> On one hand, there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste.
Who in the world believes that? Nuclear waste management in the US has been the biggest shitshow ever.
> The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...).
To repeat, its a major shitshow. The US political system has totally deadlocked itself on this issue with contradictory laws that all make no sense what so ever in the first place. Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start.
The US has been collecting billions of fees from nuclear operators that are all sitting an an account for 6 decades now and nothing productive has been done with that money. Its shameful.
The right solution is perfectly clear, build nuclear reactors that can consume waste. But of course that would require any kind of progress on nuclear technology that is not made basically impossible by regulation and hostile political and social environment.
We should be living in the nuclear age right now, but we don't. People in 100s of years will look back and say 'They discovered all the essential technologies in the 60s and they were still burning coal in 20202 what was wrong with them'.
Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start
Can you elaborate on that?
As far as I can tell, the main reason Yucca Mountain never moved forward was "Nevadans didn't want it". Which seems like a good enough reason, and that should suffice.
But in terms of the basic idea, if you're going to store nuclear waste anywhere, Yucca Mountain was as good a place as any. That's a big "if", of course, but it's kind of independent of the idea of Yucca Mountain in particular being "idiotic nonsense".
My understanding is cursory, so I'm hoping you can fill in some of the details.
It has been a long time since I have researched this topic and I don't have all the links to hand.
First of all, nuclear waste are actually a future resource. It makes very little sense to put a resource under the ground. It kind of like creating a mine.
In nuclear waste there is not just a huge potential energy resource, but also many other potential resources.
The right approach for any technologically advanced society that is continually progressing from the early days of nuclear energy would simply continue to develop reactor technology that would consume this waste and potentially filter out the useful resources from it.
If you actually do that correctly, the amount of waste left in the end is minimal and even much of that would not need 10000 years of storage.
Now, to get to that point, it might take 50, 100 or maybe even 200 years. During this time however nuclear waste can be stored rather easily above ground just fine. Because of nuclear waste transport regulation, you can not transport it so some waste has been sitting around above ground for 50+ years and it has yet to be a actual problem. This could be improved by simply putting them into a reasonable place and in a storage area.
However, there is some nuclear material that you might want to put away for a long time (most actually from nuclear weapons, not civilian fuel). There are better locations then Yucca Mountain but because of some congress insider baseball it was simply determined that it had to be Yucca and only that. Nothing else could be considered and fuel reprocessing was made illegal as well.
Because of more politics and just to make double sure Yucca would never happen, there are now demands that Yucca should be built so it could be safe for 1 million years. Complete idiocy.
And if humanity still exists in 500 years they are either living in the stone age and have much bigger problems then nuclear waste.
If you simply accept no other solution then deep storage, then we should build a facility for 500 or 1000 years (that is actually technologically more feasible) and then reopen the issue again every 100 years to see if the state of the art has improved.
To make it politically feasible you could by that people in that region an outrages amount of money, as it would still be far cheaper then what they are doing now.
More money is being waste on these things then it would have actually cost to simply push forward the technology to consume most of the waste. This is not even a new concept, old soviet nuclear warheads actually powered a lot of American homes without CO2. But I guess its much better to pay billions to the plant operates to storage the waste and then spend more billions on endless research and building a hole in the ground that you must prove will not change for a million years.
Who in the world believes that? Nuclear waste management in the US has been the biggest shitshow ever.
> The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...).
To repeat, its a major shitshow. The US political system has totally deadlocked itself on this issue with contradictory laws that all make no sense what so ever in the first place. Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start.
The US has been collecting billions of fees from nuclear operators that are all sitting an an account for 6 decades now and nothing productive has been done with that money. Its shameful.
The right solution is perfectly clear, build nuclear reactors that can consume waste. But of course that would require any kind of progress on nuclear technology that is not made basically impossible by regulation and hostile political and social environment.
We should be living in the nuclear age right now, but we don't. People in 100s of years will look back and say 'They discovered all the essential technologies in the 60s and they were still burning coal in 20202 what was wrong with them'.