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Comment by Huh1337 | Hacker News Reader

Because there's already thousands of times more wasted blades (by mass as well as land use) from the little wind power we use now. Also, nuclear "waste" is reusable as fuel for other kinds of reactors, waste is a misnomer.

There's never ever going to be this much nuclear "waste" from all reactors worldwide (notice the tiny machine for scale): https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/itxthAhXDAL...

For comparison, ALL of Switzerland's nuclear "waste" is on this picture (and it's going to be used as fuel in the future): https://external-preview.redd.it/8EhLSoS5P8Cmi-ytsY_XoDrTnh6...

> Wind turbine blades probably only make up a very small fraction of the nonrecycleable waste we produce.

Then stop producing so much other waste. Producing even more is super-bullshit, and your mentality is exactly what caused the current situation.

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This is NOT all of Switzerlands radioactive waste. It is just the highly radioactive waste. See https://www.energyscope.ch/en/questions/what-will-switzerlan...

The medium to low radioactive waste is magnitudes higher and needs to be dealt with as well.

This is a lie about "low level" waste: all the inside of a nuclear plant that has been in contact with nuclear material is also waste, which cannot be recycled. This is why the decommissioning is difficult. You can take out the fuel rods, but not all the radionucleties in the pipework and those formed by neutron absorbtion.

That waste is not the extremely problematic type with a half-life of billions of years. A couple decades of storages renders it inert.

The problematic waste is only produced by non-breeder reactors that leave 99% of the extractable energy of the uranium unextracted. Breeder reactors would allow mankind to sustain 1,000 times current electricity consumption levels for over a million years with known uranium and thorium supplies, while generating almost zero extremely long-term waste.

Why is a half life of a billion years problematic? The longer the half-life, the less 'active' it is. That aside, in about 5 billion years the sun will turn into a red giant, possibly expanding out behind the orbit of earth until it reaches the orbit of mars. Looong before that there will be many sunstorms torching us.

Or some supervolcano hick-up. Or, or, or, whatever.

Because planning on those timescales is extremely difficult. The storage needs to be made robust to civilizational collapse, civilization forgetting about the existence of the waste, and shifts in tectonic plates.

> ALL of Switzerland's nuclear "waste" is on this picture (and it's going to be used as fuel in the future

That seem to be incomplete.

1) https://www.ensi.ch/en/nuclear-facilities-in-switzerland/was... says there are more places than that, including at each reactor:

] Each nuclear power plant has facilities for the conditioning and interim storage of the radioactive waste that is produced during operation. In addition, the ZWIBEZ interim storage facility is located on the site of the Beznau nuclear power plant.

] The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) has facilities for the treatment of its own radioactive waste and for waste originating from the medical, industrial and research sectors. This waste is stored temporarily in the Federal interim storage facility on the PSI site.

2) Not all of it is spent fuel that can be reprocessed

3) That's mostly the waste since 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Switzerland comments:

] Radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is in the tens of thousand tonnes in Switzerland.[22] Its management is the responsibility of the producer.[23] Up until 2006, processing of nuclear waste was mostly done overseas.[24]

4) I don't believe Switzerland mines and produces it own fuel rods, so the radioactive waste during that production would not be stored at Zwilag

> "Because there's already thousands of times more wasted blades"

Nonsense. You need to consider that the entire plant ends up as waste when it's eventually decommissioned.

Wind turbine blades typically weigh a few tonnes each. Up to around 10 tonnes for the very largest ones. Meanwhile, building a new nuclear power plant (Hinkley Point C in the UK) takes 3 million tonnes of concrete and 230,000 tonnes of steel.

All the wind turbine blades in the entire world would only add up to the waste of one or two nuclear plants!

Mass and volume conveniently omit how careful you have to be when handling the waste. I thimble full of radioactive waste in the wrong spot can be pretty bad. Turbine blades on the other hand are not more dangerous than normal household waste.

No, it's really not that hard. My country's nuclear waste sits in containers placed outside for decades. Even shooting the container with a machine gun wouldn't produce any danger.

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