Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years
bbc.com
bbc.com
Also, this is not 'waste' there are interesting and unique materials there that might be relevant in the next 100+ years. Not to mention that there is still lots of energy that can be extracted.
These projects are all huge waste of money and the nuclear waste buggyman is mostly just the biggest anti-nuclear marketing project. And a sadly successful one.
In the US nuclear companies have spent money for waste disposal for 50 years, with lots of money hanging out in an account. But instead of doing things to actually process this waste, like advanced GenIV reactors they instead just stalemate politically over the idiotic Yucca Mountain and don't do anything. Billions blocked from making progress on technology.
Canada, the only western country with half way non insane nuclear policies is finally actually slowly moving. Together with a company called Moltex Energy they are working on reprocessing CANDU fuel to be used in the SSR Reactor.
If countries just worked together on this stuff instead of each country being tricked into digging a big unnecessary hole we could actually make clean energy, reduce the actual nuclear 'waste' to a incredibly tiny amount that can be easily managed.
This isn’t the right way to plan centuries ahead. You can’t just say “well if the dummies can’t do this one more thing we imposed on them, they deserve what they get.”
With generational risks we should aim to reduce them now as much as possible and take the most dangerous contingencies off the table.
Water contamination from naturally occurring uranium is a bigger risk than nuclear waste (uranium, like lead, can cause heavy metal poisoning independent of radioactivity). Chemical waste from non-nuclear industries are far more hazardous than nuclear waste, yet the latter is for some reason an enormously larger concern. If you're worried about generational risk, there are plenty of things an order of magnitude more concerning than nuclear waste.
How did we get this way?
Even above ground nuclear storage is far better waste management then virtually anything else, including wind and solar.
The likely hood of people dying from old wind and solar projects is quite a bit higher then people dying from nuclear waste.
Every input into the nuclear reactor is just coming out the other side in a very controlled way. There is no dispersal of anything into the environment (except potentially heat).
The lifecycle of materials is handled way better then any other form of energy.
Same reason that makes us not write code that only the author can understand (when working in a team), we need to plan ahead in the same way. We can’t rely on the future solving our current problems or even understanding them fully.
Nuclear waste will not simply be lost. The only way it gets lost if society literally collapses.
And if that happens the small amount of nuclear waste is the least important problem anybody will have.
https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/overview-of-the-cns-gl...
And I couldn't find a clear indication of how many people died from civilian nuclear waste. The article you linked does not really give much information and I'm not gone read the whole report.
Every study shows that that nuclear energy has the lowest death per person. People are more likely to die during construction then anything else.
If anything, this example serves to prove that we have an irrationally heightened fear over nuclear power's waste: we have had incidents with medical radioisotopes, but yet that doesn't get nearly as much press as the supposed "waste problem" with nuclear power.
1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else.
2. You just build a house on the ground (without digging). Nothing bad happens.
3. Civilization collapses, nobody cares about the abandoned casks.
So in the analogy it would be as if we left a stockpile of guns and ammo. I don’t think leaving a bunch of loaded guns around is a responsible way to hand the future to our children, especially since we can’t know what the future political situations will be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_bomb_disposal_i...
So let me reframe the question. Do you think it would be a good idea to store spent nuclear waste in present day Iraq or Syria?
The best way is to burn up these actinides in a suitable reactor.
Again, we do have big stockpiles of guns and ammo. We have bunkers full of artillery shells, missiles, and weapons. Where's the outrage over the dozens (hundreds?) of munitions stockpiles militaries have strewn across the globe? Again the question is, what risk does nuclear pose that we don't already navigate with other more mundane materials?
The nuclear material in casks is not _that_ dangerous because of its long half-life. So dirty bombs made from it would not result in a significant loss of life. They'll just result in a very expensive cleanup of the affected areas.
The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller.
Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not be obvious in 100 years, 1000 years, 10000 years, much less in 100000 years.
These are time spans that aren't imaginable to us. Creating a symbol that's intelligible throughout that time is a task we dont know we can do.
Can you decipher the symbols in Göbleki Tepe reliably? There are some hypotheses around these. But if they're warning you about something that warning is hard to decipher, much less obvious. And this is only 10000 years ago.
Only because we found like one stone hundreds of years ago, if that was not the case we probably could not have done it.
>Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years.
[Citation needed] This seems like quite an assumption.
Anyhow, the situation he sketched was that some random guy develops a fields with cylinders 300 years from now, how reasonable is it that he somehow understand the language or goes through the effort to translate it? I would wager pretty slim, I can barely understand text in my own language from 100 years ago.
The issue with hieroglyphics is that we only had a relatively small sample. If full books remain, it's going to be much easier to recover meaning from scratch. It's very close to what we already do with LLMs.
(And probably quite a few weirdos will still keep replicating the bible)
We might have disassembled every planet within a few thousand light years to englobe each corresponding star within a Dyson swarm.
We might have suffered a cataclysm that almost wiped us out, and have only just returned to the equivalent of the early industrial age, and the occasional remaining patch of carved rock writing from our time is as unreadable to those living in that new world as 𐘃𐘅𐘈𐘊 𐘌 𐘍𐘎𐘑 𐘖 𐘗𐘂𐘆𐘋𐘐 𐘇𐘆 𐘊 𐘑𐘉𐘂𐘆𐘊 𐘇𐘆𐘋 𐘐 𐘇𐘆𐘑𐘐𐘅𐘋 𐘐 𐘏𐘏𐘈𐘊𐘑 𐘉𐘂 𐘏𐘏𐘈 𐘊𐘏 𐘏𐘐 𐘐𐘅𐘊𐘍𐘈 𐘇 𐘆𐘑 𐘐𐘅𐘊 𐘍𐘈𐘇𐘆𐘑𐘐 is to us.
ISO 21482:
> On February 15, 2007, two groups—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—jointly announced the adoption of a new ionizing radiation warning symbol to supplement the traditional trefoil symbol. The new symbol, to be used on sealed radiation sources, is aimed at alerting anyone, anywhere to the danger of being close to a strong source of ionizing radiation.[12] It depicts, on a red background, a black trefoil with waves of radiation streaming from it, along with a black skull and crossbones, and a running figure with an arrow pointing away from the scene. The radiating trefoil suggests the presence of radiation, while the red background and the skull and crossbones warn of danger. The figure running away from the scene is meant to suggest taking action to avoid the labeled material. The new symbol is not intended to be generally visible, but rather to appear on internal components of devices that house radiation sources so that if anybody attempts to disassemble such devices they will see an explicit warning not to proceed any further.[13][14]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol#Ionizing_radiati...
