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I am one of the UPower founders. There are two big stories here that most people don't know yet: 1) that a fast reactor can be waste-negative, I.e. transform existing waste to energy. 2) a fast reactor destroys the long lived waste- instead of trying to store waste for a hundred thousand years it's on the order of a hundred.

Both of these are critically important for existing waste but also having an emission free energy source with a closed fuel cycle. No other energy source is better than a hundred thousandth as energy dense and no other energy source could produce clean energy for its own recycling.

It's obviously just a cool technology but more than that it's amazing what that could mean for the environment and remote communities. Even for solar and wind materials mining, these remote mines generally have to burn tons and tons of diesel. That's what we are trying to fight.

UPower is a fast reactor? If so that's pretty encouraging!

Yessir!

What about transport of the waste? Isn't (nearly?) all waste in the US stored on-site?

Good question, and believe it or not there have been small reactor concepts that failed for not considering that exact point.

Ours is designed to live in essentially a spent fuel cask. These things have been designed and tested to withstand being dropped from a thousand feet, being hit by missiles or airplanes. Seriously check out youtube there are crazy videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBp1FNceTTA

So from the time the reactor leaves our factory, to when it's put underground, till a decade later when it's taken out and shipped back for refueling, the fuel is locked in the reactor which is locked in this uber robust "cask".

This design is a fast reactor which means it can recycle fuel. So beyond its first decade installation we can recycle the fuel approximately 6 cycles before there is any amount of leftover that must be removed. That would be about 70 years, and the volume would be about the size of a basketball (fully glassified) and the lifetime would be on the order of a hundred years. That could be stored at our central facility or another facility, as it would not be weaponizable.

on twitter, you asked about what people want to see on your website: THIS! especially with more detail and explanations

Power plants fund their own decommissioning [1]. And they also (in a way) already pay for disposal - a 1 mill per kWh fee on all energy generated payed to the federal govermnent in exchange for the feds taking responsibility for disposal [2]. This fee has been paid for decades - the industry has no problem supporting that level of disposal cost (and could even afford a higher fee if necessary). There has been an enormous amount of research into ways for dealing with the waste all kinds of disposal, treatments, recycling, etc. The only real blocker has been a lack of political/public will to make any decisions and move forward.

[1] http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act

I'll counter your wikipedia links with the issues and costs associated with decommissioning in the UK:

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

Current estimates for one Nuclear Power Plant Site (Sellafield): £114bn which seems A LOT!

Sellafield is a large site consisting of many facilities [1]. These include Magnox reactors [2] which were historically used to create weapons grade Plutonium and are much "messier" than typical commercial power reactors. The Sellafield site has been and is still home to a very large spent fuel reprocessing plant that handles spent fuel from numerous UK reactors. Reprocessing plants are an entirely different beast. And a lot of the activity at the Sellafield site is generally from older, messier technologies as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox

Sellafield isn't an ordinary nuclear power station. It was part of the UK's nuclear weapons program and contained some of the UK's earliest (maybe the earliest) nuclear reactors.

It's not going to be representative of the decommissioning costs of modern generation II or generation III reactors.

It's also the site of one of the most ridiculous nuclear accidents in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Regardless of how much one is for or against nuclear power, i think we can all come together and agree strongly that building an air cooled nuclear reactor that uses a flammable substance as a moderator and blows exhaust out a chimney is a catastrophically bad idea.

And I don't imagine that kind of activity results in easy cleanup.

Also, AGR fuel needs to be condensed or reprocessed shortly after discharge. It's great in a gas reactor, not so much in a spent fuel pool. That means much of the UK's discharged fuel as been consolidated at Sellafield. But all that plutonium is a great fuel resource. Jealous of whoever gets to fuel their reactor with that goldmine.

Also the somewhat wide range is disturbing!

    The NRC estimates costs for decommissioning a nuclear power plant
    range from $280-$612 million.

The cost will vary significantly from plant to plant - this range is likely due to plant-to-plant variation - not uncertainty in the cost for any single plant. Do you have a citation/reference for that?

Yeah, sure, it's linked above which is why I didn't reference it:

http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html

Cost does seem quite high right?

Since it costs several billion to build a plant, that decommissioning cost is somewhere around 10-20% of the construction cost, which doesn't seem too bad.

