alt Hacker News> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year,
... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.
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quotemstr • today at 3:25 AM
Recycled down to ten grams per person per year.
Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.
To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?
All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.
Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate