Finland’s 100,000-Year Plan to Banish Its Nuclear Waste

[jpak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/science/11nuclear.html

It is, in the words of the Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, “a place we must remember to forget.”
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On a wooded island more than a hundred miles northwest of Helsinki, in the town of Eurajoki, Finnish engineers are digging a tunnel. When it is done 10 years from now, it will corkscrew three miles in and 1,600 feet down into crystalline gneiss bedrock that has been the foundation of Finland for 1.8 billion years.

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Onkalo, on the other hand, is supposed to last 20 times as long as the pyramids have so far — so long that the builders of the site have to take into account the next ice age, when the weight of two miles of ice on top of Finland will be added to the stress on the buried waste containers, copper canisters two inches thick.

It might seem crazy, if not criminal, to obligate 3,000 future generations of humans to take care of our poisonous waste just so that we can continue running our electric toothbrushes. But it’s already too late to wave off the nuclear age, and Mr. Madsen’s film comes at a perfect time to join a worldwide conversation about what to do with its ashes. On June 3, administrative law judges from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will begin hearing arguments about whether the Department of Energy can proceed with shutting down development of the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, where the United States had been planning since 1987 to store its own nuclear waste.

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[Statistical]

1. Some more info at authors website

http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/


Also here is link to info on constructing Onkalo (pdf doc)
http://www.posiva.fi/files/375/Onkalo_ENG_290306_kevyt.pdf

[kristopher]

2. Finland has 4 reactors, one under construction (late and over budget) and is talking of 1 more

Meeting one third of our energy needs would require a new Yucca Mountain sized repository every 2 years. How many Onkalo sized facilities do you think it would require?
ETA: Onkalo is being expanded to 12,000 tons. Yucca was/is 77,000 tons.

The nuclear option: size of the challenges
• If world electricity demand grows 2%/year until 2050 and nuclear share of electricity supply is to rise from 1/6 to 1/3...

–nuclear capacity would have to grow from 350 GWe in 2000 to 1700 GWe in 2050;

– this means 1,700 reactors of 1,000 MWe each.
• If these were light-water reactors on the once-through fuel cycle...

–enrichment of their fuel will require ~250 million Separative Work Units (SWU);

–diversion of 0.1% of this enrichment to production of HEU from natural uranium would make ~20 gun-type or ~80 implosion-type bombs.

-If half the reactors were recycling their plutonium the associated flow of separated, directly weapon-usable plutonium would be 170,000 kg per year;
•diversion of 0.1% of this quantity would make ~30 implosion-type bombs.

- Spent-fuel production in the once-through case would be...
•34,000 tonnes/yr, a Yucca Mountain every two years.

Conclusion: Expanding nuclear enough to take a modest bite out of the climate problem is conceivable, but doing so will depend on greatly increased seriousness in addressing the waste-management & proliferation challenges.

Mitigation of Human-Caused Climate Change
John P. Holdren

[Statistical]

3. how many landfills are there in the entire world?

How many landfills are there in the entire world?
How many waste water treatment plants?

A magnitude more than number of nuclear repositories needed.

Any number is big when you consider the size of the planet. The amount of clean drinking water needed annually is staggering. By your logic the human race would have died off from dehydration or water borne diseases decades ago because the problem is too hard.

Somehow the human race has managed to build thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of conventional waste facilities (landfills, dumps, waste water facilities, incinerators, recycling centers, etc). Yet the entire planet all 7 billion people can't build 50 repositories over the next century? There are 26 nuclear nations. That is roughly 2 facilities per nation over the next century.

Speaking of big numbers. If wind supplies 1/3 of worlds electrical energy it would require 2.8 million 2.5MW turbines. If the human race can't build 50 repositories they certainly can't build 2.8 million turbines. Guess we should all die now.

[kristopher]

4. Seriously, did you just attempt to equate nuclear waste repositories with landfills?

Really?

[Statistical]

5. No you have reading comprehension problems.

Any number is big when you consider the size of the planet.

Somehow we have managed to build hundreds of thousands of miles of electrical, water, sewage, gas lines. To supply that network we have thousands of power plants, oil wells, natural gas wells, and aquifers.

We build millions more miles of roads and train tracks along with thousands of airports and seaports and the tens of thousands of airplanes, trains & ships that are used to connect that network. Don't forget the half a billion cars on the planet. The human race collectively resides in a billion residences, and labors in millions of other buildings. We are fed by the hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and that results in raising and slaughtering tens of millions of animals.

At the other end we dispose (store) billions of tons of solid waste each year and treat billions more gallons of waste water. Sadly we do nothing about the billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution, we simply release it into the atmosphere, water, and land.


Despite all that industrial accomplishment you think it is beyond the human race to build a mere 50 repositories over the next century?

Like I said if human race was as incompetent as you think it is we would have died off decades ago.

[kristopher]

6. You did it again, you are attempting to equate nuclear waste with all other waste.

You are a real piece of work.

[Statistical]

7. Here let me simply it for you since you are denser than depleted uranium..

Building 50 repositories for over the next century isn't impossible for a $64 trillion global economy.
If fact the cost of such an endeavor would be a rounding error on total global output.

