All the nuclear waste we've ever made in the USA stacks about 3 barrels high on a single football field, about .002 square miles.

One of USA's deserts is around 190,000 square miles.

I'm sure we can find someplace to store it all.

There’s 90000 tons of nuclear waste waiting for disposal around the US. And every proposal in the last 60 years has been rejected

https://www.gao.gov/mobile/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_...

That number is potentially misleading. Only a small portion of that waste is high level waste, like fuel. 90% of that does not need to be stored for 1000 years.

Once you look at waste, most of nuclear waste is not 'waste', and some countries like france and Russia use chemical reprocessing to separate long lives waste from unburnt fuel. That gives a further >90% reduction.

What you are left with is a small amount of High level waste, that can be stored in deep repositories like sweeden is doing. That's a permanent solution, because we know that bedrock has not moved for 10s of millions of years.

To downvoters: it's a waste of time to discus nuclear waste without realising that 95% is the original fuel and only 1% of it is the actual long-lived waste.

Is there something in the tone of my comment you are unhappy about?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/TCWrO7OFt4I/AAAAAAAAIF...

Yep, that's more like 30 barrels high. The parent's point still stands though - there isn't that much of it.

If it is so simple, I wonder why the problem takes so much discussion to be solved...

That is actually the hint it isn't a problem. It is being treated as though it isn't a problem and that is working.

If it were actually a problem, someone would have to do something about it. The volumes are so small they can simply be stored in an ad-hoc matter.

It is a mystery why people get so fixated on the waste. It is very hard to articulate a problem apart from the fact that it goes away eventually (unlike most waste which sits there pretty much forever). We produce a lot of dangerous substances; nuclear waste isn't the worst of them.

Because there's little reason to solve it right now. The amount of waste is low enough and technology advances so quickly that we're better off putting this decision off. There's a good chance that some of the waste could be used as fuel itself in the future. There's also a good chance that a century from now, we can build a much better permanent storage facility than right now.

Because of the irrational fear of nuclear.

The waste is irrationally still radiating for 10.000 years? A reactor might be safe in some sense, but the waste certainly is not.

I mean, the chemical waste from photovoltaic production is also still poison for 10,000+ years - lots of heavy metals and other nasty shit there. But we don't seem to be quite so afraid of it...

Obviously nuclear waste is dangerous, but it's still safer for the planet than the massive amounts of gasses emitted to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. As opposed to radioactive casks, these gasses cannot be contained deep, deep under ground forever, they can only be released to change our environment in ways neither we nor the nature are prepared to deal with.

I'd rather manage nuclear waste in a remote site for 10000 years than needing to build up a permanent desalination effort to keep mankind supplied with drinkable water.

Don't forget that there are already nuclear waste sites that are managed by the government. It's just a small operational cost for today's governments.

There doesn't seem to be a believe that governments will be around for 10000 years to keep this managed securely. But honestly, if society deteriorates to the point it can no longer organize a government, a few highly radioactive spots on earth are not going to be a huge deal.

Nuclear waste facilities also have nice economies of scale in the sense that a single site's incremental cost of storing an additional ton of nuclear waste is negligible. So unlike global warming, you're not saddling the future generations up with a massive bill.

What percentage of the waste is radiating for 10000 years? And how radioactive is it? Without facts, precise facts to back it up your statement looks irrational indeed.

A location has already been found and selected, but the Democratic Party has single-handedly blocked it for decades to win Nevada votes through a cycle of misinformation whereby they have convinced votes that Las Vegas will somehow be at risk if the approved repository, Yucca Mountain, is used.

It's an indictment of double think that the party which believes we will all die from climate change (rightly) is also the party that has made sure the one power source we have that could have saved us in the last 70 years wasn't used.

Had we voted republican across the board in the 1960s we could have solved climate change without ever talking about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace

Noor II CSP is a 600GWh solar plant which is 2.6 square miles or ~1700 football fields. That's space permanently lost if the powerplant is run forever. A nuclear waste dump is tiny in comparison. Land use of solar is gigantic.

> That's space permanently lost if the powerplant is run forever.

Many Australian farmers who lease their land to electricity companies for use as solar farms run sheep on those same solar farms.

Since the solar panels track the sun, grass grows under them and sheep being small enough to fit under the panels are perfect at keeping that grass under control.

So the farmer actually gets two incomes from the one field.

