It is hard to imagine that much we built today will be used ten years from now, much less in a hundred. It is hard to make things that last through the ages, which is why we are fascinated with things like ancient pyramids in Mexico, Egypt, and China. However, even the oldest Egyptian pyramid is only about 5,000 years old. [Mark Piesing] at the BBC visited a site that is supposed to lock up nuclear waste for 100,000 years.
This particular project is in France, but there are apparently dozens of similar projects around the world. Locating these nuclear tombs is tricky. They need to be in a geologically stable area that won’t contaminate water. They also prefer areas already depleted of resources to lessen the chance someone will be digging nearby in the far future. You also need people to agree to have these facilities in their communities, which is probably the most difficult thing to find.
Burying anything 500 meters underground is a challenge. But we were interested in how you’d plan to keep the material safely away from people for 20 times longer than the pyramids have stood next to the Nile. Anything could happen over that timescale, and it seems unlikely that you’ll have an organization that can last that long and stand watch over these dangerous vaults. If they poke around in these holes, future archeologists could deal with a very real cursed tomb.
Of course, the whole idea is controversial. But putting that aside, how would you design something to last 100,000 years and stay secure? Let us know in the comments. It would be good practice for that generation ship to Bernard’s Star.
We’ve seen that it is hard to keep a clock running for even 100 years. Already, 50-year-old computers seem incredibly antique. What will tech be like in 100,000 years?
Dig hole to China
Drop it in
Dig hole to china, deliver the waste to china, watch as china destroys the waste forever in fast neutron reactors.
build more breeders. high level waste is mostly viable fuel with some short lived isotopes mixed in. let those burn off and throw it back into the reactor.
The US used to use breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing but the government banned it because one of the steps in the process produced fuel that could be used to make a bomb.
Well, fun fact, this year the US government started manufacturing new bombs again.
IIRC, it was an isotope SIMILAR to the one used to make bombs. You could still make a giant radioactive mess with it in a bomb, but not achieve a nuclear explosion. Now a lot of peaceful uses for that isotope are near impossible because its brother was banned by people who don’t know chemistry/physics.
Political ban.
Maybe not the China part…
https://www.deepisolation.com/nuclear-waste-solutions/
The company was found by Richard Muller – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller
Make lots of those nuclear diamond batteries, use them to power a laser to shoot down Chinese balloons and satellites.
Is this the part where we debate sending waste into space?
Here’s a possible example of trying to launch a rocket containing highly radioactive nuclear waste into space or to the sun: https://i.gifer.com/4JtI.mp4
Rocket explodes during liftoff, covers the entire earth in radioactive poison.
The entire Earth, apart from, ironically, the 100,000 year tomb.
SpinLaunch? The lack of propulsion seems attractive.
use it as rocket fuel.
Don’t you know that rocket fuel works on the principle of being ejected outside the rocket?
wasn’t that the pilot for Space:1999?
Yes, storing it on the moon.
Of course, an explosion big enough to kick the moon out of its orbit would probably be bad for everyone on the moon, not to mention the moon itself.
But they did have a bunch of wacky adventures!
Middle of Australia, it’s already a geologically stable desert wasteland.
In
Stick it at the old Woomera rocket base. It was already used for nuclear testing by the British in the 50s so it’s not exactly pristine wilderness. Its already owned by the government (and is already a restricted area with high security) so there is less to worry about there. And there aren’t really a lot of people living in the area so there is less of the “I don’t want to live near a nuclear waste dump” argument.
That said, the US has been trying to do exactly that (Yucca Mountain in Nevada at the former nuclear testing site) for several decades and still can’t overcome the political opposition.
Who says Woomera’s not already in use?
Perhaps the wittenoom blue asbestos mine then. 353 square kilometers of highly contaminated uninhabitable wasteland.
It is now possible to have I beams put deep below
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1061252
If only the pharaohs had nuclear waste – they could guarantee their tombs would be cursed.
the curse of the pharaohs turned out to just be stale air.
That crazy pseudo science theory exists. Archeologists died from radiation poisoning, because radioactive material was used to keep the robbers away. Where they get radioactive material? UFOs and aliens of curse!!! :-D
Why can’t we just dump spent nuclear fuel into ocean? Few meters of water will shield is just as good as massive concrete tombs with funny signs. And it’s unlikely to be ever tampered with unless someone:
Knows exactly where it was dumped.
Has enough resources to pull another OceanGate.
