9 ms·

In Finland they are already filling up a 100k year long term storage mine [1]. Will every country with nuclear power have to find and dig (and counter-NIMBY) th

In Finland they are already filling up a 100k year long term storage mine [1]. Will every country with nuclear power have to find and dig (and counter-NIMBY) their own mines or could those with more favorable geological features offer theirs to others? Earthquake-prone Japan might have a hard time finding an appropriate location. 1: 6m Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50

dekhn 5y ago
The US already identified a plausible site but for mostly political reasons, it was rejected and now most waste is stored in several pre-existing locations in the country and the rest is stored onsite at existing reactors. Both of those options are fairly risky compared to the planned repository but are more politically expedient. It seems not unreasonable to expect many countries will follow Sweden and Finland and actually proceed with burial, and eventually some catastrophe in the US (pig farm manure pit wall breaks, sweeps plant's storage tanks into a major river) will make Yucca a possibility again. Or, we coiuld just give Nevada $50B and ask them to take on the risk for the next 100kyears.
- sidewndr46 5y ago
  It's entirely possible that Finland and other countries are positioning themselves to become the biggest "exporter" of nuclear waste disposal. There are plenty of countries around the world with no actual plan for waste disposal, including the US. If Finland is willing to accept the risk in exchange for a certain amount of financial compensation, then it seems likely wealthy countries would make that choice.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    That's a fascinating concept. Do the people of Finland get a direct vote on that, and can they change it in the future? I'd be wary of taking on such an enormous risk [edit: see terminology correction below] even if the probability of catastrophe is very low.
    - admax88qqq 5y ago
      > enormous risk even if the probability of catastrophe is very low. That's not really how probability works. If the probability of catastrophie is low then it's not an enormous risk. Honestly I think the risk of nuclear storage is really low. Most challenges are focused om how to keep it safe for thousands of years. The next several hundred years are no problem.
      - KMnO4 5y ago
        Risk = probability * loss So even though the probability is very very low, the loss (consequence) is extremely high (say an order of magnitude) which makes this a high risk.
        RealityVoid 5y ago
        What are the risks here more exactly? Yes, there is nuclear waste buried... sooooooo... what can happen?
        dekhn 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin... More seriously, there are a wide range of problems associated with long term waste storage, from known knowns to unknown unknowns. Some of the risks can't even be reasonably anticipated.
        admax88qqq 5y ago
        You can claim unknown unknowns for literally anything and claim it's high risk as a result. There are unknown unknowns about 5G, therefore it's too risky to build and use.
        nicoburns 5y ago
        Even they were storing large volumes of waste, then I assume they'd be non-trivial risk during the transport before the waste was buried.
- pm90 5y ago
  Nevada became politically important due to its Senator being the Majority Leader (Ie the leader of the US upper house, the Senate). With him gone (retired and recently, rip) I think it might be much easier to convince them. It’s such (excuse my language) bullshit. The facility is incredibly safe. It would be so much safer than leaving spent nuclear fuel on site all across the country. It’s unbelievable that there is resistance to it.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    People resist everything. Just ask for forgiveness.
    - egeozcan 5y ago
      > People resist everything Perhaps it causes a positive bias in the natural selection or is the side effect of something that causes a positive bias?
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      I'd generally agree with this mentality when individuals are trying to get something done, but definitely not when it's my government doing it.
  - rurp 5y ago
    Nevada is a swing state though, so it's going to have disproportionate national influence until that changes, which could be a long time. I'm not sure why the approach of giving the state piles of money in exchange for hosting the storage wasn't tried initially. Or maybe it was, but was downplayed enough that it never comes up. Nevada isn't a very populous state so billions of extra dollars would go pretty far. It has also been trying to diversify its economy for a while now, with pretty mediocre results.
    - panzagl 5y ago
      Nevada could pay a dividend like Alaska or New Mexico.
- godelski 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it risky. We can safely sit in top of the material for a few hundred years. Assuming we have no technological advancements in that time then yeah we should move to a collective long term storage. But the storage problem isn't nearly as difficult if you only plan for a hundred years and only concern yourself with the waste of a single plant (or a few).
- cameldrv 5y ago
  The U.S. already operates a disposal site -- the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. This is where all of those markers that say things like "This is not a place of honor" come from. It's just not accepting waste from commercial reactors for political reasons.
- surfsvammel 5y ago
  The US plan, if I’m not mistaken, is for 10k years, not 100k.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > Or, we could just give Nevada $50B and ask them to take on the risk for the next 100kyears. I wonder what the reasonable risk-adjusted cost of burying this waste in Nevada would be. The odds of a failure are probably pretty low, and the odds of a failure that leeches into the water system in some significant dosage seems super low (how much of Nevada's water comes from deep reservoirs versus surface supplies and how integrated are these systems?). Also, how does that stack up against the death toll due to fossil fuels ("well we want to switch to renewables eventually" <- meanwhile people are still dying at a rate of tens or hundreds of thousands per year).
  - pydry 5y ago
    >Also, how does that stack up against the death toll due to fossil fuels ("well we want to switch to renewables eventually" Took about ~4 years to build hornsea. Will end up being about ~20 to build hinkley point. For 2-3x the cost you get 80% load capacity factor rather than 60%. If you're in a hurry... that huge pile of money used to ~~keep nuclear skills and industry accessible to countries with nuclear arsenals~~ save the planet might be put to better use elsewhere.
    - liketochill 5y ago
      Where is the 80% number from? With nuclear you also get to choose when the power output is 100% and when you want to take an outage for maintenance.
- polishdude20 5y ago
  Storing above ground has benefits of being visible. You can inspect for damage, you can see that it's there every year. It never leaves society's kno ledge because it's out there.
sandworm101 5y ago
Earthquake-prone japan is in a perfect position for deep disposal. Japan is atop a subduction fault. Drill a deep enough hole into that subducting plate and any waste will eventually be pulled into the mantel. If we are really serious about getting rid of things permanently, ie not having access to them for thousands of years, then miles-deep wells backfilled with concrete are very practical. Any future civilization who is building something that many miles underground, miles under the sea floor, probably has the tech to deal with whatever we have put down there far better than we. Most disposal ideas these days are premised on the idea that one day, maybe, we might want to get access to the material again. They should really call it storage.
- itake 5y ago
  If the waste is pulled into the mantle near a volcano, wouldn't that be a problem? Maybe no new volcanoes will form in 100k years.
  - varenc 5y ago
    My understanding is that there’s such a vast amount of mantle and it’s generally a liquid so that after the waste “dissolves” in the mantle only a very tiny fraction of it would be brought back to the surface in future eruptions.
  - smileysteve 5y ago
    Uranium exists in nature, it's how we mine it; if nuclear waste is distributed around the mantel, it may be distributed in part via volcanos, but likely not in quantities like a nuclear test.
- laurent92 5y ago
  When containers get breached, they diffuse through rock and soil and reach the surface. French govt estimated that it would reach the surface 400 years after burial (so, 100 years for a breach and 300 years to swim down and up), diffused enough not to cause harm. So nuclear waste in a subduction zone would require a zone which dives faster than diffusion goes.
