On waste it depends what you call "still a problem". Sellafield still has pools storing the spent Magnox fuel resulting from running Britain's nuclear stock flat out through the 1973 miners strike. Those are decaying "nicely". Risk of fuel fires has been mentioned more than once. Sellafield is a reprocessing plant, that hasn't yet touched the 45 year old waste.
Yes I'd say nuclear waste is still a problem. I'm far enough outside London that politicians probably think it's perfectly fine.
Photos: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/29/sellafie...
Can you elaborate on what the problem is? I see a photo of a pond with the sun shining, grass growing and seagulls bathing. Authorities say it is safe.
I have friends who live next to an explosives manufacturing plant. They are at a much higher risk then it sounds like you are. I don't see nuclear fuel as being different from any other hazardous industrial material we deal with.
Those are tiny ponds, by the way. I reckon they could have a 2nd set as a backup somewhere near by if it came to it. You should see the size of a mine tailings pond, when they fail it causes real problems.
Temporary storage on site is a very bad idea. Leaks, non uniform site security, drums that were designed for a few decades now being called to serve for a century.
Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
So based on information that you don't have but assume exists there is a problem? There is actual evidence of known problems that nuclear solves. Like air pollution from coal.
I don't want to sound unsympathetic, the government does lie and I also subscribe to a couple of out-there conspiracy theories. It is just there is a lot of evidence that the nuclear threat is way overblown.
> Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
You could move them in to new decade-long storage once a decade. As mentioned, those are small ponds. The world is not made up of absolutes.
To be glib, that's why there were so many renamings. To bury the inept history.
And burn coal instead, spread heavy metals and CO2 around and slowly poison everyone.
That is the alternative, we saw it in Japan after the Fukushima accident. Oh, btw, Tepco has announced it will discharge further nuclear contaminated water in the ocean as they ran out of space to store it.
Like the trace amounts of Uranium in coal. And don't forget the Radon that comes up with natural gas either. For added fun, Radon is a noble gas so good luck economically removing it as opposed to just venting it all into the atmosphere.
Of the two Radon isotopes, one has a half life of 55 seconds, the other 2.5 days. The main problem are its decay products: Pb210, Bi210 and Po210. It's better to vent it off into the atmosphere than to let it accumulate in mines and basements.
> Between 1950 and 2000, there were 21 serious incidents or accidents involving off-site radiological releases that warranted a rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, one at level 5, five at level 4 and fifteen at level 3. Additionally during the 1950s and 1960s there were protracted periods of known, deliberate discharges to the atmosphere of plutonium and irradiated uranium oxide particulates.[81] These frequent incidents, together with the large 2005 THORP plant leak which was not detected for nine months, have led some to doubt the effectiveness of the managerial processes and safety culture on the site over the years. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
There's been more than enough problems with nuclear plants that I wouldn't live anywhere near one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...
* "resulted in temporary warnings against swimming in the sea along a 10-mile (16 km) stretch of coast between St. Bees and Eskmeals"
* A paperwork issue that was within tolerance of the relevant international standard
* "No radiation was released to the environment, and no one was injured by the incident, but because of the large escape of radioactivity to the secondary containment the incident was given an International Nuclear Event Scale level 3 categorisation."
2/3 of those will be INES rated.
This is all describing a situation that is substantially safer than most industrial operations I've ever seen. Including many building sites. Try running a building site using granite or a banana plantation with no injuries and no radiation escaping into the surrounding environment; this is a high standard.
If the authorities were able to show an ongoing period of best-practice, excellent management and regulation to ensure the industry (all industry) pays the environmental cost up front from their profit, I'd still be a vocal advocate of nuclear like I was in my naive twenties. No, every time there is systemic ineptness and a public purse left holding the bill for the after-closure clean up. Decades of renaming, cover-up, lies, official inquiries and ignoring the locals. Many of whom are like me - they'd love to accept it and perhaps work there were it not so criminally inept. Same would go for an explosives plant. :p
Have confidence in a reprocessing plant that was going to make the UK billions of good Thatcherite pounds reprocessing the world's nuclear waste, that caused an international outrage, and has not actually made profit if you include the large leak and decomissioning cleanup. In fact even if you discount cleanup THORP looks pretty questionable as to whether it was really profitable at all.
