Operated from 1972 to 1996 and produced 119 billion kilowatt hours of energy
Dry cask storage is a method for safely storing spent nuclear fuel after it has cooled for several years in water pools. Once the fuel rods are no longer producing extreme heat, they are sealed inside massive steel and concrete casks that provide both radiation shielding and passive cooling through natural air circulation—no water is needed. Each cask can weigh over 100 tons and is engineered to resist earthquakes, floods, fire, and even missile strikes. This makes it a robust interim solution until permanent deep geological repositories are available. The casks are expected to last 50–100 years, though the fuel inside remains radioactive for thousands. Dry cask storage reduces reliance on crowded spent fuel pools, provides a secure above-ground option, and buys time for nations to develop long-term disposal strategies. In essence, it’s a durable, self-contained “vault” for nuclear waste
We have disposal technology, it just isn’t economical or politically supported: the material can be reprocessed, splitting it into the transuranic elements. The uranium and plutonium can be reused as fuel, americium and other elements with industrial use directed as such. The waste left that has no use can then be stored in a smaller footprint… And as a bonus to reprocessing, would only be hazardously radioactive for 150 years rather than thousands.
All that shit costs money. Just toss the waste wherever and wait for public funds to appear, amiright?
But when 8 years of wind turbine blades pile up its not a problem?
So is nuclear waste yet plenty of people here seem to act like that’s not relevant despite more nuclear waste being reprocessed than decommissioned wind turbines.
nuclear waste is more recyclable than wind turbines?
Maybe it has more subsidies for recycling?
If these float, these could make some awesome artificial islands or parts of piers. Could also form the basis for reefs with a bit of modification.
They’re glass reinforced epoxy (plastic). Id rather not add those to the ocean except in the form of floating boats.
This post is incorrect, and harmful. Casks do not only last for up to 100 years. They are given a 20 year certificate, and a renewable 40 year certificate inperpetuity pending safety inspection of the casket.
That’s similar to what’s done with a lot of mine wastes, which are just as harmful, if not more.
Millions of tonnes of metal-rich tailings are held back at a given mine by their engineered dams. The only thing stopping a ‘tee hee whoops’ is routine inspection and maintenance, even in post-closure
It is not at all similar. Those mines were just sealed off from the outside world with the dangerous materials therein left to polluted surrounding ground waters. These are stand alone and separated containers meant to hold these wastes indefinitely, until such time as their half lives render them no longer a threat.
You’re thinking abandoned mines. Closed mines are different, and the difference is big. With closed mines the objective is to return the land to its preexisting land use or one that supports something else equally as valuable.
To do that, wastes are managed in a variety of ways. Usually the biggest issues are related to water quality and preventing contamination. Landscapes are re-established and reclaimed. It’s not just dust your hands and walk away like it used to be.
Edit: sorry, I thought you were arguing they dontast that long. My brain skipped the “only” at the beginning.
The image you linked literally says they last 100+ years. Sure, they need to be checked on to make sure nothing is going wrong, but when is that not the case with hazardous material storage?
Wow. That’s excellent perspective on how little waste nuclear plants create!
It’s even more efficient these days. French reactors produce miniscule amounts of waste
Now compare it to how much fly ash a coal plant produces.
Doesn’t seem like much, tbh
It really isn’t burning coal etc. Will kill way more people and do way more damage than just having this sit around chilling
there’s an awful lot of people here that don’t understand volume over output. this is a small amount for 24 years when compared to the volume of toxic waste that fossil fuel plants put out.
Even the amount of radiation is lower, as coal power plants output quite a bit of radioactive material
“The casks are expected to last 50–100 years…”. Let’s see 2025-1972=53 years. Sounds like it is nearing time to start replacing these or to figure out a better solution to reuse the high level waste.
Behold: Breeding
I mean, breeder reactors…
“High level waste,” basically by definition, has a half life of ~30 years. So down to a quarter of the radioactivity after 60, 1/8 after 90, where they’re likely easier to repackage.
This makes it a robust interim solution until permanent deep geological repositories are available.
Molten Salt Reactors can mostly eat these; until the newer ones come out that can eat these more easily.
Technology will find a way, with proper resourcing.
Technology will find a way, with proper resourcing.
And research. It has been illegal to do research on nuclear power in some countries for decades. And then they go “SeE, nO iNnOvAtIoNs!”
Which countries?
Are you talking about illegality to enrich to a level beyond that required for civilian use? Like Iran?
I’m pro-nuclear power. don’t get me wrong. but…spent nuclear fuel does not account for all the radioactive waste produced in fission power production. even the majority of it by mass or volume. low and intermediate radioactive waste represents a MUCH larger footprint
Very much so. Anything that gets too hot has to be interred.
Where does it go?
