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Waste Management: The Critical Element For Nuclear Energy Expansion

Posted by samzenpus on from the put-that-anywhere dept.

Lasrick (2629253) writes "As part of a roundtable on the risks of developing nuclear power in developing countries, Harvard's Yun Zhou explores the reprocessing of spent fuel. Zhou points out that no country in the world has come up with a permanent solution to nuclear waste in either of its two forms: the spent fuel that emerges directly from reactor cores and the high-level radioactive waste that results when spent fuel is reprocessed. Zhou points out that China and France have just announced a joint effort to establish a reprocessing plant, but that option isn't really practical for the developing world."

16 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... by Thantik · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nuclear plants might be safer/cleaner than coal and all, but when they fail (and they always seem to, due to people attempting to cut costs and corners) it leaves areas of land unusable to us humans. Not just a little unusable either. It does it for such a long time that it might as well be considered permanent. Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.

    1. Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually seems that waste from coal plants is even more radioactive than the ones from nuclear plants, and that waste goes to the environment instead of being restricted in small areas.

    2. Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... by ray-auch · · Score: 4, Informative

      TANSTAAFL. Coal and oil are pretty good at rendering large areas uninhabitable. Water (tidal and hydro) is pretty good at major ecosystem change and rendering areas uninhabitable. Wind and solar might look like ok in the area of _deployment_, but if you look at the manufacturing... [ok, I'll save you googling it, here's one that took me all of 30secs to find: http://www.worldwatch.org/node... ]

    3. Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      but when they fail (and they always seem to

      Hmm, 600-odd nuclear reactors in the world. And they always fail? Odd that I've only heard of three failures, including one that was self-inflicted (if you put a reactor into an unsafe condition to test whether you can extract power from a reactor while it's melting down, don't be terribly surprised if it melts down).

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    4. Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most of that 'Waste' is fuel that should be 'burned' in a reactor. The tailings came out of the ground in a mine and when the mine is depleted, they can go back in. The area will be less radioactive than it was before we started. The depleted uranium is just metal, nothing special about it except that it's density makes it a pretty good material for armor piercing rounds. We can use it for things like that, bury it, or breed it into fuel (or particalize it and blow it into the air like coal plants do, but I don't recommend that one). The liquid waste is mostly water, if we apply a bit of energy to it (perhaps from a nuclear reactor), we can diminish that considerably and have a more manageable waste. The tools and such are low level waste. We don't want kids playing with it, but it's not worse in general than the various carcinogenic waste from coal and oil.

      It's amazing how bad you can make anything look if you're willing to stretch the truth. Just think of the many gallons of toxic waste created when you build a solar thermal plant (and by toxic waste, I mean in the porta-pottys).

    5. Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Informative

      Coal plants cannot do that kind of damage.

      Coal mines and coal mining can however.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

      Seriously, though if you're trying to make nuclear energy look bad, please don't compare it to coal unless you're trying to actually make it look good. Ignoring the mine fires which have rendered quite large areas utterly uninhabitable and are projected to last for centuries (not to mention afterwards leaving the ground dangeroudly prone to sinkholes for milennia).

      You might want to read this too:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

      Basically, it's a question of scale.

      https://xkcd.com/1162/

      Nuclear energy is many many orders of magnitude more energy dense than coal. What people generally don't realise is quite how vast the scale of coal mining is. You need a lot to generate energy for an entire country. Not just a lot, but the most insanely huge unimaginable amounts. The sheer scale of the thing is incredible.

      As a result the coal energy industry churns through many billions of tons of rock, coal and ash each year. With that come all sorts of nasty things including radioactivity and heavy metal contamination both of which do leave land more or less unusable. Then there's the other bits and bobs like fly ash slurry spills and so on.

      The only reason you don't hear about it as much is that most of the mining now happens in poor countries or in the middle of absoloutely nowhere (i.e. Austrailia). Coal mining is so polluting and so destructive there is no way it can happen anywhere near civilisation in a developed country now.

      It's actually easy to crunch the numbers. In terms of deaths per kWh and land rendered unusable, and a whole bunch of other things, nuclear wins.

      Yes there will be accidents. Better engineering will reduce the rate and severity of accidents because engineering tries to compensate for the human factor and others. It's impossible not to have accidents when you're talking about supplying power to billions of people for a hundred years. Such things are not possible.

