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Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me if this is a worn trope, but I've read somewhere that the upper bound on what we can do with nuclear energy is not how much we can produce, but what we can do with the leftovers ... as more and more people use nuclear power we're going to produce more and more nuclear waste, and there isn't really any answer as to what we can do with that. There are plenty of fantastic "ideas" as to what can be done, but it doesn't seem to me that we've fully solved that side of the equation, and I'd be thinking we really should have a good bit more work done before we consider something with such dangerous side effects "a solution".

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Nuclear waste is significant less harmful than fossil fuel waste which currently is produced in massive amounts.

For my perspective, we should ban the worst waste first and then iterate. If we can build an energy grid without burning fossil fuels we should do so, preferable yesterday. If we can then build one that also is without nuclear waste then lets do that too, but my first priority is going to be to get rid of the fossil fuels.

What I do not want is replacing nuclear waste with fossil fuel waste. While we have an unsolved problem with nuclear waste, it is dwarfed by what can be done once run away climate change happens. A world where 100% of energy comes from nuclear is preferable over one where 100%, 80%, 50%, maybe even as low as 20% comes from fossil fuels.

If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere. It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored.

To believe that is a problem is to not have grappled with just how big the world is and how much of it is uninhabitable to humans already. The human population is concentrated in an absurdly small footprint in major cities and fertile belts compared to the size of the planet. The area the waste would sterilise would be a non-issue.

I dunno. What do you want to be solved? If we call it poisonous instead of radioactive would you be happy? There are literally poisonous lakes out there and nobody cares much. One more doesn't matter. The only interesting thing about nuclear waste is we use a different word to describe the same outcomes. The outcomes don't seem that dangerous in the big picture.

> If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere.

I'm not sure what kind of "modern nuclear technology" you're referring to. Are you saying that our legacy power plants are bad, and should be replaced? At what cost?

> It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored.

So, a single nuclear power plant for the world?

Transporting nuclear waste is also a problem. Even in the US, where it doesn't need to cross oceans (ignoring Hawaii, Puerto Rico and maybe some other territories).

I'm also uncertain if we'll be likely to encourage modern nuclear reactors in Iran, North Korea and in various failed states. They may be safe wrt weapons grade nuclear weapons initially - but could the be modified? (honest question, I'm not sure how easy it would be to enrich material for a traditional bomb, or indeed a "dirty bomb". But small amount of high grade waste kind of sounds like it's usable for a dirty bomb?).

Most of the nuclear waste that exists is from weapons production. Nuclear generating plants produce only a very small amount.

Right now, small enough amounts of waste are produced that reactors generating power actually store the stuff on site.

>but could the be modified?

Modern reactor types are specifically designed not to be proliferation risks. The only reason the older reactor types are risks is because the governments who originally built them wanted to produce weapons, so they chose the technology that allowed them to do so.

Waste could be used for a "dirty bomb" in some sense, but it wouldn't be terribly effective. "High level" is relative, and the isotopes that would make a dirty bomb truly scary aren't available except in fuel rods shortly after their removal from a reactor... at which point no one does anything to extract those isotopes anyway, they just stick the fuel in cooling ponds to decay down to lower levels of radiation.

Yeah man, I dunno either ... I think "poisonous" is understating it somewhat. We're talking about substances that will remain toxic for thousands of years, and are quite happy to go everywhere they can if there is some issue with containment.

I appreciate that you have a conviction that this is a problem, but you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions (and I don't mean nuclear waste encased in concrete) than rhetoric as a means to address my concerns.

> you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions

It is an order-of-magnitude argument; a bit like arguing whether $1 billion or $1 million is more dollars. The difference between the two figures is almost exactly a billion dollars because there really is no comparison between orders of magnitude. Uranium is something like 6 orders of magnitude more energy dense than fossil fuels (so more of a trillion to a million) - the waste is a lot worse too, but it is nowhere near 6 orders of magnitude more dangerous, because that would suggest it is killing more people than the population of the earth already. Which it is not ^.

You can say you want something solved, but the problem you want solved is several orders of magnitude smaller than the problems everyone currently shrugs off as totally normal. The orders of magnitude are so different they do not need to be solved and can be handwaved. The nuclear waste problem is incomparably small compared to the fossil fuel problem which has proven to be tolerable despite 20+ years of resistance by Green groups.

It is also probably going to turn out to be smaller than the waste problem fabricating renewable will have by the same order of magnitude issue.

^ The evidence suggests it is actually not that much worse because it is so easy to isolate. It is practically achievable for nuclear waste to do less actual harm unit-to-unit than coal.

You're comparing magnitudes there ... but I've a feeling there's a base-rate somewhere, relating to how dangerous just a relatively small amount of nuclear waste can be if it gets into groundwater or something.

The real problem with nuclear is that it's a one way only system. The effects of other forms of fuel can in theory be sequestered eventually. Sequestration of nuclear waste is exactly something that yout don't want to happen.

As you say, it's a matter of scale. A limited amount of nuclear power is probably fine, and safe. But it can never be the "solution" to our energy problems until the various problems are solved satisfactorily.

