
Long-Term Thinking and Nuclear Waste - pmoriarty
http://blog.longnow.org/02017/03/16/the-other-10000-year-project-long-term-thinking-and-nuclear-waste/
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philipkglass
I consider these passively-stable waste disposal solutions that are supposed
to last 10,000-1,000,000 years without maintenance over-engineered and founded
on dubious assumptions. I think that something like surface dry cask storage
in a dry, geologically stable area is a lot better. The facility should have
ongoing monitoring and the capability to re-cask units every few decades or
centuries. If there's some weird failure mode that can't be discovered in
artificial accelerated aging tests, future caretakers will be much better
poised to cope with the problem if they actually have access to the waste. You
don't need to try to invent a language that will survive into deep time, you
don't have to use gargantuan safety margins to in an attempt to offset the
unknowns of deep time, and so on.

What if the maintainer-civilization collapses? And what if nobody a thousand
years from now knows how to build steel and concrete vessels or detect
ionizing radiation? The somewhat cold but IMO correct answer is _then those
future low-tech humans will not suffer much risk from our spent fuel,
relatively speaking._ Making steel and concrete, making radiosensitive
photographic emulsions -- these are 19th century technologies. If humans of
the distant future don't have even 19th-century-equivalent technology, they
probably have such high ambient morbidity and mortality from infectious
disease that leaking nuclear waste will not much diminish their quality nor
quantity of life. Not to mention that the most dangerous components of spent
fuel -- short- and medium-lived fission products -- will be diminished a
billion-fold or more after 1,000 years pass.

Spent light water reactor fuel fresh from the reactor is orders of magnitude
more hazardous per unit mass than any stable element. But after 1,000 years or
so the hazard is greatly diminished. At that point it's more akin to a
mundanely-hazardous waste like cadmium. Nobody plans how to communicate the
hazards of cadmium exposure into geological time even though it endures
forever.

~~~
pdkl95
> over-engineered and founded on dubious assumptions

Not only is it over-engineered, it's incredibly wasteful. Eventually we will
move to other reactor designs that utilize more than just a few percent of the
useful isotopes in the fuel. With several types of breeder rectors and/or
reprocessing a lot of that "waste" is potential fuel.

I suspect most people don't understand just how _little_ fuel is required for
nuclear power. We are used to the scale of chemical fuels and don't have an
experience with the massive difference in energy density. The _chemical_.
_mining_ , and other industries associated with the Superfund have already
caused an incredible amount of damage that we will be cleaning up for the
foreseeable future. I'd much rather live near nuclear waste stored in easily
manage dry casks over any of the sites with e.g. PCB or heavy metal
contamination.

~~~
inetknght
Yeah I'm not a chemist but it always strikes me as odd that "hazardous nuclear
waste" cannot be recycled. Even now there are ways to capture carbon waste
(eg, genetically-engineered carbon-eating bacteria et al). I find it hard to
believe that we won't have a way to capture radiation in the future, or (even
better) utilize the radiation-producing materials in subsequent reactions.

~~~
bsder
> I find it hard to believe that we won't have a way to capture radiation in
> the future

The problem is the energy density. Nuclear reactions are soooo much more
energetic than chemical that it's ridiculous.

"Capturing" a gamma ray is really hard. Beta particles are "easier", but you
still have to handle a _LOT_ of them.

And cracking the nucleus apart is what you were doing in the first place
generating energy from it. The best bet is to use reactor technology that
actually burns up the waste almost completely rather than leaving 95% of it
intact.

The problem is that the superpowers _like_ their reactors that can give
Plutonium. Until the a country decides it wants _power_ rather than _weapons_
and designs a reactor for that, we're going to continue all this political
dancing.

------
ChuckMcM
I get very frustrated when articles like this repeat things like this comment:

 _" “The issue of what to do with nuclear waste is a clear and present danger
to every human life within 100 miles of San Onofre,” said Charles Langley of
the activist group Public Watchdogs."_

That is demonstrably untrue, the nuclear waste in dry cask storage is, _at
most_ a danger to people within 100 meters of the storage area *should the
cask be destroyed." The stuff just sits there. And the casks keep the neutron
flux so low that it doesn't even know there is other material nearby.

We have examples of this sort of waste that has been 'stored' for thousands of
years already, its in the "reactors" in Gabon.

------
jakub_g
Semi-related: If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend "Plutopia"
[1] book which describes in great detail the history of plutonium production,
and the consequences of it, near Richland, Washington and Ozyorsk (Russia).

It significantly changed my view on the nuclear energy. Not necessarily
because it's inherently bad, but when big money is at stakes and you have
incompetent people managing stuff, things can go pretty wild.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Plutopia-Families-American-
Plutonium-...](https://www.amazon.com/Plutopia-Families-American-Plutonium-
Disasters/dp/0190233109)

~~~
philipkglass
I will second the Plutopia recommendation, with a caution. The author tries
too hard (IMO) sometimes to narratively equate Richland and Ozyorsk in terms
of contamination. By the numbers -- and there are numbers in the book --
Ozyorsk suffered _far_ worse contamination. At the Ozyorsk site the ambient
environment suffered far worse exposure, plutonium workers suffered far worse
exposure, and nearby populations suffered far worse exposure.

