7 ms·

i agree that nuclear can help reduce carbon emissions, but that doesn't mean that nuclear waste is less harmful to the planet than carbon emissions are. nuclear

i agree that nuclear can help reduce carbon emissions, but that doesn't mean that nuclear waste is less harmful to the planet than carbon emissions are. nuclear isn't any more sustainable than coal or fossil fuels.

biolurker1 6y ago
There is the off chance we will discover a way to deactivate them before they pollute
- dmos62 6y ago
  And it's even more likely that we'll end up reusing them, increasing economic efficiency of nuclear fuel.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Exactly this - today's nuclear waste is tomorrow's nuclear fuel (+ some other useful and expensive materials mixed in). Actually in some countries nuclear waste is already (part of) today's fuel using existing reprocessing technology.
OnACoffeeBreak 6y ago
Could you explain how properly sequestered nuclear waste is not less harmful to the planet as carbon in the atmosphere? I'm my current view, nuclear waste can be sequestered and stored effecting only a tiny fraction of the planet while greenhouse gases effect the whole planet.
- forgotmysn 6y ago
  i just feel like sticking nuclear waste in the ground and pretending that it's not a problem or won't impact the health of the planet is not a solution
  - godelski 6y ago
    Can you explain why sticking it in the ground is not an acceptable solution? To be clear, sticking it in the ground that is neither seismically active nor near water sources. The areas people want to stick them in the ground are thousands of miles from civilizations and meet the other criteria. It isn't like the rest of the waste that we just stick in the ground (like coal, plastics, etc that DO enter our water supply).
    - purerandomness 6y ago
      Very good question! We could totally stick it in the ground, given: "(1) stable geological formations, and (2) stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years." Easy, right? Problem: "no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period" [0] The problem isn't the "sticking into the ground" part. It's the finding of that place that will stay geologically inactive, uncivilized, and not near water sources for the next 100000 years. And then taking that bet. It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me". Plastic stuck into the ground is not radioactive. Plastic stuck into the ground also degrades in a fraction of a fraction of the half-life of Plutonium. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
      - glogla 6y ago
        > It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me". Possibly, but unless there is other realistic low-carbon energy source (and it seems there isn't - hydro is already built everywhere where it can be, and solar and wind are intermittent with large-scale storage being unsolved problem) there won't be any people born after you.
        godelski 6y ago
        This is exactly my problem with this very common retort. It is exactly "perfection is the enemy of the good." There's 3 solutions to climate that we have right now (and we should be betting on all 3. 1) Fission 2) a miracle in fusion research, 3) a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago (really 50). While we don't act we are still polluting with coal and oil. But I think people are ignoring point #3 and I don't think this is necessarily the fault of the average person because there's an inaccurate representation in the media about the progress and how far we still have to go. Fission is the compromise we make for not having acted 50 years ago. It is a much smaller problem for future generations to deal with than that of climate change. So at this point it is your choice: nuclear waste for the future or climate catastrophe. (Not to mention all the other waste and stuff but that's another discussion)
- purerandomness 6y ago
  "properly sequestered" is the key word. There is no such thing. Here in Germany, we still have not found where to put nuclear waste long-term, and there is no solution in sight. Even if one day we find one, how do we communicate the potential dangers of nuclear waste to a civilization that is supposed to understand what we're communicating in 30000, 50000 years? With a fancy unicode symbol, like U+2622? We have no idea what people 3000 years ago were trying to tell us with their fancy symbols. Nuclear energy is the analogy of tech debt that can never be paid back, ever.
  - p_l 6y ago
    With advanced reprocessing as well as waste-burning containers, the question is about communicating it for ~200 years, not 50000 years. And it would also increase our efficiency in using the fuel to boot.
  - glogla 6y ago
