In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.
"A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced."
"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years."
But for political reasons it's used only for military nuclear high level waste.
For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository. High level nuclear waste is very small and French nuclear waste from light water reactors is no different from Swiss nuclear waste or Swedish, German, Spanish. (U.K. Magnox fuel rods are different and have special storage requirements). Single waste repository in Finland, Sweden or Norway would be enough, they have lot of old granite and very stable geology.
I don't think people appreciate how much power comes from such a small amount of waste. The largest plant near me has been operating for > 50 years and the waste is still kept on site though I believe they are working on another solution.
please spare us from this nonsense. Waste can be stored in facilities like Onkalo just like we do for many others type of waste, for example in Herfa Neurode
Most plants don't need anything special for waste management. They just put it in dry cask storage and leave those in the outside.
Ironically, there's less background radiation around the casks than away from them, since they are so shielded you also get shielded from part of the background radiation too.
Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though.
Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes into the air.
> find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment
That is what safe looks like, nobody said perfect. It's like how cars are death traps but people can still reasonably call them "safe". You could do the same thing for solar panels but for the fact it isn't newsworthy if there is some toxic sludge in some dump somewhere is associated with solar panels.
There might not be any material that we produce on an industrial scale that doesn't leak hazardous or toxic chemicals. I looked up concrete [0] to find out what it's problem was, and it turns out concrete leaks toxic and radioactive materials into the environment because turns out natural rock is sometimes radioactive. Concrete is nonetheless pretty safe stuff.
They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing. Different people are taking on the risk in each scenario too. Despite this, I'd be fine with a reactor next to my city if I got something like cheap power in return.
> They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing.
Would "they" rather we just dumped the nuclear waste off in some corner somewhere? Then it'd be a slow and certain leak too. If they want slow and certain rather than probably-nothing then that can be arranged. It'd still be less damaging than business as usual.
I mean, I get that people are scared but they are scared of their own imaginations as opposed to anything that can be engineered. I still think I'd be much better off having lived through a Class 7 nuclear disaster rather than my actual experience of spending years near a coal mine. Policy made for and by people who just live in fear for no obvious reason is never going to work. They're still going to be scared whatever the actual policy is and the rest of us are going to be forced to do stupid things in the real world.
Most of the incidents are less about waste storage and more about accidental draining of something, usually contaminated water. Or like, San Onofre got its reactor installed backwards, which yeah does raise some questions that can only be answered with imagination.
While there are problems, I think that you should compare with alternative technologies to be fair. For instance, coal used in Germany and China actually releases more radioactive material than nuclear!
A great perk of nuclear waste s that it's so small compared to the power produced, it's way easier to dispose and manage, than, say, expired wind turbines (which aren't recycled currently and take a massive amount of space).
If nuclear were regulated like automotive, they'd let me run a reactor with minimal training at age 16, and the emissions inspector would be bribeable with $500. Well same with coal.
For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025):
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
So nuclear waste is not a technical problem, mostly political problem.
And it's not very much talk about, but the real issue is geopolitics. Each nuclear trans-uranium waste repository (spend nuclear fuel) could in future be mined to retrieve the stored plutonium for nuclear weapons. And even better, over centuries the most radioactive short lived isotopes are transmuted into more stable isotopes, so the mining and handling of this material is much easier. And even even better over millennia, the undesirable isotope Plutonium-240 (with half-life 6561 year, much shorter then Plutionium-239 half-life 24110 years) will decay away and the reactor-grade Plutonium waste will itself transform, without any external action, into very usable weapon-grade Plutonium.
Therefor spend nuclear fuel and storage of spend nuclear fuel in non-weapon countries is subject to monitoring by the enhanced verification measures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol.
U.S. goes to great lengths to prevent other countries from acquiring material usable for nuclear weapons. Like, for example retrieving plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.
"The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants."
"The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US."
From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.
The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.
I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).
That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!
