Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 473 posts

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

#191

Post by carlmr »

cyberax wrote: post #158
culopatin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is that maybe in 300 years someone wants to develop that land and the documents that say to not do that there are in an old version of .docx in an obsolete storage form buried under layers of bureaucracy. That’s how someone ends up living on the casket growing a massive thyroid. Same reason that makes us not write code that only the author can understand (when working in a team), we need to plan ahead in the sa…

Options: 1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else. 2. You just build a house on the ground (without digging). Nothing bad happens. 3. Civilization collapses, nobody cares about the abandoned casks.

>1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else.

The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller.

Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not be obvious in 100 years, 1000 years, 10000 years, much less in 100000 years.

These are time spans that aren't imaginable to us. Creating a symbol that's intelligible throughout that time is a task we dont know we can do.

Can you decipher the symbols in Göbleki Tepe reliably? There are some hypotheses around these. But if they're warning you about something that warning is hard to decipher, much less obvious. And this is only 10000 years ago.

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

#192

Post by audunw »

roughly wrote: post #81

Stewart Brand has an interesting take on this in Whole Earth Discipline (which is quite a read) - this is energy we don't know how to use yet. In 100 years, we'll be digging this stuff right up again, because there's energy in there. I'm not typically as utopian - techno or otherwise - as Brand, but I agree with him here - the nuclear industry is less than a century old, and we've already got a pretty good idea how t…

In 100 years we won't need it. In 100 years we'll be asking ourselves why we bothered with nuclear energy at all.

Look at the fundamentals. There's more than enough free energy all around us. In 100 years the world population will be declining, and we will already have mined and refined all the metal we'll ever need. The energy use per person is already falling and will continue to fall.

Solar will be vastly more cheap, efficient, and be part of a 100% circular economy. It'll cover most of the energy needs just by covering buildings or creating useful shades for parking, reservoars, irrigation channels and agrovoltaics.

Energy storage will essentially be solved. We have to. You can't run a car or a ferry directly on nuclear energy. We have to store and transform energy at a similar scale to what's needed to balance the grid to replace fossil fuels anyway. Think about how many days you could run your house on a modern BEV. 5-7 days in my case. And already, today, my car is helping balancing the grid by avoiding charging when prices are high. I'd be willing to do V2G too if it was supported.

In northern climates advanced geothermal will provide heat for district heating, and some extra electricity for the winter. Once you've built a well it provides all the benefits of nuclear with none of the downsides. It's just a matter of time before deep geothermal wells are cheap enough to drill. Could be decades, but not more than 100 years. With all the oil and gas engineers with nothing better to do in 20 years time.. I'm inclined to think we'll have some excellent solutions for advanced geothermal by 2050. We've already seen innovations from the oil/gas sector transferring over to geothermal in recent years.

There are some nuclear proponents that dream about everyone having megawatts of personal energy. Think of everything we could do if we had 10x the energy we have today! That's a terrible idea. If the entire world went all-in on nuclear and expanded its energy usage, the waste heat would be a problem and a barrier to getting the climate back to a cooler stable equilibrium.

Nuclear R&D is fantastic. We should continue to develop it. But mostly for future space use.

Helions fusion reactor might be a good idea if it works. It should have less problems with waste heat since it converts much of the energy directly to electricity rather than using heat exchange mechanisms.

If Helion succeeds fission is permanently dead, and we'll definitely want to bury the waste in 100k year storage so we don't burden our children with more debt and can stop thinking about the waste at all.

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

#193

Post by wizofaus »

audunw wrote: post #192
roughly wrote: post #81

Stewart Brand has an interesting take on this in Whole Earth Discipline (which is quite a read) - this is energy we don't know how to use yet. In 100 years, we'll be digging this stuff right up again, because there's energy in there. I'm not typically as utopian - techno or otherwise - as Brand, but I agree with him here - the nuclear industry is less than a century old, and we've already got a pretty good idea how t…

In 100 years we won't need it. In 100 years we'll be asking ourselves why we bothered with nuclear energy at all. Look at the fundamentals. There's more than enough free energy all around us. In 100 years the world population will be declining, and we will already have mined and refined all the metal we'll ever need. The energy use per person is already falling and will continue to fall. Solar will be vastly more che…

> The energy use per person is already falling and will continue to fall.

