Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years | Hacker News Reader

Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

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162 pointsSaint_Genet272 comments

In Finland they are already filling up a 100k year long term storage mine [1]. Will every country with nuclear power have to find and dig (and counter-NIMBY) their own mines or could those with more favorable geological features offer theirs to others?

Earthquake-prone Japan might have a hard time finding an appropriate location.

1: 6m Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50

The US already identified a plausible site but for mostly political reasons, it was rejected and now most waste is stored in several pre-existing locations in the country and the rest is stored onsite at existing reactors. Both of those options are fairly risky compared to the planned repository but are more politically expedient.

It seems not unreasonable to expect many countries will follow Sweden and Finland and actually proceed with burial, and eventually some catastrophe in the US (pig farm manure pit wall breaks, sweeps plant's storage tanks into a major river) will make Yucca a possibility again. Or, we coiuld just give Nevada $50B and ask them to take on the risk for the next 100kyears.

It's entirely possible that Finland and other countries are positioning themselves to become the biggest "exporter" of nuclear waste disposal.

There are plenty of countries around the world with no actual plan for waste disposal, including the US. If Finland is willing to accept the risk in exchange for a certain amount of financial compensation, then it seems likely wealthy countries would make that choice.

That's a fascinating concept. Do the people of Finland get a direct vote on that, and can they change it in the future? I'd be wary of taking on such an enormous risk [edit: see terminology correction below] even if the probability of catastrophe is very low.

> enormous risk even if the probability of catastrophe is very low.

That's not really how probability works. If the probability of catastrophie is low then it's not an enormous risk.

Honestly I think the risk of nuclear storage is really low. Most challenges are focused om how to keep it safe for thousands of years. The next several hundred years are no problem.

Risk = probability * loss

So even though the probability is very very low, the loss (consequence) is extremely high (say an order of magnitude) which makes this a high risk.

What are the risks here more exactly? Yes, there is nuclear waste buried... sooooooo... what can happen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...

More seriously, there are a wide range of problems associated with long term waste storage, from known knowns to unknown unknowns. Some of the risks can't even be reasonably anticipated.

You can claim unknown unknowns for literally anything and claim it's high risk as a result.

There are unknown unknowns about 5G, therefore it's too risky to build and use.

Even they were storing large volumes of waste, then I assume they'd be non-trivial risk during the transport before the waste was buried.

The most obvious danger is ground water contamination. That already happened at some locations where mines where used as a temporary storage. Some have to be salvaged which will cost billions.

The potential loss here is not extremely high.

Crack open a physics textbook. Waste can either be highly energetic or long lived. You can't pick both. And I think it's fair to say that unless they dump it down an active volcano it won't get spewed airborne Chernobyl style.

Nuclear waste isn't particularly noteworthy compared to all sorts of other nasty chemicals that humanity stores in large volume.

I think the failure mode that's more likely (although I am not an expert, I've had to take extensive nuclear safety training for biology, and more exponential decay calculations than I care to admit) is that the water table would rise or there is a large seismic event and a population would be exposed to moderate-level radioactive waste for an extended period of time (leading to higher rates of cancer and other diseases). However, there is not a lot of solid data on moderate-level radioactive waste with long exposures.

Sort of like the cross product of Fukushima reactor and Flint Michigan.

I agree with the point about nuclear waste often not being as bad as other chemical waste (or even storage/processing of nonwaste chemical materials). The issue is that in people minds, the term nuclear triggers an innate dread best described as "contamination of our precious bodily fluid".

Nuclear waste processing just dumps it in the ocean and cancer rates are quite elevated around the regions they operate. Sure, you could disallow dumping liquid waste like it was done with barrels. That isn't done for economic reasons.

I wouldn't be surprised if nuclear waste actually became a resource in a few hundred years as we discover new ways to utilize it.

as long as you're cool with breeder reactors, the waste is already a resource, I think.

The idea that we have to solve the problem for 100,000 years has always seemed crazy to me. If we can store it for 100 years, we can be fairly confident that technology will have advanced to the point where then dealing with it for the remaining 99,900 years will be relatively trivial. If not, we hold on for 200 more years. 1700->2000 was quite a leap, and if 2000->2300 isn't enough that we can handle some nuclear waste by then, we've got bigger problems.

We're merely hedging against the risk of catastrophic societal collapse causing us to lose track of the waste and lose our understanding of radiation. But this is the only area where we seem to give a hoot about the far future, which truly makes me think it's just a rationalization of "I don't like nuclear power", not a serious concern.

I think there's a point you may have overlooked: The outside of any container holding radioactive materials becomes more difficult and dangerous as time passes. Even a sealed container.

Storing containers accessibly but yet securely and designing them such that they remain safely sealed for 100 or 200 or 300 years, yet can be handled then, is a very big problem. AIUI a more difficult problem than finding stable rock that's been undisturbed for a long time.

Sorry- in yourt terminology, not "enormous risk", but "enormous consequence". So: low probability of problem, but prolem has large consequences -> small risk in your terminology. Fair enough.

Are we sure? What about terrorist acts?

Try to think of one. It's not simple. For example, someone who has a bomb big enough to blast their way in surely has better targets.

There's been no talk publicly about accepting nuclear waste from other countries. ONKALO is financed through fees gathered from electricity generated by nuclear energy in Finland. This facility is meant to hold Finnish spent nuclear fuel. I highly doubt Finland would accept fuel from other countries.

How is spent fuel buried deep into bedrock "enormous risk"? I've read your thread and I still fail to see how this is anything but hyperbole. Even in the event of a container breach, the waste is buried under hundreds of meters of bedrock. What is the threat model for how this waste results in harm to society?

Even if this uranium were somehow brought to the surface and dumped it into drinking water supplies, it would be detected. Drinking water is monitored for uranium, because naturally occurring uranium in grounder is sometimes above safe limits.

Nevada became politically important due to its Senator being the Majority Leader (Ie the leader of the US upper house, the Senate). With him gone (retired and recently, rip) I think it might be much easier to convince them.

It’s such (excuse my language) bullshit. The facility is incredibly safe. It would be so much safer than leaving spent nuclear fuel on site all across the country. It’s unbelievable that there is resistance to it.

People resist everything. Just ask for forgiveness.

> People resist everything

Perhaps it causes a positive bias in the natural selection or is the side effect of something that causes a positive bias?

I'd generally agree with this mentality when individuals are trying to get something done, but definitely not when it's my government doing it.

Nevada is a swing state though, so it's going to have disproportionate national influence until that changes, which could be a long time.

I'm not sure why the approach of giving the state piles of money in exchange for hosting the storage wasn't tried initially. Or maybe it was, but was downplayed enough that it never comes up. Nevada isn't a very populous state so billions of extra dollars would go pretty far. It has also been trying to diversify its economy for a while now, with pretty mediocre results.

Nevada could pay a dividend like Alaska or New Mexico.

That's not a bad idea! Sending people "free" money is a pretty easy sell.

Nevada isn't largely populated outside of vegas, and then there's the fact that it has already been heavily irradiated from testing. No one is really going to want to build near there. That and it doesn't have sustainable water availability to build outside of vegas. It makes perfect sense to build the mine there.

I'm a Nevadan and would be totally fine with this (actually I'm an advocate) but it's politically more toxic than the waste for anyone of either party. You say it's already been irradiated like it's a pro, but for the locals there who feel lied to about the risks and that they didn't have a voice in whether nuke tests were done in the state, they'd say they've already done enough in service of the technology.

As long as Nevada is a 50/50 purple state, I don't think things will change much. The nuclear waste site is very unpopular there. Neither party wants to be blamed for imposing such an unpopular plan, and cause 2 Senate seats to become out of reach for them.

With regards to them being "incredibly safe", how do we know? There are countless examples of chemical waste sites around the country which were promised to be leak proof and safe, but the chemical industry was totally lying. Many of those sites are leaching poisons and carcinogens into the environment and we are spending billions of dollars to clean up those super fund sites, and will be spending billions of dollars into the foreseeable future. Does the nuclear industry have more credibility than the chemical industry? I don't trust people who are so sure of themselves when they forecast 100's or 1000's of years into the future.

Lastly, it's not clear to me that spreading nuclear fuel across multiples sites across the country is actually less safe. It does increase the chance of something going wrong among all those sites, but the impact of one of those incidents will be far smaller than concentrating all the spent fuel in one place. After all, it's the concentration of nuclear material that makes them dangerous, since all that material originally came from various mines on earth.

Agreed, and to add to that, Nevada is quite seismically active. Of course, most locations with mountains usually are (or were).

Nuclear safety ought to be a bipartisan issue!

So should protecting the public from a virus…

It is bipartisan; both parties agree they do not want to be responsible for failures in the storage of nuclear waste

> After all, it's the concentration of nuclear material that makes them dangerous, since all that material originally came from various mines on earth.

