7 ms·

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 at

by 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.

by Tepix 7y ago

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.