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Nuclear waste storage is the most histrionically exaggerated environmental issue of all time. Yucca Mountain is rated to hold the stuff for hundreds of thousand

Nuclear waste storage is the most histrionically exaggerated environmental issue of all time. Yucca Mountain is rated to hold the stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. We really only need about a hundred. After a hundred years, we'll probably have effectively unlimited energy sources and a space elevator, and we'll be able to chuck the stuff directly into the Sun if we're still fussed about it. Which we won't be, because the lack of accidents will have completely inured people to the existence of the waste storage sites, and my great grandkids will be whining about how they can't get funding for their cool Chuck Nuclear Waste Into The Sun Project. (And they will be right - society has always been stupid to not divert a little money into mitigating long-term existential risks!) People would rather let the planet literally burn to death with 100% certainty than take a 0.0001% risk on a leak of the scary radioactive stuff.

TheHypnotist 5y ago
People think nuclear waste is green sludge in a barrel, when it reality its very small solid pellets.
melling 5y ago
Imagine if we had made nuclear a viable option 2 decades ago. All those greenhouse gases from the United States and China,… Wind and solar are still coming , waiting for the perfect is the enemy of the good I bet around 2050 or 2060, we’d wished we’d removed coal from the picture much sooner
- civilized 5y ago
  I bet the coal and oil execs were grinning like Cheshire Cats while eco-radicals laid waste to the prospects of the US nuclear industry in the 1970s.
  - rob_c 5y ago
    I've always thought it's always interesting to follow the accounting of the likes of greenpeace....
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > I bet the coal and oil execs were grinning like Cheshire Cats while eco-radicals laid waste to the prospects of the US nuclear industry in the 1970s. Or when Germany shutdown their nuclear plants and ran more coal after Fukushima. * https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-and-deadly-emissions-spiked/ https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-a... Gas seems to be planned to fill an upcoming gap: * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-27/germany-s-looming-power-supply-gap-will-likely-be-filled-by-gas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-27/germany-s...
pfdietz 5y ago
Nuclear is grossly uncompetitive even if waste disposal costs are ignored. So I agree waste is a red herring, in the sense that it's a strawman brought up by pro-nuclears as a diversion from nuclear's actual central problem, its economics.
- civilized 5y ago
  It seems to me that we have two options: 1. Nuclear, an up-front expensive but proven reliable way to deliver no-carbon energy at civilization scale (cf. France). 2. Renewables, which are cheap upfront, but plans for scaling them up to deliver reliable power at civilization scale are currently dinner party ideas scrawled on the back of a napkin. It's not clear to me that we have a blowout winner here, and we should probably be hedging our bets by developing all viable options simultaneously.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    I would say it's the other way around. Renewable technologies (including storage) that are being installed could power the world. The only question is how much they would cost, and how much costs will decline as the world invests tens of trillions of dollars in the conversion, driving the technologies down their experience curves. Current commercially available nuclear technology, on the other hand, cannot power the world. Thermal reactors use uranium too inefficiently. Either new seawater U extraction will have to be matured (it's not ready yet), or breeder reactors will have to be matured (they are also not ready yet). Both of these would raise costs of the current nuclear system at current uranium prices. Renewables, at least, have large and growing markets driving the learning and cost reduction, and ditto for storage. Those nuclear technologies do not. In either case fossil fuels have to be penalized sufficiently to keep them in the ground or (and perhaps this will happen) to force CO2 capture to make them greenhouse safe too (but watch the methane leakage).
    - jules 5y ago
      The real question is energy storage.

TheHypnotist 5y ago

People think nuclear waste is green sludge in a barrel, when it reality its very small solid pellets.

melling 5y ago

Imagine if we had made nuclear a viable option 2 decades ago. All those greenhouse gases from the United States and China,… Wind and solar are still coming , waiting for the perfect is the enemy of the good I bet around 2050 or 2060, we’d wished we’d removed coal from the picture much sooner

civilized 5y ago
I bet the coal and oil execs were grinning like Cheshire Cats while eco-radicals laid waste to the prospects of the US nuclear industry in the 1970s.
- rob_c 5y ago
  I've always thought it's always interesting to follow the accounting of the likes of greenpeace....
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > I bet the coal and oil execs were grinning like Cheshire Cats while eco-radicals laid waste to the prospects of the US nuclear industry in the 1970s. Or when Germany shutdown their nuclear plants and ran more coal after Fukushima. * https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-and-deadly-emissions-spiked/ https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-a... Gas seems to be planned to fill an upcoming gap: * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-27/germany-s-looming-power-supply-gap-will-likely-be-filled-by-gas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-27/germany-s...

pfdietz 5y ago

Nuclear is grossly uncompetitive even if waste disposal costs are ignored. So I agree waste is a red herring, in the sense that it's a strawman brought up by pro-nuclears as a diversion from nuclear's actual central problem, its economics.

civilized 5y ago
It seems to me that we have two options: 1. Nuclear, an up-front expensive but proven reliable way to deliver no-carbon energy at civilization scale (cf. France). 2. Renewables, which are cheap upfront, but plans for scaling them up to deliver reliable power at civilization scale are currently dinner party ideas scrawled on the back of a napkin. It's not clear to me that we have a blowout winner here, and we should probably be hedging our bets by developing all viable options simultaneously.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  I would say it's the other way around. Renewable technologies (including storage) that are being installed could power the world. The only question is how much they would cost, and how much costs will decline as the world invests tens of trillions of dollars in the conversion, driving the technologies down their experience curves. Current commercially available nuclear technology, on the other hand, cannot power the world. Thermal reactors use uranium too inefficiently. Either new seawater U extraction will have to be matured (it's not ready yet), or breeder reactors will have to be matured (they are also not ready yet). Both of these would raise costs of the current nuclear system at current uranium prices. Renewables, at least, have large and growing markets driving the learning and cost reduction, and ditto for storage. Those nuclear technologies do not. In either case fossil fuels have to be penalized sufficiently to keep them in the ground or (and perhaps this will happen) to force CO2 capture to make them greenhouse safe too (but watch the methane leakage).
  - jules 5y ago
    The real question is energy storage.