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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 don
by 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 agoI like the idea of short term storage but it sounds more expensive
- godzillabrennus 7y agohttp://www.deepisolation.com http://www.deepisolation.com They have solved a lot of these issues.
- krick 7y agoI'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 agoIt 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 agoIf it becomes cheaper to re-use or recycle than to throw away—in theory—we will reduce wastefulness and come up with better ways to deal with our problem. But, humans being humans, some will start dumping illegally.
- wbl 7y agoYou have to assess these risks against the risk of living in New Jersey with a basement.
- hinkley 7y ago- The public is exposed to greater danger due to relocation. Every time you move this stuff there's a chance for a vehicular accident or just a storage breach due to human and/or manufacturing error. Whatever happened to vitrification as a solution for some classes of nuclear waste? That was the story for one hot second and I haven't heard about it since.
- alanbernstein 7y agoWhat happens when "We" - whatever local organization is managing this stuff - becomes defunct? This seems to be nearly certain to happen when the half-life of the waste is so much longer than the average lifespan of a national government.
- slumdev 7y ago> We can easily take the containers out again, if we find a better way to dispose or (re)use the garbage We already have ways to reuse the garbage. No new science required. What we need is to lift the ban on breeder reactors and other modern designs.
- oppositelock 7y agoThorium reactors may or may not happen, but one nice part of a LFTR is that it can continuously burn up long lived fissile isotopes into short lived ones. Part of a LFTR's operating requirements are to filter the isotopes and extract or send them back in. Perhaps one day, we can reprocess long lived nuclear waste into shorter lived waste, and this won't be such a big problem.