They should just dump it in the Mariana Trench.
“They should just dump it in the Mariana Trench.“
Do you want The Creature from the Mariana Trench?
Because that’s how you get The Creature from the Mariana Trench.
Ocean dumping is a terrible idea with waste that in it’s current form would be water soluble once it’s casing failed. That trench subduction rate is too slow to pull the waste down into the mantle or even the lower crust in the few tens of thousands of years before the fuel casing fails. The sediments you would be dropping the waste into is mud and porous. Not just no buy hell no.
Carter that traitor killed the proper way to process spent fuel. It’s 96% fuel left in the rods only 4% of it is fission products that need to be stored away for a million years in two isotopes cases. Everything else is fuel mass being U235/238 and the actinides which are all fuel in a fast or epithermal spectrum.
France and Russia reprocessed their spent fuel into more fuel and glass waste. France which gets 80% of it’s electric ppower for nuclear has all it’s glass waste under three feet of concrete you can walk over in an area smaller than a soccer pitch. They burn the reprocessed fuel as MOX for more power.
Even without reprocessing the amount of waste for energy produced is miniscule. The lifetime electric need a of the average American using PWR reactors the worst choice would fit inside a 8 ounce soup can. Read that again. Your LIFETIME electricity use spent fuel which is 96% still fuel would fit in a soup can.
A PWR supplying the yearly electric use for an American would make 39 grams of spent fuel per year. It has a density of 15 grams per cubic centimeter. At 75 yrs lifespan yeah smaller than a soup can worth.
If we reprocessed only 4% of that need to be sequestered. You mix the fission products with borosilica glass which is resistant to acids and water even salt water. Then you send it down a well bore into shale,or granite where those rocks have been geologically stable for hundreds of millions of years. You only nred a million for every element to decay to under background levels.
YM in Nevada is the worst choice as a Hydrogeo I will stand against it EVERY time. It’s in porous tuff, ABOVE the water table in a seismic activity zone. They want to put raw unprocessed waste in steel containers No..NO...NO...Fing NOOOO it is a boondoggle of epic proportions.
Spent fuel should be reprocessed and the glass fission products should be put down deep directional drilled bore holes in shale that is at least two miles TVD and geologically stable for at least 100 million years. Far below even the deepest saline aquifer with a mile or more impermeable shales above it.
The horizontal laterals should be drilled toe up, heal down so the toe is up dip from the heal. This means any leechate from the triple cased cemented in package would go towards the closed toe via heat and geopressure drive it would be impossible for it to go against gradient towards the lower heal then make the bend up the drill string which is cemented all the way to the packers aanyways. We have drilled 25,000 foot laterals now into shale that’s nearly five miles worth of down hole space for a waste strong and that’s just one well the industry can stack those 400 feet apart horizontally and 500 horizontally. You could do ten weeks side by side and five layers for a 50 well pad site that’s 236 miles of horizontal well bore space for waste strings every kg of reprocessed waste would fit and more inside a single megapad typical of the oil industry. These would be triple string wells with 12” internal diameter laterals.
Shales that meet the depth and geologically stable for hundreds of millions of years requirements can be found in half a dozen basins in the USA. First choice would be the Midland area Permian basin its Permian age so stable going on 250 million years spent fuel only needs a million we good in the Permian.
Do you put raw sewage into your local water supply? Dumping nuclear waste into the ocean is just as dumb.
That would be foolish. Nearly all the original energy is still in those rods and can be utilized for generations to come with technologies such as breeder reactors.