We could grind nuclear waste from current nuclear plants into fine powder and intentionally blow it into the atmosphere and still cause fewer deaths than coal, as well as cause the release of less radioactive material, as the coal industry causes huge amounts of uranium dust to be released in the air.

So as it stands, if we look at the real world instead of some hypothetical future, we continue to depend on types of power that causes not just the release of more harmful material, but the release of more radioactive material than nuclear.

If we get to a point where we have fully supplanted fossil fuels, and we need to consider whether to continue building nuclear or replace it with alternatives, then the situation may look different, but at the moment anything that slows the replacement of things like coal causes massive amounts of harm, both environmentally and in killing people.

We could have a Chernobyl a year, and it'd still cause us less harm than the continued dependence on coal.

> We could grind nuclear waste from current nuclear plants into fine powder and intentionally blow it into the atmosphere and still cause fewer deaths than coal, as well as cause the release of less radioactive material, as the coal industry causes huge amounts of uranium dust to be released in the air.

How does the math work on this? It seems... hyperbolic.

This is actually comparison with coal plants.

Coal contains traces of uranium, which gets released during burning. The uranium released in such way would have been sufficient to generate the energy obtained from burning coal if it used for fission instead [0].

So indeed, now we disperse the nuclear fuel in the atmosphere and freaking out about it much less then when instead it is being processed in a plant, and coal left alone.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Look up fly ash. Orders of magnitude more fly ash is produced than waste from nuclear plants, and it contains high concentrations of uranium and thorium.

While plants in e.g the US now captures most of it, huge quantities are still released into the air especially in countries with lower environmental standards.

But even places where it doesn't get released that just means having to deal with far more radioactive waste than nuclear plants produces.

It's not.

Naturally occurring radioactivity in coal ash means that coal burning power plants release far more radioactivity into our environment than nuclear plants do. In fact, if you want to get the least amount of radioactivity into your body, the safest place is behind the shielding of a nuke plant, because it would also protect you from naturally occuring radiation.

If you add up the total of radioactive elements in Bequerels released annually by coal plants and then assume 100% of all waste from power generating plants could be ground up and released and count that up, the amount of radioactivity from nuclear plants would still be less than coal.

We burn a LOT of coal, and despite the media's portrayal of how much a problem radioactive waste is, it's very overblown for power generating plants. Weapons production is another matter, but we've already been trying to stop that from happening for years.

There exists coal with more fissile energy, in the form of heavy isotopes such as thorium and uranium, than it has chemical energy, in the form of carbon-carbon bonds.

This is then burned in power plants, releasing the radioactive material into the atmosphere, and leaching it into groundwater from exposed piles of fly ash.

Yeah there’s a lot of rhetoric at play here. Very little in the realm of hard details.

Fast reactors as well as other specialized designs can burn down fuel that is currently stored as "waste", and just don't produce such long-lived isotopes.

For examples, the half-life of output products from uranium-fueled SVBR-100 is ~550 years, and that can be reduced further by several technologies that are now available.

>We're talking about substances that will remain toxic for thousands of years

Most substances are toxic forever. If you bury mercury or lead in a hole a dig it up in a few million years it will be just as toxic. Radioactive substances are an anomaly in that they become less toxic over time.

To be fair, many substances in the nuclear industry, including the fuel, are quite toxic even chemically.

> and are quite happy to go everywhere they can if there is some issue with containment.

It's turned into glass as far as I know (which isn't much). It's not like some ooze to leak out.

Nuclear energy has a PR problem that is very hard to solve. It doesn’t help that movies dramatize it. From what I remember, the only people who died due to Fukushima were those that died of fear. The reality is that nuclear is remarkably safe, clean, etc.

I'd imagine the death toll from Fukushima will probably not be fully estimable for a few years yet.

By human emotional calculus, it is better for a million people to experience on average 0.001 of a mortality event than for 1000 people to be killed outright.

When we measure such things in terms of "increased cancer risk" and "possible thyroid dysfunction", it is far easier to discount, particularly as young people are not tremendously concerned when people above a certain age die of diseases that are already typical in the aged.

So even if we knew it exactly, people would still care less. It might be more relevant if, instead of death toll, it could be given a money value derived from additional healthcare expenses for exposed individuals, because young people implicitly know that they are the ones who pay when old people get sick.

Same thing for the death toll from coal burning plants. All that ash, deaths from that radioactivity and lung disease, deaths caused by global warming, etc.

If you look at a long enough time scale, anything can seem like a giant problem.

> From what I remember, the only people who died due to Fukushima were those that died of fear. The reality is that nuclear is remarkably safe, clean, etc.

Then you have a faulty memory, and a selective one at that because the crisis is still on-going; there were an estimated 2000 from evacuation alone:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/03/01/editorials/f...

You think this is safe or healthy? 100k+ displaced people living in abject squalor in the 3rd richest nation on Earth? Often seen as less-thans by their fellow citizens due to the Meltdown:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpxtMBOiD6A

What's even more conflicting is that this year's Olympics are scheduled to take place in Tokyo, all the while the food is contaminated, as is the water (and the air if they're still doing regular debris burns that spreads it around the World).

