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
Going to attempt an eli10 on this:
The waste is like the sun. It puts out light, and things like light, that you can’t see, and that light can hurt you just like too much sunlight can. Big governments aren’t as much against it as little governments are, like towns and councils, because people don’t want to hold onto it or have it stuck in the ground near their homes. Remember those X-rays you got? If you got way, way too many of those, you could get sick. That’s why doctors leave the room while they take the X-ray, because they might do a lot and be close to a lot, but you only get a couple a visit.
The X-ray is actually a lot like the stuff that comes out of the waste, and not just for how it can make you sick. We can block it with lead, and we can block it with other stuff as well. Water is pretty popular; it’s cheap, and it works pretty well for what we’re trying to do.
Another way the stuff it makes is like light is that it gets dimmer the farther away you go, and there’s only so much the source can give before it burns out. So, you can dig a big hole in the ground, build basically a big swimming pool, seal it to prevent leaks, put the waste in, and cover it with water. Then we watch it from a small distance to make sure nothing happens to it, and we let it burn itself out over time. After about 150 years, barely 3% of the waste is still dangerous. Once the material burns out, we can reuse it.
The hardest part in the whole thing is getting someone to agree to put such a pool in their town, because people mostly don’t know how it works, so it makes them afraid, but if the government wanted to pay me to hold onto it, and they gave me the money to dig the hole, build the pool, stick it all in, and then babysit it, I would. I worked with this stuff in the Navy. It got less radiation working in the plant than the guys working on the flight deck, because they were standing in the sun and I was deep below in the ship, surrounded by metal above and shielding around.
The next-hardest part is about making something that’ll last for that long without anything leaking, but that’s why we have to watch it and check it to make sure it doesn’t. We’re great at building stuff good enough for people that’ll last for hundreds of years, but not as good at building stuff that won’t ever spring a leak for that long. That’s one of the reasons why we have to watch it after we put it in the pool. The water itself doesn’t become *very* dangerous, but if we’re being responsible we have to make sure nothing corrodes and gets into water…
But that’s an engineering problem that you solve by building stuff, moving stuff, and being responsible. You can check how much radiation is coming off of the waste with a bunch of different detectors, the way the TV has a detector that checks for the signal coming off of the remote.
That’s the biggest danger out of all of them: People need to be responsible while they hold onto the stuff. It’s not anywhere close to as bad as you see on TV or in your games, but you can’t be stupid or careless with it either.
It’s fine. Like I said, I’d put some of it in my backyard if they gave me enough money to build what I need to build, and if they paid me to keep an eye on it.
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