With all this talk in the UK about building more nuclear power stations and where to bury the waste it got me thinking about what could be done to ensure the waste is securely locked away so I came up with an idea which I thought i'd mention to you guys to see if it's any good. How about burying all the worlds nuclear waste at the south pole? under all the ice it's solid ground, dig a deep hole and line it with lead walls, drop in the nuclear waste and then fill the hole up with water, the water will then freeze into a huge extremely thick block of ice. With the ice being so thick none of the radiation will get through right? the radioactive material will be surrounded by solid ground, a lead wall and metres of ice. What do you think?
However, one advantage of Antarctica is the lack of tectonic activity. The continent is in the centre of one huge tectonic plate, so no risk of volcanos spuing the radioactivity out again. With global warming, and the ice melt, antarctica will become useful land soon. It's also difficult to get machinery to antarctica, and the cold can freeze machinery up. I think it best to keep radioactive waste in places with convenient access, places already contaminated, and places remote enough that they're suited to it, like Sellafield. Nirex already consider hundreds of possible waste disposal sites for both safety and practicality. Here's the current brochure.
I was under the impression that Antarctica was just one big tectonic plate (The Antarctic Plate) with no fault lines other than round the edges. As for global warming, I highly doubt such warming would effect the south polar region as much as everywhere else, should the ice melt to the degree you're suggesting then there would be a global catastrophe and large areas of the world will be buried under the sea. Besides that the nuclear waste would still be in the ground, surrounded by lead walls and surrounded by a bath of water.
Is that not what I said? Yes it would be a catastrophe. Polar ice is not really any better than water at holding radioactivity back. You might as well just have storage in the bedrock under the North sea, for example. That has been considered more than once. Much more convenient too.
Here's the predictions. See if your house is safe for the next 1000 years. http://www.globalwarmingart.com/sealevel Not just the map, you can read the predictions in the text below it to see which colours you should be looking at. The UK almost vanishes! While I'm in a relatively safe dark green zone on one of the remaining little islands
Do some searching on Breeder Reactors. I believe the Japanese really perfected/streamlined this technology in the 1990's (yes, Japanese use nuclear).
We had some excellent breeder reactor designs we were working on in the 80s and 90s as well. One design in particular was called the Integral Fast Reactor that was a very efficient and safe design (it could not melt down; it would shut itself off if all safety and cooling systems were inactivated). The project was about done when it was cancelled in 1994 under pressure from the Clinton administration. Ironically, it cost more to shut down and mothball the project that it would have cost to finish it.
Imagine that. And people say that the Democrats are all about progress I'm betting it was shut down to to pressure from enviro-Nazis. Too bad the US Navy operates aircraft carriers and guided missile cruisers with nuclear power, submarines, and has been doing so for over 50 years ACCIDENT FREE.
Color me crazy, but I've always thought shooting the nuclear waste into the Sun might be a plausible alternative. Of course, I grew up watching Space 1999, so the whole "repositories on the moon" idea was one I never really took to.
Thats clearly the best course for getting rid of nuclear waste but as i'm sure you know it's not very safe blasting that stuff up in rockets and we're a fair way away from a space elevator so i'm still sticking with my idea above (Antarctica) as the best place to bury it. I really cant see how global warming can seriously be an arguement against burying it down there.
Oh, yeah. I remember the outcry when it was released that Cassini/Huygens would have plutonium in its power source. The only argument I can see for global warming against burying it down in Antarctica is what are you going to do when the ice is gone? How much of a risk does that pose to sea water?
I must be crazy as well. I had thought the same thing long ago. Of course we do have accidents once in a while during liftoff.
It's also pretty expensive to put stuff into low orbit right now, let alone launch something into space. I think it's safe to assume that at some point in the future we'll have a safer/cheaper way of getting stuff into space (as Fire said a space elevator would be great for that) but then again by then we might have developed an even better power source that doesn't produce radioactive waste.
And the problem is that the same argument could be made for taking it up on a space elevator. The real trick appears to be how to get it off the planet safely to dispose of it?
Most of the waste is low level waste -- and many hundreds of tonnes of it are created: concrete in the walls of the reaction chamber building, protective clothing of the engineers who need to service any radioactive areas, or those who process the fuels; the robotic machinery handling the nuclear fuels etc. Think of the cost of the rockets and rocket fuel to move hundreds of tonnes into space. At $10,000 per pound, it's gonna be expensive. And as you said, if the rocket fails, as they do, you'd have these hundreds of tonnes of nuclear waste material/dust/vapour spread everywhere. For the high level waste (spent fuel), there is much less of this, but it isn't necessarily waste, as it could one day be reburned. It isn't really disposed of, so dumping it in a deep hole in antactica, or anywhere else, just isn't the way this material is dealt with. This is usually vitrified and stored in special containers in accessible deep underground vaults and carefully monitored because it is heat generating.