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Long-Term Thinking and Nuclear Waste

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59 pointspmoriarty47 comments

I consider these passively-stable waste disposal solutions that are supposed to last 10,000-1,000,000 years without maintenance over-engineered and founded on dubious assumptions. I think that something like surface dry cask storage in a dry, geologically stable area is a lot better. The facility should have ongoing monitoring and the capability to re-cask units every few decades or centuries. If there's some weird failure mode that can't be discovered in artificial accelerated aging tests, future caretakers will be much better poised to cope with the problem if they actually have access to the waste. You don't need to try to invent a language that will survive into deep time, you don't have to use gargantuan safety margins to in an attempt to offset the unknowns of deep time, and so on.

What if the maintainer-civilization collapses? And what if nobody a thousand years from now knows how to build steel and concrete vessels or detect ionizing radiation? The somewhat cold but IMO correct answer is then those future low-tech humans will not suffer much risk from our spent fuel, relatively speaking. Making steel and concrete, making radiosensitive photographic emulsions -- these are 19th century technologies. If humans of the distant future don't have even 19th-century-equivalent technology, they probably have such high ambient morbidity and mortality from infectious disease that leaking nuclear waste will not much diminish their quality nor quantity of life. Not to mention that the most dangerous components of spent fuel -- short- and medium-lived fission products -- will be diminished a billion-fold or more after 1,000 years pass.

Spent light water reactor fuel fresh from the reactor is orders of magnitude more hazardous per unit mass than any stable element. But after 1,000 years or so the hazard is greatly diminished. At that point it's more akin to a mundanely-hazardous waste like cadmium. Nobody plans how to communicate the hazards of cadmium exposure into geological time even though it endures forever.

How do you quantify and then accept the risk of said casks being hit and made to catch fire by a kinetic object?

The casks are too thick to be penetrated by civilian firearms. They could be further protected from man-portable weapons (e.g. anti-tank guided missiles) by locating them shallowly underground, where monitoring/maintenance is still easy. Military attack on the storage site with heavy weapons? That's approximately equal to the case of a military attack on a live power reactor, with the same dire consequences and responses. (If a shooting war has escalated to war crimes against nuclear powers, I expect that MAD is just around the corner.)

It's not flammable. And properly processed, even a leakage in the containment wouldn't necessarily be disastrous, i.e. requires cleanup, but no like chernobyl problems.

I wish we would put more research into this.

Imagine if we could make nuclear waste relatively benign? It would revolutionize the entire world.

> over-engineered and founded on dubious assumptions

Not only is it over-engineered, it's incredibly wasteful. Eventually we will move to other reactor designs that utilize more than just a few percent of the useful isotopes in the fuel. With several types of breeder rectors and/or reprocessing a lot of that "waste" is potential fuel.

I suspect most people don't understand just how little fuel is required for nuclear power. We are used to the scale of chemical fuels and don't have an experience with the massive difference in energy density. The chemical. mining, and other industries associated with the Superfund have already caused an incredible amount of damage that we will be cleaning up for the foreseeable future. I'd much rather live near nuclear waste stored in easily manage dry casks over any of the sites with e.g. PCB or heavy metal contamination.

Yeah I'm not a chemist but it always strikes me as odd that "hazardous nuclear waste" cannot be recycled. Even now there are ways to capture carbon waste (eg, genetically-engineered carbon-eating bacteria et al). I find it hard to believe that we won't have a way to capture radiation in the future, or (even better) utilize the radiation-producing materials in subsequent reactions.

> I find it hard to believe that we won't have a way to capture radiation in the future

The problem is the energy density. Nuclear reactions are soooo much more energetic than chemical that it's ridiculous.

"Capturing" a gamma ray is really hard. Beta particles are "easier", but you still have to handle a LOT of them.

And cracking the nucleus apart is what you were doing in the first place generating energy from it. The best bet is to use reactor technology that actually burns up the waste almost completely rather than leaving 95% of it intact.

