Eli5: What is so bad about the waste of nuclear power plants? Why are many governments so against it? What is so hard about storing the waste in a safe place?
In: Technology
Easy. encase the waste un glass, and burry it a kilometer deep in granit, seal the well, and never look back. we found it first at much shallower depths than that.
Nuclear waste is really difficult to store, because it’s so radioactive, it destroys things that it’s in or next to. And then it’s out. So it’s hard to store.
However, we do have some places that we store it already. A cavern under a mountain is a popular choice.
The main problem is that if it gets into the ground water, it will contaminate the entire water table of that area, for a long long long time.
The main thing that really upsets people about nuclear waste is that it doesn’t stop being nuclear, and standing “near” it for a bit will kill you. Slowly and painfully.
Several items we call waste. First off the fuel which is highly radioactive is placed in dry cask containers, welded shut and filled with helium as a heat transfer medium. Casks are placed outside to continue to decay and you can walk right up to them. This is done all over the world. In the US there was discussion to consolidate the containers but currently the casks are stored on site. This is not hard and has been done for twenty years here in the US.
Second by product is contaminated waste which includes old components, consumables for service work. These get packaged up and sent to a burial site where they are sorted. Some of the old components are stored on site as they are too large to move so utilities make a bunker and let the part cool off radiologically.
All of the waste is monitored and disposed of safely and correctly with very few exceptions.
The largest risk of nuclear is not really the waste. It is the potential for a large scale issue like Fukushima which could impact the area.
Nuclear waste stays radioactive for a REALLY long time. During the first hundred years this presents little or no problems. BUT, after a while the drums sealed in concrete can and will begin to leak. Any leakage not only contaminates the the outer container but any surface the containers are in or on. That means you have to dig up the floor or dirt in the facility and recontain it and the original containers. This isn’t a big deal in the short term but over hundreds and hundreds of years it’s going to be a big problem! If 1 tom of waste is produced in the first years and each year there after: Year one = 1 ton of waste. Year two= 1 ton plus one ton equals 2 tons, Year three= 1 ton plus two tons, plus 2 tons, year four = 1 ton plus 3 tons equals four tons of stored waste. Still not a big deal, eh? Okay, lets say an accident occurs on year 8 and 44 tons of contaminated waste needs to be stored. Suddenly you have 54 tons of store waste!. Now, repeat this cycle every 20 years and by year 100 you have hundreds of tons of radioactive waste to watch over, contain and monitor. If an earthquake hits and damages the storage site you could have thousands of tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste to contend with. Politicians can safely say “they” have nothing to worry about whole ignoring the radioactive legacy they leave for our descents to live with.
There’s been serious talk about having absolutely huge sites deep under ground near bedrock and have different types of signs that will be understood by people 100.000 years from now. That no treasure or valuables are buried here. Only death that will get worse the closer you get to it.
And possibly even make a sort of religion around it to pass the knowledge to future generations.
The waste from current nuclear power plants is highly radioactive and also toxic. It is stored on site under a pool of water until the worst of the radioactive isotopes have decayed but some of the particles will have half lives in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. This means the waste remains dangerous for thousands of years. Finding a place which is safe to store it is difficult, convincing locals to let you build that storage is even more difficult and then you have the cost of actually building long term storage.
Cause you have to store it essentially forever and nothing lasts that long. Look up the WIPP in New Mexico for some interesting thoughts on it. Essentially, our civilization and language will die out long before the waste is safe.
What really needs to happen: refine it, reuse it. This is possible and would save loads of money and prevent further spent fuel needing to be stored. This is completely possible and done in some countries-France for example, and should be an environmental priority.
Not here to argue. But I would like to share [this article here](https://www.cleveland.com/pdopinion/2009/02/nuclear_power_vs_clean_coals_d.html)
Just scroll down to read the radioactive waste from a coal plant, and compare it to a nuclear plant.
That said? Green all the way. Nuclear would be a *great* step away from coal though to help bridge the gap as far as carbon emissions go however. The article I’m sharing though is just to illuminate *how insanely bad coal is* compared to literally the most though of radioactive producer that actually isnt. Nuclear power just concentrates it incredibly.
Now, compare coal to green, and ask yourself why people still argue for coal….
Where do you think the nuclear fuel comes from? It’s mined from the ground. The ground is radioactive. Coincidentally, but unrelated, the sky is too. Bananas are radioactive. So are people. You are radioactive. (Go ahead and google something like “How Much Radiation Does the Human Body Emit?” if you’re curious.) It’s totally natural and nothing to be concerned about.
The problem with nuclear waste is just that it’s concentrated. It just so happens that it’s easy to concentrate, and that’s what we do to get power out of it. You have to concentrate it for that.
If you concentrate any dangerous thing (like a poison), then it’s not easy to dispose of safely. One accident with a concentrated poison could get into the groundwater and contaminate the drinking water for an entire region. And that’s exactly the fear of nuclear waste.
Radiation isn’t dangerous in natural amounts (well, it is, but no more so than just being in nature), but concentrated it can be much more dangerous. And we have to concentrate it to get that value out of it.
The other aspect is how long can it be safely stored? It can take a long time for radioactivity to degrade. And we’re a “buy a new phone every two years” society. We’re not really good at long-term projects that can be secure for multiple generations. There’s nothing technically stopping us, but human nature and our culture tends to ignore and neglect things that are old.
We’re fully capable of containing it safely, but not quite mature enough to do so.
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