2) transportation to the site: https://static.ewg.org/files/nuclearwaste/plumes/national.pd...
3) exploding waste barrels due to corner cutting in kitty litter selection exposing surface workers and contaminating the work area - only 1/2 mile down but this type of accident is depth independent https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump...
4) fires
5) lack of a safety culture
6) communicating to future peoples not to mine here
7) long term structural stability and management (ex: Morsleben radioactive waste repository and Schacht Asse II)
3) if a waste barrel explodes, somehow, underground how does the waste make it's way through a mile of bedrock?
4) Again, how does a fire bring the wast up through a mile of bedrock?
5) This is just a vague statement.
6) So the concern is that future society will forget that this is a waste site, mine a mile deep and retrieve waste, and never figure out that the waste is bad for them? This is rather specific hypothetical that IMO demonstrates just how hard it is for a nuclear waste site to result in contamination.
Furthermore, naturally occurring uranium exists in groundwater and needs to be filtered out in places where levels exceed safe limits. So it's not like burying waste is creating a new problem: https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat...
5) Industry term. Operationalizing any significant system will involve human beings, and with it their workplace culture. You can read about it here: https://mshasafetyservices.com/fostering-a-culture-of-safety.... Many mining hese were written in blood.
6) No, the concern is that people may be harmed. You see we've lost track of radioactive waste in the past. And humans are remarkably curious. Often we've figured it out before anyone was harmed. Sometimes sadly not. But the harm is the concern, not the lack of knowledge of harm.
And again, the question remains how people may be harmed by nuclear waste buried in bedrock half a kilometer underground? A even if a buried waste canister spontaneously combusts, how does the waste make it through half a kilometer of rock? In order for an unknown harm to occur, harm first has to actually occur.
This kind of appeal to an unknown harm can be used to arbitrarily object to anything.
"We need to stop building solar panels and wind turbines because they have the potential to cause an unknown harm. You disagree that these systems have the potential to cause harm? Well of course you can't know this, because it's an unknown harm that we're trying to prevent. How can you possibly disprove the existence of an unknown harm?"
> Care to elaborate on what you mean by this? Because even if you include Chernobyl, nuclear power is one of the safest form of energy generation: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy. It's 100x safer than dams. Include only western plants and it's the safest form of energy generation.
I should also add that on average nuclear power releases less radioactivity than coal.
I grew up in a place and time where nuclear waste was routinely dumped, records lost, EPA government consultants lied, and people got sick. Nobody was held accountable other than token fines.
Please note that these are both chemically and radioactively harmful to people.
> Sure, there were plenty of bad nuclear waste disposal programs in the early cold war, but this has quite limited relevance to nuclear power generation.
That's what they said in the 00s, 90s, 80s, 70s...
> In order for an unknown harm to occur, harm first has to actually occur.
Nuclear power is an incredible technology, but understand that the nuclear industry has done little to earn trust. Just feels like an abusive ex plastered on the porch shouting "it'll be difficult this time I've changed" and doesn't inspire confidence.
Again, the point is that your link is about disposal of plutonium from nuclear weapons productions. Not spent uranium fuel from power generation.
> Nuclear power is an incredible technology, but understand that the nuclear industry has done little to earn trust. Just feels like an abusive ex plastered on the porch shouting "it'll be difficult this time I've changed" and doesn't inspire confidence.
Care to elaborate on what you mean by this? Because even if you include Chernobyl, nuclear power is one of the safest form of energy generation: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy. It's 100x safer than dams. Include only western plants and it's the safest form of energy generation.
It's not like an abusive ex promising to have changed. It's a lot more like a very respectful partner that your hippie friends hate for incoherent reasons.
It seems like a pretty obvious solution to this would be to purposely do the reaction under controlled conditions before transporting it, so then you're transporting stable cesium compounds instead of elemental cesium metal.
And what you linked is still under construction. We don't know yet, if it really works safe long term, or if there will be future costs.
It's not even open yet.
There is a difference between “something can be done correctly” and “something is likely to be done correctly.” Nuclear advocates I’ve read tend to argue the former - it’s possible to have safe reactors, it’s possible to keep the waste sequestered safely, there’s not a technical reason why nuclear is inherently unsafe. Skeptics tend to be making a different argument - not that it’s not possible to do things safely and correctly, but that in our current late-capitalist milieu, it’s almost impossible that we _will_. It’s not an argument about capability, it’s an argument about will and what happens in bureaucracies, both public and private.
Whether it's technology, economics, or politics, clearly the state of the art is deficient because we currently have persistent deficiencies.
It's not even a a matter of mundane human error when executing procedures over and over again.
It's that the entire managerial pyramid gradually and slowly erodes
The Asse II site used an existing mine to avoid having to excavate a new tunnel, which subsequently flooded.