Fusion, another step closer?

[Mechalich]

Also, for the moment, I am going to assume that "will be a threat in a thousand years" is a major upgrade from "will kill everyone and everything within the century". As much as I hate to say it, using nuclear as an immediate-term solution to have 500 years of breathing room to transition back into solar and wind sounds very palatable these days.

Considering the title of this thread it's also useful to consider fission as a stopgap to fusion.

Also, the actual quantity of high-level radioactive waste with long half lives produced by fission plants is relatively small. Only about 10% of the radioactive waste produced by power plants is long-lived, meaning a half-life of >30 years, and because the waste is high-density, the actual volume of said waste is quite small. If Earth went all fission, all the time, for everyone, forever, then yes the amount of waste generated would eventually accumulate to levels difficult to manage, but as a stopgap the issue really isn't that significant.

[NichG]

I would by no means argue that coal is good. There used to be a huge mining industry here with lots of silicosis deaths, and then there's Aberfan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

The thing is though, these tend to be horrors that stop being a problem within a hundred years of stopping mining. Radioactivity can be a problem for thousands of years. We can't assume competant management, if there was competant management there'd be no problem with either. Just because coal can be nasty is no reason to assume nuclear is perfect, it clearly is a lot less safe than wind power or solar energy.

Thing is, there's no perfect, there's no option to just use nothing, and there's also no instant turning from one tech to another. Things take 10, 20, 30 years to shift.

So in the end, the sensible calculation should look at the overall risk associated with a given energy trajectory, relative to the trajectory you'd get from waiting for some new and better tech.

From now forward? Probably that optimum is to not close down any operating nuclear plants, build a few more to fill renewable gaps in places where renewables are less consistent in their coverage (with some tweaks in ratios based on whether mining for fissiles is worse than mining for battery metals), and otherwise scale up renewables hard.

Historically, though, the optimal path probably should have been all in on nuclear from the 70s on at least, if not earlier. That we didn't do that means an accumulation of ongoing problems today - in the form of general air pollution, coal and oil industrial accidents (seems we get a major oil spill every couple of years...), climate effects, etc which are collectively much worse than if the world had seen another 10 events like Fukushima over the last 50 years.

[halfeye]

Actually, coal ash has been described in the linked video as having basically no safe solution for efficient long term storage. Meanwhile nuclear waste, which is very much not the "glowing green barrels of ooze" trope btw, has firm solutions that could hypothetically be optimized much further with means we know are viable but haven't done at scale. So competent coal management still poses a major problem in comparison.
Please do not try to dive into an argument about the semantics of what "long term" is defined as.

I wasn't about to, until I saw this was hidden. What would give you the right to determine which direction a debate goes in?

Also, for the moment, I am going to assume that "will be a threat in a thousand years" is a major upgrade from "will kill everyone and everything within the century". As much as I hate to say it, using nuclear as an immediate-term solution to have 500 years of breathing room to transition back into solar and wind sounds very palatable these days.

Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.

[factotum]

Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.

You realise that isn't the contrary argument you think it is? Look up the Great Smog of 1952 sometime to see what effect unconstrained burning of coal can have...we're talking anywhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people killed directly by the effects (figures are a little uncertain) and people just made ill into six figure territory. And that lasted a grand total of *four days*.

[Squire Doodad]

I wasn't about to, until I saw this was hidden. What would give you the right to determine which direction a debate goes in?

Because it's a tedious and irrelevant point of discussion that I specifically wanted to avoid. Moving on...

Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.

With all due respect, I'm really not sure where you're going with this. Are you assuming that the damages will be no greater than they were in the early 1900s and increase linearly? Like...do you not see the overwhelming impacts of man-driven climate change? I'm talking about the damages staying on fossil fuels will have for the future on a global scale. That coal was burned at a proportionally higher rate in the past is not relevant here.
Not to mention that coal has major incidents to its name like the aforementioned smog incidents, and oil among other resources have catastrophic spills. Nuclear isn't immune to terrible incidents, but it's naive to bemoan the impacts of nuclear power without considering the effects of oil extraction and the like.

From now forward? Probably that optimum is to not close down any operating nuclear plants, build a few more to fill renewable gaps in places where renewables are less consistent in their coverage (with some tweaks in ratios based on whether mining for fissiles is worse than mining for battery metals), and otherwise scale up renewables hard.

