this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Nuclear waste is a solved problem, it is contained to a tiny physical object, all we gotta do is dig a hole, put the object into the hole, and cover it up.
We pretend that it is way harder than it is.
I live in a suburb north of Stockholm in Sweden, and I'd support the government building a large underground permanent storage of nuclear waste from all over the world (for a fee) in my suburb, we have the best ground for permanent storage in Scandinavia, we would earn money, create jobs and make the world safer.
maybe solved where you live, and only for as long as your containment facility stays in one piece.
earthquakes, meteors, tidal waves - these things do happen, sure, not often on a lifetime scale, but compared to the long half-lives of this stuff? plenty of time for the worst case scenario.
I think you pretend the problem is simpler than it actually is, when considered the time frames involved. It's not your lifetime we're talking, it's the hundreds of generations where this shit remains hot.
AND I'd add your country is at least trying, in the US we've given up and store it in pools local to the reactors, it's ignorant as fuck
Scandinavia is geographically stable and has been politically stable for a long time, I can think of no better place for a global nuclear waste storage facility.
Meteors is just s dumb risk to consider in this case, any meteor capable of breaching an underground nuclear waste will cause far worse problems than the nuclear material will.
The baltic isn't that tidal either, so tidal waves can be disregarded.
Earthquakes have happened here, but they are few and far between.
I recommend that you watch the BBC Horizon Documentary "Nuclear Nightmares" that talks about our fear of radiation.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
why bother investing enormous amounts of money into a tech that's already problematic? when there are better solutions at hand?
I'm not anti-nuclear, I just think further investment into it is misguided when there are so many other options that don't create tens of thousands of years of radioisotopes that have to go somewhere.
good on Scandinavia, the rest of the world isn't in such privileged positions. As seen in Fukushima. As seen in the hundreds of cooling ponds all over the US.
Because we need the baseload, even a huge wind or solar farm can provide the stable baseload.
In my first comment, I suggested that we would build a facility large enough to handle global nuclear waste.
yeah, I get it, you're whole hog on it, the enthusiasm comes through loud and clear.
I don't agree, but there's no amount of sense that's going to sway the already decided.
I feel the exact way about you in this thread.
nothing, not a single thing you've argued, will in any way reduce the radioactive leftovers nuclear reactors produce and most of the world is putting off for the next generation to fix.
Like climate change.
How many crises do you think those poor kids are going to be able to manage at once?
Which crisis is the most important to manage in the short term.
Climate change, nuclear power gives us a huge tool to deal with it by shutting down fossil furl plants.
If we fail the climate change, the nuclear waste will be a tiny problem to deal with.
With nuclear power we at least give people a problem they can deal with, climate change is far, far worse.
The ammount of radioactive waste is tiny relative to normal dumps, and as described before, it is easy to deal with, dig a deep hole, put the waste in it, refill it.
Boom problem solved.
CO2 from fossil plats will keep up climate change for centuries.
I wish it were that simple. Meanwhile, in reality:
https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/scientists-say-nuclear-fuel-pools-around-the-country-pose-safety-and-health-risks/
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/safer-storage-spent-nuclear-fuel
https://www.epri.com/research/products/000000003002000640
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dlochbaum/possible-source-of-leaks-at-spent-fuel-pools-at/
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120970249.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK373720/
I am very confused now, you link to articles talking about storage pool issues, but I never mentioned storage pools.
I am talking about what they are doing in Finland.
They have drilled a very deep hole in the bedrock, built vaults where they will put cey casks of nuclear waste, then they will backfill the hole and tunnels with clay.
This is how you do it.
No one considers a storage pool as permanent storage.
THE WORLD IS NOT FINLAND.
Unless you're volunteering to take the world's radioactive waste, stop thinking the world is finland, jfc you're worse than an american
And yeah, storage pools WORLDWIDE are being used as defacto permanent storage. That's what you call it when you have no plan to move the shit.
gonna block you now, you're either too dense to realize there's a whole world outside your tiny country, or deliberately obtuse.
Since the start of this thread I have been advocating for building a facility here in Scandinavia to permanently store all nuclear waste globally.
At least TRY to read my posts before whining uselessly!
Also it's only a problem if we let it be, there's literally centuries for us to figure out a way to make those waste useful for us. Not working towards that would be the only way for the problem to come back to us in the future.
yes, I'm sure we'll hop on fixing this enormous issue with all the same urgency we've treated it with so far...
An idea I have thought about, nuclear boosted geothermal power.
Geothermal power normally just use a simple borehole with a hose going down and then up again, coolant goes in the hole, gets heated up a few degrees and the can then be processed to heat a house.
What if we could run tubes near the nuclear waste that will keep producing heat for thousands of years?