9 ms·

Deep Borehole Disposal

86 points by lelf 7y ago

Tepix 7y ago
It seems counter-intuitive to use a large amount of water on top of the borehole filling material. If some radiactive waste gets past the filling material, particles may rise up in the water all the way to the surface.
- DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
  Even if that happens, the ammount of particles that make it should be very low. At the very least low enough to not endanger the surroundings. EDIT: Just guessing though, I'm no expert by any means
- opwieurposiu 7y ago
  The "water" is actually drilling mud used to keep the bore from collapsing during construction. It is replaced with solid impermeable materials after the waste containers are loaded into the bottom of the hole.
DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
Not nearly as scary as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
- quickthrowman 7y ago
  What makes this one scary? I agree, the optics are terrible, but studies of each known dumpsite showed no real negative effects..
  - mnsc 7y ago
    It's scary if you think that the precautionary principle should be guiding when dealing with radioactive waste and looking back in history of this, and many other examples of "this seem like a permanent solution" and later scientists going "actually...". And I don't really get too much comfort from statements like "studies ... showed no real negative effects". I still imagine mutant lizards emerging from the ocean in the future with frazers[1] killing off all humanity. [1] lizard tech, don't ask
    - choeger 7y ago
      But in case there exists a hostile non-mutant species of lizards deep down there, dumping our nuclear waste might actually have been a proper defensive first strike. Who knows, maybe we completely wiped out an invasion army?
    - quickthrowman 7y ago
      I agree that ocean dumping is bad. I asked mainly because nobody openly dumps nuclear waste in the ocean any longer, and progress towards long term nuclear waste storage is being made (in Finland, particularly) It seems like the amount of water in the ocean is so vast, that the quantities of nuclear waste dumped into it will not create a nuclear ocean, but I’m just speculating here. Scary nuclear incidents to me are Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer 83, Stanislav Petrov incident, and the Norwegian rocket incident. Early nuclear era ocean dumping that isn’t being continued isn’t exactly an existential threat.
      - carapace 7y ago
        "How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster" (latimes.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21870906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21870906
      - DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash This one is also quite a scary example if you ask me. > Early nuclear era ocean dumping that isn’t being continued isn’t exactly an existential threat. I'm more worried because the mentality that lead to this doesn't seem to have changed whatsoever. The moment something is proven to be a dumb idea, people move on to the next best thing with the exactly same attitude of "We don't know it's bad, so let's just go with it"
        mnsc 7y ago
        > I'm more worried because the mentality that lead to this doesn't seem to have changed whatsoever. I think the current attitude of "new technology will solve this" is an example of this mentality. Examples readily available in this thread.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Its shockingly irresponsible behaviour from national governments of the first world, and these containers are probably not stable in the long term. Not necessarily scary as "ow my god we are going to all die" sence.
  - NopeNotToday 7y ago
    Godzilla
cultus 7y ago
Storing in salt domes is easier. Salt domes are completely impermeable because any incipient cracks creep close.
- giardini 7y ago
  Unless water is introduced, whereupon they fail: "Oil Drilling into a Salt Dome: Catastrophic Failure: Evidence Lake Peigneur 1980 Disaster BP" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhwjSI3UOIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhwjSI3UOIw This is why fracking is associated with earthquakes. Salt mining has a long and well-documented history of damaging subsurface and consequently surface structure, especially in 19th-century England. Frackers were "whistling past the graveyard" by denying that fracking caused earthquakes. They've essentially replicated the history of salt mining associations and corporations who destroyed homes and even towns in their rabid search for salt profits: "Salt: A World History" by Mark Kurlansky "Northwich sinks!": http://jsbookreader.blogspot.com/2011/09/northwich-sinks.html http://jsbookreader.blogspot.com/2011/09/northwich-sinks.htm... "Extraction of Bastard Brine in Northwich": http://www.cheshirebrine.com/history/extraction-of-bastard-brine-in-northwich/ http://www.cheshirebrine.com/history/extraction-of-bastard-b...
  - cultus 7y ago
    You certainly wouldn't want to frack in the salt dome, but you are conflating entirely separate issues. No one is pumping ultra-high pressure drill fluid into waste repos.
Lendal 7y ago
How about we switch to [newer technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor) that doesn't generate so much waste in the first place?
- DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
  Another alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
- na85 7y ago
  It still generates some waste, though, so the question of what to do with that waste remains.
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    Right, but we can't escape thinking about things qualitatively if we want to come to sensible solutions. If level of radiation is considered safe then we have to do something about all the potassium in our bodies.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sgift 7y ago
Personally, I think all of the current "long term storage" options are bad. They promote the idea that we can deal with the garbage once and then the job is done. Continued storage in short term facilities on the other hand has various advantages: * We can easily take the containers out again, if we find a better way to dispose or (re)use the garbage * We can update the containers if new technologies allow better ones * We can check that the containers are still sealed * We do not forget about the garbage, so the chance that someone in the future is hurt by accidentally digging into it is minimized
- alex_duf 7y ago
  I like the idea of short term storage but it sounds more expensive
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  http://www.deepisolation.com http://www.deepisolation.com They have solved a lot of these issues.
- krick 7y ago
  I'm not sure how, let's say, radioactive waste short term storage should look like. It's not like you can put the rods into regular containers and safely transfer them between storage facilities.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  It also has some pretty serious disadvantages. Just off the top of my head: - End-of-life storage requires re-storage regardless of whether better technologies exist - Spillage is more likely to occur due to more frequent handling/repackaging/relocation - Workers are exposed to greater danger due to more frequent handling/repacking/relocation - Overhead is greater since there will likely be a greater number of short term than long term storage facilities - Accidents are more likely and more spread out over a larger area (assumption: short term storage requires more space than long term storage)
  - rolandog 7y ago
Accujack 7y ago
This is mostly notable as an option because: A) It's cheaper than building a Yucca Mountain B) It can be built faster than Yucca Mountain, enabling it to actually be finished before it can be defunded or protested out of existence. Most power generating reactors don't generate much waste relatively speaking... the bulk of the waste that exists is from nuclear weapons. So there's a need for waste disposal, but it's not as bad a problem as many people seem to think. On top of that, newer reactor designs produce less waste, so in the future there may be even less of a need.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  > It can be built faster than Yucca Mountain, enabling it to actually be finished before it can be defunded or protested out of existence. This should not be touted as a feature. This is a surefire way to create local population blowback and most likely ruin any goodwill you may have been able to leverage.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > enabling it to actually be finished before it can be defunded or protested out of existence. Except, both of these things have already occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#American_deep_borehole_disposal_tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#America...
  - Accujack 7y ago
    Nonetheless, they still have the potential to be an easier to implement disposal solution because they're faster/cheaper to create than a massive project. I expect it'll still be necessary to put the hole somewhere there aren't hundreds of people protesting oil pipelines, but that's a topic for the future.
    - 8bitsrule 7y ago
      I heard of a place waaaaaay out in the woods - very few people lived in the area - near the Canadian Shield. One day some some Unidentifed People with serious machinery started drilling a hole. After several days, they went home for the weekend. When they came back, the hole had been filled in. This re-occured a couple more times. The UP never returned.
bob1029 7y ago
This sounds like a reasonable approach. Considering the volume of high level wastes actually being produced, dry cask storage might be the best option if we want to always have "eyes on" the waste materials. Physical risk is a little higher above ground, but you always know exactly where it all is at all times and you can constantly measure it for safety. Shoving it 3 miles deep into the earth is very likely not going to be a problem for anyone, but you will always have some uncertainty around how it is behaving down there.
jisco 7y ago
I don't think it's a good idea. If there will be any fissure in the steel container, then the water we put on top for sure will get there and in the end, that hot contaminated water will raise at the top of water column.
pstuart 7y ago
This reminds me of the short story about a bottomless hole, which is definitely worth 3 minutes of your time to read: https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2015/03/17/he-y-come-on-ou-t-a-short-story-by-shinichi-hoshi-translated-by-stanleigh-jones/ https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2015/03/17/he-y-come-on-ou-...
