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> spent nuclear fuel can be recycled even Where has this shown to be realistic at scale? Every "pro nuclear" argument always seems to include some experimenta

> spent nuclear fuel can be recycled even Where has this shown to be realistic at scale? Every "pro nuclear" argument always seems to include some experimental technology that's either never been made cost effective or never made it out of the lab. > components that last 10-30 years, It's not like nuclear plants last forever. Most seem to run for about 50 years and then need another 50 to decontaminate. The only reason there's not an existing industry to mass process old solar cells and windmill parts is that they've only recently started mass adoption - there weren't enough being decommissioned for an industry to exist around it yet.

GeneralMayhem 3y ago
> Where has this shown to be realistic at scale? France. But also, even if the fuel isn't optimally recycled, nuclear power is realistic. "Put it in a can and bury it under a mountain" is a sufficient waste disposal strategy for a pretty long time, and certainly much less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy" of "blast it all into the atmosphere and let God sort it out". The US produces about 18% of its energy from nuclear today, and generates about 2000 tons of waste per year. Presumably that means that going all-nuclear would generate about 11,000 tons per year. The Yucca Mountain facility alone had a capacity of 77,000 tons - so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country.
- foolfoolz 3y ago
  nuclear has been declining in france for 20 years
  - para_parolu 3y ago
    And now they have to play putin games because they need gas.
    - crote 3y ago
      Not really. Pre-war it only imported 17% from Russia, and like most European countries it has since switched to other suppliers. Turns out bringing LNG regasification plants online can be done in a few months, and plenty of countries are willing and able to supply that.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        Yeah now we in Europe pay 3x more for energy that we used to, and the process of liquifying natural gas generates 2-se the emissions that we did when we got gas from pipeline. Shipping LNG around the world is a greenwashing disaster, it's like when Europe burns biomass from trees chopped in the amazon and calls it 'sustainable'
        crote 3y ago
        Electricity peaked in August 2022, and has returned pretty much back to pre-war levels. You might be paying 3x more, but your electricity provider definitely is not. Besides, the claim I responded to was that the decline of nuclear in France led to a dependency on Russia for gas. The fact that Europe rapidly switched to LNG shows that this is not true, regardless of your opinion about anything else. Nobody is pretending that LNG is green, and biomass is heavily criticized for exactly that reason.
  - evilos 3y ago
    This was literally legislated by green party politicians. They passed a law mandating that the nuclear fleet must go from 75% to 50% of generation. They also forced the company that owns the fleet (EDF) to sell power at a loss to energy traders and placed a tax on all power bills that went directly to funding their renewable portfolio. Thankfully, they have changed course since the war and are now planning a new nuclear buildout as well as have removed the 50% cap. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-parliament-votes-nuclear-plan-with-large-majority-2023-03-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-parliament-votes...
- walls 3y ago
  > "Put it in a can and bury it under a mountain" is a sufficient waste disposal strategy for a pretty long time It's simple in theory, not so much in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    I wonder if hurling it into the sun could be made cost effective.
    - stephenr 3y ago
      The problem is you need to get it into space first, which means putting it on top of a rocket. Rockets have this nasty habit where sometimes they blow up, and whatever they're carrying gets vaporised into the atmosphere.
    - ericbarrett 3y ago
      It actually takes much less energy to throw something out of the solar system than into the sun: 17 km/s deltaV versus 28 km/s.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      No. Kurzgesagt has a good video about this on YouTube. Launching nuclear waste into space is not even remotely cost effective (and launching it to the Sun is even worse).
    - smileysteve 3y ago
      Why the sun? It came from the earth; the core can process it back to a future mine.
    - AndrewPGameDev 3y ago
