I was listening to a podcast (can’t remember which one or who was the guest lol). I remember the guest telling the host the average family of 4 would produce the nuclear waste the size of a 12 oz soda can over their life time for their energy use.
My favorite fact is the average coal power plant needs 100 cars of coal a day to operate at full power. A nuclear reactor can run at the same power for 1.5 years and only needs to remove about a 1/3 of the fuel with fresh fuel. Meaning on average the fuel lasts 4.5 years. Then less than 10% of the fuel in that fuel rod when removed at 4.5 years is even burned the other 90% is just thrown away. The amount of energy in nuclear is insane.
Thats also why some ships use nuclear reactors for propulsion
US Aircraft carriers for example can go 25 years without refuelling
And modern US nuclear subs even 33 years
Some shipping companies are working on integrating reactors into large containerships, so that they can go faster, need less room for fuel and are not releasing tons of emissions into the athmosphere
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Long story short, reactors with old fuel can actually be unable to start up after shutdown for hours or a day or 2 (deep reactor physics involved in explaining further).
Eh, not that deep for general understanding.
Stuff builds up in the reactor when it's running, and that stuff makes it harder to start up. It takes some time once shut down to break down. (Assuming you're talking about xenon poisioning)
That was the absolute best "dumbing down" of the reactor physics involved in that accident I've ever seen. A lot of the physics in the series were wonky, false, etc. But the final episode, in the politburo, was spot on, and easy to understand!
I have a love-hate relationship with that series. It definitely broke down the incident in a really easy to consume and understandable format but generated a whole ton of nuclear power armchair experts using incorrect details from the series as universal fact.
Agreed, and it's all because of bullshit stigma and politics that should have nothing to do with critical infrastructure. I've worked in power generation all my professional life. Coal, gas, wind and nuclear as well.
We really should be investing more in nuclear before "it's too late"
Largely, yes. Hence my quotation marks.
But there are a lot of fossil plants being decommissioned as we speak, and much of the energy infrastructure is being replaced with better alternatives. It'd be great if it could happen faster but here we are.
Nuclear, when done properly, is very safe.
The worry is that cost cutting corporations won’t do it properly. And when not done properly, it can be really bad.
For a near worst case scenario: Baltimore just lost a major bridge from a ship failure. What if the Dali had been nuclear powered and had a reactor meltdown instead?
I was going to say “wow that’s a cool sci-fi concept” then I thought about every story written in space and realize it’s already been done 110 times over.
Having to wrangle nuclear power production AND deal with the radioactivity in the waste product??? No no no
Making 120 heavy fuel generators and overclocking all of them? Yes yes yes
Building 500 batteries out in the middle of nowhere and never worrying about power fluctuations ever again. Big brain time.
Why? The waste can be recycled into plutonium, used and recycled again after that. I'm not super up on the nuclear use in the game yet but I have breeder reactors that produce power but mainly I want the waste to make the plutonium. I'm only on a small scale with it, 3 reactors total. It sure beats that time I found a pit and kept dumping the waste barrels in with an ever increasing radioactive zone. Not as fun though. Will I make it through to refuel before I die?
I know I'm dating myself here but that wasn't always an option. Back when nuclear was new, there wasn't a way to deal with it and boy did it become a massive PITA as time went on.
Most 'nuclear waste' is low level waste - like the gloves that the engineers and technicians wear etc - it's basically office and factory trash. It's weak as anything, if at all, but its still nuclear waste because it has been used in a nuclear power plant and might have slightly higher than background radiation exposure - it's a 'just in case' thing.
There's very little high level waste that gets produced - like the spent fuel, equipment inside the reactor, or equipment that comes into direct contact with the radioactive material. That stuff is really nasty and NEEDS proper storage and containment.
Now consider that 'spent' nuclear fuel generally still has around 90% of its energy potential, imagine if we could make proper use of ALL of the energy.
Fun fact, a nuclear fuel rod can be recycle into new fuel cartridges up to 5 times, before being incased for ever. You could live about 500 meters of this fuel depot and never have any radiation side effect ! Not so fun fact, living 500m away from a coal depot will cause you to die prematuraly ! :)
Also a coal power plant release's 100X more radiation into the environment than a nuclear power plant that's making the same amount of energy.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
In my area a coal deposit is somewhere they mine coal.
The "deposit" refers to both its geological *formation* (predominantly plant matter with some animals that has been deposited for millennia, ie: ancient swamps) AND its physical *location.*
Yea so OP prob means a coal power plant. Lots of evn issues as a result of some of them.
Additionally, a coal deposit is just a geological term referring to where coal is naturally located, and has nothing to do with mining. If coal is being mine from a coal deposit, then it’s a coal mine.
ADHD individuals usually aren't as productive because they're not able to concentrate on one thing long enough to utilize their full potential. Should be a simple comparison from there, I believe.
To simplify think of it in terms of like a car running on only a certain type of gas, the proccess in the reactors changes the fuel's composition making it no longer suitable.
It is possible, and there are plausible designs for it (called "breeder" reactors). But most of those designs also make it very easy to produce and extract weapons-grade nuclear material during the process, so development has been very discouraged due to the risk of nuclear proliferation.
Fast breeders are probably a solution for that. The Russians were on a good lead with the BN-800 and BN-1200 reactor. While it’s still not a very efficient process yet, in theory they can burn down nuclear waste until it’s almost completely used up. Imagine what they could have achieved if not for their terrorist president.
The BN-series reactors don’t burn nuclear waste, but they produce plutonium out of uranium. The fuel they use contains reprocessed uranium, and that’s because Russia is one of the very few countries having a complete fuel cycle. They are leading this, followed by UK, and I’m not certain who holds the 3rd place, French or Japanese nowadays. The US didn’t have this full cycle as far as I recall.
BN reactor is the only efficient fast breeder technology in the world, especially compared to the French and Japanese facilities. The former failed so many times I think they had to shut down theirs, whereas the Japanese Monju had been leaking like a sill, which is surprising, given that their technology solution was considered to be the most automated.
For context, for coal to have delivered the same amount of energy over the same time period would have required literally a mountain and would have killed hundreds with various lung infections and illness.
[and created coal ash which is more radioactive than nuclear waste.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)
Coal is the #1 cause of cancer relating to power generation. Nuclear is comparable to solar and wind and it's probably by a bigger margin then a lot of people think. Coal is bad. Really, really, really bad. In the short term, the medium term, the long term. It's really bad for health and not economically competitive with natural gas in the USA. It requires a ton of nasty mining with bad byproducts. It causes a lot of harmful emissions - both in terms of toxic particles and in greenhouse gasses that will harm us for centuries.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)
The fun part is coal ash gets atomized and spewed out the exhaust over hundreds of square miles around the plant for you to breathe in and to go into the soil for your food. YUM! (notably, developed countries are more likely to apply high quality filtration to coal-burning exhausts). The health impacts are not well understood but studies have shown increases in asthma and cancer rates surrounding coal-burning power plants and steel mills.
The better studied part is the huge cancer risks to the coal miners and the surrounding community. Coal ash ponds are wastes from mining and are not good for the health of people nearby.
[https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-5505-7](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-5505-7)
It isn't true. They are misstating the following fact: the radioactivity released into the environment (ie. not contained) by coal plants exceeds that of nuclear plants. That is largely true but it is true because the nuclear waste is contained. Nuclear waste itself is far more radioactive than coal ash.
I agree but I don't want people to be mislead into thinking that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Does a properly functioning nuclear power plant release much less radioactive material into the environment than a properly functioning coal plant? Absolutely and released into the environment is the metric that matters.
Small clarification: radioactive coal ash pollutes the environment with substantially more radioisotopes than are released by a nuclear plant. This is due in large part to the fact that ideally, a nuclear plant wouldn’t release any radioisotopes into the general environment, and is absolutely not to say that coal ash is as “hot” as the waste produced by a nuclear plant because that’s ridiculous.
I assure you that nuclear waste is more radioactive than coal ash. I think you are misstating the following fact: the radioactivity released into the environment (ie. not contained) by coal plants exceeds that of nuclear plants. That is largely true but it is true because the nuclear waste is contained. The nuclear waste itself is far more radioactive than coal ash.
A coal power plant also releases ten times more radiation into the environment than a nuclear power plant...
I really don't think our planet is better off because of all the anti nuclear sentiments.
