[toomuchtodo]

Batteries can be recycled, nuclear waste is stockpiled with no permanent disposal or recycling plan in sight.

Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity).

Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste disposal, liability insurance).

[petre]

Most of this nuclear "waste" could be recycled as well by processing and further burning it in breeder reactors. Of course the processng equipment gets contaminated but that's life.

[beaconstudios]

this might sound silly (and it probably is), but I don't understand why we don't build a hulking great cannon and shoot our nuclear waste into space.

[ben-schaaf]

I know others have addressed the dangers of this, but I had a little fun looking at the logistics. The UK alone produces 2Mt of radioactive waste[0] per year, ~9% is of "intermediate" level. Just sending those 18Mt into LEO would take 129,000 Saturn V launches per year. That's about one launch every 4 minutes. And LEO is not where we want to send anything. Lets assume a Trans-Lunar Injection is enough, bringing that number up to 370,000, almost one launch per minute.

Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone.

Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone.

[0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast... [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-t... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...

[chongli]

Launching waste into space with a rocket is a silly idea. We don't really care if the waste gets damaged as long as it doesn't break up and make a mess. Why not build a giant railgun to launch it?

[ben-schaaf]

I'd consider them equally as silly, considering we're actually capable of launching rockets into space yet the closest we've gotten with a space gun is a measly 180km apogee @ 3.6km/s[0]. The original question was why we don't send our nuclear waste into space. We can't send our nuclear waste into space using a rail gun because we can't currently send anything into space with a rail gun.

Otherwise here's a good discussion on the viability of space guns: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2370/what-technolo....

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP

[gdpgreg]

Cause someone murdered the leading scientist in the field. Also there's concerns that it'd be too easy to turn it essentially into a very long range, highly effective weapon that could lob nuclear or conventional projectiles at countries on the other side of the planet with little to no warning.

[ben-schaaf]

We already have highly effective weapons that can lob nuclear or conventional projectiles at countries on the other side of the planet with little to no warning: ballistic missile subs.

[acidburnNSA]

It's cheaper and safer to store it in deep crystalline bedrock. I guess if we geologists can't convince we the people of that maybe the railgun idea would work, especially if you could hit the sun where the fast fusion neutrons would consume the hell out of it.

[petre]

What if it fails and the waste falls back to Earth spreading over inhabited areas or agriculture/fishing grounds? It's a bad idea to begin with.

[richardburden]

2Mt is two metric tons, right? It surely is not 2 million metric tons. See the IAEA's estimates of total radwaste in storage or disposal worldwide: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

Because of the extremely high energy density of nuclear fuel, the amount of waste produced per Gigawatt-year of electricity generated is very small.

A Saturn V has a payload of 140 Mt to low earth orbit. Total high-level waste is 22,000 cubic meters, possibly 220,000 Mt, assuming a density 10 times as great as water. 1,572 Saturn V launches would carry away all of that. All the high-level waste ever produced that has not been recycled. Most of it can be recycled in breeder reactors, so there is no need to carry it away!

[ben-schaaf]

2Mt is 2 mega tonnes. If you look at the source only 0.03% of radioactive waste in the UK is "High Level". The expended fuel itself is a tiny portion of the nuclear waste. At lot of things other than nuclear reactors also produce radioactive waste that requires proper disposing, as your source confirms.

[joe_the_user]

Oh, this reminds me of high school, when I asked a physicist my mother dating about the same idea. He worked for the Rand corporation and was overall pro-nuclear. Still, He considered for a second and did his best to explain...

What I remember of his explanation was the point that if you launch a payload of material into space, you have essentially placed that payload in an elliptical orbital path, one that intersects earth's elliptical path. And since orbits are periodic, that payload is going to be intersecting earth's orbit regularly, meaning that in this instance, the chance of the material coming right back into the atmosphere is quite high.

[BurningFrog]

I like to remind people that we already live on a radioactive planet. We can build nuclear reactors because radioactive stuff naturally is everywhere. There probably wouldn't be life here without it.

