France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Respectable publications should stop quoting Greenpeace. In my mind, Greenpeace is really close to anti-vaxxers through their opposition of nuclear power and especially GMO foods such as Golden Rice which would save thousands of children's lives every year. In regards to nuclear power, it it had not been for the stringent opposition to nuclear power over the years, a much larger percentage of our power generation would be carbon free.
https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/golden-rice-attack-in-p...
This slide in every keynote is thanks to Greenpeace's pressure:
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PTzcvBp4KMjFaBymZ_M2__JaZ0Y=...
Offering tax credits for reducing carbon emissions is fundamentally the same thing, but people oppose it because many times the people earnings these credits still use fossil fuels but are switching from coal to gas. Many oppose any development of fossil fuel power, even if it reduces emissions.
It's not at all, because the reason for opposition is directly relevant to the question of which failures to address the reasons for opposition are, in fact, “blocking actions” that harm our survival the most.
Perhaps more importantly, it's relevant to the fix instead of blame issue of which approached to address opposition are likely to be most fruitful in improving our survival chances.
Which is, to me, the more important question: I'd rather human civilization survive than be able to efficiently place the blame for it's collapse.
Also, (and this is the real reason for this reply) that was some pretty bad use of italics. You just made your text harder to read mate, and honestly I just skimmed it.
Meanwhile nuclear uses up finite stores of fuel and exotic materials for the containment and control systems.
You need to calculate the trade-offs of those resources vs resources used for other types of energy. The "sun" part of the question is the least interesting part.
https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/ho...
I'm currently building a house quite north at 55N. I plan to install a solar PV system that will make the house a net-zero energy consumer (everything is electric, no fossil fuels).
It should pay for itself in around 10 years and then continue producing electricity for another 15 before warranties run out. After that the electrical equipment may need to be replaced, but the panels themselves should be fine. If it makes sense here, it can make sense almost anywhere.
Like I said, it's not so simple, nuclear is 66 g/kWh, and does not have intermittency issues.
> that will make the house a net-zero energy consumer (everything is electric, no fossil fuels).
Are you heating with electricity as well? Because that's really bad for the environment, even with PV. (Because if you heated with natural gas, you could send your PV electricity to another grid consumer and avoid more hydrocarbon fuel being burned.)
If yes, are you at least using a ground-source heat pump? (Although even there natural gas is better - install a "gas absorption heat pump" if you really want to minimize your emissions.)
> If it makes sense here, it can make sense almost anywhere.
In small quantities yes, but if everyone did that you need something to generate electricity at night.
To me nuclear wins easily.
We are going for an air source heat pump. A ground source heat pump will need bore holes to be drilled as there isn't enough space for ground loops, and the extra cost of that doesn't offset the decreased efficiency of the air source heat pump over the life of the system. The heat pump will primarily run when PV is generating more power than the rest of the house is consuming, and store heated water in a tank for consumption at night.
We are building to Passive House standards. Space heating from the heat pump will use a maximum 1000kWh of electriciy per year (worst case assuming we get a long stretch of cold days below the operating temperature of the heat pump, and it has to fall back to resistance heating), while the PV should output around 9000kWh. We'll also have a wood stove as backup, but that will generate too much heat for primary heating.
Net-zero isn't perfect as you say, but for the few winter months when we probably won't generate enough electricity to cover heating consumption I don't think it's that bad. Electricity generation in my country has an average of 300g CO2/kWh.
I'd prefer not to use gas as our country imports gas from Russia, and I'd rather not depend on them. Plus gas leakage has a massive impact on ghg.
We are in the late planning stages, so if you have any suggestions of further reading material please let me know :-)
I understand the Russia situation, but geopolitics changes all the time, and the house is likely to stand for a long time.
Since you seem to be in Europe, and you want an air source heat pump, I would suggest this product for your heating: Lochinvar LCGHPi-40HT.
Then instead of using your electricity to (inefficiently) run a heat pump, send the electricity back out on the grid, while using more efficient natural gas. And then you help CO2 emissions in a more globally way, rather than just by your house. CO2 acts globally after all.
