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So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all t

So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste >Exposure to radioactive waste may cause health impacts due to ionizing radiation exposure. In humans, a dose of 1 sievert carries a 5.5% risk of developing cancer,[12] and regulatory agencies assume the risk is linearly proportional to dose even for low doses. Ionizing radiation can cause deletions in chromosomes.[13]

SparkyMcUnicorn 6y ago
They address how they deal with the radioactive waste in the video.
manfredo 6y ago
Because it's not a problem. There's actually very little of it. It occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Storing it is pretty foolproof: bury it in an area with no aquifer. The main risk of contamination is getting into the groundwater. If there's no groundwater the risk of contamination is eliminated even if the containers decay over time. And lastly, it doesn't make sense to bury our waste right now because some of the latest reactors being built can use this waste as fuel. We hold nuclear to an incredible double standard with respect to the waste it produces. Fossil fuels release substantially more radioactive waste [2], and that waste is poorly contained. Usually put in an exposed pile next to the plant, which occasionally spills into rivers nearby [3]. Not to mention a whole other host of pollutants like heavy metals, and the carbon dioxide that is th main driver of climate change. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_f...
- merb 6y ago
  1. How long does it need to be kept safe? 2. How to find a storage facility that can keep it safe that long? 3. How to ensure that a facility does not contamine other stuff in X years? 4. if it is recycable why does nobody do it? 5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot? yeah coal is bad, but why compare it to coal in the first place when we want to reduce such things anyway?!
  - manfredo 6y ago
    1. Forever. Uranium is a heavy metal, it's toxic regardless of it's radioactivity. 2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2] 3. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater. 4. France does recycle it's nuclear waste. 5. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this waste is fuel for some of the reactors currently being built. The reality is that nuclear waste will have minimal if any impact on the rate of uranium contamination. Naturally occurring uranium is responsible for vastly more contamination than nuclear waste. Streams and rivers flowing down from mountains pick up uranium in the sediment and bring it downstream: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates-drinking-water-in-us-west/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates-drinking-w... 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
    - merb 6y ago
      both your links actually say the following: 1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity 2. onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone well no matter the waste is a problem and humans can't handle it, because money is the problem. as long as somebody can make it cheaper the cheapest option is always used which probably can harm people. nuclear technology was NEVER the problem, people were. even the safest plan is still unsafe, because people and money. fukushima, failed because of money and people. tschernobyl failed because of money and people. and money will be even a bigger issue when there are cheaper technologies. also no nuclear plant is emission free, even most construction emissions are already pretty high and lots of studies talk so nicely about that, but undervalue most of that by a high margin.
gruez 6y ago
>So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore It's not? They specifically mentioned it about 1 minute into their "MMR Life Cycle" video in the linked page.
hindsightbias 6y ago
The industry would prefer it be an unaddressed externality as there is no politically economical solution. So it’s assumed storage will always be local but not priced in.
jjoonathan 6y ago
Not mentioned? Did you watch 1:12 to 1:50 of their video?
tonyhb 6y ago
The "how it works" video shows a geological repository dug into a cement cave in the ground. Waste is stored there to minimize exposure. They at least didn't try to hide it and in fact did mention it.
jka 6y ago
I don't know, and I have been wondering whether much of the evident pro-nuclear lobbying recently (it seems apparent on many threads here related to energy generation) might be due to the nuclear industry being in serious threat of becoming obsolete. I've harped on about this many times before, but the levelized cost of energy[1] for renewables like solar and wind power is substantially cheaper than nuclear power nowadays. That, combined with the problems of long construction times, population unease with nuclear, and nuclear waste as you mention, seem like they should limit nuclear power in the near-term, and perhaps eliminate it in the mid-to-long-term. There seems to be a valid question around how to store energy from renewable sources given that they have a tendency to fluctuate in terms of generation output - but it seems to me that storage is a safer, more tractable problem to solve than the issues surrounding nuclear (fission) energy. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy
- cmehdy 6y ago
  I'll alleviate your concerns: it is not due to a big nuclear conspiracy aiming at making Big Nuclear fill its pockets, but by people who look at what physics dictates and notice that with our energy consumption things just don't add up. So you will see an increasing amount of (1) posts about nuclear, and (2) posts about de-growth or accepting to shrink economies through less consumption and production, not because there's a malevolent lobby but because people are becoming increasingly alarmed at the fantastically huge wave of problems already present due to climate change, and are acknowledging that the biggest mid-term effect is CO2 emissions (short term is water vapour and methane for what it's worth). Side note: if you pick a conspiracy to get rich or defend "big money" interests or get swindled by, you're way better off continuing to side with oil and coal and denying that climate change is a thing - since nuclear takes gigantic initial investments and is not stock-market friendly but much more about countries' political will (and I got downvoted on previous discussions where I brought that up).
