fatvegan

I'm curious about nuclear waste. I know it's bad and all that, but it's interesting to compare the amount of nuclear waste the world might conceivably create compared to the amount of other stuff we consume. So I did some maths.

(16.33 * 1,000,000,000) / (1000 * 365 * 24) * 33 = 61517

or

(16.33 billion MW/h per year total world electricity consumption) 
   / (1000MW nuclear reactor * 365 days * 24 hours) 
   * 33 tonnes of annual waste from each reactor
   = 61,517 tonnes of waste per year

That is approximately how many tonnes of nuclear waste we'd generate per year if the whole world ran on nuclear electricity. It's quite a large amount. However, compared to amount of coal leaving Newcastle each week, it's doesn't seem like so much. Newcastle coal port exports 1,610,000 million tonnes of coal in a bad week.

I'm not wanting to suggest that we can just stick everyone's nuclear waste in our Hunter coal holes and be content. But I do find the scale of these things very interesting. At first glance (or perhaps this is the second glance) we don't seem to have real issues with the sheer quantity of waste we might generate.

There are still plenty of good reasons to not like nuclear power (or possibly just a couple of super important ones), and I'm not a big fan of it. Solar plants still seem pretty winner to me.

It's also possible I have done the maths wrong.

Sources

1. How much power a 100 MW power plant generates annually?
2. The Nuclear Fuel Chain
3. The World Factbook