I don't really see why you think nuclear waste is a large storage problem. If you don't like that website, and as you requested, here's another government resource so i can't be accused of being biased (the government also made the rules here):
"If we take that a step further, U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
"Spent" fuel these days is 95%+ the same as the original fuel. If fully recycled then nuclear waste volumes could therefore be reduced 20x from where they are today. So that 10 yards deep would be 2 feet deep.
Most costs are actually self imposed. There is no reason for nuclear not to be the cheapest form of energy out there. If you don't like my original website, please see this one, which talks about the "regulatory ratchet". Regulations were increased on a highly profitable (read: cheap) sector until the industry was no longer profitable (read: as expensive as it is today)
I don't see why nuclear waste would ever make it into fertilizer.
The problem with nuclear and your cars analogy is that with cars the data is pretty clear that new cars are safer than old - this is not at all clear in nuclear!
yes! Apparently the rate of penile and throat cancer occurs at only half the rate in men as it does as cervical cancer in women, but the harm caused by the male versions of the cancer are worse, so in actual fact it may overall cause more harm in the male population.
I have had another experience with Opus 4.8 vs 5.5 which is along the lines of my prior experience of Opus generally having more common sense, whilst GPT is something along the lines of myopic code execution agent:
I was asking them each to review a regulatory pack for planning which regulatory track I needed to follow for my project. The GPT route was to check that the sources were properly referenced and the document structure was accurate and consistent. The Opus approach (the common sense approach, and what I wanted) was to check whether the argument was strong and I had a case.
This type of common sense intelligence difference is something I've seen a lot of times between the two. This doesn't show itself as a difference in a clearly defined coding task however, but there is something there which is qualitatively worse in openai models.
For the parts of the plant that cannot be put into landfill then storage like any other waste. Given how long they last, and how much energy they output, the waste is still very low per unit energy. Try this:
When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in heavy renewable grids.
100-1000 years order of magnitude. I can't remember exactly, but it's well within our ability to engineer and manage, rather than the signs that try to answer the "how do we communicate danger to later species" types of timelines
The reason is that your body has mechanisms to fix the problems of radiation. For example, when you drop a stone in water would you say that you "break the surface of the water"?
Our DNA is very similar - DNA damage occurs naturally. Our body has processes that fix DNA strand breaks. Radiation that occurs because of most exposure that has ever occurred is so minimal that the body's natural defences against radiation damange means that the harm is precisely zero. The body literally repaired itself much like that water surface repairs itself.
Harm does occur however when the rate of radiation exposure exceeds our body's ability to repair itself. However this threshold is well above any threshold we regulate around.
For more information the key words are "dna double strand breaks" and "LNT vs SNT"
- nuclear waste, after a period of the order of ~10e2/3 years is only dangerous if ingested. So it's as dangerous as any other poisonous substance after that point. There is no need for radiation shielding from that point.
- nuclear waste is very dense and so physical surface storage is cheap, and a solved problem (see: dry storage casks). We can fix leaks if/when they happen. Waste is concentrated
- current nuclear power stations (light water reactors) burn about 3% of their fuel leaving 97% unused in waste. There are nuclear power solutions which would burn most of the fuel (leaving very little for waste). So if we developed these technologies (see molton salt reactors being one of them) then nuclear waste would no longer be called "waste" as it would suddently become an extremely valuable feedstock for use in reactors.
- related to the prior point: why is it that we think we will not find a use for this very valuable and rare reasource in the future. We should think of nuclear "waste" storage as "rare element storage" which will be very useful under some states of the world. We just don't know how yet.
- as with any technology it should also be compared to the alternative when considering it's fitness: waste from the alternatives is far worse
It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing:
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
- nuclear waste is not a problem
- nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
- we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
There really is no excuse for people to be misinformed. If you actually want to understand this issue start here, but there are many other sources out there that can also help:
My experience of reddit forums is extremely poor. I admit to sometimes wanting to see if I can crack the AI on something, but mostly use it like a search engine for topics I'm not familiar with rather than to speak to/debate.
I was having a back and forth with Claude over a somewhat controversial topic, and I found it difficult for it to not misinterpret my questions. It was like speaking to a motivated reasoner who misinterpreted the 3 important words because the 10 others gave it cognitive disconence.
Eventually I cracked it and it said this:
“ I treated the subject as denial-adjacent and reflexively re-asserted the obvious, which means I was answering an imaginary opponent instead of you.”
- Does full switch programmability actually matter in production, or is it one of those things that sounds great in a slide deck but nobody uses?
- Is "on-path cores" in a DPU genuinely better than Pensando's P4 approach or NVIDIA's off-path model, or does it converge at scale?
- Can you actually swap merchant silicon under SONiC in practice, or is Broadcom lock-in deeper than the software layer?
- Is there a real market for a power-optimised 12.8T switch when the spine is moving to 51.2T+, or does the spine vendor always drag the leaf along?
- How big a deal is open-sourcing the ISA? Do people buying this really care to pay up for this type of thing?
Thanks!!