Historically, though, the optimal path probably should have been all in on nuclear from the 70s on at least, if not earlier. That we didn't do that means an accumulation of ongoing problems today - in the form of general air pollution, coal and oil industrial accidents (seems we get a major oil spill every couple of years...), climate effects, etc which are collectively much worse than if the world had seen another 10 events like Fukushima over the last 50 years.

Hmm, this is an interesting read. Does make me wonder what would have happened if Reagan hadn't pulled the solar panels out of the White House, but that's a discussion for another day.

[halfeye]

With all due respect, I'm really not sure where you're going with this.

I am saying it's not literally true. Continuing to use fossil fuels and particularly coal would not be ideal, however the chances that it will wipe out everyone and everthing inside one century are almost nil.

[Mechalich]

From now forward? Probably that optimum is to not close down any operating nuclear plants, build a few more to fill renewable gaps in places where renewables are less consistent in their coverage (with some tweaks in ratios based on whether mining for fissiles is worse than mining for battery metals), and otherwise scale up renewables hard.

It probably makes sense to scale up both nuclear fission and renewables hard. It's hard to imagine a scenario in which having too much energy would be bad, and a large energy surplus could be put to use in other projects like ripping CO2 out of the air - there's a plant in Iceland that uses geothermal power to do this, but there's no reason you couldn't use idle nuclear stations for the purpose in the otherwise utopian scenario where idle nuclear stations were available - or desalinization. Fission makes particular sense for countries that have limited renewable sources or face significant space limitations (since renewables tend to require large amounts of land area) near major population centers.

Large nuclear plants, like large power stations of any kind, take time to produce, but a major fission push now could still pay huge dividends in the second half of this century in terms of the global energy budget.

[Radar]

I am saying it's not literally true. Continuing to use fossil fuels and particularly coal would not be ideal, however the chances that it will wipe out everyone and everthing inside one century are almost nil.

Everyone and everything maybe not, but pretty much all coastal cities are in danger of being permanently flooded due to the rising sea levels and other catastrophic changes to the climate may seriously affect our agriculture around the globe. You can also expect tornadoes and hurricanes more often and of grander magnitude and so on.

[Squire Doodad]

To be fair, while all life dying is unlikely, a mass extinction is still enough of a cataclysm to justify reworking literally everything. Over 3 billion people are estimated to be at risk due to climate change, and there's probably far far more as things go along.
How did I manage to be slightly hyperbolic about this

[Mastikator]

Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.

Coal kills 8 million people every year and cause injury and illness for tens of millions. Coal kills more in a single year than all of nuclear power and nuclear bombs has ever done combined. Coal is the driving force of climate change which is likely to end civilization and has the potential to cause human extinction. There is no future where we keep using coal power.

[Lord Torath]

Living on Earth just ran a segment on nuclear power.

Takeaways:
Relatively carbon-free (depending on how much concrete goes into the construction)
Nuclear pairs well with more intermittent sources like wind and solar
New designs are "walk-away safe", meaning they can't melt down
Nuclear waste can be reused - the medical field needs it for x-ray machines for one thing, and it can be further refined and used for further power generation (France does this)

[asda fasda]

Well this article is only a discussion with Atomic energy lobbyist so not a very reliable source I would say, but I didn't have time to go through all of the article so maybe there is something there I missed. I just focus on radioactive waste issue as this is the one that makes me opposed to atomic power plant.

Lord Torath, for sure you should remove

Nuclear waste can be reused

from your list, all there was mentioned in article is that Korsnick think that in the future there may be a way to use that waste product, and since there is no viable way to use them at the moment, as most of wastes now are just stored at power plants without any long-term plan, that is just wishful thinking. Not to say that same arguments were used for plastic and CO2, that future generations will find it's way around the issue so that's not a real problem.......

As far as I'm concerned the person who earn cash from producing fission energy should be the one to pay for waste management and as long as there will not be a proper way to discount those cost in price I'm against such plants (and as far as I'm aware no one have even an idea how such thing could like like since we are talking hundreds years in the future)

ohh and KORSNICK statment:

so again, I look at it more as a resource for the future

statement is just so "evil corporate" speech, that I don't even know how to grasp it.