The UK is a small place, a major accident or Chernobyl scale catastrophe would be easily and rapidly nationwide as guessing, Sellafield is perhaps 300 miles as the crow flies from London - maybe 400 by road. I'm maybe about 40 or 50 miles straight line from the plant - it's 80 or 90 by road. A major sea incident would be similar. No one in the UK can get further than 70 miles from the sea.
Authorities say it is safe, neighbouring country Ireland and others in Europe have been campaigning against Sellafield for decades. Not just nuclear activists that you would dismiss, but they have made governmental approaches at diplomatic level and within the EU. That's been because there have been countless incidents, reports of malpractice, official reports and public inquiries of lies and cover ups, and two or three official renamings so we'd forget about the scandal of the Windscale fire, or Seascale. This seam is so rich I am not going to mine it for you. That's all on top of the couple of dozen International Nuclear authority reporting incidents that must be reported. Extensive history of (inadequate) fines too.
The TL;DR is Seascale / Windscale / Sellafield is a Western gold standard for how not to do it. It would take considerable evidence and persuasion for me to have faith and confidence in say the USA or French nuclear management competence. I'm entirely prepared to believe there is someone, somewhere doing it with excellence, but capitalism and communism appears to rule that out, so um, where now?
(Sure, to be fair, uranium mining isn't particularly eco-friendly either, but AFAIK even if you count that in, nuclear still comes on top.)
In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries. Alternatives have been suggested (such as - ridiculous - shooting the waste into space or dumping it into the deepest parts of the ocean). But none of those are even remotely viable or politically or socially acceptable.
As for the waste from fracking and tar sand processing, yes, that's terrible and it should stop. But nuclear is not the only alternative there.
We (the US) had a decent plan with the planned Yucca Mountain storage facility. But, you know, politics.
If you compare nuclear to traditional coal-fired plants, nuclear plants are a fucking god send from an emissions perspective.
> In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries.
Couple of centuries really isn't much. Industrial waste is problematic on the same timescales, and there's orders of magnitude more of it.
> Alternatives have been suggested (such as - ridiculous - shooting the waste into space or dumping it into the deepest parts of the ocean). But none of those are even remotely viable or politically or socially acceptable.
There's a catch-22 in here. We know how to deal with nuclear waste, but can't implement it because the industry is underfunded, because people are afraid of nuclear waste.
--
[0] - https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
(2) The problem isn't just the 'high level' nuclear waste, it is all nuclear waste.
But let's just assume that that 34000 cubic meters is all off the problem. And let's assume that you need to store it for 1,000 years and that you're going to make 100% of your electricity baseload using nuclear. Right now, at roughly 10% that's 34000 so for 100% you'd then need 34000x10x1000 cubic meters of storage.
That's a cube 700 meters on it's side. And because of the nature of the waste you can't just stack it that close, you're going to have to space it out and you're going to have to cool it because that much nuclear material is going to output a very large amount of heat.
You're making this all look way easier than it really is.
That 700m cube is still, in other words, ten thousand 30m cubes. Even accounting for spacing things out, that's on the order of magnitude of a large city. A single city made of high-level waste, in exchange for running 100% of today's energy needs on nuclear for thousand of years[0]. That's, again, not much relative to all the other kinds of waste we're creating. And in reality, it would be a city made of fuel for a different type of reactors.
There's a few times more of mid-level waste, which is another thing potentially worth caring about. Rest of the waste is considered low-level and is either buried or enters regular waste management pipeline.
I'm not saying nuclear waste is not a problem, just that it isn't particularly special compared to other types of highly toxic industrial waste. There's not much of it by volume, unlike most other waste it actually becomes less dangerous with time, and there are ways to put it to use that are blocked pretty much only by people saying nuclear waste is a big issue.
