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Can somebody explain to me what happens with all the nuclear waste? How is nuclear power anything else but an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen? We pi

Can somebody explain to me what happens with all the nuclear waste? How is nuclear power anything else but an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen? We pile the waste on and on, how do we deal with that?

merpnderp 8y ago
France burns its waste in nuclear plants. The US created a geologically stable dump that was shut down for political reasons. The EPA had certified it as safe for 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- pfdietz 8y ago
  France does not burn its waste in nuclear plants. Use of MOX fuel in thermal reactors doesn't count, as it only uses a fraction of the produced transuranics, and cannot then be recycled into more MOX fuel. And of course it doesn't do a damned thing to fission products.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
MFLoon 8y ago
When we burn fossil fuels a huge volume of hazardous waste just goes into the environment, and we know what it does then. With nuclear there is also a huge volume of hazardous waste, but at least it remains spatially consolidated and in our control. The consensus best solution is deep burial. Sure we might run out of space and create nuclear "landmines" over the very long term, but it's a preferable tradeoff to the much more imminent threats of the global warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_w...
- Torwald 8y ago
  How would you describe: >and we know what it does then. What is it that it does then?
  - MFLoon 8y ago
    Greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, poisoning the hydrosphere and biosphere, etc; not going to dignify the question with further details. I don't understand why one wouldn't believe in the environmental dangers of conventional energy sources but be hyper concerned about the "environmental catastrophe waiting to happen" from nuclear energy sources.
jabl 8y ago
Several options. - Bury it underground in geological repositories. These have been extensively studied and are, to the best of our knowledge, more than safe enough. - We can reprocess it and burn it in breeder reactors. The remaining waste will decay to background levels in about 300 years. Oh, and we can shutdown the uranium mining industry for, oh, the next 1000 years while we burn up the uranium we have already dug up. Also keep in mind that while the waste is dangerous, it's absolutely minuscule in volume. All worldwide spent (civilian) nuclear fuel could fit on a football field, stacked a few meters high.
OrgNet 8y ago
nuclear is much cleaner then anything else... the waste is only less radioactive then the fuel. What is your better alternative that doesn't create any waste?
- MertsA 8y ago
  The waste is many orders of magnitude more radioactive than the fuel. The fuel itself is fissile, meaning it can split when hit with a neutron. Radioactivity is a measure of how often an isotope will spontaneously split on its own. The fresh fuel gives off very little radiation and it can be handled with nothing more than a pair of latex gloves, and the gloves are only necessary to keep the handler's greasy grubby mitts off of the expensive and highly clean and pure fuel bundle. The spent fuel is so radioactive that it has to be stored underwater for at least 3 years and commonly up to 10 because the radiation is enough to heat up the fuel to unsafe temperatures before that time. Nuclear is much cleaner than fossil fuels though, you're right about that, natural gas has some radon mixed in that just gets vented to the atmosphere and coal ash that makes it past whatever filtering system the power plant uses releases far more radiation than nuclear plants could during normal operation.
MertsA 8y ago
You hear all the time about how there's thousands of tons of high level radioactive waste and that sounds scary and huge but really when you're talking about the scale of an entire country that's absolutely peanuts. I do think the way we handle nuclear waste in America needs to be overhauled but even just deep burial in long term casks would be sufficient. The only chance of someone accidentally digging one up is contingent on such a massive loss of knowledge and continuity of society that it would have to be an apocalyptic event. But if you're interested in other approaches that could be taken nuclear waste is primarily U-238 and Plutonium. Rather than bury it all the waste can be reprocessed to extract usable fuel and depleted Uranium from the waste which reduces the amount of waste to deal with by about 90%. Another thing commonly repeated is that nuclear waste has a half life of tens of thousands of years. This is wrong, isotopes have half lives, nuclear waste does not. Nuclear waste is a toxic soup of different isotopes, some short lived, others long lived. As the isotopes spontaneously fission the concentrations in the waste change. 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1 is immensely more radioactive than 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1,000,000. Fresh nuclear waste has substantially higher amounts of short lived isotopes which is why when spent fuel is removed from a reactor it has to be stored in a cooling pond for a long time before it can be stored in a cask. Radioactivity has an inverse relationship with the half live, short lived isotopes are extremely radioactive and extremely long lived isotopes are barely radioactive. If you wanted to go further than just reducing the amount of waste you can actually burn up waste so to speak. If you bombard it with tons of neutrons (like from a fusion reactor hopefully in the long term) you either split the fissile isotopes or breed them into a different isotope. Just by processing our waste we could split the waste into stuff that has a short half life that you would just let decay naturally, stuff that has a long half life that can be buried without any real concerns about someone building a dirty bomb with it, and stuff in between that could potentially be burned up in a reactor or just buried in more secure facilities like what Yucca mountain was supposed to provide.
nickik 8y ago
Nuclear waste in reality is a tiny problem. The amount of waste is insignificantly small. Its not even waste as its valuable material for the future and should be considered as such. The amount of fear spread about nuclear waste is so far out of proportion with the reality of the situation that its hard to even explain how crazy many of the believes about nuclear waste are. Compared to all other forms of energy, including solar and wind, nuclear produces by far the least amount of waste to the envoirment. In fact, nothing escapes into the environment, everything is captured and can be handled appropriately.
- cesarb 8y ago
  > Compared to all other forms of energy, including solar and wind, nuclear produces by far the least amount of waste to the envoirment. In fact, nothing escapes into the environment, everything is captured and can be handled appropriately. Sorry if I'm missing something, but which waste escapes to the environment for solar or wind during operation? I can only think of reflected light and heat for solar, and turbulence for wind. Unless you're thinking also of the waste produced during bulding and dismantling, but then you'd have to compare with bulding and dismantling the whole nuclear plant, not just its fuel.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Solar panels are not systematically recycled. Solar panel production produces quite a bit of waste and much of it is not handle appropriately in factories in China. For wind its less so, you just have gigantic towers everywhere that will eventually be ruins. And also you have to build a lot of gigantic wind turbines to match the output of a single nuclear planet. I am comparing end to end. A nuclear plant is one big building in one place and most of that is just common building materials, minimal amount of mining for the uranium. And if we eventually actually build new modern nuclear plants it would reduce the size of the plant by quite a bit as well. Nuclear has more upside in terms of efficiency (currently only 2% efficient) and minimizing resource usage. Pretty much every end to end analysis agrees that nuclear has the least amount of resource and land usage, and it has the least amount of uncontrolled waste.

