I base it on common sense and several known examples. The common sense part is that we know that we have to keep managing the waste after the plants no longer produce any energy, or money. Managing the waste costs money, and since we can't make estimates for even a decade into the future it's self-evident that we don't know what 500 years of storage will cost.
Secondly from known examples where the logic has already proven itself in practice.
One example is France, where the taxpayers have recently had to pay over 50 bn euros in costs that were never planned or paid for by the operator.
Another example is the cleanup costs for the German Asse II storage site. Several billion Euros for the cleanup alone, and the things you extract from that site will have to be stored someplace else at high cost as well, so the costs will keep ticking. Operators don't pay that either, taxpayers do.
Another example is Sweden, where they have a storage facility for second-rate waste, (i.e. low-intensity waste), which is mandated to operate for at least 500 years. It is currently employing over 100 highly qualified people and is going to grow over the next few decades.
This facility is currently underfunded for its planned operations, and please note that this is not even accounting for the costs of handling high-intensity waste. This site will only manage secondary waste, like contaminated pipes, pumps, filters and such - so the actual total costs are severely underestimated. Taxpayers in Sweden will have to pay these costs in the years to come.
Take the UK as an example. It’s estimated that to decommission our former nuclear sites (built between the 1950s and 1980s) will cost around £260 billion[1] and take 120 years to complete.
This includes the cost of decommissioning closed nuclear plants, disposing of waste, and cleaning up contaminated sites.
The UK is very much an outlier in the nuclear sector as they went with impossible to refurbish gas cooled reactors. Their experience is unlikely to resemble other countries.
In the US at least, the cost for all decommissioning and fuel handling are built into the cost of electricity sold by law.
>In the US at least, the cost for all decommissioning and fuel handling are built into the cost of electricity sold by law.
That was the plan, but it has failed. The mechanism varies but the end result is the same - the operator doesn't pay the actual costs, so they don't charge the actual costs from the customers. The actual costs are paid by taxpayers from some anonymized bucket of money, like a government entity.
As an example, the DOE has so far paid over 100 million USD to SMUD for the decommissioned Rancho Seco plant and will continue to pay for decades more. The operator doesn't pay - the government does.
This has been proven to be true in best-case scenarios like the US, France, Germany and Sweden, and of course once anything deviates from best-case the costs become astronomical almost immediately (Japan).
Without doing a lick of research into the particulars of this plant the statement scans based on storage requirements for high level radioactive waste alone. Some of this shit has to be stored for several multiples of recorded civilization before it becomes anything like safe. We're talking borderline geologic time scales.
Fortunately that's not true. The fission products that are actually dangerous only stick around for 300 to 600 years [1]. After that, you'd have to ingest what is left to be harmed. We have existing facilities [2] in the US where we can bury waste in such a way that it essentially becomes crystalized in salt after 100 years. Water moves centimeters per billion years in this salt. This one facility could easily service the entire country in perpetuity, even with 100x increase in nuclear energy.
Despite what the antis will tell you, the waste aspect of nuclear energy is overwhelmingly positive. And the crazy thing is, spent nuclear fuel isn't even waste. 90% of the energy is still in there. So why on earth would you bury it?
Except it is true because Pu-239 and other transuranic isotopes absolutely are a thing. In the case of Pu-239 it's half-life is ~20,000 years. Given the 10 half-life minimum storage requirements for high level radioactive waste, we're at 200,000 years, which is 40 times the length of recorded human history or if you prefer 2/3 of the time our species has provably existed on the planet.
Nope, half life is inversely proportional to danger. The longer the half life, the less dangerous it is to handle an isotope. You can hold Plutonium and Uranium in your hand without issue.
You'd have to eat lots of Pu-239 to get sick and we know this for a fact unfortunately because of the insane story of Albert Stevens [1] who got the highest radiation dose of any known human and lived to be 79. He was one of 18 people injected with plutonium. None of the patients died from the injections. Why injection instead of ingestion? Because the body is actually very bad at absorbing Pu when it is eaten.
Let me just emphasize again that we INJECTED A MAN WITH PURE PLUTONIUM and he was fine. Nuclear waste is not the problem you think it is.
You can hold these isotopes in your hand for how long without issue? I've got known alpha and gamma emitters in the house as we speak (side effect of fossil hunting in the Morrison formation) so I'm not exactly harboring some delusion that radioactive == WERE ALL GOING TO DIE. You don't get to use short-term exposure non-effects to sweep long term exposure effects under the rug, and given the only institution in recorded history that has maintained it's existence long enough to even start considering them viable to manage a nuclear waste containment project is the Catholic Church I'd say yeah it absolutely is the problem I think it is.
Indefinitely since they are alpha emitters. This kind of radiation is stopped by almost anything like paper and the dead outer layer of skin and so is harmless unless you ingest the source.
Fact is, the waste that everyone is worried about (used nuclear rods) is not actually waste. 90%+ of the energy is still in there. It's just that the dominant reactor technology isn't designed to extract it. It would be dumb to bury this energy. It would be better to reprocess it like France does or even better, build the kinds of reactors that can directly use it as fuel.
Then you're left with fission products that you can bury it several kilometers underground in a deep borehole using oil/gas technology. It will naturally decay away in 300 to 600 years. Remember, most industrial toxins are toxic forever. There is no amount of time that will render it safe, and we don't even particularly try to isolate it because there's so much. It is only for nuclear waste that we try so hard. And it's only feasible because there's so little of it. All the spent nuclear rods (civilian) the US has EVER produced in 70 years fits in a football field at 30 feet high. Meanwhile a single coal plant produces 1100 tons of just ash a DAY. Not to mention all the air pollution and greenhouse gases. A single plant.
The waste aspect of nuclear energy is amazingly convenient in comparison.
Nah. You ignore the fact that alpha emitters (like literally anything else) can crap up their surroundings with micro-particles, and while you might be perfectly happy to hold an alpha emitting isotope in your hand you're gonna feel a lot different once you start ingesting them. As stated above your 600 year timescale is off by close to three orders of magnitude, and you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move. End of the day you're dead-ass wrong, as is evidenced by the fact that longterm stable storage of high level nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem despite the technology you're proposing having existed in some capacity for roughly a century before the first functional nuclear power plant went online.
> you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move
That's why you bury it in rock where it doesn't move and we know it doesn't. Like the Permian Basin or where the Oklo natural reactors occurred in Gabon.
Oh yes, did you know nature formed fission reactors billions of years before we did ever existed? This always pisses off the hippies when I tell them. And guess what? The fission products from this natural process moved mere centimeters over 2 billion years.
This is a solved problem. It's just that some people desperately want it not to be.
Nuclear waste contains a lot more than plutonium (and also a lot more plutonium than was injected into Albert Stevens).
The sad fact is that nobody has correctly estimated how big a problem nuclear waste is. We keep having to pay more for it than any previous estimate predicted.