  - epistasis 6y ago
    There is absolutely no "physics" that goes into those postings. It's just some gut feelings. I've come across this at least a dozen times, with people just sure that "physics" says something, but there is no physical principle that requires we decrease energy use to power the entire world with renewables and storage and possibly hydrogen or other synthetic carbon fuels. We can power all of the developing world at Western energy levels with renewable energy. Our GDP is increasing even as the amount of primary energy per person decreases. It's no longer the 1970s and a lot of assumptions from then have been proven to be very very wrong.
steeve 6y ago
A few hints: - read about CIGEO - nuclear waste, once it has decayed, becomes metal in glass - nuclear waste is _small_, see [1], the nuclear fuel waste is the tiny red cube. - wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever [2] - renewables are more CO2 intensive than nuclear, fuel cycle included, see IPCC reports (there is a debate for nuclear vs wind depending on where nuclear is deployed. in France nuclear is 6gCO2eq/kWh, vs 12 for wind) - mercury however, will be buried in Germany, and will stay there until the end of times (unlike nuclear, which will disapear), and that doesn't seem to bother anybody 1. https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1184788641303937025?s=20 https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1184788641303937025?s=20 2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
- z8rHZM8Svhu8hE2 6y ago
  - wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever Nuclear power plants have a lifespan of about 50 years, after which the reactor and other parts will be radioactive. This waste must be buried, will be forgotten and will remain there forever.
  - wazoox 6y ago
    Actually nuclear plant have been designed for a minimal lifespan of 40 years. Most can be run safely 60, 80 or even maybe 100 years. Renewables don't provide the energy density to power our industrial world. Simple as that. Fossils emit much more pollution than nuclear in volume, and that will last arguably as long (CO2 we're dumping in the atmosphere will stay up there for millennia; coal ashes will remain toxic forever and we make megatons of them, not mere kilos).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Now compare the space taken by the buried reactor facility and produced waste, with equivalent number of buried wind turbine blades for the same amount of energy produced :).
ttul 6y ago
You have to weigh the waste disposal and storage costs against the external costs of other fuel sources. What is the "cleanup cost" of carbon emissions from fossil fuels? Even wind power has a waste disposal cost; the blades are often made of toxic material and must be buried when they wear out. The scary radioactivity of long lived isotopes can be dealt with via geological storage. There is plenty of rock underneath us that can be tunneled into. We can store basically limitless quantities of radioactive waste deep underground, forever. And then there is reprocessing. France and other countries aggressively reprocess their spent fuel, freeing up new fuel without additional uranium mining. There are highly toxic biproducts from reprocessing that must be stored for a long time; however, these products are small in volume.
- flor1s 6y ago
  Do you have a source for blades often being made of toxic material? The Bloomberg article a poster linked above makes it seem like it's completely safe to store the blades in landfill: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
  - jabl 6y ago
    They are usually made of fibreglass or carbon fibre. Somewhat nasty and almost impossible to recycle, but also fairly inert. Of all the environmental challenges humanity faces, landfilling old wind turbine blades is quite a long way down the list.
dmm 6y ago
> get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing The problems humanity faces are immense. There are no choices that are 'safe'. Even if the US was building Nuclear power plants as fast as we could it still wouldn't be enough.
shireboy 6y ago
Counterpoint: why is environmental impact of solar+batteries often not mentioned? Lithium, silicon tetrachloride, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid isn't exactly nice to produce or put into rivers. My 2c: have an "all of the above" approach towards research, dispassionately understand pros and cons and big-picture complexity, instead of retreating to tribes that ignore the complexity.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Well, you skip all the same nasty metals needed for the reactor vessels and support equipment too, so it's an even trade?
  - jabl 6y ago
    Most of the mass of a nuclear power plant is steel and concrete, which are relatively benign. But the big advantage of nuclear in this case is that the overall amount of materials needed is tiny compared to harvesting more diffuse forms of energy like wind and solar.
- projektfu 6y ago
  Mining and enriching nuclear fuel is, what, benign?
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Comparatively, yes. You need so much less of it. There aren't very many uranium mines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Uranium_production_world.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ura...
    - jabl 6y ago
      Further, many uranium mines, especially newer ones, use in-situ leaching, meaning the mine is essentially just a few holes drilled into the ground.
- 6y ago
loeg 6y ago
> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? 1. Waste is mentioned every time one of these articles hits HN. 2. Waste is not and was never a real problem. Right now our strategy for radioactive coal waste is to aerosolize it and dump it into the atmosphere. Burying a few dirty cans in the ground has only ever been a barrier due to FUD.
- aaronblohowiak 6y ago
  In some places they use coal ash on the road for traction during snowy conditions >.<
matheusmoreira 6y ago
