this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Building and maintaining one isn't really the concern I have with this one, nuclear reactors are incredibly safe these days. What are they going to do with the nuclear waste? That's the real issue here. Governments can barely figure that out, how's a megacorp going to do that in an ethical way? I already see them dumping it in a cave in some poor country in africa.
If they're actually using a new type nuclear reactor, the small portable ones, then the waste is both incredibly small and recyclable. Nuclear technology has come a long way since the decades old reactors, we just haven't built very many new ones to showcase that.
It's a shame we aren't seemingly taking them into consideration in the whole energy transition crisis we are in.
But rather let's just keep sending people into hazardous coal mines while ignoring nuclear energy until the solution to all our problems magically comes to us.
What do you mean by this, nuclear of all things is supposed to be the solution? Maybe fusion some day, but definitely not fission. But that's fine, because we already have a perfectly capable and renewable solution, and that is called wind and solar. The sun is doing fusion every day for us and irradiates the surface of the Earth so much that we could support many multiples of our civilisation.
I'm not trying to say nuclear is the definitive solution, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Progress is progress, we don't have to find the final solution in one go.
Solution already magically arrived. It's called nuclear
As noted elsewhere, these don't create the same kind of spent fuel as a PWR. So that helps.
But also, the people who designed the PWRs didn't just say "and then we'll make shitloads of unmanageable waste lol!" Up until the Carter Administration, we ran a system called "reprocessing" that essentially shredded and dissolved the old fuel rods, isolated the metals chemically, and packed out separately.
France does this. Finland does this. Japan does this. Their waste concerns are negligible compared to ours.
Meanwhile Carter, bless his heart, determined that reprocessing was a proliferation risk, and shut down the US industry, saying "y'all will figure out a way to dispose of these things".
So now we are using circular saws to hack these things apart, cramming them into barrels stuffed with kitty litter (you read that right), and hoping that nothing will happen to the barrels for 50 million years?
Long-term waste disposal became an impossible problem to solve in the US because our one and only allegedly nuclear-savvy president made the solution to the problem illegal. It became one immediately, and has never stopped being one.
How much nuclear waste are we talking about? Every time I've seen any actual quantity mentioned, it's tiny.
And relative to coal's radioactivity, it's essentially nothing.
I'm generally against nuclear--or more accurately, think the economics of it no longer make sense--but there's one thing I think we should do: subsidize reactors that process waste. It's better and more useful than tossing it in a cave and hoping for the best. Or the current plan of letting it sit around.
Weird thing is, I'd trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown...
Nuclear waste is a technically solved issue with long term geological storage, long term dangerous waste which requires more tech is a very small mass. The problems are political, uneducated people are irrationally scared of those waste that they associate with Chernobyl so they oppose any kind of geological storage, and politicians don't have the balls to openly contradict them.
I mean you say that as if just burying it isn't actually the proven safest option.
Startups are already beginning to explore using old oil drilling equipment to sink nuclear waste below where it'll pose a threat, after it's been suffused into a shitton of concrete of course.
Very rarely is nuclear waste of the corium toothpaste variety, more often it's the old hazmat suits that are getting replaced and need to be disposed of with special care, or expired rods you can still have limited contact with without many issues.
They'll ship it to India/Thailand
Governments aren't exactly known for efficiency. A corporation is less likely to bogged down by just the mere fallacy that "other entities can't figure it out, why should they do it?"