[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.

[skew-aberration]

I've never played fallout, and this isn't a game for me. I do have an electrical engineering degree, have read dozens of textbooks on (renewable) power generation, thermodynamics and manufacturing, and have spent significant time helping a research group with simulations of solar hybridised biomass gasification (mostly for Fischer Tropsch biofuels). The scale of electrification is huge, make no mistake, and we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.

> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..

A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).

> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps

This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.

Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.

Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.

Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.

[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.

[palata]

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

Did you even bother to read about how we estimate the casualties of nuclear incidents? It really sounds like you didn't, and just shared your first thought about it not being trivial.

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

How in the world does that make them less risky? If a dam collapses, it's generally very bad, even if it is an old dam.

[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.

[mpweiher]

Being an additional problem is not a contradiction of it being the least of those problems.

No it won't.

That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.

For example: "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

[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?

[mpweiher]

How does the BLU-122 relate to a deep geological repository, in your esteemed opinion?

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

[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?

[throwthrowuknow]

Good luck making a solar panel without an industrial base.

[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?

[mpweiher]

"How" is not really a relevant question in this context. They are, empirically.

Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe, meaning it doesn't really matter that much which of these you use, the overall risk is always going to be very low, and the relative numbers are going to be very sensitive to small changes or variations in analyses.

Hydro is significantly more dangerous, and all the fossil fuels are tremendously more dangerous.

Due to the fact that intermittent renewables usually require fossil backup for that majority of countries that don't have abundant hydro, you have to take that into account.

A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html

A 2019 study shows that reduced use of nuclear energy post-Fukushima cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

https://columbia.edu/~mhs119/Kharecha.Sato_Jpn.Ger_post.Fuku...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Whereas the WHO predicts that there will be no measurable health effects on the general Japanese public from Fukushima, and the majority of negative health consequences were from the unnecessary evacuations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

Radiophobia kills!

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

[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.