Yucca Mountain
up ya bum
alright, low and medium level radioactive waste is large in volume, but it is low(er) in radioactivity. how dangerous is it really? what security mechanisms have to be present to ensure it doesn’t contaminate the landscape? Would it be okay to just dump it somewhere in the great canyon or the rocky mountains? Would it reasonably do any harm there?
Would it be okay to just dump it somewhere in the great canyon or the rocky mountains? Would it reasonably do any harm there?
I wouldn’t put it anywhere near a water table if you want to keep consuming that water.
it needs to be protected from weathering.
Yucca mountain was ideal for a lot of reasons - remoteness, stability, but I suspect there are many similar places - also mines. the good thing re: this waste vs fuel waste is it’s relatively low half life will render it ‘cool’ in a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Same goes for the industry behind making photoelectric panels, etc. Fusion would also have a lot of side waste due to neutron bombardment.
Same goes for the industry behind making photoelectric panels,
I’m not sure how to parse this. are you suggesting that PV production involves radionucleotides?
the recycling of photovoltaic panels has improved enormously over the last decade, and made huge leaps in just the last few years. In some ways, it’s becoming a focus for providing new panel production because the recycling can be quite profitable:
"In 2004, according to Germany’s state-owned Fraunhofer Society, Europe’s largest institute of applied-engineering research, one watt of solar power required about sixteen grams of polysilicon; this has dropped now to about two grams. As Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and a senior researcher at Oxford University, calculated recently, “the silver used in one solar panel built in 2010 would be enough for around five panels today.”
re: Fusion - yeah, irradiated hardware is going to be a real thing, but we don’t really have much of an idea how much of it will be produced. to be determined imho.
I’m saying there is an environmental cost to all energy generation, you have to include the whole process. In this case it is the mining of the rare earth metals used to produce them.
valid.
Nuclear energy is downright silly. “These rocks get really hot when we put them close to each other, let’s boil water with it to turn turbines” lmao like something outta the scp foundation
Computers run on magic runes written in gold.
on top of that, the information represented within them modifies itself, like characters dancing around and shaping new patterns, hence the nickname of “dancing spirits”
Even weirder when you think about cpus. “Here’s a rock we filled with lightning and tricked into thinking.”
Pretty much all of our electricity is boiling water to spin turbines, even hydro except with that we wait for it to recondense to spin the turbine. Wind and solar are the only large scale exceptions, and even then some solar is boiling water instead of PV.
Even wind is just using a windmill to spin a turbine, Solar and some very limited small scale thermocouple power sources are our only non wheel based power sources.
Precisely modeling how hot they get is very important, heh.
Very odd and hyper simplified take on it.
It would be nice to see a comparison with the waste generated by other sources, over the same period and the same amount of energy generated
Why? That waste we mostly don’t need to worry about. This waste will be deadly for thousands of years…
The global heating caused by coal will be deadly as well but on a much more global scale.
Don’t forget the coal ash, which is something to worry about.
Yeah, no need to worry about the billions of tons of C02 that has been pumped into the atmosphere…
You could make out with those casks for 5 minutes every day and not suffer any ill effects. Unlike any of the byproducts from coal.
What waste are you referring to that you think does not need to be worried about?
The byproducts from solar panels and wind turbines.
Edit: the impacts of storage production are probably a way more fair comparison and I will still put Lithium-based battery production as less harmful than this type of waste that requires long term storage I doubt our species to be capable of.
Still waste, and some non radioactive waste can remain dangerous too. Maybe not as bad and for a shorter amount of time, but still.
I think it would be nice to see, to put things into perspective.
Blatant misinformation, there are so many resources you could read or watch to better inform yourself, but you have, at this point, deliberately chosen not to.
No, we do need to worry about those. The company producing them just doesn’t need to put in any effort to contain them, and the public has to deal with it. Nuclear is largely so expensive because they have to be incredibly safe, to an honestly ridiculous degree. Meanwhile other power production just throws their hazerdous waste around and let’s everyone else deal with it so they can continue to make a larger profit.
If you’re worried about nuclear waste affecting your life in any negative fashion, don’t go outside and breathe the air or stand anywhere close to a radio transmitter.
I don’t trust modern US corporations to manage anything.
How long until people can live near Chernobyl?
People could live near Chernobyl on day one.
I get what point you’re trying to make but it still is kind of ironic you’re using a very distinctly communist failure which happened due to the communist power structure every step of the way as the example here.
Three Mile Island came pretty close to a similar fate. That almost happened and didn’t because of a very brave whistle blower. But at its root, companies tried to cut corners because of a profit motive. I.E. a huge capitalist failure. When utilities and things relating to survival needs for people are tied to whether a company can make money off of it or not, they will find opportunities to gouge, cut services, or simply not reinvest into maintenance. The failure of the Texas power grid during the freeze a few years ago is another great example of this.