- war1025 7y ago
  I started in about halfway through to get to the punchline faster. The ending didn't make any sense. Decided to start from the beginning. Ah. A very good little tale.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    And that, gentleman, is why we leave weird artifacts like this one to the profesionals, namely the SCP foundation. ;-)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- saulrh 7y ago
  I know the story is intended to be "caveman science fiction" [1], but I can't help but think that that hole is probably still an excellent way to dispose of most of the things they're disposing of, particularly nuclear waste. After all, it spends, what, a couple decades totally isolated from the rest of the world? Great place for it to decay and become less active. 1: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
duxup 7y ago
Considering the distance, is there any likelihood exposing this material (or the radioactivity) again outside of ... just drilling 3+ km deep to it? This seems like a pretty solid option considering the costs / possible downsides of trying to "construct" something with similar levels of protection.
nsxwolf 7y ago
What a waste of good waste.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Indeed. What is "waste" now may be quite usable in the not-far future. Analogy: every time I cook using aluminum foil, I cringe at throwing out a usable wad of the metal solely because there's some charred food waste on it, when I presume near-future tech will easily reclaim this useful element. Would be nice to have something between "trash" and "recycling" - pre-sorting junk so that future people have a not-unmanageable repository of materials they can work with even though we can't. Likewise nuclear "waste" - it's still active material, generating energy, just needing a few more years/decades before we can use it. Even today we have (or soon will) reactors which "eat" waste from older designs. Put what we have in stable long-term containers, and making odds on when it can be used.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    I'm not sure aluminium is a good example - while your foil is high purity aluminium, large part of Earth is aluminium bound with other elements. Traditionally the main issue was separating it from those. It's questionable storing all this for later would be more efficient, even with higher purity, than just raffine it from rocks at industrial scale.
  - perilunar 7y ago
    Why are you throwing out aluminium foil? Wrap it into a ball, and when the ball gets large enough, put it in the recycling bin.
    - ctdonath 7y ago
      They don't want it with burned/crusted/rotting food on it.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Indeed, most of the regular nuclear was can still be used as fissile material, if someone bothered to reprocess it. It also contans a lot of various useful (even valuable) elements, created by permutation during fission. The amount of realy useless & dangerous is very small. Separating it from the rest is the issue, both economical & political. Still seems like a better option to solve than trying to find a mythical ideal permanent storage place.
codewithcheese 7y ago
I'm surprised people advocate in favor of nuclear energy when waste disposal is still an unresolved issue. Even if it's a modern reactor that has much less waste, it still needs to be safely handled for generations. If modern reactors are successful and their usage scales up, well that is more waste. Both the state governments of Nevada and New Mexico have pushed back on long term storage plans, and the federal government appears to have no current solution.
- cagenut 7y ago
  this is still the main issue to me. I read NTSB crash reports, I read other tech companies post-mortems, I watched Chernobyl, I've worked in devops for a decade. I don't believe that "we" (humanity) have even come close to solving for the long term reliability of systems to build/run thousands of nuclear reactors (what it would take to fight climate change using nuclear) without 1 - 10 of them being disasters. Then on top of that, I even moreso don't believe we can build a stable society long enough to oversee and manage long term waste. We can't figure out how to handle two-generation problems well yet, taking the risk on a 10 generation problem seems to just completely fail to address reality.
- pakitan 7y ago
  It's the lesser evil, IMO. Nuclear waste may kill us but burning fossils will kill us.
- Aunche 7y ago
  Why is nuclear waste the only waste product that requires a perfect long term solution? We don't even have temporary solutions to millions of tons of fertilizer runoff or billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Mining for rare earth metals of solar panels produces a lot of toxic waste, some of which is radioactive. Why doesn't that get as much negative press as nuclear waste? In 2010, there was an estimated 250,000 tons of nuclear waste [1]. The oceans naturally have 4 billion tons of uranium [2]. It seems to me that even the very dumb solution of scattering our nuclear waste across the oceans would have a negligible environmental impact compared to other destructive activities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste [2] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
