Holding Tank:
Nuclear waste lingers in dry-cask storage at the Idaho National Laboratory. More than 60,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are in temporary storage at 131 civilian and military sites around the country.
Image: Peter Essick (Getty Images)
In Brief
- The Obama administration has effectively canceled the plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
- Spent fuel will for the foreseeable future continue to be stored on-site at 131 locations around the country.
- The end of Yucca means that all options for waste disposal are now in play, including recycling, use in advanced reactors and burial at other sites.
Two weeks after President Barack Obama pulled the plug on Yucca Mountain, the site near Las Vegas where the federal government has been trying for 22 years to open a repository for nuclear waste, geochemist James L. Conca came to Washington, D.C., with an idea in his pocket.
Conca has been assigned by the state of New Mexico to monitor the environment around a different federal nuclear dump, one used for defense-related plutonium, and where others see problems, he sees opportunity.
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43 Comments
Add CommentThe fast reactor plan to break up actinides is not in operating yet and may not be economically competitve. A question that should be considered is whether or not we should proceed with a full scale nuclear renaissance before proven methods for transmution of actinides or long term isolation of spent fuel have been developed. S. E. Vandenbosch
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to comment on the economic feasibility of the fast neutron reactors. It appears that Wald has relied on Frank von Hippel's economic analysis to assert that fast neutron reactors will be more expensive than the other two alternatives; von Hippel's analysis considers only the capital cost of the plants, which will indeed be higher. However, there are offsetting economic benefits that need to be considered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince the liquid metal reactors operate at higher temperatures than the current reactors, they are on the right side of the second law of thermodynamics, and they are more efficient at generating electricity. Current reactors achieve about 33% efficiency in converting heat energy to electricity; liquid metal reactors can achieve 50 - 55% efficiency. This in turn means about 50% more electricity produced, which means 50% more revenue. Now of course this also has an impact on the capital cost of the reactor complex; it needs 50% more electric generators, but offsetting this the cooling towers can be about 30% smaller. This alone probably more than justifies the additional capital costs.
Fuel costs must also be taken into account. For current reactors, fuel costs (the costs of buying uranium, enriching and fabricating it into fuel rods) about 20% of total operating costs. As long as high level nuclear waste and surplus bomb grade plutonium are available, this is cheapest option for fueling fast reactors. And since they have an integrated recycling and fabrication plant, they don't incur processing costs for that stage of the process; the actual fuel cost is close to zero. This factor alone more than offsets the increased capital cost.
A final cost factor also addresses proliferation concerns. The fast neutron reactors need a blanket to absorb surplus neutrons, in long range operation this blanket will be primarily of depleted uranium to breed additional plutonium for enriching the high level nuclear waste. It is this excess plutonium that creates proliferation concerns. However, if about a third of this blanket consists of thorium/depleted uranium mix, the result is low enriched uranium suitable use in current reactors. This can be fabricated in the integrated recycling center and represents an additional revenue source.
I agree with Wald that dry cask is the temporary solution, but the US needs urgently to embark on an industrial scale test program to determine if this option works and what the actual costs turn out to be. It may be the cheapest electricity we can find. Philip Crawford
Another example of a way to use up spent nuclear fuel is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. It requires fissile material to start up. Thereafter it converts fertile thorium=232 to fissile U-233 at the same rate the U-233 is consumed. An introduction to the technology and benefits is at http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thispage 51 of the August issue...."a 1,000 megawatt reactor produces about 33 tons a year of spent fuel-enough to fill the bed of a large pickup truck...."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisComment: a very large pickup truck.
Bill Covington, Southern Pines, North Carolina
The basis for the ranking of environmental uncertainty in the chart on the last page of the article is unclear if not misleading. It appears that whomever prepared the chart assumed that surface storage would always be safer because it was 'visible' and recycling was more environmentally uncertain because it is a new idea. Unfortunately, all solutions are equally environmentally uncertain when considered what might happen centuries into the future. On an immediate scale (next 50 years), all three options have equal environmental uncertainties (major catacylsmic natural events in excess of design criteria). Should such events occur then burial in a deep geologic repository, such as Yucca Mountain or WIPP, poses the least risk for the public to be directly exposed to the radioactivity in the waste.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe half life of untreated nuclear waste is NOT "hundreds of thousands of years" as asserted by Wald.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe longest lived of the artificially generated isotopes present in appreciable volume in waste is Plutonium 239 which has a half life of about 25,000 years so the waste has a half life of less than that at all points.
