3 ms·

Nuclear waste is many magnitudes worse than natural uranium. It is not only way more concentrated, but contains a lot of radioactive isotopes, uranium doesn't c

by _ph_ 4y ago

Nuclear waste is many magnitudes worse than natural uranium. It is not only way more concentrated, but contains a lot of radioactive isotopes, uranium doesn't contain, as a consequence of the nuclear reactions.

espadrine 4y ago
The target should be the initial risk. One day, we can dilute it; for now, it seems fair to store it in case it comes in handy later.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. The problem is: safe storage is difficult to realize and extremely expensive. It needs to be kept safe for many millenia.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. Wellll.. we have really good technology to reprocess the worst and reuse it as fuel. The problem is, we don't do it, because this is a whole lot like what you'd do to make nuclear weapons and there are proliferation and security concerns. > It needs to be kept safe for many millenia. The vast majority of the risk disappears in a few hundred years. Very radioactive also means "decaying quickly". Compare to other industrial byproducts that stay equivalently nasty for tens of thousands of years and more readily dissolve in groundwater.
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      No, we don't have a "good technology". Yes, breeder reactors exist, but e.g. France has given up the technology, the UK has one? The problem is, that this technology is no where economic and breeder reactors are really challenging technology.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        I didn't say anything about breeder reactors. In many jurisdictions, PUREX is routinely used to extract remaining fuel and chemically segregate the worst daughter products. A lot of the actinides can be burnt up in a normal reactor, like 239Pu. Of course, in the long term, transmutation of LLFPs into precious metals is interesting, as is burning up more of the waste in e.g. fast reactors.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    How safe do you actually need it to be? Glass it and chuck it onto the abyssal plain. Watch as the ecological damage is less than a millionth (literally, not hyperbolicly) as damaging as ocean acidification caused by CO2. It really isn't hard, just unintuitive thanks to movies like Godzilla and shouted against by environmentalists who refuse to quantify the damage.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
Less concentrated, perhaps, but natural uranium in rocks is full of fission products.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > but natural uranium in rocks is full of fission products. They're dangerous too. Natural Uranium decay creates radon gas, which seeps up through the ground an accumulates inside buildings. That radon then decays, and the products of that cause lung cancers that kill more than 20 thousand people in America every year, and contribute to 2% of cancer deaths in Europe. The problem is concentrated in a few areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_environment#/media/File:US_homes_over_recommended_radon_levels.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_enviro... I grew up in one of those areas; in public school they taught us about the importance of radon testing and making sure your house, basement particularly, is well ventilated. An frightening anecdote from wikipedia: > The danger of radon exposure in dwellings received more widespread public awareness after 1984, as a result of a case of Stanley Watras, an employee at the Limerick nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Mr. Watras set off the radiation alarms (see Geiger counter) on his way into work for two weeks straight while authorities searched for the source of the contamination. They were shocked to find that the source was astonishingly high levels of radon in his basement and it was not related to the nuclear plant. The risks associated with living in his house were estimated to be equivalent to smoking 135 packs of cigarettes every day.

by _ph_ 4y ago

espadrine 4y ago

The target should be the initial risk. One day, we can dilute it; for now, it seems fair to store it in case it comes in handy later.

_ph_ 4y ago
Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. The problem is: safe storage is difficult to realize and extremely expensive. It needs to be kept safe for many millenia.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. Wellll.. we have really good technology to reprocess the worst and reuse it as fuel. The problem is, we don't do it, because this is a whole lot like what you'd do to make nuclear weapons and there are proliferation and security concerns. > It needs to be kept safe for many millenia. The vast majority of the risk disappears in a few hundred years. Very radioactive also means "decaying quickly". Compare to other industrial byproducts that stay equivalently nasty for tens of thousands of years and more readily dissolve in groundwater.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    No, we don't have a "good technology". Yes, breeder reactors exist, but e.g. France has given up the technology, the UK has one? The problem is, that this technology is no where economic and breeder reactors are really challenging technology.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      I didn't say anything about breeder reactors. In many jurisdictions, PUREX is routinely used to extract remaining fuel and chemically segregate the worst daughter products. A lot of the actinides can be burnt up in a normal reactor, like 239Pu. Of course, in the long term, transmutation of LLFPs into precious metals is interesting, as is burning up more of the waste in e.g. fast reactors.
- concordDance 4y ago
  How safe do you actually need it to be? Glass it and chuck it onto the abyssal plain. Watch as the ecological damage is less than a millionth (literally, not hyperbolicly) as damaging as ocean acidification caused by CO2. It really isn't hard, just unintuitive thanks to movies like Godzilla and shouted against by environmentalists who refuse to quantify the damage.

Turing_Machine 4y ago

Less concentrated, perhaps, but natural uranium in rocks is full of fission products.

robonerd 4y ago
> but natural uranium in rocks is full of fission products. They're dangerous too. Natural Uranium decay creates radon gas, which seeps up through the ground an accumulates inside buildings. That radon then decays, and the products of that cause lung cancers that kill more than 20 thousand people in America every year, and contribute to 2% of cancer deaths in Europe. The problem is concentrated in a few areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_environment#/media/File:US_homes_over_recommended_radon_levels.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_enviro... I grew up in one of those areas; in public school they taught us about the importance of radon testing and making sure your house, basement particularly, is well ventilated. An frightening anecdote from wikipedia: > The danger of radon exposure in dwellings received more widespread public awareness after 1984, as a result of a case of Stanley Watras, an employee at the Limerick nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Mr. Watras set off the radiation alarms (see Geiger counter) on his way into work for two weeks straight while authorities searched for the source of the contamination. They were shocked to find that the source was astonishingly high levels of radon in his basement and it was not related to the nuclear plant. The risks associated with living in his house were estimated to be equivalent to smoking 135 packs of cigarettes every day.