otterpro 7y ago
It's probably a bad idea, but has anyone thought of sending nuclear waste into space? I've always thought that it might be possible to launch it into space using a space elevator (if that is even feasible), but then I can also see the disaster if something bad happened during the launch, resulting in cataclysmic event.
- 867-5309 7y ago
  I'd imagine it would not have to leave just this planet, but also the whole solar system not to pose any future threat
  - NopeNotToday 7y ago
    We can make anything leave the solar system, with an escape velocity and the proper orientation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...
  - RunningDroid 7y ago
    Some of the nuclear material may be valuable in the future, so it's probably better to set it in a stable orbit between Jupiter and Saturn.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Some earlier spacecraft used thermoelectric generators powered by isotopic decay. More recently there have been some vigorous protests of this design, even though the modern versions apparently encase the radioactive material in a ceramic matrix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... If a well designed, low yield nuclear reactor can't be launched then firing random waste into space will surely draw many more protestors. Also I'm often surprised by the volume of waste we're talking about here. Under this umbrella you have not only fuel rods but also contaminated materials (eg, building materials, soil), and the launch costs per pound are very, very high. I think I heard at one point someone was trying to work out if they could safely evaporate water (heat of vaporization of water being much lower than most isotopes?) and just store the residuals but even that got pushback. Hanford, if memory serves, has a rather substantial volume of liquid waste to deal with, and some of the containment vessels are past their expected lifespan.
allovernow 7y ago
I don't understand why nuclear waste disposal is so controversial. The amount of waste generated is relatively tiny. Choose a site without a permeable path to an aquifer, dump the waste, seal it off, and forget about it. What are the risks? 1. Some population thousands of years from now stumbles upon the waste and a small minority may die from exposure/contamination 2. Containment breach occurs due to degradation or earthquake or some other destructive event and some minimally radioactive waste leaks out of the containment site. Are either of these serious concerns with respect to the benefit of nuclear power? If disposal occurs somewhere deep in the continental U.S., are there even any actors powerful enough to commandeer the waste for nefarious purposes? What am I missing?
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  > a site without a permeable path to an aquifer This is why salt formations are ideal. The existence of the formation is proof that water isn't leaving the area and hasn't been leaving the area even on geological time scales.
  - andor 7y ago
    Exactly, like the Asse mine and nuclear waste repository in Germany. Which now has 13500 liters of water flowing in each day, dissolving salt formations making for a slightly corrosive environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deutschlandfunk.de%2Fmarodes-atommuelllager-die-wachsende-gefahr-von-asse-ii.724.de.html%3Fdram%3Aarticle_id%3D440331 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> What are the risks? Experience teaches that anytime we can't see the risks of a technological solution, it's not because there aren't any. But because we can't see them.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
fnord77 7y ago
rather than hiding it down some hole or in a cave where it will be forgotten until it starts seeping into the aquifer, why not create a containment system that's right out in the open so everyone can keep an eye on it and maintain it?
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  The way I understand it, we expect that our waste will outlast our civilisation and that having it lying around in the open will endanger the civilisation(s) that (we fervently hope) will follow. See wikipedia pages and references for work on this: Long-time nuclear waste warning messages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin... Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - Warning messages for future humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Warning_messages_for_future_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Wa... Also, examples of proposed hostile architecture here: https://wipp.energy.gov/pdfs/site_markers.pdf https://wipp.energy.gov/pdfs/site_markers.pdf And the full permanent markers implementation plan, here: https://wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarkersImplementationPlan.pdf https://wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarkersImplementati...
carapace 7y ago
A lot of folks here being real casual about adding radioactive poison to the only known biosphere in the whole Universe, especially considering that's where all our kids live. There is a fusion reactor in the sky. It's maintenance-free and so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from a hundred and fifty giga-meters away.
- waste_monk 7y ago
  Children are the future, unless we stop them today.

