[TheCondor]

Did waste management become a solved problem?

In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.

[leonidasrup]

Waste management has been solved problem.

"A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced."

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

"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years."

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

But for political reasons it's used only for military nuclear high level waste.

For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository. High level nuclear waste is very small and French nuclear waste from light water reactors is no different from Swiss nuclear waste or Swedish, German, Spanish. (U.K. Magnox fuel rods are different and have special storage requirements). Single waste repository in Finland, Sweden or Norway would be enough, they have lot of old granite and very stable geology.

[lukan]

"For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository."

Because apparently no country wants to be the dumpster for the radioactive waste of the others?

I wonder why that is, when it is a solved problem.

[tempest_]

I don't think people appreciate how much power comes from such a small amount of waste. The largest plant near me has been operating for > 50 years and the waste is still kept on site though I believe they are working on another solution.

[wahnfrieden]

Because it’s not a solved problem and people saying so are repeating propaganda

[Saline9515]

In many cases disposing of it isn't really a good idea as we can reuse the fuel in the future.

[herewulf]

Thus spake the fossil fuel lobby.

[Moldoteck]

please spare us from this nonsense. Waste can be stored in facilities like Onkalo just like we do for many others type of waste, for example in Herfa Neurode

[LtdJorge]

Most plants don't need anything special for waste management. They just put it in dry cask storage and leave those in the outside.

Ironically, there's less background radiation around the casks than away from them, since they are so shielded you also get shielded from part of the background radiation too.

[gambiting]

In Netherlands there is a nuclear energy museum where you can literally walk around spent fuel casks.

[leonidasrup]

It not like everyone can walk in and out as he wants. But a tour can be arranged in advance. This are controled facilities.

https://prinsfrank.nl/2022/09/12/Visiting-the-only-nuclear-w...

[frollogaston]

Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though.

Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes into the air.

[roenxi]

> find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment

That is what safe looks like, nobody said perfect. It's like how cars are death traps but people can still reasonably call them "safe". You could do the same thing for solar panels but for the fact it isn't newsworthy if there is some toxic sludge in some dump somewhere is associated with solar panels.

There might not be any material that we produce on an industrial scale that doesn't leak hazardous or toxic chemicals. I looked up concrete [0] to find out what it's problem was, and it turns out concrete leaks toxic and radioactive materials into the environment because turns out natural rock is sometimes radioactive. Concrete is nonetheless pretty safe stuff.

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

[frollogaston]

They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing. Different people are taking on the risk in each scenario too. Despite this, I'd be fine with a reactor next to my city if I got something like cheap power in return.

[roenxi]

> They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing.

Would "they" rather we just dumped the nuclear waste off in some corner somewhere? Then it'd be a slow and certain leak too. If they want slow and certain rather than probably-nothing then that can be arranged. It'd still be less damaging than business as usual.

I mean, I get that people are scared but they are scared of their own imaginations as opposed to anything that can be engineered. I still think I'd be much better off having lived through a Class 7 nuclear disaster rather than my actual experience of spending years near a coal mine. Policy made for and by people who just live in fear for no obvious reason is never going to work. They're still going to be scared whatever the actual policy is and the rest of us are going to be forced to do stupid things in the real world.

[frollogaston]

Most of the incidents are less about waste storage and more about accidental draining of something, usually contaminated water. Or like, San Onofre got its reactor installed backwards, which yeah does raise some questions that can only be answered with imagination.

[Saline9515]

While there are problems, I think that you should compare with alternative technologies to be fair. For instance, coal used in Germany and China actually releases more radioactive material than nuclear!

A great perk of nuclear waste s that it's so small compared to the power produced, it's way easier to dispose and manage, than, say, expired wind turbines (which aren't recycled currently and take a massive amount of space).

[dani__german]

If automotive was regulated like nuclear, then any car crash would result in all cars being sent to the scrap heap forever.

[frollogaston]

If nuclear were regulated like automotive, they'd let me run a reactor with minimal training at age 16, and the emissions inspector would be bribeable with $500. Well same with coal.

[nradov]

So what? Occasional leaks are no big deal. Very few people die.

[leonidasrup]

You would be surprised how much toxic industrial waste is been currently stored in deep geological repositories in Europe.

https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-man...

For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025):

690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode

So nuclear waste is not a technical problem, mostly political problem.

