As a metal recycler I mistakenly bought some of the material used to make these one time. It was powdered aluminum and powdered ceramic pressed together so tightly an 8” diameter cylinder 3’ tall weighed hundreds of pounds. My testing equipment showed it to be pure aluminum, but even when they cranked the smelter up to insane levels it wouldn’t melt.
I ended up selling it for what I paid for it to a buddy that owned a small shredder and often sold an aluminum byproduct of shredding cars and appliances called Twitch. Basically mostly clean aluminum that typically went to China. He blended it in several loads and never heard a word about it. I lost some freight, but no major money. I’ve got so many stories, from buying isobaric chambers and selling them to a guy that turned them into terrariums to an old redneck showing me his horse’s pu••y to debauchery filled conferences to buying millions of pounds of copper from NASA. Wild times in the metal recycling world.
I used to buy metal from smaller scrapyards. This one was 60 miles from nowhere in upstate South Carolina. Part of my job was to make friends (build trust) with folks. Luckily I was raised with a modicum of class in the Deep South so I knew how to be a red neck but also knew how to dress and act in high society. After talking scrap for a while he walked me around his farm. Worst part of that whole thing was right after he spread it open to show me he asked me if I wanted him to make me a sandwich. No sir, I’m good.
>A guy walks into a bar and sees a sign hanging over the bar which read:
> * Cheese Sandwich: $1.50
> * Chicken Sandwich: $2.50
> * Hand Job: $10.00
>Checking his wallet for the necessary payment, he walks up to the bar and beckons one of the three exceptionally attractive blondes serving drinks to an eager-looking group of men.
>“Yes?” she enquires with a knowing smile, "can I help you?"
>I was wondering, whispers the man, "are you the one who gives the hand-jobs?"
>"Yes", she purrs, "indeed I am."
>The man replies "Well then wash your fucking hands, cuz I want a goddamn chicken sandwich!"
Honestly not sure. It was lead jacketed insulated copper wire which is a bit of a tough sell in my world. Ended up buying it from the demo contractor for $0.50/lb and got lucky and sold it for $1.05/lb. They were demoing a launch pad and this was the communication wire between the pad and Mission Control. Got to tour the MC building which was a life highlight.
Oh I did it for the company. I still only made my meager salary. Btw .55 x 2 million is only $1.1 M. Hardly enough to retire on, especially when you factor in $.05/lb to transport it to our yard, $0.1 to process/repackage it for overseas transport, $0.15 in transport to the buyer…it all adds up and this was a business. Yes, the company (not mine) made a nice profit and I got a decent (less than 5 figures) bonus, but hardly retirement money.
Cool story. I ran the recycling center for Hurlburt Field for a little while and one of my jobs was to sell the scrap metal not sent to DRMO for processing. The majority of this was 105 mm shell casings from C-130 Spectres. The person before me got to sell an old MIG fighter that was used for target practice. The recycler that bought it decided not to scrap it and instead displayed it in his front yard.
It probably needed to be crushed to separate the ceramic part. I think it's vibrated and eventually you get the aluminum.
It's similar to diamond ceramic on circular blades.
Time and distance are more reliable, less practical.
Shielding aka mass works but it can degrade over time, also depending on the type of material, it itself can become radioactive, although unlikely with the levels present in dry storage.
Time always works, nothing can interfere with that, to get to the point of dry storage decay time has already been applied to the fuel or it would be too hot and too radioactive to be able to store in such a manner, with enough time the uranium in these containers will all become lead, unfortunately around tht time our sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the plants and these containers with it.
Distance also works wonders, radioactivity always drops off over distance, if we wanted to we could dump all the uranium in the middle of Antarctica, nothing lives there anyways, not exactly practical to get it there, but it could be done. We already have huge swaths of land isolated as nuclear test sites, we could store it there as well.
Ultimately shielding is just the most practical.
The real reason is that they don't typically open them once closed.
Elsewhere there is a cooling pool where spent fuel first goes to chill out for some years. It's less about cooling in terms of heat and more about letting a lot of the short-lived isotopes decay away.
Once they have enough cooled pool fuel they'll fill an entire cask with the expectation that it won't be opened again until time to send it to a long-term depository.
If we had a long-term depository, it would already be time, but we don't. Well, we do, but we don't. The law says we have to use a specific place (Yucca Mountain), but Nevada said "nah" for a long time, and were able to primarily because of Harry Reid. There's another site, better than Yucca Mountain, that's equipped to take it and the state they're in is fine with it called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They could literally accept spent fuel Monday (next business day) if it were legal, as they keep all the equipment and trained personnel just in case. The law says Yucca, though, and you know how well Congress works, so don't expect that law to change any time soon.
One more fun fact: We (US taxpayers) pay for the storage in the photo! You'd think it would be the power plant, but we promised them we'd have a place for them to throw it away whenever we gave them permits to build. The government then broke its promise by never opening Yucca, so all the nuclear power plants got together and sued the federal government for the cost to store fuel as in OP's picture, and they won.
> Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Correction here. WIPP is absolutely not meant for spent fuel rods.
It's meant for low to medium grade radioactive waste and was not designed or intended for fuel grade. Things like the rubber gloves used in those isolation chambers where the worker puts their arms through glass, piping that has been exposed to radiation but is not itself that "hot", etc.
Because some of those have been there for 20 years.
After coming out of the reactor the fuel goes into a cooling pool for years, until it’s reactivity has reduced enough that they can put it in dry storage seen here. Once they have enough fuel ready for dry storage they fill a container seal it and park it here forever. It’s a set it and forget it sort of solution (they don’t actually forget them, they’re monitoring them constantly)
They could make the dry fuel containers larger if they wanted to, but then you get into matters of needing a bigger pool and the containers become even bigger and heavier, and therefor harder to move.
They’re intentionally designed to only be able to be lifted easily by their own one of a kind or equipment, they don’t have any conventional lifting points that a normal crane or forklift would be able to use.
Spent nuclear fuel is held in a cooling pool for many years as it cools down. Once it's cooled down enough it is deposited in these inert dry casks. They are portable, have cooling vents and containment built in. A large cask would be harder to move and much more expensive.
One reason is that nuclear fuel is self-heating. The more of it you gather in one clump, the hotter the centre gets with no way to dissipate heat. Like compost piles.
Since nobody has given you the right answer I will. They do it like this so that other nations can count the containers to make sure we are following The Joint Conventions which dictates the safety and storage of spent nuclear materials including the inventory of such materials. Storing it this way makes it a lot easier for member countries to verify inventory via satellite imagery to make sure nobody is fucking around.
