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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Can't we just bury the radioactive waste in the desert?

It's not that simple. Check out the documentary "Into Eternity" on the impracticability and difficulty of "burying" nuclear waste which remains deadly for 250,000 years.

The burying part is just (materials|nuclear|mining) engineering and it's practical. The forecasting and risk modelling over > 100k years is the uncertain part, even in deep bedrock in very seismically stable areas. IIRC the documentary makes a point about how difficult it is to signal to post apocalyptic stone age generations 100k years in the future not to go there.

Though many people think the used fuel will get dug up before then to be reprocessed into fuel...

That's because you're burying usable fuel, breeder reactors eliminate the waste problem for all practical purposes, the reason they're not being built has been entirely political. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...

Look at the Breeder reactor controversy section of the article you linked. The reasons aren't entirely political. But rather financial.

Capitalism is the culprit.

Most of the financial reasons are political. NIMBYism makes nuclear in general very expensive, even though coal blatantly kills more than even existing nuclear tech, not to mention potential next gen reactors.

In case of breeders, the 2nd argument that makes them expensive is that they're an "proliferation risk".

That documentary was the deepest SF thing I ever watched.

I don't know of how many completely uninhabited deserts there are in the United States that aren't protected as national or state parks. In addition, how do you transport nuclear waste to the desert, especially from long distances? Nobody wants a truck carrying nuclear waste around. The biggest issue is that I don't think anyone at the federal, state, or congressional representative level would volunteer or accept putting nuclear waste close to their constituencies.

I don't have an answer for where to bury it (though recycling it really ought to be an option. Politics prevents that right now) but the movement of the waste is actually a problem that has been largely solved. Nuclear flasks are designed to withstand incredible accidents. For instance, the UK flasks were tested by placing one one a derailed flatbed car & ramming a locomotive into it at >90mph. The flask was situated so that the hinge (weakest point) would be hit. The flask was minimally damaged while the locomotive was destroyed. [1]

The US flasks are required to withstand similar catastrophic accidents.

[1]http://www.railmagazine.com/trains/heritage/it-s-a-lovely-da...

We were going to put it inside a mountain in Nevada—Congress even passed a law authorizing it—but politics ended up killing the project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

I recall hearing that it wasn't so much politics as the potential for it to poison nearby water?

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/05/10/10greenwire-gao-deat...

In Finland we have a similiar project[0] under construction. The intention is to store spent nuclear fuel there from 2020-2120 and then seal the facility.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

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