And it's not very much talk about, but the real issue is geopolitics. Each nuclear trans-uranium waste repository (spend nuclear fuel) could in future be mined to retrieve the stored plutonium for nuclear weapons. And even better, over centuries the most radioactive short lived isotopes are transmuted into more stable isotopes, so the mining and handling of this material is much easier. And even even better over millennia, the undesirable isotope Plutonium-240 (with half-life 6561 year, much shorter then Plutionium-239 half-life 24110 years) will decay away and the reactor-grade Plutonium waste will itself transform, without any external action, into very usable weapon-grade Plutonium.

Therefor spend nuclear fuel and storage of spend nuclear fuel in non-weapon countries is subject to monitoring by the enhanced verification measures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol.

https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07lyman.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Addition...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_plutonium

U.S. goes to great lengths to prevent other countries from acquiring material usable for nuclear weapons. Like, for example retrieving plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-...

"The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants."

"The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US."

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

[mpweiher]

No technology is 100% safe, so that is a straw man.

However, nuclear energy is the safest form of electricity generation we have.

[frollogaston]

"Solved problem" was what the parent comment said. Tell me instead that it's going to leak like everything else.

[Moldoteck]

how is solid material supposed to leak? Like take a look at Onkalo and explain to us what will happen, how and what impact will it have?

[mpweiher]

"Solved problem" does not imply it is 100% safe.

Because no technology is 100% safe.

[indoordin0saur]

From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.

The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.

[aeturnum]

I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).

That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!

The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2432/ML24320A014.pdf

[throw0101c]

> I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know)

It's not a 10k year problem, it's a ~300 year problem, after which most of it is at the same level as natural uranium ore; and the stuff that isn't can be blocked via aluminium foil (to stop beta particles).

The first 10-20 years post-removal are the most dangerous, and why the fuel is kept in cooling ponds. From 10-300 you still have danger, but that is manageable with concrete casts:

* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

* https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...

Once you're past the ~300 year mark, all the most dangerous isotopes have burned away, and you're at point where the main ways of getting ill from what remains is by either eating the pellets or grinding them up and snorting the powder like cocaine.

[aeturnum]

That's fair and I'll admit to using a bit of hyperbole with that number. My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.

[throw0101c]

> My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.

The design life spans of bridges are 50-75, with some going towards 75-150. But once a bridge is EOL, the need for it doesn't just go away: it needs to be replaced. And in the intervening years it needs to be maintained.

So we have finite-but-overlapping life spans of infrastructure with the implicit assumption that society/civilization will continue on existing to deal with repair, renewal, and updating said infrastructure. Used-fuel storage is no different.

And if you want to reduce the total volume, spend money on reprocessing (which is currently more expensive than digging new fuel out of the ground; only France makes an effort to do this).

[KleinerJan]

> Used-fuel storage is no different.

I see quite a difference compared to the bridge example. The bridge provides a utility until it‘s EOL and replacing it, again, provides value for the generations paying for it, since they get to use it.

The spent fuel does not have a utility. In 200 years, it’s a burden left behind by a long-forgotten generation.

You can argue (or rather gamble) that those generations still rely on nuclear energy and still have an ongoing need for such facilities, but even then, a substantial portion of the facilities will be filled with something that the operating generations never received any utility from.

[indoordin0saur]

> if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen?

A good geiger counter can be bought on Amazon for $30. Something is either radioactive or it's not. You don't need to have a sophisticated understanding of the chemistry to test if dangerous radiation is present or not, nor do you need sophisticated equipment. My point is that being next to a radiation hazard should not cause the same sort of anxiety-of-the-unknown that living next to, for example, a chemical plant that may produce a menagerie of difficult-to-detect carcinogens.

[leonidasrup]

If you are looking in tritium leaks, I would encourage to look into leaks from coal power plants, which are gigantic in comparison to nuclear power plants.

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

https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10...

[tialaramex]

Coal plant waste is visibly a nightmare, mountains of toxic dust, only "mildly" radioactive but also chemically toxic and physically dangerous. If that was the other option you'd have my support for a nuclear plant - but it isn't the other option.

Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.

Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.

[skew-aberration]

Nuclear is the other option, and cherry picking the most generous data from a deindustrialised economy is a far less meaningful metric than you seem to think.

I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.

* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy * That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy * This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage * The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand * The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process

Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off

[tialaramex]

> The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy

It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?

The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.

For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.

But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.

> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off

The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.

Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.

£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.

[aeturnum]

This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about?

So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.

I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.

[NamlchakKhandro]

Because obviously(yes this should be obvious right?)...

The more we dance around nuclear, the longer we're still pumping coal by product into the atmosphere... a non storage solution.

Move to nuclear faster. Do it now. You want your EVs right?

[pocksuppet]

If you assume a continuous chain of custody for the next 10000 years, it's pretty trivial, but how do you make that happen? It's beyond all known technology. So you can't.

When Russia bombs that facility, how big will the exclusion zone be? At some point in the next 10000 years, it's not unlikely, it's not likely, it's guaranteed that there will be a war, and the facility will be bombed, or the custodians will be drafted or will just move to the city looking for work, and the nuclear post will be left abandoned (remember Russia's RTGs?), or the descendants will pass the wrong care instructions on to their descendants, and then the containers will rust and start leaching into the water supply. As long as you have a country with operating nuclear reactors you probably have all the infrastructure to keep waste safe. What when you don't?

Imagine that literally, not metaphorically, the devil came to earth in the time of the Neanderthals, destroyed almost everything, and some heroic Neanderthals managed to seal him in a box. If the box isn't taken care of the devil can break out again. Do we still have those care instructions? Is anyone executing them? There are religions from hundreds of years ago (not as long as needed!) which say you must do something or the world ends. We consider them all fairy stories, and they probably are. What if one wasn't? Then we'd be fucked because we wouldn't be following the instructions, right? Nuclear waste storage would be in that bucket.

At least the fallout will be localized. You're not destroying the world with careless handling of nuclear waste. You may make a limited region uninhabitable for thousands of years, and detectably reduce global lifespans by a few years and increase cancer rates by a few percent.

[Moldoteck]

The purpose of deep geo facility is to be deep. Bombing something 500m deep underground makes little sense when russia can use dirty bombs directly.

Besides - humanity already has such facilities for vast of toxic waste, prime example being Herfa Neurode. It's not like we ban all electronics due to arsenic waste from copper mining

[koolba]

Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.

[Krasnol]

Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?

It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.

Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.

[palata]

Again, destroy a dam and you get a catastrophe. Don't do anything in particular and watch how many people die in the mid-term due to climate change.

It's all about risk management.

[leonidasrup]

The most deadly industrial accident was the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

[oneshtein]

The dam is built to protect from floods.

[Krasnol]

Yeah but the risk management of a dam is ridiculously small compared to waste which will be dangerous so far into future that we might not know if people will even know what it is.

A dam damming water at a hill is obvious.

Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.

[palata]

Yet dams have killed more people than nuclear plants.

[Krasnol]

They have been around a bit longer don't you think?

How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown.

It's more like: something happens, a few die fast, the rest dies earlier, their children live shorter or have disabilities, their children also, and so on. Meanwhile collecting waste which will do the same for later generations who might not remember what nuclear energy even is.

[DANmode]

Is this a Katrina reference?

[throwthrowuknow]

Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.

If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.

[Krasnol]

Do you know it will still be properly monitored in 100 years?

What about 1000?

How would you know if there are even people left who know what it is??

May be societal collapse isn't a problem. Maybe we're having a nice new beginning but someone finds some nice, warm stuff?

[mpweiher]

In 100 years: sure.

Unless we have civilizational collapse in which case a bit of nuclear waste will be the least of our problems.

It won't have to be monitored for a 1000 years. First, by that time the level of radioactivity is very low, and when it's in a deep-geological repository (like the ones we already use for vastly greater amounts of highly toxic chemicals that never decay) it is gone. We know enough about how geology works.

[Krasnol]

It won't be "the least of our problems", it would be an additional problem.

The fuel and related will have to be monitored for 1000 years and more.

Yes, we know how geology works, which is why we have found a single place where it might be safe. ONE.

[frm88]

We know enough about how geology works.

We also know how a BLU-122 works. Can you be sure the US wouldn't use one on its allies in yet another moment of irrational tantrum? What about Russia?

[throwthrowuknow]

Nice new beginning my foot. Go live in the woods without power, petrochemical fuel or modern technology for a year and then tell me what you think.

[Krasnol]

Why should I when there are cheap solar panels and batteries out there?