Spent fuel is a lot hotter than what came out of mines on earth-- for a few decades.

All the other waste isn't very concentrated in absolute terms, but putting it in one place can make sense.

That's true, neutron bombardment and nuclear fission probably produce a lot of short-lived isotopes, which are much hotter than the U235 or U238 that we mined out of the earth. But after the short-lived isotopes decay, we are left with less hot, but longer life isotopes. Would it be more safe to distribute those widely instead of concentrating them? Anyway, I don't have enough knowledge to make an informed judgement on that particular topic, so I will try to keep an open mind.

Though I seem to have a strong distrust for "experts" in certain fields, such as the petroleum industry, the chemical industry, and the nuclear industry. These are industries which tend to privatize the profits and socialize the costs, so I don't trust these "experts" to prioritize the welfare of the general public.

> That's true, neutron bombardment and nuclear fission probably produce a lot of short-lived isotopes, which are much hotter than the U235 or U238 that we mined out of the earth. But after the short-lived isotopes decay, we are left with less hot, but longer life isotopes. Would it be more safe to distribute those widely instead of concentrating them? Anyway, I don't have enough knowledge to make an informed judgement on that particular topic, so I will try to keep an open mind.

The thing that's particularly annoying is you don't want to get groundwater leeching stuff, and you need to keep cooling fans running for sure so that the fuel doesn't get hot and smoke. After that, it's a pretty boring pile of heavy metal waste.

> These are industries which tend to privatize the profits and socialize the costs,

Note that fairly generous costs for disposal have been collected from the whole industry. There's just a question of how we actually spend them to dispose stuff.

> Note that fairly generous costs for disposal have been collected from the whole industry. There's just a question of how we actually spend them to dispose stuff.

I'm not sure I trust that they calculated the cost of disposal properly. Because if the disposal cost was more than the revenue generated by the nuclear industry, the entire industry would have become unprofitable. The lobbyists and politicians would never have allowed the regulators to collect enough. Hence socializing the cost.

On the other hand, if we find that we aren't de-carbonizing fast enough, and the cost of global warming is far higher than the harm caused by the nuclear industry, then I think we have no choice but to increase our nuclear energy production. But I have serious doubts that our political system, our current political climate, and regulatory capture in the nuclear industry will allow that policy decision to be made in a competent manner. It's a conundrum.

> I'm not sure I trust that they calculated the cost of disposal properly. Because if the disposal cost was more than the revenue generated by the nuclear industry, the entire industry would have become unprofitable. The lobbyists and politicians would never have allowed the regulators to collect enough. Hence socializing the cost.

I don't believe that's the case, looking at the actual reserves... and looking at the overall regulatory climate for nuclear. NRC has been a pretty strict regulator that hasn't been very hesitant to apply uneconomic costs to nuclear operators, which is part of why nuclear is so expensive. Indeed, nuclear has been structurally unprofitable in the face of very cheap natural gas from fracking, which is one reason why you don't see operators lining up to spend capital to open nuclear plants.

Compare to fossil fuel plants: 100% of the harms are socialized (national security, health effects from particulates, global warming, etc). Here, you're asserting without evidence that the cost of waste disposal may have been underestimated.

> There are countless examples of chemical waste sites around the country which were promised to be leak proof and safe, but the chemical industry was totally lying

The CSB has only been around since like 1998 vs the much older NRC. The NRC is also much more safety oriented. There's only been 1 civilian nuclear death in the US and it was in 1964. The nuclear navy has never had a serious incident. I think in total there have been 7 total civilian nuclear incidents in the US, ever, and most have been minor, hurt no one, and were a long time ago.

> After all, it's the concentration of nuclear material that makes them dangerous

That's not exactly true. Exposure to high does of ionizing radiation makes it dangerous. That can be mitigated by securing material, which can be done by keeping it in one place. The NRC is very much in favor of long term storage solutions, as are all nuclear safety experts. Most favor deep underground salt formations vs. the Nevada site though.

A major thing to consider when talking about nuclear waste is the difference between waste and spent fuel. Spent fuel is relatively low quantity (but more dangerous and short lived) whereas "waste" is any material contaminated by the reactor. The waste is typically much safer but is radioactive for much longer.

The perception of nuclear waste seems to be that it will melt your hand off if you touch it for the next 10,000 years but the reality is that the things that are that radioactive don't have that long of a half life. The waste, which has a much longer half life, is, by definition, much less radioactive. The longer it takes to decay, the less radioactive it is. I think this is a very big factor is the public perception of nuclear waste disposal.

I found this[1] article that has a pretty solid breakdown of it.

[1] https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2021-11-30/Key-facts-abou...

Your post seems to imply logical decisions can be made if people were better informed. Boy, I sure wish that were true. Society seems to have moved well past logic and reason for pretty much any topic. The FUD around nuclear power was one of the first social issue that has sound scientific data that was totally ignored because of the fearmongering.

When I toured the Hanford nuclear site I got the impression that the nuclear waste is much harder to handle in the short term (much higher reactivity, much of it is in a liquid state, much of it contains very reactive solvents used in the purification process) but as you say it will be inert in a much shorter time frame. They were talking about encasing this waste in a silica/glass blob for easier handling.

Isn't most of Nevada federal land anyway? Do we technically need Nevada's legislative permission?

Correct. But you do need to pass legislation to do it, and passing any nontrivial legislation is next to impossible. The Senate is balanced 50-50, and since the people of Nevada don't want nuclear waste in their back yard, they will always vote against it.

It’s not clear to me that one side is dramatically more pro-nuclear than the other side? Is nuclear a partisan issue?

Every issue is a partisan issue, which is why we have parties. Nevada doesn't want it and enlists their allies for support. It so happens that they are Democrats, and it's true that there is an anti nuclear wing of the Democratic party, but that's not really the issue here. They don't want to be forced to take nuclear waste and their allies support them.

If the opposing party managed to force them, their candidates would get creamed (in Nevada) up and down the ballot. Right up to the top.

That's democracy. You get votes by trading your top issues for other people's. It tends to settle into parties to formalize the arrangements.

> Every issue is a partisan issue, which is why we have parties.

No, we have parties because some issues are partisan. If every issue was partisan, then "partisan" wouldn't have any meaning. Trivial counter proof: the PATRIOT Acts was a bipartisan issue.

> Nevada doesn't want it and enlists their allies for support. It so happens that they are Democrats, and it's true that there is an anti nuclear wing of the Democratic party, but that's not really the issue here. They don't want to be forced to take nuclear waste and their allies support them.

You referenced a 50/50 split in congress as an obstacle as though one party is opposes nuclear and one party favors it. I don't think that's the case--I think there's strong anti-nuclear representation on both sides.

> That's democracy. You get votes by trading your top issues for other people's. It tends to settle into parties to formalize the arrangements.

Right, but that doesn't imply that nuclear is a partisan issue, contra your claims.

For a long time, it was specifically that the Democratic party leader was from Nevada. It doesn't make the party as a whole anti-nuclear, but it makes the party oppose finishing Yucca Mountain.

I'm not sure what's going on with that now. Apparently the Democrats still oppose it. As do many Republicans, who didn't force it through when they had the chance.

As I said, it's not so much about pro vs anti nuclear but specifically about Yucca Mountain. Even pro nuclear people don't necessarily want to build there specifically. The 50-50 split means that it takes unanimity to get anything done, and neither party has it. (It takes more than unanimity, in fact, but usually much more to get past the filibuster.)

> The facility is incredibly safe.

That's such a ridiculous claim.

One hundred thousand years, mate.

Absolutely ridiculous!

That's how long it would take for all of the material to fall below a very low threshold. Most of the actually dangerous stuff decays on the order of a few decades. The site is super remote, gets almost no rain, and is geologically stable. The casks are designed to be leak free for greater than 10k years, and even then they'd just drop some material onto a cement surface in the center of a mountain in a room sealed behind steel and concrete. The standards in place ensure that no detectable radiation from the site could possible ever enter water int he valley for more than 10k years and probably longer. At which point anything that leaked would be noise against the background radiation, and would be harmless even if you consumed it. You'd get more radiation standing in Denver than drinking that water.

It might be, but, honestly: would you happily agree to store it under your house for nothing?

Everyone that wants it probably just wants it not in my backyard.

I wouldn't call it risky. We can safely sit in top of the material for a few hundred years. Assuming we have no technological advancements in that time then yeah we should move to a collective long term storage. But the storage problem isn't nearly as difficult if you only plan for a hundred years and only concern yourself with the waste of a single plant (or a few).

The U.S. already operates a disposal site -- the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. This is where all of those markers that say things like "This is not a place of honor" come from. It's just not accepting waste from commercial reactors for political reasons.

