15 ms·

A place where no humans will tread for 100k years

165 points by Vigier 3y ago

bradley13 3y ago
Disagree. "Spent" nuclear fuel isn't spent at all. 90% or more is still there. Many of the other isotopes could be useful as well. If we cannot or will not do the reprocessing, it's a safe bet that some future generation will.
- rapsey 3y ago
  Unless a better source of energy (or a better battery) is found.
  - jabl 3y ago
    Kind of hard to beat nuclear fuel, if energy density is what you want. But sure, in many situations that's not a deciding factor.
    - geysersam 3y ago
      Energy density is never the deciding factor, except 1. On nuclear submarines, 2. On spacecraft.
      - joshstrange 3y ago
        I think battery vs fuel (oil) begs to differ. Until we can run a 747 on a battery it’s absolutely the deciding factor. I have every hope we are able to do that one day, I’m just saying that energy density is a deciding factor.
        geysersam 3y ago
        Sure, but we're talking about the energy density of uranium. Nuclear powered airplanes are both technically infeasible and an extremely bad idea from a safety perspective.
- refactor_master 3y ago
  Considering the whole journey uranium has been through in the last ~100 years, it does seem somewhat shortsighted to declare it “useless” and lock it up forever.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    On other hand, compared to alternative of just leaving it in a pool or even dry cask under open sky might not be that much better in medium term.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- doikor 3y ago
  That future generation can dig it out if they need it.
Animats 3y ago
Oh, the horror! This is the right solution - dry storage in hard rock in some rock formation that hasn't done anything in millions of years. Originally, in addition to Yucca Mountain, there was a plan for an East Coast nuclear waste repository in hard rock, probably in Maine or Vermont. When it's full, the Finland plan is to fill in everything, seal it off, and not mark it. If some future society can drill through that much hard rock, they probably know about radiation, since that's a routine hazard in mining.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > dry storage in hard rock in some rock formation that hasn't done anything in millions of years that's exactly why they chose it and it makes a lot of sense. If the environment is so stable, you don't have to worry about earth own internal movements too much. This is old news, it's been amply debated, there's a documentary by Michael Madsen titled "Into Eternity" where pros and cons are discussed at lenght, the movie is from 2010, 13 years ago. You can find it on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
- sebazzz 3y ago
  > When it's full, the Finland plan is to fill in everything, seal it off, and not mark it. If some future society can drill through that much hard rock, they probably know about radiation, since that's a routine hazard in mining. Reminds me of that Star Trek episode where Data, confused, walked with an suitcase with irradiated materials to a village that was just discovering the basic elements. They got irradiated because they couldn't understand the radiation symbols on the suitcase.
  - elihu 3y ago
    Thine Own Self. I just watched that a couple days ago. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708826/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708826/
    - pimlottc 3y ago
      More episode info on Memory Alpha: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Thine_Own_Self_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Thine_Own_Self_(episode...
coldtea 3y ago
Mars?
- vore 3y ago
  How would you get it there? Besides, if you were confident enough to not accidentally make a dirty bomb, you might as well just send it into the sun instead!
  - arbitrandomuser 3y ago
    Fun fact , it's surprisingly harder to shoot things at the Sun compared to other planets in the Solar system. It takes 55 times more energy to go to the Sun than to Mars https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-h...
    - vore 3y ago
      The more you know, thanks! Good thing I didn’t pick a career as a rocket scientist!
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    How much could you even transport? Seems like it would be crazy expensive.
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  The standard argument against that is that the risk of contamination (of the athmosphere or basically anything) in case of a rocket accident is too high.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    And the standard response to that should be to how that too is kind of a load of FUD. The safety requirements for a rocket to carry nuclear material in the US are higher than those for carrying crew. The material would be flying on a rocket that has proven itself over many flights, with a rigorously tested design, with a safe abort mode for every point along the way to orbit and on top of that, stored in a vessel such that it wouldn't be released into the atmosphere if a failure still occurred. The proper answer is that it'd be absurdly expensive and completely pointless. After all, why bring it down to Mars? Just put it in an appropriate orbit around the Sun and you're basically guaranteed to never see it again unless you want to.
thih9 3y ago
If you find the time scale interesting, see also the “Long-term nuclear waste warning messages” wikipedia page[1], elaborating on semiotics in this context. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...
- feintruled 3y ago
  And I suspect our descendants would pay as much heed to these as we did to Egyptian curses! Perhaps if they are lurid enough they might inspire caution at least.
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    The idea is that you also put detailed explanations of what's in there, why it's in there, and what it is. So, even if that doesn't sate their curiosity, they can learn enough to not get themselves killed if they do try to dig it up.
- maxweylandt 3y ago
  Thank you for posting, this was my major question when reading. A surprisingly poignant article
- joshstrange 3y ago
  > This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. This is one of my favorite little quotes/references to use if I can find a way to work it in. I know it’s about something very serious but it always makes me giggle. I’ve used it on a few commit messages/comments before for particularly gross code.
  - e_i_pi_2 3y ago
    I do the same! Using it for non-serious things just adds an extra level of irony. Funniest example I saw was "This is not a place of honor" on the back of some booty shorts
  - 3y ago
calrain 3y ago
