Hacker News Reader

Comment by maybewhenthesun | Hacker News Reader

I know it's not a green ooze. But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking. The waste is a lot more dangerous than the uranium we dug out and packaging it in a way where you are sure it won't surface for sure is really not a solved problem.

> Nuclear waste is small and solid

As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.

I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.

View on HN

> But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking.

> Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore.

Things obviously need to be weighed against each other. Burying it in a mountain does make it safe to store indefinitely, but obviously not easily accessible. It can be dug out again, however, if it becomes useful again. It's going to be more expensive, but you pay for the safety.

> As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

One of the articles I linked makes the argument that Fukushima is not as tragic as people think.

Quote:

> But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.

what has fukushima to do with storing nuclear waste. I'll go further and ask how many did fukushima kill with radioation or will kill per unscear?

Better reactors were already invented (superphenix, snr300). Both killed by greens.

> what has fukushima to do with storing nuclear waste.

They had (still have I think) a rather nasty problem with storing lots of contaminated water in leaking containers on the Fukushima site. Storing nuclear waste might be 'easy' when stuff goes as planned. I still think it's completely unrealistic to think you can store something for thousands of years. I'm quite glad the ancient egyptians didn't stash caches of plutonium in various places, for example.

>Better reactors were already invented

Better reactors are invented. But as Belgium's crumbling reactors show (and Fukushima, obv.), people are hesitant to spend money on actually building those.

A theoretical better reactor is nice, but you can't just handwave reality away. And the reality is that there are lots of practical risks in the practical application of nuclear power. Mainly because of politics, maybe. But still that's reality.

We need nuclear, but we should strive to use something better in the end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com