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> 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. Nuc

> 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.
  - Klinky 6y ago
    La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North Sea. Reactors currently cannot run 100% on MOX. Separation of Plutonium in the recycling process has proliferation concerns. Other countries have found building similar recycling plants challenging due to cost, with DoE estimating $50+ billion. La Hague was initially designed to extract Plutonium for weapons use, which likely justified its costs at the time. The Marcoule site where MOX fuel is manufactured had an explosion in 2011, which did result in a fatality.
    - webreac 6y ago
      La Hague used to dump small quantities of radioactive liquid (mainly water used to clean barrels that contained weakly radioactiv waste) in Nort Sea. When I left (in 1999), the project to completely stop this dump was well advanced. The idea was to vaporized the water and collect the remains in a barrel. You are right that we have a lot of plutonium that we can not use. The intent of superphenix was to use this plutonium. It failed.
      - p_l 6y ago
        Apparently it burned quite a lot of it, though? Pity that it got closed, I hope technical issues are fixed and a new device based on better understanding replaces it.
    - pyrale 6y ago
      > La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North Sea. That would be a long pipeline, because La Hague is facing the channel, not the north sea.
- nickik 6y ago
  There are many ways to do recycling and we have 100s of years to figure it out. What we do now is doable, but its the worst possible thing. Other forms of recycling are very viable and have much less problems and much less side streams. The problem is of course that anti-nuclear crowed have stopped practically all technology development so they can claim all problems are solvable and nuclear should be abolished. As everything with nuclear, we as a society barley got to first generation technology and then halted all development. Canada is doing some create work with recycling of CANDU fuel, Moltex Energy is in development of a reactor to use that fuel and its a much better process then what the french use.
- StreamBright 6y ago
  >> iching to go prompt critical Are you kidding? What kind of nuclear waste has even the remote possibility to go critical that is produced by a VVER reactor that is pretty common?
random_kris 6y ago
Yeah but i can imagine as we scale the hall like that will soon be able to contain only 10 years worth of material. Then 1 year etc...
- loeg 6y ago
  Scale what? France already generates all of its own power requirements and is a net exporter of electricity. They're at 100% scale already.
  - flemhans 6y ago
    We could heat the streets in winter, keep all lights on, mine bitcoin, drive around like crazy due to almost free "fuel". All possible thanks to Nuclear!
  - random_kris 6y ago
    When our energy consumption increases by 10000 times where will.we store the waste? I am not against the nuclear, I am for it but I like to ask hard questions
  - natmaka 6y ago
    In 2015, the National Assembly voted that by 2025 only 50% of France's energy will be produced by nuclear plants. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France The main pertinent local project is an utter disaster, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_3
- cbmuser 6y ago
  That single hall is for the _whole_ country for _decades_. Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just extremely dense. The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel reprocessing on site: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU
godelski 6y ago
A bigger factor to note is that 95% of radiation is contained within 1% of the waste. I think the problem here is that people don't realize how small this number is. Because 11ktons sounds like a lot. But if you compare it to any other waste in the world it is tiny. Perspective is lost. I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after decommissioning. You have a lot of shielding material (i.e. the other 99% of reactor waste that is mostly concrete) to protect a very small amount of radiation and keep the material distributed, which has some security benefits. Not having a centralized location doesn't seem like an issue. It isn't like humans are going anywhere anytime soon and we're going to lose information about where waste is stored. We have plenty of time to figure out a long term storage system that is still safe if the entirety of human information is lost. It's a great goal, but if that's our concern we should talk about deep geological repositories for a lot of other waste that we have that doesn't degrade overtime.
- patall 6y ago
  Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your scenario makes it even more likely.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (bombs disperse the radiation quickly, though it does aerosolize it). And then that cancer hits in 20+ years. It just isn't an effective weapon. Sure, it makes for a scary pipe bomb, but at the end of the day it is far more dangerous for the maker and greatly increases the complexity of the terrorist attack (also greatly increasing the likelihood that you get caught before you can deploy). So a terrorist just gets a slight increase in fear factor, but it doesn't increase deadliness of the weapon, requires a lot more work, greatly increases the chance that they get caught, puts them in more danger, and so they just don't do it. There's too many downsides for only a minor upside. Why do it when you could just make a dozen pipe bombs and put them in trash cans around the city? Really just think if you were a terrorist and wanted to do damage. There's a lot of things you could do (bunch of rusty nails on the I-5) that just don't happen. They are easy to accomplish, can do a lot of damage, but just don't. Why? Different objectives and just terrorism is extremely rare in the first place. And I'm pretty sure a drilling through feet of concrete and metal in a likely highly monitored site is too big of a hurdle when you can just go to home depot and get some stump remover and some steel pipes.
whatever1 6y ago