As a species, we are still arrogant that we know how the future will pan out. In a few decades after filling that place in, people may determine that it's valuable, send in robots to get everything back out for re-use, and make the area safe again. Maybe a few hundreds of years, or thousands, but we just don't know what inventions the future will bring
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- glitchcrab 3y ago
  Well that's probably because the requisite crystal ball we need to see into the future hasn't been invented yet either. The whole point of burying it is because we _can't_ know how the future will pan out. Your plan is just to keep stockpiling the waste in temporary storage for N years with the hope (faith?) that a technology will appear which can make use of it? I'd rather take the sensible option which has been developed with knowledge that we have now, rather than sitting on it for an indeterminate amount of years for some magical fix to come along.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Note that we already know how to use most radioactive waste, we choose not to deploy those technologies for various reasons (both good and bad). The technology is called breeder reactors.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    > Well that's probably because the requisite crystal ball we need to see into the future hasn't been invented yet either. I think your reasoning is pretty sound for the existing waste (and maybe that's all you're talking about). But for new waste it's a different game. We could simply not generate it. I'm not even asserting that we shouldn't use nuclear power, just that this argument should not be over-extended. Another thing to consider with the "well it might be useful later so lets not dump it" argument is that we probably don't need the waste we already created. We can just make more.
- 3y ago
pmontra 3y ago
Add the cost of this kind of storage facilities to the cost of nuclear energy. Of course oil, coal, solar, idro, etc have their own costs for cleaning up the places.
- jabl 3y ago
  > Add the cost of this kind of storage facilities to the cost of nuclear energy. In Finland, and I believe many other countries as well, there is a special tax on nuclear power plants whose proceeds go into a fund for handling the end of life costs, like building this repository. > Of course oil, coal, solar, idro, etc have their own costs for cleaning up the places. Indeed, all energy generation should have similar schemese like nuclear to handle end of life cleanup costs. Unfortunately it seems nuclear is fairly unique in actually having it.
  - reitanqild 3y ago
    In Norway people have been paying "environmental taxes" since the eighties at least. The only problem is that these are not pooled up towards fixing environmental issues but used as part of the general budget by whoever holds the government at any time. Which in turn annoys even people like me who think it is a good idea to tax it because: 1. not enough gets done to combat environmental damage 2. it gives politicians an incentive to keep increasing these taxes to afford other projects they want I seriously wish it was like water and sewer and waste taxes around here: the municipality can increase these as needed but are not allowed to make a profit from them so if money is saved then the next years these taxes are lowered. (Or the year after, whenever the calculations are finished.)
- mcfedr 3y ago
  Who do you think is paying for it?
- lionkor 3y ago
  It would be great if all the waste generated by e.g. burning coal would be put in big barrels and labelled toxic and dangerous (because it is) - people would get a much better understanding of why nuclear isnt that bad in comparison
Mutjake 3y ago
As a Finn I think this is the correct way. To add to some other comments here I presume uranium is so abundant even if we multiply our usage that the opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue. We have a lot of spent fuel in places like the bottom of the ocean we can tap into first. There are a lot of different materials we're burning or burying even if it might be useful in the future, I'd look into repurposing those first as they carry a much bigger risk in e.g. polluting the ground water before worrying about a marginal amount of global spent fuel being buried (you need to account for the fact that we are a small country with non-optimal geography, it is less probable that it would be viable for us build processing facilities to recycle spent fuel as it is much more viable in e.g. France where there is much more raw materials available relatively close + shipping the spent fuel from Finland is probably quite expensive as especially in the current geopolitical setting we are somewhat of an island logistically). Take what I said with a grain of salt as I am not an expert in the matters of nuclear technology, just sharing my layman's viewpoint. It's probably a complex system so I'm not sure if anyone has definitive answers as it all depends on the amount of nuclear power the world is going to build, how the reprocessing technology and know-how develops, how the alternative means for electricity production develop etc. etc. -- so we can only make educated guesses for now, but I see that we're making a good compromise here with the marginal amount of the global spent nuclear fuel we possess considering our options. For other parts of the world the equation probably plays out differently, e.g. not having suitable solid bedrock to utilize might be an obvious showstopper.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Uranium is actually pretty rare - using fuel the way we have for now, we would pretty quickly exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits - I believe I read the estimate is something like 50 years? The story changes significantly if we start using breeder reactors and other designs.
  - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
    > Uranium is actually pretty rare > estimate is something like 50 years those are pretty pessimistic estimates. From a 2009 article on Scientific America According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
fuoqi 3y ago
A better alternative would've been to develop breeder reactors and reprocess this "waste" into more fuel and a much smaller amount of true waste, which would be somewhat safe after several thousands years (it still would be a chemical hazard, but not a strongly radioactive one). But I have very little hope that such technology will be developed in the West in the next decades...
- nine_k 3y ago
  But they breed plutonium! There's some moral panic about possible siphoning of it, and nuclear proliferation. I think it's a bit late to emphasize this concern, when even North Korea has nukes.
  - fuoqi 3y ago
