Solar and wind are increasingly outpacing nuclear power globally, with solar generation surpassing nuclear for the first time in 2025, according to WNISR 2026. The report highlights nuclear’s slow (…)
Praising nuclear and deploring the cost of wind? That’s funny, considering the still-unsolved problem of securely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years. It’s almost like we have left the factor with the largest potential cost out of our calculation…
a) provide information on the total energy generated by the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2, just so we can be sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison and we can be sure that we’re looking at roughly the same amount in both pictures?
b) assess the capacity of the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2 for 1) further damages to the environment and human health, as well as 2) their potential for being recycled?
c) fast-forward these images about 250-500 years and then reasses which one depicts the greater environmental problem and cost factor?
The Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, produced approximately 119 billion kilowatt-hours (119 terawatt-hours) of electricity during its operation from1972to1996.
The Sweetwater Wind Farm is a 585.3-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Nolan County, Texas. Annual production estimates are1,700,000 MWh, or approx 1.7 terrawatt hours peryearon average
So giving the Wind farm the most generous output figures, in a ten year span it produces less than 20 Terrawatt hours, almost 1/6th (one sixth) of the power the single reactor nuclear plant produced in it’s life time.
Now let’s see which of these waste materials I can recycle, and which of them I could, theoretically, leave untouched in their current state for 250-500 years without investing a single Dollar. (The illegal Sweetwater dump was cleaned up, btw. Picture 1 is supposed to be the clean-up.)
From the turbines? Basically nothing. Millions have been spent and best has been figured out is shredding them and using them as filler, which no one is going to use when dirt and sand are cheaper and no risk of break down. All other attempts to recycle turbine blades has resulted in just better ways to crush the down to bury them, which funnily enough is what most of the ‘clean up’ for Sweetwater was.
For nuclear? They can be recycled today if the incentive was there, France recycles almost all of it’s nuclear waste with something like an 80% recovery rate and predict they could go 95% if that ever became economically viable. Most of the nuclear waste in the above picture will be inert after 100 years, though there is no data publicly available of the make up the waste though it should be fewer than 1% plutonium which could be recovered for use else where, such as if thorium reactors ever become viable or for space probes as NASA loves to use it for.
The main reason the US doesn’t recycle is because US’s flawed policy of no radiation exposure means setting up a reprocessing and recycling facility would never become viable for the amount of waste produced annually. And as other posters have pointed out, even stuff that can’t be recycled or reprocessed for other uses could still be simply buried and used to boost a geothermal powerplant.
You dig a hole, put the waste in the hole and backfill with clay.
Done.
As a Swede, I would love it if we built a huge underground storage site and sold space to other countries needing space for waste. We have a solid bedrock and a generally stable political situation, we also have the skills to build a facility like it and could make bank off of it.
Or your know, the amount of waste produced by nuclear reactors produced global is so low relative to output that the majority of it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Nuclear fuel is the smallest fraction of nuclear waste. Every bit of PPE, every part replaced, tool used, etc is nuclear waste.
At the end of life the entire reactor and part of the building are nuclear waste. They go through them with a concrete mill and remove the inner layer of concrete because it has become radioactive.
100%, there re natural rock formations that emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, hell if the US Capitol building was rezoned as a nuclear power plant, half of DC would need to be evacuated and an exclusion zone setup without any change to the building or fuel brought to the site. The granite used in it’s construction emits more radiation naturally that exceeds the legal limit that nuclear power plants are allowed.
Meanwhile self professed environmentalists are anti-nuclear energy despite it having the least impact environmentally per kw produced.
it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Oh yeah. These issues are so mild that after your “half a century”, we need to dig everything back up, reseal it and find a new place. Playing a thousand years’ worth of musical chairs with radioactive waste may sound fun to you - until one day, the music stops and you can’t find a chair.
Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts ‘thousands and thousands of years’ is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives.
So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.
It is easy to build, but as noted, it is also expensive to build.
Then you also need the right kind of bedrock and geology.
Sweden has everything needed to build such a facility, I could even see a large benefit of a permanent storage facility here.
We could get “boosted geothermal”, nuclear waste still produce heat for a long time, why not put in pipes in place in the storage facility and use the extra heat energy to heat houses or other useful things, we are already doing geothermal heating here, so much so that there has been noted issues with depleating the geothermal boreholes, with a boosted system you would get a much longer life time of using it.
Praising nuclear and deploring the cost of wind? That’s funny, considering the still-unsolved problem of securely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years. It’s almost like we have left the factor with the largest potential cost out of our calculation…
20 years of nuclear waste vs less than 10 years (2017-2023) of wind turbine blades (dumped illegally no less)
Which one is the unsolved problem again?
