this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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It's not really needed. Waste is a boogeyman, but not really a problem. It takes an incredibly small volume to store the waste, and it can be reduced with reprocessing to run in the exact same reactors.
At some point in the future when there actually is a huge amount of waste causing issues, then it might make sense to build a reactor to use it.
~ 2019 https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
Last "brilliant" plan I heard was dumping it in a hole deep enough we'd never need, nor be able to recover it.
A quick question . Other than a suprisingly lot of complexity involved in diggin the hole of sufficient size and depth why wouldnt it work ( or is that the reason )?
It would work. Much like every other sweeping of something under the rug, hiding it elsewhere for it to be a problem later always works for the person throwing it away.
After all, why would we ever wish to extract the remaining U~238~ from the spent fuel? We utilised a full 4%, let's call that square and throw the rest down a hole. Perish the thought we'll ever need to dig near this massive radioactive hole. Or that an undiscovered cycle of nature causes it to come back to bite us. Just throw it down there with the rest of the resources we never want to safely explore, and who cares if there's something valuable within it's sphere of radioactivity.
Apologies for the sarcasm. I consider the idea both wasteful and foolish.
I'm a fan of both Thorium and Molten-Salt Reactors.
So a hole with an elevator then?
If you like hauling hundreds of tons of waste up and down an elevator? Maybe. Who does maintenance every so often at the bottom of the shaft?
Weight is a way to make the problem sound worse than it is, because nuclear waste is so incredibly dense. It's not enough to be a big deal yet. Dumping it deep into the ocean is an option, but it's only going to happen to waste that doesn't have potential uses first.
Yes and no. Most current fuels are Uranium or Plutonium. Both between 19 and 20 g/cm^3^. For reference, liquid water is approximately 1 g/cm^3^. Unspent fuel is a similar weight to gold.
"Spent" U~238~ is usually around 96% U~238~. If we consider the remainder a rounding error and assume all 60 tonnes is 60 million kg of U~238~. That will give us a very rough estimate of 3,000 m^3^.
Also worthy of noting are other wastes that comes from mining and refining.
There is much waste already. The "spent" waste is too radioactive to safely re-refine until later.
Have a look at the size of the Finnish waste repository.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finland-found-the-answer-to-spent-nuclear-fuel-waste-by-burying-it
The Finnish repository is designed with a life of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens (i.e us) have existed for about 300,000 years.
Article about the problems warnings that will comprehensible in 10,000 years https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time