Maybe dump it on the Titanic to discourage billionaires?
What are the odds of leaks over 100,000 years on the ocean bed? Pretty high I’d bet!
“Why can’t we just dump spent nuclear fuel into ocean?”
You want Godzilla? Because that’s how…
Because we like to eat non-radioactive* fish, and the chance it will break, leak or otherwise spread into the sea water is pretty high (as I understand it).
Just mix it with concrete and drop it into a subduction zone.
This… nuf said…
Next question?
If it leaks 10km under water, will it be diluted enough to be safe by the time it reaches anywhere near the surface?
♫Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun♫
you know how much delta-v is required to drop things in the sun, youre gonna need some kind of nerva, fission fragment, or old boom boom.
lol, valid serious points, though I was simply having a Floydian moment
*”Floydian slip” I meant to say
Curse there be no edit. apologies, but it was just a Momentary Lapse in Reason
Did someone call? :)
That’s the exact reason I chose this name to post with in the first place – Floydian slips are surprisingly common.
Breathe, breathe in the air…but not in the radioactive nuclear vaults!
Get too close and it will make you comfortably numb… forever!
See Emily play… with that barrel of strange glowing rocks.
That or a super-powered alien in a red cape :)
Stars implode when they start fusing iron, let’s just speed up the process by dumping even heavier metals into ours.
I think we are fine. You could dump the entire earth itself into the sun and not hurry it’s demise.
But like some other posters said above, why waste it? Toss it into a reactor and use it. Worrying about some of it being really pure is silly. Just remind the bad guys that any use of nuclear weapons will result in everything they know and love being paved in green glass. Zero tolerance.
Or store it on The Dark Side of the Moon?
It seems that about 1.7 billion years ago a number of natural nuclear reactors operated on and off for a few hundred thousand years in an undergound uranium deposit in Oklo (in Africa), when the U-235/U238 ratio was about the same as in nuclear power reactors today. After the natural nuclear reactors were no longer capable of operating (or there was no more water to moderate the neutrons to fission the uranium), the eukaryote nuclear regulatory commission existing at that time decided to leave the fission products and actinides buried where they were after they determined that no one would digging down there until shovels were invented 1.7 billion years later.
And sure enough, 1.7 billion years later, after digging down to the uranium deposit, scientists determined that most of the fission products and actinides stayed pretty much in place.
It’s not waste, not to a fast breeder reactor. Use it! Renegotiate carters folly, and allow “reprocessing of nuclear waste” in fast breeder reactors. Does anyone believe this provision slowed down Russia at all?! (Or is for that matter, or any other country)
I second the motion
Any other country doesn’t have the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that was pushed through by Jimmy Carter. It effectively condemns all spent fuel to be buried.
Fast breeder reactors are more complicated (and more expensive) with the technology not fully developed, involve liquid metal (e.g., sodium) cooling, and result in fuel can be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. FBRs are not likely to be commercially viable for sometime into the future, although taxpayer-funded research FBRs have been built.
Also, for standard uranium power reactors there is enough uranium to last for quite a long time, and if thorium reactors can be proven a commercially acceptable alternative, there’s enough thorium to last until Mr. Fusion reactors are sold at Walmart.
cant wait until somone developes a pure fusion warhead so we can consign nonproliferation concerns to the ashpit of history and actually stand a chance at reversing climate change.
Until the test ban, the ripple concept was the closest to pure fusion as it only needed a tiny 3 kiloton primary and no tamper for 10 megatons vs the conventional method to reach 10mt with a 100kt primary and a large uranium tamper.
With 2024 tech and considering it doesn’t need any tamper at all, it could be powered with a scaled up ICF primary instead of a tiny fission primary. It might also need a much smaller “pulse shaper” for the X-rays as ICF pellets are more controlled than a fission primary’s pulse, which seemed to be the main difficulty with ripple.
Even if it isn’t pure fusion, it would likely need just a fraction of the total HEU and Plutonium that we need.
Great idea! You “just” need a National Ignition Facility (NIF) the size of a sports stadium to set it off. Oh, and a 900MW power station to charge the NIF.
Incorrect, those are thorium breeder reactors, not the same thing at all. FAST breeder reactors use the “fast” neutrons from spent fuel, not slow “thermal spectrum” from thorium. Vastly different technology. They’re still water cooled, and can operate right next to the plant using the fuel to make energy and fuel. All reactors breed to some extent. The idea of the fast breeder is to breed more and make less energy, thereby being able to use the “waste” to a much greater level.
mutually assured destruction works. not at destroying things unfortunately.
Exactly. If it’s still radioactive and dangerous, it can still give us energy. (Though I’ll grant that it might not always be economical to do so!)
Of course, there’s also the “used masks and gloves” kind of nuclear waste, which isn’t the same as spent fuel but is still not the sort of thing you just want to chuck into a regular landfill.
yea but thats not the 10000 year waste that hippies are always on about.
Nuclear waste or spent fuel generally consists of the highly active breakdown products from fission, and about 96% inert fuel that hasn’t reacted yet. The reason why it stays hot for a million years is because the highly active waste keeps breaking down, releasing neutrons, and activating the inert fuel. The fuel keeps burning sub-critically even when it’s been removed from the reactor, so it’s generating more nuclear waste for a long time at an ever-diminishing rate.
Nuclear waste re-processing and recycling removes the hot waste from the inert fuel and stops that from happening, making the remaining waste break down much faster, but the irony is that the same people who complain about the half-a-million-year safety window of nuclear waste are the same people responsible for banning and protesting against nuclear waste re-processing, or just about anything that could be done to handle the waste situation in a reasonable manner.
Spent fuel is highly radioactive because of the beta and gamma radiation being emitted by the fission products. In fact, most of the U-235 fuel has been used up in spent fuel although there is a signficant amount of (various isotopes of) plutonium in spent fuel.
That’s confusing cause and effect. The spent fuel releases beta and gamma radiation because it’s highly radioactive, not the other way around.
The fuel consists of U-238 which is the stable non-fissionable isotope, and U-235 which is the unstable “fuel” isotope. However, when the reactor is running, it’s converting some of the U-238 into Pu-239 which is a fissile isotope and contributes to the fuel loading. In other words, all fission reactors are “breeders” – the nominal distinction is merely about whether they generate more or less new fissionable fuel than what they burn.
When you take the spent fuel rods out of the reactor, this breeding action doesn’t stop. It merely starts slowing down, which is why you need to keep the fuel rods in a cooling pond for a couple years until the reaction has slowed down enough that you can handle them. If you bury the spent fuel rods as they were without separating the remaining U-238 and Pu-239 from the fission waste products, the buried waste will keep generating new unstable fissionable materials and new nuclear waste within itself for hundreds of thousands of years.
If on the other hand you re-process the fuel and separate the highly radioactive fission waste products, those waste products in separate have half-lives in days or months, up to a hundred years for some. You bury those in a deep hole, and as you’re not generating more of them within the discarded waste, they will be mostly gone in a 1000 years time. You don’t need to store them for as long as the pyramids have existed because they naturally decay and disappear much faster than that.
The only question remaining is, what do we do with the nuclear waste we already have?
The protesters say you can’t bury it, because it will be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. They also say you can’t re-process it to reduce the time it remains dangerous.
Apparently it’s “safer” to keep it in concrete silos under the weather and do nothing, because if we allow either solution or any solution, then we’ve effectively solved what to do with nuclear waste, and that means there’s one less argument against nuclear power.
Vitrify it in glass (Obsidian lasts eons). Dig a deep mine in Yuca Mountain and put it at the bottom. Then collapse the tunnel. Bada Bing bada boom! Its inaccessible and stable.
Or turn it into stable ceramic with a proven process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc
Why are we not doing this already?
We are on a small scale. It is going to be put into large scale soon. https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/wtp
“Hey Qkyy’p=p!”
I found this flinty stuff we can use for arrowheads! “
Depleted uranium arrowheads…
“Future cavemen” will have a lot more dangerous things to worry about.
For starters, why would the society collapse to that state in the first place?
AGI.
That’s their problem.
The whole question is helicopter parenting on a geological time scale.
Religion, or the Singularity. Or both.
“In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive…”
if only the people who wrote that song knew anything about nuclear physics.
It would be good to reread Gregory Benford’s “Deep Time” (ISBN-13: 978-0007483792) about now.
so I’ve got a couple hundred years to get around to it?
“It is hard to imagine that much we built today will be used ten years from now” – bullshit.
Yeah, the hyperbole sucks.
My house was built 160 years ago, and I’m still using it. My car was built 12 years ago, ditto. Even the laptop I’m writing this on is 9 years old, so it isn’t hard to imagine that I might still be using it next year, especially since I just spent this years computer budget on desktop upgrades.
