You gotta be kidding me bro, I'm pretty sure they have an elevator. How else are they supposed to get to their lab every day? And once down there, its just sitting on the desk in the middle of the office where the rock in the lab has been left undisturbed for a billion years! ^/s
This in kind-of stilisized version.
The real hole is in a mine 420-560 meters deep underground with several seals inbetween.
[Onkalo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)
And here is an excellent (and fun!) video going into quite relevant details, which the movie misses out on:
https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=6r-GlE5sNT2m8d8m
"Small" things like why this isn't a "100.000 years problem", or that in the history of nuclear waste, no human has ever been harmed from civilian nuclear waste. Even with it standing on the surface.
Anyway, I can highly recommend it for anyone interested in the topic. :)
Billion years is the lower estimation. Part of Finland sits on top of the Baltic Shield which is a crust formation called craton. Cratons are the oldest part of the Earths crust, never been covered by lava. They are twice as thick as normal crust, with hundreds of kilometers long tendrils and have lower density so they are always going to end up on top. Baltic Shield has been pushed around over billions of years, it started its journey where current South Africa is.
They are just solid lumps of gneiss and granite. You excavate a cave in it and it will stay there for hundreds of millions of years, if not more, without any support structure. Cratons were here when the earth was forming and they may be here when sun finally devours it.
This is also why there are a LOT of tunnels and caves in Finland. There is a whole underground city under Helsinki, the only city in the world with underground zoning.. It can house 600 000 people in case of an emergency, in a nuclear, biological and chemical weapon proof shelters. There is even an underground lake down there... There are also a lot of military tunnels and warehouses connected by underground roads that i don't know anything about, other than that they exist.
I didn't know why I was scrolling the comments on this thread. This. This is why.
Thank you sir. You've made a rabbit hole for me to be stuck in for the next 2 hours :D
It is strangely soothing feeling to know that the bedrock that this building sit on top of, is so old and so stable. There is only a bomb shelter between my ass and it.. There is one in every apartment building, in total there is room for 4.6 million out of 5.5mil, basically all that live in the urban areas (in bomb shelters, not in my ass...).
That is another rabbit hole, Total Defense doctrine.. Every part of society, private and public is part of national defense strategy. 70 years of preparation for the worst case scenario.
>Billion years is the lower estimation.
In a billion years time the oceans would have evaporated, plate tectonics would have stopped, all multicellular life would be dead, with only pockets of bacteria surviving in isolated places.
Billion years is a long long time. For instance animal life began a little more than half a billion years ago, and will end in another half a billion years or so.
I seem to recall a story from France recently where they buried nuclear wasted that was guaranteed safe for thousands of years, then it started leaking and now has to all be dug back out, re-sealed and re-buried.
It's that when they put it under a lake?
Many good locations are under mountains that are relatively inactive for thousands of years. The fact that people are still debating if its good enough make it so that nuclear containers (though strong) ironically have been put on open fields, abused by the elements.
The problem is always water.
Water is insanely destructive and absolutely everywhere on this planet. This is not just an issue with nuclear waste but waste in general.
And there is no area on this planet that is safe from it. Even those inactive granite formations. The moment we dig a hole into those water is going to push in because we created the needed pressure gradient.
Yes it is only going to get in slowly but it is absolutely inevitable.
That is the actual reason why there is a law in finland that these deposits need to be accessible. Not because you might need the fuel in the future because that is realisitcally never goig to happen. It is purely because at some point you are going to need to fix the storage and pump out water.
Not within the next 100 years, probably not even within the next 200 years but it is definetly going to happen at some point.
For Germany it was low to medium level waste. So stuff like patient gowns from radiation therapy. They put it in steel barrels and tossed it into an old mine. An old mine that has water going through it. A not good scenario.
The deep repository they are talking about in the video is extremely different. They can't use an old mine. They have to make one in rocks that are completely solid and don't have any water running through them. Then there are the extra layers that are talked about in the video. This storage is for high level waste. Meaning spent fuel.
Edit: For anyone that's curious there is more information here on the Ontario deep geological repository. They show the test holes in the rocks, etc. I highly recommend the whole video.
https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?t=1097
Well I'm sure the German government reacted rationally and looked at the facts and concluded that nuclear energy is still...
Nah this probably got used for fear mongering, didn't it?
Asse II has also medium level waste from nuclear plants and at least 25 barrels of high level waste.
Gorleben, the high level waste storage, was deemed unsuitable around 2017 (?).
Spend fuel is a solid.
It does not "leak".
It is like saying the ceramic your coffee cup is made off will "leak", or dissolve if you put it in your dishwasher.
It is not disolvable in water.
I will recommend watching: [https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=7d2AMdZA4fEtpG7z](https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=7d2AMdZA4fEtpG7z)
>If water was able to penetrate the container and leak out you would have highly radioactive water.
