A place where no humans will tread for 100k years
bbc.com
bbc.com
Take what I said with a grain of salt as I am not an expert in the matters of nuclear technology, just sharing my layman's viewpoint. It's probably a complex system so I'm not sure if anyone has definitive answers as it all depends on the amount of nuclear power the world is going to build, how the reprocessing technology and know-how develops, how the alternative means for electricity production develop etc. etc. -- so we can only make educated guesses for now, but I see that we're making a good compromise here with the marginal amount of the global spent nuclear fuel we possess considering our options. For other parts of the world the equation probably plays out differently, e.g. not having suitable solid bedrock to utilize might be an obvious showstopper.
The story changes significantly if we start using breeder reactors and other designs.
> estimate is something like 50 years
those are pretty pessimistic estimates.
From a 2009 article on Scientific America
According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total
the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates
fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Since the fuel is cooled in water ponds for decades before it is processed, even in the case of a nuclear industry boom there's ample lead time to alter the plans if running out of materials seems to become an issue. I'd be much more worried about usage of oil as it is the base material for a lot of different things like medicines, and we're burning the stuff away (granted, we can do synthetic hydrocarbons, but the whole thing with oil is a bigger problem in my books than running out of uranium; it's still there to be retrieved if it really comes down to it).
If it's "undiscovered", presumably that 0.5 metric tons amounts to spurious precision. Call it ten million, and it becomes clear that it's a wild guesstimate.
Also: the location of these Uranium deposits is not evenly distributed. I understand that substantially all of France's Uranium, for example, comes from Niger, a politically-unstable country where much of the mining is controlled by the Wagner Group.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...
( Or, if you prefer, the Nuclear Energy "Red Book":
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_79960/uranium-2022-resource...
In France, although no domestic uranium exploration and mine development activities have been carried out since 1999, majority government-owned Orano (formerly Areva) and its subsidiaries remain active abroad.
As of 2020, Orano S.A. has been working outside France, focusing on discovery of exploitable resources in Canada, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Namibia and Niger. In Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger, Orano is also involved in uranium mining operations.
In addition, as a non-operator, Orano holds shares in several mining operations and research projects in different countries. In 2020, Orano started exploration in Uzbekistan.
Total nondomestic exploration expenditures remained relatively steady from 2017 to 2018 at about USD 30 million per year, before declining by 17% to around USD 25 million in 2019 and 2020.
)So: very short half-life is good, because the element turns into something else very quickly and ceases to be a problem. This is the nanoseconds-to-days range.
Very long half-life: not actually all that radioactive. e.g. U238 itself with a half-life in the billions of years.
Medium half-life: emits a dangerously high level of radiation in the process of decaying. This is the real problem stuff as "medium" can mean "centuries".
That is part of why this "no human should set foot for 100,000 years" is silly. We only have recorded history going back a few thousand years, and all of civilisation was invented in that time. If humans are exist in 100,000 years we'll be using that century-long half life material for something important.
The sun is also a third of a million times the mass of the entire planet, or about 1.4 billion times the mass of all our oceans.
And the power output being in the form of ionising radiation is really bad: the power density of the core of the sun is 276.5 W/m^3, but in a form which will, if you leant against it for a minute and given reasonable guesses as to your body mass and shape, give you a remaining conscious lifetime of vomiting, diarrhoea, seizures, bleeding everywhere inside and out, relieved only by being followed with a coma after about an hour then death within a day or two.
(That's ignoring the fact that it's also hot and dense and would immediately explode, it's just the effect of the radiation coming from it).
> If humans are exist in 100,000 years we'll be using that century-long half life material for something important.
There are three possible futures: business as usual, collapse, transcendence/singularity.
With business as usual, there's a fairly good chance that everything from our era will be forgotten and dismissed as myth and legend.
With collapse, all of society might of forgotten how the abstract concepts of "money" and "writing" work, reinvented them, gotten up to our level, and then collapsed again 50 times over.
With the singularity: the planet itself and every star visible to the naked eye (and many which aren't) may have been physically disassembled in that time frame.
I think we should be the kind of civilisation that plans for how to minimise the damage of bad outcomes, even if only to make sure we don't mess up the "singularity" option.