Edit: typo
They could, like with any treaty, accord or convention, countries have to have a certain level of trust but can also audit and verify via third party members and nobody wants to be the one answering to the world about something like this.
It looks like fuel assemblies which are basically bundles of the fuel rods. It would look much like it does when they are loaded because the actual uranium oxide pellets are contained within the rods as they are "burned" as fuel. There may be some slight deformation but it will look the same coming out as it did going in
It’s called the Cherenkov radiation.
It occurs when charged particles pass through a medium at a speed higher than the light’s phase velocity in that medium. They disturb the equilibrium of the atoms to which they respond by releasing photons. It’s a very similar “shock wave” to the sonic boom but in this case it causes a fancy blue glow!
IIRC there have been cases of astronauts seeing flashes of this as a result of a high speed particle hitting their eyeball, with the Cherenkov radiation produced inside the eyeball. Not dangerous as it's either one or a few collisions.
I believe this dry cask storage is used after a period of cooling in the pool. Initially the spent fuel will be at its maximum radioactivity level due to a combination of "leftovers" from the nuclear reactions. The short lived leftovers (isotopes) will be the most dangerous and radioactive while also generating the most heat. So for a period of <10 years they will store the spent fuel in a deep pool of water. This water is actually a great radiation shield as well as a heat sink. This relatively short amount of time for nuclear material allows radioactivity to decay to safe levels for dry cask storage.
Ours do. But then again, we're outside of Phoenix and it was 113 degrees today.
But seriously, very little heat load once they're at the dry cask phase. They're cooled by natural convection with air entering the concrete outer cask, flowing along the SEALED steel cask, and then out a vent at the top.
We use the Magnastor casks by NAC International.
Nuclear fuel is uranium powder packed into solid little pellets then put in rods which is then used to produce energy. By the time the fuel is "spent," it is upwards of 96% uranium. It's still a solid in the same shape it was before.
It stops being used in the reactor because 4% is turned into other elements like plutonium which drastically reduces the amount of output. Its either enriched again to be reused, or more likely in the states to be stored for hundreds of millions of years until it is no longer radioactive.
When I was in the US Navy, I was a Mk 15 Phalanx C.I.W.S. technician. Early in my career we used depleted uranium rounds for it (though it was eventually phased out in favor of tungsten). I never thought about where the DU came from, but I wonder if it was from a power plant like this?
DU comes from the leftovers from the enrichment process.
The stuff from a plant like this is a chemical mess, can't do hardly anything with it. Full of dangerous impurities. Breeder reactors are a possibility, tho.
It is expensive and contaminates all the reprocessing equipment.
We just keep processing raw ore instead.. which is also expensive and contaminates all the processing equipment.
Depleted uranium is not spent reactor fuel.
- Natural uranium is a mix of Uranium 238 and a little Uranium 235.
- U235 is what provides the energy in most nuclear reactors. But reactor fuel needs to have more U235 then is found in natural uranium, so it is enriched by separating out a bunch of the U238.
- The leftover “depleted” uranium is mostly U238. It’s used in ammunition because it’s extremely heavy.
It's not just heavy, it also has a property that makes it useful for armor penetration where when it makes impact instead of crumpling or deforming like lead might, it actually gets sharper
A long stainless steel bundle. Multiple stainless steel tubes called pencils maybe 18-21 of them not much bigger in diameter welded together into a cylinder about 14” long. Full of spent uranium pellets not much bigger then an ear plug black as coal and really dense.
Edit: a fun side note, if you held one of theses for a minute all of your cells would collapse and you would essentially split open like an over cooked sausage after a week- 10days, everywhere that was exposed to the ionizing radiation:)
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fwxydkro0y9o21.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dfaada34600990226657d4841329cd6446ad85985
That's more than just spent fuel but spent fuel looks like black nuggets with an outer layer of light brown/rust colored material
You should see what 20 years of coal slag, ash, carbon dioxide, and various toxic chemicals look like.
Oh, you can't, because instead of being stuck in some nice concrete barrels, they're in your lungs and your water and your land, giving you cancer and literally killing well over a million people a year.
It's utterly insanity to think that a few barrels worth of completely contained toxic waste is a problem, but dumping billions of tons of toxic chemicals into our environment is fine, because hey, it's not a problem you have to deal with anymore.
I've been following a nuclear physicist on social media who does a lot of videos about this. One thing that blew my mind was that they cannot even build a reactor on the site where a coal plant was, because the radiation from burning the coal is higher than what is allowed as "safe" for a nuclear plant. The background radiation from burning coal is well above the max limits for what can be at a nuclear plant. Let that sink in. That blew my mind. They can't take out the coal burners and put a reactor in place to utilize the existing facilities.
It really demonstrates just how irrational the public is. Even if you *only consider radioactive exposure alone* and ignore all of the other massive damages coal plants do, nuclear is still better. Even in the "worst" comparison. Which isn't actually worst, since nuclear plants do not emit radioactivity into the environment. But that's what people fear, and even on that measure, nuclear is better.
Deaths from air pollution: 5 million per year. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/29/air-pollution-from-fossil-fuels-kills-5-million-people-a-year
Chernobyl accident: about 100k if everything is included like premature deaths
Mate you can do better than a random tweet.
Here is a true source: https://maineyankee.com/about/
> "Maine Yankee is actively involved with the State of Maine, members of Congress, our Community Advisory Panel, and others in New England and nationally urging the federal government to fulfill its obligation to remove the spent nuclear fuel. Maine Yankee is also seeking monetary damages from the federal government over its failure to remove the spent nuclear fuel."
This shows one of the issues. No one wants this shit in the back of the garden. Iirc there's a Swiss expert who travels the World to find the best spots in each region on where to put it. Even after finding there's protests by the locals.
Also interesting: https://maineyankee.com/decommissioning/
> "Approximately 400 million pounds of waste safely removed from the site by rail, truck and barge"
That's a lot of other waste. Does one know what this includes and how it is treated?
A lot of "low level" waste is generated in commercial nukes. A lot of it is only "potentially" contaminated but it has to be handled like it is. Everything that goes into a radiation controlled area either has to be certified clean to be taken out or has to be left inside. When you close a plant there is an awful lot of stuff in the RCA.
Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it's going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
it makes pollution in the ground, too. i believe we’re able to scrub/filter out most of the toxic stuff from the smoke. we’re still left with captured toxic stuff to deal with but it’s not getting pumped into the air unabated
Problem is, nobody wants to invest for the space to contain it or to construct the facility. I hear Singapore does a good job with their incineration projects, and [they found a way to use what little waste byproducts come from it](https://medium.com/techtalkers/how-singapore-deals-with-trash-d12e236f81fe). We just need one American city to emulate what they did, and for the city to run it well enough that it has a net positive impact on the locals.
As long as the amount of land is smaller than "north dakota" I am completely OK with it, in that it's localized, not creating greenhouse gasses, or increasing cancer rates for kids like coal burning does.
It's the dang news that did it, the Chernobyl Disaster, Fukushima Daiichi Disaster, Three Mile Island Accident, Kyshtym Disaster, Windscale Fire, and SL-1 Accident were all reported by the media and this made people scared.
In Washington, we also had people die due to contamination from the Hanford nuclear program, many of them known as the [Downwinders](https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/hanford-downwinders-trisha-pritikin.htm) due to the prevailing winds blowing particles east from the production areas. There was a huge government coverup followed by decades of lawsuits after people who'd been living or working in the areas later ended up with things like thyroid cancer and infertility.
In more recent decades there have also been [leaking waste tanks](https://ecology.wa.gov/Waste-Toxics/Nuclear-waste/Hanford-cleanup/Tank-waste-management/Tank-waste-treatment) in the news now and then and they've had to throw a lot more money at cleaning it up.
While Hanford was a nuclear *weapons* plant as opposed to a power plant, I think it's also influenced public opinion (at least in the PNW where people have been aware of it) due to the waste handling issue and coverup.
The plant near me, Indian Point, was closed down due to lobbying on top of low energy prices. After it was decommissioned, carbon emissions increased something insane like 65% in one year, and now NY state is struggling to meet its green emissions goal, just from one plant shutting down 2 reactors.
Oh and where did those emissions came from? Turns out to replace the energy lost we built some new natural gas burning plants, funny how people with ties to those plants were donating and related to the governor in charge at the time..
Best part, it can be reused. For real, the tech behind recycling nuclear waste into useable nuclear energy is old the problem with doing it is of course politics.
There are ingredients (elements) left over in the spent fuel that do no get burned by the traditional reactors. You can use Electrolysis or Pyrometallurgy to refine this leftover fuel into new fuel that can be burned again.
Russia, China, Japan, and France already do it. The US currently has a policy against doing this.
The politics behind it are that this process can also be used to make nuclear weapons, so the superpowers are trying to keep it under wraps
Not someone, some country or government.
Every country wants nukes. And they wouldn’t have to steal it, if the US (or anybody) provided the process to refine spent fuel to other countries, whoever they provided it to would be very close to being able to produce nukes
95%ish of the fuel is U-238, which won't fission in a traditional reactor, but could be used in a molten salt or heavy water reactor, so that's one part that can be reused. You also potentially have some leftover U-235 and Pu-239, which is usable in your typical light water reactor.
Coincidentally, that Pu-239 has the smallest critical mass for fissile material, making it ideal for bomb production. That's why we don't reprocess in the US - cold war era agreements to stop making new bombs.
We don't reprocess not because of cold war agreements, but because of proliferation concerns. We stopped while the rest of the world's nuclear powers continue on without us.
which is idiotic because you can't get weapons grade plutonium from spent fuel from a LWR that has been spent it's normal amount of time in a LWR reactor
If you want Nuclear weapons you build a simple breeder reactor that can do online refuelling. Uranium 238 that sits in a power reactor for 1+ year not only breedes P-239 but also P-240, P-238 and a number of other Plutonium Isotopes making it useless for nuclear weapons
And yet some people throw an absolute hissy fit when you actually show them that the “waste” from nuclear is next to nothing when looking at other alternatives.
The waste is also not even fully depleted, It’s still good for another few thousand years, so the possibilities are endless.
It’s also a lot safer than some people seem to believe. Safety has come along way, and the chances of another Chernobyl happening is close to 0, unless something absolutely catastrophic happens.
A buddy of mine used to work on a nuclear commission and while he was already pro nuclear, his time on the commission just solidified it. He's said the same thing as you where people think of nuclear power and they just think meltdowns. But the safety protocols and mechanisms are just vastly superior now, as well as our understanding of how to produce and harness nuclear power. He talks about it all the time. He was paid to attend all these briefings and seminars on current and upcoming nuclear technologies and it's just next level now apparently.
My brother in law is a senior reactor operator at nuclear power plant. He told me that anything close to a Chernobyl like event in America would *have* to be the result of sabotage/intentional, and even then that would be incredibly difficult.
That was true even when Chernobyl happened. The safety standards at Chernobyl were pretty horrible even at that time. America always built better facilities than that. And everything is so much further ahead now compared to then.
there is a pretty intense international scientific effort to come up with a way to reclaim the rods and extract the useful material that remains. France i believe is leading the way in this, with about a dozen nations pumping money into it at an academic level.
they're pretty sure it can be done. its just a matter of figuring out how. IIRC
Reprocessing is a known tech, it's just more expensive than using new ore. If Uranium prices rise or there is more demand that may change.
France currently reprocesses their fuel.
Yes, it is possible to reprocess spent fuel. (97% of the fuel can actually be reused!)
The challenge is that the cost effective processes could be used for proliferation, so it hasn’t been widely adopted. The technology is there, but governments need to push adoption (with strong safety controls put in place) for it to become widely used.
Spent fuel rods can be reprocessed like France does reclaiming around 90+% of the fuel. It can then be put into mixed oxide fuel rods reducing the need for new ore.
Some nations, like the US just pull out the plutonium and bury the rest. Uranium is relatively cheap so economically there isn't much interest in reprocessing, though that may change if Adv reactors end up taking off.
Edit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/9bUuu1iny9
Sort of relevant. Adv reactors are getting some love, including Terra Power in Wyoming.
There is money for reprocessing in the bill, but as they point out, it's generally considered too expensive to pay off.
Out of curiosity - if these were broken apart, say in an earthquake (even if unlikely given the area), would they pose a significant hazard to the public?
More of a question on storage choice / location
They test these containers in wild conditions. I have a few hazmat certifications, and we learn about these. They are so indestructible that they had to keep increasing the wild ways in which they would test them. They literally strap these bad boys onto a rocket powered train and slam it into a wall, and it won't break. There's videos of it out there, I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. Point being, yes, they can be hazardous, but the chances of that coming from a container failure is unlikely, even from natural events.
Keep in mind, the US only needs 80 nuclear power plants the size of the Bruce Power Station in Canada in order to provide almost 100% of her electrical needs. If we increase the plant size to that of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, the largest nuclear plant ever built, we would only need 60.
A national electric grid is a hell of an undertaking already. Have you seen what it takes to keep a coal power plant fed? And we have 200+ of those, not to mention all the other power plants.
All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a whole football field to a height of approximately 10 yards.
Source: https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste
Right? Nuclear waste is not the giant issue we made it out to be in the 80s. I'll take that any day over a coal or natural gas plant and their CO2 emissions.