Like I mentioned above - that cost is not uncertainty in single plant decommissioning cost. It is a range of much-lower uncertainty decommissioning costs for several different plant. The decommissioning cost is estimated by NRC and plant operators before the plant becomes operational and is periodically revisited. And decommissioning costs don't look nearly so big compared to the several billon $ for construction.

> Power plants fund their own decommissioning

They are supposed to. But here in germany the energy company lobbists basically said - in response to a few new proposed fees levied on coal plants - that anything threatening their revenues would cut into future revenue needed for decommissioning fees. And that's despite being required to have funds set aside for decommissioning.

I suspect some creative accounting going on, moving expected future profits into those funds or whatever.

So if their business models fail - e.g. due to renewables - it might turn out that in practice there never was any money set aside for decommissioning.

There are even talks about splitting off coal and fission plants into some sort of "bad bank" companies.

So I would be very wary of any such promises of things being priced in.

Corporations have again and again proven to be very good at privatizing profits while externalizing costs.

Nuclear power plants in the U.S. pay a fee for waste disposal. Those fees have accumulated in a fund, currently amounting to over $30 billion. The money was going to go to Yucca Mountain, until that project was shut down.

The long-lived fission products are a very small portion of the total waste, and if we only had fission products to worry about, the total waste would go back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries or so, since most fission products are relatively short-lived. It's pretty easy to contain them for that long.

The great majority of the total waste, and almost all the long-lived waste, is transuranics. Those can also be considered unspent fuel, and fissioned for energy in fast reactors or with neutrons from D-T fusion reactors. The Russians have a couple fast reactors in commercial operation, one of which has provided 560MWe to their power grid since 1980. They're working now on using them to process transuranic waste.

I really hope it's more than £30bn. No-one seems to know how much it costs to decommission one, but a link above says "range from $280-$612 million." Ouch.

I'm talking about the fund for long-term waste storage. Operators pay for decommissioning themselves in most countries, and about 90 commercial nuclear plants plus various other reactors have been shut down, with 15 fully dismantled. Once the fuel is removed, the remaining radioactivity has a short half-life. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear...

The half life of the immense amount of chemical toxic waste produced by industry each year is essentially infinite. And yet somehow we're mostly content with chucking it in a landfill (albeit ones regulated and built to safely handle it) and calling it good. Drop the dangerous period from "infinity" to "some millions of years" and suddenly people get more worried?

Who says I'm not worried about all the "bad" things(tm)?

To be honest I'm just asking the question that while we can all say "isn't it great how safe nuclear is" we still haven't 100% figured out the waste issue. Fusion... well I'll believe it when it's powering my DeLorean.

I'm not saying you're not worried, or trying to pull one of those "but this is worse, so you must only worry about it!" things. I'm just saying that you don't need to "solve" the problem, as demonstrated by how we deal with other toxic waste. Yeah, chucking it in a landfill and calling it good isn't ideal, but it's not terrible if your landfill is reasonably well designed. Nuclear waste is a problem, but not a big one, and not big enough that the continued use of nuclear power should be gated on some sort of definitive solution.

How do I answer people who say that kind of thinking is what led to the fucking mess that is Sellafield?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365

Behind schedule and over budget is totally normal of UK big projects. But still, £58bn is a lot of money to fix something that's not a big problem.

Much of that high cost is because the waste is treated so delicately, while equally deadly non-nuclear waste is treated with much less care.

I imagine there have been a lot of places in your country (as with any industrialized country) that have been horribly contaminated with non-nuclear pollution, then cleaned up. While these events can certainly be used as an argument for taking more care, they're almost never used as an argument to give up on the whole idea of industry.

Nuclear waste is bad, but it doesn't seem to be on the level of "we must lock this up so securely that God Himself cannot access it" as people seem to try for.

It suddenly becomes a solvable problem.

If something is infinite, meh, it's infinite, what you gonna do. But if it's a few million years ... whoa, we can reason about that!

"Infinite half-life" basically means an isotope is stable. Half life is only one piece of the radioactivity story. Knowing how isotopes decay is also important - alpha, beta decay, spontaneous fission, etc - these differences matter a great deal w.r.t. how to safely handle and store spent fuel. And we don't just "chuck it in a landfill" - here is a good place to start to learn a bit more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository.

