>but the dangers and difficulties were greatly overblown in the course of anti-nuclear propaganda.
The nuclear waste generation is a _HUGE_ problem, the problem is so big that very few (if any) country really know how to solve it, look a the US for example as a really frightening example of an out of control waste problem, both from civil and military sources...
The problem isn't big, it's only tricky. Countries deal with orders of magnitude more of even more toxic "regular" waste from chemical industry. Not to mention the (again, orders of magnitude more of) waste coming out of powerplant chimneys, that's out of mind because it quickly gets out of sight.
It's tricky because of a combination of factors like long half-lives and unusual suitability for some of the material to be reprocessed into a weapon (both fission devices for nation states and terror devices for small groups, the latter more thanks to public perception than any actual effectiveness). This creates a lot of political obstacles, as it's easier to pass responsibility to someone else than it is to double-down and implement methods to reprocess, transmute or reuse the waste.
Organic chemical waste decomposes relatively quickly. Few of them survive 1000 year, and those that do are ironically things we perceive as safe (PET bottles and bags).
Yes. But that's my point. Nuclear waste isn't a huge problem, because there isn't much of it compared to any other kind of waste. It's tricky, because it lives longer, it's harder to neuter, and well... it's radioactive.
Besides that, the nice thing about nuclear waste is that it's so easy to detect if something is contaminated. Anyone can locate radiation sources with a relatively cheap Geiger counter. We also have a pretty good understanding of it's harmful effects.
On the other hand, there are so many cases of contamination with persistent environmental toxins that aren't as easy to detect, or who's toxic effects are initially not understood. Just look the sad history of PCBs or at 3M's ongoing saga with PFOA and PFCs.
> Nuclear waste isn't a huge problem, because there isn't much of it
You just changed your argument. You originally said nuclear waste is less toxic than “‘regular’ waste from chemical industry,” not just that there was less of it.
Even a smaller amount of highly toxic waste that stays that way for thousands of years is a huge problem.
I’m trying to find a charitable way to interpret your criticism, and I haven’t been able to find one.
In every post in this thread, TeMPOraL has been making a consistent argument that nuclear produces orders of magnitude less waste than other not-routinely-treated-as-horrible industrial waste issues.
You appear to be making the argument that “because there isn’t much of it” is a new argument, but that appears to be the core of their argument everywhere.
To add onto this there's an old gold mine in Canada that has literally over two hundred thousand tonnes of water soluble arsenic dust just lying about the bottom, and the remediation process for the area is going just fine. We are capable of storing dangerous materials without collapsing civilization, it just requires more work is all
The amount of long-lived nuclear waste generated per human over a life time is about the size of an apple. That's (unrealistically) assuming 100% nuclear electricity generation and no further progress in reducing the waste amount. It's a problem but compared to our greenhouse problems it's not _HUGE_.
Size is not the problem. Toxicity over centuries is the problem. Apples are a poor reference because it’s safe to be near them and they decompose within a year.
An apple has a volume of ~100ml. A standard 20ft container has a volume of 33.2m^3 and would hold 332,000 people's worth of radioactive waste. 7-billion people's worth of radioactive waste would take a little over 21,000 containers. The largest container ships hold up to 20,000 containers.
We could power the world with nuclear power only have to deal with a little more than a full container ship of waste. I'm sure if there was political will we'd have no problem finding a safe place for it. I suspect just sinking it over an ocean trench would be less bad for the environment than the status quo.
It's mind boggling that we can generate all this energy by splitting atoms but we're still burning things and putting up windmills like it's the 1500s.
No its not. The civilian nuclear waste issue is vastly overblown compared to the actual danger.
Its almost impossible to solve because people think about it the wrong way, we need a change of understanding.
Just like Oil before it was useful, we need to think of nuclear waste as a resource. It is mostly fuel and a combination of other potentially useful stuff.
We need to be a nuclear society not a chemical society who wants to 'shut away' all the 'waste'.
And if the UK didn't do silly thing like selling profitable nuke companies to Japan (source senior guy at Sellafield) - and allow you junior collation partners to kill of a key project to placate the green wing of the libdems.
BTW I worked on research for fast breeders in my first job in fact one of the few times I went into our labs was to wrap a dummy fuel pin for two-phase flow tests.
The nuclear waste generation is a _HUGE_ problem, the problem is so big that very few (if any) country really know how to solve it, look a the US for example as a really frightening example of an out of control waste problem, both from civil and military sources...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...