The average age when a car gets squeezed into a metal cube is around 15 years. Sure, people drive some 20-30 year old cars that still survive, but new cars haven’t been made like that for a long time.
For electric cars, the average age of cars today – about 12 years – becomes the maximum age of cars because of the battery replacement costs more than the value of the car -problem. Sure, some people will still keep driving on with diminishing range and power, but the majority will be scrapped much sooner.
For most electric cars, the chassis, suspension and bodywork will fail to corrosion or collisions long before the battery or propulsion itself fails. And then the battery will still have about 80% of its capacity left and can be reused in stationary applications like powerwalls.
I see no indication for that. A well made car body and running gear will outlast the battery easily. Batteries age, and what “80% capacity” means after 12-15 years is debatable. Mostly they’re going to be wildly unbalanced with a bunch of dud cells and weak interconnects, and dangerous to use unless you pull the battery apart and sort out the bad cells, then rebuild it, which costs more money than it’s worth for a battery that has little life left anyhow.
But you’re right about the bodywork. As it is now, the insurance costs on EVs are ridiculous because a 10 mm bump on the battery shield in the wrong spot will result in a failure on MOT inspection on safety grounds. The manufacturer says it needs to be replaced, the MOT says the battery needs to be re-certified, etc. etc. and all that costs so much money that you’re cheaper off just claiming the insurance and buying a new car.
My car is coming up on 10 years. I just bought the thing. It better last me a while yet. The desktop is 9 years old, and still technically runs my favorite games. Might take an age to load them, and try to set itself on fire, but they run. I imagine it’ll get another year or two before it gets relegated to some other duty. About the same time I got the desktop, I replaced my NAS/webserver/etc as well, an AMD K6-2 (450MHz!). Now that’s one that had been going a while.
My neighbor across the street drives the same 1970s ford pickup that his wife drove when they were dating. Their youngest kid just graduated high school, to give some perspective on how long he’s been driving it.
I think I’m old enough to be replaced, but a good chunk of the stuff I own is just getting started.
It just occurred to me that I own an Arduino and a 555 that are more than 10 years old. Both of those seem more relevant to HaD than boring things like cars and computers :)
I have valves from 1950 around the place…
N00b! My house is 350 years old, and my main car is 35 years. (My oldest one is 1960) My upstairs laptop is an Acer Aspire from 1995, but still chugs away running Linux happily.
the really nasty stuff burns off in a few hundred years, the rest is viable nuclear fuel. we should be burning it not burying it.
Drop it into a subduction zone.
Get a bunch of monks, lock ‘em up in a compound, and get them to make little thatched roofs for the waste canisters to stop corrosion.
If you want to be nice, give them protectors too.
*protractors, not protectors
Bah, well that’s that comment ruined!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eNf2Y1K6k8
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
The Center of Danger is Here.
The Center of Danger is Here.
The Center of Danger is Here.
“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
A great art installation for the hear and now, a useless message to the future.
It’s abstract in 2024, it’ll be down right hieroglyphical by 2500, and by 12,024 any digital device it was built on will be returned to the silica from whence it came
We’ve got plenty of archeological artifacts today, some cited to be 8th to 11th century, that cannot be deciphered.
Whatever the solution is, I hope beyond all hope that video and those cryptic words are not it, or we might as well start putting frosted uranium flakes in our cereal bowls today to get it over with.
The problem I always had with the approach of “people won’t know any language, so let’s make it super scary using symbols” is that it will look exactly like Mordor, Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and every fantasy trope ever for someone to go digging for treasure in the cursed wizard’s lair …
I recall a couple of suggestions made a few decades ago of placing the dump site in a desert, and placing large blocks of basalt (black) over it making it too hot to want to tarry, and placing some type of columns with various holes and shapes that will make mournful sounds as the wind blows through them.
Just hide it deep enough.
By the time the future civilization has figured out ground penetrating radar to actually find where the waste is, they would have also figured out Geiger counters.
They should use a Mr. Yuck symbol instead.
Here for all the experts in the comments section who know better than nuclear engineers and scientists how to deal with nuclear waste.
The engineers and scientists know what options there are. That’s where the options people are talking about came from.
The problem is that politicians and fearmongers don’t understand (or don’t want to understand) how the options work. This prevents countries from forming effective plans for dealing with nuclear waste.
The problem, as usual, doesn’t lie with the technical end. It’s typically the bureaucratic and that hoses everything up.
