I completely agree with you
In real life people are scrupulously careful in designing pressure vessels and pressure vessels just don't break like that -- not the way that people suck in storage tanks every day.
In the 1980s it was realized that the real "most likely" accident is that the power runs out at the plant and they are unable to manage the heat output -- if you can swirl some water around it is not that bad, but if you can't, you get Fukushima.
Modern (post-1990) designs keep enough water around that the reactor can stay cooled for two weeks without power. Had Fukushima kept a few spare diesel generators at a site above the flood waters we'd probably never have heard about trouble there on the news.
Solar cell recycling is a thing, it is easy to melt them down to get the silicon, they are even expecting to recycle the CdTe cells from First Solar. Solar cells are more like beer cans, cars and airplanes (recycle almost 100% of the steel and aluminum) and less like houses (landfill.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000 says 72 hours, which is much less than 2 weeks.
In contrast, all the nuclear waste generated by the world since the invention of nuclear energy can fit into a single Highschool auditorium.
For perspective, a giant freight ship that burns two tons of crude fuel per hour could run on 5g of plutonium per year.
Natural uranium is a mixture of U235 and U238, an LWR consumes U235 and a small amount of the U238. It gets maybe 2% of the energy out of the uranium and most of the long-lived radioactivity is Pu239 and related actinides that have value as fuel. (In a reprocessing cycle almost all of the waste decays in 500 years.)
Reprocessing nuclear fuel to produce uranium and plutonium powder is a straightforward technology.
What's not straightforward is fabricating fuel out of that powder. The most practical way to alloy oxides of U and Pu is to put them through a high-energy ball mill that fuses together nanoparticles of U and Pu.
The HEBM can make something like Silica into a deadly poison, so just think what it can do with Plutonium!
It seems impossible to run a Pu fuel fab that is a safe place to work without using a respirator full time. The French seem cool with it, but it violates the labor laws in every other country. To make it worse, fuel fabrication is a labor intensive process which involves somebody putting pellets into a fuel rod with gloved hands.
There are alternatives (co-precipitation, liquid fuel reactors, robotics) but they have to be developed to close the fuel cycle.
In which case why are a number of other proponents in this thread suggesting the best solution is to bury it?
For instance "no nukes" think it is a scandal that we could spend $100 billion on Yucca mountain, but the average nuclear plant makes about $500 million per year in electricity so that is about 2 years of energy production. It's significant, but it's not crazy.
A reprocessing cycle could easily take a century to fully burn U238 so "what it costs" is influenced by what you think interest rates will be (or should) be for next 100 years.
Fuel cycle costs are nearly zero compared to the cost of the steam turbine at an LWR. If the price of uranium tripled, it would make little different in the basebar price of electricity.
And nope, given reprocessing, breeding, Thorium, and Uranium extraction from seawater, we're not going to run out of nuclear fuel for tens of thousands of years, if ever.
Source?
I used to feel very anti-nuclear, mostly out of fear and lack of information. Then I read more about it and learned that taking point.
Other sources I find from a quick google use different comparisons, like this one[1]:
> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
> Used fuel can be recycled.
> More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in the fuel, even after five years of operation in a reactor.
Or this measurement[2]:
> a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year,
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
2. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear...
Even a cursory glance at the amount of storage in a singe UK site, Sellafield would tell you that you are wrong. Unless, this is a rether exceptional high school https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-sellafield-nuclear-wa...
The parent is ignoring those containment requirements (or relying heavily on technologies that are still in the research phase).
If we figure out a good way to recycle solar panels, then it won’t be an issue. If we do just throw them into landfills, the waste issue with solar is only marginally better than nuclear.
If there are enough of them, recycling can be made efficient, and disposing of them would in any case be easier than for the spent yet radioactive materials. If we wanted to we could even enclose in glass container the nasty stuff, and it would not decay its container at nearly the same rate as the radioactive stuff.
Unless there is a 100% idiot-proof reactor is made, mistakes and crises will still happen, maybe less often, but still sometimes, and it will kill the PR of nuclear.
OTOH, if we decided that it was a priority to recycle more stuff and minimally subsidized it, suddenly a lot of stuff would become viable to recycle, including wind turbine blades and solar panels.
Solar panels are mostly silicon in two different forms: glass and substrate. Both can be recycled if it is a priority.
Cooling a reactor built when???
What do we do with the old reactors?
How are you so sure we won't make mistakes of a similar magnitude to the 1960s reactors, now?
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Edit:
So no answers, only downvotes. Is this the best you can do?
I'm certain of it.
The reactor used at Fukushima and many other places go haywire in a worst case failure scenario (like a massive earthquake and tsunami).
There still isn't anything that can provide the power we will need better than nuclear.
It ultimately feels like a deal with the Devil.
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I'm also certain we will find something better.
Why take so many risks unnecessarily now.
What would be more interesting is miniaturized reactors.
In the worst case scenario, nuclear presents a much greater risk.
Yes, we know exactly how catastrophic a nuclear accident can be .. and have no sensible solution for nuclear waste other than bury it and hope for the best.