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0 pointsmanquer4y ago0 comments

Plutonium-239 (and neptunium-237 not used in weapons AFAIK ) are the most long lived isotopes of HLW ( High Level Wastes) yes. There are also other isotopes and other types of waste. We don't have yet data for any civilian waste disposal ( Yuccta mountain project is effectively dead now.

We currently do not have a viable economically well understood solution, not hypothetical plans which may work to use plutonium effectively [1] at costs we have no idea about or disposal facility for which costs are not really known yet for all types (HLW/ILW and LLW) waste products we cannot talk costs of ownership.[2]

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do nuclear or not build new plants, but without knowing these costs any estimate of cost of ownership is useless numbers in the air as nobody knows what it is going to actually cost yet.

[1] Again engineering and economics, engineering maybe well understood, costs are not, we don't know the costs until we build a few, nuclear is notorious for widely over running cost estimates compared to any other power generation method.

[2] We don't need to measure thousand years of disposal to know the costs, we just need to run an actual disposal site for few years to really estimate the costs .

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mlyle4y ago· 2 in thread

Just to play devil's advocate a bit...

There's plenty of chemical waste from fossil fuel use and petrochemicals that may be very long lived and cause actual health impacts if inadequately stored, too... with basically no efforts made to apply the same sorts of criteria of quality and longevity of disposal of waste.

So effectively, we compare the (not fully known) costs of really mitigating the long term impacts of nuclear with outstanding storage ... to doing nothing about greater impacts from fossil fuels (both short term impacts and long-lived waste).

manquerOP4y ago

The difference is storing nuclear waste is accepted practice today expected from every country having a plant, storing chemical emissions(CO2) is not.

A enforced storage/cleanup would be ideal yes, U.S. has never agreed to any standards, even know while Kerry talking about shutting down Coal by 2030 from nowhere, the U.S. government explicitly did not join the pledge to shutdown coal in 2030s like some countries did last week in COP26, and has always refused to get into any international binding agreement.

From a economic perspective what you are mandated to pay for [1] today is how you model costs of the project. Running a nuclear plant today means you have to keep spent in fuel on premise with no horizon for that status quo to change. Economic model for actual money going to be spent now ( not environmental or social costs models of indirect costs) has to factor that in the cost of ownership of a plant.

Is that unfair because fossil fuels has indirect costs ? yes it is, but that does not matter from an economic decision making point of view when financing a new power plant today. Carbon tax is not a solution either as currently being envisioned [1]

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[1] The carbon tax that is being discussed in the U.S. would be a disaster .

    a) The tax rate is quite low which will supposedly increase over the years. The political pendulum in the U.S. almost guarantees that when republicans come to power in 2024 or later they are going repeal/relax a carbon tax like with Paris Agreement. U.S. is not currently in position to make serious long term commitments on any policy.

    b) The polluters want limits *relaxed* as part of the tax deal. That means they want to be able to pollute as much as they want and just pay a small tax to do so ,which is why it is actually supported by some republicans I suppose. 

    c) Finally there is no plans on how to use the money to *remove* CO2 from the atmosphere, reducing emissions with that money with green investments is not good enough as polluters are in theory paying the government to take care of the problem and will pollute as they wish so government needs to clean the CO2 up. CCS is not viable economically today certainly not at the tax rate being proposed.

mlyle4y ago

> storing chemical emissions(CO2) is not.

My comment isn't talking about CO2. I'm talking about e.g. benzene.

Nuclear waste disposal is concerned/stymied by the possibility that the water table in remote areas where no one lives currently may be moderately contaminated in thousands of years if it fails, and this contamination may last thousands of years.

Whereas we have contaminated the water table in populated areas with benzene and aromatics -- where they will remain contaminated for thousands of tens of thousands of years.

That is, we're trying to prevent theoretical harms in the distant future, and in so doing, we're accepting much larger present harms.

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