Re:Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
by cycomanic on Thursday June 16, 2022 @02:36AM
(#31763073)
Here [1] is a picture of the temporary storage at the Yankee nuclear power plant temporary storage (sorry I could not find better pictures from above to give more accurate size). There are ~90 commercial nuclear reactor in the US. I can immediately see that this would not fit into a football field sized area. And this is for a single country and ignores waste that was already transported away. And no things will not decay to harmlessness during the lifetime of a plant. They decay to a level where the containers are not very warm anymore so they can be more easily transported. Also low level waste is not harmless either, and there's going to be a lot of it when decommissioning a plant.
Re:Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
by cycomanic on Thursday June 16, 2022 @04:49AM
(#31763804)
Sorry here's the link:
https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Aerial-from-...
Storage has /been solved/ for decades.
High Level Waste is only a tiny fraction of total waste. As it stands, all of the HLW created by all the nuclear plants in the world could be kept in a football field sized area. The vast majority of the rest of the generated waste will decay to to harmlessness during the lifetime of a plant.
HLW regulations around transport are so high in most countries that the standards for transport casks has made them practically indestructible. They can literally be hit by trains and no be breached. Solutions like those developed by Deep Isolation also effectively solve any long term storage problem for the HLW.