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Comment by zeotroph | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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

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

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).

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