Nuclear waste is a solved problem

Not a fan of nuclear power, but changed my opinion because climate change is a bigger and harder to handle problem.<p>&quot;Solved Problem&quot; however isn&#x27;t a thing I like to hear in this context. Solvable problem, sure, managable risk, yes. But solved problem is strong wording for waste, which you have to keep safe for roughly 4 times the age of the oldest democratic country.<p>Nuclear powers biggest problem is the price in the one hand, and bombs on the other hand. Nuclear bombs are bad halo product for a technology, nobody associates good stuff with doomsday machines.

This may be a valid argument, but it&#x27;s an irrelevant argument. 10-20 years ago we should have been building hundreds of nuclear plants world-wide. But we didn&#x27;t and now the economics have shifted. Nuclear has gotten more expensive due to the loss of expertise and solar&#x2F;wind&#x2F;batteries have gotten crazy cheap.<p>Why build nuclear for $200&#x2F;MWh after a 20 year build delay when you can get solar+batteries for $40&#x2F;MWh in 6 months? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy-storage.news&#x2F;news&#x2F;developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-sola" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy-storage.news&#x2F;news&#x2F;developer-8minute-says-...</a>)

The article says &quot;The first, and easiest way to address it is to reprocess spent fuel as France does.&quot; but France has a long-term nuclear waste storage project (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cig%C3%A9o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cig%C3%A9o</a>) so that seems to paint an incomplete picture?<p>I don&#x27;t know much about the subject to be fair.

It&#x27;s pessimistic to think that we won&#x27;t figure out some solution to reprocess nuclear waste efficiently in the next 50 years, to say nothing of the next 30,000 years.<p>And I don&#x27;t hear people talking much about the problem of &quot;solar waste&quot; and &quot;wind waste&quot;, i.e. what are we going to do with all the obsolete solar panels and wind turbine blades in the next 20 years?

Of course, this in itself is a propaganda tactic. The truth is that nuclear waste has never actually been a problem to solve outside certain technical circles. There just isn&#x27;t enough of it to matter.<p>There has been a lot of theatre, nobody bothered actually doing anything, and it turned out not to matter that nobody did anything.

Cost, not safety, is the reason that nuclear is not really going to be part of getting to a carbon neutral energy sector. We need to shift a few PWH of electricity production away from (mostly) fossil fuel based energy generation world wide. That&#x27;s going to take a few decades. Most of the planned new capacity is solar and wind based at a cost that basically is an order of magnitude lower than the typical nuclear setup (just to even build them).<p>The total global nuclear capacity is about 400GW. Or about 3.5PWH&#x2F;year. The total electricity production is around 25PWH&#x2F;year. We&#x27;d need about 7x more to come close to what we need (discounting market growth). 10x to play it safe. Probably more long term. The cumulative investment for that existing capacity is trillions of dollars spread out over many decades.<p>Off shore wind on the other hand is basically very scalable. A couple of million per turbine (4-5). There are some turbines coming to the market with a 20MW capacity. Let say they cost 5M each (nice round number). 50 of those is basically a GW. And would cost about 250M. Most modern nuclear plants manage a few GW at best and the tend to cost tens of billions of dollars.<p>About 20000 turbines would match existing nuclear capacity. Of course they don&#x27;t operate at peak performance all the time. So lets call it 30000 turbines. Times 10 is about 300000 turbines. Or about 1,500,000,000,000 $. 1.5 Trillion $ would be the cost of getting to 25PWH production. They last about 25 years. So we&#x27;d need to spend about 60 billion per year on adding new capacity to replace the existing capacity. Sounds doable to me. Just last year, about 260GW of wind power was added. The amount of new nuclear capacity was probably closer to 5GW. Do the math. Nuclear is not going to matter. The cost just does not add up.

Nuclear waste is not a solved problem. Reprocessing is uneconomical and does not solve the nuclear storage problem, because it creates lots of low- to mid- radioactive waste products. Admittedly, they are not so highly radioactive, but because of that the half-lifetime is often longer.<p>I find it interesting, that the same people who used to critisize renewables as being uneconomical, relying on future developments in storage&#x2F;better grids etc. are now the ones pushing nuclear. Nuclear is significantly more expensive, and people always talk about the problems being solved in the future through research somehow.<p>Don&#x27;t even get me started on those small modular reactors, there are so many problems about them. For example, current generation nuclear reactors allow for significant security around them due to economy of scale. If we suddenly put many small modular reactors in (or close to) cities, are we keeping the same security? We don&#x27;t have economies of scale anymore to afford this.

