I think they’re perfectly safe, but I don’t think we have a good way of storing the waste. Just leave some highly reactive stuff underground for a few hundred to thousand years? That sounds like a recipe for disaster at some point, that is a freakin long time
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
Suppose you didn’t bury it and just stacked up heaps of those nuclear flask thingies and wrote on them “waste we didn’t know what to do with”.
Suppose this went on for several hundred years until a better solution was found, and by that time there was many thousands of those flasks.
I bet our descendents would be glad that we had left them with those rather than continuing to pump waste we didn’t know what to do with into the atmosphere.
I’m not sure about the situation in Germany, but the US built a large facility in a mountain to put all the waste in one spot and fear mongering meant it went unused.
Instead, waste is spread across the country in multiple redundant spots, wasting money and making it harder to secure.
I think they’re perfectly safe, but I don’t think we have a good way of storing the waste. Just leave some highly reactive stuff underground for a few hundred to thousand years? That sounds like a recipe for disaster at some point, that is a freakin long time
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
We know how to solve it. We just don’t want to.
Suppose you didn’t bury it and just stacked up heaps of those nuclear flask thingies and wrote on them “waste we didn’t know what to do with”.
Suppose this went on for several hundred years until a better solution was found, and by that time there was many thousands of those flasks.
I bet our descendents would be glad that we had left them with those rather than continuing to pump waste we didn’t know what to do with into the atmosphere.
I’m not sure about the situation in Germany, but the US built a large facility in a mountain to put all the waste in one spot and fear mongering meant it went unused.
Instead, waste is spread across the country in multiple redundant spots, wasting money and making it harder to secure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository