Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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>>Nuclear power is green for the duration of our lifetimes, at the cost of a near eternity of fallout.

We have a permanent, forever solution to nuclear waste, it's just that no one wants to pay for it. It's easier to just keep kicking the ball down than solve the issue permanently.

It's called deep borehole disposal - you drill a hole down to Earth's crust(~5km or deeper), fill the bottom 1-2km with nuclear waste, fill it back up. Literally solves the problem forever. It's not coming back up on anything shorter than a geological timescale, and the land above the borehole is perfectly safe to live on.

The main reasons why it wasn't and isn't pursued is

1) cost - drilling itself is "solved" but inventing new storage casks that would fit the hole and re-processing the waste to fit is a new engineering challenge which would cost money

2) the idea that nuclear fuel, even spent, can be reused - either in breeder reactors, or for other purposes. If you bury it 5km deep it's almost impossible to retrieve it.

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

The above is why I'm kinda annoyed when people say that nuclear is bad because we just produce waste that will pollute for centuries. Like, yes, but we also know what to do with it, we're just unwilling to pay for it.

Very true and it will become affordable at some point, also why we choose to store waste, for now.

On a brighter side, fusion is making progress and produces no waste.

I don't buy the argument. What if it does not become cheaper?

When many of the nuclear reactors were built, there was no pervasive global terrorism that is a threat to nuclear waste storage (edit: an nuclear reactors).

Things don't always improve.

There are solutions, this is one of them. You are right, things don't always improve, yet regarding nuclear power, they tend to. There was no nuclear accident in 50 years in France, no public threat to nuclear waste storage so far. Pessimism isn't always the way to go.

> What if it does not become cheaper?

It doesn't necessarily need to become cheaper in absolute terms, just cheaper than the alternatives of climate change damage. Those may continue to rise as we lollygag.

Do we actually have costs for the boreholes? Looking at the IDDP (geothermal deep borehole at 5km), I see costs of $22M. So we are talking about around $20B for the 800 boreholes forecasted for all the waste ever generated in the US. That sounds quite cheap to me.

Sounds lovely on paper, but nobody wants to store it on their property.

Groundwater intrusion is a clear risk. Oil companies already have (minor) problems with fracking fluids. Nuclear waste is orders of magnitude more risky.

It’s not centuries of waste, it’s millions of years of waste.

>>Groundwater intrusion is a clear risk.

How? 5km down is way below the water table. Also 5km down the soil is already radioactive by itself, so it's not like you are storing your waste in some pristine environent and polluting it - it's already a very dangerous place. If the elements at 5km depth could get into our grandwater it would all be polluted already. They can't.

>>Oil companies already have (minor) problems with fracking fluids.

Again, no one is fracking 5km down. Not even close.

>>It’s not centuries of waste, it’s millions of years of waste.

Uhm....."kinda". The highly radiactive stuff has half life of few centuries at most, otherwise it wouldn't be highly radioactive. Yes certain elements produced in the waste exist for "millions" of years, but that's no different than saying that naturally occuring Uranium exists for "millions of years". Like, yeah, duh. Again, at 5km or deeper depths that's not an actual problem.

>>but nobody wants to store it on their property.

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but 5km down is hardly anyone's property. Like, it's really really really not. You could fill up the drill hole and turn the surface into a national park and no one would ever be able to tell there's anything stored down there, just like you can't tell you might have a natural uranium deposit 5km down below you. And yes, certain groups will protest it anyway - but I think it's important to call them for what they are - insane.

Again, it sounds good behind a computer or to an engineer looking for a solution, but nature has a way of connecting itself with itself.

Waste would have to pass through the shallows of the borehole which is a risk, and then the well remains a high permeability conduit for the duration of its existence. If/when the well collapses, the infill is likely to be high permeability on a human/civilization timescale.

That’s not to mention the volume of material that would need to be placed downhole, which I would imagine is significant.

Re: duration of harmfulness, doesn’t uranium have a half life of some 10^9 years? Not an expert in nuclear chemistry, but I wouldn’t want that stuff in concentration anywhere near me, or beneath my feet, and neither does any state in the US it seems.

>>: duration of harmfulness, doesn’t uranium have a half life of some 10^9 years

Yes, and uranium in its pure form is hardly dangerous. Like, don't eat the stuff, but the same could be said about lead - you're perfectly fine holding it, just don't eat it.

Again, the more dangerous something is the shorter is its half life, stuff that has incredibly long half life is almost by definition not very dangerous. With uranium you'd worry more about the toxicity than the radioactivity.

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