
There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste - ivankirigin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690627522614525.html
======
enodo
Guy doesn't know what he is talking about. First, the French only recycle the
waste once. After it goes through the second time, they don't recycle it
again. They are building their own version of Yucca mountain to deal with it
after that.

Second, in 2003 a very detailed analysis of nuclear power options by a group
of MIT Scientists found that recycling is more expensive than the once-through
process. See <http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/>

I am not opposed to nuclear power, but as usual, we see crap on the WSJ
editorial page.

~~~
DarkShikari
The only reason it's more expensive is because the disposal of nuclear waste
is artificially cheap.

If corporations had to pay for the cost of building phenomenally expensive
disposal sites such as Yucca Mountain, recycling would suddenly become vastly
more economical.

Another issue is the very low price of uranium; reprocessing solutions weren't
considered in the past because uranium was so incredibly cheap that it made no
sense to attempt to reprocess spent fuel. One of the primary reasons recycling
has become an issue again is that the price of uranium has risen enormously in
recent years.

~~~
Tangurena
According to The Curve of Binding Energy, nuclear power was going to be
subsidized by the sale of plutonium to the AEC. At about a megabuck per
kilogram of plu, the sale of plu would pay for the cost of constructing and
operating a nuclear power plant, and that lead to the AEC's Chairman claiming
that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" because it would be a by-
product of the nuclear fuel cycle. At the end of 2005, there were 1700 tons of
privately owned plutonium in the US (the US military has about 100 tons of
plu: about 2/3 are in actual weapons).

[http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-
Theodore...](http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-
Theodore/dp/0374515980)

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7006056.stm>

If his claim is true, then it wasn't tree-huggers who killed off the nuclear
power industry, nor Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, it was cold economics.

------
bcl
Nuclear power is a solved engineering problem. France has been doing it for
years. Here in the US the problem is so called 'green' activists who don't (or
won't) understand the basic laws of physics.

~~~
ramchip
Although I agree that modern nuclear reactors are extremely safe, I'd hardly
say that the problem is 'solved'. They still don't use the fuel efficiently
comparatively to what could be done with eg. breeder reactors, and the
solution to the waste problem is still 'bury them'. Separating the nuclear
waste by isotopes is a very complex and costly process, and even once it's
done it doesn't necessarily follow that what is obtained can be used as fuel
or for medicine. It depends on the reactor you use, or the kind of medical
imaging you need to do.

Research is still ongoing in nuclear (fission) technology.

~~~
ivankirigin
It's important to look at nuclear waste in the context of alternative energy
generation processes. The solution to waste from coal plants is "pump that
shit in the air and water", which is far worse than nuclear.

~~~
parenthesis
"[a] coal power plant's radiation output [into the environment] is over 3
times greater" than that of a "nuclear power plant with the same electrical
output".

Source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_station#Radioactive_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_station#Radioactive_trace_elements)

~~~
Angostura
Unless there's some kind of accident.

~~~
jedc
That's where a professional and well-trained workforce is important, with
indepenent and very strong regulations. I'm a former US Navy submarine
officer, and the US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors in some of the
harshest environments imaginable for 40+ years without any accidents
whatsoever.

It works because Navy sailors are incredibly well-trained and well-drilled.
But also because there is a virtually independent bureaucracy in the US Navy
that can literally "take away your keys" to run the plant. (And I do mean
literally.) Regular inspections that scare the s __t out of everyone because
of their intensity and thoroughness.

But it works, and with no accidents.

~~~
Tichy
Except that 40 years is nothing. Things can change - look at the former Sowjet
Union. Maybe a US president comes to power that withdraws funding from the
Navy, and things will start to deteriorate (just making that up, but with
really long time frames, all bets are off).

Edit: yahooing for "us navy reactor accidents" comes up with quite a few hits,
and allegations that mostly the Navy is very secretive about it.

Edit2: Even with the best trained staff, the staff is essentially just running
an algorithm. Training the staff makes sure they run the algorithm correctly,
but it does not protect against bugs in the algorithm. If you are a software
developer, you don't believe in bug free algorithms (above a certain
complexity).

~~~
ovi256

      If you are a software developer, you don't believe in bug free algorithms (above a certain complexity).
    

Please allow me to introduce you to Mr. Donald Knuth (pronounced Kah-nuth). He
would like to have a word with you.

~~~
Tichy
I don't think that example proves anything - although I like Knuth.

------
willchang
From the article:

> Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth's crust.

