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Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades? I feel like not many people know just how little waste is create

• Tepix 7y ago
  No, quite the contrary. Just as an example, in Germany the search for the ultimate disposal place has just started over from scratch after decades of failed attempts. In the US, a nuclear waste dome is leaking in to the Pacific: https://www.civilbeat.org/beat/a-dome-holding-nuclear-waste-is-leaking-in-the-pacific/ https://www.civilbeat.org/beat/a-dome-holding-nuclear-waste-... Here's another story from 12 days ago: "Years of mismanagement, delays at nuclear waste sites could pose risk, report says" https://www.wsbtv.com/news/2-investigates/years-of-mismanagement-delays-at-nuclear-waste-sites-could-pose-risk-report-says/949422394 https://www.wsbtv.com/news/2-investigates/years-of-mismanage... Excerpt: "According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, cost estimates to clean up the legacy radioactive tank waste and contamination at the facilities increased $214 billion from 2011 through 2018. During that same period, DOE spent $45 billion on cleanup efforts. DOE spent $170 billion on cleanup since 1989, but the most challenging work remains. Estimates now stand at $377 billion to clean up the waste, but that amount does not include cost to clean sites where no feasible remedy exists."
  • jjoonathan 7y ago
    Would this waste have been moved to Sequoia Mountain had Obama not torpedoed it to get support from Harry Reid?
    • pfdietz 7y ago
      Yucca Mountain. Realize this thing is a sideshow. Having it open would not have helped the market acceptance of nuclear power. Even if waste disposal costs are totally ignored (as the Lazard levelized cost numbers do) new reactors are totally out of the running economically.
  • mbell 7y ago
    > In the US, a nuclear waste dome is leaking in to the Pacific That has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power. This is the type of fear mongering that caused the current situation.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • Valgrim 7y ago
      Long term, large scale containment of radioactive waste is an unsolved problem. Nuclear advocates have two answers to this problem: A) We'll solve it later (we should research fuel reprocessing, we have an urgency to act, etc.) B) It's not really a problem (people don't actually die from radioactive waste, most nuclear plants have proven themselves safely managed, etc.) Both answer sound like sweeping the dust under the rug. What happens when (not if) a catastrophe occurs? If a war breaks out, how can you guarantee the safety of all nuclear power plants around the world? If a country economy collapses, how will nuclear engineers get paid? If an epidemic of a deadly disease spreads worldwide, how many people can die before there is not enough people to safely operate a nuclear plant? We cannot sweep this under the rug. Nuclear energy may be theorically cheap to implement, but the potential cost of an uncontrollable failure is too great.
      • ageofwant 7y ago
        What if technicolor monkeys start flying out of my arse ? Whataboutism aside, today, right now, thousands of coal fired power plants are polluting the air I breathe with more radioactive waste, particulates and CO2, to a degree not seen in the last 800k years. Your catastrophe is real and happening right now, in real time, today, this minute.
      • umvi 7y ago
        A modern thorium/uranium recycling pipeline should only produce small amounts of "final" waste (and only after waste has been iteratively recycled many times). That final waste takes a few hundred years to decay, but if contained, it is harmless to the environment. So, create a warehouse large enough to handle 200 years worth of waste, and create a pipeline. At the end of the pipeline, the containers are empty and can be used at the start again. Who knows, we may even be able to figure out a way to extract even more energy from the "final" waste eventually. Consider that the final nuclear waste passively disappears after a few hundred years, whereas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not passively disappear in a few hundred years - it must be actively removed by plants, but the plants can't keep up with humans.
  • nickik 7y ago
    Typical lie. In fact nuclear waste management from civilian power has fantastic. In fact all nuclear power stations include cleanup and waste management as part of the cost. Germany problem is not technical but political and anybody that has ever looked into nuclear power in Germany knows this. Not to mention that finding a 'ultimate disposal' a pretty unnecessary and wrongheaded that is only being perused because limited understanding of nuclear power in the first place.
    • detritus 7y ago
      Really? I'm envious about your government's competency in the matter, in that case! I'm fairly pro-nuclear, at least as part of a broadly renewable energy portfolio, as I think industry and transportation will need at least something more than solar and wind to reach none-emission energy production saturation any time soon. However, if my own Government's record is anything to go by here in the UK, waste management is a perenially-deferred problem and clean up was not part of the original billing of any existing Nuclear facilities. It's all stored on site pending long-term secure solutions or - if optimisim is t obe believed - until we can develop technologies to eke every last joule of energy from the ever-growing mountain of waste.
