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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

2000 metric tons! Wow! Look out, we're dealing with the big numbers there! Nearly up to 5 figures assuming we round it wrong.

That is around 3 shipping containers. There is literally a risk of losing it in transit because the volume is so small. If you see 3 shipping containers in a field somewhere that might be a year's worth of nuclear waste.

It is hard to get across how small that number is compared to 20% of the US's annual electricity production. The reason the problem hasn't been "solved" in the last however long reactors have been a thing is it is too small a problem to devote time to.

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Except you can’t transport it. We built a giant cave for it in the desert and everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to drive past people’s homes so we just leave it sitting around on site hoping a natural disaster doesn’t wash it away. I’m pro nuclear but we need to be honest with ourselves.

I mean yeah. They do leave it sitting around on site. Because it takes up no space, they can build a bunker to store it without adding all that much to the cost and there are idiots hyperventilating at the thought of transporting dangerous goods around. I'd imagine the nuclear people decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

I feel ridiculous having to argue that volumes of material this small represent a real threat. If you wanted to move it we could. Split it up into little loads and put it in a stupidly over-engineered shielded truck. Goodness me this is not a real problem. They've been ignoring it for decades and the consequences are somewhere between nil and nothing interesting. There is nothing here to be honest about, there is no reasonable threat to debate. We transport explosives, we transport poison, we sometimes get massive port explosions that can level a district. Then we've got old mate claiming 2,000 metric tonnes of a relatively dangerous material represents a serious national problem. The absurdity of that is frustrating to deal with.

Yes, the powers that be have ignored the issue of nuclear materials sitting on site at power plants for decades, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make 5 or 10 times more of the stuff at other sites and trust that the actual knowledgeable experts, who haven’t done shit for decades, will figure out a solution by the time it’s bigger issue.

We should decrease our power usage as a whole planet, and reduce dependence on technology that has outsized biological risks, like nuclear and plastics, rather than rushing into some future that will only enrich the already wealthy.

Why? Using power meaningfully improves people’s lives, and many billions of people are still on the end of the spectrum where “improving lives” involves improvements like “not starving” and “having safe water”.

The benefits of making power available are extremely (!) robust and well-understood, as are the health and safety benefits of switching from combustion-based power to non-combustion-based power.

I have yet to hear skeptics raise specific nuclear concerns that are real, consequential, and also unmanaged. For all its cost and red tape, the past 60 years’ regulatory posture of “you must identify and mitigate every risk to the absolute maximum degree physically possible, damn the cost” seems to have resulted in a system where, well… they have.

Using power meaningfully, sure, but Bitcoin and AI are not meaningful. Using power to make steel or to use tools to make lives easier IS meaningful.

Red tape in nuclear is there for a reason. I don’t trust anyone to do nuclear without tons of red tape. The only reason it’s safe is the red tape. Take red tape away from industries that aren’t inherently unsafe, fine, but not nuclear power.

We should greatly increase our power usage as a whole planet, to improve the quality of life for humanity. Much of humanity is energy starved.

Don’t go talking about “humanity” needing power, all of the power being built is so the developed countries can write books with LLMs and other stupid shit.

Humanity might need more power some places, but it’s uneven and that probably won’t change. Your argument is moral and right, but the capitalists that choose where power go will continue to put power plants next to where their interests lie.

Developed nations need to reduce power usage so that others who are poor may have power. That is my stance, I don’t care how unpopular.

I want you to consider how much energy would be needed to bring the rest of the world up to a US, or even European, standard of living. This would utterly dwarf energy going into LLMs.

You seem to have this silly idea that LLMs are consuming huge amounts of energy.

The USA wastes so much power! I’m saying we need to use less and bring everyone up to THAT standard, but today every bit of energy added is going to be used for useless bullshit.

You’re simply avoiding my main point, where additional power isn’t going towards helping under developed countries, by trying to appeal to how great the poor downtrodden masses have it without power.

Why aren’t we building renewable power plants in rural poor areas all over the world if that’s the goal? Because it ISN’T; the wealthy capitalists simply want to expend energy and build new plants near developed areas to make themselves wealthier!

I'm pointing out that a plan to greatly limit world energy consumption is necessarily horrible, since it condemns most of the world to energy poverty.

You seem to be evading this simple mathematical point.

Renewables are being installed widely around the world. This is how much of the world will be lifted out of energy poverty.

I think some of the opposition to the idea of a renewable powered world comes from some of those who realize, at some level, that this relatively disadvantages the higher latitude white countries.

Nuclear waste is transported regularly:

https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-transp.html

> everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to drive past people’s homes

Everyone? A vocal group of activists, perhaps.

The same could be said for transport of chemicals by rail; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de... and still that goes on.

Shipping containers seem to have a maximum weight of about 20 tonnes so surely around 100 containers?

Nuclear waste has a density of ~10g/cm^3, so 2000t is about 200m^3. Standard 40’ container has a volume of 59.3m^3, so it’s indeed about 3 to 4 by volume. Of course you shouldn’t pack a container full of something so dense when shipping. Anyway it’s a pretty tiny amount of storage space; single family homes are usually larger by volume.

The more important consideration is we're wasting the waste. It still contains 90% of the fissile energy and we're calling it waste: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-....

The problem with nuclear reprocessing is that it creates more nuclear waste as a byproduct so it only really makes sense when you want to make nuclear weapons.

That figure is correct only if you consider the energy content of the U-238 in the fuel. But reprocessing fuel to recover U-238 is idiotic: we have loads of U-238 in enrichment plant waste streams, and the material is so cheap they use it as ballast weights in sailboats.

That is just the high level nuclear waste (the spent control rods) which needs to be kept in cooling pools for about a decade before being transferred to dry cask storage. That definitely takes up a lot more space.

> Dry cask storage is a method of storing high-level radioactive waste, such as spent nuclear fuel that has already been cooled in a spent fuel pool for at least one year and often as much as ten years. Casks are typically steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed. The fuel rods inside are surrounded by inert gas. Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel. Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding to workers and members of the public.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage

There’s also a lot of low level nuclear waste which is a pain to deal with (make sure you pick the right brand of kitty litter…)

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/26/395615637...

It'd be volume limited, as the other comment points out Uranium is pretty dense.

I would certainly agree that nobody should actually try to put a year's generation of dangerous nuclear waste in 3 shipping containers. It'd be hazardous and the shipping containers couldn't be moved without breaking (probably do some damage to them even without moving them). The point is more that we're dealing with a volume of material that is - for an industrial society - tiny. There is a reason that in practice it is ignored it despite the braying crowd of people insisting that it is an unsolved problem that we can't ignore. It is an extremely ignoreable problem on the scale of benefits that nuclear power provides.

I mostly agree but we should understand that the costs of dealing with the waste are not negligible. I’m pretty agnostic about nuclear power. I used to believe it was necessary but renewables and batteries now seem the more cost effective and a far faster way to reach 90% carbon free electricity.

Radioactive materials needs to be physically protected, shielded against radiation, and have active cooling system or be small enough to have passive cooling.

You may dedicate whole container to transport just a few kg of highly radioactive items.

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