    Surprise-surprise, but spent fuel rods contain plutonium (~1%) as well. The idea is that you build breeder reactors and do reprocessing in countries which already have nuclear weapons, while other countries get completed fuel rods for the classic PWRs. You prevent siphoning by mandating that all spent fuel rods must be returned to the country of origin.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      That would never work for human reasons. Specifically, a non-nuclear nation will never want their energy security to depend on the goodwill of nuclear nations. At any time, those nuclear nations could turn around and jack the price of fuel rods 100x, while also denying the non-nuclear nations the ability to make their own with the threat of sanctions or war.
      - pasc1878 3y ago
        So the same issue as oil - and actually any resource you have to get. Most resources are only found in limited places on Earth.
        3y ago
christkv 3y ago
My question is what do they do with all the pieces of the containment weasels that are also highly radioactive. Pipping and other stuff?
- evgen 3y ago
  If you ever see something described as 'low-level nuclear waste' then it is sometimes talking about things like old reactor parts and mostly talking about items like gloves, bunny suits, used dosimeters, etc. Things that have been exposed to enough neutron flux to be mildly radioactive but which are not going to make other things glow in the dark are usually put into barrels and buried. Like toxic metals, for example, the only real risk here is having it leak into the food chain or water supply.
blowski 3y ago
Are there any films or books about, say, a civilisation living in such a place?
- s17tnet 3y ago
  I hope I won't spoil it (it is a book saga from decades ago) but that is a major plot point of Shannara cycle.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Seveneves would come close. Spoiler alert, it features three groups of people surviving apocalyptic conditions on our planet in space, in deep sea, and in under mines. Part 3 is where the last two groups are introduced.
jinnko 3y ago
There was a documentary about this by Michael Madsen in 2010 called Into Eternity.
- jules-jules 3y ago
  Cannot recommend this film highly enough. Utterly haunting and thought-provoking.
- pimlottc 3y ago
  Came here to post this same comment. It’s a really thought-provoking film and quite striking in the way it was shot, edited, and scored. Highly recommended. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk
  - darraghenright 3y ago
    Incredible movie. It makes a fantastic double bill with Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". I feel his weird epilogue monologue epilogue links them well. Both movies span and ponder on such a vast period of time, which is awe inspiring, terrifying and fascinating.
oceanplexian 3y ago
These guys are about to be super wrong when a couple decades from now governments realize there's a ton of extremely valuable unburned nuclear fuel, ready to be reprocessed, conveniently located in a storage facility.
- ifdefdebug 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - flir 3y ago
    It's going to be sealed deep underground in solid, stable rock. If future generations dig it up again, it's probably because they want it?
- brap 3y ago
  Yeah, I feel like it's super pretentious to think that your solution will actually last 100,000 years into the future. If you work in tech you know that 99% of the stuff you build wouldn't (or shouldn't) last another 5 years. Most likely in the next few decades they'll figure out how to make it useful or at least not be a problem anymore. Designing something to last 100, 200 years, alright... but 100,000? We probably won't even be here, on Earth. Waste of time.
  - fasterik 3y ago
    What makes you say we "probably" won't be here on Earth in 100,000 years? We were here for the past 2,000,000 years. This also ignores the possibility that someone other than "us" will discover what we leave behind. > If you work in tech you know that 99% of the stuff you build wouldn't (or shouldn't) last another 5 years. We have technologies that have survived for thousands of years (agriculture, writing, etc.) This statement is completely myopic and absurd.
    - Proziam 3y ago
      It took less than one human lifespan to go from the first powered flight to a man landing on the moon. I see no reason for humans to be stuck on Earth for 100,000 years at our current rate of invention and growth. If "we" are here, or "something else" arrives at that time they are likely so advanced that the topic of communicating nuclear risks to them is rather pointless.
RektBoy 3y ago
[flagged]
Caligatio 3y ago
I've been binge watching Tom Scott videos after finding out he's quasi-retiring soon and just happened to have watched his video of the exact same project last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50
- Angostura 3y ago
  > after finding out he's quasi-retiring soon What?!
  - kozziollek 3y ago
    He will stop weekly videos on January 1st, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca0RpxknHCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca0RpxknHCI
Havoc 3y ago
I'd imagine in 500 years we'll have the tech to sort the site out in an afternoon so that headline may not be quite true
- robinsonb5 3y ago
  More realistically in 500 years there'll be no remaining record or understanding of what that mysterious stuff in that cave actually is, and the fact that people keep dying after going there will be put down to superstition.
  - Havoc 3y ago
    If we manage to forget about radiation in the next 500 years then I'd say something more serious went wrong than some glowing stuff buried somewhere in a mountain :p
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      Well yes, and I don't mean to bring anyone down, but I think it's incredibly optimistic to imagine our current civilisation surviving 500 years into the future! Just to be clear, I'm quite sure humans will still be here, but I think there's a good chance we'll exist in much smaller numbers, in isolated pockets. Individuals probably won't have the kind of ready access to the sum total of human knowledge that we now take for granted. I'd be amazed if any digital information from today survives even one century into the future, never mind five.
      - BoxOfRain 3y ago
        We'll probably build back after that too, civilisations coming and going is hardly new.
        robinsonb5 3y ago
        Absolutely - 500 years is far enough ahead that it could have happened more than once!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
macinjosh 3y ago
What an information free piece. No one cares about the journalists feelings. Tell us about the facility.