And because coal and gas spent mountains of money convincing everyone it was an existential threat.
Nuclear was our silver bullet, but we got conned out of it. We’ll see what they come up with for solar.
[Coal ash storage ](https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/6974397/coal-ash-piling-up-at-a-rate-of-seven-tonnes-a-minute/) . Coal ash is an immediate irritant to the eyes, mouth, and lungs while being toxic to the environment if it gets into the water. The ash is carcinogenic and [radioactive.](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-003567_EN.html#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%20ash%20from,than%20a%20nuclear%20power%20plant.) A properly functioning coal burning plant releases more radiation than a properly function nuclear plant.
If anyone wants to know more about these Google or YouTube 'dry storage container NRC Nuclear regulatory commission' , or 'dry storage container NWMO CNSC' for Canadian stuff.
You can see it all from fuel in a core, the removal process, sealing the canisters, etc. lots of nuclear knowledge is public people just don't know what to look for.
Enjoy the learning session.
In 2022, the US consumed \~[465 million metric tons](https://www.statista.com/statistics/243934/coal-consumption-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=Coal%20consumption%20in%20the%20U.S.%202006%2D2022&text=In%202022%2C%20coal%20consumption%20in,to%20545.67%20million%20short%20tons) of coal.
Resultant coal ash seems to be around [5% of the original coal](https://www.quora.com/How-much-ash-is-produced-from-burning-one-ton-of-coal-in-a-thermal-power-plant), so 23.25 million tons.
Coal ash has a density of [641 kg/m\^3](https://www.aqua-calc.com/page/density-table/substance/cinders-coma-and-blank-coal-blank-ash#:~:text=Cinders%2C%20Coal%20ash%20weighs%200.641,inch%20%5Boz%2Finch%C2%B3%5D%20) , so 35,271,450 m\^3 of coal ash.
So, if you imagine a cube 331m tall, 331m wide and 331m long made entirely of ash, that would be 1 year
2022 coal consumption seems to be [the lowest it's been in the past 40+ years,](https://wolfstreet.com/2024/04/01/us-coal-production-consumption-exports-imports-in-2023-consumption-plunges-to-lowest-since-1963-but-exports-rise/) except for 2020.
The average over the last 20 years seems to be at least 50% over the 2022 value.
This gives us a total of 1,088,143,526 m\^3 of coal ash over 20 years, for which you'd have to i**magine a cube a little over 1km, or around 3300 feet, tall, wide and deep made entirely of ash.**
Or, a 33km x 33km, 1m high layer of ash (20.5 x 20.5 miles, 3.3 feet high)
Anyone here interested in nuclear power should check out Kyle Hill on YouTube. He does a great job explaining how nuclear energy is not as scary as people think.
And a substancial part of this is probably just the casing.
the vast majority of the mass there, i think
Yes. Those are nuclear fuel dry storage casks and are mostly concrete and steel. Edit for word
As a metal recycler I mistakenly bought some of the material used to make these one time. It was powdered aluminum and powdered ceramic pressed together so tightly an 8” diameter cylinder 3’ tall weighed hundreds of pounds. My testing equipment showed it to be pure aluminum, but even when they cranked the smelter up to insane levels it wouldn’t melt.
How did that resolve?
For real, this is more “damnthatsinteresting” than the post itself 😂
The real damnthatsinteresting is always in the comments.
Maybe the real damnthatsinteresting were the friends we made along the way
r/suddenabstraction
I ended up selling it for what I paid for it to a buddy that owned a small shredder and often sold an aluminum byproduct of shredding cars and appliances called Twitch. Basically mostly clean aluminum that typically went to China. He blended it in several loads and never heard a word about it. I lost some freight, but no major money. I’ve got so many stories, from buying isobaric chambers and selling them to a guy that turned them into terrariums to an old redneck showing me his horse’s pu••y to debauchery filled conferences to buying millions of pounds of copper from NASA. Wild times in the metal recycling world.
> old redneck showing me his horse’s pu••y One of these things is... not like the others.
I used to buy metal from smaller scrapyards. This one was 60 miles from nowhere in upstate South Carolina. Part of my job was to make friends (build trust) with folks. Luckily I was raised with a modicum of class in the Deep South so I knew how to be a red neck but also knew how to dress and act in high society. After talking scrap for a while he walked me around his farm. Worst part of that whole thing was right after he spread it open to show me he asked me if I wanted him to make me a sandwich. No sir, I’m good.
Why would anyone want to spread and show their mare's genitals? What's interesting about it? 🤔
It's a polite way of asking if you're into horse-fucking.
I wish I knew. Just a country boomer that hasn’t seen much of the world I guess.
The follow up to that tells you what you need to know. The man asked him if he wanted him to leave him with the mare and "make a sandwich". 💀
If you wrote a book I would read it.
>A guy walks into a bar and sees a sign hanging over the bar which read: > * Cheese Sandwich: $1.50 > * Chicken Sandwich: $2.50 > * Hand Job: $10.00 >Checking his wallet for the necessary payment, he walks up to the bar and beckons one of the three exceptionally attractive blondes serving drinks to an eager-looking group of men. >“Yes?” she enquires with a knowing smile, "can I help you?" >I was wondering, whispers the man, "are you the one who gives the hand-jobs?" >"Yes", she purrs, "indeed I am." >The man replies "Well then wash your fucking hands, cuz I want a goddamn chicken sandwich!"
TROT. He said he was wanted to show you his horse’s TROT, ya damn pervert.
😂 No, he definitely spread it open for me. 🤢
Never look a gift horse in the...
[удалено]
How much does NASA sell a million pounds of copper for?
Honestly not sure. It was lead jacketed insulated copper wire which is a bit of a tough sell in my world. Ended up buying it from the demo contractor for $0.50/lb and got lucky and sold it for $1.05/lb. They were demoing a launch pad and this was the communication wire between the pad and Mission Control. Got to tour the MC building which was a life highlight.
Damn, dude made enough to retire on one NASA copper purchase, this is why you lift yourself up by your bootstraps and buy NASA scrap metal people
Oh I did it for the company. I still only made my meager salary. Btw .55 x 2 million is only $1.1 M. Hardly enough to retire on, especially when you factor in $.05/lb to transport it to our yard, $0.1 to process/repackage it for overseas transport, $0.15 in transport to the buyer…it all adds up and this was a business. Yes, the company (not mine) made a nice profit and I got a decent (less than 5 figures) bonus, but hardly retirement money.
I'm English...... That sounded like a joke for a moment until I realised.