Even with the gas leakage, natural gas is still worth it over heating with electricity. I think you have something like 1/5 the emissions of electricity (and remember your PV going back on the grid reduces fuel consumption elsewhere).
Few people are able to afford that because the battery backup needed for daily/seasonal solar variations is just too expensive. You are able to remove yourself from the grid with an estimated 10 year payback?
EDIT: their work isn’t simply journalism. They intentionally dramatized and lied about things - radiation being contagious, radiation bringing down helicopter, etc.
That's not a thought experiment, that's just an unsupported claim.
Further, it's not like there was a rush to adopt nuclear power that was abandoned as a result of public response to the Chernobyl miniseries.
Even further, it is not even the case that the miniseries implicated nuclear power in the accident, which it went out of its way to lay at the foot of corner-cutting by the Soviet bureaucracy causing an accident for which all the knowledge needed to prevent it absolutely existed within the system, it was just (in the narrative of the miniseries) not acted on and actively walled off from the people actually involved.
"A thought experiment considers a hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences."
We need to be more conscious in society of the benefit of lesser evils when there are no true alternatives, leaving us far worse off in the long run. Idealism and wishing for unrealistic perfection can do as much harm as outright evils like authoritarianism.
I suspect the internet and mass media pushes us further in that direction when everyone has an opinion, which gets formed by 5 minute sound bites on comedy/entertainment news shows, scare tactic viral campaigns on Facebook, and non-academic documentaries which can spin statistics, short interviews, and shocking clips into any narrative like they.
I wasn't aware it was supposed to be.
> They intentionally dramatized
Literally every show/movie ever made "based on a true story" does this. The show is a historical drama, of course it's going to be dramatized.
This is a self-professed anti-nuclear hippy giving a talk about how rationally looking at chernobyl and fukushima made him a nuclear power advocate.
I'd rather have brown outs until solar power and alternatives get better than have that stuffed stored within 100 miles of my family.
People who claim it can be safely stored, don't understand it's the lowest bidder who gets the contract, and the lowest paid workers to guard (from theft, yes) and maintain (from leaks) the storage system.
These systems are all ticking time bombs.
We can't even maintain our bridges. Look up the stats on how many bridges are at the catastrophic failing points due to over due maintenance, and we can't even fix these. (last I looked it's over 50,000 bridges)
No way in hell I want more toxic waste that last thousands of years endlessly piling up somewhere.
Nuclear power is _not_ the answer. Maybe fusion is, but not uranium in it's current form.
Edit: I have a relative in a state legislature discuss this topic with me. He inspected the storage sites in our state.
> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here[1]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data[2]). If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 17.3 GW-years of electricity to make this waste. For another perspective, each average US home using 10,000 kWh/year of nuclear electricity would generate 5 grams of waste per year. This is astoundingly low, again, thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom.
> As mentioned previously, nuclear waste is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf
[2] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car...
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Let us not forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Po...
> There is much less nuclear waste—up to two orders of magnitude less, state Moir and Teller, eliminating the need for large-scale or long-term storage; "Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium." The radioactivity of the resulting waste also drops down to safe levels after just a one or a few hundred years, compared to tens of thousands of years needed for current nuclear waste to cool off.
> Thorium fuel cycle is a potential way to produce long term nuclear energy with low radio-toxicity waste.
> Summarizing some of the potential benefits, Martin offers his general opinion: "Thorium could provide a clean and effectively limitless source of power while allaying all public concern—weapons proliferation, radioactive pollution, toxic waste, and fuel that is both costly and complicated to process.
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Worth reading as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
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The technology definitely exists. Storage is not an issue. Building or sticking to older, shittier designs that are horrible even in theory or on paper is the issue.
>...the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams
That would be 13,850 TONS [0] of radioactive waste /every year/.
Using "grams" is a manipulation tactic you seem to have fallen for. At least carbon turns back into trees and concrete.
I challenge you to visit a nuclear storage facility. They are all maxing out as far as I have heard and read. There is almost not storage room left. The one place where they were making more storage was Nevada and that got shut down years ago.
There's no more room in our state's current storage. And it's near sensitive water ways. It's just crazy. Storage it _the_ issue.
