[mimixco]

No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas). When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.

[mikestew]

Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind

From what I've been reading, seems CO2 tops that list. One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine. From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container, so the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me.

The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment

How much compared to, say, coal mining? Mining rare earth metals for solar panels and wind turbines?

Yeah, nuclear power has some downsides. But I'm not hearing the "versus" part in your argument.

[hunta2097]

Great insight.

I am fond of the phrase "final generation nuclear". We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion.

I think we're already past the point where some nuclear risk is acceptable. It's not a zero sum game - fossel fuels are already being used with risk.

We need to take some (calculated) risks again.

[beachy]

Agree, and maybe we should start installing more, smaller, less safe nuclear reactors (hence cheaper and more widespread), to the point where people are ok with the occasional failure and even with occasional loss of life resulting.

The vastly greater dangers of environmental collapse from global warning are so relatively long term that people can't make sensible risk analyses about them, hence the terror around nuclear and the nonchalance around reducing carbon emissions which are far more threatening.

[PavlovsCat]

I don't think there is a dichotomy between taking nuclear waste seriously and taking global warming seriously. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if taking one seriously is positively correlated with taking the other seriously.

[credit_guy]

> We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion.

Not sure where that comes from. I don't think we'll have competitive fusion in the next 50 years. Sure, people who talk about ITER draw (quite optimistic) plans for when we'll be able to get more from the fusion reaction than what energy we pump in, but they forget to mention that's not the end of the story. Fusion may be clean, but it's terribly inefficient. In the Sun, fusion generates about the same amount of energy per liter as a liter of warm chicken soup releases to the ambient environment [1]. The Sun is huge, so overall the amount of generated energy is huge, but on Earth a power plant that has the same power density as the Sun would need to have a volume of 4 billion m3 to be similar to a typical fission power plant (1GW). That's 4 cubes of 1 square kilometers each. And don't bet on us getting to that efficiency in the next 20-30 years. So, sorry for the bad news, but no, we won't have viable fusion power plants in the foreseeable future.

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns-powe...

[nbanks]

The Joint European Torus had a 67% efficient reaction back in 1997. The torus wasn't designed for it, so they never tried again. It seams that ITER could achieve break-even quite realistically simply because tokamak reactors are more efficient when they're bigger. Yes, it has to be hotter than the sun and use a deuterium/tritium fuel, but it's all doable with known physics.

I'm not sure when or if a sustained reaction can be done economically.

[sien]

There are a number of interesting companies looking at fusion.

High Temperature Superconductors change what you can do for Tokomaks.

In the US Commonwealth Fusion Systems are exploring these paths:

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

In the UK Tokomak energy are exploring ideas as well:

https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/

This video explains why high temperature super conductors can enhance fusion's prospects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk&t=3642s

[theothermkn]

> The Sun is huge, so overall the amount of generated energy is huge, but on Earth a power plant that has the same power density as the Sun would need to have a volume of 4 billion m3 to be similar to a typical fission power plant (1GW). That's 4 cubes of 1 square kilometers each.

The density, in terms of fusion events per m^3 per second, is orders of magnitude higher for a tokamak than in the Sun. Stars are very inefficient at fusion, as you point out, because the cross section oh H-H fusion is so low. Deuterium-Tritium fusion has a higher cross section, and the conditions we can reach realize a much higher rate of fusion.

[pvaldes]

> CO2 is the most dangerous waste

> the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me

Not. It doesn't work like that. CO2 is not even waste in the strict sense of the term; is basic for our survival. If you wipe all CO2 from the air, humankind will go extinct in a hurry because all plants would die really fast. All what we eat started as a CO2 molecule being captured by a plant somewhere.

The problem to recycle or clean it from the air has been solved for us by plants millions of years ago. Plants love CO2 and clean it for free.

Therefore, in the real life, many CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants will be soon captured by a weed or a tree. The rest will go to the atmosphere where will hang on, maybe for a long time, but far away from you.

If you touch or inhale radiactive waste you could die in literally seconds. If you encounter CO2, as long that there is also enough oxygen around, nothing will happen. You will inhale it, will readily enter in your bloodstream, do a couple of roller coaster trips and will be discarded. All of we do it, many times a day for our entire life, without noticeable damage in our body.

And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate, but again, there are much worse molecules in this sense. Methane for example.

