FRONTLINE: nuclear reaction: Why the French Like Nuclear Energy

FRONTLINE: nuclear reaction: Why the French Like Nuclear Energy:

"French technocrats had never thought that the waste issue would be much of a problem. From the beginning the French had been recycling their nuclear waste, reclaiming the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricating new fuel elements. This not only gave energy, it reduced the volume and longevity of French radioactive waste. The volume of the ultimate high-level waste was indeed very small: the contribution of a family of four using electricity for 20 years is a glass cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter."

The French seem to be leading the world in managing nuclear power and its waste products. So how big, in terms of volume, is their waste storage problem?

Let's assume all of France's electricity is generated by French nuclear plants (it's not -- Wikipedia says the number is about 88%) and that they use all of their generated electricity. (Wikipedia says they export a lot of it.) The population of France is about 64,473,140. So that's about 16 million family-of-four equivalents. In 20 years, they'll need to store 16 million cigarette lighters. What is that, about 7 million cubic feet?

Assuming that's in the ballpark, and assuming you can store that waste without having to space it out to avoid assembling a critical mass, that'd be a cube about 19 feet on a side, every twenty years. Pretty small. The Bat Cave could probably handle 20 years of waste...