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Comment by ysleepy | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, decidedly pro-nuclear stance here.

The first obvious omissions that come to mind are:

1. The evacuations took place while the meltdown was ongoing, evacuating was the sane choice given the available knowledge at the time.

2. There is no data on how not evacuating would have affected the people, since that was not done, making that comparison with such certainty seems a bit overconfident.

Nuclear in general:

How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste, built and ready, before you operate any more nuclear reactors?

I'm not totally against the technology, but storing all the nuclear waste in metal cans on parking lots (yes, thats where a majority of nuclear waste resides) is not a valid solution.

The trend of externalizing cost to future generations is something that pisses me off to no end.

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Waste was never really a problem and has been definitively solved. You bury it in a deep unmarked hole. [1]

Go ahead and keep arguing about whether or not nuclear is a good idea. Earth doesn't care. The water will be lapping at your feet soon. How's that for externalizing a cost to future generations?

I am, and will continue to be blown away that the world found out how to make rocks so spicy they can power our civilizations for thousands of years with no carbon 50+ years ago....... and decided to keep burning dead dinosaurs. Fuck big oil, fuck greenpeace, and fuck anyone who is STILL anti-nuclear energy.

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

Yea nuclear waste isn't actually a problem, I was surprised when I learned this since everyone seems to make a big deal about it.

It's solid waste (not radioactive sludge like in many movies/shows), and requires very simple storage containers, which you can just keep on site or bury, no problem.

> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. [1]

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

Yep. It is quite unbelievable how we use a 1 million old technology (burning stuff) and try to argue that the new way of producing energy (which is already much safer if you check number of deaths per twh) is somehow dangerous and bad. In 50 years of nuclear energy we already made is super safe. Now we can make it safe for being used in location which have pretty serious earthquakes or as a resource for flying (even for spaceships some day).

> 1 million old technology (burning)

AFAIK nuclear is older than oxidation/burning.

On a more serious note, burning has been a source of power only since about the steam engine, so about 300 years.

You are discounting cave man with camp fire. Also nuclear _technology_ as of being controlled by humans is not as old.

I’m pretty sure the parent is pointing out that the chemical combustion in eg a caveman’s campfire required many millions of years of stars performing nuclear fusion to create any elements with higher atomic numbers than 2, oxygen included.

I agree. I am talking about technology as of what humans control. Humans do not control this -> "many millions of years of stars performing nuclear fusion to create any elements with higher atomic numbers than 2"

Oh, I read it as a reference to natural fission reactors, like the one found at Oklo.

>Waste was never really a problem and has been definitively solved. You bury it in a deep unmarked hole.

Yeah, too bad it doesn't work in practice.

How does it not?

https://earther.gizmodo.com/this-town-didnt-want-to-be-a-rad...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-environment-i...

https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...

https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long...

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-10-30/scotland-expos...

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/un-atomic-agency-probing-del...

https://apnews.com/ba820f02074247fc8486b63b7c87d6cb/russias-...

https://www.upi.com/Energy-News/2008/09/08/Nuclear-waste-sca...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-23...

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/02/oregons-response...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...

I think there needs to be real storage plans for radioactive water before terrestrial fission is a major power source but it is certainly telling that in 3 of those cases the radioactive waste was from fracking and not a reactor.

The Onkalo spent fuel repository I linked to is the only such operational site in existence, and is slated to start storing fuel in 2020. So I think it's safe to say that no data exists to support your claim.

>Go ahead and keep arguing about whether or not nuclear is a good idea. Earth doesn't care. The water will be lapping at your feet soon. How's that for externalizing a cost to future generations?

Agreed. The reality is there is nothing like nuclear energy. We lost (and continue losing) decades of nuclear development and deployment due to the anti-nuke movement (environmental or otherwise). This resulted in hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 emitted that otherwise wouldn't have been emitted (imagine if the developed world invested in nuclear to the same level as France in the 70s) - emissions that would have bought us more decades to tackle climate change.

But physics are physics. Nuclear will come back because you cannot beat the energy density of nuclear in a world which requires more and more power, with a growing population and living standards, and is dealing with the double environmental whammy of global warming and your generic environmental collapse. Things like wind and solar need huge surface areas to operate in, and require environmentally disastrous mining as well as huge swaths of landfill once decommissioned ... and need fossil fuel base load to be viable.

I watched a YouTube video recently that compared nuclear-powered and diesel-powered aircraft carriers [1]. The diesel-powered carrier needs to refuel every few weeks, while nuclear-powered carrier needs to refuel every 20 years. That is just insanity. Living in the modern world, we have an intuitive understanding how often things need to recharged and/or refueled, and nuclear just breaks your mind.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObTKRHkIkgI&t=493s

> The diesel-powered carrier needs to refuel every few weeks, while nuclear-powered carrier needs to refuel every 20 years.

True, but while refuelling only takes hours, ROH operations on a naval reactor are usually scheduled to last 46 months [edit] and cost several billion dollars [/edit].

That's just insanity :D

A lot of that can be reduced by innovative designs, such as having a modular reactor when you can slide out the vessel(or some other sub set of the reactor, not a nuclear engineer here) with the spent fuel and slide in a new one. Then you can refuel the old vessel to be ready for the next swap. You can gain economics of scale if you build a lot of plants in a region with the same modular design and have a central refueling facility. (yes I know I switch from ships to plants, same benefits accrue though)

Carriers typical undergo a service life extension overhaul (think overhaul the whole ship, stem to stern) in conjunction with refueling. The 46 month figure is for a RCOH (Refueling and Complex OverHaul). Subs can and are refueled much more quickly (and in many cases more often).

or instead of burying the majority of it, burn it in different reactor technologies?

90% of what we are burying could be re-burned in different technology reactors. Note I didn’t say new, because the tech isn’t new. It just wasn’t prioritized because the current reactors byproducts could be used for weapons too.

And the stuff that is left over from these other reactors isn’t nearly as nasty or as long lived either, so no need for ridiculously over-engineered holes in the desert either.

The anti-nuke hysteria of the last 40 years has prevented having even remotely rational discussions about the true clean energy source out there.

With all security measures and the problem with storing waste, nuclear is just very expensive, at least for many countries with a high population density.

Europe doesn't have that many vast uninhabited landscapes for example. That Canada can just dump it beyond the polar circle is another thing.

Uranium isn't endless. With the current rate of consumption, it would last ~80 years. Sure, there are ideas to extract it and we certainly could find more, but it should certainly be a factor to be reminded of. There are also quite rare materials needed for containment, which have similar restrictions. Some say we could extract Uranium from seawater, but that is pretty much bullshit, not only economically.

I am not for shutting down nuclear plants, but I doubt it can compete or is the future of our energy production. Maybe other reactor types may help, but I don't judge people for being anti nuclear.

Nuclear can not compete against cheap renewable for dynamic power load and cheap fossil fuel for base load. For base load in particular the convenience and agility to spin up more gas burning power plants based on weather conditions and demand is impossible to beat, and as a resource, natural gas can be found in many geographical places and gathered through multiple different methods.

We will not see nuclear plants in the future as long as fossil fuels are burning to power up the energy grid and warm up homes. Maybe when the coral reefs are all gone in 20-30 years, water levels has increased a bit to be inconvenient enough, and enough people are displaces because of drought and other humanitarian disaster, then maybe the cost of burning fossil fuels will finally be applied to the operators of such power plants and alternative sources become more competitive when the sun is down and the wind is not blowing.

I do judge people for burning fossil fuels. That my country has a set date when nuclear should be all gone but no date when fossil fuels can be banned is a pretty good sign how bad the priorities are.

> How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste, built and ready, before you operate any more nuclear reactors?

"Nuclear waste" is an artificial problem. It is possible to build reactors that use the "nuclear waste" from existing reactors as fuel, which destroys it forever. We haven't done this primarily because people keep refusing to build new reactors that do this until we figure out what to do with the nuclear waste. Which obviously doesn't make any sense.

In the same sense that we will all be saved by CO2 capturing devices?

These kinds of reactors (Travelling Wave Reactor etc.) you mention are vapourware and have been for quite some time. And I highly doubt the "which destroys it forever" part, - really, no waste at all, magic you say?