To help answer your question, could you first
a) provide information on the total energy generated by the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2, just so we can be sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison and we can be sure that we’re looking at roughly the same amount in both pictures?
b) assess the capacity of the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2 for 1) further damages to the environment and human health, as well as 2) their potential for being recycled?
c) fast-forward these images about 250-500 years and then reasses which one depicts the greater environmental problem and cost factor?
The Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, produced approximately 119 billion kilowatt-hours (119 terawatt-hours) of electricity during its operation from 1972 to 1996.The Sweetwater Wind Farm is a 585.3-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Nolan County, Texas. Annual production estimates are 1,700,000 MWh, or approx 1.7 terrawatt hours per year on averageSo giving the Wind farm the most generous output figures, in a ten year span it produces less than 20 Terrawatt hours, almost 1/6th (one sixth) of the power the single reactor nuclear plant produced in it’s life time.
So yeah, balls in your court.
Uh, that’s energy, not power. Also, it’s means it is.
You could transfer that apostrophe to “ball’s”.
Unless you really mean balls. In my court.
That’s fair.
Now let’s see which of these waste materials I can recycle, and which of them I could, theoretically, leave untouched in their current state for 250-500 years without investing a single Dollar. (The illegal Sweetwater dump was cleaned up, btw. Picture 1 is supposed to be the clean-up.)
From the turbines? Basically nothing. Millions have been spent and best has been figured out is shredding them and using them as filler, which no one is going to use when dirt and sand are cheaper and no risk of break down. All other attempts to recycle turbine blades has resulted in just better ways to crush the down to bury them, which funnily enough is what most of the ‘clean up’ for Sweetwater was.
For nuclear? They can be recycled today if the incentive was there, France recycles almost all of it’s nuclear waste with something like an 80% recovery rate and predict they could go 95% if that ever became economically viable. Most of the nuclear waste in the above picture will be inert after 100 years, though there is no data publicly available of the make up the waste though it should be fewer than 1% plutonium which could be recovered for use else where, such as if thorium reactors ever become viable or for space probes as NASA loves to use it for.
The main reason the US doesn’t recycle is because US’s flawed policy of no radiation exposure means setting up a reprocessing and recycling facility would never become viable for the amount of waste produced annually. And as other posters have pointed out, even stuff that can’t be recycled or reprocessed for other uses could still be simply buried and used to boost a geothermal powerplant.
Unresolved?
It’s a super simple problem.
You dig a hole, put the waste in the hole and backfill with clay.
Done.
As a Swede, I would love it if we built a huge underground storage site and sold space to other countries needing space for waste. We have a solid bedrock and a generally stable political situation, we also have the skills to build a facility like it and could make bank off of it.
Yeah, that is why almost 80 years after the start of the nuclear age nearly no country has such a storage. It’s so easy to build!
Or your know, the amount of waste produced by nuclear reactors produced global is so low relative to output that the majority of it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Nuclear fuel is the smallest fraction of nuclear waste. Every bit of PPE, every part replaced, tool used, etc is nuclear waste.
At the end of life the entire reactor and part of the building are nuclear waste. They go through them with a concrete mill and remove the inner layer of concrete because it has become radioactive.
Yeah, it is quite startling to see the difference in physical fuel use between a coal plant and a nuclear plant.
And the really funny thing is that a coal plant releases far more radiation than a nuke plant.
100%, there re natural rock formations that emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, hell if the US Capitol building was rezoned as a nuclear power plant, half of DC would need to be evacuated and an exclusion zone setup without any change to the building or fuel brought to the site. The granite used in it’s construction emits more radiation naturally that exceeds the legal limit that nuclear power plants are allowed.
Meanwhile self professed environmentalists are anti-nuclear energy despite it having the least impact environmentally per kw produced.
Oh yeah. These issues are so mild that after your “half a century”, we need to dig everything back up, reseal it and find a new place. Playing a thousand years’ worth of musical chairs with radioactive waste may sound fun to you - until one day, the music stops and you can’t find a chair.
Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts ‘thousands and thousands of years’ is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives.
So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.
It is easy to build, but as noted, it is also expensive to build.
Then you also need the right kind of bedrock and geology.
Sweden has everything needed to build such a facility, I could even see a large benefit of a permanent storage facility here.
We could get “boosted geothermal”, nuclear waste still produce heat for a long time, why not put in pipes in place in the storage facility and use the extra heat energy to heat houses or other useful things, we are already doing geothermal heating here, so much so that there has been noted issues with depleating the geothermal boreholes, with a boosted system you would get a much longer life time of using it.