France has dropped a shitton of nuclear waste in the oceans (preferably closer to neighboring countries&#x27; shores than her own) and ever since they&#x27;ve stopped doing so all temporary storage sites have been filling up more and more, with significant political problems to open up new permanent storage sites.<p>I&#x27;d hardly call that &quot;solved problem&quot;.

Honestly, what does this guy think is the problem? As I understand the problem, the difficulty is that there’s literally nowhere on earth that people want nuclear waste to be stored. Saying “It’s okay, rather than slow radioactivity over 30,000 years it’s going to much more radioactive over 1000 years” isn’t the solution he things it is.

Nuclear waste is little different from other toxic waste, the only difference is the potential to poison at some proximity without direct contact and even that is mitigated by encasing radioactive matter in non-radioactive matter. Yet we see nuclear waste singled out, for ideological and political reasons.

&gt; Maintaining waste for hundreds of years is feasible, and on a whole different scale than a 30,000 year storage plan.<p>Maintining nuclear waste for 500 years is not feasible. I agree that it&#x27;s on a different level than 30.000 year, but we cannot predict what happens in the next 50 years, let alone the next 500 or 1000 years. The thought experiment is real simple. Look back 500 years - there is no comparison. I&#x27;m still afraid that there will be some kind of destruction of society, and who is going to take care of this stuff?

Sometimes I feel like I shouldn&#x27;t have taken Cowen&#x27;s and Thiel&#x27;s money as part of the Emergent Ventures grant. I&#x27;m not at all aligned with this &quot;American&quot; liberal way of thinking.<p>Let me make the argument against nuclear in terms &quot;they&quot; (and many here on HN also, like it seems) might understand: Costs. Nuclear is and will increasingly be more expensive and complex to build and run than wind and solar.<p>The costs of energy storage, solar and wind are dropping with every watt of capacity installed. The cost of nuclear is not.<p>Here&#x27;s the source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;cheap-renewables-growth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;cheap-renewables-growth</a><p>Let me address some arguments I read in this thread: Yes, I know that the sun is not shining at night and there&#x27;s not always wind blowing, but we will soon have cheap enough batteries to store the energy and solve the intermediacy problem. Yes, one (but by far not the only) driver of nuclear cost is regulation - but guess what - it&#x27;s fucking necessary to regulate it. No, nuclear is not the only way out of this climate mess (consider 15+ year building times for nuclear power plants). Yes, there might be some interesting small scale applications of nuclear, especially in space exploration, but we all know that this is not the point here.

Nuclear should be used for desalination as much as power generation. Leftover power from desalination should be used to backup wind&#x2F;solar. There needs to be a hybrid approach not a one or nothing.<p>Use desalinated water to make arid places habitable, perhaps extract economic benefit from that.<p>I think transmitting power from a distant and isolated nuclear powerplant is a big problem (power loss). Does anyone here know why power plants can&#x27;t transmit power using laser beams (line of sight..or reflected) to downstream substations for power conversion? Also, why aren&#x27;t sea waves used for power generation more? They&#x27;re very reliable.

I thought this would be referencing work by Nathan Myhrvold using a new type of reactor that supposedly runs on &quot;spent&quot; nuclear waste and in the event of power failure just stops running safely. Not sure of the other logistic issues involved. The one thing I remember about transitioning to this approach is that Nathan said the US isn&#x27;t very good about building new things, so they were going to build in China. But then it got shut down right as the anti-China trade policies started a few years ago. Not sure if there are big problems with this approach, but it sounded promising ...

Redefining the term &quot;nuclear waste&quot; as &quot;spent fuel residue&quot; then declaring there is a process to reprocess that, DOES NOT solve the nuclear waste problem.

I&#x27;m a fan of Nuclear too, just the reactor is ~1 AU away.

And in addition, it’s been ten years since anybody has had to abandon a city because of an accident, so that’s good.

How much nuclear waste is produced annually? Can reasonable number of Starships take it to the space?

