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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

I just don't like this, a huge amount of money spent for nothing. This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.

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.

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> “Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.”

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.

What, really, is the impact of a compromised nuclear casket in a remote, unpopulated area above ground? What is the impact buried just 100 feet deep in an unpopulated area? Someone would have to excavate the uranium and either spend loads of time around it or move it to a populated area.

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.

Thing is that maybe in 300 years someone wants to develop that land and the documents that say to not do that there are in an old version of .docx in an obsolete storage form buried under layers of bureaucracy. That’s how someone ends up living on the casket growing a massive thyroid.

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.

Options:

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_21482

First, people that far in the future will still know about the previous civilizations. So it's highly unlikely that they'll forget all the languages.

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.

I'm pretty sure that pre-Curie Europeans did a lot of digging tens of meters in the ground.

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.

> I'm pretty sure that pre-Curie Europeans did a lot of digging tens of meters in the ground.

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?

We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. Even without that, you could give the information visually in cartoon form.

>We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics.

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.

I think the best thing we can do is bury all the nuclear waste. And to avoid any future generation excavating it, mark it's location, and to stand the test of time, build a massive stone pyramid on top of it. In 5000 years people will be able to figure that out.

Surely nobody would dig under a 10ky-old massive stone pyramid out of curiosity.

> This seems like quite an assumption.

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.

What books last 10000 years? What writing is performed today on a medium that will last that long? No one is carving into clay any more

The one in text files. Data is already extremely cheap and there are many horders and archivists. I would bet that if advanced civilisation still exists in 10,000 years, they'll have an archived version of Wikipedia from around this century.

(And probably quite a few weirdos will still keep replicating the bible)

We have no way to know, either way, what humanity will look like 10k years from now.

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.

We could only read Egyptian hieroglyphics several centuries after several tombs had been raided by early grave robbers. They would make a killing on a magical stone with funny pictures.

There is a fourth option. Nuclear waste can be used in dirty bombs and poisons as well. So waste sites should be somewhat secure.

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.

But we did leave a stockpile of weapons and ammo. It's a minor inconvenience.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_bomb_disposal_i...

It’s a minor inconvenience in Europe because of the political stability of the region. However, it has been stable for only a relatively short period of time, with no guarantees for the future.

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?

Proliferation is the biggest hazard, I think. Proliferation of the fissile material remains a problem for much longer than the radiation from the fission products (which is only a few hundred years).

The best way is to burn up these actinides in a suitable reactor.

It'd be easier to just mine naturally occurring uranium. Are terrorists somehow going to successfully excavate a mile deep into bedrock in Finland, without anyone noticing?

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?

You can make poisons without nuclear materials just fine. Keep in mind, that regular heavy metals also don't go away.

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.

1. You start digging, and you find these huge mysterious concrete cylinders with a funny symbols. These must clearly have been gift to their God(s) given the amount of work they put in. We should recover them, open them up and have buses of school kids admire them up close

If you have buses, then you also likely know about radioactivity. And the archeological lab will quickly identify the casks.

And if it's a pre-historic society, then why would you be digging 30 meters below ground anyway?

Why would a pre-historic society go to the trouble of dragging large stones 150 miles or more ? (Stonehenge)

Mankind has gone to great lengths to admire the death, and digging a 30 meter hole is definitely achievable given other prehistoric monuments.

Sure. And what are the chances that a Stonehenge-like monument would be located exactly on the site of nuclear waste disposal?

For this to happen, such monuments have to be commonplace. Which would require a technological civilization. Then see above.

And why aren't we raising the same objection to the vastly greater quantities of non-nuclear industrial waste that will never decay into safer isotopes? Again, the question is, what is the heightened risk specific to nuclear waste that warrants so much more attention?

Or somebody spends 100$ on a Geiger counter ...

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.

Nuclear waste has been lost multiple times throughout history and has killed people. Kind of amazing someone could think it cannot happen.

https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/overview-of-the-cns-gl...

We are talking about spent nuclear fuel casks from civilian nuclear. Not medical isotopes that fell of a truck. We are mostly talking about many meters long fuel casks. They might get rerouted on a train once but they are rarely lost and even if they are, even during transport they are packaged to be save for a considerable amount of time.

