“Green” Energy Waste vs Nuclear Waste

So-called “green” energy waste is much worse

nuclear power plant schematic

NUCLEAR WASTE

radioactive waste isn’t as bad as we thought

To understand why solar, wind turbine, and EV waste is worse than nuclear waste, you first have to understand that the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is not nearly as bad as we’ve so often been told.

I highly recommend reading Zion Lights article “Everything I believed about nuclear waste was wrong”. She explains her former bias: “I had been told by countless friends and green organisations, of which I was an active member, that there were huge amounts of nuclear waste in the world, that it could not be disposed of safely, and that it was leaking into our precious environment. It was years before I realised that I had been misinformed, by people who were themselves misinformed.”

Most people don’t realize it, but we’re all exposed to radiation all the time. Except for levels of intensity, there is no difference between natural background radiation and the type of radiation from waste material from nuclear power plants. To make nuclear waste safe, it is contained in steel and concrete casks for about 100 years, at which point it can be reused. More on that later.

radioactive waste from power plants is not the same as that from weapon production

Zion Lights also distinguished between radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and waste from nuclear weapon production, which includes plutonium (Pu) production.

nuclear waste is tiny compared to ‘green’ energy waste

Zion says “I was also confused about how much nuclear waste there is in the world. It turns out that there isn’t very much of it. All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately ten yards.”

We need to understand that the volume of toxic waste from nuclear is tiny compared to that from solar panels and wind turbines.

The nuclear waste can be totally and safely contained.

Zion goes on…“When the [reactor] fuel assembly has cooled down, it is transferred to a stainless-steel and concrete dry storage cask. These are designed to contain fuel assemblies for around a century. The casks shield radiation, which means you can stand next to one..”

Zion standing next to dry storage casks of spent nuclear fuel

The nuclear waste can even be re-used.

Here’s another thing most people aren’t told: “In some countries, such as France, Japan, and Russia, used fuel is reprocessed…to make new fuel assemblies. Through this method of recycling, up to 96% of the reusable material in spent fuel can be recovered.

There is currently enough energy in the nuclear waste in the United States to power the entire country for 100 years with clean energy.”

Zion Lights goes into more detail on the re-use of nuclear waste in a new post, ‘The surprising reason why we should recycle our nuclear waste’. She points out that the US is sitting on immense amounts of potential nuclear energy in those previously mentioned dry storage casks.

“That's 100 years of clean energy sitting in storage casks, doing nothing.”

Surprise - volume of waste and radioactivity can be reduced

Zion eventually gets to this surprise – “Orano, a nuclear fuel cycle company headquartered in France, describes the final recycled waste as “5-times less in volume, 10-times less in radiotoxicity.”

95% reuseable!

Jack DeVanney is a nuclear expert who lives right across the Columbia River from me. He has made his slides available. I made a copy of one that illustrates how much ‘spent’ nuclear fuel can be used over again.  

                                                      

The slide is captioned  “But what is spent nuclear fuel?” and includes these bullet points:

An environmentalists’ dream come true

back to quoting Zion Lights - “If you’re afraid of radiation, you should love the idea of recycling spent fuel, as it’s the best way to reduce its radioactivity. Whether or not you like the idea of new nuclear power plants,…there is a proven method for significantly reducing its radioactivity. This method resolves both the need to store the casks for longer periods of time and also provides clean energy without the need to mine new resources. It is, surely, any environmentalist’s dream come true.”

“GREEN” ENERGY WASTE

Waste from solar plantations, wind turbines, and EVs is huge in volume and will be getting much bigger, and it’s not easily or economically recycleable, and therefore it’s not really containable, with most of it piling into landfills all over the world.

The waste problem with renewables isn’t limited to the dumping tons of worn out solar panels and wind turbines and EV batteries. The waste problem begins long before that, in the vast mining operations of rare earth elements (REEs) that are needed for wind turbines and EV batteries.

massive amounts of toxic waste, including radioactive waste, from mining rare earth elements (REE)

According to Harvard.edu, “For every ton of rare earth produced, the mining process yields … one ton of radioactive residue. Emphasis mine  This stems from the fact that rare earth element ores have metals that, when mixed with leaching pond chemicals, contaminate air, water, and soil. Most worrying is that rare earth ores are often laced with radioactive thorium and uranium,… Overall, for every ton of rare earth, 2,000 tons of toxic waste are produced.”

