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Comment by Joel_Mckay | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?

Thus far, most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks, Radon gas diffusion, or hot-material fires. Fission reactors are a 1950's loss-leader technology, and only make sense for already uninhabitable areas like space. =3

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There are plenty of dry areas like in the American Southwest which can be projected to not have meaningful water attempt ingress in that time frame.

Also, fission reactors make phenomenal sense on aircraft carriers, submarines, etc.

We've already leached too much uranium into the groundwater for many to drink just from the mining alone.

Wait till you find out how much uranium there is in coal ash and how many tons a year are put in the air or dumped into ground water. Both the ash and uranium tailings are in the 50ppm range, but we make 100Mt per year of one of them and basically no uranium tailings in the US. Globally, the ratio is over 1Gt of coal ash and 10-20Mt of uranium tailings.

One is currently a problem, the other isn't.

I have a lower opinion of coal, more than any other energy source. From an economics perspective it also costs 4% more than solar now. There is no excuse to bring back 1800's steam technology.

If you grill, use charcoal because it is short-term carbon cycle neutral.

We have one of the largest global coal deposits, but it is also one of the most contaminated natural hot heavy metal sources currently known. Indeed, the natural run off has already closed many water wells for small towns in the area. =3

Let's also not forget how much fresh water has been ruined with fracking

"Nuclear fission: the worst energy source, except for almost all the other ones"

We’ve also already depleted many aquifers past the point of recovery.

We have too many people to hydrate, too many crops to water in order to feed them, and not enough water. At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.

Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.

We're also not even attempting to be smart about our water usage, particularly when it comes to agriculture. Growing crops in a desert that require significant amounts of water to grow is already pretty bad, then exporting the bulk of those crops overseas adds insult to injury.

Of course, all that is made possible by our pants-on-head stupid water rights laws.

> Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.

I suspect what we'll actually do is what we always do. Innovate our way into a higher standard of living while simultaneously elevating the poorest people out of poverty and finding novel ways to feed, clothe and house our population.

It's funny how persistent malthusians are in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Seems more plausible given current trends. lol =3

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

We’ll see what that looks like in the face of demographic decline and increasingly expensive oil.

It’s possible that some kind of technological miracle rescues us, but it seems more likely to me that we follow the pattern of catabolic collapse seen in the Bronze Age, Easter Island, and Europe in the Dark Ages. Civilization may rebound, sure, but humans have a history of overextension followed by decline (as do all animals).

If pituitary driven impulse models are representative, than current trends of exploiting generations is provably unsustainable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CXj0AGuh4c

I wouldn't worry about it, and have a wonderful day. =3

A very small number of people are taking (and often wasting) the majority of the worlds wealth and resources and harming everyone else in the process. We could probably stave off that decline for a lot longer if we did something about the leeches accelerating our collapse.

Solar energy is abundant in the places desalination is most needed. The market will balance out once that becomes apparent to constituents. They will vote to fund solar, politics are only a temporary impediment.

> At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.

We'll also need somewhere to put all that salt. It'd be best to stop the largest wastes of the clean water that we have. We have plenty of water for people and food. We just have to stop the wasteful practices of industry and force them to be more efficient and responsible even though it will eat into their profits.

> At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.

This might be true, but desalination is not without it's own externalities (not counting energy usage). The primary one I am thinking of is the increase in salinity and heat in the local area killing sea life. These issues may be possible to avoid with limited use of desalination today, but a significant increase in volume may reach a point where things like dilution and cooling by mixing does not have the desired effect.

and we've collected enough arsenic from a single mine to kill every human on the planet 300 times over in one spot- what's your point? That because we screwed up one spot we should give up?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine

Not sure why people buried your post, but many water-soluble metal salts are pretty toxic to animals and people.

In areas with natural Arsenic accumulation (or Acid rain run off), farmers will sometimes place rusting iron equipment in the water ways to reduce metals accumulating in the topsoil.

With low rainfall the evaporated well-water problem can certainly be a serious concern. =3

>farmers will sometimes place rusting iron equipment in the water ways to reduce metals accumulating in the topsoil.

Hoes does this work and related to the arsenic and acid rain?

Would have preferred a better source, but likely a similar process to the following:

https://wedc-knowledge.lboro.ac.uk/resources/conference/26/w...

Best of luck =3

I think it's probably because- even with a trivially verifyable source- the 300x lethal dose for 9 billion people is a knee jerk "no way!"

