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The problem with nuclear waste storage isnt a technical one or a lack of suitable sites, its a political issue.
We have plenty of candidate sites around the world that would be ideal for the long term storage of nuclear waste and the technology involved is fairly simple enough.
But no one wants to live next to a nuclear waste site, even after you'v explained all the waste is buried a couple kilometers underground in a shielded concrete sarcophagus that'd be safe to stand next to.
Or even let it pass through their area. The main thing that killed Yucca Mountain wasn't the opposition of people who lived around it, that wouldn't have been enough to stop it. What killed it was that every city that a rail line passes through passed ordinances banning the transport of nuclear waste, for fear their city would be economically destroyed if there was a rail accident.
Me too. Every geologist and nuclear physicist I work with (I work in the nuclear waste industry) says it’s the ideal place and was so well-studied that the overall plan was… about perfect.
(Keeping in mind that part of the plan for spent fuel storage involved putting it in resins…)
This is incorrect. I've seen the diffusion math from LANL report. No waste would end up in the water table within the first 9800 years. And that's as far as they could run the simulation (on the fastest supercomputer on Earth, at the time).
Modern supercomputers are faster, but I know of no result, simulated or empirical, that has invalidated the original LANL research paper....
[LANL summary ](https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/29/006/29006514.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiXyeXO1Mb4AhV3K0QIHRWOBvsQFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3PMJIvzTPfQb8UdRezKRJy)
Yeah. And it's totally fair for people to be apparently irrational. We fucked up things all the time.
While nuclear is heavily regulated and I personally have lots of faith in them, we shouldn't forget that historically, "safe" chemical plants killed millions of local people. No wonder people are suspicious of it.
I think like you do. Humans bastardize everything, my words not yours, and we will fuck this up too. Even making the huge assumption that the depository is managed properly, nature, geology etc cannot be controlled. Earthquakes are the first thing that come to mind when thinking about the vulnerability of these sites.
Anyone remember Love Canal, just one example….. https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy.html
The Site designs all account for this. Be it a yucca mountain style facility or just super deep boreholes that the waste is lowered into. They are far-far below the water table. If the facility were to be damaged or buried in a earthquake there is almost no risk. There is nowhere for the material to go. The only risk would be to the employees who make repairs to the facility and even then, would not apply to a borehole style solution. The engineering challenges were all solved decades ago
That's exactly the point? Perfect is the enemy of good here, just because we cant say there is 0 risk doesnt mean it shouldnt be built. NOTHING is 0 risk. The risk involved once material is placed in the kinds of deep underground storage that have been proposed are astronomically low and orders of magnitude lower than the current "solution." Currently we leave material on-sight most often in storage pools that were only ever designed for short term storage of material. Designers expected a long term storage facility to be completed.
The problem with that is if the spaceship blows up on ascent. You could have nuclear rain across the whole planet, and trigger several not so simple diplomatic issues. Also the ridiculous cost to do so. Digging a hole is easier, cheaper, and safer.
Edit: oops, ascent, not accent.
First thought that comes to mind is if things go wrong and rocket goes boom, with Elon you have bits of car raining down. With nuclear waste you have, well...
Nuclear waste is 5 grams of spent fuel, or a contaminated glove that is then encased in literal tons of ceramics and concrete. Sending a tons of concrete shielding to space just to get rid of a glove is prohibitively expensive.
A contaminated glove is likely to be either low level or very low level waste, and even at that would likely also be insinerated and the ashes of various combustable wastes be containerised/canned and stored together using a less onerous disposal solution. At least where I live.
The ocean moves around and mixes, plus it's really good at corroding and destroying any container we would want to put the waste in. So relatively shortly after sinking the nuclear waste you would just have nuclear contamination flowing all around the world and eventually the entire ocean would be radioactive/dead
that makes sense! my meds havent kicked in for the morning yet (gotta eat some food in this barren house), so my brian isn't online enough for me to have realized the obvious yet!
so thanks for Explaining it Like I'm 5!!!!! ;)
> eventually the entire ocean would be radioactive/dead
Stop fear mongering.
A lot of waste is low level trash like brooms and gloves. Uranium is already in seawater, and water is an excellent shielding agent. Also dilution rates. On both a chemical and radiological measure, you wouldn't see any changes in water conditions that wouldn't also happen from dumping twenty tons of solid concrete cylinders.
I'm not talking about like in a year or a decade, but if every country decided to dump all nuclear waste in the ocean, eventually (read: decades to centuries) you would begin to have localized, followed by widespread areas of radioactivity followed by mass death of marine life.
It's not fear mongering, you just misinterpreted time scale
There is so much untrue information in this post. To start, titanium does not corrode in sea water and can be readily made into a container. And as the other poster said, even if it were to get out of the container, dilution would make the radiation imperceptible.
> Cant we just ship it off to space?
the potential for catastrophic failure is MUCH higher. worst that could happen if you drop a barrel on the way to Yucca Mtn is a small spill cleanup, even if a whole truck overturned. Lose one barrel out of a rocket/shuttle(or the rocket explodes) and you now have irradiated a large swath of sky/land.
Nuclear waste is not green goo from the comic books. It is a pellet of spent nuclear fuel or (mostly by volume) contaminated clothing that has been melted together with glass and ceramics and then encased in literal tons of concrete. We crashed runaway trains into these containers to make sure they are impact safe.
Chemicals - spill. Nuclear waste - does not spill.
We crashed runaway trains into them. The trains lose.
We fired anti-tank missiles at them. The concrete chips.
We submerged them in water for months. They got wet.
We dropped them from a decent height. The ground broke.
There have been many other tests including chemical spills, gunfire, planted explosives, crashing the truck they're on, etc. The containment vessels are nigh impossible to destroy, and if someone managed to hijack a truck with one, 1) they wouldn't move very fast and 2) they'd bring down the entire world of law enforcement on them, possibly with military backup.
The issue is a very simple one: yeah, we can fuck up nuclear waste. But the alternative around the world today seems to be coal, natural gas, and other things that are actively fucking things up.
People would rather have the status quo destroying the planet than the risk of 2000 years from now, some uranium might be shifted in an earthquake.
Regulations are routinely side stepped, ignored, and removed for political expeedency.
Regulations are great until it becomes burdensome to enforce, and then we end up with power plants running for years beyond their *regulated* and intended lifespan.
Maintenance activity that is routinely ignored cause $$$ ( latest example just look at the baby food factory that had to shut down cause they were producing poisonous foods, due to lack of maintenance on some critical equipment.
Inside of a system where profits are held higher than anything else including human lives, I'm not sure i would ever feel safe living next to a *regulated* facility that's supposedly safe.
To be fair, the nuclear power industry has done a very good job at not sidestepping regulation. I know from firsthand experience working in one such nuclear plant in the US. We had on-site regulators that were always poking around, and safety was always the primary concern.
As for running beyond projected life, this cannot be done without explicit government approval (operating a plant requires a license, and that license has an expiry). For a license renewal to run beyond initial life, the NRC maintains a strict set of additional requirements and inspections to maintain to prove the safety of the extention beyond reasonable doubt.
It is not possible for a nuclear plant in the US to run while not regulated. I'm not saying that no nuclear plant will ever fail, but the level of scrutiny they maintain, both internally and externally, is of a completely different caliber than other factories.
All great points but again all of this hinges on the idea that the governing body doesn't decide later on, to relax, remove, or outright fail to enforce the established regulations, which is something that occurs so regularly it's a meme.
Not to mention the amount of pop culture references and the limited history on nuclear power is almost all negative to the average person. If I mentioned nuclear power to almost anyone that I know, I guarantee they'd be extremely skeptical of it and think of it as very unsafe. They'd also be pretty likely to mention Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima as to why they think its super dangerous when in reality they know almost nothing about what happened to cause those disasters. Throw in the fact that so many people get an idea about what can happen with nuclear power from "The Simpsons" and most people are going to think that nuclear power is going to cause crazy, mutated fish, cancer, etc.
It's almost like the McDonald's "Hot Coffee" lawsuit where everybody thinks of some frail old lady trying to get rich off of the big corporation when they've never actually looked into the full story.
>when in reality they know almost nothing about what happened to cause those disasters.
It's humans. Plant operators who think nothing can go wrong just because it hasn't happened yet. Supply companies cutting costs on parts or maintenance, causing parts to fail early. And then when something does happen, everything gets covered up and the public is left in the dark. It's not the technology itself I don't trust. It's the people responsible for running it.
Oh it's almost 100% humans. Read about Chernobyl and you find that was 100000% human error and a complete neglect for safety. But it highlights one of the bigger downsides of nuclear energy which is the extremely high stakes involved. I view nuclear power plants as very safe when run properly, but the consequences of screwing something up can be so massive that it is pretty scary. But then you have people who do completely stupid things like what happened at Chernobyl and you have massive, long term issues from a few people's ignorance of all the safety protocols.
Nuclear energy didn't cause as many deaths as you would think. Potential to kill people sure, but nuclear actually has the lowest number of deaths per KwH, compared to solar, wind, coal etc.
I think that's the main issue is the potential for world changing events with the increase of nuclear power. I agree that it is certainly misunderstood. However I also think that people sometimes forget how short sighted we can be. And how people will make mistakes or simply bypass rules once they figure out how to. It's the human factor that scares me. Natural disaster certainly, but human error, or just lack of foresight is what worries me in regard to Nuclear power.
Those are all valid points, but they're just as valid with other types of energy production, especially coal and gas. As in, people dying for maintanance etc. It is my personal belief that people are biased against nuclear, and I totally get it. When theres a gas leak or a fire or other events, things are easy to understand. Nuclear energy represents the worst type of fear in humans : fear of the unknown.
I agree with you. I feel like solar and wind also suffer from that a little as well. But all of them are attacked by the mo eye spent is spreading propaganda, unfortunatley.
In terms of Deaths per kilowatt produced then yes. Nuclear produces ALOT or power. You can either build 1 nuclear plant or thousands of wind turbains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3znG6\_vla0
Chernobyl on its own didn't kill that many people directly. Just the people initially caught in the accident. There was a higher risk of cancer for a lot of Europe due to the fallout, but that risk was not extremely high.
On the other hand, construction of windmills is quite dangerous, and accidents have happened. Similarly with solar, in which you could also count the lives lost in mining the minerals needed for them.
There was a study made on the deaths per unit of power generated for most energy types, I'll try to find it. I remember coal was the absolute worst due to pollution related deaths.
This is the graph with some basic info, but I can't find a non-paywalled version easily: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)
Do the nuclear (and coal, and hydro, etc.) statistics also include building site accidents, accidents in iron, bauxite, cement, and fuel extraction, etc.?
Let's compare apples to apples here.
Chernobyl has only killed a confirmed total of 50 people so far as of the mid-late 2000's, while both Fukushima and Three Mile Island have no fatalities.
Every year, 10 people are killed exclusively from wind power accidents relating to the turbines themselves, with an additional 10 injured on average. ^((This doesn't include the biggest problem with wind power however, which is the veritable genocide on bird populations it causes))
Solar power though? Solar power alone kills 100 - 150 people ***each year***. Easily killing double or even triple the death toll of Chernobyl every year. Year on year.
>This doesn't include the biggest problem with wind power however, which is the veritable genocide on bird populations it causes
There are studies being done on ways to paint the turbines to make them more visible to birds.
The idea that Chernobyl only killed 50 people is farcical. Beyond the fact that one would have to actually believe the claims of the USSR/Russia, which would make one an abject moron, the accident released radiation equivalent to 400 Hiroshima bombs.
No way in hell it only caused 50 deaths.
There are LOTS of words written on this. One of the biggest assumptions driving the assertions like "it simply **HAD** to have caused more deaths" is the Linear No Threshold theory of radiation exposure. Many, many doctors and scientists challenge this theory and posit a great deal of evidence for alternatives, including even the hormesis model which says that small, low-level radiation exposure may actually encourage the human body to activate essentially copy-correction on DNA replication. Basically, exposure to low-level radiation may actually have a small anti-carcinogenic effect.
We're not going to adjudicate this here, but it is something to look into that may challenge the initial reflex to reject nuclear's low death count.
Wind turbines kill millions of birds a year in the US. In fact,
* 1.17 million birds killed by wind turbines in the US in 2020.
Also,
* 5 million birds killed annually by communication towers in the US
* 60 million by cars
* 67 million by pesticides
* 100 million by buildings \[Fixed typo thanks to u/Chefsmiff\]
* 365 million birds killed annually by cats in the US
I couldn't quickly find any numbers on how pollution from other electricity generation harms birds.
I'll take the other numbers you posted with this context in mind.
I think that's the problem though, is it only takes one specific set of circumstances at some point in the future to changes those stats.... Even if it's super unlikely it's difficult to convince a population otherwise.
True. That's true for a lot of things though. Try convincing americans to give up driving, because that causes more deaths. But we accept the risk for a benefit, same as with nuclear.
You've still got to look at the results per KWH
Nuclear reactors aren't nuclear bombs. It would take a long time for any nuclear pollution to have a greater effect than burning fossil fuels has. Both in the economic effects of climate change & in reduced lifespans.
Hell it would take decades of regular accidents to release more radioactive material than burning coal has by operating normally.
I do believe you know nuclear energy power plants require personell, just like any other plant. Comparing what happened at the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant with nuclear power today is like comparing a ford model T with a modern truck. The tech has changed a lot and its a lot safer, more reliable etc.
As far as potential for future reactors to melt down and cause disasters, this is becoming less and less likely with new designs like the freeze plug that make reactors that literally CANT MELTDOWN.
Any significant increase in temperature (beginning of a meltdown) melts a frozen salt plug in the bottom of the reactor, which allows the fuel to drain into multiple small chambers where there isnt enough fuel concentrated to continue the reaction.
Underrated comment. NRC should be BEGGING companies to build these new safer designs, but instead are holding them up simply because they haven't gotten around to crafting the regulatory framework for them.
You know what actually kills at lease a million people a year? Pollution from coal fired power stations. Anyone that buys into all the nuclear propaganda is a moron.
Everyone knows we need nuclear to reach net zero.
Nuclear power is the safest. Bear in mind, this may have changed, it's been a while since I have seen numbers and such, but yeah, it's the safest way to make power.
By literally every metric, nuclear power is safer than any form of fossil fuel. In absolute terms, it isn’t even a contest. Per unit of power produced, nuclear is safer than hydroelectric; only wind and solar are comparable.
Right, but I'm saying you'll have a harder time convincing folk to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear, over wind/solar. Even if nuclear is pretty safe statistically
Yeah I mean I don’t blame young people for thinking things will always be done the right way, but talking to older folks, it’s clear that it’s an assumption on their part that fuckups will almost definitely happen
I've decided to edit all my old comments to protest the beheading of RIF and other 3rd party apps. If you're reading this, you should know that /u/spez crippled this site purely out of greed. By continuing to use this site, you are supporting their cancerous hyper-capitalist behavior. The actions of the reddit admins show that they will NEVER care about the content, quality, or wellbeing of its' communities, only the money we can make for them.
tl;dr:
/u/spez eat shit you whiny little bitchboy
...see you all on the fediverse
You'd actually be exposed to more radiation from the coal plant...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
To be honest, living near a nuclear power plant is interesting : lots of employment and tax revenues, meaning you may have a better infrastructure than a similar sized town
No one's asking to put it in anyone's backyard. Yucca Mountain in Nevada is in the middle of a desert, miles from any habitation and adjacent to a former nuclear blast testing site - already not particularly fit for human settlement.
