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They talk about 'great stockpiles' then quote a figure of 22,000 m3 of high-level waste. 22,000 m3 of material is a tiny volume. Speaking from a bulk material moving perspective, that is maybe 12 hours work with a big excavator.

Speaking as a mining engineer, in an active mine site you'd need to take special precautions to make sure a 22,000 m3 stockpile didn't get lost. If you don't put it in a designated spot, you're not going to be able to find it again. We aren't talking a big pile of dirt here.

At volumes that small, if someone irresponsibly dumped it in the middle of the Sahara with a thick layer of rubble over the top it would be unlikely to be found and cause anyone any measurable harm.

Literally the only reason anyone cares is because the volumes are so small we could reasonably achieve 0 net impact. You try achieving that with lead mining, coal mining, rare earth mining for renewables, etc, etc. The volumes of material involved would overwhelm any attempt. So people don't bother talking about it. Only for nuclear fuel does it start to matter. We already churn out larger volumes of nastier substances as part of our industrial supply chain.

postscript the other good reason to talk about it the volumes are so small that if it doesn't get attention the aforementioned oops-we-lost-it problem will crop up. I mean, wow. 22 kcm of material. Going to need special markings just to distinguish it from a roll in the turf.

To put things in perspective, a 10x10x10 meters cube is 1000 cubic meters. 22 of those cubes is what we’re talking about. It’s tiny.

Another thing that often gets neglected is that nuclear power plants do not create that much radioactive waste. A lot of it is comparable to concentrating existing sources used to create enriched fuel. And areas where that fuel is mined from has (somewhat) higher radioactivity levels, just spread over wide areas.

I suspect that a technically decent solution would be mixing up waste to very low concentrations over a large area (putting it where the source came from, or dumping it at the deep sea beds). However, it would be politically unpalatable ("our water will be radioactive, etc.). My 2c.

22 piles 10x10x10 meter size would perfectly fit into decommissioned nuclear plant. These building are build to survive earthquakes, thunderstorms and small plane crashes for hundred years. It’s insane they are not used for storing the waste. Germans are dismantling them wasting huge fortune: https://m.dw.com/en/germanys-atomic-phaseout-how-to-dismantl... It’s crazy mismanagement of resources: initially expensive and extremely durable structure is build, used, then dismantled wasting millions and then another extremely durable and insanely expensive structure is build to store the waste. Sounds craze to me.

I used to play in the woods as child, there were 200 years old military structures. Nobody were maintaining them, rain, snow did their job, but they were intact. I don’t understand how we can’t reuse nuclear power plant buildings as storage for the next 200 years.

Sure 22 000m3 isn't that big, but the rate could increase sharply (currently new 34 000m3 of high and intermediate waste produced per year according to the article). The question is : should we invest and build 10 times more nuclear reactors for future energy needs ?

Build 10 times more reactors in the world, multiply per 50 years of operation and now you have 17 000 000 cube meters of high level waste.

Renewable energies introduced long-term thinking about impacts. The nuclear waste story only tells us we cannot scale the current nuclear technology, but we can still moderately use this tech for the next century to transition to more renewable methods.

> Build 10 times more reactors in the world, multiply per 50 years of operation and now you have 17 000 000 cube meters of high level waste.

So now you have 17 000 10x10x10m cubes to stuff somewhere. Still very little, and completely manageable. And that's assuming we'd build up old-school nuclear reactors. If you allow for using the new reactor designs, a lot of that would be reused as fuel.

"But energy from the sun man!"

At this point most of the arguments about nuclear power are philosophical in nature. They watched the Simpsons with the three eyed fish and evil Mr. Burns and took that as fact. It's the future, it's the way things will ultimately have to go, and future generations will be mad at modern day environmentalists holding up progress in the way that they are currently. Solar and wind is nice but it does not provide consistent enough generation for our purposes. Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for things that are much worse. Solar and wind require a new grid and new devices across the board to even get started. You want to wait a few decades for everyone to replace all of their appliances, heating and cooling mechanisms and for society to shift to this new model or do you want to make progress today?

One of the leading politicians of this generation once said "It's more important to be morally right than factually correct". Anti-nuclear folks really took that to heart.

“completely manageable”

If nuclear waste was inert, sure.

You are a mining engineer. Perhaps you know about the Asse mine in Germany. Radioactive waste has been stored there. However the storage suffers from water inflow and is in danger of collapsing. What is your opinion about this?

I don't know anything about it and have no opinion.

For comparison, the Giant Mine has 213,000 tons of water-soluble arsenic dust unceremoniously dumped at the bottom of a mine shaft, which is enough to kill all human life ten times over. Oh, and it's also off the coast of Yellowknife Bay. If that disaster in the making can be handled by just a billion dollars of remediation than we can also handle a small warehouse's worth of deadly bricks.

