4 ms·

> 70 years of nuclear US production fits in one garage box 2000 tonnes of spent fuel is generated each year and that doesn't fit in a garage box.

himinlomax 4y ago
Since we're talking about storing waste near the reactor, I believe what's meant is one garage box per reactor.
candiodari 4y ago
That's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel. Of which 3% is high level waste (which will increase with modular reactors, granted). That's ~30m3. That doesn't sound like a big garage box actually. If you have 1m free space around a car in your garage box that would fit all the high level waste. The low level waste would still easily fit in 1 floor of a parking garage. And we only ever need 100 such floors, plus 1 parking garage floor that needs to be safe for 100k years. For powering the entire US, that doesn't sound like much space. Especially since hopefully we'll only need 99% it for 100 years when we get better options like fusion.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  The US doesn't reprocess spent fuel, so that's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel per year or half the volume of an olympic pool each year. [0] Reprocessing fuel isn't very economical, digging for uranium ore makes a lot more sense. [0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    The claim about the garage box was incorrect, still the amount of spent fuel is not high. Half an olympic pool per year shared among 70 reactors over a period of less than 70 years means each reactors stores about half an olympic pool. A nuclear power plant is fairly big, so half an olympic pool is a tiny bit of real estate inside it. It can easily go up by a factor of 10 and nobody would notice.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      I agree that it's not that much when you consider the amount of energy that is generated from that fuel.

himinlomax 4y ago

Since we're talking about storing waste near the reactor, I believe what's meant is one garage box per reactor.

candiodari 4y ago

That's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel. Of which 3% is high level waste (which will increase with modular reactors, granted). That's ~30m3. That doesn't sound like a big garage box actually. If you have 1m free space around a car in your garage box that would fit all the high level waste. The low level waste would still easily fit in 1 floor of a parking garage. And we only ever need 100 such floors, plus 1 parking garage floor that needs to be safe for 100k years. For powering the entire US, that doesn't sound like much space. Especially since hopefully we'll only need 99% it for 100 years when we get better options like fusion.

cinntaile 4y ago
The US doesn't reprocess spent fuel, so that's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel per year or half the volume of an olympic pool each year. [0] Reprocessing fuel isn't very economical, digging for uranium ore makes a lot more sense. [0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
- credit_guy 4y ago
  The claim about the garage box was incorrect, still the amount of spent fuel is not high. Half an olympic pool per year shared among 70 reactors over a period of less than 70 years means each reactors stores about half an olympic pool. A nuclear power plant is fairly big, so half an olympic pool is a tiny bit of real estate inside it. It can easily go up by a factor of 10 and nobody would notice.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    I agree that it's not that much when you consider the amount of energy that is generated from that fuel.