What's wrong with that? There are many things that would go to shit without active maintenance. I'd also prefer to be around in 40-80 years, which is harder if we're burning fossil fuels than clean energy like nuclear.
What’s wrong with not having a long term plan for a relatively dangerous and expensive-to-handle hot potato? I’m only arguing that while there are plenty of good plans out there that the public are not yet willing to accept, if we don’t begin to implement better long-term strategies, local governments will be the ones left dealing with radioactive materials abandoned by their operators Long after the revenue generator has been decommissioned.
Even when centrifuged and concentrated uranium isn't particularly dangerous compared to other heavy metals. it's when you add moderators and activate the reactor that you start to transmute the uranium into really dangerous stuff.
There have been a few naturally occurring nuclear reactors but that was when the Earth was younger and the natural level of uranium enrichment was different.
This is not correct. The proximity and amount of fissionable material is exactly what causes the chain reaction. Moderators moderate (control, reduce) the reaction in a nuclear power plant so that it can be throttled.
The corium (melted reactor core) underneath Fukushima is fissioning right now and releasing fatal amounts of radioactivity. Nuclear fuel rods are purposely designed to put a (sort of) efficient amount of fissionable material together in a (sort of) efficient configuration, originally called a pile.
Fuel pellets made of U-235 (and the rods they are stacked into) absolutely do fission on their own, and for a very long time. They're only removed from the reactor because the efficiency has gotten so low as to be nearly useless for power generation, not because they're safe.
Uranium (even-235) on its own honestly isn't that dangerous, I was oversimplifying to say that the enrichment is what made it dangerous.
You're incorrect here on the nature of moderators - they moderate neutron flux, but they don't moderate the reactivity, they increase it. Fast neutrons are less likely to cause a uranium atom to fission so you have to slow emitted neutrons down to generate a sustained chain reaction.
In the absence of a whole lot of work a (fresh) uranium fuel rod is fairly inert. It doesn't produce much heat or very dangerous levels of radiation. Once you put the work in to generate a sustained chain reaction the U-235 starts turning into vastly more radioactive isotopes. For comparison U-235 has a half life of 700-million years, while Caesium-137 has a half life of 90 days.
The corium underneath Fukushima is fissioning because it's full of shorter half life fission products from its time as an active reactor, not because of the remaining Uranium. Now some of that Uranium is presumably getting fissioned by neutrons flying off of all of the other stuff decaying in there, but in 20,000 years time when the core is fairly inert nearly all of the U-235 left in the core as of today will still be there.
Yes, spent fuel rods are exceedingly dangerous, far more so than unused ones. We should really use the term "spent fuel rods" instead of the nonspecific nuclear waste.
The fact that every nuclear power plant produces these and we store them in swimming pools is really not great.
Not to push coal, but by comparison, nothing that can ever happen in a coal plant can create the unfixable mess at Fukushima, or the one at Three Mile Island, or the one at Hanford, or many other nuke accident sites. These are simply not "cleanup-able" situations and they will continue to fission for thousands of years.
Nuclear waste is many magnitudes worse than natural uranium. It is not only way more concentrated, but contains a lot of radioactive isotopes, uranium doesn't contain, as a consequence of the nuclear reactions.
Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. The problem is: safe storage is difficult to realize and extremely expensive. It needs to be kept safe for many millenia.
> Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast.
Wellll.. we have really good technology to reprocess the worst and reuse it as fuel. The problem is, we don't do it, because this is a whole lot like what you'd do to make nuclear weapons and there are proliferation and security concerns.
> It needs to be kept safe for many millenia.
The vast majority of the risk disappears in a few hundred years. Very radioactive also means "decaying quickly".
Compare to other industrial byproducts that stay equivalently nasty for tens of thousands of years and more readily dissolve in groundwater.
No, we don't have a "good technology". Yes, breeder reactors exist, but e.g. France has given up the technology, the UK has one? The problem is, that this technology is no where economic and breeder reactors are really challenging technology.
In many jurisdictions, PUREX is routinely used to extract remaining fuel and chemically segregate the worst daughter products. A lot of the actinides can be burnt up in a normal reactor, like 239Pu.
Of course, in the long term, transmutation of LLFPs into precious metals is interesting, as is burning up more of the waste in e.g. fast reactors.
How safe do you actually need it to be? Glass it and chuck it onto the abyssal plain. Watch as the ecological damage is less than a millionth (literally, not hyperbolicly) as damaging as ocean acidification caused by CO2.
It really isn't hard, just unintuitive thanks to movies like Godzilla and shouted against by environmentalists who refuse to quantify the damage.
> but natural uranium in rocks is full of fission products.
They're dangerous too. Natural Uranium decay creates radon gas, which seeps up through the ground an accumulates inside buildings. That radon then decays, and the products of that cause lung cancers that kill more than 20 thousand people in America every year, and contribute to 2% of cancer deaths in Europe.
I grew up in one of those areas; in public school they taught us about the importance of radon testing and making sure your house, basement particularly, is well ventilated.
An frightening anecdote from wikipedia:
> The danger of radon exposure in dwellings received more widespread public awareness after 1984, as a result of a case of Stanley Watras, an employee at the Limerick nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Mr. Watras set off the radiation alarms (see Geiger counter) on his way into work for two weeks straight while authorities searched for the source of the contamination. They were shocked to find that the source was astonishingly high levels of radon in his basement and it was not related to the nuclear plant. The risks associated with living in his house were estimated to be equivalent to smoking 135 packs of cigarettes every day.
Enrichment doesn't make them into very very hot rods. U-235 is boring and can be safely handled by hand. Use of them in a reactor is what makes them very very hot.