Edit: The other source of info I have was from an uncle in-law that worked security at nuclear facility in the 90s. They were having storage issues back then even.
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=39.5+grams+x+350+milli...
Now compare this to: if we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data[2]).
See the difference there? Huge!
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10000+kilograms+*+350+...
vs.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(39.5+grams+*+350+mill...
3.5 x 10^12 vs 1.383 x 10^7.
10,000 kilograms vs 39.5 grams = 0.0395 kilograms (!).
Plus it is not true that it is based on something that does not exist, it very much exists. Even if we assume that it does not, this does not invalidate anything I have said. We have the technology! We should stick to the better technology, not the older ones. I mentioned it as an issue, did I not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Th...
Also there is ITER: "Furthermore, a fusion reactor would produce virtually no CO2 or atmospheric pollutants, and its radioactive waste products would mostly be very short-lived compared to those produced by conventional nuclear reactors (fission reactors).". I did not mention it, but it probably is going to be the future. It is under construction.
> The other source of info I have was from an uncle in-law that worked security at nuclear facility in the 90s. They were having storage issues back then even.
I do not deny this. It probably uses a much older technology that is doomed to fail in theory as well. Keeping it is definitely a problem. We have much better alternatives today.
Again: building and sticking to shittier reactors when we have a much better technology is part of the problem!
But we don't use only those, so you are argument is moot.
You are ignoring my one point, storage is not working /right now/.
Yet you seem to think that it's viable to put more of the worst waste humankind has ever produced into a failing system.
Your link to thorium reactors are all "in the future", in planning or in test mode. Also, if all power is derived from thorium reactors (your quote says the waste is lowered by a factor of 2) then it's 19.75 grams of nuclear waste every year.
That is almost 7,000 /TONS/ [0] of nuclear waste every year, just from the US alone.
Consider how much this will be for India:
27,057 t (metric tons) every year. [1]
That number is mind boggling huge, and that waste /will/ pile up.
And how good is India's record on public safety? Every single year, growing and growing. Nuclear waste will kill the planet before anything else does.
Where will all the nuclear pollution be? In a giant pile waiting for storms, earthquakes, terrorists, corrosion, you name it... and then entire sections of the world will become unlivable.
Nuclear power is a dead end. It's a corporations wet dream for making money, not for saving the planet.
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=19.75+grams+*+350+mill...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=19.75+grams+x+1.37+bil...
With this I would like to end the discussion here. There is no point in repeating myself. This is not at all what I suggested. I suggested this: stop using old, obsolete, known-to-fail technologies when there are better (safer, cleaner, more efficient) ones! I acknowledge that most of our current reactors are shit, but we can build much better ones, and indeed they are under construction. Do you think that your preferred source of energy just appears out of thin air? Things need to be built. It takes time. Change does not happen overnight.
Nuclear power; specifically nuclear fusion is definitely not a dead end.
> Furthermore, a fusion reactor would produce virtually no CO2 or atmospheric pollutants, and its radioactive waste products would mostly be very short-lived compared to those produced by conventional nuclear reactors (fission reactors).[1]
It definitely has a future. You are being unnecessarily dramatic especially considering that fusion reactors would produce virtually no CO2 or atmospheric pollutants, and its radioactive waste products would mostly be very short-lived. Follow the progress of construction of ITER here: https://twitter.com/iterorg
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
If I might respectfully ask, please, stop spreading FUD. Feel free to read the relevant articles I posted, and compare their efficiency, environmental impact, and so forth to your preferred technology. At this point, keep me out of it. Thank you.
Thorium waste is still nuclear waste, and there would be tons of it. You did not address this issue.
I was reacting to "Nuclear power is a dead end. It's a corporations wet dream for making money, not for saving the planet.". Fusion power is "Nuclear fusion".
I did address the issue, it does not have to be perfect. I was not aiming for perfection. I was aiming for a significant and positive change. Renewable energies are not perfect either, they have their own drawbacks in the form of inefficiency and environmental impacts. If all reactors were replaced with the ones I suggested, we would be much better off. The thing is, we still have not thrown away old and bound-to-fail reactors. I find it a problem.
