Comment by quirkot
7 days ago
Europe has about 60,000 tons of nuclear waste storage[1], so lets say the global nuclear waste quantity is 2-3x or 120,000 to 180,000 tons. That sounds like a lot, however it's less than 2 weeks of coal deliveries to a coal plant (at 1 train of 115 cars each with 116 tons of coal = 13,340 tons delivered per day[2]). To take another approach, the average landfill size is 600 acres[3].
The "eh, just bury it" approach is really not a bad one. Its not even that much stuff to bury
[1] https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16651
[3] https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-la...
I thought something like 30 tons per Gwatt capacity per year was the ballpark for high level waste without reprocessing? How are you arriving at a 120,000 ton estimate?
Footnote has the backup. 2-3x is guesstimate, but it doesn't really matter. The answer is there's just not much waste to store
Sure there isn't a prohibitive quantity either way but regardless I think the 120k number might be off by one or two orders of magnitude even before reprocessing reduces the amount by ~95%.
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