The problem is that the superpowers like their reactors that can give Plutonium. Until the a country decides it wants power rather than weapons and designs a reactor for that, we're going to continue all this political dancing.

It can be, quite effectively. Nuclear waste is more or less a solved issue from a technical standpoint, with the caveat that there are a lot of gotchas but the general concept is well understood and several other countries do it to some degree. With regard to the USA, we don't do it for two reasons.

First is political, which that the recycling process is highly susceptible to weapons proliferation. While that's not a problem in the US per se (since we're a treaty nuclear weapons state), there was a ban put on reprocessing in the US because we didn't want it to become widespread due to the proliferation risk. Remember that pretty much all policy regarding nuclear energy was totally subservient to policy regarding nuclear weapons up until like the 1990's.

Second is economic. Uranium is cheap as chips and it'd require a big investment to move to reprocessing. We will probably do it some day though, the general sentiment in the nuclear community is that reprocessing is a much better route than ultra long-term geological repositories.

'breeder' reactors are scientifically accurate, but scary PR.

Call them "Waste Reduction Reactors" (which is also true). The general theory that I recall reading was that it was desirable to continue processing the material within a reactor. The reactors are so radioactive that proliferation is a suicide on site mission, and the outputs are a mix of isotopes that either decay /quickly/ (half lives on the order of decades) or REALLY SLOWLY (thus not very radioactive).

That's the waste reduction part; it's 'waste' in the most literal sense of us not having extracted the energy.

As a practical example, the aboriginal people of Australia (particularly in the north) refer to a thing called "sickness country":

  http://www.artistwd.com/joyzine/australia/abr_culture/sickness_country.php

These have generally been found to be regions with a lot of near surface uranium ore.

Given enough time, people will figure out that certain areas are dangerous and should be avoided. As long as it's not everywhere, it probably won't threaten the whole of humanity.

It's weird that we have chemical waste that lasts forever and nobody's trying to leave messages for future civilizations about it.

Something about having a definite timeline makes people worry more. Saying that X will be dangerous for ten thousand years motivates people more than saying Y will be dangerous until the end of time.

Not to mention the legacy of waste dumped into the atmosphere, including airborne radioactive waste from coal burning.

The one that really blows my mind is the recommendation that children and pregnant women limit their intake of seafood due to mercury contamination. That's an entire category of food, covering two thirds of the planet, made noticeably dangerous by chemical waste.

There is also a lot of more dangerous nuclear material scattered all over the country in bombs and power plants - none of which are designed to last more than a few decades. If society does collapse, and that collapse is not precipitated by total nuclear war, then it seems like the spent fuel won't even be the worst of the nuclear worries out there.

I think nuclear submarines are even more dangerous, since marine environment is much more aggressive than terrestrial one. Thus it will lead to very fast corrosion and reactor's shell corruption. But nobody cares about that.

Particularly if those casks contain HLW stabilised as Synroc[1].

Synroc, unlike glass wasteforms, consists of mineral phases, the bulk composition is carefully chosen such that the mineral assemblage provides each nuclide with an energetically favorable crystallographic site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc

I get very frustrated when articles like this repeat things like this comment:

"“The issue of what to do with nuclear waste is a clear and present danger to every human life within 100 miles of San Onofre,” said Charles Langley of the activist group Public Watchdogs."

That is demonstrably untrue, the nuclear waste in dry cask storage is, at most a danger to people within 100 meters of the storage area *should the cask be destroyed." The stuff just sits there. And the casks keep the neutron flux so low that it doesn't even know there is other material nearby.

We have examples of this sort of waste that has been 'stored' for thousands of years already, its in the "reactors" in Gabon.

Semi-related: If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend "Plutopia" [1] book which describes in great detail the history of plutonium production, and the consequences of it, near Richland, Washington and Ozyorsk (Russia).

It significantly changed my view on the nuclear energy. Not necessarily because it's inherently bad, but when big money is at stakes and you have incompetent people managing stuff, things can go pretty wild.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Plutopia-Families-American-Plutonium-...

I will second the Plutopia recommendation, with a caution. The author tries too hard (IMO) sometimes to narratively equate Richland and Ozyorsk in terms of contamination. By the numbers -- and there are numbers in the book -- Ozyorsk suffered far worse contamination. At the Ozyorsk site the ambient environment suffered far worse exposure, plutonium workers suffered far worse exposure, and nearby populations suffered far worse exposure.

But that's not to give the Hanford site a free pass. It is creepy and infuriating how the operators undertook casual large scale experiments and covered up accidents. It's doubly infuriating how locals with good plutonium jobs would turn a blind eye to, or turn against, people who were harmed on the job and whose medical/safety complaints threatened the illusion that everything was great.

Can you offer a good link for the Richland site?

I read Plutopia about 2 years ago and at certain points I recall searching Google Scholar and HathiTrust for further quantitative information about the Ozyorsk and Richland sites and other topics raised in the book. There is some quantitative information in the book too but I wanted to dive deeper. I don't know if there is any web site that presents the social Faustian bargain of Richland's "atomic city" years as well as the book does.

NUMEC which did plutonium processing was involved in a bunch of this stuff in Western Pennsylvania.

http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourallekiskivalley/youral...

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/23/what-lies-beneath-numec-...

If it were not for the political problems, it wouldn't be that hard. Pick some hard-rock mountain in an unpopulated geologically stable area that hasn't changed much in the last 20 million years or so. North and South Dakota have mountains like that. Drill tunnels, well above the water table. Encapsulate high level nuclear waste in glass and put that in big stainless steel thimbles. Lower those into holes in the tunnels.

France does something like this.

This was essentially the Yucca mountain initial plan. I found it interesting (having been a Nevada resident at one time) that glass passivation which is both durable and very difficult to reverse, was opposed by interests who want the waste to be stored in such a way that it can be reprocessed into weapons material (or presumably additional fuel). All of the papers on why it glassifying waste was "bad" came from Westinghouse :-)

Just out of curiousity, if that was basically the "initial plan" for Yucca mountain, what did the plan eventually become?

Well the current current plan is do nothing as far as I can tell. But the original vitrification plan was replaced with a casking plan which allowed the material to be removed (and recovered).

The sad thing is that you don't need a lot of 'high security' around a cave filled with vitrified nuclear waste, you can't use the glass for anything useful. But you do if your cave is filled with casks that can be opened and the contents removed and then aggregated into piles, or wrapped around a truck bomb to be distributed by detonating the now 'dirty' bomb.

It's a damn shame the US won't proceed with the vitrification method; there is ample quantity of glass containing lead from CRTs sitting in warehouses waiting to be recycled (that is not economically feasible to be recycled, so it sits in warehouses) that would be perfect for the vitrification process.

Now that's a good idea. Are there still stockpiles of leaded glass?

http://boingboing.net/2017/02/17/millions-of-lead-filled-crt...

I never understood what the problem is. This page http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ has great information about nuclear energy. The gist is that there are no problems, just "stupid" people ("radiation is scary") and policies.

I never really see this referenced anywhere. Is there some problem in this analysis or has this been "debunked" somewhere? It's a very old paper.

For example nuclear waste disposal http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html

Quote:

For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity.

I would say that a significant part of it has been debunked by ongoing events. For example, here the author talks about the then-future AP-600 reactor design that later became the AP1000:

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html

"Probabilistic risk analyses yield estimates that a core damage accident can be expected only once in 800,000 years of reactor operation, and that there is less than a 1% chance that this will be followed by failure of the containment. This makes the AP-600 a thousand times safer than the current generation of reactors. It is also much simpler, reducing the number of valves by 60%, large pumps by 50%, piping by 60%, heat exchangers by 50%, ducting by 35%, and control cables by 80%. The volume of buildings required to have a very high degree of earthquake resistance is thereby reduced by 60%. It is estimated that the plant can be constructed in 3 to 4 years. All of these factors contribute to reducing the cost."

