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2000 tons per year for the whole country though. 20 tons per reactor per year doesn't sound too bad. Compare to the approx 1 billion tons of oil consumption pe
by HPsquared 3y ago
2000 tons per year for the whole country though. 20 tons per reactor per year doesn't sound too bad.
Compare to the approx 1 billion tons of oil consumption per year, or 4 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year that the rest of the economy burns through, to get a sense of relative scale.
- wkat4242 3y ago> 20 tons per reactor per year doesn't sound too bad. Not great, not terrible :) It is super radioactive for centuries though. We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out.
- peter422 3y agoThe CO2 released by fossil fuels also can have century spanning impacts.
- ethbr1 3y ago> We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out. We did. And there's $52+ billion in the Nuclear Waste Fund. Nevada is just really good at complaining.
- acidburnNSA 3y agoExactly. We have the money and technology to build and operate repositories that responsibly handle all our nuclear waste. We just need the willpower to go out and do it.
- eru 3y agoOr just give some other country money to do it for you? Finland might do it? (They are also sophisticated and stable enough, that you don't need to worry about the fuel being mishandled. At least not any more than for the US.)
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah just put it in your own back yard then and see how you feel about it :)
- Turing_Machine 3y agoRadioactive, yes. "Super" radioactive, no. Longer half-life -> less radioactive, by definition. Infinite half-life -> not radioactive at all.
- wkat4242 3y agoThat is an oversimplification, it disregards a few things: the concentration of radioisotopes (which is extremely high in spent fuel) and type of decay products (which each have their own half lives, in many cases the radioactivity goes up for some time after the initial decay while decay products break down and eventually reach a stable isotope) and the type of emissions. Also containers that don't break down under centuries of ionising radiation bombardment haven't been invented yet.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoTaking all those into account, after a few hundred years the waste is no more radioactive than the ore from which it came. Note that natural uranium ore has a similar mix of decay products, and isn't in any kind of "container". The notion of it being INSTANT!!! DEATH!!!! FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS!!!! is just plain wrong.
- wkat4242 3y ago> Note that natural uranium ore has a similar mix of decay products, and isn't in any kind of "container". A similar mix, yes. A similar concentration, absolutely not. The concentration in ore is extremely low. The Soviets ruined the landscape of half the Czech Republic for a few warheads.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoWell, you're not throwing away any actual uranium in any realistic uranium cycle. You're separating out the "depleted" uranium and using it to breed more fuel (potentially orders of magnitude cheaper than extracting fresh uranium from ore and enriching it).
- cyberax 3y ago> If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell Fun fact: nuclear waste becomes less radioactive than the original uranium in about 300-500 years. The problem with the waste is that it's concentrated in a tiny amount of space that will stay dangerous for geological periods.
- acidburnNSA 3y agoThat with full recycling, including partitioning and transmutation. In a once-through cycle it takes more like 10,000 years. https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-partitioning-and-transmutation-in-radioactive-waste-management https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti... Edit: I'm a nuclear engineer.
- cyberax 3y agoIt might be using different measures of radioactivity (e.g. Curies instead of Watts). I did calculations myself long ago, while studying nuclear power in a university, and it indeed was 300-500 years depending on fuel type. I'll try to re-do calculations and see what I get.
- acidburnNSA 3y agoI'm a professional nuclear engineer (Ph.D. & PE) with 20 years of experience in advanced reactors and fuel cycle. I promise you it's not 300-500 yrs unless you do full recycle with minor actinide partitioning and transmutation. The publication above shows the graph vs. time in terms of radiotoxicity, which is widely considered to be the key metric. What'd you use for the calculations? Generally you need to use something like ORIGEN to get it right.
- cyberax 3y agoPerhaps I was a bit unclear. The waste will _definitely_ be dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years. No questions here. But in aggregate, it will be less radioactive than the uranium (and its natural daughter products in secular equilibrium) that was expended to produce the waste.
- ekianjo 3y agoThere is a lot of space to store that small amount of product underground. Thats a non issue.
- ars 3y ago> It is super radioactive for centuries though. It doesn't have to be that way. With nuclear fuel reprocessing you can burn all the highly radioactive stuff completely, and what's left either decays quickly or isn't very radioactive.
- wkat4242 3y agoYet we don't actually have an industry that is capable of doing this at the scale that's needed. I am not deeply knowledgeable of this industry enough to understand why but it looks like it's not as easy a solution as presented otherwise we would actually do it.
- Moldoteck 3y agoOr just build reprocessing plants like france, where abt 90% is sent back to the reactors. The remaining real waste is solidified to be stored more easily. Or just build breeding reactors that perform this by default (except solidification, for that we still need vitrification). Solidified waste is dangerous for abt 300 yrs
- photochemsyn 3y agoAnd you didn't compare that to the costs of maintaining a solar/wind/storage system, for some odd reason... these PR lines are getting pretty stale.