Darlington station is more than halfway through a $12.8-billion overhaul to refurbish all four of its reactors by the end of 2026 (MATTHEW MCCLEARN / The Globe and Mail)
I’m always ambivalent about nuclear. The “waste lasts forever” thing, combined with over budget/time construction programs make nuclear seem like a questionable choice.
I hope we see more successes like this. And someone figures out the waste thing.
The waste is purely a polictal problem. It’s been technically solved for decades.
We even have an example of safe storage of fission products from a nuclear reactor for over a billion years with no migration into the surrounding environment.
What’s been technically solved for decades? There are always waste leakages. Shit, there is/was currently a massive one happening starting in March in Minnesota. 400,000 gallons of nuclear waste was spilled into the water system. Just googling “nuclear waste leaks” brought up countless articles about massive industrial fuck ups.
That’s not a nuclear waste leak. At least it’s not nuclear waste in the same sense that I’m talking about storage of solid nuclear fuel is different from titrium releases from an active nuclear plant.
But even then, that leak you’re talking about is purely a political issue. The amount of radioactivoty contained is orders of magnitude that which has been shown to cause any measurable increases risk in cancer. There was no technical challenge in addressing thus.
If you want to evaluate the risks on an objective basis, then you should be more worried about the radiation you receive from being out in the sun for 30 minutes. Because that’s more damaging than if every single nuclear reactor in the US had a continuous tritium release of this magnitude for the next few centuries.
Adding to this, CANDU reactors actually consume the fuel much more efficiently than american style high pressure reactors. The waste only lasts under 400 years, not millions. And the only reason why American nuclear waste lasts so long is because they made recycling waste fuel illegal due to “nuclear proliferation concerns”.
Even here in Canada, we can reduce our waste even further using newer recycling techniques if we just spend the money to build the latest generation reactors that can actually use our existing waste. CANDU reactors were originally designed in the 50s, and horribly obsolete, yet only produce a few tons of high level waste a year. And this is combining the waste from all our nuclear reactors that produce like 17% of our entire nation’s electricity.