[HN Gopher] The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste [video]
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The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste [video]
Author : josephcsible
Score : 12 points
Date : 2023-06-03 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| josephcsible wrote:
| tl;dw: The material that we consider nuclear waste today still
| has a lot of useful energy in it. The only reasons we're treating
| it as waste instead of harvesting that energy are political.
| credit_guy wrote:
| I think the picture painted here is a bit on the rosy side. For
| example, at 4:22 a lady from Oklo says "we just don't have the
| commercial facility to do so [burn nuclear waste]. But the
| technology is there". What she fails to mention is that a
| technology that is not approved by the NRC is as good as not
| existing. We don't want another Chernobyl, do we? Well, the NRC
| has looked at their (Oklo's) technology, and said "no, thank you"
| [1].
|
| So, what the lady should have said at 4:22 is "The technology is
| almost there, if we work hard we might iron out all the issues in
| 10 years. But more realistically in 20."
|
| Once they iron out those issues, they will have a fast reactor
| that could burn "nuclear waste". In reality, it will turn out
| that it will be orders of magnitude cheaper to burn freshly mined
| uranium, and they'll do just that. Why? Because nuclear waste
| contains all sorts of transuranic elements, like Neptunium,
| Plutonium, Americium, Curium, and each of them with several
| isotopes. Some of these isotopes are friendly to being burned in
| a reactor, but some not. Some are highly radioactive, while
| regular nuclear fuel is not. Getting reasonably "clean" fuel out
| of this is expensive.
|
| But even if expense is not an issue, getting the NRC to approve
| the fuel will be another one. The NRC does not approve only
| reactor designs, but also everything that has to do with reactor
| operations, including nuclear fuel. There are currently several
| applications to approve uranium fuel where U-235 is enriched to a
| bit higher than 5%. Six weeks ago the NRC gave an approval to
| Framatome [2] that will allow Framatome to eventually enrich fuel
| to 8%, however, I think they will need a few more approvals until
| that fuel will burn in reactors.
|
| It takes many years for the NRC to give an approval to even such
| a simple thing as increasing enrichment from 5% to 8%, but
| otherwise keeping everything the same. Imagine how long it would
| take them to allow someone to burn a fuel that is essentially a
| random mix of a bunch of radioisotopes.
|
| [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-
| lwr/col/auro...
|
| [2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/NRC-approves-
| use...
| mikece wrote:
| The big lie is calling it waste; "partially spent fuel" is more
| accurate. As pointed out in the video re-processing the fuel gets
| all of the usable fissile material out; what's not mentioned in
| the video is that further chemical processing can neutralize the
| remaining radioactivity and leave the final waste product as
| inert glass pellets.
|
| We're barely tapping the potential of uranium-based nuclear power
| and have yet to begin with thorium. Zero-emission, cheap, and
| super-abundant electricity via nuclear has been possible for
| decades... but politics.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| "Possible" in this context is tricky. Scientifically possible,
| maybe so. But the effort and time required to build the
| facilities including treatment of "partially spent fuel" makes
| it realistically very hard.
|
| If memory serves, Germany just powered down a significant
| portion of their nuclear power plants, and those already had
| the sunken cost put into them, they were built and operating.
|
| We might eventually see a widespread use of nuclear power but
| climate change will have to kick our ass a little first.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It's not only possible, it has been actually carried out in
| dozens of facilities across the world:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
|
| As nuclear has been neglected in recent decades it's cheaper
| to mine uranium than reprocess, but it's by no means an
| experimental or prototype technology.
|
| Climate change will probably spur growth in intermittent
| sources in the short term, since politicians are usually
| optimizing for the next election cycle, but eventually peak
| production times will become saturated and the infeasibility
| of energy storage in regions within the hydroelectric power
| will become clear. Effectively all countries that have
| decarbonized their electricity sector have done so through a
| mix of hydroelectric power and nuclear power.
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