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TIL How we plan nuclear waste warning to last 100,000 years
(www.euronews.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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I am persistently mystified that so many people -- many calling themselves "green" or environmentalist -- consider this a solved problem.
Spent nuclear fuel piles up in retaining pools at nuclear reactor sites, and we can't take it anywhere because nobody can figure out where to put it. Everybody has easy answers and a proper & permanent disposal site and method are always "just around the corner".
Meanwhile, solar and wind -- for all of their problems -- can meet large portions of our energy needs RIGHT NOW with minimal capital outlay to install new capacity.
Spent nuclear fuel is absolutely an environmental hazard, but nuclear power is kinda the least-worst option for managing base load right now.
Practical fusion is decades away still, and while solar and wind are great, electrical grids don't function unless they can exactly meet electrical demand 100% of the time. You need something that can rapidly scale up and down on demand, regardless of time of day or inclement weather, otherwise one good winter storm and everyone loses their heating (assuming you've managed to transition off gas and on to electrical heating). If nuclear is out then your other options are hydro (required very specific geography and has its own environmental impact) or gas/oil/coal.
You can make solar/wind more practical by using grid-scale storage, but the amount of grid storage required to fully decarbonise the grid world-wide just isn't practical unless you can generate significant amounts of power through other means.
Personally, my hope is for a zero-carbon electrical grid in my lifetime. Ideally that won't involve nuclear, but if the choice is nuclear or carbon I'll take nuclear.
I'm totally with you on that.
Ah, baseload, the old saw. Worked really well in France last year, didn't it? Do you think there will be fewer droughts in the future?
Nuclear waste management is a solved problem, conceptually it is quite simple and elegant.
You litterarly just dig a hole, put the waste there and fill the hole in.
Practially you need to dig a deep hole in stable bedrock, put the spent fuel in special fuel containers which are put in the hole, which is backfilled.
Here in Scandinavia we have stable bedrock and technology to drill into it, I have for several years asked myself why we don't get into the international nuclear waste management business, nuclear waste takes up a surprisingly small ammount of physical space, so Sweden, Finland and Norway could just build one facility each and start selling space in them to other nations.
I have also thought about using the waste to boost geothermal power, spent nuclear fuel will still generate a bit of heat, so run geothermal loops around the main tunnel, I realize that the ammount of heat generated by the spent fuel would be limited, but it would still be there and with geothermal heat pumps we can use the extra heat energy to safely heat houses.
I would have zero issues with it if the government decided to build a spent nuclear fuel permanent storage site in my small town.
Please note however, I only see nuclear power as an interim solution, something that will power us through the next 100-150 years, and quickly phase out fossil fuel power generation, while we buy ourselves time to build sustainable power generation that works.
My response:
I did mention that I was talking about a practical solution, not a political one.
Practically, this is a fairly simple solution, poltically, it is a mess, a mess driven by unfounded fears and demands for unrealistic threat mitigation.
The fact that we are looking into how to warn a civilization 100 000 years in the future might be admirable, but it is a ridiculous stopping point.
Current plan is to build a storage site 500m in the bedrock, fill the site with waste, and backfill the site, then seal it and leave it.
This is fine.
Any society capable of drilling 500m into the bedrock can be assumed to have knowledge of radiation, so they would detect the material as being dangerous and act accordingly.
In the case I am wrong, and a society has zero idea of radiation yet manage to get to the site, it would quickly be abandoned as the society figure out that going down there makes people sick, if they have religion it would probably classify the site as cursed and forbid their members from going down there.
It is fine.
Let's focus on our current problems first, with the current storage system, that being pepetual temporary storage, it is certain that shit will leak into an active environment sooner or later without maintenance, a far worse problem than if we set up an underground permanent storage site.
And the amount of uranium available would only get us through to the end of the century.
Some countries successfully dismantle the remnants of the rods. Residues are extracted from spent nuclear fuel and rods are made not on uranium but on plutonium. The remmans of this rods is even more enriched than before reaktor starting work. as a result, it is possible to burn unenriched uranium and other heavy nuclei, so that the fuel will definitely last for a long time.
"[Nuclear] is costly, potentially dangerous, that there are problems dealing with and siting waste, and that future generations are left with a legacy they will not appreciate. ...uranium is itself a non-renewable resource, due to run out well before the end of this century. So even if it were to be cost-effective, safe, and harmless to future generations, nuclear energy is not a long-term solution to humanity’s energy problems."
Dobson, Andrew, (2000) GREEN POLITICAL THOUGHT, United Kingdom: Taylor and Francis (Books) Limited, pp.56
Standard green party retoric, they don't see the forest for the trees.
If we had built nuclear power plants and closed coal, oil and gas power plants back in 2000 we would have several nations with a carbon free grid these days.
I don't think Dobson is out to mislead people from an academic point-of-view, so I take the uranium comment as being true. If it is the case, then I'm not sure how you had better insight into the future of nuclear power.
Read their arguments above. Also, is it this Andrew Dobson? An academic but hardly an expert on the nuclear physics.
He is quoting another source (I haven't got the rest of the book to hand).
Oh, if only the reactors worked exclusively on uranium. Of course, I can quote Rosatom's articles, but unfortunately they are only in Russian. A closed fuel cycle was developed there back in 2015. If you want you can use Google translate: https://habr.com/ru/articles/388533/
P.S. It is very specific to get scientific knowledge from a book called GREEN POLITICAL THOUGHT
Thanks, I'll check it out, Google Translate usually works well on links.
Edit: tried reading it, got about half of it. How long is this closed-loop supposed to last until it is all spent? I didn't see mentions of that, just about uranium no longer being an issue.
I quoted that as I'm currently reading through it as part of my master's and it seemed particularly relevant. Dobson looks at different aspects from different perspectives, not taking particular sides. The quote above is from the 'greens' perspective; Dobson mentions the possibility of future technological advances.
At the beginning of the article, it is mentioned that only the use of uranium-238, which is now not used, will expand the reserves of nuclear fuel by about 200 times.
UPD: also in another article I read that not all uranium is completely destroyed in the reactor cycle, the rest turns into radioactive waste, which in a few years can be cooled and recycled into new rods for the reactor. in France, for example, they have been doing this for a long time. Here: https://habr.com/ru/articles/588877/
Just throw it in a subduction rift, give the earth a yummy snack
I always wonder how much of the nuclear fanboyism on social media is actually astroturfing. I suspect it's the majority. While there surely are some genuinely misguided people out there the sheer amount of bullshit you get thrown at you whenever you say anything critical of nuclear technology is just insane.
I am not sure why you are talking about climate variations: none of these projects happen at the surface or close to it. The sites are selected to be geologically stable over millions of years, so climate will have no effect on them.
Also, the 100,000 years is the design requirement for current nuclear waste to reach natural uranium toxicity. There are two important consequences from that: since radioactivity reduces exponentially, this means that at around 10,000 years you are already at ~10x higher than natural uranium (down from 1000x for fresh nuclear waste) and the risk is already much lower as 99% of the process is done already. Also, these values are for the current way the waste has been treated. If you use the DIAMEX process, your 100,000 years becomes 500-1000 years (yes, that's not a typo).
That's also part of why these projects move slowly at the moment. The current options work but we are developing solutions that are much better - why build a 100,000 years facility when you can build a 1000 year facility, or even use some of this waste in a 4th gen plant? The main reason these move slowly is that heat management is the biggest issue on the storage, and the first phase for these projects is surface storage for 60-80 years for a first cooling phase.
Humans have been around for 1.6 or so million years.