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Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

bbc.com

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Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#181

Post by janalsncm »

karlerss wrote: post #178
janalsncm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a fourth option. Nuclear waste can be used in dirty bombs and poisons as well. So waste sites should be somewhat secure. So in the analogy it would be as if we left a stockpile of guns and ammo. I don’t think leaving a bunch of loaded guns around is a responsible way to hand the future to our children, especially since we can’t know what the future political situations will be.

But we did leave a stockpile of weapons and ammo. It's a minor inconvenience. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_bomb_disposal_i...

It’s a minor inconvenience in Europe because of the political stability of the region. However, it has been stable for only a relatively short period of time, with no guarantees for the future.

So let me reframe the question. Do you think it would be a good idea to store spent nuclear waste in present day Iraq or Syria?

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#182

Post by Krasnol »

paavope wrote: post #179
Krasnol wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sheer ignorance around nuclear energy is the main reason I'm happy it already peaked in the Western World and is replaced by safe and clean renewable energies. I mean, you don't even have to look far these days. It's Finland. You know...the country just around the corner of our old and new arch enemy, Russia. And you want to create an additional target for sabotage? Also, you're talking about wasting money? Repr…

> Unlike nuclear, which Finland had to shut down recently because it just wasn't worth the money to keep it running... What are you referring to here? Nuclear power has not been shut down here in Finland to my knowledge. There have been times when production has been scaled down because there is temporarily excess energy available, when it is windy (turbines produce more) and warm (warming uses less), but that is a t…

> There have been times when production has been scaled down because there is temporarily excess energy available, when it is windy (turbines produce more) and warm (warming uses less), but that is a temporary situation.

This is what I meant, excuse my wrong wording, implying that you could shut down a reactor just like that only because the prices for energy doesn't justify to keep it running at all. Something which is quite nice to have these days with all those cheap renewable energies producing that "excess" energy.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#183

Post by throwbadubadu »

panick21_ wrote: post #101

I just don't like this, a huge amount of money spent for nothing. This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway. Also, this is not 'waste' there are interesting and unique materials there that might be relevant in the next 100+ years. Not to mention that th…

> This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares.

The cost is quite high, and turns out that all the temporal or attempted permanent storages have undesired rottening containers or leakages much earlier.. is there a good reference for that claim?

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#184

Post by cinntaile »

panick21_ wrote: post #150
KennyBlanken wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so tiresome that nuclear proponents pretend the only alternative to nuclear is coal.

His point is that other technologies are not held to the same standard. And that is still true. Even above ground nuclear storage is far better waste management then virtually anything else, including wind and solar. The likely hood of people dying from old wind and solar projects is quite a bit higher then people dying from nuclear waste.

The difference between the two scenario's is quite obvious. In coal ash it's highly diluted, in nuclear waste it's highly concentrated.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#185

Post by smaudet »

panick21_ wrote: post #159
j16sdiz wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by the time we get to generation 10....all documents are lost, technology is obsoleted, no living engineer know how this works.

And now you are proving my original argument. If society collapses to a point where engineers can't handle some well contained radioactive waste then you have far bigger problems then nuclear waste. The idea that our primary worry should be that maybe in 300 years countries will be unable to handle this simple technical task that the US figured out in 1960s is bananas. We are not talking about active nuclear weapons…

"The idea that our primary worry should be that maybe in 300 years countries will be unable to handle this simple technical task that the US figured out in 1960s is bananas."

I suggest you open a history book. It is quite likely the same countries that exist today do not exist in the future and the same knowledge does not either.

Furthermore it is not necessarily about being unable to understand some physics and processes but instead that language and knowledge quickly "deteriorates" over time, e.g. the langauge today is vastly different than even 100 years ago - technical terms and the like shift the fastest, cultural ones the slowest, but they do all become obscured by time. Even a more advanced civilization may encounter challenges that have no logical correlation with the task of keeping spent fuel safe, e.g. intential security measures such as encryption/obfuscation/code rot/reliance on no-longer manufactured tools.

Anyways there is another objection you are fundamentally missing is that the timeframes are possibly un-sustainable in terms of time per acres. Sure you have storage for 100 years in dry casks (maybe some parking lot) but then must wait 100000 years. So you must store 1000 more times the fuel for it to be truly sustainable, digging giant holes in the ground is def not sustainable. Maybe parking lots are, but then you need to be sure your mountain of nuclear waste is stable (harder to do).