[acidburnNSA]

2 soda cans are produced by a US citizen getting 100% of their primary energy from nuclear fuel in a full lifetime. It's toxic but it's tiny. It's very VERY reasonable to bury it in deep crystalline bedrock and be done with it. That's a reasonable technical solution to a legitimate problem.

The problem of global warming from CO2 emission is much harder than nuclear waste, even if we increased nuclear generate 100-fold.

[mikestew]

And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate

Uhh, that’s exactly what I was saying. Maybe too subtle? I wasn’t suggesting that we’d choke on it.

there are much worse molecules in this sense.

And therefore CO2 shouldn’t be a concern? Where are you going with this?

[pvaldes]

> And therefore CO2 shouldn’t be a concern?

And therefore CO2 is not topping the list of worse waste created by man over radioactive waste, as you claimed previously...

Is not logical to keep denying that radioactivity is a very, very dangerous stuff at this point. After the Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima experiences we should expect to start talking seriously about it, instead to deny the problem again and again.

[mikestew]

as you claimed previously...

No, that was you making up quotes I never actually typed. Right now, concentrations of CO2 affect my life more than nuclear waste ever has and likely ever will. Since you’re content to make up quotes and then argue against them, I’m gonna chalk you up for a loss on this one and go about my day.

[v_lisivka]

We can build one CO2 capture factory in Nevada desert to capture excessive CO2 and bury it there. I see no difference.

[Johnny555]

It seems easier to not produce the CO2 in the first place than to produce it then run another industrial process to remove it... which in turn uses even more electricity.

[saagarjha]

The amount of CO2 is orders of magnitude more than the amount of radioactive waste; you cannot just build “one factory in Nevada” and sequester all the carbon dioxide produced.

[v_lisivka]

We need to capture about 1 trillion of tons of CO2 to return to sane levels, and then capture about 25 billion tons of CO2 annually. It looks doable.

See http://www.climatecentral.org/news/first-commercial-co2-capt... .

[Graham67]

That process absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere at low concentrations (400 ppm) onto stones coated with X-material. Later the stones are heated (using more fuel) to release CO2 at much higher concentrations (more than 75%). Then what? It is a gas. You need to bury the carbon. They suggest feeding it to greenhouses, to grow food, which re-releases it later.

[acidburnNSA]

Six orders of magnitude, to be precise. Nuclear fuel has 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel or storage system.

[mikestew]

Can we do that today? Well, there’s your difference.

[v_lisivka]

The problem with CO2 is that we can do it tomorrow, or, even better, somebody else will do that instead of us.

With radioactive waste, we _must_ bury it today.

[pfdietz]

Why must we bury radioactive waste today? Sealing spent fuel in dry casks is an eminently practical approach.

[njarboe]

In fact we don't bury it today or for the past 60 years. No problems with that solution yet.

[PavlovsCat]

Was this included in what you've been reading?

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

> One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine.

Yeah, for a million years. The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...

> Because some radioactive species have half-lives longer than one million years, even very low container leakage and radionuclide migration rates must be taken into account.[21] Moreover, it may require more than one half-life until some nuclear materials lose enough radioactivity to no longer be lethal to living organisms. A 1983 review of the Swedish radioactive waste disposal program by the National Academy of Sciences found that country’s estimate of several hundred thousand years—perhaps up to one million years—being necessary for waste isolation "fully justified."

Look through all that. It's ideas and proposals and things we're trying. We don't even have one thing you could call "a solution", and haven't found one in decades.

> From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container

Just plant trees, then store the wood. Okay, it's probably more complex than that, or there's much better ways. But this is no anywhere near the "a bunch of proposals, and good luck to future generations" level that nuclear waste is.

You're basically saying "CO2 is a gas so it will move to me, and nuclear waste can be buried and you just have to stay a few hundred miles away". There is more to it than that. (apart than CO2 moving to you probably being a good thing, because then you can trap it)

[erikpukinskis]

> The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan.

We already have a plan. Publish the information on the internet. It will still be here in 1 million years. YouTube will outlast the Sun.

[qball]

> No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it.

You can't have this both ways. Either CO2 is the most dangerous waste and must be dealt with severely, or it is not.

>When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense.