I hope to god the goal of any remediation is in the service of conserving the site and the artifacts for their historical value. If Marie Curie's notebooks eventually end up encased in concrete somewhere "because they're contaminated"--
They are in fact contaminated, so they are kept in lead lined boxes:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2011/1107/Mari...
It makes more sense to just put it all in a deep hole, only it's hard to make a really stable hole things won't leak out of.
> "But radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, and there are traces of a uranium isotope at the Curie annex with a half-life of 4.5 billion years."
This is the extent of the numeric data. Probably from Wikipedia. There are traces of uranium isotope in the asphalt of your parking lot.
> "A 1997 study concluded that pedestrians and residents of apartments just a few feet from the perimeter wall aren’t at risk of radiation poisoning, but officials say the place remains a hazard."
In other words, the site is completely safe, as long as no one goes inside, kicks up dust, and breathes it in.
What if the whole facility is broken down and packed into drums, and the truck shipping some of them overturns on the highway?
The known flaw has a simple, well-known workaround. It's "don't do that". Attempting a fix has the potential to introduce additional unknown flaws.
The fact that France is doing a site cleaning now is perhaps a testament to the dwindling size of their low-level nuclear waste site cleaning backlog? AFAIK, their Hague processing facility only uses half its capacity on waste from their ~95 energy reactors, and takes waste from other countries to pick up some of the slack. A cleanup like this can keep it operating without having to mothball excess capacity.
That is simply untrue.
If you combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing with a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor you can burn up all the dangerous isotopes and safely use their energy.
You only need to store it for around 100 years, after which the radioactivity is very low.
It's an economics problem, not a physics one.
Not to mention the need for extremely long-term solutions on the scale of 10,000 years. You can't rely on any current civilization or language still existing. So you have to properly communicate "Don't go in here or mess with anything, this is dangerous" without words.
And that's after figuring out the above problem of the actual storage facility.
That's a solved problem already. Skull and crossbones, etc.
Even having past civilizations being storytellers causes the story and culture to mutate over generations.
You are talking about a 100 generation game of telephone to make sure one particular symbol is passed down with perfect recall.
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Personally the best solution in my opinion is bury it deep down in a chamber that can withstand the time needed, leave signs on the outsides of the container. Then forget about it.
Don't bother marking it visibly on the surface level.
Iconography across cultures is a fractally hard problem, as you just demonstrated.
Arrrrg, don't be riskin' yur life inna therr!
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/beyond-biohazard-dang...
Oh definitely not, just a consideration that's needed.
The bigger issue is that there is no current long-term storage solution. The communication bit is long-long-term thinking while storage of material is current need.
There is a long-term storage facility in Norway, I believe, that is being built or has been built.
So are we really going to block effectively unlimited non-intermittent carbon-free energy based on the concern that some future civilization might decide to dig deep in a remote location with no natural resources, and they might encounter a waste casket, and they might decide to open it. And they might do all of this without any knowledge of radiation poising. Yes, if all of those conditions are met, some poor sap thousands of years from now is going to get irradiated.
I'm going to weight the positives of nuclear power way higher than the narrow chances of people being contaminated by waste. There are valid concerns over safety and costs of decommissioning, but those are limited to the operation of the plant itself and the disposal of the reactor (the pressure vessel). The waste management argument is very weak.
The unshielded fusion reactor which we orbit around is likely to be a bigger problem.
Provided the waste isn't liquid and won't migrate off site, it's fairly easy to contain. Much of the really bad waste that we have to deal with in the present is not the result of power generation reactors, it's the result of nuclear weapons production.
Unfortunately, most people since the 1970s are incapable of distinguishing between peaceful reactors and nuclear weapons, so there's an incredible amount of fear involved.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26425674
> Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository.
Spent nuclear fuel is given time to cool off under a pool of water. After that, it is encased in a concrete cylinder. These cylinders are then buried. The main concern for the burial site is that it isn't close to an aquifer, in case the cylinders degrade and leak fuel.
