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Comment by stochastic_monk | Hacker News Reader

It’s certainly not sustainable. We can’t handle the radioactive waste we already have unless there are some massive overhauls.

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You are right, we cannot handle the nuclear waste from coal power plants. As far as nuclear waste from nuclear power plants go we can handle those very well because the volume is significantly less and there are very strict rules how to handle it.

Does nuclear waste really take up that much space? My understanding was that it's negligible for the amount of power it provides.

Handling it takes money and effort no one wants to spend. John Oliver covered the situation a couple years back [0].

[0] https://time.com/4908330/john-oliver-nuclear-waste-last-week...

Why then would people "want to spend" money and effort on handling the waste created by batteries? Let's be fair about the stick we're using to measure people's environmental altruism - it cuts both ways.

It seems like an objective fact that we cannot handle nuclear waste, at least in the US. IMO you have to consider the political situation as part of the whole system. If we as a society cannot deal with having nuclear waste repositories in our backyard, it is irresponsible to create more nuclear waste.

This argument amounts to: "People freak out about nuclear waste. Therefore nuclear waste is bad even if it's not bad."

It does not. Nuclear waste is incredibly easy to safely store. Dig a deep hole, encase the waste in concrete, and bury it in a remote location (or in a location already poisoned by nuclear weapons testing). There are digs in Finland and Yucca mountain that have enough capacity for generations. And if that's still not enough room >98% of waste can be reprocessed. France does this, and their total volume of nuclear waste in only a few cubic meters.

The hypothetical scenarios in which nuclear waste can contaminate humans are borderline hyperbolic. Yes, if society collapses and all records of disposal sites are lost, and if some future civilization digs a mile deep in a location with no natural resources, and if they crack open a nuclear waste casked, and if they manage to do all this without knowledge of radiation then they will be irradiated.

> There are digs in Finland and Yucca mountain that have enough capacity for generations.

All we need is safe transport across large distances? It's not something we're very good at..

No, it's actually quite simple. Encase the waste in concrete, and ship it in a shipping container [1]. The concrete caskets have enough radiation shielding that it is not dangerous to stand near them. Burying the waste is really just a safeguard against potential long-term leakage.

1. These concrete caskets look like this: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/avery-w2/images...

Meanwhile,

> An average of 1,390 containers have been lost at sea each year over the past three years, [...]

To be more explicit, that is 1,390 containers per year out of all shipping containers shipped in a given year. That's a fairly low failure rate. And most waste doesn't need to be shipped overseas, just within continents.

And besides, losing one (or even dozens) of these caskets at sea will not result in any noticeable increase in radiation. Multiple nuclear powered summaries have sunk with fuel still in their reactors.

The point remains: nuclear waste is a non-issue, and it is extremely difficult to use it as an objection to nuclear energy in an intellectually honest manner.

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