10 ms·

The race is on to develop new strategies for storing nuclear waste

58 points by alex_young 7y ago

Ensorceled 7y ago
This discussion always drives me crazy. What would you rather have inherited from the Victoria Era: 1) complete ecological disaster in the form of a 5-degree average temperature increase and 10 metre sea level increase; causing widespread food insecurity, human displacement, and mass extinctions due to habitat loss 2) a modicum of nasty nuclear waste, some of which can be refined for interesting isotopes Also, we already leave a ludicrous amount of nasty industrial waste in the form of mining tailings, plastics fill our oceans, we constantly create electronic devices that can't be properly recycled and contain hazardous materials. Nuclear waste isn't even close to the top of the list of hazardous waste problems. If nuclear power is one of the solutions to climate change, THE existential threat to human survival, then hamstringing ourselves because of handwringing about waste is just setting us up to continue to delay doing anything about this impending threat.
- ptah 7y ago
  nuclear power might be impractical for a hotter earth http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity-generation-threatened-heatwaves http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity...
  - ChrisRR 7y ago
    That's true during the hotter months, but that's a benefit of why renewable energy comes from different sources. When it's not very sunny, it may be windy, the tide might be changing, the rivers are still flowing, the ground is still warm. The same applies to nuclear, or when there's a shortage of oil or coal. You can't run one generator at full output, so you can increase the output of another.
    - ptah 7y ago
      why not just stick to clean energy sources
      - yrro 7y ago
        Base load
- pjc50 7y ago
  Well, from the 1950s we inherited a thin spread of radioisotopes contaminating the entire atmosphere: https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi... The problem of nuclear waste management is fundamentally one of public trust. People spent much of the 20th century going from "X is ubiquitous and perfectly safe" to "actually X has been poisoning you and the biosphere for decades". Cigarettes, leaded petrol, CFCs, pesticides, coal power, bisphenol A, and so on. People who object to the "perfectly safe" waste plans do so because they believe you are lying about the safety. (Personally I believe it's now too late for nuclear, it simply takes too long to build individual reactors, and a big bang plan would involve building thousands of them in parallel. Not to mention that the #8 and #10 global CO2 emitting countries are fundamentalist Islamic petro-states which aren't trusted with nuclear material.) There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. On the history of greens against nuclear reactors, mostly dating from the weapons issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 ; excellent rant on the public trust issue: https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blair-has-lost-it.html https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blai... (rather prescient about Hinkley Point C, which is still not built thirteen years later)
  - roenxi 7y ago
    > There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. There is already a huge amount of material underground that is too dangerous for landfill. Too dangerous for landfill is a very low standard. I don't remember the exact volume, but I've been involved with an operation that probably excavated then entombed a volume of material that was of comparable volume to the nuclear industry's low-level waste. That material was not safe enough to go into landfill, we had to take special precautions with it. Humanity already deals with 10s if not 100s of millions of cubic meters of material that is not safe for landfill. Annually. So far so good.
- tekkk 7y ago
  It bugs me to no end that green party is by majority opposed to nuclear power while it is, in my opinion, one of the best clean energy sources that works everywhere, without being subject to alternating weather or natural resources. The process of storing nuclear waste is almost trivial and from what i've gathered from the current progress of nuclear reactors, one day most if not all of that waste could be used as fuel, leaving almost nothing left. Yet the same fear-mongering tactics as those used by populists are utilized to change public opinion to hinder its use. The modern nuclear plant is extremely safe and if built in stable geographical area (without earthquakes or tsunamis), it's fail-safe. The only reason something like tsernobyl happened was the massive managerial misjudgements and obsolete technology that would not happen in any properly run modern nuclear plant. It's just... dumb. Instead of thinking rationally people are driven by irrational fear while there exists so many worse things, that might cause your early demise yet people do nothing about them. The probability of getting hit by car must be exponentially higher than dying by nuclear disaster yet i dont see people advocating traffic safety with same fervor.
sunkenvicar 7y ago
Fake solutions for an imagined problem. The unused uranium from a reactor fits neatly into a few parking stalls. Security, transport, and storage of this valuable resource are already solved. Let’s put this material to use!
reacharavindh 7y ago
Nuclear power is almost always brought up as a low carbon alternative to fossil fuels to power our civilization. Some even quote how cheap nuclear power is compared to fossil fuel based power. But, those advocating for nuclear power almost always discount the cost involved in dealing with this radioactive trash. To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. Even if not supplying all of our energy from Wind and solar, it is crime of our irresponsible generation to not invest in solar panels in sunny places like Florida, Texas, Middle East, southern India, Southeast Asia etc. Use the safe option first, and wait for nuclear option to mature until we get a better grip on what to do with its dangerous trash. Florida even actively prevents businesses from engaging in roof top solar panels. If that is not a facepalm moment of stupidity, I don’t know what is.