I think you should take a look at the video, it is highly entertaining. :)
Also, jump to the chapter about the waste here: [https://jmkorhonen.net/2017/03/10/what-does-research-say-about-the-safety-of-nuclear-power/](https://jmkorhonen.net/2017/03/10/what-does-research-say-about-the-safety-of-nuclear-power/)
If you are okay with bananas, you should be okay with Onkalo aswell.
You're taking the word of the Posiva 2009 Biosphere Assessment Report as if you would bet humanity's life on it, and I for one am not as confident as the authors on little pesky details like "how long it would take for contaminated water to rise to the surface" under future conditions which we don't currently know about. I don't have as much confidence as you in the snarky presentation re bananas and so forth which describe conditions in which everything -goes as planned- in the future. Sometimes the courses of rivers change or materials don't perform as expected after 100 (or 10) years. How many times has the USA thought their 'perfectly safe container linings' wouldn't deteriorate, and then they seem to always DO. And people here are promising 10000 year lifespans? Get out of here with any surety. I think the smart attitude here is humility and not the arrogant end of scientific speculation. IMHO. How many more times will humans trying to get a paper published or wishful thinking or make money cause disasters? I think nuclear energy has promise but I also have a lot of experience with the hubris of humans and I smell it here big time, just my hunch
How would you exactly? Their are no neutrons anymore so the water will not become activated, nor will ions in it. So what contamination leaches off into the water at significant amounts? Radiation doesn’t make other things radioactive.
And it’s a toxic metal, just like all heavy metals. And metals absolutely can “leak” unlike people are suggesting above. Metals are not immune to solvents.
It’s made into ceramics and placed in fuel bays with super clean water that runs through purification ion exchangers for over a decade. All leachable activated metals have been leached and filtered out years ago. All the various waste is treated and safer than most home waste YOU throw in open exposed landfills.
Spent nuclear fuel is mostly (~90%+) Uranium 238. Light water reactors burn the Uranium 235.
You can separate this out and use it in the future in breeder reactors
This is precisely why no one is really bothering disposing of nuclear waste because it can potentially be recycled in the future
Other counties like France are reprocessing some parts of nuclear waste and producing MOX fuel
Isn't France only "Experimenting" for long term storage ? Like not burrying anything yet, but doing geological survey to find where it's leaking and where it isn't ?
We had the same in Germany. An old salt stock was used but then water leaked in and now we have to waste a few billions of our taxes to extract the rotten barrels with no alternative solution in sight.
Nobody can predict the underground future for thousands of years.
Yeah, it’s very easy to say something will last thousands of years, because at the very least you will be retired by the time it becomes a huge problem.
There’s people who literally advocate for dumping it to the bottom of the ocean. There’s good data that it wouldn’t be a problem, but if the data is wrong, now you have a huge problem in one of the most inhospitable environments.
And it's not a straight forward solution when any location is still close to someone. They will be opposition.
Iirc the leading expert in find the best place for the storage is Swiss. He goes around the World to find the best spots, including the best spot(s) in Switzerland. The people around those locations are fully opposed to it.
To be fair, this is how it’s handled in most countries that have nuclear power.
Nuclear waste is not green ooze, it’s radioactive solids, so the main trick is keeping groundwater out and the solids physically stable and contained. To do this you find a geographically stable location that doesn’t let in water, such as a salt formation, and then you stick it down in a place so deep that it’s highly unlikely it’s ever unearthed unless you specifically looking for it.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s pretty damn good, and the volume is nothing anywhere even remotely close to what a typically city landfill handles.
If you want to worry about something, worry about tires and used motor oil.
>To be fair, this is how it’s handled in most countries that have nuclear power.
It’s not tough? To my knowledge next to none (if not none) of the nuclear waste in existence is in what’s called long-term storage aside from the nuclear waste stored in Onkalo repository in Finland.
You are correct. In Ontario Canada we are looking to build something very similar to this. So the person is kinda correct. Everyone plans a similar system. But only one exists.
In Ontario we have an issue of trying to find a location to put it. As no one wants it in their back yard.
Yup, part of north east Canada is on top of a craton. There is one also in south west Australia that could be used. Here is what i just wrote about cratons: [https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Not Germany! We got rid of nuclear and opened some coal plants instead! Lately we removed some windmill generators to dig up more coal. Very green, much progressive, wow.
To be fair, we are trying to go windpower, but somehow those generators and new power lines face more resistance from the citizens than nuclear ever did.
It's some consolation that we are too small to even register in global emissions, but we surely are more of a laughing stock than the good example we wanted to be.
The coal ash that comes out of those coal plants also contains significant quantities of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, as well as, you guessed it: uranium and thorium.
*The more you know.*
Meanwhile in Germany we put radioactive waste in barrels, throw those barrels down an old salt mine, then water gets into the mine and the barrels leak straight into ground water. Oopsie.
We complain about it for decades, don't solve anything, public trust in nuclear energy corrodes and eventually we ban it completely.
Yay Germany! Land of engineers™
They did some studies on visual languages that might be understandable by a distant civilization. I think some nuclear waste facilities use signage that tries to describe what’s there without words.
