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Nuclear waste is a solved problem
- based2 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long-term_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long-term_ma...
- jake_morrison 5y agoIt's pessimistic to think that we won't figure out some solution to reprocess nuclear waste efficiently in the next 50 years, to say nothing of the next 30,000 years. And I don't hear people talking much about the problem of "solar waste" and "wind waste", i.e. what are we going to do with all the obsolete solar panels and wind turbine blades in the next 20 years?
- glogla 5y agoYeah, it is interesting how the bar is so high for nuclear, yet for renewables everyone counts on magical energy storage that makes their intermittency practical just appearing out of nowhere.
- johnebgd 5y agoIt is a solved problem: https://www.deepisolation.com/ https://www.deepisolation.com/
- roenxi 5y agoOf course, this in itself is a propaganda tactic. The truth is that nuclear waste has never actually been a problem to solve outside certain technical circles. There just isn't enough of it to matter. There has been a lot of theatre, nobody bothered actually doing anything, and it turned out not to matter that nobody did anything.
- 20after4 5y agoSo how exactly was it not a problem at Fukushima?
- thatswrong0 5y agoClarify the problem that Fukushima faced with regards to nuclear waste. Because as far as I know, the main issue was that the backup generators running the cooling pumps for some of the cores were inundated as a result of the tsunami that the outdated facility was not designed to handle.. it had nothing to do with waste storage.
- turbinerneiter 5y agoThe waste was stored in the reactor room and greatly complicated cleanup as far as I know.
- roenxi 5y agoI don't follow, Fukushima was commissioned in 1971. Are you suggesting they were keeping 50 years worth of waste in the reactor room? That seems a bit extreme even for me.
- turbinerneiter 5y agoNot 50 years worth, but some. I remember it being criticised as bad practice, but also common. But this is from memory, you'll have to look it up if we want to dig deeper.
- nuerow 5y ago> Clarify the problem that Fukushima faced with regards to nuclear waste. I don't feel it's honest to try to discuss the pros and cons of a technology by cherry picking the cons that we can strawman out of the equation while purposely ignoring real-world examples of major cons. If anyone wants to argue in favour of nuclear power them they need to face the questions presented by Chernobyl, Fukushima, and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
- elisee 5y agoThe article says "The first, and easiest way to address it is to reprocess spent fuel as France does." but France has a long-term nuclear waste storage project (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o) so that seems to paint an incomplete picture? I don't know much about the subject to be fair.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- namdnay 5y agoLong term storage represents less than 1% of total waste, the rest is reprocessed. I can’t remember the exact figure, but the “dangerous” waste for the whole of France is something like 10 tons a year - not a big logistical issue
- PaulHoule 5y agoReprocessing contaminates air and water to some extent. The most difficult product to control is Kr 85 which is an inert gas that usually gets vented to the air but could be stored cryogenically. Waste products include Cs 137 and some other fission products that decay in 500 years or so. If these are concentrated they generate heat that must be managed. You also get some isotopes of uranium that are not good for fission like U 236, the plutonium goes back into reactors and so can some other transuranics, but others pose challenges. Np 237 is probably the isotope that would be most desirable to steal from a reprocessing plant to make a gun-type bomb, put it back into the reactor and it will fission but also breed Pu 238 which will make huge amounts of decay heat. This complicates the handling of the fuel but it might be a good thing because there is no way anybody is making a bomb out of Pu that is so contaminated…
- Aerroon 5y agoTo put the number into context: a 1 cubic meter block of uranium weighs 19 tons. You could probably fit that under a king size bed. The bed would need about 25 cm of clearance from the floor though (203x193x25 cm ~ 1 cubic meter).
- rossmohax 5y agoHow much nuclear waste is produced annually? Can reasonable number of Starships take it to the space?
- Sebb767 5y agoThe problem is not the weight, but the dangers of launching. Space rockets have a comparatively bad crash record and one full with nuclear fuel breaking down in the atmosphere would wreck havoc on anything nearby (as in countries). Storing it on earth is much easier and safer.
- Retric 5y agoHigh level waste is a serious issue in case of an accident, low-level radioactive waste is regularly disposed of already. https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/locations.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/locations.h...
- tux3 5y agoI think the standard answer to this is you really don't want to take the chance of a rocket loaded with nuclear waste crashing back down or catching fire in midair. People can accept the occasional plane debris crashing on their house. Less so with radioactive waste.
- himinlomax 5y agoLaunching it is idiotic. If you want to put it away, you could just drill a deep bore hole 2 km down. At that depth, it won't interact with anything and won't come back up except at geological time scale (millions of years). It would be very expensive, but less so than launching it.
- q1w2 5y agoThe spent-fuel waste is roughly one barrel per reactor per year - not a lot and easily managed. There is a lot of very-low risk waste (ie of the same radioactivity as bananas) which really doesn't not need to be treated like life threatening material as it is today - and is much more voluminous. The amount of that stuff depends on what the local regulations are making plants dispose of (eg some places force plant employees to throw out their uniforms every week).
- nickpp 5y agoI find anti-nuclear "green" activists just as dangerous as anti-vaxxers. They are often the same too, easy to categorize under the larger umbrella of "anti-progress" (which funny enough means conservative).
- namdnay 5y agoI don’t think it’s due to conservatism or liberalism really, more that the roots of the Green movement (at least in Europe) are in the anti-nuclear weapon movements of the 70s. They were never able to shake off the general aversion to anything nuclear
- kevingadd 5y agoWhile I'm personally pro-nuclear, I think grouping them up with anti-vaxxers is kind of absurd. There are proven historical risks to commercialized nuclear power that aren't just fantasies made up by Wakefield.
- Zababa 5y ago> There are proven historical risks to commercialized nuclear power that aren't just fantasies made up by Wakefield. There are proven risks to vaccines too. How many people die each year because anti-nuclear people slowed or stopped the adoption of nuclear power? Air pollution kills, a lot. These people have blood on their hands.
- cycomanic 5y agoAh come on, the reason there is not more nuclear in most countries has nothing to do with the anti-nuclear lobby, but is simple economics. It's hilarious that somehow anti-nuclear groups are supposed to have so much more lobbying power than some of the largest corporations in the world, that's almost on the same level as anti-climate change conspiracy theory groups who say that this is all made up because some scientists want to get grant money.
- blitzar 5y ago
- Finnucane 5y agoAnd in addition, it’s been ten years since anybody has had to abandon a city because of an accident, so that’s good.
- himinlomax 5y agoThe tsunami alone killed 10000 people, displaced many more. The nuclear accident that followed killed 1 (one). So nuclear made the disaster 0.01% worse.
- Kon5ole 5y agoBut nuclear is also the reason why it's still an ongoing expensive issue 10 years later.
- namdnay 5y agoFukushima was hardly an accident, it was a tsunami that killed a thousand times more people than the ensuing nuclear power plant leak ever did
- sqldba 5y agoApparently every accident that has happened will never happen again and is a once off. So they don’t count.
- somnic 5y agoIt's not that they don't count. They count just as much as air pollution, heat stroke or hypothermia, from fossil fuels and expensive or unreliable energy. Nuclear has costs, yes. Weigh them up against the costs of every other alternative, rather than singling them out.
- turbinerneiter 5y agoNot a fan of nuclear power, but changed my opinion because climate change is a bigger and harder to handle problem. "Solved Problem" however isn't a thing I like to hear in this context. Solvable problem, sure, managable risk, yes. But solved problem is strong wording for waste, which you have to keep safe for roughly 4 times the age of the oldest democratic country. Nuclear powers biggest problem is the price in the one hand, and bombs on the other hand. Nuclear bombs are bad halo product for a technology, nobody associates good stuff with doomsday machines.
- sofixa 5y ago> the age of the oldest democratic country. Which one? Depending on your definition of democratic and country, and if you meant continuous or not, this is between a few hundred and few thousand years, quite a delta.