The conversation.com writes:

Rare earth minerals are vital for many green technologies; they’re in magnets for wind power turbines and in batteries for hybrid-electric vehicles. In fact, up to 600 kilograms (~1320 lbs) of rare-earth metals are required to operate just one wind turbine.” emphasis mine

…the process of mining rare earth elements “can have enormous environmental impacts. Mining for rare earth minerals generates large volumes of toxic and radioactive material, due to the co-extraction of thorium and uranium — radioactive metals which can cause problems for the environment and human health.”

This same article from the conversation.com writes about recycling rare earth elements. Recovering these minerals from EV batteries is energy intensive, pollutes the atmosphere, and generates large volumes of corrosive waste.

So even more volume of waste is generated in the recycling process itself.

solar panels

About 95% of solar panels are made with silicon PV cells. Except for small amounts of lead and cadmium, they aren’t toxic like the ~5% of solar panels that are ‘thin film’, but the problem with solar panels is the sheer volume of waste…

Thomas Shepstone from Energy Security and Freedom introduced us to Geoff Buys Cars. If you want to get a laugh while learning about the immensity of solar panel waste and the difficulty of recycling the panels, watch this video. That was part one. Here’s part two. It’s not quite so funny because it’s about solar panels being made in China with slave labor

Harvard Business Review published “The Dark Side of Solar Power” in 2021. They noted that even though solar panels are expected to last 25 years, there are financial incentives to replace them after 10 years, with newer improved panels, batteries and inverters.  “If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce… around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste” emphasis mine

That’s just for residential installations. I don’t even have a figure for commercial and industrial panels, but obviously that would be a much bigger pile of waste.

Contrast that with the comparatively tiny amount of nuclear waste.

As for recycling old solar panels, it costs over $20 per panel, whereas it only costs a dollar or two to dump them in a landfill. So guess where most of them end up?

That’s another contrast - remember - ~96% of nuclear waste is reusable.

…and then there’s lithium

We have the same situation with lithium batteries used in EVs and for grid-sized backup. Again, the waste problem isn’t limited to the disposal after they’re worn out. It began first in the very nasty lithium mining process.

From Wired    “In May 2016, hundreds of protestors threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from…[a] lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem…

There are pictures of masses of dead fish on the surface of the stream…

Some eyewitnesses reported seeing cow and yak carcasses floating downstream, dead from drinking contaminated water… 

Recycling Lithium-Ion

In Australia, only two percent of the country’s 3,300 metric tons of lithium-ion waste is recycled. Unwanted MP3 players and laptops often end up in landfills, where metals from the electrodes and ionic fluids from the electrolyte can leak into the environment. Globally, perhaps 5% of Lithium batteries are recycled. Batteries can be renovated for a second use, but eventually they have to be dumped or recycled. Since an EV battery often weighs about 1000 lbs, and 30 million EVs are projected to be on the road by 2030, we’re talking millions of tons of waste. To recycle them is an awe-inspiring challenge, requiring great expense. Extracting the lithium, cobalt, and nickel also eats up a tremendous amount of energy.

wind turbine blades

CNN did a report on wind turbine blades in May ‘23.

“While about 90% of turbines are easily recyclable, their blades are not. They are made from fiberglass bound together with epoxy resin, a material so strong it is incredibly difficult and expensive to break down. Most blades end their lives in landfill or are incinerated…Blade waste is projected to reach 2.2 million tons in the US by 2050. Globally, the figure could be around 43 million tons by 2050.”

wind turbine magnets use REEs

According to the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences, a 2 megawatt (MW) wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium.

Remember, mining one ton of rare earth minerals produces about one ton of radioactive waste, according to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.

By now I think you get the point. Nuclear waste is tiny in comparison, it’s manageable, and reusable with a minimum of fuss. So-called green energy waste is much worse.