merpnderp 8y ago

France burns its waste in nuclear plants. The US created a geologically stable dump that was shut down for political reasons. The EPA had certified it as safe for 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

pfdietz 8y ago
France does not burn its waste in nuclear plants. Use of MOX fuel in thermal reactors doesn't count, as it only uses a fraction of the produced transuranics, and cannot then be recycled into more MOX fuel. And of course it doesn't do a damned thing to fission products.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

MFLoon 8y ago

When we burn fossil fuels a huge volume of hazardous waste just goes into the environment, and we know what it does then. With nuclear there is also a huge volume of hazardous waste, but at least it remains spatially consolidated and in our control. The consensus best solution is deep burial. Sure we might run out of space and create nuclear "landmines" over the very long term, but it's a preferable tradeoff to the much more imminent threats of the global warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_w...

Torwald 8y ago
How would you describe: >and we know what it does then. What is it that it does then?
- MFLoon 8y ago
  Greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, poisoning the hydrosphere and biosphere, etc; not going to dignify the question with further details. I don't understand why one wouldn't believe in the environmental dangers of conventional energy sources but be hyper concerned about the "environmental catastrophe waiting to happen" from nuclear energy sources.

jabl 8y ago

Several options. - Bury it underground in geological repositories. These have been extensively studied and are, to the best of our knowledge, more than safe enough. - We can reprocess it and burn it in breeder reactors. The remaining waste will decay to background levels in about 300 years. Oh, and we can shutdown the uranium mining industry for, oh, the next 1000 years while we burn up the uranium we have already dug up. Also keep in mind that while the waste is dangerous, it's absolutely minuscule in volume. All worldwide spent (civilian) nuclear fuel could fit on a football field, stacked a few meters high.

OrgNet 8y ago

nuclear is much cleaner then anything else... the waste is only less radioactive then the fuel. What is your better alternative that doesn't create any waste?