This is the basis of the radiothermal generator (RTG); but generally, the spent fuel is deemed spent in the first place because it's no longer emitting enough heat/neutrons to be worth keeping in the reactor. It's already got to the point of "it's no longer worth the hassle of handling this and dealing with all those neutrons/gamma radiation in exchange for a mediocre amount of warmth".
It's in a fission reactor and those isotopes aren't fissile, and aren't a huge proportion of the "spent fuel" to begin with. To be useful it has to be separated.
Short-lived highly radioactive substances are commercially valuable as radiation sources. Medium-lived radioactive substances are useful in RTGs (not fission reactors). Long-lived radioactive substances are often fissile and therefore useful as reactor fuel.
But none of them are useful when they're all mixed together, because what they're each useful for is a different thing. So separate them.
An atomic bomb is when you convince a lot of Uranium-235 or Plutonium to decay all at once in an uncontrolled way.
A nuclear reactor is what happens when you convince material to decay at a controllable rate.
It's way more complex than that but you can look up the rest, e.g. "Nuclear chain reaction".
Where I think you're going with this is
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/594598/destroyin...
tl;dr: it's more trouble than it's worth, since you need radioactive materials as the neutrons sources, and stray neutrons tend to bump into other matter and cause yet more radioactive waste.
So if you could control and direct these NPAP's to behave like a Newton Cradle, you could accelerate them away faster?
Something for CERN to try maybe?
I get the impression that your understanding of the current state of particle physics is approximately 80 years behind the state of the art. You're catching up with Leo Szilard's ideas in the 1930s
As far as the parent comment's implied question, "and is that useful for radioactive waste disposal?" the answer is a strong "no, there are far better uses for the energy required, within and outside of radioactive waste disposal", including using this energy instead of energy from the nuclear reactor that makes waste.
The key thing here is "known". In order to "know" of the economic viability of a mining source you need to invest serious money. Mining companies have serious money, and they invest them to "prove" new reserves, because that's how they can get loans from banks. But once the reserves exceed whatever demand there is in the world for more than a hundred years, there's absolutely no incentive to keep exploring further. That's where we are now: there are about 8 million tons of proven uranium reserves [1]. The annual production fluctuates very slightly around 50,000 tons [2]. At the current production levels we have more than 150 years of proven reserves.
But if we were to suddenly double the number of reactors, we would very quickly double the proven reserves. If we were to multiply 100-fold the number of reactors, we'd multiply the proven reserves by 100, or more likely more than that.
In the end there is absolutely no limit. The current market price of uranium is about $130 per kg. It is estimated that it can economically be extracted from seawater for $1000/kg, so less than a factor of 10. Such a cost would not increase the cost of electricity by even one cent per kWh ( see the math in the notes).
As for breeder reactors or other designs. The current generation reactors produce about 40 to 60 GWday of energy from 1 ton of uranium fuel (which is generally enriched to close to 5% U-235). New designs will increase this number (called burnup) to 100 [3] and some even to 180, but generally not because they are more efficient, just because they'll use fuel enriched to up to 20% U-235. There are 2 designs that will exceed that, but they are supposed to burn thorium rather than uranium. We have easily 100 times less experience with thorium than uranium, so I wouldn't hold my breath that it's a piece of cake to achieve higher burnup with it. In theory we could, but practice finds ways to disagree with theory.
Notes: the math of 1 cent per kWh: you need about 10 tons of natural uranium to produce one ton of fuel-grade uranium, and with that you get about 50 GWd, or 50 x 24 = 1200 GWh = 1.2 billion kWh of electricity. 10,000 kg at $1000/kg is $10 MM for 1.2 billion kWh, or 0.83 cents/kWh.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...
Uranium is everywhere. While there are mines that have extremely high concentrations of Uranium, it is present in trace amounts in almost everything from granite to sand to soil to groundwater. There are 4 billion tons of Uranium dissolved in the oceans. A number of projects have looked at filtering and extracting it from the oceans. It's relatively expensive to extract it from seawater, but not insane--4x-10x the cost of mining. We won't run out.
https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/oceans/articles/2018/0...