- Brusco_RF 3y ago
  Right? I also find this journalism style infuriating. Very egocentric. I like the Economist's style, articles don't even have authors listed and when they must talk about themselves they say "your correspondent" which I perceive as much more humble
pfdietz 3y ago
Burying the stuff now is a waste of money. It's cheaper to stuff the spent fuel into dry shielded casks and wait to decide what to do with it. This forecloses no future options and allows the relatively expensive burial process to be delayed, reducing the NPV of that cost. Waiting also reduces the difficulty of dealing with waste, since the fission products decay relatively rapidly. Aside from seven very long-lived fission products, they will be gone in 300-500 years (depending on your definition of "gone"). Indeed, the problem then becomes that the gamma emission of the spent fuel elements is so low they are no longer self-protecting against "amateur" diversion of the plutonium. (Note that this is fission products, not actinides, that decay relatively quickly.) Personally, I suspect spent fuel will be dealt with by launching it beyond Earth. Think how cheap and reliable distant descendants of today's rockets will be several centuries hence.
- aspyct 3y ago
  Sure, let's pollute outer space, earth isn't enough. Can't wait to see the reaction when one of these barrels inevitably hits something important to someone.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    These are deeply foolish objections. Space is already chock full of ionizing radiation, and is so enormously sparse that waste ejected into interstellar space (for example) is not going to hit anything of value, even for many orders of magnitude of time beyond the half life of anything in there. This is clearly much preferable to putting the stuff a few kilometers away from an active biosphere.
    - tomjakubowski 3y ago
      how certain are we of the effects if the rocket blows up in the atmosphere? or before it escapes orbit? the DOE currently thinks it's a bad idea https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-we-dont-launch-nuclear-waste-space https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-we-dont-lau...
Mrdarknezz 3y ago
Fantastic
samjohnation111 3y ago
[flagged]
sproketboy 3y ago
[dead]
sowbug 3y ago
Good place to put a time capsule.
cozzyd 3y ago
In grad school, I worked on an experiment housed at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). At least until a radioactive waste barrel exploded (because someone somewhere used the wrong kind of kitty litter, for real) and the place was shut down for a while. Working underground in salt "mine" (the salt is taken out so nuclear waste can go in) is no fun, do not recommend. But one of the interesting things about WIPP is how they thought about how to mark the site as "do not dig" in a way that would last a very long time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Awareness_triggers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Aw... for what they came up with...
- hulitu 3y ago
  The only warning in that picture is the skull. The majority of people on this planet have no idea what the other signs mean.
  - svachalek 3y ago
    Yeah really as long as technological people are around, they won't be going in there. The people who need help are the post-apocalyptic Stone Age people who may follow us. They don't need the exact problem explained to them, they just need to make the place as creepy as possible. Skulls, spikes, creepy murals carved in stone.
- imoverclocked 3y ago
  Maybe we should start erecting a structure on top of these sites that would be very hard to move. Perhaps we build it out of stone and carve warnings into the entrances. The most resilient structure is probably some kind of pile of large quarried rock but we need it to be recognizable so it should have a fundamental shape. I guess I'm describing a pyramid which made it about 4k years before we forgot what the symbols meant and went digging through them anyway. 4/100 ain't bad for a first try though! It takes a lot of resources (today) to dig down 1400' so that might be helpful. However, it's still doable with time and motivation for practically any human society. Space is another interesting idea with its own set of issues (eg: getting waste there safely) but has the advantage of requiring a space-fairing civilization which also requires advanced knowledge, cooperation and communication which gives a better chance that simple grave-robbers don't dig something up after the decline of our current knowledge, skillsets and civilization.
LispSporks22 3y ago
Isn’t the waste still producing heat? How come we can’t use that to boil water as well?
e12e 3y ago
Recommend watching the documentary "Into Eternity": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
elzbardico 3y ago
This is probably one of the least informative texts I have ever read. Next time BBC should sent a less emotional and more competent reporter.
w10-1 3y ago
There's no new information in the article on the process of storing nuclear fuel. The article is mainly about the feeling of how small m/y/our consciousness is relative to reality of time and the scale of problems facing us. It's worth exploring the experience, in spelunking or meditation, if it changes your fundamental incentives. Or read Ecclesiastes, et al. empathically. Finland is at least trying, doing the engineering and engaging the question. Perhaps because it has no fossil fuels?
- Mutjake 3y ago
  We do have large peat reserves (AFAIK some estimates compare the total amount to Norway’s oil reserves), but usage of peat has been decreasing/phased out for climate and environmental reasons.
ouraf 3y ago
Seems to be the least of all evils for the problem: Nuclear waste is nearly impossible to recycle in a cost effective way, can't be burned, can't be decontaminated effectively and won't decompose easily. It need to be stored in a clearly marked and delimited place, to avoid accidents, until someone in the future finds a more definitive/cost effective solution, or until it wears off, even if it take a long time for our standards.
amai 3y ago
Why not put nuclear waste into Mariana Trench? Humans who can go there most probably know about the dangers of nuclear waste.
thdc 3y ago
I'm all for alternative sources of energy (including nuclear) but I feel like generating and storing nuclear waste for future generations parallels how coal/oil/gas/etc. ruined the environment that our current generation has. What are some points that I could use to differentiate the two ideas? e.g. - not enough waste to be an issue - waste is properly secured so won't be an issue - less impact than coal/oil/gas
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

