Experts are trying to come up with the best way to warn Earth's future inhabitants — whether 10,000 or 100,000 years from now — what precisely lies under their feet.
Nuclear waste management is a solved problem, conceptually it is quite simple and elegant.
You litterarly just dig a hole, put the waste there and fill the hole in.
Practially you need to dig a deep hole in stable bedrock, put the spent fuel in special fuel containers which are put in the hole, which is backfilled.
Here in Scandinavia we have stable bedrock and technology to drill into it, I have for several years asked myself why we don’t get into the international nuclear waste management business, nuclear waste takes up a surprisingly small ammount of physical space, so Sweden, Finland and Norway could just build one facility each and start selling space in them to other nations.
I have also thought about using the waste to boost geothermal power, spent nuclear fuel will still generate a bit of heat, so run geothermal loops around the main tunnel, I realize that the ammount of heat generated by the spent fuel would be limited, but it would still be there and with geothermal heat pumps we can use the extra heat energy to safely heat houses.
I would have zero issues with it if the government decided to build a spent nuclear fuel permanent storage site in my small town.
Please note however, I only see nuclear power as an interim solution, something that will power us through the next 100-150 years, and quickly phase out fossil fuel power generation, while we buy ourselves time to build sustainable power generation that works.
I did mention that I was talking about a practical solution, not a political one.
Practically, this is a fairly simple solution, poltically, it is a mess, a mess driven by unfounded fears and demands for unrealistic threat mitigation.
The fact that we are looking into how to warn a civilization 100 000 years in the future might be admirable, but it is a ridiculous stopping point.
Current plan is to build a storage site 500m in the bedrock, fill the site with waste, and backfill the site, then seal it and leave it.
This is fine.
Any society capable of drilling 500m into the bedrock can be assumed to have knowledge of radiation, so they would detect the material as being dangerous and act accordingly.
In the case I am wrong, and a society has zero idea of radiation yet manage to get to the site, it would quickly be abandoned as the society figure out that going down there makes people sick, if they have religion it would probably classify the site as cursed and forbid their members from going down there.
It is fine.
Let’s focus on our current problems first, with the current storage system, that being pepetual temporary storage, it is certain that shit will leak into an active environment sooner or later without maintenance, a far worse problem than if we set up an underground permanent storage site.
Nuclear waste management is a solved problem, conceptually it is quite simple and elegant.
You litterarly just dig a hole, put the waste there and fill the hole in.
Practially you need to dig a deep hole in stable bedrock, put the spent fuel in special fuel containers which are put in the hole, which is backfilled.
Here in Scandinavia we have stable bedrock and technology to drill into it, I have for several years asked myself why we don’t get into the international nuclear waste management business, nuclear waste takes up a surprisingly small ammount of physical space, so Sweden, Finland and Norway could just build one facility each and start selling space in them to other nations.
I have also thought about using the waste to boost geothermal power, spent nuclear fuel will still generate a bit of heat, so run geothermal loops around the main tunnel, I realize that the ammount of heat generated by the spent fuel would be limited, but it would still be there and with geothermal heat pumps we can use the extra heat energy to safely heat houses.
I would have zero issues with it if the government decided to build a spent nuclear fuel permanent storage site in my small town.
Please note however, I only see nuclear power as an interim solution, something that will power us through the next 100-150 years, and quickly phase out fossil fuel power generation, while we buy ourselves time to build sustainable power generation that works.
My response:
I did mention that I was talking about a practical solution, not a political one.
Practically, this is a fairly simple solution, poltically, it is a mess, a mess driven by unfounded fears and demands for unrealistic threat mitigation.
The fact that we are looking into how to warn a civilization 100 000 years in the future might be admirable, but it is a ridiculous stopping point.
Current plan is to build a storage site 500m in the bedrock, fill the site with waste, and backfill the site, then seal it and leave it.
This is fine.
Any society capable of drilling 500m into the bedrock can be assumed to have knowledge of radiation, so they would detect the material as being dangerous and act accordingly.
In the case I am wrong, and a society has zero idea of radiation yet manage to get to the site, it would quickly be abandoned as the society figure out that going down there makes people sick, if they have religion it would probably classify the site as cursed and forbid their members from going down there.
It is fine.
Let’s focus on our current problems first, with the current storage system, that being pepetual temporary storage, it is certain that shit will leak into an active environment sooner or later without maintenance, a far worse problem than if we set up an underground permanent storage site.