Someone posted this to reddit once, and I stole it because it's so good. Wall of text incoming...

I'm going to California next month. I have 'no idea' how I'm going to get from the airport to my friend's house. I could take a bus, or a taxi, or call an Uber, or maybe he can get off work and pick me up. It also doesn't make sense to make a decision right now, since lots of things can change in a month.

So too it goes with nuclear waste. We have 'no idea' how to deal with nuclear waste, not in that we have all this stuff with zero viable plans of how to deal with it, but in that we have many possible options, with no certainty yet on which the best option will be, and also no incentive to make the decision before we have to.

This is Cook Nuclear Power Station. https://www.google.com/maps/search/cook+nuclear+power+plant/@41.9752762,-86.5621398,1128m/data=!3m1!1e3

Look at the scale on the map, and look at the nuclear plant on the coast of Lake Michigan. Consider for a second how small the plant is. The footprint is about 800ft x 200ft. For a 2GW power plant. If you covered that in solar panels, you'd get about 2MW of equivalent power generation.

If you look to the east of the Plant, you will see a giant concrete slab that makes up the transformer yard, which steps up voltage on the power coming from the plant to deliver it to the grid.

If you look a bit back to the west from that large slab, you will see a smaller rectangular concrete slab with a bunch of circles on it. You may have to zoom in a bit to see the circles.

Those circles are the spent nuclear fuel in dry-cask storage, sitting on those faint square-outlines that are about 4m to a side.

If you count up the circles, there are about 30 casks sitting there.

Now Cook nuclear plant, which is in no way an exceptional plant, generates about 2GW of power and has been running for about 40 years. Additionally, NRC regulations require that spent fuel spend 10 years in cooling ponds before being put into dry cask storage.

So those 30 casks outside represent about 30 years of 2GW power generation. or about 2GW-Years of energy each.

The United States grid runs on 450GW-500GW of power. Nuclear energy has made up about 20% of that power for the last 40 years. Or the equivalent of running the entire grid for 8 years.

8 years at 500GW equals 4000GW-years of energy from nuclear power. And one cask equals 2GW.

So the entirety of waste from commercial power production is about 2000 of those cannisters.

Looking again at the faint square outlines on that concrete slab, you see that there is room for rows of 16 casks. If you were to square out that rectangular slab, it would hold 256 casks.

Zoom out the tiny amount necessary to fit 8 such square concrete slabs. That would be about 1 and a half times the area of the transformer-yard slab.

That's the entirety of our 'nuclear waste crisis'. If you stacked them together the entirety of it would fit inside a high-school football stadium.

And that's just unprocessed waste sitting right there. If we used the PUREX process - a 40 year old, mature reprocessing technique used by France, and Russian, and Japan, and Sweden, it would reduce the mass of the nuclear waste to about 3%.

So zoom back in, count up those 30 casks, double it to 60, and that's the area that all of our waste from the past 40 years could fit in. That's 8 of those casks per year to run the entire US electrical grid.

This 'waste' is not green liquid sludge waiting to leak out, but solid ceramic and metal that is moderately radioactive, and will be more or less inert (apart from the Plutonium) in about 300 years. Those dry casks are designed to last for 100 years (~70 in salty-air, after which the spent fuel is just put in a new cask) and survive any feasible transportation accident should it need to be moved.

The Plutonium, and other transuranics, which constitutes about 2% of the mass in that spent fuel, will indeed last for 10,000 or 100,000 years, depending on your standards of safety. Much ado is made about 'having no place to safely store it for 10,000 years.'

And I agree. I think the idea that we can safeguard or guarantee anything over 10,000 years is silly. But I can also guarentee that even if we were to bury it in Yucca mountain, it'd only have to last 20 to 200 years before we dig it back up, because the Plutonium, along with most of the rest of the inert mass, is valuable, concentrated nuclear fuel. We can burn that plutonium up in a reactor. Seems a lot better than letting it sit there for 10 millennia.