So to me the "let's get it off the planet" idea is an overreaction. Radioactive material just need to be handled with common sense.

[jazzyjackson]

Hmm... what's the over-under on dropping barrels into a volcano?

You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust...

As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster?

Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?

[archgoon]

> As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat?

Short answer: No. Definitely not in a Volcano.

Long Answer:

Decay rates are ultimately determined by the subatomic structure of the nucleus. This is why different chemicals, and different isotopes of said chemicals, will decay differently. A lone neutron will decay after about 15 minutes (which is a long time in subatomic scales), however, the two neutrons in (4/2)He will happily stick around forever.

So melting a material won't have any impact on the structure of the nucleus, you're just disassociating the intramolecular bonds; same goes for turning said material into a gas.

If you were to raise the temperature high enough, and we're talking sun-like (not the measly 5000k that you get on the surface, I mean like 27-million degrees you find in the core), then you'll actually start stripping and fusing nuclei, which will at that point change (but not necessarily decrease) the radioactive rates of whatever material you started with.

[AngryData]

In most cases a faster decay rate does mean the material becomes safer at a faster rate, but consequently produces more radiation in that same time. If it was reprocessed we could reuse the high-output waste over and over until all that was left was the low energy but long half life material, but old regulations based on poorly understood science in the past, public ill-will, and potential international political conflicts could appear as the reprocessing technology is basically the same technology needed to make nuclear or radiation bomb source material.

[BurningFrog]

The classic answer is to bury extremely long lived waste in a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench.

A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons.

I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think it would "contaminate the oceans".

[fromthestart]

I dont think it is so easy. Subduction zones have what are called accretionary prisms, which are basically sediment that is sloughed off the top of the subducting plate. Thus, if you want the nuclear waste to be subducted, you have to bury it deep enough, though I can't say quite how far - given the scale of the crust, I'd say you're looking at something on the order of miles at least. Which is extra challenging considering subduction zones are already under thousands of feet of ocean.

[pfdietz]

And even if it were subducted, the descending seafloor sediments liberate water and other volatiles once they get deep/hot enough, and this produces volcanism.

[WalterBright]

Extremely long lived radioactive waste will, inevitably, have extremely low levels of radioactivity. I.e. not an issue.

[eseehausen]

Because we already know how to store it for thousands of years with minimal leakage without creating a contraption that could lead to nuclear waste raining down on our heads.

[pvaldes]

To be fair, we already know how to store it with minimal leakage for thousands of years, but the tentation to just dump it in the Mediterranean (1980's), Somalia (1980-90's), seed it over Irak (Gulf's war) or leak it into the Japanese Sea (2011-17) is irresistible.

[ethbro]

Uranium (elemental) has a density of 19.1 g/cm^3.

For comparison, lead has a density of 11.34 g/cm^3.

It's heavy.

[ryacko]

Yes, but how much coal versus uranium would a household use, if used to generate electricity in the most efficient way possible (cogeneration presumably)?

[skywhopper]

One answer is that it probably isn’t possible to do what you say, but if it were the failure states are wildly unacceptable. Any “cannon” (or rail gun) capable of accelerating an object to escape velocity from the surface would likely burn the object up during its flight through the atmosphere, spreading its radioactive contents into the air to float around as low level global fallout for decades.

But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution.

One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.

[Eric_WVGG]

because a misfire would result in a fine mist of nuclear fallout spread over the entire planet

[pvaldes]

We'll have to pack it very carefully in any case. Perhaps we should assume that this will happen and work with that scenery in mind. The concept of a fire resistant box is not new at a smaller scale; We can vitrify the less dangerous waste and store the crystal in steel containers. Then we could theoretically design explosion-proof containers for it with some outer sacrificial disposable layers made of a plastic clay-like matherial or so.

[erikpukinskis]

There’s some more weight.

[pvaldes]

Is much worse than that :-). The "space solution" can be split in three different possibilities. I will name the first "The slingshoot"

We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category.