Sure, every random Zakjsnd, Joe and Yelaldto won't know English, but archeologists certainly will. And they'll be able to read it.
But even if we suppose that a nearby supernova explosion resulted in a burst of magic rays that somehow wiped all memories, people will either:
1. Know what radiation is, and they'll test casks for it.
2. They won't be doing digging down for at least tens of meters.
You really need a very unlikely confluence of factors: a very developed, but still pre-technological civilization, that is somehow interested in digging way down (why?) in that particular spot.
If that knowledge somehow gets lost, which over such a long timeline seems almost likely, people will die from radiation poisoning without knowing what hit them.
In pre-industrial era? Not really. There was more digging after the steam engine invention, as suddenly people started looking for coal and ore. But that's what, 400 years out of 10000+ years of European culture?
And if it's a pre-historic society, then why would you be digging 30 meters below ground anyway?
Mankind has gone to great lengths to admire the death, and digging a 30 meter hole is definitely achievable given other prehistoric monuments.
For this to happen, such monuments have to be commonplace. Which would require a technological civilization. Then see above.
Land developers are not allowed, nor will ever be allowed to just assume that some land has never been used before. Too much of history is undocumented, and what is documented is not reliable.
It seems very clear to me that if we all follow the rules of traffic we can safely go 90+ since I’m a pretty good driver, everyone else must be too. Yet the speed limit is much lower and people crash all the time anyway.
It’s evident to me that if I order a coffee, it’ll be hot, but the lid says “caution hot”.
It’s obvious that if I see that the floor is wet and the surface is slippery, I shouldn’t run if I’m trying to avoid slipping, yet we have those yellow signs everywhere.
Just because you think something is below YOU, super smart HN user, it doesn’t mean it keeps the average idiot safe in the future.
As an example, humanity has documented ocean dangers for centuries. Everything from human created dangers like shipwrecks to natural occurring shallows and strong currents. Captains that want to avoid those dangers could read those, learning every language from ancient Greek to Latin to dutch, scouring the many archives that exist to figure out what is down below. No one does this (except for archeologists). Captains use modern maps, sonar and satellites, neither which require knowledge of ancient Greek.
Maps and their information about dangers are perishable with a fairly short lifespan. Making a map with the intention of it lasting hundred of thousands of years is an impossible task. Any danger, be that natural like cliffs or unnatural like mine shafts, can not be made into a map that will last hundred of thousands of years. Such maps will need to be maintained or rediscovered. Every single garbage dump, every industrial area, every zone or place where humans has done something to the environment will have to be maintained in updated maps for as long as those places remain dangerous to humans.
European countries and other denser ones may want to know where it finds those.. and as if we are not in a big change that will start a lot of instability, conflicts and migration.
The actual risk of nuclear waste is incredibly small. You point would make sense if it was a nuclear weapon that could just randomly go off or something like that.
However with civilian nuclear waste you really have to come up with pretty unlikely stuff for it to ever harm anybody. And you a tinfoil hat to come up with some scenario where it hurts a large number of people.
And those risks are incredibly easy to detect should they ever happen.
So again, unless you have total government collapse this simply isn't an issue. And if you have anarchy in Finland the least problem anybody will care about is a few leaking casks of nuclear waste that might happen.
This is like worrying about bad air quality for your great grant children while your house is on fire. There are about 1000 ways I could think of to improve the lives of people in 200 years that have a far better way to spend billions of $ then burying nuclear waste.
The more likely case is that people in 200 years will look back and say 'people back then already had all the fundamental research why were they so shit at using fission and fusion. What the fuck were they thinking'
Germany will be glad to hear that. They can continue using Asse II instead of needlessly spending billions clearing it out.
Burring low level nuclear waste in Asse II would have been fine. Managing the high level nuclear waste above ground would have been preferable. Germany would have saved a lot of money and trouble if they had simply managed their high level nuclear waste above ground.
PS: I'm sick of the argument that 'somebody did something stupid with nuclear waste 50 years ago therefore it disproves everything'. The reality is in terms of safety there were 1000s of things happening in the 70s that damaged far more people then some nuclear waste management. Even totally unattended Asse II death count would likely be 0 or very close to 0.
In all of nuclear history a almost vanishingly small amount of people have died from civilian nuclear waste, maybe its actually 0. And more people will actually die from building these big hole to dump nuclear waste in then would actually have died if this was was managed above ground.
Eh, no. You are making my point for me. All the "nuclear is safe and sustainable" propoganda hinges on getting a series of highly complex reactors all built and interoperating (well), and even then I am not clear that all the fuel is re-used, or that the "unspent" portions have some amazing-yet-not-yet-known use. I am sick and tired to the argument that "it's ok lets just do thes 20 other things 5 of which don't even exist yet and have innumerable hurdles facing them and it will be fine".
It's really not fine, as you state we are quite good at making mistakes and bungling things, adding more factors into the equation increases the risk of something going wrong, it doesn't reduce them. We can even see from this article, the "solutions" already involve unproven theories that we think quite possibly are wrong, and yet the plans proceed as if nothing were to go wrong.
Reduction of waste threw a reusable fuel cycle would reduce the amount of waste considerably but it isn't actually a necessary condition.
Geological storage is unproven and costs billions, but that you seem to ok with. That also involves a lot of steps and a lot of things that can go wrong.
> portions have some amazing-yet-not-yet-known use
We already know many of the potential use cases but I guess if you are not interested in production of medical isotopes to advance cancer research then I'm not sure what to tell you.
Right now we build new reactors only to make these isotopes and the are incredibly limited and only available to a limited set of people.
Equally the storage of nuclear batteries has run out and NASA and other space agencies are desperately to start producing them again.
> It's really not fine, as you state we are quite good at making mistakes and bungling things, adding more factors into the equation increases the risk of something going wrong
It also increases the risk of bringing sustainable reliable green energy, advances in nuclear technology with many application and high paying jobs in the local economy rather then putting up some solar panels produced in China.
> unproven theories that we think quite possibly are wrong
The theories are not unproven. Its simply a matter of doing the engineering, nobody really questions that these things are possible. Its just a matter of having the funds. Instead of every country spending billions digging a hole, investing in next generation technology is just obviously a better idea. For the price of the nuclear repository Switzerland is planning they could literally build a whole fleet of new reactors to power the country.
