Finnish Company Claims Its Copper Canisters Can Store Nuclear Waste for 100,000 Years

Supposing people 100,000 years down the road remember this facility. Just in case there is a post-apocalyptic situation, they need to somehow set up fireworks that go off in 100,000 years that spell out the exact instruction about what to do in the case of re-containing that waste or simply "run" might suffice.

haha check back in 100,000 years for that to happen you have to give me a robotic heart that never stops, a robotic brain that never stops or whatever, and lungs that dont collapse. just call me a cyborg. ill still be human just give me my memories and feelings. ill be old and very wise and militaries all over the world will want me

I think there was a book about this , aliens aparently had left some weapons there , they had set up various warning markers along the way to the entrance with pods that streamed mathmatical impossibilities to try and communicate "do not enter " .
I think the people involved will need to keep good records and most importantly spend lots of money in researching how to properly dispose of this stuff so that its not even there in a hundred thousand years .
We cant just sweep it under the rug and forget about it we need to neutralize it in some way or throw it into the sun or somthing .

In 100,000 years, either man will be (1) extinct (making this a non-issue), (2) reduced back to a primitive existance (making the local nature of any leak a non-issue - primitive life won't be hubbed in Finnland), or (3) continued from life now, so advanced enough to have a gieger counter to tell is a failure is critical (or even matters by then, many half lives later).

Also, re-enriching or a means of further burn down are likely goals for future watse, meaning that this junk might get repurposed into fuel again in a generation or two.

Also, people freak out way too much about radiation. Yes it is bad for you. Yes it causes defection and abortion. Yes it increase the risk for cancer. Take a look at Hiroshima today sometime. I'm pretty sure ground zero was somwhere between the McDonalds and the 7-11.

Unfortunate as it is, spent nuclear fuel rods have to be disposed of somehow. Recycling the fuel is not really an option. Sure, you can keep on using it, depleting it a bit and hitting it again, thus keeping it in the loop for a long time (eventually this will probably have to be done, to preserve existing resources). But certainly isn't a solution. Quite the contrary. Each round of recycling will render the fuel even more radioactive, produce even more nasty fission by-products and so on. It's an endless cycle, where each recycle brings in even more severe problems than the previous one.

As long as there doesn't exist a method of speeding up the half-time, then the only viable option is to hide it, and hide it deep.

Finland has had the luck of the draw in the sense that they can actually do this without /very high/ risks (risk is always present to some degree, of course). The country sits on one of the geologically most stable pieces of real-estate on this planet, the Fennoscandian shield. This shield is more or less pure and deep granite, which is directly accessible from the surface.

The sealing casks themselves are of course important too, in order to prevent water from reaching the fuel. But I do suspect they are also so much cosmetic window-dressing to keep the general public calm. Geologic stability is issue number one here. The packaging is kind of a secondary issue if the cavern is deep enough, dry enough and stable enough.

It is good to keep in mind, though, that what works for Finland does not work for most of the rest of the world, due to previously stated geologic reasons. Some better way must be found, especially now that nuclear-fission power is making a gradual comeback.

By the time that becomes a problem I'll have downloaded my brain into a computer and taken over the world.

The only way to actually get rid of radio active material is to send it to the sun or a black hole. But the security on that is also a very high risk.

I dont know about the sun or a black hole, but I would assume chucking it anywhere but Earth would be fine for anyone here. Who wants to see what tons of nuclear waste looks like falling into Jupiter?

Disposing of nuclear waste in the tectonic subduction zones should be enough.

how long does it take for the waste to be safe? if it about 100,000 then we can just find it and use it again, then bury it for another 100,000 years

So it's better to keep polluting the earth than dump nuclear waste into the vastness of the cosmos.

Who wants to ante up the 100 million dollars to take out the trash?

Nothing's come back from Voyager 1 yet... If aliens found our nuclear trash first, what kind of impression would that make?

All these suggestions to throw nuclear waste into space drive me crazy! Just "toss" it into the sun! Do any of you know how heavy this stuff is? Do you know how much energy it would take just to get it into orbit, let alone all the way to the sun or another planet? Probably more energy than you got from the reactor in the first place!

@HBillyRufus: You are entirely correct. Speaking of dumping everything into Jupiter (or some other heavenly body) is plain silly. Not to speak of the inherent risks in getting the stuff off the Earth in the first place.

