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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries.

(But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)

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>After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal.

https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w...

Yes, short term they manage it.

When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.

When we are discussing climate change, our concern is not long term.

If we could build the nuclear reactors now, keep the spent fuel (whether or not we're going to reuse it in breeder reactors) as safe as we know how, and solve the long-term problem later, then we'd have a much better chance of there being a later to worry about.

Climate change is both.

People proposing nuclear energy as this wonderful overlooked strategy are not consider why it's consistently self limiting.

It's not a "solved" problem inthe long term

The long term plan is to reprocess it, which is why we need to keep it around in the meantime. If we just wanted to get rid of it that would be trivially easy. But we don’t want that because we know in future we’re going to want to get it back from wherever we put it.

They've given up on fast reactors. Reprocessing with thermal reactors doesn't actually solve the problem, as MOX fuel cannot then be further reprocessed and used in thermal reactors again. You still end up with all the fission products, and now the higher actinides from spent MOX, to deal with.

Having said that, dry casks are a perfectly cromulent way to deal with spent fuel.

The main motivation to not reprocess fuel was nuclear nonproliferation, because it frees up the plutonium for nuclear weapons. But on the off chance that governments ever want to build a giant pile of nuclear weapons it’s sensible to not get rid of the nuclear waste, since if it ever turns out you do want it again it’s very expensive and time consuming to produce. Since you’ve already gone to all of the effort of mining the uranium and producing a bunch of plutonium, best to just keep it around somewhere in case you ever do want it for some reason.

I'd say the main motivation to not reprocess is that it costs more than not reprocessing. It's a net economic loss.

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