We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018.

Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.

[beaconstudios]

hmm, I guess that's not ideal.

[WalterBright]

If it's spread out over the planet, the resulting radiation would be insignificant.

[ThomPete]

Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that.

Its not too expensive its very cheap, its the regulation around that makes it expensive which can be solved too.

[ben_w]

> Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that.

No it can’t. Any given atom stops being uranium after it fissions. Some of the waste can be reprocessed because not all is fissioned, but even then there is a lot of literally untouchable waste left over — well, literally untouchable if you want to live: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

[cm2187]

But I don’t get this untouchable concept. Lava is untouchable. Deep oceans are unreachable. Why is it a requirement that we have to be able to go and touch every single spot on earth? What is the problem with having one minuscule location on earth where you are not supposed to go and stock pile this material there? It is contained, we have full control over it, unlike the immense volumes of chemicals currently released in rivers or the atmosphere. And there are already countless locations where you are not supposed to go because it is private or military property, polluted with chemicals, or too cold or too warm for humans, or a protected natural reserve, etc.

I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively. The risk of an uncontained explosion of a reactor is a more legitimate concern. But I understand many modern designs like molten salt reactors reduce this risk to pretty much zero.

[ben_w]

I am somewhat sympathetic to your points, but was responding to a comment that seemed to claim it was a non-issue.

I’m only “somewhat” in agreement because humans are terrible at reading warning signs, especially from long-dead people. “Oh,” they say, “that was ages ago. It’s just a primitive superstition. Anyway, we’re special.”

[cm2187]

Agree, but that being said you can walk around in Rome and read signs that were written 2000 years ago. Same characters, similar language than most european languages. English is the modern latin, and I would argue, with even more significance than latin given its global scope. I just can't think of a scenario where our descendants would not know what radiactivity is, and would have forgotten english.

[ben_w]

As a collective culture, I agree with you (assuming we don’t turn the planet into a Dyson swarm in that timeframe, which is surprisingly plausible and I don’t know how to start making forecasts).

Absent scenarios which Isaac Arthur has already made YouTube videos about, I’m more worried about atomic analogs of antivaxxers or homeopaths. Or “Traditional Chinese Medicine”. Or… well, you get the idea.

[PavlovsCat]

> What is the problem with having one minuscule location on earth where you are not supposed to go and stock pile this material there?

How much time do you have? This article isn't just long, it has many, many interesting links.

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

> There is a debate over what should constitute an acceptable scientific and engineering foundation for proceeding with radioactive waste disposal strategies. There are those who have argued, on the basis of complex geochemical simulation models, that relinquishing control over radioactive materials to geohydrologic processes at repository closure is an acceptable risk. They maintain that so-called "natural analogues" inhibit subterranean movement of radionuclides, making disposal of radioactive wastes in stable geologic formations unnecessary. However, existing models of these processes are empirically underdetermined: due to the subterranean nature of such processes in solid geologic formations, the accuracy of computer simulation models has not been verified by empirical observation, certainly not over periods of time equivalent to the lethal half-lives of high-level radioactive waste. On the other hand, some insist deep geologic repositories in stable geologic formations are necessary. National management plans of various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.

So, various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.

That's all we have for now.

> I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively.

Yeah, but so far we have no way of doing that, so it's a legitimate concern. I might as well say "we can just turn off all nuclear reactors now, we just need other means oto generate the energy and do the shutdown responsibly". Leave it allll up to the reader, or in this case, future generations, why not.

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

https://grist.org/article/stang/

> At Hanford, a rough rule of thumb for planners is to look ahead 1,000 years. That’s like a Viking trying to conceive of an astronaut, then trying to pass a note to him.

> Experts inside and outside of DOE have pondered this communication conundrum. The agency has assembled panels of scientists, historians, artists, and others to tackle from all angles the question of how a 21st century sign should look to a 31st century person. From symbols to colors to materials to size, everything’s up for grabs — and nothing’s been decided.

