Until we can find a safe and permanent way to store spent fuel (or otherwise render harmless fission products with long half-lives), nuclear power is always going to fail the "Facebook mom test". And, in my opinion, rightly so.
Despite a long-standing agreement among many experts that geological disposal can be safe, technologically feasible and environmentally sound, a large part of the general public in many countries remains skeptical. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Pri...
In fact, not only are the dozens of needed DGRs not being built, in many cases fuel which has cooled enough to be moved into cask storage is instead still sitting in actively cooled pools. So not only have we not built any large DGRs (other than that under construction one in Finland), we haven't even taken the intermediate step of preparing spent fuel for any form of passive storage.
Look at Germany quitting on nuclear and using coal power plants instead. Look at France producing relatively cheap and low-carbon energy using mainly nuclear power plants: https://www.electricitymap.org/
This is one of these conversations like GMOs, like vaccines, like herbicides, like so many others where it seems that rational conversation is impossible because only extreme viewpoints can be heard. Nuclear is incredibly dangerous when it goes wrong but the risk can be managed and when it works well it's very competitive. Of course the costs of properly dismantling the reactors and storing all the radioactive waste needs to be factored in. It's a tough engineering problem but compared to rising sea level and massive perturbations in the climate it seems a whole lot easier to manage.
I'd much sooner live close to a nuclear power plant than next to a busy highway.
1. No one does that, or has the ability to do that except the Russians [0] 2. Much less hazardous is still tons of extremely dangerous stuff that will last 100 k years. [1]
[0] fast breeders. I know you can re-process fuel for normal nuclear reactors. But that doesn’t give you: “less hazardous and only needs to be stored for a much shorter time” waste
[1] to a first approximation linger lived isotopes are less dangerous. But the conclusion that they’re not a problem is not correct:
- An isotope that lives 100k years is incredibly radioactive! - these isotopes can produce children that are very short lived, and therefore nasty (think short lived radon, produced from geologically decaying isotopes)
Edit: spelling of “extremely”
Its completely illogical to block Nuclear Power advancement, but goverments are either lobbed or public opinion disagrees after being fed complete horseshit disinformation.
The US’ got lazy, the European was good, but never innovative, Canada and S. Africa are too small.
How many would actually be needed to burn up the unused fuel of "regular" reactors? Is there some ration of regular:breeder that would be needed (5:1, 8:1, 13:1)?
> to a first approximation longer lived isotopes are less dangerous.
But isn't the shielding required for the longer lived stuff simpler? Presumably the short-lived stuff is hotter gamma radiation, which needs more shielding.
Edit: according to Wikipedia, cesium-137 decays to barium-137m, which decays to barium-137 by gamma ray emission (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137). So even though cesium-137 decays through beta radiation it needs shielding against gamma radiation.
Depends on the specifics, e.g. Russia is proposing a 2:1 ratio for a cycle they're planning:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...
Double digits of France's electricity comes from reprocessed nuclear fuel.
The nasties are all there still.
Breeders “make” their own fuel from actual waste. The US and France had reader had breeder programs, but shut them down.
ALMR reactors would use that waste to produce short half-live waste which radiation can even stop in the matter of hours...
Thats what Chinese invest into now and technology is 40 years old.
Technologically we are way past the "dirty&dengerous" nuclear reactors. ALMR also fixes issue of old nuclear reactors that could be shut down overtime.
People fear the second Chernobyl.. thats that why we dont invest into Nuclear Power that is our only chance in current age. There is no logic in that, only mass media, lobbing and disinformation going rampant..
‘S/sodium/whatever other metal you prefer/‘
It's a tragedy..
Oh really? Which isotope among the fission products would that be?
I am not very familiar with the Russian breeder design in particular, but generally that is wrong fro 4th generation designs:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts being generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
Yes, the west has done research and maybe a couple of demo reactors of insignificant power. But only the Soviets, and then the Russians have an industrial sized “fast”, or “breeder” reactor.
As to the waste of “breeders” being manageable, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?
Granted that the power level for EBR II was insignificant compared to a commercial reactor, but it did run successfully for about 30 years and generated about 2 billion kilowatts of power.
https://www.ne.anl.gov/About/reactors/frt.shtml
>...As to the waste of “breeders” being manageable, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?
Within about 4 centuries the small volume of waste generated by a breeder reactor should be less radioactive than the uranium ore that it came from.
Um, what? France has been reprocessing for decades.
> Much less hazardous is still tons of extremely dangerous stuff that will last 100 k years
Um, what? What's left over after reprocessing is only dangerous for 100 years or less.
100 years for reprocessed waste? Do cite!
(ALMR tests performed in USA already confirmed what you asked for and that was 1984..)
So … where's it in production yet? The reasons why it hasn't happened might be instructive for learning why this problem is harder than it might seem.
I look at it as a tragedy. Oil Industry is like a cancer to our society right now.
The truth is more mundane (and you should have realized something was wrong when you started thinking in conspiracy theories). The technology is simply not as great as you think it is, and like most technologies it's probably not going to win. There's no dishonor in that; the market is a brutal place.
Deep geological waste repositories are fine. Lets get those operating safely so we can answer the "what do you do with the waste" problem definitively and then move on. Reprocessing may make sense again sometime in the future but for now we need the prereq of deep storage. I agree with Frank von Hippel in this case [1].
[1] http://npolicy.org/userfiles/image/The%20Costs%20and%20Benef...
You'd need a really reliable launch process like a space elevator to do this without worrying about dispersing it around in the atmosphere. It's worth talking about but it's hard to imagine a socially-acceptable pathway at the moment. Deep geologic repositories are safe and known. We should just use them.
At the moment, no. But the economics are likely to change over the next century or so. Which means that reprocessing should definitely be taken into account when determining how long spent fuel needs to be stored. Requiring storage facilities to be good for ten thousand years or more is not reasonable given that it will be economical to reprocess it long, long before then.
Check out all this seawater extraction progress [1].
however, neither your link nor anything from a reputable site that i've found through google says anything about costs or current industrial production. do you have any data to back up your claim of low cost, or is that claim purely speculation on your part ?
unless there's data that i've missed, it doesn't sound like seawater extraction is currently economically viable
We're comparing long term scenarios here: reprocessing vs. seawater extraction. The reprocessing + hot refabrication process has been done and is extraordinarily expensive. If seawater extraction at scale is indeed viable, it's long term prospects in my view are way better than reprocessing.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
Water absorbs almost all harmful radiation within a few meters
The thought process behind just throwing barrels into an ocean trench as was done by the US was and still is sound but people are freaked out by the notion. The UK was encasing barrels in concrete before doing the same which is more than good enough by most measures.
Ultimately nuclear waste is easier to deal with than some other toxic industrial waste or chemicals.
Nuclear waste sitting at the bottom of the ocean will have a hard time ever reaching the atmosphere.