--
[0] - Or, eyeballing the doubling time of 2.5% growth rate, something like 150 years of 100% energy at current energy use growth.
2-4-5T and a bunch of other nasties (Dioxins). That's bad industrial waste, not radioactive but still, you really don't want it near your village or water supply.
Those vats were stored there at the end of the Vietnam war and conveniently forgotten (by Philips Duphar). It was only about 10,000 barrels of junk, a very small fraction of your initial 32x32x32 meter cube, less than 10%.
It took decades to clean it all up, and some parts of it will never be cleaned up because we can't dig deep enough. Because in the meantime the Dioxin had made it into the groundwater plume, the damage of which will not be known for another couple of decades.
If that had been radioactive waste they wouldn't have been able to do much about it for another couple of hundred years.
I don't follow your push to minimize this problem, it is a huge issue and just thinking of a 'a single city made of high-level radio active waste' makes my skin crawl. Such a place should not exist, and the Philips-Duphar story should give you at least one datapoint on why burying stuff and letting future generations deal with it so we can have our perks today is not - in my opinion - a viable strategy.
Energy is a great thing but we are not lacking for energy at all, it's raining energy continuously, we are awash in it. But just like with a rain of soup, if you bring a fork you're not going to do much.
In the end it isn't about the area directly affected in the near future, it is about the long term effects and those are very hard to model accurately when it comes to massive deposits of nuclear waste.
Just a couple of the risks: massive terrorist target, risk of pooling, risk of large scale groundwater contamination, risk of the whole thing blowing up. These are not trivial and not all of them can be dealt with over the time-scales that the waste would still be significantly radio active.
Political structures are not stable across the time-scales that you are looking at here, you might end up seriously regretting any particular site a few hundred years into the future.
My push to "minimize" this problem is a push towards recognizing that the problem is manageable in practice. The image of "single city made of high-level waste" was meant to picture just how little there is to manage, by volume, and once again - most of that we already know how to use as fuel; we just can't, because appropriate reactors aren't being built, primarily because people are afraid of the waste.
We may be technically drowning in energy from the Sun, but we're still not fast enough with making use of it. In the meantime, we have the closest thing after fusion to an energetic magic bullet - very high density, clean energy source with manageable waste - and we've been mostly sitting on it for decades now.
But maybe at this point it's really too late, maybe by the time enough reactors could come on-line, there really would be enough renewables to take over. It's unclear to me at this point whether the recent growth of solar and wind capacity is sustainable.
Yes, by doing not much of anything and only across a very very short span of time compared to how long it will have to work eventually. That's a bit like saying that the landmine you are sitting on hasn't gone off yet. True, it hasn't. And it may never go off. But it is still a landmine and it is still quite dangerous. If you had the choice between not having a landmine to sit on in the first place vs sitting on one to keep it safe which would you take?
France is a perfect example of this. When the oil crisis hit in the 70's they then used this knowledge to rapidly expand their use of nuclear power, which is now the highest in the world. But the reactors are aging, the waste is piling up and new construction has been delayed or halted indefinitely (and is already over budget).
Whether renewables are growing fast enough is something we control in a very direct way, and cranking out windmills and solar panels is really a mere matter of engineering. The latest iteration windmills make impressive power (8 to 12 MW design power is now a reality, something I did not expect to see in my lifetime), and can be mass produced economically.
They also tie into the grid at many locations, something aging grid infrastructure appreciates (the variability is another problem, but there are fortunately some solutions for that now).
Out of curiosity, is there a good estimate for how much money the world has spent on nuclear/renewable energy research? You'd think this information should be easy to find given the importance of the nuclear vs renewables debate, but it's not obvious to me how to find it.
Most of the money spent on renewables (solar, wind) is spent on scaling up and (boring, but necessary) production. Some (tidal, geothermal) has gone into proof of concept level projects. The amounts specified vary greatly based on the source.
ITER alone (originally projected to cost $5B) already clocks in at $20B and doesn't seem to be much closer to something resembling a working prototype than it was several years ago.
It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.
>Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources
From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11...
There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.
That's a very bold statement for which I have seen absolutely no proof. Solar and wind do not have the long term waste issues associated with nuclear and cost a small fraction of nuclear per installed Watt of power generation.
There is no significant difference in CO2 output of nuclear vs solar or wind so you'd have a climate crisis just the same. If you're looking to displace fossil fuel with nuclear you're going to have to look much further than just electricity, and solar and wind are just as good or even better at that as nuclear power is. Working fusion would be better than all of these options, but unfortunately we don't have it.
> There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.
It may seem unlikely to you but it is a well established fact. France, China the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, some of the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material. The power generated was a by-product. Countries that got into the game later and that did not have access to nuclear technology were licensed 'safe' tech that could not be used for enrichment.
Iran and North Korea are only interested in nuclear power for weapons purposes, everything else is just a fig leaf.
You got that exactly backwards. These five states all used production reactors to make their weapons Pu, which didn't produce useful power. Only later did they build power reactors, which don't produce weapons grade Pu.
Do you honestly think, Germany, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Finland, S Korea, Czechoslovakia etc. are/were also only interested in nuclear power as a cover for their weapons program?
There's a whole lot of failed attempts [0] that people conveniently just glance over like they never happened to then proclaim "Nuclear is so underfunded and never saw research".
While for many decades all things nuclear, not just weapons but also energy production, saw massive funding and hype all over the world.
People thought nuclear would be used for anything from moving earth to powering the jetpacks they'd use to fly to work, they thought we'd be running out of uranium because every country would have hundreds and thousands of nuclear reactors.
Why ain't we living in this amazing future now? Because it turned out nuclear isn't all that economical and practical as we originally believed it to be.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
In the US this might make people "feel bad" but it's not a real problem. In the southwest there are unimaginably large deserts where no one lives and no one ever will live. A lot of it is federal government property and has been used for nuclear bomb testing in the past precisely because it is land that no one will ever care about. See: Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
By 2,500 the technological and the social state of the world is either going to be unimaginably advanced from now or so horrible that nuclear issues are going to be bottom of the list of problems that they are dealing with.
We don't need to worry about the longer term beyond about 50-100 years. The waste is probably going to turn out out be an economic fuel source or a nonissue. The volumes are tiny and the risks largely undetectable outside a localised area.
This is terribly irresponsible.
Creating a massive problem for other people, and believing that the future will solve it, is the very definition of magical thinking.
Which one is worse?
Nuclear has one destabilizing factor: proliferation. Climate change will kill us more effectively however.
Thinking that you can run an industrial process with no waste is the magical thinking. Producing solar panels and wind turbines could easily produce more toxic waste watt-for-watt than nuclear does. Nobody is going to bother to check because the volumes are too small.
If that's really the case, we should stop worrying about global warming.
I don't agree with this position, for what it's worth.
You'll have to wait longer in order to really see the effects of global warming, as far as I understand it.
In the real world, exponents don't last forever. The economy will eventually give in, the question is how. 60 years ago the bet was that we'll run out of resources to burn. Today, the consensus is that we'll most likely destabilize the climate to the point of total civilizational collapse before we exhaust economically exploitable fossil fuel deposits.
As for the next years being critical in determining how the world will look like many decades from now, keep in mind that the damage CO₂ is causing is proportional to the integral of the yearly emissions curve, and also that feedback loops take time to settle at a new equilibrium. Models predicting average temperatures and sea levels take into account that even when we become completely net carbon neutral, the already accumulated CO₂ will still warm up the climate for decades. So it very much matters when we get to carbon neutrality, and the sooner we get there the (exponentially) better.
I’m contrast, all the lead we’ve scattered around the soil is a problem forever. (Lead is an element. It does not decay. All forms are toxic to varying degrees.). Various polymer waste and other petroleum and coal waste are, as far as I know and until new bacteria evolve that can eat it, problems forever.
The fact that nuclear waste decays is a win.
Bigger issue than global warming? It seems that's what environmentalists think.
