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Is nuclear waste even still a problem? We have been storing nuclear waste for more than 60 years in ‘temporary facilities ’ while we’re looking for permanent so

• mlyle 7y ago
  The temporary really sucks. We shouldn't have lots and lots of waste sitting in spent fuel pools random places and should move to something more permanent and reliable.
  • goatlover 7y ago
    Like Yucca Mountain?
    • mlyle 7y ago
      Yup. Yucca Mountain wasn't a perfect plan, but it was pretty damn good and definitely much better than the alternative of doing nothing.
      • nickik 7y ago
        No it wasn't. The US has a perfect place for nuclear waste that we discovered a while ago but politics made it be Yucca Mountain and that is not a good place. And then even worse becuase of politics the technical targets have been moved to absurd demands that make it utterly impossible to move forward. The US has the right location and the money already stored, there is still the Yuca Mountain inpass as it currently required to be the selected site. I think finding such a site in the first place is nonsense as in 50-100 years we should be consume that fuel anyway.
        • blaser-waffle 7y ago
          So then where is this perfect place?
          • nickik 7y ago
            I can't find the name at the moment but its a structure that has been unchanging for 1000s of years and has been evaluated as perfect for nuclear waste since the very early days of nuclear in the US. I think it was evaluated at about 1/5 the cost of bringing Yucca Maintain to the same standard. 'Combating climate change: The role of nuclear power' from University of University of Michigan had a number of lectures where some of this is mentioned if I remember correctly. I'm working so I don't have time at the moment.
  • tapland 7y ago
    Yeah, they should be moved within a few years from pools to sarcophagus style containers. Those containers can later be moved to end storage or wherever without nearly as much hassle as abandoned rods in pools.
• topkai22 7y ago
  I think this is generally true, but poor storage and processing at a couple of early sites (I’m thinking Hanford in particular) have had negative effects on the communities.
• NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  I'm a good few miles from Sellafield, but well within the "you're screwed" radius in the event of major leak. On waste it depends what you call "still a problem". Sellafield still has pools storing the spent Magnox fuel resulting from running Britain's nuclear stock flat out through the 1973 miners strike. Those are decaying "nicely". Risk of fuel fires has been mentioned more than once. Sellafield is a reprocessing plant, that hasn't yet touched the 45 year old waste. Yes I'd say nuclear waste is still a problem. I'm far enough outside London that politicians probably think it's perfectly fine. Photos: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/29/sellafield-nuclear-radioactive-risk-storage-ponds-fears https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/29/sellafie...
  • roenxi 7y ago
    > Yes I'd say nuclear waste is still a problem. Can you elaborate on what the problem is? I see a photo of a pond with the sun shining, grass growing and seagulls bathing. Authorities say it is safe. I have friends who live next to an explosives manufacturing plant. They are at a much higher risk then it sounds like you are. I don't see nuclear fuel as being different from any other hazardous industrial material we deal with. Those are tiny ponds, by the way. I reckon they could have a 2nd set as a backup somewhere near by if it came to it. You should see the size of a mine tailings pond, when they fail it causes real problems.
    • didbfkf 7y ago
      Authorities lie, seagulls get cancers too, and there are superfund everywhere you find a nuclear industry. Temporary storage on site is a very bad idea. Leaks, non uniform site security, drums that were designed for a few decades now being called to serve for a century. Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
      • roenxi 7y ago
        > Authorities lie, seagulls get cancers too, and there are superfund everywhere you find a nuclear industry. So based on information that you don't have but assume exists there is a problem? There is actual evidence of known problems that nuclear solves. Like air pollution from coal. I don't want to sound unsympathetic, the government does lie and I also subscribe to a couple of out-there conspiracy theories. It is just there is a lot of evidence that the nuclear threat is way overblown. > Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between You could move them in to new decade-long storage once a decade. As mentioned, those are small ponds. The world is not made up of absolutes.
• goatinaboat 7y ago
  Is nuclear waste even still a problem? That problem was solved long ago, just reprocess it through breeder reactors and get even more energy! The problem with the anti-nuclear lobby is that they block progress, then point at 50-year-old problems - that they have blocked implementing the solutions for - as current and unsolvable. They don’t actually want clean power. They want a reversion to a pre-industrial society, with themselves in charge.
  • hk__2 7y ago
    > That problem was solved long ago, just reprocess it through breeder reactors and get even more energy! That problem is far from solved, as you can see by the near-zero number of breeder reactors currently in activity around the world.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      Breeder reactors are a proliferation nightmare. Any waste processing is an automatic proliferation issue.
  • mlyle 7y ago
    If we reprocess-- the government should really do it because of proliferation concerns.
    • dunmalg 7y ago
      It takes a very specific design of breeder reactor to make weapons grade plutonium. Proliferation concerns are a red herring by anti-nuclear activists who intentionally conflate non-weapons grade plutonium with weapons grade to make ALL breeders sound dangerous.
      • mlyle 7y ago
        "Weapons grade plutonium" obfuscates that you can make a nuclear weapon from non-weapons grade plutonium, albeit with an increased risk of only getting the fizzle yield. Nuclear weapons that are "only" a couple kilotons are scary enough for me, kthx.
• jay_kyburz 7y ago
  In other words, fuck it, future generations can clean up our mess. How about instead, we use only what we can produce without waste.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    There's no such thing as "produce without waste". What you're proposing is the equivalent of wanting to eat only such things that don't cause you to have to take a dump.
    • jay_kyburz 7y ago
      Taking a dump fertilises things to eat. "energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another."
