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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

The only hard part of dealing with nuclear waste is the social aspect. If not for that, you can simply and safely dump it into the ocean. Water is excellent shielding and the amount of uranium/etc already dissolved in sea water is absurd. Put it in a stainless steel vessel first if you want most of it to decay before coming into contact with the water, but that's not even necessary.

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That doesn't really work because marine life is good at filtering and concentrating a subset of the elements that are in spent nuclear fuel. There are already ocean fish that are too poisonous too safely eat because of (coal-emitted) mercury pollution—and that's only 100,000 tons of mercury, total, in the history of human industry [0]. If you dig in to the hard numbers surrounding spent fuel, it's a much, much more toxic and difficult problem than mercury—diluting it in the oceans is a complete non-starter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mercury_pollution

Mercury from burning coal is an extremely dilute pollutant. There's zero hope for capturing and containing it. Nuclear waste in contrast is literally just barrels/boxes of stuff. You can pick it up with a forklift and put it inside a sealed container for the next thousand years.

> Nuclear waste in contrast is literally just barrels/boxes of stuff. You can pick it up with a forklift and put it inside a sealed container for the next thousand years.

You can't pick it up with a forklift to put it inside the sealed container. That would make the forklift (and its operator) radioactive. You can only use a forklift after it's already within the sealed container. See for instance this real-life video (shot on a nuclear power station in my country), which shows used nuclear fuel rods being put inside a sealed container for long-term storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5K46ALdD0

You park the forklift in the storage container and seal it in. It's not that hard.

Anyway, the forklift example wasn't about literally picking up pieces nuclear fuel with a forklift. You obviously use the forklift to move the shielded container around which contains the nuclear waste. Nuclear fuel in general is always at least in a water bath, which shields the neutrons, so your forklift is going to be fine.

In contrast to nuclar fuel, you cannot use a forklift (or any other equipment) to feasibly pick out the evenly mixed mercury atoms from the ocean or the atmosphere that we put there from burning coal.

s/ocean/subduction zone/

aka the solution to pollution is magmatic delusion err... dilution.

I really hope you aren't serious. Safe dry-cask storage on site is already a fantastic solution.

How long do we have to store it on site? Does it take any maintenance? Is there any reason to be worried about people stumbling upon it and opening it up in the distant future where nobody can read or understand English anymore?

If its half life is so long that you're afraid people won't be speaking English anymore it means it's not that dangerous.

If it's half life is so long that you're afraid people won't be speaking English anymore that means it's not that dangerous.

I'm completely serious. It was done extensively during the 20th century and never became an environmental issue. Nuclear waste is a social problem, not a technical problem.

They were referring to the Sun.

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