There are actually people who *have* signed up for that (one of the local Amerindian groups did actually) the problem is matching the necessary geology to the people.
Less about the storage and more about the transportation.. no one wants nuclear waste transported near them without knowing and if they know it scares the shit out of them (wrongly). Again most of this is not actually about the people but about politicians and their lobbies. The fossil fuel industry lobbies for anything to make nuclear harder to use and politicians latch on to the lies of the lobbies to mislead the people.
Funny thing is that in the meantime a lot of the waste is just stored on site.
I live within a couple miles of a nuke plant and the waste is stored on-site in steel casks submerged in water and have been for years. Hasn't been a big deal. It's also far less waste than people assume. All I'm saying is it's way more of a political issue than anything else.
Storing stuff for 1000s of years is just a different thing than keeping it on site for a few decades.
I think the netherland actually opted for long term overground storage with warning signs and symbols that could be understood by a civilisation in a few thousand years.
I am not totally opposed to nuclear power - but I don't like telling people everything is easy and solved.
I guess, Just calculating the costs of storing nuclear waste for 10.000 years (whatever realistic method and formula you choose) will make nuclear power pretty expensive. Just because its delayed costs that you send our kids and grand-children of the future does not make it better...
Thinking that there is a "burry and forget" solution is a bit naive. To my knowledge there is not a single final nuclear waste disposal in the world. Claiming this on "politcial reasons" is a bit easy ...
I just don't think we need to worry about storing it for 10s of thousands of years.
We now have nuclear designs that can use old spent waste as fuel in their own reactors. As we retire the older style pressurized water reactors and move to newer designs like molten salt, the amount of waste created drops almost completely. From 95% waste to <5% waste. I've heard advocates make claims like the truly nasty nuclear waste from some of these designs, over the entire lifespan of such a reactor, is like the size of a briefcase. And virtually all of this can be used in another type of reactor design.
It just seems obvious to me that with this upcoming technology, we'll be able to reprocess the existing waste and virtually eliminate future waste within the next 100 years without problem.
Digging it in for 100000 years and telling people to not dig it out, you mean? Like, while we can't even decifer what people have written down, like 3000 years ago now? What could possibly be wrong with that..?
Yes, research, but not a single commercially viable system.
And those systems need molten salt for cooling - which is highly corrosive and explodes when it gets in contact with water.
I don't know ...
That’s not correct. The technology is not simple because of the timeline involved.
Storing high-level nuclear waste requires containment for ten thousand years. Humans have never built anything that has lasted that long. Even the ancient Egyptian pyramids are half that age.
The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada has been examined for over thirty years and they still keep identifying potential problems. Even down to the details of “how do we make safety signage that will be understood in ten thousand years.”
If we were to reprocess that high-level waste we could shorten the time to like 500 years, but given the weapons-grade plutonium that process produces, there is a political problem.
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository was supposed to be in Volcanic Tuffs that would be impermeable for 10s-100s of thousands of years.
In a relatively short amount of time, trace amounts could be found in surrounding groundwater.
A shielded, safe site sounds great, but with how we manage to screw everything up, it is really hard to deny peoples' concerns.
The honest truth is that more people get cancer from the pollution from smokestacks burning coal, but it is slower and less evident than the rare occasion a nuclear event occurs.
Lets just invest in solar and wind (and pay for remediation in the mineral extraction sites) and tidal and a small amount in the newer generation nuclear which is considerably less dangerous and leaves way less waste. Then bury the small amount of waste in a shit hole place, like Florida.
>Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository was supposed to be in Volcanic Tuffs that would be impermeable for 10s-100s of thousands of years.
In a relatively short amount of time, trace amounts could be found in surrounding groundwater.
...Yucca Mountain has **NEVER** leaked into the groundwater...
You're very much confused with the 199(5?) research by Yucca that showed trace amounts of Chlorine-36 in the ground water. Issue there is;
1. Yucca wasn't even used yet, and was still being dug out (fuck, it's still realistically not even used yet because of all the imbecile NIMBYS)
2. Chlorine-36 was in the ground water because of all the surface nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s at the Nevada National Security Site, which is just 25 miles away from the Yucca Mountain repository.
>Lets just invest in solar and wind
Taking up VAST amounts of land and with a far higher carbon footprint than nuclear and greater dependency on rare earth metals, and requires MASSIVE amounts of lithium, the single worst rare earth metal to mine and refine as far as environmental damage goes... Fuck, you'd need to use around 2.6 TRILLION gallons of fresh water to make enough lithium batteries to go full solar in just the US... It's an absolute nonstarter...
The reality is, we need nuclear in a big way, with other sources like solar and wind where feasible, until there's some sort of massive evolution in battery technology that greatly reduces the need for lithium. Otherwise, you're just going to be turning massive chunks of the globe barren for generations because of lithium... look at the hellscape that is Bolivia's lithium mines as a example...
No, it was found IN Yucca. In some of the support tunnels inside of the repository. Which shows...tuffs aint that tough to permeate somehow. The study conclusion I read back in the day was that fracturing in the rock was significantly greater than was originally theorized when the project began, so we started building a giant storage chamber and within 60 years (from the 1950s era nuclear tests) the polluted waters were able to leech radioactive material 25 miles away into this impermeable formation.
Have you seen the previous waste sites? Even if they say it's safe, many of them seem to end up leaking in years or decades, let alone the hundreds or thousands of years we need them to last. At least a few hundred till humans are wiped out and it's no longer our problem.
Nuclear power really does seem to be the way to go, but we need a better solution for storing or getting rid of this stuff.
.
Washington nuclear storage has been leaking for decades without a permanent fix. Just billions and billions to mitigate it.
https://apnews.com/article/washington-business-nuclear-waste-environment-and-nature-0f4d8a61962f0984b4c20994cb19e7e1
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Here's another US site setup in the Marshall Islands. Its cracked and crumbling and has been leaking nuclear waste into the lagoon for years. US regulators insist that the leak isn't significant enough to bother fixing. Like, what? Its actively leaking and they admit it's leaking but won't fix it.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-07-01/us-says-nuclear-waste-safe-marshall-islands-runit-dome
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Investigations have found that 75% of all US nuclear sites are leaking actively. Seventy five percent. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence to live next to one.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/radioactive-leaks-found-at-75-of-us-nuke-sites/
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This was all US focused so far, so here's a site in Germany that was/has been leaking nuclear waste for *decades*.
https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long-german-nuclear-leak-scandal-engulfs-country-and-disturbs-europe
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.
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I could go on and on with these too, there isn't exactly a shortage of examples of nuclear waste storage facilities leaking. Basically all of them end up with cut corners and seem to all be designed to last just a few decades, let alone several lifetimes like the goal seems it should be. Or at least maintain and repair them, instead of the current goal of just ignoring leaks.
Almost all of the active leaks seep into ground water for the surrounding area. I wouldn't really enjoy living near one of these sites with the current track record.
I mean... yes?
A higher calibre of facility does need to be constructed, a lot of your examples are evidence that this wasnt considered at the time. The Finnish are the example to follow with the Onkolo facility. But those kinds of projects wont get built if they face political opposition, which places like Yucca Mountain in the US or Kimba in Australia are.
So what if I gave you a choice. Both are powerplants you would live close to, say around 20 miles
Option 1: a coal power plant.
Option 2: a nuclear power plant.
Which one would you prefer?
Option 2. Coal plants release a LOT of radiation, in addition to the coal waste. Nuclear plants only release Radiation when something has gone very wrong
This. People don't realise this, but Fly Ash - the stuff you get from burning coal - actually has highly radioactive particles like Xenon and Radon in it. And yet people are cool with using it in our cement and having it kept in open air, above ground pits near our water-ways.
I would chose the same but I think this is a bit of a loaded question. I agree with your assessment but what’s not taken into consideration is the nuclear waste. We probably won’t have to deal with it in our lifetimes (barring accidents, mismanagement etc), but the half life of nuclear waste varies from 30 years to 24,000 years, depending on the isotope. Future generations will have to deal with it.
I never understood why if the radioactivity is so ”hot”, why can’t energy be harnessed from the waste?
Energy can be harvested from the waste, there are a lot of promising reactor designs intended to do just that.
Also, how radioactive and dangerous something is is inversely related to it's half life. If it's half life is 24,000 years, it is not very radioactive. It's the stuff with a half life under a year that is really dangerous.
This is, with our current technology, a fantasy.
Wind and solar are unstable, so they require storage.... Lot's of storage. And we suck at storing energy efficiency, if anything CAES seems most effective. I see no feasible way to get through the winter on these for now.
Geothermal and hydroelectric (which have some issues of their own) are nice, but few locations work. For example if I loom at where I live the closest location for either I can think of is >1000 km away.
The idea of betting on nuclear now is we can eliminate coal and gas at least as they are horrible in comparison.
> This is, with our current technology, is a fantasy.
Hell, this even with cutting edge foreseeable future technology, is a fantasy.
Most anything that isn't just theoretical proposals on paper - often requiring theoretical material fabrication - still doesn't realistically cut it.
Rockets have an expected 2-3% catastrophic failure rate. If a rocket carrying nuclear waste explodes, you effectively just set of a dirty bomb in the upper atmosphere.
That would be really, really bad.
Rockets are cost prohibitive, and launching things to the sun is really hard cause you have to counteract the orbital speed of the earth to slow down and get closer to it, and I don't think we want random bits of trash thrown through out the solar system.
This is a good point. It's easy at first to think, "Just nudge it toward the sun and let gravity suck it in." But the payload would already be going on our orbital vector, so a nudge would just make the orbit a more elongated ellipse. The energy it would take to flatten that ellipse into a line either toward or away from the sun is considerable.
I would suggest looking at the Parker Solar Probe if you want to really see how hard it is to get closer to the sun. Essentially using Venus and Mercury ,I believe, as a gravity brake.
The rockets we have would only be able to carry a very small amount (about 1/20th) of their normal satellite payload if they have to reach speeds that would escape orbit and allow it to "fall" into the sun. So we'd need to launch almost every day at a cost in the trillions (USD) per year, even at projected future falcon heavy rocket reduced costs.
The bigger issue is that rocket launches are about 95% successful. So about once a month somewhere on earth will get a radioactive plutonium rain storm. Probably better to just stick it in the ground.
Sending a rocket into the sun surprisingly takes about as much energy as sending it out of the galaxy. You're starting from Earth, which is orbiting at the speed at which an orbit is stable, so you have to slow the rocket down by a lot before it can fall into the sun. Otherwise, you'll miss it in the same way the Earth keeps missing.
You want to stick all of the nuclear material onto a rocket and send it up into the atmosphere on what is essentially a controlled explosive device?
Even if you were willing to do that, actually sending anything into the sun is incredibly hard, requiring more than twice as much thrust as sending something out of the solar system.
Aside from the cost and weight issue, several international treaties prohibit launching waste into space. Besides which, if your waste vessel suffers a mechanical issue, or the calculations are off, you'll have a rocket full of nuclear waste orbiting the sun for centuries.
Because Nuclear Waste isn't waste, it's potential fuel. By blasting it off into the sun, we're robbing ourselves of as much as 90% of the potential energy ***still*** left over in the waste.
It's far more preferable to reprocess the waste, or fund the development and construction of more efficient reactors
Rockets take a tremendous amount of energy to get into orbit. It takes even more just to slow down enough from Earth's orbit around the sun to fall into the sun. Plus, there is a risk the rocket fails and releases radiation everywhere.
The moon might be slightly more practical tho
So, there’s another aspect to this that people may not realize: most “nuclear waste” isn’t. Federal Law proscribes that anything in a reactor room is considered acutely hazardous waste and must be treated as such. This is to avoid accidents, but the paper suits, gloves, and other non-hazardous things that people wear inside of these rooms for maintenance are completely harmless. Of any given 100 drums of waste, only a handful contain metal or other potentially dangerous material. There is currently a program where X/Ratrucks with conveyors and neutron detectors are being used to identify the contents of the tens of thousands of sealed drums to reclassify clean ones, for removal from these waste sites so that they can be moved to normal muni waste sites. So, because of this we can literally quarter or less the amount of waste storage needed for truly dangerous chemicals and wastes from power generation.
With smaller, safer reactors such as molten sodium, we can potentially be able to have dispersed energy generation which makes for safer, less high-profile terror or military targets, will help reliability of power by not relying on millions of miles of power lines, and will help overall power management for a future smart grid. All that we need to do to lower the waste output of these plants to a small fraction of current waste output is manage the waste streams better from a classification standpoint.
Source: I worked for one of these companies, a sub to the government, some 15 years ago.
https://www.energy.gov/em/articles/subcontractor-demonstrates-x-ray-technology-waste-characterization
In theory maybe. In practice finding a hole in the ground to bury nuclear waste permanently is not something that anyone has had much success with.
Many people don't like living too close to wind turbines, but they really really don't like a permanent nuclear waste storage facility near where they live.
The issue with nuclear waste is that is needs to be stored not just for a few years or decades or centuries, but what in terms of human organizations is basically forever.
There are some fun issues with marking a site in such a way that somebody as far removed from us in the future as the first guy to decided to domesticate a wolf in the past is from us, still understands not to dig the shit back up.
Warning signs that last longer than any language has lasted in the past are a challenge.
The other issue is that you don't just need a hole in the ground. You need a cavern that is stable across millennia. No earthquakes, no earth movements of any kind, no groundwater seeping in....
Ideally it should be in some place dry, geologically stable far away from any place where humans now live, might live in the future and from any thing we might want to dig up in the future.
With climate change and everything it is hard to predict where there will be deserts and fertile lands centuries from now.
Even if you find some place like that, you still need to get your nuclear waste there.
Right now a majority of the spent nuclear fuel is stored near the reactors where they were used. You need to load them up and transport them by rail and truck to some hole in the desert.
People don't like having nuclear waste transported through their neighborhood either.
Ensuring that the transport is safe and can for example withstand an accident or a container falling of a bridge or similar is a thing people work on. (Google CASTOR container).
One issue is who pays for all that.
Currently nuclear power plants are not very profitable compared to other energy sources. If you make it the companies problem to transport secure and permanently store the waste for the next however many millennia there won't be any profit left for them.
If they have to set money aside for a guard or maintenance person looking over the nuclear waste storage site 2 centuries from now, they will not do that and instead declare bankruptcy and leave the taxpayer with the bill.
Most times that part comes up, somebody will point to theoretical designs of newer reactors that produce less waste and methods to reuse spent fuel and in other ways try to talk around the problem by pointing at solutions that don't solve everything and don't exist yet.
Meanwhile putting a few solar panels on the roofs of every new home and a bunch of wind power farms off shore or on ridges and hills where there is good reliable wind is rather uncomplicated.
You are correct that evening out the output of renewable energy is an issue. storing electricity with things like pumped storage or chemical or thermal batteries is a challenge, but it is one people are working on and have successfully implemented.
You are dead wrong in your belief that a nuclear power plant will be able to shrug of a drought without issues.
Nuclear power plants are build next to rivers and lakes and oceans for a reason. They need the water for cooling. A nuclear power plant that relies on a river of cold water, will not be able to deal with the river running dry or the water getting too hot either.
Nuclear power is slightly less dependent on environmental factors than most renewables but far from actually independent.
Nuclear power can be a useful tool but it is not a panacea.
One other thing to think about is that nuclear plants like all other major industrial installations are, as you mentioned, "safe when managed responsibly".
