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
Since this is meant to be ELI5…
You know when mummy and daddy ask you to tody your room? And you just try to shoce everything under your bed, and hope that things work out? Unfortunately, thats about where we are with the solution to nuclear waste. Problem is, unlike your toys and dirty clothes, there’s a chance some of the nuclear waste can escape, or that people might find it in the future and be harmed by it. So until we can find somewhere better to put it than under the bed, it will remain a big problem to society.
Nuclear waste is radioactive and harmful to people. Bad particles come out of it and if they hit you, they can really hurt your body.
Because of this, many people are scared of it. And it’s right to be scared of nuclear waste, it’s dangerous.
Thankfully, scientists have have worked really hard to make new technology so that the waste isn’t as dangerous. Nuclear reactors are more efficient now and we have storage containers that can stop the bad particles from getting out. The waste is still dangerous though, so we have to be really careful.
Not an answer but a question instead… if we put it on a rocket and fire it up in space, wouldn’t that work?
TL;DR
Radioactive and toxic so gives everyone cancer and horrible poisoning.
Can take thousands or millions of years to break down so it keeps on poisoning everyone.
Storing it safely that won’t get flooded or earthquake or built on etc in all that millions of years is pretty hard to do.
Old reactors worked this way, definitely – they made spent fuel that is hard to safely store.
Modern reactors don’t. Heck, some modern reactors can use old-school spent fuel as secondary fissile (fuel) material! And then the waste they produce is pretty inert (harmless).
In short, nuclear science had come a long way, and modern reactor waste is not remotely as dangerous as old-school spent fuel.
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.
Half-Life of 25,000 years. It’s fucking Pandora’s Box. NO human enterprise can keep its shit together for that long. And then twice that again.
The literal dawn of reason in humanity was 10,000 years ago, when we know they had oral traditions from the Vedas.
This kinda shit right here is why the quote:
**Paleolithic Emotions, Medieval Institutions, God-Like Technology**
Is meaningful.
It honestly isn’t very bad anymore. Governments are against because the people are against it. People have been conditioned to be afraid of nuclear power because early nuclear reactors were much more dangerous and produced a lot of pretty dangerous waste. And that waste would stay dangerous for 100s or 1000s of years.
Modern reactors are incredibly safe and produce extremely small amounts of far less dangerous waste and some even run on waste from the older type and turn it into much less dangerous stuff.
So it’s mostly just a public opinion thing based on how reactors worked out in the past.
The warning they’ve developed to be placed at these burial sites is extra awesome.
“This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.”
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
The waste is not that difficult to manage. It is small and easily stored. The problem is that it has a half-life measured in tens of thousands of years in some cases. So where do we put it that will be safe for that long?
The benefits of nuclear also relate to the waste. Nuclear waste is small and easily stored, easily sequestered, unlike the waste of fossil fuels, which we puke into the atmosphere and which will take billions of years to clean up. (Life on earth has been sequestering carbon from the atmosphere for 2 billion years. We are putting it back into the atmosphere in a few hundred years).
The resistance to nuclear power is an exercise in what-about-ism. Nuclear is cleaner, safer and cheaper than fossil fuels, and more practical than wind or solar for now. It is not perfect, and it will be overtaken by solar. It is marketed as an alternative to coal, not solar power.
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