4 ms·

what is france doing with all the waste? it's a country a little bit larger than california is with a bit more population... i suppose we could find a way to st

what is france doing with all the waste? it's a country a little bit larger than california is with a bit more population... i suppose we could find a way to store all that waste in california somewhere since it is a big state with large swaths of land that are uninhabited. my dream is to have the main reactors give a lot of the power and then have smaller reactors that use those waste products to turn them into shorter half-lived materials. if i recall correctly liquid salt thorium was something that was trying to do that and it also had the feature that it failed safe instead of a meltdown.

therealdrag0 3y ago
Waste doesn’t take up much space does it?
- survirtual 3y ago
  It does not. The problem is, we can see and measure it. If anything went wrong, it’d be clear who messed up, so it requires actual time and effort to do it right. That’s yucky. People like it more when the waste is invisible and airborne, for the wind and their children to deal with instead of them. This provides a better level of blame dispersion. As they say, out of sight out of mind.
tokai 3y ago
They recycle it. Then store the unrecyclable remains in three different facilities. https://international.andra.fr/operational-facilities https://international.andra.fr/operational-facilities
Zopieux 3y ago
99% of nuc waste is low to medium life, low to medium radioactivity and is mostly recyclable. Russia does most of the recycling. The total amount (from the beginning of France's nuclear energy production 50+y ago) of highly radioactive, non-reusable waste fits in a cube not bigger than the Eiffel tower, and the goal is to bury that in geological storage, but dumb politics are opposing this (for dumb reasons that were debunked a thousand times).
_ache_ 3y ago
France is 40% larger than Califonia in area and population. Made it the biggest country of the EU (in size, not population).

therealdrag0 3y ago

Waste doesn’t take up much space does it?

survirtual 3y ago
It does not. The problem is, we can see and measure it. If anything went wrong, it’d be clear who messed up, so it requires actual time and effort to do it right. That’s yucky. People like it more when the waste is invisible and airborne, for the wind and their children to deal with instead of them. This provides a better level of blame dispersion. As they say, out of sight out of mind.

tokai 3y ago

They recycle it. Then store the unrecyclable remains in three different facilities. https://international.andra.fr/operational-facilities https://international.andra.fr/operational-facilities

Zopieux 3y ago

99% of nuc waste is low to medium life, low to medium radioactivity and is mostly recyclable. Russia does most of the recycling. The total amount (from the beginning of France's nuclear energy production 50+y ago) of highly radioactive, non-reusable waste fits in a cube not bigger than the Eiffel tower, and the goal is to bury that in geological storage, but dumb politics are opposing this (for dumb reasons that were debunked a thousand times).

_ache_ 3y ago

France is 40% larger than Califonia in area and population. Made it the biggest country of the EU (in size, not population).