3 ms·

What do you consider the biggest remaining challenge associated with the nuclear waste problem?

reaperman 3y ago
Personally, I think Yucca mountain is a great place to store it in the USA but that will likely never be politically viable. And I'm not sure what solutions exist for nations outside of North America. I'm also personally still concerned about transportation accidents resulting in permanently contaminated areas.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Outside the US, Finland's Onkalo repository is on track to be the first operational commercial repository [1]. We have some operating military ones, like WIPP already. [1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ
  - eru 3y ago
    For comparison, we have chemicals like mercury (and much worse) that stay dangerous forever, and we mostly handle them just fine. There's only a tiny amount of high level nuclear waste.
zdragnar 3y ago
There aren't technical problems, only political ones. Yucca mountain has been designated as the long term storage site since 1987 by Congress. Every change of party majority since then has either stopped or restarted work on it.
icy_deadposts 3y ago
Hanford has been consuming roughly 10% of the deparment of energy's annual budget for many years and is projected to continue to do so for decades. and the cleanup effort has been fraught with scary mishaps.
xenadu02 3y ago
Actinide burning reactors are IMHO a better path forward. There are various proposals and research reactors, some using alternate fuel cycles. The bottom line is the nastiest stuff in spent nuclear fuel are the actinides. They're all naturally radioactive and most of the stuff with long (10,000+ year) half lives that requires long-term storage. You need Yucca Mountain mostly for the actinides. If instead you smash them with fast neutrons you can get them to fission, releasing some energy (though sub-critical) and transmuting them into either much more stable isotopes (little radioactive decay) or really unstable ones (nasty but they decay so fast you only need to hold onto them for a few days/months/years). The short version is besides reprocessing spent fuel we should be putting the nasty stuff through the sausage grinder again to turn it into much less nasty stuff instead of fighting over where to keep the nasty stuff safe for 100,000 years.

Personally, I think Yucca mountain is a great place to store it in the USA but that will likely never be politically viable. And I'm not sure what solutions exist for nations outside of North America. I'm also personally still concerned about transportation accidents resulting in permanently contaminated areas.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Outside the US, Finland's Onkalo repository is on track to be the first operational commercial repository [1]. We have some operating military ones, like WIPP already. [1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ
- eru 3y ago
  For comparison, we have chemicals like mercury (and much worse) that stay dangerous forever, and we mostly handle them just fine. There's only a tiny amount of high level nuclear waste.

zdragnar 3y ago

There aren't technical problems, only political ones. Yucca mountain has been designated as the long term storage site since 1987 by Congress. Every change of party majority since then has either stopped or restarted work on it.

icy_deadposts 3y ago

Hanford has been consuming roughly 10% of the deparment of energy's annual budget for many years and is projected to continue to do so for decades. and the cleanup effort has been fraught with scary mishaps.

xenadu02 3y ago

Actinide burning reactors are IMHO a better path forward. There are various proposals and research reactors, some using alternate fuel cycles. The bottom line is the nastiest stuff in spent nuclear fuel are the actinides. They're all naturally radioactive and most of the stuff with long (10,000+ year) half lives that requires long-term storage. You need Yucca Mountain mostly for the actinides. If instead you smash them with fast neutrons you can get them to fission, releasing some energy (though sub-critical) and transmuting them into either much more stable isotopes (little radioactive decay) or really unstable ones (nasty but they decay so fast you only need to hold onto them for a few days/months/years). The short version is besides reprocessing spent fuel we should be putting the nasty stuff through the sausage grinder again to turn it into much less nasty stuff instead of fighting over where to keep the nasty stuff safe for 100,000 years.