The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).
> I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know)
It's not a 10k year problem, it's a ~300 year problem, after which most of it is at the same level as natural uranium ore; and the stuff that isn't can be blocked via aluminium foil (to stop beta particles).
The first 10-20 years post-removal are the most dangerous, and why the fuel is kept in cooling ponds. From 10-300 you still have danger, but that is manageable with concrete casts:
Once you're past the ~300 year mark, all the most dangerous isotopes have burned away, and you're at point where the main ways of getting ill from what remains is by either eating the pellets or grinding them up and snorting the powder like cocaine.
That's fair and I'll admit to using a bit of hyperbole with that number. My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
> My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
The design life spans of bridges are 50-75, with some going towards 75-150. But once a bridge is EOL, the need for it doesn't just go away: it needs to be replaced. And in the intervening years it needs to be maintained.
So we have finite-but-overlapping life spans of infrastructure with the implicit assumption that society/civilization will continue on existing to deal with repair, renewal, and updating said infrastructure. Used-fuel storage is no different.
And if you want to reduce the total volume, spend money on reprocessing (which is currently more expensive than digging new fuel out of the ground; only France makes an effort to do this).
I see quite a difference compared to the bridge example. The bridge provides a utility until it‘s EOL and replacing it, again, provides value for the generations paying for it, since they get to use it.
The spent fuel does not have a utility. In 200 years, it’s a burden left behind by a long-forgotten generation.
You can argue (or rather gamble) that those generations still rely on nuclear energy and still have an ongoing need for such facilities, but even then, a substantial portion of the facilities will be filled with something that the operating generations never received any utility from.
> if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen?
A good geiger counter can be bought on Amazon for $30. Something is either radioactive or it's not. You don't need to have a sophisticated understanding of the chemistry to test if dangerous radiation is present or not, nor do you need sophisticated equipment. My point is that being next to a radiation hazard should not cause the same sort of anxiety-of-the-unknown that living next to, for example, a chemical plant that may produce a menagerie of difficult-to-detect carcinogens.
If you are looking in tritium leaks, I would encourage to look into leaks from coal power plants, which are gigantic in comparison to nuclear power plants.
Coal plant waste is visibly a nightmare, mountains of toxic dust, only "mildly" radioactive but also chemically toxic and physically dangerous. If that was the other option you'd have my support for a nuclear plant - but it isn't the other option.
Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.
Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.
Nuclear is the other option, and cherry picking the most generous data from a deindustrialised economy is a far less meaningful metric than you seem to think.
I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.
* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
* That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy
* This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage
* The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand
* The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process
Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
> The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?
The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.
For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.
But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.
> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.
Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.
£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.
I've never played fallout, and this isn't a game for me. I do have an electrical engineering degree, have read dozens of textbooks on (renewable) power generation, thermodynamics and manufacturing, and have spent significant time helping a research group with simulations of solar hybridised biomass gasification (mostly for Fischer Tropsch biofuels). The scale of electrification is huge, make no mistake, and we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..
A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).
> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps
This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.
Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.
Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.
Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.
> we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
No. Things change. To understand how stupid this model of the world is you need some historical perspective
In the UK for Q4 2000, twenty five year ago, there was 33.95TWh of electricity produced from coal power, Q4 2025 that was zero. All gone. In Q4 2000 wind and solar is making 0.25TWh, in Q4 2025 that was 30.72 TWh
So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special". So lets look at another historical example to which I happen to have a connection.
In 1954, the SS Shieldhall was built for Glasgow, her main job was to take (treated) sewage and dump it into the ocean although she'd also have transported passengers (usually at low cost) because hey, why not. Shieldhall is a triple expansion oil fired steam ship, at the time she was a reasonable though slightly dated, design. Some of the aspects of her that make her desirable as a working museum piece today were deliberate (like I said passengers weren't her primary purpose but the buyers knew they existed) because they look cool, but a ship optimized for purpose in 1954 wouldn't have been that different, we don't have any because the restoration team could only afford one and this one is cool.
