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Comment by Daniel_sk | Hacker News Reader

The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel rods. Whole US produces 2000 tones of radioactive waste a year. In fact, the U.S. nuclear industry has produced roughly 64,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of radioactive used fuel rods in total or, in the words of NEI, enough "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." Which really isn't much compared to any other pollution.

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The issue for me is not quantity but time. 1000-10,000 (or even much longer) years for decay is an incredible amount of time for the human race. Written language only appeared ~5500 years ago.

Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?

You are talking about worst case scenario.

There are nuclear reactor types specifically built for getting rid of high half-time traditional nuclear waste.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-wa...

Well, there are vast amounts of highly toxic oil that we yet have to extract from below the surface - if something of that leaks by accident then it will poison and kill everything it will touch and it has been there since the dinosaurs died :-). Radioactive waste is solid waste and the amount is small - even if someone would dig it up, it would be only a local danger and it could maybe kill a reduced number of humans, but it will not be a global catastrophe. We are probably producing more highly toxic and poisonous waste that is not radioactive but it will also last hundreds if not thousands of years (e.g. toxic heavy metals) and kill many more people. Tens of thousands of people die every year from industrial pollution. How many people die from stored nuclear waste? Zero? (and even in worst case when a future civilisation digs up the nuclear waste - we are not speaking about hundreds of thousands like in case of industrial pollution).

Cadmium and lead will stay inside landfill for 1000 -10,000 million years. It already kills people in China, due to the extraction process (probably in Africa too), and destroyed PV panels were a nightmare in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, and it was often a small pv that just activated water pumps. If that happened now, it would be a disaster on top of a disaster. And one that would displace millions.

In general there is an inverse relation between the half-life and the intensity of radioactivity of an isotope. Isotopes with a long half-life decay very slowly, and so produce fewer radioactive decays per second; their intensity is less. Istopes with shorter half-lives are more intense.

In nuclear waste, isotopes with very short half-lives, say a few days or even a few weeks, are not the major concern. They will decay to negligible amounts within a year or two. Isotopes with very long half-lives, more than 1000 years, are likely to be less intense.

Long-term isotopes are more complicated. They don't dose as heavily, but there are a lot more issues than just that. Plutonium for example is comparatively long-lived, but some of its decay products can be quite nasty. At the extreme end are isotopes that are so long-lived that their hazard levels are close to zero. Uranium-238, the kind left after the fissile 235 is removed, pretty well falls into this category.

The problem is bioaccumulation of radioactive isotopes.

Worst case scenario is that society collapses and nuclear knowledge disappears. Then at some point in the future some farmers will get radiation poisoning and others will avoid the area since it’s “cursed”. This hypothetical problem is hardly anything to worry about when nuclear is sorely needed to help us with an actual problem, climate change.

Well that is a quite crass and horrible fate to condemn those farmers to.

The point is why do any of this when solar and wind are cheaper and have none of these issues? It doesn’t matter what we say here, money always wins and that is why nuclear will be left behind no matter how many astorturfers always show up.

It's kind of facile to argue about a hypothetical future a thousand years in the future when we're facing crises right now that depend on solving energy issues yesterday.

Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.

Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.

We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more. The first scenario relies on several assumptions, none of which are honestly likely at this stage of human society. And it unlikely to have an effect on nearly as many people.

Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.

> It's kind of facile to argue about a hypothetical future a thousand years in the future when we're facing crises right now that depend on solving energy issues yesterday.

Its facile to dismiss the negative of creating waste that has to be managed for thousands of years based on a sense of urgency for solving immediate problems. Thats payday loan mentality, not statecraft.

> Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.

Society collapses and the remaining primitive population is decimated or eradicated because of unmanaged waste entering the ecosystem.

> Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.

You think society collapses to the extent that we can no longer manage the nuclear waste, and millions of people don’t die? Millions of people die in both scenarios, but in one they are greater risk of nuclear waste exposure.

> We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more.

What is your plan to get China et al to stop burning coal, by the way?

> Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.

I can roll over my payday loan on a miminum wage paycheck, what could go wrong?

I mean storing waste that is dangerous for that long is the result of politics, not any technological limitation. Recycling and reusing that waste would make most of it dangerous for like 50-100 years, and after that the only danger is living on top of the low radioactive waste for 20 years or eating it, which would kill you even if it wasn't radioactive because it is a heavy metal.

Nuclear waste occurs naturally well before humans created it, I think we will manage

And yet we have places like the Marshall Islands where US nuclear waste is leaking at this very moment. If it is that easy to contain then why isn't happening?

The problem with nuclear is that people are too greedy to use it safely or want to weaponize it so lots and lots of regulation is needed. Nuclear energy will be fixed the day human greed and aggression are gone.

So nuclear has been up and running in mainstream use for what, fifty years at this point? If that waste sticks around for just 10,000 years (optimistic), and assuming no increase in demand over today (which is laughable), your ‘just one football field’ waste site is actually two hundred times bigger.

And that’s raw waste, it doesn’t include containment for each deposit you make.

Not to mention the issues we’re already having today with containment decay around existing waste sites.

There's also more waste than just the spent fuel rods. One of the things I learned that really shifted my views is just how expensive decommissioning nuclear plants is. Meanwhile, recycling solar is basically the cost of shipping the material around.

Two hundred football fields is absolutely trifling even now and much less on the scale of 10 000 years.

You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down.

>Two hundred football fields is absolutely trifling even now and much less on the scale of 10 000 years.

Yet today, there's about a quarter of a million tonnes of waste in holding storage at various locations awaiting proper disposal. The only deep geological disposal facility currently operational is WIPP and of the three that have ever existed in the world, the other two in Germany have permanently closed. It should be noted that both those sites have major issues with long-term stability and significant ongoing investment is occurring to attempt to remediate them.

The issues at WIPP in 2014 are a clear example of how non-trifling the task is: Underground truck fire, followed a few days later by (unrelated) airborne release of radioactive materials due to a waste barrel being packed with, and I am not making this up, the wrong kind of kitty litter. After a three-year hiatus and at a cost of five hundy million to remediate, it's been running again for a couple of years and due to permanently close in as little as three years.

This will be a good thing because ceasing operations and permanently sealing the site drastically reduces the risk of incidents due to human fallibility. Now in fairness it's a pilot site even in name, so procedures should be improved on the next iterations. But this is a field clearly in it's infancy, it's not yet matured.

I just can't agree that disposal even of the waste generated so far is trifling. When the waste of today is on track for secure, permanent, safe storage I'll be a bit more optimistic.

>You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down.

Yeah I hope so. Re-processing of a significant chunk of the existing waste would be an encouraging sign.

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