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YetAnotherSecretAnonymousPseudonymeArs Tribunus Militumet Subscriptorreply2 months agoignore user
Bdnzor wrote:
Everyone seems to love nuclear plants, but do they forget about the tons and tons of waste you have to store somewhere basically forever?
- Not all "radioactive" waste is the same.
Amongst the amount of radioactive waste generated by nuclear power, research, medical and a few others activities, there are different kind of waste, distinguished by their activity and their half life.
I'm most familiar with the French classification, so I'll use that one, but countries usually account for this is similar ways.
High Activity waste represent 0.2% of the volume and 94.9% of the radioactivity.
Medium Activity with long half life represent another 2.9% fo the volume and 4.9% of the activity.
The volume in France of those two categories is 4 000 + 42 000 m3. If you spread these on a football field, it raises up to 7 meters. That's the waste for the whole country.
The remainder usually is composed of shorter half life (<31 years) and medium activity, low and very low activity waste, and very short half life stuff that you can keep in storage until they get inert.
Dealing with those is significantly easier. (And generally no worse than dealing with normal industrial waste, of which we have significantly larger volumes).
- Proper underground storage is a reliable way to deal with High Level Waste.
The underground storage projects are not stupid dig how, bury, forget process. They are designed using serious geology studies, including what can be learn from the Oklo natural reactor that ran 2 billions years ago.
The vitrified waste is in such a form that water has to actually dissolve the glass to free-up the waste (that's not happening very fast, especially given that there are a few barriers before water even comes into contact with the glass), and the storage is built in low permeability rocks were water barely flows at all. As such by the time water manages to dissolve some amount of waste, it usually has decreased significantly and gets diluted to homeopathic doses by the time it gets anywhere near surface.
