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Small Modular Reactors Exacerbate Challenges of Nuclear Waste
- scrlk 4y ago>The most highly radioactive waste, mainly spent fuel, will have to be isolated in deep-mined geologic repositories for hundreds of thousands of years. At present, the U.S. has no program to develop a geologic repository, after spending decades and billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. As a result, spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in pools or in dry casks at reactor sites, accumulating at a rate of about 2,000 metric tonnes per year. No mention of fuel reprocessing, or using it in a fast breeder reactor?
- Victerius 4y agoAlso, 2000 metric tons per year is nothing.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoZero is nothing. 2000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste is not nothing.
- viraptor 4y agoNot literally, but 2000 metric tonnes is half the weight of an Olympic pool. That's very insignificant and tiny compared to what gets extracted in coal mines every hour. Finding space for it is not an issue.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoThis isn't coal. It's highly radioactive. Everything related to highly radioactive waste from handling to transport to storage is an issue.
- julienfr112 4y agowhen you burn coal, the residual is also quite radioactive, and the amount is not nothing either.
- viraptor 4y agoYes, I wasn't comparing the materials here, just the weight / volume. We have space for it. Even if we split it into pieces, encased then separately and shared it across many sites to limit issue. Patent comment mentioned the weight/yr like it's a lot, but it really isn't.
- ryathal 4y agoIt's basically nothing. Using weight for nuclear waste is largely for FUD. The volume is really small for the weight we are talking an American football field 10ft deep for the lifetime of US waste. There's no solution because there isn't a meaningful amount of waste to bother with yet.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoFor context, a large container ship can carry 250,000 metric tons.
- bell-cot 4y agoIIR, three problems with reprocessing and fast breeders: - Reprocessing generally involves plenty of kinda-horrific chemicals, and radioactive waste sludge stuff which is also (chemically) pretty horrific. With the (long, bad) track record of such facilities...yeah. Pretty hard to fault anyone who's a NIMBY about 'em. - Reprocessing technology is a critical piece of having a nice, efficient modern nuclear weapons program. That gets into non-proliferation efforts, politics, and how well most national leaders react to "we can have & use that handy technology, but you can't". - Fast breeder reactors are another really-important part of having a nice, efficient modern nuclear weapons program.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago2 and 3 doesn't really matter when talking about countries that already have nuclear weapons. If they would get serious about climate change, they could provide those facilities to other countries at cost.
- bell-cot 4y agoAh... "Government program" and "at cost" have a rather long record of spiraling-out-of-control costs. And recent events in Europe may had lessened the appeal of the "we'll trust our friends, $Other_Country, to faithfully meet our energy needs for the next few decades" strategy.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoWhich hasn't been implemented on the required scale ever. At best, those technologies could scale down the waste problem by a certain factor. It's not like you put in radioactive waste and something completely harmless comes out... There's still some radioactive waste left.
- bluGill 4y ago> The most highly radioactive waste, mainly spent fuel, will have to be isolated in deep-mined geologic repositories for hundreds of thousands of years that is false. High radioactivity means a very short half life. You only need to store such things for a few seconds before they degrade into something else - normally something with a much longer half life. The really bad stuff is only somewhat radioactive: enough to be dangerous, but degrades over a few ten thousand years. There are a lot of atoms in even a small thing, and so even with half life in the tousands of years range odds are still high that several atoms in a bunch will degrade at anytime, enough to push radiation above background levels. Of course things go through many cycles of decay before they become safe.
- supertrope 4y agoReprocessing blurs the line between nuclear fuel for electricity and bomb grade material. It's also more expensive than the one through nuclear fuel cycle. https://www.npr.org/2010/04/09/125740818/nuclear-waste-may-get-a-second-life https://www.npr.org/2010/04/09/125740818/nuclear-waste-may-g...
- hannob 4y agoNo, because a technology once seen as promising that completely failed to deliver its promises and is only used in very small scales today is irrelevant for the debate.
- vimy 4y ago> As a result, spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in pools or in dry casks at reactor sites, accumulating at a rate of about 2,000 metric tonnes per year. Seems to me we already have a working solution. We have been storing nuclear “waste” for more than 60 years like this and nothing ever happened. Problem solved.
- raphaelj 4y agoWhile it might work and be actually safe, that does not mean it does not cost a lot to keep it safe for hundred of years (or more).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoSafe from what? What do you think will happen to the nuclear waste?
- taf2 4y agoPretty sure the big risk is leaking into the water table. See: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/khalaf2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/khalaf2/
- bayesian_horse 4y agoFor example it could get dispersed an irradiate people, maybe to an immediately fatal degree or contribute to cancer etc. That's the main problem. Seeping into the ground water, worst case getting blown up in an explosion. The latter may also happen intentionally, as a dirty bomb. Because betting big on SMRs means they are going to be everywhere... You normally don't hear about these kind of problems because of course the people responsible don't let the simple and stupid stuff happen. But this has to be prevented forever for all practical purposes, for all waste ever generated.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI think ground water contamination is not an issue for a properly chosen site. I think the terrorist issue is an overblown boogeyman. More reactors would give bad actors more access to nuclear material though but I don't think that's an issue with the end of life storage part of the chain.
- Victerius 4y agoBetter some nuclear waste than more greenhouse gases. Having an advanced civilization means we're going to exploit the environment and generate waste products. It doesn't mean we can't exploit the environment sustainably or let our waste products harm the environment, but it does mean that a choice has to be made. We have almost 8 billion humans to house, clothe, and feed. Windmills aren't going to cut it. Unless you want us to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoFalse choice. And hardly anyone is buying this argument.
- elsonrodriguez 4y agoSeems like a fair argument. What are the other options? Every counterargument I come across is either trying to solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology or pays no regard to preserving or improving current quality of life.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoSafe, affordable and scaleable nuclear power is much more "tomorrow's technology" than renewable energy. The waste storage problem has not been solved. SMRs have issues and are still under development. Building plants usually takes decades. Specialized labor is in short supply. Nobody wants a reactor in their neighborhood. Putting reactors were governments could evaporate or are already riddled with corruption is ... unwise. Renewable energy is actually more on track to solve the carbon emissions problem than nuclear energy.
- elsonrodriguez 4y ago> Renewable energy is actually more on track to solve the carbon emissions problem than nuclear energy. "On track to solve" sounds like a forward looking statement, which goes back to my issue of people insisting on solving today's problem with tomorrow's technology. You simply can't put shovel in the ground today and build out a green solution to power manhattan, but you can start constructing a nuclear reactor with a proven design.
- Symmetry 4y agoIt's really hard to evaluate risks when people talk about "nuclear waste". Spent fuel rods are ferociously dangerous and their disposal as nuclear waste needs to be treated with utter seriousness. But "nuclear waste" also includes material less radioactive that granite which we only treat differently than other industrial waste because electricity providers on cost plus contracts teamed up with environmentalists to lobby for absurd rules around how nuclear plants are run.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _Microft 4y agoGerman perspective: this material is measured for radioactivity and released from being subject to nuclear material rules if the levels are low enough. It's then treated like any other waste material. The German Wikipedia article on that [0] states that 97% of the material of a nuclear reactor are eventually cleared like this. [0](de) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freimessen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freimessen
- tlb 4y agoThe cool thing about nuclear waste is that you can measure how radioactive it is with a handheld device. Very convenient compared to biohazard waste.
- dv_dt 4y agoI think this is only partially true. Yes you can measure it, but you also do not want even low radioactivity dust inhaled into ones body for example.
- vorpalhex 4y agoyes but "bury very low radiation waste in a big pit with a no digging sign" seems very sensible compared to longterm spent fuel rod storage.
- pavlov 4y agoFinland is nearing completion on a permanent repository dug 420 m below sea level and meant to last 100,000 years: https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-store-nuclear-waste-can-it-survive-100000-years https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s... The amount of fuel waste is small enough that burying it underground in places like Finland with suitable geology seems like a workable solution. The long-term risk doesn’t compare with the immediate threat from climate change, IMO.
- 7373737373 4y agoQuestion: Why aren't nuclear reactors built underground?
- blue1 4y agoCooling?
- m4rtink 4y agoAlso if you have any kind of groundwater a melted down reactor core might contaminate it.
- aerostable_slug 4y agoWell, you could put the containment completely underground, but you'd need to run your coolant of choice up to the surface (and you'd need air intakes for humans etc). You wouldn't need to with once-through water cooling using a large body of water, a river, or the ocean, but that's not allowed anymore. Note that reactor vessels themselves are sometimes at least partially underground in a reinforced concrete pit in the containment.
- api 4y agoCost and cooling would be my guess. I've always thought deep underwater would make sense, provided the containment was very good. You would never have to worry about a meltdown really since there's an unlimited heat sink readily available and the reactor could be constructed to passively cool itself through convection in a total failure / walk away scenario. Problem is that if you break containment water will carry all that nasty radioactive material everywhere. I'd look at ceramic fuel packaging such as pebble beds or sealed fuel rods that are highly water insoluble, then waste vitrification or encasement in highly water insoluble glass or ceramic materials.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThis isn't going to go over well with the crowd here, I predict.