- onlydeadheroes 7y ago
  > Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. I suppose that when you watch your children die from climate change, then you will know.
  - Brometheus 7y ago
    … or radioactivity.
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      That's not how it works. The waste has to be dealt with, but its not immediately harmful to the general population. Its a problem that has to be addressed in the long term, but climate change is a problem that has to be addressed in the short term. And by the short term I mean the past. In other words, radioactive waste isn't a "your children" problem, it's several generations removed if a solution hasn't been found by then. Climate change is indeed a "your children" problem, if you're old enough to die in the next couple of decades. Otherwise it's a You problem.
caspper69 7y ago
This might be a stupid suggestion/question, but maybe it'll become cheap enough to just toss the spent fuel rods into space?
- theBobBob 7y ago
  This option is brought up alot and while cost is probably one consideration I think that the main problem is for when (not if) one of the launches has a rapid unscheduled disassembly as they call it, and basically become becomes a large dirty bomb.
  - bipson 7y ago
    Also, what happens to the stuff we toss into space? People still seem to make the same mistake our ancestors did regarding tossing stuff into the ocean. To be more precise: achieving a velocity high enough to e.g. detonate on the surface of the sun (in particular carrying tons of nuclear waste) won't be cheap for a long time. [1] Stuff we "toss out there" would probably just keep floating in an uncontrolled (in the long run) earth bound orbit and might come back at some point. [1] https://youtu.be/uNS6VKNXY6s https://youtu.be/uNS6VKNXY6s
    - jackweirdy 7y ago
      Lunar orbit seems much more worth investigating than solar orbit
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Trying to toss radioactive waste into the Sun would be a ridiculous waste of fuel. To do that, you have to cancel out Earth's orbital velocty; that's 30 km/s of ∆v (or execute some very clever gravity assists). What you'd want to do is to shoot it out into an orbit around the Sun that's slightly lower or higher than Earth's. The chance of it somehow returning to Earth is so low that the Sun will go out before it happens. Still, the whole concept is wasteful and dangerous anyway. For one, as others mentioned, a launch failure would mean large-scale contamination on the planet. Two, you can safely store this waste on Earth for many orders of magnitude less money and work. > People still seem to make the same mistake our ancestors did regarding tossing stuff into the ocean. “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Throwing something out into orbit around the Sun isn't going to be a problem, like, ever.
blamestross 7y ago
Make RTGs out of it! https://xkcd.com/2115/ https://xkcd.com/2115/ Even with all of these issues nuclear is the least deadly energy source! More people fall off roofs putting it solar panels then have been effected by nuclear disasters.
- lizknope 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... Most RTGs use 238Pu Unlike the other three isotopes discussed in this section, 238Pu must be specifically synthesized and is not abundant as a nuclear waste product. At present only Russia has maintained consistent 238Pu production[dubious – discuss], while in the US, no more than 50 g (1.8 oz) were produced in total between 2013 and 2018.[15] The US agencies involved desire to begin the production of the material at a rate of 300 to 400 grams (11 to 14 oz) per year. If this plan is funded, the goal would be to set up automation and scale-up processes in order to produce an average of 1.5 kg (3.3 lb) per year by 2025.
  - 08-15 7y ago
    The USSR manufactured a number of RTGs using Sr-90. Sr-90 is roughly as energetic as Pu-238, but requires more shielding. It has the advantage that it doesn't need to be manufactured, because it is one of the more abundant fission products.
jsmcgd 7y ago
The best option for dealing with nuclear 'waste' is to use the use up the energy contained within it. Moltex Energy is one such proposal to do just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju59gcdmdvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju59gcdmdvI
gambiting 7y ago
I feel like the solution is literally staring us in the face and we're not seeing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal 100% safe storage for literally all of our waste, forever. Why are we not doing that? I can only assume that it's because the spent waste is still "valuable" so it's worth keeping around in case someone figures out more and more efficient ways of processing it to recover useful material from it. Putting it 5km in the ground makes is completely unrecoverable by anyone.
- raptorraver 7y ago
  There is one such site in Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
  - gambiting 7y ago
    That's not quite the same - it's more like a mine than a borehole. The whole idea of a borehole is that stuff sealed 5km under the surface isn't coming back in any way, and is nearly impossible to recover unless you drill another borehole in the same place. There is no known geological process that would bring it back up naturally. The site you quoted is pretty deep(500m) but it's not "stable and permanent for millennia" kind of deep.
- realusername 7y ago
