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.
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?
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.
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:
I am very confused now, you link to articles talking about storage pool issues, but I never mentioned storage pools.
I am talking about what they are doing in Finland.
They have drilled a very deep hole in the bedrock, built vaults where they will put cey casks of nuclear waste, then they will backfill the hole and tunnels with clay.
This is how you do it.
No one considers a storage pool as permanent storage.
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. en.wikipedia.org/…/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).
There’s always next weeks call deflection meeting for me to try again!
I haven’t been uninvited from it yet! But yeah gotta love these “problem solving” meetings from management, where they don’t actually want to give any resources or allow any policy changes to come from them.
While I agree that getting rid of coal first would have been the better strategy, I don’t get this nuclear power fetish and constant bashing of Germany on this while most countries are doing worse than Germany. Nuclear power is extremely expensive, we have as of now no storage solution for nuclear waste in Germany and Germany has no source of nuclear material itself. There are quite a few drawbacks
Nothing generates more than nuclear (like it’s not even comparable), it has basically zero emissions and there are countries like Finland who’ll happily let you burry it there, tho you ofc don’t need to go that far away. You don’t need to dispose it nearly as often as coal ash, so it being in another country ain’t really that big of a deal.
Ofc solar is also a great option, because of the versatility, sadly German seems to really fucking love wind.
I didn’t say nuclear was ever big in Germany. The whole point is about Germany being against it. If you mean the part where I said it was half their energy production, I meant coal+lignite.
In Australia the coal and gas industries appear to be pushing nuclear quite hard, mainly because they distract from the renewable options preferred by the market. They know that while we’re arguing over literally every other power source, they can just keep burning holes in the ground.
im fact they’re closing one of the last scaled down power plant simulator, where scientists and students could have a hands down experience in learning about It
im not german, but its so sad, the thing was even made of glass so you could literally see the process
Oh thank god… Apparently they aren’t destroying it YET. There is hope. Personally, I’d feel a lot safer if it went into more nuclear loving hands, like the French or Czech, actually, most of Germany’s neighbors would do.
Yes but the grid doesn’t carry power efficiently over extremely long distances. You’re putting undue load on the grid if you expect wind blowing 500 miles away to cover all the power needs of the area it’s supposed to supply as well as every neighboring area where there’s not enough power.
This isn’t just an efficiency issue you can solve by throwing more windmills at the issue. If there’s too much power flowing through the lines we have currently, things break. Usually with fires and exploding transformers. Our power grid is designed for distributed production, but with on-demand generation as a backup for when intermittent generation is underperforming. Batteries are one option to achieve this, but they’re expensive to build in the scale we need them. Hydrogen fuel production is an interesting candidate to fill this niche and for all-renewable power, but the efficiency is quite low so you’re basically tripling the cost per unit energy produced.
But one way or another, you need additional infrastructure to power the grid with zero fossil fuels. Nuclear, batteries, hydrogen fuel, or a total revamp of transmission infrastructure all require expensive construction projects. Nuclear is the only one that’s been done at scale, that’s why I want to see it given a fair chance again. But I also think plenty of other options are promising BECAUSE they are novel, and I’d love to see a future where a combination is used to make a carbon-free, brownout-free power grid
My phone. HeyPiggy, Five Surveys, and Qmee apps are the best. I’ve made about 5K in three years, this is Qmee alone. It’s a grind but I’ve really made lots of cash. I went through my Amazon account one day and discovered I’ve bought 117 items with my survey cash.
If you want the answer, here’s the data. Solar is slightly safer than Nuclear, Nuclear is slightly safer than Wind. The three are WAY safer than fossil fuels.
When a car crashes, there’s usually a magnitude less people impacted then when a plane crashes. But you know what? Air travel is still much, much safer than car travel. Large but infrequent incidents can be much less dangerous than smaller but more common incidents in the aggregate.
They’re just looking at death rates, not the reduced economic activity due to restrictions in usable land, and the transition costs for moving. They also looked at, say, the mortality rate for the thyroid cancer and count the 2-8% death rate only The other 92% suffered nothing I guess. . . /s
But i’ll grant them that coal seems way way worse. Though basing on 2007 study is a time before the IED kicked in and a lot of LCPD plants were running limited hours instead of scrubbers - modern coal has to be cleaner by the directive - unfortunately the article is paywalled so hard to tell what their sample was based on time-wise and tech-wise.
Hydro estimate is interesting because it shows the impact of the one off major catastrophic event.
Yeah it looks bombed-out as fuck to anything more complicated than plant-life. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be pursuing nuclear energy, just that this argument feels very poorly constructed and intentionally misleading.
It having an inconclusive effect on wildlife, but wildlife clearly being able to survive in the region, doesn’t really detract from what I originally thought.
From the article you linked:
“No matter what the consequences of lingering radiation might be, there were massive benefits to people leaving.”
Yeah I think we both agree that nuclear is worth pursuing, it’s not 100% safe but nothing is; even windmills catch fire or spin apart. It’s far safer than fossil fuels.
Yep, I’m also afraid of taking airplanes because a handful of them have crashed. But per TWh produced, nuclear is statistically the safest method… just like that it’s statistically safer to fly across the country than to drive there, but I’m too scared for that :/
we tried to, then the state we were gonna stick it all in said "eh maybe we don’t want to the country’s home for spent fuel, considering how it will stay hot for tens of thousands of years.
so our solution was to just… ignore it. store it in cooling pools at every plant spread all over the country. because hundreds of different waste holding ponds are SURE to be better than the thing we were planning lol.
They made the hard choice of where to put the waste and stuck with it long enough to build the facility. They call it “Onkalo”. It’s a creepy marvel of engineering.
Lol, people here do a lot of assumptions. I typically do like ~9k steps each day, I spent a lot of time outside, go to gym etc. but 1)having hard tasks to do and 2)spending a lot of time alone (alone meaning without interacting face to face with real friends) for various reasons contributes to this.
Someone I strive to be, more money for the money pit, more food for the fridge, more education for my kids, more opportunities for the family, more money for charity
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