The US plan, if I’m not mistaken, is for 10k years, not 100k.

> Or, we could just give Nevada $50B and ask them to take on the risk for the next 100kyears.

I wonder what the reasonable risk-adjusted cost of burying this waste in Nevada would be. The odds of a failure are probably pretty low, and the odds of a failure that leeches into the water system in some significant dosage seems super low (how much of Nevada's water comes from deep reservoirs versus surface supplies and how integrated are these systems?). Also, how does that stack up against the death toll due to fossil fuels ("well we want to switch to renewables eventually" <- meanwhile people are still dying at a rate of tens or hundreds of thousands per year).

>Also, how does that stack up against the death toll due to fossil fuels ("well we want to switch to renewables eventually"

Took about ~4 years to build hornsea. Will end up being about ~20 to build hinkley point. For 2-3x the cost you get 80% load capacity factor rather than 60%.

If you're in a hurry... that huge pile of money used to ~~keep nuclear skills and industry accessible to countries with nuclear arsenals~~ save the planet might be put to better use elsewhere.

Where is the 80% number from?

With nuclear you also get to choose when the power output is 100% and when you want to take an outage for maintenance.

Storing above ground has benefits of being visible. You can inspect for damage, you can see that it's there every year. It never leaves society's kno ledge because it's out there.

Earthquake-prone japan is in a perfect position for deep disposal. Japan is atop a subduction fault. Drill a deep enough hole into that subducting plate and any waste will eventually be pulled into the mantel. If we are really serious about getting rid of things permanently, ie not having access to them for thousands of years, then miles-deep wells backfilled with concrete are very practical. Any future civilization who is building something that many miles underground, miles under the sea floor, probably has the tech to deal with whatever we have put down there far better than we.

Most disposal ideas these days are premised on the idea that one day, maybe, we might want to get access to the material again. They should really call it storage.

If the waste is pulled into the mantle near a volcano, wouldn't that be a problem? Maybe no new volcanoes will form in 100k years.

My understanding is that there’s such a vast amount of mantle and it’s generally a liquid so that after the waste “dissolves” in the mantle only a very tiny fraction of it would be brought back to the surface in future eruptions.

Uranium exists in nature, it's how we mine it; if nuclear waste is distributed around the mantel, it may be distributed in part via volcanos, but likely not in quantities like a nuclear test.

When containers get breached, they diffuse through rock and soil and reach the surface. French govt estimated that it would reach the surface 400 years after burial (so, 100 years for a breach and 300 years to swim down and up), diffused enough not to cause harm.

So nuclear waste in a subduction zone would require a zone which dives faster than diffusion goes.

Sweden is storing the stuff in a room 500 meters (.25 miles) inside a hill. That isn't deep disposal. Deep is perhaps 5000 meters down, even 10000 meters, maybe also below the sea floor. Down there the rock is warm and flexible. And not in a room but just in the drilled hole. Diffusion back to the surface won't be a problem.

> French govt estimated that it would reach the surface 400 years after burial (so, 100 years for a breach and 300 years to swim down and up), diffused enough not to cause harm.

What kind of waste are you talking about? Long-term stored high-activity radioactive waste is certainly not going to leak its way to the surface in 400 years.

High activity materials decay much faster than low activity materials. There's only so many protons and electrons you can shed.

Regardless of their activity, long-term stored waste is expected to be vitrified and stored in rock formations that are water-tight (in France's case a specific type of clay) and have not moved for millions of years.

It's hard to imagine anything that would lead to radioactive material leeching to the surface or an aquifer in hundreds of years.

Activity matters a lot actually. And predicting long term geological events is the difficult part. Hundreds of years, yeah, not a problem. Thousands and we start getting fuzzy. But this is why I suggested we "pass the buck" in another comment. Meaning to develop better solutions and let our science advance and take advantage of the fact that we can safely store, with modern methods, for several hundred years.

> When containers get breached, they diffuse through rock and soil and reach the surface.

No? Unless there's some force pulling the waste up the contents of a container, breached or not - will move with the surrounding rock. And in a subduction zone, that rock is getting pulled down deeper into the crust.

From your username, you might be biased and might know someone who wants the job. ;)

I mean that's a start, but I would vitrify the waste first, then put it in a subduction zone. Of course, they were talking about vitrification when I was briefly a Nuke E.

When you have managed to build a storage site, it seems like a no-brainer to offer it to others (for a fee).

Obviously there is the difficulty of transporting the nuclear materials, but there already exist containers which are designed to survive train crashes to store this stuff in. One of those on a boat should be fine, as long as some insurance will pay the cost to recover the container from the seabed if the boat were to sink.

Chernobyl should be turned into a storage repository. It's already got monitoring equipment and NIMBY simply doesn't apply.

I am curious to see what countries like the Netherlands will do. It is easy to build new nuclear power plants when you are going to shift the real problem onto others.

In the long run, I expect the same thing will happen with the majority of nuclear waste as with a lot of other problematic waste: It is going to be exported to a poor country were the elites make money from it while the population has to bear the consquences.

If you have a storage facility I don't see why you wouldn't sell/rent it to other countries.

The logistics and political aspects of long-distance, cross-border transport of that kind of material probably remove that option from the table.

It's not operational yet, maybe in 2023 or 2025.

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

Are they really filling it up in Finland? I read the other day that they still wait for a government decision if they're allowed to use it or not.

IIRC they have recently gotten all the (major) approvals, but they haven't started to bury anything there yet.

Not yet. The trials should start next year with actual usage planned for 2025 currently.

https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchan...

I simply do not believe that mankind is capable of keeping track of certain items for that long.

if we can get transport reliable and cheap enough, i say put it in space.

Let's hope the rocket does not blow up on launch, though.

Correct, in the event of a collapse of civilization record might be lost.

But under such a scenario, how would some future civilization get contaminated? What are the chances that they'd dig hundreds of meters deep in an area with no valuable resources? The proposed scenarios in which nuclear waste may harm humans far into the future are exceptionally unlikely. Contrast the remote possibility of this form of harm with the millions that die each year due to fossil fuel pollution (and many more that may be harmed by climate change).

There are countries with negligible risk of serious earthquakes and there are reactor type where we could split the long half time isotopes to much smaller halftime elements.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-countries-have-the-...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080922100148.h...

As things stand now, each country will have to do their own storage.

For example, it is illegal to import nuclear waste to Finland.

Not really much NIMBY arguments in Finland as the storage site is right next to the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant.

Well, the number of permanent storages is quite low. I think we saw the first instances last year or so. Of course you could just drop it in the ocean. It is illegal to do so with barrels, but you can easily dump contaminated water. That is basically done in many processing plants and the result is eleveated cancer rates.

The problem of permanent storage isn't solved yet. Could as well dump it in barrels again since water is a very good radiation absorber and nobody can trace formers sins back if the radiation is tranfered into the food chain.

It's amazing to me how long 100K years are

~1-2 million years ago humans "invented" fire. ~12'000 years ago we invented agriculture. ~4'500 years ago the pyramids were built.

Will human civilization even exist in 100'000 years, or will humans consider moving to the solar system next door because it has become so advanced of a civilization?

All the while since 2022 some reactor fuel has been degrading in a some random hole in the country then named Sweden.

Finland, Sweden and Canada have areas of very stable granite that is 3 billion years old with few cracks. The granite is older than multicellular life, atmospheric oxygen event, or multicellular life.

Those are good places to store nuclear waste.

The two most possible outcomes are:

- Our civilisation collapses and there will be not much future without advanced technology

- We create AI that takes over the world trying to save humans from our own stupidity (we become pets)

Ofcourse we can also:

- Miraculously move further in evolution, put aside our differences, start working as a collective (but I highly doubt that)

We're already working together for all practical purposes. I get it's often unchallenged when people are overly negative about the future especially in a younger crowd but you're not doing yourself or us any favors and your options seem ludicrous.

Right. Humans are working together more than they have ever in our history

I wouldn't call that being negative. It's being realistic looking at what our "leaders" are focusing on.

Climate change or world pollution or population disproporties are three topics that need immediate action under rigor and force. Most estimations I'm aware of predict we will miss all of our deadlines.

Young people don't have to be the most intelligent ppl on the planet to be able to read what scientists that are experts in the field with tens of years of experience have to say. And they pretty much have consensus. Few scientists can be wrong, but if vast majority of them agrees on something -> there is a pretty high chance they are right.

The situation we are in right now with information about it being at hand causes young ppl to be constantly depressed. The sole result of that will be devastating for the future. Even if our predictions prove themselves to be wrong and all will be dandy.

I'm not gonna even talk about geopolitical issues we are currently struggling with.

