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I just don't really see how this is true. Isn't the basic idea to just dig a really deep hole somewhere geologically stable and dump it in? My impression isn't

I just don't really see how this is true. Isn't the basic idea to just dig a really deep hole somewhere geologically stable and dump it in? My impression isn't that the problem isn't solvable, but simply that no one has actually made the appropriate investment yet. That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.

cinntaile 6y ago
Research has been ongoing since the 70s to find geologically stable underground storage, this is not a solved problem.
- pas 6y ago
  No. This is not a real problem. If it were NPPs would not store spent fuel on site. The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway. Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
  - cinntaile 6y ago
    If it was an easy problem then it wouldn't have taken 50 years to build a long term storage facility. Most problems are not easy, it just looks easy to outsiders.
    - R0b0t1 6y ago
      It took that long because idiots routinely hold up the process with infinite questions. At some point you need to realize your existing behavior is worse and just move on, do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
    - pas 6y ago
      It's an easy problem that doesn't really require a solution. It doesn't really help with costs, so there's no hurry, and it's a political quagmire. So it just did not happen. (WIPP kind of happened, and is happening, but it's for non-commercial nuclear waste.)
- andbberger 6y ago
  Yes it is. You are spreading misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
  - cinntaile 6y ago
    Spreading misinformation... That's a bit harsh. It's not even in use yet. Thanks for the example though.
    - andbberger 6y ago
      Not really. Climate change is an existential problem that nuclear energy is one of few legitimately promising solutions to, so I don't think it's a stretch to compare the vapid and uninformed anti-nuclear arguments that pop up in every HN thread to anti-maskers: harmful rhetoric with no scientific basis.
      - cinntaile 6y ago
        I am not anti-nuclear though, I don't know where you got that from. Your example isn't even in production use yet so what I said was factually correct and if this is the only country in the entire world then this problem will persist for at least another few decades. It seems like you have very strong feelings about this and that is clouding your rational judgement.
        andbberger 6y ago
        You are spreading factually incorrect nuclear dogma. You're kidding yourself if you think you're not anti-nuclear. You claim this is an unsolved problem, Finland says otherwise. Moreover, deep geological storage is only needed for super long-term storage (like, long after the last humans have kicked the bucket). In the medium-term, storing high-level waste onsite is a perfectly adequate solution. The so-called waste problem is complete bullshit - there was never a problem. My rational judgement is not in question here, but that of all anti-nuclear proponents should be. And you're right, I do have strong feelings. Can you really blame me? I'm inheriting a broken world that looks existential climate change in the face, shrugs, lights up a spliff and says "well solar is pretty cheap". We've had the technological solution to climate change in hand for 60+ years: rocks so spicy they'll power our entire civilization for millenia. Yet we (the people) got outplayed so hard by the oil lobby that not only is nuclear energy on the decline, threads like these where supposedly technologically literate people espouse greenpeace's old talking points abound. And while this baseless and frustrating 'debate' continues, the water rises.
deleted 6y ago
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chmod775 6y ago
Your assumption is that every country is guaranteed to have access to underground places that are "geologically stable" over the required time-period, aren't aquifers, or at risk letting water in by some other means. The assumption is simply wrong.
- loeg 6y ago
  You could throw it in the fucking ocean and it would be better than coal plants, and arguably better than natural gas.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    You could grind it up and intentionally pump it into the air, and it still would likely kill a tiny portion of the number of people killed by coal plants. I mean a whole lot of coal plants do pump uranium dust into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you'd pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be tiny.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      Hell, I'd bet you could mix it into soft drinks and sell it as "Nuka Cola Quantum" and it'd still be significantly less deadly than coal.
- sushisource 6y ago
  How is that the assumption? There only needs to be one such place on the whole planet (or, shit, shoot it into space). I'm not saying it's easy (in fact, that was kinda my point), but it's absolutely possible and I didn't assume anything about individual groups needing their own storage.
Lammy 6y ago
I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” and a link to the spiky ground and “this is not a place of honor”. Assuming a future civilization gets to exist considering we keep burning petroleum products and calling them clean while we waste time arguing about tech that’s been proven for fifty years because the right groups of people can’t own it.
- chmod775 6y ago
  > I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion? The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one. If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
  - exar0815 6y ago
    This is not true. The most sensible place was intentionally overlooked because one of germanys larges political parties (CSU) has all her voters there, and the next best place (Gorleben) was politically and ideologically fought over for decades until we gave up and said fuck you and everyone, lets just store it where it stands.
    - logifail 6y ago
      > most sensible place Can you define who gets to decide whether a place is "most sensible"? Subject-matter experts? National politicians? Regional politicians? Or maybe it's more like: voters (nationally)? voters (regionally)? voters (locally)?
deleted 6y ago
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j-pb 6y ago
The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands. Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities? East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border. Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with. So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
- sobellian 6y ago
  If World Wars 3, 4, and 5 all occur then I think we can safely say the global population has already been thoroughly irradiated.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    Yeah, if the dangerous scenario is what if ww3 happens, wipes out all human knowledge, civilization is rebuilt and accidentally digs a kilometer down and finds some nuclear waste then I mean the whole ww3 is probably a bigger deal. Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity. Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the energy problems. I think we might need that time to get to full renewables, if we ever get there.
- spideymans 6y ago
  >And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it. This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Here is a map of seismic areas worldwide https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1441205 https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1... Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are high.
- andbberger 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
dathinab 6y ago
> geologically stable Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast... Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear. Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates. Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons". Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not). Etc. Etc. I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.
- rrss 6y ago
  > Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear waste... it is. drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    There is no Permian Basin in Germany ...
    - rrss 6y ago
      There are similar basins in Europe, probably similarly suitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      God forbid Germany exports its nuclear waste.
- corty 6y ago
  The IPCC report on climate change mitigation puts nuclear median cost on par with wind power (cheaper than offshore, slightly more expensive than onshore), cheaper than solar, more expensive than hydro. In total, squarely on par with the usual suspects for green energy. And they include fuel and decommissioning in that cost. See page 71 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_full.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... (caution, huge pdf). An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.
godelski 6y ago
It also is an issue we have a lot of time to solve. It isn't like humans are going anywhere soon. It also isn't like there's that much waste. Honestly it probably won't happen until there is enough waste that local storage becomes a problem. Which at this rate would take a few hundred more years.
- hu3 6y ago
  Until then we can figure out a solution. Something that seems crazy now will be trivial by then. For example an electromagnetic cannon to shoot waste into outer space [1]. [1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth
isodev 6y ago
The challenge with nuclear waste is that you can’t just throw money at it and expect it to work. Radioactivity and chemical toxicity persists for hundreds and thousands of years. What is needed to design, build and maintain such sites is beyond “extreme engineering” and also very expensive. Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space." Please no. A launch failure with several tons of radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.
andbberger 6y ago
Your impressions have no basis in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

