Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

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I am glad you asked because this is an interesting time in the nuclear waste world. The simple answer is that you put it deep underground in geologically stable places like crystalline bedrock or salt beds where it will sit out of danger until after at least 100,000 years, when it will have released all of its excess energy and reached stability.

For example, the Finns, being a pragmatic people, decided collectively to build and operate a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste called Onkalo. It's mostly complete and has test canisters in place as we speak. [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-waste/wor...

Relatedly, a company in Berkeley called Deep Isolation is now working to commercialize a new waste disposal technique called deep borehole disposal. Rather than mining out something a few hundred meters deep, you use modern oil/gas techniques (ironically, the same tech that allows fracking) to cheaply drill down 5-8 km and put the spent fuel down there where it really has no credible way of making it back up. This particular company is run by a woman and they focus on community outreach first. It looks to be a good approach [2].

[2] https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/

Also worth noting is that once it's out of the reactor, there's no more high pressure coolant or nuclear chain reaction to drive its dispersal. It sits in incredibly robust canisters on parking lots at the plants where it's almost impossible to imagine anything going wrong. See my buddy Jim doing a walk-through in Washington state to get a visual [3].

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g

The comparison of risk between stored nuclear waste vs. things like air pollution and climate change is astronomical: nuclear waste risk is incredibly low. In a high-carbon, high air pollution world, it's hardly a footnote in the world risks.

Yet, for every person I talk to, this is the primary concern. I feel like we've let too many MacGyvers and Captain Planets and Simpsons and HBO's run wild without correction. Nuclear PR people have been hiding under rocks since Three Mile Island. The millennial new nuclear people are much more aggressive because we got into this to cut carbon emissions, and this appears to be pretty urgent.

You say that "Nuclear PR people have been hiding under rocks", but that is not my picture of the fission industry.

You mention Onkalo. AFAIK, that uses the same solution as the proposed Swedish nuclear waste storage. Copper canisters embedded in bentonite clay.

Experts NOT employed by the nuclear fission industry tend to disagree with the industry experts: https://www.dw.com/en/sweden-plans-first-ultimate-storage-si...

Also, this SKB company in cahoots with SSM (the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority) had suppressed an internal report made by independent experts saying the same thing (article in Swedish, but with English quotes from the report): http://www.mkg.se/ssm-rapport-avslojar-att-skb-dolt-problem-...

This report about the report only came to light because of a lawsuit by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.

The whole tale is a bit more complicated and sordid (for the Radiation Safety Authority), but I can't find an article in English for you: http://www.sverigesnatur.org/aktuellt/stralsakerhetsmyndighe...

It should also be mentioned that the European radiation limits from nuclear waste storage are much more stringent than in the US. EPA's limit defined for the (fiasco-laden) Yucca Mountain storage for the first 10,000 years is 10 times higher, and then for the remainder, up to 1,000,000 years, 250 times higher, but maybe that's moot since it looks like Yucca Mountain is a dead end.

My perspective on PR is very US-heavy. I have literally never seen a fission advertisement or billboard or anything in the USA. I see ads for natural gas all the time, filled with wind mills and wizards and all sorts of garbage.

> Experts NOT employed by the nuclear fission industry tend to disagree with the industry experts

I suspect that may be over stated. The fission industry is relatively small and lots of people are not employed by it. Certainly it's possible to find opposing viewpoints on most topics, as anti-nuclear groups has a rich and powerful history.

The solution in terms of the topic discussed in your link (corrosion) is generally academia. Independent university labs can perform various kinds of corrosion tests and discuss in the open literature. Does this not happen like this in Sweden?

I've been surprised by how low some of the European radiation limits myself, especially given the growing body of science suggesting that biological systems are quite robust against low-dose radiation (perhaps because we evolved with an ever-present natural background of it).

For example: "Integrated Molecular Analysis Indicates Undetectable Change in DNA Damage in Mice after Continuous Irradiation at ~ 400-fold Natural Background Radiation": https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104294

I'm more wondering how we get the nuclear fuel in the first place and how long we can keep picking it up until it gets too expensive to find/process? And are we still using coal powerplats to process the fuel to usable quality? Then it's not very carbonfree.

Excellent question. As with many minerals, uranium-bearing minerals are found in various parts of the world in various grades of ore. Some areas have high-grade ore, and others are more diffuse. The best information on this that I'm aware of is at world nuclear [1]. In summary, there is a whole lot of uranium.

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

At the diffuse extreme, there's nearly infinite uranium in seawater, and lots of research has been done recently to extract it passively with special polymers. In 2016, this special edition journal summarized the progress [2]. It's still more expensive than conventional mining, but not so much that it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to economically get uranium from seawater. Then nuclear is renewable for billions of years, as uranium in seawater replenishes via runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever imagine using it.

[2] https://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15

This is all further complicated by the fact that conventional nuclear reactors burn about 1% of the nuclear fuel pulled out of the ground. More advanced breeder reactors with recycling facilities can get up to 90% of the energy (there are always some process losses). This extends known resources by another factor of 90x.

There's also Thorium, which can be used as nuclear fuel. There's a whole lot of that too [3].

[3] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

Regarding power to enrich, France and some others uses nuclear power plants to power their nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities. In the USA, I believe there's still lots of coal and fracked gas powering enrichment plants. The gas centrifuge enrichment plants are so energy efficient that this matters much less than back in the day when we used gaseous diffusion. In the end game, the plan would be to do as France does and make the whole fuel cycle ultra low carbon.

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