All plastics can be recycled. Does not mean they do. In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US, but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your problem, someone elses problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Hanford%20Site%20is%20a,the%20U.S.%20state%20of%20Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Han.... I can play the environmentalist on the backs of other people as well. Super easy.
- dtech 6y ago
  Most plastics are very hard if not impossible to recycle. Especially when different plastics are mixed or a product is made of multiple materials, i.e. nearly all products.
  - whatever1 6y ago
    All plastics can be recycled. Is it economical? No. Same goes for nuclear waste.
    - redisman 6y ago
      What do you mean by recycled in this case? From my understanding you can pretty much only grind it down to garbage filler and maybe press it into some primitive shape. It’ll never become cling film or whatever again
      - whatever1 6y ago
        Polymers can fundamentally be de-polymerized and then you can reuse the monomers, for example see [1]. They call it "chemical recycling". Questionable whether it will ever be price competitive with direct production from crude oil derivatives. You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the same carbon. [1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-chemical-recycling-solution/97/i39 https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-ch...
jay_kyburz 6y ago
Saying Nuclear waste is not a problem is like saying taking a shit in your neighbors yard is not a problem. Shit can be packed into plastic bags, composted, and eventually stops smelling. Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without creating waste for future generations, we should go without the power. Seriously, we don't need it.
- option 6y ago
  yes, nuclear waste is like taking a 10x smaller than the grain of rise shit in your neighbor’s yard.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    Sure, but even a grain of sand that I can't build on or walk over is still going to be annoying. It's still just rude no matter how small you think the problem is.
    - option 6y ago
      we are in a climate crisis and wind/solar alone are just not going to cut it. And nuclear is the safest power source (measured in deaths/twh) which humans have been using for decades.
    - godelski 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure you also can't build on or walk over a large pile of garbage. At least with the grain of sand there's not much area displaced.
- dijit 6y ago
  You know what, you’re right- I agree. However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future. Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know. I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.
freeflight 6y ago
> And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled: That number is not actually supported by your source, as a matter of fact, your source points out that the US it not recycling any of the fuel at all. > Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste Sorry, but I don't see the argument there? Just because there's already toxic waste, does not mean that more toxic waste wouldn't change anything. Or are you suggesting the nuclear waste should just be thrown into Herfa-Neurode with all the chemical waste? > Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall. Germany also has quite a high population density, it doesn't have the luxury of large swats of unpopulated land where it could build it's "nuclear waste storage hall", and that's assuming that "just store it in a hall" is actually a good way to store it. If it really was as simple as that, then why did Finland spend billions on building their Onkala deep geological repository? Which is the only installation of that kind on the whole planet. Not even in the US a proper storage location has been found yet, as Yucca Mountain was not deemed suitable. The best answer anybody can currently give to that is "Just store it on site", which isn't a solution, it's the temporary band-aid for a rather permanent problem that's not actually solved. You can't just hand-wave that away by claiming it ain't a problem and allegedly never was.
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  You critique his sources without posting any sources of your own. That's why your arguments (and those of chmod) can be simply waved away. > That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    I critique that their source does not actually say what they claim it says: Nowhere in there is a 95% number, it doesn't give any percentage at all about how much can be recycled. All it states is that "it can be recycled" and how "90% of its potential energy still remains", which is about as useful as declaring the plastic problem as solved because "plastic can be recycled". That makes the 95% number an assertion without evidence, as such, it can be dismissed without evidence.
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
I believe heat is a problem though. A manageable one, but it requires more space. Nuclear energy is still a fantastic, dense source of energy. I would much,much prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than a coal or similar one. If there was a way to generate even cleaner power with such efficiency then great. 25 years ago we had that hope for a few weeks with cold fusion.
volta83 6y ago
> Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was. If its so easy as you say, why doesn't every country have a small room to keep all the waster? Why do we often "just" throw it in the ocean instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_... Why do these "so easy to maintain rooms" leak? https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-storage-site-report/a-43399896#:~:text=More%20than%20400%20barrels%20of,ray%20and%20cancer%20therapy%20waste https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-st.... Why do managers of nuclear reactos "loose" all the waste? https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/missing-german-nuclear-material-located/ https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/missing-german-nuclear-mater... Etc.
ThinkBeat 6y ago
The US does not have a long term storage for nuclear waste either. at least not civilian. They are now stored in the "yard" at the different nuclear powerplant Decades of fighting has eventually killed every attempt because people do not want it. I am always curious about people who say not to mind the waste, if it would be ok to store them in their yard?