165 points by Vigier 3y ago

Disagree. "Spent" nuclear fuel isn't spent at all. 90% or more is still there. Many of the other isotopes could be useful as well. If we cannot or will not do the reprocessing, it's a safe bet that some future generation will.

rapsey 3y ago
Unless a better source of energy (or a better battery) is found.
- jabl 3y ago
  Kind of hard to beat nuclear fuel, if energy density is what you want. But sure, in many situations that's not a deciding factor.
  - geysersam 3y ago
    Energy density is never the deciding factor, except 1. On nuclear submarines, 2. On spacecraft.
    - joshstrange 3y ago
      I think battery vs fuel (oil) begs to differ. Until we can run a 747 on a battery it’s absolutely the deciding factor. I have every hope we are able to do that one day, I’m just saying that energy density is a deciding factor.
      - geysersam 3y ago
        Sure, but we're talking about the energy density of uranium. Nuclear powered airplanes are both technically infeasible and an extremely bad idea from a safety perspective.
refactor_master 3y ago
Considering the whole journey uranium has been through in the last ~100 years, it does seem somewhat shortsighted to declare it “useless” and lock it up forever.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  On other hand, compared to alternative of just leaving it in a pool or even dry cask under open sky might not be that much better in medium term.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
doikor 3y ago
That future generation can dig it out if they need it.

Animats 3y ago

Oh, the horror! This is the right solution - dry storage in hard rock in some rock formation that hasn't done anything in millions of years. Originally, in addition to Yucca Mountain, there was a plan for an East Coast nuclear waste repository in hard rock, probably in Maine or Vermont. When it's full, the Finland plan is to fill in everything, seal it off, and not mark it. If some future society can drill through that much hard rock, they probably know about radiation, since that's a routine hazard in mining.

peoplefromibiza 3y ago
> dry storage in hard rock in some rock formation that hasn't done anything in millions of years that's exactly why they chose it and it makes a lot of sense. If the environment is so stable, you don't have to worry about earth own internal movements too much. This is old news, it's been amply debated, there's a documentary by Michael Madsen titled "Into Eternity" where pros and cons are discussed at lenght, the movie is from 2010, 13 years ago. You can find it on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
sebazzz 3y ago
> When it's full, the Finland plan is to fill in everything, seal it off, and not mark it. If some future society can drill through that much hard rock, they probably know about radiation, since that's a routine hazard in mining. Reminds me of that Star Trek episode where Data, confused, walked with an suitcase with irradiated materials to a village that was just discovering the basic elements. They got irradiated because they couldn't understand the radiation symbols on the suitcase.
- elihu 3y ago
  Thine Own Self. I just watched that a couple days ago. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708826/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708826/
  - pimlottc 3y ago
    More episode info on Memory Alpha: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Thine_Own_Self_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Thine_Own_Self_(episode...

coldtea 3y ago

Mars?

vore 3y ago
How would you get it there? Besides, if you were confident enough to not accidentally make a dirty bomb, you might as well just send it into the sun instead!
- arbitrandomuser 3y ago
  Fun fact , it's surprisingly harder to shoot things at the Sun compared to other planets in the Solar system. It takes 55 times more energy to go to the Sun than to Mars https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-h...
  - vore 3y ago
    The more you know, thanks! Good thing I didn’t pick a career as a rocket scientist!
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  How much could you even transport? Seems like it would be crazy expensive.
tannhaeuser 3y ago
The standard argument against that is that the risk of contamination (of the athmosphere or basically anything) in case of a rocket accident is too high.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  And the standard response to that should be to how that too is kind of a load of FUD. The safety requirements for a rocket to carry nuclear material in the US are higher than those for carrying crew. The material would be flying on a rocket that has proven itself over many flights, with a rigorously tested design, with a safe abort mode for every point along the way to orbit and on top of that, stored in a vessel such that it wouldn't be released into the atmosphere if a failure still occurred. The proper answer is that it'd be absurdly expensive and completely pointless. After all, why bring it down to Mars? Just put it in an appropriate orbit around the Sun and you're basically guaranteed to never see it again unless you want to.

thih9 3y ago

If you find the time scale interesting, see also the “Long-term nuclear waste warning messages” wikipedia page[1], elaborating on semiotics in this context. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...

feintruled 3y ago
And I suspect our descendants would pay as much heed to these as we did to Egyptian curses! Perhaps if they are lurid enough they might inspire caution at least.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  The idea is that you also put detailed explanations of what's in there, why it's in there, and what it is. So, even if that doesn't sate their curiosity, they can learn enough to not get themselves killed if they do try to dig it up.
maxweylandt 3y ago
Thank you for posting, this was my major question when reading. A surprisingly poignant article
joshstrange 3y ago
> This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. This is one of my favorite little quotes/references to use if I can find a way to work it in. I know it’s about something very serious but it always makes me giggle. I’ve used it on a few commit messages/comments before for particularly gross code.
- e_i_pi_2 3y ago
  I do the same! Using it for non-serious things just adds an extra level of irony. Funniest example I saw was "This is not a place of honor" on the back of some booty shorts
- 3y ago

calrain 3y ago

As a species, we are still arrogant that we know how the future will pan out. In a few decades after filling that place in, people may determine that it's valuable, send in robots to get everything back out for re-use, and make the area safe again. Maybe a few hundreds of years, or thousands, but we just don't know what inventions the future will bring

