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Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

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Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#101

Post by panick21_ »

I just don't like this, a huge amount of money spent for nothing. This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.

Also, this is not 'waste' there are interesting and unique materials there that might be relevant in the next 100+ years. Not to mention that there is still lots of energy that can be extracted.

These projects are all huge waste of money and the nuclear waste buggyman is mostly just the biggest anti-nuclear marketing project. And a sadly successful one.

In the US nuclear companies have spent money for waste disposal for 50 years, with lots of money hanging out in an account. But instead of doing things to actually process this waste, like advanced GenIV reactors they instead just stalemate politically over the idiotic Yucca Mountain and don't do anything. Billions blocked from making progress on technology.

Canada, the only western country with half way non insane nuclear policies is finally actually slowly moving. Together with a company called Moltex Energy they are working on reprocessing CANDU fuel to be used in the SSR Reactor.

If countries just worked together on this stuff instead of each country being tricked into digging a big unnecessary hole we could actually make clean energy, reduce the actual nuclear 'waste' to a incredibly tiny amount that can be easily managed.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#102

Post by dminuoso »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #3

I'm excited that Onkalo will be coming onine soon, so we don't have to hear the myth that there's no solution for spent nuclear fuel anymore. The solution that enjoys a solid scientific consensus is the deep geologic repository. Another thing that is weird to me is that everyone says nuclear waste is hazardous for a uniquely long time, but it become less hazardous over time. Many non-radioactive materials, like arsen…

What is even more interesting: At a given power rating, coal plants produce up to 3 times more radioactivity than nuclear power plants directly in leftover ash because coal contains large numbers of radioactive isotopes. It might not seem like much, but when you consider that a 1TWe coal plant burns 3.2Mt of coal a year compared to 27t of uranium for an equivalent nuclear power plant, this might become more apparent.

Most of that waste is captured in ash via particle filters and has to be treated like any highly toxic and radioactive waste, but as far as I know this waste it not destined for secured long term nuclear disposal where it would be kept safe from interacting with the environment. We don’t seem to have a problem with that…

Further, some low percentage (literature tends to point at .5%) of it is in gaseous form or cannot be filtered, so it gets vented into the atmosphere. That’s assuming modern and intact particle filters. And we aren’t even talking about CO2 here.

It’s somewhat absurd we have to have discussions about nuclear power plant waste in this reality.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#103

Post by panick21_ »

gtvwill wrote: post #87
roughly wrote: post #81

Stewart Brand has an interesting take on this in Whole Earth Discipline (which is quite a read) - this is energy we don't know how to use yet. In 100 years, we'll be digging this stuff right up again, because there's energy in there. I'm not typically as utopian - techno or otherwise - as Brand, but I agree with him here - the nuclear industry is less than a century old, and we've already got a pretty good idea how t…

Less common side of the argument a friend presented to me. We shouldn't use nuclear in mainstream use cases now because we don't harness enough of its power. We're basically depleting a future fuel supply before we even know how to use it properly. It has more value to us in the future when utilization is at higher %. Personally not sure which side of the fence I sit on. It definitely has benefits now, but we also ha…

This is just a bad take. There is almost unimaginable amount Thorium and Uranium on the planet. We will never run out. In reality, volcanic activity keeps transporting thorium up, so it borderline renewable. We have energy for 100s or 1000s of years with nuclear, even used inefficiently.

Sure it fucking sucks we are only mostly U-235 and we are doing it inefficiently, but stopping progress because of that is just dumb.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#104

Post by DennisP »

gtvwill wrote: post #87
roughly wrote: post #81

Stewart Brand has an interesting take on this in Whole Earth Discipline (which is quite a read) - this is energy we don't know how to use yet. In 100 years, we'll be digging this stuff right up again, because there's energy in there. I'm not typically as utopian - techno or otherwise - as Brand, but I agree with him here - the nuclear industry is less than a century old, and we've already got a pretty good idea how t…

Less common side of the argument a friend presented to me. We shouldn't use nuclear in mainstream use cases now because we don't harness enough of its power. We're basically depleting a future fuel supply before we even know how to use it properly. It has more value to us in the future when utilization is at higher %. Personally not sure which side of the fence I sit on. It definitely has benefits now, but we also ha…

All we have to do is keep the spent fuel around, and feed it into fast reactors later.