londons_explore 5y ago
When you have managed to build a storage site, it seems like a no-brainer to offer it to others (for a fee). Obviously there is the difficulty of transporting the nuclear materials, but there already exist containers which are designed to survive train crashes to store this stuff in. One of those on a boat should be fine, as long as some insurance will pay the cost to recover the container from the seabed if the boat were to sink.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Chernobyl should be turned into a storage repository. It's already got monitoring equipment and NIMBY simply doesn't apply.
Archelaos 5y ago
I am curious to see what countries like the Netherlands will do. It is easy to build new nuclear power plants when you are going to shift the real problem onto others. In the long run, I expect the same thing will happen with the majority of nuclear waste as with a lot of other problematic waste: It is going to be exported to a poor country were the elites make money from it while the population has to bear the consquences.
admax88qqq 5y ago
If you have a storage facility I don't see why you wouldn't sell/rent it to other countries.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  The logistics and political aspects of long-distance, cross-border transport of that kind of material probably remove that option from the table.
Maxion 5y ago
It's not operational yet, maybe in 2023 or 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
polack 5y ago
Are they really filling it up in Finland? I read the other day that they still wait for a government decision if they're allowed to use it or not.
- jabl 5y ago
  IIRC they have recently gotten all the (major) approvals, but they haven't started to bury anything there yet.
  - doikor 5y ago
    Not yet. The trials should start next year with actual usage planned for 2025 currently. https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchangereleases/2021/trialrunoffinaldisposaltostartby2023.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchan...
chinathrow 5y ago
I simply do not believe that mankind is capable of keeping track of certain items for that long.
- chasd00 5y ago
  if we can get transport reliable and cheap enough, i say put it in space.
  - throwaway744678 5y ago
    Let's hope the rocket does not blow up on launch, though.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  Correct, in the event of a collapse of civilization record might be lost. But under such a scenario, how would some future civilization get contaminated? What are the chances that they'd dig hundreds of meters deep in an area with no valuable resources? The proposed scenarios in which nuclear waste may harm humans far into the future are exceptionally unlikely. Contrast the remote possibility of this form of harm with the millions that die each year due to fossil fuel pollution (and many more that may be harmed by climate change).
StreamBright 5y ago
There are countries with negligible risk of serious earthquakes and there are reactor type where we could split the long half time isotopes to much smaller halftime elements. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-countries-have-the-least-risk-of-earthquakes.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-countries-have-the-... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080922100148.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080922100148.h...
ftth_finland 5y ago
As things stand now, each country will have to do their own storage. For example, it is illegal to import nuclear waste to Finland.
doikor 5y ago
Not really much NIMBY arguments in Finland as the storage site is right next to the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Well, the number of permanent storages is quite low. I think we saw the first instances last year or so. Of course you could just drop it in the ocean. It is illegal to do so with barrels, but you can easily dump contaminated water. That is basically done in many processing plants and the result is eleveated cancer rates. The problem of permanent storage isn't solved yet. Could as well dump it in barrels again since water is a very good radiation absorber and nobody can trace formers sins back if the radiation is tranfered into the food chain.

