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I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
by chpatrick 4mo ago
I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
- awesome_dude 4mo agoThis has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
- chpatrick 4mo agoSure, you need the right place, but it's not like there's a shortage of space far away from everything.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- throwthrowuknow 4mo agoWhat kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?
- awesome_dude 4mo agoNeither concrete nor steel have the lifespans we're discussing thousands, or tens of thousands of years. And. Bacteria.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoWhen sealed several hundred meters underground in nonporous rock they do have such long lifespans. It's like observing that corn doesn't have a 10 year lifespan when left out on the counter and then objecting to canning it on that basis.
- awesome_dude 4mo agoIt's non porous right up until an earthquake or some movement of the area makes it not
- fc417fc802 4mo agoSo just to be clear the concern here is that something buried 2+ miles underground, in a secure container, encased along with other secure containers in a concrete vault, all homed in nonporous rock, in a geologically stable area, is suddenly going to be subjected to an earthquake, against all odds a fault is going to open right through the waste storage area, again against all odds groundwater will appear, the reinforced vault will be weathered to the point of failure (over what timespan I wonder?), and the resulting leak of radioactive material that is multiple miles underground will then somehow affect humans living, what, somewhere within a few hundred miles? Does that really sound like a reasonable scenario to you? Because as far as I'm concerned it's pure concern trolling.
- awesome_dude 4mo agoSo, just to be clear, you're demanding that I re-answer every concern that I've already addressed otherwise you're going to label me a troll Sounds like abuse to me.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoNo? I don't see where you addressed these points in context? I am saying that I don't find what you're saying to be at all convincing but am of course open to reasoned debate if you think I've got something wrong. Being concerned about the scenario I outlined above truly seems absurd to me. Do you see an obvious issue with the sequence of events I posed?
- awesome_dude 4mo agoI do see you instantly reaching for threats of accusations, which i do view as abuse Bye.
- Mawr 4mo agoApparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick... I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die". It's concern trolling at its worst.
- awesome_dude 4mo agoUntil we find the Rosetta stone hieroglyphs were unintelligible, and that language only stopped being used 2000 years ago.
- bethekidyouwant 4mo agoI guess they won’t have Geiger counters in the future
- awesome_dude 4mo agoWe don't have a lot of technology that we knew existed in earlier civilisations - the Aztecs, Mayans, pueblo peoples, the Easter islanders, to name just a few were doing things we have no idea how to do
- throwthrowuknow 4mo agoRidiculous, not knowing exactly how stoneage peoples carved and moved rocks and dirt around doesn’t mean we don’t know how to move rocks and dirt.
- palata 4mo agoAn earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
- awesome_dude 4mo agoIt doesn't need to - all that needs to happen is for water to suddenly have a course to where the materials are being stored.
- noosphr 4mo agoAnd yet we had a natural nuclear reactor that's been self contained for 2 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
- awesome_dude 4mo agoYeah, i know about that one and it kind of proves my point, it's been active as a nuclear reactor for roughly a billion years if i recall correctly - every time water seeped into the rock it slowed the neutrons down and the reactor started up, created steam, which then evaporated and stopped the reaction Dangerous the whole time.
- duskwuff 4mo agoIf only there had been some kind of geological steam turbine to go with it... :)
- awesome_dude 4mo agoWould have made a nice steamed ham
- TheCondor 4mo agoThen surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too. For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste? Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.
- fc417fc802 4mo ago> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit. The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.
- lukan 4mo ago"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think." Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.
- crote 4mo agoYou should read up on the Asse II mine in Germany. They tried exactly this kind of naïve "just throw it in an old mine" approach, and it has turned into a giant headache as it is now slowly collapsing and trying to leak into the surrounding groundwater - if chemical reactions don't cause it to explode first.