Nuclear waste disposal drilled deep into earth’s crust
Preface. I suspect one the greatest tragedies of the decline of oil will be all the nuclear waste left for thousands of low-tech generations in the future. We owe it to them to clean up our mess while we still have excess oil energy to do it. But far more likely nuclear wastewill sit at nuclear reactors, military sites, and wherever nuclear warheads are kept, shortening the lives of anyone who lives near them.
There are two articles below about possible ways to dispose of nuclear waste into deep holes that sound good to me.
Related: Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste by William M. Alley & Rosemarie Alley. 2013. Cambridge University Press to understand how serious the problem is.
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Vidal, J. 2019. What should we do with nuclear waste? Ensia.
Richard Muller, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and his daughter, co-founder of company Deep Isolation gave a demonstration in January 2019 of how nuclear waste could be buried permanently using oil-fracking technology. A 140 pound steel canister (with no radioactive waste) was placed in a previously drilled borehole deep into the ground.
With this technique, there’s no need to excavate expensive tunnels. The Mullers think with larger canisters pushed through 300 boreholes up to two miles deep under a billion tons of rock where radiation can’t possibly leak out. This method could store most of the US’s highest level nuclear waste permanently for a third of what storage methods cost now.
Many ideas have been investigated, but most have been rejected as impractical, too expensive or ecologically unacceptable. They include shooting it into space; isolating it in synthetic rock; burying it in ice sheets; dumping it on the world’s most isolated islands; and dropping it to the bottom of the world’s deepest oceanic trenches.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
