It’s not quite that simple, though. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be extremely geologically stable, and people still couldn’t swallow that pill.

You still need some level of containment along with environmental studies and the additional complexity of excavating a large underground cavern. Even then, someone will be concerned (possibly rightfully so) about groundwater contamination. Fracking is a prime example of how connected that all can be.

The problem with Yucca Mountain wasn't just the fact that they were storing waste there so much as the transportation of the waste through towns and cities. In this case, once the waste is created it is already in place to dispose of a mile underground solving another issue.

Mostly NIMBY problems that apply for the repository apply for transportation, but in lesser scale. Yucca was not as dry or geological stable as initially thought, and the requirements for "permanent" disposal are very stringent, so Yucca is not considered anymore for long-term storage.

I think the closer comparison would not be Yucca Mountain so much as deep bore hole research. You could essentially use the same equipment for boring your reactor hole to create disposal pits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text....

Maybe a breeder reactor would still be built to burn all this "waste" which is 90% fuel. Nuclear fission energy can become way cleaner when the political logjam around extracting and burning plutonium is unclogged.

I never really bought this tbh. Those transportation casks are insanely strong!

New Mexico recently had one explode due to improper materials used for absorption of liquid waste. To be frank I don't think it's worse than the chemical spills that happen routinely like the train in Ohio, but it isn't a small deal either.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump...

That must have been a lot of pressure! There are videos floating around I have seen of running a train engine into them at full speed.

Yeah, the testing is bonkers. But really nothing can withstand enough heat and pressure. Eventually your container just turns into a liquid. I love this video of the testing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmp3_CLx4VY

Wow. A perfect example of Silicon Valley's detachment from reality. Burn ass loads of VC to solve problems that don't exist while creating a host of new ones? Awesome.

A leak or accident in one of these deep-buried reactors could contaminate vast underground water reserves, rendering them unusable for generations. The environmental and human cost would be catastrophic and irreversible.

This should never be attempted.

I'm curious how you reached this conclusion. The same method for storing these reactors during operation is the best method for disposal of waste. Unless you are storing your reactor in an aquifer, a containment breach would be bolstered by thousands of feet of rock and concrete well casing. This is infinitely preferable to a vessel breach on the surface which will contaminate both air and water sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text....

I don't think either of those things need to cost much. Concrete casts are totally fine for long-term containment.

The cost isn't so much the materials themselves as the regulatory burden imposed by them. You need to guard them indefinitely even after the plant is shut down. You need to inspect them regularly. If the waste is a mile underground under a couple megatons of rock and concrete then it's not a lasting cost to the company that built it.

> The cost isn't so much the materials themselves as the regulatory burden imposed by them. You need to guard them indefinitely even after the plant is shut down.

These are all issues for fossil fuel extraction as well, and I have bad news for you about how this problem is currently handled.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with fossil fuel extraction is that it is slowly destroying our biosphere.

Exactly. Tons of abandoned oil wells left for the taxpayers to clean up. But of course we can’t demand that all new wells post bonds for the cleanup costs in advance, that would make them unprofitable.

It depends on what you define as long-term. For a few decades, with proper inspections, sure. For the geological time frames needed for nuclear waste disposal, definitely not.

> Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt.

Containment and disposal is largely a red herring. It's actually more or less a solved problem, from a safety perspective, because it turns out that the laws of exponential decay mean that you can just store it with proper shielding and it's safe for storage pretty much anywhere. I'm oversimplfying, but only a little bit - the public's perception of "nuclear waste" is extremely untethered to the actual reality.

The whole fiasco with Yucca Mountain was driven not by science, but by a desire to appease objectors by adhering to an arbitrary and unscientific perception of safety, not an actual assessment of the risks.

> while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines

Where are you seeing this? Nuclear energy has lost a lot of energy for active support, but active protest ("picket") of nuclear facilities is exceedingly rare these days. Wind turbines are a different matter: they're sustainable, but they're opposed by monied individuals/groups who don't want their beachfront views "ruined".

I agree with you that the requirements for permanent safe storage are very high - thousands of years with no leak, besides others - but nonetheless, even with simpler requirements, Yucca - or any other georep - was not deemed safe.

It wasn't so much deemed unsafe as not safe enough. Pretty much everyone involved threw up their hands and said screw it we'll store on-site which is WAY less safe than Yucca or deep bore sites. Meanwhile we have casks exploding in New Mexico which should have been buried 3 miles underground decades ago.

Current nuclear disposal methods may be acceptable, but they are also sub-optimal.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump...