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by sudosysgen
1950 days ago
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Two hundred football fields is absolutely trifling even now and much less on the scale of 10 000 years. You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down. |
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Yet today, there's about a quarter of a million tonnes of waste in holding storage at various locations awaiting proper disposal. The only deep geological disposal facility currently operational is WIPP and of the three that have ever existed in the world, the other two in Germany have permanently closed. It should be noted that both those sites have major issues with long-term stability and significant ongoing investment is occurring to attempt to remediate them.
The issues at WIPP in 2014 are a clear example of how non-trifling the task is: Underground truck fire, followed a few days later by (unrelated) airborne release of radioactive materials due to a waste barrel being packed with, and I am not making this up, the wrong kind of kitty litter. After a three-year hiatus and at a cost of five hundy million to remediate, it's been running again for a couple of years and due to permanently close in as little as three years.
This will be a good thing because ceasing operations and permanently sealing the site drastically reduces the risk of incidents due to human fallibility. Now in fairness it's a pilot site even in name, so procedures should be improved on the next iterations. But this is a field clearly in it's infancy, it's not yet matured.
I just can't agree that disposal even of the waste generated so far is trifling. When the waste of today is on track for secure, permanent, safe storage I'll be a bit more optimistic.
>You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down.
Yeah I hope so. Re-processing of a significant chunk of the existing waste would be an encouraging sign.