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Comment by nandomrumber | Hacker News Reader

1. There is no mountain of nuclear waste.

Literally almost all the waste that’s ever been generated is stored on site at the nuclear power plants where it was created. That’s how little of it there is.

Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.

2. There is no high level waste that is both very dangerous right now, and will remain so for tens of thousands of years. It’s either highly radioactive for not very long, or not very radioactive for very long, but never both.

How do these myths persist in otherwise educated people.

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> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.

Yeah, it’s really easy to forget how dense these materials are. A jug of milk (4L/1gal) weighs 4kg/8.8lb. Milk has about the same density as water, 1g/cm^3. Uranium has a density around 19g/cm^3, making that same gallon jug weigh 76kg/167lb. A metric ton of uranium (1000kg) is about 13 gallons.

> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.

What is the actual volume?

Long life, high activity nuclear waste represents less than 3500m3 (one Olympic swimming pool), and this, since the start of civil nuclear electrical production in the 50's. World wide.

Global waste is 400,000+ tons (https://www.stimson.org/2020/spent-nuclear-fuel-storage-and-...). Even 1 pool full is ~28,000 tons (UO2 package 8tons/m3). Urainium is dense.

I wrote about the high energy, long life waste. The part really causing issues.

I guess you mean the "super hot for centuries" minor actinides (Np-237, Am-241/243, Cm-242/244/245 etc..)? These are less than 1% global waste, but next gen reactors can still eat them. The majority of waste (95%+) is U-235, then Pu, which nextgen also eats.

20 swimming pools of total waste isn't that impressive. I don't want to live near that, but I'm sure I'd we can find a place to put that in that will have minimal impact on people's lives.

Exactly. The waste isn't really a problem. But it doesn't have to be waste. That's the point. All that U235 in 'spent' silos? You can get 60x - 100x its OG power feeding it to nextgen reactors. So cool

Properly contained nuclear waste is almost as concerning to me as my wifi router is.

Many magnitudes of order less than any of: all the steel, glass, aluminium, wood, or plastic, ever produced, and we aren’t yet drowning in cubic miles of any of those.

But a disposed sachet from Australia isnt going to enter my cranium here in India... oh wait

> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.

You’re mixing mass and volume here. From what I can tell, their numbers were essentially right. Are you saying we don’t have thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste produced?

You sound butthurt by what the person youre responding to is saying. There's no liability in their statement, its severe optimism.

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