The risk of rocket blowing up on launch is around 1%. The risk for a catastrophic geologic/seismic incident in a geologically stable area is smaller by several magnitudes.

I don't know. Somehow I prefer the idea of having the spent fuel in a known place, deep underground, well sealed in coppercaskets that have been welded shut, to having the stuff spread everywhere as result of a rocket explosion on launch or in flight (which is a certainty in the long run).

There really are only two options for waste management a) either hide it deep into the bedrock or b) come up with a new way to speed up the radioactive decay of spent fuel.

The jury is currently out with option (b), but it might just be possible to do that. A positive maybe, kind of. I'll keep my fingers crossed for success, as this would be the best long time solution to a very real and current problem.

@sirald66
are you sure you want to be responsible for the nuclear fuel-spitting volcano?

I agree, shipping it into space is one of the dumbest things possible. but so is the idea that with each round of recycling we end up with more radioactive matierial. True, we'll have radioactive material to dispose of but it will be much much less radioactive than the whole spent rod. there is a lot of energy left in those rods. And, as is the case with any radioactive substance, over time it becomes radioactive. that is the whole idea of a half life. Most smaller elements wouldn't exist without radioactivity. Thats how it works, stars explode, atoms fuse into bigger atoms, they decay, smaller atoms are stable and stick around. But, instead of sealing all that waste up forever how bout we push oak ridge national labs to speed up the development of their next gen nuclear reactors that will run on nuclear waste and have no chance of a meltdown. everybody wins!

sorry, the above comment was suppose to say "it becomes LESS radioactive."

First the Astroturfers claim that there is no use using Nuclear Power because we will run out of Uranium in 10-50 yrs, depending on which fable they subscribe to.

But then they insist on getting rid of so-called "nuclear waste" which is in actual fact 99% fuel for GenIV reactors.

With the demise of the politician's Yucca Mountain Wet Dream of a Boondoggle. It is obviously now the consensus that "nuclear waste" must be burned. No problem, Burner's of Nuclear Waste:

The Traveling Wave Reactor:

www.nuc.berkeley.edu/files/TerraPowerGilleland.pdf

The LIFTR ( Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

www.energyfromthorium.com/ppt/LFTRGoogleTalk_Bonometti.ppt

Using LCFRs (Liquid Chloride Fast Reactors) to Burn Nuclear Waste:

thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2009/11/lftr-and-msrs-achieve-doe-nes-goals.html

The IFR (Integral Fast Reactor):

skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifrQandA.htm

CERN’s Accelerator Driven SubCritical Fission Reactor:

doc.cern.ch/archive/electronic/cern/preprints/lhc/lhc-96-001.pdf

And there are a number of Fusion/Fission Hybrid concepts which are quite capable of burning so-called “nuclear waste”.

Just the current US store of Depleted Uranium waste from enriching Uranium for the current Light Water Reactors, burnt in the above reactors would fuel the entire current US electricity demand for 1150 yrs.

"By the time that becomes a problem I'll have downloaded my brain into a computer and taken over the world."

I already did. Careful. You only exist as long as I allow you to remain in memory.

Actually, I like the subduction zone idea best. The cycling time on that material is a minimum 10 million years, IIRC. Give or take a new mountain range or two.

Am i the only one who wants to crawl inside one of those canisters and go "whoo im in a tube!"?

I have to agree with the subduction zone disposal idea. You don't want to try launching nuclear waste into space, when the cost of launching material is so high and radioactive elements tend to be very heavy. Also, you don' want to run the risk of a malfunction and the contamination of a very large area under the launch site.

But drilling down into the oceanic crust, placing the containers a mile or more under the ocean floor, and letting geology do its thing seems to be pretty viable. After all, the waste would be below the ocean, not contaminating the water. It wouldn't be on land, where you would have to worry about it leaking into the water table, or poisoning our descendents who stumble upon it generations later. Once pushed under the margins of a continental plate, if the waste was far from any active volcanic hot spots, it should be subducted into the mantle, where the heavier radioactive elements would slowly sink towards the core (which is naturally radioactive, and would contain such waste until the end of the earth).

I wonder why this hasn't been discussed more in public as an option to allow for safe disposal of nuclear waste, and a possible means of expanding the use of nuclear power. Is it a cost issue, or simply lack of imagination and/or political willpower?

Good the price of scrap cooper should go up