(September 13, 2021 at 4:40 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(September 12, 2021 at 7:54 pm)onlinebiker Wrote: Uh huh.....
And WHY hasn' t ANY of it been done in 60 damned years? 60 YEARS....
Because - it COSTS MONEY.
And the people running these plamts make a.profit by virtue of you believing that they' ll do the right thing and take care of it.....any day now.....
Bwaaaaahahahaha
....
Jesus - the things some people will believe.....
It's not a money issue. It's not a technical issue. It's not a safety issue. It's a political issue.
It's all of the above. One of the big technical and safety issues is that glasses are only metastable. When you make glass containing unstable nuclides the radiation damage rapidly converts the glass into a fine powder that's much trickier to contain or handle safely. Even converting the waste to ceramic or high tensile strength minerals such as zircons fails to prevent this.
A more effective approach is to sort by half-life and dispose accordingly. Short-lived isotopes go into an RTG, which is much more useful than warming the waters of some spent fuel pool, and decay to stable isotopes before your grandkids get grey hairs. Long-lived isotopes will require disposal in a nuclear incinerator, a high-neutron flux reactor designed to either burn them as fuel or convert them to less stable, shorter-lived isotopes. As a bonus, you would almost certainly produce significant amounts of energy from reacting the transuranic waste products. Aside from the politics, which is a farce, this will require money and some smart technological solutions.
Quote:Read up on Yucca Mountain. Stalled by NIMBY-thinking and people who don't understand basic science and are smug about it.
Yucca was killed by politics but was a bad idea from the start. No great surprise seeing as it was born of politics. The area is tectonically active, prone to both earthquakes and volcanism. Yucca Mountain is the surface expression of one of these faults. The volcanic rocks from which it was formed are faulted and fractured, with subsequent hydrothermal alteration further weakening the strata and making it permeable. This is pretty much textbook everything you want to avoid in a geological repository but was chosen because it wasn't in anybody's backyard except for a handy military base. For geological repositories you want to look for areas with no active tectonics and highly impermeable rock. The cratonic rock beneath northern Minnesota would be ideal.