    > Nuclear energy is the analogy of tech debt that can never be paid back, ever. The reason why the "waste" is dangerous is that there's a lot of energy in it - energy that can still be extracted at a later date. It might very easily be very valuable in the future. Germany is really sad case, where they stopped using nuclear and replaced it with "clean coal". Terrible thing for the planet. The Greens talk about nuclear waste and Fukushima, and meanwhile German green-washed coal plants and cheating diesel engines put crazy things in the air.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Vitrify it, clad it with concrete, clad that with steel and dump it in a subduction trench where it’ll eventually join the magma under the mantle.
    - ofrzeta 6y ago
      Let's see. Deepest hole drilling: 12km - Thickness of continental lithosphere: at least 100km. How will you get your nuclear waste there?
  - deleted 6y ago
- sliken 6y ago
  Keep in mind that humans only move radiation around, not generate it. So sure if you mine uranium and concentrate it, you get a high peak source, but you are literally removing radiation from one place, and moving it to another. So if you concentrate uranium out of ocean water and them spread the radioactive waste back into the ocean (at the same concentration) you are actually benefiting the ocean.
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    That's not quite right. Yes natural uranium and its daughters are a bit radioactive (this is partially why the center of the Earth is warm). But when you go ahead and fission nuclear fuel, it breaks into smaller atoms that are less stable. This means they give off their excess energy faster, or in other words are more radioactive. The higher rate of energy release can lead to higher amounts of biological damage. You can hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hand and be fine. Once it goes in the reactor to be fissioned, you'd get a fatal radiation dose in seconds if you stood next to it unshielded.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  >Could you explain how properly sequestered nuclear waste is not less harmful to the planet as carbon in the atmosphere? That question can be answered be asking yourself how society would look if the government was efficient, logical, morale and free of corruption. In other words, its an interesting philosophical question, but not one that has any relevance to reality. Unfortunately most people, no how nominally "intelligent" they are, insist that the world exists as they wish it would, rather than it actually does. In reality, mistakes happen, incompetence happens, corruption happens, and unforeseen circumstances happen - all of which render nuclear waste (and facilities that produce nuclear power) much riskier and more dangerous than they would be in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this bit of undeniable objective reality is extremely unpopular (and offensive) to technocrats and others who worship blindly at the altar of human society and technology.
  - fractallyte 6y ago
    You are unfairly downvoted. Corruption is a real problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_waste_management_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_waste_management_crisis
boogies 6y ago
It’s arguably misleading to even call it “waste” — it’s recyclable. Even if you don’t recycle it, the little ceramic pellets weigh two hundred fifty-three thousand, one hundred and sixty-four (.55696202531645569620 ±) times less per person than gas and coal (and the difference in volume is presumably many times larger): https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here [https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data [https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_carbon.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car...]). > If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste. > For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear. > The astoundingly low amount of nuclear waste is thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom. More: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html Edit: replaced “containable” in second sentence with numbers
- donarb 6y ago
  Coal plants also create nuclear waste. Trace amounts of uranium and thorium in coal become concentrated after the coal is burned away, leaving high concentrations of nuclear waste.
  - oddmiral 6y ago
    So, you say, coal waste can be source of uranium for nuclear plants, right? How many tonnes of Uranium we can extract from coal ashes?
lm28469 6y ago
Your life expectancy is reduced right now because the air you breath is polluted by all kind of carbon related emissions. Nuclear waste is easy to manage in comparison Carbon's best case scenarios is worst than nuclear's worst case scenario.
anonu 6y ago
> All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards Source: https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste

biolurker1 6y ago

There is the off chance we will discover a way to deactivate them before they pollute

dmos62 6y ago
And it's even more likely that we'll end up reusing them, increasing economic efficiency of nuclear fuel.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Exactly this - today's nuclear waste is tomorrow's nuclear fuel (+ some other useful and expensive materials mixed in). Actually in some countries nuclear waste is already (part of) today's fuel using existing reprocessing technology.

OnACoffeeBreak 6y ago

Could you explain how properly sequestered nuclear waste is not less harmful to the planet as carbon in the atmosphere? I'm my current view, nuclear waste can be sequestered and stored effecting only a tiny fraction of the planet while greenhouse gases effect the whole planet.

forgotmysn 6y ago
i just feel like sticking nuclear waste in the ground and pretending that it's not a problem or won't impact the health of the planet is not a solution
- godelski 6y ago
  Can you explain why sticking it in the ground is not an acceptable solution? To be clear, sticking it in the ground that is neither seismically active nor near water sources. The areas people want to stick them in the ground are thousands of miles from civilizations and meet the other criteria. It isn't like the rest of the waste that we just stick in the ground (like coal, plastics, etc that DO enter our water supply).
  - purerandomness 6y ago
    Very good question! We could totally stick it in the ground, given: "(1) stable geological formations, and (2) stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years." Easy, right? Problem: "no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period" [0] The problem isn't the "sticking into the ground" part. It's the finding of that place that will stay geologically inactive, uncivilized, and not near water sources for the next 100000 years. And then taking that bet. It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me". Plastic stuck into the ground is not radioactive. Plastic stuck into the ground also degrades in a fraction of a fraction of the half-life of Plutonium. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
    - glogla 6y ago
      > It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me". Possibly, but unless there is other realistic low-carbon energy source (and it seems there isn't - hydro is already built everywhere where it can be, and solar and wind are intermittent with large-scale storage being unsolved problem) there won't be any people born after you.
      - godelski 6y ago
        This is exactly my problem with this very common retort. It is exactly "perfection is the enemy of the good." There's 3 solutions to climate that we have right now (and we should be betting on all 3. 1) Fission 2) a miracle in fusion research, 3) a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago (really 50). While we don't act we are still polluting with coal and oil. But I think people are ignoring point #3 and I don't think this is necessarily the fault of the average person because there's an inaccurate representation in the media about the progress and how far we still have to go. Fission is the compromise we make for not having acted 50 years ago. It is a much smaller problem for future generations to deal with than that of climate change. So at this point it is your choice: nuclear waste for the future or climate catastrophe. (Not to mention all the other waste and stuff but that's another discussion)
purerandomness 6y ago
"properly sequestered" is the key word. There is no such thing. Here in Germany, we still have not found where to put nuclear waste long-term, and there is no solution in sight. Even if one day we find one, how do we communicate the potential dangers of nuclear waste to a civilization that is supposed to understand what we're communicating in 30000, 50000 years? With a fancy unicode symbol, like U+2622? We have no idea what people 3000 years ago were trying to tell us with their fancy symbols. Nuclear energy is the analogy of tech debt that can never be paid back, ever.
- p_l 6y ago
  With advanced reprocessing as well as waste-burning containers, the question is about communicating it for ~200 years, not 50000 years. And it would also increase our efficiency in using the fuel to boot.
- glogla 6y ago
  > Nuclear energy is the analogy of tech debt that can never be paid back, ever. The reason why the "waste" is dangerous is that there's a lot of energy in it - energy that can still be extracted at a later date. It might very easily be very valuable in the future. Germany is really sad case, where they stopped using nuclear and replaced it with "clean coal". Terrible thing for the planet. The Greens talk about nuclear waste and Fukushima, and meanwhile German green-washed coal plants and cheating diesel engines put crazy things in the air.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Vitrify it, clad it with concrete, clad that with steel and dump it in a subduction trench where it’ll eventually join the magma under the mantle.
  - ofrzeta 6y ago
    Let's see. Deepest hole drilling: 12km - Thickness of continental lithosphere: at least 100km. How will you get your nuclear waste there?
- deleted 6y ago
sliken 6y ago
Keep in mind that humans only move radiation around, not generate it. So sure if you mine uranium and concentrate it, you get a high peak source, but you are literally removing radiation from one place, and moving it to another. So if you concentrate uranium out of ocean water and them spread the radioactive waste back into the ocean (at the same concentration) you are actually benefiting the ocean.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  That's not quite right. Yes natural uranium and its daughters are a bit radioactive (this is partially why the center of the Earth is warm). But when you go ahead and fission nuclear fuel, it breaks into smaller atoms that are less stable. This means they give off their excess energy faster, or in other words are more radioactive. The higher rate of energy release can lead to higher amounts of biological damage. You can hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hand and be fine. Once it goes in the reactor to be fissioned, you'd get a fatal radiation dose in seconds if you stood next to it unshielded.
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
>Could you explain how properly sequestered nuclear waste is not less harmful to the planet as carbon in the atmosphere? That question can be answered be asking yourself how society would look if the government was efficient, logical, morale and free of corruption. In other words, its an interesting philosophical question, but not one that has any relevance to reality. Unfortunately most people, no how nominally "intelligent" they are, insist that the world exists as they wish it would, rather than it actually does. In reality, mistakes happen, incompetence happens, corruption happens, and unforeseen circumstances happen - all of which render nuclear waste (and facilities that produce nuclear power) much riskier and more dangerous than they would be in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this bit of undeniable objective reality is extremely unpopular (and offensive) to technocrats and others who worship blindly at the altar of human society and technology.
- fractallyte 6y ago
  You are unfairly downvoted. Corruption is a real problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_waste_management_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_waste_management_crisis

boogies 6y ago

It’s arguably misleading to even call it “waste” — it’s recyclable. Even if you don’t recycle it, the little ceramic pellets weigh two hundred fifty-three thousand, one hundred and sixty-four (.55696202531645569620 ±) times less per person than gas and coal (and the difference in volume is presumably many times larger): https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here [https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data [https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_carbon.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car...]). > If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste. > For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear. > The astoundingly low amount of nuclear waste is thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom. More: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html Edit: replaced “containable” in second sentence with numbers

donarb 6y ago
Coal plants also create nuclear waste. Trace amounts of uranium and thorium in coal become concentrated after the coal is burned away, leaving high concentrations of nuclear waste.
- oddmiral 6y ago
  So, you say, coal waste can be source of uranium for nuclear plants, right? How many tonnes of Uranium we can extract from coal ashes?

lm28469 6y ago

Your life expectancy is reduced right now because the air you breath is polluted by all kind of carbon related emissions. Nuclear waste is easy to manage in comparison Carbon's best case scenarios is worst than nuclear's worst case scenario.

anonu 6y ago

> All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards Source: https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste