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Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up to put aside proper funds to s
by evolve2k 4y ago
Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up to put aside proper funds to steward waste for 10,000 years.
- planetsprite 4y agoAll nuclear waste ever produced in the US could be stored in an area the size of a football field
- ben_w 4y agoWhile true, this does not make it popular or lead to NIMBYs changing their mind. How important this is varies by nation, but it’s not nothing in most places.
- planetsprite 4y agoNuclear power is unpopular because of media messaging. Coal releases more radiation into the environment on average, even accounting for Chernobyl and Fukushima.
- ben_w 4y agoAlso because of the naturalism fallacy, and because of word association between “nuclear power” and “nuclear weapons”, and because of the zero-risk bias (most people have a preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk).
- 6581 4y agoThat's a rather meaningless assertion without stating how high you'd need to stack it.
- planetsprite 4y ago30 feet
- Krasnol 4y agoYou should check up on that Shellenberger meme before you spread it. That was is just the fuel and fuel is just a small part of all the waste. https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/ https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
- planetsprite 4y agohowever the fuel constitutes 97% of the radiation of all waste
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Krasnol 4y agoWhich is just another derailment phrase and completely useless for the discussion of nuclear waste. Yes it is very radioactive but that doesn't mean that the rest can be stored on a landfill. It is still so radioactive that we don't have a proper solution for it's storage. Only because the fuel is SO MUCH MORE radioactive, doesn't make the rest disappear or the football field argument valid in any way.
- PaulHoule 4y agoMost of the waste is Uranium which can be put back into reactors, the most dangerous long-lived element in the waste is Plutonium which is also a good nuclear fuel. Remove those elements plus the higher actinides (Neptunium, Americium, Curium, ...) and almost all of the radioactivity in the fission products has decayed by 500 years... It's less radioactive at that point than the Uranium ore was when it was mined. Burying the fuel rods was a half-baked idea that was come up with in a hurry in the 1970s because of racist fears that brown people would learn to reprocess nuclear fuel and develop nuclear weapons. Now we are facing the certain danger of getting fried by global warming as opposed to a hypothetical threat of nuclear war.
- Tao332 4y ago
- Tao332 4y agoHaha. Flagged? I really wanted to know more about the racial motivation behind burying nuclear waste! Guess it's a sensitive topic around here.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThis is what caused the Carter Administration to freak out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d... with this result https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/keeny.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
- Tao332 4y agoI can't find anything about race in there.
- deepsun 4y agoNuclear waste is not a problem at all. There's just a very very tiny amount of it produced, so storing and securing it, even with super-high expensive security is very cheap from the general viewpoint.