This is just more of "Future Tech will solve this" externalization of problems.

> really, no waste at all, magic you say?

The core problem with nuclear waste is that it's energetic. There are a number of designs that burn up waste; if we were building and testing them, poor reactor types could be abandoned and better ones could be improved. We're not doing that primarily because "nuclear" is a scary word owing to activist efforts decades ago.

> This is just more of "Future Tech will solve this" externalization of problems.

That is absolutely the right plan, though. Assuming our civilization doesn't collapse or stall, future generations will be enormously wealthier than we are, and any problem we have will be proportionately smaller for them. Of course, stall or collapse isn't impossible, but I do wish people wouldn't so heavily advocate for exactly that.

> because "nuclear" is a scary word owing to activist efforts decades ago.

Right, activists... not those pesky meltdowns spewing radioactive waste across Europe and into the pacific, it was the activists.

All the meltdowns in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s are what explains the automatic flinch that western cultures have had since the late 60s? Huh.

"spewing ... into the Pacific" actually dilutes it more than when it existed in ore in the first place. It had to be concentrated by orders of magnitude from ore, to make it radioactive enough to be fuel for a reactor. Before that, it was just backround that we've lived happily with for eons, and in the Pacific it is even lower level.

The plant operators measured 7.5M times the legal limit of radioactive iodine in the seawater.

Complete dilution is not a given, and expecting zero consequences to marine life (and anything that then feeds on marine life) is optimistic at best.

because there is a lot of water on the planet?

Or a hungry fish will introduce it into the food chain before it has dissolved completely homogeneously into the wide oceans of the earth.

Recycling for spent fuels is a proven technology. Problem is ... it creates weapons grade Plutonium as the product, out of Depleted Uranium(stuffs so safe US military puts into tank shells as weights).

You know, Plutonium is a highly toxic heavy metal, and a bit radioactive, so,

> Problem is ... it creates weapons grade Plutonium as the product, out of Depleted Uranium(stuffs so safe US military puts into tank shells as weights).

Calling this the problem is just more fear mongering. The hard part about building a uranium-based bomb is getting weapons-grade uranium, because the bomb is simpler but U-235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium and is hard to separate from U-238 because they're chemically identical. The hard part about building a plutonium-based bomb is getting the implosion right. Making weapons-grade plutonium is relatively easy -- you expose U-238 to neutrons and some of the uranium turns into plutonium, then you can chemically separate the plutonium. But then you need a sophisticated bomb instead of a sophisticated centrifuge. It's not actually easier. That's why most nascent programs don't generally even try to make plutonium.

On top of that, you can design a reactor that produces enough other Plutonium isotopes that it makes the Plutonium-239 totally useless for a bomb, because they're even harder to separate from one another than U-235 is from U-238.

Also, the nuclear waste which sticks around for 24,000 years? That's the plutonium. The existing reactors already make it, because they contain U-238 and neutrons. It's the thing we already have, don't want and newer reactors can get rid of.

It sure makes an easy dirty bomb when stuck on a regular bomb though.

Dirty bombs are, to begin with, Hollywood movie plot nonsense.

But long-lived isotopes aren't even what you would use because they're only mildly radioactive.

>These kinds of reactors you mention are vapourware and have been for quite some time.

Depends on a country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)

>The reactor uses nitride uranium-plutonium fuel, is a breeder reactor and can burn long-term radioactive waste.

I think existing BN reactors can also be used in the same way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

Yes, it's not 100% ready technology (e.g. there are problems with fuel fabrication), but I would call it last stages of development.

The BN-800 reactor was an engineering nightmare, though.

Those things had more downtime due to technical issues than operation time. The issues were indeed so severe, that the follow-up project (BN-1200) required a redesign and was put on hold indefinitely...

IIRC most issues were caused by problems and delays with fuel fabrication, mentioned in my post. And changes in fuel fabrication is one of the main reasons for postponing BN-1200 construction (i.e. it does not make sense to build a reactor, while fuel production line is not ready).

So this falls into the category of the solution of "X" is more "X".

