Low-level nuclear waste is stuff like the gown you wear when they x-ray you. Dangerous, but not horrible. It has a half-life such that it will be safe in a couple of hundred years. The US has been tossed the responsibility for the stuff to the states. The idea is each state, or group of states should handle the waste it produces.
No state has approved a long-term site for its low-level waste.
Heck a good warehouse would do.
In other news, some huge nuclear power plant has been cancelled in North Carolina. Such sites are sited away from floods, earthquakes and so on. Some of the buildings are build to withstand an airplane strike. They are about as tough as a building can be.
Proposal: Put the low-level waste in the unused containment buildings of such sites then wall it in.
Am I missing something?
Sadly nuclear waste storage is not a subject for rational discourse. (Although your idea may be one of the most sensible I have heard in ages.)
There is a an entire chain of ideology that comes with a sustainable proper solution to storage of any nuclear waste, including such simple stuff as medical related bits. (Nitpick, getting X-rayed does not make anything radioactive, and the gowns you wear are not low level radioactive waste. They go to medical waste disposal - as biologically contaminated - which will mean an incinerator. But if you are treated with a radioisotope - for instance iodine for thyroid issues - or radio tracers for diagnostic purposes, there may be some minuscule contamination.)
Anyway, the problem is that there is an (insane) set of couplings in the minds of many anti-nuclear activists that brooks no association with anything nuclear at all. The logic being that all radioactive things are ultimately rooted in support of nuclear weapons. That even your medical procedure is morally contaminated by association. So anything that makes life easier for any industry associated with anything nuclear is something that makes life easier for the nuclear weapons industry. So anything that makes life hard for anything associated with any industry working with anything radioactivity is working on the side of the angels.
I wish I was making this up. But I have seen it first hand. Even from people who you would imagine were smart enough to know how ridiculous their arguments are (PhD in engineering for instance.) It makes it almost impossible for any government to act sensibly, hence the inaction you see.
Years ago I was debating the pros and cons of nuclear power with a rabid proponent.
“So, you have a list where you can sign up for being okay with nuclear power, or not okay with it. If you sign the latter and say, 20% of power generation is nuclear, at 80% of average use, your power is cut off–”
“–Yeah, yeah! That’d be great!”
“And if you sign the former, every so often you get a lead-lined shoebox to watch over for the next 10,000 years.”
Low level waste can be used to make dirty bombs. Those bombs need no direct destructive power at all they just have to create panic and the enormous expense of the clean up and destruction of property value. Using a nuclear reactor containment wessel is overkill, but possibly alleviate the fear people have of the word nuclear even though it’s a simpler matter of security to keep people safe. However, there is a reasonable fear of human screw-ups, it is difficult to trust our bridges and dams right now, non-nuclear waste sites have been mismanaged and led to public harm, the problem goes deeper than just a physically secure storage site. We need confidence that we can properly maintain any nuclear waste storage site over a long period of time. Who knew nuclear waste storage was so complicated?
Am I somewhat whooshed, or do you actually think that’s a smart proposal?
I’m a nuclear energy proponent myself, if not a rabid one, and I don’t think that safely storing radioactive waste is a big problem. But parceling the stuff out to nuclear energy supporters to deal with themselves is just stupid and inefficient.
DesertDog, would you be OK with a plan where, in order to be allowed to use power from coal power plants, you had to agree to let your house be sealed up and filled with carbon dioxide?
That plan would be complete and sufficient if we were talking about power from gas-fired plants. For a coal-burner, you forgot the buckets full of ash slurry.
In the ideal world, all of us would be mindful of all the externalities of our choices. Both immediate externalities and the long term ones. As a thought experiment, both DesertDog’s and Chronos’ non-serious proposals highlight that externalities are real. The fact we *can *elect to ignore them does not make them actually disappear.
Nuclear has the trifecta of scary for laymen. It’s long term, it’s invisible, and it’s complicated. As noted above, the well-reasoned objection to any storage or transportation scheme is the reliability of humans & human institutions over a long span of time. That may or may not be a good enough objection. But to assert “any objection is BS” is to be equally blinkered.
Apart from the longevity of nuclear waste and the less so of it’s guardians, if it’s as simple as nuclear proponents assert, why isn’t storage simply a done deal yet ?
They decry the ignorance and lack of faith of those who don’t want the stuff adjacent; but since when did governments not ignore objectors to nuclear when they thought it imperative ? Or at least just noise.
Hanford, Christmas Island, Sellafield, Mayak, Rocky Flats, the Stuxnet software, etc. indicate governments are willing to risk other peoples’ lives for the greater good, so why haven’t they just come up with a solution ? They even gave people straight-up injections of plutonium in the early years, which doesn’t indicate unwillingness to make the hard decisions for us all.
At this moment, thanks to Brexit, my country is quarrelling over nuclear storage it willingly accepted * from other countries with the EU, and the subsequent withdrawal from Euratom ( after 60 years ).
Lady Thatcher in particular had great plans for Britain to become the world’s dumpster, filled to the brim with rotting waste; not just for nuclear.
The high-level nuclear waste issue is not really the issue I asked about.
It is a tough problem in a democracy. People are willing to kick the can down the road, exposing themselves to a risk they do not understand. Further, the anti-nuclear people are perfectly willing to ensure the waste is not dealt with to further their own political ends.
(If we bury yesterdays waste safely, that does not mean we are committed to building more nuclear power plants. Further a lot of really scary high-level stuff does not come from power generation.)
All in all, only Finland seems to have its stuff together.
Because governments are made up of people, and the people have voted that they’d rather have waste dispersed into the air they breathe than stuck down in a secure hole.
No amount of science (‘this is buried hundreds of meters down in solid rock - studies show no chance of contaminating the groundwater - it is right next to the nuclear plants the waste will be coming from, so limits the risk of transportation’) can overcome the public ‘OMG it is only a mile from the lake!’ reaction.
These places have only 60 years life time ? The concrete of the foundations may be weakening … which means the solution is knock down. Lesser buildings might get foundation repairs, but the heavy industrial site has such a large amount of foundation … with complications… its the only way ?
Actually the number one problem with walling in, is that concrete is known to degrade over time … steel reinforcing rusts, acid rain eats it away, etc etc
But there is some idea that some roman concrete has got harder over time, and still remains hard after 2000 years… Seemingly self-repairing or continuing to stregthen over time. It may be that a suitable recipe of concrete might allow the containment to be self-healing, so that even if it cracked, eg by earthquake, it at least regains some strength at the site, if not completely seals.
