Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power? A job ad from Microsoft shows it's looking to harness the power of the atom to fuel its growing datacenter footprint, but it'd hardly be the first. Redmond is looking for someone who "will be responsible for maturing and implementing a global Small Modular Reactor (SMR) and microreactor energy strategy." Microsoft's interest …
Now if the AI can either come up with a nuclear power source which doesn’t generate any waste, or a way of safely disposing of the waste, we’d be on to a winner.
If it can’t, then I think I’d rather limit the spread of AI (and block chain etc) in order to protect the environment. Save it for applications that really need it rather than wasting it on bot nets and helping spotty yoofs with their homework.
Put it in boxes buried deep underground or underwater. In a few millenia when uranium finally becomes too expensive to mine or extract from seawater remodel the burners to work further down the radiation chain and burn it all again. You will overall have less waste (ie. highly radioactive and therefore variously useful) material to deal with --- and in a solid or liquid lump which you therefore can deal with --- than the amount of raw product a large coal or gas plant burns in a month, who's (yes, radioactive) waste is pumped into the atmosphere where you and your family can breathe it in..
Not sure what more the AIs can tell us about that which isn't already in a high school physics text book.
And if anyone's going to start talking about rewnewables then it's the maths text book...
Put it in boxes buried deep underground or underwater. In a few millenia when uranium finally becomes too expensive to mine or extract from seawater remodel the burners to work further down the radiation chain and burn it all again.
Showing that people will say anything in an attempt to prove themselves right.
And are you willing to guarantee the integrity of those boxes for the millennia that you so casually mention? That ground water, seismic activity, erosion, future human development, or just plain forgetfulness of the properties of this site in future generations, won't cause any danger to anyone at any time??
Why don't you Europeans bother to read and educate yourself on Love Canal, as just a short-term example?
And we're dealing with materials that can affect life on planet Earth for centuries..
Sticking toxic waste, and your own head, into the ground doesn't eradicate the problem. It just moves it on to future generations. But, from climate change to waste to debt, everyone is very comfortable with pushing things off to the future nowadays. It's not our problem if we can convince ourselves that it's...not our problem. Give yourselves a pat on the back while you're at it.
Thanks for the thumbs down ;)
" During its 10-year lifespan, the landfill served as the dumping site of 21,800 short tons (19,800 t) of chemicals, mostly composed of products such as "caustics, alkalines, fatty acid and chlorinated hydrocarbons resulting from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal
The idea reactors create or increase dangerous radiation is false.
They do slightly accelerate the release of the previously created and stored nuclear energy in the isotopes, but they do not create any nuclear energy and only help to speed up the decay back to safe material.
The ores used for reactor fuel are even more deadly than the waste taken out of the reactors.
All the reactors do is slightly speed up the decay process.
They do not create more radioactive energy than it put into them in the first place, from the radioactive fuel.
The net result of all reactors is the fuel isotope are less deadly after having decay accelerated in the reactor.
You do want to not have them around humans while the decay process if accelerated, but reactors do not create any deadly radiation energy.
It is all already there and always somewhat deadly.
Yes, just ask Thames Water
Many 'green snobs' also have their own wood-burning stove and/or pizza oven. Cos it's green, innit.
When the crap goes up in the atmosphere via the chimney or into the ocean via the toilet, it's all fine.
But the trouble with 'nuclear' waste is that it's dead easy to spot in the most miniscule amounts, and it's possible to prove where it came from.
>Now if the AI can either come up with a nuclear power source which doesn’t generate any waste, or a way of safely disposing of the waste, we’d be on to a winner.
I'm not downvoting you because it really would be very nice, but I guess we can agree that we still need power?
Given that, can we agree that it would be wise to avoid the methods of power generation that release the most waste in the environment? Especially radioactive waste?
Might we even agree that we really ought to outright shut down power plants that rely on such polluting technology, and replace them with alternatives that don't just dump vast amounts of waste, including radioactive waste, directly into the environment, in a barely-regulated fashion? I mean, just tossing radioactive waste out of a power plant's doorstep really should be grounds for shutting it down, shouldn't it?
If we agree on all that, why the fuck aren't we shutting down coal-fired plants right now and replacing them with nukes?
I am, however, upvoting you. Good points all.
Actually, I have no problem with Nuclear at all, per se. But for nuclear to be workable, in my view, we need to invest in it continuously - and prioritise the production of energy over weapons.
