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Comment by scrlk | Hacker News Reader

>The most highly radioactive waste, mainly spent fuel, will have to be isolated in deep-mined geologic repositories for hundreds of thousands of years. At present, the U.S. has no program to develop a geologic repository, after spending decades and billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. As a result, spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in pools or in dry casks at reactor sites, accumulating at a rate of about 2,000 metric tonnes per year.

No mention of fuel reprocessing, or using it in a fast breeder reactor?

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IIR, three problems with reprocessing and fast breeders:

- Reprocessing generally involves plenty of kinda-horrific chemicals, and radioactive waste sludge stuff which is also (chemically) pretty horrific. With the (long, bad) track record of such facilities...yeah. Pretty hard to fault anyone who's a NIMBY about 'em.

- Reprocessing technology is a critical piece of having a nice, efficient modern nuclear weapons program. That gets into non-proliferation efforts, politics, and how well most national leaders react to "we can have & use that handy technology, but you can't".

- Fast breeder reactors are another really-important part of having a nice, efficient modern nuclear weapons program.

2 and 3 doesn't really matter when talking about countries that already have nuclear weapons. If they would get serious about climate change, they could provide those facilities to other countries at cost.

Ah... "Government program" and "at cost" have a rather long record of spiraling-out-of-control costs. And recent events in Europe may had lessened the appeal of the "we'll trust our friends, $Other_Country, to faithfully meet our energy needs for the next few decades" strategy.

Reprocessing blurs the line between nuclear fuel for electricity and bomb grade material. It's also more expensive than the one through nuclear fuel cycle. https://www.npr.org/2010/04/09/125740818/nuclear-waste-may-g...

> The most highly radioactive waste, mainly spent fuel, will have to be isolated in deep-mined geologic repositories for hundreds of thousands of years

that is false. High radioactivity means a very short half life. You only need to store such things for a few seconds before they degrade into something else - normally something with a much longer half life.

The really bad stuff is only somewhat radioactive: enough to be dangerous, but degrades over a few ten thousand years. There are a lot of atoms in even a small thing, and so even with half life in the tousands of years range odds are still high that several atoms in a bunch will degrade at anytime, enough to push radiation above background levels. Of course things go through many cycles of decay before they become safe.

Which hasn't been implemented on the required scale ever.

At best, those technologies could scale down the waste problem by a certain factor. It's not like you put in radioactive waste and something completely harmless comes out... There's still some radioactive waste left.

No, because a technology once seen as promising that completely failed to deliver its promises and is only used in very small scales today is irrelevant for the debate.

Also, 2000 metric tons per year is nothing.

Zero is nothing. 2000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste is not nothing.

It's basically nothing. Using weight for nuclear waste is largely for FUD. The volume is really small for the weight we are talking an American football field 10ft deep for the lifetime of US waste. There's no solution because there isn't a meaningful amount of waste to bother with yet.

Not literally, but 2000 metric tonnes is half the weight of an Olympic pool. That's very insignificant and tiny compared to what gets extracted in coal mines every hour. Finding space for it is not an issue.

This isn't coal. It's highly radioactive. Everything related to highly radioactive waste from handling to transport to storage is an issue.

Yes, I wasn't comparing the materials here, just the weight / volume. We have space for it. Even if we split it into pieces, encased then separately and shared it across many sites to limit issue. Patent comment mentioned the weight/yr like it's a lot, but it really isn't.

when you burn coal, the residual is also quite radioactive, and the amount is not nothing either.

That's why the alternative isn't coal or other fossil fuels - it is renewables.

No, coal ash is not particularly radioactive. The amount of radiation released by burning coal is completely insignificant compared to the toxicity of the ash.

For context, a large container ship can carry 250,000 metric tons.

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