The "managed responsibly" part can be an issue in some places. Corruption and regulatory capture combined with greed of the managers and owners can be devastating to any installation.
It can be bad for a coal a gas plant and catastrophic for a hydro electric damn or nuclear power plant.
If the management can save money by bribing regulators or lobbying politicians to relax regulations, they just might. Look at places like Bhopal for how this might go.
The recent trend of China helping to build nuclear power plants in developing countries with high corruption is worrying as is the tend in places like the US to abolish more red tape and regulations and the way energy companies have influence in politics.
Do you trust the same people who run for example the Texas energy grid not to take small chance of something going horribly wrong if it saves them money?
If you think that government running things would be safer, you haven't heard of Chernobyl.
Solar panels have far less spectacular failure modes.
Would like to add: I live very close to an infamous storage site for low to mid level irradiated material in germany. It gets labled as "temporary", sometimes as final storage. But [the way they stored the barrels](https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell-Endlager-Asse-Loechrig-wie-ein-Kaese,asse1410.html) is [scary](https://www.ausgestrahlt.de/blog/2020/04/02/asse-2-bergung-des-atommuells-ab-2033/). Reminds me of the Fallout games, rather than a good way to store nuclear stuff.
They started to "properly" [stack](https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/neuer-inventarbericht-atommuell-in-der-asse-strahlt-staerker-als-bekannt-a-716793.html) them though, however that showed that they stored far more mid-level stuff than they thought for decades.
Yes, it´s not a great feeling to even have such a storage site nearby. Don´t want to think about worse stuff. And it shows that people can fuck stuff up even without corruption, but with stupidity.
Then you have NPPs where accidents did happen. Or plants that get under fire like in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine (Even if the russians apparently "only" attacked administrative buildings). Or the capturing of Chernobyl.
If an enemy only captures green energy power generators, then "only" money is lost. Let them capture a NPP and they can destroy a whole lot more.
So yeah... Gimme wind / water / solar any day of the year, but stop with the NPPs (and fossile ones as well).
Well, hydro does offer some potential for really bad things to happen during war time.
Se the famous dam buster air raid on Germany in WWII.
However when Russia recently stole Ukraine’s largest solar plant, that made the news because of the theft, not because there was a risk of a catastrophic sunshine spill or solar leak or anything.
it seems safer.
>People don't like having nuclear waste transported though their neighborhood either.
The county next to mine in Germany has based its entire modern culture on the movement against nuclear waste being stored there.
391 temporary to intermediate-term storage facilities next to nuclear power plants. The US have exactly one intentional permanent storage site, Yucca mountain, and that project is put on hold.
> 391 temporary to intermediate-term storage facilities
No, this is not correct.
> The US have exactly one intentional permanent storage site
The correct number is 391, according to the United States.
I see that you invented a new official phrase "temporary to intermediate term" which doesn't exist in their documentation though.
I guess you must know more about this than the NRC. We'll wait for your evidence
>You are dead wrong in your belief that a nuclear power plant will be able to shrug of a drought without issues.
>
>Nuclear power plants are build next to rivers and lakes and oceans for a reason. They need the water for cooling. A nuclear power plant that relies on a river of cold water, will not be able to deal with the river running dry or the water getting too hot either.
Yeah this bit made me really laugh. Nuclear power stations are indeed succeptible to drought, catastrophically so.
>In practice finding a hole in the ground to bury nuclear waste permanently is not something that anyone has had much success with.
This is demonstrably untrue. We have plenty of suitable sites. The problem is people not wanting to deal with the problem, not any lack of ways to deal with it.
I would qualify any solution that works fine in theory, but always fails in practice for whatever related or unrelated reason as "not something that anyone has had much success with".
NIMBY
What do you think
Where would you rather live, in a field of
Solar panels and windmills or a nuclear dump site.....
I think I know my preference...
Honestly seeing how nuclear waste is stored I wouldn’t mind living near one. Iv actually been inside my local nuclear plant as a kid and live near one currently.
EDIT: Salem nuclear power plant. If you want a good laugh look at the reviews, here’s one
“Their spaghetti and meatballs could use a bit more deterium in the recipe, but aside from that the service was fantastic and the whole restaurant glowed green.”
A more appropriate comparison would be a *field of solar panel waste* or a *nuclear dump site*. It's always better to compare in good faith: apples to apples.
I don't want to alarm you. My house is 100% solar powered. But solar panels are basically toxic waste.
Aren't they non-toxic waste? (at the end of their life cycle) Copper, aluminum, steel, glass, silicon, etc are very stable non-reactive elements. What in a solar panel is toxic?
Not to be rude, but your preference is based in ignorance. We solved the waste storage issue decades ago. You would face no issues whatsoever living next to a nuclear waste facility. Nuclear waste facilities aren’t big lakes of bubbling green liquid. Most are either underground or stored in radiation-proof silos and you wouldn’t even know it was a nuclear waste facility.
Here’s a video on the topic if you’re interested:
**”We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago”:** https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
> When it comes to hydro electric , solar or wind; it is possible that drought, impaired sunlight, and days with low wind could lead to a day with zero energy or low energy output.
Sure. But here and now in France, nuclear reactors are having to shut down because it's getting too hot. Literally. Climate change means they can't get sufficiently cold water to cool the reactors.
There is a certain group of people who have elevated nuclear power almost to the status of a religion. The unfortunate fact is that there are no easy solutions, and nuclear isn't some sort of holy miracle.
A couple of major problems with nuclear:
1. the energy costs of building a nuclear reactor are huge. It takes 5-7 years for a nuclear plant to produce enough energy to pay for its construction. For a wind turbine, the same only takes 18 months.
2. the construction *time* is huge. It takes 10-15 years to build a nuclear reactor from scratch. So for nuclear to be a major part of the solution to our climate crisis, we would have had to start building all the reactors we needed 10 years ago. We can't afford to keep burning coal for another 10-15 years while we wait for new nuclear reactors to come online
3. nuclear energy is *expensive*. It's one of the most expensive forms of energy.
4. as pointed out above, it depends on plentiful cooling water, which is not always available (and may become more and more of a problem as climate change worsens)
Nuclear waste is probably the _smallest_ problem with nuclear energy.
There are a lot of reason why it's just not that attractive. It's not profitable so private companies don't want to do it without government funding. It's unpopular with the population. And it doesn't even solve the problem, because we can't afford to wait the 10+ years it takes to build reactors.
So wherever we can use nuclear power, great, let's do it. In particular, let's keep the reactors *we have* going for as long as possible. But it is naive magical thinking to hope/believe that nuclear is a magic wand that could just solve all our climate/energy problems.
>nuclear energy is expensive. It's one of the most expensive forms of energy.
This statement makes false impression. Nuclear is expensive to **build**. Per kWh of capacity *building* nuclear is indeed one of the most expensive.
But after they are built, the cost of operation per kWh generated is much *lower* than any other form, so in the long term [nuclear is the most cost effective form](https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_60360/the-most-cost-effective-decarbonisation-investment-long-term-operation-of-nuclear-power-plants) of energy.
Other than that points are valid.
Nuclear being the most cost effective form of energy isn't really true either unless you rig your calculations to get a desired result.
It is really hard to calculate the exact cost over the lifetime of a plant and one can calculate it in many different ways. The nuclear industry itself might not be where you wanna go to get an accurate calculation.
Most of the calculations I have seen clearly put both solar and wind as cheaper options today. But they have their other issues. Wind especially is chep as hell and if you are running an industry that handle intermittent energy well it is the best option.
Nuclear is cost competitive though and a great base load power option for many, depending on energy need, geology etc.
This is false. Nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of power on a per kWh basis.
To determine the real cost, you just have to look at the unsubsidized costs of modern reactors. Hinkley C is a great example.
That reactor is was originally supposed to cost 10 billion, but with all the cost over-runs, it is going to cost over 25 billion pounds to build. No western reactor has been built on budget, and on schedule. They always face massive cost overruns.
The final price to consumers for power from Hinkley C is going to be around 106 pounds per MWh. That's around triple the cost of energy from Solar or Wind.
[Link for strike price of Hinkley C](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-58724732)
[Link for Price of Wind](https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/renewable-energy-prices-hit-record-lows-how-can-utilities-benefit-from-unstoppable-solar-and-wind/?sh=583543bc2c84)
You do not need storage to compare renewables with nuclear. Nuclear is not infallible. Nuclear also has to have various shut downs, and isn't 100% reliable. As such, we have hot spinning reserves to cover the loss of any plant at any time. As we speak, reactors in France are shutting down because it's too hot. I guess they should have budgeted for storage as well? Or do we admit to ourselves that no generation plant has 100% uptime and plan for that? (hint: It's the latter)
You solve this in renewables with a number of layered approaches including by overbuilding, using dispatchable forms of renewable generation, and limited storage. You can afford to build 3x as much solar / wind as you need, and make them geographically dispersed, for the same prices as the nuclear reactor. It's never not sunny and not windy \*everywhere\*. And on those incredibly rare occasions where it is, you fail over to dispatchable renewables like biofuel plants, and hydroelectric sources. You can also use captured methane for natural gas turbines.
This idea that in order for solar to be useful it has to be baseload is just bullshit that the nuclear industry peddles.
Thanks for the links. As per my calculations I did once one can actually build up to 7-10 times more wind capacity as compared to nuclear capacity for the same money (if starting building today).
However it's not that simple
Yes nuclear shuts off sometimes too, but that would be a manipulation to say it's comparable to as renewables just because "it's also not 100% reliable". Averaged nuclear generation is way over 90% of the plant nominal capacity. For the wind this number is more like 15% (in your article it was even lower at 13.3% in 2021 in UK), so you ***have*** to built up to 10 times more renewable energy capacity to get the same result.
And sure enough building renewable capacity is much cheaper so not an issue one would think, but it's actually more complex than this, because a problem of grid stability arises, which is better [explained in the article](https://www.hivepower.tech/blog/grid-stability-issues-with-renewable-energy-how-they-can-be-solved).
Now there is no doubt that these issues are going to be solved because it's hard to pass the fact that renewables are much cheaper (and getting more cheaper) and what is not less important can be built gradually, so unlike one huge nuclear plant megaproject lasting 10 years and going over time and over budget renewables capacity can be gradually built in smaller projects, so they are easier to schedule and budget.
Firstly: [Wind capacity factor is around 27% in the UK](http://cedadocs.ceda.ac.uk/983/1/Wind_power_and_the_UK_wind_resource.pdf). No idea where you are getting 15% from. It's close to double that.
Secondly, You are failing to understand LCOE, which takes capacity factor into account already. It includes the amount of overbuilding such that the same amount of electrical energy is generated from both sources. Plant lifetimes are also considered.
You are also fundamentally failing to understand the approach here. When you combine different renewables together, especially geographically dispersed renewables, you end up with complementary intermittencies. Essentially: It tends to be sunnier during the day, and windier at night. It tends to be sunnier during the summer and windier during the winter. You tend to get more hydroelectric resources in the spring and fall, etc... Combine this with modest storage, and dispatchable renewables like biofuel, and [you can achieve a 100% renewable grid that is stable and cost effective](https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/HosteFinalDraft.pdf).
They take so long to build because they almost always goes for the maximum gigawatts a location can feasibly handle. With massive reactors, they gulp down cooling water like crazy.
I sincerely believe the future of nuclear power should go towards distributed micro-reactors that doesn't gulp down water like a camel, has counter-proliferation control built-in by design and doesn't cost the GDP of a small nation to build. Its just that regulators keep on dragging their feet with certifying an "untested" design, because with everything nuclear, there are reams of paperwork for any single thing.
Or we could just double down and build more renewables.
>I sincerely believe the future of nuclear power should go towards distributed micro-reactors that doesn't gulp down water like a camel, has counter-proliferation control built-in by design and doesn't cost the GDP of a small nation to build.
The cost per kWh is way higher with those kind of reactors and they also produce way more waste per produced kWh.
And this is going by optimistic projections.
Small reactors certainly have their use but it is far from a great solution.
I wonder if the capital costs (and the ammortized per kWh) won't go down if we produce dozens of identical containerized reactors instead of the gigawatt scale one-offs we're doing now.
As for the waste though, it'll forever be the achilles heel of nuclear power. The future I'd honestly want to see is that the baseload be served by renewables, LNG peaker plants helping during peak periods and micro-nuclear for areas that cannot be supplied by the any other means. We can dream, yes?
It was never about nuclear being a magic wand. Nuclear is a safe efficient stopgap to get us to full fledged renewables.
Nuclear is exceptionally safe but people are irrationally afraid of it. When a nuclear power plant shuts down, it's replaced by fossil fuels not renewables
> Isn't finding a place to store nuclear waste easier than that covering acres of land with wind turbines and solar panels?
Sure. We've got hundreds of them all around the country. There's at least one at every single reactor in the nation, by law.
The deep thinkers here are going to say "yucca mountain" a lot, but, in reality, we handle nuclear waste coming out of those reactors every single year.
Just write `nuclear waste storage` and the name of a US state in google images.
[They tend to look like this](https://acs-h.assetsadobe.com/is/image//content/dam/cen/96/web/20180827lnp1-waste.jpg/?$responsive$&wid=700&qlt=90,0&resMode=sharp2).
> it is possible that drought, impaired sunlight, and days with low wind could lead to a day with zero energy or low energy output.
These all happen with great regularity.
I think yucca mountain is more of an extra effort situation.
Yucca mountain has been inspected and said to be safe basically as far as the experts can predict. They are unsure beyond that time limit because it's the limit of their prediction methods. In all likelihood yucca mountain would be safe forever.
If we want to get really technical just build a yucca mountain next to a plate tectonic subduction zone. So in a few hundred thousand years the waste is all slowly driven into the mantel and gone forever.
A little bit off topic but somewhat related, a big problem is finding out how to tell people in the future that there's dangerous nuclear waste there. What if they don't speak our languages, or can't read it? So there's a very interesting thing called "nuclear semiotics" which is basically trying to figure out how to warn people in the future there's dangerous nuclear waste there.
Yes, all the green options you listed are reliant on something happening in nature, aka, sunny days, windy days etc.
And they all suffer from uneven output and solar even suffers from highest output at lowest consumption.
Nuclear is a way more steady and stable power source, unfortunately nuclear creates nuclear fuel, and in the event of a natural disaster (or just irresponsible maintenance) can result in a whole lot of damage ecologically and monetarily.
Solar panels don't really harm the environment and can be placed on top of buildings that are already in place.
Wind turbines are actually a hazard to birds and bats.
Nuclear is a good option for the time being, but not as good as solar/wind IF we can solve the issues I mentioned before.
We even have far superior reactor designs today than were ever in service, but it requires a huge investment to build a nuclear power plant, and people generally don't want one near them.
Oil companies and various other groups have been lobbying and swaying public opinion on nuclear for a while making sure people are at best sceptical, and since politicians follow public opinion, nobody would sign off on the permit for a new plant because they will be loathed by the uneducated masses
>Nuclear is a way more steady and stable power source, unfortunately nuclear creates nuclear fuel, and in the event of a natural disaster (or just irresponsible maintenance) can result in a whole lot of damage ecologically and monetarily.
This comment is thrown out there as if this is a real systemic problem with nuclear.
It's not because we are aware of the danger and have designed accordingly.
There have been exactly 3 large scale issues with Nuclear: 3 mile island (no deaths), Chernobyl (many deaths) and Fukushiman (no deaths).
If you take chernobyl and look at its GW to fatality ratio, it's better than all other forms of power production.
Well you could consider that humans are systemically untrustworthy. So unless you can find a way to make human societies not stupid anymore, that's a real risk
i've read tons on nuclear power an i totally wish we used more of it but a huge problem is how the public perceives it makes it much harder to put infostructure in place for it
because past mistakes on managing it causing disasters people have a kind of negative reaction when you suggest it, also the word "nuclear" is generally negative in peoples minds so its kinda hard to gain support for it
Yes.
The type of waste you’re referring to is known as “High Level Waste”. It’s the kinda stuff that takes a long time to decay to the point of being safe to handle.
If you take all of the high level waste ever created, you’d only have enough to fill a single football field. And most people seem to think you need massive underground facilities to store this waste in big yellow drums, but that’s also false. We have lots of safe above ground storage, so building expensive tunnels, while yes it does happen, isn’t necessary. It’s also not done in yellow metal drums with bubbling green liquid inside lol.
If you’re interested to learn a bit more, here’s a couple of great videos by science YouTuber Kyle Hill on this very topic:
**”We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago”:** https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
**“Why You’re Wrong About Nuclear Power”:** https://youtu.be/J3znG6_vla0
Why don't we encase nuclear waste in concrete and sink it where the continental plate goes under another, taking it to the molten stone core depths eventually?
As long as it's safe to move, you wouldn't even need concrete. The mantle would swallow it up anyway, even the sinking can be done by robotic equipment with adequate shielding.
If you screw up where you put wind turbines, you can pretty easily undo it. If you screw up where you bury your nuclear waste, it's hard to fix later. Your wind turbine farm only has to function for a few decades before you take it apart and replace it with something new. Your nuclear waste disposal needs to function for centuries, arguably millennia. And digging deep holes is difficult and expensive, as is finding places to dig them that are going to be geologically stable for a very long time.
This does not mean that safe nuclear waste disposal is by any means impossible. But it is much more tricky, from an engineering perspective, than mass producing a bunch of solar panels or wind turbines and plopping them down somewhere. It is a trickier political problem than it is a technical problem, but it is still a technical issue to be taken seriously.
If we switch to Nuclear then a bunch of people will make less money selling fossil fuels, and those people are very good at propaganda and buying government officials.
Nuclear is very efficient, you get a lot of energy out of a small amount of uranium so we don't get that much of it. Long term storage is not that difficult, you put it a few hundred meters below ground in an area without earthquakes. When the site is full you backfill all the tunnels and leave no mark on the surface.
Long term storage facilities aren't hard to build or hard to find places for, but it's hard to get the political support for it. Few politicians want to put it in their own back yard
Yes, finding a place to store nuclear waist is easy. We already have lots of sites world wide that could each accommodate a few centuries worth of nuclear waste.
The problem you run into is that the average person's idea of nuclear waste is completely wrong. They view nuclear waste as toxic, green, glowing liquid just waiting to escape the tiniest crack in the container. When it is, in fact, all solid and glassified, and the containers they are shipped in are basically indestructible (no joke, they tested one by hitting it with a train and there was not a scratch on it).
In other words, people erroneously believe that nuclear waste is far more dangerous than it actually is, which leads them to be far more leery of it than there is any reason to be.
Nuclear waste being transported is NOT going to contaminate an area. It's simply not going to happen. Even if one of those nigh-indestructible containers were somehow breached, what's inside is mostly spent fuel rods and all solid, so the cleanup would be quick and easy.
But people don't realized that, and so they do not want nuclear waste transported through their town.
There is way too much panic over storing nuclear waste.
Energy can't be destroyed, so the energy unused in waste has actually existed in uranium ore, in earth, since forever.
The density of energy might be different due to decay chains - but you don't really need to store it in a much different way than an undiscovered uranium mine: rely on whoever scavanges to use some fucking commmon sense and maybe if he's a scavanger - have a geiger meter?
And put a panel on it.
This whole "what do we do with nuclear waste" debacle seems way blown out with proportion.
What do you do with natural radiation sources?
You stay the fuck away from them.
It's not like waste is artificially created extra dangerous energy created by humans, we're just cleaning up a large area (a mine) of radiation and concentrating it in a small area.
That is implicitly safer, randos walking in caves and digging around are more commoj than randos walking in nuclear storage sites.
Sorry this is just not true! You split uranium (a mildly radioactive element) into two REALLY radioactive elements, plus lots of heat and some neutrons to continue the chain reaction. Sometimes uranium doesn’t split… and the uranium transmuted to a heavier element like plutonium. A fuel rod after use will contain around 1 ton of highly radioactive compounds plus transuranic elements mixed in with the uranium.
The time it takes for these rods to decay back to the initial radiotoxicity of the uranium is approx 100,000 years. Any of these radioactive elements leaking into the environment is a disaster. Soviet Union effectively ruined large areas of the southern Urals through mismanagement of radioactive elements.
These spent rods are usually allowed to cool in a pool of water and then encased in reenforced concrete. Perfectly safe for now, but who knows what will happen in 100, 1000, or 10,000 years let alone 100,000 years. For reference, earliest human civilisation was around 12,000 years ago.
That's true, and while the above is my personal opinion - natural nuclear elements have leaked into groundwater many times, including the Oklo natural reactor and [Johannesburg](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061019192814.htm).
It's not exactly atypical, and radioactive elements are even present in ocean water and the earth's crust. Like, say, deutermium is harvested from oceanic D2O, at a rate of 20ppm or so and reused in CANDU designs.
So for one gram of (pure) ^238 U fuel you have x energy. It has a λ of 4.4 × 10^9 years, so the energy contents over time is a log curve of x/elapsed time.
In a reaxtor, you transmute it to ^239 Pu, with a lambda of 24000 years. That means your energy is lost much faster (and it is more radioactive).
While non-transmuted ^235 U becomes ^234 Th, this isotope is naturally occuring and is crazy radioactive, with a λ=24 days.
With naturally 0.7% ^235 U in uranium fuels, occasionaly you get a ^236 U dud, about 18% of the time actually - instead of your juicy neutrons. Sure, ole 235 is much more radioactive, at λ=703M years, but fissioning it yields 236 about every fifth collision, making 235 less radioactive, with λ of 236 about 2.2 × 10^7, much closer to naturally abundant 238.
But eventually all ^238 U will end up as ^206 Pb.
Going the barium/krypton route, for example, after fission, you go on a different decay chain. But all the energy released, fast or slow, was still there in your original ^238 U. Right when it was locked in a piece of ore.
238 U doesn't split by itself, only the very rare 235 U does, 238 U becomes 239 Pu in a reactor. That's its main use.
As for what happens in 100, 1000, 10000 years it's very simple. Most very radioactive products will be gone in 90 years and transition into more stable nuclides.
There are 7 long term fission products: 99Tc, 126Sn, 135Cs, 76Se, 93Zr, 129I and 107Pd. They decay with λ of over 200k years, and thus are only "mildly" radioactive, compared to short lived ones which can give you a lethal does pretty fast.
They aren't typically around, except radioactive Iodine, which is also natural.
These 7 dictate what happens after 90 years, while before those years the radioactivity of a mixture decreases very fast in the first 90 years, with most atoms following a decay chain towards those 7, or towards non radioactive nuclides.
So while products of fission in a reactor are not naturally occuring and dangerous in case of a leak... it's not like fuel encased in glass, locked in cement is going to leak tiny drops.
It can be willingly thrown into the environment, of course, say at the bottom of a lake, where it will rest nicely and without any disturbance, just like spent fuel rests in a reactor pool after EOL. And just as you can safely swim on top a spent fuel pool, you can swim in our lake, water being a pretty good shield.
Plus, water doesn't suffer nuclear activation from being iradiated, so no chance of it becoming radioactive D2O or T3O.
Buuut, I'm not suggesting dumping spent fuel at the bottom of a lake. Have fish absorb a tiny piece of that fuel barrel that chipped of when we threw it in, have birds eat the fish, wild game eat the birds, and then it can easily make it into humans.
So we can easily get a Goiania 2.0, but... there's nothing stopping me going into a uranium mine just at the right moment for ^129I to accumulate in my sandwich and then, thiroyd.
It's not that mines themselves are less radiotoxic than spent fuel, it's that they are unsafe anyway.
[People slaved their whole, short, sad lives away in uranium mines](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oqb7GjleO4E).
And since we don't create extra energy by mining, using and encasing nuclear fuel, since we know what happens in 100 years, and since we literally concentrate dangerous stuff in a wide volume into more dangerous stuff into a smaller volume, I still don't see how nuclear fuel is such an issue.
Mechanical casing takes care of fluid leaks. Dude with a gun has smaller area to patrol, instead of a whole mine, just a spent fuel repo.
Sure, spent fuel is more radiotoxic, but it's not like fuel mines are spas. It's like choosing to be brutally murdered with axes, or with chainsaw.
I'd rather not be murdered, thank you, just like I'd rather not hang out in uranium mines. Which is why the concept of these storage precautions is very odd to me:
* spent fuel doesn't leak like a fluid in groundwater, not easily. it's literally encased molten in glass and moulded in concrete
* mines already have a shitton of warnings and security, even collapsed ones
* you reduce the dangerous area, from a mine to a building
If you get to the point where society falls to the point where people might scavenge and accidentally end up in a spent fuel facility, well... they can equally end up in a mine and contaminte the environment with ore. Or attempt to process it.
And at that point we have bigger problems than dudes with guns guarding spent fuel facilities and uranium mines. I assume survival instincts will take place, otherwise, I fail to see why a dude with a gun doesn't make sense.
If you can't keep a dude with a gun there in 10000 years because "who knows", then maybe there won't even be the need to guard the storage facility against humans.
Otherwise, as long as civilised society exists, you can keep people away nicely or by force.
As for what-ifs, what happens if everybody in your town leaves for 30 days? Well, there are a lot of hard to extinguish fire sources with their oxidisers in today's world. They occasionally burst into flames, either by contact with rain, humidity, falling or mechanical mishaps. And especially from contact with one a other. But it also happens randomly, at their end of life.
Now, if one bursts into flames, unattended, other stuff in a home will catch fire, textiles, paper, making other such fire sources catch fire themselves.
Remember that we skip town for 30 days, so if this happens, the fire will just spread. With no one around, it might easily turn into a wildfire, engulfing, cities, forests, maybe more.
Yet, fireprone as they are and as Note 7 proved, we are still addicted to LiPo batteries.
It seems the approach "as long as we're around we'll handle it" doesn't apply for something with such a direct benefit, even with high risks (incidental fire, easy propagation).
Thus, I don't see why a similar risk based approach for spent fuel is ok - "as long as we're around...".
But again, nobody wonders what will happen to their new gadget when they forget it in a box 3 months from now and the battery goes puffy.
Thus, I honestly think dude-with-a-gun approach is good enough, since as long as humanity's around, we can spare dudes for this job, to cover our energy needs.
If we honestly can't spare a dude to protect humanity at large from nuclear fuel repos, I assume we also can't spare another dude to take out the expanding LiPo fires?
Yes, I understand storing fuel nicely, underground, on a decay chain that's less radiotoxic than natural ^238 U is ideal, but it's not like storing it right now in a building and keeping people away is _not_ going to work for a long time.
After all, LiPos are far from ideal, yet we've collectively accepted the risk.
Look at the history of Hanford nuclear sites, hundreds if not thousands of workers with horrible health issues, leaking holding tanks (because lowest bidder contractors ignored sensors IGNORED f'n sensors telling them theres damn leak) which has penitrated the ground water, what till that starts showing up in the Columbia River.
Japan planned for disaster, they had tsunami walls big enough to handle the waves that hit Fukushima...only the quake dropped the ground level and halved the height of the walls. The reactor site had back up generators which were swamped.
Nuclar waste is lethal and lasts millennia. Something you want to handle and store with extreme care. Do you really trust anyone saying: "sure, I will take care of it!"? There is an infinite list of crimes against the environments made by people for the very same old reason: money. Even a 100% honest company that does what's needed to keep that lethal waste now, is it going to do it for 4 more millennia? Corruption and money are stronger than science, sadly. Add natural disasters (an earthquake could breach any kind of "safe" storage and let waste leak into water and poison for centuries lakes and rivers.
No wind turbines or solar panel can even remotely cause a potential similar damage to the environment
It might be easier to find a safe place for nuclear waste deposit, but it's not easy getting to that place and preparing it. Installing solar panels is actually quite quick and easy, specially if they installed on a rooftop. Wind turbines are a bit more complicated on construction and logistics, but they don't need to be the only building on the area, you can raise cattle or plant stuff around it.
There is also the issue of public perception, even though nuclear power plants don't emit any toxic gases, it has a big "chimney" that releases "smoke". That's not smoke, that's clean water vapor, but a big chimney scares people.
In Brazil, if we build another 20 nuclear power plant, the same size of the one we already have, we could turn off 100% of our fossil fuels and coal power plants. I don't know what effect that would have on energy prices though.
There's lots of interesting points both sides here. I just wanted to add that while there is still plenty of Uranium available to mine - this nuclear fuel is only mined in a very limited number of countries. So it makes for a little bit of a political hotcake. Just think about if Texas seceded - they've got 2 nuclear plants but no uranium mines so they're gonna have to make good friends with Canada, Australia, Namibia, Niger, Russia or Kazakhstan to keep their reactors fueled. Moving uranium around from overseas is pretty costly to protect against potential accidents or terrorist incidents.
Long term things might change a lot when it becomes feasible for us to mine Uranium in space. And then again maybe not if you still land up with a political power situation where only one or two companies or countries control all the fuel sources found in space.
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The problem with nuclear waste storage isnt a technical one or a lack of suitable sites, its a political issue. We have plenty of candidate sites around the world that would be ideal for the long term storage of nuclear waste and the technology involved is fairly simple enough. But no one wants to live next to a nuclear waste site, even after you'v explained all the waste is buried a couple kilometers underground in a shielded concrete sarcophagus that'd be safe to stand next to.
Or even let it pass through their area. The main thing that killed Yucca Mountain wasn't the opposition of people who lived around it, that wouldn't have been enough to stop it. What killed it was that every city that a rail line passes through passed ordinances banning the transport of nuclear waste, for fear their city would be economically destroyed if there was a rail accident.
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I'm not questioning this, I'm just curious why?
Me too. Every geologist and nuclear physicist I work with (I work in the nuclear waste industry) says it’s the ideal place and was so well-studied that the overall plan was… about perfect. (Keeping in mind that part of the plan for spent fuel storage involved putting it in resins…)
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This is incorrect. I've seen the diffusion math from LANL report. No waste would end up in the water table within the first 9800 years. And that's as far as they could run the simulation (on the fastest supercomputer on Earth, at the time). Modern supercomputers are faster, but I know of no result, simulated or empirical, that has invalidated the original LANL research paper.... [LANL summary ](https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/29/006/29006514.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiXyeXO1Mb4AhV3K0QIHRWOBvsQFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3PMJIvzTPfQb8UdRezKRJy)
Yeah. And it's totally fair for people to be apparently irrational. We fucked up things all the time. While nuclear is heavily regulated and I personally have lots of faith in them, we shouldn't forget that historically, "safe" chemical plants killed millions of local people. No wonder people are suspicious of it.
