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Waste is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...

by nawitus 14y ago

onemorepassword 14y ago
You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. Congrats. Edit: Just to be clear, I belong to the part of the population you can convince of nuclear energy, at least as an intermediate solution. But not this way.
- nollidge 14y ago
  > You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. I'm sure the proof is obvious to you, but how about explaining it for the rest of us?
  - thoughtsimple 14y ago
    This might help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository It is anything but a solved problem. And of course none of this talks about decommissioning reactors and what to do with the low level nuclear waste that is the decommissioned reactor.
    - jholman 14y ago
      Yes. Plus, there's an epistemological asymmetry here. We can know that it's not yet solved (and I would agree that we do know this right now). We cannot know that it is solved, at least not without waiting tens of thousands of years. Even if we escape current frying pans, we'll still have a fire to deal with. So I agree with onemorepassword's claim that nawitus's comment is indicative of dishonesty, because it demonstrates a level of confidence that no reasonable well-informed person would have, about the human ability to control events in advance, for a hundred thousand years. (I don't agree with all of what onemorepassword says, especially the implication that the pro-nuclear crowd is more dishonest than the anti-nuclear.... 99% of the utterances by the anti-nuclear crowd are VERY dishonest.)
Intermernet 14y ago
Have you by any chance seen the Futurama episode "A Big Piece Of Garbage"? A few points: Onkalo is in Finland, and the storage facility is ONLY for waste from Finnish nuclear plants. It also isn't complete as far as I'm aware. I see that Sweden are also building the same style of storage facility in Östhammar, but I don't see any similar construction going on in the USA, France, UK, Japan etc. It may be happening, but there definitely isn't a lot of press about it. This leads me to agree with the grand-parent's point about honesty. Surely, if this form of storage is actually a solution, everyone would be doing it and advertising loudly that they were. Secondly, the KBS-3 standard's final step involves storing the waste for 100,000 years! And, according to the Wikipedia article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3, linked from the article you provided the URL for) there were some questions raised about the copper capsules used as one of the storage layers, and the fact that the Finnish company building the Onkalo facility (Posiva, owned by the 2 main players in Finnish nuclear plants) seems to be being duplicitous in the way these questions are being dealt with. From the article "independent research conducted in Finland has supported the results of Szakálos's group. However, in public, Posiva dismissed the independent research in Sweden and Finland, referring to its own safety studies." So, to quote the grandparent comment, "As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns ... I'll be on the anti-nuclear side."

Waste is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...

by nawitus 14y ago

Waste is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...

onemorepassword 14y ago

You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. Congrats. Edit: Just to be clear, I belong to the part of the population you can convince of nuclear energy, at least as an intermediate solution. But not this way.

nollidge 14y ago
> You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. I'm sure the proof is obvious to you, but how about explaining it for the rest of us?
- thoughtsimple 14y ago
  This might help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository It is anything but a solved problem. And of course none of this talks about decommissioning reactors and what to do with the low level nuclear waste that is the decommissioned reactor.
  - jholman 14y ago
    Yes. Plus, there's an epistemological asymmetry here. We can know that it's not yet solved (and I would agree that we do know this right now). We cannot know that it is solved, at least not without waiting tens of thousands of years. Even if we escape current frying pans, we'll still have a fire to deal with. So I agree with onemorepassword's claim that nawitus's comment is indicative of dishonesty, because it demonstrates a level of confidence that no reasonable well-informed person would have, about the human ability to control events in advance, for a hundred thousand years. (I don't agree with all of what onemorepassword says, especially the implication that the pro-nuclear crowd is more dishonest than the anti-nuclear.... 99% of the utterances by the anti-nuclear crowd are VERY dishonest.)

Intermernet 14y ago

Have you by any chance seen the Futurama episode "A Big Piece Of Garbage"? A few points: Onkalo is in Finland, and the storage facility is ONLY for waste from Finnish nuclear plants. It also isn't complete as far as I'm aware. I see that Sweden are also building the same style of storage facility in Östhammar, but I don't see any similar construction going on in the USA, France, UK, Japan etc. It may be happening, but there definitely isn't a lot of press about it. This leads me to agree with the grand-parent's point about honesty. Surely, if this form of storage is actually a solution, everyone would be doing it and advertising loudly that they were. Secondly, the KBS-3 standard's final step involves storing the waste for 100,000 years! And, according to the Wikipedia article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3, linked from the article you provided the URL for) there were some questions raised about the copper capsules used as one of the storage layers, and the fact that the Finnish company building the Onkalo facility (Posiva, owned by the 2 main players in Finnish nuclear plants) seems to be being duplicitous in the way these questions are being dealt with. From the article "independent research conducted in Finland has supported the results of Szakálos's group. However, in public, Posiva dismissed the independent research in Sweden and Finland, referring to its own safety studies." So, to quote the grandparent comment, "As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns ... I'll be on the anti-nuclear side."