Hell, we could probably just toss them in with the arsenic. It's not like it will make things worse.

And we could also significantly reduce this number by using breeder reactors that make much better use of the materials

> we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative.

Seriously, we are pondering if a completely inert mass of nuclear waste sitting a mile inside the crust where it can harm nothing and from where there is no incentive to dug it up, is a better option than 6 orders of magnitude more CO2 dumped in the atomoshpere, bringing the climate to Jurasic levels, wiping off a large part of the biological diversity of Earth and threatening our very existence on the planet?

Nuclear power is not without it's problems. It's capital intensive, it's politically risky therefore expensive, it can, when managed badly, lead to (typically, tolerable) contamination and harm to people.

Of those problems, the handling of waste is the easiest to solve: just put them somewhere where they can't harm anyone.

Well, there actually are good incentives to dig it up (or to not bury it in the first place) as current reactors are horrendously inefficient, leaving 95%+ of usable energy in the fuel, that more modern reactors should be able to use.

Not to mention potentially usable metals & isotopes due to all the transmutations going on in the fuel.

> Nuclear power is not without it's problems. It's capital intensive, it's politically risky therefore expensive, it can, when managed badly, lead to (typically, tolerable) contamination and harm to people.

When managed badly it can make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable, as Chernobyl might have done. You shouldn't discount that!

> When managed badly it can make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable

Citation needed

> as Chernobyl might have done

No. If you take all the waste in Chernobyl as well as all the fuel, and dissiminate all around Europe equally, it will sightly increase the natural radioactivity, and in some place this increas would be laughably negligeable (Wales, Brittany, probably others).

Also, you should be aware than risk =/= danger, so even if your argument were true, it would not be receivable in any non-political debate.

Plus the pressurized water reactors reduce the risk so much than even the Tsunami the provocked Fukushima would probably just paralize the reactors sightly.

But the FUD spread by anti-nuclear activists, uniformed people and media killed more than all the nuclear incident in the last 60 years. And i'm not counting the social exclusion cost or even the abortions caused by all the bull.

In the HBO show Chernobyl one of the engineers talks about an area the size of Europe being rendered uninhabitable if things went wrong. That's a real quote taken from a book about people's reminiscences of the disaster and some Soviet engineer probably did say that at some point. But he was either exaggerating for effect or wrong.

The creators knowingly misrepresented the disaster, to have a more exciting show. Do you remember what the book is called?

Voices from Chernobyl. Personally I thought the series was rather well done all things considered and gave a good account of the human and technical factors that went into the disaster. A lot of people were compressed into a few composite characters but that's the reality of making television. I feel like I can blame the show a bit for exaggerating the danger of a steam explosion because of cherry-picking quotes. But I don't really see anything else worth complaining about.

>To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative.

Next-gen molten salt plants have much better usage of the nuclear material. Current light water reactors only use about 2% of the possible energy from the material.

One consequence of this better efficiency is the waste is only dangerous for hundreds, instead of tens of thousands, of years.

The long term consequences of nuclear waste are clearly less bad than the short term consequences of burning fossil fuels, which are estimated to kill hundreds of thousands of people world wide per year. That's entirely aside from climate change...

People are just typically ill-informed and incapable of making rational decisions about relative risk.

(BTW nuclear will also be one of the cheapest energy sources going forward, and is the only reliable 24/7 source of carbon-free energy.)

> To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative.

You probably didn't intend it this way, but this reads as a powerful argument for switching to nuclear, at least if you realize how much "a warmed/messed up planet" we're talking about, vs. how extremely small a "pile of dangerous radioactive waste".

> Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative.

In science it's better to have a known problem (radioactive waste), than hundreds of thousands of unknown problems (global warming).

> Florida even actively prevents businesses from engaging in roof top solar panels

Roof top solar panel is one of the worst way to generate energy, you just add the inefficiency of low scale on top of the inefficiencies of solar panels. Just about everything is better than that.

And then additionally, you can build all the solar and wind energy you want, you still need a constant energy to support it anyway.

Not even in science alone; climate-wise having 22km3 of solid material is much preferable over the 30 gigatonnes (!) of CO2 emissions that are just vented into the air nowadays. (and that's just co2, the source [1] I found with a second of googling mentions 60 gigatonnes total)

[1] https://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/trends-in-global-co2-and-...

Actually, that is 0.000022 km3 of solid material.

The fly ash from coal is radioactive. But we just blast stuff that in to the atmosphere for all of us to breath. I would rather deal with some irradiated slags.

Once upon a time someone posted the amount of nuclear waste generated in a person's lifetime assuming 1st world electricity usage. It was like a golfball or apple or something like that. I ran the numbers for volume and multiplied by 7 billion people it came out to be like 1-3 of the worlds largest container ships worth of waste.

That's basically nothing. We can find a place for that.