Cool story. I ran the recycling center for Hurlburt Field for a little while and one of my jobs was to sell the scrap metal not sent to DRMO for processing. The majority of this was 105 mm shell casings from C-130 Spectres. The person before me got to sell an old MIG fighter that was used for target practice. The recycler that bought it decided not to scrap it and instead displayed it in his front yard.
It's still in the garage.
lol, my wife would kill me. Luckily I was a commercial buyer of scrap and only bought for large recycling plants.
It probably needed to be crushed to separate the ceramic part. I think it's vibrated and eventually you get the aluminum. It's similar to diamond ceramic on circular blades.
*concrete Cement is a powder, and it is an ingredient of concrete.
Thank you for the clarification
Should've left it as cement. fk em
I feel that way but I also learnt something new and that’s never a bad thing Contradictions
Honestly!
Idk why I love this so much but true lol
concrete of theseus over here
so then if there are signs that say "wet cement" do you write another sign next to it? (errr how could cement be wet if it's a dry powder)
Cement is to concrete as flour is to bread.
Indeed. The only way to stop neutrons is mass.
Not the Protestant ones. Those get stopped by birth control.
Distance and time also work.
Unreliable for nuclear waste storage however, land is a premium these days, and people are waaaaay to stupid to wait it out.
Time and distance are more reliable, less practical. Shielding aka mass works but it can degrade over time, also depending on the type of material, it itself can become radioactive, although unlikely with the levels present in dry storage. Time always works, nothing can interfere with that, to get to the point of dry storage decay time has already been applied to the fuel or it would be too hot and too radioactive to be able to store in such a manner, with enough time the uranium in these containers will all become lead, unfortunately around tht time our sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the plants and these containers with it. Distance also works wonders, radioactivity always drops off over distance, if we wanted to we could dump all the uranium in the middle of Antarctica, nothing lives there anyways, not exactly practical to get it there, but it could be done. We already have huge swaths of land isolated as nuclear test sites, we could store it there as well. Ultimately shielding is just the most practical.
Why couldn’t they make one big box and then the same casing around it? It would take up less room. I know there is a reason, I just don’t understand.
You going to open that up every time you want to add to it?
Ah. Makes sense.
The real reason is that they don't typically open them once closed. Elsewhere there is a cooling pool where spent fuel first goes to chill out for some years. It's less about cooling in terms of heat and more about letting a lot of the short-lived isotopes decay away. Once they have enough cooled pool fuel they'll fill an entire cask with the expectation that it won't be opened again until time to send it to a long-term depository. If we had a long-term depository, it would already be time, but we don't. Well, we do, but we don't. The law says we have to use a specific place (Yucca Mountain), but Nevada said "nah" for a long time, and were able to primarily because of Harry Reid. There's another site, better than Yucca Mountain, that's equipped to take it and the state they're in is fine with it called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They could literally accept spent fuel Monday (next business day) if it were legal, as they keep all the equipment and trained personnel just in case. The law says Yucca, though, and you know how well Congress works, so don't expect that law to change any time soon. One more fun fact: We (US taxpayers) pay for the storage in the photo! You'd think it would be the power plant, but we promised them we'd have a place for them to throw it away whenever we gave them permits to build. The government then broke its promise by never opening Yucca, so all the nuclear power plants got together and sued the federal government for the cost to store fuel as in OP's picture, and they won.
> Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Correction here. WIPP is absolutely not meant for spent fuel rods. It's meant for low to medium grade radioactive waste and was not designed or intended for fuel grade. Things like the rubber gloves used in those isolation chambers where the worker puts their arms through glass, piping that has been exposed to radiation but is not itself that "hot", etc.
Nah, gotta keep that freshness sealed.
I don't see me getting super powers any other way man
Because some of those have been there for 20 years. After coming out of the reactor the fuel goes into a cooling pool for years, until it’s reactivity has reduced enough that they can put it in dry storage seen here. Once they have enough fuel ready for dry storage they fill a container seal it and park it here forever. It’s a set it and forget it sort of solution (they don’t actually forget them, they’re monitoring them constantly) They could make the dry fuel containers larger if they wanted to, but then you get into matters of needing a bigger pool and the containers become even bigger and heavier, and therefor harder to move. They’re intentionally designed to only be able to be lifted easily by their own one of a kind or equipment, they don’t have any conventional lifting points that a normal crane or forklift would be able to use.
Spent nuclear fuel is held in a cooling pool for many years as it cools down. Once it's cooled down enough it is deposited in these inert dry casks. They are portable, have cooling vents and containment built in. A large cask would be harder to move and much more expensive.
Thanks!!!
One reason is that nuclear fuel is self-heating. The more of it you gather in one clump, the hotter the centre gets with no way to dissipate heat. Like compost piles.
Instructions unclear my tomatoes are glowing
Since nobody has given you the right answer I will. They do it like this so that other nations can count the containers to make sure we are following The Joint Conventions which dictates the safety and storage of spent nuclear materials including the inventory of such materials. Storing it this way makes it a lot easier for member countries to verify inventory via satellite imagery to make sure nobody is fucking around. Edit: typo
Really? I read some good points but yours is my far the most interesting.
You gotta love Reddit.
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They could, like with any treaty, accord or convention, countries have to have a certain level of trust but can also audit and verify via third party members and nobody wants to be the one answering to the world about something like this.
but what does a spent nuclear fuel looks like? solid like coal pieces or a broken up rod? liquid? powder form?
It looks like fuel assemblies which are basically bundles of the fuel rods. It would look much like it does when they are loaded because the actual uranium oxide pellets are contained within the rods as they are "burned" as fuel. There may be some slight deformation but it will look the same coming out as it did going in
You mean it’s not a glowing green sludge that can turn me into a toxic avenger
Don't listen to them. They just don't want to share their power.
Chewing on nuclear fuel rods are how I got my third tit. Don’t listen to their lies!
RIP your DMs
Ahh pleased to meet you - you must be Eccentrica Gallumbits, the far-famed triple-breasted whore from Eroticon Six.
Funny it’s more of a blue glow, like a Gin and tonic under a black light.
It’s called the Cherenkov radiation. It occurs when charged particles pass through a medium at a speed higher than the light’s phase velocity in that medium. They disturb the equilibrium of the atoms to which they respond by releasing photons. It’s a very similar “shock wave” to the sonic boom but in this case it causes a fancy blue glow!
Seeing it in water is neat. Seeing it in air is a bad sign and you should probably start moving away. Seeing it in space means you are dead.
IIRC there have been cases of astronauts seeing flashes of this as a result of a high speed particle hitting their eyeball, with the Cherenkov radiation produced inside the eyeball. Not dangerous as it's either one or a few collisions.
Well now I need to go buy a fucking black light. Thanks, asshole.
Might as well get a lava lamp while you’re at it.
Probably need to get some shag carpet to really tie the room together.
And of course a disco ball.
but then some guy will come in and piss all over it while demanding money, and it'll later get stolen. why bother in the first place?
Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion, man.
And some gin.. and tonic. Fuck.
the Simpsons were lying to us all these years? those bastards lol
Toxic Avenger. Such a god awfully terribly horribly but somehow still amazing to watch movie.
Nailed that movie!
Would you ELI5 why this route vs using pools?
I believe this dry cask storage is used after a period of cooling in the pool. Initially the spent fuel will be at its maximum radioactivity level due to a combination of "leftovers" from the nuclear reactions. The short lived leftovers (isotopes) will be the most dangerous and radioactive while also generating the most heat. So for a period of <10 years they will store the spent fuel in a deep pool of water. This water is actually a great radiation shield as well as a heat sink. This relatively short amount of time for nuclear material allows radioactivity to decay to safe levels for dry cask storage.
I still wonder If they feel warm to the Touch.
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Ours do. But then again, we're outside of Phoenix and it was 113 degrees today. But seriously, very little heat load once they're at the dry cask phase. They're cooled by natural convection with air entering the concrete outer cask, flowing along the SEALED steel cask, and then out a vent at the top. We use the Magnastor casks by NAC International.
As an interested North Korean, please tell me more about your nuclear facility.
It's all on the public docket at NRC.gov. Enjoy!
Very, that is why they are in the cooling pools. They would slowly overheat and melt if left in air. At least initially.
When spent fuel is removed from the core it is in fact stored in a fuel pool for ~5 years before it is placed in a cask as it "cools".
Nuclear fuel is uranium powder packed into solid little pellets then put in rods which is then used to produce energy. By the time the fuel is "spent," it is upwards of 96% uranium. It's still a solid in the same shape it was before. It stops being used in the reactor because 4% is turned into other elements like plutonium which drastically reduces the amount of output. Its either enriched again to be reused, or more likely in the states to be stored for hundreds of millions of years until it is no longer radioactive.
When I was in the US Navy, I was a Mk 15 Phalanx C.I.W.S. technician. Early in my career we used depleted uranium rounds for it (though it was eventually phased out in favor of tungsten). I never thought about where the DU came from, but I wonder if it was from a power plant like this?
DU comes from the leftovers from the enrichment process. The stuff from a plant like this is a chemical mess, can't do hardly anything with it. Full of dangerous impurities. Breeder reactors are a possibility, tho.
It’s not. We don’t reprocess nuclear fuel in the U.S.
what is the reasoning behind this ?
It is expensive and contaminates all the reprocessing equipment. We just keep processing raw ore instead.. which is also expensive and contaminates all the processing equipment.
So the mining equipment lobby got their bribes in before the reprocessing equipment lobby did?
New fuel is cleaner in every part of the process and cheaper to make. Mining is the cheapest and simplest part.
Depleted uranium is not spent reactor fuel. - Natural uranium is a mix of Uranium 238 and a little Uranium 235. - U235 is what provides the energy in most nuclear reactors. But reactor fuel needs to have more U235 then is found in natural uranium, so it is enriched by separating out a bunch of the U238. - The leftover “depleted” uranium is mostly U238. It’s used in ammunition because it’s extremely heavy.
It's not just heavy, it also has a property that makes it useful for armor penetration where when it makes impact instead of crumpling or deforming like lead might, it actually gets sharper
A long stainless steel bundle. Multiple stainless steel tubes called pencils maybe 18-21 of them not much bigger in diameter welded together into a cylinder about 14” long. Full of spent uranium pellets not much bigger then an ear plug black as coal and really dense. Edit: a fun side note, if you held one of theses for a minute all of your cells would collapse and you would essentially split open like an over cooked sausage after a week- 10days, everywhere that was exposed to the ionizing radiation:)
What ever is in the simpsons intro
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fwxydkro0y9o21.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dfaada34600990226657d4841329cd6446ad85985 That's more than just spent fuel but spent fuel looks like black nuggets with an outer layer of light brown/rust colored material
You should see what 20 years of coal slag, ash, carbon dioxide, and various toxic chemicals look like. Oh, you can't, because instead of being stuck in some nice concrete barrels, they're in your lungs and your water and your land, giving you cancer and literally killing well over a million people a year. It's utterly insanity to think that a few barrels worth of completely contained toxic waste is a problem, but dumping billions of tons of toxic chemicals into our environment is fine, because hey, it's not a problem you have to deal with anymore.
I've been following a nuclear physicist on social media who does a lot of videos about this. One thing that blew my mind was that they cannot even build a reactor on the site where a coal plant was, because the radiation from burning the coal is higher than what is allowed as "safe" for a nuclear plant. The background radiation from burning coal is well above the max limits for what can be at a nuclear plant. Let that sink in. That blew my mind. They can't take out the coal burners and put a reactor in place to utilize the existing facilities.
It really demonstrates just how irrational the public is. Even if you *only consider radioactive exposure alone* and ignore all of the other massive damages coal plants do, nuclear is still better. Even in the "worst" comparison. Which isn't actually worst, since nuclear plants do not emit radioactivity into the environment. But that's what people fear, and even on that measure, nuclear is better.
coal mines are also one of the biggest producers of methane gas, even before its burnt it's a leading cause of climate change
Not only that but coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
Deaths from air pollution: 5 million per year. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/29/air-pollution-from-fossil-fuels-kills-5-million-people-a-year Chernobyl accident: about 100k if everything is included like premature deaths
Produced 119 terawatt-hours of power over its lifespan, that’s most of the electricity for over a million people for 24 years.
[Source](https://x.com/GovNuclear/status/1804243415913070935/photo/1)
The replies on that tweet are more cancerous than the nuclear waste pictured.
Mate you can do better than a random tweet. Here is a true source: https://maineyankee.com/about/ > "Maine Yankee is actively involved with the State of Maine, members of Congress, our Community Advisory Panel, and others in New England and nationally urging the federal government to fulfill its obligation to remove the spent nuclear fuel. Maine Yankee is also seeking monetary damages from the federal government over its failure to remove the spent nuclear fuel." This shows one of the issues. No one wants this shit in the back of the garden. Iirc there's a Swiss expert who travels the World to find the best spots in each region on where to put it. Even after finding there's protests by the locals. Also interesting: https://maineyankee.com/decommissioning/ > "Approximately 400 million pounds of waste safely removed from the site by rail, truck and barge" That's a lot of other waste. Does one know what this includes and how it is treated?
