Hacker News Reader

Comment by techdmn | Hacker News Reader

I continue to be confused about how nuclear can be considered better / cheaper / cleaner without factoring the cost of storing the waste for 10,000 years. We seem to struggle with unintended consequences of waste management on the decade scale, let alone several millennia.

View on HN

Plastic bags last longer in landfills than nuclear waste will last in a repository; plastic photodegrades in about 500 years, multiply by a two-hundred-meter-deep landfill and that plastic will finish going away in about a million years [1]. Nuclear waste is fundamentally static; unlike tailings, it pretty much stays where you put it. Coal plants actually produce titanic amounts of radiation, vastly more than nuke plants, thanks to impurities in coal, and that radioactivity is going straight into the atmosphere [2]. Nuke plants don't produce that much waste in the first place; thirty tons a year, compared to millions of tons of radioactive, caustic fly ash [3, 4]. And, finally, the kinds of nuclear reactors we can build these days simply don't produce waste that lasts that long; a good breeder reactor eats anything that's immediately dangerous (short half-life -> lots of radiation) or long-term dangerous (long half-life -> not much radiation) [5].

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_plant#Radioactive_trace_el... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#High-level_waste [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Environmental_problems [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction

multiply by a two-hundred-meter-deep landfill and that plastic will finish going away in about a million years

You can take a landfill, put dirt over the top, and now you have parkland for people to use. It's happened to two intracity landfills within a couple of kilometers of where I live. The same can't be done with nuclear waste.

> The same can't be done with nuclear waste.

Why not? Just bury it a bit deeper.

But it doesn't matter - you don't need to. Unlike bags, there is so little nuclear waste we can afford to dedicate one tiny area to it.

The entire nuclear waste of the US in the past 40 years can fit in a room 350 feet on each side. (Basically 1 city block.) That's it. That's all the space you need for the entire united states!

Why don't they do that then? Why do I keep seeing news of waste languishing in temporary storage, being "secretly" moved to different temporary storage, drifting in dust form over entire communities, leaking out into groundwater, etc.?

Maybe DOE should hire some HN experts so they'll learn how the job ought to be done? As much money as the nuclear industry has stolen from taxpayers, I think they can afford you.

They tried to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

But "environmentalists" stepped in and ended funding. Now we are stuck with the current situation of pretty much every power plant for themselves and storage all over the country.

The main problems with Yucca Mountain were that the site wasn't really suitable (permeable geology, nearby water table, seismic activity). Unfortunately, the best sites for such a long term storage facility would be in the northeast under a geologically stable mountain made of impermeable granite, but those sites were removed from consideration by congressional fiat a while back.

This is what I mean. With nuclear, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. We've been working on this for seventy years now, and however much the government subsidizes it, however many disasters we have, however many "new designs" are tried, however many "impermeable" storage depots are built, nuclear power always comes up with more ways to fail.

Because every time they try a bunch of people go 'OMG nuclear waste aaaaah' and object. We could be storing all the waste in a super-secure facility under yucca Mountain in Nevada, but is in limbo because of a few thousand people in Nevada. So we have it stored unsecurely at 131 different sites instead.

http://www.clarkcountynv.gov/depts/comprehensive_planning/nu...

the kinds of nuclear reactors we can build these days simply don't produce waste that lasts that long; a good breeder reactor eats anything that's immediately dangerous

The UK is currently committing to building a whole new set of boiling water reactors while still having not made up its mind about the location of the UK long term waste store, which is taking a while as for reasons of politics, the government is relying on voluteerism rather than geologic suitability to decide where in the country to put it.

We did have a breeder reactor in Dounreay. It is shut down now and the surrounding beaches are off limits for a while, due to old fuel rod fragments being pumped into the sea. The management were also prosecuted for dumping solid nuclear waste in landfill.

This is usually because proponents of nuclear energy are not pushing for "traditional" reactors, but for Breeder reactors.

These were the direction we were headed in the 60s, unfortunately, we then discovered that Uranium was not as rare as we thought it was, and in our usual manner, decided to go for the conventional ones we have today.

Whilst breeder reactors produce waste, they can also reuse it, as well as being more efficient. Some proponents say they would allow us to reuse today's nuclear waste. Additionally, the waste produced has a shorter half life than the waste produced from conventional reactors.

Aside from the excellent reply by saulrh the waste not a problem because there is just so little of it.

(Plus with a bit of confidence and engineering we can burn all the waste to energy, leaving nothing at all.)

You can factor in cost of storing. It should get exponentially cheaper as we store more and more. And single decent nuclear conflict and the cost of storing nuclear waste drops to zero.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com