Solar and wind are going to require billions of dollars for the same output as well, plus additional lithium mines for batteries since the sun doesn't shine every day (and reprocessing when the cells run out), plus those who are going to get killed in construction/maintenance (roof work is dangerous). We've just externalized the consequences for some of that since we don't bother to tax products based on how badly the source country destroys the environment through the manufacture of the product.

Life creates waste, and it's time to accept that reality; you won't get a perfect solution so maybe it's time to start accepting merely good ones instead. Saving the environment is too important to wait.

[BurningFrog]

> Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment

Numbers. Show numbers. Without numbers you have said NOTHING.

[acidburnNSA]

The numbers are clear. Nuclear lifecycle is 11 gCO2-eq/kWh, less than almost anything and on par with wind.

The idea that uranium mining requires tremendous amounts of anything compared to the alternatives is ludicrous simply by the physical fact that there are 938 MW*days of energy in every kilogram of natural uranium. That's 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel, and that results in a very small mining requirement compared to anything else to power humanity at world-scale.

[Graham67]

70 is a a lot closer to the truth. That 11 is a selective figure.

None of these numbers includes the carbon used to bulldoze the East side of Japan, or Belarus. And again, as the first attempt was clumsy, and a minimum.

[acidburnNSA]

Which study are you using to suggest 70? That's on the high end on any study, but not the highest.

The IPCC has min, median, and max estimates on these kinds of things. See Table A.III.2 in [1], 12 being the median.

So worst case by any estimate is that nuclear emits 110 gCO2-eq/kg. Solar PV (utility) max is 180. Hydro is an astounding 2200 (twice as bad as coal, due to biogenic methane associated with large reservoirs). By any estimate, nuclear is a very low-carbon energy source, in a whole different class than fossil fuel and biofuels. In other words, it's one of the few low-carbon options we have.

The minimum for nuclear is not 11 but rather 3.7.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

[pdonis]

> we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it.

Sure we do: reprocess it, like every country except the US that uses nuclear power does. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.

[pfdietz]

Almost no one reprocesses, because it doesn't make economic sense at current U prices. Even the french have admitted this.

The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one. You will notice that after Reagan lifted Carter's ban on reprocessing, no commercial firms here jumped into the market. That's because it's not economically justified.

I don't think burying waste anytime soon at Yucca Mountain is economically justified either, by the way.

[pdonis]

> The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one.

Not in context, because the context was that that decision was part of a general policy on the government's part to kill nuclear energy. If the government had wanted to help nuclear energy, it would have said, sure, reprocess if you want to, as long as you're willing to deal with whatever the economics of it turn out to be. (In the 1970's, when the Carter administration made the decision, uranium mining was considerably more expensive than it is now, so reprocessing might well have made economic sense then, even if it doesn't now.)

[pfdietz]

The context was that nuclear growth was going to slow down, both because electric power demand growth was slowing, and because nuclear power plants were even then experiencing large cost overruns. If the government pivoted away from nuclear, it wasn't some plan to kill nuclear, but rather a reaction to these market facts.

In that environment where nuclear growth did not match the central plans, reprocessing made no sense.

[acidburnNSA]

Not really true. Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper. It's a economic issue. France recycles their fuel once but they still only get 2% of the total energy out of the resource that's mined.

Another super-reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste is burying it in large salt deposits or deep crystalline bedrock. Both are actually totally reasonable and practical solutions. People just go nuts though when you talk about it.

[pdonis]

> Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper.

That's true now, yes. But anyone who realizes this also realizes (as you do) that nuclear waste disposal is not an issue: you just store the spent fuel now, and at some point (in the not too distant future if we were actually using nuclear energy for a large portion of base load power), mining and enriching new fuel will be more expensive than reprocessing, at which point all of that so-called "waste" will be useful. The idea that it needs to be stored safely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years is just ludicrous.

Also, reprocessing makes disposal of what's left over much easier, because the stuff you actually have to dispose of afterwards (i.e,. the stuff that isn't now reprocessed fuel) has much shorter half-lives and so only needs to be safely sequestered for a much shorter time.

[acidburnNSA]

Yeah the reduction of long-term radiotoxicity achievable by partitioning and transmuting spent nuclear fuel really is astounding.

I'm not totally convinced that uranium mining will ever be more expensive than reprocessing. For one thing, (and especially when you go to deep-burn non-reprocessing breeder reactors) the required uranium is so minuscule that extracting the (near infinite and truly renewable) uranium from seawater is practical using tech that's 3-6x more expensive today than traditional mining.

