Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

What nuclear waste problem?

"Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized. France currently recycles their spent fuel. They put the remaining good nuclear fuel back in their reactors in the form of MOX fuel and immobilize the remaining waste in vitrified borosilicate glass.

The US had a recycling program featuring the use of advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) that was shut down because it created Plutonium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the (now stalled) GNEP [wikipedia], where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist. Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.

If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).

If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.

For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear."

Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

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Interesting: "2018 Nobel Prize for Physics-winner Gérard Mourou has proposed using Chirped pulse amplification to generate high-energy and low-duration laser pulses to transmute highly radioactive material (contained in a target) to significantly reduce its half-life, from thousands of years to only a few minutes."

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Aaaand then I have not yet mentioned fusion reactors... Just check it out here: https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion

Do you have evidence that batteries are cheaper than say nuclear? I only heard of the opposite, batteries are prohibitively expensive.

1) A train is a nastier impactor than a plane, which is mostly air, soft-ish metal and plastic.

2) What's your point? You can kill way more people by flying an airplane into a building than any nuclear facility.

I have no doubt that all advocates for nuclear would agree Chernobyl is not acceptable, and that Chernobyl can't happen in more modern reactor designs.

If Fukushima is the worst case (and newer designs may even avoid/prevent Fukushima style event entirely), I'd say the cost is acceptable. ~300 square km area that's affected is relatively small, given the grand scheme of things - it would be certainly much, much less impact than coal mining has on land use and pollution (by mining itself, not counting the effect of burning coal).

So if I have a magic wand, I'd happily remove all coal mining and power plants, and replace them all with nuclear power plants (though not necessarily put them on the same location), and I think humanity will be better off.

In the really long term, if/when there's enough energy storage solutions, I think we may not need much of nuclear power plants anymore. But I think we can not wait for that to be viable as the climate disaster is already on its way.

Not only the US. The Flamanville EPR has suffered increased costs because the welders that actually learned how to do nuclear-level welds had retired by the time someone decided to build a new nuclear reactor after Chernobyl. Additionally, the foundries that build a key part of the nuclear core (I belive it’s called a chaudron in French, but it’s basically a big metal boiler) were not as good as they were, because they had to actually remake it twice.

It is horrifying but we lost a technological capacity.

Here’s a good source in French on that subject: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville#