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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

There are so many layers this article has missed. That "waste" is also viewed by some as a resource, a repository of potential material for weapons. So it cannot be put somewhere out of reach. There has also been progress in deep-drill disposal options. It could be placed a few miles down from where it is now, in bedrock that will one day melt back into the earth. Drill a really deep hole (many miles) cement it over and forget about it. But that means we wouldnt be able to get at it later.

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I think they're pretty clear in the article that the problem is that there is no centralized place to ship the waste. Having it sit out in the open where it needs constant security, next to a plant that close decades ago, is the sign of a political failure.

They keep trying to put it in Nevada, but Nevadans aren't having it. They don't trust the federal government after being lied to about the dangers of the open-air atomic bomb testing that they carried out in the 1940s and 50s.

I understand storage and bomb testing are not equivalent, but I don't blame Nevadans for being skeptical. The government should look someplace else at this point.

> I think they're pretty clear in the article that the problem is that there is no centralized place to ship the waste.

We've been trying to solve this problem for years, but they're being contested and underfunded.

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

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

Senators are moral imbeciles, and so it goes. Without a strong move in the senate to make this happen and damn the backlash, America is stuck with the rolling disaster that is their NRC, and decentralized ad hoc storage of spent fuel. It’s crazy, but it part of a long list of crazy and self destructive things that form the American status quo with “Senators are moral imbeciles” throbbing at their core.

With deep drilling (bore hole disposal) it can often be disposed of in situ, eliminating the need for transport and centralized storage.

It’s only useful for dirty bomb style weapons that a terrorist might make. You can’t make weapons grade plutonium from it. All plutonium used in US weapons was made in special purpose reactors at Hanford, WA. We made so much of it and have enough stockpiled to build all the bombs we’d ever need that we shut down the production there in 1987.

It may be a useful resource for other types of nuclear plants though.

Ideally we could bury this really deep (as you propose) and forget about it. Or buy out Nevada’s opposition and reopen Yucca.

Spent fuel can be repossessed into weapons grade material and into commercial fuel. Europe, Russia and Japan all reprocessed spent fuel into commercial fuel.

Sort of. These reactors produce too much of the wrong isotopes of plutonium to make a good bomb. It’ll turn out to have about 100th the yield or so.

But that assumes we’d ever want to give out spent fuel to Europe, Russia, Japan for them to process it for that purpose anyway? And if we did why wouldn’t we just outright give them the pure stuff that we made specifically for the purpose.

Reprocessing into fuel for power plants is the only option that could make sense. But my understanding is reprocessing hasn’t ever proved to be economically worthwhile (I may be wrong on that though).

Burying this stuff is the best option unless someone can come up with a reactor design that burns up used fuel without reprocessing. (Wasn’t that company Gates backed proposing to do that?)

> All plutonium used in US weapons was made in special purpose reactors at Hanford, WA

Do you have a source for that? Wikipedia says "the majority" of the US arsenal, but the source is hidden behind a NYT subscriber paywall (article is from 1987.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#Cold_War_expansio...

DOE also enriched weapons-grade plutonium at the Savannah River (SC) site, built after Hanford and thus somewhat less environmentally catastrophic. It’s still an operating facility, but for tritium, not plutonium.

This sounds plausible, but I haven't previously heard of this being something that affects current policy. Do you have any sources you could point to that would defend the theory that a safe permanent disposal is being overlooked because it doesn't allow for future retrieval?

I don't see any mention of solar waste.

There’s a lot of solar waste. The manufacturing process produces it, and the cells don’t last forever so after 20-30 years, they become waste too. (Not arguing against solar power, I’m very much in favor, but that’s just how it is.)

Paradoxically, nuclear waste gets a lot of attention because there’s so little of it. It’s a small enough problem for people to pay attention to. Far bigger waste problems are ignored because they’re too hard to think about.

Here ya go

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...

>Solar panels _often_ contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel.

Nowadays the definition of "often" has shifted to meaning 5%. The waste problem is only relevant for thin film solar panels which only comprise a tiny percentage of the entire market.

The lead and cadmium night explain why I feel so woozy after smoking ground-up solar panels.

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