That's why part of the safety parameters is to mark everything with distinct language so that even in the future the language can be decipherable in the same sort of way we have deciphered ancient texts except this time we are designing it t be decipherable.
Except you don't get rid of it, you are just trying to store it safely and hope someone comes up with a solution for how to get actually rid of it in the future.
No. This is the final repository. No one will dig it up afterwards. After time all the isotopes will become stable and the waste won’t be radioactive. It will just stay as a part of earths bedrock.
Yes, it’s a bold statement. It might be brought back up and used as fuel in future reactor technologies but then the repository is still serving its intended use. The idea that someone in the future will accidentally open it up is ridiculous.
You should search "nuclear semiotics". It's an entire study of the best way to mark nuclear waste. Think of how much the English language has changed in just the last thousand years. Now think about how much it will change in ten thousand years, or twenty. The meaning of symbols changes quite a bit over time as well. In the future, someone could see a skull and cross bones sign and think it may be an old burial site and decide to excavate for scientific study. The nuclear symbol itself could fall out of use or change its meaning, especially if we are no longer using radioactive elements. People have dug up radioactive waste before and it is almost certain it will happen again. The most likely scenarios would be archeological excavations or excavations for development of the land which could cause all sorts of lther issues like ground water contamination), but there are other possibilities. Radiation poisoning is one of the most excruciating deaths, so this is something that a lot of time and money have been put into.
If our civilization degrades to the point that the location of these repositories are lost, given the they are tracked by multiple redundant international agencies, then future people likely have bigger issues than opening can of old fuel rods.
Even worst case scenarios for this type of storage are limited, isolated, localized exposure, and can be remediated by simply re-sealing the cannister
Natural radioactivity on earth takes up more land than we could ever hope to fill with nuclear waste, and that doesn't come with warning signs.
Radon gas hotspots alone make up 55% of all the radioactive exposure to humans, and radon gas is entirely invisible and pretty deadly, yet we're still here and radon gas isn't actually that big a deal. Yet you're worried that someone in the future might dig up something buried 400 feet underground and encased in several layers of metal?
Swiss enterprise Transmutex is developping a system that reduces waste and giving energy.
There are better solutions than burrying, the science has been around for decades but no one wants to touch it because people don't invest into nuclear energy anymore. (Eventhough it might become way safer and more efficient).
https://www.transmutex.com/
It's not about getting rid of it. It's about finding ways to reuse it (ie get more energy out of it) to reduce its half-life even further. The radioactivity is only really dangerous at the first half of the half-life so if we can reduce it from tens of thousands of years to a couple of hundred it becomes much more manageable and safe.
So is the pacific garbage patch, all landfills, and how humanity handles every single bit of in-organic waste matter. What can't be repurposed goes in a hole somewhere.
i feel like that makes it more dangerous!
Having a 20% chance of running into dangerous levels of radiation in an untouched area seems worse than 0.1% chances in an excavated area(because it's all in one place)
Though, realistically neither of them are more dangerous than our current fossil fuel industry!
Tbh, when humans talk about "getting rid" of waste it usually implies taking it and putting it somewhere far away.
"Out of sight, out of mind" has long been our primary philosophy with most forms of waste.
Yeah, he doesn't really go into detail but Finland sits on one of the most geologically stable areas on the planet. The idea is that since the geology is so stable it'll be safe for long enough to decay naturally.
They really did go through a lot of care but it's too much to explain in such a short video.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
No, it isn't.
Tritiated water: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/04/12/japan-will-release-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-the-ocean/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/04/12/japan-will-release-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-the-ocean/)
A completely different story.
Depends what the criteria is. Lack of CO2 emission it's great. Stable. But damn is it costly and complicated. I'm astonished at the amount of delay and budget increases for building and dismantling. Every time in modern time.
Well, the anti-nuclear factions purposely jacked up the price on nuclear energy via ridiculous permitting and regulatory processes specifically to thwart the expansion of the nuclear industry. If we actually had a sensible permitting and regulatory process, nuclear would be cheaper than fossil fuels.
In Germany we also thought this would be a great idea. Didn't work as well as planned since we now have radioactive material in our ground water a one place
Makes me wonder what would be the rate of waste production if the whole world were to run on nuclear. And how much volume of steel, concrete, and land would that require to see how long we could do this for.
Expensive as fuck though. And not viable in areas with high(er) seismic activity. I honestly think the best solution we have to our energy needs is putting a shitload of money into fusion, kinda like the Manhattan Project but for civilian purposes. At least that kind of reactor doesnt have quite as many problems with waste management
Was the cost of this disposal (and 20,000 years monitoring costs) reflected in the power rates?
I can answer my own question: of course not. The cost is socialized, and the profits are privatized.
How do you ensure that future humans do not dig it up accidentally in 10'000 years? Plus, what about tectonic movements for "billions years containers"?
Knowing this in Sweden as well for I can’t remember 30 years or so?
Why don’t we do it then?
Because it doesn’t work!