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.
- Klinky 6y ago
  La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North Sea. Reactors currently cannot run 100% on MOX. Separation of Plutonium in the recycling process has proliferation concerns. Other countries have found building similar recycling plants challenging due to cost, with DoE estimating $50+ billion. La Hague was initially designed to extract Plutonium for weapons use, which likely justified its costs at the time. The Marcoule site where MOX fuel is manufactured had an explosion in 2011, which did result in a fatality.
  - webreac 6y ago
    La Hague used to dump small quantities of radioactive liquid (mainly water used to clean barrels that contained weakly radioactiv waste) in Nort Sea. When I left (in 1999), the project to completely stop this dump was well advanced. The idea was to vaporized the water and collect the remains in a barrel. You are right that we have a lot of plutonium that we can not use. The intent of superphenix was to use this plutonium. It failed.
    - p_l 6y ago
      Apparently it burned quite a lot of it, though? Pity that it got closed, I hope technical issues are fixed and a new device based on better understanding replaces it.
  - pyrale 6y ago
    > La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North Sea. That would be a long pipeline, because La Hague is facing the channel, not the north sea.
nickik 6y ago
There are many ways to do recycling and we have 100s of years to figure it out. What we do now is doable, but its the worst possible thing. Other forms of recycling are very viable and have much less problems and much less side streams. The problem is of course that anti-nuclear crowed have stopped practically all technology development so they can claim all problems are solvable and nuclear should be abolished. As everything with nuclear, we as a society barley got to first generation technology and then halted all development. Canada is doing some create work with recycling of CANDU fuel, Moltex Energy is in development of a reactor to use that fuel and its a much better process then what the french use.
StreamBright 6y ago
>> iching to go prompt critical Are you kidding? What kind of nuclear waste has even the remote possibility to go critical that is produced by a VVER reactor that is pretty common?

random_kris 6y ago

Yeah but i can imagine as we scale the hall like that will soon be able to contain only 10 years worth of material. Then 1 year etc...

loeg 6y ago
Scale what? France already generates all of its own power requirements and is a net exporter of electricity. They're at 100% scale already.
- flemhans 6y ago
  We could heat the streets in winter, keep all lights on, mine bitcoin, drive around like crazy due to almost free "fuel". All possible thanks to Nuclear!
- random_kris 6y ago
  When our energy consumption increases by 10000 times where will.we store the waste? I am not against the nuclear, I am for it but I like to ask hard questions
- natmaka 6y ago
  In 2015, the National Assembly voted that by 2025 only 50% of France's energy will be produced by nuclear plants. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France The main pertinent local project is an utter disaster, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_3
cbmuser 6y ago
That single hall is for the _whole_ country for _decades_. Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just extremely dense. The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel reprocessing on site: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU

godelski 6y ago

A bigger factor to note is that 95% of radiation is contained within 1% of the waste. I think the problem here is that people don't realize how small this number is. Because 11ktons sounds like a lot. But if you compare it to any other waste in the world it is tiny. Perspective is lost. I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after decommissioning. You have a lot of shielding material (i.e. the other 99% of reactor waste that is mostly concrete) to protect a very small amount of radiation and keep the material distributed, which has some security benefits. Not having a centralized location doesn't seem like an issue. It isn't like humans are going anywhere anytime soon and we're going to lose information about where waste is stored. We have plenty of time to figure out a long term storage system that is still safe if the entirety of human information is lost. It's a great goal, but if that's our concern we should talk about deep geological repositories for a lot of other waste that we have that doesn't degrade overtime.

patall 6y ago
Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your scenario makes it even more likely.
- godelski 6y ago
  Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (bombs disperse the radiation quickly, though it does aerosolize it). And then that cancer hits in 20+ years. It just isn't an effective weapon. Sure, it makes for a scary pipe bomb, but at the end of the day it is far more dangerous for the maker and greatly increases the complexity of the terrorist attack (also greatly increasing the likelihood that you get caught before you can deploy). So a terrorist just gets a slight increase in fear factor, but it doesn't increase deadliness of the weapon, requires a lot more work, greatly increases the chance that they get caught, puts them in more danger, and so they just don't do it. There's too many downsides for only a minor upside. Why do it when you could just make a dozen pipe bombs and put them in trash cans around the city? Really just think if you were a terrorist and wanted to do damage. There's a lot of things you could do (bunch of rusty nails on the I-5) that just don't happen. They are easy to accomplish, can do a lot of damage, but just don't. Why? Different objectives and just terrorism is extremely rare in the first place. And I'm pretty sure a drilling through feet of concrete and metal in a likely highly monitored site is too big of a hurdle when you can just go to home depot and get some stump remover and some steel pipes.

