[BonsaiDen]

Yes, nuclear power does have a safety problem, but not a imminent one. The real problem does not come from operations, but from the waste these operations leave behind.

Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants.

Another problem is the question, who is going to pay for all that waste in the end? Well first off, most likely future generations and when we look at the current time frame, that's actually not as clear as one might think. For example, the German government has long struggled - and still is - to actually get the power plant operators to pay for the waste disposal. Before that is was pretty much "We get to make the money basically for free, and you pay for the waste." Which of course is also an issue with the argument that nuclear power is cheap, because in most cases the cost of waste disposal and final storage are not included in the calculation, because these things can just "happen later".

Waste disposal was way too long under the radar, so there was no pressure to develop new, better alternatives to the current reactor technologies for a very long time, since "state of the art" was just good enough, and cheap.

[mikeash]

Lots of other human activities generate toxic waste in far greater volumes than nuclear reactors do. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, but lots of other toxic waste remains dangerous forever. Toxic waste is a problem in general, but not a particularly severe one. Why so worried about nuclear waste specifically?

[zzalpha]

Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants.

Weird you should say that. It seems Colorado has the same problem simply due to gold mining.

And don't get me started on the tailings ponds in Northern Alberta.

Given the choice between millions and millions of gallons of toxic water poisoning endangered waterfowl, and the challenge of disposing of a fraction of the amount of nuclear waste, I'll take the latter, no question.

[DennisP]

The long-term waste is the transuranics, which reactors like the BN-800 can use for fuel. What's left is fission products, which go back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.

Transuranics are 99% of conventional nuclear waste so we'd reduce the waste volume by that much, too.

[13thLetter]

> Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants.

Yes, but they are political challenges, not engineering challenges. It's well-known how to keep nuclear waste secure for the length of time one should reasonably care about. Keeping, say, Congress from killing the storage facility due to anti-nuclear ignorance is what needs to be overcome here.

But that being said, "ignorant people are preventing this problem from being solved" is not an argument against solving the problem, it's an argument in favor of educating and convincing the people.

[dredmorbius]

A challenge which persists for tens of thousands to millions of years is well beyond merely "political". You're going to need to come up with a different term for that.

Keep in mind that for a long-term nuclear regime, you're also dealing with the extreme likelihood that large amounts of not-yet-vitrified wastes in "temporary" storage may face a sudden change in operational procedure and personnel. Say, during the Widespread Global Disagreement of 2639-2645, in which team Allied and team Axis butt heads once again under stars and bars and revived flags of Indian auspiciousness.

What's your technical solution for that? Or any number of comparable scenarios?

What are the comparable failure modes for widespread renewables infrastructures?

[13thLetter]

> A challenge which persists for tens of thousands to millions of years is well beyond merely "political".

This is absurd, and it's absurd for two reasons.

a) The amount of waste which is still dangerous after that time is meaningless, compared to the amount of other dangerous waste we create (including in the process of constructing batteries and solar panels!) which will still remain dangerous indefinitely, and which is far less well secured and understood.

b) For what other endeavor of man are we required to address its consequences literally millions of years in the future? A renewables infrastructure will consume a large amount of rare earth metals, you know: are you prepared to address the awful consequences of the great neodymium shortage of 11,152 AD? If not, then where do you get off asking for similar future-proofing where nuclear is concerned?

[dredmorbius]

For what other endeavor of man are we required to address its consequences literally millions of years in the future?

Tu quoque fallacy.

Several. Just to be clear, I'm not simply holding nuclear to this standard.

Population, energy systems, resource utilisation, topsoil and water use, environmental contamination.

How long you want to consider "long term" is also an open question, though I'll note:

The modern computer age is roughly 50 years old.

The modern age of mass-industrialisation: electricity, automobiles, mass media, roughly a century old.

The Industrial Age itself, 200 years.

Western Civilisation, about 2,500 years.

Civilisation itself, and history, 6,000 years.

Anatomically modern man, about 200,000 years.

Divergence from common ancestors with chimps, 2 million.

Emergence of mammals, very roughly, 150mya.

Looking forward, there's perhaps 500m to 1 billion years in which life resembling that we know can survive on Earth.

Meantime, on the present "business as usual" track, there are numerous challenges which present on the timescale of years to decades -- shorter if you consider the prospect of nuclear annihilation (minutes to hours), somewhat longer for some more-abundant mineral resources. But numerous challenges seem likely to converge between 2020 and 2100 or so, with the implications of several of those including challenges to running long-lived complex systems with profound implications. Such as creating large quantities of nuclear waste and/or facilities which are not likely to be properly decommissioned and remediated. Hell, there's ample existing problems with this ranging from the former USSR/Russia, US, and elsewhere, with only modest amounts of political and economic disruption.

But I'd suggest that:

1. Avoiding making near-term circumstances more complex than they are (10-200 years or so).

2. Considering just what problems it is that nuclear power does and does not address, directly.

3. A view to a 200 year (industrialisation), 6,000 year (history), to 200k-1m year (evolutionary drift) would likely be somewhat useful to keep in considering pretty much all future paths and decisions.

Along with questions like "why are we here", in a thermodynamic/systems sense, and "what are the implications of this", for both us and the systems with which we interact.

Maximising throughput without limit strikes me as potentially problematic.

Something I'm putting a fair bit of thought into: https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/FAQ

[13thLetter]

"Several. Just to be clear, I'm not simply holding nuclear to this standard.

Population, energy systems, resource utilisation, topsoil and water use, environmental contamination."

Okay, I apologize for being a bit unfair. That being said...

You can't optimize all those things at the same time. If you're concerned about carbon dioxide emissions from power generation leading to the most catastrophic possible greenhouse effect, that's far more damaging than a small amount of nuclear waste buried in a mountain somewhere, and the possibility that some small number of people in a nation or culture that doesn't even exist today may be foolish enough to dig it up a thousand years from now. Such a tradeoff would be well worth it -- even to those folks a thousand years from now, because a modern-day Earth that doesn't have to deal with an environmental catastrophe is going to be wealthier and better-ordered a thousand years from now than one that does.

[dredmorbius]

You can't optimize all those things at the same time.

Also to be clear: I see total throughput, itself a function of population and affluence, as the fundamental challenge. It's not a question of optimisation, but of living within the possibility envelope.

And the harder you push up against that envelope the greater your systemic risk.

There are also nonsystemic risks: asteroid impact, nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst, etc. But as I see it now, the biggest risks humans face are systemic and self-induced.

As my earlier nuclear comments have made clear: I'm not anti nuke, but I see substantial problems, enough to wonder if they're worth the trouble.