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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

This is what I’d like to subscribe to.

But then I see the astronomical costs of nuclear in present day, and can’t make sense of it. Especially when compared to the huge fleet of older nuclear plants, which on the whole seem safe-ish at least, and didn’t bankrupt the states who built them.

Can’t quite square that up.

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Increased Nuclear power means few thousand nuclear plants 1000s of metric tons of nuclear waste generated every year. A 1 giga watt nuclear power plant produces 20-30mton of nuclear waste a year. where the fuck will the world store 20-30000 mton of nuclear waste every year.

Well the facility below is good for c21 million tonnes of high-level waste (i.e. spent fuel, the most difficult part of the nuclear waste to dispose).

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/olkiluoto-island-finland-nuc...

This facility is obviously specified for a certain level of nuclear growth, rather than the end-game solution for the planet.

> where the fuck will the world store 20-30000 mton of nuclear waste every year

well, that's about a cubic meter of plutonium, so...

To start, you put it in warehouses. Nuclear is an extremely dense fuel, so you don't need much space. I expect that for the same energy produced, you'll have orders of magnitude less waste than, for example, windmill blades, which also can't be recycled.

The biggest problem is radioactive concrete from old plants, but it isn't highly radioactive.

Worst case in the same places where it stores the gigatons of coal ash laced with heavy metals, mercury, cobalt and arsenic - in thousands of open pits or pools all across the place.

More realistically, a few big hangars will do until the radioactivity declines in a few dozen years.

Store it where you can easily access it, because >>90% of the very radioactive "waste" is actually fuel for breeder reactors.

One option is really to recycle it so that only waste are the actinides. There is plenty of uranium and plutonium that is inert/useful in the nuclear waste. It reduces the waste amount by several orders of magnitude.

https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

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