A problem inherent in renewables is they depend on climate. Doesn't make for reliable or predictable power output. Climatic conditions could suddenly change and wipe out part of your energy capacity. Happened in my country and we ended up with expensive, rationed power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Brazil#The_2001-2002_crisis_and_the_government's_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Brazil#T... It's useful to have an alternative that allows burning fuel in order to generate energy, just in case renewables fail. Nuclear energy is the best in this category.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  If we plug in Brazil (2011 weather data, 2030 cost model) into https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ you get very good prices in a 100% renewable system. Mostly solar, with hydrogen backup (although this doesn't take into account Brazil's hydro resources which could make things even cheaper.)
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Hydrogen for energy generation? I've never seen that. Does it provide on-demand power generation like fossil fuels? If so then that's pretty awesome, I bet it's even better than stuff like coal. Not really educated about it though. Also I'm not talking about energy prices. I'm talking about the reliability and predictability of the overall system. Hydroelectric power here in Brazil is constantly threatened by lack of rain. Solar power is threatened by long periods of cloudy weather. Every time it happens it shows up all over the news. I remember it happening a fes years ago. I'm not saying these energy sources are not good. They're awesome. The problem is they depend on climate so we can't always count on them. Gotta have the ability to burn some kind of fuel to compensate. If hydrogen works as a renewable fuel then it'd be great!
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Hydrogen for energy STORAGE. Yes, it could be used in turbines like natural gas currently is. The key observation here is that backing up the grid with turbines is not that expensive. A simple cycle gas turbine power plant is just a few percent of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant of the same output. Combustion turbines are amazing! So, we have stacks of turbines that are needed when there's no sun or wind and the short term storage has run down, burning hydrogen produced with excess renewable power when there's plenty of sun and wind. If the levelized cost of the renewables is sufficiently below that of nuclear then nuclear optimizes out to zero.
cbmuser 6y ago
Because it’s not a problem: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... It’s the best waste we have due to being solid and extremely compact and it can be recycled by 95%: > https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-off...
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Nuclear waste is not a problem, but not because it can be recycled. Reprocessing is an economic loser compared to just mining fresh uranium. The separated plutonium has negative value, and in thermal reactors much of it can't be destroyed before going into final disposal.
  - jabl 6y ago
    Indeed, reprocessing with PUREX and only using thermal reactors will most likely never make any economic sense. Breeder reactors and more economic and proliferation-resistant reprocessing technologies like pyroprocessing might, however. Too early to tell really, as neither have really been developed to the point where one can make precise economic predictions.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      But breeders themselves are uncompetitive (and fast breeders are inherently dangerous, since they require much higher concentrations of fissionable material, and could potentially experience fast prompt supercriticality in severe accidents.) If nuclear is not competitive with cheap uranium and burner reactors, it's not going to be competitive with breeders and reprocessing.
      - jabl 6y ago
        > But breeders themselves are uncompetitive Hard to say. Hasn't really been commercialized to the point one could make any definite conclusion. There's nothing inherent in a breeder reactor that would make it substantially more expensive. > and fast breeders are inherently dangerous, since they require much higher concentrations of fissionable material, and could potentially experience fast prompt supercriticality in severe accidents.) No. In a fast reactor the prompt neutron multiplication time is an order or magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, but still several orders of magnitude slower than in a weapon. Further, the enrichment is much lower than in a weapon (recent-ish designs are made to work below the 20% HEU limit for obvious reasons), so it's quite unclear if it's even possible to get all the material into a suitable geometry before it would blow itself apart. Of course it's possible to have a criticality excursion that would destroy the reactor, but those are possible in thermal reactors as well. > If nuclear is not competitive with cheap uranium and burner reactors, it's not going to be competitive with breeders and reprocessing. The fuel cycle costs are basically fuel + enrichment + disposal for a once-through thermal cycle, and fuel + reprocessing + disposal for the breeding cycle. Fuel and disposal costs would be lower for the breeding cycle, although with current prices and maturity level of the technology you're correct that the once-through cycle is cheaper. Not written in the stars that it will remain so forevermore, though, and breeder + reprocessing tech is waiting in the drawer for that day, in case there ever will be a need. No hurry.
godelski 6y ago
> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? - It still is the number 1 talking point. - It is a solved problem (you put it in a hole). - The "problem" is vastly overstated. We're talking about 60 years of waste can sit on a football field 1.5m high. That's tiny. Bringing up (generically) waste on a technical forum is often associated with not knowing much about the subject. - Economics is a better talking point because it is actually debatable (cases to both sides).
- johnisgood 6y ago
  Yup, thorium-based nuclear power does not generate much nuclear waste at all, for example, and nuclear waste can be recycled, called "nuclear recycling"[1]. Nuclear waste is NOT an issue. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html
  - jabl 6y ago
    The thorium fuel cycle produces about the same amount of waste as the equivalent U-Pu cycle. Both are breeding cycles requiring reprocessing. There is nothing magical in Th that gets rid of the waste. The Th cycle can't really be compared to the once-through enriched uranium cycle, as Th doesn't contain any fissile isotope by itself. It requires breeding and reprocessing.
zyxzevn 6y ago
It is only a problem for future generations...