In fact the half life of a nuclear waste declines from days when it is unloaded to 25,000 years once everything other than Plutonium 239 has decayed.
On the other hand it takes 4 billion years for half of the U238 which is 95% of the waste to decay. So it takes about 4 billion years for half of the heat in nuclear waste to be generated.
The longest lived artificial isotope present in appreciable volumes nuclear waste is Plutonium with a half life of 25,000
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyears so the half life of the artificial isotopes in the waste is always less than that.
There is no fixed half life for a nuclear waste which is a mixture of isotopes with different half lives. When discharged from the reactor contrary to Wald's statement Strontium 90 makes no appreciable contribution to the heat generated as it has a half life of decades. If U238 is included half of the heat generated by nuclear waste takes 4 Billion years to be emitted. Will nuclear waste half to be provbly isolated for 20 Billion years ?
There are a number of reasonably abundant very long lived fission product isotopes in used nuclear fuel contrary to what I wrote this morning. There are no abundant fission product isotopes with half lives in the region of PL239 and 240 each with a half life of thousands of years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy remark about half lives of mixtures still seems to me to be correct.
Put the stuff in friction-welded three-foot thick permanently sealed containers, and bury them at the edge of a plate headed to the center of the earth. It should be deep enough by the time the forces tear it apart that whatever escapes has nowhere else to go but down its one-way ride to the core. End of problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'll take my billion dollars now.
Of all the brilliant ideas expressed here on what to do with spent nuclear fuel, how many are even in planning stages?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNone.
Until we have a reasonable way to deal with spent fuel the nuclear program should be paused.
I suggest plant the nuclear wastes like the potatoes, there where they are produced, and maybe we might obtain crops of new radioactive reserves, fresh to use, or if Good or the hazard wants, food for all the people, if the Earth goes pour and pour! ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnot really that large. the stuff is tremendously heavy, but low in volume. granted, your truck would be riding a little low, but it is important for people to understand that even when we're talking about 1000s of tons, we aren't talking about that damn many cubic yards of required storage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisif you used nuclear power to fuel every aspect of your life for 80 years, the resulting waste would fit in your casket with you at the end.
this is for candide, do you know ho wmuch of our electricity is generated by our nuclear program?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit around twenty percent... Now if you wanted to shut down ALL nuclear programs in the U.S., you would also have to find a way to power our navy...
So if we were to cut all nuclear power production, then spend the resources to fill in the gap left behind, we would be spending money, valuable fuel sources, as well as other materials.
With the resources that would be used to replace the nuclear, we would be better off building a test fast reactor or converting all of our nuclear power plants to a closed system.
Basically from a pure economic standpoint, pausing or stopping the nuclear program is impossible for the US. Now imagine what it would it take for France to stop their nuclear program, because 80 percent of their electricity comes from nuclear reactors.
In democratic countries you can never convince any community to built a nuclear waste site near where they live. So let us stop cheating ourselves. Permanent waste sites shall be never available.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA technology that has no answer for handling problem of its waste can not be considered as a technology.
We should start dismantling the nuclear power plants one by one immediately and prey our children to forgive us for the error we have conducted since last 60 years.
Surely we can create technology that uses more of the energy of these fuel rods to create electricity so that at least the first stage of storage is not required!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article tends to miss the point that the waste is about 98% U238, which is good fuel for fast reactors. We must always be able to get at the waste to recycle the large amount of remaining nuclear fuel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt also misses the point is that if we are to have a reliable and sufficient electricity supply, it has to ultimately come from nuclear. (When electricity stops, everything stops!)
The fact that we must make fast breeders work to have sufficient electricity for thousands of years is not mentioned in this article. Fast breeders use metal fuel and during the recycling process, there is no weapons grade plutonium.
As of Feb 2009, there were 45 new nuclear plants under construction, and three are fast breeders one in India and two in Russia. Two fast breeders have been operation in France and Russia for many years. The US was ahead of the world in the mid-1990s when the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) was cancelled for political reasons. Now the US is behind Russia, India, France and Japan.