- pedro1976 5y agoIMO nuclear power won't help us in the climate crisis. The inertia to change our technologies, behaviour... is already extremely large, with nuclear energy (which is very limited) there will be less incentive to change anything at all. Hence, we will just prolong the party and not make use of this tiny thread of hope.
- q1w2 5y agoThis argument is so odd given that the alternatives of green energy require often and even greater shift in political will and consumer behavior.
- Zababa 5y agoAt least it can be stored, unlike the gasses that escape into the atmosphere.
- drran 5y agoWe can convert CO2 into coal and then store it underground, just like nuclear waste.
- sqldba 5y agoA THOUSAND years is a solved problem? Fuck off.
- cycomanic 5y agoNuclear waste is not a solved problem. Reprocessing is uneconomical and does not solve the nuclear storage problem, because it creates lots of low- to mid- radioactive waste products. Admittedly, they are not so highly radioactive, but because of that the half-lifetime is often longer. I find it interesting, that the same people who used to critisize renewables as being uneconomical, relying on future developments in storage/better grids etc. are now the ones pushing nuclear. Nuclear is significantly more expensive, and people always talk about the problems being solved in the future through research somehow. Don't even get me started on those small modular reactors, there are so many problems about them. For example, current generation nuclear reactors allow for significant security around them due to economy of scale. If we suddenly put many small modular reactors in (or close to) cities, are we keeping the same security? We don't have economies of scale anymore to afford this.
- DennisP 5y agoThere's no reason you can't put lots of SMRs at a central site. The main point is to fix the expense and construction time by churning them out in factories or shipyards.
- cycomanic 5y agoYou think there would not be significant regulations around placing lots of SMRs on some central site? Apart from the fact that the whole business of SMRs is still just pie in the sky stuff so far, why would we do it if solar&wind is cheaper and less dangerous?
- cturner 5y agoReprocessing is uneconomical for the sole purpose of energy generation. But is it uneconomical as part of the disposal chain? For example, if you had to send a whole lot of waste to another country, and pay their cost of reprocessing, it may be viable. With modular reactors, you could store them as an array, in a single easily-secured location. It should not be necessary for most of your skilled staff to be present - run them like datacentres.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoFrance has dropped a shitton of nuclear waste in the oceans (preferably closer to neighboring countries' shores than her own) and ever since they've stopped doing so all temporary storage sites have been filling up more and more, with significant political problems to open up new permanent storage sites. I'd hardly call that "solved problem".
- bullen 5y agoI was curious and found this: https://inventaire.andra.fr/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/fr/dossier_dechets_immerges.pdf https://inventaire.andra.fr/sites/default/files/documents/pd... Seems the UK has also dumped some... of course this document is partial to France.
- varajelle 5y agoFrance stopped disposing of nuclear waste in the ocean in 1969[1], at the time it was not a solved problem, but now it is. The reason why it is "filling up" is because the waste need too cool down at the surface for a few decades before being buried. But that's not a problem because there is not so much of it in volume [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactiv...
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago> The reason why it is "filling up" is because the waste need too cool down at the surface for a few decades before being buried. The reason it is filling up is because no one has the political capital to build or develop any of the longer term storage sites. Otherwise, for just storing during cool down periods, it would not be filling up, since they would be at exactly the capacity they were designed for (the overflow being dumped to the ocean^W^W^W being moved to long-term storage). > But that's not a problem because there is not so much of it in volume I'm tired of this argument. It doesn't matter if it is "not so much of it in volume" as long as literally a couple grams of leak within the next 10k+ years will lead to big $$$ in damages (think: permeability and water supply), and therefore no village wants to hear about it. It is still quite premature to claim it is a solved problem when the mess due to the long-term storage (e.g. Cigéo) sites is still regularly on TV.
