Compare to the approx 1 billion tons of oil consumption per year, or 4 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year that the rest of the economy burns through, to get a sense of relative scale.
Not great, not terrible :)
It is super radioactive for centuries though. We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out.
Fun fact: nuclear waste becomes less radioactive than the original uranium in about 300-500 years. The problem with the waste is that it's concentrated in a tiny amount of space that will stay dangerous for geological periods.
https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...
I'll try to re-do calculations and see what I get.
The publication above shows the graph vs. time in terms of radiotoxicity, which is widely considered to be the key metric.
What'd you use for the calculations? Generally you need to use something like ORIGEN to get it right.
But in aggregate, it will be less radioactive than the uranium (and its natural daughter products in secular equilibrium) that was expended to produce the waste.
I guess that specific metric would make heavy water infinitely radioactive?
This has been an ongoing debate though. Scientists have developed more sophisticated reprocessing processes that keep all the actinides together rather than pulling out Plutonium on its own. And in any case, the plutonium is reactor-grade rather than weapons grade, (but super-sophisticated weapons designers can make bombs out of any-grade plutonium).
George Bush Jr. tried something called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, where existing weapons states would run a bunch of reprocessing plants and contribute fuel to an international fuel bank. Non-weapons countries could reliably get fuel from it and give the spent fuel (aka nuclear waste) back for further recycling/reprocessing/treatment. It wasn't super popular among the 'have not' countries, who didn't want to be beholden to some random fuel bank.
https://atomicinsights.com/jimmy-carter-never-served-nuclear...
I suppose a lot of this is still embedded in top secret red tape :(
We did.
And there's $52+ billion in the Nuclear Waste Fund.
Nevada is just really good at complaining.
Finland might do it? (They are also sophisticated and stable enough, that you don't need to worry about the fuel being mishandled. At least not any more than for the US.)
Longer half-life -> less radioactive, by definition. Infinite half-life -> not radioactive at all.
Also containers that don't break down under centuries of ionising radiation bombardment haven't been invented yet.
The notion of it being INSTANT!!! DEATH!!!! FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS!!!! is just plain wrong.
A similar mix, yes.
A similar concentration, absolutely not. The concentration in ore is extremely low. The Soviets ruined the landscape of half the Czech Republic for a few warheads.
You're separating out the "depleted" uranium and using it to breed more fuel (potentially orders of magnitude cheaper than extracting fresh uranium from ore and enriching it).
It doesn't have to be that way. With nuclear fuel reprocessing you can burn all the highly radioactive stuff completely, and what's left either decays quickly or isn't very radioactive.
When will we give up the pipedream that it's always going to be sunny and windy, especially as climate change continues to exacerbate destructive weather patterns.
And when will we give up the pipedream that everywhere in the world is sunny and windy all the time to.
Also worth pointing out that a large fraction of the world’s population lives in places where seasonal storage is not nearly as much of a problem. Seasonal storage is much more of an issue for cool temperate and subarctic zones in the northern hemisphere, where maximum energy demand and minimum solar energy supply occur at the same time. Several billion people across South Asia, south-east Asia, most of South America, Oceania, and most of Africa don’t have this unfortunate misalignment.
So not much opportunity to expand there.
Nuclear proponents really need to give up these tired arguments. Wake up to reality. Your favored technology lost. It has zero economic benefits and you have to face reality. We live in a profit driven world, and no sane profit driven enterprise would bet on nuclear power because it's been proven to be such a loser decade after decade. The evidence is plain to see for anyone willing to take a look.
By the way, even accounting for China's recent investment in nuclear they are only projecting to have 10% of their power generated by nuclear by 2050. The US is already close to 20%, or twice as much as China as a percentage of power generated. But sure, let's just keep pretending these situations are the same.
Storage remains a big barrier to wide-scale deployment of intermittent power sources in a manner truly independent of a fossil fuel grid. While costs may be dropping, scale and competition with electric vehicles means grid storage isn't growing all that quickly. Many solar plants that are employing storage are only installing 2-4 hours worth of storage, which isn't sufficient to even out the duck curve let alone seasonal variations. Wind also has big swings in seasonal production. Even with significant overproduction, most grids are still looking at several days worth of storage to account for a string a cloudy or less-windy days.
