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

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

#201

Post by belorn »

culopatin wrote: post #141
Manuel_D wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You can not just go around and develop land today. First you need to take a survey, soil samples, water quality control, and then during digging and construction there are all kind of different dangerous. Most countries in EU still have a bunch of bombs in the ground left over from world war 2, and they will be there until someone finds them and disarms them. Soil and water contamination from industry is anyone guess, and protected archeological finds are only more likely to be found in 300 years than it is today. There will never be a .docx file to tell you that a specific land was the dumping ground for lead by-products in 19th century.

Land developers are not allowed, nor will ever be allowed to just assume that some land has never been used before. Too much of history is undocumented, and what is documented is not reliable.

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

#202

Post by melagonster »

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…

Fortunately, if we have these energy, waste heat is not a problem. the amount of energy from the sun/go back to space/ keep by green house gas are far more than waste heat! do not forget this energy supply chain can reduce greenhouse gas emission to zero, who needs burning oil? we also have enough energy to capture greenhouse gas from atmosphere:)

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

#203

Post by alexcombessie »

It’s a great milestone to establish a complete & safe lifecycle for nuclear fuel.

From what I understood of current technology, recycling used nuclear fuel is too expensive and impractical today, so it makes economic sense to invest in long-term waste storage.

But I do wonder if in 30-50 years, the main way to deal with nuclear waste would be recycling. I saw an interesting interview of experts about this last month: https://youtu.be/IzQ3gFRj0Bc

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

#204

Post by VeninVidiaVicii »

belorn wrote: post #201
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…

You can not just go around and develop land today. First you need to take a survey, soil samples, water quality control, and then during digging and construction there are all kind of different dangerous. Most countries in EU still have a bunch of bombs in the ground left over from world war 2, and they will be there until someone finds them and disarms them. Soil and water contamination from industry is anyone guess…

I think the argument is clearly trite, .docx seems like a joke, and very more likely within the hundreds to thousands of years, people probably won’t even speak Finnish there anymore.

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

#205

Post by viraptor »

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…

> This seems like quite an assumption.

The issue with hieroglyphics is that we only had a relatively small sample. If full books remain, it's going to be much easier to recover meaning from scratch. It's very close to what we already do with LLMs.

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

#206

Post by oxfordmale »

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…

We have very poor understanding of Stonehenge, only build 5000 years ago.

Throughout history many advanced civilisations have been wiped out for one reason or the other, with only anedectotal stories left.

It is not unlikely the context around nuclear waste storage on the surface is lost within generations.

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

#207

Post by flangola7 »

viraptor wrote: post #205
peterpost2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> This seems like quite an assumption. The issue with hieroglyphics is that we only had a relatively small sample. If full books remain, it's going to be much easier to recover meaning from scratch. It's very close to what we already do with LLMs.

What books last 10000 years? What writing is performed today on a medium that will last that long? No one is carving into clay any more

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

#208

Post by flangola7 »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #175
jrflowers wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, this is just delusional. Nuclear waste can not be society ending. What does this sentence mean? >If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.

By my reading, it's the opposite, that only a society that has already ended (of some other cause) would be incapable of managing nuclear waste; dangerous levels of mismanagement would only occur in a postapocalyptic setting or similar.

Which civilization has lasted so long that nuclear waste mismanagement would never have become an issue?

Every nation, every civilization, falls in time.

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

#209

Post by oxfordmale »

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. You start digging, and you find these huge mysterious concrete cylinders with a funny symbols. These must clearly have been gift to their God(s) given the amount of work they put in. We should recover them, open them up and have buses of school kids admire them up close

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

#210

Post by flangola7 »

pfdietz wrote: post #61
nabla9 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the numbers reversed. In spent nuclear fuel 96% of the mass is the remaining uranium is still usable. Spend nuclear fuel (=LEU) used in these reactors have almost all potential energy left. You can use them if you close the nuclear fuel cycle with fast neutron reactors. The downside of it is that they FNR's are also good for making fuel for nuclear weapons.

That 96% of the mass is 238U. It's usable in breeder reactors. It's not useful for today's burner reactors. We have far too much 238U for those already; enrichment is the process of stripping out 238U from natural uranium. It would be utterly pointless to recover more 238U for them. We already have great stockpiles of depleted U sitting around. The stuff is not worth very much right now. Reprocessing can recover some…

Since it if just sitting around can I buy some? I would be happy to have a kilogram cube of DU
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