In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic and if not for a preservation trust which operates her today she'd have been scrapped and I wouldn't have mentioned her, but that's not fifty years it's just thirty and yet the entire notion of steamships went from "Obviously" to "This belongs in a museum" in that time.
At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified because it just makes too much economic sense. What counts as "short" will gradually creep up, there are several electric ferries doing 30-40 minute hops today, it would be silly to imagine nobody is offering say a Channel crossing with batteries by 2050.
So then the question only comes up for the freighters. The crude carriers won't exist, if we're not digging up fossil fuels in order to burn them then they cease to be attractive for other purposes too, but both bulk carriers (e.g. moving cereals or ore) and container ships still make sense. The "luxury" cruise market also ceases to make sense though. For those bulk carriers with perishables aboard and for jet liners you would need synthetic fuel which will be expensive, but for everything else get used to going a lot slower to avoid needing fuel.
You've not addressed a single one of my arguments, only replied to my conclusion, and doubled down on the arrogance despite being apparently less educated on this topic than me.
> But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special".
You haven't even considered, much less pre-empted, any of my arguments. Energy consumption is special - as it is required by thermodynamics for manipulation of the material world. It's clear that most of it will come from the sun eventually - but as I've pointed out there's reasons to expect this to take a very long time.
> So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared, and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
Coal didn't disappear at all in that time frame - usage increased, significantly! But you only use the finished products now and don't see the cooling towers. UK economy is a rounding-error and not a meaningful model of the global energy economy, because wealthy countries like UK 'import' a huge fraction of their energy consumption. The energy required for their building materials, cars, machinery, consumer goods, etc still needs to be consumed somewhere - but it will never show up in local energy statistics. This represents the bulk of the hardest to electrify energy consumption. When you see a graph of fossil fuel usage increasing in India, China, Germany - do you not realise that is your personal usage too?
You first celebrate the fact that energy prices in UK have spiked (because lower profits for retailers, who recover their losses from whom ??), and now that UK has to import rather than produce steel (because it looks greener on paper ??).
> At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified .. So then the question only comes up for the freighters
Ah yes, it 'only' comes up for the most difficult and energy intensive types of transport. You ignore air travel too.
Bulk carriers and freighters will continue to exist for structural reasons, and their usage will increase: manufacturing has natural network effects - it makes sense to geographically concentrate it (there is less duplication of expensive capital investment), more food will be transported as population booms in regions with less arable land, and biofuels/clean carbon sources will be transported just like crude because production will naturally be concentrated in regions with more arable land and sunlight.
Air transport will continue to exist because people want to travel, and it is the fastest way to deliver many types of goods.
> In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic
30 years at current rates is catastrophic damage to the planet, I don't understand why you want this. Also wiki says this ship was 'obsolete at time of construction', essentially built to be a historical novelty, and that it was laid down around the same time that the UK's first nuclear reactor connected to the grid.
> You've not addressed a single one of my arguments
I can't really make out any coherent argument. You seem to believe in a very strange nuclear powered fairytale world, which most resembles the video game series Fallout but you say you haven't played it, OK.
You demand that we should care only about the global picture, where the data is fuzziest, and only about the total energy system, all so far as I can tell in order to swell the focus on... coal, which is obsolete - that for some reason you both recognise can't be used because we'd destroy the climate and yet you believe we'll keep using it anyway because somehow the present is the future and don't accept that things change? I'm sure you think you're making sense.
It took me longer than perhaps it should have to see why you singled out Germany which in most ways is on a typical curve for a wealthy industrialized country. I realised it's the disappearing nuclear plants that make you angry. But they didn't matter, which I expect makes you even angrier. Germany's efficiency savings over that 25 year period were much larger than its total nuke energy buduget, what made the big difference was renewables again, just like in the UK.