> I believe I read the estimate is something like 50 years?
It's more like 200 years. And that's "economically accessible", not accessible.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
Where did you get that notion?
Uranium mining is extremely destructive to the environment, not to mention using a lot of energy, so this isn't just opportunity cost, it's externality cost.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[1] https://www.nrdc.org/bio/nrdc/epa-tries-sign-away-authority-...
How so? Any pointers for more info - I'm somewhat ignorant on this topic.
First you don’t actually reduce the number of atoms of highly radioactive waste products. You’re simply chemically separating material not transmuting it to something non radioactive. Which doesn’t really make the nasty stuff easier to deal with.
Second, you end up contaminating a great deal of additional material which then becomes a high volume of low level radioactive waste. At the same time you need an input stream of various chemicals, steel, rubber, etc to replace what’s been contaminated/used which then causes environmental harm when you’re extracting them.
Finally plutonium is useful as fuel, but the ratio of u235:u238 changes so you still need enrichment. Which means at the end of this process you’re spent a great deal of effort only to throw away most of the uranium recovered.
There are reactor designs that don’t need enrichment such as CANDU, but they need far less raw uranium mined in the first place.
TLDR; What you’re recovering is u235 which is a small percentage of spent fuel and it takes a huge amount of resources to get at it.
EDIT: if you're downvoting this, do you expect that we can create and maintain a technological life without building blocks like metals and energy minerals? Did that M1 CPU just appear out of thin air and started powering itself?
And if we do need minerals to create a good life for the 7 billion people we have, do these simply materialize?
We have to dig for it. Holes are ugly and messy. But the alternative is living in one.
We have massive numbers of people who are still really poor. Making quality infrastructure and products for these people involves lots of brand-new metals.
In the meantime, increasing quality and recycling is merely a multiplier increasing the efficiency of our system. You can't recycle your way to economic greatness.
Nuclear fission based on uranium is a lot of things, but definitely not "clean" or "green" even on the raw material sourcing side like the pro-nuclear crowd keeps blathering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
Making human lives better means that you have to do dirty, destructive work like mining, drilling, and manufacturing. To some degree, we're trading pristineness of nature for increased living standards for people. As technology improves, there is potential for our footprint to get smaller, but that's almost always balanced out (or more) by an increase in population.
It's easy to make the whole country a nature preserve. You then either import things that were produced in a dirty manner overseas, or your living standards drop to that of our Aboriginal ancestors.
Depending on your criteria, no human industrial activity is green. Digging up precious metals for solar panels? Pouring tons of concrete in mountain valleys to make dams? Building forests of windmills?
At the end of the day, the question becomes “does this enable us to reduce our carbon emissions whilst keeping a reasonable quality of life”. And to that question nuclear is without a doubt a good thing
Solar and wind don't leave a ton of radioactive material behind.
But they are not a plausible global replacement at this point, and - without radical storage technology changes - for the foreseeable future.
So really what you should be asking is, is nuclear cleaner than fossil.
Do they need to be? Cut back on crap (i.e. advertising billboards, city lights), invest into decentralized storage for households (let's be real, even the demand of a home with two teenagers with gaming rigs can easily be met with a standard Powerwall), and get as many industrial processes shifted to shift operations to save on nighttime base load. The remainder can be, at least in Continental Europe and America, caught by a well-built continental grid (China manages thousands of km long lines!) and biogas/hydrogen peakers.
The power usage of these is pretty small.
> Invest into decentralized storage for households (let's be real, even the demand of a home with two teenagers with gaming rigs can easily be met with a standard Powerwall)
For those of us who are upper middle class or beyond, this is no big deal, but the additional apartment cost for someone living paycheck to paycheck could be quite noticeable (or the cost to taxpayers to subsidize this).
Further, increased electrification of loads that are nighttime-centric (EV charging, heating, industrial loads) makes this less tenable. Base load is going to go up.
> and get as many industrial processes shifted to shift operations to save on nighttime base load
This might mean tripling the amount of capital equipment, which has its own costs and impacts. Electrification of industrial loads is more capital-intensive; tripling the cost of this is even worse.