Pretty much, yeah. "Contamination" there is at trace levels, some places on Earth have naturally more radioactive water.
And can you imagine the good outcomes that can be produced with 1 billion Euros today? Why spend money on something that will maybe prevent a problem centuries from now when we have such great available investments we can make today?
Most Earthquakes would damage the casks. Unless its right on the fault line this at best causes some damages that would have to be repaired. This is incredibly unlikely to ever happen in most of the world. Also burring the casks is more likely to cause issues in case of a major unexpected earth quake. This is one of those maybe ever few 100 years somebody has to move the casks.
Floods are pretty predictable in where they happen, don't put the nuclear waste there. And if somebody put them there in error, somebody at some point might have to slightly move them. If countries figure out to not put something away from a flood prawn area, why do you think they can build a major geologically save location that can hold up for 100k years?
> some rare natural disasters
I guess if a vulcano happens and damages cask people might have bigger issues. And again, simply not really relevant for the waste majority of places.
Once you are at maybe some unknown super disaster might happen then the whole logic with the deep geostorage also doesn't hold up anymore.
Finding a location above ground that is reasonably safe for 100 years is far, far, far, far, far easier and cheaper then building a geological storage that can last 100k years.
> forget to go back and check if the container is intact
Ok, then some light radiation might leak in a area that is likely far away from human population. Maybe not fantastic but also not some major problem that is worth spending billions of $ fixing.
And again, if a government can't manage to get a guy every year to do a quick check, then your country has far bigger problems. Also this monitoring can be done by a private person with a Geiger counter even if a country has collapse into anarchy, and people would avoid that location.
Yes, militaries, secret services and terrorists don't exist. Russia/China/USA don't exist and wouldn't find it incredibly convenient to cause major damage to each other by "leaking" these stockpiles. Added benefit, it only would kill those exposed and leave machinery untouched. Nobody would ever steal stuff like this. /S
Terrorist would hurt 1000x more people buy destroying the rails along a high speed train route.
Stealing nuclear waste is incredibly hard and borderline useless.
And Russia and China don't need to attack civilian nuclear waste, if they want to nuke you they can just do that.
Do you actually really believe a general in Russia is sitting around thinking 'mhh we can make the civilian nuclear waste leak and then maybe the cancer rate is slightly higher in 20 years'.
To actually come up with a scenario where a country is seriously hurt by civilian nuclear waste takes about 3 tin foil hats on top of each other. And the is proven by the reality that civilian nuclear casts are standing around lots of places barley protected and have been doing so for many decades with nobody giving a shit.
Be more afraid that China pays for pro-smoking ads on twitter, because that's gone cause more cancer.
The old nothing bad ever happens nonsense.
Have you heard about the Ukraine conflict or does your lack of coherent points include a lack of knowlegde of current events?
Then there are the frequent insecurities, missing nuclear materials, and other fun new conflicts brewing...
Exact that not what I said. What I said to make a rational assessment of danger.
Yes things happen, how likely are their and at what risk level.
And if you do that for civilian nuclear waste you can conclude that the danger is very low and even if something happens the overwhelming probability is that it is a very low risk thing.
I have actually been to the Ukraine during the conflict? Have you? And I work with Ukrainians that have displaced family. Just saying 'what about Ukraine' is not an argument.
> Then there are the frequent insecurities, missing nuclear materials, and other fun new conflicts brewing...
Yeah what if the Russians capture the civilian nuclear waste that was originally produced in the Soviet union. The Russians could be building nuclear weapons. What then, oh the humanity.
> missing nuclear materials
When the terrorist show up and steal 12m high concert blocks only to then make an inefficient dirty bomb. I much prefer terrorist to try that then doing something that's actually effective, like derailing trains of flying planes into buildings.
> and other fun new conflicts brewing
Ok but you know what, most of the time, most nations that have civilian nuclear waste are not at war. And terrorism isn't what George Bush apparently made you believe.
And even if war or terror happen, civilian nuclear waste is incredibly low risk.
Your argument essentially boils down to 'sometimes something happens' therefore no risk of anything bad ever happening is acceptable. Of course the same argument could be made against pretty much every other human built infrastructure.
You can easily collocate this with other research operations. Then you don't even have to pay a dedicated secure guard.
> You can't just leave the high-level waste there for anyone to steal
The lots of places where nuclear waste stands around totally unguarded with maybe a small fence. And yet in reality people don't steal gigantic concrete blocks that need spacial transport.
If you are seriously question the argument that digging a huge incredibly complex geological storage is more expensive then a normal storage building then I question your sanity.
Your argument seems to boil down to the typical 'what if highly unrealistic terrorist from a holywood movie set show up'. I prefer to live in the real world, rather then Holywood fantasy land where villains with incredibly dumb and unrealistic plans are a weekly event.
We don’t beed to treat the grownups on 2200 like children.
They will probably have better science than we do, and will have had centuries of experience.
If there’s a benefit to the nuclear waste, let them have it.
A breached nuclear cask in the very specific case that civilisation has collapsed and lost all knowledge of nuclear material and signage is a limited local event. Low impact on a societal level (admittedly high on the guy with the hand tools cutting into it) and low probability.
Climate change is a probability-1 event that affects everyone. So is plastic pollution. For that matter, indeed, lack of affordable housing probably will end up with worse consequences projected into the far future than a hypothetical deep-time grave-robbing mishap.
While doing a good job of handling nuclear waste is obviously extremely important, handwringing over the effect on a contrived far-future devolved society to the extent that we inhibited the one power source that could have avoided the latter 70 years of the fossil fuel boom in the first place, a boom which actually has plausible civilisation-scale effects, seems backwards.
Admittedly it's now getting to the point where non-nuclear non-fossil energy may be the cheaper and scalable option (pending a mind-boggling but physically-possible amount of storage) so maybe the moment for a nuclear-based energy system has passed. I don't really buy it and still think only nuclear is likely to deliver the energy needed over the next 100 years, including decarbonisation of heating, industry, transport and also possibly environmental remediation. In any case, assuming human civilisation retains knowledge of the 20th and 21st centuries, they're going to be wondering what the hell we were thinking between the 1950s and the 2050s when we had nuclear energy in our hands and nearly destroyed the biosphere anyway by choice (and that "nearly" is only there because this assumes enough of it survives for someone to be looking back in the first place).
