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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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