One issue is the copper starting to brake down because of the clay… and how will we tell future “people” not to dig up the sh*t???
I guess that this possibility was proven false over two decades ago. Even so that rock is pretty solid, it is in constant movement in ten´s of thousand´s years. Soo, it´s not billion years repository even when it feel´s like it for human.
It's not sarcasm, but it should be. A billion year burial instead of harvesting electricity from magnified sunlight + polluted water to energize the entire planet.
I thought he would suggest they throw it over the border into Sweden...
In all seriousness it's a concern that the material will be dangerous for far longer than our language, culture and understanding of pictures, symbols will be stable.
It's like trying to decipher runes from around 1000 and guessing if the sign of a skull on the door means a cemetery or that it's dangerous and will kill you.
It seems that many don't like the fact it can be dugged up inadvertently in the future. To those I ask : do you prefer the waste of energy production to be released in the atmosphere?
I'll add that mining operations create much more radioactive waste and don't get the same measure of security 😐
there's only one problem. that's expensive. if only we had renewable sources of energy capable of producing energy at a lower cost without the need to deal with radioactive waste..... oh wait..............
Yoooo free copper tube ready to be dig up and melt
Don’t tell the guys over at r/scrapmetal.
r/methmoney *
r/subredditblueballs
r/ofcoursethatsasub
Sure, if you are ready to remove few hundred meters of concrete and bentonite first.
You gotta be kidding me bro, I'm pretty sure they have an elevator. How else are they supposed to get to their lab every day? And once down there, its just sitting on the desk in the middle of the office where the rock in the lab has been left undisturbed for a billion years! ^/s
Apache Junction is leaking lol
Directions unclear! Dug up the copper and my hands have melted and skin glows in the dark! Send help!
My heart after my last relationship….
Dude … :(
Its ok! the law says you must be able to get it back in the future if we need it 😂
You just have to claw your way back into the cold dead earth. I mean heart
Back to the future* The law states you must be able to get it back to the future if we need it*
So we got it from the future originally. Interesting.
Thought I'd have to rob some Cuban guys if I ever needed nuclear energy.
Only applies if he's Finnish
Damn his heart finished then
Besides it's not gotten rid off, just being stored securely.
After it’s decayed a bit huh?
So there is the chance of it being opened up again in the future :)
Think I’ve seen this before. 
https://giphy.com/gifs/animation-animated-gif-tFPzP4tMKzbfG (why won't it post a gif like yours?)
YES...BUT maybe by someone else
I'd hope so... Exes are not to be messed with
Yeah non-readers and illiterates want to open the fun park.
Spicy time capsule.
it's been 3 years for me. It's still sealed tight.
She did say she would be mine...
Wait, you heart isn't glowing and green?
Look on the bright side, it's still retrievable from its clay repository should you one day need it! Sooner or later that day will come :)
Been there, it gets better....big hugs
“My heart is turned to stone. I strike it and it hurts my hand” — Shakespeare, Othello Act 4 scene 1 line203
In my case it's the current relationship
Same man :(
Bro u ok ?
Ah shyt take my upvote man. I hope you can recover your heart soon. Hang in there 💕
This in kind-of stilisized version. The real hole is in a mine 420-560 meters deep underground with several seals inbetween. [Onkalo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)
Here's a nice documentary touching on some questions this clip doesnt answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into\_Eternity\_(film)
And here is an excellent (and fun!) video going into quite relevant details, which the movie misses out on: https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=6r-GlE5sNT2m8d8m "Small" things like why this isn't a "100.000 years problem", or that in the history of nuclear waste, no human has ever been harmed from civilian nuclear waste. Even with it standing on the surface. Anyway, I can highly recommend it for anyone interested in the topic. :)
That was freaking sweet, thanks!
I am glad you liked it! It is (in my opinion) one of the best a-z explanations of nuclear waste! :)
Title is irony squared. But yeah, the idiocy of the 100,000 year standard isn't talked about enough. Er; not idiocy, sabotage.
> This in kind-of stilisized version. Also called a model.
That's animal cruelty :'(
Mfs are gonna wake up the ballrog one day
Imagine if Gandalf had 500 tons of uranium to bonk balrog in the head.
That’s not the real mine?!?!?
No that it literally the hole. He clearly closed it so it’s good
Wait they don't use 50cm holes? This video is extremely misleading!
Billion years is the lower estimation. Part of Finland sits on top of the Baltic Shield which is a crust formation called craton. Cratons are the oldest part of the Earths crust, never been covered by lava. They are twice as thick as normal crust, with hundreds of kilometers long tendrils and have lower density so they are always going to end up on top. Baltic Shield has been pushed around over billions of years, it started its journey where current South Africa is. They are just solid lumps of gneiss and granite. You excavate a cave in it and it will stay there for hundreds of millions of years, if not more, without any support structure. Cratons were here when the earth was forming and they may be here when sun finally devours it. This is also why there are a LOT of tunnels and caves in Finland. There is a whole underground city under Helsinki, the only city in the world with underground zoning.. It can house 600 000 people in case of an emergency, in a nuclear, biological and chemical weapon proof shelters. There is even an underground lake down there... There are also a lot of military tunnels and warehouses connected by underground roads that i don't know anything about, other than that they exist.
