Waste Management: The Critical Element For Nuclear Energy Expansion

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."

Comments

No thanks on Nuclear proliferation...

[Thantik]

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.

Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation...

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Consider the source

[ahenders]

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