It sure seems like it? Any proposal the implies a rapid attenuation of capacity or consumption is no small thing to consider. The technical and political barriers to achieving them are likely orders of magnitude worse than those involved in taking up some of the capacity with nuclear.
OK buddy
In reality, Uranium is mostly mined by leaching which is the least destructive form of mining. Not to mention the quantity actually mined is several orders of magnitude less than other things we mine in much more destructive fashions like Copper, nickel, zinc etc
I'll assume that you are a proponent of Solar/Wind/Hydro. Which also have externalities, including human death, but let's ignore that.
But I am onboard with all of those. My problem is that I think solar, wind and hydro are not enough. We don't have a way to store energy in massive ways, so in order to account for cloudy days, non-windy days and nights, we need something else.
I see uranium filing that niche. If not uranium, what else? All the options I see mentioned are along the lines of "let's continue burning stuff, then, and keep adding solar/wind/hydro".
But that is what we are doing now already. And the temperature and CO2 concentration graphs keep going up. So, what is the alternative?
So we can build either energy storage or nuclear plants. Storage must surely be the better choice!
It seems quite obvious to me that it will be cheaper, faster, simpler and more reliable, not least because it will be distributed and we can engage many more people to the task of building storage than we can to the task of building nuclear plants.
Heat storage, pressure storage, gravity storage, hydrogen, methane, batteries, all so easy to make (compared to nuclear plants) that you can have thousands of "small town scale" projects going at the same time.
With few notable mega-projects, solar has still grown in capacity equivalent to several nuclear reactors per year the past few years. I think a similar thing will happen with energy storage.
It's kind of happening already (several storage projects are underway and some are online) but the results are good and it's early days.
The New Zealand government estimates that a gravity storage scheme with a capacity of 5TWh would cost 14 billion NZ dollars to construct.
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natu...
We need all of it. ASAP.
It's "yes and", not "either-or".
I enthusiastically support any and all nuclear options. Especially traveling wave and SMRs.
Unfortunately, nuclear won't arrive in time to keep us under 2C. Fortunately, we'll still need it to help with going net-negative.
Is it solely regulatory red tape? Do we not have off-the-shelf designs (i. e. from when the French built scores of plants), or are they dependent on a catalog of no-longer-available parts?
I was hoping for modular reactors that were neighbourhood-scale-- the size of a a small shipping container, and able to be delivered rather than site built. Maybe RTG instead of steam-turbine for mechanical simplicity.
The difference is a fusion's byproduct is helium, and if the core "melts down," it implodes rather than explodes. Fission creates waste who's half life is 4.5bil years (which is demonstratedly toxic to humans, hence where I imagine the apprehension for bringing reactors online is coming from)
My current belief is that it just comes down to lack of investment.
Compare the current outlooks of biofuels, "next generation" nuclear, and now green H2.
The IRA is building a H2 economy, from scratch. Soon, the govt will pay anyone anywhere a stupid amount of money to make "green" H2 (details are still being hashed out). It's stupid to not get in on the action. So that govt investment begat a torrent of private investment. And now we're off to the races.
Just like how the Obama administration bootstrapped PV solar and lithium ion batteries, in 20 years we'll look back at the passing of the IRA as the genesis of our H2 economy.
In their times, both biofuels and nuclear were supposed to be the next big thing.
But instead of forging industrial policy and committing to moonshot level investments, our neoliberals predecessors had faith these nascent industries would magically emerge from the "free market".
Everything has externalities, even the "renewables" (which are not, by definition, because nothing is renewable) - if you want to have an adult conversation you need to talk in terms of pros and cons across multiple dimensions.
This is an obviously silly structure and yet it persists.
And in fact, a major part of uranium is in-situ leaching, which is less enviromentally damaging than most other mining.
Zoom right in on Olympic Dam on Google maps.
This is the largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.
Now zoom out. Keep zooming out. Now zoom out further. Australia is big.
Uranium mining causes approximately zero damage.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...
This is one of my favorite little quotes/references to use if I can find a way to work it in. I know it’s about something very serious but it always makes me giggle.
I’ve used it on a few commit messages/comments before for particularly gross code.
Just put up a sign that says “no cash kept on premises” and an empty cash tray on a counter, behind some glass sliding doors.