If this high cost is in the long run cheaper than relying on 10+ generations to do the right thing, it's probably a worthwhile cost.
The idea that our primary worry should be that maybe in 300 years countries will be unable to handle this simple technical task that the US figured out in 1960s is bananas.
We are not talking about active nuclear weapons that detonate if you touch them wrong. We are talking about dry casks that might maybe start to leak a little in a few 100 years.
Even in the worst of bad cases you have to come up with quite a story to figure out how anybody actually dies from this, let alone many people.
Spending billions of $ now so in 300 years maybe somebody might be saved is laughable when we know that we can save people by putting up 100$ concrete railing for bike lanes right now. Let alone the 100s of other things that could be done with billions.
I suggest you open a history book. It is quite likely the same countries that exist today do not exist in the future and the same knowledge does not either.
Furthermore it is not necessarily about being unable to understand some physics and processes but instead that language and knowledge quickly "deteriorates" over time, e.g. the langauge today is vastly different than even 100 years ago - technical terms and the like shift the fastest, cultural ones the slowest, but they do all become obscured by time. Even a more advanced civilization may encounter challenges that have no logical correlation with the task of keeping spent fuel safe, e.g. intential security measures such as encryption/obfuscation/code rot/reliance on no-longer manufactured tools.
Anyways there is another objection you are fundamentally missing is that the timeframes are possibly un-sustainable in terms of time per acres. Sure you have storage for 100 years in dry casks (maybe some parking lot) but then must wait 100000 years. So you must store 1000 more times the fuel for it to be truly sustainable, digging giant holes in the ground is def not sustainable. Maybe parking lots are, but then you need to be sure your mountain of nuclear waste is stable (harder to do).
If the danger were a nuclear explosion destroying a city, then you would have point.
But its not, the danger is maybe a slightly leaking cask could maybe lead to slightly higher cancer rates in a certain area.
> So you must store 1000 more times the fuel for it to be truly sustainable
Instead of one 1 football field it might be 1000 over the next 10000 years. Yeah horrible, we can't possible spare 1000 football fields full of parking lots.
This isn't really the case. They will still have to do many of the same things, like monitoring, security and so on.
I love this sentiment.
“Yeah nuclear mismanagement could be society-ending if done poorly, but avoiding it costs money!”
What would actually help generations to come is innovating in terms of GenIV nuclear reactors that can reduce the total amount of waste. That could potentially reduce the global waste, rather then this solution that only works for Finland and has to be replicated many more times to actually solve the waste solution.
Burning up the waste and turning it into 300 year waste is the actual long term sustainable solution.
And I'm not against spending money. I'm pro-spending money. I want them to spend money on next generation nuclear technology that actually uses the 'waste' to produce energy and other things, like medical isotopes and nuclear batteries. This waste that would be produced from advanced reactors could be reduced to only need 300 years of storage, and for that you don't need geopolitical storage.
So how about instead of spending billions digging a hole, spend billions actually improving the situation.
What does this sentence mean?
>If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.
I know it's not your argument, but based on what exactly?
Accidents (repeatedly) happen. I don't get where this concept comes from that accidents are suddenly "delusional". If you don't believe me go check your home house fire rate. Accidents are frequent, safety controls just help reduce frequency. There is nothing delusional here, other than the idea we can suddenly obviate accidents.
Every nation, every civilization, falls in time.
There has been a lot of speculative bullshitting on what to do with nuclear waste since the Onkalo project started in the late 80s. So far, nobody has come up with any concrete alternatives. Given the high costs of managing nuclear waste above ground, it's cheaper to bury it underground than to wait for new breakthroughs.
> Given the high costs of managing nuclear waste above ground
Can you show me some concrete evidence that the cost is as high as you claim. In the US nuclear reactors have been storing the waste on parking lots for many decades and it doesn't seem to bankrupt them. In many places above ground nuclear waste is just standing around in casket with literally 0 people attending them.
In Switzerland a single warehouse contains all nuclear waste for the last 50 years and there are not many people working there.
Unless you can show me otherwise I'm gone go with 'its not gone cost billion+ $ to let nuclear waste sit around above ground for a century'.
Storing the waste on site is cheap as long as the reactor is operational. The facilities and the staff are there anyway. It gets more expensive once the reactor stops operating. You can't just leave the high-level waste there for anyone to steal, and you should also work proactively to prevent leaks.
This can be done with fast neutron fission reactors, albeit it's going to take a lot of time.
Meanwhile, just keeping it in dry casks aboveground is perfectly fine.
I mean, you don't even have to look far these days. It's Finland. You know...the country just around the corner of our old and new arch enemy, Russia. And you want to create an additional target for sabotage?
Also, you're talking about wasting money? Reprocessing is hilariously expensive, and they don't even have a facility. No country in the Western World will ever build one again because it's not worth it. You're still producing a bit less radioactive material in this expensive process, which has to be stored. The end product is more expensive than new fuel. It's a completely useless circle. Especially for Finland, which has a hole dug up already.
The whole nuclear energy project is a waste of money. Especially taxpayer money. The technology is overdue. New ones are here already. They are cheaper, faster to build, and they are actually getting better all the time. Unlike nuclear, which Finland had to shut down recently because it just wasn't worth the money to keep it running...
What are you referring to here? Nuclear power has not been shut down here in Finland to my knowledge.
There have been times when production has been scaled down because there is temporarily excess energy available, when it is windy (turbines produce more) and warm (warming uses less), but that is a temporary situation.
This is what I meant, excuse my wrong wording, implying that you could shut down a reactor just like that only because the prices for energy doesn't justify to keep it running at all. Something which is quite nice to have these days with all those cheap renewable energies producing that "excess" energy.
> Reprocessing is hilariously expensive, and they don't even have a facility.
So you know about every form of re-procession that will ever be invented and already know the associated costs.
> No country in the Western World will ever build one again
Canada is planning one right now to reprocess spend CANDU fuel.
> The end product is more expensive than new fuel.
This equation changes if you add the cost of storage facility the new fuel as well.
> Especially taxpayer money.
Finnland even with its very expensive new reactor now produces stable green energy and this reactor captial investment will pay off 80-100 years.
> Finland had to shut down
Funny how Finalnd with lots of nuclear has far greener energy with less money investment then Germany. Finland didn't make a 20 year propaganda campaign to claim they are so great and green, they just build a reactor and are fine now.