  > can only assume that it's because the spent waste is still "valuable" so it's worth keeping around in case someone figures out more and more efficient ways of processing it to recover useful material from it. Putting it 5km in the ground makes is completely unrecoverable by anyone. You can turn the waste into energy indeed, there's a few plants doing that and there's been prototype plants before. The issue is that it does not make sense economically yet since radioactive materials are so cheap.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Why are we not doing that? I've seen towns oppose having a trash incinerator in their town, even if the county needs it; and villages oppose having wind turbines built nearby, even if the country needs it. And of course local politicians will get on board with local campaigns, they want to be re-elected. I suspect siting a nuclear waste disposal site would have the same effect, but moreso.
FAKEDETECTOR 7y ago
This is wrong information, nuclear power is not "low-carbon" and can not be considered as a safe option for future energy production. Nuclear energy is a way to keep energy production centralized and maximize profits of a small group with an option to blackmail nation states forever because "too big to fail" + extreme health risks for millions of people. This is a dangerous path and there is no economical gain for a society to bet on nuclear power. Also there are some hard physical facts that might be of interest, e.g. we would need many more nuclear power plants to have any impact on global energy production - but that would quickly lead to "peak uranium". Does it make sense to replace one limited resource with another limited resource if we have the option to use an unlimited resource right now? The nuclear energy gang is a mafia, generating unbelievable amount of problems for our descendants with a business modell that depends on milking the tax payer - an extraordinary stupid idea that only exists, because our still extremely primitive way of doing international politics is based on nuclear weapons, what is the real reason why nuclear power plants still exist. Please do your own research. Here is a quick link: https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-... Edit - one more URL: https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/Apr/Global-energy-transformation-A-roadmap-to-2050-2019Edition https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/Apr/Global-energy-tr...
- thiht 7y ago
  That's an ironic username.
- nickik 7y ago
  So much wrong with this. Nuclear is clearly the most 'low-carbon' energy that exists, and every systematic analysis has shown it as such. I'm not gone address your bad economics. > peak uranium Peak uranium is nonsense. Just like peak coal and peak oil. We have unlimited amount of nuclear materials, not even U-235 is close to any peak. We have unlimited U-238 and Thorium that we could use as well.
  - FAKEDETECTOR 7y ago
    Both of your points are factually wrong.
peter_retief 7y ago
Make diamond batteries
- peter_retief 7y ago
  https://futurism.com/diamond-batteries-made-of-nuclear-waste-can-generate-power-for-thousands-of-years https://futurism.com/diamond-batteries-made-of-nuclear-waste...
DennisP 7y ago
The article briefly mentions fast reactors, but I think dismisses them a little too quickly. Waste from fast reactors would be short-lived. Most of our waste is uranium, mainly U238 plus a little leftover U235. This is barely radioactive. There's also a fair amount of plutonium and other transuranics, made when uranium and heavier atoms absorb a neutron without fissioning. This is the really long-lived waste that needs to be stored for thousands of years. About one percent of our waste is fission products, the smaller atoms left after breaking apart uranium and plutonium. This is highly radioactive, but only for a couple centuries. Fast reactors can fission the transuranics, and both isotopes of uranium. Their waste is almost entirely fission products. Encase them in glass, bury them, and in three centuries it'll be back to the radioactivity of the original uranium ore.
nickik 7y ago
Nuclear waste is not really waste. WE should not dispose of it at all. It is literally ZERO problem to keep nuclear waste around easly accessable with no danger for the next couple 100 years. By then we should really have the technology to consume most of that waste. The tiny rest of it can be stored, we know that this is geologically possilbe and facilities have already been built in Finland. This is really not a technology problem, but rather a political problem where any progress towards a solution is systematically stopped. So that the 'you can't manage the waste' argument can be used against the nuclear industry. The US even has a huge pile of money already collected to handle disposle and for decades US sientiests have found the best place to put that stuff. Guess what, its not where the governmnet currently wants to store it. But they can't move it to another place because of politics, and they can't actually store in the place they have selected because politics has greated essentially impossible properties that they need to insure. This is a political problem, not a technical or financial one.
shaunrussell 7y ago
Our nuclear reactors are essentially the beta product. There are alternative reactor designs that create much less waste like LFTR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...) and others like TWR that cab consume our existing spent fuel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor). There are a lot of reasons we predominantly use solid fuel light water reactors, most of them being the decades of sunk costs + commitment inertia that was created by the government investment in the technology... because it was good for the military (submarines, maybe bombs). https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-search-for-a-better-safer-nuclear-power/72765/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-s... There are some companies trying to address this like Flibe Energy, who is working on LFTR designs (https://flibe-energy.com/ https://flibe-energy.com/) and Terrapower with TWR (http://terrapower.com http://terrapower.com), of which Bill Gates is Chairman of the board. Nuclear could be great. We need massive investment in these alternative technologies.
- someguydave 7y ago
