6 ms·

Reprocessing is its own nightmare and, I think, only France tries to do it. All of these processes (the "uranium cycle") are terribly polluting in their waste o

Reprocessing is its own nightmare and, I think, only France tries to do it. All of these processes (the "uranium cycle") are terribly polluting in their waste outputs and dangerous places for the people who have to work there and live near them.

garmaine 7y ago
What nightmare? Reprocessing is a net cleanup compared with letting the waste sit. I have some nuclear engineering background and honestly I don’t know what you’re referring to.
- mimixco 7y ago
  Reprocessing isn't clean. It creates its own waste which is worse than the spent fuel you started out with. Reprocessing plants (like every part of the uranium cycle) are dangerous places to work and live near.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    It creates a lot less waste, which is the point. Lots of fuel (waste) in, little bit of waste out.
benzofuran 7y ago
It's like the US doesn't already have a number of remote areas like Hanford, Oak Ridge, Idaho Falls, the Savannah River Site, Rocky Flats, etc. that are already set up (and somewhat contaminated already) for handling this sort of material and process. In reality it's a political nightmare, not a pollution one.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Not every nuclear waste producing country has so much space. Actually most don't.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    I just don't get the problem, like at all. Dig a 5-6km deep shaft(we already have the technology for that depth, no issues), put the waste at the bottom. Keep drilling shafts until all waste is burried. That's far below the depth of any water sources, and unless you bury it near a tectonic fault, it's not making its way back through geological processes for eons. Like, can someone explain to me why we're not already doing that?
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      I can't explain you that but just the fact that nobody is doing it might give you the idea that this is probably something you shouldn't do.
      - gambiting 7y ago
        As others have pointed out, most issues are political, not technical. There are already places which would be perfect(deep mine shafts surrounded by salt deposits, so they are literally impenetrable as salt is self-sealing) but the countries/states they are in object to keeping the waste as some sort of ideological issue. What I want to know is whether there is a technical issue with what I am suggesting.
        Krasnol 7y ago
        You just literally proposed to dig a 5-6m deep hole and assumed that would be enough...not even salt mines are enough. See Germany where there is suddenly groundwater seeking into a salt mine full of radioactive waste. A salt mine that was considered safe once. Now they are looking for years now to find a new safe spot and Germany stopped producing new waste. Still they have those problems. Tax payers are paying for this search. They'll also pay for the retrieval and they are paying for pumping out of the water. There are many issues there obviously. This is not some easy thing you try to dig in there. It'll be there for a very long time.
        7y ago
- Tepix 7y ago
  That's the Russian approach. Just put it in a remote place. Problem solved.
- mimixco 7y ago
  Hanford and Rocky Flats are two of the most polluted places on Earth. Hanford has polluted the Columbia River, a tragedy in itself. Nuclear is like the insolent child who refuses to clean up his room. There isn't any cleanup, really. The waste keeps piling up (usually in something that looks like a swimming pool). It must be attended to by humans for decades or centuries. And the uranium cycle leaves its dirty underwear all over our planet. There is nothing eco about nuclear.
  - benzofuran 7y ago
