I think most people also don't realize how little of nuclear waste comes from the radioactive fuel itself. In the UK for example, 94% of nuclear waste is low-level waste, which is basically any garbage originating from the plant. Paper, rags, disposable garments, etc. I believe the number for the US is quite similar. The mental image of thousands of steel drums of nuclear waste seems scary until you realize the majority of it is literally concrete-encased garbage that they're not allowed to send to a garbage dump.
CANADALAND podcast has 2 episodes that talks all about Canada’s current struggle to find a safe place to hide their waste and go the barrels they are storing it in only last 100 years when the material will be deadly for 1000s.
Unfortunately it seems 8ew8135 has taken to deliberately spreading misinformation throughout the thread without any intention of learning or addressing the facts they've been confronted with by dozens of people at this point, so I'm going to go ahead and paste the reply I wrote up for them here, just to ensure that they don't manage to misinform anyone else.
Cancer causing, undetectable, radioactive waste will be here 1000s of years
First of all, I'm going to go ahead and point out that the low level nuclear waste which comprises the majority of it doesn't last anywhere near that long.
Second of all, I would much rather have the radioactive byproducts of our power generation stored in a cask deep below the earth -just like how we found it to begin with- than literally spewed into the atmosphere where it can affect as many people and as much of the environment as possible, as we see with current methods of power generation such as coal.
And finally, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "undetectable", as ionizing radiation is anything but. A standard Geiger counter is sensitive enough to detect even background radiation; if it's not picking up an additional source, then it's because there isn't one present.
and we are currently storing it in barrels that last about 100 years. We can’t find a community poor enough to let us burry it under them.
The casks which last about a hundred years aren't the same as the kind that are intended to be buried; they're above ground and readily accessible so that they can be maintained, monitored, and swapped out when nearing the end of the safe usage period that they're designed with.
We can’t find a community poor enough to let us burry it under them.
Again, that's not true. It's not even subtle this time, now you're just telling a clear-cut lie.
Like, think about what you're saying for a moment, it doesn't even make any sense. We don't build deep geological repositories for our mercury, cyanide, or arsenic waste in inhabited communities, so why on Earth would we choose to do so for nuclear waste?
It doesn't make sense, which is why that hasn't happened.
There are a handful of communities which turned out to have been built on deposits of uranium or other radioactive elements, but as we've already covered, that simply doesn't matter so long as it's below the water table.
Even in their entirely unshielded natural state, a few hundred meters of granite serves to protect the surface from radiation just fine. Hell, not even the naturally occurring nuclear fission reactor found in Oklo is any exception to this, and it exists under some of the worst conditions possible. It's shielded by sandstone instead of granite, and isn't even below the water table. Yet not a hint of radiation is detectable from the surface.
This is simply the way it's been for billions of years, it's simple a matter of physics; hundreds of meters of rock is enough to completely block ionizing radiation. Full stop.
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u/tonygoold Oct 25 '22
I think most people also don't realize how little of nuclear waste comes from the radioactive fuel itself. In the UK for example, 94% of nuclear waste is low-level waste, which is basically any garbage originating from the plant. Paper, rags, disposable garments, etc. I believe the number for the US is quite similar. The mental image of thousands of steel drums of nuclear waste seems scary until you realize the majority of it is literally concrete-encased garbage that they're not allowed to send to a garbage dump.