The fun part of this is this is true of any 1GW power source. We have been deploying solar+battery arrays in that range recently for much less money and much faster than nuclear.
Thanks "Office of nuclear energy" for pointing out how useful large scale solar+battery is too!
I really don't get this ackshually business about nuclear power, we're absolute idiots to not employ it more. Everywhere there's been a focus on nuclear power generation we're seeing reliable results over a long long timespan
It's sort of too late for nuclear though. They take years to build and cost a fortune. The time to invest in nuclear power on a large scale was probably 10 years ago (although, was it as safe then? I don't know)... Right now we need answers that get us away from fossil fuels much, much quicker. Nuclear may still be a part of the picture, but renewables are more pressing.
Thing is this has been said for longer than I've been alive, and will probably still be said after I'm dead, in the intervening 70-80 years we could have and could be actually building the damn things.
The problem with nuclear is: business wise, it is a TOUGH sell to the public, even without the anti-nuclear lobby groups fighting with safety propaganda.
It takes a much higher capital spend to start up nuclear than any other type of plant, so you won't "break even" for 30 plus years, if ever.
It doesn't help when there are high profile sites that are being refurbished, whose costs are already phenomenaly high, and then the managing firm fucks it up (I'm looking at you Crystal River).
It makes it high risk, financially. And it's the public that ultimately ends up paying.
My hope is that SMR's become viable. They introduce a new factor though. If you get small, "cheaper" nuclear plants, then you will get more operators and you will get some that may run fast and loose. One fuck up can ruin it for everyone.
I can accept the argument that it's safe and effective but the public irrationally won't accept it. Seems to have been a pretty good sell on the other side of the curtain though
Did you really pick the figure from the RBMK reactor type?
For PWRs, 250 m³ of LILW per GW annum is 28.5 m³ of LILW per TWh.
2.5 million turkeys in a 2.4 kW oven for 3.5 hours uses 0.021 TWh.
So 2.5 million turkeys and 0.6 m³ total low and intermediate wastes generated. Most of this can be released after ~300 years with negligible activity over natural background. That is a long time but not "basically forever".
The source for that number is the International Atomic Energy Agency aka the nuclear control agency.
As for the rest of your ideas, its sadly not that easy. It has to be stored somewhere where it cant contaminate the environment, water cant get to it, tectonics are stable, etc. No permanent storage location for the waste has been found, to date.
And to burn the unburned fuel you would have to breed the material, which is a process that requires the most dangerous reactors and is extremely costly.
I wouldn't say nuclear is better than renewables. I would say it's a good at providing base load as we transition from fossil fuels over to renewables. That's all.
Now calculate how many generations of turkeys will be eaten till the waste stops killing people
Edit: can't believe how many people here are falling for nuclear. Have you all learned nothing from what companies did with fossil fuels? Taking the profits and leaving humanity with a fucked up world?
And now you are falling for the same stuff with nuclear again, I assume this is the discourse in america which is so scewed? Here in Europe people are not that naive... Even the ones in France, which is quite into nuclear are reasonable and see the waste problem normally.
And here on Lemmy people really come and say "nuclear waste isn't dangerous, it didn't kill anyone"
Quite a few (if you remember not even a fraction oft its life time is over by now)
Also: radiation doesn't kill right away. Often you live 10 more years with weird symptoms and die from something like heart attack, so your death isn't counted as "caused by radiation exposure" but as "died from cancer" or "heart attack"
Nuclear waste is indeed a problem, however it is a contained problem that can be isolated. Oil's byproduct are distributed into the atmosphere and are killing every living thing on earth. Do you know how many people die every year due to pollution from burning fossil fuels? It's orders of magnitude worse. The fear of nuclear waste, while absolutely an issue, is so incredibly blown out of proportion compared to the silent killer that is fossil fuels.
They're over by a factor of 6 which would add up to 21 hours, not 24. I don't know what they've done to get 2.5 million, it should be 417 thousand with those numbers.
Edit: Oh dear. They said each oven could completely cook 6 turkeys in a day so they rounded to that number. At least it no longer reads GW/day. The source
in a country where half of the presidents cant even pronounce nukular....and the only usecase for nukular is make some machines like openAI work cheaper. go eat the nukular waste george.