A theoretical physicist who works at LANL told my that by his calculation, the waste product of all nuclear power generation sufficient to supply 95% of ALL American electrical demand (with tech that was current some 12 years ago), would annually be the size of ONE large refrigerator. It would be cheaper to launch it into the sun than to clean up after one coal plant that produces a fraction of one percent. Only the risk of a launch disaster prevents that “solution” from being invoked. But the point is that the harm of byproducts of nuclear electrical generation, is dwarfed by the harm of “conventional” sources.
Did I mention that he is a THEORETICAL physicist?
www.scientificamerican.com
Yes. because people are terrified of it.
So does the act of implementing every other form of energy generation. The difference is that we simply consider other forms to involve acceptable levels of risk, despite the fact that the harm from those risks manifests every day instead of hypothetically some time in millions of years. And then there’s the obvious fact that using conventional means will shortly render the planet less habitable to humans, if they haven’t already. THAT, and loss of biodiversity seem far greater and truly existential “risks”.
It needs to be addressed, yes. Though "millions" is probably a bit much. And work can be done on trying to reuse spent fuel.
Currently the amount of waste that would be created would be a very small amount. Currently, sticking with carbon we are giving our descendants a warmer, more unstable planet. Green gets us to a much more sustainable system, maybe even one where the environment starts sucking in some of the CO2 back. But that green includes a lot of nuclear. Any other option is a fail. We can't develop enough wind and solar to provide us 24/365 energy. There is no way to manage that with storage gimmicks.
It doesn't remain dangerous for that long.
You're looking straight at it, and refusing to see.
Unlike other industrial waste, which remains dangerous forever..
Yeah, proliferation isn't really an issue; Anyone who has the technology to make a nuclear bomb out of power reactor waste already has the technology to make a nuclear bomb more easily, by just building a reactor explicitly designed to make weapons grade material.
I would love to refute your point here, but I am sadly unable to determine what it is, or even whether you have one.
A lot of it is heavy metals--there are very few heavy metals that you could tolerate eating and those are ones that are non-reactive enough to avoid causing problems. Guess what, fly ash from coal plants is also rather nasty in the heavy metal department.
The fear is theft--but at that level they're not going to be able to actually build a bomb.
You could make a practical dual-use reactor by making a design that allowed very easy fuel changes. The proposed liquid fuel systems would qualify, as would the idea I dreamed up of using fuel balls instead of rods--they slowly roll down a track in the reactor.
I don't think you can draw much of a conclusion from that as most of the reactor states did so under the NPT.
Weapons grade uranium is pretty easy to turn into a bomb.
Earthquake, so what? I live near it and I don't care. I oppose Yucca because I don't believe we should be burying the stuff in the first place without extracting the useful stuff first. All I care about with a storage facility is it have very low soil mobility. That can be accomplished by being dry enough (the idea behind Yucca) or simply not disturbed (pack it up in heavy enough containers, toss it overboard above the Abyssal plains and far from earthquakes. So long as it sinks into the mud decently it's not going to actually get into the ocean before it decays.)
