Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Everything they say about nuclear waste is wrong

- safest waste from energy (death toll: 0)

- prevents fossil/biomass waste (death toll: 7M/year)

- tiny amts. (all US waste can fit on football field 50 ft. high)

- stored at site of production

- all it needs is coat of paint

https://twitter.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/1195184970613936129

Our irrational fears of nuclear stem from:

- displacement of fears of the bomb (even tho waste can’t make one)

- unconscious desire to return nuclear to underworld (by burying it)

- wrong belief that it’s liquid (it’s used fuel rods)

- The Simpsons

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

“Can’t we use solar which doesn’t create waste?”

Solar panels

- create 300x more waste than nuclear

- contain heavy metal metals whose toxicity never declines

- almost never recycled bc it’s cheaper to buy raw materials

- dumped on poor nations

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

(I took huge quantities of shit from people after I published the above column on solar waste. Multiple demands to my editors for corections, retractions, etc. The piece withstood the hazing and a year later @nytimes confirmed its basic findings)

nytimes.com/2019/05/12/cli…

Two years ago I met with a senior editor at a major US newspaper

She asked me, “What about the waste?”

I asked her what her concern was

She responded — and these were her exact words, which I’ll never forget — “I don’t know, that a terrorist will use it as a bomb?”

I patiently explained that a terrorist wouldn’t be able to make a bomb with them, that nobody could, unless they somehow managed to bring the used fuel rods to France and reprocess them in their massive reprocessing complex, over a period of weeks or months.

All of which would require breaking into a plant, loading one of those heavy canisters on an 18-wheeler, driving to a port, loading them on a container ship, traveling across the ocean, unloading them in France, driving to the reprocessing facility, which is run by French govt...

At which point she cut me off as it became clear just how ridiculous her (widely-held) concern was

For years she thought terrorists might somehow make a bomb from some used fuel rods

And yet this was a person whose job it was to investigate the facts and write editorials

I wish she were an outlier but she’s not. Consciously or unconsciously, a huge percentage of people believe that harmless used fuel rods are like little bombs. The pro- nuclear community has, for over 50 years, failed catastrophically to explain the simplest, most basic facts

Much of the reason for widespread belief in total nonsense is due to the revolutionary nature of nuclear fission, which as Niels Bohr recognized, fundamentally altered our relationship to the natural world. Fission is freaky. It’s a new fire we didn’t evolve with.

But I also blame the nuclear science, technical, & industrial communities for reinforcing fears with a patronizing, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head” attitude & an irrational insistence on burying the waste when it’s perfectly fine where it is: at the site of production.

The desire to bury the waste comes from an unconscious desire to return the astonishing power of fission to the underworld plus the desire of some industry interests to make billions of dollars digging a hole in the ground, shipping used fuel across the country, etc

I’ve never understood the obsession with burying waste. When I ask people in the industry why they want to bury it they can’t come up with a good answer. It feels like arguing with Zen priests.

Me: “Why bury the waste?”

Industry: “Because we have to bury the waste”

[repeat]

As such, industry people are no better than the newspaper editor I met with. They don’t have a clue as to why they really want to bury the waste. And they don’t have a clue because there is a taboo on even acknowledging that fears of nuclear have little to do with energy.

/END

“Nuclear is the one power source that does not emit waste, captures all of it, and stores it safely on site. There’s so little waste that nuclear produces … that we have room for thousands of years on existing plant sites.”

@DavidStaplesYEG

edmontonjournal.com/business/local…

“I was totally in love with the idea of renewables.I just think there was something very spiritual, very romantic about being powered by natural flows rather than energy stocks we dig up and burn, or fission … I viewed renewables as a way to heal America and heal the planet.”