[Radar]

from your list, all there was mentioned in article is that Korsnick think that in the future there may be a way to use that waste product, and since there is no viable way to use them at the moment, as most of wastes now are just stored at power plants without any long-term plan, that is just wishful thinking. Not to say that same arguments were used for plastic and CO2, that future generations will find it's way around the issue so that's not a real problem.......

We actually already have the technology to vastly reduce the nuclear waste and at the same broaden the available nuclear fuels. The key problem is getting those solutions commercially viable and spread them around enough. Once they are more widely used, there will also need to be some work done on processing the spent fuel from the existing nuclear plants so that it could be reused in the fast neutron reactors.

So at the very least it is not wishful thinking.

That being said, fission power should probably be viewed as a transient energy source until we fully develop fusion power plants, but we do need to get away from fossil fuels about 30 years ago. Yes, we might be trading one problem for another, but the alternative is to cook ourselves with greenhouse gasses.

[Thomas Cardew]

So I think some technical detail is needed here. I'm going to stick with very broad strokes.

It's important to talk about what level of nuclear waste you're concerned with. While there are official and legal categories waste, I think it's more useful to go back to generalities from physics and talk about what's produced in the reactor. When you cause fission in the reactor you produce basically 3 things: Fission products, Activation Products, and Capture Products. Fission products is the blasted apart remnants of a nucleus. Most of these are highly radioactive with short half lives, a lot of the immediate products have half-lives in seconds or below. The decay products can have longer half-lives but something like Cs-137 with it's 30 year half life is a good bench mark. After ~200 years this will all be gone, decayed away. Activation products are non-radioactive materials that are made radioactive by neutrons from the reactor. This includes things like the cobalt in the steel of the reactor walls. Again this usually has short half-lives, in the minutes/hour/days/years range. Sticking with cobalt, it's longest half life is ~5.3 years. This will all be gone after ~40 years. Capture products are isotopes that are made in the fuel by nuetrons that are captured instead of causing fission, i.e. plutonium and other transuraniuc materials. This is the long lived stuff, with half-lives in thousands of years. A lot of this gets consumed in the reactor, depending on how the reactor is designed and how long it run about 30% of the total power comes from Pu that is made from capture in the fuel. This can go up to 40% if you burn it longer. The reason we don't burn fuel for longer is because the the fuel rod casing material (called cladding) starts to fail. If the cladding fails, you can release radioactive material into your coolant and which is something we prefer to avoid to hopefully obvious reasons. But the material inside is still fissionable.

Here is where we start to skirt real-life politics. The US decided to not allow any reprocessing of its fuel. This was mostly due to proliferation concerns, reprocessing the fuel involves chopping it up and doing some chemistry to extract the still usable uranium and plutonium from the unwanted fission products. The fission products can then be stored elsewhere (at a fraction of the volume because only a very small percentage of the fuel actually fissions) or used for other purposes including medical and industrial. The uranium and plutonium can then be used for either new fuel or potentially diverted to a weapons program which presents a proliferation risk. The US incorrectly assumed if it did not reprocess no one else would. This was incorrect. The French developed Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) from plutonium extracted from spent fuel and depleted uranium. This currently fuels about 10% of France's nuclear fleet. Other countries also have reprocessing plants. It is perfectly feasible to use nuclear waste as a fuel source. The French do it everyday. You can also design reactors that let you take fuel to higher burn-up. This would eliminate more and more of the transuranic products.

As far as I'm concerned the person who earn cash from producing fission energy should be the one to pay for waste management and as long as there will not be a proper way to discount those cost in price I'm against such plants (and as far as I'm aware no one have even an idea how such thing could like like since we are talking hundreds years in the future)

ohh and KORSNICK statment:


statement is just so "evil corporate" speech, that I don't even know how to grasp it.

So in the US the nuclear utilities DID pay for waste management. From 1982 there was a tax on electricity generated at nuclear power plants that went into the Nuclear Waste Fund to build a repository. Over $40 billion was collected. The government then failed to build said repository and refused to take ownership of the spent fuel. Instead Congress has done things like apply the money to national debt instead of the intended purpose of waste management.

Korsnick's statement isn't as 'evil corporate' as you seem to think. Spent fuel IS a future resource. A lot of work went into creating it, the uranium had to be mined, milled, and enriched. That costs money but only a small percentage of the uranium was actually consumed. The current price of uranium makes it cheaper to use new uranium and policy prevents reprocessing in the US. But prices and policies can be changed. It can be reprocessed the way the French or Russians currently do. Or you could let it sit for 200 years on a concrete pad in a concrete cask. The fission products will decay and you'll be left with reusable fuel material. 200 years is long time, but not THAT long, not inconceivably long. We've got a pretty good idea how to build a building that would stand up for 200 years.

[Trafalgar]

So in the US the nuclear utilities DID pay for waste management. From 1982 there was a tax on electricity generated at nuclear power plants that went into the Nuclear Waste Fund to build a repository. Over $40 billion was collected. The government then failed to build said repository and refused to take ownership of the spent fuel. Instead Congress has done things like apply the money to national debt instead of the intended purpose of waste management.

I would be happily surprised if the US Congress used this money to paydown the national debt.

[Thomas Cardew]

I would be happily surprised if the US Congress used this money to paydown the national debt.

I took that particular claim from a Stanford report. After more investigation, it appears that the cash got moved into the US General fund, which does... everything, presumably including servicing the national debt which is what they based that claim. Regardless, spending the money now requires a specific congressional appropriation to be spent. So the funds essentially 'exist' on paper but can't be used without specific congressional authorization.

[Mechalich]

I took that particular claim from a Stanford report. After more investigation, it appears that the cash got moved into the US General fund, which does... everything, presumably including servicing the national debt which is what they based that claim. Regardless, spending the money now requires a specific congressional appropriation to be spent. So the funds essentially 'exist' on paper but can't be used without specific congressional authorization.

For the most part all funds collected by the US government move into the US General Fund, it's just how the process works. Only Social Security, Medicare, and a very small class of other protected sources are separate, everything else is just collected and placed in the general fund to be spent to meet bills as they come due to the Treasury. The US government collects monies from thousands of different sources, especially the very wide range of fees and penalties charged by executive agencies, so there's really no other good way to manage the accounting.

[asda fasda]

When you cause fission in the reactor you produce basically 3 things: Fission products, Activation Products, and Capture Products. Fission products is the blasted apart remnants of a nucleus. Most of these are highly radioactive with short half lives, a lot of the immediate products have half-lives in seconds or below. The decay products can have longer half-lives but something like Cs-137 with it's 30 year half life is a good bench mark. After ~200 years this will all be gone, decayed away. Activation products are non-radioactive materials that are made radioactive by neutrons from the reactor. This includes things like the cobalt in the steel of the reactor walls. Again this usually has short half-lives, in the minutes/hour/days/years range. Sticking with cobalt, it's longest half life is ~5.3 years. This will all be gone after ~40 years. Capture products are isotopes that are made in the fuel by nuetrons that are captured instead of causing fission, i.e. plutonium and other transuraniuc materials. This is the long lived stuff, with half-lives in thousands of years. A lot of this gets consumed in the reactor, depending on how the reactor is designed and how long it run about 30% of the total power comes from Pu that is made from capture in the fuel. This can go up to 40% if you burn it longer. The reason we don't burn fuel for longer is because the the fuel rod casing material (called cladding) starts to fail. If the cladding fails, you can release radioactive material into your coolant and which is something we prefer to avoid to hopefully obvious reasons. But the material inside is still fissionable.

Well I'm concerned with all 3 types, are there any reason any of those types are less dangerous to the point it is not material ?
Moreover you are using a lot of percentages and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but I assume there is no way to use 100% of radioactive waste, even from Capture Products Group, right? And this group have half-lives in thousands of years which means even we get to 1% wastes it's equivalent of 100% waste in 100 years in use.

Additionally the fission energy is consisting 4,3% of our world energy mix (as of 2019 https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix) so if we would like to scale it up to even 20% it's 5x times more waste production per year.

More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?

Not to say a lot of this waste management in the future arguments can also be used for coal, coal capturing technology exist so we cane theoretically capture all the coal we burn, the issue is that this will cost much more the we are wanting to pay for energy.

