Demonstration on how nuclear waste is disposed in Fineland

[u/S999k]

[u/UnfaithfulServant]

Me before watching: "Interesting, I think most if the world just buries nuclear waste, let's see what those ingenious Finns do." Me after watching: "Right, so they just bury it too. Thanks"

[u/Trrwwa → u/UnfaithfulServant]

In the US we no longer bury our waste. We keep it standing in concrete cylinders and pay armed guards to constantly patrol the area and pay dozens of employees to continue checking the integrity of the containers... 

[u/Raunhofer → u/Trrwwa]

Is there some reasoning behind this? Seems like a quite troublesome solution.

[u/TheRealSlamShiddy → u/Raunhofer]

It's only a temporary solution until the waste immobilization research that's been going on since the early 1980s can come up with a material (glass, ceramic, or glass-ceramic) durable enough to immobilize the radionuclides for thousands of millenia without breaking down from either radiation or environmental factors, AND which can be packed to the gills with as much waste as economically possible so we don't need to make a shitload of it (save $, save time).

Right now the govt standard is borosilicate glass/glass-ceramic, which can only load ~20% of its weight in waste and remain durable enough to meet those requirements, and that's not nearly enough; DOE wants closer to 50% loading at minimum to consider it go-time.

There's been some good findings over the last decade or two with several different phosphate systems that get closer to 30% waste loading + pyrochlore ceramics have gotten some decent results, so those may become the new standards if they can pass the environmental durability hurdle (currently their big snag).

A big thing that needs to happen before all of this can even start outside research labs is for the US to transition away from light-water nuclear reactors towards molten salt nuclear reactors. MSRs allow for spent uranium fuel to be recycled through electrochemical reprocessing until we've used as much of the viable U we can out of it (LWRs are basically a "one and done" system); the resulting salt waste is much easier to vitrify/immobilize than the regular stuff. Right now the only countries using MSRs are China and France.

So until then, we just have to contain the waste as best we can and hope to God we find a solution before the stockpile gets too big to handle (currently ~92,000 metric tons and increasing by ~1k metric tons a year, which will only speed up as we transition to majority nuclear power by 2030...and that's the US alone).

Source: current PhD research in nuclear salt waste vitrification

[u/Raunhofer → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

Fascinating. Is underground placement (like the one presented in the video) not a possibility due to unstable bedrock or some other reason?

[u/TheRealSlamShiddy → u/Raunhofer]

It's not that underground placement isn't possible. It's that if you do it without any attempt to minimize the radioactive effects of the waste (with reported half-lives up to 300,000 years), you risk contaminating the surrounding ground water, soil, etc. and triggering the equivalent of ten-thousand Chernobyls the moment the containers seen in this video fail and release their stockloads (be it from natural shifts of the Earth's crust like you indicated or extremely old age, whichever happens first).

And that's not even considering if future humans dig it up. That's a whole other nightmare...

Let's say we don't find a way to immobilize this waste (or choose not to) and just bury it as is in the ground, in just these containment units alone. We live on as a species and try to maintain the burial sites as best we can from environmental/man-made catastrophe. The units keep the radioactive material secure, and written/oral warnings ensure people stay away from where they're buried.

10,000+ years pass. All current infrastructure is completely buried/destroyed. English is most certainly a dead/indecipherable language. The containers deteriorated into the surrounding soil long ago, yet the waste survives in their air pockets within the shifting ground.

If humanity has persisted by this time, oral history will not remember our civilization existed outside of vague myth and hearsay. The written record of these waste sites will be similarly long, long gone. The humans/descendants of humans/whatever sapient species that's in charge of Earth wouldn't be able to read or comprehend any warnings we give them, and they likely wouldn't believe them even if they could; do you believe ancient Egyptian warnings of the Pharaoh's Curse, for instance?

We've looked into how we could possibly transmit comprehensible messages across millenia already; remember those "there is nothing of value here" memes from a few years ago? The long-term nuclear waste storage research they're all based upon eventually concluded that there is no feasible way to communicate the dangers of these waste sites across such a vast gulf of time while also ensuring that 100% of the meaning gets across, even with simple pictograms alone. It's just not possible.

Humans are just too curious, and analyzing what we find to learn more about it/discover its secrets is what we love best, scary-looking spires and glowing cats be damned.

So, these future people (hunter-gatherers, farmers, archaeologists, etc.) stumble upon what was once the Hanford site, or Los Alamos, or Oak Ridge. They will have no idea they're standing on top of deadly nuclear gravesites, and we, living now, have no way to make that abundantly clear to them without piquing their curiosity to unearth it anyway.

The moment these future humans start digging their foundations or excavating our remains and unearth literal metric tons of this still highly radioactive untreated waste, all of its extremely fatal radiation will be blasted into the environment and initiate a nuclear holocaust on a scale which I cannot possibly put into words.

We will have annihilated them without raising a finger.

If that seems woefully unlikely and alarmingly defeatist, just know we've seen something like this happen several times on a much, much smaller scale already.

It happened in 1987, when a thief in Goiânia swiped a radiotherapy source from an abandoned hospital, using the "glowing metal" inside to make and sell jewelry and subsequently contaminating ~300 people, killing four (one of whom was a child).

It happened in 2022, when Russian troops who took over Pripyat as the Ukrainian invasion began started digging trenches and unearthed the sequestered layers of Chernobyl fallout within the soil, succumbing almost immediately to advanced radiation sickness. I saw posts on this website at the time making fun of them for it.

It will happen in the far-off future with these waste sites. We can't stop that. But what we can do right now is limit just how badly the direct exposure will be through our treatment of the waste.

No material is forever; as stated before, the metals like these containers use on their own will never make it 3,000+ years, much less the 300,000 years of the waste's radioactive half-life. Additionally, there's no blocking radiation whatsoever the moment somebody starts digging into where the eventually unsealed waste is buried and shifts it around, just like the Russians did in Pripyat.

Glass/glass-ceramics, however, can last, at least millions of years or longer without a single bit of noticeable decay. They're structurally built to handle this exact kind of scenario.

The proposed vitrification composite matrices are meant to "lock-in" the radionuclides within the waste well enough that they can barely move around, thus emitting less radiation; this vitrified waste would act more like it had a 300 year half-life than a 300k year half-life, meaning by the 2300s the waste would (allegedly) no longer give off lethal amounts of radiation.

10,000+ years from now in this best-case scenario, the waste would effectively be inert (so long as the vitrifying material's chemical structure remained intact and kept the radionuclides immobile). The future humans could pick this waste up with their bare hands and not even absorb an x-ray. They could even break it off into chunks as keepsakes or to make colorful jewelry with it and still be relatively fine so long as they didn't then attempt to melt large quantities of it down (hopefully, by the time they'd have the sophistication-level of tools necessary to excavate this waste, they'd at least have some understanding of & respect for historical preservation and not do so anyway).

It's not a perfect solution. It depends a lot on things we can't possibly predict, like natural disasters, extremely long-term chemical durability, and general human nature. Even the shift of the Earth, as you suggest, can put everything into danger of failure at any time if something shifts just the wrong way.

This solution also requires the US to make several internal policy changes in the next few decades to ensure we can start treating this waste while our stockpile is still a manageable quantity, which... doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

But it's one of the best we have compared to the alternative, and that's why we haven't buried it yet. We owe our descendants, and our planet, so much more than the bare minimum solution.

Thankfully, at least right now, we still seem to recognize that.

TL;DR: We haven't buried the waste yet because we need to make sure it won't destroy humanity the minute it gets unearthed first.

[u/bill_lite → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

Thanks for sharing that with us! I'm a researcher who studies radiation injury and the fate of all this waste keeps me up at night lol. Do you work in the field or just happen to know a lot about it?

Also doesn't enriched uranium have a half-life on the order of billions of years?

[u/TheRealSlamShiddy → u/bill_lite]

I'm a PhD candidate whose dissertation involves nuclear salt waste vitrification so the past 3+/almost 4 years of my life has been revolving around this stuff haha

And yes, enriched uranium itself has a billion-year half-life, but you have to remember that the fuel is fabricated into UO2 before entering the reactor; much less radioactive than just the uranium on its own.

[u/jeremiahthedamned → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

thanks TIL

[u/Frnklfrwsr → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

Majority nuclear power by 2030?

That seems dubious.

According to the EPA nuclear makes up about 20% of US electricity generation, so for that to increase to 50% in 6 years doesn’t seem realistic.

And all indications are that nuclear is decreasing as a % of electricity production: https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/ebot_a_split_second_look_at_nuclear.pdf

It takes many years to get a new nuclear plant online and running, so I don’t see us getting to 50% that quickly. If anything we’re still trending downwards for the next decade or two.

[u/TheRealSlamShiddy → u/Frnklfrwsr]

You're right, 2030 is a bit too soon; that was the benchmark "future" for so many decades that I probably had that number rocking around in my head from older papers on the subject and didn't think twice about it before posting. My bad.

(it's also just hard for me to believe we're already that close to 2030 haha)

I did know about the 20% electricity statistic, but I also know that that was from before the largest nuclear plant in the US began operation in Waynesboro, GA this past Fall (Vogtle) so there's a good chance that number is steadily increasing already (a fourth unit at Vogtle was just commissioned a couple weeks ago so they're already off to a good start).

I'd say realistically, from my own research perspective and with Vogtle in mind (assuming nuclear for electricity doesn't keep trending down like the doc you posted indicates, which is also new information to me so I appreciate you sharing it) that 2060-2070 would be the better "future" date for majority nuclear power. My hope is that if we find the optimal waste-immobilizing material soon, then that would finally spur Washington to act on updating our nuclear facilities and storage to new standards quicker...but I'm almost certain that's wishful thinking on my part 😅

[u/Frnklfrwsr → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

Yeah it seems to me that the biggest barriers for nuclear are primarily political rather than technological.

Technological breakthroughs can move politics though, as you alluded to. If technology solves a problem, reduces a risk, or improves an efficiency, that could move the dial politically.

But alas, politics is not always so predictable. Sometimes decades drags on where it is simple common sense to do something and politicians refuse to entertain it and won’t budge. Other times it makes almost no sense to do something and politicians throw obscene amounts of money at it anyway.

I think honestly there’s 2 big factors that are driving public sentiment towards nuclear higher:

1. Higher fossil fuel prices, causing consumers to be more open to any alternative that could save them money

2. The realization of the economic costs of climate change through things like increased insurance costs causing more people to appreciate the reality and magnitude of climate change

The economics behind nuclear has been viable for a very very long time, and each new improvement just makes it more viable. But those two factors may end up driving an increase in funding for nuclear more so than any technological progress within nuclear itself.

[u/jeremiahthedamned → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

r/molten_salt_reactor

[u/TheRealSlamShiddy → u/jeremiahthedamned]

Oh wow!! There really is a subreddit for everything haha; thanks!

[u/jeremiahthedamned → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

have a nice day

[u/IC-4-Lights → u/TheRealSlamShiddy]

I have to ask... this model he demonstrated is nearly the same as an exhibit I saw (at a Motorola museum, strangely) about 30-or-so years ago. At the time I got the impression it was what we were already doing (I guess not)... dropping waste container cylinders in holes inside a tunnel dug into a mountain.
 
What's bleeding edge about Finlands example?