7 ms·

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 pret

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.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      > 1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity Where does it say this? Here's the paragraph under earthquakes: > DOE has stated that seismic and tectonic effects on the natural systems at Yucca Mountain will not significantly affect repository performance. Yucca Mountain lies in a region of ongoing tectonic deformation, but the deformation rates are too slow to significantly affect the mountain during the 10,000-year regulatory compliance period. Rises in the water table caused by seismic activity would be, at most, a few tens of meters and would not reach the repository. The fractured and faulted volcanic tuff that Yucca Mountain comprises reflects the occurrence of many earthquake-faulting and strong ground motion events during the last several million years, and the hydrological characteristics of the rock would not be changed significantly by seismic events that may occur in the next 10,000 years. The engineered barrier system components will reportedly provide substantial protection of the waste from seepage water, even under severe seismic loading. It sure doesn't seem to conform to what you're saying. Later in the article there is one sentence claiming it's unsafe: > Nevada National Security Site officials in April 2019 assured the public that the Device Assembly Facility on the Nevada security site was safe from earthquake threats. In contrast, Nevada officials claimed seismic activity in the region made it unsafe for the storage of nuclear waste. But this is a one-off statement that doesn't seem to be backed by any sort of studies. > onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone And when those containers corrode, how does the waste escape the bedrock that's surrounding it? Nuclear power represents the only way for countries to decarbonize their energy sector. Solar and wind offer cheap bandaids, throw up a few solar panels and you can reduce daytime use of electricity. But they do not offer a real path to decarbonization without spectacular breakthroughs in energy storage. By comparison, France has successfully produced more than 2/3rds of their electricity with nuclear power since the 1980s.
- carry_bit 6y ago
  https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html covers many of your questions. With full processing, it only takes 500 years before the radioactivity drops to that of natural uranium ore.
- s9w 6y ago
  In Germany we have a thing called Ewigkeitskosten ("eternal costs"). That's how we call the expenses that still arise as a consequence from the coal mining operations, especially in the west of Germany. That are things like constantly pumping around water. About a fifth of the western coal region would be underwater without it. They're called that way because we already knew that they will never go away. That was accepted because it brought the region and its people prosperity.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - merb 6y ago
    I'm german. and yes I know about that. It's even worse that our politics fought that it is a good idea to keep coal alive that long, worse we keep lignite alive that long, which is probably even worse than anything on the market. (we are the biggest in lignite and it's the worst thing you can do to your environment. Hambacher forst is a eyesore for our country [1]) but as already said it should not be a tradeoff between coal or nuclear. I do not doubt that nuclear is better than coal, I doubt that nuclear OR coal is the solution we should target at the moment. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hambacher+Forst/@50.9072643,6.4922961,7766m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf5c94fc8fe1af:0x34d898611d7c9285!8m2!3d50.9!4d6.4333333 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hambacher+Forst/@50.907264...
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      And despite we all know that in Germany, we fight nuclear and support fossile energies (coal and gas). > https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/ https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/
    - s9w 6y ago
      I didn't want to take any side, just wanted to add some context to the discussion as in: This is not the first time we did accept future costs for energy production.
- IBCNU 6y ago
  `5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot?` ^it's more dangerous to transport to the TRUE final depot than it is to leave in place.
- lrem 6y ago
  Because the alternative to the nuclear plants that have shut down has reliably been ramping up fossil fuels. Note that nuclear has the longest of power up/down cycles, so it's mostly practical for providing the base load. I.e. you cannot practically replace nuclear with solar, as its home turf is night time.
- cbmuser 6y ago
  4. The Russians and the French do it, the US is still researching: > https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial-batch-of-mox-fuel-loaded-into-bn-800-fast-reactor-at-beloyarsk-npp/ https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial... > https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploration-to-recycling/world-leader-in-recycling-used-nuclear-fuels https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio... > https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-off...
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    Japan also does fuel reprocessing. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/japan-nuclear-fuel-cycle.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... Which is why they have a substantial stockpile of (reactor grade) plutonium. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/31/national/japans-plutonium-stockpile-declined-2018/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/31/national/japans...
beders 6y ago
> Because it's not a problem. Have you seen John Oliver's piece about that and can you point out the flaws?
- evgen 6y ago
  Are you actually trying to use an ill-informed rant by a mid-tier comedian as the primary support for your argument? Seriously?
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Wait, we're better than this on HN. If you have concerns about an argument being made it's important to articulate the concerns. Pointing out someone's career/reputation is an appeal to authority, and a form of bias. It's possible that a comedian could be well informed from a staff, for instance, doing research. I am not familiar with John's arguments, but I wanted to address that dismissing him out of hand seems perfunctory.
    - evgen 6y ago
