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by fc417fc802 44 days ago
Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.
1 comments
lukan 43 days ago
Have people walk with radioactive material sealed in lead containers down some km into a mine and back up?
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fc417fc802 43 days ago
It's an absurd thought experiment to illustrate that even when taken to an extreme the volume is small enough that a solution broadly remains feasible.
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lukan 43 days ago
No, it really does not seem feasible to me.

In germany alone, 500 000 m³ of radioactive material is to be disposed somehow by 2050. Having people carry that underground sounds insane. There is more to waste than fuel rods. And even they .. amount to a really high number if you factor in shielding.

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fc417fc802 43 days ago
I think you have a serious misconception. The long term storage we're talking about here is for the spent fuel rods (or alternatively the byproducts extracted from them if they are reprocessed). It's known as high level waste and there isn't very much of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

> As a general rule, short-lived waste (mainly non-fuel materials from reactors) is buried in shallow repositories, while long-lived waste (from fuel and fuel reprocessing) is deposited in geological repository.

> Overall, the 60-year-long nuclear program in the UK up until 2019 produced 2150 m3 of HLW.

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