Besides that, seawater extraction of uranium is already just five times more expensive than mining. With fast reactors getting a hundred times as much energy from the same amount of natural uranium, seawater extraction becomes easily economical. Uranium mining today is a small portion of nuclear cost.

With fast reactors fueled by seawater uranium, we'll have enough fuel for millions of years.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#105

Post by pazimzadeh »

panick21_ wrote: post #103
gtvwill wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less common side of the argument a friend presented to me. We shouldn't use nuclear in mainstream use cases now because we don't harness enough of its power. We're basically depleting a future fuel supply before we even know how to use it properly. It has more value to us in the future when utilization is at higher %. Personally not sure which side of the fence I sit on. It definitely has benefits now, but we also ha…

This is just a bad take. There is almost unimaginable amount Thorium and Uranium on the planet. We will never run out. In reality, volcanic activity keeps transporting thorium up, so it borderline renewable. We have energy for 100s or 1000s of years with nuclear, even used inefficiently. Sure it fucking sucks we are only mostly U-235 and we are doing it inefficiently, but stopping progress because of that is just dum…

> We have energy for 100s or 1000s of years with nuclear, even used inefficiently

Doesn't sound like a lot to me. I believe there must be something like Parkinson's law for energy (work expands to fill the allotted time)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#106

Post by panick21_ »

simmerup wrote: post #45
pintxo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this ever be acceptable, given that rockets have a failure rate that’s not zero?

The impossibility of getting an insurance policy to cover this downside probably makes it dead in the water unless a state starts doing it

If there were sea launch platforms its perfectly acceptable I would thin.

And governments don't need insurance.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#107

Post by pazimzadeh »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #90
gtvwill wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less common side of the argument a friend presented to me. We shouldn't use nuclear in mainstream use cases now because we don't harness enough of its power. We're basically depleting a future fuel supply before we even know how to use it properly. It has more value to us in the future when utilization is at higher %. Personally not sure which side of the fence I sit on. It definitely has benefits now, but we also ha…

the problem that argument is that we learn how to increase efficiency as a result of using it and building a supply chain around that resource. Just look at gas engines. a modern gas engine uses a fraction of the fuel of a model T to transport more weight faster to their destinations. What you're suggestion would be akin to saying we should avoid the model T and wait till the prius is available. without a car industr…

I get your overall point, however it's the reverse: electric cars were around before gas-powered cars. And the first hybrid gas-electric car was made around 1898.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#108

Post by credit_guy »

pfdietz wrote: post #48
soulbadguy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the world runs out of cheap uranium very quickly. Citations ?

World uranium resource information is readily available. For example: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... gives a resource, as of 2017, of 8 million tonnes. Note that the recent expansion in uranium exploration didn't increase the resource very much. A 3000 MW(th) thermal burner reactor uses about 250 tonnes of natural uranium per year. https://material-properties.org/what-is-natural-urani…

"Known resources" is always a misleading thing. Time and again we used this logic and concluded that the world has only 20 years left of oil, for example.

Finding and proving reserves is costly. People don't just randomly decide to invest money to find new resources of Uranium. If there are 8 million tons of economically recoverable Uranium, and the world consumes less than 80k tons per year, that covers us for 100 years. If we were to double the uranium use for whatever reason, mining companies would invest more money into exploration, and the proven reserves will increase by a factor of 2.

We are not going to run out of Uranium under any scenario in the next few hundred years.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#109

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

panick21_ wrote: post #103
gtvwill wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less common side of the argument a friend presented to me. We shouldn't use nuclear in mainstream use cases now because we don't harness enough of its power. We're basically depleting a future fuel supply before we even know how to use it properly. It has more value to us in the future when utilization is at higher %. Personally not sure which side of the fence I sit on. It definitely has benefits now, but we also ha…

This is just a bad take. There is almost unimaginable amount Thorium and Uranium on the planet. We will never run out. In reality, volcanic activity keeps transporting thorium up, so it borderline renewable. We have energy for 100s or 1000s of years with nuclear, even used inefficiently. Sure it fucking sucks we are only mostly U-235 and we are doing it inefficiently, but stopping progress because of that is just dum…

‘No one will ever need more than 512kb of memory’

And calling something ‘a bad take’ because you have a differing opinion makes you an arrogant crass brute.

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