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glitchcrab 3y ago
Well that's probably because the requisite crystal ball we need to see into the future hasn't been invented yet either. The whole point of burying it is because we _can't_ know how the future will pan out. Your plan is just to keep stockpiling the waste in temporary storage for N years with the hope (faith?) that a technology will appear which can make use of it? I'd rather take the sensible option which has been developed with knowledge that we have now, rather than sitting on it for an indeterminate amount of years for some magical fix to come along.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Note that we already know how to use most radioactive waste, we choose not to deploy those technologies for various reasons (both good and bad). The technology is called breeder reactors.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > Well that's probably because the requisite crystal ball we need to see into the future hasn't been invented yet either. I think your reasoning is pretty sound for the existing waste (and maybe that's all you're talking about). But for new waste it's a different game. We could simply not generate it. I'm not even asserting that we shouldn't use nuclear power, just that this argument should not be over-extended. Another thing to consider with the "well it might be useful later so lets not dump it" argument is that we probably don't need the waste we already created. We can just make more.
3y ago

pmontra 3y ago

Add the cost of this kind of storage facilities to the cost of nuclear energy. Of course oil, coal, solar, idro, etc have their own costs for cleaning up the places.

jabl 3y ago
> Add the cost of this kind of storage facilities to the cost of nuclear energy. In Finland, and I believe many other countries as well, there is a special tax on nuclear power plants whose proceeds go into a fund for handling the end of life costs, like building this repository. > Of course oil, coal, solar, idro, etc have their own costs for cleaning up the places. Indeed, all energy generation should have similar schemese like nuclear to handle end of life cleanup costs. Unfortunately it seems nuclear is fairly unique in actually having it.
- reitanqild 3y ago
  In Norway people have been paying "environmental taxes" since the eighties at least. The only problem is that these are not pooled up towards fixing environmental issues but used as part of the general budget by whoever holds the government at any time. Which in turn annoys even people like me who think it is a good idea to tax it because: 1. not enough gets done to combat environmental damage 2. it gives politicians an incentive to keep increasing these taxes to afford other projects they want I seriously wish it was like water and sewer and waste taxes around here: the municipality can increase these as needed but are not allowed to make a profit from them so if money is saved then the next years these taxes are lowered. (Or the year after, whenever the calculations are finished.)
mcfedr 3y ago
Who do you think is paying for it?
lionkor 3y ago
It would be great if all the waste generated by e.g. burning coal would be put in big barrels and labelled toxic and dangerous (because it is) - people would get a much better understanding of why nuclear isnt that bad in comparison

Mutjake 3y ago

As a Finn I think this is the correct way. To add to some other comments here I presume uranium is so abundant even if we multiply our usage that the opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue. We have a lot of spent fuel in places like the bottom of the ocean we can tap into first. There are a lot of different materials we're burning or burying even if it might be useful in the future, I'd look into repurposing those first as they carry a much bigger risk in e.g. polluting the ground water before worrying about a marginal amount of global spent fuel being buried (you need to account for the fact that we are a small country with non-optimal geography, it is less probable that it would be viable for us build processing facilities to recycle spent fuel as it is much more viable in e.g. France where there is much more raw materials available relatively close + shipping the spent fuel from Finland is probably quite expensive as especially in the current geopolitical setting we are somewhat of an island logistically). Take what I said with a grain of salt as I am not an expert in the matters of nuclear technology, just sharing my layman's viewpoint. It's probably a complex system so I'm not sure if anyone has definitive answers as it all depends on the amount of nuclear power the world is going to build, how the reprocessing technology and know-how develops, how the alternative means for electricity production develop etc. etc. -- so we can only make educated guesses for now, but I see that we're making a good compromise here with the marginal amount of the global spent nuclear fuel we possess considering our options. For other parts of the world the equation probably plays out differently, e.g. not having suitable solid bedrock to utilize might be an obvious showstopper.

tsimionescu 3y ago
Uranium is actually pretty rare - using fuel the way we have for now, we would pretty quickly exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits - I believe I read the estimate is something like 50 years? The story changes significantly if we start using breeder reactors and other designs.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > Uranium is actually pretty rare > estimate is something like 50 years those are pretty pessimistic estimates. From a 2009 article on Scientific America According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.

fuoqi 3y ago

A better alternative would've been to develop breeder reactors and reprocess this "waste" into more fuel and a much smaller amount of true waste, which would be somewhat safe after several thousands years (it still would be a chemical hazard, but not a strongly radioactive one). But I have very little hope that such technology will be developed in the West in the next decades...