In actual fact, the AP1000s under construction are more than 3 years behind their original schedules, both in the US and China. Sanmen Unit 1 was originally supposed to take 5 years to become operational and if it starts this year, as currently projected, it will have been 8. Costs have escalated in tandem with schedule slippages.

In the 1970s and 1980s EDF in France demonstrated that a steady commitment to reactor builds can produce reactors on a predictable schedule at acceptable cost. The degree of uniformity and long term commitment required seems to be incompatible with market competition. Since EDF ceased to be a state-owned electricity monopoly in France in the late 1990s, it has struggled to build new reactors. Current reactor projects it's involved with are disastrously late and over-budget. Since it no longer has insulation from political oversight and market forces, I will also guess that EDF will not get to just try again until it can complete new-design builds predictably.

Per unit of generated energy, measured by human morbidity and mortality, nuclear power has a very good safety record. It has unpredictable schedules and costs that tend to the high side. Some of the proposals for reducing costs are bad (just deregulate nuclear power!); others are worse (make it immune to lawsuits; stop letting the public vote about it; don't let politicians make decisions about it).

The elephant in the room is that fossil power doesn't have its externalities priced in while nuclear does (at least to a much greater degree). In theory, a carbon tax could make all kinds of non-fossil energy more competitive against fossil energy without technology-specific incentives from the government. In practice, there are even more members of the public and the donor class who hate internalized emissions costs than who hate nuclear power. Even if you pass a carbon tax now it can be quickly repealed later, as Australia's example shows. Nuclear reactors need to operate for decades to justify their initial construction.

Our nearest star is a perfectly fine nuclear waste storage facility. Humanity--in much shorter timespans than those proposed for subterranean storage--could perfect a radiation-hardened space elevator, or other mechanism, capable of reliably transporting such waste to low-Earth orbit. Once in space, nudging the dry casks sunward is a solved problem.

As of 2004, the estimated cost for a space elevator was $6.2 billion USD.[1]

Others have written on this topic[2], but do not account for technological progress. Today it is prohibitively expensive and dangerous to shoot nuclear waste into the sun. In 100 years, the cost per kilogram will have dropped by orders of magnitude and the reliability of orbital delivery will probably exceed five nines. Achieving escape velocity[3] will be a fraction of today's costs.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics#Cost_...

[2]: http://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-wa...

[3]: http://www.adastrarocket.com/aarc/VASIMR

are you aware of the fact that the Δv to "fall" into the sun is _more_ than the Δv required to get to, for example, Pluto? it would be way cheaper to drop nuclear waste into Jupiter, though limited launch windows could be an issue. dropping nuclear waste into an active volcano would also be more than likely orders of magnitude cheaper.

Shh, he has citations

Their second citation[2] is actually all about this (... I realized as I was 25 minutes into writing my own version).

"nudging the dry casks sunward" is still a really bad choice of words, given the massive prevalence of that particular space travel trope.

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[2] http://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-wa...

Regardless of the mode of transportation, the chance of failure of lifting nuclear waste into orbit is much much higher than just dry cask storage on Earth.

It would be a huge waste, as it would be unrecoverable. Heavy materials are not very common in the universe, and while these elements cannot be economically used today, they may be in the future.

If a space elevator could actually be built for single-digit billions today, it would be under construction already. That's cheap enough that someone like Elon Musk could finance it solo. That it remains purely conceptual should be a good indicator that it's a lot more difficult than $6.2 billion.

> nudging the dry casks sunward

[Note: I realize you might already get this. But for the sake of having the discussion in public, where this is a very common misunderstanding of space travel, and also because I enjoyed writing it:]

It's true that, in space, without air resistance, Newton's first law reaches its fullest expression: when you push something, it's going to keep going.

In a frame of reference with no gravity happening in it -- like a totally empty universe, or if you're restricting the area you're looking at to the interior or immediate vicinity of a space ship over a short period of time -- then it's going to keep going in a straight line. ie: if you give something a push in what looks like the direction of something else, it'll get there. And it wouldn't matter how hard the push was, it would still get there eventually.

