As a Finn I think this is the correct way. To add to some other comments here I presume uranium is so abundant even if we multiply our usage that the opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue. We have a lot of spent fuel in places like the bottom of the ocean we can tap into first. There are a lot of different materials we're burning or burying even if it might be useful in the future, I'd look into repurposing those first as they carry a much bigger risk in e.g. polluting the ground water before worrying about a marginal amount of global spent fuel being buried (you need to account for the fact that we are a small country with non-optimal geography, it is less probable that it would be viable for us build processing facilities to recycle spent fuel as it is much more viable in e.g. France where there is much more raw materials available relatively close + shipping the spent fuel from Finland is probably quite expensive as especially in the current geopolitical setting we are somewhat of an island logistically).
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 opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue
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.
I don't think we need to go over the externality cost presented by Coal, Gas or Petrol.
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?
>>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.
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.
What is it about nuclear that keeps it from coming online quickly?
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.
I imagine it's regulatory for fission plants. Fusion is still a ways off, in terms of us having net-positive energy, but is the "true" nuclear energy solution as far as I'm concerned.
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".
This was from speaking to an expert, but from what I recall recovering plutonium is perfectly reasonable trying to recover the uranium isn’t helping.
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.
Sources on that? I thought uranium mining was mostly leaching (which is very, very, very energy efficient, and non-destructive if you take care of the used solution) with open mining on the decline.
Yep, 57% of the world's uranium mining is in-situ leaching, which is basically two pipes in the ground. One pumps water down, the other brings uranium-rich water back up, into a building where the uranium is filtered out.
Um, its not water down, its sulphuric acid and similar kinds of fun. We are still working out how to get ridd of side effects of that here in Czech Republic decades anfter most such mining ended.
In-situ leaching contaminates aquifiers, and remediations have not been shown to be effective [1]. Meanwhile, this still leaves all of the mining which is not ISL.
It's certainly very convenient that, sans Canada and Australia, all significant uranium mining countries are developing or virtually lawless (i.e. the government can do whatever the f..k it wants without needing to take care of nature) countries - and to be honest given how past Australian governments outright sharted on nature protection or Aboriginal activists in favor of mining conglomerates, I'd classify the country as lawless as well.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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
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.
> Cut back on crap (i.e. advertising billboards, city lights)
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.
> given how past Australian governments outright sharted on nature protection or Aboriginal activists in favor of mining conglomerates, I'd classify the country as lawless as well
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.
> so this isn't just opportunity cost, it's externality cost.
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.
The difference is that renewables mostly end up paying for those externalities. Particularly nuke. We've managed to internalize the idea as a society that if I decide to burn an enormous amount of hydrocarbons I get to profit from the power generated (or whatever desirable outcome is present) but society gets to deal with the byproducts, none of which I am expected to contribute to handling.
This is an obviously silly structure and yet it persists.
Oh? Solar panels made today have an expected e80 of 30 years before refurb is required. What is the expected capital lifetime that you'd consider not to be replaced 'constantly'? This compares pretty decently with natural gas turbines, especially considering that panels have a small fraction of the capital cost.
This is disinformation and you should delete it. I don't use that term lightly, Nuclear FUD is spread by Russia to keep the west dependent on their oil, and you're helping them whether you know it or not.
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
Mining is destructive whatever you mine. The worst kind of mining is open-pit mining, which isn't the most common method for uranium, so in average uranium mining is probably less destructive than most mining operations.
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.
Or we could stop building throwaway things. Sure it won't reduce mining to zero, but when a significant fraction of what we mine is ending up in landfills after just a few years, there sure is margin of improvement.
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.
Uranium is actually pretty rare - using fuel the way we have for now, we would pretty quickly exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits - I believe I read the estimate is something like 50 years?
The story changes significantly if we start using breeder reactors and other designs.
> exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits
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.
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.
Yeah, and to my understanding we're not specifically looking for it as the uranium isn't really that expensive at the moment. The largest plant in Finland needs 128 tons of uranium for the fuel to be fully loaded which on a quick calculation is $57 per pound * 2.2 pounds per kilo * 128000 kilos = around $16M and based on a quick search it lasts from three to five years.
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).
> an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered
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.
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.
