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clean... so many storage pools full of spent fuel, no home for them in sight... hundreds of pools, spread all over the US....
clean?
I mean cleaner than coal, sure. but it's enormous infrastructure and regulatory hurdles aren't worth it.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem, it is contained to a tiny physical object, all we gotta do is dig a hole, put the object into the hole, and cover it up.
We pretend that it is way harder than it is.
I live in a suburb north of Stockholm in Sweden, and I'd support the government building a large underground permanent storage of nuclear waste from all over the world (for a fee) in my suburb, we have the best ground for permanent storage in Scandinavia, we would earn money, create jobs and make the world safer.
Also it's only a problem if we let it be, there's literally centuries for us to figure out a way to make those waste useful for us. Not working towards that would be the only way for the problem to come back to us in the future.
there’s literally centuries for us to figure out a way to make those waste useful for us.
yes, I'm sure we'll hop on fixing this enormous issue with all the same urgency we've treated it with so far...
An idea I have thought about, nuclear boosted geothermal power.
Geothermal power normally just use a simple borehole with a hose going down and then up again, coolant goes in the hole, gets heated up a few degrees and the can then be processed to heat a house.
What if we could run tubes near the nuclear waste that will keep producing heat for thousands of years?
Nuclear waste is a solved problem
maybe solved where you live, and only for as long as your containment facility stays in one piece.
earthquakes, meteors, tidal waves - these things do happen, sure, not often on a lifetime scale, but compared to the long half-lives of this stuff? plenty of time for the worst case scenario.
I think you pretend the problem is simpler than it actually is, when considered the time frames involved. It's not your lifetime we're talking, it's the hundreds of generations where this shit remains hot.
AND I'd add your country is at least trying, in the US we've given up and store it in pools local to the reactors, it's ignorant as fuck
Scandinavia is geographically stable and has been politically stable for a long time, I can think of no better place for a global nuclear waste storage facility.
Meteors is just s dumb risk to consider in this case, any meteor capable of breaching an underground nuclear waste will cause far worse problems than the nuclear material will.
The baltic isn't that tidal either, so tidal waves can be disregarded.
Earthquakes have happened here, but they are few and far between.
I recommend that you watch the BBC Horizon Documentary "Nuclear Nightmares" that talks about our fear of radiation.
why bother investing enormous amounts of money into a tech that's already problematic? when there are better solutions at hand?
I'm not anti-nuclear, I just think further investment into it is misguided when there are so many other options that don't create tens of thousands of years of radioisotopes that have to go somewhere.
good on Scandinavia, the rest of the world isn't in such privileged positions. As seen in Fukushima. As seen in the hundreds of cooling ponds all over the US.
Because we need the baseload, even a huge wind or solar farm can provide the stable baseload.
In my first comment, I suggested that we would build a facility large enough to handle global nuclear waste.
yeah, I get it, you're whole hog on it, the enthusiasm comes through loud and clear.
I don't agree, but there's no amount of sense that's going to sway the already decided.
I feel the exact way about you in this thread.
nothing, not a single thing you've argued, will in any way reduce the radioactive leftovers nuclear reactors produce and most of the world is putting off for the next generation to fix.
Like climate change.
How many crises do you think those poor kids are going to be able to manage at once?
Which crisis is the most important to manage in the short term.
Climate change, nuclear power gives us a huge tool to deal with it by shutting down fossil furl plants.
If we fail the climate change, the nuclear waste will be a tiny problem to deal with.
With nuclear power we at least give people a problem they can deal with, climate change is far, far worse.
The ammount of radioactive waste is tiny relative to normal dumps, and as described before, it is easy to deal with, dig a deep hole, put the waste in it, refill it.
Boom problem solved.
CO2 from fossil plats will keep up climate change for centuries.
The ammount of radioactive waste is tiny relative to normal dumps, and as described before, it is easy to deal with, dig a deep hole, put the waste in it, refill it.
Boom problem solved.
I wish it were that simple. Meanwhile, in reality:
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/safer-storage-spent-nuclear-fuel
https://www.epri.com/research/products/000000003002000640
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dlochbaum/possible-source-of-leaks-at-spent-fuel-pools-at/
There are functioning Thorium based Molten Salt Breeder reactors, which for ~50MW can be built in a shipping container size - they are small, so can be deployed at local sites, thus reducing transmission losses, much harder to use for weapons (thats why the world tilted towards the use of uranium reactors in the first place), dont need prior enrichment, and can use much higher percentage of the fuel - so much less waste product. Also since the whole stuff is a molten salt, you just drain it from the reactor core and the reaction simply comes to halt.
The technology works, as it was tested when they were deciding if the industry goes with uranium or thorium, but the war lobby win out unfortunately, as they wanted a source for their nuclear weapons, at which the Thorium reactors are not great.
And yes, nuclear is super clean even if we compare it with solar+wind batteries not even counted in to the equation. BTW you can use "spent" fuel rods from conventional nuclear plants in a breeder reactor, to further diminish waste and use them up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
yep, they're awesome, and may sidestep some of the HUGE investments in gigantic infrastructure - one day. What you conveniently leave out is no one is doing this yet at scale; china's got one test reactor going last time I looked.
I personally love the idea, but the nuclear industry here in the US is obsessed with large steam turbine setups in the multiple megawatt scale; even small modular reactors are getting side eyes.
So yeah, it exists, but it's not going to displace the current tech (which is really 60's tech with better electronics).