Do you see the gap between "all will be dandy" and "we will be ai-pets or civilisation will collapse"?

Everything will not be dandy, human progress is a messy thing, not solving inequality or climate concerns will cause a lot of issues, agreed. Being a defeatist about it and extrapolating missed climate goals to total defeat is neither constructive or true.

Everyone knows its going to be a slow process.

Children of my children are going to face issues like climate migrants or health system collapse.

This taking time doesnt change anything. Fact is that world in a hundred of years will look ALOT worse that it does now. The same it looks worse now in comparison to 30 years ago.

Human race never had to think about solving issues we have now. We finally hit the moment in our evolution where the only way ro solve those kind of issues is to either:

- make miraclous breakthrough in science (like cold fussion)

- all human beings on the planet change mindsets and we become one nation

I simply dont see that happening. We are too early in evolution cycle (at least most of us are).

I'm kind of beyond trying to win the argument and more thinking what you need. Some books that helped me a few years back when I was overly negative was especially 2 from the bill gates reading list: homo deus and maybe even more so Enlightment Now. This is what it looked like a 100 years ago: https://slides.ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-food-provision/... I worry about the issues my kids will face too but by almost any metric things are getting indisputably better and better. The things you think are life or death issues aren't really yet so people don't care enough but they will, eventually.

Nitpicking a bit. Humans (as in homo sapiens) have only existed for roughly 300k years. The use of fire was invented by earlier species but the timeframe you mention is probably correct.

The documentary Into Eternity is a very fascinating look into the kind of longtermist questions that must be answered for a project like this, like: how do you write warning signs that are supposed to be read 50k years from now, warning not to open the storage vault? What kind of language do you use?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

I remember reading about this a long time ago at [1]. They had a panel come up with the essential message they want to communicate which I found really interesting and chilling:

> This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

> This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.

> What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

> The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.

> The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

> The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

> The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

> The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of...

How could I ever sleep again if I was investigating a ruin and read that message.

I'd have to dig into it.

It'd be like `Well, we warned you...` but that message is too intriguing.

This sounds like the beginning of an Indiana Jones knockoff! He will dig after reading this, for sure!

Surely, it’d be written in a .txt file!

You bury the storage deep underground in an area with no natural resources, and put no sign over it. Security through obscurity: why would some future civilization dig hundreds of meters deep, for no conceivable reason?

I'll concede that if there's some sort of civilization collapse and records of waste repositories are lost, and if some future civilization decides to dig in the area of a waste repository, and if said civilization lacks knowledge of radiation poisoning, then unfortunately yes said future civilization will be harmed.

But how does the extremely remote possibility of all these hypotheticals occurring stack up against the certain harm caused by fossil fuel pollution and climate change?

The risk is not through digging, it's through geological processes happening over 100 k years that break up the storage site.

And in the event of a container breach, how does uranium make it through hundreds of meters of rock to get back onto the surface? And if the waste is in a subduction zone, those geological processes are brining the waste deeper into the ground.

People seem to be under the impression that even one gram of waste escaping is going to cause irreparable harm. Do people not realize that we've detonated hundreds of nuclear warheads in the atmosphere (and many more underground)? Do people not realize that the UK and Soviet Union simply dumped their nuclear waste into the ocean [1]? Yet we're worried about waste buried deep into bedrock?

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

There won't be a vault.

After about 70 years, when the tunnels are full, they will be packed with bentonite clay to keep out water and the facility sealed up.

Here it is to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4 (from petermcneeley comment below)

The most important bit is 200.000 - 300.000 tonnes of spent uranium exists in the world today, that means we have to build between 15 and 25 equivalents of the Swedish storage (that isn't even started yet) or 30 - 50 Onkalo (that actually exists)...

You also need to realize the symmetry that Sweden and Finland are building here... we are briding the failing English/American civilization and the now leading (by energy remaining) Russian civilization (Finland has a Russian power plant in Loviisa) by having powerplants AND storage AND a underwater cable between these at each side of the sea.

This is THE project of human civilization, WAAAAAY more important than tesla or spacex (both much more likely to fail and meaningless in comparison).

I'll repeat that France has abandoned the 4th generation tech after 10 years building (76-86), 10 years running (86-96); over 20 years ago! They ARE leaders in that field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

What I don't understand is their choice to not leave the spent fuel easily recoverable AND why so close to the water when we predict levels will rise way above the entrances to these constructions?!?!

There are multiple teams and projects using spent nuclear fuel to power new types of much smaller power plants, and even portable power boxes and space tech. Those storage facilities may start being a lucrative resource soon.

Exactly. I have room in my back yard.

The medium term storage might but the long term storage sections will be sealed and I don't think it would be cost effective (or super possible) to actually unseal it.

The copper capsules will be buried 500m in the bedrock, the capsules will then be placed inside a hole which will later be covered by bentonite clay. As the sections fill up that will also be filled with clay.

Good luck to them. In Germany the national storage facility had nuclear waste stored in it for a decade or so and it “unexpectedly” started leaking and resurfacing. The project was subsequently abandoned about a decade ago and all existing waste had to be dug out again.

Mark me as skeptic as to whether this is feasible. 100k years is all marketing in any case and can’t realistically be designed for.

The notion of a permanent repository for nuclear waste always seemed misguided to me. There are too many uncertainties and unknown unknowns even in the relative short term. It’s like assuming a piece of software is "finished", no new bugs will ever be found and no new requirements will ever come up. I believe it would make more sense to treat the waste as something that will have to be maintained over its lifetime, and changes to the storage will have to be expected, anticipated and accommodated over time.

They haven't dug it out, though. The waste is still in that cave where ground water enters. They think that they are ready to start the recovery in 10 (!) years. The estimated cost to prepare the recovery are above 4 billion Euro.

I'd love to know what cost they have put for 100k of storage of nuclear waste. Talk about intergenerational debt. Surely once storage costs are factored into nuclear energy, renewables are much much more cost effective, without all the risks of nuclear waste spilling out at some point in the next 100k years?!?!

> renewables are much much more cost effective

It's not a cost issue, it's an "intermittent and non storable" issue.

We don't need theories just look at Germany right now... Their last two nuclear reactors (max output 4GW) often produce more than their entire sun+wind system (max output 122GW)

https://mobile.twitter.com/fmbreon/status/148058947971495936...

They also have 6 GW of pumped water storage and interconnects to countries with 20GW more, with 8TWh of storage in total.

https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany

Aren't there now ways of renewing (for lack of a better word) spent nuclear fuel?

They are in the research state, no production facilities as far as I know. I hope the tech is ready soon so at least some waste can be disposed that way.

This is very outdated.

"Nuclear fuel reprocessing is performed routinely in Europe, Russia and Japan"

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

Oh I meant specifically in power generation, i.e. using the spent as fuel in "next gen" plants, thereby reprocessing it. The idea of course being that if it produces energy then some of the cost can be offset and that the end result has a much shorter half life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Never completely. Spent material is also casing for the actual fuel, for instance, which can't be reused. In the fuel itself, there is some uranium and plutonium which can be reused, but there are also atoms produced by the fission which are not useful.

For instance, a possible output of an uranium atom splitting could be one Krypton atom and one Baryum atom. Both are radioactive, and the path for krypton to a non-radioactive atom includes one step with a half-life of ~10^6 years.

There is also waste from the plant itself. When you decomission a plant, the vessel steel is going to be radioactive and needs to be stored safely.

There are plenty or other waste types that can be stored more or less safely. Some can be reused, some not.

Anti nuclear sentiment has made it very difficult to build/research ways of processing currently "spent"fuel

yes, nuclear reprocessing is actually a fairly old technology and it closes the nuclear fuel cycle, leaving only short lived byproducts.

It is currently illegal in America because reprocessing spent nuclear fuel produces weapons grade plutonium which is a proliferation risk. The economics are not great either since it's cheaper to just mine more uranium and pay to store the (5% used) fuel.

France and Russia have a few plants that do it though.

I wonder who thinks that in 100,000 years Sweden will exist or even if Swedish in 1,000 or 10,000 years would respect this decision, haha. Looks like an impossible for me: nothing is forever, and 100,000 years is a long time.

Yeah, that's a massive timescale in human history. As far as we know we've only had intentional agriculture for around 10,000 years.

I'm wondering more if humanity will exist.

I think it will, still. But it is just a belief.

No one, obviously. Its an open question in the project how to e.g. communicate to a future civilization that the area is dangerous.

Indeed, most pyramids are less than 5k years old. A 100k years means making the step from the first Egyptian dynasty to today 20 times. That’s an incredible timespan. I don’t think we can design rules and agreements around this type of storage and expect them to last that long. Statistically it’s unlikely the country you are living in still exists in just 10k years, let alone in a 100k years.