> I don't understand why you want this
It doesn't matter whether I want things, it matters that your "argument" consists of believing that nothing changes = over a fifty year timespan no less - and I was illustrating that's entirely wrong.
India, China, Germany are just examples of countries who burn fossil fuels to provide for your standard of living.
I explained, in some detail, why a) I expect decarbonisation to take a long time, on the order of 50+ years b) why the UK cannot be extrapolated to global economy c) Why it's not even true that UK residents themselves use less fossil fuels for energy than they did 20 years ago.
Instead of engaging, you try to read between the lines and psychoanalyse me while throwing juvenile insults. It's pointless, hostile, disrespectful, and frankly it says a lot more about the state of your mind than it does mine.
You claim coal is obsolete in 2026, the highest coal consumption year on record, in direct contradiction of the panels of global energy experts who have time and again agreed that these usages are 'hard to abate' (i.e unlikely to become obsolete soon). China expects to be using enormous quantities of coal (and gas) industrially in 2060 - their net zero plan hinges on capturing and offsetting the carbon released. What do you know that legions of global experts don't?
I'm all for decarbonisation, and I've likely dedicated far more of my time, effort, and money to that cause than you have. I think a healthy amount of nuclear in the mix (on the order of 25%) will bring us to net zero sooner, mitigate the enormous damage done to our planet, and help hedge our bets against future developments (as you point out, we can't really be sure how the economy will change).
Like I said, Germany is an example of the thing you say isn't happening.
In 2000 Germany uses about 14 exajoules of energy, somewhat less than 2EJ are nuclear electricity and the rest is almost entirely fossil fuels But in 2025 the 2EJ of nukes are gone, there are 2EJ of renewables and the total is now only 10.5EJ. So both the absolute amount and the proportion of fossil fuels fell in this period in which you believe the UK offshored some of its fossil fuel consumption to Germany.
This is a game of musical chairs and for maybe the next decade or two you'll be able to make increasingly contorted arguments that somehow the same problem was just moved, but it's already looking flimsy because of just how fast solar deployments are.
"Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
I'm pro-renewables, and I've worked, studied extensively, and invested in that field. There remain significant hard-to-abate uses (fact) which I believe (opinion) will slow down decarbonisation to a 50+ year timeline - this in line with the views of many experts.
> Germany is an example of the thing you say isn't happening.
I was wrong to include Germany in that list, it was an editing mistake hence why I didn't pick up on your reply. I can see that derailed the conversation. I only meant to list countries which were unlikely to decarbonise as quickly as UK due to a larger share of hard-to-abate uses (which UK residents still depend on), separately I was listing countries with increasing fossil fuels and I merged the sentences carelessly.
I chose Germany because I was looking at lists of exporters of steel and cars to the UK, not nuclear energy stats. As you point out fossil fuels have fallen slightly as a share there, not grown. I didn't say though that Germany isn't rapidly scaling renewables, you've just assumed I'm some kind of anti-renewable luddite. The fact remains you likely drive a car made with fossil fuels in Germany (I do).
You cite the 30% reduction in German primary energy consumption in 25 years as evidence against my prediction of decarbonisation taking 50+ years. In the same period, emissions have fallen closer to 40%. I doubt that the remaining 60% will happen in the next 25 years
* Germany did outsource hard-to-abate energy uses in this time frame (energy intensive industry production indices fell ~30%, 15% since the war, UK closer to 40% - both countries now manufacturer higher up the value chain, and import more high embodied carbon commodities)
* They did not decarbonise the remaining hard-to-abate uses in proportion to the 30% reduction you cite (cement is a possible exception). Closer to 10-20% max across a range of industries
* The biggest change coming in the next 10-15 years is the electrification of transport, which could reduce emissions by another 20+%, the so called 'easy-to-abate' uses.
* Hard-to-abate uses remain hard-to-abate - cement emissions decreased 30% in 25 years, it will be even more difficult to achieve the next 30%, let alone 70%.
