Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore (opens in new tab)

Even our own revered patio11 got caught as a patsy, repeating propaganda about how perfectly organized and careful the Japanese nuclear industry was.

Anyway, overall, whether the dangers are technical or social, they are still dangers.

Sources, please? I don't disbelieve you; I want to know more. (And precisely what you're referring to.)

While I work in the same lab as a bunch of nuclear physicists, my physics expertise is in experimental gravity.

To get the official scoop on such things, I'd start with the NRC: http://www.nrc.gov .

If you're at/near a university, many of them have a radiation safety office as a part of their Environmental Health and Safety department. University radiation safety officers are a great resource for timely details regarding rules in an experimental setting. Even if there's no "nuclear science" underway at a school, if there's a medical school or nuclear chemistry at work, there's probably a radiation safety office.

It's far from solved, but there are partial solutions, including reprocessing.

My appeal to dabblers was to think through the entire life cycle of an experiment before beginning. If I were to crack open a smoke detector in order to play around with the Americium source, I'd think hard first about whether I actually knew what I was doing, making sure I worked in a clean/orderly environment, that the entire experiment was nicely contained, and that I had a viable plan for how to safely manage the waste I'd created.

Just as with the bathtub ring in "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" [1], once contamination leaves containment, it can wander everywhere, generating lots of low-level waste. You'd rather not eat or aspirate an alpha-emitter.

Nobody wants an unsafe nuclear experiment in the garage next door; it's irresponsible. It's one thing to hurt yourself, but quite another to harm someone unaware of a risk. It's also irresponsible to dispose of a hot source in your garbage can. That source may no longer be able to hurt you, but it's able to harm everyone who comes into contact with it in the future.

Our lab's standard for whether or not something has been cleaned up: any residual activity is comparable to/indistinguishable from background, and any activated waste has been disposed of with someone licensed to handle it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_in_the_Hat_Comes_Back

here in australia, decades of research and policy development have hit upon a world-class solution to the nuclear waste challenge.

We're building a road in a semi-arid remote location, on the traditional lands of a small, disemowered, remote indigenous community. At the end of the road, we plan to build a shed with a barbed wire fence. In return for this inconvenience, the local community will see employment opportunities (2 security guards) and compensation (scholarships for their children).

this standard of excellence is possible when you have a society that tolerates institutionalised inequity and cultural genocide, and apartheid style laws that target particular races. None of this should surprise, as this is the same spirit in which a large portion of the world's uranium is mined on traditional lands in Australia. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-ranger-u...

If we want sustainable nuclear energy, the only solution would be fast reactor that can burn nuclear waste. Politically, it is near impossible to find a place to build nuclear waste storage. Nobody know how safe is such a storage. If we can burn nuclear waste, we will have sufficient clean energy for several hundred years. By then, nuclear fusion will be harnessed, and we will have enough energy for next many million years, and they have much less environmental impact.

Of course, some of the work done in the construction/mining/decommissioning could be powered by electricity from other reactors, getting closer to carbon-zero.

But realistically, there is no extant electricity supply that has zero carbon costs over it's lifecycle. At least that I am aware of.

If you take a sandwich into the control room of a nuclear plant and eat it there and throw the wrapper in the bin, that's "low level nuclear waste". If you do the same in an airliner, your sandwich will be exposed to more radiation! but it's just litter.

Is this a real world problem with real world consequences?

It is my understanding that the nuclear waste can be stored safely without too much cost. It is also my understanding that there are ways to re-use the already used fuel rods, effectively 1) making them radiate less 2) getting "leftover" power from already consumed fuel.

Psychological footprint fueled by ignorance however... Well, that borders religiousness. Maybe education and awareness helps.

That is one of the emotions.

If you read the article you will read about two reactors that are actually fueled by what we consider waste today.

That we don't completely burn the fuel used in a reactor is a 'bug', a misfeature if you will. That was expedient when the initial reactors were being brought online and now is a regulatory pain in the butt. There is nothing in the physics that requires a nuclear reactor complex to generate nuclear waste of any kind[1]. Only in the regulations.

[1] Nuclear incineration of even low level waste can effectively convert anything that was once radioactive into short lived nucleotide. Converting everything burned into its lowest energy stable state. But we don't do that either.

The waste is a vastly exaggerated problem. We've released vastly more uranium and thorium into the atmosphere via burning of coal than we've generated waste from nuclear plants that needs long term storage (the vast majority of nuclear waste by volume has a half life short enough that it is not a storage problem for more than a few decades; only a few percent needs long term storage).

Now, the waste that needs long term storage is more dangerous than the dispersed uranium from coal, but most of the spent fuel can also be reprocessed at least once, and at least India is looking into reprocessing spent fuel multiple times to reduce the amount of high level waste that actually needs to be stored rather than reused.

The resulting storage volume is miniscule, and while it needs to be dealt with, it takes a lot for it to be a significant risk. E.g. plutonium is nasty in some ways - you really don't want to breathe in particulate. But it mostly emits alpha particles, which can be blocked by not much more than cardboard (I remember physics class when our teachers demonstrated with an alpha source, a geiger counter and cardboard...).

Large scale dispersal of plutonium particulate would require a large explosion, so the challenge with plutonium (and uranium) storage is largely to ensure there's no risk of reaching critical mass. But that's "simple" enough to do just by diluting the material enough. There is a security aspect (you don't want people to have an easy way of mining plutonium from waste to produce weapons) but the main storage problem is down to fear.

Most of the gamma emitters have short half lives. I grew up in Norway, and remember the massive fear after Chernobyl relating to Caesium contamination for example (fallout making it into the soil caused Cesium to get picked up in various plants that were eaten by sheep, deer, elks etc. in the highland regions). While it was a public health concern, Caesium-137 has a half-life of "only" 30 years, and a biological half-life in the human body of a few months, and there are plenty of "workarounds" in the case of a major accident (deep ploughing; screening the riskiest food sources; fertilizing with potassium) that helps reduce Caesium uptake until it's radioactivity has sufficiently diminished and/or it has been spread enough to not be a problem any more.

That's not to say we shouldn't take nuclear waste seriously, but it's not a big deal compared to a lot of other hazardous waste we don't think twice about.

It actually does, depending on your reactor design.

That too. There's been something of a confluence of posts on this topic in the past few days. Not that it isn't a topic that has some attraction here.

Another datapoint: a recently posted (here?) interview of Richard Feynman, shot only a few weeks before he died. What really got me was the mischievous nature he displayed: constantly smiling and joking. Einstein was somewhat similar. God may not play dice with the Universe, but each of these two was, I think, toying with it.

Mini reactors are becoming a big industry.

For cities or countries (or large ships) that can't afford a full-scale nuclear reactor there are smaller and cheaper ones that can replace fossil-fuel power plants.

I'm sure most people go into the nuclear field to experiment, few people expect to sit around with a checklist and watch a dial.

This company is working on similar goals: http://terrapower.com/