Hacker News Reader

Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Coal power plants produce hazardous byproducts called "coal ash". [1] The US generates 200 million tons of this highly toxic sludge and most of it just gets dumped in a landfill, contaminating the area for decades. [2] Nuclear is far cleaner, even if the byproduct is radioactive.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_coal_ash

2. https://www.sierraclub.org/wisconsin/coal-ash-pollution

View on HN

I'm not anti-nuclear, but would you agree that solving the coal waste is an easier problem to solve than the nuclear waste one?

I'm not sure that point is a very strong one.

I wouldn't. Coal ash takes up an enormous amount of space, and it can blow around too. Nuclear waste takes up a relatively small volume.

Interesting. I think the opposite. Just the fact that we've spent tens of billions on Yucca mountain alone to have it go nowhere makes me think differently.

If I was a contractor faced with solving the coal ash problem or the nuclear waste problem, I'd avoid the latter like the plague even if just for the political difficulties, notwithstanding the engineering part of the problem.

The only reason trillions of dollars haven't been spent cleaning up the byproducts of burning fossil fuels is because we just dump it into the environment instead. If the fossil fuel industry were held accountable for the waste, it would be much more expensive than the boondoggle that is Yucca mountain. (Particularly if CO2 emissions are properly considered...)

Good point. Any idea on the costs associated with implementing something like carbon capture?

Best so far is 1 gigajoule per ton of CO2: http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-engineers-develop-new-way-remov...

Which is pretty much only going to happen if you invest a lot of money into nuclear facilities dedicated to this. 1GJ is about 280 kilowatt-hours.

Yucca mountain is the wrong solution. We can reprocess nuclear fuel waste easily already, reducing this issue by quite a lot. As a policy issue the United States does not, so you end up with much more “spent fuel” than necessary.

Radioactive byproducts (steel and such) are a bigger issue, but hopefully you only see a lot of that when you are actively decommissioning a plant.

As you alluded to, I think it's the policy/political problems that are more difficult to overcome compared to the technical issues. That's the main reason I was assuming it would be easier to solve the coal ash problem

Reply on news.ycombinator.com