Here's all of Switzerland's high level nuclear waste for the last 45 years. It solid pellets. You could fit the entire world's US' waste on a football field.
It's not the greatest challenge mankind have faced.
Also want to point out, most of that is container, not spent fuel. The safety standards are so ridiculously high that they basically guarantee zero risk.
More people (per plant) are exposed to elevated levels of radiation due to coal power, and that's not even including the health risk of all the other shit they release
According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:
That only covers around a third of Switzerland's energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we're talking about, if I'm not mistaken).
France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:
And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant's owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a "deep" geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.
I should mention that I'm not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.
That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.
Overall, I don't trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now "unsafe to restart" because of the military activity in the region.
The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.
Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren't found there either, but as least with "renewables" they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.
I don't know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.
I don't think solution for storage would be a problem if politicians had more of a backbone with deciding a place for storage, and I frankly don't see a future without fossil fuels where nuclear doesn't play a key role. All of the US' nuclear waste could fit on a football field 3 meters tall. We got space for it.
As for energy security. Canada is a massive producer, and NexGen Energy is sitting on a massive deposit. Most utilities store ~4 years of material on site, and the fact it's so easily stored for many years is why Japan invested heavily in it in all those years ago. I don't think access to uranium is much of a concern.
and I frankly don’t see a future without fossil fuels where nuclear doesn’t play a key role
I think the anti-nuclear idiots are, well, idiots, but I disagree with you here. I think the idiots have successfully blocked nuclear long enough that it's just more economical to go full renewable + storage. Yeah, we should have had nuclear 50 years ago and would probably be looking at a much more habitable planet, I fully agree. But I think the ship has sailed.
France made a record year last year, with 320TWh of nuclear power produced for a total of 434 TWh of electricity, while being the top exporter of electricity of Europe.
I don't know how they got to 1000TWh of nuclear a year, I suspect weed.
In Germany, we've got a location with 47,000 cubic meters: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/
That requires some pretty tall stacking on that football field. Or I guess, you're saying if you'd unpack it all and compress it?
Also, we really should be getting the nuclear waste out of said location, since there's a known risk of contamination. But even that challenge is too great for us, apparently.
Mainly, because we don't have any locations that are considered safe for permanent storage. It's cool that Switzerland has figured it out. And that some hypothetical football field exists. But it doesn't exist in Germany, and I'm pretty sure, Switzerland doesn't want our nuclear waste either.
we don’t have any locations that are considered safe for permanent storage
I'm gonna hazard a guess that the "consideration" was not from actual scientists but rather activist homeowner groups in every potential site.
NIMBYism and nuclear, name a more iconic duo
I mean, can you blame them? Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard? Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
Having said that, I am not aware of the 'scientists' coming up with good suggestions either. Gorleben got hemmed and hawed around for the longest time, but its selection process was non-scientific from the start.
It's genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years. And we don't have a big desert or some other unpopulated area where you could chuck it without political opposition, when it's not 110% safe to do so.
I mean, can you blame them?
Yes. I do it a lot.
Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard?
It's not toxic, nor is it in their backyard.
Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
What issues?
It’s genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years.
Read your link: 47 000m³ of low and intermediate radioactive waste.
Low radioactive waste is objects (paper, clothing, etc...) which contain a small amount of short-lived radioactivity, and it mostly comes from the medical fields, not nuclear plants, so even if you phase out of nuclear, you'll have to deal with it anyway.
This waste makes up for the vast majority (94% in UK for example) of the nuclear waste produced, and you can just leave it that way a few years, then dispose of it as any other waste.
Intermediate radioactivity waste is irradiated components of nuclear power plants. They are in solid form and do not require any special arrangement to store them as they do not heat up. This includes shorts and long-lived waste and represents only a small part of the volume of radioactive waste produced (4% in UK).
So you're mostly dealing with your medical nuclear waste right here, and you can thank your anti-nuclear folks for blocking most of your infrastructure construction projects to store this kind of waste.
That shit still needs to be stored. I do not know, why you're berating me about it.
I did not berated you, I corrected you. If being corrected feel like being berated to you, maybe fact check yourself before commenting
They had written that you could fit the entire world's waste on a football field. I had not interpreted that as specifically referring to high level nuclear waste.
Come on, even the comment above it specifically mention waste generated by nuclear power and its management
The comment mentioned Homer (glowing green rods), I don’t recall any episode where Springfield deals with socks from radiology departments nearby. That kind of obfuscation is kinda par for the course any time you bring up nuke stuff though, folks don’t realize it’s a political problem not an engineering one and most of the anti nuke talking points are fabricated for fearmongering
I'm speaking strictly of the mass. Most the volume on those containers are likely structure to make sure there is no accidental leak, similar to Switzerland.
I also misremembered, it was all of US' waste that could fit on a single football.
Unfortunately, there's not much structure to these, no. It's nuclear waste from the 60s and early 70s, when there were practically no safety laws in place yet. They just got dumped down there in steel barrels. In a salt mine, which now has water entering it. I'm hoping, the barrels got at least filled up with concrete, but I have no idea.
world'sUS' waste on a football field.It's not the greatest challenge mankind have faced.