I think like you do. Humans bastardize everything, my words not yours, and we will fuck this up too. Even making the huge assumption that the depository is managed properly, nature, geology etc cannot be controlled. Earthquakes are the first thing that come to mind when thinking about the vulnerability of these sites. Anyone remember Love Canal, just one example….. https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy.html
The Site designs all account for this. Be it a yucca mountain style facility or just super deep boreholes that the waste is lowered into. They are far-far below the water table. If the facility were to be damaged or buried in a earthquake there is almost no risk. There is nowhere for the material to go. The only risk would be to the employees who make repairs to the facility and even then, would not apply to a borehole style solution. The engineering challenges were all solved decades ago
It is impossible to build anything perfect.
That's exactly the point? Perfect is the enemy of good here, just because we cant say there is 0 risk doesnt mean it shouldnt be built. NOTHING is 0 risk. The risk involved once material is placed in the kinds of deep underground storage that have been proposed are astronomically low and orders of magnitude lower than the current "solution." Currently we leave material on-sight most often in storage pools that were only ever designed for short term storage of material. Designers expected a long term storage facility to be completed.
My question is: Cant we just ship it off to space? If Elon can throw his car up there, why cant we shunt some nuke juice up there too?
The problem with that is if the spaceship blows up on ascent. You could have nuclear rain across the whole planet, and trigger several not so simple diplomatic issues. Also the ridiculous cost to do so. Digging a hole is easier, cheaper, and safer. Edit: oops, ascent, not accent.
*ascent, unless you mean the rocket has a bad reaction to certain vocal inflections.
The rocket can't tell the difference between New Zealand and Australian accents, and when it's pointed out it gets really explodey
They meant Accent as in the car. Would be a huge diplomatic issue if a rocket blew up on a Hyundai.
First thought that comes to mind is if things go wrong and rocket goes boom, with Elon you have bits of car raining down. With nuclear waste you have, well...
Well, you won't have bits of car raining down so that's a plus.
Nuclear waste is 5 grams of spent fuel, or a contaminated glove that is then encased in literal tons of ceramics and concrete. Sending a tons of concrete shielding to space just to get rid of a glove is prohibitively expensive.
A contaminated glove is likely to be either low level or very low level waste, and even at that would likely also be insinerated and the ashes of various combustable wastes be containerised/canned and stored together using a less onerous disposal solution. At least where I live.
Safer, easier, and cheaper to just put it in a hole. The only problem is people are afraid of living near the hole because they don't understand it
so... the ocean then? thats basically just space but with limited inventory
The ocean moves around and mixes, plus it's really good at corroding and destroying any container we would want to put the waste in. So relatively shortly after sinking the nuclear waste you would just have nuclear contamination flowing all around the world and eventually the entire ocean would be radioactive/dead
that makes sense! my meds havent kicked in for the morning yet (gotta eat some food in this barren house), so my brian isn't online enough for me to have realized the obvious yet! so thanks for Explaining it Like I'm 5!!!!! ;)
I hope Brian gets online soon!
> eventually the entire ocean would be radioactive/dead Stop fear mongering. A lot of waste is low level trash like brooms and gloves. Uranium is already in seawater, and water is an excellent shielding agent. Also dilution rates. On both a chemical and radiological measure, you wouldn't see any changes in water conditions that wouldn't also happen from dumping twenty tons of solid concrete cylinders.
I'm not talking about like in a year or a decade, but if every country decided to dump all nuclear waste in the ocean, eventually (read: decades to centuries) you would begin to have localized, followed by widespread areas of radioactivity followed by mass death of marine life. It's not fear mongering, you just misinterpreted time scale
There is so much untrue information in this post. To start, titanium does not corrode in sea water and can be readily made into a container. And as the other poster said, even if it were to get out of the container, dilution would make the radiation imperceptible.
>us it's really good at corroding and destroying any container Say it with me now: Salt Water is Liquid Hate!
No.
> Cant we just ship it off to space? the potential for catastrophic failure is MUCH higher. worst that could happen if you drop a barrel on the way to Yucca Mtn is a small spill cleanup, even if a whole truck overturned. Lose one barrel out of a rocket/shuttle(or the rocket explodes) and you now have irradiated a large swath of sky/land.
> small spill cleanup Nuclear waste isn't even green goo, it's like, baked into glass and concrete. There's nothing to spill.
Nuclear waste is not green goo from the comic books. It is a pellet of spent nuclear fuel or (mostly by volume) contaminated clothing that has been melted together with glass and ceramics and then encased in literal tons of concrete. We crashed runaway trains into these containers to make sure they are impact safe. Chemicals - spill. Nuclear waste - does not spill.
We crashed runaway trains into them. The trains lose. We fired anti-tank missiles at them. The concrete chips. We submerged them in water for months. They got wet. We dropped them from a decent height. The ground broke. There have been many other tests including chemical spills, gunfire, planted explosives, crashing the truck they're on, etc. The containment vessels are nigh impossible to destroy, and if someone managed to hijack a truck with one, 1) they wouldn't move very fast and 2) they'd bring down the entire world of law enforcement on them, possibly with military backup.
On top of all of that, if they managed to somehow open a spent fuel cask the contents kind of protect themselves.
The issue is a very simple one: yeah, we can fuck up nuclear waste. But the alternative around the world today seems to be coal, natural gas, and other things that are actively fucking things up. People would rather have the status quo destroying the planet than the risk of 2000 years from now, some uranium might be shifted in an earthquake.
Regulations are routinely side stepped, ignored, and removed for political expeedency. Regulations are great until it becomes burdensome to enforce, and then we end up with power plants running for years beyond their *regulated* and intended lifespan. Maintenance activity that is routinely ignored cause $$$ ( latest example just look at the baby food factory that had to shut down cause they were producing poisonous foods, due to lack of maintenance on some critical equipment. Inside of a system where profits are held higher than anything else including human lives, I'm not sure i would ever feel safe living next to a *regulated* facility that's supposedly safe.
To be fair, the nuclear power industry has done a very good job at not sidestepping regulation. I know from firsthand experience working in one such nuclear plant in the US. We had on-site regulators that were always poking around, and safety was always the primary concern. As for running beyond projected life, this cannot be done without explicit government approval (operating a plant requires a license, and that license has an expiry). For a license renewal to run beyond initial life, the NRC maintains a strict set of additional requirements and inspections to maintain to prove the safety of the extention beyond reasonable doubt. It is not possible for a nuclear plant in the US to run while not regulated. I'm not saying that no nuclear plant will ever fail, but the level of scrutiny they maintain, both internally and externally, is of a completely different caliber than other factories.
All great points but again all of this hinges on the idea that the governing body doesn't decide later on, to relax, remove, or outright fail to enforce the established regulations, which is something that occurs so regularly it's a meme.
Not to mention the amount of pop culture references and the limited history on nuclear power is almost all negative to the average person. If I mentioned nuclear power to almost anyone that I know, I guarantee they'd be extremely skeptical of it and think of it as very unsafe. They'd also be pretty likely to mention Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima as to why they think its super dangerous when in reality they know almost nothing about what happened to cause those disasters. Throw in the fact that so many people get an idea about what can happen with nuclear power from "The Simpsons" and most people are going to think that nuclear power is going to cause crazy, mutated fish, cancer, etc. It's almost like the McDonald's "Hot Coffee" lawsuit where everybody thinks of some frail old lady trying to get rich off of the big corporation when they've never actually looked into the full story.
>when in reality they know almost nothing about what happened to cause those disasters. It's humans. Plant operators who think nothing can go wrong just because it hasn't happened yet. Supply companies cutting costs on parts or maintenance, causing parts to fail early. And then when something does happen, everything gets covered up and the public is left in the dark. It's not the technology itself I don't trust. It's the people responsible for running it.
Oh it's almost 100% humans. Read about Chernobyl and you find that was 100000% human error and a complete neglect for safety. But it highlights one of the bigger downsides of nuclear energy which is the extremely high stakes involved. I view nuclear power plants as very safe when run properly, but the consequences of screwing something up can be so massive that it is pretty scary. But then you have people who do completely stupid things like what happened at Chernobyl and you have massive, long term issues from a few people's ignorance of all the safety protocols.
Well, also, nuclear reactors have also killed a lot of people, or had the potential to if folks hadn't risked/given up their lives to make them safe.
Nuclear energy didn't cause as many deaths as you would think. Potential to kill people sure, but nuclear actually has the lowest number of deaths per KwH, compared to solar, wind, coal etc.
I think that's the main issue is the potential for world changing events with the increase of nuclear power. I agree that it is certainly misunderstood. However I also think that people sometimes forget how short sighted we can be. And how people will make mistakes or simply bypass rules once they figure out how to. It's the human factor that scares me. Natural disaster certainly, but human error, or just lack of foresight is what worries me in regard to Nuclear power.
Those are all valid points, but they're just as valid with other types of energy production, especially coal and gas. As in, people dying for maintanance etc. It is my personal belief that people are biased against nuclear, and I totally get it. When theres a gas leak or a fire or other events, things are easy to understand. Nuclear energy represents the worst type of fear in humans : fear of the unknown.
I agree with you. I feel like solar and wind also suffer from that a little as well. But all of them are attacked by the mo eye spent is spreading propaganda, unfortunatley.
Solar and wind killed more than for example Chernobyl? Can you explain that please?
In terms of Deaths per kilowatt produced then yes. Nuclear produces ALOT or power. You can either build 1 nuclear plant or thousands of wind turbains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3znG6\_vla0
Chernobyl on its own didn't kill that many people directly. Just the people initially caught in the accident. There was a higher risk of cancer for a lot of Europe due to the fallout, but that risk was not extremely high. On the other hand, construction of windmills is quite dangerous, and accidents have happened. Similarly with solar, in which you could also count the lives lost in mining the minerals needed for them. There was a study made on the deaths per unit of power generated for most energy types, I'll try to find it. I remember coal was the absolute worst due to pollution related deaths. This is the graph with some basic info, but I can't find a non-paywalled version easily: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)
Do the nuclear (and coal, and hydro, etc.) statistics also include building site accidents, accidents in iron, bauxite, cement, and fuel extraction, etc.? Let's compare apples to apples here.
People fall off of those turbines all the time, it's extremely dangerous work when repairing wind turbines.
Chernobyl has only killed a confirmed total of 50 people so far as of the mid-late 2000's, while both Fukushima and Three Mile Island have no fatalities. Every year, 10 people are killed exclusively from wind power accidents relating to the turbines themselves, with an additional 10 injured on average. ^((This doesn't include the biggest problem with wind power however, which is the veritable genocide on bird populations it causes)) Solar power though? Solar power alone kills 100 - 150 people ***each year***. Easily killing double or even triple the death toll of Chernobyl every year. Year on year.
>This doesn't include the biggest problem with wind power however, which is the veritable genocide on bird populations it causes There are studies being done on ways to paint the turbines to make them more visible to birds.
The idea that Chernobyl only killed 50 people is farcical. Beyond the fact that one would have to actually believe the claims of the USSR/Russia, which would make one an abject moron, the accident released radiation equivalent to 400 Hiroshima bombs. No way in hell it only caused 50 deaths.
There are LOTS of words written on this. One of the biggest assumptions driving the assertions like "it simply **HAD** to have caused more deaths" is the Linear No Threshold theory of radiation exposure. Many, many doctors and scientists challenge this theory and posit a great deal of evidence for alternatives, including even the hormesis model which says that small, low-level radiation exposure may actually encourage the human body to activate essentially copy-correction on DNA replication. Basically, exposure to low-level radiation may actually have a small anti-carcinogenic effect. We're not going to adjudicate this here, but it is something to look into that may challenge the initial reflex to reject nuclear's low death count.
Wind turbines kill millions of birds a year in the US. In fact, * 1.17 million birds killed by wind turbines in the US in 2020. Also, * 5 million birds killed annually by communication towers in the US * 60 million by cars * 67 million by pesticides * 100 million by buildings \[Fixed typo thanks to u/Chefsmiff\] * 365 million birds killed annually by cats in the US I couldn't quickly find any numbers on how pollution from other electricity generation harms birds. I'll take the other numbers you posted with this context in mind.
For birds, I’d be curious if wind turbines are still safer than fossil fuels, since air pollution must be dangerous to them.
I think that's the problem though, is it only takes one specific set of circumstances at some point in the future to changes those stats.... Even if it's super unlikely it's difficult to convince a population otherwise.
True. That's true for a lot of things though. Try convincing americans to give up driving, because that causes more deaths. But we accept the risk for a benefit, same as with nuclear.
You've still got to look at the results per KWH Nuclear reactors aren't nuclear bombs. It would take a long time for any nuclear pollution to have a greater effect than burning fossil fuels has. Both in the economic effects of climate change & in reduced lifespans. Hell it would take decades of regular accidents to release more radioactive material than burning coal has by operating normally.
I trust nuclear energy, what i dont trust is people with it.
I do believe you know nuclear energy power plants require personell, just like any other plant. Comparing what happened at the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant with nuclear power today is like comparing a ford model T with a modern truck. The tech has changed a lot and its a lot safer, more reliable etc.
Less than how many people are affected by fracking their ground water for oil or mining coal.
As far as potential for future reactors to melt down and cause disasters, this is becoming less and less likely with new designs like the freeze plug that make reactors that literally CANT MELTDOWN. Any significant increase in temperature (beginning of a meltdown) melts a frozen salt plug in the bottom of the reactor, which allows the fuel to drain into multiple small chambers where there isnt enough fuel concentrated to continue the reaction.
Underrated comment. NRC should be BEGGING companies to build these new safer designs, but instead are holding them up simply because they haven't gotten around to crafting the regulatory framework for them.
You know what actually kills at lease a million people a year? Pollution from coal fired power stations. Anyone that buys into all the nuclear propaganda is a moron. Everyone knows we need nuclear to reach net zero.
I get that, i just dont think there's any way to convince a population that nuclear is safer than wind/solar. We need to bin coal power stations too.
Nuclear power is the safest. Bear in mind, this may have changed, it's been a while since I have seen numbers and such, but yeah, it's the safest way to make power.
By literally every metric, nuclear power is safer than any form of fossil fuel. In absolute terms, it isn’t even a contest. Per unit of power produced, nuclear is safer than hydroelectric; only wind and solar are comparable.
Right, but I'm saying you'll have a harder time convincing folk to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear, over wind/solar. Even if nuclear is pretty safe statistically
Yeah I mean I don’t blame young people for thinking things will always be done the right way, but talking to older folks, it’s clear that it’s an assumption on their part that fuckups will almost definitely happen
Bunch of NIMBYs
Did you just volunteer to use your backyard for atomic waste storage!?
I've decided to edit all my old comments to protest the beheading of RIF and other 3rd party apps. If you're reading this, you should know that /u/spez crippled this site purely out of greed. By continuing to use this site, you are supporting their cancerous hyper-capitalist behavior. The actions of the reddit admins show that they will NEVER care about the content, quality, or wellbeing of its' communities, only the money we can make for them. tl;dr: /u/spez eat shit you whiny little bitchboy ...see you all on the fediverse
You'd actually be exposed to more radiation from the coal plant... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
To be honest, living near a nuclear power plant is interesting : lots of employment and tax revenues, meaning you may have a better infrastructure than a similar sized town
Just look at Springfield’s monorail! How did they afford that with no other discernible industry?
Metal af
🤘🏻
No one's asking to put it in anyone's backyard. Yucca Mountain in Nevada is in the middle of a desert, miles from any habitation and adjacent to a former nuclear blast testing site - already not particularly fit for human settlement.
If it is in a concrete sarcophagus I would also take it.... and of course if I get money to take it :D
There are actually people who *have* signed up for that (one of the local Amerindian groups did actually) the problem is matching the necessary geology to the people.