What is the likelihood that some future civilization is going to just happen to dig up a nuclear waste repository stored deep underground? Furthermore, why does nuclear waste get so much attention when there's plenty of other hazardous waste sites [1]. Why aren't we concerned about a future civilization breaching a salt mine that's been pumped full of toxic chemicals?

1. https://www.epa.gov/hwpermitting/hazardous-waste-management-...

In one thousand years, when there are still ninety nine thousand years to go, what will the people in Europe think of us?

We left toxic waste dumps, of waste that is silently toxic, a stealthy killer, all over the place. Some will be leaking. Some won't.

And why did we do it? To pay for our current consumption.

What will they think of us?

Likely as unsophisticated people that were unable to harness the remaining energy in that waste.

What do you think about people who lived 1000 years ago? Do you care about the pollution and deforestation around some mining areas in use during their time? Probably not. These issues, although serious, get swallowed by the progress of civilization.

I don't understand why your comment was downvoted. If humans haven't transitioned into nuclear waste eating flying robots within a couple of thousand years, that's because they then have managed to go extinct, and in that case, whatever nuclear material that might leak into a nearby lake will only affect some fish and the occasional moose walking by (and these are creatures that we, today, kill for food, so it doesn't seem like most people care about them all that much).

Caring about how future generations of humans will handle our nuclear waste is akin to someone 2000 years ago being worried that leaving a heap of rocks somewhere would be to much of a hazzle for us to get rid off.

Likely the same as I feel about the PCB/DDT emissions from just the last century. How on earth could you be that stupid and selfish?

The idea that random stuff sunk into oceans was "gone" lived into the 60's even in progressive places like Sweden. It's insane to think that this wasn't one generation ago.

... and then they'll dig it up and reprocess it when they really need the energy contained in it.

Could be. My unpopular prediction is that within 100 years, well-engineered deep-ocean burial will be considered good enough, given all else which is likely to become clear by then.

praying irrationally for shipping the junk to the moon.

that'll show em.

If you can get it to the moon isn't it almost as easy to just shoot it into the Sun?

Actually nope. It takes more energy to slow yourself down enough to crash into the sun, starting from the earth, than it does to hop on over to the moon.

Definitely a stupid question, because I actually have no idea how they work: can a solar sail be "tacked" so as to decelerate towards the sun, like a sailboat sailing into the wind?

(Setting aside the risky problem of getting this waste off earth and into space to begin with)

I have not done any calculations now, but given how small the solar wind is in drag, it would have to be a very, very big sail.

Tacking works because boats have a second "sail" interacting with a second fluid moving differently than the wind (the keel is in the water). There's no second thing to push against in space.

If you "tack" your solar sail, you'll spin.

It's a misconception that shooting things to the Sun is easy, it's actually extremely difficult due to the fact that when you launch off of the Earth, after escaping Earth's gravity you're left with ~30km/s of leftover momentum that you have to do something with in order to not wind up in an orbit around the Sun.

Why can't you just aim for a direct hit at 30km/s?

The exact same reason why planets don't immediately fall into the sun

The momentum you inherit from Earth isn't in the direction of the sun, but roughly perpendicular to that direction.

It's similar to a car going down the freeway at high speed that needs to make an immediate 90 degree right turn. It can't do that without slowing down first, if it did, it would slide sideways off the sideroad. It's harder in space because the car is going 30 km/s and there's no friction that slows you down.

That's not how orbital mechanics works. Objects move in elliptical orbits around the sun, not in straight lines.

https://space.stackexchange.com/a/45619

Imagine sitting on a huge carousel spinning fast, like 100 times the speed of sound fast. Now imagine jumping off and trying to get to the center of it.

Yes, gravity is holding us back from yeeting of into space but to get closer to the sun you need to slow down. A lot. It takes way less rocket fuel to speed up enough to leave the solar system than to get to the sun.

I think it would be a pretty big difference in delta-v.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...

There's a few major issues with disposing of nuclear waste into the sun. First and foremost is that if the rocket explodes you'll contaminate a huge radius with dirty bomb like material. Probably not great.

Further, if you do decide to launch it, it takes significantly more energy to shoot it out of the solar system than towards the sun. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this...

Did you mean to word that the other way around? It takes less energy to shoot it out of the solar system than towards the sun.

Ooof, good catch. Thank you, yes, that's what I intended to say. Too late to edit.

No. Getting to the Sun requires scrubbing off nearly all the orbital speed of the Earth (30km/s), or the payload just orbits at a smaller radius.

The delta v to the Moon is something like 7 times less than to the Sun (3 vs 20ish).

The delta v need of the Parker Space Probe, which still "only" gets to 8.5 solar radii is so high it will use 7 Venus assists to get it close enough (it can't do big Jupiter assists because the solar panels it would need at Jupiter wouldn't be able to fit behind the sun shield at perihelion, and they didn't want to give it an RTG because they're saving plutonium for future missions).

You can eventually hit the Sun with enough Venus assists and Earth assists, for a total delta v of under 4 km/s, but it'll take a very, very long time, and your nuclear waste will be doing Earth flybys until finally it hits the Sun. Also it might be tricky to get the ball of sun-melted radioactive slag to do accurate assists after the sun melts it on the last few close encounters.

why not mars? didn't falcon heavy do that with a car?

Yeah, water is a very good radiation shield, and seafloor gunk doesn't hurt. The concrete casks probably sink pretty easily too.

Also, salty seawater will eat through any metal at about the rate of a Windows 95 install process indicator. At that point, the nuclear gunk will disperse in the water, enter the food chain, and soon be part of your romantic lobster dinner. Enjoy!

The casks aren't metal on the outside, they're a specialized concrete. These casks have been dropped from building, exploded, struck by speeding trains, and burned at incredibly high temp all without losing integrity. Even still, uranium and similar waste products aren't water soluble and being more dense than any surrounding material so they would sink through the sediment and become locked in place. Here's a really old survey on the topic[1]. Here's another study [2]. Basically most of the waste would be short-lived beta and gamma emitters that are no longer dangerous after a few years. The longer lived alpha emitters aren't dangerous because alpha particles are easily stopped. You can safely hold a small amount of uranium in you hand.

With respect to ocean life, there is also very little life in these trenches, and what life there is doesn't mix with food chains at higher levels. All of the food comes from biological material sinking, and nothing really goes the other direction.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/31404684750.pdf [2] https://www.swr.de/-/id=13132940/property=download/nid=23345...

Also, last time I estimated Bequerels (aka decays) in the ocean already, compared to what extremely dilute waste would add, well as I recall it was "a drop in the ocean."

Need to recheck this sometime.

Most of the talk about deep-ocean burial has assumed that we're burying (worthless) fission products.

Leftover uranium and plutonium in the fuel contains more than 95% of the energy from the original uranium so it is madness to bury it in a place we can't get it.

I was thinking about writing a science fiction story about the Mormons and Scientologists fighting over Yucca Mountain 2000 years from now but now I don't think the Scientologists are going to last that long.

Yes, in terms of eventual ocean burial, as one option, I was assuming after reprocessing, burning in a fast breeder or Moltex, etc.

This thought might be more for additional existence proof right now.

+1 for Moltex.

I presented at the first thorium energy conference put on by Kirk Sorenson and it has been breathtaking to watch the focus shift away from thermal to fast and fluoride to chloride and now static fuels.

Moltex really looks like the one and it will be wonderful if Canada develops a world-beating nuclear technology like what they attempted with CANDU.

To be fair, most people don't understand the storage problem. They think we have to store it for hundreds of thousands of years (ironically we don't think about this with plastics, heavy metals, or other products that don't decay). But it's storing for hundreds of thousands of years and assuming that the future civilizations don't know our language, we lost maps of these sites, and there's no reason to dig them up. This is left over cold war era thinking where WW3 brings us back to the stone age. But in reality it's fine to sit on the material, in place, and hope we figure out better things in the next few hundred years that we can safely do that. I've heard a complaint that this is passing the buck, like we did with climate, but I think that's only true if we assume no technological advancements. Or in other words, we stop researching. But also nuclear waste is a slowly building problem with a positive feedback loop so I think the comparison is bad anyways. In a few hundred years we'll probably pretty easily be able to extract the 95% of the energy that's left in our waste material and put it to good use. After all, France can already do a bit. It's just not cost effective for most because it's cheaper to mine than recycle.

> But in reality it's fine to sit on the material, in place, and hope we figure out better things in the next few hundred years that we can safely do that.

This is a very optimistic view. There are 56 nuclear power plants in the US alone. It is entirely believable that one or more of them will be shut down and then outright abandoned at some point in the next few hundred years, leaving nuclear waste with no long term containment story. Over the course of history, abandonment of once-important areas has been pretty common. I see no reason to believe it cannot happen to a nuclear plant.