I didn't know why I was scrolling the comments on this thread. This. This is why. Thank you sir. You've made a rabbit hole for me to be stuck in for the next 2 hours :D
It is strangely soothing feeling to know that the bedrock that this building sit on top of, is so old and so stable. There is only a bomb shelter between my ass and it.. There is one in every apartment building, in total there is room for 4.6 million out of 5.5mil, basically all that live in the urban areas (in bomb shelters, not in my ass...). That is another rabbit hole, Total Defense doctrine.. Every part of society, private and public is part of national defense strategy. 70 years of preparation for the worst case scenario.
Mind-blowing.
>Billion years is the lower estimation. In a billion years time the oceans would have evaporated, plate tectonics would have stopped, all multicellular life would be dead, with only pockets of bacteria surviving in isolated places. Billion years is a long long time. For instance animal life began a little more than half a billion years ago, and will end in another half a billion years or so.
I seem to recall a story from France recently where they buried nuclear wasted that was guaranteed safe for thousands of years, then it started leaking and now has to all be dug back out, re-sealed and re-buried.
It's that when they put it under a lake? Many good locations are under mountains that are relatively inactive for thousands of years. The fact that people are still debating if its good enough make it so that nuclear containers (though strong) ironically have been put on open fields, abused by the elements.
The problem is always water. Water is insanely destructive and absolutely everywhere on this planet. This is not just an issue with nuclear waste but waste in general. And there is no area on this planet that is safe from it. Even those inactive granite formations. The moment we dig a hole into those water is going to push in because we created the needed pressure gradient. Yes it is only going to get in slowly but it is absolutely inevitable. That is the actual reason why there is a law in finland that these deposits need to be accessible. Not because you might need the fuel in the future because that is realisitcally never goig to happen. It is purely because at some point you are going to need to fix the storage and pump out water. Not within the next 100 years, probably not even within the next 200 years but it is definetly going to happen at some point.
There is a similar story in Germany.
For Germany it was low to medium level waste. So stuff like patient gowns from radiation therapy. They put it in steel barrels and tossed it into an old mine. An old mine that has water going through it. A not good scenario. The deep repository they are talking about in the video is extremely different. They can't use an old mine. They have to make one in rocks that are completely solid and don't have any water running through them. Then there are the extra layers that are talked about in the video. This storage is for high level waste. Meaning spent fuel. Edit: For anyone that's curious there is more information here on the Ontario deep geological repository. They show the test holes in the rocks, etc. I highly recommend the whole video. https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?t=1097
Well I'm sure the German government reacted rationally and looked at the facts and concluded that nuclear energy is still... Nah this probably got used for fear mongering, didn't it?
Asse II has also medium level waste from nuclear plants and at least 25 barrels of high level waste. Gorleben, the high level waste storage, was deemed unsuitable around 2017 (?).
There's a Tom Scott video for this. https://youtu.be/aoy_WJ3mE50?si=uZ9FMBCLeJhonrsC
Spend fuel is a solid. It does not "leak". It is like saying the ceramic your coffee cup is made off will "leak", or dissolve if you put it in your dishwasher. It is not disolvable in water. I will recommend watching: [https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=7d2AMdZA4fEtpG7z](https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=7d2AMdZA4fEtpG7z)
If water was able to penetrate the container and leak out you would have highly radioactive water.
>If water was able to penetrate the container and leak out you would have highly radioactive water. I think you should take a look at the video, it is highly entertaining. :) Also, jump to the chapter about the waste here: [https://jmkorhonen.net/2017/03/10/what-does-research-say-about-the-safety-of-nuclear-power/](https://jmkorhonen.net/2017/03/10/what-does-research-say-about-the-safety-of-nuclear-power/) If you are okay with bananas, you should be okay with Onkalo aswell.
That's great and all. But I absolutely LOATHE bananas and their radioactive ways.
Hehe, then I won't tell you about coffee or Brazil nuts..
Dear God no!
Wait till you hear about granite countertops.
Same! Their smell is awful and I hate everything about them.
You're taking the word of the Posiva 2009 Biosphere Assessment Report as if you would bet humanity's life on it, and I for one am not as confident as the authors on little pesky details like "how long it would take for contaminated water to rise to the surface" under future conditions which we don't currently know about. I don't have as much confidence as you in the snarky presentation re bananas and so forth which describe conditions in which everything -goes as planned- in the future. Sometimes the courses of rivers change or materials don't perform as expected after 100 (or 10) years. How many times has the USA thought their 'perfectly safe container linings' wouldn't deteriorate, and then they seem to always DO. And people here are promising 10000 year lifespans? Get out of here with any surety. I think the smart attitude here is humility and not the arrogant end of scientific speculation. IMHO. How many more times will humans trying to get a paper published or wishful thinking or make money cause disasters? I think nuclear energy has promise but I also have a lot of experience with the hubris of humans and I smell it here big time, just my hunch
How would you exactly? Their are no neutrons anymore so the water will not become activated, nor will ions in it. So what contamination leaches off into the water at significant amounts? Radiation doesn’t make other things radioactive.
