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It's not tricky. There are already disposal sites that have enough capacity to accommodate nuclear waste for centuries. Spent nuclear fuel is given time to coo
by manfredo 7y ago
It's not tricky. There are already disposal sites that have enough capacity to accommodate nuclear waste for centuries.
Spent nuclear fuel is given time to cool off under a pool of water. After that, it is encased in a concrete cylinder. These cylinders are then buried. The main concern for the burial site is that it isn't close to an aquifer, in case the cylinders degrade and leak fuel.
Geologic activity is not a concern for the waste itself (but it could damage entrance tunnels for the digs), in fact some groups are experimenting with using subduction zones to make waste get sucked out of the earth's crust.
Thieves are not a concern either. The waste caskets are huge concrete cylinders buried underground. One might as well mine uranium. Or just buy it commercially. Reprocessing the waste into weapons requires large centrifuges which are much harder to obtain than uranium itself.
The hypothetical scenarios in which humans could be contaminated by buried nuclear waste are well into the realm of hyperbole. Sure, if someone dug hundreds of meters underground in a waste disposal site with no natural resources in the vicinity and broke open the storage caskets then yes, they will be exposed to radiation. There's no way that this would happen accidentally, at least short of even more outlandish scenarios that involve societal collapse, subsequent loss of all records describing nuclear waste disposal sites.
Edit (HN won't let me respond):
Let me phrase it better: the Yucca mountain dig has enough capacity at the moment to accommodate the waste that would be generated by nuclear power over the course of centuries. The waste itself will be stored for millennia (though much of it will likely be reprocessed if nuclear power becomes more popular).
The point remains: nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem
- pizza234 7y ago> It's not tricky. There are already disposal sites that have enough capacity to accommodate nuclear waste for centuries. It's ironic how the "centuries" mentioned are in fact not enough (by a long shot) for 100% of the waste to decade. If the more accurate "millennia" was used, it would be unrealistic in a very obvious way (at least, to prudent engineers/managers) to talk about maintenance. --- Software project, 20 years after: "This project sucks. Nobody knows it. It's undocumented. There are bugs unfixed for years. There are no tools to work with it. We can't work on it without breaking something. It's a disaster." Nuclear waste disposal project, 10.000 years after: "EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY FINE". Sure. /sarcasm
- moftz 7y agoFrance doesn't really have any big deserts for their own Yucca Mountain. So they would need someone willing to import their nuclear waste. Also, you don't need to process nuclear waste to build a weapon. Attach some Caesium-137 to an air-burst weapon and you can ruin lots of land really quick.
- hollerith 7y agoUh, how would I produce the Caesium-137 without using a nuclear reactor?
- manfredo 7y agoPresumably, they're referring to the risk that someone might dig up nuclear waste and use it in a dirt bomb. But that kind of delivery method would be better used to deliver chemical weapons that are much more toxic than spent nuclear fuel (and probably easier to obtain, nuclear waste or not).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]