On the other hand advances in industrial controls and robotics could conceivably reduce reprocessing costs.

Either option would be fine for a much expanded nuclear fleet providing 24/7 low-footprint carbon-free energy.

[nickik]

This is mostly wrong.

> No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it.

Nuclear waste is incredibly well controlled, unlike waste from solar, wind or fossil. Most Western countries didn't have contamination from civil nuclear waste at all and specially not in the last 30 years. Civilian Nuclear waste has basically killed nobody.

Calling it the 'most dangerous' is nonsense.

> Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas).

Nothing is as cheap as natural gas in the US. Specially don't just look at creation but also the grid, the end to end price.

Nuclear on mass scale is very competitive and has been proven to be able to replace fossil fuels on large scales. South Korea and China can produce very competitive nuclear reactors and we could do the same in the West. France did it in the 70/80 with 1960s tech.

Nuclear has the massive advantage of being able to replace coal plants directly without redesigning the countries or even continents grid. These cost (and others) are always ignored when solar advocates claim of low dispatch cost.

> When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense.

Cleanup for any modern plants in the West are already part of the dispatch price. It takes a while to clean up, but the overall land use of nuclear is still 100/1000x smaller then anything else.

> Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.

This is another failure in understanding scale. Uranium mining is not very heavy in terms of equipment compared other mining. Furthermore Uranium has a far higher energy density then anything else we could mine for energy. Solar, Wind and literally everything else involves far more mining and far more 'gray CO2' in the production.

Nothing is zero carbon but nuclear is easily the closest thing we have. No other form of energy has a lower land use, lower resource use and produces less CO2. These are well established facts, however much anti-nuclear advocates want to ignore it.

One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced (and the resource mined).

[jws]

One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced…

1.1 billion hectares of land are farmed to feed the 7.5 billion people. That works out to 2000 square meters per person.

World energy consumption (all sources) runs about 18 terawatts, or 2400 watts per person. That is 58kWhr per day. Using an insolation factor of 3.0 (that is a 1W solar panel averages 3Whrs per day) each person will require 20kW of solar panels to replace ALL sources of energy. That is about 100 square meters of panels per person.

That's a lot, but not unthinkable. You could buy 8 pallets of panels today for $13k and cover a person, and it only takes 5% as much land as the land used to feed that person.

[nickik]

I never claimed its impossible with solar, its just not very smart. Your calculation also leaves out a lot of issues with solar and intermittency. But even those things could be overcome.

However, how is that better? Uranium mining is tiny and a non issue. Thorium is even more plentiful, literally a waste product. We have enough of that stuff for 1000s of years. We have the technology to use it on mass scale and it has PROVEN track record of replacing fossil fuels at mass scales.

Solar panel waste is further duplicated by the live cycle and the lack of life cycle planning in the global supply.

[theK]

Is there a reason other than weapons lobby that blocks humanity from adopting thorium reactors?

[nickik]

The weapons lobby has nothing to do with it. The widely talked about claims that Thorium is not usable for weapons is false.

Uranium would most likely be picked for an industrial scale nuclear weapons program for a couple reasons but thorium does not eliminate these problems.

Furthermore many of the benefits people talk about when talking about Thorium is really about the reactor. Many of the same benefits could also be achieved with Uranium.

Thorium really shines for some specific reactor types.

Whats holding reactors back in general is regulation in all parts of the supply chain, from research to operational licenses, and a wide popular anti-nuclear feeling.

[ImprovedSilence]

All land doesn't receive the same quality or quantity of sunlight.

[jws]

That is the 3.0 insolation I chose. It’s reasonably representative of areas of northern hemisphere cities. The United States average by population is probably between 4 and 5 according to this map, but winter is lower and you have to plan for that.

https://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/eere_pv/national_photovoltai...

Here is a map of the world…

https://globalsolaratlas.info/downloads/world

Northern Europeans are going to want to have some power lines to the south. Chile might be the new aluminum refining capital of the world. Africa would be energy rich.

[pfdietz]

I sometimes wonder if some of the resistance to a solar-powered world stems from their discomfort with the implied economic shift of heavy industry to brown-skinned countries.

[robocat]

So choose land that is poor for food production and good for electricity production, then find a way to transport the energy (one good advantage of gas/coal/oil is transportability with current infrastructure).