  • Vomzor 7y ago
    What mess? The waste is being kept in manned facilities and will likely be repurposed in the next 20 years as fuel for a new generation of nuclear reactors. The first commercial nuclear power plant was in 1956. If you think about it, we are dealing with the 'mess' of the previous generation. And we are doing fine.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      No, we're not dealing with it at all. We are just keeping it around because we don't really have a solution. The stuff that was stored decades ago lies mostly untouched, and if it has been touched it is usually because the containment failed and there have been leaks.
      • Google234 7y ago
        The earth is 1 trillion km^3 in volume. I don't get your problem with using 0.00000000003% (that 1000 year estimate of waste from earlier in the thread) of that to store nuclear waste so that we can stop pumping 32.5 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year.
• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Nuclear waste is really non-issue, especially compared to what it could help replace - for instance, sludge that comes from oil sands extraction processes, which is equivalently toxic, but there's orders of magnitude more of it, and it's in liquid form, making it much more difficult to handle. (Sure, to be fair, uranium mining isn't particularly eco-friendly either, but AFAIK even if you count that in, nuclear still comes on top.)
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    Nuclear waste - rather than a non-issue - is a giant issue. The amount of nuclear waste is only increasing, our ways of dealing with it for the longer term - say up to the next 500 years - do not stand up to scrutiny and there is a fair chance that we will end up with numerous sites that make your average Superfund site look like Disney Land. In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries. Alternatives have been suggested (such as - ridiculous - shooting the waste into space or dumping it into the deepest parts of the ocean). But none of those are even remotely viable or politically or socially acceptable. As for the waste from fracking and tar sand processing, yes, that's terrible and it should stop. But nuclear is not the only alternative there.
    • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      Yeah the ideas of shooting into space or dumping into ocean are really asinine. It is a complex issue (waste storage). We (the US) had a decent plan with the planned Yucca Mountain storage facility. But, you know, politics.
      • dane-pgp 7y ago
        Right, nuclear energy is a perfectly clean and safe technology, unless built by corporations, operated by humans, or overseen by politicians...
        • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
• kensai 7y ago
  There are companies working exactly at nuclear waste. Deep Isolation is probably the most interesting of them. https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/ https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/
• Someone 7y ago
  https://euobserver.com/beyond-brussels/132085 https://euobserver.com/beyond-brussels/132085: ”It seemed such a good idea at the time. At least, to the German politicians in charge. But in hindsight, the Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.” Because it doesn’t store highly radioactive waste, it isn’t _that_ much of a concern, but it started leaking ten years into operation. That, IMO, is a concern, as it indicates sloppiness.
  • freeflight 7y ago
    What makes it even more absurd is that storing in a salt mine was considered the "best option" back then, backed by a scientific consensus. That consensus came out of an international conference in the 50s in, I believe, Beirut. Asse II was supposed to be one of the experimental sites to prove the theory, but over the decades ended up being run much more like a "general dump" with extremely lackluster documentation habits.
• JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  This has to be one of the most short-sighted comments I’ve ever read on HN. 60 years for something with a half life of 24,000 years or so and you are calling it good?
  • didbfkf 7y ago
    Add an order of magnitude!
  • mlyle 7y ago
    In fairness, the stuff with a half life of 24,000 years isn't that radioactive/scary. It's the stuff with half lives of 3-300 years that you need to worry about, really. Compared to its activity a month after being removed from the reactor-- spent fuel loses 90% of its activity in 80 years or so and 99% of its activity in 200 years, at which time it's still about 150x as active as the original uranium ore (which itself is 6x or so diluted, so about 25x as active as the original uranium)
• didbfkf 7y ago
  There have been uncountable leaks! Storing nuclear waste is very tricky. It changes chemically due to the atomic decay, so you have to figure out a container that is stable against scores of different chemicals in many concentrations. On top of that, it’s emitting heat so the container can’t be too big otherwise it’ll melt. Then the waste evolves gases, some radioactive, that make the pressure build up. Then your container is getting bombarded by alpha rays which wedges itself between the grain boundaries and embrittlement the container. It’s a bloody (and expensive) mess!
  • 08-15 7y ago
    All of this is made up nonsense. Only 14 radioactive fission product isotopes end up in the final waste form, and they are in an inert oxide form. Their decay chains are short and hardly change the chemistry, if anything, it becomes more stable. They also don't produce gasses, much less radioactive ones. The only kernel of truth is that __if__ you throw out fuel instead of waste, then you get a heat problem over the long term and the container is irradiated by alpha particles. It won't melt, but it might corrode. But why would you throw away fuel?
• dilippkumar 7y ago
  I’ve always thought of nuclear waste as a thinly veiled euphemism for Plutonium. Plutonium is an unavoidable product of U235 fission - and can be extracted from the resulting “nuclear waste” by chemical processes. Having seen stuxnet, I’m convinced that there’s a lot of investment in preventing people from gaining access to U238. Starting from Uranium ore, getting to Plutonium would be much simpler than getting to sufficient quantities of U238 and have the benefit of generating energy along the way. Additionally, Plutonium based bombs have a “higher yield” according to what I’ve read. I wonder if USA and Russia agreed to limit Plutonium production- and that’s the real reason behind severely limiting nuclear energy.
  • chipsa 7y ago
    There's different types of plutonium that's made. Bombs are made from Pu-239. But reactors will normally produce Pu-240 as well, unless you specifically design your reactor and fuel it appropriately to produce mostly Pu-239. So what's the difference? Pu-240 is hot. It's too radioactive to make bombs out of, because you'll end up cooking your workers. And because it's so similar in weight to Pu-239, you can't effectively separate it out.