We don't have solutions. Pretending we have solutions will not help us get solutions, either.

[ThomPete]

The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.

Furthermore, the price of uranium is so cheap that it's financially feasible right now. It will be over time but that should also show you just how abundant and available it is as a resource.

If we actually got politicians to sit down and go through the requirements with engineers and scientists they would realize how cheap and still safe it can be.

[PavlovsCat]

> The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.

Well, if that "counts", then solar power will become totally free and have a net positive environmental impact, we'll just plant some nanobots that grow and repair solar panels inside a marked area, and can be scooped up should we need them elsewhere, hence "100% free once we perfected them". They'll smell like vanilla, and change color according to the moods of people using the energy.

Latter on we make nanobots and send them to the sun to hang out there for a few thousand years and grow a scaffolding from, uhh, space dust or something, and then we shoot nanobots at it that grow solar panels on it, and we have our Dyson sphere. Add some nanostuff that creates material from energy and flings that at Earth, then convert material back to energy.

This didn't even take me 5 minutes, so I really don't get what the problem is :P

[ThomPete]

You can say the same about solar which needs fuelcell technology we dont have. Nuclear waste is not problems that we have no idea to solve.

[pfdietz]

Solar doesn't need fuel cells.

Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.

[toomuchtodo]

If it was easy to solve, it’d be solved already. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap, and for those reasons it’s likely it won’t be done.

It’s already cheaper to build new solar plants and wind farms than continue to run an existing coal plant (which itself is cheaper to run than nuclear).

[ThomPete]

No it wouldnt be solved already since the political environment is completely against nuclear, so simply false. Solar is a fraction of energysupply and will not even be close to being signifficant whare it really matters which is in transportation.

[toomuchtodo]

How is nuclear being expensive political? It is fundementally untenable as a commercial enterprise when compared to natural gas, solar, and wind.

90-95% of all new generation coming online each year are renewables in the US. Renewables cost continues to decline year over year, speeding its uptake. I cannot fathom how one would think nuclear can compete at all in such an environment.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31192

“Nearly all nuclear plants now in use began operation between 1970 and 1990. These plants would require a subsequent license renewal before 2050 to operate beyond the 60-year period covered by their original 40-year operating license and the 20-year license extension that nearly 90% of plants currently operating have either already received or have applied for. The AEO2017 Reference case projections do not envision a large amount of new nuclear capacity additions. By 2050, only four reactors currently under construction and some uprates at existing plants are projected to come online.”

[acidburnNSA]

> How is nuclear being expensive political?

Super-expensive safety regulations are often based on the linear no-threshold model of biological dose response. There is more and more data showing that this is illogical at very low doses. Changing that is highly political.

The large 3-shift security staff at nuclear power plants is based on political concerns.

The contractor and financing models in play in the US to build nukes causes lots of misalignment, and contracts end up suing each other over trivialities rather than building the plant like the Koreans do or French did (in the 1970s). That's nearly political.

Anti-nuclear intervenors watch over plant plans and try to delay at all costs. Totally political.

[thatcat]

If flyash disposal, mining, carbon emission, and fracking were equally regulated then these regulations create incentive to R+D nuclear technology, making it more affordable. The results of a rigged race don't prove anything.

[toomuchtodo]

That doesn’t address solar and wind being drastically cheaper than nuclear fission. It would be wasteful to continue to poor dollars into fission at this point, versus scaling up renewables and battery manufacturing further.

Whether the race is rigged is irrelevant; the race is over.

[Spooky23]

You use it as baseload to replace coal. The problem with renewables is the variability, which would lead to overcapacity or other issues as it scales up.

[pfdietz]

When we say a source is "baseload", we're not saying something good about it. What that means is that source's business case depends on being able to sell its output most of the time. It's a word describing economic inflexibility.

There is no reason why a grid needs any baseload sources whatsoever.

[ThomPete]

Because of the safety concerns.

Again it doesent matter how much come online it matters if it replaces fossile or nuclear in any significant way, it doesent, its unreliable.