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Ontario’s Darlington nuclear station is on time, on budget and learning from past mistakes
(www.theglobeandmail.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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The waste is purely a polictal problem. It's been technically solved for decades.
We even have an example of safe storage of fission products from a nuclear reactor for over a billion years with no migration into the surrounding environment.
What's been technically solved for decades? There are always waste leakages. Shit, there is/was currently a massive one happening starting in March in Minnesota. 400,000 gallons of nuclear waste was spilled into the water system. Just googling "nuclear waste leaks" brought up countless articles about massive industrial fuck ups.
That's not a nuclear waste leak. At least it's not nuclear waste in the same sense that I'm talking about storage of solid nuclear fuel is different from titrium releases from an active nuclear plant.
But even then, that leak you're talking about is purely a political issue. The amount of radioactivoty contained is orders of magnitude that which has been shown to cause any measurable increases risk in cancer. There was no technical challenge in addressing thus.
If you want to evaluate the risks on an objective basis, then you should be more worried about the radiation you receive from being out in the sun for 30 minutes. Because that's more damaging than if every single nuclear reactor in the US had a continuous tritium release of this magnitude for the next few centuries.
Adding to this, CANDU reactors actually consume the fuel much more efficiently than american style high pressure reactors. The waste only lasts under 400 years, not millions. And the only reason why American nuclear waste lasts so long is because they made recycling waste fuel illegal due to "nuclear proliferation concerns".
Even here in Canada, we can reduce our waste even further using newer recycling techniques if we just spend the money to build the latest generation reactors that can actually use our existing waste. CANDU reactors were originally designed in the 50s, and horribly obsolete, yet only produce a few tons of high level waste a year. And this is combining the waste from all our nuclear reactors that produce like 17% of our entire nation's electricity.
I wouldn't say this is correct. Candu reactors do have an advantage in that they don't require enrichment, but I'd say that they use fuel less efficienctly since their discharge exposure (in units of gigawatt-days per ton of uranium) is much lower than LWRs.
I'm also not sure where you get the idea their waste has to be stored for a shorter period. They use thermal neutrons in fission so they end up with a near identical set of fission products in their fuel to LWRs.
That's not the only reason the US previously made recycling fuel illegal. Also note that it's not currently illegal. There are no laws preventing you from setting up a reprocessing facility in the US.
What is preventing it is the fact that it's more expensive to reprocess than it is to just buy new enriched uranium. Plutonium also has some less favorable reactivity characteristics that make the plant response to transients worse which further worsens the economics (you need to buy more fuel to overcome the impact this has on thermal limits).
The US has a similar percentage coming from nuclear and similarly only produces a few tons of high level waste each year.
You can fit the entire amount of spent fuel that the US has produced on a single good all field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
I think the lack of requirement for enrichment is quite the tradeoff for a lower fuel efficiency, especially considering that not only is uranium quite plentiful on Earth, but Canada is the top three producer of the stuff as well.
That said, I might be wrong on some of the details I mentioned, as I'm working from memory and I'm not nuclear physicist, but I'm sure that the physics for a fast neutron reactor is pretty different from high pressure reactors the US uses.
I haven't heard that the US had ever rescinded the law on recycling nuclear fuel, though I have heard about how much cheaper it is to mine and refine more than to recycle used fuel. Those are the sort of stuff that market regulations will never address, and is why government regulation and intervention is so crucial.
And I also do understand that the amount of high level waste in the US isn't really a significant amount anyways. Most numbers that people throw around include low level waste, and I think they're only marginally dangerous for a year or less? It's all burned or thrown in regular dumps after about that long as things stand anyways.