Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the scary propaganda line that there's mountains of highly radioactive waste pouring out of nuclear power plants that is just waiting to irradiate our neighborhoods because we don't have anywhere to put it.
> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year!
And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle:
> Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
I agree that nuclear waste is an overblown problem, but that link entirely ignores the structural components that become radioactive. There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.
Because the radiation from those structural components is not harmful in the doses people would experience from them. The fear of radiation is wildly exaggerated and is based on the LNT model which every single scientific test of has proved invalid. The threshold appears to be about 25 mSv / day.
The worst American nuclear disaster, TMI, exposed some people to a radiation dose equivalent to a single trans-Atlantic flight. What do you think the radiation dose from structural equipment is? One of the worst examples from structural irradiation was when recycled rebar was used to build 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan, the highest annual dose received from that was 910 mSv, or 2.5 mSv / day, significantly less than the threshold dose of 25 mSv / day. The occupants of those apartments had fewer cancers than the average population.
A terrible mining accident/dam failure, not a storage issue of radioactive structural material. Now go ahead and compare deaths from mining accidents and dam failures from other sources of energy to those associated with nuclear fuel. What do you think the result would be when a nuclear reactor requires hundreds of thousands of times less fuel than any conventional reactor does or hundreds of thousands tons less of concrete and steel and rare elements than renewable generation does?
Mining accidents kill some ~10,000 people every year. Mining coal is a large portion of that. The worst damn failure killed 170,000 people.
If you don't like deaths from mining accidents then an energy source with millions of times the energy density is far superior. If you don't like deaths from dam failures then maybe putting a dam on every river isn't the greatest idea either.
> There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.
That's actually the VAST majority of what needs to be contained. But these don't need to be contained for thousands or even hundreds of years. We're talking a few years (<=5). This waste also does not require shielding nor cooling and is mostly a precautionary factor ensuring that there is no cross contamination. Low level waste accounts for ~90-95% of waste, intermediate is ~5%-7% (shielding but no cooling. Short lived ILW -- <30 yrs -- is often stored on site and disposed normally. Long lived ILW is just thrown in with HLW in geological depositories for convenience) and high level/trans-uranic waste (<1%-3%) is what needs to be stored in a geological depository (several of which exist btw).
Just want to make sure you have the facts before you start forming big opinions. Things like concrete and steel are typically stored on site and later disposed of normally. It's not really the concern of nuclear waste.
Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.
Not an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated materials, in addition to being harmful to biological entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay and then return it to the raw material stream.
elting it down doesn't make it less radioactive. It's still a significant health hazard to work with, making new construction with the remolded materials prohibitively expensive.
I don't think that actually meaningfully helps all that much. Storing it for 2 years, 30 years, or 500 years, are nearly the same problem from a political perspective. "Where to keep it" is really the question "where to put it", and then you leave it there because moving it is dealing with the problem "where to put it" all over again.
On site. That's what we're doing and that's what works really well. Honestly, it is only the high level stuff that will outlive the powerplant. I know this might not be the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that we probably won't do any significant huge waste repositories (like Yucca Mountain. Though we do have smaller ones) until the waste reaches a significant volume and it actually becomes a problem. Human nature and the inability to do long term planning or something. The good news is that even if we increased our nuclear output, globally, by say 10x or something, we'd still have many decades to resolve that problem because so little waste is actually produced that it can be stored on site relatively easily. Maybe we put things off because in the future we're usually more knowledgeable and have better technology so things are cheaper. Maybe we're just dumb. Either way, it doesn't seem like a huge worry.
> And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle
This is scifi. MOX has the fuel reused once to provide a small boost in efficiency after being reprocessed in an incredibly polluting weapons facility that needs an excuse to stay open and then the Pu240 still needs dealing with. And the "leftover uranium" is U238 not U235. There is no closed or "mostly closed" fuel cycle, it's just a shell game.
And your 40 grams doesn't include the 400 grams of non-radioactive heavy metal enrichment tailings, the 4kg of low level and non-radioactive waste and the 40kg of milling or leaching slurry that would come out of any new mine or half of the existing mines.
Then multiply that all by 5 for full decarbonization rather than just electricity.
Man, the source I listed is literally from a guy with a Ph.D on the topic. Where exactly am I "falling for the narrative of the nuclear industry?" An industry which, by the way, hardly exists in the US anymore.
> Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?
You can tell that the biggest damage from nuclear power plant waste is emotional, by the fact that no one gives a shit about disposal of radioactive coal power plant ash.
Even though that shit is dumped next to where people live on the regular, with increases to cancer rates as you would expect.
I had an active nuclear plant in my neighborhood (Indian Point Energy Center) until the NY government made it untenable to continue the relicensing process. I would be perfectly fine with the plant continuing to run and continuing to have onsite storage of the waste. It provided 25% of the power for our county and NYC, employed 1500 people directly, and paid for roughly 1/3 of our children's schools. Shutting it down was a mistake, nuclear is so upfront capital cost intensive that it is a waste to stop a functional plant.
If zealous supporters of coal plants asked for the fumes to go into their neighborhood I still would not be on board. Have you ever seen the effects of coal power? Like really - lived there?
I have and it is not pretty at all. I would take a correctly stored nuclear waste right away.
I would love a nuclear plant in my neighborhood, especially if I could buy power from it without going through PG&E. I have trouble imagining waste storage being cost effective here.
Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense. Small nuclear could go near where power is used. Waste should be somewhere with inexpensive land and in a convenient location for putting the waste there.
If there were container-sized reactors that produced a few tens of MW, they could go all over the place. Fancy neighborhoods could pay a premium to put them in fake houses. But the waste would probably be much more economical to handle by moving the entire container to a service facility, refueling at the facility, and handling the waste at or near the facility. This would be in an industrial area, just like other large warehouses or factories.
To be fair, if it was going to be a Fukushima-style boiling water reactor that can fail dangerously if it loses power, sticking it that close to a major fault line in an isolated area may not be the best idea.
At Fukushima, the reactor SCRAMed successfully and it was the seawater that took out the generators powering the decay-heat cooling system. If California experienced a wave that could crest Bodega Head's yuge natural seawall then we have bigger problems lol https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93...
I would very happily have one in my neighbourhood, so kindly stop slandering me.
Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid, you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue signalling over a gas grid is killing people, people I know, and I don't like people who support that. No "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free tech forty years ago. If you frustrated that you too are responsible for the destruction I now see everywhere.
If zealous deniers of nuclear asked for storage of other power waste to be stored anywhere other than the sky, they'd realize their argument is worthless.
Waste is stored on site until it’s quite a bit less radioactive, this can and has been done for decades. The fear of shipping this cooled down waste and burying it in a mountain is entirely unfounded and the only reason it hasn’t happened is people spreading unnecessary fear.
If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.