Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years

Re:Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k ... by godelski on Thursday January 27, 2022 @02:42PM (#30105300)

To be fair, most people don't understand the storage problem. They think we have to store it for hundreds of thousands of years (ironically we don't think about this with plastics, heavy metals, or other products that don't decay). But it's storing for hundreds of thousands of years and assuming that the future civilizations don't know our language, we lost maps of these sites, and there's no reason to dig them up. This is left over cold war era thinking where WW3 brings us back to the stone age. But in reality it's fine to sit on the material, in place, and hope we figure out better things in the next few hundred years that we can safely do that. I've heard a complaint that this is passing the buck, like we did with climate, but I think that's only true if we assume no technological advancements. Or in other words, we stop researching. But also nuclear waste is a slowly building problem with a positive feedback loop so I think the comparison is bad anyways. In a few hundred years we'll probably pretty easily be able to extract the 95% of the energy that's left in our waste material and put it to good use. After all, France can already do a bit. It's just not cost effective for most because it's cheaper to mine than recycle.

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Re:Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k ... by dpark on Thursday January 27, 2022 @03:12PM (#30105764)

> But in reality it's fine to sit on the material, in place, and hope we figure out better things in the next few hundred years that we can safely do that.

This is a very optimistic view. There are 56 nuclear power plants in the US alone. It is entirely believable that one or more of them will be shut down and then outright abandoned at some point in the next few hundred years, leaving nuclear waste with no long term containment story. Over the course of history, abandonment of once-important areas has been pretty common. I see no reason to believe it cannot happen to a nuclear plant.

I can easily imagine a plant being turned off and a future government deciding that it’s just not worth dealing with a proper decommissioning, so they just walk away. It’s easy to imagine this because it’s exactly the same stance you are proposing. “It’s good enough for now, someone else can deal with it later when magic (technical advancements) shows up.”

I’m also quite concerned about what happens if one of these “just store it on site” facilities gets bombed at some point.

> I've heard a complaint that this is passing the buck, like we did with climate, but I think that's only true if we assume no technological advancements.

Of course you’ve heard that complaint, because it is passing the buck. Betting on future technological advancements without actually investing in those technological advancements is 100% passing the buck.

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Re:Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k ... by godelski on Thursday January 27, 2022 @07:01PM (#30108856)

It's passing the buck but it also isn't a problem that needs to be solved for several hundred years. And you'll notice I said this isn't a problem as long as we keep researching, aka. not abandonment. My bigger point is that it wasn't like climate change where every day we ignore or don't solve the problem then the problem gets worse (a positive feedback loop). In the case of nuclear, this is not actually true. We also have a substantially larger timeframe to solve the problem. I believe it is naive to also believe that we can come up with a perfect storage solution (long term, doesn't rely on known languages, can handle apocalyptic events, loss of history, and many other factors that only matter when we're looking 10k years out). I think it is a bit naive to believe that a solution we could implement today would be a descent solution. It is better to continue researching and sitting on it (which is safe for now and the next few hundred years. Which is only unsafe because geological effects come into play). No matter what we do you can define it as "passing the buck" simply due to the underlying issue of humans being dumb.

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Re:Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k ... by thaumasiotes on Thursday January 27, 2022 @03:33PM (#30106141)

> Over the course of history, abandonment of once-important areas has been pretty common. I see no reason to believe it cannot happen to a nuclear plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Of course, that wasn't waste.

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Re:Sweden approves plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k ... by PaulHoule on Thursday January 27, 2022 @04:14PM (#30106788)

It's a reason why we need to implement a solution for nuclear waste. With the carbon crisis the fear of proliferation is more dangerous than proliferation.

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