Comment by godelski
19 hours ago
If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1].
For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.
I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.
On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.
[0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
[2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year,
... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.
In the sense that you're using this, doesn't this apply to every power company?
Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.
To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?
All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.
Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.
Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate
Recycled down to ten grams per person per year.