The anti-renewable energy lobby does not want wind-turbines nor solar farms in their area. Visual pollution and power lines, or some such.
So nuclear waste is an absolute no for them.
At the same time, they want lower energy costs, which nuclear definitely won’t provide.
The planet is going to hell rather rapidly, but the oldies do not want to change anything to prevent that outcome.
The only demographic that supported the Tories at the last election was the over 65s.
Remember that.
mighty_issac on
All of the nuclear waste produced by humanity, ever, of all time, would fill an area similar to a football pitch.
That is safely, under lots of concrete.
Potential-Secret-760 on
Can’t we dump it on one of the inhabitable islands surrounding ours? (If there are any)
HumbleOwl6876 on
Throw it in some old mine somewhere In The Scottish highlands. We could literally just pay the 50 people that live within a mile or two of it a few hundred grand. I can guarentee you’d get next to no complaints for the locals
takesthebiscuit on
Which town/ village wants to guarantee high quality well paid jobs for generations to come to look after low level waste?
Nuclear_Wasteman on
The big issues with geological disposal are political more than practical and mired in fear from an uneducated populace. There is no ‘perfect’ geological formation, some are better than others and some are a ‘different’ kind of better; you still have to engineer your waste packages to the geology. Given the legacy of existing nuclear waste that the UK needs to dispose of a GDF is a guarantee of almost a century of skilled work in an area.
I get very dubious about a lot of the timescales banded about in stories like this. A big lump of mixed fission and activation products will reach a level of radioactivity equivalent to natural uranium ore (which, while I wouldn’t want to be mining and milling it without significant PPE isn’t hugely radioactive) in ~1000 years (very easy to engineer containment for that). A big lump of actinides (plutonium, americium etc) take several orders of magnitude longer to decay to that level but are generally less ‘mobile’ in the environment and spend most of that time after 1000 years have passed slowly decaying from 100 times the radioactivity of uranium ore (still relatively spicy but not of huge concern if some were to migrate).
A lot of concerns abound less from migration of material into water tables etc but more that one cannot predict the political situation five decades hence, let alone five centuries/millennia. It may be that a future civilisation may see a GDF as a source of weapons grade material for a nuclear programme; hence a lot of work is being put into chemically processing certain materials into wasteforms that are hard to reprocess and extract, for example, plutonium.
6 Comments
The anti-renewable energy lobby does not want wind-turbines nor solar farms in their area. Visual pollution and power lines, or some such.
So nuclear waste is an absolute no for them.
At the same time, they want lower energy costs, which nuclear definitely won’t provide.
The planet is going to hell rather rapidly, but the oldies do not want to change anything to prevent that outcome.
The only demographic that supported the Tories at the last election was the over 65s.
Remember that.
All of the nuclear waste produced by humanity, ever, of all time, would fill an area similar to a football pitch.
That is safely, under lots of concrete.
Can’t we dump it on one of the inhabitable islands surrounding ours? (If there are any)
Throw it in some old mine somewhere In The Scottish highlands. We could literally just pay the 50 people that live within a mile or two of it a few hundred grand. I can guarentee you’d get next to no complaints for the locals
Which town/ village wants to guarantee high quality well paid jobs for generations to come to look after low level waste?
The big issues with geological disposal are political more than practical and mired in fear from an uneducated populace. There is no ‘perfect’ geological formation, some are better than others and some are a ‘different’ kind of better; you still have to engineer your waste packages to the geology. Given the legacy of existing nuclear waste that the UK needs to dispose of a GDF is a guarantee of almost a century of skilled work in an area.
I get very dubious about a lot of the timescales banded about in stories like this. A big lump of mixed fission and activation products will reach a level of radioactivity equivalent to natural uranium ore (which, while I wouldn’t want to be mining and milling it without significant PPE isn’t hugely radioactive) in ~1000 years (very easy to engineer containment for that). A big lump of actinides (plutonium, americium etc) take several orders of magnitude longer to decay to that level but are generally less ‘mobile’ in the environment and spend most of that time after 1000 years have passed slowly decaying from 100 times the radioactivity of uranium ore (still relatively spicy but not of huge concern if some were to migrate).
A lot of concerns abound less from migration of material into water tables etc but more that one cannot predict the political situation five decades hence, let alone five centuries/millennia. It may be that a future civilisation may see a GDF as a source of weapons grade material for a nuclear programme; hence a lot of work is being put into chemically processing certain materials into wasteforms that are hard to reprocess and extract, for example, plutonium.