[yazan94]

Maybe it is uninformed, but the media certainly doesn't help in it's coverage of nuclear disasters. Speaking as someone with very little understanding of nuclear physics and energy, how it seems like nuclear power plants are amazing right up until they don't work (see Fukashima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl) or the fuel rods are spent. We still don't have long-term nuclear waste storage plans other than cordoning off certain areas and burying the spent fuel underground[1]. From the same article, nuclear plants have massive 'ponds' 7-12 meters deep that store highly radioactive spent fuel rods for a few years until they reduce their reactivity and heat to something more manageable before disposing of them. When decommissioning a nuclear station, what do we do with that water when in the meantime? Especially if it really is true that a nuclear plant's lifetime is on the order of 50 years[2].

Don't get me wrong, maybe nuclear is the optimal answer to Earth's energy needs. But also, maybe the tech is just not there yet, and certainly the media's fear-mongering needs to be more tempered and more informative to allow public acceptance of nuclear. Otherwise we will probably still keep getting NIMBY responses

[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

[2] https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...

[hackerman12345]

I'm not quite sure what your question is with the spent fuel pool. The water will just sit there and slowly evaporate probably or be cleaned and checked for contaminants before going elsewhere. It's really not that much water. I think you're making a problem where there isn't one.

The water keeps it from melting as the spent fuel becomes a little more inert each day (it transfers heat to the water, and as we know radioactive stuff has half lives). After a few years, we can move it to dry storage (incased by concrete and steel).