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There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for wh

There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.

jackweirdy 6y ago
Lunar orbit
sushisource 6y ago
I just don't really see how this is true. Isn't the basic idea to just dig a really deep hole somewhere geologically stable and dump it in? My impression isn't that the problem isn't solvable, but simply that no one has actually made the appropriate investment yet. That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.
- cinntaile 6y ago
  Research has been ongoing since the 70s to find geologically stable underground storage, this is not a solved problem.
  - pas 6y ago
    No. This is not a real problem. If it were NPPs would not store spent fuel on site. The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway. Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
    - cinntaile 6y ago
      If it was an easy problem then it wouldn't have taken 50 years to build a long term storage facility. Most problems are not easy, it just looks easy to outsiders.
      - R0b0t1 6y ago
        It took that long because idiots routinely hold up the process with infinite questions. At some point you need to realize your existing behavior is worse and just move on, do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
      - pas 6y ago
        It's an easy problem that doesn't really require a solution. It doesn't really help with costs, so there's no hurry, and it's a political quagmire. So it just did not happen. (WIPP kind of happened, and is happening, but it's for non-commercial nuclear waste.)
  - andbberger 6y ago
    Yes it is. You are spreading misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
    - cinntaile 6y ago
      Spreading misinformation... That's a bit harsh. It's not even in use yet. Thanks for the example though.
      - andbberger 6y ago
        Not really. Climate change is an existential problem that nuclear energy is one of few legitimately promising solutions to, so I don't think it's a stretch to compare the vapid and uninformed anti-nuclear arguments that pop up in every HN thread to anti-maskers: harmful rhetoric with no scientific basis.
        cinntaile 6y ago
        I am not anti-nuclear though, I don't know where you got that from. Your example isn't even in production use yet so what I said was factually correct and if this is the only country in the entire world then this problem will persist for at least another few decades. It seems like you have very strong feelings about this and that is clouding your rational judgement.
        andbberger 6y ago
        You are spreading factually incorrect nuclear dogma. You're kidding yourself if you think you're not anti-nuclear. You claim this is an unsolved problem, Finland says otherwise. Moreover, deep geological storage is only needed for super long-term storage (like, long after the last humans have kicked the bucket). In the medium-term, storing high-level waste onsite is a perfectly adequate solution. The so-called waste problem is complete bullshit - there was never a problem. My rational judgement is not in question here, but that of all anti-nuclear proponents should be. And you're right, I do have strong feelings. Can you really blame me? I'm inheriting a broken world that looks existential climate change in the face, shrugs, lights up a spliff and says "well solar is pretty cheap". We've had the technological solution to climate change in hand for 60+ years: rocks so spicy they'll power our entire civilization for millenia. Yet we (the people) got outplayed so hard by the oil lobby that not only is nuclear energy on the decline, threads like these where supposedly technologically literate people espouse greenpeace's old talking points abound. And while this baseless and frustrating 'debate' continues, the water rises.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chmod775 6y ago
  Your assumption is that every country is guaranteed to have access to underground places that are "geologically stable" over the required time-period, aren't aquifers, or at risk letting water in by some other means. The assumption is simply wrong.
  - loeg 6y ago
    You could throw it in the fucking ocean and it would be better than coal plants, and arguably better than natural gas.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      You could grind it up and intentionally pump it into the air, and it still would likely kill a tiny portion of the number of people killed by coal plants. I mean a whole lot of coal plants do pump uranium dust into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you'd pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be tiny.
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        Hell, I'd bet you could mix it into soft drinks and sell it as "Nuka Cola Quantum" and it'd still be significantly less deadly than coal.
  - sushisource 6y ago
    How is that the assumption? There only needs to be one such place on the whole planet (or, shit, shoot it into space). I'm not saying it's easy (in fact, that was kinda my point), but it's absolutely possible and I didn't assume anything about individual groups needing their own storage.
- Lammy 6y ago
  I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” and a link to the spiky ground and “this is not a place of honor”. Assuming a future civilization gets to exist considering we keep burning petroleum products and calling them clean while we waste time arguing about tech that’s been proven for fifty years because the right groups of people can’t own it.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    > I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion? The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one. If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
    - exar0815 6y ago