If you shit on a nuclear reactor for being turned off, boy I have news for you about wind and solar.
Lets actually look at data rather then what lives in your imagination:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Mhh look at that Finland has green energy thanks to nuclear power.
You can do the math. Had Germany started building nuclear reactors, even with conservative cost estimate. Nuclear would have been a far better deal then the 'Energiewende' they actually did. Starting in 2000 building nuclear reactors at rates like France did in the 70/80s would have lead to a far, far greener grid then they have now.
My calculation result in about 4-5% of debt to GDP increase for a full build-out to 100% nuclear energy starting in 2020. And those reactors would last 60-100 years. Unlike the investments they actually did, lots of wind turbines and solar that have to be replaced 2 times over until then.
Nuclear for France has been on of the best public investments ever done. Minimal impact on taxes and cheap long term stable fuel prices for literally half a century.
Sure...there is the nuclear reactor around the corner...
What is this sentence even based upon? Do you have some strategic study on that? Because they're investing a hell lot of money to protect that stuff.
> So you know about every form of re-procession that will ever be invented and already know the associated costs.
Please tell me of that magic forms of reprocessing which are somewhere even at the far horizon.
> Canada is planning one right now to reprocess spend CANDU fuel.
There is a lot "in planning" and has been for decades, not much came of it. Even with those reactors currently being build...besides rising costs of course.
> This equation changes if you add the cost of storage facility the new fuel as well.
How does it if nobody wants to buy your overpriced fuel you still have to mix with actual fresh fuel which you can get cheaper? Do you want to force them to take it after you wasted so much money on it? To what end? It doesn't go away. You'll still have to store it in the end, just like the stuff which gets created during the process. The process actually generates more stuff you have to store...
> Finnland even with its very expensive new reactor now produces stable green energy and this reactor captial investment will pay off 80-100 years.
The fact that they already had to reduce output because the actual price on the market is far below what they produce already shows that it will take much longer. Longer then the thing will run.
> Funny how Finalnd with lots of nuclear has far greener energy with less money investment then Germany. Finland didn't make a 20 year propaganda campaign to claim they are so great and green, they just build a reactor and are fine now.
The only "funny" thing about that paragraph (and the whole comment) is the use of greenwashing.
Other than that: Germany has done much more for the implementation of truly green energy around the world than any of those "nuclear countries" you've mentioned here. Today, humans on the farthest corners of this planet can afford to have electricity, and it's not because of a nuclear reactor in their backyard.
> If you shit on a nuclear reactor for being turned off, boy I have news for you about wind and solar.
The difference between turning off wind or solar is that it works almost instantly and without creating additional costs. It's called flexibility. Flexibility in power generation is a concept from the future. You should read it up. It's cheap and clean. Unlike with nuclear, where countries like France (back when their fleet wasn't rotting around) have to sell for peanuts on the EEX because it's too expensive and problematic to reduce power on the reactor. Not even talking about a real shut down here.
> Had Germany started building nuclear reactors, even with conservative cost estimate. Nuclear would have been a far better deal then the 'Energiewende' they actually did. Starting in 2000 building nuclear reactors at rates like France did in the 70/80s would have lead to a far, far greener grid then they have now.
This is hilarious. Germany replaced their nuclear fleet years ago. Why would they need to waste money on a technology from the past? Especially because not even France can build reactors at rates like France did in the 70/80s...
How didn't you know that? It's a running joke for years.
> My calculation
Your calculations are useless if you don't even know about those astronomical cost explosions and delays around nuclear reactors in Europe...
> And those reactors would last 60-100 years.
This is hilarious. How did you miss all those news about the rotting fleet in France?
> Nuclear for France has been on of the best public investments ever done. Minimal impact on taxes and cheap long term stable fuel prices for literally half a century.
The price is fixed by the government. It's called tarif blue and the company selling the stuff had to be nationalised...again. Such a "great" business...
How didn't you know that...too...?
We both know why: you grabbed those talking points from the Astro Turf and their followers without checking anything of it.
The cost is quite high, and turns out that all the temporal or attempted permanent storages have undesired rottening containers or leakages much earlier.. is there a good reference for that claim?
Throughout history many advanced civilisations have been wiped out for one reason or the other, with only anedectotal stories left.
It is not unlikely the context around nuclear waste storage on the surface is lost within generations.
Yanosuke Hirai's ways seem more adequate to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
Personally not sure which side of the fence I sit on. It definitely has benefits now, but we also have capacity to make do with other shit. If we make do with other stuff will we forget about it and never get to that higher utilization point?
I found it an interesting point. Wouldn't be the first time humans have made something extinct/disappear/rare before the true value of the thing is understood.
Use now with low efficacy for mild gains. Save for future with bet on higher efficiency and increased gains.
That’s where the increased efficiency and gains will come from in the future - better and better ways to convert big atoms into fissile atoms. It doesn’t matter if those big atoms come from nuclear waste or some other source (like thorium!)
Sure it fucking sucks we are only mostly U-235 and we are doing it inefficiently, but stopping progress because of that is just dumb.
Doesn't sound like a lot to me. I believe there must be something like Parkinson's law for energy (work expands to fill the allotted time)
And calling something ‘a bad take’ because you have a differing opinion makes you an arrogant crass brute.
You need to use stuff. Only then can you have better ideas.
Edit: I’ve conflated parent and grandparents points, I was in the middle of avoiding a social situation while posting.
To this day we're still trying to upgrade the infrastructure, and replace copper with fibre, and the cost so far is far above twice the initial estimate of cost.
The quote was "640K", and Bill Gates probably didn't actually say it, at least not in a general context, vs "... to run MS-DOS and Visicalc" or similar.
> Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. "Not forever," he said.
> "Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert."
> "That's not forever."
> "All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Ten billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?"
> Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. "Ten billion years isn't forever."
> "Well, it will last our time, won't it?"
> "So would the coal and uranium."
> "All right, but now we can hook up each individual spaceship to the Solar Station, and it can go to Pluto and back a million times without ever worrying about fuel. You can't do that on coal and uranium. Ask Multivac, if you don't believe me.
> "I don't have to ask Multivac. I know that."
> "Then stop running down what Multivac's done for us," said Adell, blazing up, "It did all right."