As for additional tax paid by atomic plants you have mentioned, I would said that this is exactly "not-paying" for wastes. Having a flat sum paid (most probably lobbied to be as low as possible) by the company instead of actual cost of waste management and leaving the potential risk and cost to the society was probably a wet dream of every CEO of those plants.....

Korsnick's statement isn't as 'evil corporate' as you seem to think. Spent fuel IS a future resource. A lot of work went into creating it, the uranium had to be mined, milled, and enriched. That costs money but only a small percentage of the uranium was actually consumed. The current price of uranium makes it cheaper to use new uranium and policy prevents reprocessing in the US. But prices and policies can be changed. It can be reprocessed the way the French or Russians currently do. Or you could let it sit for 200 years on a concrete pad in a concrete cask. The fission products will decay and you'll be left with reusable fuel material. 200 years is long time, but not THAT long, not inconceivably long. We've got a pretty good idea how to build a building that would stand up for 200 years.

This is exactly what I mean as "evil corporate". I understand that she is not technically lying there, but she is making a spin in the way that because maybe in the future somehow / somebody will use this waste in an effective way we should not concerned ourselves about the issue now. If this can be used, use it right now and not expect that future generation will take the bill (even if it will be just higher price of uranium) for your profits.

And let me be clear I don't say the fission reactors are evil, but brushing off the waste issue without detailed plan and price tag is. Acknowledge the issue is necessary for development of solution, and be ready to pay for this. For example I acknowledge that renewables also has waste issue, but as those wastes are not toxic and for electronics (which are toxic) we have recycle plants in place already so this one doesn't strike me as a deadly option .

[NichG]

Well I'm concerned with all 3 types, are there any reason any of those types are less dangerous to the point it is not material ?
Moreover you are using a lot of percentages and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but I assume there is no way to use 100% of radioactive waste, even from Capture Products Group, right? And this group have half-lives in thousands of years which means even we get to 1% wastes it's equivalent of 100% waste in 100 years in use.

Additionally the fission energy is consisting 4,3% of our world energy mix (as of 2019 https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix) so if we would like to scale it up to even 20% it's 5x times more waste production per year.

More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?

Not to say a lot of this waste management in the future arguments can also be used for coal, coal capturing technology exist so we cane theoretically capture all the coal we burn, the issue is that this will cost much more the we are wanting to pay for energy.

Nuclear waste basically is born captured, whereas capturing all of the harmful side-effects of the coal doesn't just mean filtering the smoke, it means scavenging CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is much harder to do. And the scales of the things are massively, massively different - providing the same energy as we get from coal doesn't require 1-to-1 amounts of nuclear waste handling.

Human civilization burns 8 billion tons of coal each year. Thats 5 cubic kilometers of coal. Putting aside the smoke, the CO2 from that is 2.4 times the mass of the coal burned (because oxygen from the atmosphere is the majority weight component). Coal and dry ice have around the same density, so that's 10 km^3 of storage needed per year if we wanted to e.g. store the waste CO2 as dry ice.

Current total nuclear waste production is something like ~10000 tons per year (I could only find 2000 tons/yr for the US, but the US has about 1/4 of the world's operating plants). I don't know the distribution of densities for that, or what fraction of extra volume is needed for containment stuff not counted in that, but generally most solids have a density between 1g/cm^3 and 10g/cm^3, and coal and dry ice are around the 1g/cm^3 range. So even if we multiplied the number of nuclear plants by 100x (covering 5 times the current energy needs of human civilization), we'd still be dealing with 10000x less volume that you'd have to store byproducts in at worst compared to coal. If the mass of waste produced figure I found isn't including e.g. the materials added to vitrify the waste, that's about a factor of 10 difference (I found a figure of about 7.2 mass percent fraction of plutonium to additives in borosilicate vitrification) and you're still at 1000x less volume.

And its not like the coal byproducts would become any safer to release after 1000 years either.

