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This is such a non problem, here is the waste from the entire french nuclear production ever (the red cube): https://www.discoverthegreentech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023...

Meanwhile I've been filtering the german coal byproducts with my lungs, and paying my electricity 2-3x more per kwh than the french

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Yep. The anti-nuclear group's narrative is always that "but no one wants that in their backyard..." but my god if only most voters realize that the waste from their whole state/country can literally fit in one single backyard.
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That’s only the high-level radioactive waste. There is also the intermediate-level with long life radioactive waste that is problematic. Overall you’re right, it’s much less of a concern than many people seem to think, but no point in downplaying it.
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Yup, nuclear waste also includes all the hazmat suits and apparatus used at the site, all the fabrics and plastics that have built up sufficient levels of radiation, fluids and chemicals that can’t be treated, vehicles and equipment, irradiated concrete and structural materials…
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Is that the real location or a mere simulation of size? If it's the former I wonder why close to the water? I'd understand if it was a nuclear reactor...maybe for cooling purposes but only for storing the waste? I guess it's just a size simulation, although if it were reality maybe the though is: Oceans are big enough to dilute the whole thing in case it breaks...as a watersports and ocean fan that makes me sad
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How much of that waste is needed for a dirty bomb?

Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?

Me neither.

BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised

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> Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?

That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.

> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?

So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)

Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2

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The French government have been able to safely store actual nuclear weapons without incident, so I'm sure they can do just fine with a few barrels of nuclear waste.
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So you want to guard nuclear waste by the military just like nuclear weapons or what is your point?
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Yes obviously. Its a trivial amount of waste generated over 60 years, less than the size of a football field. I'm pretty sure a football field can be guarded.
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"Fears" is the correct word. See also: Radiophobia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

Reality, on the other hand, is that nuclear power is what keeps the lights on in Ukraine in this war, and Ukraine is looking to expand.

The ARENH program is not a subsidy, it is, in fact, a reverse subsidy. It requires EDF to sell electricity cheaply to its competitors.

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most of Ukraine's ren infra is destroyed or conquered by russia. Zaporozhie is in cold shutdown. Thousands died from dam collapse caused by russia.

Waste is irrelevant for bombs due to parasitic isotopes. You clearly have zero idea about the topic.

France pays no subsidies(yet, epr2 is another topic). In fact EDF was forced to pay a tax till this year called arenh to subsidize competition. This year that tax was replaced by another tax. Many read the law wrongly about 70eur. It's not that EDF will get guaranteed CFD. It's that EDF will be forced to pay EXTRA tax IF it sells above that limit. French prices dropped both in 2025 and now in 2026. French households have lower prices vs german ones per eurostat.

Basically all your statements are nonsense antinuclear rambling

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Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion.

How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?

The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US:

"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[6]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

Some German state governments even made this explicit, stating that they would not allow a repository to be designated until the German nuclear exit was finalized in their official coalition agreements.

Another nice little trick was changing the language to require the "best possible" site, rather than a suitable one. Sounds innocuous, but anyone with a bit of experience in algorithms know that in theory, this actually makes the task impossible, because how can you definitively prove that there isn't an even better site that you haven't looked at yet?

In practice it has made the process of finding a site incredibly lengthy, difficult and expensive. It doesn't help that the BASE, the Germany federal agency for nuclear waste has been completely taken over by the Green Party, so there is no interest in actually finding a site, and they spend almost their entire budget every year on spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.

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> if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?

The german government and institutions were (are?) full of pro gas (pro russian/russian tied) people who spend decades in the government before bouncing of to russia to work for petro companies. It's hard enough when you try, so imagine how hard it is if you don't even try

> Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, has worked extensively for Russian state-owned energy companies since leaving office.

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Isn't it rumored that many of the activists who lobbied (successfully) for Germany to shut down all of their nuclear power plants were being unwittingly funded by Russian interests?
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Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine.

It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse, and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste, plus a large amount of contaminated salt mine material, sitting above ground right where it started.

I reckon they would rather not want a repeat of this.

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1. Asse does not house spent reactor fuel

2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use.

3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves.

4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.

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1. Does it matter where the radioactive material comes from? It still represents the ability of storing nuclear waste. 2. Never intended, but still used as such [0] 4. Seems like most experts disagree here

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140118011319/http://www.haz.de...

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Why the hell did they build this in a former salt mine with known water intrusion.
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They didn't. It's a research mine and never stored any spent fuel.
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asse was never intended to be final repository. It was experimental repository without a plan to extract the waste if their experiment goes sideways. Onkalo does account for such factors, hence the name- final repository

Most of the waste in asse is from medical and research sectors

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This sounds like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. There are certain types of reactors that can reuse uranium to further reduce its half life to around 6000 years so the one million years legal requirement is an unreasonable target.
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Any material that is still radioactive after a hundred years wasn’t that deadly to begin with. There is a strong link between ”hotness” and short half-lifes, fast-decaying extra spicy isotopes are..fast-decaying
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Actually, those materials can be MUCH more radioactive in the beginning compared to 'conventional' nuclear waste, the half-life is just so short that you can let them sit for a couple of decades and then deal with it.
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IIR, those "certain types of reactors" and their supporting infrastructure are (1) very handy for producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and (2) extremely difficult to operate (historically) without sundry environmental disasters.

Which problems make them considerably hotter - politically - than no-reuse type reactors.

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That's an argument in favour of using such reactors in the EU, isn't it?

We need EU-level nuclear missiles and we need them fast. We also need EU-level nuclear-powered submarines and maybe carrier groups.

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Most of the "danger" from nuclear waste passes in a few years as the most radioactive isotopes decay quickly (which is obvious when you think about it).

Interestingly the US/UK/USSR dumped loads of nuclear waste in the ocean in the 1950s-70s and I recently read that there was basically no trace detectable of any of it.

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If you have more info on that, I'd be interested. They're currently trying to keep it geologically stable and far away from any water that might disperse it, but then dispersion by just putting tiny tiny quantities per m³ of sea water sounds... almost too easy to be true tbh. Would be interesting to read about. (Surely they've looked into this and found that stable geology was the better solution, rather than that it's just more palatable to the public!)

And do you know, even if there's no trace today (sufficient dilution), if it also didn't have an impact on the ecosystem in the area at the time?

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Yes, nuclear power regulations are unreasonably strict because that was the method we used to soft-ban it.
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I wonder where they store coal waste.
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In their lungs.
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On ash and slag heaps that are incredibly toxic to their surroundings. Current research suggests that living in the vicinity of such a heap has an immense effect on cancer rates.
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> Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one.

Pah! We have a lot of those places but excessive federalism has every German state blocking any concrete plan.

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Dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years is pure fearmongering. There are loads of chemicals, metals and other nasty stuff that are dangerous forever and also need to be stored somewhere safely, indefinitely.

I personally live close to a commercial Asbestos dump (an old mine) and absolutely nobody cares about it. It's so unimportant it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article.

Yet the second radioactive waste is concerned (even if it's just old rubble) everybody seems to lose their minds and refuses to even think rational.

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The most bureaucratic thing ever done... search for a place to store something for 56 years. still not done
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What if they dump it in a trench in the ocean, what will actually happen? The ocean is very large...
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Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?
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> if not, just send it to space

So what do you think is going to happen when (not "if") one of those rockets has a malfunction and blows up?

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Terrorists already have a use case
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Naive question - why couldn't we just launch this nuclear waste into ... space ?
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> All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.

Some was stored underground in the past with bad results because the former mines were unstable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_re...

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> they have not yet found one.

Meaning no region can be selected by a politician with out committing political suicide.

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I think it's the other way around:

Rejecting nuclear waste site is an easy and almost cost-free way of garnering browny points with the part of your electorate that has been indoctrinated into massive radiophobia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

It is almost cost-free because in reality, nuclear waste is so low in quantity and so easy/unproblematic to store "temporarily" that it just isn't a real problem. Politicians know this. So they can play this game.

And once pressure builds enough you dig a hole in the ground like you always could have and like the Fins just did and start storing.

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Yes, putting it in a swing state is a non-starter. But putting the waste in a solid red or blue state? Makes perfect sense.
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I was referring to Germany and I am not aware, that a concept such as "swing states" exists there. Is declaring a suitable place for nuclear waste an issue in the USA as well?
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they havent found one bc they dont want to. Otherwise they would approve storing in say, herfa neurode
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