dekhn 5y ago

The US already identified a plausible site but for mostly political reasons, it was rejected and now most waste is stored in several pre-existing locations in the country and the rest is stored onsite at existing reactors. Both of those options are fairly risky compared to the planned repository but are more politically expedient. It seems not unreasonable to expect many countries will follow Sweden and Finland and actually proceed with burial, and eventually some catastrophe in the US (pig farm manure pit wall breaks, sweeps plant's storage tanks into a major river) will make Yucca a possibility again. Or, we coiuld just give Nevada $50B and ask them to take on the risk for the next 100kyears.

sidewndr46 5y ago
It's entirely possible that Finland and other countries are positioning themselves to become the biggest "exporter" of nuclear waste disposal. There are plenty of countries around the world with no actual plan for waste disposal, including the US. If Finland is willing to accept the risk in exchange for a certain amount of financial compensation, then it seems likely wealthy countries would make that choice.
- dekhn 5y ago
  That's a fascinating concept. Do the people of Finland get a direct vote on that, and can they change it in the future? I'd be wary of taking on such an enormous risk [edit: see terminology correction below] even if the probability of catastrophe is very low.
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    > enormous risk even if the probability of catastrophe is very low. That's not really how probability works. If the probability of catastrophie is low then it's not an enormous risk. Honestly I think the risk of nuclear storage is really low. Most challenges are focused om how to keep it safe for thousands of years. The next several hundred years are no problem.
    - KMnO4 5y ago
      Risk = probability * loss So even though the probability is very very low, the loss (consequence) is extremely high (say an order of magnitude) which makes this a high risk.
      - RealityVoid 5y ago
        What are the risks here more exactly? Yes, there is nuclear waste buried... sooooooo... what can happen?
        dekhn 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin... More seriously, there are a wide range of problems associated with long term waste storage, from known knowns to unknown unknowns. Some of the risks can't even be reasonably anticipated.
        admax88qqq 5y ago
        You can claim unknown unknowns for literally anything and claim it's high risk as a result. There are unknown unknowns about 5G, therefore it's too risky to build and use.
        nicoburns 5y ago
        Even they were storing large volumes of waste, then I assume they'd be non-trivial risk during the transport before the waste was buried.
pm90 5y ago
Nevada became politically important due to its Senator being the Majority Leader (Ie the leader of the US upper house, the Senate). With him gone (retired and recently, rip) I think it might be much easier to convince them. It’s such (excuse my language) bullshit. The facility is incredibly safe. It would be so much safer than leaving spent nuclear fuel on site all across the country. It’s unbelievable that there is resistance to it.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  People resist everything. Just ask for forgiveness.
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    > People resist everything Perhaps it causes a positive bias in the natural selection or is the side effect of something that causes a positive bias?
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    I'd generally agree with this mentality when individuals are trying to get something done, but definitely not when it's my government doing it.
- rurp 5y ago
  Nevada is a swing state though, so it's going to have disproportionate national influence until that changes, which could be a long time. I'm not sure why the approach of giving the state piles of money in exchange for hosting the storage wasn't tried initially. Or maybe it was, but was downplayed enough that it never comes up. Nevada isn't a very populous state so billions of extra dollars would go pretty far. It has also been trying to diversify its economy for a while now, with pretty mediocre results.
  - panzagl 5y ago
    Nevada could pay a dividend like Alaska or New Mexico.
godelski 5y ago
I wouldn't call it risky. We can safely sit in top of the material for a few hundred years. Assuming we have no technological advancements in that time then yeah we should move to a collective long term storage. But the storage problem isn't nearly as difficult if you only plan for a hundred years and only concern yourself with the waste of a single plant (or a few).
cameldrv 5y ago
The U.S. already operates a disposal site -- the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. This is where all of those markers that say things like "This is not a place of honor" come from. It's just not accepting waste from commercial reactors for political reasons.
surfsvammel 5y ago
The US plan, if I’m not mistaken, is for 10k years, not 100k.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> Or, we could just give Nevada $50B and ask them to take on the risk for the next 100kyears. I wonder what the reasonable risk-adjusted cost of burying this waste in Nevada would be. The odds of a failure are probably pretty low, and the odds of a failure that leeches into the water system in some significant dosage seems super low (how much of Nevada's water comes from deep reservoirs versus surface supplies and how integrated are these systems?). Also, how does that stack up against the death toll due to fossil fuels ("well we want to switch to renewables eventually" <- meanwhile people are still dying at a rate of tens or hundreds of thousands per year).
- pydry 5y ago
  >Also, how does that stack up against the death toll due to fossil fuels ("well we want to switch to renewables eventually" Took about ~4 years to build hornsea. Will end up being about ~20 to build hinkley point. For 2-3x the cost you get 80% load capacity factor rather than 60%. If you're in a hurry... that huge pile of money used to ~~keep nuclear skills and industry accessible to countries with nuclear arsenals~~ save the planet might be put to better use elsewhere.
  - liketochill 5y ago
    Where is the 80% number from? With nuclear you also get to choose when the power output is 100% and when you want to take an outage for maintenance.
polishdude20 5y ago
Storing above ground has benefits of being visible. You can inspect for damage, you can see that it's there every year. It never leaves society's kno ledge because it's out there.

sandworm101 5y ago

Earthquake-prone japan is in a perfect position for deep disposal. Japan is atop a subduction fault. Drill a deep enough hole into that subducting plate and any waste will eventually be pulled into the mantel. If we are really serious about getting rid of things permanently, ie not having access to them for thousands of years, then miles-deep wells backfilled with concrete are very practical. Any future civilization who is building something that many miles underground, miles under the sea floor, probably has the tech to deal with whatever we have put down there far better than we. Most disposal ideas these days are premised on the idea that one day, maybe, we might want to get access to the material again. They should really call it storage.