A fall in the share of fossil fuels from 84% to 77% during a rapid 30% decline in heavy industry is broadly in line with my slow decarbonisation prediction - heavy industry is harder to abate than other uses, if you export it you can electrify faster.
Does 2EJ/year not matter to you or not? When it is energy savings or renewables, you say it is significant. When it is the reduction in nuclear power you say it is negligible. The proportional fall in fossil fuels in Germany you celebrate is 84-77 = 7% of the mix. (1/0.93 - 1) * 10.5 = 0.8EJ.
> maybe the next decade or two
I'm just predicting it will take closer to 50 years, not that it won't happen. In two decades you can just check global emissions - if they're down by less than say 2/3 I'll be right, there won't be any need to argue. If they're down 80 or 90% I'll be wrong.
> "Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
China's 35 year decarbonisation timeline assumes CCS for approx 5-15% of today's emissions, up to 5x the UK's current emissions. Are they wrong about 35 years (too high?) or wrong about CCS (too low?) or both? They also expect 10-20 EJ/year nuclear. Are they wrong about nuclear too?
This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about?
So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.
I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.
If you assume a continuous chain of custody for the next 10000 years, it's pretty trivial, but how do you make that happen? It's beyond all known technology. So you can't.
When Russia bombs that facility, how big will the exclusion zone be? At some point in the next 10000 years, it's not unlikely, it's not likely, it's guaranteed that there will be a war, and the facility will be bombed, or the custodians will be drafted or will just move to the city looking for work, and the nuclear post will be left abandoned (remember Russia's RTGs?), or the descendants will pass the wrong care instructions on to their descendants, and then the containers will rust and start leaching into the water supply. As long as you have a country with operating nuclear reactors you probably have all the infrastructure to keep waste safe. What when you don't?
Imagine that literally, not metaphorically, the devil came to earth in the time of the Neanderthals, destroyed almost everything, and some heroic Neanderthals managed to seal him in a box. If the box isn't taken care of the devil can break out again. Do we still have those care instructions? Is anyone executing them? There are religions from hundreds of years ago (not as long as needed!) which say you must do something or the world ends. We consider them all fairy stories, and they probably are. What if one wasn't? Then we'd be fucked because we wouldn't be following the instructions, right? Nuclear waste storage would be in that bucket.
At least the fallout will be localized. You're not destroying the world with careless handling of nuclear waste. You may make a limited region uninhabitable for thousands of years, and detectably reduce global lifespans by a few years and increase cancer rates by a few percent.
The purpose of deep geo facility is to be deep. Bombing something 500m deep underground makes little sense when russia can use dirty bombs directly.
Besides - humanity already has such facilities for vast of toxic waste, prime example being Herfa Neurode. It's not like we ban all electronics due to arsenic waste from copper mining
Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?
It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.
Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.
Yeah but the risk management of a dam is ridiculously small compared to waste which will be dangerous so far into future that we might not know if people will even know what it is.
A dam damming water at a hill is obvious.
Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.
They have been around a bit longer don't you think?
How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown.
It's more like: something happens, a few die fast, the rest dies earlier, their children live shorter or have disabilities, their children also, and so on. Meanwhile collecting waste which will do the same for later generations who might not remember what nuclear energy even is.
> How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown.
Did you even bother to read about how we estimate the casualties of nuclear incidents? It really sounds like you didn't, and just shared your first thought about it not being trivial.
> They have been around a bit longer don't you think?
How in the world does that make them less risky? If a dam collapses, it's generally very bad, even if it is an old dam.
The numbers are highly speculative and are either those you get pushed in your face by the nuclear astroturf (killed on site) or are scientific and the range is very wide since it's so hard to calculate. It's cancer and it happened in the Soviet Era.
Your whole comment didn't add anything to the discussion. What's your point?
Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.
If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.
Unless we have civilizational collapse in which case a bit of nuclear waste will be the least of our problems.