I think you misunderstand my point. I'm saying that modern industry produces a vast amount of poisons with an infinite half life, because they're chemical poisons rather than radioactive poisons. And despite the fact that they last essentially forever, we don't worry about things like deep geological repositories, we just construct reasonably contained landfills and toss the stuff in.

"Poisons" is subjective. Practially all the stable bi-products are naturally occuring in nature and many of them have all sorts of uses [1] [2]. The chemical toxicity of spent nuclear fuel (excluding radioactivity issues) is not worse than many other industrial processes in general. Spent nuclear fuel definitely needs to be treated/handled carefully, but what you say is not a "nuclear" problem - rather it is a 21 century high-tech, industrialized society problem in general.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirconium

That's more or less my point. Nuclear waste is similar to other toxic waste in terms of the danger and long-term storage problems. Yet with one we just say "Let's be real careful about how we dispose of this" while with the other we say, "We cannot proceed with any more of this activity until we come up with an absolutely foolproof disposal method that will last longer than civilization itself."

Well, the difference between chemical toxic waste is that there are accessible methods for making it non-toxic. It's just a matter of cost. For example, toxic organic and inorganic compounds can be thermally decomposed. For organics, you create elemental carbon. For inorganics (containing metal ions), you can reform the metal and collect it. Acid/base waste can be neutralized. You can't really do that for radioactive material except trying to accelerate the decay. And while chemical waste can often be handled with standard safety measures, radioactive waste is just too dangerous to work with.

I see your point. I think one needs to consider both the danger of the waste and the amount of it generated. Then try to find a good balance.

What about elemental toxins like mercury and arsenic?

Just collect and store. They can be purified and have commercial use. Otherwise, since they came from the earth in the first place, storing it back in the earth doesn't change the amount of toxins we have in the ground.

So why is "collect and store" OK for this stuff, which lasts forever, but not OK for nuclear waste, which "only" lasts some thousands of years?

Because this stuff already existed in the ground (just not as concentrated), is not as toxic as radioactive waste, and can be recovered and reused. Nuclear waste generates new highly toxic substances that are extremely dangerous. And even after the waste has "decayed", the products are still toxic (just not radioactive) and last forever.

> Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer?

That's an important question, but climate change is a far larger bill underwritten by the tax payer (and millions or billions more who can't afford taxes), so I don't think the question is a deal-breaker.

Yes it surely is. We need to take everything into the equation on where to go.

- grey energy invested

- full lifetime costs from start of construction until fully recovered land

- inclusive recycling costs

- inclusive environmental impacts

This is one of the great challenges nuclear has to overcome on paper. Most of these costs are based on absurd standards that have consistently been proven wrong. Fukushima's cleanup would be orders of magnitude less if they didn't have to treat nearby soil as waste when its radioactive signature is far lower than the soil found at the ski slopes in CO, and even less than beach sand in Brazil. We treat low level radiation as dangerous, it really isn't. Nobody at Fukushima was exposed to high level radiation, and no one will die early due to the exposures they had. And if everybody moved back to the town and land that was evacuated, they could live their whole lives out and be fine! Why waste money on cleaning up things that are not dangerous, just lied about? Changing the standards to actually reflect science would eliminate so many of these "nebulous" costs and perceived indirect costs of nuclear power.

Why do you think those standards are absurd?

Low level radion is dangerous. http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-...

"However the latest study, (Zablotska et al, 2013) is very large (over 110,000 workers) and succeeded in finding statistically significant leukemia increases, even at the relatively low doses experienced by most of these adult workers (average dose = 92 mSv)."

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-fundi...

This reactor eats some of the waste, but UPower can eat all of the waste, including this reactor's waste.

I'm surprised people are so worried about nuclear waste. It's literally the best type of waste imaginable - you can easily grab it, put it in barrels and store for possible future use as fuel source, and even if not, left alone this waste turns harmless with time, without reacting with anything.

Compare that to waste generated from burning dead dinosaurs - its storage is not a problem only because it's dumped into the atmosphere to poison everyone. You can say that nuclear plants have one less externality here.

Yes, multiple decomissioning projects are showing the true costs these days.

Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant Decomissioned: 1990

Destruction started: 1995

Ongoing as of today....

Yeah, I see from Wikipedia "In France, decommissioning of Brennilis Nuclear Power Plant, a fairly small 70 MW power plant, already cost €480 million (20x the estimate costs) and is still pending after 20 years." Plus it leaked into the lake nearby.