  Molten salt designs have somewhat unsolved waste and proliferation issues, but you are correct in general.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Isn't there also a corrosion issue, that hot salt tends to corrode normal stainless steel? The usual Achilles heel of these things is welding issues. It seems research is ongoing: http://www.electrochemsci.org/papers/vol13/130504891.pdf http://www.electrochemsci.org/papers/vol13/130504891.pdf
    - jabl 7y ago
      You think hot salt is bad? Now let's add 1/3 of the periodic table to the salt.. But yeah, people are working on it. The Americans had something in the 60ies (hastalloy), the Chinese are working on it today. In the short term, many o the MSR startups are planning to replace the reactor vessel every few years to get around corrosion issues, as well as the graphite moderator going bad.
tiku 7y ago
Why can't we just use the waste to heat homes? Is there a magic ratio of isolation that allows enough heat but not enough radiation to use at home?
- gnode 7y ago
  This doesn't solve any part of the waste management problem; it only frustrates safety for a small benefit. High-level nuclear waste generates heat, but is not kept hot; it's stored in cool pools. Allowing it to reach a high temperature and using it for district heating is not sensible.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
I feel like support for nuclear energy is the acceptable face of climate denial these days. It's like states rights and racism. Who can be against states rights? That's totally noble sounding. Yet quite a few people who took up that banner were actually trying to achieve racist ends, and when forced to choose between states rights and racism, would choose racism, exposing them to anyone paying attention. Similarly, it's a weird that nuclear (which is possibly the most state supported energy source) gets so much support from libertarians[1], rather than decentralised wind and solar with carbon taxes to internalize externalities. Of course if you genuinely believe in states rights, or nuclear power, you now need some kind of introductory proviso to seperate yourself from the people stealing your topic as cover for their own ends. My litmus test is: do you strongly believe in nuclear only because you think renewables are useless? If so, where did you get this information from? Second hand fossil fuel propaganda probably. [1] this gets meta for libertarians as I'd say the same thing has occured there. Corporate fascists like a lot of the libertarian ideals and push them hard, while ignoring/fighting the logically coherent principles that don't suit them. Climate change denial being an obvious one were paychecks override principle, when the libertarian idea of carbon fees is probably the single best way to solve the problem.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  What's there about climate denial in support for nuclear energy? Everyone I've seen who push for nuclear, myself included, do so because of climate change. Supporting decentralized wind and solar is good too, but it's really ridiculous how the discourse turned into nuclear vs wind and solar, where it should be about nuclear and wind and solar vs fossil fuels. We're sitting on a magical fuel of incredible energy density and zero carbon footprint, suitable for use in base-load power generation - and we're not doing anything with it, because it's too magical for people's taste.
  - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    As pointed out in one of my other comments, it's not zero carbon, it's slightly more carbon intensive than wind or solar (actually I misread that graph, they're basically tied but all ahead of fossil fuels), both of which are getting better on that scale as they expand. So it's more expensive and it therefore does less to solve the problem. And every discussion about it devolves into "aren't those silly hippies stupid unlike us rational types, we'd have solved climate change already if the damn hippies hadn't been so irrational" which seems like a great way to hijack people's emotions to drive them towards bad decisions, and basically echos climate change denial strategy. If your argument for nuclear sound like something a Fox host would say then that's a bad sign, right? That's why I associate it with climate denial.
cjslep 7y ago
To get our bachelor's degree in Nuclear Engineering at NCSU a bunch of us looked at a continuous pyroprocess involving molten salt, molten cadmnium, EM pumps, and electroplating. The idea is to plate out the Uranium -- and only the uranium, satisfying nonproliferation concerns -- and precipitate out the minor actinides and plutonium together for HLW long term storage, or a different further recycling process. This would close the loop and recycle uranium while still keeping the weapons grade plutonium out of people's hands. It doesn't transmute so it wouldn't solve the waste problem. It only solves the Uranium recycling problem. The US Government is far more concerned about non-proliferation than it is about waste. Hence the lack of political will in fixing the long-known uranium recycling problem with methods like UREX/PUREX, which is not proliferation-resistant. Was really fun, the tech looked promising, the maintenance looks awful, and the political will isn't there. Edit to add: once we are able to recycle the Uranium, the theory is that the rest of the HLW can be used in a different kind of reactor (not a light water one) that would burn the waste as fuel, fully dealing with the waste problem. So there's multiple degrees with which we could recycle spent nuclear fuel.
- petschge 7y ago
  It is not just the political will that is lacking. The is no economic reason to do it. The maintenance can not be done by humans and if -- after a lot of investment -- you are able to develop robots that can do it, you get a better ROI by becoming worlds leading robotics company and replace Kuka, ABB and Co.
- jabl 7y ago
  Was this the same pyroprocess Argonne had developed? Seems very promising, what a shame IFR was killed though.
bleaknet 7y ago
reuse the energy, create mini nuclear power plant/reactor that can be sent into space to mine bitcoin.