      Sorry, that was probably too glib of a response. How about this: John Oliver has a history of making ill-informed rants that conveniently skip relevant facts or counter-arguments for the sake of having a pithy little segment that sounds funny and which complements his English mock-outrage. It is not a good argument against nuclear power and in fact it generally only takes a few minutes to point out the rows and rows of strawmen he has set up so that he can knock them down with comedic zingers. We should have higher standards here.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >Wait, we're better than this on HN No were not. We're just more polite and consider it customary to google up someone else who agrees with you that you can cite. Humans are pretty consistent. The rules of conduct vary between tribes. And FWIW John Oliver seems to be a pretty decent comedian. His filter bubble certainly informs his work and he's prone to bias but he's an entertainer by trade so I don't count those against him.
lmilcin 6y ago
Yeah, exactly. Even though it is costly to deal with, per kilogram, there is very little of it when compared to amount of energy produced. An atomic plant might use couple dozen tonnes of fuel which is peanuts compared to the amount of waste from coal power plant. There are no technical problems with storage that we can't solve. The biggest problem is that nobody wants it around.
- rtx 6y ago
  There is no problem at all. Even a nuclear disaster is less harmful than the pollution we currently releasing in the atmosphere.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    Singular or irregular events are easier to comprehend and be afraid of than something like pollution that's somewhat invisible and happening everywhere.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Nuclear disasters reduce the available budget to build more nuclear power plants. Even with the assumption of a $30 billion dollar nuclear plant Japan could have enough money to build dozens of those if it didn't have to clean up Fukushima.
    - lmilcin 6y ago
      I don't think this is true. Countries do not decide to build or not build nuclear power plants based on budget, because nuclear is the cheapest way to produce power at scale. It has mostly to do with sentiment people have towards nuclear power and trust that the project can be done safely.
- cbmuser 6y ago
  Even without considering the amount of energy produced, it’s nothing. The US has accumulated 83.000 tons in decades. Compare that to the billions of tons CO2 that coal plants blow into the atmosphere.
arkitaip 6y ago
> This number may sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite small. In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. A football field of forever death is not a comforting mental image.
- aperrien 6y ago
  How large are those toxic fields of coal ash again?
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    Nobody is arguing we burn more coal. Many of us want to see and end to both coal and nukes.
theptip 6y ago
One point that's commonly missed in the lay discussions is that the stuff with a really long half-life (e.g. uranium/plutonium) is not that radioactive/harmful; by definition if it takes you 100k years for 50% of your unstable nuclei to decay, the emission rate per second is very low. In contrast, the really nasty stuff has a very short half-life, and emits radiation at a very high rate for a very short duration. These can be more like 10s of years half-life. The counterpoint is that they become mostly non-radioactive in 100s of years, not 100s of millenia. The actual environmental risks from long-half-life radioactive substances are pretty minimal as far as I can see. The US makes this problem a lot worse than it needs to be by declining to reprocess nuclear fuel (I believe on proliferation concerns). Reprocessing is done in Europe, China, and Russia. You can separate the uranium & plutonium in spent fuel rods from the shorter-lived and much more nasty fission products, reuse the uranium, do something safe with the potentially weapons-grade plutonium, and then handle / store the separated fission products in a shorter-term facility. The design goals of Yucca Mountain were assuming that you need to keep nuclear fuel safe for 100k years; that's an intensely challenging design constraint. If we just need to keep something safe for 100s of years it becomes much more tractable. See https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r... for some further reading.
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  >do something safe with the potentially weapons-grade plutonium Reprocessed plutonium from a civilian power reactor would never be weapons-grade, it has too much Pu-240 in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium It is claimed that it is possible to make weapons from reprocessed plutonium, but the warheads would need active cooling and exotic pit geometries, making them not so amendable to miniaturization.
  - rwcarlsen 6y ago
    It looks like you replied to the wrong sibling comment.
    - 6y ago
PaulHoule 6y ago
The main problem with "nuclear waste" is that it is not waste at all. If it is sufficiently concentrated in Pu238, then people might want to steal it to make bombs with. Current LWR(s) use about 1% of the energy in the fuel. Burying the waste in Yucca Mountain is like buying a gallon of gas, filling your car with a thimble, then carefully trying to store the rest of the gas so it doesn't ever get burned up. The one reason we were going ahead with Yucca Mountain was a matter of "cutting off our nose to spite our face." That is, if we recycled nuclear fuel, somebody might use the recycling plant to make materials for nuclear weapons. If it wasn't for that policy of kneecapping nobody would have once suggested that we bury perfectly usable nuclear fuel. People are slowly waking up to notion that burning carbon is slow motion suicide, so maybe policies will change.
croutonwagon 6y ago
I wouldnt necessarily agree. It needs to be stored for a time that is longer than any single civilization has survived. Its pretty arrogant to assume we will still be around for that amount of time. This source pretty heavily influenced my change of opinion on nuclears efficacy https://www.pbs.org/video/independent-lens-containment/ https://www.pbs.org/video/independent-lens-containment/
- manfredo 6y ago
  The waste is buried under hundreds of meters of rock. And even if the containers eventually corrode, the waste needs to escape from this bedrock. The only way this is going to happen is either deliberately or through a meteor hitting in just the right spot.
  - solstice 6y ago
    > or through a meteor hitting in just the right spot. It's 2020. Don't tempt fate /s
- scoopertrooper 6y ago
  It's pretty crazy to assume that we wouldn't be around in a millennia, two, or three. No other civilisation has been truly global, no other civilization has achieved so much in terms of mastery of nature and technological advancement. So unless the carrying capacity of earth suddenly collapses to the point that it's impossible to maintain organised society for several hundred years, then I think we'll be alright. If that does happen, then a few nomads stumbling upon a nuclear waste dump will likely be the least of humanity's problems!
  - croutonwagon 6y ago
    Well. We also have the capacity to destroy all life on earth many times over. When the carrying capacity of earth does collapse it will likely be sudden. Food insecurity will do it quick. We are only like 6 meals away from total chaos at the best of times.

