5 ms·
> Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt.
by chimeracoder 2y ago
> Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt.
Containment and disposal is largely a red herring. It's actually more or less a solved problem, from a safety perspective, because it turns out that the laws of exponential decay mean that you can just store it with proper shielding and it's safe for storage pretty much anywhere. I'm oversimplfying, but only a little bit - the public's perception of "nuclear waste" is extremely untethered to the actual reality.
The whole fiasco with Yucca Mountain was driven not by science, but by a desire to appease objectors by adhering to an arbitrary and unscientific perception of safety, not an actual assessment of the risks.
> while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines
Where are you seeing this? Nuclear energy has lost a lot of energy for active support, but active protest ("picket") of nuclear facilities is exceedingly rare these days. Wind turbines are a different matter: they're sustainable, but they're opposed by monied individuals/groups who don't want their beachfront views "ruined".
- blueant 2y agoI agree with you that the requirements for permanent safe storage are very high - thousands of years with no leak, besides others - but nonetheless, even with simpler requirements, Yucca - or any other georep - was not deemed safe.
- foxyv 2y agoIt wasn't so much deemed unsafe as not safe enough. Pretty much everyone involved threw up their hands and said screw it we'll store on-site which is WAY less safe than Yucca or deep bore sites. Meanwhile we have casks exploding in New Mexico which should have been buried 3 miles underground decades ago.
- foxyv 2y agoCurrent nuclear disposal methods may be acceptable, but they are also sub-optimal. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump-20160819-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump...