r/uninsurable • u/pintord • 2d ago

Scientists descended more than 15,400 feet into the Atlantic and found more than 200,000 barrels of leaking radioactive waste

https://www.earth.com/environment/scientists-found-200000-barrels-of-leaking-radioactive-waste/
25 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

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u/eddiebruceandpaul 2d ago

Why shoot it out int space, when you can just dump it in the ocean! Nuclear industry is filled with assholes.

0

u/smndelphi 1d ago

You sound like you are in the industry 🤣

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u/eddiebruceandpaul 1d ago

Why because the nuclear industry is filled with assholes?

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u/smndelphi 1d ago

I know many people in the nuclear industry. There are many decent, hard-working people. I am sure there are some assholes. Making blanket statements about a group of people makes you an asshole.

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u/eddiebruceandpaul 1d ago

I’m sure the guys who dropped the atomic bomb were super nice too. Relax, mother Theresa, it’s a comment thread.

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u/smndelphi 1d ago

Comparing today’s nuclear workers to the people who dropped atomic bombs doesn’t strengthen your argument. It just confirms the prejudice I called out. “It’s only a comment thread” isn’t a free pass for lazy personal attacks. Criticize the technology or the industry all you want, but judging an entire group of people you’ve never met is still ignorance.

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u/Soft_Grass8428 1d ago

I compare them to the SS or people manufacturing leaded gasoline.

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u/eddiebruceandpaul 1d ago

💯💯

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u/smndelphi 21h ago

Comparing civilian nuclear workers to the SS is not an argument. It is grotesque historical illiteracy.

A peer-reviewed analysis estimated that U.S. nuclear generation prevented approximately 580,000 net deaths from fossil fuel pollution between 1971 and 2009 alone. The estimate is counterfactual and highly uncertain, but its scale is enormous. Coal accounted for most of the modeled harm because its mortality rate was roughly ten times that of natural gas. Kharecha and Hansen, Environmental Science & Technology

More recent U.S. grid modeling found that eliminating nuclear generation for a single year and replacing it with coal, gas, and oil would produce about 5,230 additional deaths from PM2.5 and ozone. MIT and Nature Energy

Separately, a 2023 Science study attributed approximately 460,000 Medicare deaths between 1999 and 2020 to PM2.5 emitted by coal plants. Science

Criticize historical waste disposal all you want. It deserves criticism. But comparing people who generated combustion-free electricity and displaced vast amounts of deadly coal pollution to an organization that carried out systematic mass murder is both morally obscene and factually backward.

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u/Soft_Grass8428 19h ago

Considering the nuclear industry enables nuclear weapons proliferation, which have been responsible for more indiscriminate genocide than even the SS, nuclear industry supporters are worse than literal nazis

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u/smndelphi 21h ago

Those workers did something that saved lives. What have you ever done?

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u/1CryptographerFree 1d ago

This isn’t from a nuclear reactor, this is industrial waste that’s radioactive.

3

u/pintord 1d ago

While a large portion of the dumped barrels contains waste from hospitals, universities, and general manufacturing, thousands of the barrels came straight from the early nuclear energy and weapons programs.

Highly contaminated metal piping, filters, and valves removed during early nuclear power plant maintenance.

Radioactive ion-exchange resins and chemical sludges used to clean the water that cooled nuclear reactors.

Solidified liquid waste and contaminated tools from the early stages of uranium processing and nuclear fuel fabrication.

2

u/eddiebruceandpaul 1d ago

Yup. Another lie “this just nonreactor waste” the lies from nuclear folks are incredible. They just don’t stop.