23 ms·

> The challenge with waste storage and other risks are real of course But the “challenge” with waste storage is a big lie. The French have all the waste ever

by rosndo 5y ago

> The challenge with waste storage and other risks are real of course But the “challenge” with waste storage is a big lie. The French have all the waste ever generated by their nuclear program sitting under the floor of a single room. The quantities of “waste” generated by nuclear plants are not really meaningful even over long time horizons.

chinathrow 5y ago
How can you be so sure about that? We have like waste from max 40-50 years now sitting around and the problem is still unsolved. I doubt that civilisation can manage to manage this waste for 100'000y to come.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  It's sitting around. Solid. Inert. Meanwhile there are gigatons of CO2 released to the atmosphere every year that causes an extremely acute global problem and we have no idea what to do to that either.
  - chinathrow 5y ago
    My post was not about CO2 (the fact that I hate that we emit way too much that I remove some via Stripe Climatr). Sitting nuclear waste still needs to be maintained for centuries to come and we still have no solition for that.
    - Paradigma11 5y ago
      But there is little difference to maintain the current amount of waste or 100 times as much.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rosndo 5y ago
  Because the quantities of waste are laughable https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-waste-is-there-in-the-world/ https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-wast... (The HLW is what people mostly worry about) Even in a weird scenario where we don’t start recycling our nuclear “waste”, storing 100000x the current amounts would not present a particularly huge challenge.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  The really radioactive stuff (fission products) is basically gone after 300 years. The longer-lived stuff (transuranic elements: plutonium etc) could in theory be recycled and burned up in another reactor, though this probably won't happen in practice. It's not as scary as the fission products though: it's less mobile, less bioavailable, less radioactive, etc. Still definitely a hazard, but a lower grade of hazard.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  The waste will be radioactive for 100000 years, but it will not be dangerous for that long. Low levels of radioactivity is not a problem. It takes a much shorter time for the waste to reach the same level of radioactivity that the original ore that we dug out of the earth had.
foverzar 5y ago
It's not even an actual "waste". Given a proper nuclear cycle and a proper diversity of reactors, you can both extract precious isotopes and reuse "waste" as fuel for another kind of reactor. AFAIK, Russia, for example, had got extremely good at cycling nuclear materials. I assume it is due to the fact that after Chernobyl they were actually forced to invest in nuclear energy due to safety reasons, rather then abandon it.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  The detail you’re overlooking is that it stays active for thousands of years, so even a small volume will end up being very costly. And other countries have much higher volume of waste stored, how about 40000m3? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_...
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    The most radioactive fraction has relatively short lifetimes. (There is only so much energy that can be radiated out.) Even the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl is much less radioactive now, mere 35 years after the accident. The less radioactive fraction will indeed stay active for thousands of years, but its level of radiation will be closer to natural sources than to an atomic bomb.
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      There's a sour spot of isotopes with half-lives of 1-100 thousands years, these are still very radioactive but will not decay in any forseeable future.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Uh, there's plenty of spent fuel components that aren't fissile. It's not a perpetual motion machine. So to say that it's not "actual waste" is rather unhelpful.
  - 5y ago
logifail 5y ago
> [..] all the waste ever generated [...] All the waste? https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.... "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020"
- Accujack 5y ago
  Those are numbers for the waste from bomb making, not power generation.
  - yencabulator 5y ago
    Those two have been linked together ever since the discovery of the chain reactions. The US nuclear weapons are managed by the Department of Energy..
- rosndo 5y ago
  >All the waste? Probably not the most boring kind of waste. > "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020" It’s worth noting that even a million cubic feet isn’t a big quantity, this is something one guy with an excavator could feasibly bury. (Not that we should actually pursue the guy-with-excavator disposal strategy)
  - petre 5y ago
    It's 28317 cubic metres or 500 residential swimming pools, 4 by 7 by 2 metres. By contrast 250000 cubic metres of concrete went into OL3[1]. This is also low level waste such as Fukushima rubble. For reference the UK has LLW in storage amounting to 14700 cubic metres or 17800 tonnes by mass, with an activity of 11 terabecquerels. These are the estimates for decomissioning of all the Olkiluoto reactors[2]: "The amount of decommissioning waste is around 32 000 m3, generated from Olkiluoto 1 and 2 mainly during 2068-2076. The amount of Olkiluoto 3 decommissioning waste is estimated to be around 11000 m3 before packing and generated during 2079-2085. Additionally there will be approximately 2000 m3 of waste from the spent fuel interim storage decommissioning to be generated around 2100." 1. https://www.tvo.fi/uploads/File/2009/OL3_Basic_Facts_2009.pdf 2. https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/fi_2nd_nr.pdf
doikor 5y ago
Also Finland has for the most part solved our nuclear waste problem. A couple km down the road from Olkiluoto is Onkalo which is basically ready with now going through final checkups and to be put into use in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- spurgu 5y ago
  Yup. The risk factor there is that humans might go extinct and then aliens visit Earth in 20k years and decide to start digging.
  - doikor 5y ago
    Yeah the risks are really low. Basically you would have to dig down there for any risk. The risk simulations they did for it are hilarious to read This is the worst case scenario they thought about > Posiva on arvioinut ydinjätteiden pahimpia mahdollisia seurauksia. Skenaariossa ydinkanisteri syöpyisi puhki tuhannessa vuodessa lasketun sadantuhannen vuoden sijaan ja samanaikaisesti sitä ympäröivä savipuskuri katoaisi selittämättömästi. Lisäksi pohjavesi kulkisikin ylöspäin ja paikan päälle rakennettaisiin kaupunki. Ihminen, joka eläisi kehdosta hautaan saastuneimmalla neliömetrillä ja söisi vain sillä kasvanutta ruokaa ja joisi saastuneinta vettä, saisi vain kolminkertaisen säteilyannoksen Tampereen Pispalassa nyt asuviin ihmisiin nähden. Rough translation > Posivat has estimated the worst case scenarios. In the case the vessels would corrode in 1000 years instead of the calculated 100000 years and the clay barrier would "disappear" (nobody knows how it would do that) and the ground water would move upwards (it moves down in that area) and someone built a city above it and ate from crops grown on the worst possible radiated land they would get 3x the lifetime radiation does of someone living in Piispala, Tampere (the stuff in quotes is my additions)
    - spurgu 5y ago
      Hahaha, hilarious indeed!

by rosndo 5y ago

chinathrow 5y ago

How can you be so sure about that? We have like waste from max 40-50 years now sitting around and the problem is still unsolved. I doubt that civilisation can manage to manage this waste for 100'000y to come.

Sharlin 5y ago
It's sitting around. Solid. Inert. Meanwhile there are gigatons of CO2 released to the atmosphere every year that causes an extremely acute global problem and we have no idea what to do to that either.
- chinathrow 5y ago
  My post was not about CO2 (the fact that I hate that we emit way too much that I remove some via Stripe Climatr). Sitting nuclear waste still needs to be maintained for centuries to come and we still have no solition for that.
  - Paradigma11 5y ago
    But there is little difference to maintain the current amount of waste or 100 times as much.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rosndo 5y ago
Because the quantities of waste are laughable https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-waste-is-there-in-the-world/ https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-wast... (The HLW is what people mostly worry about) Even in a weird scenario where we don’t start recycling our nuclear “waste”, storing 100000x the current amounts would not present a particularly huge challenge.
HPsquared 5y ago
The really radioactive stuff (fission products) is basically gone after 300 years. The longer-lived stuff (transuranic elements: plutonium etc) could in theory be recycled and burned up in another reactor, though this probably won't happen in practice. It's not as scary as the fission products though: it's less mobile, less bioavailable, less radioactive, etc. Still definitely a hazard, but a lower grade of hazard.
user-the-name 5y ago
The waste will be radioactive for 100000 years, but it will not be dangerous for that long. Low levels of radioactivity is not a problem. It takes a much shorter time for the waste to reach the same level of radioactivity that the original ore that we dug out of the earth had.

foverzar 5y ago

It's not even an actual "waste". Given a proper nuclear cycle and a proper diversity of reactors, you can both extract precious isotopes and reuse "waste" as fuel for another kind of reactor. AFAIK, Russia, for example, had got extremely good at cycling nuclear materials. I assume it is due to the fact that after Chernobyl they were actually forced to invest in nuclear energy due to safety reasons, rather then abandon it.

ricardobeat 5y ago
The detail you’re overlooking is that it stays active for thousands of years, so even a small volume will end up being very costly. And other countries have much higher volume of waste stored, how about 40000m3? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_...
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  The most radioactive fraction has relatively short lifetimes. (There is only so much energy that can be radiated out.) Even the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl is much less radioactive now, mere 35 years after the accident. The less radioactive fraction will indeed stay active for thousands of years, but its level of radiation will be closer to natural sources than to an atomic bomb.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    There's a sour spot of isotopes with half-lives of 1-100 thousands years, these are still very radioactive but will not decay in any forseeable future.
jhgb 5y ago
Uh, there's plenty of spent fuel components that aren't fissile. It's not a perpetual motion machine. So to say that it's not "actual waste" is rather unhelpful.
- 5y ago

logifail 5y ago

> [..] all the waste ever generated [...] All the waste? https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/statistics.... "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020"

Accujack 5y ago
Those are numbers for the waste from bomb making, not power generation.
- yencabulator 5y ago
  Those two have been linked together ever since the discovery of the chain reactions. The US nuclear weapons are managed by the Department of Energy..
rosndo 5y ago
>All the waste? Probably not the most boring kind of waste. > "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020" It’s worth noting that even a million cubic feet isn’t a big quantity, this is something one guy with an excavator could feasibly bury. (Not that we should actually pursue the guy-with-excavator disposal strategy)
- petre 5y ago
  It's 28317 cubic metres or 500 residential swimming pools, 4 by 7 by 2 metres. By contrast 250000 cubic metres of concrete went into OL3[1]. This is also low level waste such as Fukushima rubble. For reference the UK has LLW in storage amounting to 14700 cubic metres or 17800 tonnes by mass, with an activity of 11 terabecquerels. These are the estimates for decomissioning of all the Olkiluoto reactors[2]: "The amount of decommissioning waste is around 32 000 m3, generated from Olkiluoto 1 and 2 mainly during 2068-2076. The amount of Olkiluoto 3 decommissioning waste is estimated to be around 11000 m3 before packing and generated during 2079-2085. Additionally there will be approximately 2000 m3 of waste from the spent fuel interim storage decommissioning to be generated around 2100." 1. https://www.tvo.fi/uploads/File/2009/OL3_Basic_Facts_2009.pdf 2. https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/fi_2nd_nr.pdf

doikor 5y ago

Also Finland has for the most part solved our nuclear waste problem. A couple km down the road from Olkiluoto is Onkalo which is basically ready with now going through final checkups and to be put into use in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

spurgu 5y ago
Yup. The risk factor there is that humans might go extinct and then aliens visit Earth in 20k years and decide to start digging.
- doikor 5y ago
  Yeah the risks are really low. Basically you would have to dig down there for any risk. The risk simulations they did for it are hilarious to read This is the worst case scenario they thought about > Posiva on arvioinut ydinjätteiden pahimpia mahdollisia seurauksia. Skenaariossa ydinkanisteri syöpyisi puhki tuhannessa vuodessa lasketun sadantuhannen vuoden sijaan ja samanaikaisesti sitä ympäröivä savipuskuri katoaisi selittämättömästi. Lisäksi pohjavesi kulkisikin ylöspäin ja paikan päälle rakennettaisiin kaupunki. Ihminen, joka eläisi kehdosta hautaan saastuneimmalla neliömetrillä ja söisi vain sillä kasvanutta ruokaa ja joisi saastuneinta vettä, saisi vain kolminkertaisen säteilyannoksen Tampereen Pispalassa nyt asuviin ihmisiin nähden. Rough translation > Posivat has estimated the worst case scenarios. In the case the vessels would corrode in 1000 years instead of the calculated 100000 years and the clay barrier would "disappear" (nobody knows how it would do that) and the ground water would move upwards (it moves down in that area) and someone built a city above it and ate from crops grown on the worst possible radiated land they would get 3x the lifetime radiation does of someone living in Piispala, Tampere (the stuff in quotes is my additions)
  - spurgu 5y ago
    Hahaha, hilarious indeed!