The nuclear lobby is seizing on climate change to push through an agenda that would not stand a chance otherwise, and I refuse to have the wool pulled over my eyes. If we go into this we need to readily acknowledge the problem and budget for it accordingly. This will - at present, barring new developments - price nuclear as it is today right out of the equation compared to the alternatives.
Solar and wind have become viable alternatives, tackling baseload using them is still tough but getting better every day with new developments in short term storage and transmission line technology.
We could fuel the whole world with nuclear fuel and not have any significant issue with nuclear waste storage.
Specially if we are moving to more modern reactors who can consume the current nuclear waste and massivly reduce the volumne (something we should manage over the next 500 years I'm sure).
In fact with modern reactors you can get to a point where you only have 300 years of storage requirment until it hits background radiation.
And even if you want a 1000s of year solution, we can absolutly build those already and its not really all that much of a technical issue. As has been done in Finland I believe.
Plutonium is an unavoidable product of U235 fission - and can be extracted from the resulting “nuclear waste” by chemical processes.
Having seen stuxnet, I’m convinced that there’s a lot of investment in preventing people from gaining access to U238. Starting from Uranium ore, getting to Plutonium would be much simpler than getting to sufficient quantities of U238 and have the benefit of generating energy along the way. Additionally, Plutonium based bombs have a “higher yield” according to what I’ve read.
I wonder if USA and Russia agreed to limit Plutonium production- and that’s the real reason behind severely limiting nuclear energy.
So what's the difference? Pu-240 is hot. It's too radioactive to make bombs out of, because you'll end up cooking your workers. And because it's so similar in weight to Pu-239, you can't effectively separate it out.
”It seemed such a good idea at the time. At least, to the German politicians in charge.
But in hindsight, the Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.”
Because it doesn’t store highly radioactive waste, it isn’t _that_ much of a concern, but it started leaking ten years into operation. That, IMO, is a concern, as it indicates sloppiness.
That consensus came out of an international conference in the 50s in, I believe, Beirut. Asse II was supposed to be one of the experimental sites to prove the theory, but over the decades ended up being run much more like a "general dump" with extremely lackluster documentation habits.
Storing nuclear waste is very tricky. It changes chemically due to the atomic decay, so you have to figure out a container that is stable against scores of different chemicals in many concentrations.
On top of that, it’s emitting heat so the container can’t be too big otherwise it’ll melt.
Then the waste evolves gases, some radioactive, that make the pressure build up.
Then your container is getting bombarded by alpha rays which wedges itself between the grain boundaries and embrittlement the container.
It’s a bloody (and expensive) mess!
The only kernel of truth is that __if__ you throw out fuel instead of waste, then you get a heat problem over the long term and the container is irradiated by alpha particles. It won't melt, but it might corrode. But why would you throw away fuel?
It's the stuff with half lives of 3-300 years that you need to worry about, really.
Compared to its activity a month after being removed from the reactor-- spent fuel loses 90% of its activity in 80 years or so and 99% of its activity in 200 years, at which time it's still about 150x as active as the original uranium ore (which itself is 6x or so diluted, so about 25x as active as the original uranium)
The US has the right location and the money already stored, there is still the Yuca Mountain inpass as it currently required to be the selected site.
I think finding such a site in the first place is nonsense as in 50-100 years we should be consume that fuel anyway.
I think it was evaluated at about 1/5 the cost of bringing Yucca Maintain to the same standard.
'Combating climate change: The role of nuclear power' from University of University of Michigan had a number of lectures where some of this is mentioned if I remember correctly.
I'm working so I don't have time at the moment.
That problem was solved long ago, just reprocess it through breeder reactors and get even more energy!
The problem with the anti-nuclear lobby is that they block progress, then point at 50-year-old problems - that they have blocked implementing the solutions for - as current and unsolvable. They don’t actually want clean power. They want a reversion to a pre-industrial society, with themselves in charge.
Nuclear weapons that are "only" a couple kilotons are scary enough for me, kthx.
That problem is far from solved, as you can see by the near-zero number of breeder reactors currently in activity around the world.