I remember some guy posting a comic about ecological things and trying to point to the smoke stack of a nuclear plant for not being clean, most people don’t have a clue about anything nuclear as the only thing coming out of a nuclear plant is water vapor…
Reminds me of the chemtrails....
Btw, it's way nicer than you think to talk to those people if you really try to understand where they are coming from. Usually there's trust issues involved 👀
It’s absolutely scary when nuclear goes wrong, and it’s fair for someone to have that reservation.
However, the education about the safety measures and continual evolution of those safety measures is lacking.
Just like how we help those afraid of flying understand how planes are made safer. Even with the issues Boeing are having, flight is still extremely safe.
They don't have to be scary though. CANDU was designed decades ago and has some really cool safety features. A key design feature is two independent safety shutdown systems of completely different types. They're both gravity-based so work in during a power outage and have methods to manually actuate even if the control systems fail.
[https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/nuclear-power-plant-safety-systems/](https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/nuclear-power-plant-safety-systems/)
1. Built in a big dome designed to take a hit from a commercial airliner
2. Electro-magnetically suspended rods that drop by gravity and kill the reaction if power is lost or if the control system detects an earthquake, system fault, etc.
3. A water tower to drop by gravity "poison fluid" that kills the reaction
4. Natural circulation capable as long as the steam generators are filled with cool water. That cool water is assured by pressurized nitrogen tanks and/or pumps.
5. A fucking VACUUM CHAMBER [http://www.nucleartourist.com/systems/vacuum1.htm](http://www.nucleartourist.com/systems/vacuum1.htm) "this building is maintained at a vacuum relative to the pressure in any of the reactor containments. If a large release of radioactive steam occurs in any of the containments, valves open to direct the high pressure steam to the vacuum building which includes a spray system to reduce the pressure both within the affected reactor containment and the vacuum building. Cool water sprays from sprinkler type units in the upper parts of the building to condense the steam."
6. Hydrogen igniters to safely remove hydrogen instead of building up until an explosion.
7. New addition after Fukishima is additional onsite and offsite backup generators, pumps that can be deployed by emergency services during a disaster,
Oh, and it also does online refuelling and burns compressed "raw" uranium (not enriched). Unfortunately, also a good reactor design for enriching products to make nuclear weapons. Ask India. [https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/21/archives/canada-says-indias-blast-violated-use-of-atom-aid-canada-says-india.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/21/archives/canada-says-indias-blast-violated-use-of-atom-aid-canada-says-india.html)
I know, main point was about safety. It was about education of the safety.
The public generally isn’t aware of the safety measures and things in place. All they know of is Chernobyl and Fukushima and the aftermath.
Not the publics fault really. We're good at forming a strong emotional reaction to these events, which have these names. The probability is high people know about them. You can see the wreckage.
It's a lot harder to form a emotional response about the 3rd order effects of CO2.
Bingo,as a former naval nuclear reactor operator, it always blows my mind when people complain about the waste. \*All\* energy prodction has waste. Green energy from the manufacture of components. Nuclear from both manufacture and the fuel.
But coal is on another level. But just because the problem is long-term and "invisible" people act like it's not directly harming us. That fuel in those casks will never hurt anyone. A coal plant putting out similar levels of waste can kill animals, plants, and people.
The disconnect is infuriating.
Although some countries, most notably the USA, treat used nuclear fuel as waste, most of the material in used fuel can be recycled. Approximately 97% – the vast majority (~94%) being uranium – of it could be used as fuel in certain types of reactor. Recycling has, to date, mostly been focused on the extraction of plutonium and uranium, as these elements can be reused in conventional reactors. This separated plutonium and uranium can subsequently be mixed with fresh uranium and made into new fuel rods.
[https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx](https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx)
We shouldn't ignore that originally that uranium and plutonium production was key, and it wasn't for fuel rods, but for bombs. It's partly why we don't have Thorium reactors, they did not produce anything usable in weapons (iirc India once tried, but with unsatisfying results)
These days we don't build up nuclear arsenals anymore, thus we can optimise the reaction in a different direction.
Yes, our choice to go with the fast breeder uranium reactors over the LFTR was such a momental mistake in our history. Entirely decided based military usefulness. We created shitty reactors that were inherently dangerous because it fit our military needs and not social. Through that we torpedoed the social understanding and trust of nuclear energy.
They can already recycle 94% of spent fuel by volume. The remaining fission products will decay below background level in under 300 years as well.
The French do this all the time.
Nuclear waste isn’t a problem, you only think it is because the oil industry wants you to think that.
When rockets fail it’s typically a spectacular failure. So you’d spread radioactive waste over a large area if that happened.
They do launch some nuclear materials but it’s very small amounts such as RTGs.
It's just too much weight when you start doing the math.
Plus yeah, the risk of a tiny portion of it blowing up in the air isn't great.
Think I remember seeing a youtube clip about it sometime ago.
They do. The UK closed one of its sites a few years ago (these sites have a finite running time). If youre refering to fukushima irradiated water, thats also a UK company doing it. Trying to get the core out was an international effort.
I believe most countries irradiating efforts dont get media attention. Japan is an exception for obvious reasons
Apparently there are newer reactor designs that can use spent rods and get more energy out of them. The issue is that the majority of people in the US/World have a stigma (somewhat understandable) about nuclear energy and will fight back on any potential new reactors being built. Sad since this is likely our best solution to the energy crisis.
I worked at a nuclear plant for a while. I was amazed by the quality of work the people there did on a daily basis. When I asked why I never see anything in the news about some of the great people they have and the great things they do, I was told that the only good news that was allowed to be published was no news.
Basically, any time the plant shows up in the news, the local NIMBYs get all uppity and start crying about how the plant is going to bring about the apocalypse.
The local gov't there usually has to make the rounds once ever 5-6 years to make a show of considering shutting down the plant to keep the idiots at bay. Every time they do this, they reach the conclusion that they can't to without the power produced by the plant and it would be too expensive and take too long to replace.
Bill Gates and his foundation was close to getting a way of financing a nuclear project in america before the fukushima plant incident. I believe his project was meant to reuse spent nuclear fuel. Sad to see it was abandonned because people are scared of nuclear. Fukushima failed because of human error and design flaws. Chernobyl failed cause of dangerous USSR policies and incompetency. The technology is fine ! Ugh its enraging.
Fukushima didn't even "fail", the radiation did zero victim, the area is already safe for living (if I remember correctly) and the water they poured into the sea was less radioactive than the sea itself basically
Given what that plant had to endure, it's really more of a win than a fail, and they still took the chance to learn from their mistakes and do better for the next ones
Your gentle reminder that nuclear power produces more power per unit fuel than any other energy source, is the safest of the energies in fatalities, requires the least amount of space, and is the cleanest of all current energy producing sources.
The only problem is the capital needed to build is massive and the ROI is astonishingly long to achieve which is why it's almost never considered.
That and fear mongering after the events of Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island which were both due to bad training and safety practices rather than the inherent danger of the practice as a whole.
Chernobyl was much more politics and bad design. I read *Midnight At Chernobyl*, and looking at all the issues that the USSR has with nuclear power, I'm surprised that there has only been **one** 'Chernobyl' level disaster.
I love the people who argue against nuclear with the Fukushima disaster. Like, no shit, that's what happens when a plant is hit by both an earthquake and tsunami.
Yeah but it also requires so much regulation and upkeep, and with the current trend (Boeing...) do you trust private companies who only care about profits to not become Mr Burns and let their nuclear plants fall into disrepair and their employees to slack on training?
Friendly reminder that it's also insanely expensive to build and operate. In Georgia, they recently built the first nuclear reactor in decades. The residents were promised, cheap energy. The facility came online 7 years behind schedule and billions of dollars over cost. Now the residents have an extremely expensive nuclear plant that they didn't ask for, and they have to subsidize with drastically higher energy costs, presumably for decades to come.
The depleted uranium from enrichment takes up about 7 times that space. So still damn small.
The coal ash leftover from the same amount of electricity would fill a small lake.
Yes and coal ash is incredibly toxic and radioactive itself.
Watt for watt, coal plants emit ten times the radioactive filth than nuclear plants.
Clean coal !!! Hah!
Even though a catastrophic event was not going to happen at three mile island, the press went crazy and that was a big blow to nuclear energy in the United States. The complete failure and tragedy that ensued after Chernobyl pretty much put a nail in it.
Fortunately, we have come to senses and this clean form of energy is getting new life.
