12 votes

Nuclear power offers an abundant supply of low-carbon energy. But what to do with the deadly radioactive waste?

5 comments

  1. [2]
    nothis
    Link
    I swear whenever nuclear power comes up in a reddit thread, it's full of near-religious praise. I don't know if that's due to reddit's still fairly tech-loving demographic seeing it as a super...

    I swear whenever nuclear power comes up in a reddit thread, it's full of near-religious praise. I don't know if that's due to reddit's still fairly tech-loving demographic seeing it as a super cool technology treated unfairly or because there's genuine shillery going on (always skeptical about jumping to the latter, but there's a lot of "nuclear engineer here, let me tell you why Chernobyl is no big deal!").

    I simply can't bring myself to stop worrying and learn to love nuclear energy. Even if we go and completely ignore the possibility of human error (in raw theory, nuclear disasters are and always have been impossible, it takes someone to make an error), storing all the nuclear waste is my biggest concern with nuclear energy. It's a more or less unsolved problem. It's also a dirty, "sweep underneath the rug" kind of problem, the current solution is literally to lock the problem away for thousands of years. Not to mention the possibility of using it for nuclear weapons, which makes it require military grade protection.

    7 votes
    1. alyaza
      Link Parent
      i mean, ultimately all energy forms run into things like this that are tradeoffs of using it as a source of energy: solar and wind are reliant on certain materials which underpin highly...

      It's a more or less unsolved problem. It's also a dirty, "sweep underneath the rug" kind of problem, the current solution is literally to lock the problem away for thousands of years. Not to mention the possibility of using it for nuclear weapons, which makes it require military grade protection.

      i mean, ultimately all energy forms run into things like this that are tradeoffs of using it as a source of energy: solar and wind are reliant on certain materials which underpin highly exploitative mining enterprises or cannot be recycled and will likely never be free of those unless we manage to reinvent how we make them (or with wind, switch to wood), and hydroelectric power is often damaging to ecosystems and leads to displacement of people where it can be implemented at all. coal and natural gas both have obvious tradeoffs of contributing to carbon emissions.

      for nuclear, the tradeoff is as you mention the waste (that and it's not renewable even though it's low-carbon so we'd most likely have to switch to renewables sometime in the future), but for some people, that's a worthwhile trade because of the energy generating ability of nuclear power--the about one-hundred reactors in the US currently output about the same electricity as all the wind and solar combined, which is kinda ridiculous--relative to the potential of active disaster, which is roughly in line with other forms of energy production.

      2 votes
  2. [3]
    The_Fad
    Link
    This might be a dumb question, but what's the main thing preventing us from just launching bulk spent nuclear energy rods into the sun? Is it just prohibitively expensive due to the weight and...

    This might be a dumb question, but what's the main thing preventing us from just launching bulk spent nuclear energy rods into the sun? Is it just prohibitively expensive due to the weight and thus frequency with which we'd have to launch them? Would it make the sun explode? Okay it probably won't make the sun explode but that's why I'm asking because I don't know.

    2 votes
    1. Diet_Coke
      Link Parent
      Probably the risk of an explosion on the way to space.

      Probably the risk of an explosion on the way to space.

      5 votes
    2. cstby
      Link Parent
      It's actually takes a lot of fuel to send something into the sun from a low earth orbit. The Earth is moving sideways compared the sun really really fast. To get a collision course with the sun,...

      It's actually takes a lot of fuel to send something into the sun from a low earth orbit.

      The Earth is moving sideways compared the sun really really fast. To get a collision course with the sun, you would need to cancel out that velocity by accelerating at a tangent to the Earth's orbit.

      5 votes