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As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues i

As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues if not more, groundwater pollution for example, risk of explosion, potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes ? >so if it does manage to overheat, the nuclear reaction will automatically dampen itself down. This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ? I am a believer in nuclear power. It can already be done safe and is being done safe in most cases. This isn't solving any real problem.

francisofascii 2y ago
According to the article, it is "encased in solid rock far below any water table", so maybe groundwater pollution isn't a concern.
foobarian 2y ago
It seems that digging cost is pretty minor when compared to the usual cost of these projects. As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, so even with a meltdown there would be no effect on water sources. Presumably if something like Chernobyl happened they would bury the hole and the fuel would just melt its way further down without ill effect. There were plenty of underground nuclear tests already so some of the effects might be understood in practice as well.
- senectus1 2y ago
  As someone that works in the mining industry... digging is not cheap. not cheap at all.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    How do you think it compares to construction of a plane-proof bunker?
  - pjc50 2y ago
    HS2 estimating £33 million per kilometer, in the absolute best case of a horizontal fairly shallow tunnel through earth and clay. A 1km hole straight down? I suspect that's going to start at 100m and go up unforseeably from there. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a819fe740f0b623026984f5/HS2_Guide_to_Tunnelling_Costs.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a819fe740f0b... But! What's not apparent until you read the article is that the planned reactor is .. 76cm across. That is, it's designed to fit down an oil well. Effectively you get "artificial high temperature geothermal", a hot object buried deep underground that you circulate water past.
    - AlexAndScripts 2y ago
      HS2 is more about NIMBYs and inefficiency than actual technical issues.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    Not cheap, but may be small compared to nuclear plant construction.
  - Bedon292 2y ago
    I don't think they were meaning to say digging is cheap, just that the cost would be minor when compared to the total costs of other nuclear power projects. It cost something like $34B to add two reactors to Plant Vogtle in Georgia [1]. And cost overruns at a project in South Carolina ended up with an estimate of $25B before the company filed for bankruptcy and the project never got finished. Whereas most of the estimates I have seen are in the single digit millions per mile for drilling. But even $100M in drilling would be minor compared to $25B. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
  - euroderf 2y ago
    FWIW... Finland has built a deep geological nukewaste repo. Wikipedia's numbers are: 520m (1700 feet) deep for 818 M€. Source of the money: "The State Nuclear Waste Management Fund has approximately €1.4 billion from charges for generated electricity."
  - swader999 2y ago
    This is drilling.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, Nuclear power needs lots of water for cooling and this is no exception. Can you realistically have a nuclear power plant far enough away from groundwater that this isn't a concern? Not a rhetorical question. Maybe you can!
phkahler 2y ago
>> groundwater pollution for example Just put these in areas where the water is already contaminated from fracking. Then when the stuff starts bubbling up it can be toxic AND radioactive!
jerf 2y ago
""it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?" We humans have a bias. We live in the biosphere, and from our perspective, we are surrounded by it. Everywhere we go from day-to-day, life abounds. But this is a very deceptive bias. Most of the universe is not the biosphere. Outside of the biosphere, the universe is rather nasty. High levels of radiation are the norm. Extreme temperatures (or what we consider extreme temperatures) are the norm. Very life-unfriendly chemical regimes are the norm, either by being full of nasty chemicals (Venusian sulpheric acid) or, more commonly, being so full of boring chemicals that life is very very difficult (Mars). This comes up most often in space exploration, when I see someone being concerned about putting nuclear power on the moon, whatever will we do with the waste, and the answer is that the lunar surface is already a radiation hell-hole. If you dump something like that on the surface, yeah, we humans will want to stay away from it, but it's a lot less material change than our intuition thinks. Our intuition wants to say "but what about all the wonderful life that will be affected", because everywhere we go, there is life. But there isn't any on the moon. Nothing will die because we dumped a couple hundred pounds of waste on the surface. Similarly, the subsurface of Earth below the biosphere... and I include the bacteria living in rocks and the water table and everything like that as part of the "biosphere", we know it goes deep but it doesn't go down forever... is already an incredibly harsh place. The chemistry is already nasty. It's already full of chemicals either too "interesting" or too "boring" to be useful for life. I'd like to see a good analysis to make sure this isn't going to work its way back up into the biosphere, yes, but your intuition that anywhere we put something, some life is going to be affected, does not necessarily apply to a mile under the surface. "Radiating its surrounding environment" is definitely not an issue in the slightest. There is no "environment" there, in the sense you mean. I'm more worried about what might physically migrate around into something that does have an "environment", but a mile is a long way for anything to travel through solid rock, and it needs to move pretty quickly too to get up into the biosphere while it's still a danger.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  I think there's some valid concerns about a meltdown contaminating groundwater, etc. But I agree that "radiation" is something we should be thinking about more pragmatically. For decades it's been a scary buzzword that the public completely misunderstands and fears. We should be having more rational discussions about it. Nuclear power has unfairly suffered attacks from "both" "sides" here in the US. The "left" has tended to be generally anti-nuke in what I consider to be very blind ways. And the "right" has closer ties to the fossil fuel industry and has always had a vested interest in torpedoing nuclear. These are vast generalizations with plenty of exceptions, but that's the big picture and I hate it.
donny2018 2y ago
The article says it will be in rocky grounds, and deep enough to be below any water tables.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
If we can construct nuclear reactors a mile down, doesn’t that mean we can more easily drill for essentially unlimited geothermal power? I realize this is an “obvious” question but it isn’t addressed by TFA.
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  I’d imagine if it was cost competitive with existing power generation methods people would be doing that already?
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    Well, I saw this a few months ago [1]. So I think maybe people are? But the key words in this article are "put a nuclear reactor one mile down" and I'm not sure we have the tech to do that either. [1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-fervo-geothermal-energy-partnership/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
- cwong430 2y ago
  Erik Townsend talks about repurposing oil drilling technology to geothermal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwdchfjtR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwdchfjtR4
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  I'd suspect that you could put a far higher-capacity nuclear power plant in a deep well than you could extract geothermal energy from same. Most deep-bore geothermal proposals call for many wells to be bored, on the order of dozens to hundreds. These have a limited lifespan (a few decades), and provide relatively low amounts of energy per well (perhaps tens of MW, as compared with 100s to 1,000s of MW from a nuclear reactor). Scale and efficiency matter. (I'm not advocating for or against either alternative here, simply noting the relative scale/effectiveness.)
thayne 2y ago
> groundwater pollution for example It is well below the water table > risk of explosion According to the article it is "self limiting" so that risk is very small, and an explosion a mile underground is a lot less threatening than an explosion in a facility on the surface. A mile of rock is going to provide a lot more protection than any amount of concrete and steel. > potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes From what I can tell (see for example https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-nuclear-explosions-cause-earthquakes https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-nuclear-explosions-cause-earth...), underground nuclear weapons tests, which have larger explosions than this could possibly create have a rather limited risk for earthquakes. I'm not a seismologist, but I think the risk there is less than the risk of an explosion in a reactor on the surface. > digging isn't cheap No. But it might be cheaper than building a large facility above-ground that meets all the necessary safety regulations for a nuclear reactor. And probably produces less carbon emissions in the process as well.
foxyv 2y ago
"A Mile Underground" is way below most ground water deposits. Most wells are less than 1000 feet deep. The world's deepest aquifer is less than 2 miles deep. You would not bury a nuclear reactor in such a place. Also, nature has multiple buried natural fission reactors just like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... Essentially what is being proposed here is an artificial geothermal well. The cost of the drilling is offset by not having to pay for the construction of huge concrete buildings and disposal of secondary nuclear waste. Disposal of waste on-site would essentially be filling the well with concrete. You are killing two birds with one stone. In addition, ground water is usually filtered through miles of sand, coal, and limestone. Well water is often radioactive and needs to be tested regularly because it has been filtered through uranium and thorium decay products. If such a reactor were to be breached, it's waste would not reach the surface unless it were placed in a mile deep spring that no one knew about somehow. https://www.epa.gov/radtown/natural-radionuclides-private-wells https://www.epa.gov/radtown/natural-radionuclides-private-we... https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/dph/environmental_health/private_wells/2018-downloads/050818-uranium_in_well_water_september_2016.pdf https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/d...
- bilekas 2y ago
  Okay that is a bit more less concerning then and makes a bit more sense to a layman like myself.
- butlike 2y ago
  From that article, it appears to have been a singular fission reactor that happened 1.7 billion years ago, which would make study of the ramifications to the surrounding area impossible now, right?
  - foxyv 2y ago
    The best part about studying radioactivity is how predictable it is and how easy it is to detect. It's part of how we are able to date the age of earth using Uranium isotope ratios. Decay occurs at predictable rates. The entire earth's crust is contaminated with nuclear byproducts which allow us to learn a great deal about it's formation even a couple billion years later. Fossil reactors are just an example of the nuclear world we live on. There are also countless other nuclear materials in the earth's crust. It's part of why we have to test for nuclear contamination of our wells. The destruction of one of these reactors a mile deep would be a blip on the radioactive material being unearthed. We would have to be careful not to place them next to existing aquifers, but they would be way more safe than surface plants which already have an amazing track record.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues if not more, groundwater pollution for example, risk of explosion, potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes ? Digging isn't cheap if you wanted to drill a gas well for yourself. A mile would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million. A million is chump change when talking about a nuclear plant, which are priced either in the tens of billions or possibly even in the low hundreds of billions. Groundwater is not a mile down. Nuclear reactors cannot explode in the same way that nuclear weapons explode. But if they somehow could, a mile down isn't going to hurt anyone. > This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ? Did you read the same article as the rest of us?