Looking at the global warming crises, I don’t have faith that humanity as a whole is responsible enough for safely handling nuclear facilities. Chernobyl is now in a warzone. I think Fukushima is still uninhabitable. Our monkey brains and 80 year lifespans blinds us from the consequences 200 years from now.
I hope I’m wrong.
modern nuclear designs are pretty much unable to melt down. they’re properly failsafe. storage of nuclear waste is in a completely different category to active nuclear, and Chernobyl afaik was a flawed design for its time
modern nuclear designs are pretty much unable to melt down.
Some gifted idiot at a nuclear plant
"Hold my beer.*
until permanent deep geological repositories are available
I have been growing up with the outlook that one day we might find these yet somehow this promise/hope still sounds exactly the same many many years later
In Germany we already found suitable places but lobby work and local governments worked against it and now it’s in moist mines in leaky barrels.
The problem with DGRs is the resistance from uninformed locals and environmental groups, on a technical level we know how to build them and how to make them safe.
I thought the problem was SEP fields. Because as soon as you’ve found an ideal location for a facility all the locals come out (probably in part funded by oil companies) and are like “this sounds great but not here”.
Americans also know how sloppy US contractors get.
I think the main reasoning why permanent solutions haven’t been “found” yet is because we still closetedly believe that we will find a better use for the waste if we just wait a few more decades.
it would be a shame to bury all that waste under 1000 meters of concrete now only to find out you can re-use these spent fuel rods for another round in the reactor in 2050.
You can reprocess then and run them through breeder reactors, but no one has proven you can make money doing it.
That biggest reason no one has permanent storage sites is political. There will always be loud protests at any proposed site.
I think the nice thing about breeder reactors isn’t so much that they produce additional energy or are economically profitable on their own, but that they have the potential to eliminate nuclear waste that has accumulated in the last few decades, therefore effectively eliminating the storage problem.
Consider this: Storing nuclear waste costs something. A country might pay $1bn to store its nuclear waste for a hundred years. Instead, it could give that money to breeder reactors so they get rid of the nuclear waste permanently.
Breeder reactors don’t have to be profitable only by producing electricity. They have another selling-point, and that is that they eliminate the nuclear waste for good. That’s also worth something, and politics might be willing to pay for it at some point.
The current situation in the US is that private industry builds and runs the reactors, but the federal government has promised to take care of the waste. So either the breeder reactor needs to be commercially viable, or the government needs to run the reactor and push in on private sector businesses. I’m not sure which would be more difficult to achieve, honestly.
Research takes time, and it’s not like there’s a ticking clock or anything, the uranium is just going to sit there until we do something with it. It’s not as if the uranium is going to get bored and suddenly explode or something.
Why not just mix it to trace amounts with sand and deposit in a biologically dead zone?
Outside the environment you mean?
I mean, we dig it out of the earth, concentrate and refine it. So the problem is the concentration, no? Geologically dead and whatnot are requirements for a final depot, because the high concentrated radioactive and poisonous stuff is a disaster waiting to happen.
But mixing it with gravel/dirt for a final depot might be safer too.
I’m just confused by what you think a biologically dead zone is?
Why would we want to store it out in the open when we can just store it in a giant underground chasm somewhere. How does mixing it with sand make it less radioactive.
I thought more of marine dead zones, because slightly poisonous and radioactive gravel/sand could still be a problem. But maybe forget that.
But still, instead of one hole with high risk, 5 holes with medium risk might be better.
Well, it’s usually planned deep underground (and in rock that’s unlikely to have water or earthquakes running through) in hopes of it remaining undeterred for as long as possible. If you were to dump it in the desert, then winds or the occasional rain might still carry it all over the place.
Ok, but mixing it with gravel for the final depot would still make it saver.
I too have played satisfactory. Next step, more containers on top of these.
It’s really not complicated. Drop a concrete pillar on each corner, a layer of foundations, and they’ve just doubled the storage…
What ever happened to Yucca Mountain? I thought that was supposed to solve America’s nuclear waste problem for good.
They’ve been talking about that since I was in primary school in the 1980s.
The problem is the weak railroad and interstate infrastructure. There are too many derailments and crumbling bridges to transport such ‘hot’ materials safely. There’s also the danger of hijacking and making of dirty bombs.
If the cylinders in the OP can withstand missile strikes (supposedly) why would a derailment be a problem?
Because mountain > missile
/j
Probably what happens to all these projects.
Maybe Nevadans don’t want that in their backyard? Or maybe they oughta at least get serious compensation for it.
But they don’t get a say.
For what? The existence of something?
“Not in my back yard” is the biggest cause of so many issues in the world. Get over it.
For argument’s sake, let’s say you live near a disposal/storage site.
It’s underfunded, so it leaks into the groundwater. Or maybe they don’t catch a leak in time. You develop cancer because of radiation because you live close to the storage/disposal site.
It’s not an uncommon scenario. Fracking has done this with wastewater being pumped back into the ground (https://news.yale.edu/2022/08/17/proximity-fracking-sites-associated-risk-childhood-cancer), and even places like Whidbey Island in Washington state have dealt with forever chemicals leeching into their groundwater (https://www.whidbeynewstimes.com/news/navy-expands-testing-of-wells-for-forever-chemical/). Yes, we need a storage site, but people should have a say about what is stored near where they live… whether it makes a difference or not.
Comparing fracking to nuclear waste is comparing apples to oranges. These are literally one of the most carefully handled materials in the world. We aren’t just dumping them in a pit and forgetting about them.
I’m not anti nuclear by any means. All I pointed out was that people should have a say in something that has the potential to cause health impacts on their communities.
I love how you take the sins of the fossil companies and try to make nuclear responsible for their actions. It’s almost like the problem is the unhinged capitalism and lack of regulation and not the nuclear power itself.
Nuclear is great. I never said it wasn’t. My point is that no storage solution is perfect and communities should have a say in what is stored near them.
You’re not wrong in that people should have a say in what is stored where. But…
I can’t say that no one lives near Yucca Mountain but almost no one lives close to it.
Yucca Mountain was considered because its a mountain of solid granite without an aquifer under it.
It also has to be transported there. One of the long running arguments is that this just uses up their roads and highways and cones through their state without their knowledge or compensation.
Look at the train derailment that have occurred.
The general public is unaware how nuclear waste works. Their fears are valid and it is their state, not everyone else’s. The federal government is arguably flippant about it.
The casks are expected to last 50–100 years, though the fuel inside remains radioactive for thousands.
In other words, kicking the can down the road. “I hope they find a solution, but I don’t care. I’ll be dead by then.”
The casks are continuously recertified for as long as the material needs to be held. Radioactive material decays into non radioactive elements over the course of its half life. This is not kicking the can down the road.
The nuclear energy industry is the safest industry anyone has ever worked in, and it is intentionally so. Please go watch any number of resources on this fact.
Radioactive material decays into non radioactive elements over the course of its half life. This is not kicking the can down the road.
That’s not what half life is.
The nuclear energy industry is the safest industry anyone has ever worked in, and it is intentionally so.
Oh, this is not some idiot but rather some LLM propaganda bot. That explains the braindead comment on half-life times…
Stick with the personal insults if you dont understand something.
You dont understand half lives, which is okay. As radioactive elements decay, they follow very predictable decay chains, typically ending at lead. This can happen many ways, from alpha decay (emitting the equivalent of a helium atom from the nucleus) to positron emissions. Uranium specifically will undergo an “alpha decay chain” bringing it all the way from Uranium with an atomic number of 92 to lead with an atomic number of 82.
This looks like a very rapid decay of Uranium->Thorium->Radium->Radon->Polonium->Lead.
The great part of Lemmy is that there are very few bots, at least in my (anecdotal) experience. And again, Im.not going to call you names, but I must insist you educate yourself on the state of the nuclear energy industry and the amount of safety procedures that it employs.
Or at least, like…present a rebuttal? You just said “nuh uh, youre a bot”. Pretty lame.
Or at least, like…present a rebuttal? You just said “nuh uh, youre a bot”. Pretty lame.
Your sentence:
Radioactive material decays into non radioactive elements over the course of its half life.
Reality:
Half of a [r]adioactive material decays into other elements (which may or may not be radioactive) over the course of its half life.
And in 10 half life times, you still have 1/1024 of the original material / radiation. Try being smarter and less of a smartass.
That’s just pedantic. They aren’t wrong. You just used slightly different language
Also, you’re being an asshole.
Editing this post for people who may find it but not read further. This user makes claims about waste getting into water, and other claims. When asked for any evidence they cannot provide any. I would recommend extreme skepticism of anything they say.
That’s not “slightly different language”, that’s the difference between a few decades and thousands of years until radioactive hazards subside. And it was a bad faith argument. Anti-intellectualism isn’t acceptable when it is lethal.
It depends on your definition of hazard. It’ll be radioactive almost until the end of time. It’ll be half as radioactive after the half life. It’s already pretty damn safe as is, where being near it for a moderate amount of time isn’t an issue.
You’re just here to deny and reject. Ive tried to educate, and you have rejected it. Best of luck friend.
Welcome to the world of mining. Metal leaching/acid rock drainage (ML/ARD) is a big issue associated with waste rock, and the solution is often an engineered cover that limits oxygen and water ingress (as these react with sulphur, lowering pH and releasing bound metals in the form of leachate). These covers often use geomembranes that have lifespans of 25 years… Yet you have 300 million tons of ML/ARD waste rock entombed by them.
Look up the Giant Mine - that one will make your head spin.