    Thus reprocessing - if Hanford's government contractors could get over the hump and get the vitrification plant online, it'd be a lot easier to clean up the waste that's interred in the solid dump and tank farms. And if we didn't have state governors screaming about "No atoms and radiation in my state!" and not allowing passage of waste through their state in properly designed containment and transfer casks, we'd be able to get that waste to a facility where it can be made safer. The radiation plume under Hanford is not as terrible as certain sources make it to be, the same with the contamination of the river. The area around the reservation itself has led to a recovered and strong population of many endangered indigenous animals in the area as well. Regarding Rocky Flats, again, not as terrible as many make it out to be. Once you factor in living at high elevation there's not a huge increase in overall exposure. An important consideration that comes into this is that most of these were weapons production facilities (dealing with purifying and handling some of the nastiest material around). The waste from properly designed and operated power reactors is a much cleaner and much easier to contain process. Condemning an entire avenue of clean energy (most of the fuel needs for a century+ which have already been extracted and refined) because the work done on the technology in the 40's-60's (when we were still figuring out how awful some of the waste is), is not conducive to progress. Source: Field engineering on projects at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Yucca Mountain
baylisscg 7y ago
The UK still has a site too but yes there's only a handful globally. The former site at Dounreay in Scotland used to leak particles on a regular basis which were all kinds of bad news for anything living that came into contact with them or perhaps one kind of bad news: horrible death.
roenxi 7y ago
France's power is cheap by European standard [0]. So there isn't an economic issue. Going by order-of-magnitude of input materials, if it is an environmental nightmare it is still going to be better than the mining process for raw materials going in to solar panels and whatever else. AFAIK they all use rare earths that get mined in China and refined with some horrible process. Pure volumes of solar panels suggest the incidental environmental damage will be worse from, eg, trampled grass and land disturbed. So it isn't an environmental or an economic nightmare relative to the alternatives. In what sense is it a nightmare? It seems to be working for France. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- bildung 7y ago
  > France's power is cheap by European standard [0]. Because France heavily subsidized its nuclear infrastructure. They also have a big problem right now because most plants are old and have to be decomissioned, and building new plants is not economical.[0] Energy from nuclear power plants is pretty expensive sans subsidies, not just in France. Just as an example of the live cycle costs: An old plant in my country is in the process of deconstruction - for over 25 years now. The company created as a legal umbrella for the job employs over 500 people since its creation. No end in sight. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/c7421fbe-f326-11e8-9623-d7f9881e729f https://www.ft.com/content/c7421fbe-f326-11e8-9623-d7f9881e7...
  - literallycancer 7y ago
    Renewable sources are too expensive without subsidies too. So, how do we make people use solar? I know, let's make everything else more expensive: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/b/b5/Electricity_prices_for_non-household_consumers%2C_first_half_2018_%28EUR_per_kWh%29.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/b/...
    - bildung 7y ago
      Renewables are way cheaper without subsidies. Just compare how nuclear got financed in the 1950s compared to what flows into renewables in recent decades, it's an order of magnitude smaller. And those subsidies don't include nuclear plant decomissioning, the costs of which dwarf everything else. The plant in my example cost over a billion already, and isn't even finished. A single plant. Also those per kilowatt numbers in the chart don't mean much without comparing total consumption per household. I pay way more than the most expensive example in the charts, at 30 cents per kilowatt, yet our monthly total is only 80 Euros for a 5 person household.
nickik 7y ago
This is wrong. There are many ways of reprocessing and many are far better then the limited once used so far. Its just that we haven't advanced in terms of nuclear technology in the last 40 years. We will never solve any of these problems if we don't embrace nuclear technology.