itake 5y ago
If the waste is pulled into the mantle near a volcano, wouldn't that be a problem? Maybe no new volcanoes will form in 100k years.
- varenc 5y ago
  My understanding is that there’s such a vast amount of mantle and it’s generally a liquid so that after the waste “dissolves” in the mantle only a very tiny fraction of it would be brought back to the surface in future eruptions.
- smileysteve 5y ago
  Uranium exists in nature, it's how we mine it; if nuclear waste is distributed around the mantel, it may be distributed in part via volcanos, but likely not in quantities like a nuclear test.
laurent92 5y ago
When containers get breached, they diffuse through rock and soil and reach the surface. French govt estimated that it would reach the surface 400 years after burial (so, 100 years for a breach and 300 years to swim down and up), diffused enough not to cause harm. So nuclear waste in a subduction zone would require a zone which dives faster than diffusion goes.

londons_explore 5y ago

When you have managed to build a storage site, it seems like a no-brainer to offer it to others (for a fee). Obviously there is the difficulty of transporting the nuclear materials, but there already exist containers which are designed to survive train crashes to store this stuff in. One of those on a boat should be fine, as long as some insurance will pay the cost to recover the container from the seabed if the boat were to sink.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

Chernobyl should be turned into a storage repository. It's already got monitoring equipment and NIMBY simply doesn't apply.

Archelaos 5y ago

I am curious to see what countries like the Netherlands will do. It is easy to build new nuclear power plants when you are going to shift the real problem onto others. In the long run, I expect the same thing will happen with the majority of nuclear waste as with a lot of other problematic waste: It is going to be exported to a poor country were the elites make money from it while the population has to bear the consquences.

admax88qqq 5y ago

If you have a storage facility I don't see why you wouldn't sell/rent it to other countries.

Baeocystin 5y ago
The logistics and political aspects of long-distance, cross-border transport of that kind of material probably remove that option from the table.

Maxion 5y ago

It's not operational yet, maybe in 2023 or 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

polack 5y ago

Are they really filling it up in Finland? I read the other day that they still wait for a government decision if they're allowed to use it or not.

jabl 5y ago
IIRC they have recently gotten all the (major) approvals, but they haven't started to bury anything there yet.
- doikor 5y ago
  Not yet. The trials should start next year with actual usage planned for 2025 currently. https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchangereleases/2021/trialrunoffinaldisposaltostartby2023.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchan...

chinathrow 5y ago

I simply do not believe that mankind is capable of keeping track of certain items for that long.

chasd00 5y ago
if we can get transport reliable and cheap enough, i say put it in space.
- throwaway744678 5y ago
  Let's hope the rocket does not blow up on launch, though.
Manuel_D 5y ago
Correct, in the event of a collapse of civilization record might be lost. But under such a scenario, how would some future civilization get contaminated? What are the chances that they'd dig hundreds of meters deep in an area with no valuable resources? The proposed scenarios in which nuclear waste may harm humans far into the future are exceptionally unlikely. Contrast the remote possibility of this form of harm with the millions that die each year due to fossil fuel pollution (and many more that may be harmed by climate change).

StreamBright 5y ago

There are countries with negligible risk of serious earthquakes and there are reactor type where we could split the long half time isotopes to much smaller halftime elements. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-countries-have-the-least-risk-of-earthquakes.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-countries-have-the-... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080922100148.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080922100148.h...

ftth_finland 5y ago

As things stand now, each country will have to do their own storage. For example, it is illegal to import nuclear waste to Finland.

doikor 5y ago

Not really much NIMBY arguments in Finland as the storage site is right next to the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant.

raxxorrax 5y ago

Well, the number of permanent storages is quite low. I think we saw the first instances last year or so. Of course you could just drop it in the ocean. It is illegal to do so with barrels, but you can easily dump contaminated water. That is basically done in many processing plants and the result is eleveated cancer rates. The problem of permanent storage isn't solved yet. Could as well dump it in barrels again since water is a very good radiation absorber and nobody can trace formers sins back if the radiation is tranfered into the food chain.