Seems to me we already have a working solution. We have been storing nuclear “waste” for more than 60 years like this and nothing ever happened. Problem solved.
Anyone complaining about nuclear waste is a troll or ignorant.
Radioactivity in coal ash is primarily due to small quantities of uranium in the coal. It's not significantly radioactive, though; the hazards it poses are more due to other heavy metals which are often present in the ash (lead, mercury, etc).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...
And e.g. neodymium extraction for wind turbine magnets produces waste with radioactive thorium https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
Also consider that we will be able to recycle the materials used so the extraction should level off to only supplying potential market expansion and loss.
CCGT turbines are a bit different in that they have turbine first, and then the same steam boiler to turbine setup.
That is why I ask. All generation from mechanical sources needs generators, they need control circuitry. Steam plants need boilers, cooling towers and what not.
Just wanted to point out that singularly focusing on "hurr durr renewables need to dig stuff out from the ground and not made using pixie-dust" is quite the irrelevant take since the entire energy generation industry shares so much complexity, no matter the source of energy.
Is iron mining and refining as toxic as, say, lithium? Particularly when adjusted for how much extra mining you have to do for a particular amount of end product?
Just throwing out factors to consider like you are doing (and I just did) is not very useful unless you also include some numbers for scale. Do some research and share.
https://www.evwind.es/2017/05/31/rare-earths-and-wind-turbin...
https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alterna...
Furthermore, batteries do not require rare-earths. (A formerly-popular chemistry needed cobalt, which is not one.) Finally, "rare-earths" is just a name; the ones used industrially, including in some wind turbines, are not rare, and are anyway recycled.
So, no, no, and no.
We will need energy storage, eventually, after we have built out enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. Fortunately, storage cost is falling very fast.
I certainly might be using the term "rare earth" imprecisely, but cobalt is used in most batteries and mining it is in fact detrimental to the environment. It's just much more localized pollution than releasing methane or carbon, which is for sure a win in the climate change fight.
You say storage cost is falling very fast, but again, what are the technologies being used backing up that storage you mention? I'm pretty sure it's batteries, but I'm totally open to facts saying otherwise.
Storage as anhydrous ammonia or liquified hydrogen is attractive because tankage is cheap and transportable, and it can be burned in existing turbines or sold to other utilities or to industry as feedstock, fertilizer, or fuel. International shipping is has begun converting to ammonia fuel.
Storage as liquified nitrogen is similarly attractive. The production equipment is very mature tech. LN2 is boiled in ambient air to drive a turbine.
Underground compressed air is attractive because it is simple and cheap. Extraction is via turbines, optionally spiked with fuel.
Underground hydrogen is common because it is simple and slots into existing NG infrastructure.
Various underwater methods -- compressed air, evacuated-cavity, buoyancy -- are very cheap if the mechanical parts remain onshore.
Battery chemistries competing with lithium use cheaper, often heavier, sometimes less inflammable materials. Iron, molten metal, sodium-ion, "flow".
In all cases, the determiner of competitiveness is economics. It is far from clear which aspects will dominate, and which will end up cheapest in them. Batteries cost per max MWh stored. Some cost per max MW in or out, with cheap tankage. Some are very cheap to construct and add onto. Some produce saleable surplus. Round-trip efficiency is all over the map, and in some is improving fast. Round-trip efficiency doesn't matter like it did when top-line generation was costly.
One thing we know is that Energy Vault, a $2B market-cap property, will not be in the mix.
The answer is “kick the can down the road and hope we find a better solution.” That’s not a bad plan, but we do need a better plan so that local governments are not stuck holding the bag for power companies that are long gone, having left their nuclear waste behind. I would like to avoid an “EPA nuclear super fund” To deal with messes after the fact like we have from industries in the last century.
EDIT- it does sort of seem like treating nuclear waste the same as other industrial waste and sending it off to approved Class III landfills should be acceptable. So then, kicking the can down the road leads to the public being forced to accept nuclear waste at a Class III landfill.
ISIS in Mossul contemplated building dirty bombs, for example.
- nuclear reactor containment domes, like hydro dams, are built to withstand a few bombs or the impact of a fighter jet, or maybe even a tsunami or once-a-millenium major quake
- neither of the two are built to withstand nuclear weapons or continued bunker busters - that's the job of the military...
No, apparently not all reactors are built that sturdily. Certainly the proposed SMRs and micro reactors have no such ambitions. Fukushima was built to withstand Tsunamis and earth quakes. The topic of "impossible accidents" actually happening makes the public a little uneasy about predictions by pro-nuclear salespeople.
The whole argument about dams vs nuclear plants is pointless.
It’s not like the rocks were not dangerous before we dug them out.
One day, we can dilute it; for now, it seems fair to store it in case it comes in handy later.
Wellll.. we have really good technology to reprocess the worst and reuse it as fuel. The problem is, we don't do it, because this is a whole lot like what you'd do to make nuclear weapons and there are proliferation and security concerns.
> It needs to be kept safe for many millenia.
The vast majority of the risk disappears in a few hundred years. Very radioactive also means "decaying quickly".