As far as I can see, which is based on what I’ve read - and not on particular personal expertise, the technology for ‘clean’ nuclear exists (where clean is defined as waste which is lethally dangerous for hundreds of years rather than hundreds of thousands of years), and with investment (hybrid reactors, which are currently largely theoretical) we could get that number down to years. In which case, let’s grab the opportunity with both hands. BUT, if I’ve understood correctly, these reactors have not received the investment that they need precisely because they are rubbish at producing the material required for an atomic weapons program.
But, even with clean energy, it seems to me that we should be a little less resource greedy in order to enjoy a cleaner and less polluted planet. Will your life be worse off if you don’t have a car with a massive frontal area? Will you be poorer if your TV, microwave, games console etc are actually fully turned off at night rather than on standby (of course not - actually you’ll be marginally richer)? Will you be worse off if you walk or cycle short distances rather than hopping in your car (nope - you’ll be fitter)? What about limiting the accessibility of AI (we’d be forced to use our brains, which seems like a good thing to me)? And yet, suggest any of these simple measures for measurably improving your life, everyone’s life, and anyone would think you’d lobbed the first grenade in a culture war.
So yes. New generation nuclear. But yes save energy too.
No downvotes/upvotes here. It's a learning experience.
Nuclear investment; the average person has no insight nor influence on this. It's on our governments/corporations to do this. As an individual, all I can do is pontificate on these things and that does nothing to solve the problem. We can throw words out on a computer screen all we want but it won't change anything.
Resource "greediness"; the average person is just a consumer in our modern society. Their ability to influence these things is directly driven by their consumption in our society. Our entire society appears to be driven to either sustain or increase our consumption. If those things are generally true, how do we expect the consumers to change their behaviors?
Limiting AI; the relatively small group of people that we allow to lead us do not seem interested in this approach. The apparent limits of the consumer model we have in place seem to need to be supplemented and apparently AI is the way to do that. (I'm really stretching on this one but I can't think of a better comment).
In the end, there is apparently no free lunch for energy. I guess we'll keep trying like we always do.
Now if the AI can either come up with a nuclear power source which doesn’t generate any waste, or a way of safely disposing of the waste, we’d be on to a winner.
We don't need AI for that. We already have the Thorium cycle, which generates little to no Plutonium, nor nasty actinides.
It's not a silver bullet or course. You still get waste, but much less. In a reactor, Thorium-cycle burns up far more of the Uranium, far more efficiently. By contrast, Uranium-to-Plutonium cycle reactors have to pull the rods when they get poisoned (at which point fission slows despite there being loads of decent fuel still in there, which we then have to process out from the Plutonium and actinides).
But nobody is interested in funding that properly or overcoming the engineering challenges, because you can't make bombs out of it at the end.
Thorium cycle does generate U-232, which has a viciously dangerous decay chain (Thallium-238, very strong gamma radiation), but which follows the "live fast, die young" rule. U232 has a half-life of 68years - not millennia. The Thallium has a half life just under 2 years. Consequently storage is not a horribly long-term problem.
And we've already worked out how to store the remaining waste. Dig a hole in a geologically stable formation and stick our vitrified leftovers in it. It's honestly not that hard. Not that I'm a fan of burying waste in general, but it's a matter of scale and proportion. Burying all our plastics without recycling (or just reducing what we use) would be bad. But a small quantity of nuclear waste (order of tonnes)? Yeah, we can objectively get away with that in return for clean, safe power.
"But nobody is interested in funding that properly or overcoming the engineering challenges, because you can't make bombs out of it at the end."
And that's the big hope of these massive consumers wanting to build their own SMR/micro reactors.
Because they have the resources to actually overcome those challenges in the pursuit of cheap power to feed their habit.
And that's the big hope of these massive consumers wanting to build their own SMR/micro reactors.
Because they have the resources to actually overcome those challenges in the pursuit of cheap power to feed their habit.
But they don't. That's the point. These SMR designs are mostly running naval submarine reactors on conventional Uranium cycles - which is why there's a lot of regulatory (nuclear proliferation) concerns about having small units deployed in many locations (as opposed to a handful of sites with large scale reactors).
In fairness, Thorium is only proliferation-resistant when used in a light water reactor - it still generates some nasties when used in a molten-salt reactor.
The problem with all this is:
* Grid-scale nuclear power stations are expensive - private industry can't raise/won't commit that much capital.
* Novel reactor designs/fuel cycles are expensive - private industry can't raise/won't commit that much capital.