[bethekidyouwant]

Correct as long as we still have Geiger counters.. I’m not sure what kind of apocalypse you’re planning for. Maybe get a radon detection kit for your basement.

[Krasnol]

I'm not planning for anything because you can't plan for the next decade atm. How would you plan for 100s and 1000s of years?

We should REDUCE the danger to those generations and not make it larger for no sane reason.

[mpweiher]

Nuclear is REDUCING the overall danger.

Because the alternatives are much more dangerous.

[Krasnol]

How are renewables more dangerous?

[Mawr]

You realize we're literally dispersing coal, gas & gasoline fumes into the atmosphere that we all breathe, right? 24/7?

Yeah, small amounts of solid waste sitting somewhere is as much of a non issue as can be.

[Krasnol]

Yeah I know this Shillenberger tactic of playing "you love coal because you hate nuclear".

It is no argument or discussion happening in real life now.

It is nuclear vs. renewables and nuclear is losing.

...also those are not small amounts. The fuel may be a small amount but there is much much more that needs to disappear in holes we don't have.

[tremon]

Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.

[GolfPopper]

My understanding has been that an additional reason breeder reactors have been discouraged is due to nuclear proliferation fears; the neccessary reprocessing of the fuel also produces weapons-grade plutonium.

[Moldoteck]

proliferation argument doesn't hold considering you can do it much cheaper with distributed enrichment of uranium. Breeders can open a pathway for plutonium warheads but it's more about optimization. If a country wants such warheads, it'll start with easy enrichment path

[cameldrv]

It really never was that big of a problem. People make a big deal that it lasts 30,000 years, but there are many other types of waste, such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, etc, that will literally never go away, but we don't make people put those types of wastes in repositories that will last forever. Basically you just want to put it in a very remote place with a lot of earth over it. The good thing about nuclear waste is that it's so energy dense that there really isn't even that much of it.

[throw0101c]

> Did waste management become a solved problem?

Yes? Just have them sit in concrete casks? It's safe enough to do a 'maternity photoshoot' with:

* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

The volumes of "waste" that is generated, given the electricity produced, is not a lot. The entirety of the US' waste created, over the course of multiple decades, can fit on single football field/pitch, ten yards/metres high (that's the actual fuel bundles: the dry casks they're stored in would increase the volume).

France is just across the border, so Orano can do reprocessing with the "waste" to reduce its volume even further if desired, and extract the unused fuel from the waste.

[patall]

Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.

[Ray20]

In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons that will make the widespread use of nuclear energy possible: once your neighbor have built a reactor, you begin to share with them all the risks associated with nuclear energy, but you receive none of the benefits. This makes building a nuclear reactor more attractive to you, since you're already bearing the risks.

[chpatrick]

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

[TheCondor]

Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.

For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?

Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.

[fc417fc802]

> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened?

Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.

The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.

[lukan]

"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think."

Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.

[fc417fc802]

Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.

[lukan]

Have people walk with radioactive material sealed in lead containers down some km into a mine and back up?

[crote]

You should read up on the Asse II mine in Germany. They tried exactly this kind of naïve "just throw it in an old mine" approach, and it has turned into a giant headache as it is now slowly collapsing and trying to leak into the surrounding groundwater - if chemical reactions don't cause it to explode first.

[awesome_dude]

This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years

And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

[throwthrowuknow]

What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?

[Mawr]

Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...

I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".

It's concern trolling at its worst.

[awesome_dude]

Until we find the Rosetta stone hieroglyphs were unintelligible, and that language only stopped being used 2000 years ago.

[bethekidyouwant]

I guess they won’t have Geiger counters in the future

[awesome_dude]

Neither concrete nor steel have the lifespans we're discussing thousands, or tens of thousands of years.

And. Bacteria.

[fc417fc802]

When sealed several hundred meters underground in nonporous rock they do have such long lifespans. It's like observing that corn doesn't have a 10 year lifespan when left out on the counter and then objecting to canning it on that basis.

[awesome_dude]

It's non porous right up until an earthquake or some movement of the area makes it not

[palata]

An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.

[awesome_dude]

It doesn't need to - all that needs to happen is for water to suddenly have a course to where the materials are being stored.

[chpatrick]

Sure, you need the right place, but it's not like there's a shortage of space far away from everything.