SparkyMcUnicorn 6y ago

They address how they deal with the radioactive waste in the video.

manfredo 6y ago

Because it's not a problem. There's actually very little of it. It occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Storing it is pretty foolproof: bury it in an area with no aquifer. The main risk of contamination is getting into the groundwater. If there's no groundwater the risk of contamination is eliminated even if the containers decay over time. And lastly, it doesn't make sense to bury our waste right now because some of the latest reactors being built can use this waste as fuel. We hold nuclear to an incredible double standard with respect to the waste it produces. Fossil fuels release substantially more radioactive waste [2], and that waste is poorly contained. Usually put in an exposed pile next to the plant, which occasionally spills into rivers nearby [3]. Not to mention a whole other host of pollutants like heavy metals, and the carbon dioxide that is th main driver of climate change. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_f...

merb 6y ago
1. How long does it need to be kept safe? 2. How to find a storage facility that can keep it safe that long? 3. How to ensure that a facility does not contamine other stuff in X years? 4. if it is recycable why does nobody do it? 5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot? yeah coal is bad, but why compare it to coal in the first place when we want to reduce such things anyway?!
- manfredo 6y ago
  1. Forever. Uranium is a heavy metal, it's toxic regardless of it's radioactivity. 2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2] 3. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater. 4. France does recycle it's nuclear waste. 5. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this waste is fuel for some of the reactors currently being built. The reality is that nuclear waste will have minimal if any impact on the rate of uranium contamination. Naturally occurring uranium is responsible for vastly more contamination than nuclear waste. Streams and rivers flowing down from mountains pick up uranium in the sediment and bring it downstream: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates-drinking-water-in-us-west/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates-drinking-w... 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
  - merb 6y ago
    both your links actually say the following: 1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity 2. onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone well no matter the waste is a problem and humans can't handle it, because money is the problem. as long as somebody can make it cheaper the cheapest option is always used which probably can harm people. nuclear technology was NEVER the problem, people were. even the safest plan is still unsafe, because people and money. fukushima, failed because of money and people. tschernobyl failed because of money and people. and money will be even a bigger issue when there are cheaper technologies. also no nuclear plant is emission free, even most construction emissions are already pretty high and lots of studies talk so nicely about that, but undervalue most of that by a high margin.