58 points by alex_young 7y ago

This discussion always drives me crazy. What would you rather have inherited from the Victoria Era: 1) complete ecological disaster in the form of a 5-degree average temperature increase and 10 metre sea level increase; causing widespread food insecurity, human displacement, and mass extinctions due to habitat loss 2) a modicum of nasty nuclear waste, some of which can be refined for interesting isotopes Also, we already leave a ludicrous amount of nasty industrial waste in the form of mining tailings, plastics fill our oceans, we constantly create electronic devices that can't be properly recycled and contain hazardous materials. Nuclear waste isn't even close to the top of the list of hazardous waste problems. If nuclear power is one of the solutions to climate change, THE existential threat to human survival, then hamstringing ourselves because of handwringing about waste is just setting us up to continue to delay doing anything about this impending threat.

ptah 7y ago
nuclear power might be impractical for a hotter earth http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity-generation-threatened-heatwaves http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190726-frances-nuclear-electricity...
- ChrisRR 7y ago
  That's true during the hotter months, but that's a benefit of why renewable energy comes from different sources. When it's not very sunny, it may be windy, the tide might be changing, the rivers are still flowing, the ground is still warm. The same applies to nuclear, or when there's a shortage of oil or coal. You can't run one generator at full output, so you can increase the output of another.
  - ptah 7y ago
    why not just stick to clean energy sources
    - yrro 7y ago
      Base load
pjc50 7y ago
Well, from the 1950s we inherited a thin spread of radioisotopes contaminating the entire atmosphere: https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi... The problem of nuclear waste management is fundamentally one of public trust. People spent much of the 20th century going from "X is ubiquitous and perfectly safe" to "actually X has been poisoning you and the biosphere for decades". Cigarettes, leaded petrol, CFCs, pesticides, coal power, bisphenol A, and so on. People who object to the "perfectly safe" waste plans do so because they believe you are lying about the safety. (Personally I believe it's now too late for nuclear, it simply takes too long to build individual reactors, and a big bang plan would involve building thousands of them in parallel. Not to mention that the #8 and #10 global CO2 emitting countries are fundamentalist Islamic petro-states which aren't trusted with nuclear material.) There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. On the history of greens against nuclear reactors, mostly dating from the weapons issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347 ; excellent rant on the public trust issue: https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blair-has-lost-it.html https://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blai... (rather prescient about Hinkley Point C, which is still not built thirteen years later)
- roenxi 7y ago
  > There is also a complicated motte-and-bailey distinction between high-level waste (spent fuel itself, etc.) and low-level. High-level waste can often be reprocessed and is comparatively small volume. The low-level waste is everything that's deemed too dangerous to landfill, and there's a lot more of it. From used rubber gloves to the entire volume of decomissioned reactors. There is already a huge amount of material underground that is too dangerous for landfill. Too dangerous for landfill is a very low standard. I don't remember the exact volume, but I've been involved with an operation that probably excavated then entombed a volume of material that was of comparable volume to the nuclear industry's low-level waste. That material was not safe enough to go into landfill, we had to take special precautions with it. Humanity already deals with 10s if not 100s of millions of cubic meters of material that is not safe for landfill. Annually. So far so good.
tekkk 7y ago
It bugs me to no end that green party is by majority opposed to nuclear power while it is, in my opinion, one of the best clean energy sources that works everywhere, without being subject to alternating weather or natural resources. The process of storing nuclear waste is almost trivial and from what i've gathered from the current progress of nuclear reactors, one day most if not all of that waste could be used as fuel, leaving almost nothing left. Yet the same fear-mongering tactics as those used by populists are utilized to change public opinion to hinder its use. The modern nuclear plant is extremely safe and if built in stable geographical area (without earthquakes or tsunamis), it's fail-safe. The only reason something like tsernobyl happened was the massive managerial misjudgements and obsolete technology that would not happen in any properly run modern nuclear plant. It's just... dumb. Instead of thinking rationally people are driven by irrational fear while there exists so many worse things, that might cause your early demise yet people do nothing about them. The probability of getting hit by car must be exponentially higher than dying by nuclear disaster yet i dont see people advocating traffic safety with same fervor.

sunkenvicar 7y ago

Fake solutions for an imagined problem. The unused uranium from a reactor fits neatly into a few parking stalls. Security, transport, and storage of this valuable resource are already solved. Let’s put this material to use!

reacharavindh 7y ago

Nuclear power is almost always brought up as a low carbon alternative to fossil fuels to power our civilization. Some even quote how cheap nuclear power is compared to fossil fuel based power. But, those advocating for nuclear power almost always discount the cost involved in dealing with this radioactive trash. To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. Even if not supplying all of our energy from Wind and solar, it is crime of our irresponsible generation to not invest in solar panels in sunny places like Florida, Texas, Middle East, southern India, Southeast Asia etc. Use the safe option first, and wait for nuclear option to mature until we get a better grip on what to do with its dangerous trash. Florida even actively prevents businesses from engaging in roof top solar panels. If that is not a facepalm moment of stupidity, I don’t know what is.