I'm usually skeptical of arguments like these especially when "X" is complex, potentially harmful, or offered as a magic bullet.

In your case in order to validate claims, I have to be a nuclear scientist to understand the potential ramifications of your argument before I can fully understand the pros/cons.

If as an engineer, I cannot afford the time to do it, how our are politicians supposed to?

The same way politicians build bridges and operate air traffic control systems: by hiring experts to do it.

I feel you're being pedantic here.

When bridges fail, they don't affect potentially millions of people's health. Nor does when an ATC system fail at an airport -- traffic can just be rerouted to other airports.

Meh, when major industry things fail, and e.g. a refinery just breaks and releases all of the oil and other stuff into the next best river, it will affect potentially millions of people's health if it's located right.

That's why we're trying to make extra extra sure that it doesn't happen and hire experts, and learn from mistakes (and there were plenty, and I'm sure there will be more).

"If this fails it's just too horrible, we mustn't attempt it" doesn't sound like the most helpful attitude when dealing with large projects that have gigantic benefits but can also cause gigantic issues when they explode.

It seems with Nuclear we have always underestimated the risk in the risk/reward nature.

I disagree, in fact, we have more frequently underestimated the reward. RTFA. As the article points out, tens of thousands of people die every year from lung disease directly related to fossil fuel combustion. Furthermore, he argues that more people have died from stress due to being relocated from Fukushima, than would have died if we left most of them in place. It’s the trolley problem writ large.

I did RTFA.

Have you read how:

    TEPCO tried to hide the extent of Fukushima? 

    USSR tried to hide the extent of Chernobyl?

    Russia tried to hide the extent of the latest nuclear sub accident recently?

Why is it when the last three major nuclear incidents occurred in recent memory, people have been not willing to cough up the truth on the extent of the disaster?

> When bridges fail, they don't affect potentially millions of people's health.

If you are saying bad policy decisions are inherently less scaling than nuclear disasters, I would remind you the Great Leap Forward and the tens of millions of people dead as a result of the famine in just a few years. Sure that was an outlier event, and so was the nuclear disasters of past.

The problem is, with nuclear there seems to be an emotional shock and imagery that accompanies it which doesn’t seem to match those of, for example, dying of hunger. Just like airplanes feel less safe than cars but the latter kills much more people in practice, our emotive reasoning biases us heavily in this topic.

Sure, GLF focused on idealistic purity rather than expertise.

There are also a lot more agricultural experts in the US than nuclear experts.

> Sure, GLF focused on idealistic purity rather than expertise

1986 USSR bureaucracy didn’t fail only for a lack of expertise either.

> There are also a lot more agricultural experts in the US than nuclear experts.

It is not a numbers game of that sort. If anything, public misinformation being amplified in influence through social media affects expert based political will negatively insofar the topic is ripe for emotional biases, not lack of real experts.

> 1986 USSR bureaucracy didn’t fail only for a lack of expertise either.

I think you're talking Chernobyl here, without actually saying Chernobyl. Again they were arguably pushing ideology over science -- in many ways to save cost. Then making any criticisms about safety state secrets so no one could know about them.

It's worth noting that Gorbachev believed that Chernobyl led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, six years later.

> If anything, public misinformation being amplified in influence through social media affects expert based political will negatively insofar the topic is ripe for emotional biases, not lack of real experts.

True, but that cuts your argument. As it turns questions of science into ideological ones. If you're a farmer you can go to your local extension office, and ask questions about herbicide and fertilizers and planting schedules without government interference -- essentially expanding knowledge.

If Russia ran ads on FB that said the best time to plant corn was in November of the following year, there would be a lot of laughter.

There is no such thing as extension offices for nuclear science -- ergo making it even more ripe for the idea that you're talking about.

On the other hand, people trust vaccines less, and there has been a concerted effort to cause public distrust. Imagine what would happen if that happened to nuclear scientists. Worse, there would be only few people to make that argument against it. With vaccines there were lots of people that could, and still largely failed.

> I think you're talking Chernobyl here, without actually saying Chernobyl

Yes.

> True, but that cuts your argument. As it turns questions of science into ideological ones.

