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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

You're technically correct, and what I should have said was 'zero-carbon emitting sources' as was in the source.

But for practical purposes there is so much Uranium on this planet that we'll most likely never even use 1% of it. Especially when you factor in newer or experimental reactor designs such as fast breeder reactors [1] that can generate even more power and use waste materials from current systems.

So yes, it is technically not a renewable source of energy, but there is such abundance of fuel that it's not 'non-renewable' the way Coal or Gas is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Fast_breeder_r...

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If we're speaking of reality as opposed to theory, "renewables" was coined by environmentalists, and their exclusion of nuclear power has simply become part of the commonly-understood definition of term, except in the State of Utah.

And even though I get why one would believe that nuclear power should be included among Solar/Hydro/etc., it's slightly funny that proponents of nuclear power start start their pitch with "technically, nuclear is also..." when, technically, it clearly isn't.

On top of that, we are VERY likely gonna get either fusion or space based mining within the time we have left before exhausting the "easily" reached uranium.

Fusion is very questionable -- it has inherently poor features from an engineering/cost point of view, and space is a terrible place to mine uranium or thorium. Earth is actually the best place in the solar system to mine uranium, as the element is concentrated by something like three orders of magnitude in the continental crust over average chondritic abundance.

Aren’t waste disposal sites effectively non-renewable uses of natural space?

The amount of all nuclear waste ever produced takes up about the space of a football field.

> The amount of all nuclear waste ever produced takes up about the space of a football field

No.

Let’s be generous and use a soccer field, which is bigger than a NFL field, at 7,100 m3.

There is about 22,000 m3 of high level nuclear waste globally, according to the IAEA. That’s the really bad stuff. There’s 460,000 m3 of intermediate level (sludge, reactor cladding, etc), and 3,479,000 m3 of low level.

So yeah, considerably more than the space of a football field.

[source: https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2019/08/02/how-much-radioactive-wast...]

How are you going from size of a field (which should be square meters) to volume (meters cubed)?

The MCG (an australian football field) is 25,000 square meters. The stadium holds approx 1,700,000 cubic metres.

"Football field" is a highly regional term.... lets not measure things in them?

Just a quick clarification. My comment wasn't clear I wanted to talk about waste from reactors specifically, but yes there is more nuclear waste if you do include all sources.

Why don't we talk about the difference between high level nuclear waste(HLW), intermediate level waste(ILW), and low level waste (LLW)?

The volume breakdown for nuclear waste is roughly LLW 90% ILW 7% HLW 3%

"Radioactivity" contribution breakdown is like so. LLW 1% ILW 4% HLW 95%

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

>7,100 m3

You mean 7,100 m2. 22,000 cubic meters would fit in there if you stacked it just over 3 meters high.

The same is true for solar that is not easily recyclable.

how would solar result in areas beeing uninhabitable for decades (or much longer?) after we stopped using them?

What part of solar is not easily recyclable? The glass? Oh noez, now the world is being polluted with silicates!

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