We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited in nuclear power debates to argue that waste storage is a political rather than technical problem.
What it is
Kyle Hill explains what nuclear waste actually is and how it is stored, arguing that the problem was effectively solved decades ago. It covers solid shielded waste and deep geological storage.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends devoutsalsa · 2022-06 · on “Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?”
Nuclear waste isn't a problem if you drill a hole that's deep enough, encase the waste in a "dry cask", and drop it in the hole. Kyle Hill did a great video on this... "We solved nuclear waste decades ago" => [this video]
Recommends slenk · 2022-07 · on “Russian gas flows to Europe”
Nuclear waste, as far as I have been learning, is pretty "safe". Yeah, you need a place to deal with it, but it's mostly highly shielded solids. A video I watched recently explaining a lot: [this video]
Cites pornel · 2022-07 · on “Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy”
You know nuclear waste isn't green glowing leaky barrells like in cartoons, right? It's stored as solid glass. For super-duper cautious extra safety it can be stored below ground water levels. The volume of the high-level waste is relatively tiny (roughly a swimming pool per year per country). [this video]
Cites cyphar · 2022-08 · on “Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it”
> Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities. By the same token, no energy production technology is "green". Solar panels use rare earth metals (and require clearing land in many cases), batteries use lithium, and wind farms have to have replacement fan blades every decade or so (which are not recyclable, so much so that the current state of the art is to burn them[1]) and kill larger birds of prey as well. > Th
Cites slavik81 · 2022-09 · on “How does the land use of different electricity sources compare?”
We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago - [this video] The safe long-term storage of nuclear waste is not a technical problem. It's a political problem. The public opposes even just doing research into safer storage methods for nuclear waste. In 2016, the Department of Energy test wells for deep borehole disposal were cancelled due to protests. The tests were not even going to involve nuclear material! The opposition feared that the tests might show that the area was geologically appropriate for the safe storage of nuclear waste.