So, even if that doesn't sate their curiosity, they can learn enough to not get themselves killed if they do try to dig it up.
https://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-di...
I think it's a bit late to emphasize this concern, when even North Korea has nukes.
But in those cases yes - sunshine is not there for at least half the time and some areas have rather a lot of clouds.
Wind also some areas e.g. NW Europe have a lot but others don't.
That's assuming they act as a cartel. But if the US tried to do this, Russia would sell them the material just to stick it to the US, and vice versa.
Not only that, the top four countries for energy production representing more than half of global power generation are all nuclear nations. The countries in the top 10 without nuclear weapons are Japan, Brazil, Canada, South Korea and Germany, of which only Brazil would have any significant concern about being cut off by western nuclear powers. And Brazil is at an equatorial latitude that implies they would benefit from a higher proportion of solar regardless.
But one of the interesting things about WIPP is how they thought about how to mark the site as "do not dig" in a way that would last a very long time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Aw... for what they came up with...
I guess I'm describing a pyramid which made it about 4k years before we forgot what the symbols meant and went digging through them anyway. 4/100 ain't bad for a first try though!
It takes a lot of resources (today) to dig down 1400' so that might be helpful. However, it's still doable with time and motivation for practically any human society. Space is another interesting idea with its own set of issues (eg: getting waste there safely) but has the advantage of requiring a space-fairing civilization which also requires advanced knowledge, cooperation and communication which gives a better chance that simple grave-robbers don't dig something up after the decline of our current knowledge, skillsets and civilization.
Most likely in the next few decades they'll figure out how to make it useful or at least not be a problem anymore.
Designing something to last 100, 200 years, alright... but 100,000? We probably won't even be here, on Earth. Waste of time.
> If you work in tech you know that 99% of the stuff you build wouldn't (or shouldn't) last another 5 years.
We have technologies that have survived for thousands of years (agriculture, writing, etc.) This statement is completely myopic and absurd.
If "we" are here, or "something else" arrives at that time they are likely so advanced that the topic of communicating nuclear risks to them is rather pointless.
>If "we" are here, or "something else" arrives at that time they are likely so advanced that the topic of communicating nuclear risks to them is rather pointless.
I can think of at least two scenarios where that's not true: (1) human civilization collapses between now and then, and (2) humans go extinct and intelligence evolves in some other species. I'm sure there are other possibilities as well.
What?!
This is the right solution - dry storage in hard rock in some rock formation that hasn't done anything in millions of years. Originally, in addition to Yucca Mountain, there was a plan for an East Coast nuclear waste repository in hard rock, probably in Maine or Vermont.
When it's full, the Finland plan is to fill in everything, seal it off, and not mark it. If some future society can drill through that much hard rock, they probably know about radiation, since that's a routine hazard in mining.
that's exactly why they chose it and it makes a lot of sense.
If the environment is so stable, you don't have to worry about earth own internal movements too much.
This is old news, it's been amply debated, there's a documentary by Michael Madsen titled "Into Eternity" where pros and cons are discussed at lenght, the movie is from 2010, 13 years ago.
You can find it on YouTube
Reminds me of that Star Trek episode where Data, confused, walked with an suitcase with irradiated materials to a village that was just discovering the basic elements. They got irradiated because they couldn't understand the radiation symbols on the suitcase.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Thine_Own_Self_(episode...
Right to me implies the best. Its not the best. Shooting it to the sun seems like a better alternative.
...may not be the correct decision.
Putting it deep underground is the safer option.
[1] you can use gravity assists like the Parker Solar Probe, or go very, very far out, make a small adjustment and then fall back in for about 1/3 the total delta-v, which is still a rather large amount.
To get something to fall into the sun rather than just carry on orbiting it you need it to lose the velocity it has by virtue of being launched from Earth, if you just punt it into interstellar space on the other hand you need a lot less fuel and you can get a boost from the planets if you line it up right.
"Space Launch Vehicle Reliability" - https://www.tech-insider.org/related/research/2001/0301.html
"Of the 4378 space launches conducted worldwide between 1957 and 1999, 390 launches failed (the success rate was 91.1 percent)"
It makes a fantastic double bill with Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". I feel his weird epilogue monologue epilogue links them well.
