Comments by "boz" (@BOZ_11) on "The Uncertain Future of Nuclear Power" video.

@electron1264 if funding for hundreds of thousands of years of waste management was pre-funded by the power station operator/owners, no stations could ever be built. They're only profitable once governments pick up the waste management tab for thousands of years, so a few owners can die rich in the next 30
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@jlight7346 "The fuel itself is so powerful that it pays (in units of energy) for its waste processing and removal millions of times over. " - not for 700 million years it doesn't (the half-life of uranium235)
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@cherriberri8373 " in fact coal waste is responsible for more radioactive pollution than all of our meltdowns so far, counterintuitively." --this is disingenuous clap-trap, and your BS meter should have registered it. I'm pasting this answer from elsewhere: "the (coal) ash is not more radioactive than the waste of the NPPs, (nuclear power plant) but in fact even less radioactive than the low level waste from the NPP. The difference comes from the fact that the nuclear waste is highly regulated and will never end up in the environment, while the coal ash is stacked usually in the environment and much less regulated as a waste. As a result, the ash is much more polluting than the nuclear waste simply because in many cases it is freely released in opened stacks, not because it is more radioactive."
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the half-life of this radioactive waste is often longer than 100,000 years. it's a foolhardy "solution"
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@benpietersen3723 uranium-235's half life is 700 million years (i.e. 1.4 billion years to become inert). Once you factor in the waste management costs of this absurdly long time period, the idea that humanity can derive any net energy from nuclear power in this time-frame is utterly absurd. In the year 4000 we'll be using far more efficient, far cleaner energy to maintain the waste of deluded fools (our society) from the 20th and 21st centuries.
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The US Govt is spending $6b a year for the waste of private nuclear operators. That's another nuclear subsidy on top of all the other ones.
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@benpietersen3723 Did you get yours from Facebook? U-235 will never be safe enough for land-fill! It has to be monitored for a million years. The US Govt is currently spending $6 billion per year managing the waste of private nuclear operators. If you need super-massive subsidies for thousands of years, you either should not be in business or said business should be nationalised. The $6B figure will increase exponentially if fission becomes our primary source of energy. The half-life of U-235 is so long, that if we took that time-frame backwards, the dinosaurs are yet to arrive! These power stations only last for 40-50 years, so once you take into account the massive capital outlays for building, decommissioning, and then handling its waste for 1m years, you have a MASSIVE NET NEGATIVE energy equation on our hands. At least with coal you send the exhaust air out into the atmosphere, and mother nature takes care of it!
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@Echidna23Gaming now factor in the nominal cost of $1m per year, per power station, to manage waste with a half-life of 700m years ($700 trillion per plant). The idea that we'll get any net energy out of these things is absurd. The US Govt is presently spending $6bn per year to manage the waste of private companies operating nuclear power plants; filthy commie subsidy
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@the9red9one You can't just stick it in the ground and forget about it. Right now, the US Govt is spending $6 Billion PER year handling the waste of PRIVATE nuclear power station operators, and will continue to do so for hundreds of thousands of years. There are 35,000 metric tonnes of this crap, and that's just the last 40 years, in one country. This is a massive net negative energy equation. At least with fossil fuels you could pollute the air and mother nature takes care of it, eventually. This stuff can't be dumped and forgotten.
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@OzixiThrill "Which, in case you're paying attention, means that it's pretty safe to store as-is." --- That's not even remotely true. if that were true, we wouldn't still be managing waste from 50 years ago, for billions of dollars per year. There is currently NO long-term storage strategy for nuclear waste (though Yucca Mountain has been considered). The ongoing and expensive waste management (currently the Govt spends $6B every year) wouldn't be ongoing for waste from 50 years ago if the stuff was inert enough to be discarded in land-fill or some long-term storage solution (which doesn't yet exist). Billions of dollars have been spent trying to find geologically appropriate permanent disposal sites (aside from the billions in direct waste management, and billions in nuclear subsidy). Most of this waste remains stored on-site at nuclear plants across the country in temp' storage. Waste management over centuries is a problem because the operators should pay, but it opens a legal issue on who should pay, yet most of these companies won't even exist in 70+ years, let alone the 100,000+ years that are required to manage this stuff. Our civilisation will long be forgotten, before this junk becomes inert. At least with coal, you let the ash exhaust through a chimney stack and have mother nature takes care of it. It's only you autistic buggers who advocate for fission, and the sooner the political will disappears for nuclear fission, the better. Even after the political will has gone, we still have AT LEAST 100,000 years to manage this crap, which is roughly 8 times longer than the length of human civilisation post development of agriculture. For 95% of the time this stuff remains a concern, we won't be managing it (monitoring for leaks, millennia from now)
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