Mining and transport of uranium ore, processed fuel and nuclear waste. I don’t know how significant those are.
My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.
> Mining and transport of uranium ore, processed fuel and nuclear waste. I don’t know how significant those are.
Completely and utterly insignificant, to the point where it is downright insulting when they are brought into a discussion about how 10000 people die of coal-related air quality problems every year in Europe.
> My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.
Do you have any sources for that? And no sensible person is advocating that we should continue burning coal as we have. So it is not nuclear vs coal, but nuclear vs renewables.
The Onkalo repository is still not active. It is projected to begin storing this year, I can't find any more exact status. And that is one site for the whole world. You have to agree that that is a rather meager result considering that they have been trying to find a solution for at least half a century.
Yes. You bury waste underground in an area with no groundwater. No geological event is going to bring a cask from 500 meters below ground to the surface, short of a meteor strike (which would make nuclear waste one of your smaller worries).
Where do you get the idea there’s no ground water at Onkalo? And no, no one is worried that the tubes one day by accident will float up to the surface one way or another.
Re: "underground isn't dry" (HN is rate limiting this thread)
Yes, it is. These story facilities are built in bedrock. You seem to be under the impression that these digs are in some random back yard. They're not. They're built in places with no groundwater and no geological activity. The only way this waste is getting out into the environment is through human intervention. I have indeed read through the waste storage plans. I suggest you do the same.
Yucca Mountain's cancellation is entirely due to political posturing, not feasibility.
There’s groundwater at Onkala [0]. So you are suggesting that there is a site in the US that will be used for burying
Nuclear waste that is dry and will be guaranteed to be dry for the next 10000 years? Why don’t you name it? I’m sure more people than I want to know.
Nowhere in your source does it predict that this trace amount of water will compromise the storage. This study doesn't even contain results, only describing the process used to measure potential water infiltration.
And for the second time, Yucca mountain is a cave dug out of bedrock. In a desert. It's abandonment was done by politicians, not by scientists raising concern over safety. We're not using it because there's so little nuclear waste to store.
The concern over waste storage is laughable in comparison to environmental damage done by fossil fuels, solar power, and hydroelectricity. We're concerned about uranium buried deep underground, miles away from any population center. Despite the fact that uranium is a naturally occurring resource that we dug from out of the ground in the first place.
Think of it this way: right now there are veins of uranium unknown to us. We're taking this uranium and putting it in a known location. In between we use it as a carbon free power source.
No, because that was a study of the water flow, which contradicted your idea about it being dry. There are countless other studies where they look at how for example how radioactivity affects corrosion etc.
It doesn't matter why Yucca was abandonned. It isn't active. If it is technical or political reason behind it. It doesn't matter because you still don't have anywhere to store the waste. If it is political or technical problem doesn't matter, because it is still not solved.
And about that desert, maybe you have heard about this thing climate change that sometimes they mention in the news? That might actually mean that in even a hundred years there isn't any desert there any more.
Arsenic occurs naturally in many places. Would you mind me burrying a few gallons of it in your backyard? You'll know where it is, so you don't have to worry about it.
> Arsenic occurs naturally in many places. Would you mind me burrying a few gallons of it in your backyard? You'll know where it is, so you don't have to worry about it.
In concrete casks, buried 500 meters deep in bedrock, sure.
That was me answering a question about dry storage casks. Dry storage casks are used above ground. Under ground it is rarely dry, so it’s not dry storage. All these things are easy to look up. I suggest you do.
And I don’t know what US proposed disposal site you have in mind, but you do know that Yucca Mountain was abandoned?
Basically we just bury it and hope for the best, it will be someone else's problem anyway.
> The Onkalo repository is expected to be large enough to accept canisters [...] until around 2120.[13] At this point, the final encapsulation and burial will take place, and the access tunnel will be backfilled and sealed.
We go from "dig it out" to "dig it in". Very sustainable. /s
> Basically we just bury it and hope for the best, it will be someone else's problem anyway.
It's rather more involved than that. The short version is that we find a place where the rock has remained undisturbed for more than a billion years, and bury them deep enough that they should remain undisturbed for the next billion years.
It doesn't need to last a billion years. Within 10-50 thousand years the uranium is no more radioactive that uranium that was never used in fuel. Sure, uranium is still a toxic heavy metal. But you do understand where this uranium came from before it was used as fuel?
Indeed.
For example, the 9TWh required to power France's high speed train fleet for a year produce 200kg of nuclear waste. Since the beginning of the country's nuclear programme, the total cumulative volume is 3650m3 of waste : one olympic swimming pool's worth of it.
What percentage of potential energy is extracted? My (old, probably out of date) understanding is that (at least in Canada) nuclear facilities limit themselves to extracting some tiny quantity of the potential energy in order to avoid producing material that could be made into nuclear weapons.
Normal nuclear reactors only extract single-digit percentages of the energy. You want to use breeder reactors to actually burn all the nuclear fuel. The "waste" still contains almost all of its energy. Breeder reactors are of course unpopular politically, because they create raw material for nuclear bombs as part of their normal operation.