francisofascii 2y ago

According to the article, it is "encased in solid rock far below any water table", so maybe groundwater pollution isn't a concern.

foobarian 2y ago

It seems that digging cost is pretty minor when compared to the usual cost of these projects. As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, so even with a meltdown there would be no effect on water sources. Presumably if something like Chernobyl happened they would bury the hole and the fuel would just melt its way further down without ill effect. There were plenty of underground nuclear tests already so some of the effects might be understood in practice as well.

senectus1 2y ago
As someone that works in the mining industry... digging is not cheap. not cheap at all.
- itishappy 2y ago
  How do you think it compares to construction of a plane-proof bunker?
- pjc50 2y ago
  HS2 estimating £33 million per kilometer, in the absolute best case of a horizontal fairly shallow tunnel through earth and clay. A 1km hole straight down? I suspect that's going to start at 100m and go up unforseeably from there. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a819fe740f0b623026984f5/HS2_Guide_to_Tunnelling_Costs.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a819fe740f0b... But! What's not apparent until you read the article is that the planned reactor is .. 76cm across. That is, it's designed to fit down an oil well. Effectively you get "artificial high temperature geothermal", a hot object buried deep underground that you circulate water past.
  - AlexAndScripts 2y ago
    HS2 is more about NIMBYs and inefficiency than actual technical issues.
- foobarian 2y ago
  Not cheap, but may be small compared to nuclear plant construction.
- Bedon292 2y ago
  I don't think they were meaning to say digging is cheap, just that the cost would be minor when compared to the total costs of other nuclear power projects. It cost something like $34B to add two reactors to Plant Vogtle in Georgia [1]. And cost overruns at a project in South Carolina ended up with an estimate of $25B before the company filed for bankruptcy and the project never got finished. Whereas most of the estimates I have seen are in the single digit millions per mile for drilling. But even $100M in drilling would be minor compared to $25B. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
- euroderf 2y ago
  FWIW... Finland has built a deep geological nukewaste repo. Wikipedia's numbers are: 520m (1700 feet) deep for 818 M€. Source of the money: "The State Nuclear Waste Management Fund has approximately €1.4 billion from charges for generated electricity."
- swader999 2y ago
  This is drilling.
JohnBooty 2y ago
As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, Nuclear power needs lots of water for cooling and this is no exception. Can you realistically have a nuclear power plant far enough away from groundwater that this isn't a concern? Not a rhetorical question. Maybe you can!