* Much of the world's political thinking is still in thrall to a lite version of Reaganomics and so governments won't make those investments.
* Small nuclear sub-type reactors are somewhat in the reach of the likes of Google/Apple/Microsoft, even though they're less efficient than their grid-scale counterparts.
So that's what we end up with. Just as our big uranium-cycle grid reactors are ultimately derived from military breeder reactor tech, so the SMRs are just a scaled-up version of submarine tech. But it's still not actually a good fit for power production or long-term waste management.
Basically, they're all investing in the compromised designs that the military already paid for, because it's what the private sector is willing to pay for. Even though we could - as a society - get much better value for money out of doing the research and deploying low waste, proliferation-resistant technologies en masse.
It also means we spend a lot less time negotiating with the likes of Iran about "honestly, our nuclear programme is peaceful". We can just hand them the IP for a proliferation-resistant thorium reactor. We can even offer to build it for them. If they say "no thanks" then they're fessing up that their programme is a weapon programme (which yes, we know, but it just cuts the crap. Anyone shows any interest in nukes, we hand them a power plant and see if they actually want it. It instantly closes down any discussion on refining uranium).
>> Because they have the resources to actually overcome those challenges in the pursuit of cheap power to feed their habit.
> But they don't.
These companies have very deep pockets indeed Apple would be the eighth richest country in the world, MS the twelfth, Amazon the fourteenth....
They really do have the resources to develop something like this, not only to reduce their own power bill, but also to sell the technology to competitors and grids across the world.
They'd also see a significant boost in their corporate image.
I'm not holding my breath - but they're some of the few places where the desire and the funds could come together relatively easily.
These companies have very deep pockets indeed Apple would be the eighth richest country in the world, MS the twelfth, Amazon the fourteenth....
They really do have the resources to develop something like this, not only to reduce their own power bill, but also to sell the technology to competitors and grids across the world.
Of course they have those resources. Note in my original post "can't raise/won't commit".
BUT THEY'RE NOT.
They are investing billions in civilian-ising nuclear submarine tech. Instead of just doing the foundational R&D to bring clean fuel cycles to market.
They could do the good thing. But they are choosing to go the (relatively) low-technical-risk route and re-package existing tech.
There's no question of "will they, won't they". They won't.
“Nuclear” what, though?
Fusion? Definitely a hope for the future, but as of today, there’s exactly one fusion reactor on the planet that exceeds its energy input, and it only exists in a lab.
Fission of Thorium isotopes? Maybe, but Thorium reactors don’t exist outside of experimental facilities... and that’s after a research history that’s almost as long as Uranium’s.
So that leaves the existing technologies. Uranium and Plutonium fission. Well, a cursory glance at the half-life values of the most common waste isotopes produced by these provides a sobering rebuttal of the definition of “long” you just used there...
The argument about nuclear power generating wastes is incorrect.
All the nuclear energy is created in some old star that died long ago.
The nuclear material got all of its dangerous energy eons ago.
All the nuclear reactors do is slightly accelerate the natural decay process of releasing that stored energy.
If you do not put the nuclear isotopes in to a reactor, they will just retain their deadly nuclear energy longer.
The reactor does not create deadly nuclear energy, but just releases it, allows it to decay faster, and reduces it.
I guess, everyone gets nuclear waste sent by mail, in order for micros~1 to dispose of the their nuclear waste in the way they are used to ... just dump it onto the users.
If you can't spot the sentiment: I would very much not hand over nuclear reactors to internet companies who "move fast, and break things" or who abandoned "don't be evil" a long time ago.
Without even mentioning that the coal-powered power plants used by Germany release way more radioactivity in the atmosphere than nuclear power plants.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-stations-produce-radioactive-waste
The coal fired power station site near me (Ratcliffe on Soar) would be ideal as a development site for SMR's being just a few mile south of the Rolls Royce factory but it is more radioactive than would be allowed for a nuclear facility. Apparently it's ok as a 'normal' power station...
The best development site for SMR would be one of the old Magnox sites, as local communities are accepting of nuclear power, there's export links for power, and established site security and civil contingency arrangements. Oldbury or Trawsfynydd would be ideal. The proximity to Derby is largely immaterial, in the same way that Faslane is nowhere near Derby.
The best development site for SMR would be one of the old Magnox sites, as local communities are accepting of nuclear power
The problem is that those sites are by the coast, which is a desirable area for Londoners to have second or third homes. As a result, they run well funded NIMBY operations screaming about the evils of Nuclear power (despite in some cases existing reactors still operating) and in some areas actually oppose running new high voltage lines across the countryside to connect the off shore wind turbines to the National Grid.
