2. How to find a storage facility that can keep it safe that long?
3. How to ensure that a facility does not contamine other stuff in X years?
4. if it is recycable why does nobody do it?
5. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot?
yeah coal is bad, but why compare it to coal in the first place when we want to reduce such things anyway?!
2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2]
3. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater.
4. France does recycle it's nuclear waste.
5. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this waste is fuel for some of the reactors currently being built.
The reality is that nuclear waste will have minimal if any impact on the rate of uranium contamination. Naturally occurring uranium is responsible for vastly more contamination than nuclear waste. Streams and rivers flowing down from mountains pick up uranium in the sediment and bring it downstream: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates-drinking-w...
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
France is also developing a deep geological storage facility for nuclear waste, known as "Cigéo":
How can anything with a cost that lasts forever be cheaper?
Remember that the status quo already has a large forever-waste cost of its own. Nuclear waste is a trade off vs. other kinds of waste, and it is cheaper than the status quo.
Many, many industrial processes generate waste, sometimes horrible waste. Much of the waste needs to be stored in various ways, often indefinitely. Nuclear reactors aren't unique; it's more than a decent chunk of the population has noticed nuclear reactors, but is still oblivious to all the other costs of modern industrial lifestyles.
The good news about nuclear waste (and your car battery, come to that), is that dealing with it is actually fairly cheap. Would that we could say the same about the byproducts of burning fossil fuels!
And crucially this waste is solid and can be buried underground. Unlike carbon dioxide which is more or less impossible to store.
1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity
2. onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone
well no matter the waste is a problem and humans can't handle it, because money is the problem. as long as somebody can make it cheaper the cheapest option is always used which probably can harm people.
nuclear technology was NEVER the problem, people were. even the safest plan is still unsafe, because people and money. fukushima, failed because of money and people. tschernobyl failed because of money and people.
and money will be even a bigger issue when there are cheaper technologies. also no nuclear plant is emission free, even most construction emissions are already pretty high and lots of studies talk so nicely about that, but undervalue most of that by a high margin.
Where does it say this? Here's the paragraph under earthquakes:
> DOE has stated that seismic and tectonic effects on the natural systems at Yucca Mountain will not significantly affect repository performance. Yucca Mountain lies in a region of ongoing tectonic deformation, but the deformation rates are too slow to significantly affect the mountain during the 10,000-year regulatory compliance period. Rises in the water table caused by seismic activity would be, at most, a few tens of meters and would not reach the repository. The fractured and faulted volcanic tuff that Yucca Mountain comprises reflects the occurrence of many earthquake-faulting and strong ground motion events during the last several million years, and the hydrological characteristics of the rock would not be changed significantly by seismic events that may occur in the next 10,000 years. The engineered barrier system components will reportedly provide substantial protection of the waste from seepage water, even under severe seismic loading.
It sure doesn't seem to conform to what you're saying. Later in the article there is one sentence claiming it's unsafe:
> Nevada National Security Site officials in April 2019 assured the public that the Device Assembly Facility on the Nevada security site was safe from earthquake threats. In contrast, Nevada officials claimed seismic activity in the region made it unsafe for the storage of nuclear waste.
But this is a one-off statement that doesn't seem to be backed by any sort of studies.
> onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone
And when those containers corrode, how does the waste escape the bedrock that's surrounding it?
Nuclear power represents the only way for countries to decarbonize their energy sector. Solar and wind offer cheap bandaids, throw up a few solar panels and you can reduce daytime use of electricity. But they do not offer a real path to decarbonization without spectacular breakthroughs in energy storage. By comparison, France has successfully produced more than 2/3rds of their electricity with nuclear power since the 1980s.
but as already said it should not be a tradeoff between coal or nuclear. I do not doubt that nuclear is better than coal, I doubt that nuclear OR coal is the solution we should target at the moment.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hambacher+Forst/@50.907264...
> https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial...
> https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio...
> https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-off...
Which is why they have a substantial stockpile of (reactor grade) plutonium. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/31/national/japans...
With full processing, it only takes 500 years before the radioactivity drops to that of natural uranium ore.
^it's more dangerous to transport to the TRUE final depot than it is to leave in place.