86 points by lelf 7y ago

It seems counter-intuitive to use a large amount of water on top of the borehole filling material. If some radiactive waste gets past the filling material, particles may rise up in the water all the way to the surface.

DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
Even if that happens, the ammount of particles that make it should be very low. At the very least low enough to not endanger the surroundings. EDIT: Just guessing though, I'm no expert by any means
opwieurposiu 7y ago
The "water" is actually drilling mud used to keep the bore from collapsing during construction. It is replaced with solid impermeable materials after the waste containers are loaded into the bottom of the hole.

DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago

Not nearly as scary as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

quickthrowman 7y ago
What makes this one scary? I agree, the optics are terrible, but studies of each known dumpsite showed no real negative effects..
- mnsc 7y ago
  It's scary if you think that the precautionary principle should be guiding when dealing with radioactive waste and looking back in history of this, and many other examples of "this seem like a permanent solution" and later scientists going "actually...". And I don't really get too much comfort from statements like "studies ... showed no real negative effects". I still imagine mutant lizards emerging from the ocean in the future with frazers[1] killing off all humanity. [1] lizard tech, don't ask
  - choeger 7y ago
    But in case there exists a hostile non-mutant species of lizards deep down there, dumping our nuclear waste might actually have been a proper defensive first strike. Who knows, maybe we completely wiped out an invasion army?
  - quickthrowman 7y ago
    I agree that ocean dumping is bad. I asked mainly because nobody openly dumps nuclear waste in the ocean any longer, and progress towards long term nuclear waste storage is being made (in Finland, particularly) It seems like the amount of water in the ocean is so vast, that the quantities of nuclear waste dumped into it will not create a nuclear ocean, but I’m just speculating here. Scary nuclear incidents to me are Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer 83, Stanislav Petrov incident, and the Norwegian rocket incident. Early nuclear era ocean dumping that isn’t being continued isn’t exactly an existential threat.
    - carapace 7y ago
      "How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster" (latimes.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21870906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21870906
    - DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash This one is also quite a scary example if you ask me. > Early nuclear era ocean dumping that isn’t being continued isn’t exactly an existential threat. I'm more worried because the mentality that lead to this doesn't seem to have changed whatsoever. The moment something is proven to be a dumb idea, people move on to the next best thing with the exactly same attitude of "We don't know it's bad, so let's just go with it"
      - mnsc 7y ago
        > I'm more worried because the mentality that lead to this doesn't seem to have changed whatsoever. I think the current attitude of "new technology will solve this" is an example of this mentality. Examples readily available in this thread.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Its shockingly irresponsible behaviour from national governments of the first world, and these containers are probably not stable in the long term. Not necessarily scary as "ow my god we are going to all die" sence.
- NopeNotToday 7y ago
  Godzilla

cultus 7y ago

Storing in salt domes is easier. Salt domes are completely impermeable because any incipient cracks creep close.

giardini 7y ago
Unless water is introduced, whereupon they fail: "Oil Drilling into a Salt Dome: Catastrophic Failure: Evidence Lake Peigneur 1980 Disaster BP" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhwjSI3UOIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhwjSI3UOIw This is why fracking is associated with earthquakes. Salt mining has a long and well-documented history of damaging subsurface and consequently surface structure, especially in 19th-century England. Frackers were "whistling past the graveyard" by denying that fracking caused earthquakes. They've essentially replicated the history of salt mining associations and corporations who destroyed homes and even towns in their rabid search for salt profits: "Salt: A World History" by Mark Kurlansky "Northwich sinks!": http://jsbookreader.blogspot.com/2011/09/northwich-sinks.html http://jsbookreader.blogspot.com/2011/09/northwich-sinks.htm... "Extraction of Bastard Brine in Northwich": http://www.cheshirebrine.com/history/extraction-of-bastard-brine-in-northwich/ http://www.cheshirebrine.com/history/extraction-of-bastard-b...
- cultus 7y ago
  You certainly wouldn't want to frack in the salt dome, but you are conflating entirely separate issues. No one is pumping ultra-high pressure drill fluid into waste repos.