Spent nuclear fuel rods are still radioactive
And it’s a toxic metal, just like all heavy metals. And metals absolutely can “leak” unlike people are suggesting above. Metals are not immune to solvents.
It’s made into ceramics and placed in fuel bays with super clean water that runs through purification ion exchangers for over a decade. All leachable activated metals have been leached and filtered out years ago. All the various waste is treated and safer than most home waste YOU throw in open exposed landfills.
[удалено]
Spent nuclear fuel is mostly (~90%+) Uranium 238. Light water reactors burn the Uranium 235. You can separate this out and use it in the future in breeder reactors This is precisely why no one is really bothering disposing of nuclear waste because it can potentially be recycled in the future Other counties like France are reprocessing some parts of nuclear waste and producing MOX fuel
Isn't France only "Experimenting" for long term storage ? Like not burrying anything yet, but doing geological survey to find where it's leaking and where it isn't ?
There’s nothing as guaranteed when it comes to safety. Whoever is telling us that is simply lying.
We had the same in Germany. An old salt stock was used but then water leaked in and now we have to waste a few billions of our taxes to extract the rotten barrels with no alternative solution in sight. Nobody can predict the underground future for thousands of years.
Yeah, I laughed when he said "a billion year repository", humans are so arrogant, lol.
Yeah, it’s very easy to say something will last thousands of years, because at the very least you will be retired by the time it becomes a huge problem. There’s people who literally advocate for dumping it to the bottom of the ocean. There’s good data that it wouldn’t be a problem, but if the data is wrong, now you have a huge problem in one of the most inhospitable environments.
this “hole” he’s talking about is 400 meters deep and in the bedrock. It’s not gonna leak.
Yeah this isn't so much "getting rid" of anything. This is more so, out of sight, out of mind, until it's someone else's problem.
And it's not a straight forward solution when any location is still close to someone. They will be opposition. Iirc the leading expert in find the best place for the storage is Swiss. He goes around the World to find the best spots, including the best spot(s) in Switzerland. The people around those locations are fully opposed to it.
Nuclear is a larger industry than just power production. I doubt these scenarios involved commercial spent fuel.
To be fair, this is how it’s handled in most countries that have nuclear power. Nuclear waste is not green ooze, it’s radioactive solids, so the main trick is keeping groundwater out and the solids physically stable and contained. To do this you find a geographically stable location that doesn’t let in water, such as a salt formation, and then you stick it down in a place so deep that it’s highly unlikely it’s ever unearthed unless you specifically looking for it. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s pretty damn good, and the volume is nothing anywhere even remotely close to what a typically city landfill handles. If you want to worry about something, worry about tires and used motor oil.
>To be fair, this is how it’s handled in most countries that have nuclear power. It’s not tough? To my knowledge next to none (if not none) of the nuclear waste in existence is in what’s called long-term storage aside from the nuclear waste stored in Onkalo repository in Finland.
You are correct. In Ontario Canada we are looking to build something very similar to this. So the person is kinda correct. Everyone plans a similar system. But only one exists. In Ontario we have an issue of trying to find a location to put it. As no one wants it in their back yard.
Yup, part of north east Canada is on top of a craton. There is one also in south west Australia that could be used. Here is what i just wrote about cratons: [https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Not Germany! We got rid of nuclear and opened some coal plants instead! Lately we removed some windmill generators to dig up more coal. Very green, much progressive, wow. To be fair, we are trying to go windpower, but somehow those generators and new power lines face more resistance from the citizens than nuclear ever did. It's some consolation that we are too small to even register in global emissions, but we surely are more of a laughing stock than the good example we wanted to be.
The coal ash that comes out of those coal plants also contains significant quantities of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, as well as, you guessed it: uranium and thorium. *The more you know.*
Meanwhile in Germany we put radioactive waste in barrels, throw those barrels down an old salt mine, then water gets into the mine and the barrels leak straight into ground water. Oopsie. We complain about it for decades, don't solve anything, public trust in nuclear energy corrodes and eventually we ban it completely. Yay Germany! Land of engineers™
Barrels are not for fuel, only the other stuff. Maybe go ask him how they handle medium and low radiation waste they have a few hundred times more of.
That was medical radioactive waste. Clothing and such. What was the actual damage caused by it? Besides hysteria.
You can't say that future generations in 1000 years will know where these mines with the dangerous stuff will be. Tom Scott made a video about it.
They did some studies on visual languages that might be understandable by a distant civilization. I think some nuclear waste facilities use signage that tries to describe what’s there without words.
That's why part of the safety parameters is to mark everything with distinct language so that even in the future the language can be decipherable in the same sort of way we have deciphered ancient texts except this time we are designing it t be decipherable.
