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Comment by sinoue | Hacker News Reader

The key to industry acceptance is standardization of approved parts so that modular reactors can scale. Constant design changes and one off reactors will lead to more accidents.

The US needs to finalize waste processing/storage. Congress' inability to do this has held the industry back. There are 70 reactor sites with waste stored in the parking lot, about a 1/3 of them no longer have active reactors.

Forced obsolescence. One of the advantages is to get everyone using the same design and then set mandatory retirement dates to get folks to move to newer standards. Our constant extending nuclear reactors beyond their planned life span just creates unnecessary risk.

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Prof. David Ruzic argues that storing waste near to the reactor makes the most sense. Around the reactor is a safe zone, the amount of space required is tiny (70 years of nuclear US production fits in one garage box), and the waste is easily available if the waste ever becomes valuable due to new technologies. See https://youtu.be/KnxksKmJa6U for more info.

He also argues that worrying about the small amounts of nuclear waste is probably not the best idea if you compare it to the waste produced by other energy sources.

  The generation of electricity from a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year.

High level waste makes around 3% of radioactive waste in a typical power plant.

https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear...

> 70 years of nuclear US production fits in one garage box

2000 tonnes of spent fuel is generated each year and that doesn't fit in a garage box.

Since we're talking about storing waste near the reactor, I believe what's meant is one garage box per reactor.

That's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel. Of which 3% is high level waste (which will increase with modular reactors, granted).

That's ~30m3. That doesn't sound like a big garage box actually. If you have 1m free space around a car in your garage box that would fit all the high level waste.

The low level waste would still easily fit in 1 floor of a parking garage. And we only ever need 100 such floors, plus 1 parking garage floor that needs to be safe for 100k years.

For powering the entire US, that doesn't sound like much space. Especially since hopefully we'll only need 99% it for 100 years when we get better options like fusion.

The US doesn't reprocess spent fuel, so that's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel per year or half the volume of an olympic pool each year. [0]

Reprocessing fuel isn't very economical, digging for uranium ore makes a lot more sense.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

The claim about the garage box was incorrect, still the amount of spent fuel is not high. Half an olympic pool per year shared among 70 reactors over a period of less than 70 years means each reactors stores about half an olympic pool. A nuclear power plant is fairly big, so half an olympic pool is a tiny bit of real estate inside it. It can easily go up by a factor of 10 and nobody would notice.

I agree that it's not that much when you consider the amount of energy that is generated from that fuel.

Yucca mountain has been in the works for decades, but I guess the political momentum just isn't there.

Definitely sad to see an inability to compromise cause such long-lasting problems.

To be honest, I think we should keep the spent fuel handy. Right now it's just a nuisance, but when we develop fast neutron reactors, we'll be able to burn U-238, and more than 90% of the spent fuel is U-238. We won't do this tomorrow, but if the SMR's get the nuclear industry going again, we might have fast reactors in 2 or 3 decades. At which point, having one hundred thousand tons of fuel around won't hurt.

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