cinntaile 6y ago

Research has been ongoing since the 70s to find geologically stable underground storage, this is not a solved problem.

pas 6y ago
No. This is not a real problem. If it were NPPs would not store spent fuel on site. The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway. Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
- cinntaile 6y ago
  If it was an easy problem then it wouldn't have taken 50 years to build a long term storage facility. Most problems are not easy, it just looks easy to outsiders.
  - R0b0t1 6y ago
    It took that long because idiots routinely hold up the process with infinite questions. At some point you need to realize your existing behavior is worse and just move on, do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
  - pas 6y ago
    It's an easy problem that doesn't really require a solution. It doesn't really help with costs, so there's no hurry, and it's a political quagmire. So it just did not happen. (WIPP kind of happened, and is happening, but it's for non-commercial nuclear waste.)
andbberger 6y ago
Yes it is. You are spreading misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- cinntaile 6y ago
  Spreading misinformation... That's a bit harsh. It's not even in use yet. Thanks for the example though.
  - andbberger 6y ago
    Not really. Climate change is an existential problem that nuclear energy is one of few legitimately promising solutions to, so I don't think it's a stretch to compare the vapid and uninformed anti-nuclear arguments that pop up in every HN thread to anti-maskers: harmful rhetoric with no scientific basis.
    - cinntaile 6y ago
      I am not anti-nuclear though, I don't know where you got that from. Your example isn't even in production use yet so what I said was factually correct and if this is the only country in the entire world then this problem will persist for at least another few decades. It seems like you have very strong feelings about this and that is clouding your rational judgement.
      - andbberger 6y ago
        You are spreading factually incorrect nuclear dogma. You're kidding yourself if you think you're not anti-nuclear. You claim this is an unsolved problem, Finland says otherwise. Moreover, deep geological storage is only needed for super long-term storage (like, long after the last humans have kicked the bucket). In the medium-term, storing high-level waste onsite is a perfectly adequate solution. The so-called waste problem is complete bullshit - there was never a problem. My rational judgement is not in question here, but that of all anti-nuclear proponents should be. And you're right, I do have strong feelings. Can you really blame me? I'm inheriting a broken world that looks existential climate change in the face, shrugs, lights up a spliff and says "well solar is pretty cheap". We've had the technological solution to climate change in hand for 60+ years: rocks so spicy they'll power our entire civilization for millenia. Yet we (the people) got outplayed so hard by the oil lobby that not only is nuclear energy on the decline, threads like these where supposedly technologically literate people espouse greenpeace's old talking points abound. And while this baseless and frustrating 'debate' continues, the water rises.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chmod775 6y ago