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If we turn out to need the uranium, we know where it is: in the special spent fuel storage facility. It's just very contaminated with radioactive elements that aren't uranium and have shorter, more dangerous half-lives.
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".
If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place Like the sun - as I recall per-m3 it isn't all that energetic but there is enough sun that it provided the energy for ~99% of all life on earth. Lots of not-quite-enough energy is enough energy.
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.
> If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place
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".
> 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 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.
> If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place Like the sun - as I recall per-m3 it isn't all that energetic but there is enough sun that it provided the energy for ~99% of all life on earth.
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.
And I'm to assume that decay events are like a fundamental law of physics in that they will never change, so they cant be speeded up, or slowed down, or even reversed?
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.
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
Decay, like anything else can be (from our subjective point of view) be slowed down by accelerating it away from us at speeds approaching that of light.
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.
Faster can still be a very long time, relative to the kind of time we typically operate projects on, and also means that the decaying material is more radioactive in terms of exposure risk.
> quickly exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits
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.
If you find the time scale interesting, see also the “Long-term nuclear waste warning messages” wikipedia page[1], elaborating on semiotics in this context.
> This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
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.
I do the same! Using it for non-serious things just adds an extra level of irony. Funniest example I saw was "This is not a place of honor" on the back of some booty shorts
And I suspect our descendants would pay as much heed to these as we did to Egyptian curses! Perhaps if they are lurid enough they might inspire caution at least.
A better alternative would've been to develop breeder reactors and reprocess this "waste" into more fuel and a much smaller amount of true waste, which would be somewhat safe after several thousands years (it still would be a chemical hazard, but not a strongly radioactive one). But I have very little hope that such technology will be developed in the West in the next decades...
Surprise-surprise, but spent fuel rods contain plutonium (~1%) as well. The idea is that you build breeder reactors and do reprocessing in countries which already have nuclear weapons, while other countries get completed fuel rods for the classic PWRs. You prevent siphoning by mandating that all spent fuel rods must be returned to the country of origin.
That would never work for human reasons. Specifically, a non-nuclear nation will never want their energy security to depend on the goodwill of nuclear nations. At any time, those nuclear nations could turn around and jack the price of fuel rods 100x, while also denying the non-nuclear nations the ability to make their own with the threat of sanctions or war.
> At any time, those nuclear nations could turn around and jack the price of fuel rods 100x, while also denying the non-nuclear nations the ability to make their own with the threat of sanctions or war.
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.
Japan also has its own nuclear industry; they are likely a few months from constructing a nuclear weapon if need be. Their constitution limits their military to self-defense though, so they don't have a doctrinal need to build nukes.
Its like that already even for nuclear plant technology and support. And unlike with oil or coal, you can (and many do) stockpile years worth of fuel rods, just in case you need to find another suplier.
Holding molten fuel in a small container and extracting heat via convection is quite interesting. The idea seems obvious, but Oak Ridge never tried because they were designing an aircraft reactor that couldn't rely on gravity.
In grad school, I worked on an experiment housed at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). At least until a radioactive waste barrel exploded (because someone somewhere used the wrong kind of kitty litter, for real) and the place was shut down for a while. Working underground in salt "mine" (the salt is taken out so nuclear waste can go in) is no fun, do not recommend.
Maybe we should start erecting a structure on top of these sites that would be very hard to move. Perhaps we build it out of stone and carve warnings into the entrances. The most resilient structure is probably some kind of pile of large quarried rock but we need it to be recognizable so it should have a fundamental shape.
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.
Yeah really as long as technological people are around, they won't be going in there. The people who need help are the post-apocalyptic Stone Age people who may follow us. They don't need the exact problem explained to them, they just need to make the place as creepy as possible. Skulls, spikes, creepy murals carved in stone.
These guys are about to be super wrong when a couple decades from now governments realize there's a ton of extremely valuable unburned nuclear fuel, ready to be reprocessed, conveniently located in a storage facility.
Yeah, I feel like it's super pretentious to think that your solution will actually last 100,000 years into the future. If you work in tech you know that 99% of the stuff you build wouldn't (or shouldn't) last another 5 years.
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.
What makes you say we "probably" won't be here on Earth in 100,000 years? We were here for the past 2,000,000 years. This also ignores the possibility that someone other than "us" will discover what we leave behind.
> 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.
It took less than one human lifespan to go from the first powered flight to a man landing on the moon. I see no reason for humans to be stuck on Earth for 100,000 years at our current rate of invention and growth.
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.
Well, the closest potentially habitable planets outside the solar system are lightyears away. Even if we master space travel, I don't see a reason why at least some humans wouldn't stay on Earth, unless it becomes truly uninhabitable. Of course this is speculation about the far future and technologies that don't yet exist, so it's hard to predict what would be likely in that scenario.
>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.
I've been binge watching Tom Scott videos after finding out he's quasi-retiring soon and just happened to have watched his video of the exact same project last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50
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.
> dry storage in hard rock in some rock formation that hasn't done anything in millions of years
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.
> 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.
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.
Not a couple of tons, thousands and thousands of tons. A rocket to move any significant mass of waste to the sun (far more delta-v than getting to the moon, or escaping the solar system), without decades-long journeys [1] would make Saturn V and Starship look like toys, or if would be a very complex asssemble-in-orbit deal.
[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.
Even if you wanted to put a bunch of very radioactive waste on a rocket which might not necessarily make it away from Earth, it'd be very wasteful of fuel to shoot it into the sun compared to shooting it out of the solar system.
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.
Don't worry, Sun will consume these rods at right time in the future, with rest of our planet. We don't need to store this waste indefinitely. We need to keep it safe just for few billions years.
Sending it into the sun could be a solution for a lot of our waste. But I wonder if the energy we need to produce/spend to first launch all of it into our orbit won't create more problems than what we're trying to get rid of.
Came here to post this same comment. It’s a really thought-provoking film and quite striking in the way it was shot, edited, and scored. Highly recommended.
Burying the stuff now is a waste of money. It's cheaper to stuff the spent fuel into dry shielded casks and wait to decide what to do with it. This forecloses no future options and allows the relatively expensive burial process to be delayed, reducing the NPV of that cost.
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.
These are deeply foolish objections. Space is already chock full of ionizing radiation, and is so enormously sparse that waste ejected into interstellar space (for example) is not going to hit anything of value, even for many orders of magnitude of time beyond the half life of anything in there. This is clearly much preferable to putting the stuff a few kilometers away from an active biosphere.
Right? I also find this journalism style infuriating. Very egocentric.
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
There's no new information in the article on the process of storing nuclear fuel. The article is mainly about the feeling of how small m/y/our consciousness is relative to reality of time and the scale of problems facing us.
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?
We do have large peat reserves (AFAIK some estimates compare the total amount to Norway’s oil reserves), but usage of peat has been decreasing/phased out for climate and environmental reasons.
Seems to be the least of all evils for the problem: Nuclear waste is nearly impossible to recycle in a cost effective way, can't be burned, can't be decontaminated effectively and won't decompose easily.
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.
I'm all for alternative sources of energy (including nuclear) but I feel like generating and storing nuclear waste for future generations parallels how coal/oil/gas/etc. ruined the environment that our current generation has.
What are some points that I could use to differentiate the two ideas? e.g.
If you ever see something described as 'low-level nuclear waste' then it is sometimes talking about things like old reactor parts and mostly talking about items like gloves, bunny suits, used dosimeters, etc. Things that have been exposed to enough neutron flux to be mildly radioactive but which are not going to make other things glow in the dark are usually put into barrels and buried. Like toxic metals, for example, the only real risk here is having it leak into the food chain or water supply.
More realistically in 500 years there'll be no remaining record or understanding of what that mysterious stuff in that cave actually is, and the fact that people keep dying after going there will be put down to superstition.
If we manage to forget about radiation in the next 500 years then I'd say something more serious went wrong than some glowing stuff buried somewhere in a mountain :p
Well yes, and I don't mean to bring anyone down, but I think it's incredibly optimistic to imagine our current civilisation surviving 500 years into the future!
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.
I'm quite sure there will still be humans in 500 years' time, but I suspect the global population will be much smaller, and life will be more primitive and much less technologically centred.
Seveneves would come close. Spoiler alert, it features three groups of people surviving apocalyptic conditions on our planet in space, in deep sea, and in under mines. Part 3 is where the last two groups are introduced.
> Add the cost of this kind of storage facilities to the cost of nuclear energy.
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.
In Norway people have been paying "environmental taxes" since the eighties at least.
