7mo ago

Sweden starts building 100,000 year storage site for spent nuclear fuel

www.arctictoday.com

Sweden starts building 100,000 year storage site for spent nuclear fuel - ArcticToday

Sweden started building a final storage facility for spent nuclear fuel on Wednesday, only the second such site in the world, where highly radioactive waste will be stored for 100,000 years.

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21 comments

I think that is awesome, but the thumbnail image is totally giving T-Virus vibes.
- Had to look it up myself.
  The T-Virus from the Resident Evil series:
  
  Also The Hive, just being huge and underground:
[...] will consist of 60 km of tunnels buried 500 metres down in 1.9 billion year old bedrock.
Are 500 meters deep enough?
- It's way more than is needed to block any radiation.
  
  What about archeologists of a distant future?
- I mean, really the only thing that's gonna expose them is plate tectonics. Just to give a sense of scale, America and Europe are diverging by 4 cm/yr, so will be 500 metres farther from each other, horizontally, in about 10,000 years. Geologically stable regions (called cratons) would not experience such motion vertically for much, much, much longer.
- 500m is the industry standard depth for deep geological repositories for nuclear waste
  
  But is that enough? I rarely trust industry standards.
New place of honor dropped
What SCP containment site is that?
And yet I keep hearing from nuclear fans that there's nothing to worry about and that it's safe. And how is this cheaper than renewable. That place has to be maintained and secured for 100,000 years.
If we put that onto our timeline, we were just getting out of Africa and using stone tools.
That's not the sort of gift we should be leaving our descendents. Okay we have to deal with what we have, but we shouldn't be making any more of the stuff. Because there will be an accident somewhen down the line.
- The whole point of doing it this way is that it doesn't need to be maintained. Once it's full you just fill the tunnels up (probably with dirt and/or rock) and close them off and you're good, it'll sit there for those 100,000 years.
  
  I've heard those lines way too often. You cannot build in a way that guarantees safety for every scenario. Your concrete fails, water erodes into the caverns, earthquakes, volcanos, or simply someone digging in that spot. How the hell do you believe we can build something that pasts for longer than mankind has documented it self in any way? The Nazis failed to build something that would last a thousand years, that is a fraction of the time you claim will be absolutely safe
  
  No security or monitoring? No warnings about digging or mining?
- And yet it's still better than destroying the global environment.
- People wanting to save the environment for our children, by leaving nuclear waste with a half life time of 24.000 to billions of years for them to take care of, are a certain kind of stupid.
  
  That's the bit I don't understand either.

21 comments