Stephan: The reality of nuclear energy is, and always has been, that no one knows how to deal with the waste that the technology produces. It is hard to even think about. How do you maintain in unbroken perpetuity the safety of of the most toxic substance on earth, when micrograms can kill a person and you have thousands of tons of it?
Perpetuity? Am I exaggerating? I don't know, what do you think? Of particular concern in nuclear waste planning are two long-lived fission products,
Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and
I-129 (half-life 17 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after the first few thousand years.
To get a sense of scale consider this: The Sumerian language is one of the earliest known written languages, dating to circa 3300 to 3000 BCE, basically just 5,300 hundred years ago.
And what do you think it costs to store it? It is very hard to actually get a number; try Googling it yourself to see how obfuscated the actual cost is. The best I can work out is $750 million a year. Just a 1,000 years of storage would cost $750,000,000,000. I'm not even sure what you would call that number.
It's all absurd. The truth is nuclear power makes no sense and never did. It is the evil child of the Cold War.
European nuclear waste facility
Credit: Politico
BURE, FRANCE — Half a kilometer underground in floodlit tunnels, a French government lab is testing the safety of a site intended to hold 80,000 cubic meters of deadly radioactive waste.
Crews drill barrel-sized openings into the sides of the shafts, dug deep into the earth not far from the small town of Bure, in northeastern France. The containers will have to be retrievable for a century, in case better technologies for dealing with radioactive materials are developed. Barring such a discovery, the idea is for the waste to spend the next 100,000 years underground.
The technical hurdles will be the easy bit. Far more difficult for France’s radioactive waste management agency, Andra, will be overcoming political opposition to the construction of the site — of any site — intended to serve as the final resting place for tons of radioactive waste.
Six decades after the construction of the first wave of nuclear power plants, no country has opened a permanent storage site. Spent nuclear fuel and other contaminated material […]
I think nuclear power is the evil child of World War II. The cold war was an effect, but the drive to win wars was the cause.