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Comment by zahma | Hacker News Reader

What really frustrates me in this whole debate is the question asked so to dismiss nuclear by asking about what to do with nuclear waste. As if it’s insurmountable or somehow worse than fossil fuel pollution.

For decades we’ve been kicking the can down the road by ignoring the toll of fossil fuel waste. That bill is coming due both for our climate and our bodies.

Enough is enough. We will leave nuclear waste for another day as we try to pull ourselves out from underneath a century of fossil fuel addiction.

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And not just less waste than fossil fuels, it's less waste than what solar panels, batteries and wind turbines produce. A lot of which can't be recycled and ends up in landfill.

For perspective, one person's lifetime nuclear waste would fit in a Coke can.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125740...

Equating (per unit weight) fission reactor waste and waste from PV or wind is a bold position.

And equating fossil fuel waste with fission reactor waste is not?

If the only alternative to fission was fossil fuels, you'd be making a point. Also, the person I was responding to was comparing nuclear waste to waste from renewables and batteries.

That waste is pretty bad too. Maybe not on par with fission reactor waste, but definitely up there with fossil fuel waste.

Not at all. Renewable waste is vastly better than fossil fuel waste. Remember, the latter includes CO2, the most intractable waste problem we have.

Most physical waste from renewables is simple stuff like steel, aluminum, and glass. These are all recyclable, and (more to the point) they will be a small fraction of the same materials produced in the rest of industrial society. If we can deal with the non-energy-related waste from industrial society (and we must, if we are to have an industrial society at all, even a nuclear-powered one), we can deal with the waste from a renewable system to power that society.

> Equating (per unit weight)

You don't need to equate it per unit weight for GP's point to be relevant: there are several orders of magnitude less fission waste than waste from PV or Wind. The entire volume of the dangerous wastes produced by the French nuclear park during its whole life (40 years) can fit in an Olympic swimming pool! (3 200m³).

Of course there are other wastes (up to 4 million cubic meters by the French definition of a nuclear waste, which includes every piece of gravel from a nuclear plant: the walls of my wife's office will one day be considered as “Nuclear waste” by the French authority), but the most dangerous of those isn't specific to nuclear: it's asbestos!

Here's a picture:

* https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968

Thanks! I've seen it before and I wanted it to illustrate my point but was unable to google it effectively!

The point was that while nuclear waste is physically small, it is many orders of magnitude more dangerous per unit mass.

The number to look at is "water dilution volume" -- how much water would some waste need to be diluted in to bring it down to regulatory limits. For spent fuel 1 year out of a reactor, the waste from 1 GW(e)-year would need to be diluted in something like 3 trillion tonnes of water to reach regulatory limits. This is dominated by soluble species like Cs and Sr.

>What really frustrates me in this whole debate is the question asked so to dismiss nuclear by asking about what to do with nuclear waste. As if it’s insurmountable or somehow worse than fossil fuel pollution.

In a US context it is even more silly considering built a place to store it costing billions of dollars and then decided not to use it. If the US doesn't want to commit to long term storage then they at least need to start reprocessing it to reduce the amount of waste.

They didn’t use it because it was faulty.

Also, the entire debate about waste is completely hypocritical. The “nuclear waste problem” is only special compared to other waste because there's a fraction of the wastes[1] (the only thing people think about when they talk about nuclear wastes) which are highly radioactive and will remain so for hundreds of thousand of years. they are legitimately scary. BUT we've known for decades how to get rid of them! It's called a breeding reactor, it's more sophisticated than a regular reactor but the technology isn't alien at all: France have built two of such reactors as an experiment. Too bad they where shut down under pressure from environmentalists, because you know they don't want new reactors to be built! And those same guys are now arguing about how wastes make nuclear irresponsible…

[1] As a reminder there are 4 “kinds” of nuclear wastes:

- Minor actinides: the scary ones. Their volume is ultra small, but they live practically forever if you leave them that way and are harmful even at low concentration because they are alpha emitters. They are mostly produced when neutrons are captured by U238 (the non-fissile part of the fuel). Plutonium makes the majority of it, and it's not by accident: the nuclear process was designed this way in order to get plutonium to build atomic bombs.

- Fission products: they are produced when a U235 nucleus is split. They are really radioactive (well it depends, but some are) but they don't live that long. They are the dangerous thing when a nuclear incident happens.

- Activation products: they are produced when neutrons hit something in the reactor (the structure, the water or water additives). They are radioactive but don't live that long, and they are often pretty diluted in the structure. It's dangerous for people working on the decommissioning though, because they can accumulate in specific places.

- Legal products: in some jurisdiction (for instance France), everything in a nuclear plant is a nuclear waste, including the walls of the offices, the pavement, the turbine, etc.