But if you're working in frame of reference with a lot of gravity happening in it, straight lines stop being the usual mode of movement. If you start at rest and push straight towards something, you're going to curve away from your apparent initial trajectory, towards the source of the gravity. You can't just gently push directly towards something and eventually end up there.

"Well", you say, "we can still just push directly towards the source of the gravity -- which is our destination anyway." Absolutely! We'd successfully end up there, and it would even still be a straight line. If we were starting at rest.

But we're not starting at rest: we're starting out with a velocity of about 100,000 km/h, in a direction perpendicular to a straight line towards the sun. The velocity of the orbit of the earth around the sun.

Starting from there, if we were to give a really big push, directly towards the sun, say a ~15,000 km/h push (the magnitude of the push that moved the Apollo missions from low-earth orbit onto a collision-course with the moon)... that would just leave us in a slightly off-center orbit, which only gets very slightly closer to the sun at its closest point. And actually moving just a little faster than we were (~101,000 kh/h), at an angle less than 10 degrees closer to "towards the sun" than our previous direction of travel.

Think hypotenuse of a triangle. Pythagorean theorem and stuff. Really big width (our initial orbital velocity around the sun), relatively small height (our big push towards the sun). If we want our hypoteneuse (our actual velocity vector) to get really steep (point directly towards the sun), and changing the height of the triangle is our only move (again, pushing towards the sun), we'd basically need our triangle to achieve infinite height (infinitely big push towards the sun).

We could actually do significantly better by making our push in the direction opposite to our initial orbit, rather than directly inwards towards the sun. With a push of the same magnitude, now we're orbiting at only 85,000 km/h, making our orbit dip lower at its closest point.

In fact, that reveals what we actually need to do to dump something into the sun: stop orbiting it.

Cancel (almost) all of our initial 100,000 km/h of orbital velocity. By accelerating 100,000 km/h in the opposite direction to our orbit. When that's done, we fall into the Sun.

----

No extensive comment on the logistics of this. Your [2] link discusses that more fully.

My point is that "nudge something in the right direction in space, and it'll get there eventually" is not actually a thing that can happen in any practical sense.

tldr: play Kerbal Space Program.

> play Kerbal Space Program.

Or watch Scott Manley demonstrate the unreasonable orbital dynamics you just described.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s

This is one proposed experimental solution in category "deep geological repository". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

Related nice documentary where they cover the questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

Dry casks at the reactor site are totally the correct approach. It should be made law, that all high level waste be so stored on site.

Also, a investment fund, a modest one, should be created to fund the re packing of the waste 50 to 100 years from now. It is unclear exactly how long these casks will function without leaking.

The communities around the reactors benefited economically from the jobs, it is only fair they tend the waste.

Am I correct that you are against nuclear energy? That law sounds like a poison pill with the effect of reducing future plant development.

What's wrong with requiring it to be shipped to Yucca Mountain and charging fees into investment funds for long term management? Jobs and benefits for both communities, no?

I like nuclear fusion. Fission has the risk of meltdown, and isn't economically competitive without epic subsidies. So yes and no.

This current situation is totally ironic and shows just how ignorant people are. The nearby residents didn't object to an operating reactor but do object to casket-encased waste. The risks involved with an operating reactor are enormously larger. Casks are safe.

It amuses me that people so often fall for the "renewables will have their problems solved in 10 years" mantra, while they say that reprocessing nuclear waste won't be solved in 10000 years.

As one of the comments on the site point out, this is really rooted in radiophobia.

By the most conservative estimates we should have fusion that can reliably yield more energy than put in within around 500 years. With fusion (and the energy abundance it will bring) we can transmute that waste into less dangerous elements [1], and perhaps even into useful rare metals.

The most interesting thing about this article to me is how they fail to mention the amount of radiation involved. If you are interested in just how big of a scale you need to talk about radiation, I would look at xkcd's brilliant chart [2].

1: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/could-fusion-clean-u...

2: https://xkcd.com/radiation/

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