gruez 6y ago

>So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore It's not? They specifically mentioned it about 1 minute into their "MMR Life Cycle" video in the linked page.

hindsightbias 6y ago

The industry would prefer it be an unaddressed externality as there is no politically economical solution. So it’s assumed storage will always be local but not priced in.

jjoonathan 6y ago

Not mentioned? Did you watch 1:12 to 1:50 of their video?

tonyhb 6y ago

The "how it works" video shows a geological repository dug into a cement cave in the ground. Waste is stored there to minimize exposure. They at least didn't try to hide it and in fact did mention it.

jka 6y ago

I don't know, and I have been wondering whether much of the evident pro-nuclear lobbying recently (it seems apparent on many threads here related to energy generation) might be due to the nuclear industry being in serious threat of becoming obsolete. I've harped on about this many times before, but the levelized cost of energy[1] for renewables like solar and wind power is substantially cheaper than nuclear power nowadays. That, combined with the problems of long construction times, population unease with nuclear, and nuclear waste as you mention, seem like they should limit nuclear power in the near-term, and perhaps eliminate it in the mid-to-long-term. There seems to be a valid question around how to store energy from renewable sources given that they have a tendency to fluctuate in terms of generation output - but it seems to me that storage is a safer, more tractable problem to solve than the issues surrounding nuclear (fission) energy. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy

cmehdy 6y ago
I'll alleviate your concerns: it is not due to a big nuclear conspiracy aiming at making Big Nuclear fill its pockets, but by people who look at what physics dictates and notice that with our energy consumption things just don't add up. So you will see an increasing amount of (1) posts about nuclear, and (2) posts about de-growth or accepting to shrink economies through less consumption and production, not because there's a malevolent lobby but because people are becoming increasingly alarmed at the fantastically huge wave of problems already present due to climate change, and are acknowledging that the biggest mid-term effect is CO2 emissions (short term is water vapour and methane for what it's worth). Side note: if you pick a conspiracy to get rich or defend "big money" interests or get swindled by, you're way better off continuing to side with oil and coal and denying that climate change is a thing - since nuclear takes gigantic initial investments and is not stock-market friendly but much more about countries' political will (and I got downvoted on previous discussions where I brought that up).
- epistasis 6y ago
  There is absolutely no "physics" that goes into those postings. It's just some gut feelings. I've come across this at least a dozen times, with people just sure that "physics" says something, but there is no physical principle that requires we decrease energy use to power the entire world with renewables and storage and possibly hydrogen or other synthetic carbon fuels. We can power all of the developing world at Western energy levels with renewable energy. Our GDP is increasing even as the amount of primary energy per person decreases. It's no longer the 1970s and a lot of assumptions from then have been proven to be very very wrong.

steeve 6y ago

A few hints: - read about CIGEO - nuclear waste, once it has decayed, becomes metal in glass - nuclear waste is _small_, see [1], the nuclear fuel waste is the tiny red cube. - wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever [2] - renewables are more CO2 intensive than nuclear, fuel cycle included, see IPCC reports (there is a debate for nuclear vs wind depending on where nuclear is deployed. in France nuclear is 6gCO2eq/kWh, vs 12 for wind) - mercury however, will be buried in Germany, and will stay there until the end of times (unlike nuclear, which will disapear), and that doesn't seem to bother anybody 1. https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1184788641303937025?s=20 https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1184788641303937025?s=20 2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

z8rHZM8Svhu8hE2 6y ago
- wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever Nuclear power plants have a lifespan of about 50 years, after which the reactor and other parts will be radioactive. This waste must be buried, will be forgotten and will remain there forever.
- wazoox 6y ago
  Actually nuclear plant have been designed for a minimal lifespan of 40 years. Most can be run safely 60, 80 or even maybe 100 years. Renewables don't provide the energy density to power our industrial world. Simple as that. Fossils emit much more pollution than nuclear in volume, and that will last arguably as long (CO2 we're dumping in the atmosphere will stay up there for millennia; coal ashes will remain toxic forever and we make megatons of them, not mere kilos).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Now compare the space taken by the buried reactor facility and produced waste, with equivalent number of buried wind turbine blades for the same amount of energy produced :).