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.

That was nuclear waste from medical instruments, not 12 foot high concrete cinders of nuclear power plant waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File...

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.

That report includes radiation sources which are much more radioactive and much smaller than nuclear waste from power plants. Small radioactive sources can be easily lost or stolen due to their size. Nuclear waste from a power plant is larger being mostly fuel rods or irradiated containers and is stored and transported in large containers that are not easily lost or stolen. Making an argument based on that report also covers arguing against the use of radioactive materials in healthcare and industry since that is where most of the small losable isotopes are employed.

You can not just go around and develop land today. First you need to take a survey, soil samples, water quality control, and then during digging and construction there are all kind of different dangerous. Most countries in EU still have a bunch of bombs in the ground left over from world war 2, and they will be there until someone finds them and disarms them. Soil and water contamination from industry is anyone guess, and protected archeological finds are only more likely to be found in 300 years than it is today. There will never be a .docx file to tell you that a specific land was the dumping ground for lead by-products in 19th century.

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.

I think the argument is clearly trite, .docx seems like a joke, and very more likely within the hundreds to thousands of years, people probably won’t even speak Finnish there anymore.

I find the argument that they will need to speak Finish to be boring. Why should they in hundreds to thousands of years need to read an ancient document to figure out whats below the ground. It is not a realistic problem.

You don’t know that, all you can do is try your best TODAY to avoid issues in the future.

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.

It not about how smart future people will be, or how we can eliminate every danger possible for future man. It is that we even today we do not reference old documents to figure out what is safe and was is not.

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.

Frankly I don’t even understand why the poster above you says it’s unrealistic. Is it because humans won’t be around?

> a remote, unpopulated area above ground?

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.

Yea, isn't coal ash way worst regardless of how "green" they capture the emissions. They always seem to leek into other water sources and do way more.

How did we get this way?

It's so tiresome that nuclear proponents pretend the only alternative to nuclear is coal.

His point is that other technologies are not held to the same standard. And that is still true.

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.

The difference between the two scenario's is quite obvious. In coal ash it's highly diluted, in nuclear waste it's highly concentrated.

Being highly concentrated is exactly what makes it easy store and protect people from any impacts.

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.

Actually it is the right way to plan centuries ahead. Taking a reasonable look at the risk and making an assessment.

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'

> However with civilian nuclear waste you really have to come up with pretty unlikely stuff for it to ever harm anybody.

Germany will be glad to hear that. They can continue using Asse II instead of needlessly spending billions clearing it out.

Germany did exactly the stupid thing they shouldn't have done. Instead of easily managing the waste above ground they threw it into a mine. You are literally making my point for me.

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.

"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."

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.

So many things wrong here. Even if you don't build any 'highly complex reactors' as you call them nuclear waste is safe.

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.

So many unfounded assertions.

> Just walk away, turn off the pumps, it'll be fine.

Pretty much, yeah. "Contamination" there is at trace levels, some places on Earth have naturally more radioactive water.

Sadly, the actually-plausible generational risks don't get anywhere near this care.

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).

What do the 'dummies' have to do exactly? Just not touch containers marked as "nuclear waste?"

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?

Have thief/wild life/earthquakes/floods/some rare natural disasters, and forget to go back and check if the container is intact.

A thief is mostly just scifi nonsense.

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.

"A thief is mostly just scifi nonsense."

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

The old 'what if evil terrorist' nonsense.

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 'what if evil terrorist' nonsense."

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...

> The old nothing bad ever happens nonsense.

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.

The waste has to be slightly monitored but that's it. The most likely case is that for 100+ years nobody has to do anything to this fuel.

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.

The right way to plan centuries ahead is to trust future generations.

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.

Most of the costs are for managing the waste above ground. The overall cost of the project is estimated to be €5-6 billion, out of which construction is €1-2 billion. I believe the actual underground facility cost ~€1 billion, while the rest is for various above-ground processing facilities.

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.

Fusion reactors will produce enough fast neutrons to transmute the waste into something less long-lived.

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.

