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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

Not a snark, but a genuine question - Have we figured out what to do with the spent nuclear fuel yet?

What are the options and how bad/risky are they versus the impending climate change problem?

We’ve known what to do with nuclear waste for a very long time. In the US at least, its more a question of politics and funding.

Basically, we can:

* Bury all of it (deep geological repository, bore holes)

* Reprocess fuel, take out the remaining U and/or built-up Pu, and then dispose of the small amount of fission products remaining

* Keep storing it in casks at plant sites or regionally consolidated ISFSIs (like [1])

All options are feasible; the first seems to be cheaper. Nobody seems to want a geological repository for nuclear waste in their backyard, even if it’s quite safe.

[1] https://holtecinternational.com/products-and-services/hi-sto...

In Germany, nuclear waste from one of the first storage sites that was deemed "safe" in the 60s already needs to be recovered at great cost[1]. Sticking a few million tons of nuclear waste into the ground and hoping it will never come into contact with ground water is not a great plan IMHO. That stuff has the potential to render drinking water reserves unusable for millenia, so no wonder no one wants that in their own backyard. And storing it above ground seems quite difficult too judging by the issues in Fukushima and Chernobyl. Even Tepco couldn't come up with a better solution for some of the waste than "Let's drain it into the ocean where it'll be diluted".

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

I think the main problem with your argument is that it seems to appeal to the idea that because some German people in the 60s failed to correctly establish the longterm stability of a German mine, that it basically can't be done and we can't improve on what happened in the 60s, so we should simply not use nuclear power at all.

The other is that however bad those things are, or could be, global warming is still orders of magnitude worse. These very German arguments against nuclear power don't make sense at all.

We already have dozens (hundreds?) of contaminated sites worldwide e.g. in Russia, China, the US, Japan, ... It's not a problem exclusive to Germany, in general most countries seem to be unable to come up with a viable long-term strategy for nuclear waste disposal. Maybe it's possible to dispose of nuclear fuel in a responsible way, but my hopes that this will happen are very low judging by all the nasty things we did to the environment in the last century.

Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...).

> Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...).

I have my own biases, but I am fairly confident that people of the future will come to a much different conclusion.

Every form of power generation has byproducts and waste. Many of these (even for renewables) are nasty, toxic substances. Nuclear seems to have one of the best ratios of waste to electric production of any form of power generation, including very low lifetime CO2 generation. I would hope the future people of earth are far more aghast that people kept doing things like burning coal (and then dumping the fly ash in places that contaminate groundwater) instead of building alternate sources of baseload generation.

> a few _million_ tons of nuclear waste

Massive exageration by several orders of magnitude.

They say in the link you provided it is less than 126000 barrel containers of material. Even if you overestimate at 400 litres per container (they will probably be some sort of sarcophagus vessel) that is about 50k tonnes of material, for more than 30 years of operation. That sounds pretty efficient to me.

Edit: misread that you were refering to the material specifically stored in Asse II

The US alone produces several thousand tons of nuclear waste per year. If you take into account the waste associated with dismantling power plants it's easily tenfold. Multiply by all the countries that use nuclear energy and a few million tons over 50-100 years is no exaggeration, probably more of a conservative estimate I'd say.

Uranium is 19 times more dense than water. 2000 tons of nuclear waste means 100 cubic meters. 100 cubic meters means a 40 foot + 20 foots containers. That is the highly radioactive waste produced by the US each year. This powers 20% of the US. Of course, actual storage would be in some caskets, so a higher volume, but that is the radioactive material volume.

There are ~450 reactors in the world with the US operating close to 100. You don't get to millions of tons.

Plants themselves are producing lower radiation materials, that don't need those iconic caskets or the extreme care. They wuldn't melt down or anything. This is from day to day operation (gloves, suits, containers) and decomissioning.

Regarding 1. so far several of the bury all of it projects have had significant issues (water ingress etc.) Things are definitely not as straight forward as you make it out to be.

Reprocessing will produce lots of low to moderately radioactive waste which also has to be stored.

And the 3rd solution is not really a long time solution, nobody can confirm the safety for a 100 years let alone several 1000.

You forgot option 4. drop it into the subduction zone in the ocean.

This and your first option aren't super popular in part because the waste itself isn't exactly waste and has valuable parts that could be extracted and no one wants to make that too hard to recover later.

Regarding your last point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

Burying it seems to make sense and I know it’s done a lot - but is there any risk it would be crushed and leak? I mean a once in a 10,000 year event. And if it does leak, what would the consequences be?

Whatever we do it's always possible. The consequences would be a place similarly dangerous to the natural nuclear reactors that are already found in parts of the world.

If burying it and hoping that we figure it out in the future is our best option, I’d say we haven’t figured out the problem just yet. I was hoping that I was out of the tech loop and that there was some new way of storing them “safely” for a few years until they are no harm anymore.

Consideriour examples of Fukushima, Chernobyl and such, why do we keep thinking we would do better in the future with this problem. If anything humanity is not to be trusted with making decisions for the greater good (just look at how all first world countries hoarded COVID vaccines in a protectionist, short sighted way).

I don’t know, how about in the 1,083,206,916,846 cubic kilometers of earth and rock under our feet that already holds 40 trillion tons of uranium?

Or we could set aside a 1km square plot of uninhabitable desert to store it above ground.

Or we could just spread it around in a few different places like we do today.

Global warming effects are global, non-linear and there are still many unknowns, which makes it more riskier. Nuclear waste is only local and the harm is much better known. Also nuclear energy is anti-fragile (more disasters means saver plants).

The risks of nuclear energy is far more favourable than global warming. Because of potential catastrophic outcomes of climate change I think we need to diversify our bets and include nuclear energy in our portfolio.

I agree that we need to diversify our power bets. However, it is prudent to evaluate our options and if necessary push one option over the other if we know the other has severe problems kicked into the future. For example, we incentivise Solar + Wind a lot more than we do already if the safety risk from Nuclear waste is too high.

As NASA explains, evidence for warming is via globally averaged parameters but some locations are getting cooler and some are getting warmer. Thus 'global warming effects' are not in fact global.

Geological disposal is about to go into production in Finland: https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/finaldisposal/geologicalfinal...

Reprocessing has been mostly blocked by the US due to proliferation concerns, but it reduces the problem enormously, since you then have new fuel plus some very nasty waste that decays on more human-friendly timescales.

For reference, the amount of the very nasty waste produced by a lifetime's electricity demand for an average European citizen (so you probably want to multiply by 2 or 3 for future usage), immobilised in glass, is about the size of a hockey puck. A very deadly hockey puck mind, a kill-you-from-twenty-paces hockey puck, but a solid hockey puck.

You know what we haven't figured out? How to even re-concentrate the several tonnes of dispersed waste product fossil fuels put into the atmosphere for the same number of kWh, not as an accident but as part of normal operations, and that's currently wreaking havoc everywhere.

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