Lendal 7y ago

How about we switch to [newer technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor) that doesn't generate so much waste in the first place?

DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
Another alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
na85 7y ago
It still generates some waste, though, so the question of what to do with that waste remains.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  Right, but we can't escape thinking about things qualitatively if we want to come to sensible solutions. If level of radiation is considered safe then we have to do something about all the potassium in our bodies.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sgift 7y ago

Personally, I think all of the current "long term storage" options are bad. They promote the idea that we can deal with the garbage once and then the job is done. Continued storage in short term facilities on the other hand has various advantages: * We can easily take the containers out again, if we find a better way to dispose or (re)use the garbage * We can update the containers if new technologies allow better ones * We can check that the containers are still sealed * We do not forget about the garbage, so the chance that someone in the future is hurt by accidentally digging into it is minimized

alex_duf 7y ago
I like the idea of short term storage but it sounds more expensive
godzillabrennus 7y ago
http://www.deepisolation.com http://www.deepisolation.com They have solved a lot of these issues.
krick 7y ago
I'm not sure how, let's say, radioactive waste short term storage should look like. It's not like you can put the rods into regular containers and safely transfer them between storage facilities.
cgriswald 7y ago
It also has some pretty serious disadvantages. Just off the top of my head: - End-of-life storage requires re-storage regardless of whether better technologies exist - Spillage is more likely to occur due to more frequent handling/repackaging/relocation - Workers are exposed to greater danger due to more frequent handling/repacking/relocation - Overhead is greater since there will likely be a greater number of short term than long term storage facilities - Accidents are more likely and more spread out over a larger area (assumption: short term storage requires more space than long term storage)
- rolandog 7y ago

Accujack 7y ago

This is mostly notable as an option because: A) It's cheaper than building a Yucca Mountain B) It can be built faster than Yucca Mountain, enabling it to actually be finished before it can be defunded or protested out of existence. Most power generating reactors don't generate much waste relatively speaking... the bulk of the waste that exists is from nuclear weapons. So there's a need for waste disposal, but it's not as bad a problem as many people seem to think. On top of that, newer reactor designs produce less waste, so in the future there may be even less of a need.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
> It can be built faster than Yucca Mountain, enabling it to actually be finished before it can be defunded or protested out of existence. This should not be touted as a feature. This is a surefire way to create local population blowback and most likely ruin any goodwill you may have been able to leverage.
cr0sh 7y ago
> enabling it to actually be finished before it can be defunded or protested out of existence. Except, both of these things have already occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#American_deep_borehole_disposal_tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#America...
- Accujack 7y ago
  Nonetheless, they still have the potential to be an easier to implement disposal solution because they're faster/cheaper to create than a massive project. I expect it'll still be necessary to put the hole somewhere there aren't hundreds of people protesting oil pipelines, but that's a topic for the future.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    I heard of a place waaaaaay out in the woods - very few people lived in the area - near the Canadian Shield. One day some some Unidentifed People with serious machinery started drilling a hole. After several days, they went home for the weekend. When they came back, the hole had been filled in. This re-occured a couple more times. The UP never returned.

bob1029 7y ago

This sounds like a reasonable approach. Considering the volume of high level wastes actually being produced, dry cask storage might be the best option if we want to always have "eyes on" the waste materials. Physical risk is a little higher above ground, but you always know exactly where it all is at all times and you can constantly measure it for safety. Shoving it 3 miles deep into the earth is very likely not going to be a problem for anyone, but you will always have some uncertainty around how it is behaving down there.

jisco 7y ago

I don't think it's a good idea. If there will be any fissure in the steel container, then the water we put on top for sure will get there and in the end, that hot contaminated water will raise at the top of water column.

pstuart 7y ago

This reminds me of the short story about a bottomless hole, which is definitely worth 3 minutes of your time to read: https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2015/03/17/he-y-come-on-ou-t-a-short-story-by-shinichi-hoshi-translated-by-stanleigh-jones/ https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2015/03/17/he-y-come-on-ou-...