      Just some napkin math: (Suppose, as it hasn't been tested that the) SpaceX Starship can carry up to 100 tons of material to LEO. It costs 100 million USD per launch. (11,000 tons / 100 tons) * 100 million USD = 11 billion dollars. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a budget of 149 billion, so under these pessimistic conditions it would cost around 7% of the budget. That's not good, but its not crazy either. Elon Musk has stated that he thinks the cost of launching Starship will go down to 10 million per launch in the next 2-3 years (not sure if thats realistic). On the other hand, we probably don't want to unload a bunch of nuclear material in LEO, but much further away from Earth. Just watched the Kurzgesagt video. They make the point that more radioactive material is put into the world by burning coal, which I think is a valid point. They use the Falcon 9 exclusively to calculate the cost of launching, and they never indicate in the video that the cost of putting 1 kg of material into space might go down. Falcon Heavy can already launch (reusable) 63.8 tons to LEO at a cost of 97 million, which is around 1500USD/kg instead of the 4000 they cite. They also strangely compare it to the cost of the fissile material, which doesn't make any sense as the majority of the cost for a nuclear reactor is in safety precautions, not in the actual production of nuclear fuel. In their sources they're a little less forward: Electricity from nuclear reactors is produced for about $70 per MWh, which is 7 cents per kWh. The fuel costs represent just 0.46 cents per kWh or 6.5% of the total cost. If we had to get rid of nuclear waste by putting it on rockets, causing fuel costs to rise 3.4 times to 1.57 cents per kWh, the total cost would be increased to 8.1 cents per kWh. This means the total cost becomes 16% higher. In the video they state "In 2021, we saw a record 135 launches into space. If we repurposed each of those rockets and filled them all with nuclear waste, the total amount that could be lifted into a Low Earth Orbit, which is the closest orbit above the atmosphere, is nearly 800 tonnes. " And then they extrapolate this out to... forever, I guess? Either way there were 178 successful launches in 2022. There have already been 123 (successful) launches in 2023. Regardless it seems reasonable to expect this number to go up and the average tonnage per rocket to go up. It just seems strange to make this video that is very explicitly only about 2021 and to have the economics change so much even in 2 years. I would've preferred if they stated in the video that it doesn't make sense today, but it could in 5 or 50 years, and made more arguments in favor of storing it deep underground. --- The biggest risk (as another commenter mentioned) is the massive risk to the environment by trying to shoot it into space. If we really needed to get rid of it, we could bury it under a mountain for 100 years, dig it back up, and shoot it into space when the cost is much lower, and its much safer to launch. Or just never launch it at all. I don't really buy the idea that burying nuclear waste in remote areas is dangerous. Critics say that the problem is that you have to keep waste contained continuously (say for the next 10,000 years) but I'm near certain we will have some way of truly getting rid of it in the next 500 years. Whether that's blasting it into space or reprocessing or something else entirely.
- stephenr 3y ago
  If your argument (or the argument you're standing by) says "the spent fuel can be recycled", but then you say "well even if we can't recycle it we can just bury it" (which by the by, is what happens a reasonable chunk of French nuclear waste), it makes your entire argument (or the argument you're standing by) sound... how do I put this.... juvenile. We know it can be buried. That’s what we're arguing against. What kind of mentality does it take to think that "aha! We can just bury it" is a gotcha response when someone says "but what about all the nuclear waste". That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it". > so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country Wow, what a long term solution you hate there. > less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy" You realise that literally no one arguing against nuclear power, thinks fossil fuels are the alternative right? What is it with nuclear proponents and ridiculous straw man arguments.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    The point is this is tractable. Your argument is Sophist deconstructing the previous argument without contributing to the discussion by nitpicking points.
  - GeneralMayhem 3y ago
    > What kind of mentality does it take to think that "aha! We can just bury it" is a gotcha response when someone says "but what about all the nuclear waste". It's not a "gotcha" response - it's simply pointing out that "all" the nuclear waste is really not that much. > That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it". No... because the whole point is the relative quantity. There's an absurd amount of plastic. Much, much, much more. And even collecting it into one place is hard, since it's in tiny bits in every room on the planet, whereas nuclear reactor byproducts tend to be centralized and easy to locate.
- pseudosavant 3y ago
  To put it into perspective, in 2021, the US generated ~1,800,000,000 tons of carbon (just the carbon part) from electricity generation. So yes, burying 11,000 tons per year would be far better than pumping 2B tons into the air and hoping for the best...
aoeusnth1 3y ago