- sklargh 4y agoI wonder what would occur if a climate-change driven wildfire reached a dry cask waste storage site (probably nothing tbh). The reasonable possibility of this represents the ultimate irony of the anti-nuke movement.
- aerostable_slug 4y agoNothing. They are designed to survive fire among many other contingencies. People who moan and groan about dry cask storage generally have no idea what they are talking about.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThe pro-nuke fanboys want to establish climate change as the only alternative to nuclear power. It's a false choice. Nuclear power has proven so unwieldy and hard to scale that renewable energy is going to be the faster solution, even if it is not fast enough. And with renewable energy, the technology might advance faster than anticipated. With nuclear energy, the risk might turn out more catastrophic than anticipated.
- _ph_ 4y agoIf the containmaint fails, it means widespread contamination. This is basically the reason, Chernobyl was so bad: the graphite in the nuclear core caught fire and the fire launched a lot of radioactive material high into the air. So beyond the impact on the immediate region around the reactor, there were nuclear clouds moving across Europe. In consequence, a lot of forests in Bavaria are still contaminated. Even today, one needs to be a bit carefull eating mushrooms and especially wild boar (who ate a lot of mushrooms...) from the local forests. Also, that was the reason everyone was so thrilled by the news that Russian troups camped and lit fires in the contaminated forests around the reactor, both endangering themselves and spreading more radioactivity. Of course there is much less material involved than with the original accident, but still one wants to avoid any of this.
- hrgiger 4y agoFew years ago I asked ESA via email the possibility of sending waste to space via micro satellites, i.e. to the sun, they didnt answer probably question was too stupid, maybe someone here knowledgeable can throw 2 cents about why its not good solution?
- gravypod 4y agoI'm not experienced in this but if there was a launch failure isn't that basically a dirty bomb?
- hrgiger 4y agoyes, I can take that as an answer:)
- vihren 4y agoThat's the issue exactly. Many things can go wrong if you place a lot of radioactive material on top of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks.
- aerostable_slug 4y agoNot if it's built correctly. The problem is that would be weight-prohibitive (vs. putting a small nuclear thermoelectric generator into a very tough housing, which has been done for years).
- danpalmer 4y agoThere are a few reasons why this is a bad idea: 1) Launch failure could scatter nuclear waste over a large area 2) It takes a LOT of delta-V to fire something into the sun. It took the world's most powerful rocket to put the Parker Solar Probe even close to the sun and that was only 700kg. 3) If it doesn't get to the sun it could easily return to Earth accidentally.
- Symmetry 4y ago2) It's actually a lot easier to speed something up enough to eject it from the solar system than it is to slow it down enough to let it fall into the Sun. the first is only 18 km/s but the later is 30 and with the tyranny of the rocket equation every bit of delta-v is harder than the last.
- baybal2 4y ago
- throw0101a 4y agoMeanwhile, "The energy in nuclear waste could power the U.S. for 100 years, but the technology was never commercialized": > There is enough energy in the nuclear waste in the United States to power the entire country for 100 years, and doing so could help solve the thorny and politically fraught problem of managing spent nuclear waste. > That’s according to Jess C. Gehin, an associate laboratory director at Idaho National Laboratory, one of the government’s premier energy research labs. * https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power...
- _ph_ 4y agoYes. Fast breeders are not new. But they are even more difficult than plain nuclear reactors. France built some, but gave up on the technology.
- pmyteh 4y agoYeah. The UK tried too, with a prototype reactor at Dounreay. We had all kinds of operational problems and gave up when it became apparent that the falling level of new nuclear installations meant that we weren't going to be short of uranium as a primary fuel. The economics, without a fuel shortage, were awful.
- Manuel_D 4y agoYou could also reprocess the fuel, and use normal reactors.
- tiku 4y agoI still don't get why we can't use the waste, it gives off heat and radiation, so why can't we turn that into electricity? Is it not potable enough? What is the problem?
- _ph_ 4y agoBy far, not enough heat and radiation. With some luck you could drive the lights around the storage depots.
- tlb 4y agoMost waste doesn't give off very much heat unless you get enough of it close together to get a chain reaction going. A lump of stuff radioactive enough to kill you in minutes barely produces enough heat to get warm. So you have to get a chain reaction going if you want to drive a steam turbine with it. But if you get it a little too close together, it goes boom. So for all the reasons that nuclear reactors are expensive, a waste heat generator would be larger and at least as complex.
- diamondlovesyou 4y ago> But if you get it a little too close together, it goes boom. It won't go boom. One of the difficulties (of many) of the Manhattan project was that it was really really difficult to get fissile material together fast enough to cause a significant explosion. Those conditions are impossible in reactors. What does happen is that gaseous hydrogen is generated and that subsequently explodes.
- ncmncm 4y agoChernobyl made an entirely big enough boom for any practical purpose.
- ratdragon 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor is supposed to be the solution. A company called TerraPower is planning to build a test reactor soon.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoI'm serious when I say we should dump it all into a pit in the middle of Antarctica. Why can't we do this?
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoYou don't want North Korea to send a boat to Antarctica and grab a bunch of enriched uranium.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoIf NK and other evil civilizations out-live our navies, I say they're welcome to whatever they can haul.
- tsol 4y agoThey don't have to outlive us, they just have to wait until our navy is occupied with a different engagement. Why open the world up to such a risk?
- Turing_Machine 4y agoWaste is pretty much not going to be enriched uranium, by definition. No one would be dumping enriched uranium in the first place... it's expensive, yo. Low-enriched uranium (suitable for burning in standard power reactors) is 3-5% U-235 Highly-enriched uranium (suitable for building bombs) is >= 20% U-235. Spent fuel is typically < 1% U-235.
- throw827474737 4y agobecause this location is so accessible and not already melting fast enough?!
- _ph_ 4y agoWe could... but is it a good idea?
- namlem 4y agoAntarctica is protected by various international treaties. Plus it's not necessary, there are plenty of good places to store nuclear waste. Political opposition is the real problem. Yucca mountain should never have been scrapped.
- ethagknight 4y agoThis is not on the topic of the article, but could nuclear waste be the ultimate storage of value for a cryptocurrency-type “coin”?? Very expensive and energy intensive to produce, very limited supply, must be closely guarded but not really all that dangerous in small amounts?? What if the US government agreed to purchase “coined” waste after 30 years in circulation for a set, relatively high price, making it, in effect, a treasury or bond? At the end of the day, this would incentivize production of nuclear power, kick the can down the road, incentivizes the US government to research storage or processing techniques or simply resell back into the market.
- ethagknight 4y agoThis comment got downvoted but I still think its an interesting and substantive idea to solve and worthy of discussion. Nuclear waste is very difficult to produce but is manufactured as a byproduct of a very valuable process, and is produced in such limited quantities that it creates a very interesting "Spent Nuclear Fuel Standard" in lieu of gold or USD. The source of a given piece of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) can presumably be verified for authenticity, and while its not a necessity, a blockchain can assist with market making and transactions so that the actual SNF itself can remain in secured locations. If the whole effort is backstopped by the potential to find a process 30 years out that can squeeze more energy out of old SNF or further refine it, then there's an interesting potential value store as well.
- ncmncm 4y agoGrift is grift, however spun.
- kkfx 4y agoReasons behind them are not efficiency nor safety but flexibility: in a changing world we need flexible infra, that's while while most denied it we really push air and sea research for logistic because they do not need roads or rails, or they do not needs thing that demand years, decades to be built and can't change much in quick terms. For nuclear the target is being able to deploy many small plants where we need them quickly vs create in a decade or more one big + adapt the electricity grid to that. Let's say a powerful landslide crush a main high-voltage line: how many people are affected? How many cascading effects? How much time and cost to restore? Vs how quick and economic is just deliver by air few diesel generators? The issue with them is the hyper-big amount of fuel they need, but if we ever been able to create really small nuclear generator we can imagine future small cities with local-only infra for their electricity needs. That allow for hyper-big flexibility. I suspect such push is done because of climate change and wars that probably, inevitably follow, so we want to be able to keep a kind of civil society in the storm... There will be a rush for the arctic but with melting permafrost is next to impossible developing infra there beside a very small scale. There will be a vast set of mass relocation due to floods and wildfires so again we need to be able to respond in emergency mode quickly. Probably no one is really sure what will happen, at what scale, in how many years and anyway planning for space exploration expansion we need something small enough to fit satellites and ships to Mars and Moon so, for earth we will need them to de-carbonize shipping... They are not something we can build for tomorrow morning so research on them is useful for many reasons. I can't be sure, but IMVHO that's the most significant reasons behind this push.
- clarionbell 4y agoI find it interesting that just when SMRs are getting a bit, and just a bit in a grand scheme of things, of traction, the old nuclear waster argument is revived. Weren't the real reasons why we can't use nuclear power the long time needed to finish a plant and unreasonable economics?