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.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    > 1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity Where does it say this? Here's the paragraph under earthquakes: > DOE has stated that seismic and tectonic effects on the natural systems at Yucca Mountain will not significantly affect repository performance. Yucca Mountain lies in a region of ongoing tectonic deformation, but the deformation rates are too slow to significantly affect the mountain during the 10,000-year regulatory compliance period. Rises in the water table caused by seismic activity would be, at most, a few tens of meters and would not reach the repository. The fractured and faulted volcanic tuff that Yucca Mountain comprises reflects the occurrence of many earthquake-faulting and strong ground motion events during the last several million years, and the hydrological characteristics of the rock would not be changed significantly by seismic events that may occur in the next 10,000 years. The engineered barrier system components will reportedly provide substantial protection of the waste from seepage water, even under severe seismic loading. It sure doesn't seem to conform to what you're saying. Later in the article there is one sentence claiming it's unsafe: > Nevada National Security Site officials in April 2019 assured the public that the Device Assembly Facility on the Nevada security site was safe from earthquake threats. In contrast, Nevada officials claimed seismic activity in the region made it unsafe for the storage of nuclear waste. But this is a one-off statement that doesn't seem to be backed by any sort of studies. > onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone And when those containers corrode, how does the waste escape the bedrock that's surrounding it? Nuclear power represents the only way for countries to decarbonize their energy sector. Solar and wind offer cheap bandaids, throw up a few solar panels and you can reduce daytime use of electricity. But they do not offer a real path to decarbonization without spectacular breakthroughs in energy storage. By comparison, France has successfully produced more than 2/3rds of their electricity with nuclear power since the 1980s.
carry_bit 6y ago
https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html covers many of your questions. With full processing, it only takes 500 years before the radioactivity drops to that of natural uranium ore.
s9w 6y ago
In Germany we have a thing called Ewigkeitskosten ("eternal costs"). That's how we call the expenses that still arise as a consequence from the coal mining operations, especially in the west of Germany. That are things like constantly pumping around water. About a fifth of the western coal region would be underwater without it. They're called that way because we already knew that they will never go away. That was accepted because it brought the region and its people prosperity.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- merb 6y ago
  I'm german. and yes I know about that. It's even worse that our politics fought that it is a good idea to keep coal alive that long, worse we keep lignite alive that long, which is probably even worse than anything on the market. (we are the biggest in lignite and it's the worst thing you can do to your environment. Hambacher forst is a eyesore for our country [1]) but as already said it should not be a tradeoff between coal or nuclear. I do not doubt that nuclear is better than coal, I doubt that nuclear OR coal is the solution we should target at the moment. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hambacher+Forst/@50.9072643,6.4922961,7766m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf5c94fc8fe1af:0x34d898611d7c9285!8m2!3d50.9!4d6.4333333 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hambacher+Forst/@50.907264...
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    And despite we all know that in Germany, we fight nuclear and support fossile energies (coal and gas). > https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/ https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/
  - s9w 6y ago
    I didn't want to take any side, just wanted to add some context to the discussion as in: This is not the first time we did accept future costs for energy production.
IBCNU 6y ago
`5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot?` ^it's more dangerous to transport to the TRUE final depot than it is to leave in place.
lrem 6y ago
Because the alternative to the nuclear plants that have shut down has reliably been ramping up fossil fuels. Note that nuclear has the longest of power up/down cycles, so it's mostly practical for providing the base load. I.e. you cannot practically replace nuclear with solar, as its home turf is night time.
cbmuser 6y ago
4. The Russians and the French do it, the US is still researching: > https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial-batch-of-mox-fuel-loaded-into-bn-800-fast-reactor-at-beloyarsk-npp/ https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial... > https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploration-to-recycling/world-leader-in-recycling-used-nuclear-fuels https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio... > https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-off...
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  Japan also does fuel reprocessing. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/japan-nuclear-fuel-cycle.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... Which is why they have a substantial stockpile of (reactor grade) plutonium. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/31/national/japans-plutonium-stockpile-declined-2018/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/31/national/japans...

