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Comment by klondike_ | Hacker News Reader

People seem to overstate the risk of nuclear waste. Surely a few tons of radioactive waste is better than millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? Nuclear could provide a solution to our energy needs NOW instead of having to wait around for solar and grid storage to be reliable on a nationwide scale.

Right now radioactive waste is stored in pools on site at the reactor. If the US government would actually fund the Yucca Mountain project [1] the risk would be negligible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

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When you have too much CO2, there's a pretty obvious fix for that: plant a ton of trees.

When you have nuclear waste, you're stuck with it for at least a few thousand years, probably longer.

Assuming neither gets "fixed" to your satisfaction—we couldn't physically plant enough trees anyway—I'd rather deal with a few piles of inconvenient material over a planet-wide fucked up atmosphere.

Yucca mountain isn't a great solution... more of a stopgap really. Besides, how do you convince the fine citizens of Nevada to go along with having the nation's nuclear waste buried under their water table? We're not talking about Native Americans defending a river here, these are actual Americans we're talking about.

Low level waste (medical, scientific, etc) is such trivial matter that worrying about the water table is paranoid ignorant bunkum.

As for high level "waste" — it should be reprocessed and reused or burned as fuel in breeder reactors. Burying it underground is a criminal waste of productive resources.

This is what I dislike about current US policy on nuclear waste, there are no plans to store nuclear waste in a form suitable for reprocessing later on. If nuclear waste is vitrified or buried way underground I fear that digging it up, crushing it, and reprocessing it decades later will be economically prohibitive compared to just using fresh ore like we do today. The French already reprocess their waste and nuclear power provides the majority of electricity in France.

We have the same issues in France, or Yucca mountain is called "Bure" in eastern France, and the project is already a political mess.

Yes but you have way less waste to dispose of. In America, the Uranium and Plutonium that makes up the vast majority of spent nuclear fuel is not separated out from the fission products, we just get rid of it all. IIRC reprocessing is actually slightly more expensive than just mining fresh Uranium as now you need to re-enrich the fuel anyways and Uranium is plentiful enough at least for now. By separating out the spent fuel you isolate the most radioactive components and now you can avoid having to store the majority of the fuel for extremely long periods of time.

Reprocessing does not eliminate all nuclear waste, it just minimizes it to only storing the highly radioactive portions instead of the inert components. It also is a prerequisite for any of the proposals that I know about for actually eliminating the nuclear waste instead of just burying it. The long lived radioactive waste could be used as a blanket around a fusion reactor that is used as a neutron source to fission the waste and generate more energy from it.

American people seem to underestimate the damage and risk of anything they are doing. Producing tons of highly-toxic, highly radioactive elements with a lifetime of several the factor humans are living on earth and not the singles clue how to contain them safely even for a decade!

Sure – why save energy, why invest in renewable, energy. Because we have it and we can do it.

This arrogoance towards the subsequent and already generations of today makes me unbelievable angry.

Nuclear waste that is long-lived is by definition not dangerous.

We absolutely should improve energy efficiency and invest in renewable energy. We should be installing solar panels, wind turbines, utility-scale solar, batteries and storage as fast as we can.

But we can simultaneously construct new nuclear power without slowing down renewable deployment. We need a diversity of energy sources; nuclear is the ideal source of base-load power which is necessary to ensure grid stability and sufficient dispatchable power. It's the only way we'll ever kick the habit of burning coal, oil and gas.

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