Quote:
Originally Posted by billnchristy
Here's the problem with nuclear waste. If it was legit just spent fuel and actually contaminated parts it would be very small in number. I was in the nuclear navy for 9.5 years and spent my last 3 years as a repair facility mechanic. We would repack/repair upwards of 20 nuclear valves a year and maybe came across actual detectable contamination once. Every job a 75-85k valve cutter was bagged and tagged, at least 6-8 pairs of gloves, countless wiping rags, cuttings, old packing and any other waste inside the glove bag were yellow bagged, double wrapped and labelled as contaminated. Then you get a big ass bag to dispose of the glovebag in. Basically one job=one drum of "radioactive waste". 1 drum=20k in early 2000s money to dispose of.
We worked on two very small reactor plants, under 100mw and were generating train cars of waste every year.
People bought into fear and made this happen. US nuclear power is safe, overbuilt and robust. Stuff built in the 60s is still viable and usable because it was so over-engineered and had so many redundancies.
Fuel in a navy nuclear vessel is good for 20+ years. If we truly threw away only legit radioactive waste then the storage and disposal would be manageable easily.
And, yes, I would live near one. I lived 300' from one for 5 years and was never worried in the least. Give me a 2 bedroom apartment on top of a containment vessel and I would happily live there today. In America, not some janky foreign plant.
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My brother was a nuclear engineer in the Navy as well. He says basically the same thing. There are places that do not have many renewable sources and logistics are much harder, so it becomes the only reasonable alternative in some places. The thing is it takes so much to implement and regulate and the consequences are very severe, like Fukishima, but for every one of those, there are numerous "close calls" that not nearly as many people are aware of. It borders on impossibility to anticipate every possible outcome, the ones that you can't think of in planning and design, but with enough controls it usually mitigates the outcome, except in the most extreme events, like above. But all of that takes immense resources...