The fact that recycling is outlawed in the US, has hampered progress, and not stopped proliferation.
H. Douglas Lightfoot
This article tends to miss the point that the waste is about 98% U238, which is good fuel for fast reactors. We must always be able to get at the waste to recycle the large amount of remaining nuclear fuel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt also misses the point is that if we are to have a reliable and sufficient electricity supply, it has to ultimately come from nuclear. (When electricity stops, everything stops!)
The fact that we must make fast breeders work to have sufficient electricity for thousands of years is not mentioned in this article. Fast breeders use metal fuel and during the recycling process, there is no weapons grade plutonium.
As of Feb 2009, there were 45 new nuclear plants under construction, and three are fast breeders – one in India and two in Russia. Two fast breeders have been operation in France and Russia for many years. The US was ahead of the world in the mid-1990s when the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) was cancelled for political reasons. Now the US is behind Russia, India, France and Japan.
The fact that recycling is outlawed in the US, has hampered progress, and not stopped proliferation.
One fact I feel was left out in this article is the fact that Japan and France already recycle their waste; I fail to see the dangers in third world countries getting the technology if created when it has already been created and is being used.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suppose, if I were a 'crazy_religious', ('Christian' or 'Islamic' Taliban, 'ProLifer', who-whatever), I would have crashed a plane into the reactor cooling pools at various sites around the planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead of two almost empty office buildings, (one of which I used to be employed in), in lower Manahattan.
If these salt mines are as 'time stable' as implied by the article...that's the 1st. 'good news' I've heard regarding anything 'nuclear', in my entire life!
There has been much talk about what kind of warnig signs to emplace, (supposed to be useful for 10K years), around N-waste deposits.
As one can grasp by considering the primitive male found in the Alps a few years back, (the so-called 'Otzi' paleolithic), NO ONE has the slightest, viable idea what to do about anything concerning 10,000 years, let alone the hundred's of thousands-to-millions of years required for some of this waste.
So...Let's bury it, (the waste);
...and the reactors, and reacter designers, and nuclear profiteers, (military & civilian), along with it!
Scientists are telling us that there is some chance we are as little as 10 years away from falling off a climate precipice with permafrost methane emissions and ocean acidification forming the leading edge of a very steep slope.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this70% of our total energy needs are non electrical fossil fuel based and that has to stop and very quickly. This throws the electric forecast model right out the window. The only way we can rapidly replace fossil fuels with electricity is nuclear power. There is no other way to do it in the less than 10 year time frame.
Westinghouse has begun construction of four 1.2 gigawatt nuclear plants it sold China for 5.5 billion. Legislators could come up with similar public power deal replacing fossil fuel plants with nuclear if they could just outlaw lawyers, rabid insurance companies, endless environmental assessments and lawsuits from the process. We finally could move ahead on really and finally greening America. The massive increase in employment and industrial capacity would be paid for by the rapid elimination of fossil fuel imports.
This would get us well into the future with electric vehicles, hydrogen based synfuels and electric/geothermal/solar heat technologies replacing a big chunk of our fossil fuel requirements. Ten years from now we would be looking at fast breeder and fusion technology taking care of all our energy needs at a very low cost and cleaning up almost all the waste from previous generation reactors.
Not much time left to get going on this!!
When you consider the cost of handling the nuclear waste, electricity produced out of it is extremely expensive. Every body should know that only solution is sending it to space. But then we should live with the dangers of rocket failures at launch!!!! (I personally would not accept this solution and please someone calculate the KW cost of electricity by including the cost for sending the wastes to space)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease note that there no place on this earth we can dump the nuclear wastes. Till we find a good solution to handle the wastes or develope a new technology that produces no wastes, we should stop running all the nuclear power plants. We should accept that we have made a big mistake by asking from our governers to supply us cheap energy. Our governers should be so brave to tell us that there no more cheap energy on this world.
Actually the solution is making an amendment to the constitution. There should be such a phrase in the constitution:
"The governments are banned to satisfy the needs of individuals that is in contrary to nature and humanity."
