Why does nuclear always come in for special consideration when it comes to waste management?
The waste management solution for fossil fuel engines is "dump the waste into the atmosphere." Is that a good idea? It turns out the answer is no, it's not.
Nuclear waste seems like a hard problem because we choose to manage it. Fossil fuel waste only seems easy because we pretend it doesn't exist. But it does, and someday we'll need to manage it too. I bet we'll find that it is at least as hard as nuclear.
It's because you can dump lots and lots and lots of fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere for a long time before it starts becoming a noticeable health hazard -- and by then you can see it coming.
Radiation will kill you relatively quickly and you won't even know you're dying.
In 1952, 12,000 people died in a few days in the 1952 London Great Smog, caused by fossil fuel exhaust. In 1956, the world's first commercial nuclear plant went live at the Windscale/Sellafield site in the UK. The nuclear waste still stored at the Sellafield site may be scary, but it's not killing anybody; the fossil fuel waste very much did.
That's not the right comparison. The equivalent comparison would be, what if we just dumped nuclear waste out in an empty field, or in a river or something, or atomized it and pumped it into the air?
Conventional thermal power is so much better; we simply store the waste in the air, or in the case of coal partially in poorly-regulated fly ash ponds which periodically spill into rivers.
> As always, I wonder, what was the plan exactly? What did the engineers of yesteryear actually plan to do with the stuff?
Some of it can be reprocessed, though there's a question of whether that's economical; France and Britain are the only countries to do it on a large scale these days. Really, though, it's not a new problem; industry produces a lot of very nasty waste.
I'm curious as to the actual plans as well, but I suspect the early engineers seriously underestimated how dangerous the waste materials were going to be. Of course, now I think we overestimate.
They knew very well how dangerous it was. However, you have to look at the timescale. The first nuclear power plants were built in the 50s. In 1952, 12,000 people died in London in a few days in the Great Smog. The Love Canal catastrophe, which ultimately caused mass birth defects and cancers, would not be revealed for another 20 years. The Bhopal Disaster, which killed 16,000 people and caused 558,000 injuries, happened in _1984_.
Non-nuclear industrial disasters greater than any actual nuclear disaster which has ever occurred were a fact of life. For that matter, they still are, to a lesser extent; for all the worry about nuclear waste, power-plant waste has never killed anyone, excepting a small number (< 20) deaths at reprocessing plants, while conventional waste kills thousands every year.
The power nuclear fission got us was remarkable and when they started, the marked wasn't regulated, so the companies could make huge amounts of money. This money was free to pay lobbying. They just outperformed the law makers.
That's not really the way it was; the regulation was always quite tight, and the lack of nuclear development today (outside China and to an extent France) is due to deep public mistrust more than anything else, though changes in the economics of power generation favouring high cost per kWh but low capital cost due to liberalisation of the market are also a factor.
Nuclear waste is a pretty small downside, too. The amount produced is tiny compared to the energy you get out.
People will bring up the long life of nuclear waste. It's dangerous for ten thousand years! OK, how long is stuff like mercury and arsenic dangerous for? We accept much worse stuff dumped much less carefully for much less benefit.
While mercury poisoning has affected major ecosystems (it's not a good idea to eat fish you catch in the Great Lakes), it's limited to where the chemical actually is. I suspect the problem with radioactive waste is that it's ranged: you don't have to touch the radioactive source to get a fatal case of acute radiation syndrome.
But it gets spread just about everywhere. Mercury only affects you where it actually is, but it's widespread enough to have significantly contaminated all seafood at this point.
Nuclear waste might get you if you're not actively ingesting it, but you still have to be within, what, a few dozen feet of a large chunk of it?