It won't have to be monitored for a 1000 years. First, by that time the level of radioactivity is very low, and when it's in a deep-geological repository (like the ones we already use for vastly greater amounts of highly toxic chemicals that never decay) it is gone. We know enough about how geology works.
> Being an additional problem is not a contradiction of it being the least of those problems.
How does this even help your argument?
Yeah, we have a nuclear winter. 80% of the civilisation is dead. "Hey look, we've found warm stuff". A few years later: 10% of the population died of cancer.
Are you kidding?
> No it won't.
Spent nuclear fuel stays a radiation hazard for extended periods of time with half-lifes as high as 24,000 years.
> That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
The fact that your single example is Yucca mountain and even the US wasn't able to come up with another place and is still discussing this one, shows that there is not an abundance of places you can put it. Even in such a huge country like the USA.
Other countries have the same issues and they are geological.
Germany had a spot a few decades ago. Everybody thought it would be safe. It has to be evacuated now. An evacuation which will cost the taxpayer millions of Euros.
Please explain how people in the midst of a nuclear winter aren’t going to be aware of what a radiation hazard is? Come on, just think for a moment before you say something.
Loss of knowledge in disasters so wide is not something which is hard to imagine. How come you have so much trouble with it? And nuclear winter is just one catastrophic scenario. Will you come for every one I list?
Nuclear winter would be caused by a nuclear war so there would be a lot of effort put into surviving the effects of radioactive fallout, it would be the first thing on everyone’s minds and would be an ongoing concern. In that case there would be many other sources of radiation to deal with. There’d be plenty of other hazards leftover too in any disaster of similar scale. Those aren’t reasons to not use potentially hazardous materials, the best thing to focus effort on is preventing those worst case scenarios in the first place and having a plan to deal with them if they do happen.
....and then nuclear winter ends, generations after generations despise everything about nuclear. later they forget about it, more generations, more generations and meanwhile the stuff is still there and still dangerous.
We also know how a BLU-122 works. Can you be sure the US wouldn't use one on its allies in yet another moment of irrational tantrum? What about Russia?
Correct as long as we still have Geiger counters.. I’m not sure what kind of apocalypse you’re planning for. Maybe get a radon detection kit for your basement.
"How" is not really a relevant question in this context. They are, empirically.
Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe, meaning it doesn't really matter that much which of these you use, the overall risk is always going to be very low, and the relative numbers are going to be very sensitive to small changes or variations in analyses.
Hydro is significantly more dangerous, and all the fossil fuels are tremendously more dangerous.
Due to the fact that intermittent renewables usually require fossil backup for that majority of countries that don't have abundant hydro, you have to take that into account.
A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
Whereas the WHO predicts that there will be no measurable health effects on the general Japanese public from Fukushima, and the majority of negative health consequences were from the unnecessary evacuations.
> Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe
Who said that?
What are you talking about? How is a solar panel even on the same safety-shelf with nuclear material??
What are you talking about??
> A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
Which is again related to the Astroturf tactic of playing nuclear vs. coal and is not related to today's calculations where it is renewables vs. nuclear.
Would you please stop derailing the discussion with this?
> Who said [that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe]?
Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Empirically. Completely independent of whether you understand how.
And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year, 2025 was another record production year, the number of states adopting nuclear power is rising, the number of reactors is rising, the number of builds is rising, the rate of the increase in number of builds is rising.
Empirically.
And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels. Which is why almost all industrialized nations are doing nuclear AND renewables.
Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
In the real world they are complementary. Here's the Finnish environment minister:
"If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines.
> Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Why don't you link to "the data" then?
> And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year,
I just gave you a source which proves my statement and shows that yours is a lie. Just like everything else you added to it.
> And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels.
Weird how they can't but already do. Must be some kind of magic eh?
> Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
Nope. This is a lie also :)
Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary. This is a fact and happens today.
