Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by abernard1 1950 days ago
> ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear?

That waste goes into Yucca mountain, and it's behind / underneath 100s of meters of neutron heavy metals. If we were exclusively powered by nuclear power for a century without recycling, it'd be something like 100 football fields. Absolutely, completely, utterly inconsequential.

1 inch of neutron-heavy lead is enough to dispel the radioactivity from full blast of a thermonuclear weapon and be safe for a human. Saying that the Yucca mountain waste facility had potential for harm is the most unscientific, embarrassing thing that a certain unnamed political party has ever claimed on nuclear waste.
2 comments
thinkcontext 1950 days ago
> That waste goes into Yucca mountain

Yucca Mountain hasn't accepted waste and there is no plan for it to begin accepting it. The government collects a tax on nuclear generation and used it to construct Yucca Mountain but political considerations have blocked it being used.

There is no current plan for long term storage of nuclear waste in the US.

link
abernard1 1948 days ago
> Yucca Mountain hasn't accepted waste and there is no plan for it to begin accepting it.

Replace Yucca Mountain with any out of the way mountain, and there are many around the world globally. (We wouldn't want to be shipping every nation's nuclear waste to one spot).

The point is that nuclear waste has been well understood for 75 years. The mechanism for how it's shielded, by natural means, is so well understood that the political destruction of these sites is a crime against science.

The fissile, radioactive isotopes came from mountains in the first place, and we're not telling people to not live by mountains.

link
rpiguyshy 1950 days ago
ok but i just have doubts. you say that buried nuclear waste is safe but i need more detail. what if it leaks into ground water? can it leak? what kind of containment is necessary? and does it need to be guarded? do people want the stuff for bombs or something? i just have a bunch of doubts and i think they are reasonable.

and meanwhile solar is simple and there are no doubts about it. probably much easier to do cleanly. nuclear people want us to hold out for this miracle reactor that cant melt down, but they are too impatient for a panel that doesnt have heavy metals?

and its not embarrassing, i just think solar edges out nuclear. im not dogmatically against nuclear.

link
tedk-42 1950 days ago
The problem is that you see it as one or the other as opposed to investing in BOTH solutions and trying to adopt both technologies for the better.

It seems like we should put all our eggs into one basket but why? If people realised how 'anti-nuclear' they actually were, things would move along faster.

link
rpiguyshy 1950 days ago
well for the record i am not saying we should have zero nuclear. i think we need nuclear waste products to power rovers, do certain medical diagnostics and we need nuclear subs to keep the chinese at bay.
link
tedk-42 1950 days ago
A giveaway of your position on nuclear science usage is if you associate nuclear with 'defence' or war-like capabilities.
link