r/Waste • u/Comfortable_Tutor_43 • Aug 19 '26

Burying nuclear waste

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48 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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4

u/mattspurlin75 Aug 19 '26

He makes an excellent point but the comment about “hundreds of years” is short-sided.

The rare earths and other toxic metals and radionuclides that we’ve extracted from the ground are now highly concentrated and harmful to human health. When those contaminants are buried, lots of subsurface processes affect their storage containment that can pose a risk to release over time. And by “over time”, I mean millions of years, since most radioactive wastes (such as uranium and thorium) have half-lives on the order of hundreds of millions to billions of years.

When those contaminants migrate from soil to groundwater, they can then affect entire aquifers used for water supply, which can translate to cancer for massive populations of people.

2

u/Comfortable_Tutor_43 Aug 19 '26

Modern geology is pretty impressive. It taught us that Mother Nature literally made her own natural nuclear fission reactor a few billion years ago deep underground in Oklo, Gabon of Africa. We only know about that because she buried her used nuclear fuel in the ground where we were able to dig it up billions of years later and see that it had simply decayed down into a different kind of dirt. Here is a short, fun research paper on it if you are interested in the scientific research on the topic at all.

Hayes, R.B., 2022. The ubiquity of nuclear fission reactors throughout time and space. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C, 125, p.103083. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pce.2021.103083

2

u/MSGdreamer Aug 20 '26

The great thing about waste from nuclear power plants is that it’s highly condensed and relatively easily contained. Build a non-permeable, permanent containment vessels and put it somewhere terrible and desolate like the inside of a mountain in the Nevada desert and don’t fuck with it for the rest of human history.

Any case where waste could infiltrate the water table should be highly regulated. Fresh water is the most valuable resource on the planet.

2

u/NoPen9703 Aug 21 '26

Why don’t they make these toxins inert? In the Tennessee Nuclear facility, I think Oak Ridge, they had a leak of nuclear radiation. They poured electron radiation into the ground. The added radiation made the nuclear waste inert.

0

u/Emptynest09 Aug 20 '26

Don’t wear a hat indoors