This isn't even mentioning the byproducts of extracting coal in the first place. You have to extract nuclear fuels as well, but you can extract a much smaller amount to get the same energy output. Coal is about 8kWh per 1kg. Uranium is 24000000kWh per 1kg for pure U-235, but there's a lot of losses: it's about a 1-to-5 ratio of ore to waste rock, and the ore grade is from 1% to 12% usable uranium. So lets call worst case that you have to extract 1000x more mass than you can use as fuel (and not even count any waste rock, etc for coal). That still puts the Uranium extraction at 24000kWh per kg of material pulled from the earth, so compared to coal you're mining 3000x less material (and dealing with 3000x less mine tailings, etc).

[Bohandas]

Yeah. The solutions for storing nuclear waste aren't optimal, but at least there are solutions and the waste isn;t just floating around in the atmosphere like with fossil fuels

[Thomas Cardew]

Well I'm concerned with all 3 types, are there any reason any of those types are less dangerous to the point it is not material ?

Yes. It is important to disaggregate issues into the relevant problems. Activation Products and Fission products are a short term problem. The solution to these it to either use them for medical purposes or to literally let them sit in a pool of water or on a concrete pad for 7 half lives, after which (.5^7=0.008) less than 1% of any material will remain. For the longest ones this takes 200 years; for most it takes much less time. After 50 years the total radioactivity of spent fuel is 0.1% of its original level after being removed from a reactor. This stuff goes away fast. This is why you can walk around ground zero at Hiroshima or the former nuclear test sites safely today. I’ve done it. The radioactive material has decayed away.

Any of this waste type is a solvable technical problem, to a certain extent it has been solved. Dry casks are licensed for 40 years, renewable for another 40. Even if you assume you have to replace casks 5 times (every 40 years) to get to 200 years, this is still a bounded problem that you can do reliable cost estimates for. And the casks are safe. They are designed to withstand airplane impacts and not release material. They are safe to walk and work around. I have friends who literally climbed on top of them to take measurements.

Essentially all 'low level waste' is contaminated with type of material, the vast majority of waste by volume. This is stuff like tools, discard coveralls, swipes, etc. This material can be handled safely by burning it, putting the ash in glass (vitrification), putting the glass in barrel with concrete and other filler, and burying it in a shallow grave, or just stacking it somewhere. And it will be completely safe to handle.

Moreover you are using a lot of percentages and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but I assume there is no way to use 100% of radioactive waste, even from Capture Products Group, right? And this group have half-lives in thousands of years which means even we get to 1% wastes it's equivalent of 100% waste in 100 years in use.

To answer the first part, yes you could use 100% of the transuranic waste. This is what I mean by different reactor designs. Something like an aqueous homogenous reactor allows to you go to arbitrarily high burn-up because it has no cladding. You will eventually burn all the transuranic material in it. You can also design accelerator based systems to transmute the nuclear waste. France, China, the US, Japan, and Russia are all working on these kinds of systems.

This is stuff is confusing and there’s multiple ways of counting things but the percentages don’t work that way. As you burn fuel you continuously produce some waste but you also continuously consume of it. Burning fuel longer reduces the total Pu content in the fuel. This is part of the reason why weapons plutonium is produced in short burn cycles and one of the things we watch for in nuclear safeguards is short or irregular reactor burn times.

Additionally the fission energy is consisting 4,3% of our world energy mix (as of 2019 https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix) so if we would like to scale it up to even 20% it's 5x times more waste production per year.

Sure but the amount is not really the problem. The total amount of nuclear waste from spent nuclear fuel (ie the long lived stuff) is tiny in tonnage and volume terms. All of the used nuclear fuel in the US would fit on a football field. To an extent, 5x as much isn’t any harder to deal with. To analogize, we’re in storing first piece of SNF costs $10,000 and the second costs $5 territory.

More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?

These are policy questions. It is currently illegal to do this in the US, because it’s considered a proliferation risk. Suppose the US changed policy and made it legal to reprocess fuel. Or allowed the Waste Disposal fund to be used for something other than a geological repository and paid out per ton of eliminated waste? Or allowed the NRC to license new reactors? It is possible to make this cheaper or more expensive through subsidies or taxes, just as renewables are artificially cheapened by subsidies and tax credits. And are you forcing renewables to include in either cost of storage or estimated disposal costs?