nine_k 3y ago
But they breed plutonium! There's some moral panic about possible siphoning of it, and nuclear proliferation. I think it's a bit late to emphasize this concern, when even North Korea has nukes.
- fuoqi 3y ago
  Surprise-surprise, but spent fuel rods contain plutonium (~1%) as well. The idea is that you build breeder reactors and do reprocessing in countries which already have nuclear weapons, while other countries get completed fuel rods for the classic PWRs. You prevent siphoning by mandating that all spent fuel rods must be returned to the country of origin.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    That would never work for human reasons. Specifically, a non-nuclear nation will never want their energy security to depend on the goodwill of nuclear nations. At any time, those nuclear nations could turn around and jack the price of fuel rods 100x, while also denying the non-nuclear nations the ability to make their own with the threat of sanctions or war.
    - pasc1878 3y ago
      So the same issue as oil - and actually any resource you have to get. Most resources are only found in limited places on Earth.
      - 3y ago

christkv 3y ago

My question is what do they do with all the pieces of the containment weasels that are also highly radioactive. Pipping and other stuff?

evgen 3y ago
If you ever see something described as 'low-level nuclear waste' then it is sometimes talking about things like old reactor parts and mostly talking about items like gloves, bunny suits, used dosimeters, etc. Things that have been exposed to enough neutron flux to be mildly radioactive but which are not going to make other things glow in the dark are usually put into barrels and buried. Like toxic metals, for example, the only real risk here is having it leak into the food chain or water supply.

blowski 3y ago

Are there any films or books about, say, a civilisation living in such a place?

s17tnet 3y ago
I hope I won't spoil it (it is a book saga from decades ago) but that is a major plot point of Shannara cycle.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Seveneves would come close. Spoiler alert, it features three groups of people surviving apocalyptic conditions on our planet in space, in deep sea, and in under mines. Part 3 is where the last two groups are introduced.

jinnko 3y ago

There was a documentary about this by Michael Madsen in 2010 called Into Eternity.

jules-jules 3y ago
Cannot recommend this film highly enough. Utterly haunting and thought-provoking.
pimlottc 3y ago
Came here to post this same comment. It’s a really thought-provoking film and quite striking in the way it was shot, edited, and scored. Highly recommended. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk
- darraghenright 3y ago
  Incredible movie. It makes a fantastic double bill with Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". I feel his weird epilogue monologue epilogue links them well. Both movies span and ponder on such a vast period of time, which is awe inspiring, terrifying and fascinating.

oceanplexian 3y ago

These guys are about to be super wrong when a couple decades from now governments realize there's a ton of extremely valuable unburned nuclear fuel, ready to be reprocessed, conveniently located in a storage facility.

ifdefdebug 3y ago
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- flir 3y ago
  It's going to be sealed deep underground in solid, stable rock. If future generations dig it up again, it's probably because they want it?
brap 3y ago
Yeah, I feel like it's super pretentious to think that your solution will actually last 100,000 years into the future. If you work in tech you know that 99% of the stuff you build wouldn't (or shouldn't) last another 5 years. Most likely in the next few decades they'll figure out how to make it useful or at least not be a problem anymore. Designing something to last 100, 200 years, alright... but 100,000? We probably won't even be here, on Earth. Waste of time.
- fasterik 3y ago
  What makes you say we "probably" won't be here on Earth in 100,000 years? We were here for the past 2,000,000 years. This also ignores the possibility that someone other than "us" will discover what we leave behind. > If you work in tech you know that 99% of the stuff you build wouldn't (or shouldn't) last another 5 years. We have technologies that have survived for thousands of years (agriculture, writing, etc.) This statement is completely myopic and absurd.
  - Proziam 3y ago
    It took less than one human lifespan to go from the first powered flight to a man landing on the moon. I see no reason for humans to be stuck on Earth for 100,000 years at our current rate of invention and growth. If "we" are here, or "something else" arrives at that time they are likely so advanced that the topic of communicating nuclear risks to them is rather pointless.

RektBoy 3y ago

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Caligatio 3y ago

I've been binge watching Tom Scott videos after finding out he's quasi-retiring soon and just happened to have watched his video of the exact same project last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50

Angostura 3y ago
> after finding out he's quasi-retiring soon What?!
- kozziollek 3y ago
  He will stop weekly videos on January 1st, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca0RpxknHCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca0RpxknHCI

Havoc 3y ago

I'd imagine in 500 years we'll have the tech to sort the site out in an afternoon so that headline may not be quite true

robinsonb5 3y ago
More realistically in 500 years there'll be no remaining record or understanding of what that mysterious stuff in that cave actually is, and the fact that people keep dying after going there will be put down to superstition.
- Havoc 3y ago
  If we manage to forget about radiation in the next 500 years then I'd say something more serious went wrong than some glowing stuff buried somewhere in a mountain :p
  - robinsonb5 3y ago
    Well yes, and I don't mean to bring anyone down, but I think it's incredibly optimistic to imagine our current civilisation surviving 500 years into the future! Just to be clear, I'm quite sure humans will still be here, but I think there's a good chance we'll exist in much smaller numbers, in isolated pockets. Individuals probably won't have the kind of ready access to the sum total of human knowledge that we now take for granted. I'd be amazed if any digital information from today survives even one century into the future, never mind five.
    - BoxOfRain 3y ago
      We'll probably build back after that too, civilisations coming and going is hardly new.
      - robinsonb5 3y ago
        Absolutely - 500 years is far enough ahead that it could have happened more than once!

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macinjosh 3y ago

What an information free piece. No one cares about the journalists feelings. Tell us about the facility.

