Living with nuclear waste means remembering on a different scale | Hacker News Reader

Living with nuclear waste means remembering on a different scale

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29 pointsHooke41 comments

Why does nuclear waste require remembering on a different scale because it lasts for 100,000 years, but chemical waste which lasts literally forever does not?

It seems like a long but definite timespan leaves open the possibility of a solution so people see a goal to strive for. Mercury and arsenic and a million other things have to solution so we just dump them into the atmosphere or whatever.

Made me wonder what people think about the naturally occurring radioactive sites in nature.

I don't think there are any naturally occurring sites whose radioactivity comes anywhere close to that of high-level nuclear waste.

They have discovered naturally occurring nuclear reactions in rock formations. There is also the issue of radio active radon gas. My point is more that radiation hazards exist naturally on earth. A carefully constructed handful of man made ones doesn't feel like it changes the risk profile all that much.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-nuclear-r...

There are natural nuclear reactors in Africa¹, though they fizzled out 2 billion years ago.

Fortunately high radiation nuclear materials burns out pretty quickly. The stuff that is active very long term also has very low levels of radiation.

¹ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nucl...

Radon leaking into buildings has killed many orders of magnitude more people than nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons combined, no matter how liberal your estimates.

That's only because radon is way more common.

That's kind of the point.

I don't get the point. It's quite reasonable to treat a pervasive, small risk differently from a rare, large risk. You're far more likely to die from sunlight than from botulism, but we treat the latter far more carefully. That's only to be expected, since the risk from exposure is far higher for botulism.

What I'm pointing out is different behavior when dealing with substances that have similar risks. If I had a basement, I'd much prefer to have naturally occurring radon in it than either high-level nuclear waste or toxic chemical waste, if somehow that was my choice.

Optimism says that both hazardous chemicals and spent nuclear fuel are problems that have solutions. In the case of chemical waste, we will eventually have entirely closed chemical cycles just like life. That is not enough of course: we must also try to avoid them ending up in the wrong places in the wrong form, and when they inevitably sometimes do, find ways to clean that up or obviate their effects.

It depends on the waste. The long-term waste is mostly plutonium and other transuranics; fast reactors can use that as fuel. The remaining collection of fission products goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore in two or three centuries.

Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation, and various companies are working on their own designs.

I guess it's not that simple. Say you have a factory that made Plutonium triggers and that same factory was pretty awful at following safety and containment protocol. Now that Plutonium is in very low levels within the actual soil of where the now decommissioned plant resides. Do you mine that soil for the Plutonium, or do you make all that soil nuclear waste?

In Colorado, we've decided to open up the area as a Wildlife Refuge.

http://e360.yale.edu/features/rocky_flats_wildlife_refuge_co...

Plutonium triggers have nothing to do with nuclear power. The nuclear bomb industry has a horrific environmental record, which isn't surprising considering what they were building.

If the plutonium is valuable fuel instead of waste, then a commercial operation has a good incentive to hold on to it, even aside from the regulations that commercial power has to deal with.

Yes, after a few hundred years you've got a pretty good source for weapons grade plutonium

No, the point is the plutonium is gone because you've fissioned it in your reactor.

One should also consider the possibility that if we fall back to the point where we can't reason about radioactivity cholera and dysentery will likely bounce back to the leading causes of human death.

This idea of needing to protect nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is absurdist. Over this timescale there are threats that are just more dangerous [1]. What about conventional war over scare energy? That is a real threat.

And this argument is assuming that the next 100 years have absolutely no advances to a science that didn't exist 150 years ago. I find that unlikely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk

Already been solved, it's safer than than other forms of power generation http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html

What has been solved? The terrorist goes in there, takes some waste, builds dirty bomb problem? I may forgive him for not thinking about that 25 years ago but thats not what I consider as solved (asside from dissolved which he indeed convers in quite some detail). Although I agree that one could do that with other stuff as well.

It's solved just like poverty has been solved. There is enough food, energy and shelter for the 7bn people.

It's just those pesky humans hoarding, cutting corners, cheating, fighting, using more than their fair share, etc. Because nuclear lives inside of a fallible society it requires additional safety considerations.

Here is an opinion article on Yucca mountain that I think makes most of the same points, but in a smaller footprint.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2008/12/2...

I wish this bogus eye watering bullshit will just stop. I'm as big a fan of dystopian future planet hell as the next guy, but it will not involve "nuclear waste" in any shape or form. Nuclear war, sure, fallout yes. But waste, no. There is no such thing as nuclear waste. If ever there was fake news, and a dead horse whipped to the bone....

Care to expand? I am not convinced of planetary-scale ecosystem restructuring due to nuclear waste, but certainly leaks of such waste could poison large areas for quite some time.

(I prefer to call it ecosystem "restructuring" rather than "destruction" because clearly under almost every possible scenario some organisms would prosper. The term "destruction" only makes sense if you suppors a selfish view that the ecosystem is designed to be congenial to humans, and anything else is "wrong". It is interesting to speculate if the sentient cockroaches of 100 megayears hence would detect any traces of us).