As for additional tax paid by atomic plants you have mentioned, I would said that this is exactly "not-paying" for wastes. Having a flat sum paid (most probably lobbied to be as low as possible) by the company instead of actual cost of waste management and leaving the potential risk and cost to the society was probably a wet dream of every CEO of those plants.....
This is exactly what I mean as "evil corporate". I understand that she is not technically lying there, but she is making a spin in the way that because maybe in the future somehow / somebody will use this waste in an effective way we should not concerned ourselves about the issue now. If this can be used, use it right now and not expect that future generation will take the bill (even if it will be just higher price of uranium) for your profits.

The government does not legally allow you to do this. Full stop. You can’t keep the fuel, the government says you have to give it back. You can’t reprocess the fuel. You can’t sell the fuel to someone else to reprocess. I'm also going to drop this line of discussion. It's getting close to board rules and in general I hate arguing policy choices online. I try to stick to just giving technical information or facts.

And let me be clear I don't say the fission reactors are evil, but brushing off the waste issue without detailed plan and price tag is. Acknowledge the issue is necessary for development of solution, and be ready to pay for this. For example I acknowledge that renewables also has waste issue, but as those wastes are not toxic and for electronics (which are toxic) we have recycle plants in place already so this one doesn't strike me as a deadly option .

The renewable waste is toxic. The heavy metals in solar panels are toxic and leechable. Wind power composite blades are toxic waste and more microplastics. The byproducts of lithium mining are horrific. Recycling plants are an unsustainable lie that merely shipped material off to China and later other countries in Asia where the super low cost of labor made it slightly more feasible to extract a tiny portion of them. The rest just went in Asian landfills instead of American/European. Renewables have already killed more people than nuclear. Both are drastically better than fossil fuels.

[Radar]

More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?

Aside from everything else: renewables as they are now, cannot be used as a the main power source unless we somehow solve the massive energy storage problem that would induce and the related grid stability issue.

From reliable and directly adjustable sources we have either fossils or nuclear. Neither is ideal, but if we look at the environmental impact, the choice is very obvious.

[Melayl]

The storage issues with solar and wind don't seem that far from a solution. Looking at trends in battery technology and innovation, I don't think we're more than a decade or two from solving the problem.

Graphene and carbon nanotube (and graphene nanotube) batteries already exist. They already have almost 10 times the capacity of the best lithium batteries, with massively improved life cycles and charge/discharge speeds.

While graphene is difficult and expensive to produce (thus far), it is getting cheaper. If we can also pull CO2 from the atmosphere or capture it from powerplants and other sources and use it for batteries, we could drastically reduce the greenhouse effect while vastly improving our energy storage.

[gomipile]

The storage issues with solar and wind don't seem that far from a solution. Looking at trends in battery technology and innovation, I don't think we're more than a decade or two from solving the problem.

Graphene and carbon nanotube (and graphene nanotube) batteries already exist. They already have almost 10 times the capacity of the best lithium batteries, with massively improved life cycles and charge/discharge speeds.

While graphene is difficult and expensive to produce (thus far), it is getting cheaper. If we can also pull CO2 from the atmosphere or capture it from powerplants and other sources and use it for batteries, we could drastically reduce the greenhouse effect while vastly improving our energy storage.

For grid scale storage, I'm hoping that redox flow batteries become affordable at scale soon. Basically big tanks of electrolyte/electrode solutions flowing through something that's like a love child of a fuel cell and a battery. The basic technology looks to be able to produce very reliable, easy to maintain and repair large scale batteries.

Their mass energy density isn't great, but for stationary grid scale storage, that isn't too big an issue. A lot of the local infrastructure required for set-up or capacity expansion is large tanks and plumbing, which we know how to do. Also, upgrading the battery in place would only require replacing the reaction cell, which would be comparatively tiny. The tanks themselves could be left in place. They might need a thorough wash if the new cell uses different electrolytes, but the facility itself wouldn't have to be rebuilt.

[Radar]

The storage issues with solar and wind don't seem that far from a solution. Looking at trends in battery technology and innovation, I don't think we're more than a decade or two from solving the problem.

Graphene and carbon nanotube (and graphene nanotube) batteries already exist. They already have almost 10 times the capacity of the best lithium batteries, with massively improved life cycles and charge/discharge speeds.

