4 ms·

Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the scary propaganda line that there's mountain

by S201 4y ago

Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the scary propaganda line that there's mountains of highly radioactive waste pouring out of nuclear power plants that is just waiting to irradiate our neighborhoods because we don't have anywhere to put it. > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle: > Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized. Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

delecti 4y ago
I agree that nuclear waste is an overblown problem, but that link entirely ignores the structural components that become radioactive. There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.
- S201 4y ago
  Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.
  - mjevans 4y ago
    Not an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated materials, in addition to being harmful to biological entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay and then return it to the raw material stream.
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      The halflife of irradiated equipment isn't that long (it's what you call low level waste), you just bury it and wait till it becomes less radioactive.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    You can't just announce the problem is "easy to solve". The other article on the front page is about the decommissioning of Sellafield, predicted to take over a century. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    elting it down doesn't make it less radioactive. It's still a significant health hazard to work with, making new construction with the remolded materials prohibitively expensive.
- DennisP 4y ago
  That's only a problem for a few decades though.
  - delecti 4y ago
    I don't think that actually meaningfully helps all that much. Storing it for 2 years, 30 years, or 500 years, are nearly the same problem from a political perspective. "Where to keep it" is really the question "where to put it", and then you leave it there because moving it is dealing with the problem "where to put it" all over again.
    - 8note 4y ago
      Today already gives an answer -- just keep it where it is. It grows extraordinarily slowly, so neither the problem not the solution changes on human timescales
    - godelski 4y ago
      Oh, I got your answers. > "Where to keep it" On site. That's what we're doing and that's what works really well. Honestly, it is only the high level stuff that will outlive the powerplant. I know this might not be the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that we probably won't do any significant huge waste repositories (like Yucca Mountain. Though we do have smaller ones) until the waste reaches a significant volume and it actually becomes a problem. Human nature and the inability to do long term planning or something. The good news is that even if we increased our nuclear output, globally, by say 10x or something, we'd still have many decades to resolve that problem because so little waste is actually produced that it can be stored on site relatively easily. Maybe we put things off because in the future we're usually more knowledgeable and have better technology so things are cheaper. Maybe we're just dumb. Either way, it doesn't seem like a huge worry.
- gravitywave 4y ago
  Because the radiation from those structural components is not harmful in the doses people would experience from them. The fear of radiation is wildly exaggerated and is based on the LNT model which every single scientific test of has proved invalid. The threshold appears to be about 25 mSv / day. The worst American nuclear disaster, TMI, exposed some people to a radiation dose equivalent to a single trans-Atlantic flight. What do you think the radiation dose from structural equipment is? One of the worst examples from structural irradiation was when recycled rebar was used to build 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan, the highest annual dose received from that was 910 mSv, or 2.5 mSv / day, significantly less than the threshold dose of 25 mSv / day. The occupants of those apartments had fewer cancers than the average population. Check out the authors article on this: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed-nuclear https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Now do church hill, and the cancer rates around the other mines on the Navajo nation.
    - gravitywave 4y ago
      A terrible mining accident/dam failure, not a storage issue of radioactive structural material. Now go ahead and compare deaths from mining accidents and dam failures from other sources of energy to those associated with nuclear fuel. What do you think the result would be when a nuclear reactor requires hundreds of thousands of times less fuel than any conventional reactor does or hundreds of thousands tons less of concrete and steel and rare elements than renewable generation does? Mining accidents kill some ~10,000 people every year. Mining coal is a large portion of that. The worst damn failure killed 170,000 people. If you don't like deaths from mining accidents then an energy source with millions of times the energy density is far superior. If you don't like deaths from dam failures then maybe putting a dam on every river isn't the greatest idea either.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
- godelski 4y ago
  > There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well. That's actually the VAST majority of what needs to be contained. But these don't need to be contained for thousands or even hundreds of years. We're talking a few years (<=5). This waste also does not require shielding nor cooling and is mostly a precautionary factor ensuring that there is no cross contamination. Low level waste accounts for ~90-95% of waste, intermediate is ~5%-7% (shielding but no cooling. Short lived ILW -- <30 yrs -- is often stored on site and disposed normally. Long lived ILW is just thrown in with HLW in geological depositories for convenience) and high level/trans-uranic waste (<1%-3%) is what needs to be stored in a geological depository (several of which exist btw). Just want to make sure you have the facts before you start forming big opinions. Things like concrete and steel are typically stored on site and later disposed of normally. It's not really the concern of nuclear waste.
beders 4y ago
Keep falling for the narrative of the nuclear power industry. Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
- S201 4y ago
  Man, the source I listed is literally from a guy with a Ph.D on the topic. Where exactly am I "falling for the narrative of the nuclear industry?" An industry which, by the way, hardly exists in the US anymore. > Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping. Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?
  - ImHereToVote 4y ago
    You can tell that the biggest damage from nuclear power plant waste is emotional, by the fact that no one gives a shit about disposal of radioactive coal power plant ash. Even though that shit is dumped next to where people live on the regular, with increases to cancer rates as you would expect.
- 8note 4y ago
  What's the nuclear recycling failure? Isnt the US running nuclear plants off of decommissioned Soviet weapons?
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle This is scifi. MOX has the fuel reused once to provide a small boost in efficiency after being reprocessed in an incredibly polluting weapons facility that needs an excuse to stay open and then the Pu240 still needs dealing with. And the "leftover uranium" is U238 not U235. There is no closed or "mostly closed" fuel cycle, it's just a shell game. And your 40 grams doesn't include the 400 grams of non-radioactive heavy metal enrichment tailings, the 4kg of low level and non-radioactive waste and the 40kg of milling or leaching slurry that would come out of any new mine or half of the existing mines. Then multiply that all by 5 for full decarbonization rather than just electricity.

by S201 4y ago

delecti 4y ago

I agree that nuclear waste is an overblown problem, but that link entirely ignores the structural components that become radioactive. There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.