Geologic activity is not a concern for the waste itself (but it could damage entrance tunnels for the digs), in fact some groups are experimenting with using subduction zones to make waste get sucked out of the earth's crust.
Thieves are not a concern either. The waste caskets are huge concrete cylinders buried underground. One might as well mine uranium. Or just buy it commercially. Reprocessing the waste into weapons requires large centrifuges which are much harder to obtain than uranium itself.
The hypothetical scenarios in which humans could be contaminated by buried nuclear waste are well into the realm of hyperbole. Sure, if someone dug hundreds of meters underground in a waste disposal site with no natural resources in the vicinity and broke open the storage caskets then yes, they will be exposed to radiation. There's no way that this would happen accidentally, at least short of even more outlandish scenarios that involve societal collapse, subsequent loss of all records describing nuclear waste disposal sites.
Edit (HN won't let me respond): Let me phrase it better: the Yucca mountain dig has enough capacity at the moment to accommodate the waste that would be generated by nuclear power over the course of centuries. The waste itself will be stored for millennia (though much of it will likely be reprocessed if nuclear power becomes more popular).
The point remains: nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem
It's ironic how the "centuries" mentioned are in fact not enough (by a long shot) for 100% of the waste to decade.
If the more accurate "millennia" was used, it would be unrealistic in a very obvious way (at least, to prudent engineers/managers) to talk about maintenance.
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Software project, 20 years after: "This project sucks. Nobody knows it. It's undocumented. There are bugs unfixed for years. There are no tools to work with it. We can't work on it without breaking something. It's a disaster."
Nuclear waste disposal project, 10.000 years after: "EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY FINE".
Sure. /sarcasm
Also, you don't need to process nuclear waste to build a weapon. Attach some Caesium-137 to an air-burst weapon and you can ruin lots of land really quick.
For medium-grade radioactive waste landfills typical at research sites (landfills that contain things like transuranic/TRU contaminated materials, things like gloves/aprons/tools/containers used with uranium), the process is generally to excavate the landfill using equipment with air filtration (and using chemical binders and site containment to prevent radioactive fugitive dust), then loading the material into large gloveboxes where workers sort through it by hand to classify based on type of material and radioactivity levels to ensure that it is all safe for the intended storage strategy. It is then usually mixed with something to provide shock protection, binding, and contain any liquid seepage (famously often cat litter).
The big problem is that acquiring equipment with operator protection for this kind of work, and building out a processing facility with gloveboxes, air filtration, and monitoring/sampling (which needs to be onsite since, prior to processing, none of the waste is considered safe for transport) is expensive and takes quite some time. Even then, since there is usually no perceived urgency, a relatively small facility will be built that will take many years to complete the job.
The waste, once packaged, may be stored on-site or transferred to a short-term repository (often just a well-built warehouse where certified staff monitor for any trouble). Ultimately it should be transferred to a long-term repository where it should be safe for the indefinite future without expensive continuous monitoring, but for a variety of reasons, both technical and political, this doesn't yet happen on a large scale.
This is, though, what is happening in New Mexico right now - various sites, but most notably Los Alamos National Laboratories, are excavating and processing their waste landfills, packaging the material, storing it temporarily on site in purpose-build facilities or transporting it to an off-site certified storage facilities (e.g. commercial operations near the New Mexico-Texas border), and ultimately transferring it to the WIPP geological repository. If you know anything about WIPP's rather rocky recent past, you will know that this process is still fraught with occasional problems and the industry has plenty more to learn about how to do it safely and efficiently.
Millennia is a stretch to say the least... I figure we'll have a solution long before then, as long as science is being done.
In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy... (As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
I'm not a huge proponent of nuclear power generation—I'd much rather we focus on renewables (especially solar) and storage technology—but if we're going to have radioactive pollution from power generation, I'd much rather it also be carbon neutral. That's ignoring coal's many other environmental deficiencies (mountaintop removal comes immediately to mind).
Today, nuclear power plants are so much more advanced, safer and can even recycle their used nuclear fuel. See the PRISM[1] reactor, for example.
[1] https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-p...
It is 2019 and neither the U.S., the U.K., France nor Switzerland have started to dispose (= bury) their waste.