Source? I certainly wouldn't expect it to fall for the vast majority of the world's population.

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

#194

Post by HPsquared »

carlmr wrote: post #191
cyberax wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Options: 1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else. 2. You just build a house on the ground (without digging). Nothing bad happens. 3. Civilization collapses, nobody cares about the abandoned casks.

>1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else. The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller. Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not…

We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. Even without that, you could give the information visually in cartoon form.

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

#195

Post by HPsquared »

janalsncm wrote: post #181
karlerss wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Proliferation is the biggest hazard, I think. Proliferation of the fissile material remains a problem for much longer than the radiation from the fission products (which is only a few hundred years).

The best way is to burn up these actinides in a suitable reactor.

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

#196

Post by ben_w »

WalterBright wrote: post #136
crote wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting concentration. C14 isn't a significant issue because only one in every trillion carbon atoms is C14 - the rest is stable. Meanwhile, high-level nuclear waste is a densely concentrated soup of spicy elements, all neatly packed together to provide a really bad day to anyone stumbling onto it.

If it's densely concentrated, it can be spread out. If it's concentrated enough, it's still a source of usable energy.

With an unfortunate chasm between the two: the "immediate coma, you don't wake up before you bleed to death everywhere inside and out" level of radiation is an absorbed dose of a mere few tens of joules of ionising radiation per kilogram of body mass.

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

#197

Post by peterpost2 »

HPsquared wrote: post #194
carlmr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else. The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller. Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not…

We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. Even without that, you could give the information visually in cartoon form.

>We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Only because we found like one stone hundreds of years ago, if that was not the case we probably could not have done it.

>Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years.

[Citation needed] This seems like quite an assumption.

Anyhow, the situation he sketched was that some random guy develops a fields with cylinders 300 years from now, how reasonable is it that he somehow understand the language or goes through the effort to translate it? I would wager pretty slim, I can barely understand text in my own language from 100 years ago.

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

#198

Post by Maxion »

ilyt wrote: post #43
chrisbrandow wrote: post #31

“ The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view” I’m a little surprised that the emissions are so high per page view. I’ve never looked at co2 emission calculations for web pages before, but this seems a little high.

napkin math on https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 0.855 pounds/0.38kg of CO2 per kWh. or 0.38g per Wh so 3.6g would be ~9.4 Wh, let's assume 10Wh Site takes ~700ms to render, . So it would need to consume the equivalent of over 5kW of compute for a second to get that amount of CO2 per view. That assuming it would be 100% load, and not just "waiting on various network RTTs" I think it's safe to assume i…

I don’t think that metric is just the power usage of the servers, it’s more likely that it also includes the other energy costs of the company and its employees, and how much effort went in to working on the article itself.

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

#199

Post by Maxion »

Ekaros wrote: post #73
nabla9 wrote: post #7

The mechanical container solution is top notch, but 99% of the safety is just geological stability and selecting right place. Over 2 billion year old granite with very few cracks far from any fault lines. The worst possible scenario they calculated: 1) the nuclear canister would corrode in a thousand years instead of the calculated hundred thousand years, 2) and at the same time installed clay buffer surrounding cani…

I wonder if that area has Radon... Which likely would mean much higher dosage...

More or less the entirety of Finland has radon.

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

#200

Post by YuccaGloriosa »

peterpost2 wrote: post #197
HPsquared wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. Even without that, you could give the information visually in cartoon form.

>We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Only because we found like one stone hundreds of years ago, if that was not the case we probably could not have done it. >Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. [Citation needed] This seems like quite an assumption. Anyhow, the situation he sketched was that some random guy develops a fields with cylinders 300 years fro…

I think the best thing we can do is bury all the nuclear waste. And to avoid any future generation excavating it, mark it's location, and to stand the test of time, build a massive stone pyramid on top of it. In 5000 years people will be able to figure that out.
Post reply on HN