For 5-6 billion they could have helped to develop and built new GenIV reactors and reduce the waste and also manage all the waste for the next 100 years.

> 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'.

That's 5-6 billion over ~140 years. The operating costs of the Swiss Zwilag facility are similar.

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 sheer ignorance around nuclear energy is the main reason I'm happy it already peaked in the Western World and is replaced by safe and clean renewable energies.

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...

> 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.

> 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.

This has to be repeated again and again. Civilian nuclear waste isn't really a good great target for sabotage. There are 1000 places to attack that are far cheaper and have higher effect.

> 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.

> This has to be repeated again and again. Civilian nuclear waste isn't really a good great target for sabotage. There are 1000 places to attack that are far cheaper and have higher effect.

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.

> I just don't like this, a huge amount of money spent for nothing. This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.

I love this sentiment.

“Yeah nuclear mismanagement could be society-ending if done poorly, but avoiding it costs money!”

Again, this is just delusional. Nuclear waste can not be society ending. Did you read to much Greenpeace propaganda or maybe was it some cheap action movie?

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.

> Again, this is just delusional. Nuclear waste can not be society ending.

What does this sentence mean?

>If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.

I think the argument was that if the society loses the ability to manage nuclear waste, it would have been due to some societal collapse caused by other reasons.

By my reading, it's the opposite, that only a society that has already ended (of some other cause) would be incapable of managing nuclear waste; dangerous levels of mismanagement would only occur in a postapocalyptic setting or similar.

"dangerous levels of mismanagement would only occur in a postapocalyptic setting."

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.

Which civilization has lasted so long that nuclear waste mismanagement would never have become an issue?

Every nation, every civilization, falls in time.

Yes, finally the politicians do something properly and immediately they get criticised for spending money.. on long term, sustainable solutions that will help generations to come.

I have not criticized them for spending money, but spending money inefficiently and on the wrong things.

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.

In the extreme, the have been politicians and other leaders who came in and decided to undo decisions of their predecessors for petty reasons. A memorable example being the US' 45th President.

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.

Generations 1 through 9 don't really need to do anything. Generation 10 will have a bit of work to do, but much less work than it takes to deal with it now. The really radioactive components of the waste (the fission products) decay away after a few hundred years.

by the time we get to generation 10....all documents are lost, technology is obsoleted, no living engineer know how this works.

And now you are proving my original argument. If society collapses to a point where engineers can't handle some well contained radioactive waste then you have far bigger problems then nuclear waste.

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.

"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."

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).

The most likely scenario is that at some point next 300 years we figure out advanced fission or fusion and if we do so burning that waste up isn't that big a deal.

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.

Yeah, it is pretty terrible. For one reactor, you would have a point. For many reactors, it is x1000 time cost.

You make the wrong assumption that managing the geological storage and all the operations around it will be irrelevant and give those 10+ generations no work.

This isn't really the case. They will still have to do many of the same things, like monitoring, security and so on.

It reminds me of how "useless" gasoline used to be burnt off at oil wells to extract parrafin oil.

We are still unable to properly recycle plastic. Nuclear fuel is a very well known product carefully crafted, nuclear waste is a corrosive mix of very different things, mainly everything near the reactor that isn't fuel (pipes, concrete, clothes, machinery...) that gets contaminated and you can't do anything with it except store away in a radioactive landfill. The used nuclear fuel is already being processed and reused. But we can't do much with a contaminated piece of steel except turn it to small pieces and store the more contaminated in a concrete brick, no "gasoline" to extract there.

We have very poor understanding of Stonehenge, only build 5000 years ago.

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.

Above ground? Terrorism/war seems like a problem. Imagine if Russia was motivated to invade Finland or something.

In the team managing the Fukushima plant there probably was someone absolutely sure of what we can manage, and of his ability to predict and therefore dislike spending money for some useless higher wall...

Yanosuke Hirai's ways seem more adequate to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

This is a natural solution for Finland because the country is full of bunkers of all shapes and sizes. They do bunkers at scale. It also has the benefit that in case of war with a nearby historically aggressive neighbour, the enemy can not bomb the repository to create a radiological disaster.

> This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares.

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?

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