Compare to other industrial byproducts that stay equivalently nasty for tens of thousands of years and more readily dissolve in groundwater.
In many jurisdictions, PUREX is routinely used to extract remaining fuel and chemically segregate the worst daughter products. A lot of the actinides can be burnt up in a normal reactor, like 239Pu.
Of course, in the long term, transmutation of LLFPs into precious metals is interesting, as is burning up more of the waste in e.g. fast reactors.
It really isn't hard, just unintuitive thanks to movies like Godzilla and shouted against by environmentalists who refuse to quantify the damage.
They're dangerous too. Natural Uranium decay creates radon gas, which seeps up through the ground an accumulates inside buildings. That radon then decays, and the products of that cause lung cancers that kill more than 20 thousand people in America every year, and contribute to 2% of cancer deaths in Europe.
The problem is concentrated in a few areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_enviro...
I grew up in one of those areas; in public school they taught us about the importance of radon testing and making sure your house, basement particularly, is well ventilated.
An frightening anecdote from wikipedia:
> The danger of radon exposure in dwellings received more widespread public awareness after 1984, as a result of a case of Stanley Watras, an employee at the Limerick nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Mr. Watras set off the radiation alarms (see Geiger counter) on his way into work for two weeks straight while authorities searched for the source of the contamination. They were shocked to find that the source was astonishingly high levels of radon in his basement and it was not related to the nuclear plant. The risks associated with living in his house were estimated to be equivalent to smoking 135 packs of cigarettes every day.
There's a reason you don't see very many natural concentrations of dangerous fission products in the wild.
There have been a few naturally occurring nuclear reactors but that was when the Earth was younger and the natural level of uranium enrichment was different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
The corium (melted reactor core) underneath Fukushima is fissioning right now and releasing fatal amounts of radioactivity. Nuclear fuel rods are purposely designed to put a (sort of) efficient amount of fissionable material together in a (sort of) efficient configuration, originally called a pile.
Fuel pellets made of U-235 (and the rods they are stacked into) absolutely do fission on their own, and for a very long time. They're only removed from the reactor because the efficiency has gotten so low as to be nearly useless for power generation, not because they're safe.
You're incorrect here on the nature of moderators - they moderate neutron flux, but they don't moderate the reactivity, they increase it. Fast neutrons are less likely to cause a uranium atom to fission so you have to slow emitted neutrons down to generate a sustained chain reaction.
In the absence of a whole lot of work a (fresh) uranium fuel rod is fairly inert. It doesn't produce much heat or very dangerous levels of radiation. Once you put the work in to generate a sustained chain reaction the U-235 starts turning into vastly more radioactive isotopes. For comparison U-235 has a half life of 700-million years, while Caesium-137 has a half life of 90 days.
The corium underneath Fukushima is fissioning because it's full of shorter half life fission products from its time as an active reactor, not because of the remaining Uranium. Now some of that Uranium is presumably getting fissioned by neutrons flying off of all of the other stuff decaying in there, but in 20,000 years time when the core is fairly inert nearly all of the U-235 left in the core as of today will still be there.
The fact that every nuclear power plant produces these and we store them in swimming pools is really not great.
Not to push coal, but by comparison, nothing that can ever happen in a coal plant can create the unfixable mess at Fukushima, or the one at Three Mile Island, or the one at Hanford, or many other nuke accident sites. These are simply not "cleanup-able" situations and they will continue to fission for thousands of years.
I think you mean a class I landfill/disposal wells, unless there's another scale I don't know.
Something like a Yucca Mountain isn't perfect, but it's better than that.
The nice thing about nuclear waste is the hazard disappears over time.
The worst of it is spent fuel. Spent fuel does needs cooling for 40+ years. Then after 300-400 years, the vast majority of the hazard is gone. Yes, it does take tens of thousands of years to completely vanish to baseline.
Compare to various kinds of nasty toxic-to-life things that more readily dissolve in groundwater and are equivalently nasty for tens of thousands of years.
The radiation hazard disappears over time but how do you know this stuff isn't poisonous for example?
Oh, it is -- it's mostly heavy metals. But:
- We're not going to stop using heavy metals.
- We produce a lot less of it than other heavy metals-- so we're talking about a tiny portion of this hazard.
- We can reasonably expect it'll be a lot better disposed than what we typically do with heavy metals.
Yes, nuclear waste is dangerous and needs careful, well planned management. OK. Are we serious about addressing carbon emissions, or not? If we are, it's something we have to figure out. It's not beyond our capability, and any risks need to be considered in light of the alternative of continuing to dump carbon into the atmosphere.
You normally don't hear about these kind of problems because of course the people responsible don't let the simple and stupid stuff happen. But this has to be prevented forever for all practical purposes, for all waste ever generated.
And so far most of the nuclear waste has been stored right were it was used. SMRs are supposed to be everywhere. So nuclear waste will be everywhere, ready to get stolen, or shot at or blown up.
So it is a relatively close call. To close to hand-wave away the possibility of terrorists or failed states abusing nuclear material.
Just hand-waving away future risks like that does sound intellectually dishonest and careless to me.
Plus now you have to maintain and staff those facilities for millennia...