- bob229 5y agoLol yes only radioactive for 1000 years is a “solved problem”. Clown
- bryanlarsen 5y agoThis may be a valid argument, but it's an irrelevant argument. 10-20 years ago we should have been building hundreds of nuclear plants world-wide. But we didn't and now the economics have shifted. Nuclear has gotten more expensive due to the loss of expertise and solar/wind/batteries have gotten crazy cheap. Why build nuclear for $200/MWh after a 20 year build delay when you can get solar+batteries for $40/MWh in 6 months? (https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-sola https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-...)
- lrem 5y agoIgnoring dollar amounts, are we even able to mine raw materials fast enough to get the required battery capacity in place? Or would the plan be to burn fuel at night and sequester the carbon during the day? That sounds inefficient :/
- bryanlarsen 5y agoYes. LFP batteries use lithium, iron and phosphorous, all extremely common elements world wide.
- lrem 5y agoHmmm, that's the kind of battery that electric cars use? There are some worries about availability of the rare earth metals for them... Are they used for the engines only?
- bryanlarsen 5y agoElectric cars usually use nickel and cobalt in their cathodes, which are rarer and less geographically diverse. Cheap electric cars are switching to LFP though. Rare earths are used in permanent magnets. Most, but not all, motors use those.
- lrem 5y ago
- mrjin 5y ago"its own spent fuel is only dangerous for on the order of a thousand years (600-1200), instead of the 30,000 from current US designs", hmmm, I get it, by reducing the dangerous period of nuclear waste from 30000 year to 600~1200 years resolves the problem per the author... Hopefully there was a typo, it was really meant to be 600 days instead of 600 years, or vent it was really meant 600 months, I just cannot see how that could be deemed as a solution.
- nickpp 5y agoGlobal warming will make most of the planet uninhabitable forever. Is that much better than to have a few well defined spots on Earth dangerous to visit for a mere thousand years?
- nixpulvis 5y agoI'm a fan of Nuclear too, just the reactor is ~1 AU away.
- Jon_Lowtek 5y agoRedefining the term "nuclear waste" as "spent fuel residue" then declaring there is a process to reprocess that, DOES NOT solve the nuclear waste problem.
- napo 5y agoWhy? Intuitively it does feel like the "nuclear waste" part is some radioactive elements that we could re-use for nuclear fissions. If we found a way to re-use the left-overs multiple times until we used all the radioactive parts, that would suggest that it solves the waste problem.
- Jon_Lowtek 5y agoI will try to explain it, but it is probably better to link wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nuclear_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nuclear_waste TLDR: nuclear waste also includes things like the reactor casing, uranium mining tools and similar contaminated equipment. Power wash them and you get slightly less contaminated tools and lots of contaminated water. Many people argue that the stuff coming out of la hagues chimney and waste water pipes also qualifies as nuclear waste, even if it is only "slightly radioactive" per cubic meter air/water pumped through them and "just within legal thresholds". Frances reprocessing plant, which is named as "the solution" in the comment, is by many critics seen as a greenwashing plant that for decades failed to hold its proclaimed commercial quotas while irradiating ocean and atmosphere. And we are still taking fuel rod cycle, there is no repurposing a decades old used reactor casing, or a highly contaminated repurposing plant chimney. The thing with "until we used all the radioactive parts" is, that it is a spherical cow, an idealised mathematical solution that doesn't happen in the real world. Yes la hague reduces spent nuclear fuel, but it produces large amounts of mid level and low level nuclear waste.
- moomin 5y agoHonestly, what does this guy think is the problem? As I understand the problem, the difficulty is that there’s literally nowhere on earth that people want nuclear waste to be stored. Saying “It’s okay, rather than slow radioactivity over 30,000 years it’s going to much more radioactive over 1000 years” isn’t the solution he things it is.
- lumost 5y agoThe plutonium left in the 30,000 year nuclear waste represents a proliferation risk. By burning the plutonium and remaining uranium you are left with shorter lived isotopes that cannot be used in a bomb. Further the number of sites which can promise 30k year storage is quite small. Only Requiring geologic and hydrologic stability for 1k years opens additional options.