      This is not true. The most sensible place was intentionally overlooked because one of germanys larges political parties (CSU) has all her voters there, and the next best place (Gorleben) was politically and ideologically fought over for decades until we gave up and said fuck you and everyone, lets just store it where it stands.
      - logifail 6y ago
        > most sensible place Can you define who gets to decide whether a place is "most sensible"? Subject-matter experts? National politicians? Regional politicians? Or maybe it's more like: voters (nationally)? voters (regionally)? voters (locally)?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- j-pb 6y ago
  The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands. Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities? East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border. Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with. So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
  - sobellian 6y ago
    If World Wars 3, 4, and 5 all occur then I think we can safely say the global population has already been thoroughly irradiated.
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      Yeah, if the dangerous scenario is what if ww3 happens, wipes out all human knowledge, civilization is rebuilt and accidentally digs a kilometer down and finds some nuclear waste then I mean the whole ww3 is probably a bigger deal. Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity. Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the energy problems. I think we might need that time to get to full renewables, if we ever get there.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    >And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it. This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Here is a map of seismic areas worldwide https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1441205 https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1... Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are high.
  - andbberger 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- dathinab 6y ago
  > geologically stable Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast... Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear. Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates. Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons". Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not). Etc. Etc. I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.
  - rrss 6y ago
    > Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear waste... it is. drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.
    - dathinab 6y ago
      There is no Permian Basin in Germany ...
      - rrss 6y ago
        There are similar basins in Europe, probably similarly suitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        God forbid Germany exports its nuclear waste.
  - corty 6y ago
    The IPCC report on climate change mitigation puts nuclear median cost on par with wind power (cheaper than offshore, slightly more expensive than onshore), cheaper than solar, more expensive than hydro. In total, squarely on par with the usual suspects for green energy. And they include fuel and decommissioning in that cost. See page 71 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_full.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... (caution, huge pdf). An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.
- godelski 6y ago
  It also is an issue we have a lot of time to solve. It isn't like humans are going anywhere soon. It also isn't like there's that much waste. Honestly it probably won't happen until there is enough waste that local storage becomes a problem. Which at this rate would take a few hundred more years.
  - hu3 6y ago
    Until then we can figure out a solution. Something that seems crazy now will be trivial by then. For example an electromagnetic cannon to shoot waste into outer space [1]. [1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth
- isodev 6y ago
  The challenge with nuclear waste is that you can’t just throw money at it and expect it to work. Radioactivity and chemical toxicity persists for hundreds and thousands of years. What is needed to design, build and maintain such sites is beyond “extreme engineering” and also very expensive. Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    "Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space." Please no. A launch failure with several tons of radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.
- andbberger 6y ago
  Your impressions have no basis in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
cinntaile 6y ago
It would be interesting to see some examples of EU countries that have solved the long-term storage problem? All I know of are countries that have been researching underground tunnels since the 70s and they're still not in production use.
- bjelkeman-again 6y ago
  Sweden is nearly done with the environmental review of final storage of spent nuclear fuel. There is still scientific discussion regarding if the containers will last and remain intact for the 10 000 year goal. They hope to have a facility ready by 2030. https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repository/our-methodology/ https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...
- jsnell 6y ago
  Finland's long term storage is expected to be operational in a couple of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- noinsight 6y ago
  Finland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Kuinox 6y ago
This is not "temporarly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
freeone3000 6y ago
Find a mountain and shove it in there. Doesn't have to be that hard.
- drran 6y ago
  Yeah, we can send all our nuclear waste to Afghanistan. They will find a place to store it.
- Slikey 6y ago