garmaine 7y ago

What nightmare? Reprocessing is a net cleanup compared with letting the waste sit. I have some nuclear engineering background and honestly I don’t know what you’re referring to.

mimixco 7y ago
Reprocessing isn't clean. It creates its own waste which is worse than the spent fuel you started out with. Reprocessing plants (like every part of the uranium cycle) are dangerous places to work and live near.
- garmaine 7y ago
  It creates a lot less waste, which is the point. Lots of fuel (waste) in, little bit of waste out.

benzofuran 7y ago

It's like the US doesn't already have a number of remote areas like Hanford, Oak Ridge, Idaho Falls, the Savannah River Site, Rocky Flats, etc. that are already set up (and somewhat contaminated already) for handling this sort of material and process. In reality it's a political nightmare, not a pollution one.

Krasnol 7y ago
Not every nuclear waste producing country has so much space. Actually most don't.
- gambiting 7y ago
  I just don't get the problem, like at all. Dig a 5-6km deep shaft(we already have the technology for that depth, no issues), put the waste at the bottom. Keep drilling shafts until all waste is burried. That's far below the depth of any water sources, and unless you bury it near a tectonic fault, it's not making its way back through geological processes for eons. Like, can someone explain to me why we're not already doing that?
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    I can't explain you that but just the fact that nobody is doing it might give you the idea that this is probably something you shouldn't do.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      As others have pointed out, most issues are political, not technical. There are already places which would be perfect(deep mine shafts surrounded by salt deposits, so they are literally impenetrable as salt is self-sealing) but the countries/states they are in object to keeping the waste as some sort of ideological issue. What I want to know is whether there is a technical issue with what I am suggesting.
      - Krasnol 7y ago
        You just literally proposed to dig a 5-6m deep hole and assumed that would be enough...not even salt mines are enough. See Germany where there is suddenly groundwater seeking into a salt mine full of radioactive waste. A salt mine that was considered safe once. Now they are looking for years now to find a new safe spot and Germany stopped producing new waste. Still they have those problems. Tax payers are paying for this search. They'll also pay for the retrieval and they are paying for pumping out of the water. There are many issues there obviously. This is not some easy thing you try to dig in there. It'll be there for a very long time.
        7y ago
Tepix 7y ago
That's the Russian approach. Just put it in a remote place. Problem solved.
mimixco 7y ago
Hanford and Rocky Flats are two of the most polluted places on Earth. Hanford has polluted the Columbia River, a tragedy in itself. Nuclear is like the insolent child who refuses to clean up his room. There isn't any cleanup, really. The waste keeps piling up (usually in something that looks like a swimming pool). It must be attended to by humans for decades or centuries. And the uranium cycle leaves its dirty underwear all over our planet. There is nothing eco about nuclear.
- benzofuran 7y ago
  Thus reprocessing - if Hanford's government contractors could get over the hump and get the vitrification plant online, it'd be a lot easier to clean up the waste that's interred in the solid dump and tank farms. And if we didn't have state governors screaming about "No atoms and radiation in my state!" and not allowing passage of waste through their state in properly designed containment and transfer casks, we'd be able to get that waste to a facility where it can be made safer. The radiation plume under Hanford is not as terrible as certain sources make it to be, the same with the contamination of the river. The area around the reservation itself has led to a recovered and strong population of many endangered indigenous animals in the area as well. Regarding Rocky Flats, again, not as terrible as many make it out to be. Once you factor in living at high elevation there's not a huge increase in overall exposure. An important consideration that comes into this is that most of these were weapons production facilities (dealing with purifying and handling some of the nastiest material around). The waste from properly designed and operated power reactors is a much cleaner and much easier to contain process. Condemning an entire avenue of clean energy (most of the fuel needs for a century+ which have already been extracted and refined) because the work done on the technology in the 40's-60's (when we were still figuring out how awful some of the waste is), is not conducive to progress. Source: Field engineering on projects at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Yucca Mountain

baylisscg 7y ago

The UK still has a site too but yes there's only a handful globally. The former site at Dounreay in Scotland used to leak particles on a regular basis which were all kinds of bad news for anything living that came into contact with them or perhaps one kind of bad news: horrible death.

roenxi 7y ago

France's power is cheap by European standard [0]. So there isn't an economic issue. Going by order-of-magnitude of input materials, if it is an environmental nightmare it is still going to be better than the mining process for raw materials going in to solar panels and whatever else. AFAIK they all use rare earths that get mined in China and refined with some horrible process. Pure volumes of solar panels suggest the incidental environmental damage will be worse from, eg, trampled grass and land disturbed. So it isn't an environmental or an economic nightmare relative to the alternatives. In what sense is it a nightmare? It seems to be working for France. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

bildung 7y ago
> France's power is cheap by European standard [0]. Because France heavily subsidized its nuclear infrastructure. They also have a big problem right now because most plants are old and have to be decomissioned, and building new plants is not economical.[0] Energy from nuclear power plants is pretty expensive sans subsidies, not just in France. Just as an example of the live cycle costs: An old plant in my country is in the process of deconstruction - for over 25 years now. The company created as a legal umbrella for the job employs over 500 people since its creation. No end in sight. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/c7421fbe-f326-11e8-9623-d7f9881e729f https://www.ft.com/content/c7421fbe-f326-11e8-9623-d7f9881e7...
- literallycancer 7y ago
  Renewable sources are too expensive without subsidies too. So, how do we make people use solar? I know, let's make everything else more expensive: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/b/b5/Electricity_prices_for_non-household_consumers%2C_first_half_2018_%28EUR_per_kWh%29.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/b/...
  - bildung 7y ago
    Renewables are way cheaper without subsidies. Just compare how nuclear got financed in the 1950s compared to what flows into renewables in recent decades, it's an order of magnitude smaller. And those subsidies don't include nuclear plant decomissioning, the costs of which dwarf everything else. The plant in my example cost over a billion already, and isn't even finished. A single plant. Also those per kilowatt numbers in the chart don't mean much without comparing total consumption per household. I pay way more than the most expensive example in the charts, at 30 cents per kilowatt, yet our monthly total is only 80 Euros for a 5 person household.

nickik 7y ago

This is wrong. There are many ways of reprocessing and many are far better then the limited once used so far. Its just that we haven't advanced in terms of nuclear technology in the last 40 years. We will never solve any of these problems if we don't embrace nuclear technology.