onlydeadheroes 7y ago
> Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. I suppose that when you watch your children die from climate change, then you will know.
- Brometheus 7y ago
  … or radioactivity.
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    That's not how it works. The waste has to be dealt with, but its not immediately harmful to the general population. Its a problem that has to be addressed in the long term, but climate change is a problem that has to be addressed in the short term. And by the short term I mean the past. In other words, radioactive waste isn't a "your children" problem, it's several generations removed if a solution hasn't been found by then. Climate change is indeed a "your children" problem, if you're old enough to die in the next couple of decades. Otherwise it's a You problem.

caspper69 7y ago

This might be a stupid suggestion/question, but maybe it'll become cheap enough to just toss the spent fuel rods into space?

theBobBob 7y ago
This option is brought up alot and while cost is probably one consideration I think that the main problem is for when (not if) one of the launches has a rapid unscheduled disassembly as they call it, and basically become becomes a large dirty bomb.
- bipson 7y ago
  Also, what happens to the stuff we toss into space? People still seem to make the same mistake our ancestors did regarding tossing stuff into the ocean. To be more precise: achieving a velocity high enough to e.g. detonate on the surface of the sun (in particular carrying tons of nuclear waste) won't be cheap for a long time. [1] Stuff we "toss out there" would probably just keep floating in an uncontrolled (in the long run) earth bound orbit and might come back at some point. [1] https://youtu.be/uNS6VKNXY6s https://youtu.be/uNS6VKNXY6s
  - jackweirdy 7y ago
    Lunar orbit seems much more worth investigating than solar orbit
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Trying to toss radioactive waste into the Sun would be a ridiculous waste of fuel. To do that, you have to cancel out Earth's orbital velocty; that's 30 km/s of ∆v (or execute some very clever gravity assists). What you'd want to do is to shoot it out into an orbit around the Sun that's slightly lower or higher than Earth's. The chance of it somehow returning to Earth is so low that the Sun will go out before it happens. Still, the whole concept is wasteful and dangerous anyway. For one, as others mentioned, a launch failure would mean large-scale contamination on the planet. Two, you can safely store this waste on Earth for many orders of magnitude less money and work. > People still seem to make the same mistake our ancestors did regarding tossing stuff into the ocean. “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Throwing something out into orbit around the Sun isn't going to be a problem, like, ever.

blamestross 7y ago

Make RTGs out of it! https://xkcd.com/2115/ https://xkcd.com/2115/ Even with all of these issues nuclear is the least deadly energy source! More people fall off roofs putting it solar panels then have been effected by nuclear disasters.

lizknope 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... Most RTGs use 238Pu Unlike the other three isotopes discussed in this section, 238Pu must be specifically synthesized and is not abundant as a nuclear waste product. At present only Russia has maintained consistent 238Pu production[dubious – discuss], while in the US, no more than 50 g (1.8 oz) were produced in total between 2013 and 2018.[15] The US agencies involved desire to begin the production of the material at a rate of 300 to 400 grams (11 to 14 oz) per year. If this plan is funded, the goal would be to set up automation and scale-up processes in order to produce an average of 1.5 kg (3.3 lb) per year by 2025.
- 08-15 7y ago
  The USSR manufactured a number of RTGs using Sr-90. Sr-90 is roughly as energetic as Pu-238, but requires more shielding. It has the advantage that it doesn't need to be manufactured, because it is one of the more abundant fission products.

jsmcgd 7y ago

The best option for dealing with nuclear 'waste' is to use the use up the energy contained within it. Moltex Energy is one such proposal to do just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju59gcdmdvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju59gcdmdvI

gambiting 7y ago

I feel like the solution is literally staring us in the face and we're not seeing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal 100% safe storage for literally all of our waste, forever. Why are we not doing that? I can only assume that it's because the spent waste is still "valuable" so it's worth keeping around in case someone figures out more and more efficient ways of processing it to recover useful material from it. Putting it 5km in the ground makes is completely unrecoverable by anyone.

raptorraver 7y ago
There is one such site in Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- gambiting 7y ago
  That's not quite the same - it's more like a mine than a borehole. The whole idea of a borehole is that stuff sealed 5km under the surface isn't coming back in any way, and is nearly impossible to recover unless you drill another borehole in the same place. There is no known geological process that would bring it back up naturally. The site you quoted is pretty deep(500m) but it's not "stable and permanent for millennia" kind of deep.
realusername 7y ago
> can only assume that it's because the spent waste is still "valuable" so it's worth keeping around in case someone figures out more and more efficient ways of processing it to recover useful material from it. Putting it 5km in the ground makes is completely unrecoverable by anyone. You can turn the waste into energy indeed, there's a few plants doing that and there's been prototype plants before. The issue is that it does not make sense economically yet since radioactive materials are so cheap.
michaelt 7y ago
Why are we not doing that? I've seen towns oppose having a trash incinerator in their town, even if the county needs it; and villages oppose having wind turbines built nearby, even if the country needs it. And of course local politicians will get on board with local campaigns, they want to be re-elected. I suspect siting a nuclear waste disposal site would have the same effect, but moreso.

