Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Lots of scientists disagree strongly with your statement.

"The conclusion that disposal is needed and that deep geologic disposal is the scientifically preferred approach has been reached by every expert panel that has looked at the issue and by every other country that is pursuing a nuclear waste management program."

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/blue-ribbon-commission-am...

One thing that drives me craziest of all is when people simultaneously claim that nuclear waste is among the most hazardous things out there while also blocking any progress to get it safely out of the biosphere.

View on HN

> by every other country that is pursuing a nuclear waste management program.

This claim is simply false. Many countries reprocess nuclear waste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...

That list includes the US, which hasn't had commercial reprocessing in many decades.

The truth is that reprocessing is an economic loser at this point; even France admits it. Separated plutonium literally has negative value; you lose money trying to fabricate fuel elements from it instead of using freshly enriched natural uranium. France still does reprocessing because whatever is done with spent fuel is not that expensive compared to the cost of just building and operating nuclear reactors, so the boondoggle is not that big.

> That list includes the US, which hasn't had commercial reprocessing in many decades.

But it also includes many countries that reprocess currently.

The US has not reprocessed fuel in many decades, and never on any significant scale, because the Carter Administration outlawed it based on mistaken concerns about proliferation, and it's been a political pariah ever since. It has nothing to do with any rational technical assessment.

Pakistan and India do it for their nuclear weapons programs. You don't want to be making that argument.

The UK, France, Japan, and Italy don't reprocess anymore (I'm not sure Italy ever did on any substantial scale).

Carter stopped reprocessing by executive order, but Reagan quickly reversed that order. No reprocessing then occurred, because reprocessing made no economic sense. It turned out Carter's order isn't what killed reprocessing in the US; cold hard economics did. It did provide a convenient excuse for those who wish to ignore that reality.

> Carter's order isn't what killed reprocessing in the US; cold hard economics did.

No, "cold, hard economics" would say, if you are correct that it's not even cost effective to do any reprocessing now, that the spent fuel should be stored for 100 years or so and then reprocessed, when it's economically cost effective.

But US policy has been that spent fuel has to be stored in a facility that's good for 100,000 years. That makes no sense if the waste is going to be reprocessed 100 years from now. It makes sense only as part of a political scheme to kill nuclear power altogether. Which is exactly what it was, even if on paper reprocessing was "allowed" after the Reagan administration.

You do raise a good question: why was there this idea that burying waste now was a good idea? I can think of two reasons:

First, it may have been thought that opposition to nuclear energy is due to waste, and that burying it would remove the opposition. I consider this ill-founded, both because those predisposed to oppose nuclear use waste only as one of many arguments, and because the actual objective argument (economics) as nothing to do with waste.

Second, it may have been thought in the height of the Cold War that spent fuel at the surface would be a tempting target for ground burst H-bombs, where it would then contribute to long term fallout (each 1 GW(e)-year of spent fuel has about the same long lived fission products as a 20 MT bomb.) This is not an argument the government would have been pushing publicly, of course.

> why was there this idea that burying waste now was a good idea?

I've already answered that: nobody actually thought it was a good idea. It was imposed as a policy because the actual (though of course not publicly admitted) purpose of the policy was to kill nuclear power by imposing unreasonable requirements on it. (It's possible, I suppose, that the Cold War rationale you give played a role, but I don't think it's very likely; that objective could have been met without requiring anything like 100,000 year storage.)

> reprocessing is an economic loser at this point

Not on a time scale of 100 years or so, let alone the 100,000 years that are being imposed as a requirement on geologic storage. On that time scale recovering unburned fuel from reprocessing will be cheaper than mining and refining fuel.

> France still does reprocessing because whatever is done with spent fuel is not that expensive

Yes, particularly when you factor in that reprocessing gives you a source of additional fuel (most of the "spent" fuel removed from reactors is actually not spent, and reprocessing recovers it for future use) that, as noted above, is expected to be cheaper than mining it in the not too distant future.

> the boondoggle

It's not a boondoggle at all, it's a rational way of anticipating future nuclear fuel requirements, as above. It's certainly much more rational than requiring spent fuel to be stored for 100,000 years as if that was the only possible thing that could be done with it.

> Not on a time scale of 100 years or so

AT THIS MOMENT it's an economic loser. If you need reprocessed fuel in 100 years, by the miracle of nonzero interest rates you save money by doing it closer to then instead of right now. The cost of storing the fuel until then is low enough that this works out.

> It's not a boondoggle at all, it's a rational way of anticipating future nuclear fuel requirements, as above.

No, it's a waste of money to do it right now.

> it's a waste of money to do it right now

If you're allowed to store the current waste in a facility that's only good for 100 years or so, then yes. But not if you're required to store any waste you don't reprocess for 100,000 years.

Where does that requirement come from, though? If society is going to collapse in 100 years, I suggest the money be better spent preparing for the consequences of that, not worrying about whether the documentation on dry casks will satisfy some licensing requirement.

> Where does that requirement come from, though?

I've answered that already in another subthread we're having.

> If society is going to collapse in 100 years

Where was that kind of thinking involved in this at all?

Countries that reprocess nuclear waste still need a deep geologic repository for the fission products and minor actinides due to process losses. Reprocessing reduces the number of repositories you need for a given fleet size, but you still need a repository.

> Countries that reprocess nuclear waste still need a deep geologic repository

That's possible, but even if it's done, it's only necessary for hundreds of years (because the radioactive isotopes left over have much shorter half-lives), not 100,000 years. Big difference.

Radiotoxicity does indeed drop to ore levels in 300-500 years but even then there are a few problem actors. Partitioning and transmutation can help with these, probably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product

I consider the elements containing those isotopes to be prime candidates for space disposal, not burial.

The thing is, that to human knowledge it is currently the only viable way to handle the situation. But still it is not a solution.

A solution would be to make it non-hazardous. But there is no viable way to do it right now.

> to human knowledge it is currently the only viable way to handle the situation.

No, it's not. See comments elsewhere in the thread about reprocessing.

highly recommended to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k

How about we reprocess it and use it as nuclear fuel. IIRC France is the only country that does this. We just don't like the kind of reactor needed.

> IIRC France is the only country that does this

No, many countries do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...

>The conclusion that disposal is needed and that deep geologic disposal is the scientifically preferred approach

The parent post didn't say that burying the waste wasn't the scientifically preferred approach. Disposal is only needed if you create it in the first place.

I think the people you're referring to want us to stop producing nuclear waste in the first place.

This approach of geological sequestration, while being the scientifically preferred solution, still has potential very negative consequences for some future generation many years in the future. By some people calling this safe, it enables the nuclear proponents to leverage that to say there is no issue with the waste so it's fine to create more.

> By some people calling this safe, it enables the nuclear proponents to leverage that to say there is no issue with the waste so it's fine to create more.

Unfortunately those who believe nuclear energy generation is necessary often refuse to acknowledge the very real risks and costs associated with it. The fact is that there is no panacea when it comes to energy generation. All known methods come with risks, rewards and downside. It is fine to argue that nuclear energy is the cleanest and safest way to generate energy, but not that it is completely safe or without risk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com