- dane-pgp 4y agoTo be fair, the time needed to build the necessary production lines and then hundreds of SMRs is even less certain than the time needed for building Large Old-fashioned Reactors (which can take 3x longer than planned[0]), and the economics are similarly unproven. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
- banku_brougham 4y ago>the old nuclear waste argument is revived. The nuclear waste problem never goes away, that's what makes nuclear power special. (I am not a nuclear power engineer.)
- ncmncm 4y agoAny argument that gets traction and makes building more of those ramshackle contraptions harder to start is a net good. Economics absolutely dictates no new reactors, but economics is frequently overwhelmed, strong-armed by politics.
- p1mrx 4y agoCunningham's Law: "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." This paper seems to have rustled a lot of feathers: - NuScale's rebuttal: https://s24.q4cdn.com/104943030/files/PNAS-Letter-Reyes-NuScale-5.31.22-(002).pdf https://s24.q4cdn.com/104943030/files/PNAS-Letter-Reyes-NuSc... - Terrestrial Energy's rebuttal: https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Letter-to-PNAS-22-06-03-final2.pdf https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06...
- ncmncm 4y agoThe correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation.) Any citation suggesting competitiveness always neglects the subsidy of disaster insurance, which cost would exceed operations cost if paid. Instead, society at large pays it. Renewables are by a large margin the cheapest sustainable energy production systems ever fielded. Storage cost is falling even faster than renewables costs still are. (Until we have enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage while meeting demand, building out substantial storage would be a misuse of funds better spent getting to that point. By that time, storage will be very, very cheap.) Renewables are being built out faster than ever, but still way too slowly to fend off climate catastrophe. Diverting money from renewables build-out to anything else brings catastrophe nearer.
- p1mrx 4y agoI think this principle should drive cost competition: https://www.un.org/en/energy-compacts/page/compact-247-carbon-free-energy https://www.un.org/en/energy-compacts/page/compact-247-carbo... If enough people/companies commit to buying carbon-free energy for every hour of the year, then money will naturally flow toward reliable sources. Let the best technology win.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- karaterobot 4y ago> At present, the U.S. has no program to develop a geologic repository, after spending decades and billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. As a result, spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in pools or in dry casks at reactor sites, accumulating at a rate of about 2,000 metric tonnes per year. Yucca Mountain would have been the solution, but it was blocked and then defunded. Then, the absence of a permanent storage facility got used as an argument against expanding nuclear, in some cases by the same people.
- dv_dt 4y agoCommercial nuclear utilities could build their own private facility - but one of the fundamental problems with nuclear technology is that it would not be cost effective. Renewables are much better in this respect - through there is still a lifetime material cycle to think of, it's much simpler a problem to address.
- ryathal 4y agoIt's really not, they just get a pass on disposal because it's not scary enough. Used windmill blades are going to be an actual problem in the near future, but no renewable company has to buy land to hold 100 years of turbine blades or solar panels. Nuclear waste only exists as a problem to kill investment. We'd just dump it deep in the ocean, but it's too valuable for future use (unlike renewable waste).
- Gwypaas 4y agoThey're not a problem. It's simply that in countries which still allow landfills it's the most cost efficient method since fiberglass itself is very low value. You also have the trouble of that wind turbines designed 20-30 years ago didn't have recycling in mind so they. It is a completely made up issue to allow the nuclear industry to say "what about wind turbine blades?!" trying to draw an equivalency between nuclear waste and inert fiber glass. > The catch here is that while wind turbine blade recycling is technically possible, landfill disposal remains the most cost-efficient and accessible option in many cases. > “Physical and material scientists can recycle blades now," Eric Lantz, wind analysis manager at National Renewable Energy Laboratory told USA TODAY in an email. "But, broadly speaking, scaling up recycling technologies will require more research and development to maximize the value of the recycled materials and improve the economics of the processes.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact-check-recycling-can-keep-wind-turbine-blades-out-landfills/8647981002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fac...
- nickbauman 4y agoOur nuclear storage problem will not change whether or not we build more nuclear power plants or shutter them. The problem will remain "forever" regardless. So I am for new nuclear power projects because we will need generations of people that can steward the waste regardless. And it's important to keep the ability and technical expertise with these materials for centuries. If the industry is abandoned the risk of a mishandling the waste will increase every year.
- petre 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31595699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31595699
- banku_brougham 4y agoI'm bitterly disappointed that the Yucca mountain site was decommissioned. The explorations of ways to communicate danger to humans of unknown language, culture, government and history in > 10000 years was fascinating work.