Nuclear power is back in the public consciousness these days as we search for better sources of clean energy to combat climate change.

Opponents cite the problem of what to do with nuclear waste, while proponents say it's no big deal and that all the nuclear waste from every nuclear power plant in the world could be safely disposed of in a relatively tiny underground facility or — perhaps even better — could simply be left where it is.

But the reality is that people don't want nuclear waste near where they live. So it mostly gets left wherever it gets created, and nuclear waste must be guarded around the clock, at great expense. The result is that we still don't actually have a good answer for where to put it or even how to pay for leaving it where it is.

These dumpsters of old nuclear waste are costing taxpayers a fortune - The Boston GlobeThey were supposed to be hauled away decades ago. They're still here.www.bostonglobe.com

There are a number of problems that need to be solved for nuclear power to be truly viable as a means of fighting climate change, but I feel like this one tends to be brushed aside too quickly. It's easy to dismiss it as not a big deal, or to defer worrying about it and assume someone will eventually come up with a good solution.

But the fact is it's a problem that hasn't yet been solved, even though many people say a solution should theoretically be easy. Can we actually solve it? If so, what would a realistic solution look like?

📷 Radioactive keeper drums, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0

I think Bill Gates isn't getting enough attention for TerraPower, a next-gen reactor that generates very little waste and has the potential to use current nuclear waste as fuel.

Nuclear is one of those things that naturally terrifies humans and maybe Gates hasn't been able to communicate TerraPower's potential in simple enough terms, I dunno, but perhaps a YouTuber can:

I live within 20 minutes of such power plant and actually love it's park like setting and its environs. Not sure if the air and water would have been that clean, if one of the conventional coal plants was nearby instead. But off the many sources of energy, I for some reason have this belief that if done and managed properly, nuclear can be the most efficient while being also clean. I don't know how much of it results, and how the waste gets processed from such plants, but read long ago that there were plans to shoot it out of the earth - in space, which really makes sense but of course I (again) have no idea on feasibility and price for it. I know in NYC the garbage business is "big", how about an intergalactic garbage business? LOL

I read long ago that there were plans to shoot it out of the earth - in space, which really makes sense but of course I (again) have no idea on feasibility and price for it. I know in NYC the garbage business is "big", how about an intergalactic garbage business?

The challenge with shooting nuclear waste out into space is that you have even greater containment issues.  

Even if you decided to rocket it all into our sun or into Beetlejuice, the cargo could be destroyed by meteor showers or knocked off course to crash land on asteroids or other planets.  We may one day mine asteroids for resources: I don’t want our grandchildren to be SOL because an asteroid had Chernobyl level radioactivity.

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I know @Dracula that you were joking about an intergalactic garbage business, but are you familiar with The United Galaxies Sanitation Patrol Cruiser?

upload.wikimedia.org

It’s mission was to clean up trash in space by collecting "space baggies".  

Quark (TV Series 1977-1978) - IMDbCreated by Buck Henry. With Richard Benjamin, Tim Thomerson, Patricia Barnstable, Cyb Barnstable. The misadventures of an outer space garbage collector and his crew.m.imdb.com

This reminds me of the nuclear semiotics research first done in the 1980s. The basic idea was to find out what, if anything, we can do to make sure that a place where we dump radioactive waste stays safe not just in the immediate future, but as long as necessary even if that means thousands of years and surviving even the fall of our current civilization.

Ten Thousand Years - 99% InvisibleIn 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would be there on assignment. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation's only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste.99percentinvisible.org

As much as I love the concept of ray cats and landscapes of thorns, all of this doesn't really sound feasible to me. Instead, we would need concepts that reduce the amount of waste - and the amount of time it stays dangerous - for nuclear power to really work. I still need to watch the video @Chris posted, but that sounds like it might be the way to go here.

The challenge with shooting nuclear waste out into space is that you have even greater containment issues.  

Even if you decided to rocket it all into our sun or into Beetlejuice, the cargo could be destroyed by meteor showers or knocked off course to crash land on asteroids or other planets.  We may one day mine asteroids for resources: I don’t want our grandchildren to be SOL because an asteroid had Chernobyl level radioactivity.

Thanks so much for the Quark show reference, I never knew about it; the short clip had me laughing out loud!

I think sending that stuff in space, far away towards a back hole, or even towards the sun, once on its way at a safe distance from Earth, would pose an infinitesimal problem, if any at all, for anyone in the future, given the probabilistic realities. And it may prove actually efficient cost wise vs. the storage example in @yaypie OP, which to me today looks more like due to some reason or another it turned an once active power producing plant, into toxic residue storage facility acting as milk cow for cash in disguise, multiple generations will have to contend with. But I am no scientist and feel very short sighted regarding society's future..

Those wave reactors and using the unused material so readily available, in such less polluting ways seem at the first glance the perfect solution. But the more time passes, the more seeing aspects of life such as this reinforces my belief that to adopt anything progressive and benefic for the world, as of today in its majority, it could only be happening when those most powerful 0.1% at the top of the human society of today, will really start to care. And perhaps also a radical shift and change on how the global world's society operates, as far as goals and vision.

I know there is a mood right now that billionaires shouldn’t exist, but I believe there are good ones. I want to believe the biggest and best became rich not through ill-gotten gains but by creating legit companies like Tesla.

Anyway, I think Gates is a good one and does care and has funded a long-term risky bet on TerraPower no one else would. I’m hoping they can pull it off.

Here are my notes and highlight’s from Chris’ video:

- Less than 1% of the uranium mined is usable in existing nuclear power plants.

- Wave reactors can run on this unused uranium. As a result, a nuclear fuel supply that could power the United States for over 1,000 years has already been dug up.

- Bill Gates’ wave reactors convert the uranium into usable plutonium over several phases or “waves.”

- Gates’ reactors also use molton salt reactor technology so there is less risk of a meltdown: unfortunately, they kinda glossed over why this is true.

- The technology has not been field tested yet.  It has been “proven” over thousands of simulations in a super computer.

Gates’ had hoped to pilot a reactor in China but had to cancel it this past June:

TerraPower, the company I started 10 years ago, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and produces very little waste. We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely. We may be able to build it in the United States if the funding and regulatory changes that I mentioned earlier happen.

- Bill Gates, December 2018

Source for the above quote:

What I learned at work this yearBill Gates looks back on 2018, and shares a few thoughts on what's going well and what isn't with innovation in some specific areas that he works on.www.gatesnotes.com

Yeah, they were light on the molten salt explanation. I think the simplest explanation comes from MIT, but since they require registration, I'll quote the key parts:

Producing zero carbon, they use a radioactive solution that blends nuclear fuel with a liquid salt. They can run on uranium but are also ideally suited for thorium, an alternative nuclear fuel that is cleaner, safer, and more abundant than uranium.

Molten-salt reactors also offer inherent safety advantages: because the fuel is liquid, it expands when heated, thus slowing the rate of nuclear reactions and making the reactor self-governing.  And they’re built like bathtubs, with a drain in the bottom that’s blocked by a “freeze plug.” If anything goes wrong, the freeze plug melts and the reactor core drains into a shielded underground container. They can operate as producers of thermal power or as “burner” reactors that consume nuclear waste from conventional reactors.

Essentially, molten-salt reactors could solve the two problems that have bedeviled the nuclear power industry: safety and waste.

Bringing Molten-Salt Nuclear Reactors to RealityResearchers say they could build a prototype of a molten-salt reactor, a safer, cleaner option for nuclear power, in 10 years.www.technologyreview.com

I used to be a regular listener to 99% Invisible, so I appreciate the article share. Their current episode is on “Where does your recycling go?”

National Sword - 99% InvisibleWhere does your recycling go? In most places in the U.S., you throw it in a bin, and then it gets carted off to be sorted and cleaned at a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF).99percentinvisible.org

I think the inherent problem with Ray Cats that turn colors in the presence of dangerous levels of radiation is that most animals who can change colors need to be alive to do so.

Perhaps a better early warning system for our descendants would be to breed a race of “ray cockroaches.”

Cockroaches Survive Nuclear ExplosionThe Mythbusters pose the question: Could roaches really survive a nuclear explosion? Find out whether roaches could really survive a nuclear explosion.www.discovery.com

I think the inherent problem with Ray Cats that turn colors in the presence of dangerous levels of radiation is that most animals who can change colors need to be alive to do so.

I guess that the most dangerous type of nuclear waste in a post-apocalyptic setting is the stuff that doesn't kill immediately, but over longer periods of time.

