Waste storage.
If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.
If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.
> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year!
And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle:
> Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
The other article on the front page is about the decommissioning of Sellafield, predicted to take over a century.
It grows extraordinarily slowly, so neither the problem not the solution changes on human timescales
> "Where to keep it"
On site. That's what we're doing and that's what works really well. Honestly, it is only the high level stuff that will outlive the powerplant. I know this might not be the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that we probably won't do any significant huge waste repositories (like Yucca Mountain. Though we do have smaller ones) until the waste reaches a significant volume and it actually becomes a problem. Human nature and the inability to do long term planning or something. The good news is that even if we increased our nuclear output, globally, by say 10x or something, we'd still have many decades to resolve that problem because so little waste is actually produced that it can be stored on site relatively easily. Maybe we put things off because in the future we're usually more knowledgeable and have better technology so things are cheaper. Maybe we're just dumb. Either way, it doesn't seem like a huge worry.
The worst American nuclear disaster, TMI, exposed some people to a radiation dose equivalent to a single trans-Atlantic flight. What do you think the radiation dose from structural equipment is? One of the worst examples from structural irradiation was when recycled rebar was used to build 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan, the highest annual dose received from that was 910 mSv, or 2.5 mSv / day, significantly less than the threshold dose of 25 mSv / day. The occupants of those apartments had fewer cancers than the average population.
Check out the authors article on this: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...
Mining accidents kill some ~10,000 people every year. Mining coal is a large portion of that. The worst damn failure killed 170,000 people.
If you don't like deaths from mining accidents then an energy source with millions of times the energy density is far superior. If you don't like deaths from dam failures then maybe putting a dam on every river isn't the greatest idea either.
That's actually the VAST majority of what needs to be contained. But these don't need to be contained for thousands or even hundreds of years. We're talking a few years (<=5). This waste also does not require shielding nor cooling and is mostly a precautionary factor ensuring that there is no cross contamination. Low level waste accounts for ~90-95% of waste, intermediate is ~5%-7% (shielding but no cooling. Short lived ILW -- <30 yrs -- is often stored on site and disposed normally. Long lived ILW is just thrown in with HLW in geological depositories for convenience) and high level/trans-uranic waste (<1%-3%) is what needs to be stored in a geological depository (several of which exist btw).
Just want to make sure you have the facts before you start forming big opinions. Things like concrete and steel are typically stored on site and later disposed of normally. It's not really the concern of nuclear waste.
Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
> Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?
Even though that shit is dumped next to where people live on the regular, with increases to cancer rates as you would expect.
This is scifi. MOX has the fuel reused once to provide a small boost in efficiency after being reprocessed in an incredibly polluting weapons facility that needs an excuse to stay open and then the Pu240 still needs dealing with. And the "leftover uranium" is U238 not U235. There is no closed or "mostly closed" fuel cycle, it's just a shell game.
And your 40 grams doesn't include the 400 grams of non-radioactive heavy metal enrichment tailings, the 4kg of low level and non-radioactive waste and the 40kg of milling or leaching slurry that would come out of any new mine or half of the existing mines.
Then multiply that all by 5 for full decarbonization rather than just electricity.
I have and it is not pretty at all. I would take a correctly stored nuclear waste right away.
Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense. Small nuclear could go near where power is used. Waste should be somewhere with inexpensive land and in a convenient location for putting the waste there.
If there were container-sized reactors that produced a few tens of MW, they could go all over the place. Fancy neighborhoods could pay a premium to put them in fake houses. But the waste would probably be much more economical to handle by moving the entire container to a service facility, refueling at the facility, and handling the waste at or near the facility. This would be in an industrial area, just like other large warehouses or factories.
Like Bodega Head where you can actually visit the never-finished reactor pit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
At Fukushima, the reactor SCRAMed successfully and it was the seawater that took out the generators powering the decay-heat cooling system. If California experienced a wave that could crest Bodega Head's yuge natural seawall then we have bigger problems lol https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93...
Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid, you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue signalling over a gas grid is killing people, people I know, and I don't like people who support that. No "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free tech forty years ago. If you frustrated that you too are responsible for the destruction I now see everywhere.
Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east and Russia for fossil fuels.