Both movies span and ponder on such a vast period of time, which is awe inspiring, terrifying and fascinating.
Waiting also reduces the difficulty of dealing with waste, since the fission products decay relatively rapidly. Aside from seven very long-lived fission products, they will be gone in 300-500 years (depending on your definition of "gone"). Indeed, the problem then becomes that the gamma emission of the spent fuel elements is so low they are no longer self-protecting against "amateur" diversion of the plutonium. (Note that this is fission products, not actinides, that decay relatively quickly.)
Personally, I suspect spent fuel will be dealt with by launching it beyond Earth. Think how cheap and reliable distant descendants of today's rockets will be several centuries hence.
Can't wait to see the reaction when one of these barrels inevitably hits something important to someone.
the DOE currently thinks it's a bad idea https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-we-dont-lau...
I like the Economist's style, articles don't even have authors listed and when they must talk about themselves they say "your correspondent" which I perceive as much more humble
It's worth exploring the experience, in spelunking or meditation, if it changes your fundamental incentives. Or read Ecclesiastes, et al. empathically.
Finland is at least trying, doing the engineering and engaging the question. Perhaps because it has no fossil fuels?
It need to be stored in a clearly marked and delimited place, to avoid accidents, until someone in the future finds a more definitive/cost effective solution, or until it wears off, even if it take a long time for our standards.
What are some points that I could use to differentiate the two ideas? e.g.
- not enough waste to be an issue
- waste is properly secured so won't be an issue
- less impact than coal/oil/gas
Just to be clear, I'm quite sure humans will still be here, but I think there's a good chance we'll exist in much smaller numbers, in isolated pockets. Individuals probably won't have the kind of ready access to the sum total of human knowledge that we now take for granted. I'd be amazed if any digital information from today survives even one century into the future, never mind five.
Of course oil, coal, solar, idro, etc have their own costs for cleaning up the places.
In Finland, and I believe many other countries as well, there is a special tax on nuclear power plants whose proceeds go into a fund for handling the end of life costs, like building this repository.
> Of course oil, coal, solar, idro, etc have their own costs for cleaning up the places.
Indeed, all energy generation should have similar schemese like nuclear to handle end of life cleanup costs. Unfortunately it seems nuclear is fairly unique in actually having it.
The only problem is that these are not pooled up towards fixing environmental issues but used as part of the general budget by whoever holds the government at any time.
Which in turn annoys even people like me who think it is a good idea to tax it because:
1. not enough gets done to combat environmental damage
2. it gives politicians an incentive to keep increasing these taxes to afford other projects they want
I seriously wish it was like water and sewer and waste taxes around here:
the municipality can increase these as needed but are not allowed to make a profit from them so if money is saved then the next years these taxes are lowered. (Or the year after, whenever the calculations are finished.)
It's factored in, and especially on new projects such as Hinkley Point C it'd actually a pretty sizable chunk of the budget, and increases the price of the electricity produced even more because the timeline is quite short (the goal is to reimburse the construction costs within 20-25 years, meanwhile the power plant can operate for 50-70 years with some maintenance; that's what happens when you add a commercial profit incentive to such long term projects that simply shouldn't have one).
Other energy systems have their clean up costs too, but they don't need to consider a 100,000 year time scale, so are much, much cheaper.
In a few decades after filling that place in, people may determine that it's valuable, send in robots to get everything back out for re-use, and make the area safe again.
Maybe a few hundreds of years, or thousands, but we just don't know what inventions the future will bring
I think your reasoning is pretty sound for the existing waste (and maybe that's all you're talking about). But for new waste it's a different game. We could simply not generate it. I'm not even asserting that we shouldn't use nuclear power, just that this argument should not be over-extended.
Another thing to consider with the "well it might be useful later so lets not dump it" argument is that we probably don't need the waste we already created. We can just make more.
the fact that we don't know what the future will pan out, doesn't mean we shouldn't take precautions.
Everybody knows that a lock won't keep a determined thief out, but we lock the door nonetheless to make their job a little bit harder, enough to discourage the average ones.
