3 ms·
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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoI agree that it's not that much when you consider the amount of energy that is generated from that fuel.