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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

I still think the waste is the elephant in the room. Exactly how is the (indefinite) cost of safely managing it factored into all those kilowatt-hour costs? Does it include tax-dollars going to projects like Hanford or Yucca Mountain?

Even if we're now experienced-enough to develop good socio-regulatory systems for day-to-day generation safety and standards, is the same really true for the waste? Our collective record is still a sad tale of fraying "temporary" solutions, leaks, NIMBY reactions, and playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato.

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Gen IV reactors offer a pretty alluring solution to the so-called waste problem. Being able to close the nuclear fuel cycle, and even consume existing nuclear waste from older reactors, would be much more effective than just locking it all away. Right now, we're only using about 5 percent of the energy in nuclear fuel, where we could be looking at something closer to 95 percent. Instead of looking at transuranics as a problem, we should look at them as a resource in themselves in the future.

They're way too far away. 2030 maybe, 2040 or 2050 more likely. Those are timelines in which we can replace everything with renewables

India figured out how to re-burn used nuclear material in their reactors due to an embargo. Surely the US can figure this out if they had to.

Bluestrike2 is talking about consuming much more of the spent fuel material than existing reprocessing.

India is getting ready to turn on a fast reactor that they can use to produce more fuel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor

But I don't think it will be able to consume as much waste products as the Gen IV stuff, it focuses on making more fuel.

The waste issue has already been solved. You turn it into glass then store it somewhere geologically stable, such as Yucca Mountain. See http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html

Ummm, no. Irrational tho' it may seem, local, regional and national resistance has made Yucca Mountain untenable. So we're back to dry cask and concrete, which is not a long term solution.

> The waste issue has already been solved.

Yes, but the solution isn't to store it. The solution is to reprocess it. That's what all the other major nuclear-using countries do. The only reason the US doesn't is politics.

The glassification plant at Hanford is just starting to come online, but Yucca doesn't want it.

We have a political problem now, not a technical one... and yeah that's going to be a tough one. I wonder how long until someone figures out ways to let a 3rd world country be the deep bore storage place and allow export?

> I wonder how long until someone figures out ways to let a 3rd world country be the deep bore storage place and allow export?

I very much doubt that'll happen. Political stability for a waste repository is going to be just as much a concern as geological stability.

What do you think I was referring to by "playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato"? The places you mention are actually examples of failure.

> Exactly how is the (indefinite) cost of safely managing it factored into all those kilowatt-hour costs?

Not a problem for an accountant. It's easy to value an indefinite stream of future dollars in present value terms.

The UK even has government debt like that, and they trade for finite amounts of money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetuity

In other words, the future is worthless ;)

Or more technocratic: interest rates haven't vanished, yet.

But some do save for retirement, children's education, etc, etc. Even though the present value of all that is ~0. So there's something missing from the accounting perspective.

I don't get it. What's your calculation / estimate to get at a present value of ~0 here?

Also, different people have different discounting rates they use for planning the future. When I talked about `interest rates' in general, I meant the prevailing interest rates on the market.

If your own discounting rate is lower than that, it totally makes sense to save. If your own rate is lower, borrowing is good. (All other things being equal, of course, which they never are.)

OK, so ~0 was exaggerating. At ~4% annual discount rate, you're looking at 13% for 50 years out. But that assumes that you'll be alive to benefit.

Anyway, my point is that accounting calculations tend to justify screwing the future. And that people, when thinking about themselves and their families, typically don't rely solely on accounting calculations.

The future is worth less, and typically discounted at a rate of around 4% a year. So 25 years out is around 36%, 50 years is 13%, 100 years is 1.6%, 200 years is 0.02%...

If that seems a little extreme then consider using 1816's technology to plow a field, travel to Europe, send a message around the world, or treat a cancer patient, and consider whether or not it's 500x better or cheaper or faster. Remember that the hot new technology of the day is the steamboat but transatlantic voyages, Ireland to New York, still run on sail and might take around, say, ~25 days.

Sure. But I was commenting on the concept of discounting future costs in present-value calculations. A 4% discount rate is about right for strontium-90, with a half-life of 28.9 years. But plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24.1 thousand years, so maybe a lower discount rate is appropriate.

Uhm, that's a bit like encountering the question "how do you put this equipment in orbit and what will it tell us" and answering with: "Use something that goes boom."

Sure, it's a starting point, but it's hardly a full plan, a good plan, or the answers we seek.

For starters, maintenance is not an annuity: How exactly did you estimate the number of real-dollars spent on repairing leaky barriers for the year of 2245?

Ask an engineer, and add a margin of safety. As long as the (nominal) maintenance cost-per-year inflation stays below (nominal) interest rates, you get a finite current value.

In some years you'll spend less than your estimate, in some more. Accountants use reserves to deal with these fluctuations.

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