It works the same way here: there will be much better places in the future to steal the same materials.
> Maybe a few hundreds of years, or thousands, but we just don't know what inventions the future will bring
And yet you predicted only the worse outcome, not the best.
We decide what to expect from the future, we don't predict it.
Maybe in the future we'll invent technologies that will make nuclear waste as safe as clean water and kids will play with it.
Who knows?
The issue is that the assumption is that it will take 100k years to get back in there, not that it's a bad idea to store nuclear waste.
Storing it is critical for safety, but I'm sure that within 100k years we will have a way to process it that is more intelligent than just putting it in a hole.
And then we can get into that storage system well before 100k years are up.
It won't be filled until the last nuclear reactor is closed. With current plan that is 60 years from now (or 80/100 depending on extensions for OL3).
It is actually a bit more then that (a decade or two in worst case) as the plan is to also store a some of the waste from decommission of the reactors down there.
Maybe even further if we decide to build more reactors which would mean adding new caverns into the site.
If we cannot or will not do the reprocessing, it's a safe bet that some future generation will.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-h...
The material would be flying on a rocket that has proven itself over many flights, with a rigorously tested design, with a safe abort mode for every point along the way to orbit and on top of that, stored in a vessel such that it wouldn't be released into the atmosphere if a failure still occurred.
The proper answer is that it'd be absurdly expensive and completely pointless. After all, why bring it down to Mars? Just put it in an appropriate orbit around the Sun and you're basically guaranteed to never see it again unless you want to.
In general, the vast majority of rocket explosions in the US ever since we got past the phase of having to build two of everything in-case one launch failed have been ones which were either still in active development or weren't anywhere near nuclear rated at the time anyway. The media loves to report on exploding rockets, but by and far that is not the norm and if you're flying on a rocket that is allowed to carry even nuclear material, you're essentially guaranteed to be safe (if not necessarily guaranteed to make it to orbit).
Do you think we should be using planes to send nuclear waste into the upper atmosphere?
> What's with this insanity that seems to grip even supposedly educated science-minded people whenever something involves nuclear technology?
Maybe the educated science-minded people have a better understanding of some of the risks involved.
I once heard that 1 kg of plutonium burning up in the upper atmosphere would be enough to wipe out humanity. Now I don't know the math behind that claim, and of course I know that most nuclear waste is not plutonium, but I would much rather be safe than sorry with things like burning up radioactive waste in the upper atmosphere.
Especially in the face of superior alternatives like putting it deep underground.
A more detailed look into the matter shows that even that is very likely overblown: http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/answers/llnl.html
You simply couldn't possibly spread it enough with enough density to be both inhalable and common enough to measurably increase cancer risk.
While I agree that just putting it in the ground is the superior solution, my point is that fears of putting nuclear material on modern American rockets are very exaggerated.
But even apart from the launch risk, shooting stuff into space is not cheap, and shooting stuff into the sun is a lot more expensive than that. To justify that, it has to be not only safer, but also cheaper than putting it underground.
The only real advantage I see to shooting it into the sun is that if our civilisation ever collapses and nobody can read anymore, there's less risk of the people then running into our waste in the sun than finding it buried.
They misrepresent the culture that led to the space shuttle disasters to push a catchy statistic and somehow try to compare that with a 35 year old rocket design that isn't even supposed to carry crew, let alone nuclear material, and that's supposed to reflect on rockets that are rated for nuclear material?
The primary risk does not need to be explosion for explosion to be too risky.
How old are reusable rockets? 5 years? And up until that point they were considered worse because they weren't new. I think you're overstating how safe it is to put nuclear waste onto a maybe bomb.
Also, reusable rockets were not considered worse. It was obvious to everyone that in a technical sense, a properly designed reusable rocket was better (ie not the Shuttle, where most of its design was dictated by missions it might be required to handle).
What other companies/agencies disagreed on was if they were economical. For example, ULA expected to have to fly a booster 10 times to break even on it for reuse and Arianespace similarly believed that they weren't having to launch often enough to justify a reusable rocket, arguing that if they went reusable they'd just have a bunch of people with nothing to do most of the time.
Very expensive,but you can reuse the shell for many launches.