&gt; its own spent fuel is only dangerous for on the order of a thousand years<p>&quot;only&quot;.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radioactive_waste#Long-term_management" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radioactive_waste#Long-term_ma...</a>

Having dangerous waste for a thousand years is not a solved problem. Fukushima is exactly why we shouldn&#x27;t go down that path. We now have better, safer, and cheaper alternatives.

Solved problem or not, the important thing to realize is that it is a problem with zero marginal cost. That is, we don&#x27;t make the storage problem harder by continuing.

I find anti-nuclear &quot;green&quot; activists just as dangerous as anti-vaxxers. They are often the same too, easy to categorize under the larger umbrella of &quot;anti-progress&quot; (which funny enough means <i>conservative</i>).

Tyler Cowen has separately observed that progress has stagnated and nukes have been stuck with 1950s era designs, without connecting the dots.<p>Explain: Why don&#x27;t we have liquid sodium, thorium, or traveling wave reactors? Why don&#x27;t we refine like the French? Why did we stop experimenting?<p>Often, tree huggers are blamed for nuke&#x27;s decline.<p>Also true: nukes got stuck in amber. Suffered from their own goals. Early success locked in those early choices.<p>Enviros didn&#x27;t shut down my state&#x27;s nuclear power plants. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WNP-3_and_WNP-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WNP-3_and_WNP-5</a><p>Enviros didn&#x27;t renege on cleaning up Hanford Nuclear Reservation. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanford_Site" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanford_Site</a><p>Something else happened. Something financial, <i>bureaucratic</i>, political, psychological, or whatever.<p>Both public capitalism (USSR) and hybrid private capitalism (USA) favored massive top-down initiatives. Too big to fail.<p>We should acknowledge this tendency towards winner-takes-all, in all systems, and then adapt.<p>One great recent contrasting example is NASA &amp; SpaceX.<p>Musk makes great points about SpaceX&#x27;s progress: NASA had plenty of smart people and could have done a lot more. However, NASA stopped innovating because they weren&#x27;t allowed to fail. So these massive projects, like the Space Shuttle, <i>have</i> to succeed, no matter the cost, and are not allowed to revisit bygone choices and assumptions, not allowed to adopt state of the art.<p>Another great example is Operation Warp Speed wrt vaccines.<p>One critical success factor was the US Govt&#x27;s <i>portfolio</i> strategy of placing multiple bets, increasing the likelihood of success. (Leveraging the math of NPV, as detailed in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity.) Versus other nations placed single big bets. With very mixed outcomes, sadly.<p>--<p>Also true: Easy wins are easily won.<p>Per Wright&#x27;s Law, innovation and productivity progress may be proportional to investment.<p>But scholarship, our understanding of the world, seems to be punctuated equilibrium. Theories, ideas, metaphors, insights. This progress seems cyclic. Maybe because of Kuhn&#x27;s structure of scientific revolutions, aka &quot;science progresses one funeral at time&quot;.<p>Sometimes I wonder if we would have had feasible solar power sooner if Reagan had continued Carter&#x27;s energy self-reliance efforts. (I don&#x27;t even know how to factor in obstruction, like Big Oil lobbying against alteratives.)<p>Surely, the economics of solar panels would have slowly improved. But it seems the path towards today&#x27;s boom relied on advances in material science. Maybe there were other paths we could have explored, I dunno.<p>--<p>I&#x27;m weirdly optimistic about our current times. Because of maths. Society is on the cusp of knowingly adopting risk management strategies. But unlike FDR&#x27;s (necessary) New Deal strategy of trying everything, we have better tools for right sizing our bets.<p>--<p>Thanks for reading this far. I really don&#x27;t know how to talk about this stuff, am struggling to gather and articulate my thoughts.

It is a solved problem: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepisolation.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepisolation.com&#x2F;</a>

&quot;its own spent fuel is only dangerous for on the order of a thousand years (600-1200), instead of the 30,000 from current US designs&quot;, hmmm, I get it, by reducing the dangerous period of nuclear waste from 30000 year to 600~1200 years resolves the problem per the author... Hopefully there was a typo, it was really meant to be 600 days instead of 600 years, or vent it was really meant 600 months, I just cannot see how that could be deemed as a solution.