The strongest pro nuclear argument is just to look at France’s vs Germany’s carbon intensity. This does not require experimental technology.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  The problem with that comparison is that it's a political one, not an economic one - France's nuclear power has been largely publicly owned, whereas Germany's has been largely private, and what's more Merkel's energy policy 20 years ago took the Greens plan of "shut down nuclear and replace it all with renewables" and took out half of the renewables forcing the country to backfill with coal/gas. So the carbon intensity was a failure of politics. I think it's kind of ironic, really - there are three arguments against nuclear (safety, cost, and political feasibility), and political feasibility is by far the biggest problem - safety is overblown (in no small part because right now we're using coal/gas which is toxic AF), cost is a genuine issue but frankly irrelevant if nuclear will genuinely speed up decarbonization (climate change is hella expensive), so the big problem with nuclear is that it's so easy to scuttle at any point with fearmongering, so if it delays renewables it could be literally worse than useless due to politics.
BurningFrog 3y ago
The simple technology for storing nuclear fuel is a box. The volume of waste is very small and is easily stored as is.
- stephenr 3y ago
  I guess that's why the US still stores a bunch of used fuel at reactors in concrete and steel vessels, with zero long term storage plans... because it's "easy".
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    We have had many long term storage options evaluated over the years, none more popularly known than Yucca mountain. Every time the political parties exchange power, it either gets renewed or cancelled. According to the GAO, it is not for technical or other reasons, just purely political ones.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    It's a lot easier than pumping pollution into the atmosphere where we all get to breathe it and it causes climate problems. But I guess you think that's a better solution.
    - stephenr 3y ago
      I'm just going to literally copy and paste a response I wrote 6 hours ago: > You realise that literally no one arguing against nuclear power, thinks fossil fuels are the alternative right? > What is it with nuclear proponents and ridiculous straw man arguments.
      - BurningFrog 3y ago
        New nuclear power does typically directly replace fossil fuel power.
- II2II 3y ago
  Statements like this make me more nervous about the advocates of nuclear energy than of the mass adoption of nuclear energy itself. In the simplest of terms: radioactive material emits energetic particles and photons. In itself, this is not much of a problem for naturally occurring radioactive materials since it is usually in low concentrations and captured by the crust of the Earth. The problem with radioactive materials used in reactors is that it has to be concentrated, otherwise the reaction rates would be too low to be useful. Disposing of that nuclear waste isn't as simple as sticking it in a small box then burying the box in a hole. At the very least, you're going to want that hole to be geologically stable (to ensure nature doesn't interfere with how it is stored) and physically secure (to ensure humanity doesn't interfere with how it is stored). You're going to want to consider what is absorbing those emitted particles and photons, since you want to minimize how much is being absorbed by the nuclear waste stored alongside it. So I hope you don't mind if I dismiss your claims that it is easily stored and put more faith in engineers and scientists who specialize in nuclear waste disposal. Sure, their systems may be over engineered and more expensive than they need to be. On the other hand, they have put a lot more thought into it.
credit_guy 3y ago
> Where has this shown to be realistic at scale? From a pro-nuke guy: no, it has not been shown. The vast majority of the nuclear fuel is low enriched Uranium, meaning U-238 makes 95% of it or more. A little is transmuted to Plutonium during operation, but more than 90% of the spent fuel is still U-238. We don't currently have the capability to burn that. We may have it one day, but that day is many decades in the future. What nuclear recycling does is to extract unburned U-235 and plutonium from spent fuel. That can only be done once, after that the plutonium is too rich in Pu-240, and only the Pu-239 isotope is optimal for fission. So, those who say we can keep recycling spent fuel, either don't know the whole story, or choose not to tell it. But many companies are working on developing fast reactors. These reactors can burn U-238. In principle they can burn it all. In reality, I think in the short term they'll burn just some part of it. For example, current nuclear plants can generate about 40 to 60 GW-day per ton of fuel. Various new plant proposals can go to 180 GWd/ton [1]; this is impressive, but it's not the factor of 20 you'd expect from fully burning all the uranium in the nuclear fuel. In the link I provided you'll see two reactor types with higher burnups; they are both envisioned to burn thorium. Fingers crossed, but thorium is much more unproven than uranium. In any case, even when burning spent fuel will be possible, it will initially be economically non-profitable. And it will be so for decades. But not for centuries. That's important. Naysayers will try to convince you that spent fuel will be a problem for ten thousand years. But that is only assuming that we freeze all progress to where we are today. Why such an assumption? If you were to place a bet where you miraculously wake up in the future 200 years from now, would you wager that we won't be able to burn the 20'th and 21'st century spent nuclear fuel, or that we will be able to? [1] https://aris.iaea.org/sites/burnup.html https://aris.iaea.org/sites/burnup.html