  Given that mountains are a result of geological activity, this is for sure the worst place to store it. You'll have a better chance digging out a big hole in the desert - which the EU doesn't have.
cbmuser 6y ago
> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected. And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... > Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II. Asse isn't a storage for high-level waste. It contain low-level waste that can also come from hospitals and such. Germany has no storage for high-level waste yet. Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste: > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall. Just look at this photograph, it shows all of the French nuclear waste accumulated in decades: > https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was.
- makomk 6y ago
  The big problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the required reprocessing is much worse in terms of safety than the nuclear power plants themselves. Lots of lovely, toxic, highly radioactive solutions which are practically iching to go prompt critical and ruin everyone's day. I think the only reprocessing program which managed not to be a safety train wreck is France's, and I half-suspect they might have just been better at covering up because it's so unusual (and in keeping with other aspects of their nuclear program).
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    The French have been doing it for decades already with not a single casualty: > 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... It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie factory.
fermienrico 6y ago
Ridiculous Arm-chair Concept: - What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build bridges, surely we can build large containers. Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love to know why its a stupid idea.
- seoaeu 6y ago
  This is basically what we already do, and it works fine. But opponents will still pester you about where to put the sealed boxes :P
  - drran 6y ago
    Put it under your home.
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      If someone else is paying the cost to excavate, bury, secure, backfill, then sure.
    - mrshadowgoose 6y ago
      Sure! How much am I being paid for the nuissance of construction, and ongoing disturbance of my day-to-day life when waste deliveries occur? So now that your appeal to emotion has failed, do you have any actual points?
- random5634 6y ago
  The problem is in part the anti-nuclear folks don't want the problem to be solved. So you can build a skyscraper 100 feet tall in a high earthquake zone, but you can't build a container. The normal approach (france etc) is to recycle and then vitrify the leftovers and store in a container. You get much shorter half lives, much less waste. So even if it comes out the container, it's still "in" something. Of course, you can build a reasonably secure container as well.
winter_blue 6y ago
The solution to nuclear waste is to use breeder reactors extensively. Breeder reactors both (1) substantially reduce the radioactivity of nuclear waste, and (2) allow you to get up to 100 times the energy out of the same quantity of initial nuclear fuel. A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a radioactive isotope, often with much shorter half-lives. Some of these are even useful in industry. There are new kinds of reactors, like the Traveling Wave Reactor (TVR) which efficiently use fuel like breeder reactors as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor There were challenges in the past with breeder reactor design (for example as this article outlines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-breeder-reactors-nuclear-waste-nightmare https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...), but this is an area that there should be a lot more active research in. The long-term benefits of doing so would be immense.
- hedora 6y ago
  We should move to breeder reactors. However, there is one unsolved problem: As the fuel is repeatedly refined/recycled, there is a step where it is trivially easy to skim some weapons grade material out of the process. I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed. Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal material from the line.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Or, we accept that people will occasionally have access to weapons-grade nuclear material and move on. "But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet, "That's a terrible idea!" Yes, it is, but hear me out: Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants pocket or something. So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe) someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that: "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO 234-867-5309" Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now what? - You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're suddenly near the top of the suspect list. - Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too. Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured destruction! - Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times and we might end up with world peace. All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the alternative right now can range from "millions of people displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my chances, thanks.
dmos62 6y ago
> some of which already had issues with flooding Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water. Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will. Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil. Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I think having to store a lot of nuclear fuel is a much better problem than having to extract carbon out of the atmosphere, or building difficult to recycle chemical batteries out of scarce resources.
- redprince 6y ago
  > Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water. Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage because of several incidents of water ingress even during the time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open right there and then. Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.
Angostura 6y ago
I absolutely agree that we don't have a long term solution for storing nuclear waste. The thing is, we don't have a long term solution for storing CO2 either. The thing I like about nuclear waste is is it's obvious, its tangle and it sits around in sinister looking containers. As opposed to CO2.
- anonporridge 6y ago
  The fact that this simple line of reasoning seems to be completely missing from the minds of anti nuclear activists is...perplexing.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    At the same time it's not. Big scary looking symbols plastered over everything compared to just filling the air making it out of sight out of mind. Once that's achieved, the mass populace doesn't care. Try to build a facility with those scary symbols that are visible anytime one chooses to look, and people get all NIMBY very quickly.
    - pas 6y ago
      The solution seems obvious. Set up a town of nuclear power activists. YIMBY.
      - Chris2048 6y ago
        Or create scary-looking CO2 storage facilities in every town.
        dylan604 6y ago
        Depending on the town, that storage facility already looks scary whenever you look up
- kaibee 6y ago
  We don't have short term solutions for storing CO2 either.
nickik 6y ago
I still don't understand why nuclear waste needs long terms storage. With Burner reactors you can produce waste that only needs storage for 100s of years, not 1000s. Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years. The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.
- p_l 6y ago
  The reason why you don't see much of fast-neutron "burners" is that NPT is essentially an empty shell, and you have to be lucky to survive putting up so-called plutonium economy - and the "survive" part might be literal. It all goes back to Indian nuclear program, AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. Now that climate crisis pushes for more solutions to power, you get absurd proposals from USA like reactors with remote disable on them controlled from USA.
  - opo 6y ago
    >...AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada): >...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest... >...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India. It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor
beefield 6y ago
What I really, really do not get is why the countries that do have long term solution do not start selling nuclear waste disposal services to other countries. First, you could charge outrageus amounts of money for the service. Second, you could practically ditch your defence forces simply because absolutely nobody would want anyone else to attack a country with huge amounts of radioactive waste. Finally, after some time, you could likely sell the waste back as a fuel ingredient to new nuclear technologies. This only slightly tongue in cheek. Of course I understand that proposing that would be a political suicide, but nevertheless, it would make sense.
f6v 6y ago
Let’s just build nuclear(power plants and storage) in places that aren’t flooded.
StreamBright 6y ago
>> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant. Yes we can. Case closed.
andrewseanryan 6y ago
Probably a dumb question, but why can’t we just blast nuclear waste out into space with a rocket? Seems like a rather small payload in the grand scheme of things.
- andbberger 6y ago
  Comes up every time - because nuclear waste is heavy, delta-v is expensive, and mostly because nuclear waste was never actually a problem.
- threeseed 6y ago
  And then what happens when the rocket explodes ? Because that scenario is very common.
pyrale 6y ago
> There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The thing is, these are not just straw men, but talking points frequently used by nuclear energy opponents. Along with others, like asserting that nuclear energy is a source of CO², etc. If nuclear proponents had to focus only on reasonable, grounded talking points, they would probably be happier for it. > for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. It's an OK point, and it's a shame that Germany seems to skip its environmental responsibilities. However, EU laws apply to all EU countries, including the ones that do a better job.
Rule35 6y ago
That's not a technical problem, but a political one. Imagine if I said "yeah, solar sucks because people burn down the solar farms" and then you saw me sneaking away with a can of gas... Deep geological storage, but not in salt beds, is a simple answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting to be inspected and repaired. I've been in deep hard-rock mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste. The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as well.
opo 6y ago
>...The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste Why would you think that? In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
estaseuropano 6y ago
It goes even beyond this and comments like yours are important to stress that there is a lot of nuance. If you count carbon emissions related to building the plant, the enrichment facility, the storage facility, the mining, the lonf-term maintenance, the decomissioning, etc you end with quite a carbon footprint as (so far) that all relies on diesel.
ivan1783 6y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but why do the coal & oil plants get a free pass to dump their waste into the air? Its much easier to contain and store nuclear waste because you can keep track of it, whereas the coal and oil waste is just dumped in the air for everyone to breathe.

