I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.
For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?
Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.
> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened?
Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.
The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.
This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?
Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...
I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".
It's concern trolling at its worst.
Until we find the Rosetta stone hieroglyphs were unintelligible, and that language only stopped being used 2000 years ago.
Neither concrete nor steel have the lifespans we're discussing thousands, or tens of thousands of years.
And. Bacteria.
When sealed several hundred meters underground in nonporous rock they do have such long lifespans. It's like observing that corn doesn't have a 10 year lifespan when left out on the counter and then objecting to canning it on that basis.
Sure, you need the right place, but it's not like there's a shortage of space far away from everything.
And yet we had a natural nuclear reactor that's been self contained for 2 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...