The cancer rates, thyroid maladies and heart disease are all correlated to the radiation exposure, but they don't have an interest in monitoring this accurately and reporting it to the Public due to typical Japanese 'cultural norms.' So, in it a very defying sense of abnormal behaviour, Japanese house wives have taken to measure their neighborhoods, as well as the food and the vacuumed debris.

This is quite honestly a bigger part of why Humanity has to solve its energy crisis, Greta makes a good case for what their generation is left to live with, but being in between the two generations as a millennial and having been around for both Chernobyl and Fukushima, its hardly comprehensive of the true costs. That last video even delves into the Children of Chernobyl, they are reporting large frequencies of cancer and various immunological diseases. This is more the norm that I ever thought in surrounding areas, when I lived in Croatia it was also the same. When I lived in Germany their were patches of Earth that looked scorched that had been hit particularly hard due to the Fallout of Chernobyl. Many farming families in that area went Bankrupt due to it.

I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum. You'll see first hand how perilous it could be, the infrastructure around coastal areas is another bottle neck that most don't consider an issue for things like evacuation until its too late; they often only have 1 way in-1 way out layouts.

Nuclear regulation is a joke, and is as entrenched and as corrupt as Big Oil. The legal system, in both Japan and the US, is equally as complicit as the Nuclear lobby and refuse to take preventive action, as was the case with why Fukushima was left exposed on the coastal area after TEPCO was warned, repeatedly by several studies, that is was prone Meltdown should something like that Tsunami happen. The Nuclear village/TEPCO/Japanese Government did nothing:

https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventabl...

There were no known deaths from accute radiation syndrome[0]. There were deaths from things like the tsunami, the evacuation, and stress, which was essentially the point I was trying to make. The nuclear part of the equation caused a lot of fear, but it was all of the other things (and maybe the fear itself) that caused the deaths. That said, you're not wrong about the long-tail effects being hard to quantify and measure.

> I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum.

For what it's worth, I've lived near nuclear power plants for over 30 years, and have no problem living near them until I die-- which will almost certainly not be from radiation unless we have a nuclear war. I had more radiation exposure from the coal fired power plant in my childhood town than from any of the nuclear plants I've been around.

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

> we're going to produce more and more nuclear waste, and there isn't really any answer as to what we can do with that.

There are several answers to the question "what we can do with it", such as 1) reprocess it and use it again; 2) keep it in the power plant pools or similar storage facilities; 3) dump it to some deserted place where it isn't a big problem (high depth, stable earth crust). In the past, UK just dumped nuclear waste in barrels into the sea, which seems kind of convenient and irresponsible, but if done right (better isolation from sea creatures), this could work too.

It is true that there is no single universally agreed upon answer. But that is the same as with all other waste. Most of waste gets either burned or dumped at some place. The same will happen to nuclear "waste", until people start reprocessing it.

I didn't think nuclear waste could be "burned" ... I was given to believing that containment was the only option right now.

I'm familiar with your (1) (2) (3) items, but again, from what I've read these aren't fully satisfactory. (1) is probably ideal but hasn't really been cracked, (2) and (3) are just different facets of containment, but (3) is admittedly the most plausible right now.

We can tolerate a limited amount of this for sure, while we work on other solutions, but unless this question gets resolved it will hamper the widepsread adoption of nuclear.

The UK approach is interesting because yes, they just dumped it in the Irish sea. There's a deep underwater ravine between Scotland and Northern Ireland where it's all dumped, along with various other bits of old military hardware and other bits that are inconvenient.

Think about that the next time you here Bojo talking about building a bridge to Northern Ireland.

Fast reactors can burn waste pretty well, as few other designs. However, it's politically problematic because it involves using plutonium burning (not as fuel, but produced in the reactor while burning down uranium).

This is not liked by certain governments, even if theoretically NPT gives a framework to do it safely, and large scale commercial reprocessing essentially died after India used Canada-built CANDU reactors to kickstart their nuclear weapons program.

Global-politically, there shouldn't be any problem for the US, UK, France, Russia, and China to have fast-breeder reactors, but it still may be a concern in local politics due to environmental or terrorism concerns.

Nuclear waste has to be shipped to the facility. All the shipping routes from all the nearest waste-producing reactors converge there. That's naturally a concern to all those who live nearby.

A quick google search says if we only used nuclear we'd get 40g of waste per person per year assuming western energy consumption standards[1].

Multiply by 8*10^9 people (a little more than the current world population) and you get 320,000 metric tons which is about 3/5th the capacity of the largest oil tankers.

Finding a place for that much waste per year is a political problem, not a technical problem. There's plenty of geologically "safe enough to outlast the radioactivity" places we could dig a deep hole (thanks to the fossil fuel industry that is a solved problem) to dump that much waste into.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf (no idea on source bias here, I didn't read the whole thing)

Isn't the fact that failure of the transport system would have catastrophic consequences an issue you're concerned with?

Considering the already realized catastrophic disasters due to failures of our fossil fuel transport system (Exxon Valdez comes to mind) it would still be a net improvement.

Interestingly, this post on an application for Nuclear waste was on the front page[1]. This talk on nuclear waste may also be of interest to you[2].

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

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