Cleo Abram
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2025
13:04 · 4.8M views · May 10, 2023
Cleo Abram's explainer on whether nuclear waste is really the intractable problem it is portrayed as, looking at how spent fuel can be recycled and used. It features a collaboration with Johnny Harris.
HN cites it in nuclear power debates for the point that recycling waste is largely a solved problem, though costly to build.
3 comments from Hacker News
How well do solar and wind infrastructures handle tornados and hurricanes? Also, consistent wind resources are notably absent in the South/Southeast. There are no Hoover Dam-like sites available there. Do you honestly expect to tell tens of millions of people that they should just be content with a single hurricane knocking out their electricity grid for a month? That's not realistic. You cannot plan an electrical future on the hope that the weather is always pleasant and consistent. This is one of the reasons why fossil fuel dominance continues in those regions. Go ahead and draw a map of those places where hurricanes and tornados are most prevalent and their large scale adoption of solar and wind. They're not stupid. They're not just political. There are real concerns you are handwaving away because you (likely) like in a region that does not have these same concerns. What works for California will not work for Georgia, Florida, or Nebraska as-is. Baseball-size hail destroys huge solar arrays let alone softball-size [0]. Nuclear plants laugh at hail and would handle and have(!) weathered tornados and hurricanes just fine. Check the numbers. Even accounting for nuclear disasters outside the US like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the number of deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of electricity is lower than any fossil fuel, lower than wind, and about equal to solar. Just imagine if we put the same R&D force behind nuclear that we've done for solar. You think solar's cheap?
It’s a great milestone to establish a complete & safe lifecycle for nuclear fuel. From what I understood of current technology, recycling used nuclear fuel is too expensive and impractical today, so it makes economic sense to invest in long-term waste storage. But I do wonder if in 30-50 years, the main way to deal with nuclear waste would be recycling. I saw an interesting interview of experts about this last month: this video
The annoying thing is recycling nuclear waste is kind of a solved problem. I've watched this video a while ago but iirc it is just more expensive to build a reactor that can also recycle its own waste. this video