war1025 7y ago
I started in about halfway through to get to the punchline faster. The ending didn't make any sense. Decided to start from the beginning. Ah. A very good little tale.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  And that, gentleman, is why we leave weird artifacts like this one to the profesionals, namely the SCP foundation. ;-)
deleted 7y ago
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saulrh 7y ago
I know the story is intended to be "caveman science fiction" [1], but I can't help but think that that hole is probably still an excellent way to dispose of most of the things they're disposing of, particularly nuclear waste. After all, it spends, what, a couple decades totally isolated from the rest of the world? Great place for it to decay and become less active. 1: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

duxup 7y ago

Considering the distance, is there any likelihood exposing this material (or the radioactivity) again outside of ... just drilling 3+ km deep to it? This seems like a pretty solid option considering the costs / possible downsides of trying to "construct" something with similar levels of protection.

nsxwolf 7y ago

What a waste of good waste.

ctdonath 7y ago
Indeed. What is "waste" now may be quite usable in the not-far future. Analogy: every time I cook using aluminum foil, I cringe at throwing out a usable wad of the metal solely because there's some charred food waste on it, when I presume near-future tech will easily reclaim this useful element. Would be nice to have something between "trash" and "recycling" - pre-sorting junk so that future people have a not-unmanageable repository of materials they can work with even though we can't. Likewise nuclear "waste" - it's still active material, generating energy, just needing a few more years/decades before we can use it. Even today we have (or soon will) reactors which "eat" waste from older designs. Put what we have in stable long-term containers, and making odds on when it can be used.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  I'm not sure aluminium is a good example - while your foil is high purity aluminium, large part of Earth is aluminium bound with other elements. Traditionally the main issue was separating it from those. It's questionable storing all this for later would be more efficient, even with higher purity, than just raffine it from rocks at industrial scale.
- perilunar 7y ago
  Why are you throwing out aluminium foil? Wrap it into a ball, and when the ball gets large enough, put it in the recycling bin.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    They don't want it with burned/crusted/rotting food on it.
m4rtink 7y ago
Indeed, most of the regular nuclear was can still be used as fissile material, if someone bothered to reprocess it. It also contans a lot of various useful (even valuable) elements, created by permutation during fission. The amount of realy useless & dangerous is very small. Separating it from the rest is the issue, both economical & political. Still seems like a better option to solve than trying to find a mythical ideal permanent storage place.

codewithcheese 7y ago

I'm surprised people advocate in favor of nuclear energy when waste disposal is still an unresolved issue. Even if it's a modern reactor that has much less waste, it still needs to be safely handled for generations. If modern reactors are successful and their usage scales up, well that is more waste. Both the state governments of Nevada and New Mexico have pushed back on long term storage plans, and the federal government appears to have no current solution.

cagenut 7y ago
this is still the main issue to me. I read NTSB crash reports, I read other tech companies post-mortems, I watched Chernobyl, I've worked in devops for a decade. I don't believe that "we" (humanity) have even come close to solving for the long term reliability of systems to build/run thousands of nuclear reactors (what it would take to fight climate change using nuclear) without 1 - 10 of them being disasters. Then on top of that, I even moreso don't believe we can build a stable society long enough to oversee and manage long term waste. We can't figure out how to handle two-generation problems well yet, taking the risk on a 10 generation problem seems to just completely fail to address reality.
pakitan 7y ago
It's the lesser evil, IMO. Nuclear waste may kill us but burning fossils will kill us.
Aunche 7y ago
Why is nuclear waste the only waste product that requires a perfect long term solution? We don't even have temporary solutions to millions of tons of fertilizer runoff or billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Mining for rare earth metals of solar panels produces a lot of toxic waste, some of which is radioactive. Why doesn't that get as much negative press as nuclear waste? In 2010, there was an estimated 250,000 tons of nuclear waste [1]. The oceans naturally have 4 billion tons of uranium [2]. It seems to me that even the very dumb solution of scattering our nuclear waste across the oceans would have a negligible environmental impact compared to other destructive activities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste [2] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

otterpro 7y ago

It's probably a bad idea, but has anyone thought of sending nuclear waste into space? I've always thought that it might be possible to launch it into space using a space elevator (if that is even feasible), but then I can also see the disaster if something bad happened during the launch, resulting in cataclysmic event.