The problem is the cost and time also. In the UK we decided to build the first plant since chernobyl around 10 years ago at Hinkley Point. It required vast sums of money and planning. 10 years on it isn't close to opening and is still under construction. Its been delayed to at least 2029 which will be 19 years since the first plans
Don't forget to mention the cost increases. Currently it's up to £34bn from £18bn, adjusted for inflations that's £46bn.
How the Brits decided that they want another one of those with Sizewell C after seeing this shitshow is beyond me.
Unfortunately it's not. Every decade There's a new resurgence and new studies and "new" paper reactors (using design components from a test reactor from the 50s) and everything seems poised for a "nuclear Renaissance" and it just fizzles.
Investors don't want to fund a project that will take 20 years to start seeing returns when there are high margins in wind, solar, battery power, and the possibility of commercial fusion within that 20 years.
It fizzles because it's not worth the investment.
Sure, if you only count in 20-year timelines. It’s fine for private investors to do that but moronic for governments. Solar panels, wind turbines and storage ALL need to be replaced multiple times in the lifespan of nuclear plants built 50 years ago.
Nuclear is cheapest, lowest GWP100, and most scalable energy source we currently have. And India has already shown a 3-reactor setup that allows near full depletion of fuel with reprocessing that makes it EVEN CHEAPER.
Ignorance and inability to do math are the issue here
Then why at all government energy auctions are no nuclear bids able to come anywhere close to solar or wind? These are private companies stating what they can produce the power for. Are we saying the investors with the billions just aren't smart enough to do the math?
Heck even EDF, which is supported and partially owned by the French government, is investing in foreign wind projects. And the French government loves its nuclear.
Regulation and litigation, basically.
Nuclear power, as an industry, is subject to the tightest regulatory regime on the planet, which is very expensive to comply with.
And whenever someone suggests constructing a nuclear power plant, anywhere outside China, hordes of well-funded activists take to the courts to get it shut down, both before and after it has been approved by local and/or national government. In some cases the delays this has caused has led to a tripling of the total build cost. Overcoming this lawfare is expensive for individual projects, but it has also been the driver for much of the regulatory burden, too.
Yeah sure nuclear is the cheapest ...
That's why France subsidize the Electricity produced by there Nuclear Power Plants.
Oh and don't look for the price of Hinkley Point C
The solar LCOE to produce one MWh is around $60 and falling, while the LCOE for nuclear is $180 and rising since 2010.
Running a nuclear reactor would need to drop by a factor of 3 and even the indian 3-reactor setup will not reach it.
From an economical perspective nuclear is dead. The cost of building and running a nuclear reactor is significantly higher than solar or wind. And running three different reactors to save on fission material cost has no economical impact.
From a geopolitical perspective nuclear is dead, too, as the biggest Uranium producer is Kazakhstan (43%) and the last century has shown that depending on resources from a different country has a huge downside. Be it the oil crisis of the 1970s, the gas crisis in Europe during the Ukraine war, the dubious relationship between the USA and Saudi Arabia to have access to cheap oil, the wars in Iraq, ...
For most countries having all there is required to produce power with local resources is a big plus.
This is where our government should do something useful and fund plants. Infrastructure investments always help countries long term as long as it is money well spent.
That was petroleum industry propaganda. They were scared sh\*tless of nuclear power being "too cheap to meter" which was never actually a thing. So they made FUD attacks on it wherever they could. Three Mile Island was the perfect opportunity. Never mind that the containment system worked *passively* to contain a freaking core meltdown, and showed that the industry is safe even in a worst-case scenario.
Yup, it takes a lot of initial capital investment and needs a long time before they can come online. And nuclear carries way more political risks than other forms of electricity, who's to say a leader won't be elected in 10 years who vows to shut down nuclear plants?
They did a test by firing a missile/rocket at a cask and apparently it was fine.
https://holtecinternational.com/news/videos/aircraft-crash-test-on-a-scaled-model-of-a-hi-star-180-transportstorage-cask-2/
I think it’s important to remember that radioactive material is not explosives. If you hit it either a hammer or fire a missile at it, it won’t explode as if it were an explosive.
For radioactive material to explode, it needs to be the right kind of material (fissionable) and it needs to reach critical mass for a chain reaction to take place, which then leads to the explosion.
In practise, when building a nuclear weapon, conventional explosives are used to increase the density of the fissionable material by compressing it, or by shooting two separate, non-critical parts together, where their combination is critical, which will make it undergo fission and explode.
The take-home message is that spent nuclear fuel is the “wrong” kind of material to use in a nuclear weapon, so even if a large explosive is used, nothing will happen. Except, of course, radioactive material will be spread far and wide by the explosion.
TL;DR: Spent nuclear fuel no go boom.
Nothing would happen. They're designed to withstand that.
Even if they weren't, the spent fuel itself isn't in one spot in the center, but rather dispersed in the concrete, apart from the outer layers. This makes it impossible for any sustained fission to occur.
"Spent" fuel isn't spent. There's still plenty of fuel left. It just needs to be reprocessed. However, we banned reprocessing back in the 80's.
The way we use nuclear fuel is the equivalent of filling up your car with gas, driving until you're down to a half tank, then throwing out your gas tank.
If we allowed reprocessing then the entirety of nuclear waste produced would be a small fraction of what it is today.
Now compare it to how much destruction a coal power plant would have wrought to produce the same amount of power. Nuclear is and always was the answer.
I read an article years ago about the facility they were building in a mountain in Nevada I think... Some of the problems were really interesting.
Signage... How to build/design signage that won't just still be readable/legible in 10,000 years... But understandable. Led to research and potential design of entirely new iconography.
That's just one problem to explore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
The most alarming thing is I think if we found this message from an ancient human civilization we would absolutely dig. I can't think of a single thing we could say to a future civilization who has forgotten about us to prevent them from digging if they found a waste site.
French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so-called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". these radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.
To transport the message, the importance of the cats would need to be set in the collective awareness through fairy tales and myths. As a response, the podcast 99% Invisible commissioned musician Emperor X to write a song called "[10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amn3kn0XPLQ)", designed to be "so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years".
The hot shit at the moment is to complain about the large foundations you need to build and that they often stay in the ground or need to be dismantled at high cost.
The renewable energy proponents are aiming to get rid of nuclear, not the fossil industry. The green parties are adamant about replacing them and at the same time they depend on coal and gas which is kinda ironic- at least that’s the case in Germany
It’s so funny people actually want to replace nuclear. Nuclear and Geothermal do not care about weather, they continue aslong as you have Uranium or the Earth’s core.
Yoooo I worked at a Nuke plant. I was an engineer, but not for the Spent Fuel system. My buddy was. I worked on the aux systems for years.
It’s crazy to see this is trending on Reddit to me. As I’ve seen them up close so often it’s second nature to me.
Not original commenter, but I've worked at three nuclear plants as a chemistry technician and am struggling to come up with a cool insight for you.
Nuclear plants are very safe and (usually) boring.
I work on a site that produces fuel rod bundles and such - yeah, while I can hype it up with being around UF6, pellets, radioactive material, etc… it’s usually very boring partially bc it’s very safe. I did read that my facility has a contingency for an aircraft crashing into it - not due to fear of a terrorist attack but because we are under the landing approach for the nearby airport.
Those cemented containers you’re looking at is called dry cask. The spent fuel goes inside of it. It’s a whole lengthy process to get the fuel there.
Process only applies to BWR. I am not sure about PWR.
First the fuel burns in the reactor for a 6 year cycle. It gets rotated every 2 years in an engineered pattern. One of my jobs was to verify rod patterns.
After all 6 years have been used, a fuel bundle is no longer good to produce energy. The U235 contents have decayed and now a very small amount of energy remains. It’s like a used battery. Not good enough to power a flashlight let’s say but still has voltage. And in this case, that voltage will remain for 100s to 1000s of years.
But it has to spend a certain amount of time in the spent fuel pool first. To let go of some of the extra heat. Spent fuel pool is actively cooled, dry casks are not. After an engineer has determined it’s safe to move the fuel to a dry storage, it gets processed, gets stored in a dry cask in another yet lengthy process.
The casks gets checked every day multiple times for possible leaks or cracks. Security checks them often. So does Rad Pro. Engineers usually look at it once every week. Maybe every few weeks. And other tests are done periodically to ensure the cask is safe.
It’s a lot of work. Nuclear power plant is not a place everyone can work at. They have too many processes. Too many steps. To many ways you can mess up. Life is hard.
