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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

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)
    - godelski 6y ago
      > no known human civilization has ever endured for so long I have 2 points here. 1) The half life is longer than recorded history so this isn't really fair. We've seen humans continually advance. Sure, there has been setbacks and some regressions but we haven't ever come even close at reverting back to the stone or even bronze age. That is highly unlikely and if that were to happen we'd probably have bigger problems. 2) Not all waste is equal. A good rule of thumb is that high energy waste is short lived and long lived waste is low energy. Why? Because high energy waste is shedding particles much faster than low energy. Simply if you use a bucket to remove the water from your swimming pool you'll finish a lot faster than you would if you used a tea cup. > 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 This is false and I'm not sure where you got this information from. We chose the location for the Seed Vault (and the GitHub vault) for similar reasons. There's plenty of other locations as well, several within the US. As for the bet, I'm betting on generations of PhD holding geologists to make that decision over really anyone else. As long as what they say doesn't set off any bullshit alarms I don't see why they shouldn't be believed. They are in fact the experts in the subject matter and just rejecting their work with no real evidence is rather arrogant and surprising to see on HN. I believe them for the same reason I believe climate scientists. I've read their work, seems reasonable, I've talked to them and they seem reasonable and passionate and well studied. How arrogant would I need to be to tell them they are wrong. My expertise lies in other fields. I'd also suggest reading what actual plans are and understanding the scale of the waste problem. I find that many people over estimate the scale by many orders of magnitude. [0] > It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me". I'd say that not taking care of climate is saying "Fuck other people who are born after me." You're letting perfection get in the way of progress. We can say similar things about strip mining and rare earth materials. The things we'd need to develop battery storage to make renewables a feasible path forward. We can't wait for a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago. So now we have to make compromises. And as we drag our feet we are still polluting with coal and oil. To me that is the real "fuck you" to future generations. That we got so caught up in perfection that we let high pollution levels continue right on while we prayed for a miracle. [0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
- sliken 6y ago
  Keep in mind that nuclear fuel came out of the environment to begin with. Take a radiation detector to a large/old building sometime that has large granite blocks. For similar reasons note that coal burning power plants add WAY more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants. So humans don't create radiation, they just mine it, concentrate it, extract energy from it, and then dispose of it. So we are just moving it around, not creating additional radiation. Imagine we extract uranium from ocean water, the radiation levels in the ocean would go from low, to even lower. If we take the nuclear waste and distribute it across the ocean the radiation levels would (at worst) raise to the levels we started with. Based on what I've read all the scientists that are experts in relevant fields say that dealing with nuclear waste is a political problem, not a scientific one. There are multiple reasonable solutions. My favorite it making giant spikes out of a mix of radioactive material and glass. Covering the spike with steel and dropping it where the ocean is deep, near a subduction zone, and the sedimentation rate is higher than the leakage rate. By the time the spike hits the ocean floor it's going fast enough to bury itself deeply, the sediment fills in behind and will keep getting deeper, and the spikes will get sucked beneath the continental plate and not bother anyone ever again.
  - time0ut 6y ago
    I apologize in advance if I am not understanding you, but the process of fission generates new radioactive daughter nuclides and neutron activated material. The radioactivity in a nuclear reactor isn't simply a concentrated aggregate of the original fuel. It is a heterogeneous mixture of transmuted elements that is quite different from the original in its radioactivity.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Not really, because the nuclear fuel would naturally degrade into much the same materials anyway, just over a longer time frame. Nuclear reactors just speed up the process. Yes that means higher concentrations of those decay products to deal with in the short term, but these mostly have quite short half lives in the grand scheme of things, in the order of years or decades. The environmental impacts of nuclear energy are often grossly overestimated, this is why so many environmentalists are advocating for nuclear energy.
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

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)
  - godelski 6y ago
    > no known human civilization has ever endured for so long I have 2 points here. 1) The half life is longer than recorded history so this isn't really fair. We've seen humans continually advance. Sure, there has been setbacks and some regressions but we haven't ever come even close at reverting back to the stone or even bronze age. That is highly unlikely and if that were to happen we'd probably have bigger problems. 2) Not all waste is equal. A good rule of thumb is that high energy waste is short lived and long lived waste is low energy. Why? Because high energy waste is shedding particles much faster than low energy. Simply if you use a bucket to remove the water from your swimming pool you'll finish a lot faster than you would if you used a tea cup. > 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 This is false and I'm not sure where you got this information from. We chose the location for the Seed Vault (and the GitHub vault) for similar reasons. There's plenty of other locations as well, several within the US. As for the bet, I'm betting on generations of PhD holding geologists to make that decision over really anyone else. As long as what they say doesn't set off any bullshit alarms I don't see why they shouldn't be believed. They are in fact the experts in the subject matter and just rejecting their work with no real evidence is rather arrogant and surprising to see on HN. I believe them for the same reason I believe climate scientists. I've read their work, seems reasonable, I've talked to them and they seem reasonable and passionate and well studied. How arrogant would I need to be to tell them they are wrong. My expertise lies in other fields. I'd also suggest reading what actual plans are and understanding the scale of the waste problem. I find that many people over estimate the scale by many orders of magnitude. [0] > It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me". I'd say that not taking care of climate is saying "Fuck other people who are born after me." You're letting perfection get in the way of progress. We can say similar things about strip mining and rare earth materials. The things we'd need to develop battery storage to make renewables a feasible path forward. We can't wait for a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago. So now we have to make compromises. And as we drag our feet we are still polluting with coal and oil. To me that is the real "fuck you" to future generations. That we got so caught up in perfection that we let high pollution levels continue right on while we prayed for a miracle. [0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
sliken 6y ago
Keep in mind that nuclear fuel came out of the environment to begin with. Take a radiation detector to a large/old building sometime that has large granite blocks. For similar reasons note that coal burning power plants add WAY more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants. So humans don't create radiation, they just mine it, concentrate it, extract energy from it, and then dispose of it. So we are just moving it around, not creating additional radiation. Imagine we extract uranium from ocean water, the radiation levels in the ocean would go from low, to even lower. If we take the nuclear waste and distribute it across the ocean the radiation levels would (at worst) raise to the levels we started with. Based on what I've read all the scientists that are experts in relevant fields say that dealing with nuclear waste is a political problem, not a scientific one. There are multiple reasonable solutions. My favorite it making giant spikes out of a mix of radioactive material and glass. Covering the spike with steel and dropping it where the ocean is deep, near a subduction zone, and the sedimentation rate is higher than the leakage rate. By the time the spike hits the ocean floor it's going fast enough to bury itself deeply, the sediment fills in behind and will keep getting deeper, and the spikes will get sucked beneath the continental plate and not bother anyone ever again.
- time0ut 6y ago
  I apologize in advance if I am not understanding you, but the process of fission generates new radioactive daughter nuclides and neutron activated material. The radioactivity in a nuclear reactor isn't simply a concentrated aggregate of the original fuel. It is a heterogeneous mixture of transmuted elements that is quite different from the original in its radioactivity.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Not really, because the nuclear fuel would naturally degrade into much the same materials anyway, just over a longer time frame. Nuclear reactors just speed up the process. Yes that means higher concentrations of those decay products to deal with in the short term, but these mostly have quite short half lives in the grand scheme of things, in the order of years or decades. The environmental impacts of nuclear energy are often grossly overestimated, this is why so many environmentalists are advocating for nuclear energy.

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