No Time to (Nuclear) Waste!

Apologies for the delayed posting, I was on a transcontinental flight back home. The American government promised nuclear power utilities that by 1998 they would begin collecting their waste and disposing of it safely. To this day the waste remains uncollected, and the growing bill in owed damages is estimated by some to be up to $50 billion. So why hasn't this been dealt with yet? In this post I'd like to explain exactly why Sweden managed to find a home for its nuclear waste in a far timelier fashion than America. The process by which Sweden arrived at finding sites for a nuclear waste repository started in 1977 and was only really finalised in 2009. This long process involved five stages: (I've shamelessly ripped this diagram off the slides of a presentation I attended by the Swedish company (SKB) that runs the nuclear waste disposal program in Sweden) I sadly couldn't find a version of this photo from 1980s  anti-nuclear depository protests without th...

The option that a quick perusal of most academic literatur e and government proposals as the safest or 'best' option for dealing with nuclear waste is the creation of geological repositories (GRs). Essentially after exploring various ways of dealing with nuclear waste, we're going to return to the time-old tradition of burying things to keep them a) safe and b) out of sight. The science behind GRs is fairly simple: the radioactive waste put deep enough and behind enough stone, clay and other geological materials, could potentially be contained safely for up to millions of years ( Wiley and Sons 1995) . GRs are touted as the cheap (relatively), low maintenance solution to our nuclear waste disposal needs. At a conference I attended on nuclear waste over summer, global experts on nuclear waste disposal from around the world unanimously agreed on geological disposal as the most viable and desirable method of containing our waste. Using the natural shield of geological materi...

The search for a safe, reliable, low maintenance nuclear waste depository takes us to the Central African State of Gabon. The Oklo region of Gabon was home to several mines run by their colonial rulers France, who exploited and continue to exploit the rich uranium ores in Gabon and other African countries (a story for another day) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21318043 . The French in 1972 discovered that there were discrepancies in isotope levels of Uranium-235 in the uranium coming from a particular Oklo mine (Davis et al., 2014) . Discrepancies that mirrored what would happen to uranium ore in a nuclear reactor. After evaluating the journey the ore had undertaken French scientists realised that the only possible reason for this to be the case was that the uranium ore in Oklo had operated as a natural fission reactor, producing essentially nuclear waste that had been stored beneath the earth for billions of years. The reason this was possible was that the amount of Uranium...

Hopefully my last post got the point across that long-term, safe, relatively cheap, and low maintenance solutions to where to put nuclear waste is something that most governments want and need. In fact I'd say it's one of the most crucial issues when thinking about nuclear energy as a long-term energy source Several long term storage solutions have already been thought of, several have been put into practice, others... not so much. Today I'd like to focus specifically on one that's definitely been thought of a lot - space disposal. The idea seems sound; put nuclear waste on a rocket, and jet it into the Sun, or onto the Moon, or even just on a random trajectory into the vast emptiness of space. It seemed like such an easy way out that companies started researching into the possibilities, Boeing had a serious look in the 1980s into investing in space disposal but ultimately decided it wasn't worth it.  (Cospar Information Bulletin, 1980) . Why? Well not because...

So like I said in my last post, humanity currently has an awkward 276,000 tonnes of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to deal with. In this post I'd like to briefly show you how we currently deal with this waste. There are two main ways to store SNF, 'dry' and 'wet (Romanto, 2011) . Wet storage involves placing the spent nuclear fuel in large pools of water. Water is a good 'shield' for the radiation and it also helps to cool the hot radioactive waste. Over summer I was actually lucky enough to visit the pools in Sweden where their SNF is stored, the level of shielding the water provided meant we could stand right next to the pools! However my worries did prompt a question aptly answered by one of my favourite comic series:  xkcd . I remember being very surprised by two things, the fact that the pools literally looked like a large public Olympic sized swimming pool, and also the incredible heat in the room emanating from the pool, it was 5C at the...

In today's post I'd like to discuss nuclear waste and its properties. Nuclear waste is often imagined as a sort of cartoony toxic green goo in large yellow barrels, but this is really not the case! In fact nuclear waste can exist in many forms and varieties. A quick screenshot of what turns up when I search 'nuclear waste' on Google Images The world loosely agrees on the three definitions for nuclear waste: Low level waste (LLW) Intermediate level waste (ILW) High level waste (HLW) LLW consists of of the least dangerous waste; things like paper, plastic and metal that has been used in hospitals, research establishments and certain aspects of the nuclear industry. Fun fact: in the UK LLW makes up 90% of the volume of nuclear waste but only <10% of the radioactivity ( UK White Paper on Nuclear Waste Disposal , 2014). ILW is defined as waste that exceeds the radioactivity boundaries of LLW, but is not so radioactive that heat is an iss...