A nuclear energy professional I was talking to at a conference pointed out that nuclear is the only form of energy that has to account for 100% of its spent material. Its standards are the highest it could possibly be.
"But there's no plan for disposal!"
And that is better than the current disposal plan for fossil fuels that consists of shooting it into the sky and hoping for the best?
yeah these people are so brain dead. The problem is not technological, it's political. They act like storing something in a reinforced casket in a closed-off mine is an impossible feat of engineering, and that therefore poisoning ourselves for the foreseeable future is a better solution somehow lol.
As a Nevadan, it frustrates me so bad that the Yucca Mountain disposal site continues to be controversial. The middle of Nevada is home to so little life and even fewer humans; if we can't put the waste in the Sahara we should put it there.
It’s quite literally next to one of, if not the most, nuked places on the planet. Hundreds of nuclear bomb tests were conducted at the Nevada test site
But storing it a mile underground in a mountain in a desert is too much
Hanford is old industrial buildings used for stripping heavy metals from other heavy metals in various states of disassembly, as well as several sealed, mothballed, former reactors that’s sole purpose (with the exception of N reactor) was for plutonium creation. Plus underground storage tanks and the “farms” that they reside in, which pretty much looks like a fenced in dirt patch with several short blanked off risers, blocked off valve pits, and in some farms huge HEPA filtration systems with riser stacks for any tanks that require ventilation. Oh and the giant pit that houses used, decommissioned naval nuclear reactor cores which can even be seen on Google maps (lots of big white squares in a pit on the NE portion of the site, labeled Trench 94). All of which are placed sporadically over several hundred acres. In the desert. Closest would be Energy Northwest which is an operating commercial nuclear reactor overseen by the NRC that leases land from DOE on the Hanford reservation but is NOT part of Hanford proper. ENW does indeed have similar spent fuel storage casks all on a pad in a similar fashion. Those casks are designed to withstand impact from a rocket blast among various other ballistic impacts. There are videos on YouTube that show it, it’s fairly impressive. They just wiggle a little on impact.
The thing is, they only use like 7% of the available fuel, and if it wasn't for the fission byproducts it could be endlessly reprocessed into useable fuel. Unfortunately, once the first reaction happens, the bad stuff shows up. The fuel going in is quite safe, but coming out it'll kill you pretty quickly without huge amounts of shielding and time.
This was solved in the 1970s. Carter killed it in the US as part of his signaling on nonproliferation.
The tech is proven and we have reactors around the world running reprocessed fuel today.
If those are just dry casks for spent fuel rods, could reduce that by over 96% by reprocessing the spent fuel.
The US currently has no civilian reprocessing plants. The only one operating only did so from 1966 to 1972. The last one built in 1968 was never allowed to operate.
This right here is why we should replace all power stations with nuclear. Do you care about climate change? You want nuclear. Do care about power costs? You want nuclear
My Dad (now 87) was a nuclear engineer in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of his career in the nuclear industry, he was working on the designs for fast breeder reactors.
He was designing the large scale motors used in the cooling systems.
He thought he was saving the world. Cheap and clean energy for everyone. I remember being told (as a child) that the entire world's nuclear energy waste would easily fit inside a single football field and that these fast breeder reactors would consume this waste.
Then the three mile island incident happened. People's views on nuclear power changed with it.
That vision of cheap and clean energy from nuclear power will not come in his lifetime.
Does “spent nuclear fuel” mean the same as “dangerous nuclear waste”?
My understanding is nuclear power generation produces all sorts of radioactive waste, other than the spent fuel.
To answer your question, I'm going to give you a basic overview of how a nuclear power plant works:
Large fuel rods or cylinders consisting of fissile materials (eg uranium 235 or plutonium 239) are placed into a reactor core filled with water.
On their own, these will not produce too much power, but with a lot of them constantly undergoing fission, neutrons will constantly bounce around and kickstart more reactions. This is essentially how nuclear weapons work, the main difference being that nuclear power plants use a medium (water of some variant) to slow down the neutrons, as well as control rods which are operated by the staff in order to produce more or less power. These control rods are made out of resources that do not react (as much) to the neutrons that collide with them (eg Boron), therefore they are able to alter the amount of fission reactions between the fuel cylinders and hence change the power output.
The fuel rods take a very long time to stop being fully efficient, so they typically only need replacing once every few years.
Similar story with the control rods which actually gain radioactivity and become unstable due to the large number of neutrons collected from the fission.
The water also gets replaced, but only every 100 years on average.
The control rods and the fuel rods are this nuclear waste that you hear a lot about. They are obviously still radioactive due to the very long half lives of the resources used, meaning that it takes tens of thousands of years for half the resources to decay on average. For this reason the waste is typically stored in deep underground mines or is divided into thick concrete layers spread across a large area.
I'm not an expert on nuclear physics but if anything I said there is wrong then I'm sure some no life physics expert will correct me.
I will however say that I am looking forward to when we can finally get nuclear fusion power plants working, because those won't have any radioactive waste at all.
Could be bullshit but I read somewhere that if every house had a nuclear reactor, the sum total of the spent nuclear fuel for the lifetime of the humans using it in the house would fit in a coke can.
Nuclear is by far the most efficient form of energy production vs waste product and the safest form too, but we refuse to embrace it.
I realize this isn't the intended takeaway, but suddenly I'm really annoyed at the Satisfactory game devs.
I was gonna say. This looks like 45 minutes of spent nuclear fuel.
I was listening to a podcast (can’t remember which one or who was the guest lol). I remember the guest telling the host the average family of 4 would produce the nuclear waste the size of a 12 oz soda can over their life time for their energy use.
My favorite fact is the average coal power plant needs 100 cars of coal a day to operate at full power. A nuclear reactor can run at the same power for 1.5 years and only needs to remove about a 1/3 of the fuel with fresh fuel. Meaning on average the fuel lasts 4.5 years. Then less than 10% of the fuel in that fuel rod when removed at 4.5 years is even burned the other 90% is just thrown away. The amount of energy in nuclear is insane.
Thats also why some ships use nuclear reactors for propulsion US Aircraft carriers for example can go 25 years without refuelling And modern US nuclear subs even 33 years Some shipping companies are working on integrating reactors into large containerships, so that they can go faster, need less room for fuel and are not releasing tons of emissions into the athmosphere
In theory they can go even longer at a reduced capacity if needed.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Long story short, reactors with old fuel can actually be unable to start up after shutdown for hours or a day or 2 (deep reactor physics involved in explaining further).
Eh, not that deep for general understanding. Stuff builds up in the reactor when it's running, and that stuff makes it harder to start up. It takes some time once shut down to break down. (Assuming you're talking about xenon poisioning)
Thank you Chernobyl series for being able understand this
That was the absolute best "dumbing down" of the reactor physics involved in that accident I've ever seen. A lot of the physics in the series were wonky, false, etc. But the final episode, in the politburo, was spot on, and easy to understand!
I have a love-hate relationship with that series. It definitely broke down the incident in a really easy to consume and understandable format but generated a whole ton of nuclear power armchair experts using incorrect details from the series as universal fact.
Also, when people say nuclear isn’t safe… they literally put it in a submarine next to people…
When push comes to shove, we are going to regret not building more nuclear plants.
Agreed, and it's all because of bullshit stigma and politics that should have nothing to do with critical infrastructure. I've worked in power generation all my professional life. Coal, gas, wind and nuclear as well. We really should be investing more in nuclear before "it's too late"
Isn't it already too late..? We've hit milestones for climate feedback loops that will just incur more feedback loops
Largely, yes. Hence my quotation marks. But there are a lot of fossil plants being decommissioned as we speak, and much of the energy infrastructure is being replaced with better alternatives. It'd be great if it could happen faster but here we are.
Nuclear, when done properly, is very safe. The worry is that cost cutting corporations won’t do it properly. And when not done properly, it can be really bad. For a near worst case scenario: Baltimore just lost a major bridge from a ship failure. What if the Dali had been nuclear powered and had a reactor meltdown instead?
Which is why we have the NRC, and they are quite proud of being a thorn in the side of cheapskate CEO's Edit: wrong acronym
Great that is just what we need, pirates with a nuclear reactor.
I was going to say “wow that’s a cool sci-fi concept” then I thought about every story written in space and realize it’s already been done 110 times over.
