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.
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.