> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.
The US has operating Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years.
But it's only used to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
Political constraints are extremely important in the real world if the goal is to actually get things done. Yucca Mountain isn't actually a viable solution because, despite the technical arguments in favor, it lacks the support to implement.
Similar problem if local communities fight new nuclear plants tooth and nail, dragging out the timelines/increasing costs. Having the "correct" argument based on objective facts doesn't really matter if people/elected officials who have veto or dilatory powers aren't buying it.
Thankfully a handful of countries have managed to approve and begun building out permanent geologic disposal sites at this point so as long as at least one of them is willing to sell disposal services the problem is now globally solved. At least provided a given country has the political will to pay to export their waste but that seems like a much lower barrier to overcome.
I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste.
Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.
You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.
Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically
Edit: it's clear from the down votes i am getting that this is political, not technical.
If you're down voting with no technical understanding you're political.
I think it is you who hasn't bothered to do basic research before forming an opinion. I suggest at least skimming the wikipedia page on radioactive waste. [0] There's also a page documenting the various national management plans. [1]
> I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible ...
It just needs to be little enough that the cost of constructing long term storage space isn't cost prohibitive.
The amount produced is something like 25 to 30 tons per GW per year before reprocessing; after reprocessing it's something like ~5% of that. Unfortunately I couldn't readily find numbers for the dilution rate when vitrifying the waste for geological disposal. Regardless, that amount is almost nothing when considered in terms of volume. A full size shipping container is somewhere between 75 and 108 cubic meters depending on which standard you prefer. To give a rough idea that equates to ~180 (US) tons of borosilicate glass (one of the materials commonly used to vitrify high level waste) on the low end (assuming I got the math right).
There are also alternative disposal methods to consider such as breeder reactors (rather expensive at present) or horizontal drillholes.
You appear to be reiterating an irrational position. I provided links to overviews of the topic; I strongly suggest at least skimming them. The quantity of unavoidable high level waste would appear to be sufficiently small that geological disposal is a cost effective solution.
The high level waste in question is not magically safe. Rather the various reprocessing and disposal methods have been extensively engineered and deliberated. At this point there is no cause to believe deep geological disposal in crystalline bedrock to be unsafe.
I said from the start that the argument you presented was fallacious, and all you did was present it, now, because you have no other argument, you're working on aggressive attacks.
Do please explain how it's fallacious? I've made the claims that one, there is a sufficiently low volume of waste produced per unit of generation that geologic disposal is affordable and scalable and that two, said geological disposal is in fact safe. Where's the fallacy?
It appears to me that you are attached to a position that you aren't capable of defending.
Also worth seeing that less has to be fundamentally safe at some point, otherwise background radiation would be a threat. If examined on its own without considering the surrounding inert volume, one decaying particle is presumably quite radioactive.
So since less->magically safer is true some point, the argument can't be made fallacious by asserting it is true. The worst the argument can be is unpersuasive (although it is persuasive - from a practical perspective there is a tiny volume of toxic waste, it isn't a reason to block progress).
Less waste to deal with makes it safer, simply because you need to control and manage less material.
We also know how to get rid of it entirely, leaving only material that will decay to safe levels within hundreds of years. It's prohibitively expensive right now, but may be feasible in the future once technology matures.
It's called "closed [nuclear] fuel cycle". Just google it. I studied it at a university.
TLDR; if you have enough fast neutrons, you can transmute anything into safe materials. Fast neutron reactors produce enough, classic PWR reactors do not. The only commercial fast reactor right now is in Russia.
If at some point humanity decides to stop making reactors altogether, it's still possible to burn the waste with particle accelerators. It'll take hundreds of years, but waste won't be going anywhere.
And finally, if commercial fusion reactors ever happen, they can also be used as neutron sources to trivially burn up all the waste.
In the US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste was stopped not for technical reasons, but for political reasons. The primary reasoning was that: US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste would encourage other non-nuclear weapon states to build nuclear reprocessing capabilities which would make easier access to plutonium - nuclear weapon material.
"On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead."
Commercial fusion reactors could be used burn (transmutate) long-term transuranic waste, on the other hand they will produce short-term nuclear waste, like neutron activated steels.
Yeah. My former coworker was researching ways to make steel less "activatable". Turns out that the most problematic contaminant is niobium, so he was working on possible ways to remove it completely.
The proliferation risk was real at that time, but it's now a moot point. The details of plutonium refining are well known.