FAKEDETECTOR 7y ago

This is wrong information, nuclear power is not "low-carbon" and can not be considered as a safe option for future energy production. Nuclear energy is a way to keep energy production centralized and maximize profits of a small group with an option to blackmail nation states forever because "too big to fail" + extreme health risks for millions of people. This is a dangerous path and there is no economical gain for a society to bet on nuclear power. Also there are some hard physical facts that might be of interest, e.g. we would need many more nuclear power plants to have any impact on global energy production - but that would quickly lead to "peak uranium". Does it make sense to replace one limited resource with another limited resource if we have the option to use an unlimited resource right now? The nuclear energy gang is a mafia, generating unbelievable amount of problems for our descendants with a business modell that depends on milking the tax payer - an extraordinary stupid idea that only exists, because our still extremely primitive way of doing international politics is based on nuclear weapons, what is the real reason why nuclear power plants still exist. Please do your own research. Here is a quick link: https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-... Edit - one more URL: https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/Apr/Global-energy-transformation-A-roadmap-to-2050-2019Edition https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/Apr/Global-energy-tr...

thiht 7y ago
That's an ironic username.
nickik 7y ago
So much wrong with this. Nuclear is clearly the most 'low-carbon' energy that exists, and every systematic analysis has shown it as such. I'm not gone address your bad economics. > peak uranium Peak uranium is nonsense. Just like peak coal and peak oil. We have unlimited amount of nuclear materials, not even U-235 is close to any peak. We have unlimited U-238 and Thorium that we could use as well.
- FAKEDETECTOR 7y ago
  Both of your points are factually wrong.

peter_retief 7y ago

Make diamond batteries

peter_retief 7y ago
https://futurism.com/diamond-batteries-made-of-nuclear-waste-can-generate-power-for-thousands-of-years https://futurism.com/diamond-batteries-made-of-nuclear-waste...

DennisP 7y ago

The article briefly mentions fast reactors, but I think dismisses them a little too quickly. Waste from fast reactors would be short-lived. Most of our waste is uranium, mainly U238 plus a little leftover U235. This is barely radioactive. There's also a fair amount of plutonium and other transuranics, made when uranium and heavier atoms absorb a neutron without fissioning. This is the really long-lived waste that needs to be stored for thousands of years. About one percent of our waste is fission products, the smaller atoms left after breaking apart uranium and plutonium. This is highly radioactive, but only for a couple centuries. Fast reactors can fission the transuranics, and both isotopes of uranium. Their waste is almost entirely fission products. Encase them in glass, bury them, and in three centuries it'll be back to the radioactivity of the original uranium ore.

nickik 7y ago

Nuclear waste is not really waste. WE should not dispose of it at all. It is literally ZERO problem to keep nuclear waste around easly accessable with no danger for the next couple 100 years. By then we should really have the technology to consume most of that waste. The tiny rest of it can be stored, we know that this is geologically possilbe and facilities have already been built in Finland. This is really not a technology problem, but rather a political problem where any progress towards a solution is systematically stopped. So that the 'you can't manage the waste' argument can be used against the nuclear industry. The US even has a huge pile of money already collected to handle disposle and for decades US sientiests have found the best place to put that stuff. Guess what, its not where the governmnet currently wants to store it. But they can't move it to another place because of politics, and they can't actually store in the place they have selected because politics has greated essentially impossible properties that they need to insure. This is a political problem, not a technical or financial one.

shaunrussell 7y ago

Our nuclear reactors are essentially the beta product. There are alternative reactor designs that create much less waste like LFTR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...) and others like TWR that cab consume our existing spent fuel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor). There are a lot of reasons we predominantly use solid fuel light water reactors, most of them being the decades of sunk costs + commitment inertia that was created by the government investment in the technology... because it was good for the military (submarines, maybe bombs). https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-search-for-a-better-safer-nuclear-power/72765/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-s... There are some companies trying to address this like Flibe Energy, who is working on LFTR designs (https://flibe-energy.com/ https://flibe-energy.com/) and Terrapower with TWR (http://terrapower.com http://terrapower.com), of which Bill Gates is Chairman of the board. Nuclear could be great. We need massive investment in these alternative technologies.

