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Comment by thoroughburro | Hacker News Reader

> if you sidestep the issue of waste

If you do that, just sidestep the elephant, then nuclear is very attractive indeed!

The waste isn't even that bad. There's not that much of it and we have extremely safe storage solutions. We way over engineered the safety by orders of magnitude. Nuclear waste storage facilities can take a direct missile hit and still be safe.

Reality likes to have a word with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

> we have extremely safe storage solutions

This doesn't mean "we don't have unsafe storage solutions".

Humans are simply terrible at long-term safety. How often do we have to experience that until we say: while it might be theoretically possible to store this stuff securely for thousands of years, apparently, we are just unable to do it, be it because of incompetence, greed, or both.

I’d rather us try and almost always successful store harmful waste than spew all of it directly into the air, killing millions of people. Over a million people die every year from carbon emissions from things like gas and coal power plants and vehicles

You'd think if that were the case, you'd at least know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who's cause of death was coal fired power plant emissions.

You're characterising it wrong. Epidemiologists estimate the days of lost life across a population due to environmental exposures.

If you add all those up they aren't equivalent to number of lives lost.

You do probably know someone, and almost definitely know someone who knows someone, whose death was due to chronic coal fired power plant emissions. The fact that that's not what's on the death certificate doesn't mean it's not what happened.

People who are exposed to radiation typically do not die of acute radiation poisoning. They die of cancers years later. People who are exposed to coal plant pollution also die of cancers and all sorts of pulmonary diseases.

respiratory disease kills over 8 million people a year, and that disease is very often largely attributable to air pollution

We better get good at it. There are many dangerous chemicals used in all kinds of industry that we need to store forever because they will always be harmful to human health. Lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic elements will never break down.

> There are many dangerous chemicals used in all kinds of industry that we need to store forever

Or better yet, reuse.

>Humans are simply terrible at long-term safety

He says while we carbon swaths of our planet out of habitability at current technological/economic levels because the available solutions are good and not perfect.

Surely you see the irony.

Do you see the irony in trying to fix a problem caused by persistent, universal short term and selfish thinking with a solution which relies on no one thinking like this in the future anymore?

Sometimes it is good to tradeoff solving a known short term problem, by taking on a solution with a uncertain long term issue.

If the world had continued to adopt nuclear power unabated, it is likely that climate change would not be a problem, and millions of cases of cancer not occurred.

This is not to say it is now time to adopt nuclear carte blanche, but to demonstrate that your way of thinking is not without issue either.

I think people also heavily underestimate what 1000s of years means. This type of storage has to survive 3x as long as the Egyptian pyramids. The problem is not just technological. At those timespans you can’t assume the country you live in - or the language you speak - to still exist.

do you have a link with where all the gigatons of CO2 emitted annually are stored safely?

An interesting example of bad waste management in the 70's.

But hardly an argument for how safe nuclear energy can be. You wouldn't judge the safety of aviation based on the Wright brothers plane.

Also note that one of the problems on that mine is not only the radioactive waste, but also mercury, lead, arsenic, and other product not coming from nuclear facilities. That kind of waste is dangerous for basically ever compared to the radioactive atoms. Yet nobody talk about it.

Nuclear energy is not the only industry producing nuclear waste. You've got also significant radioactive waste produced by the medical, research, defence, mining, and other industries. And so we need safe waste storage regardless of the existence of nuclear power plants.

However kitty litter will take them out https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/4/15/when-kitty-litt...

Hanford.

Nuclear waste is not released in the atmosphere. You cannot compare solid waste in canisters and what gets out of the smokestacks.

Not sure why you're down voted, but who cares. This is THE issue. I hope you're forgiven, in time, for stepping out of line in the cathedral of modern nuclear power.

The nuclear waste issue is such a non-issue that the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste, the actual spent fuel, is stored on site at the nuclear power plants.

Long lived nuclear waste just isn't that radioactive, and highly reactive nuclear waste products just aren't that long lived.

If the waste is vitrified (glassified) it becomes basically chemically non-reactive too.

This is an important point that a lot of people don't seem to understand. The longest live materials that are the hardest store are the least dangerous.

Least dangerous. I recommend storing them in a shed next to your home. Thanks for stepping up. We appreciate you.

Happily. As long as I also receive a billion dollar check and the necessary permits for digging a ridiculously deep shaft straight down.

The issues surrounding long term storage are almost entirely political.

All I read above is "If's" "As long as" "Unless'" , etc.

I'll do further research but my initial impression is that you're all operating like economists ... "ceteris paribus".

The funny thing is. Life isn't like that. Mismanagement, cost compromises, engineering fuck ups, climate disaster, terrorism, etc are almost de rigueur ...

You've not convinced me.

There are many cases where I'd agree with you that the economic model is an elaborate mathematical ruse to discount externalities and critical tail risks.

In this case I'll pose a question. Consider a geologically stable location within the US of your choosing. How deep would a hole have to be before you would no longer be concerned about the potential consequences of mishaps? Is that depth technologically viable for us to reach today?

Keep in mind that the contingency plan here is to simply fill in the pit and forget that it exists.

You are acting like this is some kind of gotcha...I literally would do this for extremely reasonable sums. Unless you are grinding up and swallowing these materials (which requires that you first break into their storage casks), they are not at all dangerous.

It is not "THE" issue, it's barely even "an issue". The amount of radioactive material produced by a fission plant, and the form in which it comes, makes it trivial to store relatively safely - certainly much, much easier than the CO2 waste that most of our other energy generation solutions emit.

Also, the biggest issues with nuclear power are (1) the risk of catastrophic meltdowns, (2) the risk of using it as cover for nuclear armament, (3) the massive capital expenditure to create a plant, and (4) the amount of water needed for cooling and running the plant. All of these make the problem of taking some radioactive rocks and burying them trivial in comparison.

Do I remember correctly that modern thorium-based reactor designs mitigate at least #1 and #2?

And #4 can be addressed by not using potable water for cooling. Even assuming a reactor is water-cooled in the first place, that water has to be purified anyway before it can be used as coolant - so might as well just use seawater if you're gonna have to purify it anyway.

Hell, a coastal nuclear plant could be a net-negative water consumer with a desalination plant onsite. California could completely abolish the very notion of "drought" within its borders by going all-in on nuclear and desalination. It probably never will, though, because rich landowners are California's most protected class and anything that'll lower their property values (by "ruining" the pretty coastal views) is verboten.

I actually tried to do some back-of-the-napkin calculations about this a while ago and unfortunately, even if you made nuclear regulations sane, so that the cost came down significantly, I still don't think it would be cheap enough for ag use, which is the actual issue with droughts in CA. Municipal water you could likely supply completely with desal and it wouldn't even get that much more expensive, but 70% of water use in CA is for ag, and they couldn't support the price increase.

As it stands, agricultural water users are massively underpaying (given the high demand and dwindling supply); correcting that would make nuclear-powered desal a lot less unattractive. Southern California in particular is a major issue, given the widespread effort to grow crops in the Mojave for whatever boneheaded reason; if they want to do that, then they should absolutely be making their own water via desal instead of robbing Northern California (via the aqueduct system) and Nevada/Arizona (via the Colorado River's mandatory downstream allocations) - and if desal water's "too expensive", then the prices of both of those sources needs jacked up to match it.

Probably won't ever happen, though, given how hard the ag sector lobbies for every direct and indirect subsidy they can get.

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