      • nickik 7y ago
        We need to differentiate between a number of different problems. One is cleanup of nuclear sites, in that are there is a separation between civilian nuclear reactors and the much, much more problematic site management for nuclear waste from nuclear weapons production. Most problems from civilian sites date back to the early days of nuclear and most states have put in place some live cycle protocols for these sites. Old nuclear weapons production sites are a whole lot of a bigger issues and its a desperate topic. Its not fair to accuse nuclear power of being problematic based on issues from those sites. In general, I would argue most of these problems date back to the early days of nuclear technology and should not be used as a argument against new nuclear power. In terms of waste management from civilian waste there is a very good argument to be made that putting all that waste into a long term storage (1000s of years) is not a smart thing to do. The nuclear waste is so small in overall size and relatively easy to story that it is not really a pressing issue for the next couple decades or even small number of centuries. The technologies to use the energy from nuclear waste will not happen unless nuclear energy get used and finds larger commercial adoption. If you believe in 200 years nuclear will not exist and solar and wind will be used, then these technology will never exists. However if you assume that humanity has any kind of nuclear future, these technologies will very likely exists and that nuclear waste will be considered a resource. Technically its pretty clear that we can build such long term facilities for the eventual small amount nuclear waste without much technical difficulty. What bother me is the push to demand that this problem is handled, before any other nuclear innovation can take place. It is used as an argument against nuclear even if the problem is not pressing in the least and compared to the continued exists of coal and utterly disingenuous way to attempted prevent usage of nuclear technology. Finnland has build a repository called, Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, and has shown that this is not really that crazy of a thing. Again, for me this is a problem that should be pretty far down on the list of priorites to solve for the world. The reason it doesn't exists in most countries is political, not technical. See the Yucca Maintain political shitshow while at the same time much better sites exists in the US but those can't be considered because of political deadlock.
  • Ygg2 7y ago
    Did you read your link? Honest question. Here is a quote: A concrete dome containing radioactive waste on the Marshall Islands is cracking open, The Washington Post reported Monday. The U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands in the 1940s and 1950. The dome was built decades later to cover remaining fallout debris To put it in perspective, that's like closing solar power plant, because a star went supernova in another galaxy.
• bilbo0s 7y ago
  In fairness, no one needs to be convinced that nuclear plants are better than coal plants. The problem is the renewables. In Iowa, they are in the process of shuttering their nuclear plants. Now no one in Iowa was out protesting the plants or anything, but here's the issue. Windmills have reached a level of practicality and low cost that encouraged Iowans to slap them up almost everywhere. (Seriously, drive through Iowa sometime and you'll see what I mean.) Even relatively small investors can get together, slap up some windmills, and start making some money. Now imagine you're in Iowa and deciding on which electric bill you want to pay. Do you want to pay the 2 to 3 cents per kWh for wind? Or do you want to pay the 5x cost for coal or nuclear? Not surprisingly, Iowans, who are more poor than most of you on the coasts, have switched to wind in a big way. It's a money problem. If we want nuclear, we have to convince the government to subsidize it. You're not going to find a lot of people out there who will just agree to sign up and pay 5 to 10 times the electricity bill just for the pleasure of saying they're using carbon free nuclear. It's like organic food. Sure, maybe it is better for them. But a lot of the masses only see the price tag.
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    People do need to be convinced that nuclear is better than natural gas. In calm winter nights, nuclear is competing with natural gas, not wind. And because of fracking and horizontal drilling, the electricity prices have fallen in deregulated markets like the midwest, and electricity revenues have dropped precipitously. When you have a plant that's all capital and O&M with very low fuel cost (like a nuke), this unexpected drop in electricity price is hard to swallow and you shut down. Having natural gas prices go back up because it emits greenhouse gas would have a lot better optics than subsidizing nuclear plants. But you're right that Iowans don't care about that. Shoot, even in Seattle we couldn't get a carbon tax passed. The nuclear industry needs to get serious about reducing its costs. It's not very efficient. They've got a few hundred people at each plant doing regulatory compliance paperwork with some really inefficient and expensive process. At least the nuclear industry is trying, a little: https://www.nei.org/resources/delivering-the-nuclear-promise https://www.nei.org/resources/delivering-the-nuclear-promise
    • 7y ago
• ekianjo 7y ago
  Greenpeace has successfully spent several decades painting nuclear power as Evil so its going to be difficult to convince voters to support it from now on.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    Hoisting my previous comment on Greenpeace from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point: 1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked. This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury. 2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland. Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century." 3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains. 4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent. 5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.
    • benj111 7y ago
      All reasonable points, but would you not agree that in the here and now, our first priority should be replacing that coal power station with renewables, and then the gas, then the nuclear?
• ilaksh 7y ago
  What do they do with the little waste?
  • TheHypnotist 7y ago
    In many cases, store it in concrete casks on site. Google the fuel pellets used and understand that the waste from refueling is actually quite small.
• Tharkun 7y ago
  > Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades? I thought you were being snarky at first, but the rest of the comment appears to indicate you're being serious. In Belgium we've been stuck in endless discussions regarding what to do with our nuclear waste. We used to dump it in the sea, which was probably a bad idea. Now it's stored in barrels which are apparently leaking some kind of radioactive goo[1]. So either this waste recycling isn't as good everywhere, or we have a different definition of the word "good". [1] https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/informatiedossiers/radioactief-afval/beheer-van-radioactief-afval/berging/zeeberging-van-belgisch https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/informatiedossiers/radioactief-afval... (Dutch)
  • Cederfjard 7y ago
    The grandparent comment mentioned modern recycling. Perhaps Belgium is operating old types of reactors that aren't amenable to modern ways of dealing with waste? A quick search yielded that all of Belgium's reactors were built in the 70's and 80's.
