Building and maintaining one isn’t really the concern I have with this one, nuclear reactors are incredibly safe these days. What are they going to do with the nuclear waste? That’s the real issue here. Governments can barely figure that out, how’s a megacorp going to do that in an ethical way? I already see them dumping it in a cave in some poor country in africa.
As noted elsewhere, these don’t create the same kind of spent fuel as a PWR. So that helps.
But also, the people who designed the PWRs didn’t just say “and then we’ll make shitloads of unmanageable waste lol!” Up until the Carter Administration, we ran a system called “reprocessing” that essentially shredded and dissolved the old fuel rods, isolated the metals chemically, and packed out separately.
France does this. Finland does this. Japan does this. Their waste concerns are negligible compared to ours.
Meanwhile Carter, bless his heart, determined that reprocessing was a proliferation risk, and shut down the US industry, saying “y’all will figure out a way to dispose of these things”.
So now we are using circular saws to hack these things apart, cramming them into barrels stuffed with kitty litter (you read that right), and hoping that nothing will happen to the barrels for 50 million years?
Long-term waste disposal became an impossible problem to solve in the US because our one and only allegedly nuclear-savvy president made the solution to the problem illegal. It became one immediately, and has never stopped being one.
I mean you say that as if just burying it isn’t actually the proven safest option.
Startups are already beginning to explore using old oil drilling equipment to sink nuclear waste below where it’ll pose a threat, after it’s been suffused into a shitton of concrete of course.
Very rarely is nuclear waste of the corium toothpaste variety, more often it’s the old hazmat suits that are getting replaced and need to be disposed of with special care, or expired rods you can still have limited contact with without many issues.
Governments aren’t exactly known for efficiency. A corporation is less likely to bogged down by just the mere fallacy that “other entities can’t figure it out, why should they do it?”
Building and maintaining one isn’t really the concern I have with this one, nuclear reactors are incredibly safe these days. What are they going to do with the nuclear waste? That’s the real issue here. Governments can barely figure that out, how’s a megacorp going to do that in an ethical way? I already see them dumping it in a cave in some poor country in africa.
As noted elsewhere, these don’t create the same kind of spent fuel as a PWR. So that helps.
But also, the people who designed the PWRs didn’t just say “and then we’ll make shitloads of unmanageable waste lol!” Up until the Carter Administration, we ran a system called “reprocessing” that essentially shredded and dissolved the old fuel rods, isolated the metals chemically, and packed out separately.
France does this. Finland does this. Japan does this. Their waste concerns are negligible compared to ours.
Meanwhile Carter, bless his heart, determined that reprocessing was a proliferation risk, and shut down the US industry, saying “y’all will figure out a way to dispose of these things”.
So now we are using circular saws to hack these things apart, cramming them into barrels stuffed with kitty litter (you read that right), and hoping that nothing will happen to the barrels for 50 million years?
Long-term waste disposal became an impossible problem to solve in the US because our one and only allegedly nuclear-savvy president made the solution to the problem illegal. It became one immediately, and has never stopped being one.
I mean you say that as if just burying it isn’t actually the proven safest option.
Startups are already beginning to explore using old oil drilling equipment to sink nuclear waste below where it’ll pose a threat, after it’s been suffused into a shitton of concrete of course.
Very rarely is nuclear waste of the corium toothpaste variety, more often it’s the old hazmat suits that are getting replaced and need to be disposed of with special care, or expired rods you can still have limited contact with without many issues.
Governments aren’t exactly known for efficiency. A corporation is less likely to bogged down by just the mere fallacy that “other entities can’t figure it out, why should they do it?”