While graphene is difficult and expensive to produce (thus far), it is getting cheaper. If we can also pull CO2 from the atmosphere or capture it from powerplants and other sources and use it for batteries, we could drastically reduce the greenhouse effect while vastly improving our energy storage.

Graphene-based and other supercapacitors do not scale well enough to solve grid-level problems. In case of balancing solar power we are talking about storing enough energy for the whole night. Redox flow batteries that goomipile wrote about might be a far better solution. The question is, if this solution actually can be applied on a large enough scale? Do they require some rare materials or are there some other logistic bottlenecks? How much work would have to be done to accomodate the grid to the new system?

[Melayl]

Graphene-based and other supercapacitors do not scale well enough to solve grid-level problems. In case of balancing solar power we are talking about storing enough energy for the whole night. Redox flow batteries that goomipile wrote about might be a far better solution. The question is, if this solution actually can be applied on a large enough scale? Do they require some rare materials or are there some other logistic bottlenecks? How much work would have to be done to accomodate the grid to the new system?

If redox flow batteries work better, that's great.

However, the articles I've been finding are saying that graphene-based superconductors can, indeed, scale up to grid level. If Im interpreting them correctly, that is...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...13468617321540

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34385877/

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/nl1...of%201%20A%2Fg.

Someone with a better understanding of electrochemical engineering than I have (which is likely many people) might have a different take on it, though.

[Radar]

If redox flow batteries work better, that's great.

However, the articles I've been finding are saying that graphene-based superconductors can, indeed, scale up to grid level. If Im interpreting them correctly, that is...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...13468617321540

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34385877/

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/nl1...of%201%20A%2Fg.

Someone with a better understanding of electrochemical engineering than I have (which is likely many people) might have a different take on it, though.

The tested sizes are nowhere near what you need on a grid-level system. Supercapacitors are so far only slowly coming to the sizes and energy capacities of regular batteries. It did not have time to read those papers in detail, so if I missed something specifically about scaling it up to grid-level sizes, please point that fragment.

[Melayl]

The tested sizes are nowhere near what you need on a grid-level system. Supercapacitors are so far only slowly coming to the sizes and energy capacities of regular batteries. It did not have time to read those papers in detail, so if I missed something specifically about scaling it up to grid-level sizes, please point that fragment.

I can't say that such a detail was present. I did originally say 10-20 years, after all. At the rate such developments are progessing, that seems like a reasonable timeframe.
Using the redox flow batteries, assuming they are currently able to scale up (or at least sooner able to scale up) in the meantime is certainly reasonable and intelligent to do.

[Radar]

I can't say that such a detail was present. I did originally say 10-20 years, after all. At the rate such developments are progessing, that seems like a reasonable timeframe.
Using the redox flow batteries, assuming they are currently able to scale up (or at least sooner able to scale up) in the meantime is certainly reasonable and intelligent to do.

Not every technology can be reasonably upscaled regardless of the progress, so I would not count on graphene there. Supercapacitors will most likely make their way to cars, but grid-level storage is just too many orders of magnitude beyond that.

[Mastikator]

I am saying it's not literally true. Continuing to use fossil fuels and particularly coal would not be ideal, however the chances that it will wipe out everyone and everthing inside one century are almost nil.

That may be technically true but there's the issue that the global temperature lags behind CO2. If we stopped adding CO2 to the carbon cycle today the global temperature would continue to warm for hundreds of years.

The problem we're currently facing is that we're paying for the temperature every year whether we emit CO2 or not, and the price rises along with the temperature. The cost is something we can currently afford but truthfully not for long. What you can expect within the century is global economic collapse, we will get to a point where we no longer can afford to keep up with global warming and will make cut backs in living standards/life expectancy.

If we keep adding CO2 to the carbon cycle then in thousands or tens of thousands of years we very well may be in a mass extinction event, and the carbon that kills us is the carbon we're burning today. We're already locked into catastrophe mode for the future, that's the future even if we stop today. And the window to stop annihilation mode is closing. Once we're past that it will be too late if we then switch to fusion or nuclear or whatever.

The path we're currently on is one where the next century will be extremely hard, we will not be able to reverse the damage after that, and then it will be a slow and painful death over the next few thousand years. Technological advancement will stop and go in reverse as society collapses.