# The Crazy Years

**URL:** <https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/the-crazy-years/1451>\
**Category:** The Happening World\
**Tags:** crazy-years, clown-show\
**Created:** [30 May 2022 12:56 UTC](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/the-crazy-years/1451 "2022-05-30T12:56:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2737

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**Author:** ![johnwalker](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/user_avatar/scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/johnwalker/32/17415_2.png) [@johnwalker](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/u/johnwalker)\
**Post date:** [11 September 2023 12:11 UTC](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/the-crazy-years/1451/2737 "2023-09-11T12:11:19Z")

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> [@civilwestman](#):
>
> Surely, sufficient experience, engineering expertise and narrow AI presently exists to make such plants operate extremely safely.

Indeed, the design and operating procedures of _existing_ plants are such that the death toll from light water and heavy water moderated nuclear power reactors from 1957 (the first in the U.S.) to the present has been precisely zero. (Cheronbyl was a graphite moderated reactor intended for dual-use production of electricity and plutonium breeding and had no containment building.)

Coal-burning power stations currently in operation release an estimated 30,000 tonnes per year of radioactive radon, uranium, and thorium in flue gases from contaminants in the coal. Natural gas also contains radon from decay of uranium in the rocks surrounding the underground source. A one gigawatt electric natural gas plant releases around 8 Curies of radon into the atmosphere per month. This is approximately equal to the total radiation released by the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in 1979.

(Source: Robert Zubrin, [_The Case for Nukes_](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1736386069/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour), 2023)

> [@civilwestman](#):
>
> Are there not even designs which greatly limit radioactive waste?

As discussed by my [“Nuclear Fission Fuel is Inexhaustible”](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/nuclear-fission-fuel-is-inexhaustible/1257) post on 2022-04-25, a breeder reactor fuel cycle drastically reduces the amount of nuclear waste because it burns up many of the actinide elements which are the most difficult to manage components of spent fuel from water-moderated reactors. Actually, most of the “waste” from the moronic “once-through” fuel cycle used in the U.S. (but not in Europe or other saner regions of the world) is not waste at all but rather unreacted uranium-238, which a breeder reactor calls “fuel”. By eschewing fuel reprocessing, the U.S. even throws away the plutonium-239 and -240 bred in the spent fuel, which can be extracted and used as reactor fuel.

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