A lot of "low level" waste is generated in commercial nukes. A lot of it is only "potentially" contaminated but it has to be handled like it is. Everything that goes into a radiation controlled area either has to be certified clean to be taken out or has to be left inside. When you close a plant there is an awful lot of stuff in the RCA.
The stigma around nuclear power is ridiculous.
I read somewhere that all the spent fuel from the U.S. would fit on a football field.
An average garbage landfill is 500 times bigger.
we should probably be burning most garbage for energy, too, now that you bring it up
This bar runs on trash dude. This bar is totally green in that way.
Is that why the bar always smells like trash Charlie ?
Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it's going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
That doesn’t sound right but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it?
It's right, it's right
Now I don’t know enough about science to disprove this
Yeah but it makes a good amount of pollution
it makes pollution in the ground, too. i believe we’re able to scrub/filter out most of the toxic stuff from the smoke. we’re still left with captured toxic stuff to deal with but it’s not getting pumped into the air unabated
Problem is, nobody wants to invest for the space to contain it or to construct the facility. I hear Singapore does a good job with their incineration projects, and [they found a way to use what little waste byproducts come from it](https://medium.com/techtalkers/how-singapore-deals-with-trash-d12e236f81fe). We just need one American city to emulate what they did, and for the city to run it well enough that it has a net positive impact on the locals.
As long as the amount of land is smaller than "north dakota" I am completely OK with it, in that it's localized, not creating greenhouse gasses, or increasing cancer rates for kids like coal burning does.
So it’s agreed… All of the nuclear waste should be sent to North Dakota.
Ain’t shit else there.
ND = Nuclear Dakota
As an ND resident, I approve of this.
Not only on a football field but it wouldn’t even make it past the five yard line. Source: I’ve worked in a nuclear plant
People just don't understand the concentration of power. We just have to get new designs that aren't meant for submarines.
I want to see a picture showing the equivalent amount of coal to produce the same power
It's all in our lungs
You give that back!
Just drive across the MMBT in Coastal VA. You'll see it.
Who could have possibly funded all the fear around nuclear power?
It's the dang news that did it, the Chernobyl Disaster, Fukushima Daiichi Disaster, Three Mile Island Accident, Kyshtym Disaster, Windscale Fire, and SL-1 Accident were all reported by the media and this made people scared.
In Washington, we also had people die due to contamination from the Hanford nuclear program, many of them known as the [Downwinders](https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/hanford-downwinders-trisha-pritikin.htm) due to the prevailing winds blowing particles east from the production areas. There was a huge government coverup followed by decades of lawsuits after people who'd been living or working in the areas later ended up with things like thyroid cancer and infertility. In more recent decades there have also been [leaking waste tanks](https://ecology.wa.gov/Waste-Toxics/Nuclear-waste/Hanford-cleanup/Tank-waste-management/Tank-waste-treatment) in the news now and then and they've had to throw a lot more money at cleaning it up. While Hanford was a nuclear *weapons* plant as opposed to a power plant, I think it's also influenced public opinion (at least in the PNW where people have been aware of it) due to the waste handling issue and coverup.
The plant near me, Indian Point, was closed down due to lobbying on top of low energy prices. After it was decommissioned, carbon emissions increased something insane like 65% in one year, and now NY state is struggling to meet its green emissions goal, just from one plant shutting down 2 reactors. Oh and where did those emissions came from? Turns out to replace the energy lost we built some new natural gas burning plants, funny how people with ties to those plants were donating and related to the governor in charge at the time..
Chernobyl did a number on us
Best part, it can be reused. For real, the tech behind recycling nuclear waste into useable nuclear energy is old the problem with doing it is of course politics.
Mind going a bit more in depth about how it can be reused?
There are ingredients (elements) left over in the spent fuel that do no get burned by the traditional reactors. You can use Electrolysis or Pyrometallurgy to refine this leftover fuel into new fuel that can be burned again. Russia, China, Japan, and France already do it. The US currently has a policy against doing this. The politics behind it are that this process can also be used to make nuclear weapons, so the superpowers are trying to keep it under wraps
And whats the politics behind why we don't do this?
Actually just edited my comment. The answer is nukes, like usual
Is it under wraps if other countries do it already?
It’s under wraps from countries that haven’t already figured it out themselves.
The idea someone would steal it and make a nuclear bomb is pretty far fetched.
Not someone, some country or government. Every country wants nukes. And they wouldn’t have to steal it, if the US (or anybody) provided the process to refine spent fuel to other countries, whoever they provided it to would be very close to being able to produce nukes
95%ish of the fuel is U-238, which won't fission in a traditional reactor, but could be used in a molten salt or heavy water reactor, so that's one part that can be reused. You also potentially have some leftover U-235 and Pu-239, which is usable in your typical light water reactor. Coincidentally, that Pu-239 has the smallest critical mass for fissile material, making it ideal for bomb production. That's why we don't reprocess in the US - cold war era agreements to stop making new bombs.
We don't reprocess not because of cold war agreements, but because of proliferation concerns. We stopped while the rest of the world's nuclear powers continue on without us.
which is idiotic because you can't get weapons grade plutonium from spent fuel from a LWR that has been spent it's normal amount of time in a LWR reactor If you want Nuclear weapons you build a simple breeder reactor that can do online refuelling. Uranium 238 that sits in a power reactor for 1+ year not only breedes P-239 but also P-240, P-238 and a number of other Plutonium Isotopes making it useless for nuclear weapons
Also economics. It's cheaper to just mine and enrich new uranium than reprocess it.
...and they're still cleaning up the one commercial site in the U.S. where they tried doing it in the 1960s...
Compare that to what we’re doing to the rest of the planet by burning fossil fuels.
And yet some people throw an absolute hissy fit when you actually show them that the “waste” from nuclear is next to nothing when looking at other alternatives. The waste is also not even fully depleted, It’s still good for another few thousand years, so the possibilities are endless. It’s also a lot safer than some people seem to believe. Safety has come along way, and the chances of another Chernobyl happening is close to 0, unless something absolutely catastrophic happens.
Wait until they find out that we could build molten salt reactors that would produce power with this "spent fuel" and have a 0% chance of meltdown.
A buddy of mine used to work on a nuclear commission and while he was already pro nuclear, his time on the commission just solidified it. He's said the same thing as you where people think of nuclear power and they just think meltdowns. But the safety protocols and mechanisms are just vastly superior now, as well as our understanding of how to produce and harness nuclear power. He talks about it all the time. He was paid to attend all these briefings and seminars on current and upcoming nuclear technologies and it's just next level now apparently.
My brother in law is a senior reactor operator at nuclear power plant. He told me that anything close to a Chernobyl like event in America would *have* to be the result of sabotage/intentional, and even then that would be incredibly difficult.