ttul 6y ago

You have to weigh the waste disposal and storage costs against the external costs of other fuel sources. What is the "cleanup cost" of carbon emissions from fossil fuels? Even wind power has a waste disposal cost; the blades are often made of toxic material and must be buried when they wear out. The scary radioactivity of long lived isotopes can be dealt with via geological storage. There is plenty of rock underneath us that can be tunneled into. We can store basically limitless quantities of radioactive waste deep underground, forever. And then there is reprocessing. France and other countries aggressively reprocess their spent fuel, freeing up new fuel without additional uranium mining. There are highly toxic biproducts from reprocessing that must be stored for a long time; however, these products are small in volume.

flor1s 6y ago
Do you have a source for blades often being made of toxic material? The Bloomberg article a poster linked above makes it seem like it's completely safe to store the blades in landfill: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
- jabl 6y ago
  They are usually made of fibreglass or carbon fibre. Somewhat nasty and almost impossible to recycle, but also fairly inert. Of all the environmental challenges humanity faces, landfilling old wind turbine blades is quite a long way down the list.

dmm 6y ago

> get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing The problems humanity faces are immense. There are no choices that are 'safe'. Even if the US was building Nuclear power plants as fast as we could it still wouldn't be enough.

shireboy 6y ago

Counterpoint: why is environmental impact of solar+batteries often not mentioned? Lithium, silicon tetrachloride, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid isn't exactly nice to produce or put into rivers. My 2c: have an "all of the above" approach towards research, dispassionately understand pros and cons and big-picture complexity, instead of retreating to tribes that ignore the complexity.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Well, you skip all the same nasty metals needed for the reactor vessels and support equipment too, so it's an even trade?
- jabl 6y ago
  Most of the mass of a nuclear power plant is steel and concrete, which are relatively benign. But the big advantage of nuclear in this case is that the overall amount of materials needed is tiny compared to harvesting more diffuse forms of energy like wind and solar.
projektfu 6y ago
Mining and enriching nuclear fuel is, what, benign?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Comparatively, yes. You need so much less of it. There aren't very many uranium mines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Uranium_production_world.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ura...
  - jabl 6y ago
    Further, many uranium mines, especially newer ones, use in-situ leaching, meaning the mine is essentially just a few holes drilled into the ground.
6y ago

loeg 6y ago

> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? 1. Waste is mentioned every time one of these articles hits HN. 2. Waste is not and was never a real problem. Right now our strategy for radioactive coal waste is to aerosolize it and dump it into the atmosphere. Burying a few dirty cans in the ground has only ever been a barrier due to FUD.

aaronblohowiak 6y ago
In some places they use coal ash on the road for traction during snowy conditions >.<

matheusmoreira 6y ago

A problem inherent in renewables is they depend on climate. Doesn't make for reliable or predictable power output. Climatic conditions could suddenly change and wipe out part of your energy capacity. Happened in my country and we ended up with expensive, rationed power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Brazil#The_2001-2002_crisis_and_the_government's_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Brazil#T... It's useful to have an alternative that allows burning fuel in order to generate energy, just in case renewables fail. Nuclear energy is the best in this category.

