You could fit all the spent nuclear fuel humanity has ever used into a single swimming pool.
Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers.
I’m fairly sure a swimming pool can’t hold 90 Kilotons of nuclear waste.
Also, not needing enriched uranium is a pretty big deal, considering it’s an expensive process. And just having an enrichment facility is enough for the UN to stop and take notice, start flailing around with their arms in the air, and scream about nuclear weapons projects.
Another poster already mentioned that transuranics and other such byproducts tend to be very dense, so a swimming pool can in fact hold tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel. Also, ‘nuclear waste’ is a generic catch-all term that includes less radioactive material, compared to ‘spent fuel’ which is just the really ‘high-grade’ material.
The part about not needing enrichment is worth discussing, but we do have solutions to that already. There are entire classes of reactors dedicated to not producing weapons byproducts or needing enrichment using the same processes capable of generating weapons-grade material.
The reason we see reactors that can make these materials so often is because many of the early reactor designs (many still in use today) were explicitly selected for use by the US government during the early days for their dual-use ability to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. Examples of proliferation-safe designs include molten salts and integral fast reactors, but there’s an engineering experience chicken-and-egg problem - they don’t get built very often because we don’t have experience building them. A new design like this will face the same challenges.
I just wanted to say that at a volume of an Olympic swimming pool of 2500 m³, and a density of plutonium of 19.85 g/cm³, a pool can contain about ridiculous 50,000 tons of plutonium
I’m fairly sure a swimming pool can’t hold 90 Kilotons of nuclear waste.
Also, not needing enriched uranium is a pretty big deal, considering it’s an expensive process. And just having an enrichment facility is enough for the UN to stop and take notice, start flailing around with their arms in the air, and scream about nuclear weapons projects.
Another poster already mentioned that transuranics and other such byproducts tend to be very dense, so a swimming pool can in fact hold tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel. Also, ‘nuclear waste’ is a generic catch-all term that includes less radioactive material, compared to ‘spent fuel’ which is just the really ‘high-grade’ material.
The part about not needing enrichment is worth discussing, but we do have solutions to that already. There are entire classes of reactors dedicated to not producing weapons byproducts or needing enrichment using the same processes capable of generating weapons-grade material. The reason we see reactors that can make these materials so often is because many of the early reactor designs (many still in use today) were explicitly selected for use by the US government during the early days for their dual-use ability to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. Examples of proliferation-safe designs include molten salts and integral fast reactors, but there’s an engineering experience chicken-and-egg problem - they don’t get built very often because we don’t have experience building them. A new design like this will face the same challenges.
I just wanted to say that at a volume of an Olympic swimming pool of 2500 m³, and a density of plutonium of 19.85 g/cm³, a pool can contain about ridiculous 50,000 tons of plutonium
Theres always someone who does the math for me and I appreciate you.
I was thinking “90,000 tons is a LOT, But swiming pools are also a massive volume and nuclear material is very dense… hmmmm”