36 ms·
Are there any technical solutions solving the nuclear waste storage problem yet? Before following the HN crowd and becoming pro-nuclear-power, I'd like to unde
by willvarfar 9y ago
Are there any technical solutions solving the nuclear waste storage problem yet?
Before following the HN crowd and becoming pro-nuclear-power, I'd like to understand what problems it is leaving to our children and their children and so on.
- mikeash 9y agoYes, put it in sturdy canisters and store it somewhere with a nice fence and some guards.
- beat 9y agoAnd who will be paying for the guards in the year 8017? How will the fence be doing? Will anyone still be speaking English to read the signs?
- mikeash 9y agoThere's lots of highly dangerous non-nuclear waste which stays dangerous forever, and we don't worry about this. The best answer to those questions is to do our best to ensure that civilization doesn't collapse in the first place.
- beat 9y agoI don't wear a seat belt, because I do my best not to get into accidents.
- mikeash 9y agoWhat's the plan for warning future civilizations away from mercury, arsenic, and other long-lived toxic waste? The current approach for those things is to dump it in a suitable landfill or similar, and let it be. Nobody seems worried about what happens when some future civilization discovers it thousands of years hence.
- beat 9y agoMaybe we should be worried.
- wbl 9y agoThey already have places full of mercury naturally: cinnabar mines.
- mikeash 9y agoMaybe. But I find it really weird that people constantly wring their hands over a few thousand tons of nuclear waste because it remains dangerous for ten thousand years, yet pay almost no attention to millions of tons of chemical waste that remains dangerous until the end of time. I realize people can't worry about every single thing, and worrying about one thing doesn't mean other things aren't a problem. But at the same time, I see lots of people say that nuclear is worse than fossil fuels because of the waste problem, which makes no sense to me at all.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoMan... I don't even care about "the millennials" who were born like 10 years after me. Those privileged 8017'ers can get a new planet with their alien buddies if they don't like the Nuclear waste on this one. It's not like those fuckers leave their data plane and transubstantiate into physical reality (go outside) very often anyways.
- briffle 9y agoYes, reprocessing fuel has been around since the 70's.. its just not 'politically feasible' to reverse the ban President Carter put on it in the US.
- adrianN 9y agoAlso, breeder reactors.
- ckozlowski 9y agoCorrect. The problem is that the fuel cycle involves stages where you have large amounts of plutonium sitting around for long periods of time. Ironically enough, it's also mastery of that fuel cycle that enables the neutralization of weapons-grade material. France has mastered this cycle, and they're one of a few nations who are capable of reprocessing nuclear weapon primaries.
- pmyteh 9y agoWe (Britain) built the THORP plant to reprocess into mixed oxide fuel. It was billions over budget, seemingly difficult to operate without causing a stream of minor nuclear accidents, and was never commercially successful. We closed it. Carter-era politics is the least of the problems...
- GeneralMayhem 9y agoBury it in a mountain and never look at it again. The amount of waste produced, even if we powered all of the United States with it, is not that big.
- pycal 9y agoYeah, you can increase the safety of handling nuclear waste material, decrease its volume, increase its long term stability, and lower its surface mobility by turning it in to a glass-like material http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513010313 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513...
- specialist 9y agoI have almost zero problems with nuclear power. I have almost zero confidence in the humans involved. Operations, waste disposal, financials, turf wars, transparency, accountability, whatever. Humans ruin everything. Even in my own (very low stakes) work as a programmer, the problem is rarely the tech, its the humans. Whenever someone floats an idea, I wonder "What's the worst that could go wrong?" Solar panels becomes landfill and the silicon fabs become superfund sites. vs Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, proliferation, dirty bombs, etc.
- exabrial 9y agoRecycle it in a breeder reactor is my favorite option. We would only really need one of them to process the entire nation' waste.