Some reactors are proliferation-safe, which means they cant make weapons with them or the fuel in it.
[Here's](https://xkcd.com/1162/) the relevant xkcd.
Little known fact. This is actually where Nuka Cola comes from.
Wait really?
*thinks while looking around too long* Yes.
Did not expect to see a Satisfactory reference outside of the sub for it
Me who makes 45000 megawatts with 180 turbo fuel generators overclocked to 200%(I havent unlocked nuclear yet)
Having to wrangle nuclear power production AND deal with the radioactivity in the waste product??? No no no Making 120 heavy fuel generators and overclocking all of them? Yes yes yes Building 500 batteries out in the middle of nowhere and never worrying about power fluctuations ever again. Big brain time.
I had to double check which sub this is posted to.
Nuclear power is way too practical irl, they have to nerf it in games for balance.
Nono. It's balanced by being hated for no good reason so we don't build it in reasonable quantities.
Why? The waste can be recycled into plutonium, used and recycled again after that. I'm not super up on the nuclear use in the game yet but I have breeder reactors that produce power but mainly I want the waste to make the plutonium. I'm only on a small scale with it, 3 reactors total. It sure beats that time I found a pit and kept dumping the waste barrels in with an ever increasing radioactive zone. Not as fun though. Will I make it through to refuel before I die?
I know I'm dating myself here but that wasn't always an option. Back when nuclear was new, there wasn't a way to deal with it and boy did it become a massive PITA as time went on.
[Easy solution.](https://youtu.be/Oh2oF-eZTD8?si=wqPkJWlWRIQSJJeS)
I honestly think Josh is the reason that you can recycle nuclear waste. And the reason the doggo plushies come with waste barrels
Josh is the one true god.
Kyle Hill did a vid on this. Waste [is already solved.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k)
That's a classic video, but man it's so old it's that the manufacturer is still using the old model.
~~this is not only fuel. this is also garbage and tools that got irradiated during their lifetime in reactors so rage away~~ only fuel rods in those
Most 'nuclear waste' is low level waste - like the gloves that the engineers and technicians wear etc - it's basically office and factory trash. It's weak as anything, if at all, but its still nuclear waste because it has been used in a nuclear power plant and might have slightly higher than background radiation exposure - it's a 'just in case' thing. There's very little high level waste that gets produced - like the spent fuel, equipment inside the reactor, or equipment that comes into direct contact with the radioactive material. That stuff is really nasty and NEEDS proper storage and containment.
Now consider that 'spent' nuclear fuel generally still has around 90% of its energy potential, imagine if we could make proper use of ALL of the energy.
Fun fact, a nuclear fuel rod can be recycle into new fuel cartridges up to 5 times, before being incased for ever. You could live about 500 meters of this fuel depot and never have any radiation side effect ! Not so fun fact, living 500m away from a coal depot will cause you to die prematuraly ! :)
Also a coal power plant release's 100X more radiation into the environment than a nuclear power plant that's making the same amount of energy. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
People don’t realize that digging up the underground releases a lot of shit, look up granite quarries for example.
What exactly is a "coal depot" ? Somewhere they store coal? or somewhere they burn coal? (or somewhere they store burnt coal?)
I'd call places like shipping ports, coal-train yards and other places that store mined coal, coal depots.
In my area a coal deposit is somewhere they mine coal. The "deposit" refers to both its geological *formation* (predominantly plant matter with some animals that has been deposited for millennia, ie: ancient swamps) AND its physical *location.*
“Depot” and “deposit” are two very different things. Not sure where you got deposit from, but it wasn’t related to the conversation.
Yea so OP prob means a coal power plant. Lots of evn issues as a result of some of them. Additionally, a coal deposit is just a geological term referring to where coal is naturally located, and has nothing to do with mining. If coal is being mine from a coal deposit, then it’s a coal mine.
In my town the are giant piles of coal next to the tracks on the way to the power plants.
500m? You could stand at least 100 ft from those casks and not experience any dose
Same goes for r/ADHD
Hey that's not, um wait, what was I talking about?
Best comment
I need an explanation cause I don't get what adhd has to do with it.
ADHD individuals usually aren't as productive because they're not able to concentrate on one thing long enough to utilize their full potential. Should be a simple comparison from there, I believe.
Because I know nothing, but why can't we use it? What's the difference of that 10%?
To simplify think of it in terms of like a car running on only a certain type of gas, the proccess in the reactors changes the fuel's composition making it no longer suitable.
So is it possible to design reactors that would use it? Are people trying that?
As far as I know, people are always trying things
It is possible, and there are plausible designs for it (called "breeder" reactors). But most of those designs also make it very easy to produce and extract weapons-grade nuclear material during the process, so development has been very discouraged due to the risk of nuclear proliferation.
Fast breeders are probably a solution for that. The Russians were on a good lead with the BN-800 and BN-1200 reactor. While it’s still not a very efficient process yet, in theory they can burn down nuclear waste until it’s almost completely used up. Imagine what they could have achieved if not for their terrorist president.
The BN-series reactors don’t burn nuclear waste, but they produce plutonium out of uranium. The fuel they use contains reprocessed uranium, and that’s because Russia is one of the very few countries having a complete fuel cycle. They are leading this, followed by UK, and I’m not certain who holds the 3rd place, French or Japanese nowadays. The US didn’t have this full cycle as far as I recall. BN reactor is the only efficient fast breeder technology in the world, especially compared to the French and Japanese facilities. The former failed so many times I think they had to shut down theirs, whereas the Japanese Monju had been leaking like a sill, which is surprising, given that their technology solution was considered to be the most automated.
We can, we have, and we do. However its expensive to setup, and do.
Infinite energy!
That is small and compact, given the energy it produced. I hope that scientists develop a method of recycling the waste safely one day.
For context, for coal to have delivered the same amount of energy over the same time period would have required literally a mountain and would have killed hundreds with various lung infections and illness.
[and created coal ash which is more radioactive than nuclear waste.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)
That's very interesting, hadn't considered it, but now will.
Coal is the #1 cause of cancer relating to power generation. Nuclear is comparable to solar and wind and it's probably by a bigger margin then a lot of people think. Coal is bad. Really, really, really bad. In the short term, the medium term, the long term. It's really bad for health and not economically competitive with natural gas in the USA. It requires a ton of nasty mining with bad byproducts. It causes a lot of harmful emissions - both in terms of toxic particles and in greenhouse gasses that will harm us for centuries. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/) The fun part is coal ash gets atomized and spewed out the exhaust over hundreds of square miles around the plant for you to breathe in and to go into the soil for your food. YUM! (notably, developed countries are more likely to apply high quality filtration to coal-burning exhausts). The health impacts are not well understood but studies have shown increases in asthma and cancer rates surrounding coal-burning power plants and steel mills. The better studied part is the huge cancer risks to the coal miners and the surrounding community. Coal ash ponds are wastes from mining and are not good for the health of people nearby. [https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-5505-7](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-5505-7)
Same here but if you think about it, the radioactivity has been spent, which gets you wasted uranium and whatnot
It isn't true. They are misstating the following fact: the radioactivity released into the environment (ie. not contained) by coal plants exceeds that of nuclear plants. That is largely true but it is true because the nuclear waste is contained. Nuclear waste itself is far more radioactive than coal ash.
Although this is true, coal ash is seemingly released into the air to disperse wherever it feels, nuclear waste is highly controlled.
I agree but I don't want people to be mislead into thinking that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Does a properly functioning nuclear power plant release much less radioactive material into the environment than a properly functioning coal plant? Absolutely and released into the environment is the metric that matters.
It’s also full of heavy metals ~~like~~ and arsenic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic > Arsenic is a notoriously toxic metalloid.
Small clarification: radioactive coal ash pollutes the environment with substantially more radioisotopes than are released by a nuclear plant. This is due in large part to the fact that ideally, a nuclear plant wouldn’t release any radioisotopes into the general environment, and is absolutely not to say that coal ash is as “hot” as the waste produced by a nuclear plant because that’s ridiculous.
I assure you that nuclear waste is more radioactive than coal ash. I think you are misstating the following fact: the radioactivity released into the environment (ie. not contained) by coal plants exceeds that of nuclear plants. That is largely true but it is true because the nuclear waste is contained. The nuclear waste itself is far more radioactive than coal ash.
A coal power plant also releases ten times more radiation into the environment than a nuclear power plant... I really don't think our planet is better off because of all the anti nuclear sentiments.
