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Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal
by cjsuk 9y ago
Apart from the waste.
We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
- c3534l 9y agoWe found it in the ground, we're just putting it back in the ground when we're done with it.
- simias 9y agoNot in the same state and not in the same concentration. I'm not anti-nuclear in the least but let's not spread disinformation (or "fake news" in modern parlance).
- canadianwriter 9y agoThat's why a lot of people see it as the lesser evil and a good stop gap before we move to 100% renewable.
- gaius 9y agoWe really don't know what to do about it Another myth. Of course we do: breeder reactors. Hint: why is nuclear waste dangerous? because there is still loads of energy in it.
- swerner 9y agoAnd then we put the breeder reactors into abandoned mines. Breeders aren't the solution, they have waste products too, and those waste products are also radioactive.
- sliverstorm 9y agoThe good news is breeder waste is a mix of very short half lives and very long half lives. The very short ones decay to safe levels quickly, and the very long ones have a low level of activity.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoThis. Conservation of energy/matter applies. If there's a lot of energy output and a fixed amount of input the duration must be small. You can visit the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You just can't spend a good chunk of your life there there. I'd be totally for "Yucca Mountain OHV park"
- monknomo 9y agoTricky to use breeder reactors in a way that doesn't upset the non-proliferation balance
- maxerickson 9y agoIt's not a solved engineering problem. It's likely that planned reactors would work, but they are also likely to be really expensive.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago> why is nuclear waste dangerous? because there is still loads of energy in it. I though it was because of γ-radiation and long half lives? Are those properties unique to matter with high energy potential?
- KGIII 9y agoI will try to explain it as best as I can. Radioactive material decays as particles are emitted. If it has a long half-life, that pretty much means that the energy is being released rather slowly. In other words, just don't go poking at it and you'll be fine. On the othe hand, stuff with a short half-life means that atoms are decaying rapidly. Particles are being knocked off with great rapidity. That stuff is much more dangerous, in the now. It is transferring energy, in a harmful form, quickly. A long half-life means don't go poking at it for a while. A short half-life means you probably should consider containing it really well. We store both safely because we know people like to poke stuff, and it is harmful. It's just that the scary long half-lives only tell part of the story and many people seem to think those are the more problematic. Disclaimer, I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. However, I've taken a whole lot of physics courses. Someone can probably explain this better than I.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago[Same here] From what I remember, the energy released by γ-radiation is quite low. I'm still not convinced that just because something emits γ-radiation, short or long half life, it has an inherently meaningful energy potential. α- and β-radiation: sure. But γ? It's harmful to humans for very different reasons than fissile material is a useful energy source, isn't it? Or am I completely misremembering this all?
- gaius 9y agoCorrelation is not causation sure. But "spent" nuclear fuel has plenty of energy left in it that a breeder can extract.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 9y agoEven if the waste starts to leak, it will be just local problem and not big catastrophe. Compared to global warming, burying nuclear waste is more responsible solution for the future generations sake.
- kaikai 9y agoNuclear waste leaking into an aquifer or the ocean will not be a local problem.
- lmm 9y agoEither it will be local, or it will be dilute enough not to matter.
- y4mi 9y agountil it doesn't and it does. i'm sure that its safe to dump small amounts of radioactive material into the oceans, but if you start to build more reactors and dispose of all the waste into the ocean, the dilution will soon cease to be enough to offset a global ... disaster.
- lmm 9y agoNope. Unless we start importing uranium from off-planet, there just isn't enough material to make the whole planet significantly radioactive.
- all_usernames 9y agoWhat does significantly radioactive mean? If I am a single individual, a single particle of Cesium or whatever could give me cancer. It's not an averages game when you're talking about real lives.
- wbl 9y agoDo you know how much uranium coal plants release into the air?
- sbarker 9y agoWe should shoot the waste into to sun.
- fnj 9y ago1) Extreme costs. 2) Chance for disaster in case of launch mishap.
- sbarker 9y ago2 Is a valid point. For 1, it would be a global win as we reduced costs IMHO.
- 0xffff2 9y agoI don't think you understand how much energy would actually be required to launch the waste into the sun. Costs would have to be reduced by a couple orders of magnitude to make launching any significant amount of material into the sun viable.