Also want to point out, most of that is container, not spent fuel. The safety standards are so ridiculously high that they basically guarantee zero risk.
More people (per plant) are exposed to elevated levels of radiation due to coal power, and that's not even including the health risk of all the other shit they release
According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:
That only covers around a third of Switzerland's energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we're talking about, if I'm not mistaken).
France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:
And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant's owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a "deep" geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.
I should mention that I'm not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.
That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.
Overall, I don't trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now "unsafe to restart" because of the military activity in the region.
The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.
Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren't found there either, but as least with "renewables" they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.
I don't know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.
I don't think solution for storage would be a problem if politicians had more of a backbone with deciding a place for storage, and I frankly don't see a future without fossil fuels where nuclear doesn't play a key role. All of the US' nuclear waste could fit on a football field 3 meters tall. We got space for it.
As for energy security. Canada is a massive producer, and NexGen Energy is sitting on a massive deposit. Most utilities store ~4 years of material on site, and the fact it's so easily stored for many years is why Japan invested heavily in it in all those years ago. I don't think access to uranium is much of a concern.
I think the anti-nuclear idiots are, well, idiots, but I disagree with you here. I think the idiots have successfully blocked nuclear long enough that it's just more economical to go full renewable + storage. Yeah, we should have had nuclear 50 years ago and would probably be looking at a much more habitable planet, I fully agree. But I think the ship has sailed.
France made a record year last year, with 320TWh of nuclear power produced for a total of 434 TWh of electricity, while being the top exporter of electricity of Europe.
I don't know how they got to 1000TWh of nuclear a year, I suspect weed.
In Germany, we've got a location with 47,000 cubic meters: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/
That requires some pretty tall stacking on that football field. Or I guess, you're saying if you'd unpack it all and compress it?
Also, we really should be getting the nuclear waste out of said location, since there's a known risk of contamination. But even that challenge is too great for us, apparently.
Mainly, because we don't have any locations that are considered safe for permanent storage. It's cool that Switzerland has figured it out. And that some hypothetical football field exists. But it doesn't exist in Germany, and I'm pretty sure, Switzerland doesn't want our nuclear waste either.
I'm gonna hazard a guess that the "consideration" was not from actual scientists but rather activist homeowner groups in every potential site.
NIMBYism and nuclear, name a more iconic duo
I mean, can you blame them? Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard? Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
Having said that, I am not aware of the 'scientists' coming up with good suggestions either. Gorleben got hemmed and hawed around for the longest time, but its selection process was non-scientific from the start.
It's genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years. And we don't have a big desert or some other unpopulated area where you could chuck it without political opposition, when it's not 110% safe to do so.
Yes. I do it a lot.
It's not toxic, nor is it in their backyard.
What issues?
Good thing we don't need to.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Good thing we don't need to.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It is toxic and they wrote "NIMBY", which means "not in my backyard", which is what I used figuratively here.
Depends on the location. In Asse, there is water entering into the caverns, for example.
You should inform the BGE about it. They'll be glad to hear all their challenges are solved.
Read your link: 47 000m³ of low and intermediate radioactive waste.
Low radioactive waste is objects (paper, clothing, etc...) which contain a small amount of short-lived radioactivity, and it mostly comes from the medical fields, not nuclear plants, so even if you phase out of nuclear, you'll have to deal with it anyway.
This waste makes up for the vast majority (94% in UK for example) of the nuclear waste produced, and you can just leave it that way a few years, then dispose of it as any other waste.
Intermediate radioactivity waste is irradiated components of nuclear power plants. They are in solid form and do not require any special arrangement to store them as they do not heat up. This includes shorts and long-lived waste and represents only a small part of the volume of radioactive waste produced (4% in UK).
So you're mostly dealing with your medical nuclear waste right here, and you can thank your anti-nuclear folks for blocking most of your infrastructure construction projects to store this kind of waste.
That shit still needs to be stored. I do not know, why you're berating me about it.
I did not berated you, I corrected you. If being corrected feel like being berated to you, maybe fact check yourself before commenting
They had written that you could fit the entire world's waste on a football field. I had not interpreted that as specifically referring to high level nuclear waste.
Come on, even the comment above it specifically mention waste generated by nuclear power and its management
The comment mentioned Homer (glowing green rods), I don’t recall any episode where Springfield deals with socks from radiology departments nearby. That kind of obfuscation is kinda par for the course any time you bring up nuke stuff though, folks don’t realize it’s a political problem not an engineering one and most of the anti nuke talking points are fabricated for fearmongering
I'm speaking strictly of the mass. Most the volume on those containers are likely structure to make sure there is no accidental leak, similar to Switzerland.
I also misremembered, it was all of US' waste that could fit on a single football.
Unfortunately, there's not much structure to these, no. It's nuclear waste from the 60s and early 70s, when there were practically no safety laws in place yet. They just got dumped down there in steel barrels. In a salt mine, which now has water entering it. I'm hoping, the barrels got at least filled up with concrete, but I have no idea.