Another factor is that wind and solar have significantly different output depending on geography and weather. Nuclear's only geographic requirement is a source of water for cooling - and that doesn't have to be potable water, it can be salt water or wastewater. And since human beings need water, too, this is rarely an impediment to deploying nuclear power plants near the population centers that use the most power. By contrast, wind and solar often need to be produced hundreds of miles away from population centers. This tends to overload the transmission capacity of rural power infrastructure [1], sometimes halting wind and solar projects.
1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
It's just yet another example of how the nuclear industry tries to spin its activies as safe and harmless. They probably spend as much money on PR these days as they do on R & D.
The IEAA says so -> https://www.iaea.org/publications/10959/high-burnup-fuel-imp...
Nuclear physics says so -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-burning_process
The term gets used in rocketry, and not all rockets use combustion (doing a burn with a cold gas thruster)
Hey, might as well get into CD's -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_disc_authoring
Why is it that the entire industry uses the term just fine, but not you? Because you're wrong.
Now, the fission fragments are highly radioactive and unstable isotopes of lighter elements. These fragments undergo beta and gamma decay, emitting high-energy particles and photons, transforming into stable isotopes over time. Furthermore, some neutrons, instead of inducing fission in uranium-235, are absorbed by uranium-238 nuclei, typically actinides, like plutonium and neptunium.
So this ridiculously toxic brew of rather random radioactive heavy elements is what we call a 'spent fuel rod'. If you were to pack a few kilos of high explosive around one of these 'spent' fuel rods and detonate it in a city center, it would probably cost at least a billion dollars to clean up, if that.
It sounds kind of ridiculous when you can build 1 GW of reliable 24/7 wind/solar/storage power generation for the same cost as a 1 GW nuclear power plant, and then you never have to buy fuel or deal with the waste stream ever, doesn't it?
Using spent nuclear fuel as a terror weapon would be vastly less deadly than more conventional means. Think about the immense effort of planning and manpower to steal nuclear waste, weaponize it, and then deliver that weapon to a population center. Now think about all that planning and manpower going towards a more conventional attack, like flying a plane into a building or detonating a normal explosive bomb.
Nuclear waste can be deadly, but it's a slow killer. We regularly test our water supply for uranium not out of any fear of a dirty bomb, but because naturally occurring uranium is common enough that it's a problem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC359425/
In short, fears over nuclear waste are incredibly contrived.
... and if properly distributed, is enough to kill every human being on the planet.
Which proves the ridiculousness of such comparisons, i.e. enough bullets were produced in World War Two to wipe out the global human population too.
Stars "burn" their fuel. This usage is deeply precedented in astrophysics.
Direct link here: https://doomberg.substack.com/p/angels-on-a-pin
It actually is. Spent nuclear fuel goes from 3-5% of U-235 at the start to 0.3% at the end of the fuel campaign. There will also be some fissile plutonium, but not much.
Having just 1/10-th of initial fuel left definitely qualifies as "burnt".
That's also why reprocessing isn't economical right now. You just won't get that much new fuel.
> If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell
That can't physically happen. Nuclear fuel is made of tablets of sintered oxide powders, and they are permeable to gases (helium is the main one produced as a result of fission).
FYI, this is a pretty typical industry term. Even to the point where "burn up" is a unit of measure tracked at operation and within model predictions.
There is no beating the energy density of uranium.
Isn't not 'burnt' by any reasonable interpretation of the word, what happens is that the fuel becomes too hot to handle in any of today's working reactors because of the buildup of radioactive fission products as well as transuranic species. If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell and eventually block circulation of the primary coolant, and the high radioactive flux would have other negative effects on the reactor core material itself (as well as on any workers that had to fix the mess).
This is well known and many proposals have been made to recover this energy from the 'spent' 'burnt' fuel rods, but it's mostly been an expensive mess. Reprocessing to recover the transuranics for use in MOX (plutonium-based fuel, basically) is really expensive as well as generating large amounts of highly toxic waste as well as raising the plutonium-nuclear-weapon proliferation issue.
Instead, this 2000 tons of years represents an ever-increasing long-term headache that generally has to be stored onsight for about a decade at the nuclear power plant before it can be transferred to long-term dry cask storage, all at considerable expense and with high security costs.
With costs for solar/wind/storage dropping every year, isn't it time to give up on this pipe dream?