Which is OK in today's climate.
A couple of thousand years from now, if the roof leaks, so to speak, and the area gets significant rainfall, those hot containers might corrode away. I wouldn't want to be drinking from a well near that...
Not thinking this as an alarmist, but a responsible individual, and as a geologist.
The whole question could be rendered moot by anything from a pandemic to an impact to the Second Coming in that time frame, anyway.
Some of those isotopes are nasty stuff, though.
When I worked down that way, (on oil rigs), every now and then you'd see a blur of bird or something in the edge of the headlights while driving at night. We used to joke about "just another critter from the test site.."
Mr. Joe,
What I'm thinking is that a thousand years from now, who knows what technology will exist?
According to the Leftists, global warming will make us extinct anyway.
I respect your opinion as a Geologist, as I spent time on Offshore rigs as a Field Engineer for Schlumberger in a (seemingly) previous life, working closely (as you might imagine) with Geologists.
Smart dudes, most with Phd's.
Amazing knowledge of history, among other things.
I think it is relevant that I was leaving the oil patch there were ex-Slob guys making fortunes opening previously capped wells due to advances in-you guessed it-well production technologies
I will respectfully defer to your opinion, as my expertise is Mechanical Engineering.
Mike
"Which is OK in today's climate."
Yes ...
"A couple of thousand years from now, if the roof leaks, so to speak, and the area gets significant rainfall, those hot containers might corrode away. I wouldn't want to be drinking from a well near that..."
and
"Some of those isotopes are nasty stuff, though."
This is true, but people make 2+2 = 5 when they put together "radiation that lasts for thousands of years" with
"some of this is highly radioactive".
Reality check: The longer the half-life, the lower the level of radiation. Then you have to consider the decay path; is it something nasty (high energy particle that can penetrate human body) or low energy. The radiation level in these casks is not constant; it goes down drastically year by year for a few hundred years to a level of very low radioactivity, radiation level that is many orders of magnitude smaller than the level of when it left a nuclear power plant.
All of the "hot" radoactive decay elements in nuclear waste have half-lives measured in days, years, or tens of years. After about 100 years, the radiation level is much much lower. The main source of radiation then is the transuranics (uranium, plutonium). Stuff like strontium and other elements would have decayed away.
Correspondingly, the very long half-life material has low level of radiation. (For example the human body has a half-life measured in billions of years - does that mean we are 'unsafe' for a billion years?)
So, if you wait 10,000 years for geology to change and Yucca to actually get rainfall, etc. you'll find in the interim that the level of radiation danger is much reduced. They'll still have plutonium etc. and radiation, but the containers will be not that "hot" at all.
IMHO, the Yucca solution is vastly overengineered and well within what is safe, and the prospective claimed risks to it are not reasonably based on the facts.