Asimov’s Nightfall is a good read, which deals with similar themes of long time scales.
It is over 3 times deeper than the pyramids are high and they have not lost much height to erosion in 5000 years so why wouldn’t a 500 meter deep facility still be buried after 100,000? The sort of events you can expect would simply serve to make it even more inaccessible. However I suspect that within a century or two that valuable material will be taken out and completely recycled via accelerator driven transmutation.
I recall reading about a proposed method for dealing with waste, in which it would be buried in some kind of sediment in certain locations of the sea bottom. The sediment is stable for geologically long periods of time, and migration of nasty stuff from the sediment into the sea would take eons. I don’t recall the downsides of this method.
Why isn’t anyone saying “volcanoes”? Or at least deep ocean exposed magma? I thought that was always an interesting/terrifying go to for n-waste disposal.
Because volcanoes sometimes spew out what is tossed in them?
Nuclear waste could stored around a computer complex to protect it from being broken into…..or switched off as it and its companion take over the world…right ? …..Dr. Forbin
What kind of waste needs to be stored for that long? High level waste, obvs, but more specific than that?
Things that are that radioactive usually have short half-lives, and things with long half-lives aren’t usually that radioactive.
The problems begin when you mix the two together, because the highly radioactive wastes will give off neutrons that activate the rest of the stuff, keeping it from cooling down.
That’s what happens when you simply dump spent fuel rods in a cave without separating what’s in them.
Start a religious order of monks “to preserve knowledge” and protect the ‘artifacts’. Might work for a while.
It’s a recurring theme in SF, but a good take on it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Enjoyed reading 📚 it in High School!
Great book!
Also, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is on a similar theme. (No spoilers, but it has something very relevant to the point of this article.)
Fantastic book, too.
This actually raises another question : even if you seal the tomb, how do you make sure that future générations “understand” the risk of it ? Which language/signs do you use, on which support that is supposed to resist at least as long as the danger itself ?
To hook up on the pharaohs analogy, egyptian hieroglyphs were invented some 5000 years ago and we already lost the way to decipher them (until we find the Rosetta lexicon by chance). How do we design a message that is intended to be understood some 20x longer than that ?
I think the whole question is a red herring.
If they have the technology to excavate the waste out, they have the technology to detect radioactivity.
The pharaohs tombs were being robbed soon after they were sealed, up til Victorian times, and yet they didn’t “understand” radioactivity.
There was an entry about that already on HAD. I just wanted to post a link in comment but I just can’t find it – sorry.
No matter how hard you try to protect future societies, you will be defeated by their own versions of whip equipped (or with pistol at each hip) archeologist.
Like the Love Canal site.
If we are serious about keeping it safe then it should be stored under the seats of our governments.
…like the details to a certain bypass in the West Country.
If humans are so stupid that they can’t get their act together to process nuclear material into energy or safe materials within 1000 years then we deserve whatever disaster befalls us. Seriously, how to solve this problem is known to science but here we are investing in stupidity.
Hey, maybe the future generations will have a much more advanced technology than us, to actually turn these waste into precious fuel. Our doomed junk could become 35th century new oil and they will thank us for that (#not) !
(provided that humans survive long enough to reach the said 35th century…)
The only places that will survive a nuclear war will be the places where we store nuclear waste.
Dude at October 22, 2024 at 12:59 pm,
Radioactivity is the property of an isotope to emit particles or high energy photons during decay. The instabilities of various nuclei cause the various types of radioactivity.
Also, when the spent fuel is moved from the reactor to the cooling pool, the fission process stops (except for a small amount of naturally-occuring fission by a few of the actinide isotopes). The fuel bundles are spaced far enough apart and there are neutron-absorbing panels in the cooling pool to prevent any kind of fission chain reaction to occur. Of course, when the spent fuel rods are put into casks, there is no water that would help cause any fission chain reaction. The thermal heat in spent fuel is mostly caused by the fuel rods absorbing the beta (and some gamma) emissions from various fission products.
Also, because of the spacing of nuclear waste containers in an underground repository, even if groundwater gets in, the spend fuel would not turn into a nuclear reactor again.
One problem with reprocessing spent fuel for today’s boiling or pressuized nuclear power reactors is that the recovered plutonium contains other isotopes of Pu that are more radioactive and less fissile than Pu-239, limiting how much plutonium can be incorporated into the reprocessed fuel rods.