pfdietz 6y ago
If we plug in Brazil (2011 weather data, 2030 cost model) into https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ you get very good prices in a 100% renewable system. Mostly solar, with hydrogen backup (although this doesn't take into account Brazil's hydro resources which could make things even cheaper.)
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Hydrogen for energy generation? I've never seen that. Does it provide on-demand power generation like fossil fuels? If so then that's pretty awesome, I bet it's even better than stuff like coal. Not really educated about it though. Also I'm not talking about energy prices. I'm talking about the reliability and predictability of the overall system. Hydroelectric power here in Brazil is constantly threatened by lack of rain. Solar power is threatened by long periods of cloudy weather. Every time it happens it shows up all over the news. I remember it happening a fes years ago. I'm not saying these energy sources are not good. They're awesome. The problem is they depend on climate so we can't always count on them. Gotta have the ability to burn some kind of fuel to compensate. If hydrogen works as a renewable fuel then it'd be great!
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Hydrogen for energy STORAGE. Yes, it could be used in turbines like natural gas currently is. The key observation here is that backing up the grid with turbines is not that expensive. A simple cycle gas turbine power plant is just a few percent of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant of the same output. Combustion turbines are amazing! So, we have stacks of turbines that are needed when there's no sun or wind and the short term storage has run down, burning hydrogen produced with excess renewable power when there's plenty of sun and wind. If the levelized cost of the renewables is sufficiently below that of nuclear then nuclear optimizes out to zero.

cbmuser 6y ago

Because it’s not a problem: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... It’s the best waste we have due to being solid and extremely compact and it can be recycled by 95%: > https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-off...

pfdietz 6y ago
Nuclear waste is not a problem, but not because it can be recycled. Reprocessing is an economic loser compared to just mining fresh uranium. The separated plutonium has negative value, and in thermal reactors much of it can't be destroyed before going into final disposal.
- jabl 6y ago
  Indeed, reprocessing with PUREX and only using thermal reactors will most likely never make any economic sense. Breeder reactors and more economic and proliferation-resistant reprocessing technologies like pyroprocessing might, however. Too early to tell really, as neither have really been developed to the point where one can make precise economic predictions.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    But breeders themselves are uncompetitive (and fast breeders are inherently dangerous, since they require much higher concentrations of fissionable material, and could potentially experience fast prompt supercriticality in severe accidents.) If nuclear is not competitive with cheap uranium and burner reactors, it's not going to be competitive with breeders and reprocessing.
    - jabl 6y ago
      > But breeders themselves are uncompetitive Hard to say. Hasn't really been commercialized to the point one could make any definite conclusion. There's nothing inherent in a breeder reactor that would make it substantially more expensive. > and fast breeders are inherently dangerous, since they require much higher concentrations of fissionable material, and could potentially experience fast prompt supercriticality in severe accidents.) No. In a fast reactor the prompt neutron multiplication time is an order or magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, but still several orders of magnitude slower than in a weapon. Further, the enrichment is much lower than in a weapon (recent-ish designs are made to work below the 20% HEU limit for obvious reasons), so it's quite unclear if it's even possible to get all the material into a suitable geometry before it would blow itself apart. Of course it's possible to have a criticality excursion that would destroy the reactor, but those are possible in thermal reactors as well. > If nuclear is not competitive with cheap uranium and burner reactors, it's not going to be competitive with breeders and reprocessing. The fuel cycle costs are basically fuel + enrichment + disposal for a once-through thermal cycle, and fuel + reprocessing + disposal for the breeding cycle. Fuel and disposal costs would be lower for the breeding cycle, although with current prices and maturity level of the technology you're correct that the once-through cycle is cheaper. Not written in the stars that it will remain so forevermore, though, and breeder + reprocessing tech is waiting in the drawer for that day, in case there ever will be a need. No hurry.

godelski 6y ago

> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? - It still is the number 1 talking point. - It is a solved problem (you put it in a hole). - The "problem" is vastly overstated. We're talking about 60 years of waste can sit on a football field 1.5m high. That's tiny. Bringing up (generically) waste on a technical forum is often associated with not knowing much about the subject. - Economics is a better talking point because it is actually debatable (cases to both sides).

johnisgood 6y ago
Yup, thorium-based nuclear power does not generate much nuclear waste at all, for example, and nuclear waste can be recycled, called "nuclear recycling"[1]. Nuclear waste is NOT an issue. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html
- jabl 6y ago
  The thorium fuel cycle produces about the same amount of waste as the equivalent U-Pu cycle. Both are breeding cycles requiring reprocessing. There is nothing magical in Th that gets rid of the waste. The Th cycle can't really be compared to the once-through enriched uranium cycle, as Th doesn't contain any fissile isotope by itself. It requires breeding and reprocessing.

zyxzevn 6y ago

It is only a problem for future generations...