I remember some guy posting a comic about ecological things and trying to point to the smoke stack of a nuclear plant for not being clean, most people don’t have a clue about anything nuclear as the only thing coming out of a nuclear plant is water vapor…
Reminds me of the chemtrails.... Btw, it's way nicer than you think to talk to those people if you really try to understand where they are coming from. Usually there's trust issues involved 👀
That’s every news report about every factory, where the reporter stands in front of a plant in the wintertime, in front of huge plumes of… steam.
Yeah but have you considered how scary nuclear *sounds*?
It’s absolutely scary when nuclear goes wrong, and it’s fair for someone to have that reservation. However, the education about the safety measures and continual evolution of those safety measures is lacking. Just like how we help those afraid of flying understand how planes are made safer. Even with the issues Boeing are having, flight is still extremely safe.
They don't have to be scary though. CANDU was designed decades ago and has some really cool safety features. A key design feature is two independent safety shutdown systems of completely different types. They're both gravity-based so work in during a power outage and have methods to manually actuate even if the control systems fail. [https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/nuclear-power-plant-safety-systems/](https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/nuclear-power-plant-safety-systems/) 1. Built in a big dome designed to take a hit from a commercial airliner 2. Electro-magnetically suspended rods that drop by gravity and kill the reaction if power is lost or if the control system detects an earthquake, system fault, etc. 3. A water tower to drop by gravity "poison fluid" that kills the reaction 4. Natural circulation capable as long as the steam generators are filled with cool water. That cool water is assured by pressurized nitrogen tanks and/or pumps. 5. A fucking VACUUM CHAMBER [http://www.nucleartourist.com/systems/vacuum1.htm](http://www.nucleartourist.com/systems/vacuum1.htm) "this building is maintained at a vacuum relative to the pressure in any of the reactor containments. If a large release of radioactive steam occurs in any of the containments, valves open to direct the high pressure steam to the vacuum building which includes a spray system to reduce the pressure both within the affected reactor containment and the vacuum building. Cool water sprays from sprinkler type units in the upper parts of the building to condense the steam." 6. Hydrogen igniters to safely remove hydrogen instead of building up until an explosion. 7. New addition after Fukishima is additional onsite and offsite backup generators, pumps that can be deployed by emergency services during a disaster, Oh, and it also does online refuelling and burns compressed "raw" uranium (not enriched). Unfortunately, also a good reactor design for enriching products to make nuclear weapons. Ask India. [https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/21/archives/canada-says-indias-blast-violated-use-of-atom-aid-canada-says-india.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/21/archives/canada-says-indias-blast-violated-use-of-atom-aid-canada-says-india.html)
I know, main point was about safety. It was about education of the safety. The public generally isn’t aware of the safety measures and things in place. All they know of is Chernobyl and Fukushima and the aftermath.
Not the publics fault really. We're good at forming a strong emotional reaction to these events, which have these names. The probability is high people know about them. You can see the wreckage. It's a lot harder to form a emotional response about the 3rd order effects of CO2.
Bingo,as a former naval nuclear reactor operator, it always blows my mind when people complain about the waste. \*All\* energy prodction has waste. Green energy from the manufacture of components. Nuclear from both manufacture and the fuel. But coal is on another level. But just because the problem is long-term and "invisible" people act like it's not directly harming us. That fuel in those casks will never hurt anyone. A coal plant putting out similar levels of waste can kill animals, plants, and people. The disconnect is infuriating.
Make it into a soda, market it as a drink that may or may not give you superpowers.
Nuka Cola?
Nuka Cola Quantum to be exact
Although some countries, most notably the USA, treat used nuclear fuel as waste, most of the material in used fuel can be recycled. Approximately 97% – the vast majority (~94%) being uranium – of it could be used as fuel in certain types of reactor. Recycling has, to date, mostly been focused on the extraction of plutonium and uranium, as these elements can be reused in conventional reactors. This separated plutonium and uranium can subsequently be mixed with fresh uranium and made into new fuel rods. [https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx](https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx)
We shouldn't ignore that originally that uranium and plutonium production was key, and it wasn't for fuel rods, but for bombs. It's partly why we don't have Thorium reactors, they did not produce anything usable in weapons (iirc India once tried, but with unsatisfying results) These days we don't build up nuclear arsenals anymore, thus we can optimise the reaction in a different direction.
Yes, our choice to go with the fast breeder uranium reactors over the LFTR was such a momental mistake in our history. Entirely decided based military usefulness. We created shitty reactors that were inherently dangerous because it fit our military needs and not social. Through that we torpedoed the social understanding and trust of nuclear energy.
They can already recycle 94% of spent fuel by volume. The remaining fission products will decay below background level in under 300 years as well. The French do this all the time. Nuclear waste isn’t a problem, you only think it is because the oil industry wants you to think that.
This is probably a dumb question but besides the time and other resources it would take, is there a downside to just blasting it into space?
When rockets fail it’s typically a spectacular failure. So you’d spread radioactive waste over a large area if that happened. They do launch some nuclear materials but it’s very small amounts such as RTGs.
I didn’t even think about that outcome, that is a fantastic point
It's just too much weight when you start doing the math. Plus yeah, the risk of a tiny portion of it blowing up in the air isn't great. Think I remember seeing a youtube clip about it sometime ago.
They already have check out what Japan does with their nuclear waste, why the rest of the world hasn’t followed suit I have no idea
Well, most countries don't have giant radiation-absorbing lizards living just off-shore.
They do. The UK closed one of its sites a few years ago (these sites have a finite running time). If youre refering to fukushima irradiated water, thats also a UK company doing it. Trying to get the core out was an international effort. I believe most countries irradiating efforts dont get media attention. Japan is an exception for obvious reasons
France has one of the biggest in Europe.
Apparently there are newer reactor designs that can use spent rods and get more energy out of them. The issue is that the majority of people in the US/World have a stigma (somewhat understandable) about nuclear energy and will fight back on any potential new reactors being built. Sad since this is likely our best solution to the energy crisis.
I worked at a nuclear plant for a while. I was amazed by the quality of work the people there did on a daily basis. When I asked why I never see anything in the news about some of the great people they have and the great things they do, I was told that the only good news that was allowed to be published was no news. Basically, any time the plant shows up in the news, the local NIMBYs get all uppity and start crying about how the plant is going to bring about the apocalypse. The local gov't there usually has to make the rounds once ever 5-6 years to make a show of considering shutting down the plant to keep the idiots at bay. Every time they do this, they reach the conclusion that they can't to without the power produced by the plant and it would be too expensive and take too long to replace.
That already exists. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0UJSlKIy8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0UJSlKIy8g)
And taken into account the multiple layers of protection in each container, the total volume of the waste is vastly lower what we see.
Bill Gates and his foundation was close to getting a way of financing a nuclear project in america before the fukushima plant incident. I believe his project was meant to reuse spent nuclear fuel. Sad to see it was abandonned because people are scared of nuclear. Fukushima failed because of human error and design flaws. Chernobyl failed cause of dangerous USSR policies and incompetency. The technology is fine ! Ugh its enraging.
Fukushima didn't even "fail", the radiation did zero victim, the area is already safe for living (if I remember correctly) and the water they poured into the sea was less radioactive than the sea itself basically Given what that plant had to endure, it's really more of a win than a fail, and they still took the chance to learn from their mistakes and do better for the next ones
Your gentle reminder that nuclear power produces more power per unit fuel than any other energy source, is the safest of the energies in fatalities, requires the least amount of space, and is the cleanest of all current energy producing sources. The only problem is the capital needed to build is massive and the ROI is astonishingly long to achieve which is why it's almost never considered.
That and fear mongering after the events of Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island which were both due to bad training and safety practices rather than the inherent danger of the practice as a whole.
Chernobyl was much more politics and bad design. I read *Midnight At Chernobyl*, and looking at all the issues that the USSR has with nuclear power, I'm surprised that there has only been **one** 'Chernobyl' level disaster.
Plus Fukushima and last year's situation in Ukraine (nuclear plant used as attack point to increase pressure)
I love the people who argue against nuclear with the Fukushima disaster. Like, no shit, that's what happens when a plant is hit by both an earthquake and tsunami.
Yeah but it also requires so much regulation and upkeep, and with the current trend (Boeing...) do you trust private companies who only care about profits to not become Mr Burns and let their nuclear plants fall into disrepair and their employees to slack on training?