Principles of plutonium separation are well known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX), but preventing non-nuclear weapon states from having access to nuclear materials usable for nuclear weapons (Plutonium, Highly enriched uranium) is still cornerstone of US foreign policy. See the current events in Iran. Or the discussions with South Korea:
"The U.S. State Department did not give specific responses when asked if the U.S. was open to changing the agreement and what sort of discussions it had agreed to, but a spokesperson said:
"America has a longstanding policy to limit the spread of enrichment and reprocessing capabilities around the world and to seek the highest nonproliferation standards achievable in all 123 agreements.""
This also the reason for monitoring and inspections by International Atomic Energy Agency in all facilities handling nuclear materials (nuclear reactors, fuel manufacturing, nuclear waste storage) or capable of producing nuclear materials - in non-nuclear weapon states.
There's very little waste that lasts hundreds of years, and the reason it's "prohibitively expensive to store" is purely political. Because we safely and cheaply store it now while waiting for multi-decade trillion-dollar projects drilling deep mountain storage close to magma or something.
I actually did produce a technical solution: stick it deep in yucca mountain and forget about it. It's safe, and there's more than enough room for the little waste that can't be turned back into fuel.
The time frame we are talking about invalidates the "safety" because the earth's crust moves and warps, which allows water to access that sort of storage
The Earth's crust will take far longer to move yucca than the nuclear waste will be a problem. That's the whole reason that site was chosen. Even Yellowstone isn't set to blow on that time scale.
Why dont you suggest what "safe" looks like, and we can discuss your understanding of safety. Its clear to me that the issue is your standards and not actual waste disposal.
My understanding is that this material remains toxic to life for thousands, to tens of thousands of years.
Safe means that it's stored such that there's no harm to the environment for that lifetime.
In all "bury it" scenarios, the place where the waste is buried will be subject to change resulting in water, air, able to interact with that waste when normal tectonic and erosion processes do their thing.
I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement.
How do you think spent uranium interacts with the environment?
There's an estimated 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater. Naturally occurring. I honestly think we missed a trick when we outlawed dumping in the ocean, there's basically no way for human generated nuclear waste to even move the needle on ocean sources.
Lets say I take you completely at face value. Every notion of yours comes to pass. We cask it, and leave it in an underground vault. 9999 years later, a cask fails. Whats the issue? Are you using that vault as a busy thoroughfare? Its still in a big hole in the ground. Maybe theres an earthquake? And the vault shears a little. What is the radiation now doing in your mind that makes it dangerous? TBH we shouldnt leave signs warning people to stay away, we should leave a concrete recipe behind on all the signage.
There's life thriving in Pripyat just past the big concrete dome. There's a war going on there.
> I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement.
The problem you're running in to is most likely that you asked someone to define a subjective measure. What you then bump into with the anti-nuclear crowd is safety has one standard for most things and then a different, inconsistent standard when "nuclear" gets mentioned. So a level of harm (or cost/benefit to be more precise) that would be fine for say, lead poisoning or car safety would be a shut-down-the-industry event if it involved nuclear material.
And there isn't really a follow up at that point because there is a definitional tautology where, because it involves nuclear material, nuclear material can't be safe. The problem with that is obvious if you want people to have access to clean-cheap-safe power, but it is logically valid and there isn't really a socially acceptably way to have a go at someone for having inconsistent standards if they are happy to own it. And the argument just got derailed away from the actual issues.
The more argumentatively correct line is to ask what level of harm is acceptable for nuclear, get told "zero", then point out that this is a standard that isn't applied to anything else in power generation and that our standards of harm from nuclear power should be consistent with everything else. The argument then isn't over a definition but why they think it is acceptable to have an unreasonable and inconsistent standard (which is the real issue).
Hi, what's your physics understanding of the problem?
You need to get very concrete. The waste is the problem, not the containment. You can find out what the 'background' levels are X m away from containers, and the containers--and their containers--are very strong and stable.
You accuse the "nuclear crowd" of dealing in misinformation while suggesting yucca mountain isn't a safe storage site because of plate tectonics, which is a total non-issue, or as you call it, "some wild theories that only live in your imagination."
Tectonic and erosion processes take place over millions of years, so they aren't an issue for waste that's only dangerous for tens of thousands of years.
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Each year additional waste is added and it will be toxic forever.
The movement of tectonic plates is something that takes millions, not thousands, of years. Not to mention Yucca Mountain is far from the edge of any tectonic plate.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.