(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.
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[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.
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[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.