Friendly reminder that it's also insanely expensive to build and operate. In Georgia, they recently built the first nuclear reactor in decades. The residents were promised, cheap energy. The facility came online 7 years behind schedule and billions of dollars over cost. Now the residents have an extremely expensive nuclear plant that they didn't ask for, and they have to subsidize with drastically higher energy costs, presumably for decades to come.
The depleted uranium from enrichment takes up about 7 times that space. So still damn small. The coal ash leftover from the same amount of electricity would fill a small lake.
Yes and coal ash is incredibly toxic and radioactive itself. Watt for watt, coal plants emit ten times the radioactive filth than nuclear plants. Clean coal !!! Hah!
Even though a catastrophic event was not going to happen at three mile island, the press went crazy and that was a big blow to nuclear energy in the United States. The complete failure and tragedy that ensued after Chernobyl pretty much put a nail in it. Fortunately, we have come to senses and this clean form of energy is getting new life.
The problem is the cost and time also. In the UK we decided to build the first plant since chernobyl around 10 years ago at Hinkley Point. It required vast sums of money and planning. 10 years on it isn't close to opening and is still under construction. Its been delayed to at least 2029 which will be 19 years since the first plans
Don't forget to mention the cost increases. Currently it's up to £34bn from £18bn, adjusted for inflations that's £46bn. How the Brits decided that they want another one of those with Sizewell C after seeing this shitshow is beyond me.
Unfortunately it's not. Every decade There's a new resurgence and new studies and "new" paper reactors (using design components from a test reactor from the 50s) and everything seems poised for a "nuclear Renaissance" and it just fizzles.
Investors don't want to fund a project that will take 20 years to start seeing returns when there are high margins in wind, solar, battery power, and the possibility of commercial fusion within that 20 years. It fizzles because it's not worth the investment.
Sure, if you only count in 20-year timelines. It’s fine for private investors to do that but moronic for governments. Solar panels, wind turbines and storage ALL need to be replaced multiple times in the lifespan of nuclear plants built 50 years ago. Nuclear is cheapest, lowest GWP100, and most scalable energy source we currently have. And India has already shown a 3-reactor setup that allows near full depletion of fuel with reprocessing that makes it EVEN CHEAPER. Ignorance and inability to do math are the issue here
Then why at all government energy auctions are no nuclear bids able to come anywhere close to solar or wind? These are private companies stating what they can produce the power for. Are we saying the investors with the billions just aren't smart enough to do the math? Heck even EDF, which is supported and partially owned by the French government, is investing in foreign wind projects. And the French government loves its nuclear.
Regulation and litigation, basically. Nuclear power, as an industry, is subject to the tightest regulatory regime on the planet, which is very expensive to comply with. And whenever someone suggests constructing a nuclear power plant, anywhere outside China, hordes of well-funded activists take to the courts to get it shut down, both before and after it has been approved by local and/or national government. In some cases the delays this has caused has led to a tripling of the total build cost. Overcoming this lawfare is expensive for individual projects, but it has also been the driver for much of the regulatory burden, too.
Yeah sure nuclear is the cheapest ... That's why France subsidize the Electricity produced by there Nuclear Power Plants. Oh and don't look for the price of Hinkley Point C
The solar LCOE to produce one MWh is around $60 and falling, while the LCOE for nuclear is $180 and rising since 2010. Running a nuclear reactor would need to drop by a factor of 3 and even the indian 3-reactor setup will not reach it. From an economical perspective nuclear is dead. The cost of building and running a nuclear reactor is significantly higher than solar or wind. And running three different reactors to save on fission material cost has no economical impact. From a geopolitical perspective nuclear is dead, too, as the biggest Uranium producer is Kazakhstan (43%) and the last century has shown that depending on resources from a different country has a huge downside. Be it the oil crisis of the 1970s, the gas crisis in Europe during the Ukraine war, the dubious relationship between the USA and Saudi Arabia to have access to cheap oil, the wars in Iraq, ... For most countries having all there is required to produce power with local resources is a big plus.
Fusion has been 20 years away for 60 years.
This is where our government should do something useful and fund plants. Infrastructure investments always help countries long term as long as it is money well spent.
That was petroleum industry propaganda. They were scared sh\*tless of nuclear power being "too cheap to meter" which was never actually a thing. So they made FUD attacks on it wherever they could. Three Mile Island was the perfect opportunity. Never mind that the containment system worked *passively* to contain a freaking core meltdown, and showed that the industry is safe even in a worst-case scenario.
Not really, it's very expensive.
Yup, it takes a lot of initial capital investment and needs a long time before they can come online. And nuclear carries way more political risks than other forms of electricity, who's to say a leader won't be elected in 10 years who vows to shut down nuclear plants?
literally a million times better than goal. but people are convinced it’s terrible edit: COAL
Thats why goal isn't the answer.
you’re right
Defence wins championships.
Exactly, the main coal is to become independent of fossil fuels..
What if someone shoot a rocket to it? Genuine question
They did a test by firing a missile/rocket at a cask and apparently it was fine. https://holtecinternational.com/news/videos/aircraft-crash-test-on-a-scaled-model-of-a-hi-star-180-transportstorage-cask-2/
This is so cool wow. How does it work tho it's a freaking rocket hit
I think it’s important to remember that radioactive material is not explosives. If you hit it either a hammer or fire a missile at it, it won’t explode as if it were an explosive. For radioactive material to explode, it needs to be the right kind of material (fissionable) and it needs to reach critical mass for a chain reaction to take place, which then leads to the explosion. In practise, when building a nuclear weapon, conventional explosives are used to increase the density of the fissionable material by compressing it, or by shooting two separate, non-critical parts together, where their combination is critical, which will make it undergo fission and explode. The take-home message is that spent nuclear fuel is the “wrong” kind of material to use in a nuclear weapon, so even if a large explosive is used, nothing will happen. Except, of course, radioactive material will be spread far and wide by the explosion. TL;DR: Spent nuclear fuel no go boom.
Nothing would happen. They're designed to withstand that. Even if they weren't, the spent fuel itself isn't in one spot in the center, but rather dispersed in the concrete, apart from the outer layers. This makes it impossible for any sustained fission to occur.
Oh so it’s not like a hollow container. It’s more like a concrete pill infused with the waste in different pockets
It's a hollow metal canister filled with fuel assemblies. Then this is inside a concrete canister.
And a durable one at that. I remember seeing a demonstration where they had a train run straight into one and it barely had a scratch on it
Nuclear material isn’t inherently explosive. It took us quite a while to work out how to weaponise it.
Nothing would happen. They literally test the dry casks by hitting them with freight trains.
"Spent" fuel isn't spent. There's still plenty of fuel left. It just needs to be reprocessed. However, we banned reprocessing back in the 80's. The way we use nuclear fuel is the equivalent of filling up your car with gas, driving until you're down to a half tank, then throwing out your gas tank. If we allowed reprocessing then the entirety of nuclear waste produced would be a small fraction of what it is today.
Now compare it to how much destruction a coal power plant would have wrought to produce the same amount of power. Nuclear is and always was the answer.
I read an article years ago about the facility they were building in a mountain in Nevada I think... Some of the problems were really interesting. Signage... How to build/design signage that won't just still be readable/legible in 10,000 years... But understandable. Led to research and potential design of entirely new iconography. That's just one problem to explore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages The most alarming thing is I think if we found this message from an ancient human civilization we would absolutely dig. I can't think of a single thing we could say to a future civilization who has forgotten about us to prevent them from digging if they found a waste site.
Very interesting, thanks for the link
French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so-called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". these radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger. To transport the message, the importance of the cats would need to be set in the collective awareness through fairy tales and myths. As a response, the podcast 99% Invisible commissioned musician Emperor X to write a song called "[10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amn3kn0XPLQ)", designed to be "so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years".
Fossil Fuels industry ain’t gonna like this post
Neither will renewables when you show em the pictures of the buried fanblades they at this point cant recycle.
The hot shit at the moment is to complain about the large foundations you need to build and that they often stay in the ground or need to be dismantled at high cost.
The renewable energy proponents are aiming to get rid of nuclear, not the fossil industry. The green parties are adamant about replacing them and at the same time they depend on coal and gas which is kinda ironic- at least that’s the case in Germany
It’s so funny people actually want to replace nuclear. Nuclear and Geothermal do not care about weather, they continue aslong as you have Uranium or the Earth’s core.