Because that 'waste' is fuel for 4th generation breeder reactors and will be used as such. The result of that process is low grade waste that you can dump a meter of topsoil on and build a park or kindergarten on top of. Guarapari beach is more radioactive. There is no such thing as nuclear waste.

Maybe you should talk to some actual nuclear engineers and not just read starry eyed proposals. The engineering tasks of building and maintainig said reactors plus digging up the waste and shipping it there is tremendous. Especially sodium cooled proposals get the most face palms from people who actually work in the field. "There's a reason psysicists don't design reactors but engineers do" is a quote I remember from the last time I met a nuclear engineer and discussed transmutation proposals.

Bottom line: Nothing is solved and it will take decades to get to a design that consumes new waste, let alone old waste that is currently rotting under ground and is ever harder to get to.

Russia seems pretty happy with their sodium-cooled reactors, they have two in commercial operation and are building more.

There are a lot more things than simply spent fuel that end up as nuclear waste.

Are nuclear waste that toxic for that long?

The longer lived an element is, the less radioactive it is, so if some radioactive waste can last for 100000 years, it must be radiating very weakly. You probably could have a barrel of it under your bed and live your life normally, although with a slightly increased risk of cancer.

And finding ways of preventing future generation from digging is thinking little of humanity. That's assuming we won't be able to detect radiation in the future. In fact, this "waste" may prove very valuable.

That's the trouble with radioactive isotopes. A hundred thousand years is long enough that it will be radioactive for longer than we can foresee, many times longer than written history, but it's short enough that it's still very active. Even a gram will have billions of decays per second. And while our body is of course capable of repairing a small amount of DNA damage, evolution never prepared us for a continuous bombardement by the subatomic equivalent of a machine gun.

Pu-239 [0] has a half-life of 24k years, and is considered dangerously radioactive.

Of course, this only applies when we're talking about large quantities, like radioactive waste. I have had a bone scintigraphy done, which means I probably have a fraction of a gram of Tc-99 with a half life of 211k years embedded in my bones, which is unlikely to be an issue. But I wouldn't want to store a decent chunk of that under my bed. I would, however, have no qualms about sleeping with uranium 238, an alpha-emitter that lasts many billion years.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards

Why are we talking about 100,000 years, when all we know with any confidence is that things will be so different in 100 that it is impossible to predict most of the problems that will face us then?

In fact I have trouble imagining a future where people still exist, but this problem is not solved or obviated well before 100,000 years from now -- in fact before 100.

It's a solved problem, just with a solution too expensive to be adopted: send them on a one-way trip to the sun, BSG-style.

I'd actually rather dump them in the moon somewhere. Then if the material turns out useful you could recover it. Otherwise you can use the heat as part of an rtg type system to power a colony or station on the moon.

  This place is not a place of honor.
  No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
  Nothing valued is here.
  This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
  Pay attention to it!
  Sending this message was important to us.
  We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

Hard to imagine a circumstance in which such a statement is not a lie. In this case it's a real doozy; plutonium is the most valuable substance on Earth.

On the other hand, maybe such a confused people do not deserve it.

Those are proposed markers. Here's a real one.[1] That's the SL-1 reactor site, in Idaho. There, an experimental reactor ran away due to a control rod removal during maintenance, and blew apart in a steam explosion. This was in 1961.

Already, that marker looks dated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1#/media/File:SL-1Burial.jp...

It's hard to think of a worse plan for spent nuclear fuel than burying it in an inaccessible location.

There is no such problem as maintaining nuclear waste for 100,000 years. In reality, events will overtake our plans long before then. For example:

* inevitable flaws in the design of the burial system may cause leakage that burial will likely make more expensive to correct than leaving the waste where it is

* we will want to burn up the spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors (which actually removes the problem, and simultaneously creates wealth)

* we will find ways to clean up leaks and spills

* we will find ways to prevent and cure diseases caused by radioactivity

What, and no mention of Anathem?

Put it in Antarctica. Problem solved.

Or we can keep digging up fossil fuels and burning them, in which case there won't be an Antarctica at some point.

What are fossil fuels going to do to the land mass? It has the highest elevation on earth.

That might be true in a technical sense, I suppose, although I thought Everest was the highest point on Earth. I can't find any references regarding Antarctica having the highest land elevation; any pointers?

And I'm sure it won't all melt.

But if we want to preserve the continent's desirable property of complete inaccessibility to non-technologically literate humans for the next 10,000 or more years, it would be worth considering the effects of ACC. Right now it's a good place to store nuke waste for that very reason.

>I can't find any references regarding Antarctica having the highest land elevation; any pointers?

Wikipedia says Antarctica "has the highest average elevation of all the continents", but right now a lot of it is ice. East Antarctica is supposed to be covered with so much ice that a large majority of the land has been compressed below sea level(CTRL+F the wikipedia article for 'isostatic rebound' and view the pictures).

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

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