[noosphr]

And yet we had a natural nuclear reactor that's been self contained for 2 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

[awesome_dude]

Yeah, i know about that one and it kind of proves my point, it's been active as a nuclear reactor for roughly a billion years if i recall correctly - every time water seeped into the rock it slowed the neutrons down and the reactor started up, created steam, which then evaporated and stopped the reaction

Dangerous the whole time.

[duskwuff]

If only there had been some kind of geological steam turbine to go with it... :)

[awesome_dude]

Would have made a nice steamed ham

[dark-star]

Newer reactors produce much less long-lasting waste. A half-life of only 100 or 200 years makes a tremendous difference to the old reactors where half-life was measured in 1000s of years

[ViewTrick1002]

Mythical Gen IV reactors? Without even existing prototypes?

[Moldoteck]

Yes. Check Onkalo. At worst you can unban reprocessing to reduce the amount of waste or pour some $ in fast reactors

[remarkEon]

Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.

[geden]

What is the solution?

Where are the free nuclear plants?

Sizewell C = £40 billion

That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.

[subscribed]

You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar.

Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.

Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

[bjourne]

Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.

[remarkEon]

This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …

… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.

[bjourne]

Plain false. The "economics" never got bad. They were always bad to begin with, hidden under layers of government subsidies.

[herewulf]

The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).

Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!

[throwthrowuknow]

Ask why it suddenly got so expensive and why delays were introduced. Hint, it happened more in some countries than others.

[bjourne]

Hint, being snarky on HN is not as cool as you think.

Nuclear "became expensive" because state subsidies declined, labor costs increased, and environmental regulations across all industries tightened.

[Mawr]

Yeah, the efficient coal plants displaced the inefficient nuclear ones. Efficiency all the way!

Climate change? Pollution? Nah, who cares, efficiency!

[int_19h]

And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.

[lukan]

Source needed, a quick search if mine showed very different numbers:

"China aims to reach 110 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity by 2030."

"China installed over 430 GW of renewables in 2025"

In other words china installed last year alone 5x the energy capacity in solar and wind, what the are planning to have in 2030

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

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

[ViewTrick1002]

Vastly slower. China is on one hand building enough renewables to soak up the entire grid expansion and displace fossil fuels.

On the other hand their nuclear share is declining. It peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is today down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant.

For each plan they put out they lower their nuclear targets and push them further into the future.

Going from a French like buildout 10-15 years ago to having it as a token investment today.

[nazgul17]

Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?

A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?

Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.

[Filligree]

What does the linear no-threshold model say about air pollution from coal plants, anyway?

[Gibbon1]

Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.

[Moldoteck]

I do see how France and Sweden have lowest GHG emissions in EU by building both nuclear and renewables. I see other countries like Denmark/Germany who decided to go with ren alone. Germany spent on EEG double than entire french nuclear fleet. We can see the results. There's no race here. There's no imagine if. We already have historical data. We already have results on hand

[sehansen]

I don't see that?

France: 4.12 tons CO2 per capita Denmark: 4.34 tons CO2 per capita

and the electricity price for industrial costumers is also close to identical:

France: 0.153 EUR/kWh (0.130 EUR/kWh without taxes) Denmark 0.122 EUR/kWh (0.121 EUR/kWh without taxes)

CO2 data from EUs EDGAR: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025?vis=co2pop#emissi...

Price data from: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[remarkEon]

Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.

[lukan]

Maybe have a look at that by now old old image. Notice the red square. It is a bit larger today, but the principle stays the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg

There are enough roofs and waste lands for solar.

But out of curiosity, would you like to live next to a nuclear plant/uran mining/radioactive waste deposit?

[remarkEon]

Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?

This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.

[ars]

The solution is nuclear fuel reprocessing + breeder reactors.

You end up burning all of the uranium, leaving being only short lived isotopes.

[Moldoteck]

Will solar + bess supply power with the same pattern in UK or will they require gas firming on top?

[lukan]

"We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity"

Did you ever handled radioactive material yourself?

Or watched how Uranium mining works and what gets left behind?

I doubt that.

[Moldoteck]

Uranium mining nowadays is pretty environmentally friendly. More than half of global production is in situ mining. Nuclear also requires least amount of mining per kwh vs alternatives https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

[NamlchakKhandro]

Have you?

[lukan]

Yes. I was born and live close to a site where Uranium was extensively mined and cannot confirm clean nor safe.