I can easily imagine a plant being turned off and a future government deciding that it’s just not worth dealing with a proper decommissioning, so they just walk away. It’s easy to imagine this because it’s exactly the same stance you are proposing. “It’s good enough for now, someone else can deal with it later when magic (technical advancements) shows up.”

I’m also quite concerned about what happens if one of these “just store it on site” facilities gets bombed at some point.

> I've heard a complaint that this is passing the buck, like we did with climate, but I think that's only true if we assume no technological advancements.

Of course you’ve heard that complaint, because it is passing the buck. Betting on future technological advancements without actually investing in those technological advancements is 100% passing the buck.

> Over the course of history, abandonment of once-important areas has been pretty common. I see no reason to believe it cannot happen to a nuclear plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Of course, that wasn't waste.

It's a reason why we need to implement a solution for nuclear waste. With the carbon crisis the fear of proliferation is more dangerous than proliferation.

It's passing the buck but it also isn't a problem that needs to be solved for several hundred years. And you'll notice I said this isn't a problem as long as we keep researching, aka. not abandonment. My bigger point is that it wasn't like climate change where every day we ignore or don't solve the problem then the problem gets worse (a positive feedback loop). In the case of nuclear, this is not actually true. We also have a substantially larger timeframe to solve the problem. I believe it is naive to also believe that we can come up with a perfect storage solution (long term, doesn't rely on known languages, can handle apocalyptic events, loss of history, and many other factors that only matter when we're looking 10k years out). I think it is a bit naive to believe that a solution we could implement today would be a descent solution. It is better to continue researching and sitting on it (which is safe for now and the next few hundred years. Which is only unsafe because geological effects come into play). No matter what we do you can define it as "passing the buck" simply due to the underlying issue of humans being dumb.

You don't need to predict anything. It's already been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

If it's anything like the Finnish facility there would be no digging, the facility has tunnels leading to the different storing locations. It will be continually used for centuries to place new spent fuel. They different rooms with spent fuel could easily be opened again.

Planned lifespan of ONKALO is around a hundred years, not multiple centuries.

A hundred years should be enough time to make enough renewable energy to replace nuclear.

...or have Covid 2055 that wipes out 90% of the population.

The Finnish site is based on the Swedish method (KBS-3 if you want to read more) so not only is it anything like it, they are the same :)

Sweden could have uranium mines themselves but don't want that dirty stuff happening in their own backyard, so buy fuel needed from other places (Canada, I think?)

Sweden used to have their own uranium mine, but since it was cheaper to buy it than to mine it they shut it down. Pretty sure most of it is purchased from Russia.

Yes, they just did start buying from Russia. It is a security concern these days and was discussed as recently as yesterday in Swedish media.

It's a security concern but it is not as big a one as Russian gas.

If you import 10 years of gas you import 10 years of gas.

If you import 10 years of uranium for the LWR you imported more like 1000 years of uranium for fast reactors.

Gas is difficult to ship long distances and dependent on pipeline networks. It is hard to substitute American or Middle Eastern gas for Russian gas but easy to replace Russian uranium with uranium from South Africa, Australia and many other places.

We need it.

I think it's unreasonable to expect any solution to work for 100k years. Too many unknown unknowns. But hopefully if it does fail in say a few hundred years the radioactivity will already be less and they will be better equipped to clean it up.

100k is still on the order of engineerable problems if you do proper risk assessment.

I don't think any reasonable solution expects avoiding failures, but rather is fail-safe. I'm not even sure if you call them failures if they are part of the expected lifecycle.

The bedrock at the Finnish nuclear waste storage site was estimated by geologists to have not moved an inch in four and a half billion years. I'd bet every penny on it standing for another hundred thousand.

I propose we periodically check, e.g. every 1K years or so, to make sure the facility is working as designed. If it doesn't, whoever approved the plan should be shamed and reprimanded very publicly.

> I propose we periodically check, e.g. every 1K years or so...If it doesn't, whoever approved the plan should be shamed and reprimanded very publicly.

I reckon that the possibility of public shame in 3022 is not much of a deterrent.

it seems HN has lost the ability to detect sarcasm :-(

I couldn't tell. Maybe be more explicit next time, try "/s" for instance.

A couple good Canadian podcasts about this (in Canada, related to our search for a Deep Geological Repository) have recently aired: on Canadaland [ https://www.canadaland.com/nuclear-waste-ignace-ontario/ ] (also an article) and "Open to Debate" on how nuclear energy is important for decarbonization [ https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/open-to-debate-with-david... ];

ELI5: why don’t we eject it to space or send it into the sun?

Say 1 in 1,000 rockets fails like the challenger and explodes. Now you have spent nuclear waste all over the Earth!

At the volumes and surface area we’re talking about, is it any more than a blip? Say one rocket explodes. What’s the worst result of that fallout? Is it worse than peeling a banana or flying in a jumbo jet?

Some fraction of rockets explodes during launch. Also dropping things into the sun costs a lot of energy because you have do decelerate it from earths orbital speed (30 km/s) or whatever you are trying to drop will just orbit around the sun.

The cost is between the same and many times higher, and the risk of explosion in one rocket approaches 100% very quickly when you launch hundreds.

It's not cost effective. (Same reason we don't encase it in giant synthetic diamonds or bury it in the earth's mantle)

Plus the material is valuable & space launches are dangerous. Launching to space probably introduces more contamination risk than any other option short of intentionally making dirty bombs out of it

Judging from the current historical record is this feasible? Most civilizations don't have enough time behind them to prove this out.

That's the source of the "This is not a place of honor" meme - it's a study about designing a site that is foreboding across vast time scales, so our remote ancestors^Wdescendants won't be tempted to dig it up.

Sweden is going to rely on good old record-keeping though...

> so our remote ancestors won't be tempted

To nit-pick, I think you mean descendants.

D'oh, thanks. Fixed.

The No Place of Honor came from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant report out of Sandia National Lab back in 1993. It is good read about long time and how to deal with communicating messages through the ages. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/...

There's a documentary that explores this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

They deal with exactly the problems you're imagining. How do you convey danger to a civilization 100,000 years in the future? How do you get them to take your warnings seriously? (We'd ignore any warning in the Egyptian pyramids created only ~5,000 years ago) How do you handle earthquakes and other natural disasters?

I found it interesting and you might too.

> We'd ignore any warning in the Egyptian pyramids created only ~5,000 years ago

Worse, the 'mummys curse' became a part of popular culture!

The key is probably do explain honestly what the warning is about. Then the grave robbers can make their own decisions.

We'd ignore any warnings in the Egyptian pyramids, because they'd warn us that the gods would get us, and we don't believe in the gods. We warn future people that the radiation will get them, and if they're more advanced than us, they still believe in radiation. (And if they're not more advanced than us, maybe they think that radiation is a spell from the gods?)

The problem is to communicate "radiation danger" to someone 10,000 years from now who doesn't use our language, alphabet, or iconography. That's not easy. Not impossible, but not easy.

The other problem is devising warning signs that will survive 100,000 years...

Unlike Egyptian Gods, which I'm pretty sure have never had any supernatural effects on grave robbers/archeologists who have studied tombs, I'm pretty sure at some point, radiation poisoning will become somewhat obvious.

In the same way that the dangers of radiation were found fairly quickly from usage of radium in paints, anyone in the future will probably figure out pretty quickly something is wrong.

>How do you convey danger to a civilization 100,000 years in the future?

Hopefully the skin of the first group of people to dig up our waste sliding right off their bodies will send a strong message.

What sort of time interval between attempts are you presuming.

At 100k years, there could be generations between such attempts, and accounts could likely themselves take on the form of incredible (in the literal sense of "non-credible") legends.

Effects from lower-level contamination might be less pronounced, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Here are my thoughts: If we assume civilization doesn't collapse, the concept of radiation is likely to remain poignant enough to keep people from futzing around in a radioactive waste repository.

However, if we do assume civilization collapses and people forget about what radiation is, we can also safely assume that the future civilization will not be industrialized. If the waste is stored in some place extremely remote, inhospitable, or miles underground, the sheer cost of trying to reach the material would bankrupt any future civilization. We do have some precedence for this, one of the Great Pyramids was meant to be dismantled but it just proved too expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Menkaure

Don't change color, kitty. Keep your color, kitty. Stay that pretty gray.

Look at it this way: so far, our ability to communicate to the future and understand evidence from the past has only increased over time. So, while we have no precedent, we also have no reason to doubt the humans of future.

In addition, if our civilization lasts that long and technological advancement continues, there's a good chance some use will be found for the nuclear waste and it'll be mined out again

The waste will be encapsulated in huge copper cylinders, and then embedded in bentonite clay.