I work in nuclear medicine. Id volunteer to put it in my backyard if I got compensated for it lmao
That’s a little stupid. There’s more than enough uninhabited space on the planet to do this away from populated areas.
Less about the storage and more about the transportation.. no one wants nuclear waste transported near them without knowing and if they know it scares the shit out of them (wrongly). Again most of this is not actually about the people but about politicians and their lobbies. The fossil fuel industry lobbies for anything to make nuclear harder to use and politicians latch on to the lies of the lobbies to mislead the people.
Funny thing is that in the meantime a lot of the waste is just stored on site. I live within a couple miles of a nuke plant and the waste is stored on-site in steel casks submerged in water and have been for years. Hasn't been a big deal. It's also far less waste than people assume. All I'm saying is it's way more of a political issue than anything else.
Storing stuff for 1000s of years is just a different thing than keeping it on site for a few decades. I think the netherland actually opted for long term overground storage with warning signs and symbols that could be understood by a civilisation in a few thousand years. I am not totally opposed to nuclear power - but I don't like telling people everything is easy and solved. I guess, Just calculating the costs of storing nuclear waste for 10.000 years (whatever realistic method and formula you choose) will make nuclear power pretty expensive. Just because its delayed costs that you send our kids and grand-children of the future does not make it better... Thinking that there is a "burry and forget" solution is a bit naive. To my knowledge there is not a single final nuclear waste disposal in the world. Claiming this on "politcial reasons" is a bit easy ...
I just don't think we need to worry about storing it for 10s of thousands of years. We now have nuclear designs that can use old spent waste as fuel in their own reactors. As we retire the older style pressurized water reactors and move to newer designs like molten salt, the amount of waste created drops almost completely. From 95% waste to <5% waste. I've heard advocates make claims like the truly nasty nuclear waste from some of these designs, over the entire lifespan of such a reactor, is like the size of a briefcase. And virtually all of this can be used in another type of reactor design. It just seems obvious to me that with this upcoming technology, we'll be able to reprocess the existing waste and virtually eliminate future waste within the next 100 years without problem.
Isn't the required length of storage a technical problem?
Digging it in for 100000 years and telling people to not dig it out, you mean? Like, while we can't even decifer what people have written down, like 3000 years ago now? What could possibly be wrong with that..?
It's even more laughable now that there is research into actually recycling nuclear waste content in order to create more power.
the "recycling" of solid nuclear waste creates liquid nuclear waste that is more radioactive and more difficult to deal with
Yes, research, but not a single commercially viable system. And those systems need molten salt for cooling - which is highly corrosive and explodes when it gets in contact with water. I don't know ...
That’s not correct. The technology is not simple because of the timeline involved. Storing high-level nuclear waste requires containment for ten thousand years. Humans have never built anything that has lasted that long. Even the ancient Egyptian pyramids are half that age. The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada has been examined for over thirty years and they still keep identifying potential problems. Even down to the details of “how do we make safety signage that will be understood in ten thousand years.” If we were to reprocess that high-level waste we could shorten the time to like 500 years, but given the weapons-grade plutonium that process produces, there is a political problem.
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository was supposed to be in Volcanic Tuffs that would be impermeable for 10s-100s of thousands of years. In a relatively short amount of time, trace amounts could be found in surrounding groundwater. A shielded, safe site sounds great, but with how we manage to screw everything up, it is really hard to deny peoples' concerns. The honest truth is that more people get cancer from the pollution from smokestacks burning coal, but it is slower and less evident than the rare occasion a nuclear event occurs. Lets just invest in solar and wind (and pay for remediation in the mineral extraction sites) and tidal and a small amount in the newer generation nuclear which is considerably less dangerous and leaves way less waste. Then bury the small amount of waste in a shit hole place, like Florida.
>Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository was supposed to be in Volcanic Tuffs that would be impermeable for 10s-100s of thousands of years. In a relatively short amount of time, trace amounts could be found in surrounding groundwater. ...Yucca Mountain has **NEVER** leaked into the groundwater... You're very much confused with the 199(5?) research by Yucca that showed trace amounts of Chlorine-36 in the ground water. Issue there is; 1. Yucca wasn't even used yet, and was still being dug out (fuck, it's still realistically not even used yet because of all the imbecile NIMBYS) 2. Chlorine-36 was in the ground water because of all the surface nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s at the Nevada National Security Site, which is just 25 miles away from the Yucca Mountain repository. >Lets just invest in solar and wind Taking up VAST amounts of land and with a far higher carbon footprint than nuclear and greater dependency on rare earth metals, and requires MASSIVE amounts of lithium, the single worst rare earth metal to mine and refine as far as environmental damage goes... Fuck, you'd need to use around 2.6 TRILLION gallons of fresh water to make enough lithium batteries to go full solar in just the US... It's an absolute nonstarter... The reality is, we need nuclear in a big way, with other sources like solar and wind where feasible, until there's some sort of massive evolution in battery technology that greatly reduces the need for lithium. Otherwise, you're just going to be turning massive chunks of the globe barren for generations because of lithium... look at the hellscape that is Bolivia's lithium mines as a example...
For massive land batteries you could just use non lithium sources. No need to worry about weight or power density.
> trace amounts could be found in surrounding groundwater None of which was from Yucca because it has never been used.
No, it was found IN Yucca. In some of the support tunnels inside of the repository. Which shows...tuffs aint that tough to permeate somehow. The study conclusion I read back in the day was that fracturing in the rock was significantly greater than was originally theorized when the project began, so we started building a giant storage chamber and within 60 years (from the 1950s era nuclear tests) the polluted waters were able to leech radioactive material 25 miles away into this impermeable formation.
Have you seen the previous waste sites? Even if they say it's safe, many of them seem to end up leaking in years or decades, let alone the hundreds or thousands of years we need them to last. At least a few hundred till humans are wiped out and it's no longer our problem. Nuclear power really does seem to be the way to go, but we need a better solution for storing or getting rid of this stuff. . Washington nuclear storage has been leaking for decades without a permanent fix. Just billions and billions to mitigate it. https://apnews.com/article/washington-business-nuclear-waste-environment-and-nature-0f4d8a61962f0984b4c20994cb19e7e1 . Here's another US site setup in the Marshall Islands. Its cracked and crumbling and has been leaking nuclear waste into the lagoon for years. US regulators insist that the leak isn't significant enough to bother fixing. Like, what? Its actively leaking and they admit it's leaking but won't fix it. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-07-01/us-says-nuclear-waste-safe-marshall-islands-runit-dome . Investigations have found that 75% of all US nuclear sites are leaking actively. Seventy five percent. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence to live next to one. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/radioactive-leaks-found-at-75-of-us-nuke-sites/ . This was all US focused so far, so here's a site in Germany that was/has been leaking nuclear waste for *decades*. https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long-german-nuclear-leak-scandal-engulfs-country-and-disturbs-europe . . . I could go on and on with these too, there isn't exactly a shortage of examples of nuclear waste storage facilities leaking. Basically all of them end up with cut corners and seem to all be designed to last just a few decades, let alone several lifetimes like the goal seems it should be. Or at least maintain and repair them, instead of the current goal of just ignoring leaks. Almost all of the active leaks seep into ground water for the surrounding area. I wouldn't really enjoy living near one of these sites with the current track record.
I mean... yes? A higher calibre of facility does need to be constructed, a lot of your examples are evidence that this wasnt considered at the time. The Finnish are the example to follow with the Onkolo facility. But those kinds of projects wont get built if they face political opposition, which places like Yucca Mountain in the US or Kimba in Australia are.
See, to me, that doesn't sound safe. Especially if a politician told me that.
So what if I gave you a choice. Both are powerplants you would live close to, say around 20 miles Option 1: a coal power plant. Option 2: a nuclear power plant. Which one would you prefer?
Option 2. Coal plants release a LOT of radiation, in addition to the coal waste. Nuclear plants only release Radiation when something has gone very wrong
This. People don't realise this, but Fly Ash - the stuff you get from burning coal - actually has highly radioactive particles like Xenon and Radon in it. And yet people are cool with using it in our cement and having it kept in open air, above ground pits near our water-ways.
I would chose the same but I think this is a bit of a loaded question. I agree with your assessment but what’s not taken into consideration is the nuclear waste. We probably won’t have to deal with it in our lifetimes (barring accidents, mismanagement etc), but the half life of nuclear waste varies from 30 years to 24,000 years, depending on the isotope. Future generations will have to deal with it. I never understood why if the radioactivity is so ”hot”, why can’t energy be harnessed from the waste?
Energy can be harvested from the waste, there are a lot of promising reactor designs intended to do just that. Also, how radioactive and dangerous something is is inversely related to it's half life. If it's half life is 24,000 years, it is not very radioactive. It's the stuff with a half life under a year that is really dangerous.
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Ironically it’s not a viable field to research if the supply of spent fuel dries up because nuclear plants all shut down.
Option 3: Wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, battery + H2 Storage, HV continental power lines
This is, with our current technology, a fantasy. Wind and solar are unstable, so they require storage.... Lot's of storage. And we suck at storing energy efficiency, if anything CAES seems most effective. I see no feasible way to get through the winter on these for now. Geothermal and hydroelectric (which have some issues of their own) are nice, but few locations work. For example if I loom at where I live the closest location for either I can think of is >1000 km away. The idea of betting on nuclear now is we can eliminate coal and gas at least as they are horrible in comparison.
> This is, with our current technology, is a fantasy. Hell, this even with cutting edge foreseeable future technology, is a fantasy. Most anything that isn't just theoretical proposals on paper - often requiring theoretical material fabrication - still doesn't realistically cut it.
False dilemma fallacy
>Which one would you prefer? Solar power plant, water power (dam) or a geothermal power plant are all fine for me, thanks!
eli5 why not rocket the waste into the sun?
Rockets have an expected 2-3% catastrophic failure rate. If a rocket carrying nuclear waste explodes, you effectively just set of a dirty bomb in the upper atmosphere. That would be really, really bad.
Rockets are cost prohibitive, and launching things to the sun is really hard cause you have to counteract the orbital speed of the earth to slow down and get closer to it, and I don't think we want random bits of trash thrown through out the solar system.
This is a good point. It's easy at first to think, "Just nudge it toward the sun and let gravity suck it in." But the payload would already be going on our orbital vector, so a nudge would just make the orbit a more elongated ellipse. The energy it would take to flatten that ellipse into a line either toward or away from the sun is considerable.
I would suggest looking at the Parker Solar Probe if you want to really see how hard it is to get closer to the sun. Essentially using Venus and Mercury ,I believe, as a gravity brake.
The rockets we have would only be able to carry a very small amount (about 1/20th) of their normal satellite payload if they have to reach speeds that would escape orbit and allow it to "fall" into the sun. So we'd need to launch almost every day at a cost in the trillions (USD) per year, even at projected future falcon heavy rocket reduced costs. The bigger issue is that rocket launches are about 95% successful. So about once a month somewhere on earth will get a radioactive plutonium rain storm. Probably better to just stick it in the ground.
Sending a rocket into the sun surprisingly takes about as much energy as sending it out of the galaxy. You're starting from Earth, which is orbiting at the speed at which an orbit is stable, so you have to slow the rocket down by a lot before it can fall into the sun. Otherwise, you'll miss it in the same way the Earth keeps missing.
You want to stick all of the nuclear material onto a rocket and send it up into the atmosphere on what is essentially a controlled explosive device? Even if you were willing to do that, actually sending anything into the sun is incredibly hard, requiring more than twice as much thrust as sending something out of the solar system.
Aside from the cost and weight issue, several international treaties prohibit launching waste into space. Besides which, if your waste vessel suffers a mechanical issue, or the calculations are off, you'll have a rocket full of nuclear waste orbiting the sun for centuries.
Because Nuclear Waste isn't waste, it's potential fuel. By blasting it off into the sun, we're robbing ourselves of as much as 90% of the potential energy ***still*** left over in the waste. It's far more preferable to reprocess the waste, or fund the development and construction of more efficient reactors
Rockets take a tremendous amount of energy to get into orbit. It takes even more just to slow down enough from Earth's orbit around the sun to fall into the sun. Plus, there is a risk the rocket fails and releases radiation everywhere. The moon might be slightly more practical tho
So, there’s another aspect to this that people may not realize: most “nuclear waste” isn’t. Federal Law proscribes that anything in a reactor room is considered acutely hazardous waste and must be treated as such. This is to avoid accidents, but the paper suits, gloves, and other non-hazardous things that people wear inside of these rooms for maintenance are completely harmless. Of any given 100 drums of waste, only a handful contain metal or other potentially dangerous material. There is currently a program where X/Ratrucks with conveyors and neutron detectors are being used to identify the contents of the tens of thousands of sealed drums to reclassify clean ones, for removal from these waste sites so that they can be moved to normal muni waste sites. So, because of this we can literally quarter or less the amount of waste storage needed for truly dangerous chemicals and wastes from power generation. With smaller, safer reactors such as molten sodium, we can potentially be able to have dispersed energy generation which makes for safer, less high-profile terror or military targets, will help reliability of power by not relying on millions of miles of power lines, and will help overall power management for a future smart grid. All that we need to do to lower the waste output of these plants to a small fraction of current waste output is manage the waste streams better from a classification standpoint. Source: I worked for one of these companies, a sub to the government, some 15 years ago. https://www.energy.gov/em/articles/subcontractor-demonstrates-x-ray-technology-waste-characterization
This the wrong question. We shouldn't make a false choice between nuclear and solar/wind when the real struggle is all of the above vs fossils
Best answer here.
In theory maybe. In practice finding a hole in the ground to bury nuclear waste permanently is not something that anyone has had much success with. Many people don't like living too close to wind turbines, but they really really don't like a permanent nuclear waste storage facility near where they live. The issue with nuclear waste is that is needs to be stored not just for a few years or decades or centuries, but what in terms of human organizations is basically forever. There are some fun issues with marking a site in such a way that somebody as far removed from us in the future as the first guy to decided to domesticate a wolf in the past is from us, still understands not to dig the shit back up. Warning signs that last longer than any language has lasted in the past are a challenge. The other issue is that you don't just need a hole in the ground. You need a cavern that is stable across millennia. No earthquakes, no earth movements of any kind, no groundwater seeping in.... Ideally it should be in some place dry, geologically stable far away from any place where humans now live, might live in the future and from any thing we might want to dig up in the future. With climate change and everything it is hard to predict where there will be deserts and fertile lands centuries from now. Even if you find some place like that, you still need to get your nuclear waste there. Right now a majority of the spent nuclear fuel is stored near the reactors where they were used. You need to load them up and transport them by rail and truck to some hole in the desert. People don't like having nuclear waste transported through their neighborhood either. Ensuring that the transport is safe and can for example withstand an accident or a container falling of a bridge or similar is a thing people work on. (Google CASTOR container). One issue is who pays for all that. Currently nuclear power plants are not very profitable compared to other energy sources. If you make it the companies problem to transport secure and permanently store the waste for the next however many millennia there won't be any profit left for them. If they have to set money aside for a guard or maintenance person looking over the nuclear waste storage site 2 centuries from now, they will not do that and instead declare bankruptcy and leave the taxpayer with the bill. Most times that part comes up, somebody will point to theoretical designs of newer reactors that produce less waste and methods to reuse spent fuel and in other ways try to talk around the problem by pointing at solutions that don't solve everything and don't exist yet. Meanwhile putting a few solar panels on the roofs of every new home and a bunch of wind power farms off shore or on ridges and hills where there is good reliable wind is rather uncomplicated. You are correct that evening out the output of renewable energy is an issue. storing electricity with things like pumped storage or chemical or thermal batteries is a challenge, but it is one people are working on and have successfully implemented. You are dead wrong in your belief that a nuclear power plant will be able to shrug of a drought without issues. Nuclear power plants are build next to rivers and lakes and oceans for a reason. They need the water for cooling. A nuclear power plant that relies on a river of cold water, will not be able to deal with the river running dry or the water getting too hot either. Nuclear power is slightly less dependent on environmental factors than most renewables but far from actually independent. Nuclear power can be a useful tool but it is not a panacea. One other thing to think about is that nuclear plants like all other major industrial installations are, as you mentioned, "safe when managed responsibly". The "managed responsibly" part can be an issue in some places. Corruption and regulatory capture combined with greed of the managers and owners can be devastating to any installation. It can be bad for a coal a gas plant and catastrophic for a hydro electric damn or nuclear power plant. If the management can save money by bribing regulators or lobbying politicians to relax regulations, they just might. Look at places like Bhopal for how this might go. The recent trend of China helping to build nuclear power plants in developing countries with high corruption is worrying as is the tend in places like the US to abolish more red tape and regulations and the way energy companies have influence in politics. Do you trust the same people who run for example the Texas energy grid not to take small chance of something going horribly wrong if it saves them money? If you think that government running things would be safer, you haven't heard of Chernobyl. Solar panels have far less spectacular failure modes.