      But if you opt away from nuclear, you're choosing to pander to your fears with the deaths of energy workers, without actually making the situations you fear any better.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  2. Politics by Tokolosh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "no country in the world has come up with a political solution to nuclear waste" FTFY

    The technology is relatively simple. But then so are the opponents.

    --
    Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
  3. We already have Yucca Mountain, stick it there? by marcgvky · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We spent billions on that facility and it can store most waste (including spent fuel) for 1000's of years. Use it!

  4. Re:Nuclear waste by ChromaticDragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This would entail the risk of failure in the launch phase which could rain down a nasty amount of stuff anywhere on Earth.

    MAYBE when we have a viable Space Elevator would folk give careful consideration to this. Until then, forget about it.

    But even then, you'd still have the expense of the Delta-V to get it to fall into the Sun. It almost certainly would be cheaper to send the stuff to Alpha Centuari than to the Sun.

  5. Hydroelectric killed 280,000 people in 1 accident by raymorris · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's really no comparison. Hydroelectric killed 280,000 people at Banquai. (Or was it 180,000?). Nuclear power has killed dozens of people in 50 years. Coal? Ever heard of Black Lung? Nuclear has proven to be orders of magnitude safer than any other option for bulk power.

    Solar can provide about 5% of our energy needs, but for the vast majority of our power, we can choose between oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear. Of the options that can provide significant power, nuclear is by far the safest option, by a very large margin.

  6. Re:Hydroelectric killed 280,000 people in 1 accide by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Solar power people are as deluded as the religious zealots they hate so much. Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell? The amount of silver? The mining of the silver is so destructive that solar power is one of the worst forms of energy for the environment. Coals worst of course. Nuclear is almost totally nurtral. The few accidents we've had with it have been on 40yr old 1st generation reactors, all of them. Modern reactors can't fail. We, unfortunately, don't build any of them however. Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion into the frey. I'm sick of it, if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells and I'd be getting rich of selling it to all my neighbors. What do I get instead? A $30,000, very ugly roof so I can save $30 a month on my electric bill. It's THAT GOD DAMNED OBVIOUS.

  7. Re:Consider the source by ahenders · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's the wrong Yun Zhou. The Yun Zhou who wrote this article has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.

  8. Re:Hydroelectric killed 280,000 people in 1 accide by DexterIsADog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Modern reactors can't fail.

    This. Right here. This is the attitude that makes so many people distrustful of nuclear proponents.

    I know you said we don't actually build "modern" reactors, but ANY design of reactor can fail, because people run them, boards that demand profit oversee management, and sometimes people fly airplanes into buildings.

  9. 'fraid not. They hope 25% of ELECTRICITY. 3% actua by raymorris · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm afraid the author of that article got the facts grossly wrong, in a couple of different ways. DOE has a wealth of statistics in easily readable reports you can look at. Bottom line, by tripling the cost of electricity, Germany now gets about 3% of their energy from solar.

    The author confused ENERGY with ELECTRICITY, and confused GOALS with RESULTS. Germany tried to reduce electric usage (via huge surcharges) and increase solar usage (via huge subsidies) so that solar would be a larger percentage of electricity. They could have just turned off all of the non-solar electric plants to get 100% solar electric (but a huge electricity shortage). That's essentially the same as what they did, but they were a little less extreme. Their goal was 25% of ELECTRICITY would be solar. To do that, you've got to dramatically reduce electric usage - no electric cars, for sure.

  10. Re:Hydroelectric killed 280,000 people in 1 accide by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think he meant, new reactor designs do not fail catastrophically. The built in *PASSIVE* safety of these new designs would mean it take a deliberate act (sabotage) to cause a reactor to fail in a way that involves the release of radioactive materials.

    You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.

  11. !?!?!? 500,000 is more than zero by raymorris · · Score: 3, Informative

    Church Rock mine? Are you kidding?

    Coal mining: 500,000 victims of black lung
    Hydroelectric: 300,000+ killed
    Church Rock and all other uranium mining: 0. Maybe a cow.

    Yeah, the uranium sure as heck looks like the safest option to me.