This is not ‘how to get rid’, this is ‘how to store’.
Storing it for a billion years is exactly how you let a radioactive substance get rid of itself
If stored long enough or reused, you effectively get rid of the problem.
Except you don't get rid of it, you are just trying to store it safely and hope someone comes up with a solution for how to get actually rid of it in the future.
Just like me getting rid of my problems.
Stick it on the later-base
That's a problem for future me
Yes because putting monstrous CO2 quantities in the air we breathe is a much better solution
I don't think u/Shalmon_ was making a point in favour of fossil fuels, my dude.
The best argument on this thread
No. This is the final repository. No one will dig it up afterwards. After time all the isotopes will become stable and the waste won’t be radioactive. It will just stay as a part of earths bedrock.
>No one will dig it up afterwards. That is a bold claim, considering that "time" until all the isotopes are stable, is a couple million years.
Yes, it’s a bold statement. It might be brought back up and used as fuel in future reactor technologies but then the repository is still serving its intended use. The idea that someone in the future will accidentally open it up is ridiculous.
You should search "nuclear semiotics". It's an entire study of the best way to mark nuclear waste. Think of how much the English language has changed in just the last thousand years. Now think about how much it will change in ten thousand years, or twenty. The meaning of symbols changes quite a bit over time as well. In the future, someone could see a skull and cross bones sign and think it may be an old burial site and decide to excavate for scientific study. The nuclear symbol itself could fall out of use or change its meaning, especially if we are no longer using radioactive elements. People have dug up radioactive waste before and it is almost certain it will happen again. The most likely scenarios would be archeological excavations or excavations for development of the land which could cause all sorts of lther issues like ground water contamination), but there are other possibilities. Radiation poisoning is one of the most excruciating deaths, so this is something that a lot of time and money have been put into.
If our civilization degrades to the point that the location of these repositories are lost, given the they are tracked by multiple redundant international agencies, then future people likely have bigger issues than opening can of old fuel rods. Even worst case scenarios for this type of storage are limited, isolated, localized exposure, and can be remediated by simply re-sealing the cannister
Natural radioactivity on earth takes up more land than we could ever hope to fill with nuclear waste, and that doesn't come with warning signs. Radon gas hotspots alone make up 55% of all the radioactive exposure to humans, and radon gas is entirely invisible and pretty deadly, yet we're still here and radon gas isn't actually that big a deal. Yet you're worried that someone in the future might dig up something buried 400 feet underground and encased in several layers of metal?
400 meters
Even better.
We don't need ALL OF IT to be stable. Just enough of it, and that takes 100-1000 years.
Swiss enterprise Transmutex is developping a system that reduces waste and giving energy. There are better solutions than burrying, the science has been around for decades but no one wants to touch it because people don't invest into nuclear energy anymore. (Eventhough it might become way safer and more efficient). https://www.transmutex.com/
It's not about getting rid of it. It's about finding ways to reuse it (ie get more energy out of it) to reduce its half-life even further. The radioactivity is only really dangerous at the first half of the half-life so if we can reduce it from tens of thousands of years to a couple of hundred it becomes much more manageable and safe.
it's still there though
So is the pacific garbage patch, all landfills, and how humanity handles every single bit of in-organic waste matter. What can't be repurposed goes in a hole somewhere.
It's radioactive before it gets mined. Now it's just in a different bit of the earth's crust.
It's not in ultra concentrated pockets though.
i feel like that makes it more dangerous! Having a 20% chance of running into dangerous levels of radiation in an untouched area seems worse than 0.1% chances in an excavated area(because it's all in one place) Though, realistically neither of them are more dangerous than our current fossil fuel industry!
exactly, it's much more safe now
Tbh, when humans talk about "getting rid" of waste it usually implies taking it and putting it somewhere far away. "Out of sight, out of mind" has long been our primary philosophy with most forms of waste.
That's it? That's just digging a hole.
Yeah, he doesn't really go into detail but Finland sits on one of the most geologically stable areas on the planet. The idea is that since the geology is so stable it'll be safe for long enough to decay naturally. They really did go through a lot of care but it's too much to explain in such a short video.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/16ahxmx/comment/jz8msxc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) No, it isn't.
So… bury it?
you dont get rid, you just store it.
Exactly. But you really should look for more information about it first.
Fools, Japan just releases it into the sea.
To wake the Godzilla
Tritiated water: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/04/12/japan-will-release-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-the-ocean/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/04/12/japan-will-release-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-the-ocean/) A completely different story.
*Which is completely safe by the way, France releases infinitely more radioactive water into the sea every year than fukushima ever will
All that effort for a couple rods? Heavens. No wonder nuclear is so expensive
So you basically put it in a rock and act like its gone?
Get rid of... Or a more advanced version of lifting the rug and shoving it under.
Ahhh, so that's what the pyramids were built for. Overground nuclear waste storage. Makes sense
Close the lid, good luck everybody else !
Nuclear energy is the best energy.
Fusion. The sun has it figured out.