[kristopher]

8. Riiiiiight.....

We haven't built ONE acceptable repository in the past 50 years and you think we can build one every two years, after all, it is just like any other landfill...

:crazy: :dunce:

[Statistical]

10. Well now "we" (global we) build a couple thousand landfills every year.

We haven't needed to build a repository for the last 50 years. Necessity is the mother of all invention. We could get by with another century or so using interim length storage facilities while we decide of how to store spent fuel.

Prior to going to the moon nobody had done it so I guess it was impossible. It took only six decades from the time people though heavier than air flying machines were impossible to the time we landed a human on the moon. The ability of human race to achieve the "impossible" is pretty amazon.

So once Finland builds their repository what will be your next excuse?

[jpak]

11. Then let the nuclear industry take back their spent fuel and pay for them 100%

BTW - the Nuclear Waste Fund is a sick joke perpetrated on the taxpayers - it will only pay a fraction of the total cost of spent fuel disposal.

yup!

[JohnWxy]

9. 3,000 generations. Not too long........(!!!)...of course, I expect someone will comment that this

is an unrealistic estimate. It's probably going to be, maybe 1,000 generations!

[Ready4Change]

13. I know someone who worked on such projects.

Part of his teams work was to develop signage that would indicate to future generations the dangers of what was stored in such sites. They have to take into account that those generations probably won't speak any language known today. They have to take into account how comparably quickly most of our common materials today will corrode over time.

In the end what they developed is a LOT like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Pictures carved in stone.

[Terry in Austin]

16. The language angle - wow!

Do you have any links with more info about the glyphs they developed?
(Linguistics fan here.)

:7

[Statistical]

17. Here is some info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Message_for_the_future

Since 1991, the United States Department of Energy has been working with a team of linguists, scientists, science fiction writers, anthropologists and futurists to come up with such a warning system. The markers, called "passive institutional controls", will include an outer perimeter of 32, 25-foot-tall granite pillars built in a four-mile (6 km) square. These pillars will surround an earthen wall, 33 feet (10 m) tall and 100 feet (30 m) wide. Enclosed within this wall will be another 16 granite pillars. At the center, directly above the waste site, will sit a roofless, 15-foot (4.6 m) granite room providing more information. The team intends to etch warnings and informational messages into the granite slabs and pillars. This information will be recorded in the six official languages of the United Nations (English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic) as well as the Native American Navajo language native to the region, with additional space for translation into future languages . Pictograms are also being considered, such as stick figure images and the iconic "The Scream" from Edvard Munch's painting. Complete details about the plant will not be stored on site, instead, they would be distributed to archives and libraries around the world. The team plans to submit their final plan to the U.S. Government by around 2028.

The WIPP (Waste Isolation, Pilot Plant) is the US first large scale deep geological repository.
Designed for weapons, medical, and research waste though not spent nuclear fuel.

Lots of interesting research and concepts of making markets visible after thousands of years.





Some more info:
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/PICsProg/PICs_images.htm

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/03/business/fi-forever3


They did some analysis native American pictographs to compare faded pictographs to those still clearly visible to look for characteristic that make signage visible after centuries.
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/PICsProg/documents/monument%20survey.pdf

[Terry in Austin]

18. Great info

Truly the stuff of "anthropologists and science fiction writers." Fascinating and chilling - thanks!

[Heywood J]

12. It seems a better idea to develop

new reactors that eat the waste from our current models. Most of the U235 in a fuel rod isn't burned up and can still be re-used. Doing so (by whatever method) will reduce the volume of waste that needs to be stored, reduce the length of time such storage is needed, and generate more electricity from the same initial amount of fuel that we've already ripped up the ground to get. Even if you're completely anti-nuclear, waste that only lasts a few hundred years should look better than just stuffing the current waste in the ground for hundreds of thousands of years and hoping nothing happens in that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_nuclear_fusion

[jpak]

14. It's the fission products and the plutonium that are the problem - not unburned 235U

and those thing will hang around for longer than the US has been a sovereign nation

If George Washington had operated a nuclear plant and produced spent fuel - we would be paying for it -today

long after GW was dead

that is the immorality of nuclear power

(besides the nuclear weapons proliferation stuff)

yup!

[Heywood J]

15. Plutonium is quite fissionable in modern reactors.

There are three long-lived isotopes of plutonium - Pu-239, Pu-242, and Pu-244. 239 is bred in commercial reactors and undergoes fission, producing a notable fraction of a standard reactor's power output - it can certainly be burned up. 242 has a much longer half-life and is much less radioactive - it can be burned in a fast-neutron reactor, although those present other challenges. 244's half-life is eighty million years - the radon in basements is of more concern. Nuclear reactors don't make much of it anyway, because it quickly becomes another much shorter-lived isotope.

You're very right in that the lanthanides, actinides, and other fission products are the ones that need to be contained for long periods. However, containing them for a few thousand years is better than containing spent waste and fuel for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and then have to contain the short-lived fission products again. Unburned U-235 contributes significantly to the sheer bulk of material, and the Earth has already been ripped up to extract it - we may as well get our money's worth.

We're already committed to some storage by virtue of what's happened in the past. It's best to reduce the bulk of what needs to be stored, and the length for which we need to store it.