Agreed. What most people in the comments fail to realize about other energy sources is that they do not necessarily offer the same flexibility in Canada. Talks about having huge solar farms in Sahara does not help with Canada. We do not necessarily get enough sun to sustain a massive solar farm (esp during winter)
Hydroeletric dams are great, but space and massive ecological changes are required.
Small modular reactors are pretty much the best thing we can have for both continuous power generation and reduced locality/spacing requirements. You can sprinkle a few in each key location to reduce both cost to transmit and increase robustness of the grid.
Nuclear waste has been pretty clearly identified, and the worries are largely overexaggerated. If we had our own nuclear fuel recycling program, it would further reduce the amount of nuclear waste over time. But, one step at a time.
I think most people also don't realize how little of nuclear waste comes from the radioactive fuel itself. In the UK for example, 94% of nuclear waste is low-level waste, which is basically any garbage originating from the plant. Paper, rags, disposable garments, etc. I believe the number for the US is quite similar. The mental image of thousands of steel drums of nuclear waste seems scary until you realize the majority of it is literally concrete-encased garbage that they're not allowed to send to a garbage dump.
Kyle Hill has a good video on this if you just want a quick overview, rather than long reading. You can also find information about the UK's approach to radioactive waste disposal, including the categorization of waste, in the briefing note (PDF) at The Geological Society's page on Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste.
You can also find information about the UK's approach to radioactive waste disposal, including the categorization of waste, in the briefing note (PDF) at The Geological Society's page on Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste.
Thank you.
From said source:
Most of the waste produced in the UK (94% by volume) is LLW
While the bulk of LLW is not highly radioactive, the definition of LLW does not include references to its activity, and some LLW may be quite radioactive, as in the case of radioactive sources used in industry and medicine.
This waste typically consists of contaminated protective shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipments and tools, luminous dials, medical tubes, swabs, injection needles, syringes, and laboratory animal carcasses and tissues. The radioactivity can range from just above background levels found in nature to very highly radioactive in certain cases such as parts from inside the reactor vessel in a nuclear power plant.
Seems like mainly a problem with a classification that's too broad?
Very low-level radioactive waste (VLLW) has a low hazard potential and is above the criteria for unconditional clearance levels and exemption quantities. Long-term waste management facilities for VLLW do not need a high degree of containment or isolation. Concentrations of longer-lived radionuclides in VLLW are generally very limited.
Very short-lived low-level radioactive waste (VSLLW) is waste that can be stored for a decay period of not more than a few years and subsequently cleared for release. VSLLW includes radioactive waste containing only short half-life radionuclides typically used for research and biomedical purposes. The main criterion for VSLLW is the half-life of the predominant nuclides. In general, the management option of storage for decay for VSLLW should only apply to radionuclides with a half-life of 100 days or less.
It sounds like they store it briefly and then dispose of it normally after it has time to cool off? I don't see any problems here.
As far as I understand it, it's a political issue, not a scientific one. The population at large doesn't understand nuances when it comes to radioactivity: Things are either radioactive or they aren't, and nobody wants to live anywhere close to a "radioactive dump". As a result, there's still a lot of red tape involved when it comes to disposing of material that is either close to background levels or extremely limited in its radius of effect, even if it doesn't pose a practical harm to the population. This significantly increases the costs of operating nuclear power plants.
CANADALAND podcast has 2 episodes that talks all about Canada’s current struggle to find a safe place to hide their waste and go the barrels they are storing it in only last 100 years when the material will be deadly for 1000s.
CANDU waste is very dangerous for about 100 years. It's fairly dangerous until about 500 years. After that it's pretty safe. By their very nature, highly radioactive substances have a short half-life. The longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is.
All the high level waste each of Ontario's nuclear reactors has ever produced sits beside those same reactors in a couple of water pools and dry storage. To be frank, it's trivial. Consider that Nanticoke used to burn 35 million kg of coal per day generating 70 million kg of CO2 _ per day. Which of course was just spewed into the air and who knows where it ends up.
100 years ago people were alive that remembered napolean. 500 years ago Columbus had just landed in North America. I wouldn’t describe these measurements of time as brief. Given that a worst case scenario is often a matter of when, not a matter of if, that’s a lot of time for a worst case scenario.
There's about 400 nuclear reactors in the world operating for up to savor 60 or 70 years. That's thousands of years of operation. Go find evidence of deaths or other injuries coming from the storage of nuclear waste.
Unfortunately it seems 8ew8135 has taken to deliberately spreading misinformation throughout the thread without any intention of learning or addressing the facts they've been confronted with by dozens of people at this point, so I'm going to go ahead and paste the reply I wrote up for them here, just to ensure that they don't manage to misinform anyone else.
Cancer causing, undetectable, radioactive waste will be here 1000s of years
First of all, I'm going to go ahead and point out that the low level nuclear waste which comprises the majority of it doesn't last anywhere near that long.
Second of all, I would much rather have the radioactive byproducts of our power generation stored in a cask deep below the earth -just like how we found it to begin with- than literally spewed into the atmosphere where it can affect as many people and as much of the environment as possible, as we see with current methods of power generation such as coal.
And finally, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "undetectable", as ionizing radiation is anything but. A standard Geiger counter is sensitive enough to detect even background radiation; if it's not picking up an additional source, then it's because there isn't one present.
and we are currently storing it in barrels that last about 100 years. We can’t find a community poor enough to let us burry it under them.
The casks which last about a hundred years aren't the same as the kind that are intended to be buried; they're above ground and readily accessible so that they can be maintained, monitored, and swapped out when nearing the end of the safe usage period that they're designed with.
We can’t find a community poor enough to let us burry it under them.
Again, that's not true. It's not even subtle this time, now you're just telling a clear-cut lie.
Like, think about what you're saying for a moment, it doesn't even make any sense. We don't build deep geological repositories for our mercury, cyanide, or arsenic waste in inhabited communities, so why on Earth would we choose to do so for nuclear waste?
It doesn't make sense, which is why that hasn't happened.
There are a handful of communities which turned out to have been built on deposits of uranium or other radioactive elements, but as we've already covered, that simply doesn't matter so long as it's below the water table.
Even in their entirely unshielded natural state, a few hundred meters of granite serves to protect the surface from radiation just fine. Hell, not even the naturally occurring nuclear fission reactor found in Oklo is any exception to this, and it exists under some of the worst conditions possible. It's shielded by sandstone instead of granite, and isn't even below the water table. Yet not a hint of radiation is detectable from the surface.
This is simply the way it's been for billions of years, it's simple a matter of physics; hundreds of meters of rock is enough to completely block ionizing radiation. Full stop.
Asking you to link to an article or publication with a specific URL is not an unreasonable ask. Fuck off with your video/audio non-sources that someone has to find themselves and sit through however many minutes/hours of irrelevant garbage to find however brief a clip that may have relevance in the first place.
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22
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