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Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

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Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#181

Post by RankingMember »

toyg wrote: post #133
joering2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very easily these days [1] Its been done since days of nuclear plants. And no - there are no security issues, since as the name indicates, its a “waste”; you can’t make a bomb out of it and spreading it would not be as efficient as some type of gas that you would have easier access to. I imagine actually officials would love just to give away that nuclear waste to ISIS, preferrably deliver it to them for further hand…

Depleted uranium is used in artillery munitions by the US since the early '90s. It is, allegedly, a cause of increased cancer rates in NATO personnel and others involved in conflicts were the US deployed heavy artillery. If you cannot think of security issues around nuclear waste, you have no business discussing nuclear waste and you are doing your "cause" a disservice.

It's at least enough of an issue that the VA addresses it directly: https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/depleted_uranium/

Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#182

Post by bildung »

literallycancer wrote: post #143
bildung wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> France's power is cheap by European standard [0]. Because France heavily subsidized its nuclear infrastructure. They also have a big problem right now because most plants are old and have to be decomissioned, and building new plants is not economical.[0] Energy from nuclear power plants is pretty expensive sans subsidies, not just in France. Just as an example of the live cycle costs: An old plant in my country is…

Renewable sources are too expensive without subsidies too. So, how do we make people use solar? I know, let's make everything else more expensive: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/b/...

Renewables are way cheaper without subsidies. Just compare how nuclear got financed in the 1950s compared to what flows into renewables in recent decades, it's an order of magnitude smaller. And those subsidies don't include nuclear plant decomissioning, the costs of which dwarf everything else. The plant in my example cost over a billion already, and isn't even finished. A single plant.

Also those per kilowatt numbers in the chart don't mean much without comparing total consumption per household. I pay way more than the most expensive example in the charts, at 30 cents per kilowatt, yet our monthly total is only 80 Euros for a 5 person household.

Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#183

Post by coredog64 »

pvaldes wrote: post #128
joering2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very easily these days [1] Its been done since days of nuclear plants. And no - there are no security issues, since as the name indicates, its a “waste”; you can’t make a bomb out of it and spreading it would not be as efficient as some type of gas that you would have easier access to. I imagine actually officials would love just to give away that nuclear waste to ISIS, preferrably deliver it to them for further hand…

> there are no security issues, since as the name indicates its a “waste”; you can’t make a bomb out of it Without applying a lot of imagination, I can think out about some non trivial security issues in the idea of adding deplected uranium waste to a bomb as shrapnel. Definitely a bomb can be made with this stuff.

Depleted uranium is uranium that isn’t as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium. That’s what the depleted means. It’s so dangerous that they use it in hospitals as X-ray shielding.

Paper, your clothing, or even your dead skin cells is enough to block what little radioactivity is present in DU. What is dangerous about DU is that it’s a heavy metal (and pretty toxic). It’s not easy to work, so even forming it into bomb parts would kill more ISIS members than using it would kill the general public.

Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#184

Post by mimixco »

cuspycode wrote: post #178
mimixco wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes, decommissioning, that dirty little word no one in the nuclear industry likes to talk about. Decommissioning can take decades and cost billions, usually passed on the ratepayers. These costs are never mentioned when the industry discusses its economics. I'm also getting kind of tired of the "solar pollutes, too" argument. Yes, solar pollutes. So does making PC processors. But neither of those activities creat…

There is one aspect in which non-radioactive heavy metals are worse: since they are stable elements they must be stored away and guarded forever, not just for a limited number of years.

Heavy metals can't hurt you unless you ingest them. Proximity or handling doesn't hurt people. Radioactive materials, however, vomit particles everywhere in an untraceable way. Radioactivity cannot be removed from contaminated materials without transferring the radioactivity to something else. This is the key difference. Heavy metals can also be filtered from water and segregated from other substances, while radioactivity cannot.

Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#186

Post by mimixco »

gridlockd wrote: post #57
andor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of the OP was that pollution and long-term storage are not priced in. Try coming up with a price for safely storing nuclear waste for the next few thousand years.

> Try coming up with a price for safely storing nuclear waste for the next few thousand years. Quoting the article: " Environmental group Greenpeace estimates that there’s a global stockpile of about 250,000 tons of toxic spent fuel spread across 14 countries, based on data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Of that, 22,000 cubic meters—roughly equivalent to a three-meter tall building covering an area the…

It has to be stored and cooled because otherwise it kills people.

Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#187

Post by admax88q »

I wonder what our attitude towards landfills would be if they were described the same way that nuclear waste storage facilities are.

> no country can claim to have a comprehensive solution for dealing with its toxic waste.

> more than 60 years after getting into nuclear energy, [France] still has no definitive way to cope with it.

Sentences like these imply that there's dangerous waste just sitting sitting around while officials scratch their heads about what to do.

We do have comprehensive solutions. We build giant concrete wells and just put the waste there, problem solved.

This solution seems to be accepted as reasonable for garbage via landfills, but for nuclear waste its somehow treated as a workaround until we find some other magical way to get rid of it.

Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#188

Post by borkt »

erentz wrote: post #150
hairytrog wrote: post #59

Spent nuclear fuel, sometimes called waste, is actually a resource that next generation reactors will be able to tap - both for energy and uncommon element feedstock. Just like shale used to be "garbage" until the tech to make it useful was developed, spent fuel will be seen as waste until we can make it useful. Letting this very manageable amount of waste sit in repositories until we get our shit together is utterly…

And no one ever talks about how we’ll handle solar waste. Has it changed and is no longer a problem going forward? Last I looked into it a few years back it was shaping up to be a very serious and toxic problem. They were very difficult to recycle, and full of lead, cadmium, and other nasty things. Something needs to be done with them but everyone was pretending they’re completely clean and safe.

I mention this all the time to coworkers who blindly believe solar is a perfect technology. It is really, really bad - especially the old stuff with all these REE's and extremely low efficiency. I am pretty upset that California now REQUIRES solar for new construction. It really feels we should have waited for the efficiency/cleanliness/recycling to mature a lot before that.

Re: Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

#190

Post by pvaldes »

roenxi wrote: post #139
pvaldes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nuclear energy had a very bad PR for past 50 years There is not a positive way to tell people that will be forced to quit their homes, workplaces and properties when nuclear problems eventually arose but hide information or lie systematically about it does not help, neither does the "see no evil/ what could happen?/ but nobody died / your cancer is not my fault" permanent defensive stance deployed again and again.…

> There is not a positive way to tell people that will be forced to quit their homes, workplaces and properties when nuclear problems eventually arose ... That is an enormous problem, but the problem there is that governments aren't being held accountable for forcing people out of their homes. The Fukashima evacuation debatabley caused ~3 orders of magnitude more deaths than the Fukushima nuclear disaster ([0] see th…

> We have to ask why we are forcing people to evacuate

I guess that maybe is for things like that:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2915/2004/1600/belarus.jp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...

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