"The problem is that those sites are by the coast, which is a desirable area for Londoners to have second or third homes."
Trawsfynydd is not particularly near the coast, and situated in the second-home-hating Parochiality, so nobody is in much of a queue to buy second homes there (despite the fervent victim beliefs of the Welsh assembly). Berkeley is on the muddy and dull middle reaches of the Severn not that far from me, not really a queue for second homes there. Hunterston is a bit far from London and a bit cold for softy southerners, as is Chapelcross, Wylfa's over the edge from civilisation. You might have a case with Dungeness or Winfrith attracting rich Cockneys, but there's still a good choice of potential SMR sites, even after ruling out Hinkley A, Sizewell A, and Bradwell as they're already actual or proposed sites for new big nuclear.
Moreover, the locals and councillors in most of these areas are generally pretty amenable to anything that has "new jobs" written on it, so a few Johnny-come-latelies whining about turning an old nuclear power station into a new nuclear power station will find their seed is spilt upon stoney ground.
The issue here is not the money (nationally we can apparently afford £100bn+ for a railway we don't need), it's not the location, it's not the technology. It's the lack of political will amongst the lightweights in Parliament. And if the current shower won't commit, you can be certain the shower-in-waiting won't.
I imagine in years to come, the super big, globe spanning organisations that crunch data for a living, will also outgrow home nation's ability/willingness to protect them. At which point this article would have morphed to data centres requiring small nuclear deterrents to fill the gap between what the nation is willing to supply and what the ever more unpopular big brother orgs feel is needed for their security.
Yeah, about that. Have a good long look at the history of the humble trading company founded in Britain as a joint stock company in the year of our lord 1600 to trade to that far side of the world known as the East Indies.
I really do mean take a long look at what happens when you have companies that are more powerful than countries. A really long look. The short answer is that they end up influencing, and eventually dictating their nominal countries foreign policies as they grow too powerful. After being chopped down, it took over a hundred years before companies even started getting remotely that powerful again.
On that subject, let's have a look at the total yearly revenue of say Amazon and compare it to a list of countries by GDP.
You'll find that Amazon is the 26th richest country in the world. Microsoft is down at 54th and Alphabet (ie; Google) is in a similar position.
These same corporations cross ancient linguistic, ethnic, and religious lines which changes the balance of rivalries. This for better or more probably worse allows a different type of progressiveism than the past. If it weren't for some greedy SOBs risking their funds and lives organizing and participating in the Moscow Company and upsetting the state church I probably would not be here questioning a part of your core beliefs.
As to the British East India Company and the British West India Company the government of the UK derived funds that allowed such organized sports as the the American Revolt, the Boer Trek and of course the taking of the India subcontinent from the French. Seeing as to how internecine has returned to the area maybe your right it should have been left to the French.
Rolls Royce would be delighted. However, it's beyond the risk-capacity of a private company to develop an SMR, and HMG won't back the concept with anything other than words so I suspect that it won't happen. And of course, the government's fascination with wind and solar mean that the assets that there's a lot of those about, and they're the worst possible counterparts to nuclear.
From the evidence HMG will encourage Rollls Royce to sell the technology to the Japanese, then go into contracts with China and a French company to deliver SMRs to the UK at no up front cost to HMG. Naturally, they will get some clause guaranteeing x percentage is UK sourced so they can claim to be protecting or even creating UK jobs. If asked about Rolls Royce they will go on about how the UK doesn’t have the skills, UK has too many regulations, UK workers are lazy and too expensive etc..
Agree. We do have the skills etc. but we have spineless, useless, lying pricks that govern us that always come up with this nonsense. Red / Blue ones are all the same.
What I find annoying is that the UK invented most things up to when we gave up and let the americans run everything after the second world war. For those unaware- see how we boxed up everything that Tommy Flowers of the GPO and most of Bletchley Park were working on for years while we sat back and watched the US take all this stuff and make money from it. Now all we get is the morons in charge clamping down and over regulating everything. (Except the cash paid to the incompetents running our utilities and HS2.)
No development required: just Dock a nuclear sub and plug it in.
I vote for Gibraltar, there are already a bunch of data centers spewing poker and gambling bits at the public, and the Spanish hate the British already.
UK only needs 3 subs in case one has to surface. Whenever systems are working, one could be powering bit barns.
