I thought the biggest hurdle with nuclear energy was waste management? As in, we've nowhere to put the toxic dump that's produced that will radiate a few tens of thousands of years? Unless that's been solved, in which case consumer education would be a next step
Much of the waste problem can be solved by using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel. This isn't currently done, but there's no big technical reason it couldn't be.
For what remains after that, well, there's nothing particularly wrong with sticking it in some extremely sturdy armored containers, sticking the containers in a shed, surrounding the shed with a razor-wire fence, and stationing a couple of guards at the gate.
The paranoia over nuclear waste is weird. What if civilization collapses and people in the far future discover the stuff and don't know it's dangerous? It lasts tens of thousands of years, after all! OK, but we leave dangerous stuff all over the place. There are tons of barrels of toxic chemicals, ponds full of poison, and heaps of awful stuff just sitting around, and more being produced all the time. Nuclear waste is bad because it lasts tens of thousands of years? How about arsenic or mercury, which lasts forever? And sure, precautions are taken with those toxins, but not on the "this must be placed in a geologically stable area, packaged to survive the fall of civilization, and signposted so that all future intelligence will know to avoid it" level of precaution.
> using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel
What do you mean? The waste is full of nuclear poisons (a technical term, isotopes that stop fission by neutron capture). Reusing it means reprocessing to extract the Plutonium, which is burnable in a reactor (particularly as MOX). The chemistry required for this is pretty messy, and the radioactive environment (fuel from a power station is very 'hot' radioactively speaking) so horrific that you need a fully robotic plant.
But we do now have 112 tonnes of Plutonium as a result of our half a century of reprocessing. Which no one knows what to do with, and is an enormous liability.
The main problem with reprocessing is fears of weapons proliferation, which is an odd fear when it happens in countries that already have large piles of nuclear weapons, but there we are. The waste is mostly still full of fuel. Advanced designs like the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor could make this simpler and cheaper.
What to do with the UK's plutonium seems obvious to me: use it as nuclear fuel. If this isn't being done it's presumably because of political opposition, not technical problems.
Hardly an odd fear when adding new systematic components to the material supply chain massively increases the chance of some of that supply leaking.
Not doing that route makes you less exposed to risk.
In an extremely complex world where risk needs to be minimized as much as possible, it's totally reasonable for society to decide not to extract plutonium at mass scale in a free market way.
Sure if the military controlled the whole thing (as they do via their own supply chain) that could perhaps feel more secure... but who controls outflows of waste between governments, etc?
Oh and the mind-boggling cost. Who pays?
Nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of energy when you cost in the full price of making it safe, including dealing with waste and ensuring absolutely no proliferation of weapons.
Hardly an odd fear when adding new systematic components to the material supply chain massively increases the chance of some of that supply leaking.
Not doing that route makes you less exposed to risk.
In an extremely complex world where risk needs to be minimized as much as possible, it's totally reasonable for society to decide not to extract plutonium at mass scale in a free market way.
Sure if the military controlled the whole thing (as they do via their own supply chain) that could perhaps feel more secure... but who controls outflows of waste between governments, etc?
There are various reactor design proposals (such as molten-salt), which can be used to burn a variety of fissionable materials. There hasn't been nearly enough investment to put that sort of thing into production yet.
There's a lot of energy in those 112 tonnes, but you really need a fast reactor to burn it. Plutonium is a lot easier to tackle in a fast reactor than a thermal reactor.
Also, UPower can use the waste without putting it through a chemical separations process. In fact you can just take the SNF grind it up, and dump it into the UPower reactor alongside the rest of the fuel. It actually makes a pretty good fuel that way.
It's not paranoia, it's a real issue with that waste.
We have no working waste solution as of today.
We have no working long term storage solution as of today.
We have not priced the cost of long term storage/plant decomissioning etc at the full cost into the price of nuclear power - that is for most countries.
What's wrong with copying the solution used for all the other toxic waste modern industry produces?
We have no working long term solution for storing arsenic, but people mostly seem fine with "just dispose of it in a way where it doesn't leech into the groundwater" and not the crazy restrictions everyone wants to put on nuclear waste storage.
I am not a tox/haz/nuclear waste engineer (someone?) but I assume that groundwater threatening waste is being regarded differently than highly radioactive substances.
Can't you protect yourself and go cleanup an arsenic spill "easily" compared to how you would cleanup a radioactive spent fuel rod container which tore open?
IIRC the latter is a real issue currently at Asse in Germany.
Sry, that is a terrible argument. You are saying that we do not have to worry about nuclear waste, because we currently do not worry about other waste.
I'm saying that nuclear waste is treated with far more paranoia than it deserves, as illustrated by how we dispose of other waste much less carefully, even though it's just as dangerous. And mostly successfully, too. That doesn't mean that it's something to be ignored, or that current methods of waste disposal are perfect, but if we aren't shutting down the entire chemical industry (for example) over this problem then why should we require that nuclear waste and only nuclear waste be solved for all time before nuclear power can be used?
Exactly. Nuclear waste is one of the best types of toxic waste we've ever seen. It's relatively compact, still able to be used as fuel in the future, there isn't much of it, and it makes itself harmless with just passage of time; no need to treat it with anything.
I've been convinced for a while that the reason this problem is not solved is that everybody is sure that the problem is not solved, and therefore nuclear is really hard, and therefore we shouldn't do research on nuclear, and therefore we shouldn't do any engineering on the topic of how to solve our waste issues. In other words, ultimately the reason is circular logic.
It's 2015, and we remain essentially stuck on 1950s B-Movie era stereotypes on how nuclear works, what it is, and how dangerous it is.