someguydave 7y ago
Molten salt designs have somewhat unsolved waste and proliferation issues, but you are correct in general.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Isn't there also a corrosion issue, that hot salt tends to corrode normal stainless steel? The usual Achilles heel of these things is welding issues. It seems research is ongoing: http://www.electrochemsci.org/papers/vol13/130504891.pdf http://www.electrochemsci.org/papers/vol13/130504891.pdf
  - jabl 7y ago
    You think hot salt is bad? Now let's add 1/3 of the periodic table to the salt.. But yeah, people are working on it. The Americans had something in the 60ies (hastalloy), the Chinese are working on it today. In the short term, many o the MSR startups are planning to replace the reactor vessel every few years to get around corrosion issues, as well as the graphite moderator going bad.

tiku 7y ago

Why can't we just use the waste to heat homes? Is there a magic ratio of isolation that allows enough heat but not enough radiation to use at home?

gnode 7y ago
This doesn't solve any part of the waste management problem; it only frustrates safety for a small benefit. High-level nuclear waste generates heat, but is not kept hot; it's stored in cool pools. Allowing it to reach a high temperature and using it for district heating is not sensible.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago

I feel like support for nuclear energy is the acceptable face of climate denial these days. It's like states rights and racism. Who can be against states rights? That's totally noble sounding. Yet quite a few people who took up that banner were actually trying to achieve racist ends, and when forced to choose between states rights and racism, would choose racism, exposing them to anyone paying attention. Similarly, it's a weird that nuclear (which is possibly the most state supported energy source) gets so much support from libertarians[1], rather than decentralised wind and solar with carbon taxes to internalize externalities. Of course if you genuinely believe in states rights, or nuclear power, you now need some kind of introductory proviso to seperate yourself from the people stealing your topic as cover for their own ends. My litmus test is: do you strongly believe in nuclear only because you think renewables are useless? If so, where did you get this information from? Second hand fossil fuel propaganda probably. [1] this gets meta for libertarians as I'd say the same thing has occured there. Corporate fascists like a lot of the libertarian ideals and push them hard, while ignoring/fighting the logically coherent principles that don't suit them. Climate change denial being an obvious one were paychecks override principle, when the libertarian idea of carbon fees is probably the single best way to solve the problem.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
What's there about climate denial in support for nuclear energy? Everyone I've seen who push for nuclear, myself included, do so because of climate change. Supporting decentralized wind and solar is good too, but it's really ridiculous how the discourse turned into nuclear vs wind and solar, where it should be about nuclear and wind and solar vs fossil fuels. We're sitting on a magical fuel of incredible energy density and zero carbon footprint, suitable for use in base-load power generation - and we're not doing anything with it, because it's too magical for people's taste.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  As pointed out in one of my other comments, it's not zero carbon, it's slightly more carbon intensive than wind or solar (actually I misread that graph, they're basically tied but all ahead of fossil fuels), both of which are getting better on that scale as they expand. So it's more expensive and it therefore does less to solve the problem. And every discussion about it devolves into "aren't those silly hippies stupid unlike us rational types, we'd have solved climate change already if the damn hippies hadn't been so irrational" which seems like a great way to hijack people's emotions to drive them towards bad decisions, and basically echos climate change denial strategy. If your argument for nuclear sound like something a Fox host would say then that's a bad sign, right? That's why I associate it with climate denial.

cjslep 7y ago

To get our bachelor's degree in Nuclear Engineering at NCSU a bunch of us looked at a continuous pyroprocess involving molten salt, molten cadmnium, EM pumps, and electroplating. The idea is to plate out the Uranium -- and only the uranium, satisfying nonproliferation concerns -- and precipitate out the minor actinides and plutonium together for HLW long term storage, or a different further recycling process. This would close the loop and recycle uranium while still keeping the weapons grade plutonium out of people's hands. It doesn't transmute so it wouldn't solve the waste problem. It only solves the Uranium recycling problem. The US Government is far more concerned about non-proliferation than it is about waste. Hence the lack of political will in fixing the long-known uranium recycling problem with methods like UREX/PUREX, which is not proliferation-resistant. Was really fun, the tech looked promising, the maintenance looks awful, and the political will isn't there. Edit to add: once we are able to recycle the Uranium, the theory is that the rest of the HLW can be used in a different kind of reactor (not a light water one) that would burn the waste as fuel, fully dealing with the waste problem. So there's multiple degrees with which we could recycle spent nuclear fuel.

petschge 7y ago
It is not just the political will that is lacking. The is no economic reason to do it. The maintenance can not be done by humans and if -- after a lot of investment -- you are able to develop robots that can do it, you get a better ROI by becoming worlds leading robotics company and replace Kuka, ABB and Co.
jabl 7y ago
Was this the same pyroprocess Argonne had developed? Seems very promising, what a shame IFR was killed though.

bleaknet 7y ago

reuse the energy, create mini nuclear power plant/reactor that can be sent into space to mine bitcoin.