Your assumption is that every country is guaranteed to have access to underground places that are "geologically stable" over the required time-period, aren't aquifers, or at risk letting water in by some other means. The assumption is simply wrong.

loeg 6y ago
You could throw it in the fucking ocean and it would be better than coal plants, and arguably better than natural gas.
- vidarh 6y ago
  You could grind it up and intentionally pump it into the air, and it still would likely kill a tiny portion of the number of people killed by coal plants. I mean a whole lot of coal plants do pump uranium dust into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you'd pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be tiny.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Hell, I'd bet you could mix it into soft drinks and sell it as "Nuka Cola Quantum" and it'd still be significantly less deadly than coal.
sushisource 6y ago
How is that the assumption? There only needs to be one such place on the whole planet (or, shit, shoot it into space). I'm not saying it's easy (in fact, that was kinda my point), but it's absolutely possible and I didn't assume anything about individual groups needing their own storage.

Lammy 6y ago

I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” and a link to the spiky ground and “this is not a place of honor”. Assuming a future civilization gets to exist considering we keep burning petroleum products and calling them clean while we waste time arguing about tech that’s been proven for fifty years because the right groups of people can’t own it.

chmod775 6y ago
> I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion? The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one. If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.
- Lammy 6y ago
  The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
- exar0815 6y ago
  This is not true. The most sensible place was intentionally overlooked because one of germanys larges political parties (CSU) has all her voters there, and the next best place (Gorleben) was politically and ideologically fought over for decades until we gave up and said fuck you and everyone, lets just store it where it stands.
  - logifail 6y ago
    > most sensible place Can you define who gets to decide whether a place is "most sensible"? Subject-matter experts? National politicians? Regional politicians? Or maybe it's more like: voters (nationally)? voters (regionally)? voters (locally)?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

j-pb 6y ago

The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years. And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands. Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities? East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border. Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with. So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.

sobellian 6y ago
If World Wars 3, 4, and 5 all occur then I think we can safely say the global population has already been thoroughly irradiated.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Yeah, if the dangerous scenario is what if ww3 happens, wipes out all human knowledge, civilization is rebuilt and accidentally digs a kilometer down and finds some nuclear waste then I mean the whole ww3 is probably a bigger deal. Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity. Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the energy problems. I think we might need that time to get to full renewables, if we ever get there.
spideymans 6y ago
>And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it. This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Here is a map of seismic areas worldwide https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1441205 https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1... Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Where is somewhere actually geologically stable long term? Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are high.
andbberger 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

dathinab 6y ago

> geologically stable Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast... Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear. Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates. Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons". Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not). Etc. Etc. I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.

rrss 6y ago
> Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear waste... it is. drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.
- dathinab 6y ago
  There is no Permian Basin in Germany ...
  - rrss 6y ago
    There are similar basins in Europe, probably similarly suitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(Europe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_basin
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    God forbid Germany exports its nuclear waste.
corty 6y ago
The IPCC report on climate change mitigation puts nuclear median cost on par with wind power (cheaper than offshore, slightly more expensive than onshore), cheaper than solar, more expensive than hydro. In total, squarely on par with the usual suspects for green energy. And they include fuel and decommissioning in that cost. See page 71 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_full.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... (caution, huge pdf). An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.

godelski 6y ago

It also is an issue we have a lot of time to solve. It isn't like humans are going anywhere soon. It also isn't like there's that much waste. Honestly it probably won't happen until there is enough waste that local storage becomes a problem. Which at this rate would take a few hundred more years.

hu3 6y ago
Until then we can figure out a solution. Something that seems crazy now will be trivial by then. For example an electromagnetic cannon to shoot waste into outer space [1]. [1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth

isodev 6y ago

The challenge with nuclear waste is that you can’t just throw money at it and expect it to work. Radioactivity and chemical toxicity persists for hundreds and thousands of years. What is needed to design, build and maintain such sites is beyond “extreme engineering” and also very expensive. Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.

inglor_cz 6y ago
"Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space." Please no. A launch failure with several tons of radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.

andbberger 6y ago

Your impressions have no basis in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...