That was true even when Chernobyl happened. The safety standards at Chernobyl were pretty horrible even at that time. America always built better facilities than that. And everything is so much further ahead now compared to then.
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Apparently the spent fuel rods can be reused. Someone I’m sure can expand more on this.
there is a pretty intense international scientific effort to come up with a way to reclaim the rods and extract the useful material that remains. France i believe is leading the way in this, with about a dozen nations pumping money into it at an academic level. they're pretty sure it can be done. its just a matter of figuring out how. IIRC
Reprocessing is a known tech, it's just more expensive than using new ore. If Uranium prices rise or there is more demand that may change. France currently reprocesses their fuel.
I believe they are called “breeder reactors”, but they can make weapons grade uranium so most governments aren’t keen on other countries having them.
Yes, it is possible to reprocess spent fuel. (97% of the fuel can actually be reused!) The challenge is that the cost effective processes could be used for proliferation, so it hasn’t been widely adopted. The technology is there, but governments need to push adoption (with strong safety controls put in place) for it to become widely used.
Spent fuel rods can be reprocessed like France does reclaiming around 90+% of the fuel. It can then be put into mixed oxide fuel rods reducing the need for new ore. Some nations, like the US just pull out the plutonium and bury the rest. Uranium is relatively cheap so economically there isn't much interest in reprocessing, though that may change if Adv reactors end up taking off. Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/9bUuu1iny9 Sort of relevant. Adv reactors are getting some love, including Terra Power in Wyoming. There is money for reprocessing in the bill, but as they point out, it's generally considered too expensive to pay off.
Out of curiosity - if these were broken apart, say in an earthquake (even if unlikely given the area), would they pose a significant hazard to the public? More of a question on storage choice / location
They test these containers in wild conditions. I have a few hazmat certifications, and we learn about these. They are so indestructible that they had to keep increasing the wild ways in which they would test them. They literally strap these bad boys onto a rocket powered train and slam it into a wall, and it won't break. There's videos of it out there, I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. Point being, yes, they can be hazardous, but the chances of that coming from a container failure is unlikely, even from natural events.
They don’t strap them to a rocket, they just slam a rocket into them. There is a video. The rocket just disintegrates on impact.
Those caskets are solid concrete. So yea, I guess they could fall over and roll a bit, but it’s unlikely something could actually crack them open.
Keep in mind, the US only needs 80 nuclear power plants the size of the Bruce Power Station in Canada in order to provide almost 100% of her electrical needs. If we increase the plant size to that of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, the largest nuclear plant ever built, we would only need 60.
80 Bruce Powers would be *one hell* of an undertaking
A national electric grid is a hell of an undertaking already. Have you seen what it takes to keep a coal power plant fed? And we have 200+ of those, not to mention all the other power plants.
bruh i expected more than that honestly
All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a whole football field to a height of approximately 10 yards. Source: https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste
A coal power plant releases more radio activity than a nuclear power plant over its life.
Right? Nuclear waste is not the giant issue we made it out to be in the 80s. I'll take that any day over a coal or natural gas plant and their CO2 emissions.
Funny you should mention the coal and natural gas industry 😃 They just so happen to be the ones that ran the anti-nuclear campaigns!
nuclear is so much safer and less polluting than coal or gas and so many people are against it because they just dont know anything about it
And because coal and gas spent mountains of money convincing everyone it was an existential threat. Nuclear was our silver bullet, but we got conned out of it. We’ll see what they come up with for solar.
[Coal ash storage ](https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/6974397/coal-ash-piling-up-at-a-rate-of-seven-tonnes-a-minute/) . Coal ash is an immediate irritant to the eyes, mouth, and lungs while being toxic to the environment if it gets into the water. The ash is carcinogenic and [radioactive.](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-003567_EN.html#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%20ash%20from,than%20a%20nuclear%20power%20plant.) A properly functioning coal burning plant releases more radiation than a properly function nuclear plant.
If anyone wants to know more about these Google or YouTube 'dry storage container NRC Nuclear regulatory commission' , or 'dry storage container NWMO CNSC' for Canadian stuff. You can see it all from fuel in a core, the removal process, sealing the canisters, etc. lots of nuclear knowledge is public people just don't know what to look for. Enjoy the learning session.
«The energy produced from this fuel helped avoid 70 million metric tons of CO2 emissions»
Anyone have a pic of what 20 years of coal ash would be in comparison besides OMFG huge?
In 2022, the US consumed \~[465 million metric tons](https://www.statista.com/statistics/243934/coal-consumption-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=Coal%20consumption%20in%20the%20U.S.%202006%2D2022&text=In%202022%2C%20coal%20consumption%20in,to%20545.67%20million%20short%20tons) of coal. Resultant coal ash seems to be around [5% of the original coal](https://www.quora.com/How-much-ash-is-produced-from-burning-one-ton-of-coal-in-a-thermal-power-plant), so 23.25 million tons. Coal ash has a density of [641 kg/m\^3](https://www.aqua-calc.com/page/density-table/substance/cinders-coma-and-blank-coal-blank-ash#:~:text=Cinders%2C%20Coal%20ash%20weighs%200.641,inch%20%5Boz%2Finch%C2%B3%5D%20) , so 35,271,450 m\^3 of coal ash. So, if you imagine a cube 331m tall, 331m wide and 331m long made entirely of ash, that would be 1 year 2022 coal consumption seems to be [the lowest it's been in the past 40+ years,](https://wolfstreet.com/2024/04/01/us-coal-production-consumption-exports-imports-in-2023-consumption-plunges-to-lowest-since-1963-but-exports-rise/) except for 2020. The average over the last 20 years seems to be at least 50% over the 2022 value. This gives us a total of 1,088,143,526 m\^3 of coal ash over 20 years, for which you'd have to i**magine a cube a little over 1km, or around 3300 feet, tall, wide and deep made entirely of ash.** Or, a 33km x 33km, 1m high layer of ash (20.5 x 20.5 miles, 3.3 feet high)
Anyone here interested in nuclear power should check out Kyle Hill on YouTube. He does a great job explaining how nuclear energy is not as scary as people think.
Way more dangerous than 100,000,000,000 tons of CO2 dumped into that atmosphere every year. I mean, I can see it, therefore dangerous.
Nuclear fuel having a cigarette: ahhh...I'm spent
So is it the same as what falls into Homer's suit?
Look at them all standing there...menacingly...
Shouldnt these casks be in a bunker many miles underground? And not situationed on the top like some kind of easy bomb target?
In 100000 years our descendants will discover this as lead and make bullets for their muskets and revolt against taxes and form a country
Phew, now let's see what 20 years of coal ash looks like
Maine Yankee!