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There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will

There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.

godelski 6y ago
Do you actually have evidence of this? Because I have evidence to the contrary. https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
- Afforess 6y ago
  Nuclear waste has not existed in the medium or long term. It hasn't even existed longer than the Catholic church, a mere blip on histories timescale. Of course there is no evidence. But the short term failures do not give me hope.
  - wow_why 6y ago
    The Catholic Church is the continuation of the Roman Empire and among the oldest institutions - competitors are China, Ethiopia, etc
  - ByteJockey 6y ago
    Except it has. There are natural fission reactors (Oklo mine being the best example). We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own. Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
com2kid 6y ago
> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy. You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high. Roughly 83,000 metric tons. Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment. Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
- Afforess 6y ago
  Comparisons of hog fecal matter to nuclear waste are tens of magnitudes of danger and complexity apart. A person can move hog waste. The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
  - atty 6y ago
    Are you confusing the products of a meltdown and spent nuclear fuel? Spent nuclear fuel can be handled very safely, and moved relatively easily. The problem is just that everyone says “not in my backyard” when it comes to long term storage. Nuclear is, in terms of waste and logistics, a solved problem. In truth, off-site storage may not even be necessary, as reactors can many times handle storage on site.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    > The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste. Concrete and a train is the usual method. Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume! Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol. With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel. Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
orangecat 6y ago
Its not the will of the voting public. To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
- Afforess 6y ago
  So it is true.
roenxi 6y ago
> Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge. The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will. The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
- Arubis 6y ago
  At the risk of being too reductive, it strikes me that it’s most appropriate to let the public determine the strategy: the broad strokes and goals they want (clean, safe, low/no carbon energy sources), but to defer to actual trained experts on the tactics: the generation mix and transmission tech. This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    America and the UK haven't done well at deferring to actual trained experts with COVID-19 tactics. I have no idea what you might say the public's broad-strokes and goals for COVID19 were. It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.
Lazare 6y ago
> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
Camas 6y ago
In the UK more people support than oppose nuclear power when polled. The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section.
- joijoiwejrr 6y ago
  > The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section. I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power. (I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])
toast0 6y ago
Burn it and distribute it in the atmosphere like coal plants do, and it won't be that big of a deal. Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.
jodrellblank 6y ago
Yet coal power plants pump radioactive, climate changing, material into the air we breathe by the chimney full, and gas vehicles do it by the cylinder full at the rate of ~1 litre/second outside homes and schools, and nobody gives a shit about "disposing of that safely in the medium or long term". You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.
fuoqi 6y ago
Read about burner mode of breeder reactors, they allow to "burn" spent nuclear fuel and make the resulting waste much safer in the long-term, i.e. not only volume of waste will be 100 times smaller, but also the "burnt" fuel will be relatively safe radiologically speaking after just several hundreds years, instead of tens of thousands of years for waste from existing reactors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
- jnxx 6y ago
  Breeders are not established technology, and they have their own risks; they are much harder to control and cool.
pezezin 6y ago
I literally live in front of a nuclear reprocessing facility (as in a can see it from my window), and I want more nuclear energy. Also, there are some reactor designs that can burn the waste we currently have, so we could get more energy and less waste.

godelski 6y ago

Do you actually have evidence of this? Because I have evidence to the contrary. https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

Afforess 6y ago
Nuclear waste has not existed in the medium or long term. It hasn't even existed longer than the Catholic church, a mere blip on histories timescale. Of course there is no evidence. But the short term failures do not give me hope.
- wow_why 6y ago
  The Catholic Church is the continuation of the Roman Empire and among the oldest institutions - competitors are China, Ethiopia, etc
- ByteJockey 6y ago
  Except it has. There are natural fission reactors (Oklo mine being the best example). We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own. Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.

com2kid 6y ago

> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy. You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high. Roughly 83,000 metric tons. Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment. Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.

Afforess 6y ago
Comparisons of hog fecal matter to nuclear waste are tens of magnitudes of danger and complexity apart. A person can move hog waste. The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
- atty 6y ago
  Are you confusing the products of a meltdown and spent nuclear fuel? Spent nuclear fuel can be handled very safely, and moved relatively easily. The problem is just that everyone says “not in my backyard” when it comes to long term storage. Nuclear is, in terms of waste and logistics, a solved problem. In truth, off-site storage may not even be necessary, as reactors can many times handle storage on site.
- com2kid 6y ago
  > The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste. Concrete and a train is the usual method. Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume! Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol. With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel. Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.

orangecat 6y ago

Its not the will of the voting public. To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.

Afforess 6y ago
So it is true.

roenxi 6y ago

> Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge. The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will. The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.

Arubis 6y ago
At the risk of being too reductive, it strikes me that it’s most appropriate to let the public determine the strategy: the broad strokes and goals they want (clean, safe, low/no carbon energy sources), but to defer to actual trained experts on the tactics: the generation mix and transmission tech. This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  America and the UK haven't done well at deferring to actual trained experts with COVID-19 tactics. I have no idea what you might say the public's broad-strokes and goals for COVID19 were. It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.

Lazare 6y ago

> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.

Camas 6y ago

In the UK more people support than oppose nuclear power when polled. The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section.

joijoiwejrr 6y ago
> The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section. I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power. (I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])

toast0 6y ago

Burn it and distribute it in the atmosphere like coal plants do, and it won't be that big of a deal. Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.

jodrellblank 6y ago

Yet coal power plants pump radioactive, climate changing, material into the air we breathe by the chimney full, and gas vehicles do it by the cylinder full at the rate of ~1 litre/second outside homes and schools, and nobody gives a shit about "disposing of that safely in the medium or long term". You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.

fuoqi 6y ago

Read about burner mode of breeder reactors, they allow to "burn" spent nuclear fuel and make the resulting waste much safer in the long-term, i.e. not only volume of waste will be 100 times smaller, but also the "burnt" fuel will be relatively safe radiologically speaking after just several hundreds years, instead of tens of thousands of years for waste from existing reactors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...

jnxx 6y ago
Breeders are not established technology, and they have their own risks; they are much harder to control and cool.

pezezin 6y ago

I literally live in front of a nuclear reprocessing facility (as in a can see it from my window), and I want more nuclear energy. Also, there are some reactor designs that can burn the waste we currently have, so we could get more energy and less waste.