this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
136 points (95.3% liked)
Technology
58678 readers
4516 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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