- sofixa 5y agoFinland does, they have very long term storage they propose others to use.
- shafyy 5y agoSometimes I feel like I shouldn't have taken Cowen's and Thiel's money as part of the Emergent Ventures grant. I'm not at all aligned with this "American" liberal way of thinking. Let me make the argument against nuclear in terms "they" (and many here on HN also, like it seems) might understand: Costs. Nuclear is and will increasingly be more expensive and complex to build and run than wind and solar. The costs of energy storage, solar and wind are dropping with every watt of capacity installed. The cost of nuclear is not. Here's the source: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth Let me address some arguments I read in this thread: Yes, I know that the sun is not shining at night and there's not always wind blowing, but we will soon have cheap enough batteries to store the energy and solve the intermediacy problem. Yes, one (but by far not the only) driver of nuclear cost is regulation - but guess what - it's fucking necessary to regulate it. No, nuclear is not the only way out of this climate mess (consider 15+ year building times for nuclear power plants). Yes, there might be some interesting small scale applications of nuclear, especially in space exploration, but we all know that this is not the point here.
- Nimitz14 5y agoThe costs are high because noone is building. It's because of all the building that solar is low. If you started building npps the costs would go down a lot.
- lamontcg 5y agoFrance built out nuclear and the costs kept rising. Not every learning curve is positive.
- Nimitz14 5y agoWrong according the parent comments' source. > Not every learning curve is positive. It should be, if it's not then someone is fucking up and that fuck up needs to be fixed, rather than giving up on the entire project.
- shafyy 5y ago
- rogers18445 5y agoNuclear waste is little different from other toxic waste, the only difference is the potential to poison at some proximity without direct contact and even that is mitigated by encasing radioactive matter in non-radioactive matter. Yet we see nuclear waste singled out, for ideological and political reasons.
- jhokanson 5y agoI thought this would be referencing work by Nathan Myhrvold using a new type of reactor that supposedly runs on "spent" nuclear waste and in the event of power failure just stops running safely. Not sure of the other logistic issues involved. The one thing I remember about transitioning to this approach is that Nathan said the US isn't very good about building new things, so they were going to build in China. But then it got shut down right as the anti-China trade policies started a few years ago. Not sure if there are big problems with this approach, but it sounded promising ...
- hollander 5y ago> Maintaining waste for hundreds of years is feasible, and on a whole different scale than a 30,000 year storage plan. Maintining nuclear waste for 500 years is not feasible. I agree that it's on a different level than 30.000 year, but we cannot predict what happens in the next 50 years, let alone the next 500 or 1000 years. The thought experiment is real simple. Look back 500 years - there is no comparison. I'm still afraid that there will be some kind of destruction of society, and who is going to take care of this stuff?
- q1w2 5y agoNuclear waste is buried in underground rock formations with geological ages in the millions of years. It's not a perfect solution, but if we don't start building out nuclear, we're going to flood most cities on Earth in 50 years. All these renewable green energy solutions have failed to provide BASELINE reliable power. Nuclear is literally the only near-zero-carbon solution that works.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoCost, not safety, is the reason that nuclear is not really going to be part of getting to a carbon neutral energy sector. We need to shift a few PWH of electricity production away from (mostly) fossil fuel based energy generation world wide. That's going to take a few decades. Most of the planned new capacity is solar and wind based at a cost that basically is an order of magnitude lower than the typical nuclear setup (just to even build them). The total global nuclear capacity is about 400GW. Or about 3.5PWH/year. The total electricity production is around 25PWH/year. We'd need about 7x more to come close to what we need (discounting market growth). 10x to play it safe. Probably more long term. The cumulative investment for that existing capacity is trillions of dollars spread out over many decades. Off shore wind on the other hand is basically very scalable. A couple of million per turbine (4-5). There are some turbines coming to the market with a 20MW capacity. Let say they cost 5M each (nice round number). 50 of those is basically a GW. And would cost about 250M. Most modern nuclear plants manage a few GW at best and the tend to cost tens of billions of dollars. About 20000 turbines would match existing nuclear capacity. Of course they don't operate at peak performance all the time. So lets call it 30000 turbines. Times 10 is about 300000 turbines. Or about 1,500,000,000,000 $. 1.5 Trillion $ would be the cost of getting to 25PWH production. They last about 25 years. So we'd need to spend about 60 billion per year on adding new capacity to replace the existing capacity. Sounds doable to me. Just last year, about 260GW of wind power was added. The amount of new nuclear capacity was probably closer to 5GW. Do the math. Nuclear is not going to matter. The cost just does not add up.
