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Comment by jhgb | Hacker News Reader

Countries, sadly, don't get to pick their geology.

Fortunately we don’t need many storage places. Nuclear waste is very compact.

Yes, we also need "only one", except in my country it's basically impossible to go a few kilometers from any spot without hitting a settlement (and if you can do that, your point of origin was probably inside a protected national park). That's probably why we still don't have a storage place despite even having reasonable (even if not perfect) geology for it.

We’d only need one place worldwide if people didn’t object to it crossing borders.

Everything nasty from all of them put together is something like one large modern soccer stadium.

But the logistics of transporting this is crazy even without objections

Really? Why?

I had this discussion on HN a while ago and looked into it - the costs of transportation are high because of various logistical regulations, there is a high cost upfront cost to set up a disposal site, there is a fairly significant cost for staffing such sites, and these sites will need to be managed for millennia.

Here's a good paper on the costs https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/12/2437/pdf

https://www.jnfl.co.jp/en/business/hlw/

It has being done for 20+ years now.

Nuclear waste is a mostly artificial problem considering we've known how to recycle/reuse nuclear waste to the point where it is no longer dangerous. The actual hurdle to nuclear adoption is really more about concerns with nuclear proliferation since a lot of the recycle tech can also be adapted to create weapons grade nuclear fuel.

Additionally, even with no nuclear reactors whatsoever, we'll still have to deal with nuclear waste as it is used in various other areas like medicine. The Goiânia accident incident in Brazil killed many people _immediately_ (unlike Fukushima) and originated from a defunct hospital, not a nuclear power plant. We need to find ways to deal with this stuff regardless if you use nuclear power or not.

> Nuclear waste is a mostly artificial problem considering we've known how to recycle/reuse nuclear waste to the point where it is no longer dangerous.

These repositories are meant specifically for the separated waste from the recycling/reusing process. So the process you're suggesting is the one that creates this "artificial problem".

>known how to recycle/reuse nuclear waste to the point where it is no longer dangerous

The experience of that has been a bit mixed in the real world at Windscale/Sellafield "Europe's largest nuclear site" in the UK.

The incidents section on Wikipedia goes on for pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents

and "The site is due to be fully decommissioned by 2120 at a cost of £121bn."

which doesn't sound ideal for future reprocessing.

Yucca mountain is absolutely safe and geologically stable. That was why it was chosen. Don't spread FUD.

Only the US has access to Yucca Mountain; my country doesn't. Not sure how Yucca Mountain is relevant for the all other non-US, non-Finnish countries talked about by GGP.

Not every country has every resource; that's why we have global trade. Yet that isn't even relevant since nuclear storage doesn't require special geography – US plants mostly just keep it onsite.

So will your country allow my country to store our waste in Yucca Mountain, then?

There's a lot more nuclear waste storage facilities than you might think. Europe has many, for example, and the US has 80+[1][2] in total including Yucca Mountain. Any nation that has operated a nuclear power plant is going to have some sort of storage site.

Regardless, it's possible to negotiate this as some sort of trade agreement, sure. Your country could also build their own if they didn't have one already...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#/media/File:...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/05/31/new-map-...

Thank you; I'm fully aware of our intermediate storage sites (we have exactly two of them). But that's not what the top-level comment about the stable storage site was talking about.

> Your country could also build their own if they didn't have one already

It's like you didn't read at all what I wrote! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842914)

Being near a populated area is not a factor for these sites, particularly if you are geologically stable.

Look at the map from the US, many sites of varying level are extremely close to major metropolitan areas. They are often deep underground.

It absolutely is a factor for the politics of site decision. I've checked Yucca Mountain; apparently the closest settlement is like 25 kilometers away or so, the next one like 40 kilometers or so. Finding a comparable site in a country 1% the size of US with quadruple the population density and with no sparsely inhabited areas is a Herculean task -- especially if you don't have huge areas appropriated by the military for such purposes.

> Look at the map from the US, many sites of varying level are extremely close to major metropolitan areas. They are often deep underground.

Wikipedia tells me that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM is currently the only deep underground waste storage site in the US.

Yes, but that is a political problem, not a nuclear problem.

> Wikipedia tells me that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM is currently the only deep underground waste storage site in the US.

The US storage sites are old (the Carlsbad facility design is from the 70's for example), and the US has vast amounts of land. European sites are often much deeper, and new sites are deeper and deeper, up to 800 meters below the surface.

They're "old", but the Carlsbad facility that went into operation in 1999 was only the third in the world after two German sites? That still doesn't seem to make sense for the claim that the US sites are "often deep underground" if only only of them is. One out of many is not "often" -- that's "rarely".

Carlsbad stores waste from production of nuclear weapons, among other things, and is the only facility in the US tasked with storage of so-called "transuranic waste". There are different classifications for nuclear waste, and each warrants different handling as you might imagine.

The Yucca Mountain site is 50 meters underground, which is about 164 feet. That's deep enough to not disturb things on the surface if in a geologically stable area.

You can see Yucca in on the shallow-side of things for many countries[1].

Perhaps I overspoke when I alleged many are deep in the US. The US is very spread out, and it seems going 200+ meters below the surface wasn't warranted except for the highest classifications of waste.

However, in a more densely populated nation, there is no hurdle to building deep repositories, except politics.

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

I'm quite confident you could sell your waste to Russia, to store in the vast empty tundra, for a couple rubles.

That would be politically problematic because of our relations with Russia. Also, the tundra is going to thaw soon.

Except that it's not necessary waste for Russia. At least some of this 'waste' can be used as fuel now or in future.

France does have at least some of necessary technologies to do so too. USA/Finland doesn't.

See https://habr.com/ru/post/473028/ (in Russian) and links from it

Money talks.

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