- nothrabannosir 9y agoThat is hard (there was an article on HN about exactly this a while ago). You need a large amount of energy to cancel out our orbit or you just end up sending it into its own solar orbit (which will intersect with ours, to boot).
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoWhy we can't we just use Venus or Mercury?
- nemo 9y agoNot a lot of fun if the transport rocket fails.
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- stcredzero 9y agoApart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. We could do like we do with coal, and just release the radioactivity into the atmosphere. That industry disposes of a lot of radioactive material that way.
- Terr_ 9y agoYou could argue that it's actually our social and legal system which is causing problems, rather than a deficiency of technology. Not in the sense that people are being irrational, but in the sense that we don't have a good framework for dealing with liabilities -- like nuclear waste -- for extremely long periods of time. We could probably store it pretty well if anybody was motivated in paying the direct and indirect costs of doing so properly.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoIt's also possible that if those costs were correctly tallied, then nuclear power would not be economically viable (assuming it even is without them).
- zackmorris 9y agoI live in Idaho, and something that comes up fairly regularly is whether to accept more nuclear waste shipments to be stored at the https://www.inl.gov https://www.inl.gov indefinitely. To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years. That would basically mean revisiting all the waste that is currently stored and freeze it in glass or whatever. If the industry did that for all existing waste and proved their expertise in that area, then I think more people would entertain the notion of more reactors.
- mikeash 9y agoMeanwhile we have people fighting for coal power plants even though their waste disposal plan for things like mercury and arsenic is basically "dump it into the air and hope it doesn't kill too many people." And that stuff stays dangerous until the heat death of the universe, not merely thousands of years.
- flubert 9y ago> Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years. The "Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982" charged utilities a 0.1 cent/kwh fee for disposal of nuclear waste, and the DOE was supposed to take receipt of that waste. There is $31 billion in reserve for waste disposal... https://www.eenews.net/stories/1059999730 https://www.eenews.net/stories/1059999730
- scottLobster 9y agoBreeder reactors have been around since the dawn of nuclear energy and are extremely efficient, re-using the bulk of harmful waste material as fuel. If we built more of those waste would be far less of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet support for actually building one has been tepid at best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power The issue is nuclear energy is so risky that only nation-states are willing to underwrite the creation of plants. As a result regulations on plant design tend to be extremely conservative, so innovation is brought to a crawl. On top of that the origins of nuclear energy is weapons research, the waste was the original objective. So the most proven model of reactor is the one that produces the most waste. Put the two together and we're left with the simplest, least efficient design: light-water reactors. Nuclear can be viable, but the government will have to grow some balls and take some extra risk. We could really use another Musk or Bezos to take on Nuclear Power the same way the former two are taking on space.
- ethanwillis 9y agoOne thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced? When I was reading about this IIRC all of the nuclear waste we have produced in the US over the life of our nuclear programs could be stored in an area the size of a football field. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
- dfox 9y agoThat depends on what you qualify as waste. As for the actual otherwise unuseful radioactive reaction byproducts this might very well be true. But in the industrial meaning nuclear waste also includes various stuff that can not (or could not at the time) be economically separated from the waste althought it is either not dangerous at all or useful as nuclear fuel. And also stuff that is simply radioactive and has nothing to do with nuclear reactors per se.
- bildung 9y ago> One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced? A lot of the generated waste is not the used up fuel itself, but contaminated construction materials etc. So lower radiation, but still not something you have to bury somewhere. In the region I live in an old nuclear plant gets deconstructed for over two decades now because its tricky to seperate uncontaminated from contanimated material. The whole deconstruction costs an estimated €5 billion by the way.
- mikeash 9y agoLots of industrial processes create dangerous chemical wastes which remain dangerous forever. Why are you so worried about nuclear waste which is only dangerous for 10,000 years?
- cjsuk 9y agoI'm worried about both!
- Recurecur 9y agoIf safe storage is really the goal (I think part of the thinking is that we might someday have a use for the "waste") it seems highly technically feasible to encase it suitably, and drop it on the subducting side of the Mid-Pacific Subduction Zone. Since the containers would be very dense, they'd embed deep into the sediment, many thousands of feet underwater. Over geologic time, subduction would draw them deeper and deeper, eventually into the Earth's mantle. Problem solved, if permanent disposal is truly the goal.