Whoa; TIL. It's terrifying the number of future-time-bombs we keep planting for ourselves.

if you're interested, theres several documentaries on the canadian government's efforts to keep it contained. I think Tom Scott's shortish one was my starting point.

Every miner knows most holes fill with water sooner or later.

Corollary: Every sailor knows most vessels are sunk sooner or later.

Aircraft carriers and Submarines are not civilian infrastructure, and if they sink offshore where no can live... will usually pose less of a problem like buoyant waste barrels popping up later.

We are in the age of bargain conflicts, where throwing gold bricks at adversaries makes less sense strategically. =3

Exactly. Most is not all and the ones that don't have striking traits in common ignored only by a fool.

> Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?

Why are people still proposing this antiquated 20th century storage technology instead of just building the newer reactor types that not only don't have this problem but are the best way to get rid of the long-lived isotopes we already have from 20th century reactor designs?

The answer to what you do with isotopes with long half lives is that you put them in a reactor that turns them into isotopes with shorter half lives.

Mostly, it is the same naive lies we have all heard dozens of times before in the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUHuX-Gbenc

Also, the billions of dollars boondoggle reactor projects that never delivered is a hard sell. "Trust me bro" isn't enough anymore. lol =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc

None of it is lies. The CANDU reactors Canada has been operating for decades can run on spent fuel from legacy reactors and China actually uses them that way. The US hasn't built any of them, or any of the other designs that can do the same thing, in significant part because people keep presenting the circular reasoning that we shouldn't build newer reactors without dealing with nuclear waste when we should be dealing with nuclear waste by building newer reactors.

Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.

As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational. Yes these can run on garbage fuel, but only because other designs could never tolerate such waste.

It is a teachable moment about legacy designs having unintended benefits as well. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNQu_3VQYAE

> Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.

What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel? The reactors that consume spent fuel are ordinary power generating reactors rather than small research reactors and the US already has nuclear weapons.

> As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational

The CANDU design is from the 1960s. It's not what you would actually use for a new project, it's an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel are a real thing that actually exist rather than merely a theoretical possibility. There are also modern designs under construction in Europe and the same company is partnering with a US company to permanently destroy some of the US government's cold war era plutonium.

>What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel?

Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reasons.

>an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel

It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel.

However, China's recent Thorium reactor facility is interesting, and it would be neat to see some real data on its output. The US shuttered their own facility a long time back, but it is unclear why the research was effectively abandoned. There probably was a legitimate reason, but who knows for sure. =3

> Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reason

Those are the existing reactors. The premise is building new ones of a different design.

> It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel.

It has to be accounted for but it's not some kind of impossible sorcery.

> The US shuttered their own facility a long time back, but it is unclear why the research was effectively abandoned. There probably was a legitimate reason, but who knows for sure.

There is a lot of politics involved in energy in general and nuclear in particular.

There's no such thing as a closed-loop fuel cycle - that would be perpetual motion.

In a nuclear energy context "closed cycle" just means that the uranium and plutonium is separated out from the spent fuel for future reuse. The loop is only closed in the sense that some of the spent fuel material that leaves the reactor will enter it again in the future. It doesn't imply that new inputs won't be added to the loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle_in_France#C...

> most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks

There's nothing obvious I could find that I could find that would confirm it. Could you cite something?

Indeed, signal-to-noise ratio on the modern web is fairly challenging search space, but there was DoE documentation out there showing near zero practical success rate at actual long-term disposal sites. Every site has shown some concrete degradation within years, reported incidents, water ingress, and persistent operational costs. Current methodology is to pile up waste near cooling ponds, and lie to people about dealing with it at some point in the future.

My point was, few organizations have ever shown actual success with what they claimed would happen. Thus, arguing sites will hold for 75 years let alone 30k years is a fools errand. Water fills holes in the ground, and will likely continue to do so in the future. =3

https://armscontrolcenter.org/nuclear-waste-issues-in-the-un...

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/acts-and-regulations/event-r...

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

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

I think storing nuclear waste was decided to be a bad idea a long time ago.

I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I was under the impression that if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power.

Is that not the case?

A brand new Uranium fuel pellet is often safe to hold with gloved hands for a moment.

Spent fuel with complex decay isotopes must be kept under deep cooling pools with criticality control precautions. From a chemistry perspective, complex isotope products like Plutonium are more obscure to evolutionary biology, so it is often much more dangerous even in accidental trace exposures.