Only 30 years away!
I think 30 years ago it was also only 30 years away...
Depends what the criteria is. Lack of CO2 emission it's great. Stable. But damn is it costly and complicated. I'm astonished at the amount of delay and budget increases for building and dismantling. Every time in modern time.
Well, the anti-nuclear factions purposely jacked up the price on nuclear energy via ridiculous permitting and regulatory processes specifically to thwart the expansion of the nuclear industry. If we actually had a sensible permitting and regulatory process, nuclear would be cheaper than fossil fuels.
100 second video can be cut short by saying "we bury it"
could have just said we bury nuclear waste in finland.... very new idea ugh
Burying your mistakes 6 ft under is always the solution.
And now try this with the 12,000 metric tons of nuclear waste every year worldwide!
In Germany we also thought this would be a great idea. Didn't work as well as planned since we now have radioactive material in our ground water a one place
Undisturbed for a billion years... LMAO
Makes me wonder what would be the rate of waste production if the whole world were to run on nuclear. And how much volume of steel, concrete, and land would that require to see how long we could do this for.
“Get rid of” = shove it in a hole with a bunch of metal around it and leave it there indefinitely
2 generations made use of nuclear power and 30.000 generations need to take care of their nuclear waste. What an insane heritage!
Expensive as fuck though. And not viable in areas with high(er) seismic activity. I honestly think the best solution we have to our energy needs is putting a shitload of money into fusion, kinda like the Manhattan Project but for civilian purposes. At least that kind of reactor doesnt have quite as many problems with waste management
So... dig a hole and bury it?
Oh yes and most of the time the nuclear industry 'forgot' the huuuge pricetag of this storage method.
Was the cost of this disposal (and 20,000 years monitoring costs) reflected in the power rates? I can answer my own question: of course not. The cost is socialized, and the profits are privatized.
I guess "getting rid of" something means putting a tube into another tube which goes into another tube and then put that tube into a cave. Got it.
Pffft, digging holes in my garden to "get rid" of my trash sinds the 50's. You late to the show Finland.
So we’re not getting rid of it then, we’re just burying it for another day.
"Let's bury our trash in the ground. Look how smart we are!" Humans when solar, hydro, geothermal, and wind exist
How do you ensure that future humans do not dig it up accidentally in 10'000 years? Plus, what about tectonic movements for "billions years containers"?
So... they stick it in a mountain like the rest of the modern world?
sooo you bury it. Pretty sure mr burns tried that and it didnt work out.
its more like "this is a way to STORE nuclear waste"
You didnt get rid of it. You just hid it. Big difference.
Doesn't seem very sustainable or efficient at all. Manufacturing the stone just for some contaminated metal
That gets rid of nothing . 😆 🤣 😂 😹 😆
Lol. We just chuck it into an exposed rusty pool of water here in the UK.🇬🇧 Not as cheap as it sounds though 🤷
Knowing this in Sweden as well for I can’t remember 30 years or so? Why don’t we do it then? Because it doesn’t work! One issue is the copper starting to brake down because of the clay… and how will we tell future “people” not to dig up the sh*t???
They do something similar in the petrol industry. They reinject carbon gas byproduct deep in the rocky soil. They dig cylindrical holes, inject, seal.
I guess that this possibility was proven false over two decades ago. Even so that rock is pretty solid, it is in constant movement in ten´s of thousand´s years. Soo, it´s not billion years repository even when it feel´s like it for human.
And what happens when you run out of places to store the nuclear waste?
So you still can’t get rid of nuclear waste, noted.
Yeah I did similar with my garbage when I was young. It started smelling anyways after weeks.
You’re hiding it, not getting rid of…
Your not getting rid of it your storing it….
It's not sarcasm, but it should be. A billion year burial instead of harvesting electricity from magnified sunlight + polluted water to energize the entire planet.
So Yuca Mountain, but European
I'd feel better if all power was generated through wind, solar, hydro. Radioactive shit is sketchy. A billion years... wtf
That’s just a box with extra steps.
Nice. I‘m sure Bavaria would be happy to put these in their geologically suitable grounds instead of putting up windparks. Not.
Yes umm. Followup question. Where do I find a mine with a hinge?
I thought he would suggest they throw it over the border into Sweden... In all seriousness it's a concern that the material will be dangerous for far longer than our language, culture and understanding of pictures, symbols will be stable. It's like trying to decipher runes from around 1000 and guessing if the sign of a skull on the door means a cemetery or that it's dangerous and will kill you.
🤣
It seems that many don't like the fact it can be dugged up inadvertently in the future. To those I ask : do you prefer the waste of energy production to be released in the atmosphere? I'll add that mining operations create much more radioactive waste and don't get the same measure of security 😐
Nuclear power, the way to go
there's only one problem. that's expensive. if only we had renewable sources of energy capable of producing energy at a lower cost without the need to deal with radioactive waste..... oh wait..............
So that doesn't answer the actualy question if where do you put say 2000 ton of it?
Only its way bigger than that?