- petters 5y agoSolved problem or not, the important thing to realize is that it is a problem with zero marginal cost. That is, we don't make the storage problem harder by continuing.
- specialist 5y agoTyler Cowen has separately observed that progress has stagnated and nukes have been stuck with 1950s era designs, without connecting the dots. Explain: Why don't we have liquid sodium, thorium, or traveling wave reactors? Why don't we refine like the French? Why did we stop experimenting? Often, tree huggers are blamed for nuke's decline. Also true: nukes got stuck in amber. Suffered from their own goals. Early success locked in those early choices. Enviros didn't shut down my state's nuclear power plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5 Enviros didn't renege on cleaning up Hanford Nuclear Reservation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site Something else happened. Something financial, bureaucratic, political, psychological, or whatever. Both public capitalism (USSR) and hybrid private capitalism (USA) favored massive top-down initiatives. Too big to fail. We should acknowledge this tendency towards winner-takes-all, in all systems, and then adapt. One great recent contrasting example is NASA & SpaceX. Musk makes great points about SpaceX's progress: NASA had plenty of smart people and could have done a lot more. However, NASA stopped innovating because they weren't allowed to fail. So these massive projects, like the Space Shuttle, have to succeed, no matter the cost, and are not allowed to revisit bygone choices and assumptions, not allowed to adopt state of the art. Another great example is Operation Warp Speed wrt vaccines. One critical success factor was the US Govt's portfolio strategy of placing multiple bets, increasing the likelihood of success. (Leveraging the math of NPV, as detailed in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity.) Versus other nations placed single big bets. With very mixed outcomes, sadly. -- Also true: Easy wins are easily won. Per Wright's Law, innovation and productivity progress may be proportional to investment. But scholarship, our understanding of the world, seems to be punctuated equilibrium. Theories, ideas, metaphors, insights. This progress seems cyclic. Maybe because of Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions, aka "science progresses one funeral at time". Sometimes I wonder if we would have had feasible solar power sooner if Reagan had continued Carter's energy self-reliance efforts. (I don't even know how to factor in obstruction, like Big Oil lobbying against alteratives.) Surely, the economics of solar panels would have slowly improved. But it seems the path towards today's boom relied on advances in material science. Maybe there were other paths we could have explored, I dunno. -- I'm weirdly optimistic about our current times. Because of maths. Society is on the cusp of knowingly adopting risk management strategies. But unlike FDR's (necessary) New Deal strategy of trying everything, we have better tools for right sizing our bets. -- Thanks for reading this far. I really don't know how to talk about this stuff, am struggling to gather and articulate my thoughts.
- cratermoon 5y ago> its own spent fuel is only dangerous for on the order of a thousand years "only".
- _8j50 5y agoNuclear should be used for desalination as much as power generation. Leftover power from desalination should be used to backup wind/solar. There needs to be a hybrid approach not a one or nothing. Use desalinated water to make arid places habitable, perhaps extract economic benefit from that. I think transmitting power from a distant and isolated nuclear powerplant is a big problem (power loss). Does anyone here know why power plants can't transmit power using laser beams (line of sight..or reflected) to downstream substations for power conversion? Also, why aren't sea waves used for power generation more? They're very reliable.
- adultSwim 5y agoHaving dangerous waste for a thousand years is not a solved problem. Fukushima is exactly why we shouldn't go down that path. We now have better, safer, and cheaper alternatives.