- dotancohen 3y ago
  Why isn't the spent nuclear fuel used to conductively pre-heat the water going to the turbine? Then less energy would be required to convert it to steam, making the whole plant more efficient.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    The steam water is a closed loop. It's boiled, passes through the turbine, condensed back to water, and boiled again. It's already "hot" and doesn't need pre-heating.
kalleboo 3y ago
> Every "pro nuclear" argument always seems to include some experimental technology that's either never been made cost effective or never made it out of the lab To be fair, the same is true of pro-renewable arguments. Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs), "molten salt!", some wild globe-spanning HVDC network or an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries. Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions.
- stephenr 3y ago
  > To be fair, the same is true of pro-renewable arguments. Do some people claim the solution is non-existent (at scale) solutions? Sure. Does it come up anywhere near as often as "we just need <insert Nuclear technology that's never proven reliable/commercially viable>"? Not in my experience. > Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs) Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro. > Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions. It's so difficult that South Australia (a state with a relatively small economy - about on par with South Dakota, with double the population) went from 1% to more than 70% electricity generated from renewables (wind and solar), in the space of 15 years. > an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries I wanted to come back to this after talking about South Australia. SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage. Renewable energy has increased exponentially in technological advances and installed capacity in the last few decades, and while some people may be pinning their hopes and dreams on as-yet-unproven "renewable" pipe dreams like world-wide HVDC networks, there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical (it was claimed for a long time that renewables could at best provide 20% of South Australia's power needs).
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    > Not in my experience Then our experiences are different, fine. > Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro I'm from Sweden. Lots of hydro, but even the hydro we have is controversial as it has destroyed habitats. Even if we added storage capability to existing hydro, it's not enough to run the whole country through the winter. I live in Japan now. Absolutely zero natural resources for storage, so it's a country which after Fukushima has invested lots in coal, and the world's largest car manufacturer is investing in hydrogen (which COULD be generated from renewables but we all know the fossil fuels will win in cost) > SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage That's awesome! We should all use renewables as much as we can to remove as much fossil fuels as we can. But as with many problems, after the first 90%, comes the remaining 90%. > there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical I want to see a 100% renewable grid, complete with transport and heavy industry (not some off-grid house or tropical island). I really do. Please show me it. We NEED this. I still don't see it.
rtpg 3y ago
Japan does fuel reprocessing for its nuclear reactors, my understanding is that this allows them to just not need to import any more uranium. I believe there is still some waste product at the end of all of this, but it is a very manageable amount of it? That's my understanding at least.
- stephenr 3y ago
  Not because they want to. Japan is what you or I might call "seismically active", so picking a place that's going to be secure for 100K years is even harder than other places. They determined in the 90's that MOX reprocessing costs 4x what it would cost to bury the stuff.. by 2017 the price had quadrupled again from the '94 cost.
  - rtpg 3y ago
    My understanding is the reprocessing is more about trying to recover uranium and have a somewhat closed cycle rather than constantly try and import uranium from mines? But my understanding is limited
    - stephenr 3y ago
      I'm not an expert but my understanding is that MOX reprocessing does produce usable fuel, yes - but the point I was highlighting is that it's ridiculously expensive to do so.
    - fomine3 3y ago
      Japan has never had nuclear final repository for obvious NIMBY and anti nuclear reason. Nuclear fuel cycle has been considered to the way to process nuclear "waste" in nuclear strategy. Fast reactor wasn't a thing but people thought it will be made in the future. Saving fuel is an another reason of course. Japan's fast reactor Monju is failed and there's no realistic plan to have a new one. Other western countries' projects had stopped. The cycle is now almost broken, but govt still need to say that it's in progress because it's terrible to say that we run nuclear plants but we don't have repository.

GeneralMayhem 3y ago

> Where has this shown to be realistic at scale? France. But also, even if the fuel isn't optimally recycled, nuclear power is realistic. "Put it in a can and bury it under a mountain" is a sufficient waste disposal strategy for a pretty long time, and certainly much less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy" of "blast it all into the atmosphere and let God sort it out". The US produces about 18% of its energy from nuclear today, and generates about 2000 tons of waste per year. Presumably that means that going all-nuclear would generate about 11,000 tons per year. The Yucca Mountain facility alone had a capacity of 77,000 tons - so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country.

foolfoolz 3y ago
nuclear has been declining in france for 20 years
- para_parolu 3y ago
  And now they have to play putin games because they need gas.
  - crote 3y ago
    Not really. Pre-war it only imported 17% from Russia, and like most European countries it has since switched to other suppliers. Turns out bringing LNG regasification plants online can be done in a few months, and plenty of countries are willing and able to supply that.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      Yeah now we in Europe pay 3x more for energy that we used to, and the process of liquifying natural gas generates 2-se the emissions that we did when we got gas from pipeline. Shipping LNG around the world is a greenwashing disaster, it's like when Europe burns biomass from trees chopped in the amazon and calls it 'sustainable'
      - crote 3y ago
        Electricity peaked in August 2022, and has returned pretty much back to pre-war levels. You might be paying 3x more, but your electricity provider definitely is not. Besides, the claim I responded to was that the decline of nuclear in France led to a dependency on Russia for gas. The fact that Europe rapidly switched to LNG shows that this is not true, regardless of your opinion about anything else. Nobody is pretending that LNG is green, and biomass is heavily criticized for exactly that reason.
- evilos 3y ago
  This was literally legislated by green party politicians. They passed a law mandating that the nuclear fleet must go from 75% to 50% of generation. They also forced the company that owns the fleet (EDF) to sell power at a loss to energy traders and placed a tax on all power bills that went directly to funding their renewable portfolio. Thankfully, they have changed course since the war and are now planning a new nuclear buildout as well as have removed the 50% cap. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-parliament-votes-nuclear-plan-with-large-majority-2023-03-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-parliament-votes...
walls 3y ago
> "Put it in a can and bury it under a mountain" is a sufficient waste disposal strategy for a pretty long time It's simple in theory, not so much in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  I wonder if hurling it into the sun could be made cost effective.
  - stephenr 3y ago
    The problem is you need to get it into space first, which means putting it on top of a rocket. Rockets have this nasty habit where sometimes they blow up, and whatever they're carrying gets vaporised into the atmosphere.
  - ericbarrett 3y ago
    It actually takes much less energy to throw something out of the solar system than into the sun: 17 km/s deltaV versus 28 km/s.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    No. Kurzgesagt has a good video about this on YouTube. Launching nuclear waste into space is not even remotely cost effective (and launching it to the Sun is even worse).
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    Why the sun? It came from the earth; the core can process it back to a future mine.
  - AndrewPGameDev 3y ago
    Just some napkin math: (Suppose, as it hasn't been tested that the) SpaceX Starship can carry up to 100 tons of material to LEO. It costs 100 million USD per launch. (11,000 tons / 100 tons) * 100 million USD = 11 billion dollars. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a budget of 149 billion, so under these pessimistic conditions it would cost around 7% of the budget. That's not good, but its not crazy either. Elon Musk has stated that he thinks the cost of launching Starship will go down to 10 million per launch in the next 2-3 years (not sure if thats realistic). On the other hand, we probably don't want to unload a bunch of nuclear material in LEO, but much further away from Earth. Just watched the Kurzgesagt video. They make the point that more radioactive material is put into the world by burning coal, which I think is a valid point. They use the Falcon 9 exclusively to calculate the cost of launching, and they never indicate in the video that the cost of putting 1 kg of material into space might go down. Falcon Heavy can already launch (reusable) 63.8 tons to LEO at a cost of 97 million, which is around 1500USD/kg instead of the 4000 they cite. They also strangely compare it to the cost of the fissile material, which doesn't make any sense as the majority of the cost for a nuclear reactor is in safety precautions, not in the actual production of nuclear fuel. In their sources they're a little less forward: Electricity from nuclear reactors is produced for about $70 per MWh, which is 7 cents per kWh. The fuel costs represent just 0.46 cents per kWh or 6.5% of the total cost. If we had to get rid of nuclear waste by putting it on rockets, causing fuel costs to rise 3.4 times to 1.57 cents per kWh, the total cost would be increased to 8.1 cents per kWh. This means the total cost becomes 16% higher. In the video they state "In 2021, we saw a record 135 launches into space. If we repurposed each of those rockets and filled them all with nuclear waste, the total amount that could be lifted into a Low Earth Orbit, which is the closest orbit above the atmosphere, is nearly 800 tonnes. " And then they extrapolate this out to... forever, I guess? Either way there were 178 successful launches in 2022. There have already been 123 (successful) launches in 2023. Regardless it seems reasonable to expect this number to go up and the average tonnage per rocket to go up. It just seems strange to make this video that is very explicitly only about 2021 and to have the economics change so much even in 2 years. I would've preferred if they stated in the video that it doesn't make sense today, but it could in 5 or 50 years, and made more arguments in favor of storing it deep underground. --- The biggest risk (as another commenter mentioned) is the massive risk to the environment by trying to shoot it into space. If we really needed to get rid of it, we could bury it under a mountain for 100 years, dig it back up, and shoot it into space when the cost is much lower, and its much safer to launch. Or just never launch it at all. I don't really buy the idea that burying nuclear waste in remote areas is dangerous. Critics say that the problem is that you have to keep waste contained continuously (say for the next 10,000 years) but I'm near certain we will have some way of truly getting rid of it in the next 500 years. Whether that's blasting it into space or reprocessing or something else entirely.
stephenr 3y ago
If your argument (or the argument you're standing by) says "the spent fuel can be recycled", but then you say "well even if we can't recycle it we can just bury it" (which by the by, is what happens a reasonable chunk of French nuclear waste), it makes your entire argument (or the argument you're standing by) sound... how do I put this.... juvenile. We know it can be buried. That’s what we're arguing against. What kind of mentality does it take to think that "aha! We can just bury it" is a gotcha response when someone says "but what about all the nuclear waste". That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it". > so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country Wow, what a long term solution you hate there. > less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy" You realise that literally no one arguing against nuclear power, thinks fossil fuels are the alternative right? What is it with nuclear proponents and ridiculous straw man arguments.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  The point is this is tractable. Your argument is Sophist deconstructing the previous argument without contributing to the discussion by nitpicking points.
- GeneralMayhem 3y ago
  > What kind of mentality does it take to think that "aha! We can just bury it" is a gotcha response when someone says "but what about all the nuclear waste". It's not a "gotcha" response - it's simply pointing out that "all" the nuclear waste is really not that much. > That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it". No... because the whole point is the relative quantity. There's an absurd amount of plastic. Much, much, much more. And even collecting it into one place is hard, since it's in tiny bits in every room on the planet, whereas nuclear reactor byproducts tend to be centralized and easy to locate.
pseudosavant 3y ago
To put it into perspective, in 2021, the US generated ~1,800,000,000 tons of carbon (just the carbon part) from electricity generation. So yes, burying 11,000 tons per year would be far better than pumping 2B tons into the air and hoping for the best...

aoeusnth1 3y ago

The strongest pro nuclear argument is just to look at France’s vs Germany’s carbon intensity. This does not require experimental technology.