>> Since the solar panels track the sun

Really? Such tracking systems do exist, but outside of CSP they are generally not economic. I would be surprised if many PV solar plants in Australia use tracking motors.

Not to say grass won't grow under static panels. I have no idea about that.

It does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPTetKHb7Yw

Open pit brown coal mining destroys bigger areas in irreversible manner. Solar plant at least doesn't exhaust.

I think everyone here wants to move away from fossil fuels. The discussion is bout what to move to next.

Comparing waste from coal, oil and natural gas to nuclear waste is a difficult discussion to have. Climate change is not caused by nuclear waste. We can hit any temperature goal we want regardless of how much nuclear waste is generated.

My own personal view is that the threat from global warming is worse than the threat of nuclear waste buildup. This is why I usually comment that we should ban burning fossil fuels for power generation and then first afterward start the discussion on how we want to create the energy grid of the future. Nuclear waste is a very relevant topic once we got to the point that we agree that burning fossil fuels has to stop and we decided which day the fossil fueled power plants must shut down.

96% of the mass of nuclear "waste" is uranium 238. This can be fissioned when neutron are 1000 times faster. This occurs in fast reactors.

Uranium 238 is unused fuel.

Coal, oil, natural gas waste sit in the air you breath and in pools or dumps on land. Plus there is the CO2.

Solar and Wind use ten times the cement and steel to generate the same power as nuclear. Cement and steel generate pollution and CO2 in their production.

> Solar and Wind use ten times the cement and steel to generate the same power as nuclear.

I'd be interested in a reference for this. My intuition goes like this:

I can see wind using a lot of steel and cement for the towers (though masts built incorporating other materials do exist) and solar using just a small amount of cement and steel -- but solar doesn't produce much power for the same area compared to a nuclear power plant, so I can see that amounting to a lot of steel and cement if you build a bunch of solar in the same way you'd build nuclear power plants.

However, solar power plants and some wind power are often not far away from where the power will be used, which means that less steel is used for the electrical masts and power lines. And solar is often mounted on roofs, which means that very little structural cement is needed.

Plus... while the article says that solar and wind power needs to be replaced every 20-25 years (note: there are turbines in operation that are older than that), when you replace a wind turbine, you'll often keep the tower and just replace the turbine on the top, so it's not like you need to scrap the whole thing every 20-25 years.

It doesn't take up much space so I imagine the cost is just as much as it would cost to dig a very deep hole in the ground in a location unlikely to be exposed even if all record of its location was lost... perhaps under the ocean.

All of it needs to be processed in a breeder reactor before storage. Processing in a breeder reactor is illegal under US law.

Just dump it in the Marianas Trench.

> a crescent-shaped trough in the Earth's crust averaging about 2,550 km long and 69 km wide.

It's still better for humans and the environment than burning fossil fuels (and arguably better than solar/wind).

You are continually getting radioactive sulfur and carbon into your lungs from coal--and they're beta emitters.

And, while people talk about Chernobyl and Fukushima, they never talk about coal fires that have been burning for decades in places like Centralia and Xinjian--which are WAY worse than all of our nuclear disasters.

Since the longest lived isotope of sulfur has a half-life of 87 days, those coal deposits must be REALLY young.

Not necessarily: the sulfur might be continually created from the decay of a radioisotope of longer half-life.

It's not.

Let's be clear: the claim that burning coal releases radioactive sulfur and carbon is wrong. There are radioactive materials released, but they are from contaminants like uranium and its decay products.

I'm not going to repeat all the arguments against this article as countless other HN commenters have already done a fine job of this. But it's worth making the point that this article is revealing in its use of lies, misrepresentations, flimsy arguments and circular reasoning. It all looks rather desperate.

There's so much of it going on that you have to wonder whether the author is aware of this. I.e. is this an intentionally misleading article written to green wash highly lucrative government spending on new nuclear plants? Without this spending no nuclear plants get built. Just a theory but this article looks a lot like it is written with this kind of agenda in mind.

> doesn't include a discussion of waste and the costs associated with handling and storing it safely

Right, so French nuclear waste is given to private shipping companies who take it to Somalia and dump it just off the shore there.

The rise of Somalian "piracy" 30 years ago was due to villagers tired of the poison washing up on shore and so they would take rafts out to ships to inspect them, as is their right as an impromptu but only existing coast guard.

France doesn't export its nuclear waste.