This is off by 4 orders of magnitude:

>
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth'...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust)

~~~
robin_reala
I thought that sounded fishy, but I didn’t go to check it out. Thanks for the
reference.

------
asciilifeform
Anti-nuclear activists _want_ nuclear power to be dangerous, in the same way
that religious conservatives _like_ STDs such as HIV - because they provide a
grounding in reality for some of their pathological whining and blind hatreds.

~~~
tvon
> Anti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous (...)

That really doesn't make any sense. They are opposed to nuclear power because
they don't perceive it to be safe (which they learned from disasters like
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island), if it was perceived to be safe then they
wouldn't be opposed to it. It's not like they hate the power it would give or
the jobs i wold create, there is no other agenda for them to oppose it on
(unless you're talking about astroturfing campaigns by alternatives, in which
case I misunderstood you).

Extreme religious conservatives are another story (and I add 'extreme' because
someone can be religious, conservative, and perfectly sane).

~~~
asciilifeform
> It's not like they hate the power it would give

Please read the writings of the prominent environmentalists. Many of them
_want humans to hurry up and go extinct._ Not necessarily in so many words,
but anyone who advocates a return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is in fact
calling for the murder of the billions of people who are alive only due to
agriculture, of a kind which depends on modern energy sources.

~~~
tvon
You are applying extreme positions held by a minority to broad groups of
people who don't hold those positions. To imply that being an environmentalist
means advocating a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyle is absurd.

Honestly it's starting to sound a bit hypocritical given your original
statement.

~~~
asciilifeform
I'm not simply talking about openly declared human-extinction advocates. The
death by starvation of billions is a logical consequence of perfectly
mainstream environmentalist platforms - pushing for the elimination of nuclear
power, factory farming, pesticides, genetically-engineered crops, and other
technologies which make our historically-unprecedented abundance of food and
other necessities possible.

I simply _don't care_ about anyone's _stated_ goals. What I care about is the
logically inevitable results of the changes they are pursuing.

------
superkarn
I've always wonder why we needed to get rid of nuclear waste. If it's
radioactive enough to harm you, then obviously there's some kind of energy
there. We just need to find out how to extract and use it (which is what the
article is about).

~~~
yummyfajitas
We know how to extract and use it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing>

The only problem is political.

~~~
jbert
> The only problem is political.

And economic? Perhaps low-grade waste is the bigger issue?

~~~
Kadin
Low-grade waste is problematic, but it's really no worse than lots of chemical
and industrial waste that we produce and deal with every day. It's completely
within the scope of current technology to dispose of it, since most low-level
waste doesn't have particularly long decay times.

~~~
SwellJoe
And it's definitely not worse than coal, which is our primary source of
electricity in the United States. Merely mining it kills three to four dozen
people in the US directly every year, on average, since the 90s (and it was
dramatically higher in the past). I don't think I need to mention to HN that
the production of nuclear power has killed zero people in that period. The
waste produced by the burning of coal dwarfs the waste that is generated per
kWh...it's literally several orders of magnitude larger. And the shortened
lives of people breathing coal pollution certainly adds up to dramatically
larger impact than that of nuclear waste.

Yes, coal pollution is "safer" the nuclear waste in equal amounts, but neither
is clean, and nuclear waste (low-grade or otherwise) can be contained safely,
while coal simply produces too much to store or convert to non-dangerous
forms.

I talked to a Greenpeace activist a few weeks ago to try to understand how
Greenpeace can _still_ be anti-nuclear energy with all that we know about the
costs of the alternatives. Obviously, an on-the-street activist isn't
necessarily representative of all of Greenpeace, but she did have a pamphlet
about nuclear energy that she was very familiar with. In short, there is no
recognition in their materials that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are
dramatically different (and so, "no nukes!" applied equally to weapons and
energy in her mind, and she simply couldn't imagine that one could exist
without the other). There was also a deep-seated denial about coal and the
realistic options for moving off of coal. Her response was, "We shouldn't
compromise on clean energy, it's too important. We need clean sources of
energy, like solar and wind, to replace coal and nuclear power." Obviously,
there's no reasoning with this sort of mentality.