I am just a sentient turnip that prefers distributed Solar products. Have a great day =3

> if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power

Only under certain circumstances is it financially worth harnessing this power. I think of space probes and their RTGs. They use alpha emitters like Pu-238, to minimize the shielding requirements.

As for the rest of the stuff, dry casks are good enough. Reprocessing isn’t currently economical while uranium is so cheap, although the vitrification of the fission products can help immobilize the worst radiation emitters, but really the UO2 structure does a decent job of keeping things put.

99.99% of the radiation is gone after 300 years, so you don't really have to.

"Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24110 years"

There are dozens of other decay products with various hazardous properties.

Scientific hubris can't be made safe, and societies have proven irresponsible with fuel life-cycle management. =3

And why am I supposed to care? Because plutonium sounds scary?

>And why am I supposed to care?

Indeed, one persons opinion is not really all that important, but one is alive because of decisions made long before they were born.

>Because plutonium sounds scary?

Which of the 14 isotopes are you referring too? In general, synthetic isotopes unknown in our evolutionary biology are far more toxic in trace exposures.

Some people don't get a chance to learn form their mistakes. Best of luck =3

> Which of the 14 isotopes are you referring too? In general, synthetic isotopes unknown in our evolutionary biology are far more toxic

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/aug/09/rorycarroll . Or does the biochemistry of Pu particularly depend on the isotope?

It is a complex answer, and heavily depends on decay product chemistry. =3

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK599402/

> It is a complex answer, and heavily depends on decay product chemistry.

The source you provided does not agree with that assessment. It is purely radiation damage. The Pu-238 (half life 87.7 years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,110 years) experiments.

    plutonium-induced health effects are considered to be the result of energy deposited by alpha particle emissions in tissues that retain plutonium for extended periods (i.e., lung, bone, liver following inhalation exposure). Similar health effects would be expected from any alpha-emitting source that would result in similar cumulative tissue-specific radiation dose and dose rate.

They seem fairly certain that it is alpha particle damage, not chemistry.

The toxicology of soluble heavy-metal bioavailable material is a well understood area of research, and can bioaccumulate in humans several times higher than background if a food chain allows biomagnification of a contaminant. The publication assumes the reader has first year biology, and will understand test subject mortality data implications.

I would recommend studying the story of Polychlorinated biphenyls in whales, Mercury levels in salmon, and PFAS in the Veritasium hosts blood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY

"Particle Accelerator vs Egg" is a great demonstration of purely irradiated cell decomposition, and is great entertainment for all ages. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CiLov03IX4

> "Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24110 years"

Great, that means it is not very radioactive, and an alpha emitter, so unless you ingest it is not particularly harmful.

> societies have proven irresponsible with fuel life-cycle management

Do you have evidence that the spent nuclear fuel from power stations has killed people?

>Do you have evidence that the spent nuclear fuel from power stations has killed people?

Did you mean intentional Polonium 210 exposure from decay chains, medical mistakes, or unintentional worker exposure to hot garbage.

I could have a look for you, but Google should already give several reasonable results to keep one entertained. =3

> intentional Polonium 210 from decay chains

What do you mean "decay chains"? Po-210 decays to Pb-206 which is stable. So you mean Po-210 decay. Let's shut down the chemical industry because someone attempted to poison The Skripals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_... .

> medical mistakes

Spent nuclear fuel is generally not used for medical isotopes. They specially prepare samples for irradiation to not have to use reprocessing, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60#Production .

> I could have a look for you

It would be illuminating to see what you find reasonable.

1. Uranium miners have high risk of lung cancer due to radon gas and decay products.

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/canadian-...

2. Workers exposed to alpha-emitting materials like plutonium/uranium show increased risk of lung cancer

https://www.ovid.com/jnls/epidem/fulltext/10.1097/ede.000000...

3. Plant operators within heavily regulated work areas are usually unaffected, and show an odd statistical wellness anomaly inconsistent with control groups. However, if one includes accidents/events with collateral impact:

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/health/health-effe...

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

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

4. Waste management incidents are difficult to quantify over 30000 year time scales. However, the industry has failed to even maintain containment for 30 years at some sites.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141129021716/http://www.katu.c...

>It would be illuminating to see what you find reasonable.

Cheap distributed sustainable infrastructure more robust against conflicts/regulatory-capture/arms-proliferation, and leave a light footprint for those yet to live here. Good luck, =3

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