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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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