The first is that they are more expensive than burner reactors. With uranium ore being cheap and plentiful, and with the energy cost of enrichment so low now (gas centrifuges using 50x less energy than gaseous diffusion), there's no economic case for reprocessing, let along breeding.
The other problem is that fast breeders are inherently dangerous, with the possibility of fast supercriticality lurking in a serious accident. Edward Teller famously pointed this out publicly in 1967:
"For the fast breeder to work in its steady-state breeding condition you probably need something like half a ton of plutonium. In order that it should work economically in a sufficiently big power-producing unit, it probably needs quite a bit more than one ton of plutonium. I do not like the hazard involved. I suggested that nuclear reactors are a blessing because they are clean. They are clean as long as they function as planned, but if they malfunction in a massive manner, which can happen in principle, they can release enough fission products to kill a tremendous number of people.
[…]
...But, if you put together two tons of plutonium in a breeder, one tenth of one percent of this material could become critical.
[…]
I have listened to hundreds of analyses of what course a nuclear accident can take. Although I believe it is possible to analyze the immediate consequences of an accident, I do not believe it is possible to analyze and foresee the secondary consequences. In an accident involving a plutonium reactor, a couple of tons of plutonium can melt. I don't think anybody can foresee where one or two or five percent of this plutonium will find itself and how it will get mixed with some other material. A small fraction of the original charge can become a great hazard."
Interesting. I didn't know that they were even more expensive than normal nuclear plants. Do you have sources, so that I don't have to cite you comment the next time I talk about breeder reactors?
This slide deck also gives references to more detailed reports.
Fans of traveling wave reactors, molten salt reactors, and other not-actually-operating reactors will quote rosily low cost projections despite the lack of any empirical evidence. They're not worth arguing with. If/when commercial TWRs or MSRs actually exist, then we can compare costs. Right now the advanced reactor cost claims are on par with Battery Breakthrough of the Week stories about how a laboratory experiment could revolutionize energy in 10 years, if it's followed up with a lot of funding and absolutely no problems crop up along the way.
The French have admitted the reprocessing doesn't save them any money, in fact it's more expensive than not reprocessing. But the cost is still only a very small part of the cost of nuclear power.
I haven't kept up on it, but aren't travelling wave reactors supposed to use the spent rods from light water reactors?[0] Seems like an elegant use of nuclear waste.
There was an argument made last year [1] that the problem with nuclear power generation is that everything we have in production is 50+ yo technology. Modern reactors are far cleaner, far safer, but the political hurdles for regulatory approval and NIMBY hurdles are enormous barriers.
Incidentally, if we're considering mining and transport of base resources to be part of indirect deaths, let's not forget that our renewable infrastructure relies on very dirty mining and transportation processes for quartz, rare earth minerals... and coal!
There are always a lot of interesting research projects brought up about what to do with the nuclear waste in the future. But never anything cost effective actually in production yet, and it's not like they haven't hade some decades to get them going. If we can cite <future technolog> as our solution, I suggest that we go with fusion reactors directly.
The main barriers for building new nuclear plants are that they aren't cost effective, so no one wants to invest in them. I'm certain they could be built cheaper without regulations about safety and funds for long term storage of waste. But I don't think we want to go there.
(Your second link directs me to a documentary about Bill Gates. How is that relevant?)
The Gates Foundation is one of the leading US investors in new nuclear tech right now. That documentary gets into the details of what they're working on and the hurdles they have in bringing new tech online. For a quick digestible bit of Gates on nuclear, watch the following. The documentary explores a lot more about the reactors:
No, it’s not good for some centuries. Corrosion and other processes that aren’t fully understood how they are affected by radiation make it hard to make any leakproof containers that will last even one century. Also, above ground storage is vulnerable both to changing climate as well as changing political circumstances.
Finally, even if all of the above was overcome, it’s just a way to push the problem to future generations. I’d be quite upset if our generation would have to deal with a hundred thousand tons of radioactive waste in old corroding containers without getting anything for it.
> My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.
That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel.
Only, we're not building them. Because coal is better or whatever.
[1]: that's bit of a shortcut, but elements that undergo radioactive decay on timescales that make them dangerous are unstable enough, you can put them in a reactor and poke them to undergo that decay faster and get you electricity.
No, it is not a red herring. It doesn't matter that it in theory has a lot of energy remaining if there isn't any cost-efficient and safe way to extract it. And the reason we aren't building them is because other forms of energy, including wind, water and sun, are cheaper.
> Only, we're not building them. Because coal is better or whatever.
No, we're not building them because they are more expensive than ordinary LWRs, uranium is cheap, and separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value.
> That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel.
Don't these reactors produce nuclear weapons products? Seems like that may be a reason we don't want a lot of them around.
Rather, their fuel is plutonium. There's lots of plutonium in spent reactor fuel that can be extracted into more pure plutonium and used as fuel, but also to build nuclear weapons.
