Nuclear Plant Could Bring 1,600 Jobs to Kemmerer, Wyoming

Of the top of my head, cadmium and lead, low level radioactive waste from associated lithium extraction from spodumene concentrates, pools of acids as a result of rare earth processing, etc.

Solar, wind, batteries etc are growing but as yet are only a small percentage of the energy produced by coal - as coal is phased out and replaced the waste from renewables will grow.

To be absolutely clear, I am not anti renewable energy .. but there are some serious waste issues associated with all forms of rare earth and other concentrate pocessing. Pretending there isn't would be just head in the sand greenwashing of recycling issues.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) did a 100 page report 8 years ago on the need to harvest solar panels to recover materials to form a closed cycle. To date we're still dominated by end-of-life e-waste going to landfill to be recoved "later".

https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...

That's one form of waste. The associated and often overlooked other form of waste is the byproducts from first creation, the processing of mined concentrates into useful materials comes with a slew of nasty by products that have yet to be comprehensibly dealt with.

These are material forms of renewable debt.

But, and this is the frustrating part, you're applying a terrible double standard there. With nuclear you're focusing on the tiny part that is hard to deal with. In solar you're ignoring the heavy metals [0]. By mass, there will be at least comparable heavy metals to the amount of dangerous nuclear waste. Probably more, given how fuel-lite nuclear can get.

And with nuclear a risk of cancer sees people believing that this stuff needs to be locked in containers for all of time while with solar panels if a few people get silicosis over that time frame you're going to do the rational thing, shrug and say "oh well". Over all of human history, the risk of solar panel waste killing a bunch of people indirectly is basically a certainty. It is a big world and, I repeat, this waste is with us forever. Or if we admit that it will be recycled as an argument ... so will the nuclear waste, in all likelihood. The stuff is an energy source. It'll be like when they figured out that oil was good for fuel back when it used to be a toxic waste product.

We don't need to isolate nuclear waste forever. We can cordon off a dump somewhere for the nasty stuff and make plans to deal with it for 300 years. Then move on with life. Odds are good it will be feedstock for a nuclear plant at some point in that timeframe.

To be clear, I don't mind that we're ignoring the negligible costs in solar. But they aren't a problem in nuclear either. If we agree to ignore negligible risks (like we do for literally every other industrial process), all of these objections start looking a bit silly. The opponents of nuclear are correct that the risks can't be reduced from where they are, but the risks are already lower than comparable sources of energy.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-solar-...

You might have heard the funny story about a nuclear contamination incident where the workers had to dig a big trench to clear out contaminated material, then filled the trench in with local soil ... that was naturally higher in radiation than the stuff removed.

I'm not entirely happy with the premise that nobody has learned anything about plant design since 1970 when Fukushima & friends were designed. And it seems quite likely that this 1 trillion figure is not actually an amount of money that got spent. But what I'd really like to know is what exactly were the consequences if we just ignored the situation? Because with coal we more or less ignored the pollution from 1800 -> 2023 and that turned out well [0] for everyone involved for centuries. Is this money actually worth spending? What is it buying? The nuclear debate seems to be largely detached from what actually happens as routine. Lots of people just don't exercise and that is bad for all sorts of health outcomes - there is a level of risk that people ignore in favour of more comfort.

These arguments are like 1800s peasants deciding to kill off the industrial revolution because they were worried about global warming. I don't think people are looking at the multiple orders of magnitude improvement in fuel energy density and thinking logically about what the upside is. It might be high enough that a trillion every couple of years is chump change.

And, when I hear "trillion", we note that the US wasted that much in Afghanistan. It isn't like these sums are prohibitive - Japan is slowly restarting their nuclear programs as they work out that energy is required to live a comfortable life.

[0] Like, really well. As in, any attempt to deal with the pollution would have left the whole world a lot worse off. Our entire lifestyle in the present is built on the back of infrastructure built while ignoring pollution in the industrial revolution and follow up era.

Most common assumptions about nuclear waste don't reflect the data - it is a solved problem in the industry and much less an issue than expected. A good collection of sources in https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-abou...

Costs are lower in the long run, especially when considering lower system costs - the power grid has to be much more capable and more complex with variable generation from solar and wind, plus these energy sources always need a stable backup (like nuclear)

> > What waste from solar and wind is not recyclable?

> Of the top of my head, cadmium and lead,

Lead isn't recyclable?