phkahler 2y ago

>> groundwater pollution for example Just put these in areas where the water is already contaminated from fracking. Then when the stuff starts bubbling up it can be toxic AND radioactive!

jerf 2y ago

""it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?" We humans have a bias. We live in the biosphere, and from our perspective, we are surrounded by it. Everywhere we go from day-to-day, life abounds. But this is a very deceptive bias. Most of the universe is not the biosphere. Outside of the biosphere, the universe is rather nasty. High levels of radiation are the norm. Extreme temperatures (or what we consider extreme temperatures) are the norm. Very life-unfriendly chemical regimes are the norm, either by being full of nasty chemicals (Venusian sulpheric acid) or, more commonly, being so full of boring chemicals that life is very very difficult (Mars). This comes up most often in space exploration, when I see someone being concerned about putting nuclear power on the moon, whatever will we do with the waste, and the answer is that the lunar surface is already a radiation hell-hole. If you dump something like that on the surface, yeah, we humans will want to stay away from it, but it's a lot less material change than our intuition thinks. Our intuition wants to say "but what about all the wonderful life that will be affected", because everywhere we go, there is life. But there isn't any on the moon. Nothing will die because we dumped a couple hundred pounds of waste on the surface. Similarly, the subsurface of Earth below the biosphere... and I include the bacteria living in rocks and the water table and everything like that as part of the "biosphere", we know it goes deep but it doesn't go down forever... is already an incredibly harsh place. The chemistry is already nasty. It's already full of chemicals either too "interesting" or too "boring" to be useful for life. I'd like to see a good analysis to make sure this isn't going to work its way back up into the biosphere, yes, but your intuition that anywhere we put something, some life is going to be affected, does not necessarily apply to a mile under the surface. "Radiating its surrounding environment" is definitely not an issue in the slightest. There is no "environment" there, in the sense you mean. I'm more worried about what might physically migrate around into something that does have an "environment", but a mile is a long way for anything to travel through solid rock, and it needs to move pretty quickly too to get up into the biosphere while it's still a danger.

JohnBooty 2y ago
I think there's some valid concerns about a meltdown contaminating groundwater, etc. But I agree that "radiation" is something we should be thinking about more pragmatically. For decades it's been a scary buzzword that the public completely misunderstands and fears. We should be having more rational discussions about it. Nuclear power has unfairly suffered attacks from "both" "sides" here in the US. The "left" has tended to be generally anti-nuke in what I consider to be very blind ways. And the "right" has closer ties to the fossil fuel industry and has always had a vested interest in torpedoing nuclear. These are vast generalizations with plenty of exceptions, but that's the big picture and I hate it.

donny2018 2y ago

The article says it will be in rocky grounds, and deep enough to be below any water tables.

matthewdgreen 2y ago

If we can construct nuclear reactors a mile down, doesn’t that mean we can more easily drill for essentially unlimited geothermal power? I realize this is an “obvious” question but it isn’t addressed by TFA.