> "Who says it didn't? What I say is that a sun won't last forever. That's all I'm saying. We're safe for ten billion years, but then what?" Lupow pointed a slightly shaky finger at the other. "And don't say we'll switch to another sun."
> There was silence for a while. Adell put his glass to his lips only occasionally, and Lupov's eyes slowly closed. They rested.
Besides that, seawater extraction of uranium is already just five times more expensive than mining. With fast reactors getting a hundred times as much energy from the same amount of natural uranium, seawater extraction becomes easily economical. Uranium mining today is a small portion of nuclear cost.
With fast reactors fueled by seawater uranium, we'll have enough fuel for millions of years.
What fraction of the cost of nuclear comes from the uranium costs?
A lot of that fuel cost is probably fabrication and enrichment, which aren't trivial. But let's say it's the raw ore cost, in which case five times raises total cost by 40% for conventional reactors.
But fast reactors use 1% as much uranium ore as conventional reactors, so it'd be 1% of 10%, times five means seawater extraction for fast reactor fuel would account for about half a percent of the cost of power.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
There's another enormous source of energy right under our feet - the geothermal heat of the Earth. It isn't that far down, either.
Look at the fundamentals. There's more than enough free energy all around us. In 100 years the world population will be declining, and we will already have mined and refined all the metal we'll ever need. The energy use per person is already falling and will continue to fall.
Solar will be vastly more cheap, efficient, and be part of a 100% circular economy. It'll cover most of the energy needs just by covering buildings or creating useful shades for parking, reservoars, irrigation channels and agrovoltaics.
Energy storage will essentially be solved. We have to. You can't run a car or a ferry directly on nuclear energy. We have to store and transform energy at a similar scale to what's needed to balance the grid to replace fossil fuels anyway. Think about how many days you could run your house on a modern BEV. 5-7 days in my case. And already, today, my car is helping balancing the grid by avoiding charging when prices are high. I'd be willing to do V2G too if it was supported.
In northern climates advanced geothermal will provide heat for district heating, and some extra electricity for the winter. Once you've built a well it provides all the benefits of nuclear with none of the downsides. It's just a matter of time before deep geothermal wells are cheap enough to drill. Could be decades, but not more than 100 years. With all the oil and gas engineers with nothing better to do in 20 years time.. I'm inclined to think we'll have some excellent solutions for advanced geothermal by 2050. We've already seen innovations from the oil/gas sector transferring over to geothermal in recent years.
There are some nuclear proponents that dream about everyone having megawatts of personal energy. Think of everything we could do if we had 10x the energy we have today! That's a terrible idea. If the entire world went all-in on nuclear and expanded its energy usage, the waste heat would be a problem and a barrier to getting the climate back to a cooler stable equilibrium.
Nuclear R&D is fantastic. We should continue to develop it. But mostly for future space use.
Helions fusion reactor might be a good idea if it works. It should have less problems with waste heat since it converts much of the energy directly to electricity rather than using heat exchange mechanisms.
If Helion succeeds fission is permanently dead, and we'll definitely want to bury the waste in 100k year storage so we don't burden our children with more debt and can stop thinking about the waste at all.
Source? I certainly wouldn't expect it to fall for the vast majority of the world's population.
The worst possible scenario they calculated:
1) the nuclear canister would corrode in a thousand years instead of the calculated hundred thousand years,
2) and at the same time installed clay buffer surrounding canisters would inexplicably disappear.
3) In addition, the groundwater would magically flow upwards and
4) a city would be built on the site. A person who would live on the most polluted square meter from cradle to grave and would only eat food grown there and drink the most polluted water
Result: people would only receive three times the radiation dose compared to people currently living in a city of Tampere.
If your nuclear waste is that "hot" (highly radioactive), then you're not draining as much energy out of the material.
Ideally, the closer to lead you are, the more energy is drained out. And that's what I'd hope to see from the mining required for uranium. Instead, we seem to run it once and then go "whoop have to stop".
In spent nuclear fuel 96% of the mass is the remaining uranium is still usable. Spend nuclear fuel (=LEU) used in these reactors have almost all potential energy left.
You can use them if you close the nuclear fuel cycle with fast neutron reactors. The downside of it is that they FNR's are also good for making fuel for nuclear weapons.
What you're referring to is the fact that some reactors (aka breeder reactors, fast or thermal) can fission a much higher percentage of the total atoms loaded into the reactor, including most of the majority isotope (U-238) in addition to the minority (U-235).
I wrote a bit about breeding and recycling here: https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html
Well then maybe you should talk about the problem at hand, which is the stuff people are considering "nuclear waste" and wanting to bury.
Reprocessing can recover some plutonium, which can be reused (once more) in MOX fuel. Spent MOX fuel cannot be reprocessed further for use in today's thermal reactors, though.
Legality might depend which country you live in, and the stores I've seen sell only tiny quantities for high prices because they can (only collectors really want it and they will pay), but you can totally just buy some.
(1) the radiation levels increase, making it more dangerous for workers to do maintenance and safety operations (so overall reactor design would need to take this into account),
(2) some fission products and transuranics (plutonium etc.) act as neutron poisons (absorbing neutrons rather than generating energy-productive fission events), resulting in reduced reactor output and instability issues as the accumulate in the fuel rods.
(3) since you are actually transmuting elements, physical and chemical changes take place resulting in fuel rod corrosion and degradation, swelling and structural changes, etc. which could lead to catastrophic failure by clogging the reactor core and preventing coolant circulation.
[edit] note that reprocessing the spent fuel (plutonium recovery) for use in MOX reactors is possible, but since this is also how you run a nuclear weapons program, there are additional concerns and the costs are really high:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
I was honestly surprised to learn how big of an issue nuclear waste management is. Up to the point where people are actually reinforced in popular opinion, that nuclear waste is a dirty and an unmanageable problem.
This isn't even really waste, there are lots of useful materials that you can extract or reprocess into other kinds of useful fuel for other types of reactor.
Except after Chernobyl, almost no one actually bothered with developing proper infrastructure and production chains for nuclear industry.
Another thing that is weird to me is that everyone says nuclear waste is hazardous for a uniquely long time, but it become less hazardous over time. Many non-radioactive materials, like arsenic and mercury, are toxic forever.
In the US we have WIPP operating, but it stores weapons-related radioactive material rather than commercial spent fuel, so I guess it doesn't count.
