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
Think of it this way, large amounts of water are required for cooling. That normally means plant sites are near bodies of water. This increases the chance for radioactive fallout.
On top of that, a lot of sites are built on seismically active faults, which is bad news in the event of an earthquake.
I’m a nuclear engineer. Elements can have different weights when they have different numbers of neutrons in their nucleus. A reactor is a neutron throwing machine. Certain atoms split into pieces when it absorbs a neutron, making smaller atoms, while others hold onto the neutron and get bigger. Generally, more neutrons make the atom radioactive, meaning it spits out energy and/or parts of the atom to be more stable, like a ball rolling down a hill. So, after running for 3-4 years, nuclear fuel has made some of every element in different weights. That includes toxic metals, which makes it chemically toxic, and many radioactive versions of atoms.
People have long been conditioned to be afraid of radiation, though compared with most industrial hazards it is pretty easy to manage. In fact, the atoms that decay slowly (“they last for hundreds of thousands of years”) release radiation slowly, and is of little risk. The real problem ones last a hundred to two hundred years, which is relatively easy to store.
The short answer is fear and lack of perspective. Basically, reactors make a chemical soup that is capable of putting out a lot of energy for a couple hundred years, and after that you’re left with a weird mix of elements. We have multiple techniques for reusing, recycling, and safely storing the used fuel, but fear keeps hitting those ideas down and we’re left in a weird limbo as an industry. Essentially, a technically challenging but solved problem is being confused with the politically challenging and unsolved problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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