While reading the article, I repeatedly thought "wow this reads like a big ad for nuclear power".
Almost all passages of the very long text pointed out how great it is. It gives only a hand-wavey comment to the problem of what do we do with the waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years to come. Its not a technical but a political problem. Uhm, okay. And the other problem that uranium is much scarcer than previously thought is not even mentioned.
Atomic energy is way cleaner when it comes to immediate CO2 generation - true. But the long term problem of waste is not solved at all.
This is a wildly oversimplified and inaccurate picture of nuclear waste, that I've seen all too often.
Nuclear waste is problematic because it emits radiation. It emits radiation because the atoms are unstable, and are decaying into other, more stable atoms. The rate of this decay is normally measured by the half-life - which is the time by which 50% of the element has changed into another, more stable element. The by-product of this decay is that it emits radiation, which is harmful to life. However, it emerges from this that the rate of the decay is directly proportional to the amount of harmful radiation that is emitted. Many things encountered in ordinary life are unstable to some degree or another, but ordinarily either the quantity is so low, or the rate of decay is so slow, that the amount of radiation we recieve under normal conditions isn't particularly harmful.
Now, nuclear waste. This falls into three broad categories. First is those with a half life of less than 50 years, like strontium-90 and cesium-137. These are horribly, horribly dangerous isotopes, and will do horrible things to you if you get near large quantities of them. However the fact that they are so very dangerous means that they are by turn, not going to be a threat for very long. After a short period of time (~30 years for the two I mentioned), they are half decayed already. Devising a storage system to store these sin't very challenging - the quantities are small, and they don't need to be stored for terribly long.
The second category is the one that the anti-nuclear lobby loves to blur with the first. These are isotopes like plutonium-239, with half lives in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years timelines (~24000 years for Pu-239). However what the anti-nuclear lobby fails to mention is that by the very fact that these elements have such a long half life, they are by definition not emitting all that much harmful radiation - many of the waste products in this category similar radiation per kg than coal ash. If we're happy storing coal ash behind nothing more than a chain-link fence, objecting to these waste products is sheer fear mongering, nothing else.
The third category is the problematic one. Here we have things like radium-226, which have half-lives in the thousand-year range (1300 years for ra-226), but are still radioactive enough you want a bit more safety than just piling them up behind a fence. However the good news here is that the quantities of radioactive products in this range are tiny. So tiny the entire non-military waste of these isotopes we, as a species, have ever produced would probably fit onto a single train. I think getting rid of one of the most effective ways of power production we've discovered to date for this amount of waste might, just maybe, be described as a colossal overreaction.
Well said. We also need to remember that all of these are 50 to 100 year problems rather than thousand year problems simply because there is no reason to expect that we won't come up with ways to reprocess that fuel within 50 to 100 years. Just consider how our knowledge of these processes has changed over the last 100 years. Do we have so little confidence in our ability to innovate that we really think we will have to deal with this stuff for a few thousand years? So, this is likely a problem of a few decades for the reasons given above and because we will get better at this stuff.
This is assuming that our level of technology keeps advancing. Given the level of political instability in our world I would take that far from granted.
Except the coal ash isn't pyrophoric, so doesn't spontaneously ignite. Then there is the little problem with simple heavy metal toxicity, apart from being radioactive.
So i think it is misleading trying to reduce the problem to long half life is good for you.
I suspect you're referring to the widely debunked claims of Ralph Neder here?
Plutonium is, in itself, not all that toxic - it is significantly less toxic than many other heavy metals, and can be handled safely. I wouldn't suggest going out of your way to inhale plutonium dust - but that holds true for such large swathes of the periodic table such that it seems somewhat silly to base a power generation strategy on that alone.
It is of course radioactive, but that then falls into the problems I described above (the tradeoff between not-that-dangerous and not-that-long-lived). However the main reason people complaining about plutonium dust sound rather silly to me is this: plutonium is extremely dense - almost double the density of lead - and thus encouraging it to float around the atmosphere isn't all that easy. Unless you have someone machining doorknobs out of Pu-238 in your bedroom (in which case I would strongly urge you to find different housemates) then inhaling plutonium dust seems rather low on the list of things to worry about.
There is sufficient evidence in humans that inhalation of plutonium-239 aerosols causes lung cancer, liver cancer and bone sarcoma. Exposure to plutonium-239 also entails exposure to plutonium-240 and other isotopes. /Plutonium-239/
Yeah this is why I'm still against it. I know it can be run safely. But disposing of stuff that can be extremely dangerous for 20.000 years is not as easy.
It already eats through the containers it's in and up to date storage facilities are meant to last 100 years at most. They're just storing it now "until we find a safe method for long term storage". Which is really worrying.
Almost all passages of the very long text pointed out how great it is. It gives only a hand-wavey comment to the problem of what do we do with the waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years to come. Its not a technical but a political problem. Uhm, okay. And the other problem that uranium is much scarcer than previously thought is not even mentioned.
Atomic energy is way cleaner when it comes to immediate CO2 generation - true. But the long term problem of waste is not solved at all.