867-5309 7y ago
I'd imagine it would not have to leave just this planet, but also the whole solar system not to pose any future threat
- NopeNotToday 7y ago
  We can make anything leave the solar system, with an escape velocity and the proper orientation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...
- RunningDroid 7y ago
  Some of the nuclear material may be valuable in the future, so it's probably better to set it in a stable orbit between Jupiter and Saturn.
hinkley 7y ago
Some earlier spacecraft used thermoelectric generators powered by isotopic decay. More recently there have been some vigorous protests of this design, even though the modern versions apparently encase the radioactive material in a ceramic matrix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... If a well designed, low yield nuclear reactor can't be launched then firing random waste into space will surely draw many more protestors. Also I'm often surprised by the volume of waste we're talking about here. Under this umbrella you have not only fuel rods but also contaminated materials (eg, building materials, soil), and the launch costs per pound are very, very high. I think I heard at one point someone was trying to work out if they could safely evaporate water (heat of vaporization of water being much lower than most isotopes?) and just store the residuals but even that got pushback. Hanford, if memory serves, has a rather substantial volume of liquid waste to deal with, and some of the containment vessels are past their expected lifespan.

allovernow 7y ago

I don't understand why nuclear waste disposal is so controversial. The amount of waste generated is relatively tiny. Choose a site without a permeable path to an aquifer, dump the waste, seal it off, and forget about it. What are the risks? 1. Some population thousands of years from now stumbles upon the waste and a small minority may die from exposure/contamination 2. Containment breach occurs due to degradation or earthquake or some other destructive event and some minimally radioactive waste leaks out of the containment site. Are either of these serious concerns with respect to the benefit of nuclear power? If disposal occurs somewhere deep in the continental U.S., are there even any actors powerful enough to commandeer the waste for nefarious purposes? What am I missing?

jjoonathan 7y ago
> a site without a permeable path to an aquifer This is why salt formations are ideal. The existence of the formation is proof that water isn't leaving the area and hasn't been leaving the area even on geological time scales.
- andor 7y ago
  Exactly, like the Asse mine and nuclear waste repository in Germany. Which now has 13500 liters of water flowing in each day, dissolving salt formations making for a slightly corrosive environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deutschlandfunk.de%2Fmarodes-atommuelllager-die-wachsende-gefahr-von-asse-ii.724.de.html%3Fdram%3Aarticle_id%3D440331 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> What are the risks? Experience teaches that anytime we can't see the risks of a technological solution, it's not because there aren't any. But because we can't see them.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

fnord77 7y ago

rather than hiding it down some hole or in a cave where it will be forgotten until it starts seeping into the aquifer, why not create a containment system that's right out in the open so everyone can keep an eye on it and maintain it?

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
The way I understand it, we expect that our waste will outlast our civilisation and that having it lying around in the open will endanger the civilisation(s) that (we fervently hope) will follow. See wikipedia pages and references for work on this: Long-time nuclear waste warning messages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin... Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - Warning messages for future humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Warning_messages_for_future_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Wa... Also, examples of proposed hostile architecture here: https://wipp.energy.gov/pdfs/site_markers.pdf https://wipp.energy.gov/pdfs/site_markers.pdf And the full permanent markers implementation plan, here: https://wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarkersImplementationPlan.pdf https://wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarkersImplementati...

carapace 7y ago

A lot of folks here being real casual about adding radioactive poison to the only known biosphere in the whole Universe, especially considering that's where all our kids live. There is a fusion reactor in the sky. It's maintenance-free and so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from a hundred and fifty giga-meters away.

waste_monk 7y ago
Children are the future, unless we stop them today.