Lots of Nuclear Waste – Is it true now?

Worldwide, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates approx. 250,000 tons of spent fuel from all the nuclear power plants that have existed since the 1950s [1].

This number may sound like a lot, but by industrial standards it is actually incredibly little, overall it would fit into a single football field stacked in approx. 10 meters high.

We can visit the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant in Texas, whose two reactors can make green electricity for half of Denmark’s population. The spent fuel in dry storage from over 30 years of operation does not even fill half a football field [2]. As can be seen from the picture below.

This testifies to the incredible energy density of nuclear power – this relatively small amount of spent fuel over 60+ years has produced a staggering 84,500 TWh of reliable, low-carbon electricity for the world.

Comparison

So let’s do something that anti-nuclear activists NEVER do – compare the amount of waste from nuclear plants to the amount of other toxic waste.

As the graph below shows, the amount of highly radioactive waste is almost nothing when compared to other types of toxic industrial waste [3]. So little that it is actually difficult to include in the graph. We should consider what happens to all the other toxic waste that we produce today! Many are heavy metals and chemical substances that break down only slowly or sometimes not at all in nature. Shouldn’t we be more concerned about mercury, cadmium, lead, phenols and lots of incredibly harmful substances we really have no storage for today?


What about waste from fossil energy?

Globally, we burn eight billion tonnes of coal every year. Each TWh of electricity produced by burning coal emits 800,000 tonnes of CO2, other air polluting particles and an average of 50 kilos of mercury [4]. The world consumes 5,685,160,808,764 cubic meters of coal annually – a volume equivalent to almost 6,000 Empire State Buildings – all of which becomes waste after combustion. In contrast, spent nuclear fuel takes up almost nothing.

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