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I'm surprised people advocate in favor of nuclear energy when waste disposal is still an unresolved issue. Even if it's a modern reactor that has much less wast

I'm surprised people advocate in favor of nuclear energy when waste disposal is still an unresolved issue. Even if it's a modern reactor that has much less waste, it still needs to be safely handled for generations. If modern reactors are successful and their usage scales up, well that is more waste. Both the state governments of Nevada and New Mexico have pushed back on long term storage plans, and the federal government appears to have no current solution.

cagenut 7y ago
this is still the main issue to me. I read NTSB crash reports, I read other tech companies post-mortems, I watched Chernobyl, I've worked in devops for a decade. I don't believe that "we" (humanity) have even come close to solving for the long term reliability of systems to build/run thousands of nuclear reactors (what it would take to fight climate change using nuclear) without 1 - 10 of them being disasters. Then on top of that, I even moreso don't believe we can build a stable society long enough to oversee and manage long term waste. We can't figure out how to handle two-generation problems well yet, taking the risk on a 10 generation problem seems to just completely fail to address reality.
pakitan 7y ago
It's the lesser evil, IMO. Nuclear waste may kill us but burning fossils will kill us.
Aunche 7y ago
Why is nuclear waste the only waste product that requires a perfect long term solution? We don't even have temporary solutions to millions of tons of fertilizer runoff or billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Mining for rare earth metals of solar panels produces a lot of toxic waste, some of which is radioactive. Why doesn't that get as much negative press as nuclear waste? In 2010, there was an estimated 250,000 tons of nuclear waste [1]. The oceans naturally have 4 billion tons of uranium [2]. It seems to me that even the very dumb solution of scattering our nuclear waste across the oceans would have a negligible environmental impact compared to other destructive activities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste [2] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
manigandham 7y ago
It's not unresolved. We can handle it just fine. 99% of the issues are political because people are uneducated about nuclear and fear some kind of nuclear bomb fallout event (which isn't the case). Sure it would be nice if we could have infinite solar power but until then, nuclear is far cleaner and safer than anything else we have today.

cagenut 7y ago

this is still the main issue to me. I read NTSB crash reports, I read other tech companies post-mortems, I watched Chernobyl, I've worked in devops for a decade. I don't believe that "we" (humanity) have even come close to solving for the long term reliability of systems to build/run thousands of nuclear reactors (what it would take to fight climate change using nuclear) without 1 - 10 of them being disasters. Then on top of that, I even moreso don't believe we can build a stable society long enough to oversee and manage long term waste. We can't figure out how to handle two-generation problems well yet, taking the risk on a 10 generation problem seems to just completely fail to address reality.

pakitan 7y ago

It's the lesser evil, IMO. Nuclear waste may kill us but burning fossils will kill us.

Aunche 7y ago

Why is nuclear waste the only waste product that requires a perfect long term solution? We don't even have temporary solutions to millions of tons of fertilizer runoff or billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Mining for rare earth metals of solar panels produces a lot of toxic waste, some of which is radioactive. Why doesn't that get as much negative press as nuclear waste? In 2010, there was an estimated 250,000 tons of nuclear waste [1]. The oceans naturally have 4 billion tons of uranium [2]. It seems to me that even the very dumb solution of scattering our nuclear waste across the oceans would have a negligible environmental impact compared to other destructive activities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste [2] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

manigandham 7y ago

It's not unresolved. We can handle it just fine. 99% of the issues are political because people are uneducated about nuclear and fear some kind of nuclear bomb fallout event (which isn't the case). Sure it would be nice if we could have infinite solar power but until then, nuclear is far cleaner and safer than anything else we have today.