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