According to the reference below, there was 140 lb (64 kg) of fissile material in the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The average nuclear reactor is going to generate TONS of waste over its life cycle (including, eventually, its core) as anything which comes into contact with or spends any time near that core is going to be considered to be “waste.”
It can’t be reused and it will have to disposed of in a safe manner.
Reference:
[tangent]I don’t know how accurate the book’s author’s information about nuclear weapons is, given the naturally super-secret nature of the trade, but the book goes into rich detail about the history of the various systems in a weapon, discussing failure modes and testing done to determine stability. In that context, it seems pretty amazing that the warhead didn’t at least explode conventionally, scattering its plutonium all over the place. And it doesn’t seem implausible that the thing could have gone off. It was the largest weapon in our arsenal; Little Rock wouldn’t have been happy.
One area discussed was safety of “sealed pit” weapons, with the core already assembled; other discussions revolved around the testing done to ensure that weapons were “one-point safe” and could sustain a single point source explosion (starting in one explosive lens) without a nuclear yield (not all could).
He mentioned key individuals in Sandia, Livermore, and Congress who tried to get the military to add safeguards to the weapons, but were always told “we’ll commission a study on it”
He provides enough background on the infighting between military branches and civilian authorities, the resistance to any kind of safeguards from SAC, to cast substantial doubt on the party line of “the weapon is absolutely safe and could never explode unintentionally.” There is clearly an agenda in the author’s work, but in a world where SAC kept their highly secret missile codes set to 00000000, I don’t buy the “it was completely safe” line.[/tangent]
Of course, but will it last longer than Hiroshima?
Love it, especially the violent, uncontrolled kind. But seriously, why are developed countries trying to kick it? Uranium deposits are pretty plentiful in somewhat ‘peaceful’ countries like America and Canada. Technology has progressed enough to fit a small and safe reactor in a corner of a basement parking lot. It’s the only (as I see it) viable substitute for all thermal plants. Arguing for things like solar and wind is just bad math to me.
California is NIMBY Paradise, there’s no way any new nuclear plants will ever be built. Hell, it’s all but impossible to build ANY power station ANYWHERE even in the middle of the Enron Energy Crisis. And God only knows what type of boogeyman the NIMBYs & BANANAs will invent once desalinization is proposed!
There are many modern safe designs, but it’s way too expensive to upgrade and/or replace every single power plant. The major problem with Fukushima (aside from building any nuclear power plant in a known earthquake/tsunami zone) was that it’s an older design built in the 70’s, unable to shut down safely when power was lost. And sadly, the Fukushima Disaster (despite causing NO loss of life, regarding the nuclear disaster only) pretty much sealed the deal on a dying industry anyway – we’ll have pocket-sized fusion reactors before anyone forgets the spectre of Japan '11.
I’ve been meaning for a while to ask about these numbers, to see whether anyone can tell me if they’re off-base somehow.
That people have unrealistic expectations of how well we should cope when Mother Nature decides to murder 20,000 people.
Wait, what? How long should a nuclear power plant last? What is actually possible? As far as I can tell, the viability of nuclear power, including mythical fusion power, is hamstrung by this hurdle. You simply cannot make a plant last any longer than spec, because of radiation damage. With the high cost of construction and certification, this really is a huge problem that taints the green hue of atomic power.
I am pro nuclear power and suspect in the future the anti-nuclear people will be seen much as the same way as Luddites are today.
I think the people of the future will be more like the Luddites of today, and they will look upon us as wimps and lightweights.
If I understand correctly, fast breeder reactors will not generate nuclear waste -in fact, they will consume nuclear waste.
That’s very good to know. I still can’t help but wonder about the construction and operation of nuclear power plants in corruption-prone areas (China, Russia, Quebec, etc.). They’re not supposed to cut corners or be unsafe, but you pay a little bribe here, a little bribe there…
Since you can freely visit the Genbaku Dome (which is 160 meters from the center of the air burst) then the answer is, yes. Also, people live and work near where the bomb was dropped and they have rebuilt Hiroshima since then.
References:
“millions of years for spent nuclear fuel”
Thanks, nevadaexile.
A nuclear power plant that supplied part of my electricity has just closed down. The operators said it was too expensive to continue to operate and would be too costly to modernize. What does that tell you?
Not lasting to the designed lifetime (or lasting that long but with huge extra mainenance costs) is a big problem.
Take the Trojan plant.
“After sixteen years of service it was closed by its operator, Portland General Electric (PGE), almost twenty years before the end of its design lifetime.”
The economics of Trojan sucked big time. It’s still costing PGE to maintain the waste tanks on the site.
Arkansas Nuclear One came online on May 21, 1974. It is licensed to operate through May 20, 2034.
When considering long-term storage places like Yucca Mountain, there’s always talk about what language to use for the warning signs for civilizations 100,000 years in the future. My attitude is – who cares??? The Ancient Egyptians didn’t put up any warning signs outside their pharaoh tombs, did they?
Also, I’d like to think there’ll be enough continuity in our current-to-future civilization that the locations of long-term nuclear waste dumps won’t be easily forgotten.
My late Father in Law, a geologist, suggested that nuclear waste be sealed in containers and dropped in the Marianas Trench where in that couple of million years it work work it’s way towards the mantle.
I actually work about a block away from a nuclear reactor and more than once I’ve thought “I wish our hot water was secondary/tertiary coolant rather than from a boiler, because this is just ridiculous.” Granted, it’s a 500 kW research reactor rather than a 500 MW commercial generator, but generally speaking I’d rather have nuclear power in my backyard over just about any other industrial system.
Careful, that’s how Godzilla woke up. :eek:
More seriously: I’ve heard your idea before, but is it even logistically feasable? And what happens if the containers begin leaking?
Seems much easier & cheaper to bury the waste in the ground and build a razor wire fence around it, plus a mile-wide moat w/crocodiles & killer squid just for good measure.