I believe that, in the short or medium, or even long (n hundreds of years) term. But what about the very long term, i.e. thousands of years? How/where do we store the radioactive leftovers safely for future generations? It must be stored in a geologically stable location, safe from the natural elements, with easy access to add more but at the same time hard to remove any in order to make dirty bombs.
I don’t have a link off-hand, but here is the basic outline:
nuclear materials with a long half-life are less acutely dangerous. The “hot” material, by definition, has a short half-life. If something decays with a half-life of 1 year, it’s putting out a million times more radiation than something that decays with a million-year half-life. You wouldn’t want to carry a lump of Plutonium-240 (half-life = 6600 years) in your pocket, but it’s not something that would kill you if you looked at it from 100 feet away. The isotopes that scare people (I-131, Cs-137, Sr-90) tend to have half-lives under 30 years.
moreover, it’s all about concentration. Carbon-14, which is what’s used for radiocarbon dating, has a shortish half-life (5700 years) but is so rare (1 atom per 10^12) that it’s unlikely to do any damage. Tritium (Hydrogen-3) has a half-life of 12 years but there are only a couple hundred thousand atoms of it in a glass of water. Most of the nuclear waste by volume is gloves and lab coats that were worn during nuclear processes that have caught a few flecks of radioactive material. Again, you wouldn’t want to use them as bedsheets, but they’re probably not going to be dangerous in 5,000 years.
there isn’t a whole lot of “hot stuff” (e.g. plutonium, thorium) and much of that can be reused, and the rest of it is compact enough that disposal is not as severe of issue as it’s made out to be: you can hide it in an underground vault. The high-volume stuff is the low-level stuff that is technically contaminated but not at Chernobyl levels.
most radiation is still natural, and people in places with high levels of natural background radiation (e.g. Ramsar, Iran) seem to be only mildly affected, if at all. There are order-of-magnitude variations in NBR, but almost all of the measured harm from natural radiation is limited to two well-known “boring” causes: sunlight (UV) and indoor accumulations of radon gas.
This isn’t to say that nuclear waste is no problem at all. It has to be dealt with, but it’s a solvable problem and the environmental costs are far less than those for oil and gas (and have been for decades).
One of the challenges of nuclear waste disposal is that the waste products can have very bad chemical properties as well. The most obvious example is Hydrogen - if you put concentrated high-level waste in a sealed container, the pressure will slowly rise because lots of fission products are way too proton-rich, so they pop off hydrogen nuclei. Aside from the explosion risk, hydrogen can also embrittle metals… so if you don’t design very carefully, your cask will be weak, radioactive, and full of hydrogen gas :(
This is certainly not the biggest challenge of waste disposal (that’s probably political arrangements?), but it really struck me when I was reading about it for the first time. That was an interesting day or two of Wikipedia surfing.
I have read a few times about reactors being developed that “burn” current nuclear waste material (thorium, PRISM, WAMSR). So that could be one way – since you are talking about hundreds of years long term. There are also different types (gen IV) of reactors now being researched and built that are also safer and generate less waste, apparently.
I believe that, in the short or medium, or even long (n hundreds of years) term. But what about the very long term, i.e. thousands of years? How/where do we store the radioactive leftovers safely for future generations? It must be stored in a geologically stable location, safe from the natural elements, with easy access to add more but at the same time hard to remove any in order to make dirty bombs.
There’s very little practical difference between the remains of an ancient nuclear waste dump and a natural deposit of radioactive elements.
[Comment removed by author]
We could spread it through the oceans easily enough if it were politically acceptable to do so, no?
Ooh, that is interesting. Do you have a link to more info about that?
I don’t have a link off-hand, but here is the basic outline:
This isn’t to say that nuclear waste is no problem at all. It has to be dealt with, but it’s a solvable problem and the environmental costs are far less than those for oil and gas (and have been for decades).
One of the challenges of nuclear waste disposal is that the waste products can have very bad chemical properties as well. The most obvious example is Hydrogen - if you put concentrated high-level waste in a sealed container, the pressure will slowly rise because lots of fission products are way too proton-rich, so they pop off hydrogen nuclei. Aside from the explosion risk, hydrogen can also embrittle metals… so if you don’t design very carefully, your cask will be weak, radioactive, and full of hydrogen gas :(
This is certainly not the biggest challenge of waste disposal (that’s probably political arrangements?), but it really struck me when I was reading about it for the first time. That was an interesting day or two of Wikipedia surfing.
I have read a few times about reactors being developed that “burn” current nuclear waste material (thorium, PRISM, WAMSR). So that could be one way – since you are talking about hundreds of years long term. There are also different types (gen IV) of reactors now being researched and built that are also safer and generate less waste, apparently.