As individuals we should be ready to pay the costs of our needs. The governments should tell us the exact cost of our claims. We as the limited time scale inhabitants of this lovely earth should be responsible enough not to ask for impossible solutions from our governments to satisfy our needs that conflicts with nature and humanity.
candide: What time do you wnat your electiricity turned off? It sounds to me like you don't like 20% of your electricity, so I'll take your share.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have worked on both WIPP and Yucca projects, which are meant for disposal of defense mixed nuclear waste and high-level spent nuclear wastes respectively. At Yucca, I have seen deplorable management and lack of understanding to defensibly meet the NRC requirements on time and on budget. No wonder, after 22 years and spending about $9 billion, the repository was not any where close to completion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI fully agree with Dr. Chew, the newly appointed Energy secretary, that long term storage of spent nuclear fuel in concrete dry casks on site will be a viable approach.
Since there are no abundant fission product isotopes with half lives in the region of PL239 and 240 each with a half life of thousands of years, the onsite long term storage will facilitate the decay of those isotopes, rendering lower radiation emissions.
There are viable and cost-effective innovative gamma and neutron radiation shielding concrete technologies available that can be used to construct storage dry casks, bunkers and vaults.
How much would our nuclear waste be worth to non-earth life forms?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a simple solution to safely store nuclear and radioactive wastes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy solution answers the related problems, terrorism, earthquakes, fire, sites needed, corrosion, leakage, and expense. Located in an above ground facility that would be safe in anyones back yard.
A structure the same size as Yucca Mountain can be built for 100 million euors on the surface.
This solution if allowed would put all of the worlds top nuclear scientists to shame as it is very simple, it took me hours to invent and I am not in the field nor am I a scientist, it has taken them over 90 years to find a solution yet where is it.
Yes it is! There is plenty of room in the outside space. Why not load the rockets with spent fuel, and send them out to a planet like the moon?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy answer: Shoot it at the sun. (I'm not joking)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisall nuclear waste should be launched into the sun. I know that if you put it in a rocket, and it blows up at launch you essentially have a dirty bomb. But I propose we simply keep it in sealed containers (like we currently do). Until 20 -50 years down the road when access to space will be much cheaper & safer. At which point we can dispose of it thanks to the sun.
Hey, since Coal Power plants produce more radioactive waste per kwh generated than Nuclear Power plants, and Coal Power plants are allowed to happily dump their Radioactive Waste into landfills, waterways and the atmosphere, thus for Nuclear to be treated on a less unequal footing than King Coal, it is only fair that Nuclear Waste could be powdered and mixed with a diluent, like sand for instance in equal quantities to Coal Waste, and dumped into landfills. Or make it water soluble with suitable acids and dump it into the Ocean. Certainly vastly more environmentally friendly than COAL WILL EVER BE. ( I haven’t mentioned the 12 millions of tons of other noxious substances an equivalent Coal Power plant puts out every year that the Nuclear Power plant doesn’t.) And yet Obama & Chu are going to pour more billions into the Clean Coal Fantasy, and nothing into the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe LIFTR or Thorium Molten Salt Reactor would fuel a 1000 MWe power plant for one year with 1000 kg of Natural Thorium and generate 2000 kg of waste, 83% of which is valuable for industrial instrumentation, agricultural irradiation and medical cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging. The remaining 170 kg of radioactive waste only needs containment for 300 yrs. The annual ash from the Coal Power Plant contains 12 tons of thorium which would run the 1000 MWe Thorium Nuclear Power Plant for 11 years.
And there are simple solutions to the Nuclear Waste issue, that were blocked by the Fossil Fuel Lobby and their Pseudo-Environmentalist Surrogates. Deep Seabed burial, is cheap, simple and safe for millions of years. As well dumping it into deep Oceanic Trench Subduction zones is another. See:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
And how is it that Coal with CCS fantasy can pretend to store trillions of tons of CO2 underground, which will be released in an Earth Tremor suffocating any human or animal in the region – perhaps even one million years from now? How is it that the Canadian Government can happily store 237,000 tonnes of Arsenic Trioxide right on the shores of Great Slave Lake – permanently like forever – by keeping it frozen – which requires constant maintenance - enough to kill every person on the Earth 300 times over – and the anti-Nuclear Environmentalists are completely silent about it? The double standard against Safe, Clean, Green Nuclear is incomprehensible until you realize the power and influence of the Fossil Fuel Lobby.