In fact, if you look back to one of those dry casks, the plutonium and unbred-U238 inside holds 24x as much energy as we got out of the fuel originally.

Put another way, without mining another gram of Uranium, we have enough nuclear fuel in our 'waste' to power the entire US grid for 200 years.

If you consider that 3/4ths of the U-238 was already separated away as depleted uranium to enrich the fuel in the first place, the number is closer to powering the entire US for 800 years using only the Uranium we've mined up to today.

I could go on, but I hope this demonstrates what a generally small non-problem nuclear waste is. There's no safety or financial incentive to do anything and pick a certain route (geological storage, burner reactors, volume-reduction reprocessing) because it's simple and safe to keep the waste sitting there on a glorified parking lot inside concrete casks.

if I told you I could power the entire world for 1000 years, and it would produce one soda-can-sized super-deadly indestructible evil chunk of darkmatter, I would hope you would agree it is an entirely worthwhile tradeoff. Even if we need to package it inside 30 meter cube of lead and bury the cube a kilometer into the Earth. Compared with the industrial-scale of benefits, that's no cost at all.

Nuclear waste may not be quite that compact. But it's still so low in quantity compared with what we get from it, that safe storage is not an issue. The quantity is simply too small.

Nuclear is a big win for everyone

Fukushima is a great example of why investing in Nuclear power is fine. The media portrays it as this massive disaster on par with Chernobyl. In reality the plant was hit with a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 50 foot tall tsunami. The reactors were damaged, but things were fairly well controlled. No immediate deaths occurred and so far they've linked 1 cancer death to Fukushima. The biggest problem was the flooding getting the water contaminated and carrying it around.

It is estimated people in the area of Fukushima have a 1% greater cancer risk now. To help deal with this they implemented screening programs.

This all happened with a nearly 50 year old plant that got hit with the kind of shit they make disaster movies about.

Nuclear power is clear, efficient, and reduces America's dependence on foreign old.

We have seen the risks from nuclear. Even in the worst case they are nothing compared to what we are being told about climate change. For coal and gas we can capture and bury CO2 but they won't consider that. How can we take anyone seriously that tells us the world is going to end but won't accept any tradeoffs?

Molten salt thorium reactors weren't researched much, because they didn't produce enough by-products for making bombs? I also saw something a while ago about high-temperature reactors that "closed the nuclear cycle." Spent fuel from ordinary reactors could be fed in, and the higher energy neutron flux would make it fissionable again. Something like that. And that was ignored also. Priorities are so wrong, these days.

Great meme. The post here has some ideas about getting past the algorithm based image censoring,

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https://thedonald.win/p/HEzIfJdx/i-dont-know-if-q-is-real-but-thi/

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Exactly. There is a completely non-polluting system of power generation that can power up the whole world, but dumbasses see the word "nuclear" and freak out.

Never have a conversation with an environmentalist if they are against nuclear power.

Fear....... if the nuclear industry had been less regulated. How small would a reactor be ?

The Left only has one solution for their "climate emergency": communism.

But the SIMPSONS!

I can't believe we aren't like 75% nuclear energy by now.

We need matter/antimatter reactors.

My small town in illinois (like population of 25k small) used to have a nuclear reactor. They took it down because it was "too expensive to repair". Absolutely wrecked a good chunk of our economy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion_Nuclear_Power_Station

Nuclear power is Steampunk, change my mind.

In high school some bitch interrupted English class to rant for nearly 20 minutes about how she went to New York State and protested against some nuclear plant or something, and she wanted us to sign a petition. I don't remember if anyone signed it.

I was pretty surprised. Like, would you rather there be a coal plant there or something? It makes no sense at all. Even with solar the amount of shit we'd have to mine to create solar panels, and the area they'd have to take up, would be terrible. More lithium mining and tearing up the earth when you could have made a single nuclear plant that will power way more. I don't understand these people.

Yes! Nuclear energy will bring true progress to an ever expanding civilization. Wind and solar can't even keep up with what we currently consume for energy needs. The abundance that nuclear energy has to offer will create opportunities never thought possible.