whatever1 6y ago

All plastics can be recycled. Does not mean they do. In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US, but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your problem, someone elses problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Hanford%20Site%20is%20a,the%20U.S.%20state%20of%20Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Han.... I can play the environmentalist on the backs of other people as well. Super easy.

dtech 6y ago
Most plastics are very hard if not impossible to recycle. Especially when different plastics are mixed or a product is made of multiple materials, i.e. nearly all products.
- whatever1 6y ago
  All plastics can be recycled. Is it economical? No. Same goes for nuclear waste.
  - redisman 6y ago
    What do you mean by recycled in this case? From my understanding you can pretty much only grind it down to garbage filler and maybe press it into some primitive shape. It’ll never become cling film or whatever again
    - whatever1 6y ago
      Polymers can fundamentally be de-polymerized and then you can reuse the monomers, for example see [1]. They call it "chemical recycling". Questionable whether it will ever be price competitive with direct production from crude oil derivatives. You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the same carbon. [1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-chemical-recycling-solution/97/i39 https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-ch...

jay_kyburz 6y ago

Saying Nuclear waste is not a problem is like saying taking a shit in your neighbors yard is not a problem. Shit can be packed into plastic bags, composted, and eventually stops smelling. Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without creating waste for future generations, we should go without the power. Seriously, we don't need it.

option 6y ago
yes, nuclear waste is like taking a 10x smaller than the grain of rise shit in your neighbor’s yard.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  Sure, but even a grain of sand that I can't build on or walk over is still going to be annoying. It's still just rude no matter how small you think the problem is.
  - option 6y ago
    we are in a climate crisis and wind/solar alone are just not going to cut it. And nuclear is the safest power source (measured in deaths/twh) which humans have been using for decades.
  - godelski 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure you also can't build on or walk over a large pile of garbage. At least with the grain of sand there's not much area displaced.
dijit 6y ago
You know what, you’re right- I agree. However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future. Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know. I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.

freeflight 6y ago

> And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled: That number is not actually supported by your source, as a matter of fact, your source points out that the US it not recycling any of the fuel at all. > Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste Sorry, but I don't see the argument there? Just because there's already toxic waste, does not mean that more toxic waste wouldn't change anything. Or are you suggesting the nuclear waste should just be thrown into Herfa-Neurode with all the chemical waste? > Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall. Germany also has quite a high population density, it doesn't have the luxury of large swats of unpopulated land where it could build it's "nuclear waste storage hall", and that's assuming that "just store it in a hall" is actually a good way to store it. If it really was as simple as that, then why did Finland spend billions on building their Onkala deep geological repository? Which is the only installation of that kind on the whole planet. Not even in the US a proper storage location has been found yet, as Yucca Mountain was not deemed suitable. The best answer anybody can currently give to that is "Just store it on site", which isn't a solution, it's the temporary band-aid for a rather permanent problem that's not actually solved. You can't just hand-wave that away by claiming it ain't a problem and allegedly never was.

LockAndLol 6y ago
You critique his sources without posting any sources of your own. That's why your arguments (and those of chmod) can be simply waved away. > That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
- freeflight 6y ago
  I critique that their source does not actually say what they claim it says: Nowhere in there is a 95% number, it doesn't give any percentage at all about how much can be recycled. All it states is that "it can be recycled" and how "90% of its potential energy still remains", which is about as useful as declaring the plastic problem as solved because "plastic can be recycled". That makes the 95% number an assertion without evidence, as such, it can be dismissed without evidence.

BrandoElFollito 6y ago

I believe heat is a problem though. A manageable one, but it requires more space. Nuclear energy is still a fantastic, dense source of energy. I would much,much prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than a coal or similar one. If there was a way to generate even cleaner power with such efficiency then great. 25 years ago we had that hope for a few weeks with cold fusion.

volta83 6y ago

> Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was. If its so easy as you say, why doesn't every country have a small room to keep all the waster? Why do we often "just" throw it in the ocean instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_... Why do these "so easy to maintain rooms" leak? https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-storage-site-report/a-43399896#:~:text=More%20than%20400%20barrels%20of,ray%20and%20cancer%20therapy%20waste https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-st.... Why do managers of nuclear reactos "loose" all the waste? https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/missing-german-nuclear-material-located/ https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/missing-german-nuclear-mater... Etc.

ThinkBeat 6y ago

The US does not have a long term storage for nuclear waste either. at least not civilian. They are now stored in the "yard" at the different nuclear powerplant Decades of fighting has eventually killed every attempt because people do not want it. I am always curious about people who say not to mind the waste, if it would be ok to store them in their yard?