Qwertious 3y ago
The problem with that comparison is that it's a political one, not an economic one - France's nuclear power has been largely publicly owned, whereas Germany's has been largely private, and what's more Merkel's energy policy 20 years ago took the Greens plan of "shut down nuclear and replace it all with renewables" and took out half of the renewables forcing the country to backfill with coal/gas. So the carbon intensity was a failure of politics. I think it's kind of ironic, really - there are three arguments against nuclear (safety, cost, and political feasibility), and political feasibility is by far the biggest problem - safety is overblown (in no small part because right now we're using coal/gas which is toxic AF), cost is a genuine issue but frankly irrelevant if nuclear will genuinely speed up decarbonization (climate change is hella expensive), so the big problem with nuclear is that it's so easy to scuttle at any point with fearmongering, so if it delays renewables it could be literally worse than useless due to politics.

BurningFrog 3y ago

The simple technology for storing nuclear fuel is a box. The volume of waste is very small and is easily stored as is.

stephenr 3y ago
I guess that's why the US still stores a bunch of used fuel at reactors in concrete and steel vessels, with zero long term storage plans... because it's "easy".
- zdragnar 3y ago
  We have had many long term storage options evaluated over the years, none more popularly known than Yucca mountain. Every time the political parties exchange power, it either gets renewed or cancelled. According to the GAO, it is not for technical or other reasons, just purely political ones.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  It's a lot easier than pumping pollution into the atmosphere where we all get to breathe it and it causes climate problems. But I guess you think that's a better solution.
  - stephenr 3y ago
    I'm just going to literally copy and paste a response I wrote 6 hours ago: > You realise that literally no one arguing against nuclear power, thinks fossil fuels are the alternative right? > What is it with nuclear proponents and ridiculous straw man arguments.
    - BurningFrog 3y ago
      New nuclear power does typically directly replace fossil fuel power.
II2II 3y ago
Statements like this make me more nervous about the advocates of nuclear energy than of the mass adoption of nuclear energy itself. In the simplest of terms: radioactive material emits energetic particles and photons. In itself, this is not much of a problem for naturally occurring radioactive materials since it is usually in low concentrations and captured by the crust of the Earth. The problem with radioactive materials used in reactors is that it has to be concentrated, otherwise the reaction rates would be too low to be useful. Disposing of that nuclear waste isn't as simple as sticking it in a small box then burying the box in a hole. At the very least, you're going to want that hole to be geologically stable (to ensure nature doesn't interfere with how it is stored) and physically secure (to ensure humanity doesn't interfere with how it is stored). You're going to want to consider what is absorbing those emitted particles and photons, since you want to minimize how much is being absorbed by the nuclear waste stored alongside it. So I hope you don't mind if I dismiss your claims that it is easily stored and put more faith in engineers and scientists who specialize in nuclear waste disposal. Sure, their systems may be over engineered and more expensive than they need to be. On the other hand, they have put a lot more thought into it.

credit_guy 3y ago

> Where has this shown to be realistic at scale? From a pro-nuke guy: no, it has not been shown. The vast majority of the nuclear fuel is low enriched Uranium, meaning U-238 makes 95% of it or more. A little is transmuted to Plutonium during operation, but more than 90% of the spent fuel is still U-238. We don't currently have the capability to burn that. We may have it one day, but that day is many decades in the future. What nuclear recycling does is to extract unburned U-235 and plutonium from spent fuel. That can only be done once, after that the plutonium is too rich in Pu-240, and only the Pu-239 isotope is optimal for fission. So, those who say we can keep recycling spent fuel, either don't know the whole story, or choose not to tell it. But many companies are working on developing fast reactors. These reactors can burn U-238. In principle they can burn it all. In reality, I think in the short term they'll burn just some part of it. For example, current nuclear plants can generate about 40 to 60 GW-day per ton of fuel. Various new plant proposals can go to 180 GWd/ton [1]; this is impressive, but it's not the factor of 20 you'd expect from fully burning all the uranium in the nuclear fuel. In the link I provided you'll see two reactor types with higher burnups; they are both envisioned to burn thorium. Fingers crossed, but thorium is much more unproven than uranium. In any case, even when burning spent fuel will be possible, it will initially be economically non-profitable. And it will be so for decades. But not for centuries. That's important. Naysayers will try to convince you that spent fuel will be a problem for ten thousand years. But that is only assuming that we freeze all progress to where we are today. Why such an assumption? If you were to place a bet where you miraculously wake up in the future 200 years from now, would you wager that we won't be able to burn the 20'th and 21'st century spent nuclear fuel, or that we will be able to? [1] https://aris.iaea.org/sites/burnup.html https://aris.iaea.org/sites/burnup.html

