this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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For over a century, the standard way we’ve been disposing of hazardous materials that can’t be easily recycled is to permanently bury it. We’re doing it with thousands of tonnes of hazardous materials daily.
A nuclear power plant only generates about 3 cubic meters of hazardous nuclear waste per year.
At the typical sizes we’re currently building them, you need 50-100 solar or wind farms to match the electricity output of a single nuclear reactor.
When we eventually dispose of the solar panels from those farms we literally end up with more toxic waste in heavy metals like cadmium than the nuclear power plant produced.
No solution is perfect.
But contrary to the propaganda, nuclear is one of our cleanest options.
The question is, why do we look at recycling solar panels, but compare that to nuclear and ignore that these have to be decomissioned and dismantled, too? And the whole process of mining uranium etc. While it may be true that the depleted uranium is low in volume, that's far from being the actual amount of waste in the end. You'd have to compare the entire lifecycle of the plant to the entire lifecycle of a solar panel. (And solar isn't the best option anyways.) Also who's paying for 40.000 years of storage of those 3 cubic meters? The power companies certainly aren't.
Are we though?
About 400,000 tonnes of used fuel has been discharged from reactors worldwide, but only about one-third has been reprocessed.
Yes. Nuclear waste is tiny. That’s the point.
Nuclear isn’t the only hazardous waste we dispose of burying it.
We’re disposing of tonnes of hazardous waste daily. Only a tiny percentage of that is nuclear waste.
Yet for some reason everyone loses their mind about the comparatively tiny amount of hazardous waste from nuclear and no one cares about the significantly larger about of hazardous waste from the eventual disposal of solar panels and 100s of other sources of hazardous waste.
The half life of solar panels is insignificant.
The half life of high grade nuclear waste is significant.
Until 1994, one standard way of disposing of radioactive waste was throwing it into the ocean. There are at least 90.000 containers that got dumped along the shores of the USA alone. (Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altlasten_in_den_Meeren#Atomm%C3%BCllverklappung )
I'd agree that "No solution is perfect" qualifies for the history of nuclear energy.
Yes that’s correct.
To be more clear, nuclear waste is only a small percentage of the hazardous waste we’ve been disposing of by permanently burying it.