jackweirdy 6y ago

Lunar orbit

sushisource 6y ago

I just don't really see how this is true. Isn't the basic idea to just dig a really deep hole somewhere geologically stable and dump it in? My impression isn't that the problem isn't solvable, but simply that no one has actually made the appropriate investment yet. That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.

cinntaile 6y ago
Research has been ongoing since the 70s to find geologically stable underground storage, this is not a solved problem.
- pas 6y ago
  No. This is not a real problem. If it were NPPs would not store spent fuel on site. The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway. Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
  - cinntaile 6y ago
    If it was an easy problem then it wouldn't have taken 50 years to build a long term storage facility. Most problems are not easy, it just looks easy to outsiders.
    - R0b0t1 6y ago
      It took that long because idiots routinely hold up the process with infinite questions. At some point you need to realize your existing behavior is worse and just move on, do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
    - pas 6y ago
      It's an easy problem that doesn't really require a solution. It doesn't really help with costs, so there's no hurry, and it's a political quagmire. So it just did not happen. (WIPP kind of happened, and is happening, but it's for non-commercial nuclear waste.)
- andbberger 6y ago
  Yes it is. You are spreading misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
  - cinntaile 6y ago
    Spreading misinformation... That's a bit harsh. It's not even in use yet. Thanks for the example though.
    - andbberger 6y ago
      Not really. Climate change is an existential problem that nuclear energy is one of few legitimately promising solutions to, so I don't think it's a stretch to compare the vapid and uninformed anti-nuclear arguments that pop up in every HN thread to anti-maskers: harmful rhetoric with no scientific basis.
      - cinntaile 6y ago
        I am not anti-nuclear though, I don't know where you got that from. Your example isn't even in production use yet so what I said was factually correct and if this is the only country in the entire world then this problem will persist for at least another few decades. It seems like you have very strong feelings about this and that is clouding your rational judgement.
        andbberger 6y ago
        You are spreading factually incorrect nuclear dogma. You're kidding yourself if you think you're not anti-nuclear. You claim this is an unsolved problem, Finland says otherwise. Moreover, deep geological storage is only needed for super long-term storage (like, long after the last humans have kicked the bucket). In the medium-term, storing high-level waste onsite is a perfectly adequate solution. The so-called waste problem is complete bullshit - there was never a problem. My rational judgement is not in question here, but that of all anti-nuclear proponents should be. And you're right, I do have strong feelings. Can you really blame me? I'm inheriting a broken world that looks existential climate change in the face, shrugs, lights up a spliff and says "well solar is pretty cheap". We've had the technological solution to climate change in hand for 60+ years: rocks so spicy they'll power our entire civilization for millenia. Yet we (the people) got outplayed so hard by the oil lobby that not only is nuclear energy on the decline, threads like these where supposedly technologically literate people espouse greenpeace's old talking points abound. And while this baseless and frustrating 'debate' continues, the water rises.
deleted 6y ago
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chmod775 6y ago
Your assumption is that every country is guaranteed to have access to underground places that are "geologically stable" over the required time-period, aren't aquifers, or at risk letting water in by some other means. The assumption is simply wrong.
- loeg 6y ago
  You could throw it in the fucking ocean and it would be better than coal plants, and arguably better than natural gas.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    You could grind it up and intentionally pump it into the air, and it still would likely kill a tiny portion of the number of people killed by coal plants. I mean a whole lot of coal plants do pump uranium dust into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you'd pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be tiny.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      Hell, I'd bet you could mix it into soft drinks and sell it as "Nuka Cola Quantum" and it'd still be significantly less deadly than coal.
- sushisource 6y ago
  How is that the assumption? There only needs to be one such place on the whole planet (or, shit, shoot it into space). I'm not saying it's easy (in fact, that was kinda my point), but it's absolutely possible and I didn't assume anything about individual groups needing their own storage.
Lammy 6y ago
I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” and a link to the spiky ground and “this is not a place of honor”. Assuming a future civilization gets to exist considering we keep burning petroleum products and calling them clean while we waste time arguing about tech that’s been proven for fifty years because the right groups of people can’t own it.
- chmod775 6y ago
  > I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion? The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one. If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
  - exar0815 6y ago
    This is not true. The most sensible place was intentionally overlooked because one of germanys larges political parties (CSU) has all her voters there, and the next best place (Gorleben) was politically and ideologically fought over for decades until we gave up and said fuck you and everyone, lets just store it where it stands.
    - logifail 6y ago
      > most sensible place Can you define who gets to decide whether a place is "most sensible"? Subject-matter experts? National politicians? Regional politicians? Or maybe it's more like: voters (nationally)? voters (regionally)? voters (locally)?
deleted 6y ago
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j-pb 6y ago
The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands. Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities? East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border. Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with. So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
- sobellian 6y ago
  If World Wars 3, 4, and 5 all occur then I think we can safely say the global population has already been thoroughly irradiated.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    Yeah, if the dangerous scenario is what if ww3 happens, wipes out all human knowledge, civilization is rebuilt and accidentally digs a kilometer down and finds some nuclear waste then I mean the whole ww3 is probably a bigger deal. Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity. Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the energy problems. I think we might need that time to get to full renewables, if we ever get there.
- spideymans 6y ago
  >And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it. This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Here is a map of seismic areas worldwide https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1441205 https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1... Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are high.
- andbberger 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
dathinab 6y ago
> geologically stable Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast... Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear. Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates. Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons". Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not). Etc. Etc. I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.
- rrss 6y ago
  > Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear waste... it is. drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    There is no Permian Basin in Germany ...
    - rrss 6y ago
      There are similar basins in Europe, probably similarly suitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      God forbid Germany exports its nuclear waste.
- corty 6y ago
  The IPCC report on climate change mitigation puts nuclear median cost on par with wind power (cheaper than offshore, slightly more expensive than onshore), cheaper than solar, more expensive than hydro. In total, squarely on par with the usual suspects for green energy. And they include fuel and decommissioning in that cost. See page 71 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_full.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... (caution, huge pdf). An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.
godelski 6y ago
It also is an issue we have a lot of time to solve. It isn't like humans are going anywhere soon. It also isn't like there's that much waste. Honestly it probably won't happen until there is enough waste that local storage becomes a problem. Which at this rate would take a few hundred more years.
- hu3 6y ago
  Until then we can figure out a solution. Something that seems crazy now will be trivial by then. For example an electromagnetic cannon to shoot waste into outer space [1]. [1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth
isodev 6y ago
The challenge with nuclear waste is that you can’t just throw money at it and expect it to work. Radioactivity and chemical toxicity persists for hundreds and thousands of years. What is needed to design, build and maintain such sites is beyond “extreme engineering” and also very expensive. Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space." Please no. A launch failure with several tons of radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.
andbberger 6y ago
Your impressions have no basis in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

