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Has the US Navy worked out what no one else has yet? What to do with all the toxic waste? Hiding it in a mountain and hoping for the best is hardly a solution.

Has the US Navy worked out what no one else has yet? What to do with all the toxic waste? Hiding it in a mountain and hoping for the best is hardly a solution. The US Navy also has effectively as much money as it ever needs to “decommission” reactors. How many private reactors have their decommissioning costs adequately covered? Everything I’ve read says most estimates from time of construction were woefully inadequate and thus any money that may have been squirrelled away to pay for decommissioning will fall way short of what’s required.

ars 7y ago
> Has the US Navy worked out what no one else has yet? What to do with all the toxic waste? I don't know about the Navy, but we do know what to do with the toxic waste. I didn't realize people still thought it was a problem. Nuclear fuel reprocessing plus breeder reactors can almost completely burn up all the nuclear fuel, leaving only short lived elements behind, and no long term storage issues. The only reason we don't do it today is economic plus arms control.
- gpm 7y ago
  > The only reason we don't do it today is economic [...] Which would appear to be a disqualifying issue since the entire reason people are advocating for nuclear and not renewables is economic.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    The salient point is that it's uneconomical primarily as a result of purposeful regulatory obstructionism. It costs a lot because opponents want it to cost a lot. Moreover, that is a temporary issue. You have a lot of money from oil and coal lobbying against anything that could replace them, but you don't have to reprocess the spent fuel this year, or next year, or ten years from now. You can do it thirty years from now when the coal lobby is dead and gone because nobody burns coal anymore by then. And storing it for that long is much easier than needing somewhere to put it for thousands of years.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      If you are going to say "nuclear is cheap, we just have to live with meltdowns and learn to like them", then you might as well stop wasting your keystrokes. That dog won't hunt. Or if you're saying "reactors are going to be just as safe even if all those expensive regulations are removed", then you have to justify that (and justify that removing regulations will reduce the cost enough). I am extremely skeptical.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        It's not about having no safety rules, it's about having more reasonable safety rules that weren't enacted with the goal of increasing costs. Safety is always about trade offs. One solution makes things 30% safer and costs $2500, another makes things 0.000000002% safer and costs $2,500,000, another makes things 10% safer and costs $50,000 but is strictly an alternative to a newer technology that makes things just as safe but costs $500. The problem with existing nuclear regulations is that they're stale and brittle. You're not allowed to do something which is a safety improvement because every change has to go through a slow, expensive bureaucratic process. By definition, preventing safety improvements does not improve safety. But it also increases costs, because technology gets better over time in multiple dimensions, including efficiency. You can't use the technology which is both safer and less expensive because existing rules require you to do things in the strictly worse ways that existing reactors do them. The process of improving the rules is itself the source of significant expense. Opponents will fight sound proposals on spurious grounds just to extend the duration of the process and increase costs. Or propose wastefully inefficient "safety improvements" that are politically difficult to argue against, because pointing out that you can get ten times the safety improvement at 10% of the cost with other technologies will only cause them to turn around and argue for all of those things too, so then your costs increase by 110% of the unreasonable amount instead of 100%. The existing process is inherently broken. It isn't optimizing for safety or cost, both of which would be improved by a more efficient regulatory environment. Like the regulatory processes -- by no means perfect but a thousand times better than this -- that are used for other things with equally dangerous potential like dams and large chemical plants.
nharada 7y ago
I feel that "put it in a mountain until we figure out what to do with it" is a better solution than "fail to figure out decarbonization and watch the collapse of society as we know it"
jimmaswell 7y ago
Why is hiding it in a mountain not a solution?
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Has the US Navy worked out what no one else has yet? What to do with all the toxic waste? The answer is inherently the same thing we do with what we already have. We've been generating electricity from nuclear power for sixty years. Nuclear waste is a thing that already exists. The question of what to do with two hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste is not fundamentally different than the question of what to do with one hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste. It needs to be answered independently of whether we build new reactors, and then the answer is the same for the new reactors as the existing ones. Moreover, we already know the answers. The big one that nobody seems to talk about for some reason (?) is that the stuff is made of commercially valuable commodities. The short-lived isotopes are used in medical imaging. The longer-lived isotopes can be used to build RTGs and generate power. You can also build fission reactors that run on it. Ironically the problem is that people keep complaining that we shouldn't build new reactors because of the unspent fuel which dampens investment into the new reactors that can do something about the existing material.
pdonis 7y ago
What to do with nuclear waste is a solved problem: you reprocess it. That gives you more fuel (since much of the "waste" is actually unburned fuel) and reduces the radioactivity of what's left over to easily manageable levels. Every other country that uses nuclear power does this; the US didn't do it for decades for political reasons.
- stephenr 7y ago
  So, Nuclear, which is already arguably more expensive than renewables, to become even remotely "clean", would cost even more... Sure sounds like a great plan.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  No, actually most countries that use nuclear power don't reprocess. Some send their waste to France to be reprocessed, but even that is becoming a problem. France's reprocessing effort is (they have admitted) a net economic loss. It doesn't reduce the cost of waste disposal, it increases it. And when France reprocesses someone's waste, like Japan, they send back the plutonium. Japan now has enough reactor grade Pu to make thousands of bombs. It's not ideal for making bombs, but it can be made to work. For Japan, reprocessing has been a kind of plausibly deniable nuclear proliferation. They have the material to become a nuclear armed nation in a big way, and quickly, should they ever decide to do that.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > most countries that use nuclear power don't reprocess Most countries don't reprocess spent nuclear fuel immediately on removing it from the reactor. They store it until it is economical to reprocess it--because reprocessing turns most of the spent fuel into new fuel. So of course it doesn't make sense to reprocess it until doing so is cheaper than just buying new fuel on the market. The point of reprocessing is not to get rid of all the waste immediately, but to reduce the required storage time from something totally unrealistic like 10,000 years to something totally realistic like 30 to 50 years--in other words, enough time for the market price of new fuel to exceed the cost of reprocessing the spent fuel you have stored. In other words, reprocessing is simply part of a sane long-term plan for the nuclear fuel cycle. But of course the people who are against nuclear power are not against it for sane reasons, so you wouldn't expect them to understand a sane long-term plan.

ars 7y ago

> Has the US Navy worked out what no one else has yet? What to do with all the toxic waste? I don't know about the Navy, but we do know what to do with the toxic waste. I didn't realize people still thought it was a problem. Nuclear fuel reprocessing plus breeder reactors can almost completely burn up all the nuclear fuel, leaving only short lived elements behind, and no long term storage issues. The only reason we don't do it today is economic plus arms control.

gpm 7y ago
> The only reason we don't do it today is economic [...] Which would appear to be a disqualifying issue since the entire reason people are advocating for nuclear and not renewables is economic.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  The salient point is that it's uneconomical primarily as a result of purposeful regulatory obstructionism. It costs a lot because opponents want it to cost a lot. Moreover, that is a temporary issue. You have a lot of money from oil and coal lobbying against anything that could replace them, but you don't have to reprocess the spent fuel this year, or next year, or ten years from now. You can do it thirty years from now when the coal lobby is dead and gone because nobody burns coal anymore by then. And storing it for that long is much easier than needing somewhere to put it for thousands of years.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    If you are going to say "nuclear is cheap, we just have to live with meltdowns and learn to like them", then you might as well stop wasting your keystrokes. That dog won't hunt. Or if you're saying "reactors are going to be just as safe even if all those expensive regulations are removed", then you have to justify that (and justify that removing regulations will reduce the cost enough). I am extremely skeptical.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      It's not about having no safety rules, it's about having more reasonable safety rules that weren't enacted with the goal of increasing costs. Safety is always about trade offs. One solution makes things 30% safer and costs $2500, another makes things 0.000000002% safer and costs $2,500,000, another makes things 10% safer and costs $50,000 but is strictly an alternative to a newer technology that makes things just as safe but costs $500. The problem with existing nuclear regulations is that they're stale and brittle. You're not allowed to do something which is a safety improvement because every change has to go through a slow, expensive bureaucratic process. By definition, preventing safety improvements does not improve safety. But it also increases costs, because technology gets better over time in multiple dimensions, including efficiency. You can't use the technology which is both safer and less expensive because existing rules require you to do things in the strictly worse ways that existing reactors do them. The process of improving the rules is itself the source of significant expense. Opponents will fight sound proposals on spurious grounds just to extend the duration of the process and increase costs. Or propose wastefully inefficient "safety improvements" that are politically difficult to argue against, because pointing out that you can get ten times the safety improvement at 10% of the cost with other technologies will only cause them to turn around and argue for all of those things too, so then your costs increase by 110% of the unreasonable amount instead of 100%. The existing process is inherently broken. It isn't optimizing for safety or cost, both of which would be improved by a more efficient regulatory environment. Like the regulatory processes -- by no means perfect but a thousand times better than this -- that are used for other things with equally dangerous potential like dams and large chemical plants.

nharada 7y ago

I feel that "put it in a mountain until we figure out what to do with it" is a better solution than "fail to figure out decarbonization and watch the collapse of society as we know it"

jimmaswell 7y ago

Why is hiding it in a mountain not a solution?

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> Has the US Navy worked out what no one else has yet? What to do with all the toxic waste? The answer is inherently the same thing we do with what we already have. We've been generating electricity from nuclear power for sixty years. Nuclear waste is a thing that already exists. The question of what to do with two hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste is not fundamentally different than the question of what to do with one hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste. It needs to be answered independently of whether we build new reactors, and then the answer is the same for the new reactors as the existing ones. Moreover, we already know the answers. The big one that nobody seems to talk about for some reason (?) is that the stuff is made of commercially valuable commodities. The short-lived isotopes are used in medical imaging. The longer-lived isotopes can be used to build RTGs and generate power. You can also build fission reactors that run on it. Ironically the problem is that people keep complaining that we shouldn't build new reactors because of the unspent fuel which dampens investment into the new reactors that can do something about the existing material.

pdonis 7y ago

What to do with nuclear waste is a solved problem: you reprocess it. That gives you more fuel (since much of the "waste" is actually unburned fuel) and reduces the radioactivity of what's left over to easily manageable levels. Every other country that uses nuclear power does this; the US didn't do it for decades for political reasons.

stephenr 7y ago
So, Nuclear, which is already arguably more expensive than renewables, to become even remotely "clean", would cost even more... Sure sounds like a great plan.
pfdietz 7y ago
No, actually most countries that use nuclear power don't reprocess. Some send their waste to France to be reprocessed, but even that is becoming a problem. France's reprocessing effort is (they have admitted) a net economic loss. It doesn't reduce the cost of waste disposal, it increases it. And when France reprocesses someone's waste, like Japan, they send back the plutonium. Japan now has enough reactor grade Pu to make thousands of bombs. It's not ideal for making bombs, but it can be made to work. For Japan, reprocessing has been a kind of plausibly deniable nuclear proliferation. They have the material to become a nuclear armed nation in a big way, and quickly, should they ever decide to do that.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > most countries that use nuclear power don't reprocess Most countries don't reprocess spent nuclear fuel immediately on removing it from the reactor. They store it until it is economical to reprocess it--because reprocessing turns most of the spent fuel into new fuel. So of course it doesn't make sense to reprocess it until doing so is cheaper than just buying new fuel on the market. The point of reprocessing is not to get rid of all the waste immediately, but to reduce the required storage time from something totally unrealistic like 10,000 years to something totally realistic like 30 to 50 years--in other words, enough time for the market price of new fuel to exceed the cost of reprocessing the spent fuel you have stored. In other words, reprocessing is simply part of a sane long-term plan for the nuclear fuel cycle. But of course the people who are against nuclear power are not against it for sane reasons, so you wouldn't expect them to understand a sane long-term plan.