Brusco_RF 3y ago
Right? I also find this journalism style infuriating. Very egocentric. I like the Economist's style, articles don't even have authors listed and when they must talk about themselves they say "your correspondent" which I perceive as much more humble

pfdietz 3y ago

Burying the stuff now is a waste of money. It's cheaper to stuff the spent fuel into dry shielded casks and wait to decide what to do with it. This forecloses no future options and allows the relatively expensive burial process to be delayed, reducing the NPV of that cost. Waiting also reduces the difficulty of dealing with waste, since the fission products decay relatively rapidly. Aside from seven very long-lived fission products, they will be gone in 300-500 years (depending on your definition of "gone"). Indeed, the problem then becomes that the gamma emission of the spent fuel elements is so low they are no longer self-protecting against "amateur" diversion of the plutonium. (Note that this is fission products, not actinides, that decay relatively quickly.) Personally, I suspect spent fuel will be dealt with by launching it beyond Earth. Think how cheap and reliable distant descendants of today's rockets will be several centuries hence.

aspyct 3y ago
Sure, let's pollute outer space, earth isn't enough. Can't wait to see the reaction when one of these barrels inevitably hits something important to someone.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  These are deeply foolish objections. Space is already chock full of ionizing radiation, and is so enormously sparse that waste ejected into interstellar space (for example) is not going to hit anything of value, even for many orders of magnitude of time beyond the half life of anything in there. This is clearly much preferable to putting the stuff a few kilometers away from an active biosphere.
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    how certain are we of the effects if the rocket blows up in the atmosphere? or before it escapes orbit? the DOE currently thinks it's a bad idea https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-we-dont-launch-nuclear-waste-space https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-we-dont-lau...

Mrdarknezz 3y ago

Fantastic

samjohnation111 3y ago

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sproketboy 3y ago

[dead]

sowbug 3y ago

Good place to put a time capsule.

cozzyd 3y ago

In grad school, I worked on an experiment housed at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). At least until a radioactive waste barrel exploded (because someone somewhere used the wrong kind of kitty litter, for real) and the place was shut down for a while. Working underground in salt "mine" (the salt is taken out so nuclear waste can go in) is no fun, do not recommend. But one of the interesting things about WIPP is how they thought about how to mark the site as "do not dig" in a way that would last a very long time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Awareness_triggers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Aw... for what they came up with...

hulitu 3y ago
The only warning in that picture is the skull. The majority of people on this planet have no idea what the other signs mean.
- svachalek 3y ago
  Yeah really as long as technological people are around, they won't be going in there. The people who need help are the post-apocalyptic Stone Age people who may follow us. They don't need the exact problem explained to them, they just need to make the place as creepy as possible. Skulls, spikes, creepy murals carved in stone.
imoverclocked 3y ago
Maybe we should start erecting a structure on top of these sites that would be very hard to move. Perhaps we build it out of stone and carve warnings into the entrances. The most resilient structure is probably some kind of pile of large quarried rock but we need it to be recognizable so it should have a fundamental shape. I guess I'm describing a pyramid which made it about 4k years before we forgot what the symbols meant and went digging through them anyway. 4/100 ain't bad for a first try though! It takes a lot of resources (today) to dig down 1400' so that might be helpful. However, it's still doable with time and motivation for practically any human society. Space is another interesting idea with its own set of issues (eg: getting waste there safely) but has the advantage of requiring a space-fairing civilization which also requires advanced knowledge, cooperation and communication which gives a better chance that simple grave-robbers don't dig something up after the decline of our current knowledge, skillsets and civilization.

LispSporks22 3y ago

Isn’t the waste still producing heat? How come we can’t use that to boil water as well?

e12e 3y ago

Recommend watching the documentary "Into Eternity": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4

elzbardico 3y ago

This is probably one of the least informative texts I have ever read. Next time BBC should sent a less emotional and more competent reporter.

w10-1 3y ago

There's no new information in the article on the process of storing nuclear fuel. The article is mainly about the feeling of how small m/y/our consciousness is relative to reality of time and the scale of problems facing us. It's worth exploring the experience, in spelunking or meditation, if it changes your fundamental incentives. Or read Ecclesiastes, et al. empathically. Finland is at least trying, doing the engineering and engaging the question. Perhaps because it has no fossil fuels?

Mutjake 3y ago
We do have large peat reserves (AFAIK some estimates compare the total amount to Norway’s oil reserves), but usage of peat has been decreasing/phased out for climate and environmental reasons.

ouraf 3y ago

Seems to be the least of all evils for the problem: Nuclear waste is nearly impossible to recycle in a cost effective way, can't be burned, can't be decontaminated effectively and won't decompose easily. It need to be stored in a clearly marked and delimited place, to avoid accidents, until someone in the future finds a more definitive/cost effective solution, or until it wears off, even if it take a long time for our standards.

amai 3y ago

Why not put nuclear waste into Mariana Trench? Humans who can go there most probably know about the dangers of nuclear waste.

thdc 3y ago

I'm all for alternative sources of energy (including nuclear) but I feel like generating and storing nuclear waste for future generations parallels how coal/oil/gas/etc. ruined the environment that our current generation has. What are some points that I could use to differentiate the two ideas? e.g. - not enough waste to be an issue - waste is properly secured so won't be an issue - less impact than coal/oil/gas

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