dotancohen 3y ago
Why isn't the spent nuclear fuel used to conductively pre-heat the water going to the turbine? Then less energy would be required to convert it to steam, making the whole plant more efficient.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  The steam water is a closed loop. It's boiled, passes through the turbine, condensed back to water, and boiled again. It's already "hot" and doesn't need pre-heating.

kalleboo 3y ago

> Every "pro nuclear" argument always seems to include some experimental technology that's either never been made cost effective or never made it out of the lab To be fair, the same is true of pro-renewable arguments. Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs), "molten salt!", some wild globe-spanning HVDC network or an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries. Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions.

stephenr 3y ago
> To be fair, the same is true of pro-renewable arguments. Do some people claim the solution is non-existent (at scale) solutions? Sure. Does it come up anywhere near as often as "we just need <insert Nuclear technology that's never proven reliable/commercially viable>"? Not in my experience. > Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs) Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro. > Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions. It's so difficult that South Australia (a state with a relatively small economy - about on par with South Dakota, with double the population) went from 1% to more than 70% electricity generated from renewables (wind and solar), in the space of 15 years. > an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries I wanted to come back to this after talking about South Australia. SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage. Renewable energy has increased exponentially in technological advances and installed capacity in the last few decades, and while some people may be pinning their hopes and dreams on as-yet-unproven "renewable" pipe dreams like world-wide HVDC networks, there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical (it was claimed for a long time that renewables could at best provide 20% of South Australia's power needs).
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > Not in my experience Then our experiences are different, fine. > Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro I'm from Sweden. Lots of hydro, but even the hydro we have is controversial as it has destroyed habitats. Even if we added storage capability to existing hydro, it's not enough to run the whole country through the winter. I live in Japan now. Absolutely zero natural resources for storage, so it's a country which after Fukushima has invested lots in coal, and the world's largest car manufacturer is investing in hydrogen (which COULD be generated from renewables but we all know the fossil fuels will win in cost) > SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage That's awesome! We should all use renewables as much as we can to remove as much fossil fuels as we can. But as with many problems, after the first 90%, comes the remaining 90%. > there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical I want to see a 100% renewable grid, complete with transport and heavy industry (not some off-grid house or tropical island). I really do. Please show me it. We NEED this. I still don't see it.

rtpg 3y ago

Japan does fuel reprocessing for its nuclear reactors, my understanding is that this allows them to just not need to import any more uranium. I believe there is still some waste product at the end of all of this, but it is a very manageable amount of it? That's my understanding at least.

stephenr 3y ago
Not because they want to. Japan is what you or I might call "seismically active", so picking a place that's going to be secure for 100K years is even harder than other places. They determined in the 90's that MOX reprocessing costs 4x what it would cost to bury the stuff.. by 2017 the price had quadrupled again from the '94 cost.
- rtpg 3y ago
  My understanding is the reprocessing is more about trying to recover uranium and have a somewhat closed cycle rather than constantly try and import uranium from mines? But my understanding is limited
  - stephenr 3y ago
    I'm not an expert but my understanding is that MOX reprocessing does produce usable fuel, yes - but the point I was highlighting is that it's ridiculously expensive to do so.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Japan has never had nuclear final repository for obvious NIMBY and anti nuclear reason. Nuclear fuel cycle has been considered to the way to process nuclear "waste" in nuclear strategy. Fast reactor wasn't a thing but people thought it will be made in the future. Saving fuel is an another reason of course. Japan's fast reactor Monju is failed and there's no realistic plan to have a new one. Other western countries' projects had stopped. The cycle is now almost broken, but govt still need to say that it's in progress because it's terrible to say that we run nuclear plants but we don't have repository.