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Comment by forgotmysn | Hacker News Reader

i just feel like sticking nuclear waste in the ground and pretending that it's not a problem or won't impact the health of the planet is not a solution

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Keep in mind that nuclear fuel came out of the environment to begin with. Take a radiation detector to a large/old building sometime that has large granite blocks.

For similar reasons note that coal burning power plants add WAY more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants.

So humans don't create radiation, they just mine it, concentrate it, extract energy from it, and then dispose of it. So we are just moving it around, not creating additional radiation.

Imagine we extract uranium from ocean water, the radiation levels in the ocean would go from low, to even lower. If we take the nuclear waste and distribute it across the ocean the radiation levels would (at worst) raise to the levels we started with.

Based on what I've read all the scientists that are experts in relevant fields say that dealing with nuclear waste is a political problem, not a scientific one. There are multiple reasonable solutions. My favorite it making giant spikes out of a mix of radioactive material and glass. Covering the spike with steel and dropping it where the ocean is deep, near a subduction zone, and the sedimentation rate is higher than the leakage rate. By the time the spike hits the ocean floor it's going fast enough to bury itself deeply, the sediment fills in behind and will keep getting deeper, and the spikes will get sucked beneath the continental plate and not bother anyone ever again.

I apologize in advance if I am not understanding you, but the process of fission generates new radioactive daughter nuclides and neutron activated material. The radioactivity in a nuclear reactor isn't simply a concentrated aggregate of the original fuel. It is a heterogeneous mixture of transmuted elements that is quite different from the original in its radioactivity.

Not really, because the nuclear fuel would naturally degrade into much the same materials anyway, just over a longer time frame. Nuclear reactors just speed up the process.

Yes that means higher concentrations of those decay products to deal with in the short term, but these mostly have quite short half lives in the grand scheme of things, in the order of years or decades.

The environmental impacts of nuclear energy are often grossly overestimated, this is why so many environmentalists are advocating for nuclear energy.

Can you explain why sticking it in the ground is not an acceptable solution? To be clear, sticking it in the ground that is neither seismically active nor near water sources. The areas people want to stick them in the ground are thousands of miles from civilizations and meet the other criteria. It isn't like the rest of the waste that we just stick in the ground (like coal, plastics, etc that DO enter our water supply).

Very good question! We could totally stick it in the ground, given: "(1) stable geological formations, and (2) stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years." Easy, right?

Problem: "no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period" [0]

The problem isn't the "sticking into the ground" part.

It's the finding of that place that will stay geologically inactive, uncivilized, and not near water sources for the next 100000 years. And then taking that bet.

It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me".

Plastic stuck into the ground is not radioactive. Plastic stuck into the ground also degrades in a fraction of a fraction of the half-life of Plutonium.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...

> It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me".

Possibly, but unless there is other realistic low-carbon energy source (and it seems there isn't - hydro is already built everywhere where it can be, and solar and wind are intermittent with large-scale storage being unsolved problem) there won't be any people born after you.

This is exactly my problem with this very common retort. It is exactly "perfection is the enemy of the good." There's 3 solutions to climate that we have right now (and we should be betting on all 3. 1) Fission 2) a miracle in fusion research, 3) a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago (really 50). While we don't act we are still polluting with coal and oil. But I think people are ignoring point #3 and I don't think this is necessarily the fault of the average person because there's an inaccurate representation in the media about the progress and how far we still have to go. Fission is the compromise we make for not having acted 50 years ago. It is a much smaller problem for future generations to deal with than that of climate change. So at this point it is your choice: nuclear waste for the future or climate catastrophe. (Not to mention all the other waste and stuff but that's another discussion)

> no known human civilization has ever endured for so long

I have 2 points here. 1) The half life is longer than recorded history so this isn't really fair. We've seen humans continually advance. Sure, there has been setbacks and some regressions but we haven't ever come even close at reverting back to the stone or even bronze age. That is highly unlikely and if that were to happen we'd probably have bigger problems. 2) Not all waste is equal. A good rule of thumb is that high energy waste is short lived and long lived waste is low energy. Why? Because high energy waste is shedding particles much faster than low energy. Simply if you use a bucket to remove the water from your swimming pool you'll finish a lot faster than you would if you used a tea cup.

> no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period

This is false and I'm not sure where you got this information from. We chose the location for the Seed Vault (and the GitHub vault) for similar reasons. There's plenty of other locations as well, several within the US. As for the bet, I'm betting on generations of PhD holding geologists to make that decision over really anyone else. As long as what they say doesn't set off any bullshit alarms I don't see why they shouldn't be believed. They are in fact the experts in the subject matter and just rejecting their work with no real evidence is rather arrogant and surprising to see on HN. I believe them for the same reason I believe climate scientists. I've read their work, seems reasonable, I've talked to them and they seem reasonable and passionate and well studied. How arrogant would I need to be to tell them they are wrong. My expertise lies in other fields.

I'd also suggest reading what actual plans are and understanding the scale of the waste problem. I find that many people over estimate the scale by many orders of magnitude. [0]

> It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me".

I'd say that not taking care of climate is saying "Fuck other people who are born after me." You're letting perfection get in the way of progress. We can say similar things about strip mining and rare earth materials. The things we'd need to develop battery storage to make renewables a feasible path forward. We can't wait for a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago. So now we have to make compromises. And as we drag our feet we are still polluting with coal and oil. To me that is the real "fuck you" to future generations. That we got so caught up in perfection that we let high pollution levels continue right on while we prayed for a miracle.

[0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

Can’t we keep it underground just till we have space rockets so reliable and cheap so we can dispose all the nuclear waste to space? Definitely not something we are even remotely able to do now but when talking about hundreds and thousands of years it seems possible.

"Space" isn't a place, it's a velocity. Even if you throw something really fast in space, it will eventually come back to you unless it hits something else.

This is not correct. Space is a place. And when people say send it into space they typically mean the sun. Although any uninhabitable body would do fine as well. There are plenty of those.

The amount of energy required to send something into the sun is quite high. It's not like driving 93 million miles, you have to change the orbit of the waste away from Earth's orbit.

I didn't say it was a good idea, but that's what people mean. Although it isn't unreasonable to imagine space elevators and slingshots a few thousand years from now.

If, say, 0.01% of millions of rockets, needed to deploy radioactive waste, will blow up in the process, then we will have much bigger problem.

There is surely some location in the Australian outback that would meet this criteria, as we have quite little seismic activity

This stuff came out of the ground in the first place. What are we supposed to do about all the millions of tons of nuclear fuel just lying around in rocks and seawater right now?

What we need to do is evaluate the risks from all the current options. Fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear energy and come up with a balanced strategy. There are people dying right now from radioneucleotides released from fossil fuels, or just ambient radioactivity. It's a matter of relative risk.

That's not a fair comparison because nuclear material for weapons and reactors is enriched. There's not much naturally occurring U235. Not that you can't safely put it in the ground, but your comparison isn't exactly fair.

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