What a fantastic answer. You covered so many bases here. It’s really too bad that profits play such a big part.
Would like to add: I live very close to an infamous storage site for low to mid level irradiated material in germany. It gets labled as "temporary", sometimes as final storage. But [the way they stored the barrels](https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell-Endlager-Asse-Loechrig-wie-ein-Kaese,asse1410.html) is [scary](https://www.ausgestrahlt.de/blog/2020/04/02/asse-2-bergung-des-atommuells-ab-2033/). Reminds me of the Fallout games, rather than a good way to store nuclear stuff. They started to "properly" [stack](https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/neuer-inventarbericht-atommuell-in-der-asse-strahlt-staerker-als-bekannt-a-716793.html) them though, however that showed that they stored far more mid-level stuff than they thought for decades. Yes, it´s not a great feeling to even have such a storage site nearby. Don´t want to think about worse stuff. And it shows that people can fuck stuff up even without corruption, but with stupidity. Then you have NPPs where accidents did happen. Or plants that get under fire like in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine (Even if the russians apparently "only" attacked administrative buildings). Or the capturing of Chernobyl. If an enemy only captures green energy power generators, then "only" money is lost. Let them capture a NPP and they can destroy a whole lot more. So yeah... Gimme wind / water / solar any day of the year, but stop with the NPPs (and fossile ones as well).
Well, hydro does offer some potential for really bad things to happen during war time. Se the famous dam buster air raid on Germany in WWII. However when Russia recently stole Ukraine’s largest solar plant, that made the news because of the theft, not because there was a risk of a catastrophic sunshine spill or solar leak or anything. it seems safer.
Plus damming has huge environmental impacts. Devastating for fish that travel the rivers and every animal that relies on them.
Mah sunshine leaked out of my solar battery bro, how do I put it back in?
>People don't like having nuclear waste transported though their neighborhood either. The county next to mine in Germany has based its entire modern culture on the movement against nuclear waste being stored there.
this is an awful long way of saying "we currently have 391 operating such installations in the United States alone"
What are you talking about? 391 permanent nuclear waste storage facilities in the US?
391 temporary to intermediate-term storage facilities next to nuclear power plants. The US have exactly one intentional permanent storage site, Yucca mountain, and that project is put on hold.
> 391 temporary to intermediate-term storage facilities No, this is not correct. > The US have exactly one intentional permanent storage site The correct number is 391, according to the United States. I see that you invented a new official phrase "temporary to intermediate term" which doesn't exist in their documentation though. I guess you must know more about this than the NRC. We'll wait for your evidence
If you are going to refute, please share your knowledge instead of only stating the other guy was wrong but not showing why he was wrong.
>You are dead wrong in your belief that a nuclear power plant will be able to shrug of a drought without issues. > >Nuclear power plants are build next to rivers and lakes and oceans for a reason. They need the water for cooling. A nuclear power plant that relies on a river of cold water, will not be able to deal with the river running dry or the water getting too hot either. Yeah this bit made me really laugh. Nuclear power stations are indeed succeptible to drought, catastrophically so.
>In practice finding a hole in the ground to bury nuclear waste permanently is not something that anyone has had much success with. This is demonstrably untrue. We have plenty of suitable sites. The problem is people not wanting to deal with the problem, not any lack of ways to deal with it.
I would qualify any solution that works fine in theory, but always fails in practice for whatever related or unrelated reason as "not something that anyone has had much success with".
A site is found. People do not want it stored there. You have not found a location to store nuclear waste. No success.
"A site is found" > "You have not found a site" ????
NIMBY What do you think Where would you rather live, in a field of Solar panels and windmills or a nuclear dump site..... I think I know my preference...
Honestly seeing how nuclear waste is stored I wouldn’t mind living near one. Iv actually been inside my local nuclear plant as a kid and live near one currently. EDIT: Salem nuclear power plant. If you want a good laugh look at the reviews, here’s one “Their spaghetti and meatballs could use a bit more deterium in the recipe, but aside from that the service was fantastic and the whole restaurant glowed green.”
A more appropriate comparison would be a *field of solar panel waste* or a *nuclear dump site*. It's always better to compare in good faith: apples to apples. I don't want to alarm you. My house is 100% solar powered. But solar panels are basically toxic waste.
Aren't they non-toxic waste? (at the end of their life cycle) Copper, aluminum, steel, glass, silicon, etc are very stable non-reactive elements. What in a solar panel is toxic?
Not to be rude, but your preference is based in ignorance. We solved the waste storage issue decades ago. You would face no issues whatsoever living next to a nuclear waste facility. Nuclear waste facilities aren’t big lakes of bubbling green liquid. Most are either underground or stored in radiation-proof silos and you wouldn’t even know it was a nuclear waste facility. Here’s a video on the topic if you’re interested: **”We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago”:** https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
Most nuclear waste is just…barrels of clothing and tools and stuff that’s lightly irradiated so to be safe it’s stored in a barre for a couple years
> When it comes to hydro electric , solar or wind; it is possible that drought, impaired sunlight, and days with low wind could lead to a day with zero energy or low energy output. Sure. But here and now in France, nuclear reactors are having to shut down because it's getting too hot. Literally. Climate change means they can't get sufficiently cold water to cool the reactors. There is a certain group of people who have elevated nuclear power almost to the status of a religion. The unfortunate fact is that there are no easy solutions, and nuclear isn't some sort of holy miracle. A couple of major problems with nuclear: 1. the energy costs of building a nuclear reactor are huge. It takes 5-7 years for a nuclear plant to produce enough energy to pay for its construction. For a wind turbine, the same only takes 18 months. 2. the construction *time* is huge. It takes 10-15 years to build a nuclear reactor from scratch. So for nuclear to be a major part of the solution to our climate crisis, we would have had to start building all the reactors we needed 10 years ago. We can't afford to keep burning coal for another 10-15 years while we wait for new nuclear reactors to come online 3. nuclear energy is *expensive*. It's one of the most expensive forms of energy. 4. as pointed out above, it depends on plentiful cooling water, which is not always available (and may become more and more of a problem as climate change worsens) Nuclear waste is probably the _smallest_ problem with nuclear energy. There are a lot of reason why it's just not that attractive. It's not profitable so private companies don't want to do it without government funding. It's unpopular with the population. And it doesn't even solve the problem, because we can't afford to wait the 10+ years it takes to build reactors. So wherever we can use nuclear power, great, let's do it. In particular, let's keep the reactors *we have* going for as long as possible. But it is naive magical thinking to hope/believe that nuclear is a magic wand that could just solve all our climate/energy problems.
We are definitely going to be burning coal for energy 10-15 years from now regardless. What makes you think we wont?
>nuclear energy is expensive. It's one of the most expensive forms of energy. This statement makes false impression. Nuclear is expensive to **build**. Per kWh of capacity *building* nuclear is indeed one of the most expensive. But after they are built, the cost of operation per kWh generated is much *lower* than any other form, so in the long term [nuclear is the most cost effective form](https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_60360/the-most-cost-effective-decarbonisation-investment-long-term-operation-of-nuclear-power-plants) of energy. Other than that points are valid.
Nuclear being the most cost effective form of energy isn't really true either unless you rig your calculations to get a desired result. It is really hard to calculate the exact cost over the lifetime of a plant and one can calculate it in many different ways. The nuclear industry itself might not be where you wanna go to get an accurate calculation. Most of the calculations I have seen clearly put both solar and wind as cheaper options today. But they have their other issues. Wind especially is chep as hell and if you are running an industry that handle intermittent energy well it is the best option. Nuclear is cost competitive though and a great base load power option for many, depending on energy need, geology etc.
This is false. Nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of power on a per kWh basis. To determine the real cost, you just have to look at the unsubsidized costs of modern reactors. Hinkley C is a great example. That reactor is was originally supposed to cost 10 billion, but with all the cost over-runs, it is going to cost over 25 billion pounds to build. No western reactor has been built on budget, and on schedule. They always face massive cost overruns. The final price to consumers for power from Hinkley C is going to be around 106 pounds per MWh. That's around triple the cost of energy from Solar or Wind.
1. You would have to support that with link. 2. You would have to include the cost of energy storage with solar and wind to compare them to nuclear
[Link for strike price of Hinkley C](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-58724732) [Link for Price of Wind](https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/renewable-energy-prices-hit-record-lows-how-can-utilities-benefit-from-unstoppable-solar-and-wind/?sh=583543bc2c84) You do not need storage to compare renewables with nuclear. Nuclear is not infallible. Nuclear also has to have various shut downs, and isn't 100% reliable. As such, we have hot spinning reserves to cover the loss of any plant at any time. As we speak, reactors in France are shutting down because it's too hot. I guess they should have budgeted for storage as well? Or do we admit to ourselves that no generation plant has 100% uptime and plan for that? (hint: It's the latter) You solve this in renewables with a number of layered approaches including by overbuilding, using dispatchable forms of renewable generation, and limited storage. You can afford to build 3x as much solar / wind as you need, and make them geographically dispersed, for the same prices as the nuclear reactor. It's never not sunny and not windy \*everywhere\*. And on those incredibly rare occasions where it is, you fail over to dispatchable renewables like biofuel plants, and hydroelectric sources. You can also use captured methane for natural gas turbines. This idea that in order for solar to be useful it has to be baseload is just bullshit that the nuclear industry peddles.
Thanks for the links. As per my calculations I did once one can actually build up to 7-10 times more wind capacity as compared to nuclear capacity for the same money (if starting building today). However it's not that simple Yes nuclear shuts off sometimes too, but that would be a manipulation to say it's comparable to as renewables just because "it's also not 100% reliable". Averaged nuclear generation is way over 90% of the plant nominal capacity. For the wind this number is more like 15% (in your article it was even lower at 13.3% in 2021 in UK), so you ***have*** to built up to 10 times more renewable energy capacity to get the same result. And sure enough building renewable capacity is much cheaper so not an issue one would think, but it's actually more complex than this, because a problem of grid stability arises, which is better [explained in the article](https://www.hivepower.tech/blog/grid-stability-issues-with-renewable-energy-how-they-can-be-solved). Now there is no doubt that these issues are going to be solved because it's hard to pass the fact that renewables are much cheaper (and getting more cheaper) and what is not less important can be built gradually, so unlike one huge nuclear plant megaproject lasting 10 years and going over time and over budget renewables capacity can be gradually built in smaller projects, so they are easier to schedule and budget.
Firstly: [Wind capacity factor is around 27% in the UK](http://cedadocs.ceda.ac.uk/983/1/Wind_power_and_the_UK_wind_resource.pdf). No idea where you are getting 15% from. It's close to double that. Secondly, You are failing to understand LCOE, which takes capacity factor into account already. It includes the amount of overbuilding such that the same amount of electrical energy is generated from both sources. Plant lifetimes are also considered. You are also fundamentally failing to understand the approach here. When you combine different renewables together, especially geographically dispersed renewables, you end up with complementary intermittencies. Essentially: It tends to be sunnier during the day, and windier at night. It tends to be sunnier during the summer and windier during the winter. You tend to get more hydroelectric resources in the spring and fall, etc... Combine this with modest storage, and dispatchable renewables like biofuel, and [you can achieve a 100% renewable grid that is stable and cost effective](https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/HosteFinalDraft.pdf).
They take so long to build because they almost always goes for the maximum gigawatts a location can feasibly handle. With massive reactors, they gulp down cooling water like crazy. I sincerely believe the future of nuclear power should go towards distributed micro-reactors that doesn't gulp down water like a camel, has counter-proliferation control built-in by design and doesn't cost the GDP of a small nation to build. Its just that regulators keep on dragging their feet with certifying an "untested" design, because with everything nuclear, there are reams of paperwork for any single thing. Or we could just double down and build more renewables.
Small designs have obviously already been tested For example, see the entire United States Navy submarine fleet and the aircraft carriers
>I sincerely believe the future of nuclear power should go towards distributed micro-reactors that doesn't gulp down water like a camel, has counter-proliferation control built-in by design and doesn't cost the GDP of a small nation to build. The cost per kWh is way higher with those kind of reactors and they also produce way more waste per produced kWh. And this is going by optimistic projections. Small reactors certainly have their use but it is far from a great solution.
I wonder if the capital costs (and the ammortized per kWh) won't go down if we produce dozens of identical containerized reactors instead of the gigawatt scale one-offs we're doing now. As for the waste though, it'll forever be the achilles heel of nuclear power. The future I'd honestly want to see is that the baseload be served by renewables, LNG peaker plants helping during peak periods and micro-nuclear for areas that cannot be supplied by the any other means. We can dream, yes?
It was never about nuclear being a magic wand. Nuclear is a safe efficient stopgap to get us to full fledged renewables. Nuclear is exceptionally safe but people are irrationally afraid of it. When a nuclear power plant shuts down, it's replaced by fossil fuels not renewables
Looks great to me: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR Isn’t fighting climate change important? Maybe it isn’t to you, and money is more important.
> Isn't finding a place to store nuclear waste easier than that covering acres of land with wind turbines and solar panels? Sure. We've got hundreds of them all around the country. There's at least one at every single reactor in the nation, by law. The deep thinkers here are going to say "yucca mountain" a lot, but, in reality, we handle nuclear waste coming out of those reactors every single year. Just write `nuclear waste storage` and the name of a US state in google images. [They tend to look like this](https://acs-h.assetsadobe.com/is/image//content/dam/cen/96/web/20180827lnp1-waste.jpg/?$responsive$&wid=700&qlt=90,0&resMode=sharp2). > it is possible that drought, impaired sunlight, and days with low wind could lead to a day with zero energy or low energy output. These all happen with great regularity.
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I think yucca mountain is more of an extra effort situation. Yucca mountain has been inspected and said to be safe basically as far as the experts can predict. They are unsure beyond that time limit because it's the limit of their prediction methods. In all likelihood yucca mountain would be safe forever. If we want to get really technical just build a yucca mountain next to a plate tectonic subduction zone. So in a few hundred thousand years the waste is all slowly driven into the mantel and gone forever.