beders 6y ago

> Because it's not a problem. Have you seen John Oliver's piece about that and can you point out the flaws?

evgen 6y ago
Are you actually trying to use an ill-informed rant by a mid-tier comedian as the primary support for your argument? Seriously?
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Wait, we're better than this on HN. If you have concerns about an argument being made it's important to articulate the concerns. Pointing out someone's career/reputation is an appeal to authority, and a form of bias. It's possible that a comedian could be well informed from a staff, for instance, doing research. I am not familiar with John's arguments, but I wanted to address that dismissing him out of hand seems perfunctory.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Sorry, that was probably too glib of a response. How about this: John Oliver has a history of making ill-informed rants that conveniently skip relevant facts or counter-arguments for the sake of having a pithy little segment that sounds funny and which complements his English mock-outrage. It is not a good argument against nuclear power and in fact it generally only takes a few minutes to point out the rows and rows of strawmen he has set up so that he can knock them down with comedic zingers. We should have higher standards here.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >Wait, we're better than this on HN No were not. We're just more polite and consider it customary to google up someone else who agrees with you that you can cite. Humans are pretty consistent. The rules of conduct vary between tribes. And FWIW John Oliver seems to be a pretty decent comedian. His filter bubble certainly informs his work and he's prone to bias but he's an entertainer by trade so I don't count those against him.

lmilcin 6y ago

Yeah, exactly. Even though it is costly to deal with, per kilogram, there is very little of it when compared to amount of energy produced. An atomic plant might use couple dozen tonnes of fuel which is peanuts compared to the amount of waste from coal power plant. There are no technical problems with storage that we can't solve. The biggest problem is that nobody wants it around.

rtx 6y ago
There is no problem at all. Even a nuclear disaster is less harmful than the pollution we currently releasing in the atmosphere.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  Singular or irregular events are easier to comprehend and be afraid of than something like pollution that's somewhat invisible and happening everywhere.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Nuclear disasters reduce the available budget to build more nuclear power plants. Even with the assumption of a $30 billion dollar nuclear plant Japan could have enough money to build dozens of those if it didn't have to clean up Fukushima.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    I don't think this is true. Countries do not decide to build or not build nuclear power plants based on budget, because nuclear is the cheapest way to produce power at scale. It has mostly to do with sentiment people have towards nuclear power and trust that the project can be done safely.
cbmuser 6y ago
Even without considering the amount of energy produced, it’s nothing. The US has accumulated 83.000 tons in decades. Compare that to the billions of tons CO2 that coal plants blow into the atmosphere.

