ago. Its scale overwhelms me. And yet the chain of institutional, engineering, and circumstancial events triggering it offer a huge set of cautionary lessons to nuclear advocates. I recommend reading the history closely.
Today, and for another 300 years, Fukushima and Chernobyl have effectively no inhabitants.
Zhumadian city, inundated by the Banqiao disaster, is home to over 7 million souls.
Once dam breaks cease being raging floods, life resumes, for those not fully extinguished, in a matter of weeks or years. Not centuries.
And the factors in assessing, avoiding, mitigating, alerting, and responding to risks are all remarkably similar to those of nuclear installations, save the very long-tail disasters.
The US has seen few major dam failures, though several have ocurred. Johnstown (1889) saw by far the most deaths, 2,200 (it spurred creation of the Red Cross and massive reforms to liability law), but see also the St. Francis (431 souls) and Teton (11) failures, and near misses or ongoing risks at Oroville, Isabella, Glen Canyon, among others.
Elsewhere, there are the cases of Vajont (2000+), Machchu (5500+), and others.
Again, the failures largely accrued from institutional hubris, engineering insufficience, lack of domain knowledge (often deliberate ignorance or denial), poor overall management, lack of disaster preparation, drilling, or readiness, communications breakdown (see Banqiao's comms loss), and inadequate resonse in light of imminent or present threat.
None of these are domain-specific to hydraulic civil engineering or absent from nuclear engineering projects.
> What's the long term storage costs for spent fuel rods?
Not too much. Frankly because the quantity is low. This is one of the things people don't realize, while the waste is highly contaminated there's REALLY small quantities. We're talking about less than a coke can of waste per person per year. (that's not per reactor, that's ALL reactors) It is expensive though. The cost of nuclear is from construction and decommissioning. Operating costs are extremely low.
> Is this factored into the price?
Yes (mostly)
> Is post plant cleanup factored into generation costs (we're paying for a nuclear plant closing nearby in our electric bills now on top of generation costs)?
Yes (mostly)
Mostly means that it is supposed to be factored in. But those are of course estimates. I'll also be honest that sometimes people cheat.
> Can we possibly reuse those spent fuel rods for something else useful?
They already are. 17% of France's electricity is from recycled nuclear. That's not 17% of France's nuclear energy, that's 17% of TOTAL energy. Additionally most of these materials are used for a lot of other things. A lot goes to medical.
> Can we prevent disasters like Fukishima?
Yes, actually Fukushima is a great example of how to prevent disasters like Fukushima. The reactors that didn't fail had their backup generators on higher ground. There were also better safety factors and I'm over simplifying things, but the reactors that failed had sub par safety factors. We've had much better designed reactors for awhile, but that's a longer conversation and extremely convoluted (you'll commonly see it expressed simpler, but nothing is simple).
> Can we prevent every single disaster?
No. Such a notion is really unrealistic. I'd rephrase it as "Can we reduce danger to an acceptable risk?" Which I'd say the answer is yes. I'd even say we've been there for awhile. Nuclear fission is, next to hydro, the safest form of electricity we have, even when you include predictions of future deaths from past events (Chernobyl and Fukushima).
> (an implied one) Can we reduce environmental damage from meltdown events?
Yes! Actually this is super interesting. Chernobyl has turned into a really big nature preserve. Wildlife is thriving there. It is interesting to also look at radiation maps of Japan [0]. For context to this map, all measurements are in nSv (1e-9Sv). 1Sv within a year equates to a 5.5% increase in chance of cancer over your lifetime. But 20mSv is the max allowed dosage to a radiation worker. You'll notice that the vast majority of places is WELL below the 20mSv mark. Max value I found was 8,528nSv/hr (82528nSv/hr1e-9(Sv/nSv)24(hrs)*365(days) = 74.7mSv/yr). The point of this last part isn't to say something like "oh well humans can live here hur dur dur", but rather to illustrate why Fukushima is turning into a nature preserve. But I do also want to acknowledge that many people did lose their homes and have been permanently displaced. Again, I believe that we should be honest.
> Thorium reactors...
This is a convoluted subject. I'll leave it for another post. There's (a lot of) potential but we definitely need to do more research and testing.
> Fusion reactors...
Are a completely different beast. They don't have the same radiation concerns. Their waste product is mostly Helium (a resource we are in short supply of). While fission and fusion are both nuclear based there are more differences than similarities (including power output, by orders of magnitude). Think like the difference between nuclear and coal. Both heat water to turn turbines (this is how almost all electricity is generated actually), but they're very different in most aspects.
> We already had one problem by not thinking about long term negatives...
Honestly this is why I'm PRO nuclear. Sure it has negatives, and I'm not going to try to deny them. If we're considering human lives then consider that coal kills an order of magnitude more Americans per year than have ever died from Chernobyl (several orders when you consider the world). We also have to consider the places that have become uninhabitable because of mining and other things that humans have done. Everything has negatives, I think we're just more aware of nuclear's (fission's). It is about the exchange of good and bad and if we net more good than bad. It is also about comparing to our other options. (If we're in a negative sum game we are trying to get the least negative, but we're still getting negative utility) I won't dive into this because it seems you're aware of this. It is honestly complicated and a difficult subject. It takes a lot of research. But there's a saying "When it comes to nuclear, those that know the most fear the least." There's a reason that the majority of climate researchers are pro nuclear, there's a reason the UN Climate Committee endorses nuclear.
> I really want to avoid contamination of the only planet we can currently live in as a species.
I'm with you there. 110%. We're hundreds of years from being able to live somewhere else. We must do everything we can to protect THIS planet.
Again, I'm happy for a follow up and I will do my best to answer.
[0] https://jciv.iidj.net/map/