[lousken]

why is nuclear waste such a big problem? in terms of m^3 the amount is rather small, and I feel like we're not discussing what's gonna happen with old solar panels. Is there a way to recycle them / how good is it? The article doesn't mention it. As for the nuclear storage problem, from my point of view it seems more like the biggest problem is that people don't want it near them even though it's stored hundreds of meters below surface, and they rather accept a factory and directly breathe the stuff from it

[ic0n0cl4st]

When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions? Does that area become a no-man’s land for decades /centuries, even after spending many billions to try and rectify the damage?

There is absolutely no comparison to long term storage of nuclear waste and discarded solar panels.

[orwin]

> When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions?

Well, crush 100 acre of solar panels, put them in a landfill near a river, and tell me if cadmium, lead and mercury taste good and have a good effect on the fauna around. I'm not talking about batteries here.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...

https://goodelectronics.org/chinese-workers-demand-compensat...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6161498/

[ic0n0cl4st]

If a truck full of solar panels crashes on the highway, that highway doesn’t become a superfund site. It doesn’t cost hundreds of millions to clean up, the local community doesn’t see a massive spike in cancer.

You cannot say the same about nuclear waste.

[Nicksil]

>If a truck full of solar panels crashes on the highway, that highway doesn’t become a superfund site. It doesn’t cost hundreds of millions to clean up, the local community doesn’t see a massive spike in cancer.

>You cannot say the same about nuclear waste.

Sure you can. Look-up transport casks.

[timthorn]

An account of the 1984 test: https://www.railmagazine.com/trains/heritage/it-s-a-lovely-d...

And the BBC Six O'clock News report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo22l4wJdx8

[nikitaga]

TLDR: That test showed no leaks after hitting the flask with a train at 100mph.

[lazide]

When has that happened with nuclear waste again?

[aksss]

If we’re trying to be honest here, that’s not an appropriate comparison. Properly disposed-of nuclear waste doesn’t necessarily cause these problems either. When you look at the physical footprint disparities (land-clearing) needed for commensurate solar power generation, rendering such land unusable and ecologically disrupted/destroyed, solar doesn’t come out smelling like roses these days either. If you’re lucky it can be reclaimed more easily but in the daily operation for its lifetime and beyond in the best case, the land occupation needed to power a small town exclusively with solar is pretty massive. Now do a country. Now do a continent.

[ic0n0cl4st]

Since you’re going to go there, let’s add in the damage from all the iron, that limestone and uranian required to build the nuclear plant? Also quite damaging.

Photovoltaics, not the best. Now what about mirrors pointing at concrete towers moving liquid sodium around, like in Spain, or pointed at steel pipes filled with water.

The pro-nuclear crowd have two things in common:

1. They have more faith in humanity than we have shown is warranted 2. They won’t accept that Nuclear has failed to achieve the promised widescale adoption and economic benefits.

We can’t even contain plastic bags.

[aksss]

I’m for a full accounting of all of it. Maybe we can agree all power generation for an industrialized world comes with enormous cost and trade-offs.

Where does that leave us? You need to supplement renewables with something. Your options seem like fossil fuels or nuclear right now. That’s what this all comes down to - the load factor of renewables sucks for most of the world, storage tech isn’t suitable for the demand that would be placed on it, nor will it be for the foreseeable future barring a miracle. So one either ends up saying that we’ll hold out using fossil fuels to augment the <20% load factor of solar, or we think about embracing nuclear with an assumption that it can be done safely. Point #2 that you bring up is an outcome skewed by many roadblocks of our own making, so people open to nuclear tend to reject the assumption that this is a quality inherent to the technology.

I literally just don’t see any options with a lower carbon footprint to meet demand in a highly reliable manner, though I would love a miracle energy generating technology to magically appear that could let us avoid nuclear.

[QuarterReptile]

>We can’t even contain plastic bags.

So definitely don't give radioactive waste away for free at checkouts.

[nightski]

There are 96 nuclear power plants in the U.S. supplying ~20% of our electricity generation. I'm not sure I'd call it a failure?

[FooHentai]

>why is nuclear waste such a big problem? in terms of m^3 the amount is rather small

The meme is that nuclear waste produced so far amounts to 'a football field worth' or some similar framing. But you could fit the entire earth into a football field if you're prepared to go quite deep. It's a deliberate trick to make it seem like a non-issue, and deflects from the serious challenge that is long-term handling of nuclear waste. Plus, this is the size of the problem if we stop tomorrow, just the amount produced in the 50 years nuclear power has been up and running. So you must multiply not only by the length of time to be stored but also future projections for continued operation. If you try and project that out to a rolling total, assumming you keep the level of waste production at it's current level and no greater, it's an enourmous quantity.

Then there's looking at how well we're progressing with permanent, safe sequestration of existing nuclear waste. Not very well - There have only ever been three sites in the world for permanent waste disposal and only one of them is operating today (WIPP in the USA). The other two in Germany closed many years ago, and are costing billions in ongoing remediation costs as it turns out 'permanent' didn't pan out as well as hoped. Of course, no nations are accepting waste produced by other nations as that would be a political nightmare, and so each country is left to work out a plan on it's own.

The USA has shut down something like 30 plants so far, but of those only about 10 have so far been decommissioned. Of those, about half were truly decommed and most of the rest were put in to the SAFSTOR programme, where they are left to decay for up to 60 years. Theory is they'll be a bit cheaper to decommission after that time, and the funds to decomm them up-front are not available. A handful opted for a third option of entombing the reactor in situ.

[armada651]

Ironically many countries are considering underground storage of CO2 to combat climate change.

[aksss]

Is carbon sequestration even remotely realistic though (beyond PoC, and at scale)?

[Trombone12]

I mean, it's pretty realistic at incinerator plants, the concentrations and temperatures are such that you use up some reasonably small percentage of the total plant effect on capture and you can capture 90 % of the generated CO2.

The trick will be to make sure economic incentives don't lead to people simply building so many incinerators that you end up emitting more than before anyway...

[gameswithgo]

Hard to say, its a big mega project, but then so is what we do today to keep getting more oil and gas. Same story goes for energy storage to make solar/wind workable at large scales. Very hard problem! So is sucking the last dregs of oil out of the ocean, or creating earthquakes to suck it out of the ground.

[Hammershaft]

I reccomend Vaclav Smil's interviews on this subject. The short answer is no.