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Comment by worik | Hacker News Reader

I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.

The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption

Such greed and disregard for following generations

Climate change is a minor problem in comparison

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That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.

Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:

- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);

- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;

- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.

You are being silly!

You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia

Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption

Well, if we extract the energy from the spicy rocks today through fission then on a time scale of over hundreds of millennia you actually end-up with less radioactivity on earth! (After 300 000 years to be accurate, and the figure I have is based on low enriched uranium based fuel as typically used in a light water reactor).

You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?

I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…

I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).

That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.

Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.

May need to work on this bad boy, first:

https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/c...

And of course have a chat with the traditional custodians of the land, and see if they're keen.

Reading down through that, there are exceptions built in already for research waste, medical waste, waste from "a nuclear vessel" (ie. submarines), and generic "waste that needs to buried for safety reason".

I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).

Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.

It was Chuck Schumer who torpedoed Yucca mt. Vegas had nothing to do with it.

This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.

If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.

Would indigenous Australians living near proposed sites object to this plan? Are there areas of Australia with no human population? My impression is that nomadic indigenous groups used a lot of land in Australia even far from permanent settlements.

They're generally not fans of being bulldozed out of the way so a mine can get slapped in wherever Kartiya want to put one.

( eg: Noonkanbah - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/30/the-d... )

They do make agreements and keep them when they are part of the discussion from the outset and consulted for advice.

ie: find a place to make a hole that is both stable and not a significant site.

It doesn't help that more recent good faith agreements have been torpedoed by, say, Rio Tinto not keeping their word going forward.

( in recent follow up news from an epic Rio FUBAR - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-25/juukan-gorge-archaeol... )

>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.

Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.

>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia

Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.

>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison

What do you base that on?

There is no place on earth that is geological stable for the required time periods

We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future

That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence

What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future

For current consumption

Unbelievable

A) This isn't true

B) We could reprocess the waste

C) There are reactors that produce 95% less waste, regulation prevents their testing and deployment

D) All the nuclear waste in the US (the country with by far the most NPPs) fits in 1 Olympic sized pool

Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?

>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison

No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.

Its also the source of the majority of human caused exposure to ionizing radiation. Coal dust has a small amount of radioactivity (from literally the least radioactive element) and there is an amazingly large amount of coal dust.

Oh great because the practical alternative, fossil fuels, definitely doesn't burden anyone after us.

Ten generations, maybe.

Nuclear: hundreds

It doesn't have to be and probably isn't. That's only because of the fear mongering you are doing. At the behest of and to the benefit of the fossil fuel extractors ironically.

Again, simple ignorance. The reason it lasts so long is that we aren't allowed to reprocess it for rather illogical reasons. Also, most of the "waste" from the reactor are either rare earths or silver (which is stable from the moment it is created) or valuable and useful gases. It can also be reprocessed and the nuclear fuel can be put into another reactor. We don't do this because of the absurdly small chance someone could get some Pu-239 (which would still require very advanced and noticeable processing). Basically things that only happen in James Bond movies and because some politician without any scientific knowledge can imagine it, it gets banned.

Climate change is a consequence of fearmongering against cleaner solutions. We have methods for handling radioactive waste safely- whether it's vitrification and dropping it in subduction zones, or just putting it deep underground in wastelands, there are lots of solutions that are infinitely better than the status quo.

Don't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.

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