MertsA 8y ago
The waste is many orders of magnitude more radioactive than the fuel. The fuel itself is fissile, meaning it can split when hit with a neutron. Radioactivity is a measure of how often an isotope will spontaneously split on its own. The fresh fuel gives off very little radiation and it can be handled with nothing more than a pair of latex gloves, and the gloves are only necessary to keep the handler's greasy grubby mitts off of the expensive and highly clean and pure fuel bundle. The spent fuel is so radioactive that it has to be stored underwater for at least 3 years and commonly up to 10 because the radiation is enough to heat up the fuel to unsafe temperatures before that time. Nuclear is much cleaner than fossil fuels though, you're right about that, natural gas has some radon mixed in that just gets vented to the atmosphere and coal ash that makes it past whatever filtering system the power plant uses releases far more radiation than nuclear plants could during normal operation.

MertsA 8y ago

You hear all the time about how there's thousands of tons of high level radioactive waste and that sounds scary and huge but really when you're talking about the scale of an entire country that's absolutely peanuts. I do think the way we handle nuclear waste in America needs to be overhauled but even just deep burial in long term casks would be sufficient. The only chance of someone accidentally digging one up is contingent on such a massive loss of knowledge and continuity of society that it would have to be an apocalyptic event. But if you're interested in other approaches that could be taken nuclear waste is primarily U-238 and Plutonium. Rather than bury it all the waste can be reprocessed to extract usable fuel and depleted Uranium from the waste which reduces the amount of waste to deal with by about 90%. Another thing commonly repeated is that nuclear waste has a half life of tens of thousands of years. This is wrong, isotopes have half lives, nuclear waste does not. Nuclear waste is a toxic soup of different isotopes, some short lived, others long lived. As the isotopes spontaneously fission the concentrations in the waste change. 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1 is immensely more radioactive than 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1,000,000. Fresh nuclear waste has substantially higher amounts of short lived isotopes which is why when spent fuel is removed from a reactor it has to be stored in a cooling pond for a long time before it can be stored in a cask. Radioactivity has an inverse relationship with the half live, short lived isotopes are extremely radioactive and extremely long lived isotopes are barely radioactive. If you wanted to go further than just reducing the amount of waste you can actually burn up waste so to speak. If you bombard it with tons of neutrons (like from a fusion reactor hopefully in the long term) you either split the fissile isotopes or breed them into a different isotope. Just by processing our waste we could split the waste into stuff that has a short half life that you would just let decay naturally, stuff that has a long half life that can be buried without any real concerns about someone building a dirty bomb with it, and stuff in between that could potentially be burned up in a reactor or just buried in more secure facilities like what Yucca mountain was supposed to provide.

nickik 8y ago

Nuclear waste in reality is a tiny problem. The amount of waste is insignificantly small. Its not even waste as its valuable material for the future and should be considered as such. The amount of fear spread about nuclear waste is so far out of proportion with the reality of the situation that its hard to even explain how crazy many of the believes about nuclear waste are. Compared to all other forms of energy, including solar and wind, nuclear produces by far the least amount of waste to the envoirment. In fact, nothing escapes into the environment, everything is captured and can be handled appropriately.

cesarb 8y ago
> Compared to all other forms of energy, including solar and wind, nuclear produces by far the least amount of waste to the envoirment. In fact, nothing escapes into the environment, everything is captured and can be handled appropriately. Sorry if I'm missing something, but which waste escapes to the environment for solar or wind during operation? I can only think of reflected light and heat for solar, and turbulence for wind. Unless you're thinking also of the waste produced during bulding and dismantling, but then you'd have to compare with bulding and dismantling the whole nuclear plant, not just its fuel.
- nickik 8y ago
  Solar panels are not systematically recycled. Solar panel production produces quite a bit of waste and much of it is not handle appropriately in factories in China. For wind its less so, you just have gigantic towers everywhere that will eventually be ruins. And also you have to build a lot of gigantic wind turbines to match the output of a single nuclear planet. I am comparing end to end. A nuclear plant is one big building in one place and most of that is just common building materials, minimal amount of mining for the uranium. And if we eventually actually build new modern nuclear plants it would reduce the size of the plant by quite a bit as well. Nuclear has more upside in terms of efficiency (currently only 2% efficient) and minimizing resource usage. Pretty much every end to end analysis agrees that nuclear has the least amount of resource and land usage, and it has the least amount of uncontrolled waste.