~~~
jcl
_...the production of nuclear power has killed zero people in that period._

This particular assertion seems unlikely to me. People die while mining coal,
but they don't die while mining uranium?

~~~
kmavm
While I was in my senior year in college (1999) at Brown, there was a fatal
accident at a fuel reprocessing facility in Japan. It was a criticality
accident; some solution of Ur was put in a bucket or something when it needed
to be in a nice, skinny cylinder to stay sub-critical. Three workers died, and
they all saw the "blue flash" from Cerenkov radiation in their optic fluid. I
only happen to know this because I was taking a class on radiation and health
at the time, and the professor found it topical; I got the impression that
things like this happen with some regularity.

Fuel reprocessing plants are much less heavily scrutinized than the power
plants themselves, since they are less likely to cause massive damage to the
surrounding populace. I don't have the numbers to hand, but my impression is
that if you're looking for serious worker safety issues in nuclear energy, you
should look to the reprocessing plants.

------
gamble
One of my civil engineering professors worked as a consultant on Yucca
Mountain and the Swedish nuclear waste repository. I had the chance to talk to
him about Yucca Mountain, and he was very critical of their approach. Yucca's
design is intended to prevent contact between groundwater and the waste, and
ensure the waste is always accessible. While it sounds like a good idea, it's
hard to guarantee in practice and made the design very difficult to engineer.

The Swedish design is simpler - they simply bury the waste and backfill the
chambers. Waste is always in contact with groundwater, but the site was chosen
so that diffusion through the rock is slow enough that it will decay to stable
elements long before leaving the site.

~~~
Oxryly
That sounds implausible on the face of it. Its safer to let the waste contact
the groundwater than to try not to...?

~~~
gamble
No, but it is extremely difficult to guarantee that you can hermetically seal
nuclear waste from groundwater indefinitely, which is the standard Yucca
Mountain has been held to. They've poured billions of dollars into engineering
Yucca, but they'll never be able to eliminate the possibility of failure.

------
ramchip
The author seems to forget that separating U235 from U238, plutonium, and a
slew of various highly radioactive and hazardous materials isn't exactly
something you do in your shed with a couple of beakers. Especially if you want
medical-grade concentrations of exotic isotopes... Saying that plutonium can
be reused as fuel is also an assumption on the reactor technology used.

Imagine even just transporting the spent fuel to another plant. You can't
permanently cast it in concrete and glass if you want to recycle it.

Many isotopes for nuclear medicine are also produced in accelerators, not by
recycling.

------
rms
<http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160>

------
nazgulnarsil
Coal plants put out more radioactive waste directly into the atmosphere than
nuclear plants generate.

[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-
radioac...](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-
than-nuclear-waste)

tell everyone you know, tell them again and again until it sinks in. everyone
needs to know this. environmental groups need to be supporting nuclear plants.
coal plants put out radioactive waste directly into the environment. the
problem of storing it is trivial by comparison.

------
davidw
I'll stick my neck out and start the "this is _not_ hacker news!" thread. Just
look at the discussion - "green activists", "religious conservatives", etc...
looks more like reddit than hacker news, which is what happens when we stray
from our "core competencies", to turn a phrase.

~~~
falsestprophet
It is silly to have a discussion about whether each submission falls within
the guidelines. This submission has received more votes than any other today
(80 at present) and has not been rejected by the moderators. What else do you
want?

In the end, this story is congruent with the community guidelines but your
comment is not.

 _Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can
flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users
will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please
don't also comment that you did._

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

------
cakeface
I wonder if they could start reprocessing some of the waste that has already
been stored at Yucca mountain.

~~~
sachinag
If this op/ed - it's not an article - is correct, then theoretically, sure.
Practically, good luck getting people comfortable with the idea of taking it
out.

The interesting issue is that if we make it easier to reprocess spent fuel,
then DPK and Iran and others might be able to get rid of their "civilian
power" smokescreen and focus on just that part. Then, we're back where we
started.

~~~
ivankirigin
I'm not sure developing and deploying the technology domestically makes it
easier for other countries to use it.

Also, we're rapidly approaching an age when WMD will be accessible to very
small groups. Our strategy should be to treat this like a reality today, and
act accordingly.

Terrorism is certainly no reason to fuck up our entire domestic energy policy.

~~~
stewiecat
>Terrorism is certainly no reason to fuck up our entire domestic energy
policy.

Nor is terrorism a reason to fuck up the Constitution, but the prior
Administration had no qualms doing that.

------
Tichy
Interesting, but in the same sense you could say "there is no such thing as
waste", because in theory everything could be recycled somehow (and if we have
no use for it now, we might find some in the future - just as the article
states about some of the radioactive waste). Yet getting rid of waste dumps
and just keeping the garbage around at home seems infeasible for now.

It is also not clear from the article how expensive recycling the radioactive
waste would be.

------
kayleighxoxo
hello my name is kayleigh, i like to eat pie. that is my opion on nuclear
mining

------
weegee
Japan recycles their nuclear waste, should be done in the USA too. Hopefully
Obama will be able to get new plants built, we're going to need them when all
the cheap Chinese cars start coming in in a few years (it's already happening
around my area, and they are cheap).