S201 4y ago
Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.
- mjevans 4y ago
  Not an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated materials, in addition to being harmful to biological entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay and then return it to the raw material stream.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    The halflife of irradiated equipment isn't that long (it's what you call low level waste), you just bury it and wait till it becomes less radioactive.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  You can't just announce the problem is "easy to solve". The other article on the front page is about the decommissioning of Sellafield, predicted to take over a century. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  elting it down doesn't make it less radioactive. It's still a significant health hazard to work with, making new construction with the remolded materials prohibitively expensive.
DennisP 4y ago
That's only a problem for a few decades though.
- delecti 4y ago
  I don't think that actually meaningfully helps all that much. Storing it for 2 years, 30 years, or 500 years, are nearly the same problem from a political perspective. "Where to keep it" is really the question "where to put it", and then you leave it there because moving it is dealing with the problem "where to put it" all over again.
  - 8note 4y ago
    Today already gives an answer -- just keep it where it is. It grows extraordinarily slowly, so neither the problem not the solution changes on human timescales
  - godelski 4y ago
    Oh, I got your answers. > "Where to keep it" On site. That's what we're doing and that's what works really well. Honestly, it is only the high level stuff that will outlive the powerplant. I know this might not be the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that we probably won't do any significant huge waste repositories (like Yucca Mountain. Though we do have smaller ones) until the waste reaches a significant volume and it actually becomes a problem. Human nature and the inability to do long term planning or something. The good news is that even if we increased our nuclear output, globally, by say 10x or something, we'd still have many decades to resolve that problem because so little waste is actually produced that it can be stored on site relatively easily. Maybe we put things off because in the future we're usually more knowledgeable and have better technology so things are cheaper. Maybe we're just dumb. Either way, it doesn't seem like a huge worry.
gravitywave 4y ago
Because the radiation from those structural components is not harmful in the doses people would experience from them. The fear of radiation is wildly exaggerated and is based on the LNT model which every single scientific test of has proved invalid. The threshold appears to be about 25 mSv / day. The worst American nuclear disaster, TMI, exposed some people to a radiation dose equivalent to a single trans-Atlantic flight. What do you think the radiation dose from structural equipment is? One of the worst examples from structural irradiation was when recycled rebar was used to build 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan, the highest annual dose received from that was 910 mSv, or 2.5 mSv / day, significantly less than the threshold dose of 25 mSv / day. The occupants of those apartments had fewer cancers than the average population. Check out the authors article on this: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed-nuclear https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Now do church hill, and the cancer rates around the other mines on the Navajo nation.
  - gravitywave 4y ago
    A terrible mining accident/dam failure, not a storage issue of radioactive structural material. Now go ahead and compare deaths from mining accidents and dam failures from other sources of energy to those associated with nuclear fuel. What do you think the result would be when a nuclear reactor requires hundreds of thousands of times less fuel than any conventional reactor does or hundreds of thousands tons less of concrete and steel and rare elements than renewable generation does? Mining accidents kill some ~10,000 people every year. Mining coal is a large portion of that. The worst damn failure killed 170,000 people. If you don't like deaths from mining accidents then an energy source with millions of times the energy density is far superior. If you don't like deaths from dam failures then maybe putting a dam on every river isn't the greatest idea either.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
godelski 4y ago
> There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well. That's actually the VAST majority of what needs to be contained. But these don't need to be contained for thousands or even hundreds of years. We're talking a few years (<=5). This waste also does not require shielding nor cooling and is mostly a precautionary factor ensuring that there is no cross contamination. Low level waste accounts for ~90-95% of waste, intermediate is ~5%-7% (shielding but no cooling. Short lived ILW -- <30 yrs -- is often stored on site and disposed normally. Long lived ILW is just thrown in with HLW in geological depositories for convenience) and high level/trans-uranic waste (<1%-3%) is what needs to be stored in a geological depository (several of which exist btw). Just want to make sure you have the facts before you start forming big opinions. Things like concrete and steel are typically stored on site and later disposed of normally. It's not really the concern of nuclear waste.

beders 4y ago

Keep falling for the narrative of the nuclear power industry. Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.

S201 4y ago
Man, the source I listed is literally from a guy with a Ph.D on the topic. Where exactly am I "falling for the narrative of the nuclear industry?" An industry which, by the way, hardly exists in the US anymore. > Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping. Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  You can tell that the biggest damage from nuclear power plant waste is emotional, by the fact that no one gives a shit about disposal of radioactive coal power plant ash. Even though that shit is dumped next to where people live on the regular, with increases to cancer rates as you would expect.
8note 4y ago
What's the nuclear recycling failure? Isnt the US running nuclear plants off of decommissioned Soviet weapons?

Schroedingersat 4y ago

> And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle This is scifi. MOX has the fuel reused once to provide a small boost in efficiency after being reprocessed in an incredibly polluting weapons facility that needs an excuse to stay open and then the Pu240 still needs dealing with. And the "leftover uranium" is U238 not U235. There is no closed or "mostly closed" fuel cycle, it's just a shell game. And your 40 grams doesn't include the 400 grams of non-radioactive heavy metal enrichment tailings, the 4kg of low level and non-radioactive waste and the 40kg of milling or leaching slurry that would come out of any new mine or half of the existing mines. Then multiply that all by 5 for full decarbonization rather than just electricity.