"The conclusion that disposal is needed and that deep geologic disposal is the scientifically preferred approach has been reached by every expert panel that has looked at the issue and by every other country that is pursuing a nuclear waste management program."
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/blue-ribbon-commission-am...
One thing that drives me craziest of all is when people simultaneously claim that nuclear waste is among the most hazardous things out there while also blocking any progress to get it safely out of the biosphere.
A solution would be to make it non-hazardous. But there is no viable way to do it right now.
No, it's not. See comments elsewhere in the thread about reprocessing.
No, many countries do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...
This approach of geological sequestration, while being the scientifically preferred solution, still has potential very negative consequences for some future generation many years in the future. By some people calling this safe, it enables the nuclear proponents to leverage that to say there is no issue with the waste so it's fine to create more.
Unfortunately those who believe nuclear energy generation is necessary often refuse to acknowledge the very real risks and costs associated with it. The fact is that there is no panacea when it comes to energy generation. All known methods come with risks, rewards and downside. It is fine to argue that nuclear energy is the cleanest and safest way to generate energy, but not that it is completely safe or without risk.
This claim is simply false. Many countries reprocess nuclear waste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...
That's possible, but even if it's done, it's only necessary for hundreds of years (because the radioactive isotopes left over have much shorter half-lives), not 100,000 years. Big difference.
The truth is that reprocessing is an economic loser at this point; even France admits it. Separated plutonium literally has negative value; you lose money trying to fabricate fuel elements from it instead of using freshly enriched natural uranium. France still does reprocessing because whatever is done with spent fuel is not that expensive compared to the cost of just building and operating nuclear reactors, so the boondoggle is not that big.
Not on a time scale of 100 years or so, let alone the 100,000 years that are being imposed as a requirement on geologic storage. On that time scale recovering unburned fuel from reprocessing will be cheaper than mining and refining fuel.
> France still does reprocessing because whatever is done with spent fuel is not that expensive
Yes, particularly when you factor in that reprocessing gives you a source of additional fuel (most of the "spent" fuel removed from reactors is actually not spent, and reprocessing recovers it for future use) that, as noted above, is expected to be cheaper than mining it in the not too distant future.
> the boondoggle
It's not a boondoggle at all, it's a rational way of anticipating future nuclear fuel requirements, as above. It's certainly much more rational than requiring spent fuel to be stored for 100,000 years as if that was the only possible thing that could be done with it.
AT THIS MOMENT it's an economic loser. If you need reprocessed fuel in 100 years, by the miracle of nonzero interest rates you save money by doing it closer to then instead of right now. The cost of storing the fuel until then is low enough that this works out.
> It's not a boondoggle at all, it's a rational way of anticipating future nuclear fuel requirements, as above.
No, it's a waste of money to do it right now.
If you're allowed to store the current waste in a facility that's only good for 100 years or so, then yes. But not if you're required to store any waste you don't reprocess for 100,000 years.
I've answered that already in another subthread we're having.
> If society is going to collapse in 100 years
Where was that kind of thinking involved in this at all?
But it also includes many countries that reprocess currently.
The US has not reprocessed fuel in many decades, and never on any significant scale, because the Carter Administration outlawed it based on mistaken concerns about proliferation, and it's been a political pariah ever since. It has nothing to do with any rational technical assessment.
The UK, France, Japan, and Italy don't reprocess anymore (I'm not sure Italy ever did on any substantial scale).
Carter stopped reprocessing by executive order, but Reagan quickly reversed that order. No reprocessing then occurred, because reprocessing made no economic sense. It turned out Carter's order isn't what killed reprocessing in the US; cold hard economics did. It did provide a convenient excuse for those who wish to ignore that reality.
No, "cold, hard economics" would say, if you are correct that it's not even cost effective to do any reprocessing now, that the spent fuel should be stored for 100 years or so and then reprocessed, when it's economically cost effective.
But US policy has been that spent fuel has to be stored in a facility that's good for 100,000 years. That makes no sense if the waste is going to be reprocessed 100 years from now. It makes sense only as part of a political scheme to kill nuclear power altogether. Which is exactly what it was, even if on paper reprocessing was "allowed" after the Reagan administration.
First, it may have been thought that opposition to nuclear energy is due to waste, and that burying it would remove the opposition. I consider this ill-founded, both because those predisposed to oppose nuclear use waste only as one of many arguments, and because the actual objective argument (economics) as nothing to do with waste.
Second, it may have been thought in the height of the Cold War that spent fuel at the surface would be a tempting target for ground burst H-bombs, where it would then contribute to long term fallout (each 1 GW(e)-year of spent fuel has about the same long lived fission products as a 20 MT bomb.) This is not an argument the government would have been pushing publicly, of course.
I've already answered that: nobody actually thought it was a good idea. It was imposed as a policy because the actual (though of course not publicly admitted) purpose of the policy was to kill nuclear power by imposing unreasonable requirements on it. (It's possible, I suppose, that the Cold War rationale you give played a role, but I don't think it's very likely; that objective could have been met without requiring anything like 100,000 year storage.)
The parent post didn't say that burying the waste wasn't the scientifically preferred approach. Disposal is only needed if you create it in the first place.
That's not what as Ostrich does. An Ostrich leaves itself exposed and just closes its eyes.
Mankinds attitude to all sorts of threats is an ostrich policy, but burying nuclear waste is not one of those. Leaving it in a barrel and saying "nothing to see here" would be.
We should balance ourselves with nature now instead of dumping it on the future.
This way we're solving the CO2 problem the way a gambler solves their debt by borrowing more money to pay off loans.
Nuclear waste is something new we are creating, but I'd rather have it deep underground in a geologically stable place, than sitting in casks on the surface.
What the mining industry do is to fence it up (including pools used for waste), put up a sign to warn people, and then let nature fill it up with water. The best we can hope for is that they did their research properly and made sure that it doesn't leak into the groundwater.
In the past there were people who tried diluting stuff like this by dumping it into the ocean, but that isn't the best idea.
Most of that waste is captured in ash via particle filters and has to be treated like any highly toxic and radioactive waste, but as far as I know this waste it not destined for secured long term nuclear disposal where it would be kept safe from interacting with the environment. We don’t seem to have a problem with that…
Further, some low percentage (literature tends to point at .5%) of it is in gaseous form or cannot be filtered, so it gets vented into the atmosphere. That’s assuming modern and intact particle filters. And we aren’t even talking about CO2 here.