I fear the price of copper may be a problem in the future. Some dumb tomb raiders that don't know better will dig it up like a treasure.

The sites in Switzerland that are under consideration for the same thing: https://s.geo.admin.ch/7caba0d5c9

Artistic documentary on the project in Finland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4

This could be a stupid question, but could we not literally fire this stuff into the sun? My science be bad, forgive me.

Because sometimes rockets explode.

Not a stupid question, though.

All or nothing though, eh? :P

But seriously I see your point, but would the cost (economic, social, environmental) of developing a launch tech that could get the mass out of the atmosphere without rockets, heading towards the sun, not be be worth it? The amount of applications for that would be insane.

I'm not sure I'd trust a slingshot either :)

What about one made that had an NFT?

what if the launch goes wrong and suddently you have a nuclear waste going all over the place. Anyway I think the resources and overall cost to put this amount of material in space would be... astronomical.

> ... astronomical.

Ha!

100k years! wow, can we reuse this stuff if we are able to stabilize it enough to send into space?

What would happen if the site was hit by a meteroid 2km in diameter?

I longbet you the fuel won't be there 100k years from now.

!remindme 99y

I don't understand why Europe is being so bearish on nuclear. It'll solve all of their energy woes without becoming dependent on Russia.

Europe doesn't have significant earthquake or tornado risks either. It's about the best place for nuclear you could imagine.

Germany shut their plants down and is now buying LNG. That's a downgrade.

Nuclear is the quickest path to green, and it's staring us right in our faces.

I bet Russia would pay through the roof to keep West Europe hooked… wonder which German politician will get a sweet Gazprom seat this time.

Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is chairman of the Nordstream shareholders group.

I bet on Manuela Schwesig. She's a big supporter of NS2 and coincidently from the same party as Gerhard Schröder.

Does anyone have a good political explanation for Europe's hostility to nuclear power?

Is it really just post-Fukushima nuclear concern?

There are so many pressing issues at stake - CO2 production, dependency on an increasingly aggressive foreign adversary for fuel - that it seems like there must be some logic, but I can't figure it out.

Even if wind/solar are cheaper than nuclear, it doesn't seem that they can become the only type of of energy supplied in Europe due to variability issues.

Oh, no, it started in the seventies, around that.

It is a mixture of "look what happens if we let everybody have nuclear power: now Pakistan and India have it, and there is a great chance of a nuclear conflict" (simplifying). And at the same time the ecologists, saying "NO to nuclear power" (I remember this in my childhood in Spain, it was huge).

Fuckushima has turned it into what seems a non-negotiable idea at any costs.

But notice that some weeks ago the European Commission decided to push for calling nuclear "green" (I agree with this) but also liquified gas (!!).

Yes, it was pretty big. I remember the slogan as "Nuclear power? No thanks!" in the UK.

So how did France end up being a giant producer of nuclear energy?

The UK, Germany and the Netherlands had respectively oil, coal and gas reserves. France only had uranium reserves in Africa.

Also, de Gaul figured out quickly that without nukes, France would cease to count geopolitically. To build nukes you need a nuclear industry.

> To build nukes you need a nuclear industry.

The corollary being, if you want to reduce the chance of nuclear war, you should phase out civilian nuclear power.

At the very least, we should limit nuclear energy to only countries that are declared nuclear weapon states. If necessary, the ban could apply to only building new nuclear power plants after some agreed date (e.g. 2045), to give some time to improve battery and other energy storage technologies.

Also, the nuclear weapon states should commit to using 10% of their installed capacity on atmospheric carbon capture, as a tax on the privilege of operating that dangerous technology. This would effectively be a carbon dividend for countries that had to forego using nuclear energy.

LNG is green(er), compared to coal.

People want to not freeze in winter. They're going to try to heat with something. If they don't burn coal, and they don't heat with nuclear- or renewable-created electricity, then what's left? LNG in a power plant or NG in their home is greener than the alternative.

You want to go still greener? Great. But this winter, people still want to be warm, and if your answer is "create more renewable energy in five years", that's not going to cut it.

"You want to go still greener? Great. But this winter, people still want to be warm, and if your answer is "create more renewable energy in five years", that's not going to cut it. "

It looks like you are fighting straw men. No one here pledged for abolishment of gas or coal as of today. It is a general discussion of where we are heading.

So yes, how could we still be warm in 5 years. 10. 20.

Oh and the general question of whether our choices today will lead too much warmth in general.

Electrolyze the massive overproduction in the summer into gas, store it for the winter.

One possible solution, even though you need really massive overproduction in summer, due to the big losses in transformation.

I never said I was against using it. Just calling it “green” (no ‘er’) is simply false, misleading and against what they have been calling it for years.

I am all for nuclear and greener energy.

I am totally against doublespeak.

Chernobyl scare is probably more top of mind still given the prevailing wind at the time spread it over european territory

I have two general reasons that I think are salient:

The public is terrified of nuclear and governments are responding to that.

The electorate is structurally incapable of asking for slightly more people to die in order to avert huge numbers of people dying. Therefore “more nuclear” is not a valid option even for many that think there is existential risk from climate change.

Yes. Nuclear Is a threat to socialists/environmentalists because it would deprive them of an excellent source of political capital. Namely, the justifications required to artificially increase the price of energy, to pass regulation which controls the manufacture of goods, and to regulate lifestyles and culture.

All sectors of the economy depend on the energy sector. Control the energy sector means control of the entire economy.

I’m not saying that climate change isn’t a real threat, nor that scientists are wrong in their predictions, nor that we don’t have to make a change in how we produce energy. However, what makes environmentalism useful to the political class has nothing to do with the hard science behind energy, civilization, and the health of our planet. What the political class sees in this movement is the perfect set of excuses to increase the size of the central government.

Not really Fukushima, more likely Chernobyl and the disastrous handling of governments trying to hide things instead of taking action, explaining complexities and planning further education. That let a wide open hole for every naysayer for spraying and preaching political and scientific non-sense. Let it rot 20y without addressing the issue and you'll pick anyone on our streets today and be virtually assured that one's either totally afraid or fully ignorant of nuclear power.

Furthermore, Chernobyl isn't something for Europeans that was far far away or a long time ago.

Germany spends (and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future) millions each year to compensate for losses of hunters and farmers due to radioactive contamination which accumulates in wild boars and mushrooms which have to undergo inspection before being sold. Everything above 600Bq needs to be discarded as contaminated waste.

Yes, and it's worth bearing in mind that Chernobyl was far from the worst case scenario. We were very lucky that Chernobyl was located in an isolated area and that the wind didn't blow the radioactive material towards Kyiv or another densely populated area. A Chernobyl-like event that ended up making a major city uninhabitable would be a crisis on another level.

"Even if wind/solar are cheaper than nuclear, it doesn't seem that they can become the only type of of energy supplied in Europe due to variability issues."

They can with storage systems, e.g. hydrogen

> Does anyone have a good political explanation for Europe's hostility to nuclear power?

Perhaps because of oil funding of anti-nuclear FUD:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...

> Is it really just post-Fukushima nuclear concern?

It's mostly German ideology being forced down every other countries. France had one of the the cleanest and cheapest energy and is bullied into selling it to the European market at loss...

Germany is shutting down its nuclear sources while buying from other nuclear powered countries (France, Finland) and gas from russia. They just don't want it to happen on their land, but as long as they can keep the "we produce green energy" lie they'll be happy.

If it's so cheap why us France selling at loss? Germany is still exporting more than importing and the gas is mostly for heating.

> They just don't want it to happen on their land, but as long as they can keep the "we produce green energy" lie they'll be happy.

I can't see how this fits with your first sentence, either they're forcing other countries to give up nuclear power or they're forcing them to keep it running.

> If it's so cheap why us France selling at loss?

It's a long story. Basically EDF (électricité de France) was a monopoly (which is fine because it's nationalised) but Europe asked to break this monopoly (capitalism says monopoly = bad). The problem is that third parties can't really build nuclear power plants or hydroelectric dams to generate their own electricity (because it's hard and expensive, which is why it was nationalised in the first place), so Europe forces EDF to sell electricity to the European market at a fixed price (which is currently lower than the market price) which is then bought by third parties and sold to customers for a profit.

The bottom line is that EDF was built with public money and is now financing private entities at a loss...

Now for the fun part, these competitor don't do anything other than buying low and selling high. EDF still is a monopoly in term of energy production, it's just not allowed to benefit from it. None of these third party benefits are reinjected in the country's energy production system.

> either they're forcing other countries to give up nuclear power

It's an ongoing process, they themselves want to stop nuclear but for now they're very happy about buying electricity from nuclear powered countries.

If you want to read more about it:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_10_...

https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/EDF-to-sell-more...