That’s fair enough. If I am understanding correctly, you’re saying the institutional mistrust and failing public discourse we are experiencing today would render existing nuclear dangerous too. No matter if we have expertise or not (I believe we do) we can’t navigate our way to it in the presence of so much other BS.

Not only that, but in the past when a nuclear accident happens, TEPCO - a private company, and the USSR/Russia (twice now) have hidden information from the public during the accidents.

This makes the entire situation worse. Who does the public trust? The press? Watchdog groups?

It's bad enough it happens at all, but could it happen in the US? I would have said no until the last few years.

I kind of think this would be a good board game, actually. Kind of like pandemic but for a nuclear accident, and trying to make decisions based upon imperfect information.

> If as an engineer, I cannot afford the time to do it, how our are politicians supposed to?

I'm not fond of this line of reasoning. Politicians are by definition not scientists and engineers. Their job is to listen to different experts, not to understand nuances of a technology.

Yea nuclear waste isn't actually a problem, even barring newer reactor designs that re-use nuclear fuel. I was surprised when I learned this since it's always coached as the biggest issue with nuclear as a power source.

It's solid waste (not radioactive sludge like in many movies/shows), and requires very simple storage containers, which you can just keep on site or bury, no problem.

> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. [1]

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

Wow I didn't realize it was that little waste. I also knew it was small, but that is minuscule all things considered.

How about you show me where to put all the carbon waste before we build another car/gas plant?

Making orders of magnitude less waste that stays in one place seems obviously better... it’s in parking lots because there isn’t much of it

> where to put all the carbon waste

Trees have been extensively proven and are reliable. Human body stores also a lot of carbon.

Im game. For the same amount of fossil fuels being burned a power plant need to plant and then for all future stored so the tree won't be burned or decomposed.

Basically for ever bit of fuel burned we expand a ever expanding area of nature reserves which carbon is forbidden to be touched until it return itself as fossil fuels. It would gloriously make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive to the point where any other energy should would be more commercial viable.

I don’t think this is really practical or actual (isn’t tree coverage decreasing?) but I’m all for planting trees

> How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste

You don't need one. You reprocess the waste; then you only need about 100 years storage, not 100,000, for what's left over, and we already have plenty of storage methods that will meet that need. Every nuclear-using country other than the US already does this. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.

> How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste, built and ready, before you operate any more nuclear reactors?

This isn't a complete solution, but reprocessing the nuclear fuel gives you a significantly smaller amount of waste to deal with and also removes some of the most problematic elements - meaning you don't have to worry about 100k years of protection.[0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

>1. The evacuations took place while the meltdown was ongoing, evacuating was the sane choice given the available knowledge at the time.

Once the accident starts, there's maybe a handful of people that really know what's going on, if that. Worse, is if there's a "fog of war"-like scenario where they can't see inside, their sensors aren't working, and they have to send sacrificial humans in to get word back to the control.

I keep thinking about this event. Some people might speculate that the fallout level would have been low across Europe as a whole. But, who's to say really until you cross that bridge? And do you really want to cross that bridge to find out?

https://www.businessinsider.com/chernobyl-volunteers-divers-...

Have you considered cost of NOT building nuclear? France's industry was decarbonized in 10 years, long ago. Imagine the cost for future generations of not doing the same to other industrialized economies.

And because of it they have a better way to renewables (+fusion). As renewables become better they can replace nuclear but because of their standing they don't have to worry about many of the issues that other countries do: base load, long term energy storage with renewables, etc. Because of this France is starting with an emission level that is lower than most countries goals. If all the major countries had went the way of France we wouldn't be in a climate crisis, though it would still be a worrying event for the future (just not a crisis).

It is also worth mentioning that almost 20% of France's energy is produced from recycled nuclear (not 20% of nuclear energy, 20% of total).

You might be surprised but burning coal also produces nuclear waste. We jut don't care.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Please note the metal can parking lots is a USA thing. Other countries are actually building long term repos.

You are right about the waste, it really sucks. But I still feel like abandoning nuclear energy now would be incredibly bad timing, given the urgence of reducing our carbon footprint. It's kind of ok not have a 100k years storage facility yet since it is a long term problem. Climate change is a problem we should have started tackling decades ago, and abandoning nuclear power might worsen it dramatically.

They're not right about the waste. High level radioactive waste will fit in a space about 7 meters high and the area of a football field. That's all nuclear waste since we started operating nuclear reactors... worldwide.

It's not necessarily the amount of waste that is the problem, it's the incredibly long duration of its radioactivity. At some point we will need super long term storage, and it's true that there is no viable solution out there yet. Even the most sophisticated facilities can not guarantee that no leakage will contaminate the surroundings at some point. But as I said, I think finding a solution for this should not be our main priority.

The longer it’s radioactive lifespan, the less dangerous it is.

Exactly! In the extreme, things like mercury have an infinite half-life and are toxic forever. Yet nuclear waste always gets the bad reputation because it becomes less dangerous with time. Odd.

Not odd at all. Just very, very successful propaganda.

The coal industry's astroturfed anti-nuclear campaign in the 1960s and 1970s has warped thinking on this for generations.

That's what people say but we produce many orders of magnitude more toxic chemical waste which is dangerous forever. The fact that nuclear waste becomes safe over time almost seems like an advantage (over other forms of waste at least).

Long term storage of high-level nuclear waste is not a technical problem - there are a number of viable solutions. All of them boil down to "dig a deep hole and put the nuclear waste there."

The only problem is the political problem of choosing the sites.

>...It's not necessarily the amount of waste that is the problem, it's the incredibly long duration of its radioactivity.

In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

> It's not necessarily the amount of waste that is the problem...

You might change your mind on that after a bit of reflection; it doesn't make sense. We produce a bunch of things that are going to be hazardous forever - I always point to lead when nuclear comes up. The only reason anyone talks about nuclear waste is because 1 football field is small enough that we could contain it forever. Most industrial processes produce too much hazardous waste for that to be feasible.

Just look at the sludge that comes with aluminum mining. It’s definitely dangerous and should be handled... but doesn’t mean we should ban aluminum...

> You might change your mind on that after a bit of reflection; it doesn't make sense. We produce a bunch of things that are going to be hazardous forever - I always point to lead when nuclear comes up.

This is actually a particularly apt comparison, because Uranium is a toxic heavy metal that affects the body much like lead. Nuclear waste is toxic forever - but it was toxic before it was used as nuclear fuel, too.

I portray it this way: buried in the ground there's toxic uranium in unknown locations. We're taking all this toxic material and putting it in a known location where we can monitor it. And in between we use it to generate carbon free energy.

We do have a final long term storage solution for spent swedish waste. Location selected and approved, method tested and the cost has been covered by a nuclear waste fund fee on the produced power. In short it's copper clad steel capsules put in holes surrounded by bentonite clay down in deep shafts dug in stable bedrock. It's probably a waste of good breeder fuel. But it won't leak due to any natural occuring incident in a very, very long time. I think there is information in english here for the curious. https://www.skb.com/ (They have a nice guided tour down in the research mine the did dig to study water flow and chemistry, can recommend it.http://www.skb.com/research-and-technology/laboratories/the-... )

There is probably other ways of doing it, but saying there is no method ready is wrong. I would prefer to burn it again in a breeder and get 500yr waste instead of 50k yr waste. But if we're going to bury it, this will keep the stuff safe for the time needed.

> How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste, built and ready, before you operate any more nuclear reactors?

So you'd rather breathe the waste NOW from your power source instead of storing it where something maybe, possibly might go wrong?

Waste is not a good talking point if you want to be anti-nuclear given what we know about just exactly how bad air pollution is--and the medical science around air pollution just keeps bringing more and more bad news.

You could have a Fukushima every year and it wouldn't match the harmful effects of fossil fuel air pollution.

> How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste, built and ready, before you operate any more nuclear reactors?

Bury it in bedrock with no aquifer. The only scenarios where this results in waste being exposed are borderline hyperbolic: somehow society collapses, all knowledge of radiation is lost, and some future civilization decides to dig up a waste disposal site. The US already built one of these, but then the government killed the project for political reasons [1]. Europe is building a facility in Finland [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

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