I prop0se: Drill a large well hole as deep as practical. Top it with an airlock. Drop the hottest, most radioactive possible waste into the hole. At some point the waste will reach a critical temperature and begin to melt it's way through the earth, ultimately reaching and dispersing in the core. The borehole is now effectively empty and ready to receive more high level waste. I request a royalty of $1.00 per metric ton of waste disposed of in this way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have an idea_ why not store the waste on the moon. You could use the shuttles as transports during that 5 years of inactivity between programs. There have got to be some arid ,dry ares that are steep walled enough to store that waste.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Reduce reuse recycle", that is the mantra we are asked to follow with our household wastes and nuclear should be no different. There is a lot of research and design work completed on advanced recycling through the use of a fast reactor. This does all three. It reduces the amount of waste that needs to be stored, it reuses uranium to make light water reactor fuel, and it recycles the transuranics into metal fuel for the fast reactor. The fast reactor produces electricity that is needed, thus, generating income that pays for the plant. That's not including revenue from selling recycled fuel to existing reactors. The waste stream is minimized, the long lived transuranics are transmuted to shorter lived elements. The waste storage time is on the order of 300 to 500 years before the activity of the waste is about the same as naturally occuring uranium. People have built lot's of above ground buildings that are that old so a geologic repository should be simple. The recycling is also proliferation resistant in that the extracted actiniods are not suitable for bomb material without lots of additional refining. Fast reactors have been built and operated successfully, recycling has been demonstrated, albeit on a small scale. There is no science fiction in this solution, unlike some of the other suggestions such as a rocket to the sun or moon carrying a significant tonnage of waste, or digging the deepest hole ever created ...please!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf one thing you may be sure; when science determines how to handle a situation, politics will screw it up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"There is no situation, no matter how bad, that politicians cannot make worse. And usually will!
The thrust of the article seems to place blame on the politics of the situation that exists in Nevada and now Washington DC. What was not mentioned at all was the finding of Chlorine 36 in the deepest area at Yucca Mountain. Since this isotope did not exist before atomic testing, the implication is that it took only 50+ years to get to a place that needed to be dry for 10,000 years or more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have made trips to both the visitor center in Las Vegas and to Yucca Mountain as well. When I asked the question about Chlorine 36 on the tour, my question was not answered. I have no doubt that the persons who have worked at Yucca believe strongly in the project. But they also appear to have ignored strong scientific evidence of the deficiencies at the site. So, their desire to make it work economically trumped their objectivity.
This link will be of interest: http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/1629
Another nuclear 'site' worth visiting is the Atomic Testing Museum, also in Las Vegas. But here too, there is no information about nuclear waste.
Very interesting. I read a lot of news sources and had no idea that Obama was committed to closing Yucca Mtn. as a waste site and that Congress has now legislatively done so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA reminder of how difficult it is to make hard decisions in a democracy, how there is likely to be enough opposition to every solution to block it. Oh well, I won't be here when the worst consequences of all these developing problems come to pass 100+ years from now.
It's time to think outside the crypt. What if we could find a place that was already so radioactively contaminated that the additions of a few hundred thousand tons of contaminated waste wouldn't make a difference? A place which already has more than 8000 burial sites of highly contaminated material?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm talking about the site in the Ukraine surrounding the Chernobyl event where there are areas with half-lives of contamination equal to that of all the stored nuclear waste material we currently have.
Sure there are problems of control, transportation and security, all of which can be resolved. set up an international zone supervised by the UN where the worst of the waste can be buried. treat it as a utility and pay the Ukrainians a fair price for what is an unproductive and expensive zone.
It's worth looking into so that we can resume an intelligent return to the construction of nuclear power plants with known costs for waste disposal.
I would like to write about the nuclear waste article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have worked at nuclear plants and talked to various fuel engineers. The waste fuel can be recycled 20 plus times to recycle the uranium and plutonium. It is true that a fast reactor can breakdown the actinides. It is unfortunate that politicians wont get off their butts and do something right for the people.
