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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

Germany is ending nuclear power because there is no consensus on how and where to store nuclear waste. People tend to forget that the waste is dangerous for thousands of years to come and Germany doesn't have deserts to put it in. Putting it in the ground is a bad idea, as you can see if you just search the internet for "Asse nuclear".

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Putting it in the ground is a very very good idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

Just because the Germans can't do it properly, doesn't mean it's impossible.

And a BBC World Service podcast about Onkalo for your perusal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswvxg

You seem to have no clue how small Germany is. So no. It's not because we don't know how to get rid of it. We have neither the space nor the geological properties that makes this easy.

Also this disposal site is still in construction and a research group in 2012 already has cast doubt on the corrosion proofness. Nothing has been proven yet. This is not an easy problem.

There's actually not that much of it. In fact, over the past 4 decades, the entire industry has produced about 62 500 metric tons of waste. You could probably put all of that in the space of a football field.

Except that some of it has to be kept apart so it does not go critical, some has to be put in special containers...

I didn't mean dumping it all in a heap together, but putting it in e.g. high-density polyethylene should do the trick. It has the density of 930 to 970kg/m^3. Very good tensile strength and longevity.

There's more than enough space and geologically stable locations to put this stuff. Politically speaking and in terms of getting nuclear back in the game, I wouldn't worry too much about waste with the modern solutions within storage.

Use it as reactor fuel. The "waste" which is radioactive for thousands of years is fissile and the fission byproducts are not radioactive for that long.

Germany is forbidden by international law from having the processing facilities that could re-enrich the spent fuel to reuse it.

Ironic, since Germany is maybe the only country I would trust with such facilities. From a pure not-fucking-it-up perspective. (Ahem... cough Sellafield...)

Well, look at the Asse II, Germany has a long tradition of fucking uo everything nuclear.

The french actually are allowed to do it, and have the facilities, and don't have nearly as many issues.

I would not count on it, since in France everything nuclear is state controlled and largely state owned. Independent control is not on the level as in Germany.

Ouch. Apparently €140 million of federal money is spent a year for the Asse clean-up, and they haven't even begun retrieving the 140k barrels yet?

use it as is in Molten Salt Reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

Because its better to spew all of the toxic exhaust generated by coal burning plants into the atmosphere? At least with nuclear you know where your waste is and you can control it.

> People tend to forget that the waste is dangerous for thousands of years to come

Why people always talk about that like it's the worst thing that ever happened? There's also dangerous chemical storage facilities and these products most of the time don't even degrade over time (so even longer than thousands of years), they are also stored in worse condition than nuclear waste. Despite all of that, I don't see any environmental group talking about it.

Environmental groups talk a lot about chemical waste.

> these products most of the time don't even degrade over time (so even longer than thousands of years)

Just see fate of the German storage site Asse II:

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/asse-atomlager-101.html

That's a very costly problem: it will cost billions to fix it.

Export to the sahara?

Maybe nuclear waste should be deliberately stored near population centers, helpfully incentivizing the populace to maintain the safety and integrity of long term storage.

Where the wind blows the dust to europe every month? Sounds safe if anything should happen...

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