flowbark: But you’re presenting a chicken-and-egg problem. We know how to handle nuclear waste responsibly and safely. But we can’t do it because of the roadblocks (sometimes literally) that are put up by the anti-nuke activists. Then they turn around and say, “The big problem with nuclear power is that they can’t dispose of waste properly”.
Specifically, we can turn high-level waste into glass, encase it in concrete cylinders, and drop it into subduction zones in the deep ocean, never to be heard from again. There is virtually zero exchange of materials between the deep ocean and the surface ocean in the first place, but the glassification prevents the stuff from leeching out anyway. And it’s encased in concrete or steel. Eventually, it will be driven underneath a continental plate and recycled into the deep Earth.
Alternatively, we can simply stack the stuff inside dry salt beds, which have not exchanged materials with the rest of the environment for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
Most people have this vision of the country full of waste storage facilities, with radioactive ground water, three-headed fish, etc. The fact is, nuclear plants create very little high-level waste. You could power the entire U.S. completely from nuclear power for the next 100 years, and the total amount of high-level waste created could fit inside a football stadium. Of course, nuclear plants also create a lot more low-level waste (dirty gloves, slightly contaminated water, etc). But this is much less dangerous, and there are methods for handling it as well.
And you know, it’s misleading when the anti-nuke lobby says things like, 'and it’ll be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years!" This is true, but irrelevant. GRANITE is radioactive. It’s not a question of whether it’s radioactive, but rather just how dangerous it is. In a very small fraction of the time mentioned, the radioactivity in the waste will be back down to levels roughly equivalent to the original ore it came from. The thing about radioactive material is that the most dangerous stuff has the shortest half-life. That’s why there are ‘cooling ponds’ at reactor sites - after only a few days the waste is much less dangerous.
But the big problem with waste is political, and the political problem is driven by hysteria manufactured by anti-nuke activists. I can recall reading scare articles by activists talking about the ‘deadly white plumes hanging over the area like a pall’. Of course, those deadly white plumes are nothing more than water vapor. And the radioactivity emitted by nuclear plants is by law lower than the radioactivity emitted by coal plants. Grand Central Station has a background radiation level higher than the NRC maximum allowed inside nuclear plants.
When waste is transported, it’s sealed in containers that are engineered to maintain their structural integrity even if subjected to forces MUCH higher than those caused in even the worst auto accidents. So nothing can happen to the stuff as it’s being transported. Yet just try to send a waste convoy near any populated area - you’ll be snarled by so much red tape and met with so many protestors you won’t know what hit you.
So instead, the stuff gets stacked in ‘temporary’ holding facilities, or local waste dumps are created to avoid the transport problems. And it’s those sites that are now causing the problems.