> Here's the Finnish environment minister:
Why not add the French environment minister also? You can add as many ministers as you want, the world doesn't care. The money goes into renewables and they're the future.
What I wrote is and has been an actual topic of real world politics here.
There is nothing speculative or questionable about it.
Nuclear reactors are not flexible. To keep them in any way financially sane, you have to keep them running as long as possible. Even when the energy they produce is much much more expensive then the one from renewables. This is why they block the grid an renewables had to be turned off.
Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
My understanding has been that an additional reason breeder reactors have been discouraged is due to nuclear proliferation fears; the neccessary reprocessing of the fuel also produces weapons-grade plutonium.
proliferation argument doesn't hold considering you can do it much cheaper with distributed enrichment of uranium. Breeders can open a pathway for plutonium warheads but it's more about optimization. If a country wants such warheads, it'll start with easy enrichment path
It really never was that big of a problem. People make a big deal that it lasts 30,000 years, but there are many other types of waste, such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, etc, that will literally never go away, but we don't make people put those types of wastes in repositories that will last forever. Basically you just want to put it in a very remote place with a lot of earth over it. The good thing about nuclear waste is that it's so energy dense that there really isn't even that much of it.
The volumes of "waste" that is generated, given the electricity produced, is not a lot. The entirety of the US' waste created, over the course of multiple decades, can fit on single football field/pitch, ten yards/metres high (that's the actual fuel bundles: the dry casks they're stored in would increase the volume).
France is just across the border, so Orano can do reprocessing with the "waste" to reduce its volume even further if desired, and extract the unused fuel from the waste.
Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.
In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons that will make the widespread use of nuclear energy possible: once your neighbor have built a reactor, you begin to share with them all the risks associated with nuclear energy, but you receive none of the benefits. This makes building a nuclear reactor more attractive to you, since you're already bearing the risks.
Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.
For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?
Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.
> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened?
Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.
The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.
"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think."
Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.
Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.
It's an absurd thought experiment to illustrate that even when taken to an extreme the volume is small enough that a solution broadly remains feasible.
In germany alone, 500 000 m³ of radioactive material is to be disposed somehow by 2050. Having people carry that underground sounds insane. There is more to waste than fuel rods. And even they .. amount to a really high number if you factor in shielding.
I think you have a serious misconception. The long term storage we're talking about here is for the spent fuel rods (or alternatively the byproducts extracted from them if they are reprocessed). It's known as high level waste and there isn't very much of it.
> As a general rule, short-lived waste (mainly non-fuel materials from reactors) is buried in shallow repositories, while long-lived waste (from fuel and fuel reprocessing) is deposited in geological repository.
> Overall, the 60-year-long nuclear program in the UK up until 2019 produced 2150 m3 of HLW.
You should read up on the Asse II mine in Germany. They tried exactly this kind of naïve "just throw it in an old mine" approach, and it has turned into a giant headache as it is now slowly collapsing and trying to leak into the surrounding groundwater - if chemical reactions don't cause it to explode first.
This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...
I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".
We don't have a lot of technology that we knew existed in earlier civilisations - the Aztecs, Mayans, pueblo peoples, the Easter islanders, to name just a few were doing things we have no idea how to do
Isn’t this no longer true? I’ve seen many experimental archaeology documentaries that use a recipe that uses pozzolanic ash and rock from volcanoes in Italy that they show to create the same properties found in Roman concrete. We don’t make concrete with it now because the supply is too limited and the expense of mining it would be greater than making portland cement.
When sealed several hundred meters underground in nonporous rock they do have such long lifespans. It's like observing that corn doesn't have a 10 year lifespan when left out on the counter and then objecting to canning it on that basis.
