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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 lik

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.

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.