That was meant as a joke, but thinking about it, it's not a bad idea for the monetization of the trident program. Someone ping Rishy he's a business man.
Also the UK government, red or blue, will sit on the fence and wait until they can throw all our taxpayers money at US companies that eventually come up with an SMR rather than back an UK based company that has a working model requiring some work to make them suitable. Has been the case ever since WW2.
I'm amazed that Microsoft isn't setting up a limited liability company at arms length and hiring from there. The whole point of SMR's is that they have lower insurance requirements, and those will become even lower in 2025 when Price-Anderson comes up for renewal. But those lower insurance requirements wouldn't indemnify the parent company from damages above the insured amount.
But isn't electricity basically the movement of electrons from one source to another? And aren't electrons an atomic particle? So, then it would follow that every time you plug something in, or even think about plugging something in, you're thinking about atomic power.
Nuclear costs include a certain percentage of the money being put in a decommissioning fund so that's not quite true, is it?
The Guardian also described the Hinkley point deal where UK PLC didn't pay a penny for construction but instead promised to pay a minimum of £92.50 per megawatt hour from the output as a "terrible deal" for the taxpayers as wind would soon drop the cost of electricity to well below that price.
Our electricity prices peaked at £580.55 per megawatt hour across the last winter as a result of relying on being reliant upon gas generation for power, combined with buying gas in from abroad. The Guardian was noticeably silent about the results of the policies they had campaigned for and pointedly refused to notice the resulting death toll from people unable to heat their homes. Also, it's notable that recently every company offered deals to build new wind turbines at the reduced price that the Guardian suggested would be happening refused to put any money in, so that ain't happening.
Incidentally; Hinkley point C is not even going to cover the output being lost from decommissioning existing nuclear generation so we can expect prices to keep going up. We really ought to build another few to ensure that electricity prices stay low if the intention is that the entire population is going to be able to have homes heated with electricity and drive electric cars, otherwise the generation won't be there to support the change over and it'll just be reducing much of the country to grinding poverty.
'promised to pay a minimum of £92.50 per megawatt hour'
It's my understanding of this current market for renewables and nuclear installations that it's a fixed generation price not a minimum price.
However, if the nuclear station or renewable installation is in a position to generate then the grid controllers have to pay them the minimum price ( and in some circumstances a premium) not to generate and export power.
It's fossil fuel generators that are subject to the vagaries of the open market.
This model ensures renewables/nuclear have preferential access to the grid with fossil fuels playing a balancing role.
Until someone comes up with an economical technology to replace the responsiveness of gas in particular, this is likely to remain the model.
"Atomic power"? What is this, the 1950s?
Yes it is. It is the 1950's all over again, only without the skilled nuclear- engineers and -scientists (which also couldn't get SMR's and molten salt whatever hokum and of course the magick thorium reactor off the ground).The difference is that they understood why, whereas the present genereation thinks that enough money will somhow bend physics and make it happen :).
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20230105-how-france-s-prized-nuclear-sector-stalled-in-europe-s-hour-of-need
Nuclear reactors need water for cooling and when global warming causes heatwaves and drought, that’s a problem. Nuclear reactors need regular maintenance and repairs, too, so half of France’s reactors were not producing electricity last year.
It's certainly not reliable if you're not allowed to build new ones to new, more efficient, more easily maintainable designs and are forced to keep running the old ones that are optimised for weapons creation rather than energy production.
ALL power production methods require regular maintenance and repairs. Wind and Solar are excellent but unreliable due to weather changes and fossil fuels have highly volatile pricing and are massive polluters. The problem in France last year was a management and political failure, not a nuclear one. We have a much worse problem here in the UK because successive short-sighted politicians on both sides neglected nuclear power for 40+ years, so now we find ourselves reliant on gas and imported electricity. A mix of power production methods is needed and we need the ability to over-produce substantially so that we can adapt to the vagaries of the national/international power market. Nuclear is an important part of that, as are wind, solar, hydro, and even fossil fuels when needed. France put too many of their eggs in one basket, but here we simply don't have enough eggs, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Nuclear reactors need water for cooling and when global warming causes heatwaves and drought, that’s a problem.
It is when you design your reactors to use freshwater from rivers, yes.
We (Great Britain) designed ours to use seawater, and so didn't have that particular problem, but that does drive up certain costs more as salt water is more corrosive.
'We (Great Britain) designed ours to use seawater'
That is not the case , Trawsfynydd and any site on the Severn estuary proving the point.