    • jobigoud 7y ago
      But then if we need to replace all the old reactors by new ones, the argument that renewables are just ramping up is moot.
      • jessaustin 7y ago
        If that argument could convince investors, it would have already.
      • pfdietz 7y ago
        We don't need to replace old reactors by new ones. Replacing the reactors with new ones is an option, but only an option, and almost certainly not the economically optimal one.
    • Tharkun 7y ago
      That's a good point. These reactors are ancient. I wasn't aware of any major improvements in spent fuel handling, so I've got some reading to do!
• nickik 7y ago
  No. Unfortunatly research and devlopment into all things nuclear has been systematically eradicated. Regulation that were put in place have essentially eliminated all progress specially progress that isn't incredibly incremental. The problem is that it is essentially impossible to bring these new technologies to market as a private companies. And government have shown zero interest in doing anything by themselves or even having a regulatory system that is in any way sensible. Current plants in the west are pretty safe in general but recycling is non-existent. Only France does any kind of nuclear waste reprocessing at all (outside of research). Sadly the anti nuclear wave went incredibly deep and has since basically destroyed the industry and a whole field of engineering. The only positive thing is that both with democrats and republicans a new pro nuclear consensus is emerging. The US regulatory agency are slowly waking up to the fact that they have utterly destroyed the nuclear industry and are taking small steps in the right direction. Thanks to these changes a few important changes have gone threw congress and are getting implemented by the Department on Energy. Sadly these things are way to slow.
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    Reprocessing made sense in an environment in which nuclear was winning and uranium was becoming scarce. In that environment, it could make sense to reprocess to extend fuel reserves. But we do not live in that world. Uranium supplies are plentiful. It's cheap and simple to just store spent fuel in dry casks and put off worrying about if it will ever be reprocessed. Reprocessing is a net economic loss, in France and elsewhere.
• pjc50 7y ago
  There's really two kinds of waste: spent fuel (which can be effectively recycled, leaving only a tiny bit of extremely dangerous lanthanides, actinides, and plutonium), and "lower level" waste. The latter includes pretty much every other part of the reactor building after it's decomissioned. > positive PR campaign The nuclear industry has been at this for decades; at this stage, the PR is part of the problem. My view on this is that it's probably too late to start building new nuclear plants, the cost overrun problems are severe, and there are plenty of countries that they should not be built in. But that doesn't mean we should close the existing ones early. If they can be refurbished economically without compromising safety, we should do that. Switching from nuclear to natural gas indicates that gas is too cheap, and should be subject to carbon pricing and curtailment of new drilling and fracking.
  • petre 7y ago
    We can build plants with SMRs. These should fix most of the issues of larger plants except maybe decomissioning. It should be easier to decomission 12 x 60 MW modules instead of a single 720 MW utility scale reactor. At least you can transport the smaller modules without dissasembly.
    • pfdietz 7y ago
      Nuclear power plants got big because operating costs do not scale linearly with reactor size. SMR advocates have not explained why their concepts will not be killed by increased operating cost per kWh.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• briandear 7y ago
  It could definitely be bipartisan. I am a conservative and 100% support nuclear as an alternative to dirty coal. Unfortunately, many “environmentalists” seem to be stuck in the 1970s when it comes to knowledge about modern nuclear.
• perfunctory 7y ago
  also modern airplanes with modern software never crash.
  • air7 7y ago
    I know its only a metaphor but arguably modern planes crash much less. No crashes in the US in the last decade. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ago-reshaped-us-aviation-safety.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-year...
  • magduf 7y ago
    Modern planes really do crash less than older ones. Just stay away from 737MAX models.
    • blackbrokkoli 7y ago
      So, nuclear reactors are very safe except of dangerous-tech-xA45b which we only know is deadly after one or two incidents?
      • magduf 7y ago
        Actually, yes. 1) Don't use crappy Soviet reactors like Chernobyl; this should be a no-brainer. 2) Don't locate a nuclear power plant in a place where it can be flooded easily. Other than the crappy Chernobyl reactor, I don't know of any inherently dangerous reactor designs, especially in Western nations.
        • waste_monk 7y ago
          AFAIK most modern designs are fail-safe, e.g. with passive features like control rods suspended with electromagnets over the reactor - if activated (or if power fails) they simply fall in and kill the reaction.
  • r00fus 7y ago
    It's arguable that the 737Max is the exception that proves the rule. I still have no idea how the FAA approved the "software fix". To me the bug is the corruption that allowed it to be deployed in the first place and the lack of punishment.
• sdinsn 7y ago
  People also overestimate the amount of waste. Very little waste is produced. Also, the only safety feature needed to store nuclear waste is water.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    Keeping the contaminated water out of the groundwater is the big problem.
    • sdinsn 7y ago
      No, it's not. I never said anything about the ground, contain the water & waste in a tank.
      • politician 7y ago
        Not to mention the water is optional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Vitrification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Vitrificatio...
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    People also overestimate how much waste disposal has contributed to the current economic failure of nuclear power.