The defueling process is pretty slick. On a 688-class submarine, they remove a semi-cylindrical section of the hull around the reactor compartment (RC) before landing a temporary building on the RC.
One tricky bit is the fact that the spent fuel is so radioactive that it still makes a significant amount of heat. The thermal power is low enough that sinking it away from the fuel isn't difficult, but if such measures were not in place, the fuel would heat up until (redacted) Something Bad Happens. So every step along the way has either timing and/or heat sinking requirements involved.
When I was in the Navy I was stationed at Puget Sound and got to watch the yard workers dismantle a submarine. Every day I would walk past the dry dock on my way to my ship and check out the progress. It's pretty cool seeing a sub in dry dock getting cut apart section by section.
Spent fuel will be dangerous on time scales much greater than recorded history. However, the old reactor compartments primary source of radioactivity is Cobalt-60, with a half-life of about 5 years. So on time scales on the order of our national history, we should be able to recycle them.
Also Cobalt-59, which is a commonly used hardening agent in ferrous alloys. In the old days, valve seat wear products were a strong source of radioactive cobalt.
Should store it at the south pole. It's inaccessible to anyone that is not very well-financed, the cold will slow down decomposition of the containers, anything liquid will freeze and stay put.
Any leaks will also be thousands of miles from anything important.
I like this idea, my own outlandish suggestion has been to just drop it off at a subducting ocean trench and let it return to the mantle. It's only slightly more feasible though, and getting the casks to stay intact until they're deep enough would be a difficult engineering challenge.
I always liked the idea of vitrifying the radioactive waste before putting it in barrels and putting the barrels into the subduction zones.
With the hazardous material rendered into chemically inert glass beads it should stay put even if (when) the containers are breached.
I'm not sure how practical that is. I presume the radioactive decay will break down the chemical structure of the glass, which will limit the ultimate effective lifetime of the solution
(Shrug) They've been hauling it around all over the planet inside submarine reactors for decades, with a remarkable safety record. They can find a way to get it to Antarctica safely. This idea makes a lot of sense.
They can call the screenplay 2101: A Penguin Odyssey. Humans have nuked themselves into oblivion, making room at the top of the intellectual food chain. Then, the first few penguins stumble upon the abandoned waste site...
And you propose we haul nuclear waste somewhere on the continent? With our helicopters and trucks in -30 -40 degrees weather and on ice/snow? I doubt anyone would like to try that :-)
Is it so different from what's done on the northern tip of Alaska? People go to Antarctica all the time. Airplanes are built to handle cold weather like that.
Sure, there'll be problems. Hardly insurmountable ones, though.
It also resolves the problem of stone age men after civilization's collapse not being able to read the warning signs, because they won't be able to get within a thousand miles of the place.
Two problems with that approach: 1) rockets are too unreliable, and 2) depending on how nuclear-energy technology develops, someday we might want that fuel back. There is still a lot of energy in "spent" fuel.
Earth's orbital velocity is 29.78 km/s, and the escape velocity from the Solar System, at Earth's distance, is 42.1 km/s.
Of you want to get rid of something, it would be energy-wise cheaper to shoot it out of the solar system, than to slow it down completely so that it would drop into the Sun.
If you shoot it out of the solar system though, then you are littering the region outside our solar system with nuclear waste that future generations might stumble across as they start exploring the galaxy.
It's pretty big inside the solar system - I can't even begin to imagine how large a space nuclear fuel capsule shot on a solar-system escape velocity would have to itself.
When I read the first half of this the image that popped into my head was a sub with booster rockets strapped to the side taking off like the space shuttle!
My father was a civil service EE at mare island naval shipyard in vallejo, on north-east san francisco bay. He told me that when they drain the reactor cooling water, there is a flange where they cut the hole in the hull, with a pipe running to there to a cement mixer. They make concrete out of the radioactive water, then haul the concrete and the mixer to hanford, to bury it.
But one time they neglected to bolt the flange together. When they pumped out the water, it poured down on a shipyard worker who was standing on the floor of the drydock.
While he was not injured, he exceeded his lifetime maximum dose of radiation. At the time Dad told me this story, the guy still worked at Mare Island but was no longer permitted in the nuclear yard.
Normal reactor coolant isn't nearly that radioactive. However, there is a continuous filtration system that gets flushed from time to time, and it is extremely nasty stuff. Its possible that the yard worker was actually doused with filter media.
I actually don't think it's possible. If I remember my OPWACHEM course correctly, if the media you're thinking of did wash onto the yard worker he'd have been severely injured by radiation exposure, and not just quickly bumped up to his maximum lifetime allowable exposure. It is indeed extremely nasty stuff.
One tricky bit is the fact that the spent fuel is so radioactive that it still makes a significant amount of heat. The thermal power is low enough that sinking it away from the fuel isn't difficult, but if such measures were not in place, the fuel would heat up until (redacted) Something Bad Happens. So every step along the way has either timing and/or heat sinking requirements involved.