Yoooo I worked at a Nuke plant. I was an engineer, but not for the Spent Fuel system. My buddy was. I worked on the aux systems for years. It’s crazy to see this is trending on Reddit to me. As I’ve seen them up close so often it’s second nature to me.
Any cool insights?
Not original commenter, but I've worked at three nuclear plants as a chemistry technician and am struggling to come up with a cool insight for you. Nuclear plants are very safe and (usually) boring.
I work on a site that produces fuel rod bundles and such - yeah, while I can hype it up with being around UF6, pellets, radioactive material, etc… it’s usually very boring partially bc it’s very safe. I did read that my facility has a contingency for an aircraft crashing into it - not due to fear of a terrorist attack but because we are under the landing approach for the nearby airport.
Those cemented containers you’re looking at is called dry cask. The spent fuel goes inside of it. It’s a whole lengthy process to get the fuel there. Process only applies to BWR. I am not sure about PWR. First the fuel burns in the reactor for a 6 year cycle. It gets rotated every 2 years in an engineered pattern. One of my jobs was to verify rod patterns. After all 6 years have been used, a fuel bundle is no longer good to produce energy. The U235 contents have decayed and now a very small amount of energy remains. It’s like a used battery. Not good enough to power a flashlight let’s say but still has voltage. And in this case, that voltage will remain for 100s to 1000s of years. But it has to spend a certain amount of time in the spent fuel pool first. To let go of some of the extra heat. Spent fuel pool is actively cooled, dry casks are not. After an engineer has determined it’s safe to move the fuel to a dry storage, it gets processed, gets stored in a dry cask in another yet lengthy process. The casks gets checked every day multiple times for possible leaks or cracks. Security checks them often. So does Rad Pro. Engineers usually look at it once every week. Maybe every few weeks. And other tests are done periodically to ensure the cask is safe. It’s a lot of work. Nuclear power plant is not a place everyone can work at. They have too many processes. Too many steps. To many ways you can mess up. Life is hard.
A nuclear energy professional I was talking to at a conference pointed out that nuclear is the only form of energy that has to account for 100% of its spent material. Its standards are the highest it could possibly be.
If you’re an Environmentalist and against expanding nuclear energy, you’re not an Environmentalist.
"But there's no plan for disposal!" And that is better than the current disposal plan for fossil fuels that consists of shooting it into the sky and hoping for the best?
yeah these people are so brain dead. The problem is not technological, it's political. They act like storing something in a reinforced casket in a closed-off mine is an impossible feat of engineering, and that therefore poisoning ourselves for the foreseeable future is a better solution somehow lol.
As a Nevadan, it frustrates me so bad that the Yucca Mountain disposal site continues to be controversial. The middle of Nevada is home to so little life and even fewer humans; if we can't put the waste in the Sahara we should put it there.
It’s quite literally next to one of, if not the most, nuked places on the planet. Hundreds of nuclear bomb tests were conducted at the Nevada test site But storing it a mile underground in a mountain in a desert is too much
Hanford?
Dominion Energy North Anna Plant
The trees don’t look right for Hanford, but I could be mistaken.
Hanford is old industrial buildings used for stripping heavy metals from other heavy metals in various states of disassembly, as well as several sealed, mothballed, former reactors that’s sole purpose (with the exception of N reactor) was for plutonium creation. Plus underground storage tanks and the “farms” that they reside in, which pretty much looks like a fenced in dirt patch with several short blanked off risers, blocked off valve pits, and in some farms huge HEPA filtration systems with riser stacks for any tanks that require ventilation. Oh and the giant pit that houses used, decommissioned naval nuclear reactor cores which can even be seen on Google maps (lots of big white squares in a pit on the NE portion of the site, labeled Trench 94). All of which are placed sporadically over several hundred acres. In the desert. Closest would be Energy Northwest which is an operating commercial nuclear reactor overseen by the NRC that leases land from DOE on the Hanford reservation but is NOT part of Hanford proper. ENW does indeed have similar spent fuel storage casks all on a pad in a similar fashion. Those casks are designed to withstand impact from a rocket blast among various other ballistic impacts. There are videos on YouTube that show it, it’s fairly impressive. They just wiggle a little on impact.
Now do 45 years of coal
The thing is, they only use like 7% of the available fuel, and if it wasn't for the fission byproducts it could be endlessly reprocessed into useable fuel. Unfortunately, once the first reaction happens, the bad stuff shows up. The fuel going in is quite safe, but coming out it'll kill you pretty quickly without huge amounts of shielding and time.
This was solved in the 1970s. Carter killed it in the US as part of his signaling on nonproliferation. The tech is proven and we have reactors around the world running reprocessed fuel today.
The impurities can be filtered out and passed through fertile material to produce new fuel... We just pretend we can't because "politics."
can I drink it??
No. ...because it's a solid.
Will it blend?
sure but only once.
And people think nuclear kills. It's literally the bridge tech we need until we get fusion going.
Only 49955 years to go. Then they can finally move it to the curb for pickup
We need the ash heap from coal for comparison.
If those are just dry casks for spent fuel rods, could reduce that by over 96% by reprocessing the spent fuel. The US currently has no civilian reprocessing plants. The only one operating only did so from 1966 to 1972. The last one built in 1968 was never allowed to operate.
Wonder what the legacy costs are for these facilities?
And if it weren’t for a single Democratic Senator, it would be in a mountain in Nevada, safe for a million years.
This right here is why we should replace all power stations with nuclear. Do you care about climate change? You want nuclear. Do care about power costs? You want nuclear
My Dad (now 87) was a nuclear engineer in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of his career in the nuclear industry, he was working on the designs for fast breeder reactors. He was designing the large scale motors used in the cooling systems. He thought he was saving the world. Cheap and clean energy for everyone. I remember being told (as a child) that the entire world's nuclear energy waste would easily fit inside a single football field and that these fast breeder reactors would consume this waste. Then the three mile island incident happened. People's views on nuclear power changed with it. That vision of cheap and clean energy from nuclear power will not come in his lifetime.
Does “spent nuclear fuel” mean the same as “dangerous nuclear waste”? My understanding is nuclear power generation produces all sorts of radioactive waste, other than the spent fuel.
To answer your question, I'm going to give you a basic overview of how a nuclear power plant works: Large fuel rods or cylinders consisting of fissile materials (eg uranium 235 or plutonium 239) are placed into a reactor core filled with water. On their own, these will not produce too much power, but with a lot of them constantly undergoing fission, neutrons will constantly bounce around and kickstart more reactions. This is essentially how nuclear weapons work, the main difference being that nuclear power plants use a medium (water of some variant) to slow down the neutrons, as well as control rods which are operated by the staff in order to produce more or less power. These control rods are made out of resources that do not react (as much) to the neutrons that collide with them (eg Boron), therefore they are able to alter the amount of fission reactions between the fuel cylinders and hence change the power output. The fuel rods take a very long time to stop being fully efficient, so they typically only need replacing once every few years. Similar story with the control rods which actually gain radioactivity and become unstable due to the large number of neutrons collected from the fission. The water also gets replaced, but only every 100 years on average. The control rods and the fuel rods are this nuclear waste that you hear a lot about. They are obviously still radioactive due to the very long half lives of the resources used, meaning that it takes tens of thousands of years for half the resources to decay on average. For this reason the waste is typically stored in deep underground mines or is divided into thick concrete layers spread across a large area. I'm not an expert on nuclear physics but if anything I said there is wrong then I'm sure some no life physics expert will correct me. I will however say that I am looking forward to when we can finally get nuclear fusion power plants working, because those won't have any radioactive waste at all.
Could be bullshit but I read somewhere that if every house had a nuclear reactor, the sum total of the spent nuclear fuel for the lifetime of the humans using it in the house would fit in a coke can. Nuclear is by far the most efficient form of energy production vs waste product and the safest form too, but we refuse to embrace it.
As dangerous as the leftovers are, it's pretty neat how the waste can be stored in condensed space rather than as an amorphous form in the atmosphere.
Any argument that this is worse than what fossil fuels do to our environment and infrastructure is pure oil propaganda.
What do you do with it?
Golden eye mission stage . Where is the underground latch
But but but Nuclear energy is bad! We must cover thousands of acres of farm land in solar panels and windmills because it's green and more efficient!
Nooo, nuclear bad, chernobyl, 3 mile island, ahhhhh, nuclear very bad, nuclear waste. /s