Seawater is just a convenient heat sink to cool the steam cycle back to condensate, as is river water. Corrosion can be controlled with material selection and chemical dosing.
Steam turbines being inextricably linked to significant power generation from nuclear, there will always be a steam cycle and requisite condenser.
However there is established technology to air cool the condenser on smaller steam turbine units. This significantly reduces water requirements as all that is then required is to replace necessary losses from the steam circuits / cycle.
That is not the case , Trawsfynydd and any site on the Severn estuary proving the point.
You're evidently not familiar with the concept of an estuary. Particularly one like the Severn with a massive tidal range. Anything on the Severn is sea-water cooled. It's not "river cooled" like the Saint Laurent, Belleville or Bugey. With proper placement of intakes (beyond the lowest low-water from spring tide), you're not going to run dry!
Trawsfynydd is the only "inland" nuclear plant in the UK, and it pulls it's cooling water from a reservoir, which buffers the supply compared to direct-from-river. It's also less than 10miles from the coast. So if the reservoir cooling really hadn't worked out, hypothetically you could run some pipes down. That location also guarantees more reliable rainfall than the inner departments of France.
'You're evidently not familiar with the concept of an estuary'
I believe I am fully familiar thanks. An estuary contains a mix of sea and freshwater, the chemistry of which varies depending upon the tide. Placement of the intakes will make little difference overall. For example the chemistry at Oldbury will vary significantly from Hinckley at a given time purely due to its location.
To be accurate,Trawsfynydd is situated on a lake but my point still stands, the UK nuclear stations are not solely cooled via seawater.
By far, the biggest problem with using single pass water cooling from any natural source is the entrained organics, this is closely followed by keeping the discharge temperature low enough so that it doesn't create problems in the water source/course. Running dry is not the issue, environmental impact is.
I was about to say the same thing. The Severn estuary, especially as far down as Hinckley is salt water at high tide, and mud at low tide. Arguably, it's the Bristol Channel at this point, and it's tens of miles across to Wales. The actual amount of freshwater there is nil. Oldbury is a bit further up, and there might be some appreciable amount of freshwater coming down the Severn at low tide, but I seriously doubt there's any there that's not at least brackish. The tidal bore goes all the way up to Gloucester.
A full-blown PWR has about 1200MW. Just buy one and sell the extra power to the grid.
And that could happen anywhere around the planet where you can buy and sell energy, and because it is Microsoft, that can run their servers anywhere in the planet as well.
Or, I don't know, build a 1200 MW server farm and slap a power plant right next to it, in a Country that doesn't mind nuclear power.
No microreactor thing, think big already.
The only reason why nuclear is not used for everything is because it is not as profitable.
But we do not want energy production to be profitable to greedy companies, and we would prefer it to be public and free.
Those claiming it is too risky have a point in that anything nuclear that can produce electricity can also be used for weapons.
But the idea of nuclear wastes being a problem is foolish, since nuclear reactors decrease nuclear material, not increase it.
The fuel used in reactors is much more radioactive before it is used in the reactor than afterward.
All a reactor does is speed up nuclear decay.
They do not cause or create it.
It is already in the fissile material, created in the core of a extinct star.
It will remain radioactive until it has totally decayed.
Plutonium doesn't come from "cores of extinct stars", it comes from neutron bombardment of uranium inside a breeder reactor. I think current astrophysical theories are that most heavy elements are actually created in the collision of neutron stars, but I stand to be corrected there.
Either way, in nature, concentrated radioactive isotopes don't tend to occur*. Most of the ones on Earth are actually in the core, because heavy stuff tends to sink through lighter stuff. The ones we can extract from ores aren't hugely concentrated until we do so, which is why you can walk across Dartmoor without getting radiation poisoning, but it is inadvisable to walk across a floor coated in 235U.
As for "more radioactive before than after," I think that is a bit disingenuous, because the daughter isotopes from reaction products are pretty nasty things AFAIK. It's not just a matter of "this is radioactive, and this is less radioactive", but there are other considerations, such as the energy of the particles / gamma radiation that is emitted form decay, decay rate, further daughter isotopes, etc. and the nature of those daughter elements, because radioactive gases are less easy to deal with, and inherently more dangerous, than solids, for example.
It's almost as if radioactive waste is actually hazardous, and does actually present a technical challenge in its disposal, and the scientists and engineers working on that problem haven't just been making it up for all these years.
*Yes, I know, Oklo. Concentration by natural processes. It's a bit of an exception that proves the rule, though.
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