But that's not to give the Hanford site a free pass. It is creepy and
infuriating how the operators undertook casual large scale experiments and
covered up accidents. It's doubly infuriating how locals with good plutonium
jobs would turn a blind eye to, or turn against, people who were harmed on the
job and whose medical/safety complaints threatened the illusion that
everything was great.

~~~
ianai
Can you offer a good link for the Richland site?

~~~
philipkglass
I read _Plutopia_ about 2 years ago and at certain points I recall searching
Google Scholar and HathiTrust for further quantitative information about the
Ozyorsk and Richland sites and other topics raised in the book. There is some
quantitative information in the book too but I wanted to dive deeper. I don't
know if there is any web site that presents the social Faustian bargain of
Richland's "atomic city" years as well as the book does.

------
Animats
If it were not for the political problems, it wouldn't be that hard. Pick some
hard-rock mountain in an unpopulated geologically stable area that hasn't
changed much in the last 20 million years or so. North and South Dakota have
mountains like that. Drill tunnels, well above the water table. Encapsulate
high level nuclear waste in glass and put that in big stainless steel
thimbles. Lower those into holes in the tunnels.

France does something like this.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This was essentially the Yucca mountain initial plan. I found it interesting
(having been a Nevada resident at one time) that glass passivation which is
both durable and very difficult to reverse, was opposed by interests who want
the waste to be stored in such a way that it can be reprocessed into weapons
material (or presumably additional fuel). All of the papers on why it
glassifying waste was "bad" came from Westinghouse :-)

~~~
justaguyonline
Just out of curiousity, if that was basically the "initial plan" for Yucca
mountain, what did the plan eventually become?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well the current current plan is do nothing as far as I can tell. But the
original vitrification plan was replaced with a casking plan which allowed the
material to be removed (and recovered).

The sad thing is that you don't need a lot of 'high security' around a cave
filled with vitrified nuclear waste, you can't use the glass for anything
useful. But you do if your cave is filled with casks that can be opened and
the contents removed and then aggregated into piles, or wrapped around a truck
bomb to be distributed by detonating the now 'dirty' bomb.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It's a damn shame the US won't proceed with the vitrification method; there is
ample quantity of glass containing lead from CRTs sitting in warehouses
waiting to be recycled (that is not economically feasible to be recycled, so
it sits in warehouses) that would be perfect for the vitrification process.

~~~
Animats
Now that's a good idea. Are there still stockpiles of leaded glass?

~~~
toomuchtodo
[http://boingboing.net/2017/02/17/millions-of-lead-filled-
crt...](http://boingboing.net/2017/02/17/millions-of-lead-filled-crts-h.html)

------
kisstheblade
I never understood what the problem is. This page
[http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/](http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/)
has great information about nuclear energy. The gist is that there are no
problems, just "stupid" people ("radiation is scary") and policies.

I never really see this referenced anywhere. Is there some problem in this
analysis or has this been "debunked" somewhere? It's a very old paper.

For example nuclear waste disposal
[http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html](http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html)

Quote:

For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to
convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and
simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we
don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power
plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities,
spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood.
Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In
fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all
the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the
radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above
its present level from natural radioactivity.

~~~
philipkglass
I would say that a significant part of it has been debunked by ongoing events.
For example, here the author talks about the then-future AP-600 reactor design
that later became the AP1000:

[http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html](http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html)

"Probabilistic risk analyses yield estimates that a core damage accident can
be expected only once in 800,000 years of reactor operation, and that there is
less than a 1% chance that this will be followed by failure of the
containment. This makes the AP-600 a thousand times safer than the current
generation of reactors. It is also much simpler, reducing the number of valves
by 60%, large pumps by 50%, piping by 60%, heat exchangers by 50%, ducting by
35%, and control cables by 80%. The volume of buildings required to have a
very high degree of earthquake resistance is thereby reduced by 60%. _It is
estimated that the plant can be constructed in 3 to 4 years. All of these
factors contribute to reducing the cost._ "

In actual fact, the AP1000s under construction are more than 3 years behind
their original schedules, both in the US and China. Sanmen Unit 1 was
originally supposed to take 5 years to become operational and if it starts
this year, as currently projected, it will have been 8. Costs have escalated
in tandem with schedule slippages.

