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Just a random thought. What would happen if you dumped nuclear waste in a volcano? Would that burn it off or cause an explosion?
by philliphaydon 6y ago
Just a random thought. What would happen if you dumped nuclear waste in a volcano? Would that burn it off or cause an explosion?
- crowbahr 6y agoYou have the problem of potential eruptions sending it off everywhere. Nuclear Waste has heavy elements that are dangerous specifically because they're radioactive. The heat might accelerate their half-life decay rate but it doesn't "burn" the atoms.
- philliphaydon 6y agoSo tossing it in wouldn’t cause an eruption or burn off the radiation. But if the volcano erupted then it could send radiation everywhere. Interesting. Is research being done to try figure out safer disposal of nuclear waste?
- thesuitonym 6y agoReally the safest means of disposal is to bury it, but that is fraught with its own problems.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoI did wonder if dumping waste in subduction zones has been looked at.
- bityard 6y agoSafest or cheapest? And on what time scale? Because the safest long-term means of disposal is to launch it into the sun, but that's prohibitively expensive and is short-term extremely dangerous (e.g. the rocket exploding or crashing shortly after lift-off).
- mynameisash 6y agoIf the spent fuel were contained, you could first run it through a breeder reactor[0] to reduce volume by an order of magnitude or two. The remains are still highly radioactive, but now you have much less volume to deal with. I assume that the waste in Chernobyl is largely/entirely distributed and contaminated with sand, dirt, other various debris, and thus probably couldn't benefit from that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
- asdff 6y agoThe best solution is to bury it on land that is already more irradiated than any more added nuclear waste would make it. There is plenty of land like that.
- Apocryphon 6y agoWhat about launching it into space?
- jandrese 6y agoRockets are not 100% reliable--having one carrying radioactive waste explode on launch would make for a really nasty mess to clean up. Ultimately, the total volume of Radioactive waste ever created is tiny in the grand scheme of things. Burying it is not a technical problem. The problems are entirely political. This is also why breeder reactors don't make sense. They're trying to apply a technical solution to a political problem.
- merb 6y ago> Burying it is not a technical problem. it is. the problem is that it needs to be stored way longer than any human is living. basically there are very few sites which might be able to withstand a timeframe so large without every polluting the environment. you know just burying is not enough, you need to be sure that no water or anything else might break your containments. it's probably impossible to do it and it's also not a good idea to think that burying it and forgetting about it is a good idea either.
- jandrese 6y agoThings that are radioactive for longer than human lifetimes are not very radioactive at all. The danger is more that they are still poisonous. Finding places where you can control the groundwater isn't that hard. We have many candidates. Old salt mines are preferred because the salt slowly flows around the containers and entombs them. This is where the relatively small volume of the radioactive waste is a feature, you don't need a massive number of old mines to handle all of the waste. One or two would be sufficient. Most of the concern about this is people demanding solutions that are grossly more complex and elaborate than the problem really demands. A political problem. Imagine if coal mines had to treat their tailings with the same level of care? They are similarly radioactive after a few years and just as poisonous, but we let them be dumped right into streams. Natural gas is extracted by pumping poisonous chemicals into the ground to break up rocks--greatly increasing the possibility of groundwater contamination. Imagine if they had to extract all of those chemicals back out of the ground and then store them someplace where they could be proven to never leak out again. High level radioactive waste doesn't stay high level for very long by its very nature. This is why nuclear power plants have ponds where they store the hot stuff until it cools down enough for long term storage. After that they just have to be handled like any other nasty industrial chemical, plus some extra shielding to protect the workers from hitting their total yearly exposure limits too quickly.
- jtbayly 6y agoI mean, you seem to be asking in earnest, so I'll answer. Still, the question is silly. Of course research is being done on this. Google is your friend.
- philliphaydon 6y agoWell I know we are researching how to /use/ nuclear waste. I believe that’s what one of bill gates projects is trying to do. But I donno if we have just decided burying it is it and that’s it.
- orwin 6y agoThe thing is, reusing nuclear waste is possible, but too expensive in the end, compared to renewables. I think there was 4 research reactor that did that in the world, and Russia launched a new one recently. I still think nuclear must be part of the solution NOW (for an effect on CO@ in 2030 and on climate drift on 2050). Nuclear in 50 year will be too late. And i don't think nuclear is "the best", nor do i think that it isn't dangerous, nor do i think we should stop with renewables. Nuclear is a crutch and should be used as such.
- klaussilveira 6y ago"There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question." - Carl Sagan
- satya71 6y agoI doubt the heat in volcano is enough that change anything at the nuclear level. Heat is just motion of atoms/molecules. The temperature has to be high enough for the atoms to undergo high-energy collisions.
- kzrdude 6y agoWe don't know any non-nuclear process that can accelerate the decay of nuclei, so that should not be possible to change anything about that!
- adammunich 6y agoThere’s some experiments that indicate ultrashort and high energy laser pulses may accelerate decay but not a lot of interest has been allocated to it.
- kzrdude 6y agoUltrashort and high energy.. are you sure we're not getting into gamma rays and nuclear physics with that? I guess by definition we are, if it has an effect :)
- tantalor 6y agoMaybe the heavy atoms would sink into the mantle.
- beckingz 6y agoThere have been serious proposals to put a bunch of nuclear waste in a tungsten sphere, add a few sensors, and use it as a probe into the earth as it melts through the mantle.
- Ajedi32 6y agoSeems like a silly idea, but thinking about it more deeply I'm not so sure. Uranium is almost 7 times as dense as even the densest magma, so it _should_ sink in theory. The only issue I can think of is that "maybe" isn't good enough when you're talking about risking a large amount of radioactive waste getting spread out over a large area in a volcanic eruption if it turns out you're wrong. But if we could figure out a way to do it reliably... maybe? Another potential issue: is getting rid of nuclear waste _permanently_ really such a good idea? What if we discover some other use for it in the future?
- simonh 6y agoVolcanoes are places where magma upwells to the surface, so they'd have to be so heavy they were able to sink against that upward flow. Very unlikely.
- fullstop 6y agoWhen I was a kid I thought that launching nuclear waste into the sun was a decent idea. Now, not so much!
- ceejayoz 6y agoInto the sun would be fine. Launches would be risky, though, and it's easier to send off to deep space instead. An out-of-the-solar-system orbit is cheaper energy wise than an into-the-sun one.
- fullstop 6y agoRight, the sun would obliterate anything that got close. The risks of the containers falling back to earth from a failed launch are significant. Launching into deep space reminds me of the drill instructor in the game Mass Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q1IaWLsyrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q1IaWLsyrQ
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nickalaso 6y agoIt would be a pretty good idea if it didn't require such an insane amount of delta-v to deorbit a payload into the sun.
- devoutsalsa 6y agoRelated: "Why Don't We Throw Trash in Volcanoes? " => https://youtu.be/Q1blQRrM4TA https://youtu.be/Q1blQRrM4TA
- gspr 6y ago"Burn it off"? What would that even mean? Burning is a chemical reaction. It doesn't alter nuclear processes that matter here.
- kstenerud 6y agoThe heat of the volcano wouldn't change anything. The problem is first that you can't guarantee it won't be carried on magma currents and be pushed above ground elsewhere, and second if it got stuck and didn't sink into Earth's core, you'd have a volcano dirty bomb just waiting for the next eruption. And you'd have no way of knowing if it got stuck or not.
- iSnow 6y agoVolcanic eruptions on the one hand and radioactive waste on the other are bad enough - no need to combine both. Basically nothing would happen except that the radioactive materials would be dispersed among the environment.
- sp332 6y agoYou could put it near a subduction zone and wait for it to be pushed under a neighboring tectonic plate.