arkitaip 6y ago

> This number may sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite small. In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. A football field of forever death is not a comforting mental image.

aperrien 6y ago
How large are those toxic fields of coal ash again?
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  Nobody is arguing we burn more coal. Many of us want to see and end to both coal and nukes.

theptip 6y ago

One point that's commonly missed in the lay discussions is that the stuff with a really long half-life (e.g. uranium/plutonium) is not that radioactive/harmful; by definition if it takes you 100k years for 50% of your unstable nuclei to decay, the emission rate per second is very low. In contrast, the really nasty stuff has a very short half-life, and emits radiation at a very high rate for a very short duration. These can be more like 10s of years half-life. The counterpoint is that they become mostly non-radioactive in 100s of years, not 100s of millenia. The actual environmental risks from long-half-life radioactive substances are pretty minimal as far as I can see. The US makes this problem a lot worse than it needs to be by declining to reprocess nuclear fuel (I believe on proliferation concerns). Reprocessing is done in Europe, China, and Russia. You can separate the uranium & plutonium in spent fuel rods from the shorter-lived and much more nasty fission products, reuse the uranium, do something safe with the potentially weapons-grade plutonium, and then handle / store the separated fission products in a shorter-term facility. The design goals of Yucca Mountain were assuming that you need to keep nuclear fuel safe for 100k years; that's an intensely challenging design constraint. If we just need to keep something safe for 100s of years it becomes much more tractable. See https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r... for some further reading.

sbierwagen 6y ago
>do something safe with the potentially weapons-grade plutonium Reprocessed plutonium from a civilian power reactor would never be weapons-grade, it has too much Pu-240 in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium It is claimed that it is possible to make weapons from reprocessed plutonium, but the warheads would need active cooling and exotic pit geometries, making them not so amendable to miniaturization.
- rwcarlsen 6y ago
  It looks like you replied to the wrong sibling comment.
  - 6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago

The main problem with "nuclear waste" is that it is not waste at all. If it is sufficiently concentrated in Pu238, then people might want to steal it to make bombs with. Current LWR(s) use about 1% of the energy in the fuel. Burying the waste in Yucca Mountain is like buying a gallon of gas, filling your car with a thimble, then carefully trying to store the rest of the gas so it doesn't ever get burned up. The one reason we were going ahead with Yucca Mountain was a matter of "cutting off our nose to spite our face." That is, if we recycled nuclear fuel, somebody might use the recycling plant to make materials for nuclear weapons. If it wasn't for that policy of kneecapping nobody would have once suggested that we bury perfectly usable nuclear fuel. People are slowly waking up to notion that burning carbon is slow motion suicide, so maybe policies will change.

croutonwagon 6y ago

I wouldnt necessarily agree. It needs to be stored for a time that is longer than any single civilization has survived. Its pretty arrogant to assume we will still be around for that amount of time. This source pretty heavily influenced my change of opinion on nuclears efficacy https://www.pbs.org/video/independent-lens-containment/ https://www.pbs.org/video/independent-lens-containment/

manfredo 6y ago
The waste is buried under hundreds of meters of rock. And even if the containers eventually corrode, the waste needs to escape from this bedrock. The only way this is going to happen is either deliberately or through a meteor hitting in just the right spot.
- solstice 6y ago
  > or through a meteor hitting in just the right spot. It's 2020. Don't tempt fate /s
scoopertrooper 6y ago
It's pretty crazy to assume that we wouldn't be around in a millennia, two, or three. No other civilisation has been truly global, no other civilization has achieved so much in terms of mastery of nature and technological advancement. So unless the carrying capacity of earth suddenly collapses to the point that it's impossible to maintain organised society for several hundred years, then I think we'll be alright. If that does happen, then a few nomads stumbling upon a nuclear waste dump will likely be the least of humanity's problems!
- croutonwagon 6y ago
  Well. We also have the capacity to destroy all life on earth many times over. When the carrying capacity of earth does collapse it will likely be sudden. Food insecurity will do it quick. We are only like 6 meals away from total chaos at the best of times.