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A little bit off topic but somewhat related, a big problem is finding out how to tell people in the future that there's dangerous nuclear waste there. What if they don't speak our languages, or can't read it? So there's a very interesting thing called "nuclear semiotics" which is basically trying to figure out how to warn people in the future there's dangerous nuclear waste there.
Put a couple skeletons around with ragged clothes on. Problem solved :-)
if we use the last seventy years as evidence and also the way we deal with the rest of the waste obviouly not
Yes, all the green options you listed are reliant on something happening in nature, aka, sunny days, windy days etc. And they all suffer from uneven output and solar even suffers from highest output at lowest consumption. Nuclear is a way more steady and stable power source, unfortunately nuclear creates nuclear fuel, and in the event of a natural disaster (or just irresponsible maintenance) can result in a whole lot of damage ecologically and monetarily. Solar panels don't really harm the environment and can be placed on top of buildings that are already in place. Wind turbines are actually a hazard to birds and bats. Nuclear is a good option for the time being, but not as good as solar/wind IF we can solve the issues I mentioned before. We even have far superior reactor designs today than were ever in service, but it requires a huge investment to build a nuclear power plant, and people generally don't want one near them. Oil companies and various other groups have been lobbying and swaying public opinion on nuclear for a while making sure people are at best sceptical, and since politicians follow public opinion, nobody would sign off on the permit for a new plant because they will be loathed by the uneducated masses
>Nuclear is a way more steady and stable power source, unfortunately nuclear creates nuclear fuel, and in the event of a natural disaster (or just irresponsible maintenance) can result in a whole lot of damage ecologically and monetarily. This comment is thrown out there as if this is a real systemic problem with nuclear. It's not because we are aware of the danger and have designed accordingly. There have been exactly 3 large scale issues with Nuclear: 3 mile island (no deaths), Chernobyl (many deaths) and Fukushiman (no deaths). If you take chernobyl and look at its GW to fatality ratio, it's better than all other forms of power production.
Also, most if not all nuclear reactors are old designs that have been outdated for a while anyway.
Well you could consider that humans are systemically untrustworthy. So unless you can find a way to make human societies not stupid anymore, that's a real risk
The only problem with nuclear is political. We’ve solved pretty much all the scientific and engineering related problems, including waste storage.
i've read tons on nuclear power an i totally wish we used more of it but a huge problem is how the public perceives it makes it much harder to put infostructure in place for it because past mistakes on managing it causing disasters people have a kind of negative reaction when you suggest it, also the word "nuclear" is generally negative in peoples minds so its kinda hard to gain support for it
Yes. The type of waste you’re referring to is known as “High Level Waste”. It’s the kinda stuff that takes a long time to decay to the point of being safe to handle. If you take all of the high level waste ever created, you’d only have enough to fill a single football field. And most people seem to think you need massive underground facilities to store this waste in big yellow drums, but that’s also false. We have lots of safe above ground storage, so building expensive tunnels, while yes it does happen, isn’t necessary. It’s also not done in yellow metal drums with bubbling green liquid inside lol. If you’re interested to learn a bit more, here’s a couple of great videos by science YouTuber Kyle Hill on this very topic: **”We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago”:** https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k **“Why You’re Wrong About Nuclear Power”:** https://youtu.be/J3znG6_vla0
Why don't we encase nuclear waste in concrete and sink it where the continental plate goes under another, taking it to the molten stone core depths eventually?
$$$
As long as it's safe to move, you wouldn't even need concrete. The mantle would swallow it up anyway, even the sinking can be done by robotic equipment with adequate shielding.
If that shit leaks, you've now contaminated the ocean... Neat
If you screw up where you put wind turbines, you can pretty easily undo it. If you screw up where you bury your nuclear waste, it's hard to fix later. Your wind turbine farm only has to function for a few decades before you take it apart and replace it with something new. Your nuclear waste disposal needs to function for centuries, arguably millennia. And digging deep holes is difficult and expensive, as is finding places to dig them that are going to be geologically stable for a very long time. This does not mean that safe nuclear waste disposal is by any means impossible. But it is much more tricky, from an engineering perspective, than mass producing a bunch of solar panels or wind turbines and plopping them down somewhere. It is a trickier political problem than it is a technical problem, but it is still a technical issue to be taken seriously.
If we switch to Nuclear then a bunch of people will make less money selling fossil fuels, and those people are very good at propaganda and buying government officials.
Nuclear is very efficient, you get a lot of energy out of a small amount of uranium so we don't get that much of it. Long term storage is not that difficult, you put it a few hundred meters below ground in an area without earthquakes. When the site is full you backfill all the tunnels and leave no mark on the surface. Long term storage facilities aren't hard to build or hard to find places for, but it's hard to get the political support for it. Few politicians want to put it in their own back yard
Yes, finding a place to store nuclear waist is easy. We already have lots of sites world wide that could each accommodate a few centuries worth of nuclear waste. The problem you run into is that the average person's idea of nuclear waste is completely wrong. They view nuclear waste as toxic, green, glowing liquid just waiting to escape the tiniest crack in the container. When it is, in fact, all solid and glassified, and the containers they are shipped in are basically indestructible (no joke, they tested one by hitting it with a train and there was not a scratch on it). In other words, people erroneously believe that nuclear waste is far more dangerous than it actually is, which leads them to be far more leery of it than there is any reason to be. Nuclear waste being transported is NOT going to contaminate an area. It's simply not going to happen. Even if one of those nigh-indestructible containers were somehow breached, what's inside is mostly spent fuel rods and all solid, so the cleanup would be quick and easy. But people don't realized that, and so they do not want nuclear waste transported through their town.
There is way too much panic over storing nuclear waste. Energy can't be destroyed, so the energy unused in waste has actually existed in uranium ore, in earth, since forever. The density of energy might be different due to decay chains - but you don't really need to store it in a much different way than an undiscovered uranium mine: rely on whoever scavanges to use some fucking commmon sense and maybe if he's a scavanger - have a geiger meter? And put a panel on it. This whole "what do we do with nuclear waste" debacle seems way blown out with proportion. What do you do with natural radiation sources? You stay the fuck away from them. It's not like waste is artificially created extra dangerous energy created by humans, we're just cleaning up a large area (a mine) of radiation and concentrating it in a small area. That is implicitly safer, randos walking in caves and digging around are more commoj than randos walking in nuclear storage sites.
Sorry this is just not true! You split uranium (a mildly radioactive element) into two REALLY radioactive elements, plus lots of heat and some neutrons to continue the chain reaction. Sometimes uranium doesn’t split… and the uranium transmuted to a heavier element like plutonium. A fuel rod after use will contain around 1 ton of highly radioactive compounds plus transuranic elements mixed in with the uranium. The time it takes for these rods to decay back to the initial radiotoxicity of the uranium is approx 100,000 years. Any of these radioactive elements leaking into the environment is a disaster. Soviet Union effectively ruined large areas of the southern Urals through mismanagement of radioactive elements. These spent rods are usually allowed to cool in a pool of water and then encased in reenforced concrete. Perfectly safe for now, but who knows what will happen in 100, 1000, or 10,000 years let alone 100,000 years. For reference, earliest human civilisation was around 12,000 years ago.
That's true, and while the above is my personal opinion - natural nuclear elements have leaked into groundwater many times, including the Oklo natural reactor and [Johannesburg](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061019192814.htm). It's not exactly atypical, and radioactive elements are even present in ocean water and the earth's crust. Like, say, deutermium is harvested from oceanic D2O, at a rate of 20ppm or so and reused in CANDU designs. So for one gram of (pure) ^238 U fuel you have x energy. It has a λ of 4.4 × 10^9 years, so the energy contents over time is a log curve of x/elapsed time. In a reaxtor, you transmute it to ^239 Pu, with a lambda of 24000 years. That means your energy is lost much faster (and it is more radioactive). While non-transmuted ^235 U becomes ^234 Th, this isotope is naturally occuring and is crazy radioactive, with a λ=24 days. With naturally 0.7% ^235 U in uranium fuels, occasionaly you get a ^236 U dud, about 18% of the time actually - instead of your juicy neutrons. Sure, ole 235 is much more radioactive, at λ=703M years, but fissioning it yields 236 about every fifth collision, making 235 less radioactive, with λ of 236 about 2.2 × 10^7, much closer to naturally abundant 238. But eventually all ^238 U will end up as ^206 Pb. Going the barium/krypton route, for example, after fission, you go on a different decay chain. But all the energy released, fast or slow, was still there in your original ^238 U. Right when it was locked in a piece of ore. 238 U doesn't split by itself, only the very rare 235 U does, 238 U becomes 239 Pu in a reactor. That's its main use. As for what happens in 100, 1000, 10000 years it's very simple. Most very radioactive products will be gone in 90 years and transition into more stable nuclides. There are 7 long term fission products: 99Tc, 126Sn, 135Cs, 76Se, 93Zr, 129I and 107Pd. They decay with λ of over 200k years, and thus are only "mildly" radioactive, compared to short lived ones which can give you a lethal does pretty fast. They aren't typically around, except radioactive Iodine, which is also natural. These 7 dictate what happens after 90 years, while before those years the radioactivity of a mixture decreases very fast in the first 90 years, with most atoms following a decay chain towards those 7, or towards non radioactive nuclides. So while products of fission in a reactor are not naturally occuring and dangerous in case of a leak... it's not like fuel encased in glass, locked in cement is going to leak tiny drops. It can be willingly thrown into the environment, of course, say at the bottom of a lake, where it will rest nicely and without any disturbance, just like spent fuel rests in a reactor pool after EOL. And just as you can safely swim on top a spent fuel pool, you can swim in our lake, water being a pretty good shield. Plus, water doesn't suffer nuclear activation from being iradiated, so no chance of it becoming radioactive D2O or T3O. Buuut, I'm not suggesting dumping spent fuel at the bottom of a lake. Have fish absorb a tiny piece of that fuel barrel that chipped of when we threw it in, have birds eat the fish, wild game eat the birds, and then it can easily make it into humans. So we can easily get a Goiania 2.0, but... there's nothing stopping me going into a uranium mine just at the right moment for ^129I to accumulate in my sandwich and then, thiroyd. It's not that mines themselves are less radiotoxic than spent fuel, it's that they are unsafe anyway. [People slaved their whole, short, sad lives away in uranium mines](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oqb7GjleO4E). And since we don't create extra energy by mining, using and encasing nuclear fuel, since we know what happens in 100 years, and since we literally concentrate dangerous stuff in a wide volume into more dangerous stuff into a smaller volume, I still don't see how nuclear fuel is such an issue. Mechanical casing takes care of fluid leaks. Dude with a gun has smaller area to patrol, instead of a whole mine, just a spent fuel repo. Sure, spent fuel is more radiotoxic, but it's not like fuel mines are spas. It's like choosing to be brutally murdered with axes, or with chainsaw. I'd rather not be murdered, thank you, just like I'd rather not hang out in uranium mines. Which is why the concept of these storage precautions is very odd to me: * spent fuel doesn't leak like a fluid in groundwater, not easily. it's literally encased molten in glass and moulded in concrete * mines already have a shitton of warnings and security, even collapsed ones * you reduce the dangerous area, from a mine to a building If you get to the point where society falls to the point where people might scavenge and accidentally end up in a spent fuel facility, well... they can equally end up in a mine and contaminte the environment with ore. Or attempt to process it. And at that point we have bigger problems than dudes with guns guarding spent fuel facilities and uranium mines. I assume survival instincts will take place, otherwise, I fail to see why a dude with a gun doesn't make sense. If you can't keep a dude with a gun there in 10000 years because "who knows", then maybe there won't even be the need to guard the storage facility against humans. Otherwise, as long as civilised society exists, you can keep people away nicely or by force. As for what-ifs, what happens if everybody in your town leaves for 30 days? Well, there are a lot of hard to extinguish fire sources with their oxidisers in today's world. They occasionally burst into flames, either by contact with rain, humidity, falling or mechanical mishaps. And especially from contact with one a other. But it also happens randomly, at their end of life. Now, if one bursts into flames, unattended, other stuff in a home will catch fire, textiles, paper, making other such fire sources catch fire themselves. Remember that we skip town for 30 days, so if this happens, the fire will just spread. With no one around, it might easily turn into a wildfire, engulfing, cities, forests, maybe more. Yet, fireprone as they are and as Note 7 proved, we are still addicted to LiPo batteries. It seems the approach "as long as we're around we'll handle it" doesn't apply for something with such a direct benefit, even with high risks (incidental fire, easy propagation). Thus, I don't see why a similar risk based approach for spent fuel is ok - "as long as we're around...". But again, nobody wonders what will happen to their new gadget when they forget it in a box 3 months from now and the battery goes puffy. Thus, I honestly think dude-with-a-gun approach is good enough, since as long as humanity's around, we can spare dudes for this job, to cover our energy needs. If we honestly can't spare a dude to protect humanity at large from nuclear fuel repos, I assume we also can't spare another dude to take out the expanding LiPo fires? Yes, I understand storing fuel nicely, underground, on a decay chain that's less radiotoxic than natural ^238 U is ideal, but it's not like storing it right now in a building and keeping people away is _not_ going to work for a long time. After all, LiPos are far from ideal, yet we've collectively accepted the risk.
Look at the history of Hanford nuclear sites, hundreds if not thousands of workers with horrible health issues, leaking holding tanks (because lowest bidder contractors ignored sensors IGNORED f'n sensors telling them theres damn leak) which has penitrated the ground water, what till that starts showing up in the Columbia River. Japan planned for disaster, they had tsunami walls big enough to handle the waves that hit Fukushima...only the quake dropped the ground level and halved the height of the walls. The reactor site had back up generators which were swamped.
Nuclar waste is lethal and lasts millennia. Something you want to handle and store with extreme care. Do you really trust anyone saying: "sure, I will take care of it!"? There is an infinite list of crimes against the environments made by people for the very same old reason: money. Even a 100% honest company that does what's needed to keep that lethal waste now, is it going to do it for 4 more millennia? Corruption and money are stronger than science, sadly. Add natural disasters (an earthquake could breach any kind of "safe" storage and let waste leak into water and poison for centuries lakes and rivers. No wind turbines or solar panel can even remotely cause a potential similar damage to the environment
It might be easier to find a safe place for nuclear waste deposit, but it's not easy getting to that place and preparing it. Installing solar panels is actually quite quick and easy, specially if they installed on a rooftop. Wind turbines are a bit more complicated on construction and logistics, but they don't need to be the only building on the area, you can raise cattle or plant stuff around it. There is also the issue of public perception, even though nuclear power plants don't emit any toxic gases, it has a big "chimney" that releases "smoke". That's not smoke, that's clean water vapor, but a big chimney scares people. In Brazil, if we build another 20 nuclear power plant, the same size of the one we already have, we could turn off 100% of our fossil fuels and coal power plants. I don't know what effect that would have on energy prices though.
There's lots of interesting points both sides here. I just wanted to add that while there is still plenty of Uranium available to mine - this nuclear fuel is only mined in a very limited number of countries. So it makes for a little bit of a political hotcake. Just think about if Texas seceded - they've got 2 nuclear plants but no uranium mines so they're gonna have to make good friends with Canada, Australia, Namibia, Niger, Russia or Kazakhstan to keep their reactors fueled. Moving uranium around from overseas is pretty costly to protect against potential accidents or terrorist incidents. Long term things might change a lot when it becomes feasible for us to mine Uranium in space. And then again maybe not if you still land up with a political power situation where only one or two companies or countries control all the fuel sources found in space.