[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.