In the 1970s and 1980s EDF in France demonstrated that a steady commitment to
reactor builds _can_ produce reactors on a predictable schedule at acceptable
cost. The degree of uniformity and long term commitment required seems to be
incompatible with market competition. Since EDF ceased to be a state-owned
electricity monopoly in France in the late 1990s, it has struggled to build
new reactors. Current reactor projects it's involved with are disastrously
late and over-budget. Since it no longer has insulation from political
oversight and market forces, I will also guess that EDF will not get to just
try again until it can complete new-design builds predictably.

Per unit of generated energy, measured by human morbidity and mortality,
nuclear power has a very good safety record. It has unpredictable schedules
and costs that tend to the high side. Some of the proposals for reducing costs
are bad (just deregulate nuclear power!); others are worse (make it immune to
lawsuits; stop letting the public vote about it; don't let politicians make
decisions about it).

The elephant in the room is that fossil power doesn't have its externalities
priced in while nuclear does (at least to a much greater degree). In theory, a
carbon tax could make all kinds of non-fossil energy more competitive against
fossil energy without technology-specific incentives from the government. In
practice, there are even more members of the public and the donor class who
hate internalized emissions costs than who hate nuclear power. Even if you
pass a carbon tax now it can be quickly repealed later, as Australia's example
shows. Nuclear reactors need to operate for decades to justify their initial
construction.

------
thangalin
Our nearest star is a perfectly fine nuclear waste storage facility. Humanity
--in much shorter timespans than those proposed for subterranean storage--
could perfect a radiation-hardened space elevator, or other mechanism, capable
of reliably transporting such waste to low-Earth orbit. Once in space, nudging
the dry casks sunward is a solved problem.

As of 2004, the estimated cost for a space elevator was $6.2 billion USD.[1]

Others have written on this topic[2], but do not account for technological
progress. Today it is prohibitively expensive and dangerous to shoot nuclear
waste into the sun. In 100 years, the cost per kilogram will have dropped by
orders of magnitude and the reliability of orbital delivery will probably
exceed five nines. Achieving escape velocity[3] will be a fraction of today's
costs.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics#Cost_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics#Cost_estimates_for_a_space_elevator)

[2]: [http://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-
wa...](http://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-
the-sun/)

[3]:
[http://www.adastrarocket.com/aarc/VASIMR](http://www.adastrarocket.com/aarc/VASIMR)

~~~
taktoa
are you aware of the fact that the Δv to "fall" into the sun is _more_ than
the Δv required to get to, for example, Pluto? it would be way cheaper to drop
nuclear waste into Jupiter, though limited launch windows could be an issue.
dropping nuclear waste into an active volcano would also be more than likely
orders of magnitude cheaper.

~~~
jewbacca
Their second citation[2] is actually all about this (... I realized as I was
25 minutes into writing my own version).

"nudging the dry casks sunward" is still a really bad choice of words, given
the massive prevalence of that particular space travel trope.

\----

[2] [http://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-
wa...](http://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-
the-sun/)

------
Sami_Lehtinen
This is one proposed experimental solution in category "deep geological
repository".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)

Related nice documentary where they cover the questions:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_\(film\))

------
marze
Dry casks at the reactor site are totally the correct approach. It should be
made law, that all high level waste be so stored on site.

Also, a investment fund, a modest one, should be created to fund the re
packing of the waste 50 to 100 years from now. It is unclear exactly how long
these casks will function without leaking.

The communities around the reactors benefited economically from the jobs, it
is only fair they tend the waste.

~~~
dahdum
Am I correct that you are against nuclear energy? That law sounds like a
poison pill with the effect of reducing future plant development.

What's wrong with requiring it to be shipped to Yucca Mountain and charging
fees into investment funds for long term management? Jobs and benefits for
both communities, no?

~~~
marze
I like nuclear fusion. Fission has the risk of meltdown, and isn't
economically competitive without epic subsidies. So yes and no.

This current situation is totally ironic and shows just how ignorant people
are. The nearby residents didn't object to an operating reactor but do object
to casket-encased waste. The risks involved with an operating reactor are
enormously larger. Casks are safe.

------
kodfodrasz
It amuses me that people so often fall for the "renewables will have their
problems solved in 10 years" mantra, while they say that reprocessing nuclear
waste won't be solved in 10000 years.

------
colemannugent
As one of the comments on the site point out, this is really rooted in
radiophobia.

By the most conservative estimates we should have fusion that can reliably
yield more energy than put in within around 500 years. With fusion (and the
energy abundance it will bring) we can transmute that waste into less
dangerous elements [1], and perhaps even into useful rare metals.

The most interesting thing about this article to me is how they fail to
mention the amount of radiation involved. If you are interested in just how
big of a scale you need to talk about radiation, I would look at xkcd's
brilliant chart [2].

1: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/could-fusion-
clean-u...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/could-fusion-clean-up-
nuclear-waste)

2: [https://xkcd.com/radiation/](https://xkcd.com/radiation/)