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.)
> Add the cost of this kind of storage facilities to the cost of nuclear energy.
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).
It would be great if all the waste generated by e.g. burning coal would be put in big barrels and labelled toxic and dangerous (because it is) - people would get a much better understanding of why nuclear isnt that bad in comparison
As a species, we are still arrogant that we know how the future will pan out.
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
Well that's probably because the requisite crystal ball we need to see into the future hasn't been invented yet either. The whole point of burying it is because we _can't_ know how the future will pan out.
Your plan is just to keep stockpiling the waste in temporary storage for N years with the hope (faith?) that a technology will appear which can make use of it? I'd rather take the sensible option which has been developed with knowledge that we have now, rather than sitting on it for an indeterminate amount of years for some magical fix to come along.
Note that we already know how to use most radioactive waste, we choose not to deploy those technologies for various reasons (both good and bad). The technology is called breeder reactors.
> Well that's probably because the requisite crystal ball we need to see into the future hasn't been invented yet either.
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.
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.
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.
In 100k years there’s much less need to process it anycase, the waste is very front-heavy in its radioactive harmfulness. Of course it’s still chemically harmful later on, but it does not differ from other heavy metals and is leagues better disposed of than all the lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other such stuff we have laying around (which does not decay at all).
> As a species, we are still arrogant that we know how the future will pan out.
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.
Considering the whole journey uranium has been through in the last ~100 years, it does seem somewhat shortsighted to declare it “useless” and lock it up forever.
I think battery vs fuel (oil) begs to differ. Until we can run a 747 on a battery it’s absolutely the deciding factor. I have every hope we are able to do that one day, I’m just saying that energy density is a deciding factor.
Sure, but we're talking about the energy density of uranium. Nuclear powered airplanes are both technically infeasible and an extremely bad idea from a safety perspective.
The standard argument against that is that the risk of contamination (of the athmosphere or basically anything) in case of a rocket accident is too high.
And the standard response to that should be to how that too is kind of a load of FUD. The safety requirements for a rocket to carry nuclear material in the US are higher than those for carrying crew.
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.
Rockets are still by far the most dangerous mode of transportation developed. It's by no means safe to fly a rocket, even though it may be safer than it was before.
They're certainly safe enough that the primary risk is not of them exploding. Hell, the most current iteration of Falcon 9 has only ever had one failure, which was early in its lifetime before it was crew rated.
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).
Lets see if we can go a couple of decades without any rocket explosions at all before we risk burning up radioactive waste in the upper atmosphere. I don't want to trust this on mere claims of safety, I want to trust statistics on large, non-cherry-picked numbers of launches.
Have we gone decades without plane crashes? What's with this insanity that seems to grip even supposedly educated science-minded people whenever something involves nuclear technology?
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.
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.
It's entirely possible it's overblown, but I'm pretty sure we're talking about larger amounts than that if we're using this to get rid of our nuclear waste.
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.
You might as well be searching for articles on how climate models predict a total collapse of all life bearing capability in 6 months...
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 material would be flying on a rocket that has proven itself over many flights
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.
By proven itself over many flights, I wasn't quite referring to reuse, but rather just that by the time it is flying people - unless it's something that Congress couldn't care less about killing people with (like SLS) - the class of rocket will have flown many times.
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.
Those incidents are exactly why we have requirements like the ability to safely abort (ie separate the capsule and safely bring it down to somewhere near a coast for quick recovery, or abort to orbit) at every point of the flight, which those vehicles did not have but current ones do.
Ah crap, there was a micro fracture in the solid fuel booster that caused it to fail just after launch, now we have 100 tons of spent nuclear fuel in the atmosphere. Sorry.
How would you get it there? Besides, if you were confident enough to not accidentally make a dirty bomb, you might as well just send it into the sun instead!
Fun fact , it's surprisingly harder to shoot things at the Sun compared to other planets in the Solar system. It takes 55 times more energy to go to the Sun than to Mars
This is a solved problem, we already put nuclear fuel on rockets for stuff like RTGs, and they are shielded so well that even when they go wrong, it doesn't spread past the crash site. The other thing is that with re-usable rockets you could spread the waste over a large number of launches, and fire them off over the ocean. If something goes wrong with any single launch, the risk to people or property would be pretty small.
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.