Germany has a strong cultural and political opposition to nuclear power, particularly in their Green Party, for many different reasons that I’m not qualified to discuss. I suspect the initial cost is also a barrier to much of Europe, if only for political reasons.

> Nuclear is the quickest path to green, and it's staring us right in our faces.

This is held as self-evident in all these discussions on HN and yet all the simulations I've seen have nuclear as way too expensive compared to the alternatives. After someone points that out the discussion shifts to how it's also evident that nuclear is only expensive because of red tape but no one can explain how. We're stuck there as far as I can tell.

> ... nuclear is only expensive because of red tape but no one can explain how.

Noone ever or you haven't seen it? The over regulation by the NRC and EPA is well documented.

https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/costs-benefits-...

I was trying to synthesize the discussion I've seen here. Your link is interesting but still in line with the discussion I've seen so far. People can point out examples of excessive red-tape in some countries. But no one agrees how much can be removed, because everyone agrees the downside to failing nuclear is grave and needs to be regulated. And since nuclear needs something like a 5 to 10x improvement in cost to be competitive it doesn't seem feasible that just deregulation is the answer.

My hypothesis is that nuclear was our best bet to decarbonize the grid 20 or 30 years ago but meanwhile wind and solar have improved so much and are still on such a steep improvement curve that nothing else makes sense. But I'm happy to be convinced otherwise. It would be cool to have a fourth good source of energy in the clean mix and SMRs do sound better than traditional plants.

> yet all the simulations I've seen have nuclear as way too expensive compared to the alternatives

Links? There is evidence that it's expensive because nuclear has to compete with cheap, environment-damaging gas: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#conclusions.

The comparison is with solar and wind, and there seem to be enough solutions between interconnects, overcapacity, batteries, demand modulations and others for nuclear to not be valuable even to solve intermittency. Here's a simulation for how an 100% solar+wind+battery grid would work and be cheap:

https://www.rethinkx.com/energy

And here's the same reasoning used to argue that even the already built gas, coal, nuclear and hydro assets are overvalued:

https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe

I've seen other simulations that weren't as extreme and ended up keeping the hydro we have as generation as well as grid scale batteries and even some gas to fill a few moments in time. What I haven't seen is any simulation that makes new nuclear build make sense.

> nuclear as way too expensive compared to the alternatives

Yet German electricity is two times more expensive than France's one. One is nuclear the other is """green"""

And the worst part is that it doesn't work: their last two nuclear reactors (max output 4GW) often produce more than their entire sun+wind system (max output 122GW) so they end up buying electricity from nuclear powered countries and gas from Russia

https://mobile.twitter.com/fmbreon/status/148058947971495936...

> Yet German electricity is two times more expensive than France's one. One is nuclear the other is """green"""

Please add more logical fallacies

i've been saying this for some time in the US and think it is similar to the reasons we cannot build high speed rail here. Too many points of opposition for a not immediate and obvious benefit (namely lower energy prices, and fewer negative environmental effects). Individual and municipal solar with expensive batteries seems to just fit better with our individualistic and consumer mindsets.

> Nuclear is the quickest path to green

Nuclear is neither cheap, sustainable (limited resources and storage problem) nor is it quick (takes at least a decade to add it to the grid)

I'm not sure if I would think densely populated western democracies are 'about the best place for nuclear you could imagine'.

Currently the best place for nuclear are centrally run countries (China, ...) with a state-owned electricity sector (like France). Bonus points for a nuclear weapons industry or plans for those.

> Germany shut their plants down

Three nuclear powerplants are currently online in Germany. Their shutdown is planned for the end of the year.

> Nuclear is the quickest path to green, and it's staring us right in our faces.

That would surprise me. France builds a single nuclear reactor (the EPR at Flamanville) and is late 11 years (start now planned for 2023, instead of 2012). The reactor costs then around 20 billion Euros.

Nuclear is slow to build-up and extremely expensive.

> It'll solve all of their energy woes without becoming dependent on Russia.

Could you stop being so xenophobic?

"Without being dependent on countries that dont share the same view on the european security order, integrity of borders, sovereignty of countries and so on"

There are many such countries, but there is only one near Europe and its easier to just say "Russia" tbf.

The whole world is on aggregate bearish on nuclear electricity - its share of global electricity generation has fallen from about 18% in the mid 1990s to about 10% today. The reason is simply economics/cost.

In the late 1980s in most of the world, the focus of new generation capacity switched to coal and natural gas as it became obvious that the price of nuclear on a per-MWh basis is multiples of times that of NG in particular. Nuclear is not and never was cheap.

The second issue with nuclear is project risk - the industry has a disastrous record for delivering late and way over budget. For example, since 1990 only three new reactors have started operations in the USA. Watts Bar 2 went live in 2016 having originally started construction in 1974 [2]. The other two: Watts Bar 1 and Comanche Peak 2 took nearly 20 years each to go live.

These aren't outliers - in Europe, two projects based on the newest 3rd generation reactor design - Flamanville and Olkiluoko - started construction in 2007 and 2005 respectively and both are years over schedule and are now expected to cost 6 and 3 times their budgets respectively. Work on this particular reactor design started in 1990 - which gives you an idea of what's involved in bringing new reactor designs to the commercial reality.

A coal or gas plant can be up and running in 2-5 years with no long tails. A solar PV plant or on-shore wind farm can be constructed in a year or two with little or no risk of massive delays and budget overruns. And both options deliver cheaper electricity.

It's just too expensive and niche in the modern world. In the age of mass-production where wind turbines and solar PV panels are rolling off assembly lines, the idea of spending $12B (Olkiluoto) or $25B (Flamanville) for a single 1.6GW reactor seems nuts.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-electri...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant

The situation is complicated. Some EU member states are pro-nuclear, and some are anti-nuclear. In each state, the predominant popular sentiment may not actually match the current government's policy, but it usually does.

France is the most significant player in the pro-nuclear bloc, operating a huge number of nuclear power plants and exporting its technology. France is joined by less populous countries in the eastern half of the EU that operate nuclear power plants to great benefit (Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Finland), supplying large proportions of their states' electricity needs [1] from a small number of facilities, and makes them less reliant on import of natural gas from Russia. And, it's joined by bigger countries in the eastern half that want to diversify their generation mix away from coal and not towards Russian-sourced natural gas (Romania, Poland).

Opposing nuclear power is Austria, who is a fierce opponent of nuclear power on principle, but has generous hydro capacity to not have to worry about it, and also operates the biggest natural gas interconnection point in the eastern EU [2]. Austria is joined by Luxembourg: anti-nuclear sentiment is very high, it has one the lowest share of renewables in Europe, and probably imports [3] most of its electricity from the coal plants outside Cologne in Germany. They're joined by Germany, where the anti-nuclear Greens party are in the governing coalition, anti-nuclear sentiment is high, plentiful coal exists, natural gas is imported from Russia, Norway, and the Netherlands, and wind and solar have been rising rapidly. They convinced wind-dominated Denmark to support them, along with Portugal, which gets most of its energy from Algerian or Nigerian natural gas, but has significant hydro and wind generation as well.

The common link between anti-nuclear countries is that they're well ahead on wind and/or hydro vs. your typical pro-nuclear country, and they have fewer geopolitical concerns about natural gas imports to tide them over until alternative generation replaces most gas. The common link between pro-nuclear countries is that they like the benefits nuclear brings to them, and some of them want more of that.

[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro... [2] https://www.gasconnect.at/en/network-information/at-a-glance... [3] https://www.klyme.online/post/where-does-luxembourg-s-electr...

Many people including me have changed their stance over the years. But unfortunately the Green party in Germany has their roots in de-nuclearization and that alone is probably enough to deter them from changing their policy worrying it would cost them votes.

> I don't understand why Europe is being so bearish on nuclear. It'll solve all of their energy woes without becoming dependent on Russia.

you are just clueless.

> Germany shut their plants down and is now buying LNG. That's a downgrade. > Nuclear is the quickest path to green, and it's staring us right in our faces.

you would need both anyway?

nuclear does not change the fact that you need LNG.

I often hear so many stupid arguments like yours, I wonder where do people think that nuclear means solving energy problems and reducing coal and gas? in fact nuclear solves the base load problem when there is low wind, BUT it's not the reason why germany uses so much coal. germany was always strong on coal and it was political that we neither reduced it as much as we should have.

btw. even frances uses tons of lng besides a heavy nuclear user (60% at the moment I'm writing can serve up to 80% of it's energy with nuclear), in fact it's second highest energy is gas.

> you are just clueless.

> I often hear so many stupid arguments like yours

Not a way to win an argument, even if you have reputable facts. I could have used the rest of your comment without the snark.

I enjoy being wrong on HN. It's a quick way to evaluate and possibly update my mental model. It's just not very fun running into your type of attitude.

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