It is a good thing that France is building more reactors. I for one am glad that Macron has reversed his position on this. It is good for the country’s climate goals as well as energy independence.

We're a few month before a presidential election, don't take these words for granted… I may have become a bit cynical, bit I actually expect some sort of a “Je ne dirais pas que c'est un échec, je dirais juste que ça n'a pas marché” when these (non-existing so far) projects eventually get cancelled.

Plutonium can be fortunately further burned down in reactors that accept MOX fuels

MOX isn't without issues though. Plutonium is kept until we can use it to start breeding reactors IMHO!

better kept*

Plutonium can only be sent through burner reactors as MOX fuel once. After that, the isotopes left are no longer suitable and have to be buried (or saved for fast reactors.)

It has proved (politically) insurmountable here in the UK. We have drums and drums of it that rust and leak and no one can find the money or political will to actually solve it. The fact a solution is possible or easy in a technical sense doesn't mean it will ever be implemented.

This is a lot of the issue with nuclear that I don't think ycombinator or technical people get: you're not bring offered the ideal, well managed, properly funded nuclear you think. You're getting short sighted, lowest bidder, incompetent management nuclear. Because that's how we do everything around here...

It's not necessary to point to nuclear waste (or safety) to dismiss nuclear. Cost is sufficient. Construction of new nuclear power plants is simply far too expensive to be a good way to contribute to CO2 emission reduction.

"Far too expensive" in what context? For whom? Short-sighted profit-seeking, growth-oriented capitalism got us into this mess and it certainly won't get us out.

Far too expensive compared to other non-fossil alternatives.

For a long time, nuclear supporters just ignored the cost issue, since they felt they were the only real non-fossil alternative. Yes, they'd be expensive, but society had no choice. In the last decade this changed. Renewables are now far cheaper on a levelized basis, cheap enough that even with the cost of dealing with intermittency they are likely to come out cheaper than nuclear.

This is why so much new capacity in the world (and in the US) is renewables. It's not because of green mind control, it's because of brute economics. Nuclear is in dire shape competitively, in comparison.

> Far too expensive compared to other non-fossil alternatives.

But what are the costs of unstable supply and behavior of whole grid?

Until we get to extremely high renewable penetration, that doesn't much matter. And at that point, the cost is still going to be cheaper than nuclear, most likely. You optimize with short and long term storage, demand dispatch, and transmission.

What are the costs of monolithic production where taking one generator offline blacks out an entire state?

Talking about capitalism is fun, but people still have to pay to keep their homes warm in the winter, and be paid to build and maintain these things.

Well, talking about people wanting their home warm in winter, in a discussion about non-fossil power source is pretty ironic.

What does that have to do with my point?

Whether or not you make this argument, or whether you feel it is unnecessary, is beside the point. People often ask "What about the waste?" as a sort of final argument. I have encountered this multiple times. It can be time consuming and frustrating to explain why it is not a serious issue, and hurts one's credibility to dismiss the issue too quickly.

Waste is a side issue. It just doesn't matter, so there is no point in even talking about it, never mind minimizing it.

The real issue is that, at least in the US, nukes cost overwhelmingly more than any other energy source, take 10+ years to build with no power output in the meantime, frequently consume billions of dollars without ever being completed, and (if ever put into production) develop leaks. They just don't make sense when considering the current alternatives.

Solar and wind installations start producing power almost immediately, and can be continuously added onto while operating, with only the most minimal of site preparation.

""" Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.

This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. """ from: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

The problem isn't that nuclear is regulated, the problem is that nuclear power plants are big, tightly coupled things where iterating the design takes decades. No technology with that long a feedback loop can survive if it has any competition improving at a modern technology pace. If nuclear plants were as nimble as PV or wind turbines they'd be able to easily work through regulatory requirements. As it stands, the technology is paralyzed, or even regressing.

The national deficit over the last 10 years has increased by 18 trillion. How much of that would have been required to go completely nuclear. Maybe not even a trillion?

US primary energy consumption is about 3 TW. If a 1 GW(e) reactor has 33% thermal efficiency, that's 3 GW of primary energy production. So, ballpark, about 1000 reactors, or about $10 T.

I think you'll find the cost of not doing that turns out to be higher. Like a lot of shitty behavior, global CO2 emissions are not currently economically accounted for.

False dichotomy. It's not nuclear or nothing; it's nuclear, renewables, or nothing. Nuclear is more expensive than going the renewable path. Start taxing CO2 enough and the world will switch to renewables, not to nuclear.

When I last checked with a nuclear professional, he said that nuclear waste is not really a problem. We can easily store million times more of it, it doesn't really cost that much in the grand scheme of things.

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