Then 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.
> 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.
"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.
Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.
It's an absurd thought experiment to illustrate that even when taken to an extreme the volume is small enough that a solution broadly remains feasible.
In germany alone, 500 000 m³ of radioactive material is to be disposed somehow by 2050. Having people carry that underground sounds insane. There is more to waste than fuel rods. And even they .. amount to a really high number if you factor in shielding.
I think you have a serious misconception. The long term storage we're talking about here is for the spent fuel rods (or alternatively the byproducts extracted from them if they are reprocessed). It's known as high level waste and there isn't very much of it.
> As a general rule, short-lived waste (mainly non-fuel materials from reactors) is buried in shallow repositories, while long-lived waste (from fuel and fuel reprocessing) is deposited in geological repository.
> Overall, the 60-year-long nuclear program in the UK up until 2019 produced 2150 m3 of HLW.
You 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.
This 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
Apparently 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".
We 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
Isn’t this no longer true? I’ve seen many experimental archaeology documentaries that use a recipe that uses pozzolanic ash and rock from volcanoes in Italy that they show to create the same properties found in Roman concrete. We don’t make concrete with it now because the supply is too limited and the expense of mining it would be greater than making portland cement.
When 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.
So 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.
No? 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?
An 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.
Yeah, 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
