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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

The ocean constantly churns, mixing these all together, so dividing by the constant area of the world oceans doesn't change this.

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This takes decades. The plume was largely concentrated over a few dozen km and couple hundred m deep when it hit california five years later. And actually significant spill would be orders of magnitude worse.

This is also why mass expansion of reprocessing facilities is completely untenable.

Which is why any next-gen nuclear should be doing near-complete fuel consumption. Solid fuel rods aren't going to cut it.

Liquid / molten salts can be reprocessed "online" and the fission products extracted (yeah, handwaves a LOT of chemistry), so you don't get these partially transmuted solid rods.

Even if you have solid rods or solid pebbles doing the primary power, maybe you can have a secondary on-site molten processor to take care of the waste without it shipping.

One of the annoying aspects of arguing with pro-nuclear people is their blind spot for reprocessing/waste. It just gets shrugged/handwaved away, but to the voting public, having a reactor that produces no waste in the traditional solid fuel sense would be a political boon.

The real issue is that nuclear simply isn't price competitive, it barely beats coal. I would like it to be otherwise.

Safe single fluid LFRs are scifi. Two fluid ones have worse reprocessing problems than solid fuel.

It would be nice, but the list of reasons which are sufficient to stop it happening is very long.

Explain the trash islands

I dont think its accurate to equate floating trash and something dissolved in solution. Their behavior is likely to be very different.

Explain the lack of sodium islands.

E: "Cesium dissolves easily in water."[1]

[1] https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclide-basics-cesium-137

This is presumably being downvoted for the unnecessary “gotcha” phrasing, but it is an interesting point of distinction. I have an intuitive guess as to the principles at work, but I don’t really know the actual physics.

> but I don’t really know the actual physics

Vastly oversimplifying: two versus three dimensions.

I don’t think that explains it at all. So garbage floats (more or less), so can be modeled as a 2D plane. But why do patches form? Why isn’t the garbage distributed uniformly across the plane? And why doesn’t that same mechanism apply in 3D?

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