cinntaile 6y ago

It would be interesting to see some examples of EU countries that have solved the long-term storage problem? All I know of are countries that have been researching underground tunnels since the 70s and they're still not in production use.

bjelkeman-again 6y ago
Sweden is nearly done with the environmental review of final storage of spent nuclear fuel. There is still scientific discussion regarding if the containers will last and remain intact for the 10 000 year goal. They hope to have a facility ready by 2030. https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repository/our-methodology/ https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...
jsnell 6y ago
Finland's long term storage is expected to be operational in a couple of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
noinsight 6y ago
Finland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

Kuinox 6y ago

This is not "temporarly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

freeone3000 6y ago

Find a mountain and shove it in there. Doesn't have to be that hard.

drran 6y ago
Yeah, we can send all our nuclear waste to Afghanistan. They will find a place to store it.
Slikey 6y ago
Given that mountains are a result of geological activity, this is for sure the worst place to store it. You'll have a better chance digging out a big hole in the desert - which the EU doesn't have.

cbmuser 6y ago

> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected. And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... > Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II. Asse isn't a storage for high-level waste. It contain low-level waste that can also come from hospitals and such. Germany has no storage for high-level waste yet. Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste: > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall. Just look at this photograph, it shows all of the French nuclear waste accumulated in decades: > https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was.

makomk 6y ago
The big problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the required reprocessing is much worse in terms of safety than the nuclear power plants themselves. Lots of lovely, toxic, highly radioactive solutions which are practically iching to go prompt critical and ruin everyone's day. I think the only reprocessing program which managed not to be a safety train wreck is France's, and I half-suspect they might have just been better at covering up because it's so unusual (and in keeping with other aspects of their nuclear program).
- cbmuser 6y ago
  The French have been doing it for decades already with not a single casualty: > 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... It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie factory.

fermienrico 6y ago

Ridiculous Arm-chair Concept: - What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build bridges, surely we can build large containers. Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love to know why its a stupid idea.

seoaeu 6y ago
This is basically what we already do, and it works fine. But opponents will still pester you about where to put the sealed boxes :P
- drran 6y ago
  Put it under your home.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    If someone else is paying the cost to excavate, bury, secure, backfill, then sure.
  - mrshadowgoose 6y ago
    Sure! How much am I being paid for the nuissance of construction, and ongoing disturbance of my day-to-day life when waste deliveries occur? So now that your appeal to emotion has failed, do you have any actual points?
random5634 6y ago
The problem is in part the anti-nuclear folks don't want the problem to be solved. So you can build a skyscraper 100 feet tall in a high earthquake zone, but you can't build a container. The normal approach (france etc) is to recycle and then vitrify the leftovers and store in a container. You get much shorter half lives, much less waste. So even if it comes out the container, it's still "in" something. Of course, you can build a reasonably secure container as well.

winter_blue 6y ago

The solution to nuclear waste is to use breeder reactors extensively. Breeder reactors both (1) substantially reduce the radioactivity of nuclear waste, and (2) allow you to get up to 100 times the energy out of the same quantity of initial nuclear fuel. A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a radioactive isotope, often with much shorter half-lives. Some of these are even useful in industry. There are new kinds of reactors, like the Traveling Wave Reactor (TVR) which efficiently use fuel like breeder reactors as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor There were challenges in the past with breeder reactor design (for example as this article outlines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-breeder-reactors-nuclear-waste-nightmare https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...), but this is an area that there should be a lot more active research in. The long-term benefits of doing so would be immense.

hedora 6y ago
We should move to breeder reactors. However, there is one unsolved problem: As the fuel is repeatedly refined/recycled, there is a step where it is trivially easy to skim some weapons grade material out of the process. I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed. Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal material from the line.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Or, we accept that people will occasionally have access to weapons-grade nuclear material and move on. "But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet, "That's a terrible idea!" Yes, it is, but hear me out: Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants pocket or something. So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe) someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that: "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO 234-867-5309" Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now what? - You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're suddenly near the top of the suspect list. - Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too. Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured destruction! - Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times and we might end up with world peace. All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the alternative right now can range from "millions of people displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my chances, thanks.

dmos62 6y ago

> some of which already had issues with flooding Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water. Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will. Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil. Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I think having to store a lot of nuclear fuel is a much better problem than having to extract carbon out of the atmosphere, or building difficult to recycle chemical batteries out of scarce resources.

redprince 6y ago
> Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water. Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage because of several incidents of water ingress even during the time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open right there and then. Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.

