this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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If it results in the nuclear plants remaining online and providing energy after the AI bubble pops, that doesn't seem so bad.
Fission is one of the cleanest energy sources we have today.
There’s nothing clean about fission. It produces expensive poisonous waste that has to be stored for 1000 years. And in the US, no one wants it in their state, driving the price up further. And when you’re unlucky, you end up with superfund sites like Fukushima and Chernobyl.
It is very clean. The image below shows what 20 years worth of spent nuclear fuel looks like at the former Maine Yankee plant. This is way smaller than most supermarkets in north america, let alone their parking lots!
To add to this, spent fuel is over 90% recyclable. If the US were to instate a comprehensive recycling program like France has done, the spent fuel cache could be reduced to negligible amounts.
Nuclear might be better than coal or fossil fuels, but it’s still dirty and expensive.
Spent fuel recycling costs a fortune. Only France is currently invested in it.
“In 1996 it estimated that reprocessing of existing used nuclear fuel could cost more than $100 billion.”
Most waste is stored in underground salt mines and requires special transportation, handling, and storage. That storage includes providing space between the spent rods to prevent interaction (you can’t just stack them compactly together). So while you may read that we produce half a swimming pool worth of waste, it takes a lot more space to store the spent rods than a “grocery store”. We produce about 2000 metric tons of spent rods per year. In addition, there’s all the other waste created when you run a nuclear plant — that includes garments and other materials. That adds up to “160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters) of radioactive material from its nuclear power plants annually”.
Disposing of spent rod storage casks costs $1 million per cask.
And then there’s the waste produced when decommissioning plants, or when plants go awry.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-lethal-trash-or-renewable-energy-source/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
There’s a great video DW tv did on reprocessing and still having to store spent nuclear waste here:
https://youtu.be/hiAsmUjSmdI