Edit: I invite anyone who doesn't think that's basically nothing to run numbers for the waste products of other energy sources.

> discount the cost involved in dealing with this radioactive trash

That is 100% wrong. In fact in the US for example the money to handle radioactive waste was collected almost from the beginning.

The Government HAS a huge fund, that is owned by nuclear power utilites, this fund can be used by the government to solve the problem.

Unfortunatly, anti-nuclear people have made any progress on nuclear waste managment impossible, but this is not, and never has been about money.

> we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative.

That is also nonsense. In no way of estimation, radioactive waste is close to as dangerous as climate change. Handling of radioactive waste is not that difficult and in the future it, once nuclear power is more standard, those things can be used as nuclear fuel again. You are not handing down useless stuff, but a well controlled resource.

> Use the safe option first, and wait for nuclear option to mature until we get a better grip on what to do with its dangerous trash.

Nuclear waste has not been a technical issue for decades. Its a purley political problem.

First of all, the amount of nuclear waste is wastly over-estimated. The danger from civilian nuclear waste is wastle over-estimated as well.

And more importantly, if we actually had a large nuclear industry, this 'waste' would actually be quite useful and most of it should never be disposed in a permanent way.

> instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground

Without actual numbers this just sounds like FUD. How much nuclear waste is produced? How much volume is it? Why is it so bad that we keep it under ground? How does that compare to costs of other power sources?

So far it looks like nuclear is by far cheapest and cleanest least deadly source of power and only irrational phobias are in the way of adopting it in planetary scale and developing even better reactors and more efficient waste management procedures.

> Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative.

I suppose that when you watch your children die from climate change, then you will know.

… or radioactivity.

That's not how it works. The waste has to be dealt with, but its not immediately harmful to the general population. Its a problem that has to be addressed in the long term, but climate change is a problem that has to be addressed in the short term. And by the short term I mean the past.

In other words, radioactive waste isn't a "your children" problem, it's several generations removed if a solution hasn't been found by then. Climate change is indeed a "your children" problem, if you're old enough to die in the next couple of decades. Otherwise it's a You problem.

So basically, let's just offload the nuclear waste problem to future generations. That's exactly the same line of thinking that caused climate change.

Out of all the problems we're offloading to future generation, this is by far one of the smallest. It's a tiny amount of tightly controlled substance that can be reprocessed further to reduce both its volume and half-life - we know how, just this stupid FUD doesn't let us build the actual reactors to do that.

I'm not denying it's offloading a problem, but it's not the same scale of problem and the resolution needed is on a far longer time scale as well.

You simply can't compare a worldwide, global, catastrophic change in climate, causing millions to die, species to go instinct, and trillions of dollars in damages to... this. What exactly is your reasoning in making them equal?

You can safely store radioactive waste but there's no method of storage for the CO2 we put in the air, that's the big difference.

can you name any? btw. putting it somewhere and forgetting about it is definitiv not an option.

You can use part of it as fuel, it's just does not economically make sense to do so right now. And what's wrong with storing it exactly?

Put it in a sealed container and drop it in an abandoned mine, or even a pool. Keep an armed detail protecting it from getting stolen. There, done.

If you're talking about storing the waste long-term, on the order of "more than any country existed on the planet", then this is a problem only because the irrational fear of nuclear doesn't let us build reactors that could further reprocess the fuel.

(And if civilization collapsed now, then all you have to do is to burn the paper maps on which the storage location is marked, and nobody will find the waste before it decays to background radiation levels. If we fuck up civilization now, then the few remaining survivors will be stuck for a couple thousand years with medieval-era technology on a thoroughly broken planet. It's extremely unlikely someone would stumble upon the ruins radioactive waste storage plant. The planet is very large, the amount of nuclear waste is ridiculously tiny.)

> Put it in a sealed container and drop it in an abandoned mine, or even a pool. Keep an armed detail protecting it from getting stolen. There, done.

Indeed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

Why isn’t it an option? There are plenty of places where it’s implausible for any future civilisation to reach without knowing what radiation is any why such waste is best left undisturbed.

Here's a disposal site in Finland: http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/basics_of_the_final_d...

oh great. the methodology which might not work because of copper erosion. also kbs-3 is not in use. it might be next year, but nothing is proven yet, especially since it already had some critism.

in 100 years we will see if it was a good idea. and basically thats the problem of waste disposal.

Typical straw man argument. No one is arguing to put it somewhere and forget about it. Monitoring will of course be a big part of any of these strategies. The small volume of material has to be located somewhere safe for a few dozen years until reprocessing tech catches up. That is a manageable issue, assuming we get out of our own way and invest in the required R&D. It only takes the will and the commitment to get it done. The return is carbon free energy at a massive scale. That is transformative.

You mean the many times of radioactive material that’s aerosolized by coal burning?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Wouldn't the parents die first?