Angostura 6y ago

I absolutely agree that we don't have a long term solution for storing nuclear waste. The thing is, we don't have a long term solution for storing CO2 either. The thing I like about nuclear waste is is it's obvious, its tangle and it sits around in sinister looking containers. As opposed to CO2.

anonporridge 6y ago
The fact that this simple line of reasoning seems to be completely missing from the minds of anti nuclear activists is...perplexing.
- dylan604 6y ago
  At the same time it's not. Big scary looking symbols plastered over everything compared to just filling the air making it out of sight out of mind. Once that's achieved, the mass populace doesn't care. Try to build a facility with those scary symbols that are visible anytime one chooses to look, and people get all NIMBY very quickly.
  - pas 6y ago
    The solution seems obvious. Set up a town of nuclear power activists. YIMBY.
    - Chris2048 6y ago
      Or create scary-looking CO2 storage facilities in every town.
      - dylan604 6y ago
        Depending on the town, that storage facility already looks scary whenever you look up
kaibee 6y ago
We don't have short term solutions for storing CO2 either.

nickik 6y ago

I still don't understand why nuclear waste needs long terms storage. With Burner reactors you can produce waste that only needs storage for 100s of years, not 1000s. Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years. The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.

p_l 6y ago
The reason why you don't see much of fast-neutron "burners" is that NPT is essentially an empty shell, and you have to be lucky to survive putting up so-called plutonium economy - and the "survive" part might be literal. It all goes back to Indian nuclear program, AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. Now that climate crisis pushes for more solutions to power, you get absurd proposals from USA like reactors with remote disable on them controlled from USA.
- opo 6y ago
  >...AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada): >...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest... >...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India. It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor

beefield 6y ago

What I really, really do not get is why the countries that do have long term solution do not start selling nuclear waste disposal services to other countries. First, you could charge outrageus amounts of money for the service. Second, you could practically ditch your defence forces simply because absolutely nobody would want anyone else to attack a country with huge amounts of radioactive waste. Finally, after some time, you could likely sell the waste back as a fuel ingredient to new nuclear technologies. This only slightly tongue in cheek. Of course I understand that proposing that would be a political suicide, but nevertheless, it would make sense.

f6v 6y ago

Let’s just build nuclear(power plants and storage) in places that aren’t flooded.

StreamBright 6y ago

>> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant. Yes we can. Case closed.

andrewseanryan 6y ago

Probably a dumb question, but why can’t we just blast nuclear waste out into space with a rocket? Seems like a rather small payload in the grand scheme of things.

andbberger 6y ago
Comes up every time - because nuclear waste is heavy, delta-v is expensive, and mostly because nuclear waste was never actually a problem.
threeseed 6y ago
And then what happens when the rocket explodes ? Because that scenario is very common.

pyrale 6y ago

> There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The thing is, these are not just straw men, but talking points frequently used by nuclear energy opponents. Along with others, like asserting that nuclear energy is a source of CO², etc. If nuclear proponents had to focus only on reasonable, grounded talking points, they would probably be happier for it. > for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. It's an OK point, and it's a shame that Germany seems to skip its environmental responsibilities. However, EU laws apply to all EU countries, including the ones that do a better job.

Rule35 6y ago

That's not a technical problem, but a political one. Imagine if I said "yeah, solar sucks because people burn down the solar farms" and then you saw me sneaking away with a can of gas... Deep geological storage, but not in salt beds, is a simple answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting to be inspected and repaired. I've been in deep hard-rock mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste. The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as well.

opo 6y ago

>...The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste Why would you think that? In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

estaseuropano 6y ago

It goes even beyond this and comments like yours are important to stress that there is a lot of nuance. If you count carbon emissions related to building the plant, the enrichment facility, the storage facility, the mining, the lonf-term maintenance, the decomissioning, etc you end with quite a carbon footprint as (so far) that all relies on diesel.

ivan1783 6y ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but why do the coal & oil plants get a free pass to dump their waste into the air? Its much easier to contain and store nuclear waste because you can keep track of it, whereas the coal and oil waste is just dumped in the air for everyone to breathe.