So just to be clear the concern here is that something buried 2+ miles underground, in a secure container, encased along with other secure containers in a concrete vault, all homed in nonporous rock, in a geologically stable area, is suddenly going to be subjected to an earthquake, against all odds a fault is going to open right through the waste storage area, again against all odds groundwater will appear, the reinforced vault will be weathered to the point of failure (over what timespan I wonder?), and the resulting leak of radioactive material that is multiple miles underground will then somehow affect humans living, what, somewhere within a few hundred miles? Does that really sound like a reasonable scenario to you? Because as far as I'm concerned it's pure concern trolling.
No? I don't see where you addressed these points in context? I am saying that I don't find what you're saying to be at all convincing but am of course open to reasoned debate if you think I've got something wrong. Being concerned about the scenario I outlined above truly seems absurd to me.
Do you see an obvious issue with the sequence of events I posed?
An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
Yeah, i know about that one and it kind of proves my point, it's been active as a nuclear reactor for roughly a billion years if i recall correctly - every time water seeped into the rock it slowed the neutrons down and the reactor started up, created steam, which then evaporated and stopped the reaction
Newer reactors produce much less long-lasting waste. A half-life of only 100 or 200 years makes a tremendous difference to the old reactors where half-life was measured in 1000s of years
Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.
Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …
… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.
The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).
Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!
this is nonsense. Take german plants - zero subsidies for operation, plants were built mostly by private sector.
In France - no CFD's for existing units, plants were constructed by govt for about 150bn. In comparison Germany spent on EEG subsidies double of that and you can see the result in emissions...
Really? Which private sector built nuclear power plants in East Germany? In West Germany most plants were constructed by state-controlled enterprises and there were no expectation of them to ever reach profitability.
it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west - state was a partial owner. For example PreussenElektra, when it built plants was a publicly traded company and during Grohnde state mostly divested from it. Plants not only reached profitability but were cheapest firm power in german merit order bringing huge profits to the owners
According to Wikipedia, PreussenElektra was a subsidiary of VEBA, a state owned energy company. You have to cite your sources here because I don't want to have to rebut made-up stuff.
I do note that you have changed your argument from "plants were built mostly by private sector" to "it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west". Closer to the truth, but still incorrect.
I stand corrected. VEBA was state owned at that time. On the other hand RWE was 50/50 private-municipality owned in the same period.
Still, no CFDs were given to them. So it's not about state reducing subsidies. Nor was it about environment regulations.
The high costs of recent western projects are more related to depleted supply chain and poor designs of the plants. We'll get a chance soon to observe how Canada and Korea will build in Europe. Both have much better supply chain and both want to build (Czechia- apr and Romania -candu). If both will have the same cost blows as flamanville then it's clearly related to EU itself. If not- then the problem was EDF incompetence specifically here and Westinghouse incompetence in US
As I said, cite your sources. You claim RWE was a public-private partnership "in the same period" but don't even state which period. Your claim about CFDs is a complete non-sequitur as I never claimed that the subsidies were in the form of CFDs.
Subsidized capital mostly. When you go to a private bank and want to borrow billions of money the bank will ask you "what for?" You tell it "nuclear, might generate profit in 25 years" and it will quote you an interest rate. The rate will be insanely high due to the risk. So you borrow the money from the government at a much lower interest rate.
And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
what has installed capacity to do with price? Check recent chinese solar parks prices and power. Normalize that power with chineze weather capacity factor. Do the same for their nuclear which is roughly 2.5bn/unit
China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)
430 GW a year on 20% (which it is not, as china has lots of desserts with no clouds) would still be a way bigger number than 110 GW that are planned to be reached in a few years.
Then here I might stand corrected, but it does not change the basic equation nore the invalidation of the claim above, that china is building nuclear like it builds solar and wind. It does not. Not even close.
Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?
A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?
Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
I do see how France and Sweden have lowest GHG emissions in EU by building both nuclear and renewables. I see other countries like Denmark/Germany who decided to go with ren alone. Germany spent on EEG double than entire french nuclear fleet. We can see the results. There's no race here. There's no imagine if. We already have historical data. We already have results on hand
Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.
Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?
This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.
In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.