NegativeLatency 2y ago
I’d imagine if it was cost competitive with existing power generation methods people would be doing that already?
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Well, I saw this a few months ago [1]. So I think maybe people are? But the key words in this article are "put a nuclear reactor one mile down" and I'm not sure we have the tech to do that either. [1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-fervo-geothermal-energy-partnership/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
cwong430 2y ago
Erik Townsend talks about repurposing oil drilling technology to geothermal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwdchfjtR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwdchfjtR4
dredmorbius 2y ago
I'd suspect that you could put a far higher-capacity nuclear power plant in a deep well than you could extract geothermal energy from same. Most deep-bore geothermal proposals call for many wells to be bored, on the order of dozens to hundreds. These have a limited lifespan (a few decades), and provide relatively low amounts of energy per well (perhaps tens of MW, as compared with 100s to 1,000s of MW from a nuclear reactor). Scale and efficiency matter. (I'm not advocating for or against either alternative here, simply noting the relative scale/effectiveness.)

thayne 2y ago

> groundwater pollution for example It is well below the water table > risk of explosion According to the article it is "self limiting" so that risk is very small, and an explosion a mile underground is a lot less threatening than an explosion in a facility on the surface. A mile of rock is going to provide a lot more protection than any amount of concrete and steel. > potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes From what I can tell (see for example https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-nuclear-explosions-cause-earthquakes https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-nuclear-explosions-cause-earth...), underground nuclear weapons tests, which have larger explosions than this could possibly create have a rather limited risk for earthquakes. I'm not a seismologist, but I think the risk there is less than the risk of an explosion in a reactor on the surface. > digging isn't cheap No. But it might be cheaper than building a large facility above-ground that meets all the necessary safety regulations for a nuclear reactor. And probably produces less carbon emissions in the process as well.

foxyv 2y ago

"A Mile Underground" is way below most ground water deposits. Most wells are less than 1000 feet deep. The world's deepest aquifer is less than 2 miles deep. You would not bury a nuclear reactor in such a place. Also, nature has multiple buried natural fission reactors just like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... Essentially what is being proposed here is an artificial geothermal well. The cost of the drilling is offset by not having to pay for the construction of huge concrete buildings and disposal of secondary nuclear waste. Disposal of waste on-site would essentially be filling the well with concrete. You are killing two birds with one stone. In addition, ground water is usually filtered through miles of sand, coal, and limestone. Well water is often radioactive and needs to be tested regularly because it has been filtered through uranium and thorium decay products. If such a reactor were to be breached, it's waste would not reach the surface unless it were placed in a mile deep spring that no one knew about somehow. https://www.epa.gov/radtown/natural-radionuclides-private-wells https://www.epa.gov/radtown/natural-radionuclides-private-we... https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/dph/environmental_health/private_wells/2018-downloads/050818-uranium_in_well_water_september_2016.pdf https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/d...

bilekas 2y ago
Okay that is a bit more less concerning then and makes a bit more sense to a layman like myself.
butlike 2y ago
From that article, it appears to have been a singular fission reactor that happened 1.7 billion years ago, which would make study of the ramifications to the surrounding area impossible now, right?
- foxyv 2y ago
  The best part about studying radioactivity is how predictable it is and how easy it is to detect. It's part of how we are able to date the age of earth using Uranium isotope ratios. Decay occurs at predictable rates. The entire earth's crust is contaminated with nuclear byproducts which allow us to learn a great deal about it's formation even a couple billion years later. Fossil reactors are just an example of the nuclear world we live on. There are also countless other nuclear materials in the earth's crust. It's part of why we have to test for nuclear contamination of our wells. The destruction of one of these reactors a mile deep would be a blip on the radioactive material being unearthed. We would have to be careful not to place them next to existing aquifers, but they would be way more safe than surface plants which already have an amazing track record.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

> As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues if not more, groundwater pollution for example, risk of explosion, potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes ? Digging isn't cheap if you wanted to drill a gas well for yourself. A mile would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million. A million is chump change when talking about a nuclear plant, which are priced either in the tens of billions or possibly even in the low hundreds of billions. Groundwater is not a mile down. Nuclear reactors cannot explode in the same way that nuclear weapons explode. But if they somehow could, a mile down isn't going to hurt anyone. > This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ? Did you read the same article as the rest of us?