Brad Philpott
Of course, the NIMBY syndrome - Not In My Back Yard - is a public relations obstacle at Yucca, and a reason no political wants to deal with the problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndeed, it is not a technical problem, but a political one.
Though there is nothing wrong with the Yucca development , public opinion on this subject is prone to hysteria, and arbitrary standards are brought into play.
But just because the public prefers not to think about it does not mean waste disappears.
It appears that no progress has been made in educating the public. not even in decades.
Perhaps one could begin by pointing out that a waste repository one day will have no more radioactivity that the uranium ore body whence it originated.
It is a shame that this subject is not taken very seriously. There is such a great wealth of misinformation in the press and even in Scientific American. The scientists at Argonne NL, among others, have done excellent work on this subject and they are superceeded by politics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe result of all of this will be that another country will develop the product and we will have to buy the solution from them. Such a shame when we have such a wealth of technical advantage.
Re the comment by Bill Covington; Not a very large pick-up, (33 tonnes is only a cube about 1.2 mtrs on each side) but it sure would be a STRONG pick-up!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe. the comment by Bill; It wouldn't need a very large pick up ( a cube 1.2 mtrs on each side is about 33 tonnes) but it sure would need a very strong one!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes it is, but i like to share a good news, well i know a person who have the solution for nuc. waste, he can dispose the waste into a useful manner, "FERTILIZER ",
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIntresting !!?? ask me for further.
viru_singh80@rediffmail.com
If I have my way, Yucca Mountain comes roaring back to life after dingy Harry Reid and addled Obama are both gone. Nevada's died in the wool NIMBY folks must wake up and smell the coffee--the gambling industry that built Las Vegas and Reno is dying. Even if the economy comes back, these cities won't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYucca Mountain will leak nothing for at least 10,000 years and even when it does start leaking the amount of radiation will be moving so slow and be so tiny that an advanced civilization around at that time, 12,000 A.D., will easily be able to deal with it, if they even choose to.
Some people suggest that the problem is that humans will either be so degenerated by then that they can't deal with it, or humans will be extinct.
If that is true, so what? I refuse to worry about anything happening to a world without man, because Nature already has a whole line-up of cataclysms inevitably coming on that will be so much more damaging than the worst Yucca mountain slow-motion seepage problem anyhow,
Problems like: 1) a gamma-ray burster zapping us with enough radiation to sterilize the earth fives miles down in the solid crust, 2) a north-pole to south-pole magnetic flip flop, which will bathe the Earth in deadly cosmic radiation during the transition phase, 3) a Yellowstone Park supervolcano blow out which has the potential to make 75% of everything extinct, 4) any other supervolcano blow out, 5) an asteroid the size of Dallas smashing into our planet and making 95% or maybe 195% of everything extinct, 6) the wrong genes finally get together in the fowl and swine populations of the world and a pandemic wipes out 99.99% of humanity in six months, leaving only the residents of the Falkland Islands alive, 7) a sudden-onset Ice Age turns out to be exceptionally serious, seguing directly into a new snowball Earth. A tiny population of humans survive living in ice caves over a breeder reactor they may or may not be able to keep running until they figure out how to turn climate around in a serious way.
There are probably more real catastrophes to list, but the foregoing all have a reasonable probability of happening in the next 10,000 years. In fact, the magnetic flip-flop and the supervolcano eruption may well happen in the next 1000 years or even 100 years.
An active Yucca Mountain repository is going to start looking pretty good to Nevadans when they are literally left with nothing else. In fact, the repository could be viewed as about the cleanest and least noticeable industry that any state could hope to attract.
I think that a study should be conducted to consider placing our nuclear waste into the global incinerator (send it to the earth’s core?). We measure tectonic plate movement. So we know where plates are being consumed into the earth’s core. (Basically the earth recycles itself). If we place the waste in containers deep enough and close enough to a fault line of a submerging plate. Then we should be able to calculate when the waste will be taken low enough into the earth where it will naturally incinerated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo in we should be able to not worry what will happen tyo the waste in future generations or discoveries. Because IT WILL BE GONE in time. THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO DISCOVER. The earth probably recycles itself faster than the waste deteriorates.
Just a thought that should be considered as a global effort….