It’s somewhat absurd we have to have discussions about nuclear power plant waste in this reality.
There's apparently a documentary on this project, "Into Eternity," released in 2010, which has been on my list since earlier this morning (i.e., since I read about its existence).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
It seems like all nuclear waste doomerism is based on the same assumption that at some point in the future all of humanity is reduced to 100 individuals and all of them decide to dig into the same mine shaft.
They wouldn't die outright, see Goiânia accident.
But honestly, if the future mankind would lose it knowledge about such place and it's dangers and would get a lesson... then it would get a lesson.
In any case, the lack of a geological repository for commercial high level waste in the US is mostly because there's no stakeholder who really needs it. Storing spent fuel in dry casks is a perfectly cromulent solution -- and that waste could be buried or reprocessed later (more easily, after it cools more) so this doesn't rule out any other solution.
Citations ?
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
gives a resource, as of 2017, of 8 million tonnes. Note that the recent expansion in uranium exploration didn't increase the resource very much.
A 3000 MW(th) thermal burner reactor uses about 250 tonnes of natural uranium per year.
https://material-properties.org/what-is-natural-uranium-cons...
To "power the world" (by which I mean provide, as heat, the 18 TW of current world primary energy consumption) would therefore require 6000 x 250 or 1.5 million tonnes of natural U per year.
It has long (like, since shortly after WW2) been known that powering the world with fission will require some kind of breeding, which implies some kind of reprocessing. If you are committed to that, burying spent fuel as is makes no sense.
Finding and proving reserves is costly. People don't just randomly decide to invest money to find new resources of Uranium. If there are 8 million tons of economically recoverable Uranium, and the world consumes less than 80k tons per year, that covers us for 100 years. If we were to double the uranium use for whatever reason, mining companies would invest more money into exploration, and the proven reserves will increase by a factor of 2.
We are not going to run out of Uranium under any scenario in the next few hundred years.
From what I understood of current technology, recycling used nuclear fuel is too expensive and impractical today, so it makes economic sense to invest in long-term waste storage.
But I do wonder if in 30-50 years, the main way to deal with nuclear waste would be recycling. I saw an interesting interview of experts about this last month: https://youtu.be/IzQ3gFRj0Bc
Anything with a long half-life is emitting very, very little radiation.
Anything with a short half-life isn't going to last long.
Meanwhile, high-level nuclear waste is a densely concentrated soup of spicy elements, all neatly packed together to provide a really bad day to anyone stumbling onto it.
Almost none of the sunlight that gets through the air is ionising, and yet despite the biological defences aimed specifically at what remains, sunlight still gives us cancers in the exposed areas.
I’m a little surprised that the emissions are so high per page view. I’ve never looked at co2 emission calculations for web pages before, but this seems a little high.
0.855 pounds/0.38kg of CO2 per kWh.
or 0.38g per Wh
so 3.6g would be ~9.4 Wh, let's assume 10Wh
Site takes ~700ms to render, . So it would need to consume the equivalent of over 5kW of compute for a second to get that amount of CO2 per view.
That assuming it would be 100% load, and not just "waiting on various network RTTs"
I think it's safe to assume it's pure bullshit, even including every device along the way
NIMBY may not be the right acronym. Not In My Very Remote, Geologically Stable Bunker System.
There are many hard rock mountains in the world where the geology hasn't done much in millions of years. This really isn't that hard to do.
Is this the gift we are leaving for posterity?
What about "do no harm" instead? Looking for advancements in authentically environmentally friendly technologies.
The dissonance of I'm driving a Tesla and I'm saving the world! Instead of filling the air with poison, we're filling the bedrock with it.
So, to summarize, we are not the species that can really plan for 100k years and have the conviction of maintaining those plans.
Compare this to running nuclear power plants and operating radioactive waste storage facilities. That we haven't done for even a single century. Already now we know way better how to build nuclear power plants than 40 years ago, and our knowledge is only improving.
Personally I think we shouldn't bury any highly contaminant waste for the next 300 years, until we gain experience from the medium to low contaminant storage sites.
Do you believe the Simpsons view of radioactive waste being glowing, liquid goo?
Underground is nice until you get radioactive groundwater. The time cost of 100k years of maintaining safety seems more than the financial cost of maintaining a F9 fleet and disposing of second stages.
That’s the same delta-V as going to Jupiter. You would need a lot of rockets.
Why is it so difficult? The answer lies in the same fact that keeps Earth from plunging into the Sun: Our planet is traveling very fast — about 67,000 miles per hour — almost entirely sideways relative to the Sun. The only way to get to the Sun is to cancel that sideways motion."
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-h...
Earth escape velocity is 11.2 km/s or 25,000 mph in your preferred units.
And you don't have to go backwards relative to earths orbit and cancel it out, you can maintain earths' solar orbit and degrade it.
You only need enough energy to reach L1 and since human time scales are irrelevant you can do that as efficiently as you like. After you reach slightly past L1, the sun will do the rest of the work.
At closest approach, Mars is 54 million km away. L1 is typically 1.5 million km away. Even ignoring the fact that human timescales are irrelevant, it is a significantly easier journey.
You are probably thinking of speeds required to orbitally maneuver near the sun, as we typically do with instruments...
A trip straight into the sun is substantially easier than mars.
And governments don't need insurance.
The 2nd stage flight can be planned not to go over populated land.
But anyways, I don't think its a good solution but it would be possible.
You'd have to construct a container that would survive a failure - so an explosion of the rocket (on the pad or during launch), or a failure in LEO where it would have reentry. That container would then need to be able to be recovered no matter where it landed on that failure -- so things like floating would be important, and some form of control over landing so it didn't crash onto someones house. Or in an inconvenient country. Obviously it has to stay in one piece.
Now sure, much of that shielding doesn't need to go beyond LEO, but it leaves very little room for the actual payload.
Bad idea, it boils down to 1) too much of it (yes really, in an almost definitive sense) 2) exploding rockets + nuclear fuel is bad
Disposal of troublesome fission products and actinides, on the other hand, could be much easier. There are seven fission products with troublingly long half lives that would be difficult to retain in geological repositories. Extraction and space disposal of the elements of those isotopes could make sense.
In any case, space disposal can wait until launchers are mature and the technology has stopped improving. We have centuries before spent fuel stops being self-protecting against diversion due to its radioactivity, so stick the stuff in dry casks and wait.