Is storing nuclear waste even a significant concern? The entirety of US nuclear power generation's waste can fit in a rectangle that is 20 feet high and the width and length of a football field. This is trivial in terms of volume of waste disposal. There's really not much difficulty in disposing this. Bury it in a site without groundwater.
Yes I've often maintained that we could just drill a hole in the middle of Australia and dump the worlds nuclear waste in it. Its the perfect spot, no ground water (if you make sure its west of the great artesian basin), geologically and politically stable, no one lives there for miles, and there's already a shit ton of radiation there anyway - thats where the Uranium comes from.
One problem would be transporting it, but again, solvable problems, we tanker oil around the world, so it can be done. The trouble is though political. No one wants all that nuclear waste in their back yard, even if no one ever uses the backyard.
Fukishima added to the problem - if the Japanese, whose engineering skill is the best in the world, have problems then what about the rest of the world? I see this as a very valid objection.
One of the problems I see in the popular mind is the idea that radiation is somehow unique and only occurs in nuclear reactors, and any of it appears somewhere then we're all dead. The coal industry makes sure no one finds out that the amount of radiation expelled by coal powered stations exceeds that produced by nuclear reactors https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
As you say the amount to be stored is pretty small, and could probably be dumped down a hole in an afternoon and home in time for tea
An anecdote - I went to a radiology clinic a while ago for a tour (writing some software) and we stopped by the room where they store the radioactive material, pretty low level stuff and all stored away. The manager taking me around said "This is where we store the radiocative stuff" looking at me and waiting for a reaction - a bit of fun I imagine he has - expecting me to run away and panic, but I have a physics degree so no drama - he was disappointed, and we laughed. But this is the public mind - radiation is scary stuff that causes mutations and kills you, so there's a real marketing problem. No doubt this has been pumped up by the oil and coal industry over the years.
My point remains: is there any actual safety concern with putting nuclear waste underground other than potential groundwater pollution if the containment casks get perforated (which can be avoided by not burying waste where there's groundwater)?
The only scenarios that people have presented in which nuclear waste could result in contamination are borderline absurd, like if humanity hypothetically loses all records of where waste is buried along with knowledge of what radiation is and some future civilization might dig up the waste canisters and crack them open.
Nothing in your link covers the safety or dangers of waste disposal beyond the vague statement that, "There is general agreement that placing spent nuclear fuel in repositories hundreds of meters below the surface would be safer than indefinite storage of spent fuel on the surface." That article is a couple paragraphs on waste containers, and a list of different countries' waste management schemes. It doesn't dig into any long term risk assessment.
It's not that trivial. It's hard to find places that are geologically stable over very long timeframes.
However, anti-nuclear activists deliberately focus too much on the problem of storing it indefinitely in the near term.
If we plan storage for tens of thousands of years, waiting out a few hundred years for economic and technological development is in order. The waste of tomorrow might be the fuel of the future.
The waste needs to be stable over the span of ~10,000 years. This is very short in terms of geological time frames. Yucca mountain isn't going to be pulled apart by continental drift any time in the next several million years.
> The waste needs to be stable over the span of ~10,000 years.
How did you arrive at that number? The waste is harmful for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.
Like I said, I think the "indefinite storage" question is a red herring posed by anti-nuclear activism.
Perhaps a better question would be: How much we should be concerned about the inhabitants of this planet in 10,000 years when supposedly there's a mass extinction coming up in the next 100 years due to the energy needs of today and yesterday.
The waste itself is harmful, for eternity, simply by virtue of the fact that it is uranium. It's a toxic heavy metal, like lead, regardless of any radioactivity. The duration of the serious concern due to radiation is gone in roughly 10,000 years but if course the original enrichment and subsequent use of the fuel can have large impacts on this figure.
The reality is, nuclear waste should mostly be treated similarly to the toxic waste that is generates by other sectors of heavy industry.