Consider a future where humanity exists in a state comparable to medieval or earlier times - and assume that some random explorer happens to find a cave with endless rows of weird, yellow barrels in it.

If that explorer opens one of the barrels and then dies within the next few hours due to radiation poisoning, before he can even return to his village and tell others about it, problem solved.

On the other hand, if he doesn't, but instead manages to bring back some strange item that is warm to the touch to the village's alchemist, who decides that it is a good idea to throw it into the village's water supply - then that is a much bigger problem.

Ray cats might be dead in scenario 1, but could do some good in scenario 2. :)

The best way to get to the truth of the dangers would be to require that the wastes be buried in the back yards of the largest investors in nuclear power.

TerraPower, a next-gen reactor that generates very little waste

I tried finding out what exactly the eventual waste consists of, but couldn't. Some articles state that the waste product can be "recycled without the need for chemical separation", but surely the end product must be different from what has been put into it? Everything else would make the inventor of thermodynamics spin in his grave (pun intended ;)).

So, by running this type of reactor, would we eventually end up with all of the world's Uranium turned into slowly decaying Plutonium-239, or is there anything else going on? If our waste is Plutonium instead of something else, would that solve anything?

The best way to get to the truth of the dangers would be to require that the wastes be buried in the back yards of the largest investors in nuclear power.

In the largest city in my state, the chief of police is required to live within the city limits.  The logic behind this law is that a police chief whose children and spouse live in the city is going to care more about reducing urban crime than someone who lives in the suburbs.

I think aligning common interests would be useful in a number of areas: landfills, chemical plants, coal mines and nuclear storage facilities.  Require the COO and CFO to live in the same town: the CFO will be less inclined to cut costs to make the quarterly numbers if it means putting their health and their loved ones’ at risk.

Now here's a novel way to store radioactive material: put it in a museum!

Uranium Ore Stored At Grand Canyon Park Museum May Or May Not Pose Health RiskA safety director issued a public warning that buckets of ore may have exposed employees and tourists to unsafe radiation. But it's not clear whether anyone experienced dangerous levels of radiation.www.npr.org

Yikes. 😬☢️

How much nuclear waste is left over after it’s burned by a “traveling wave” reactor?

Here’s what I was able to find out from multiple videos produced by TerraPower, Bill Gates next generation wave reactor company:

In 60 years, nuclear power has generated a total of 70,000 tons of used fuel. Coal plants generate that amount of waste in one hour.

Only 5% of the fuel has been spent in used fuel rods.

After 30 years in storage, the fuel rods decay into uranium and plutonium that are not very radioactive and could be safely held in your hand.

The Wave Reactor can safely burn this low level radioactive material.

The waste from nuclear power is different from the nuclear sludge left over from nuclear weapons production, such as at the Hanford Site in Washington State.

Hanford Site - WikipediaThe Hanford Site is a decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the United States federal government on the Columbia River in Benton County in the U.S. state of Washington. The site has been known by many names, including Hanford Project, Hanford Works, Hanford Engineer Works and Hanford Nuclear Reservation.en.m.wikipedia.org

Commercial nuclear waste is solid—it can’t leak the way liquid waste does.  It cannot be used to make weapons; not even a dirty bomb.

Nice work chasing that down. I knew very little of that.

I sometimes wonder why some things terrify us. Is it because they happen so infrequently?

For example, I sometimes do the Escape From Alcatraz swim. It’s an organized event with 700 swimmers. It terrifies my friends when they find out about it. They ask, aren’t you afraid of how dangerous that is? Sharks! Dangerous tides.

I respond that I am concerned. There has never been a shark attack in the bay, nor anyone getting hurt in the swim, which has s regatta of lifeboats accompanying us. But you have to drive on the freeway to get there and that is dangerous.

“Oh that. I’m not worried about that. It’s the sharks that terrify me.”

I wonder if nuclear power is like those sharks.

I think it’s hard sometimes to put statistics into reality. If a family member died in an airplane crash, believing that cars are safer can “feel” correct.

Of course, the argument for not swimming in shark-infested waters is that, well, you don’t have to.

😉

I believe this is good news:

Senate re-introduces bill to help advanced nuclear technologyLegislation was praised by Bill Gates, who has funded an advanced nuclear company.arstechnica.com