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#186

Post by throwbadubadu »

Manuel_D wrote: post #122
pavlov wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.” This isn’t the right way to plan centuries ahead. You can’t just say “well if the dummies can’t do this one more thing we imposed on them, they deserve what they get.” With generational risks we should aim to reduce them now as much as possible and take t…

What, really, is the impact of a compromised nuclear casket in a remote, unpopulated area above ground? What is the impact buried just 100 feet deep in an unpopulated area? Someone would have to excavate the uranium and either spend loads of time around it or move it to a populated area. Water contamination from naturally occurring uranium is a bigger risk than nuclear waste (uranium, like lead, can cause heavy metal…

> a remote, unpopulated area above ground?

European countries and other denser ones may want to know where it finds those.. and as if we are not in a big change that will start a lot of instability, conflicts and migration.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#187

Post by otherme123 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #114
panick21_ wrote: post #101

I just don't like this, a huge amount of money spent for nothing. This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway. Also, this is not 'waste' there are interesting and unique materials there that might be relevant in the next 100+ years. Not to mention that th…

It reminds me of how "useless" gasoline used to be burnt off at oil wells to extract parrafin oil.

We are still unable to properly recycle plastic. Nuclear fuel is a very well known product carefully crafted, nuclear waste is a corrosive mix of very different things, mainly everything near the reactor that isn't fuel (pipes, concrete, clothes, machinery...) that gets contaminated and you can't do anything with it except store away in a radioactive landfill. The used nuclear fuel is already being processed and reused. But we can't do much with a contaminated piece of steel except turn it to small pieces and store the more contaminated in a concrete brick, no "gasoline" to extract there.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#188

Post by jltsiren »

panick21_ wrote: post #143
jltsiren wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the costs are for managing the waste above ground. The overall cost of the project is estimated to be €5-6 billion, out of which construction is €1-2 billion. I believe the actual underground facility cost ~€1 billion, while the rest is for various above-ground processing facilities. There has been a lot of speculative bullshitting on what to do with nuclear waste since the Onkalo project started in the late…

For 5-6 billion they could have helped to develop and built new GenIV reactors and reduce the waste and also manage all the waste for the next 100 years. > Given the high costs of managing nuclear waste above ground Can you show me some concrete evidence that the cost is as high as you claim. In the US nuclear reactors have been storing the waste on parking lots for many decades and it doesn't seem to bankrupt them.…

That's 5-6 billion over ~140 years. The operating costs of the Swiss Zwilag facility are similar.

Storing the waste on site is cheap as long as the reactor is operational. The facilities and the staff are there anyway. It gets more expensive once the reactor stops operating. You can't just leave the high-level waste there for anyone to steal, and you should also work proactively to prevent leaks.

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#189

Post by fsh »

dminuoso wrote: post #102
acidburnNSA wrote: post #3

I'm excited that Onkalo will be coming onine soon, so we don't have to hear the myth that there's no solution for spent nuclear fuel anymore. The solution that enjoys a solid scientific consensus is the deep geologic repository. Another thing that is weird to me is that everyone says nuclear waste is hazardous for a uniquely long time, but it become less hazardous over time. Many non-radioactive materials, like arsen…

What is even more interesting: At a given power rating, coal plants produce up to 3 times more radioactivity than nuclear power plants directly in leftover ash because coal contains large numbers of radioactive isotopes. It might not seem like much, but when you consider that a 1TWe coal plant burns 3.2Mt of coal a year compared to 27t of uranium for an equivalent nuclear power plant, this might become more apparent.…

Nuclear power plants produce many many orders of magnitude more radioactivity than coal power plants for a given amount of energy produced. You are probably misinterpreting the famous 1978 study [1] where the radioactive emissions of nuclear and coal power plants were estimated to be roughly the same. This does not include the solid and liquid nuclear waste, only the radioactive gases that are inadvertently leaked from nuclear reactors. Coal ash is barely radioactive at all, and the radioactivity is completely negligible compared to the chemical toxicity.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045

Re: Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

#190

Post by fsh »

bluGill wrote: post #124
SoftTalker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arsenic and mercury came out of the ground, originally. It's not like we can make those elements from scratch. Diluting them and putting them back where we got them is probably fine. Nuclear waste is something new we are creating, but I'd rather have it deep underground in a geologically stable place, than sitting in casks on the surface.

Uranium came out of the ground as well, and there were natural reactors.

Nuclear waste does not consist of Uranium, but of the much more radioactive fission products. The Okla natural reactor went critical for the last time around 2 billion years ago. Indeed, nuclear waste is not a problem if you can wait for 2 billion years.
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