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Shale: Good For Gas, Oil...and Nuclear Waste Disposal?
Lasrick writes: Chris Neuzil is a senior scientist with the National Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey. He thinks the qualities of shale make it the perfect rock in which to safely and permanently house high-level nuclear waste. Given the recent discovery that water is much more of an issue than originally thought for the tough rock at Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Utah, the unique qualities of shale, along with its ubiquitous presence in the U.S., could make shale rock a better choice for the 70,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel currently sitting above ground at nuclear power facilities throughout the country. France, Switzerland, and Belgium are all considering repositories in shale, but it hasn't been studied much in the U.S. "Shale is the only rock type likely to house high-level nuclear waste in other countries that has never been seriously considered by the U.S. high-level waste program. The uncertain future of Yucca Mountain places plans for spent nuclear fuel in the United States at a crossroads. It is an opportunity to include shale in a truly comprehensive examination of disposal options."
Why would we hide some of the most energy dense stuff known to man? Instead put it in long term storage, plan for say 200 years.
Sometime down the road future generations will reprocess it and use it. Unless energy gets super cheap, then in that case...Energy is super cheap and they will have no issue cleaning up the pasts mistakes.
Most of the "waste" from pressurized water reactors still has about 97% of its extractable energy left in it. It could fairly easily be reprocessed and reused in a PWR again, or used almost as-is in the future generation IV design fast neutron reactors.
The reason most used fuel is not reprocessed now, apart from the NIMBY complaints about the processing plants, is that "virgin" fuel is so cheap and abundant that the small extra cost is not deemed to be worth it.
Not that it makes much difference, but the Yucca Mountain site is in Nevada, not Utah.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Now the people in towns nearby can have flaming AND glowing water.
3 mile island scale... you mean a media induced panic over a non-event that hasn't harmed anyone, compared to the absolutely devastating cost of coal alone to the environment and human life?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
TMI was the perfect accident, dramatic but with no deaths - a wakeup call from the complacency where the plant wasn't even monitored as well as a fertilizer plant had to be.
It showed the dramatic contrast in attitude between the early stages of design where the containment vessels were made to be the strongest in the USA due to the risk of a plane crashing into it on approach to the nearby airport, and the implementation of the control and monitoring systems years later that sucked by any measure. It resulted in the early retirement of some other reactors that were frankly death traps and the improvement of all the others.
The engineers of the time didn't write it off as a non-event like you are counterproductively doing. Such bleating as above harms the cause of nuclear power instead of helping it. Instead of ignoring it the engineers put in the work and extra care that resulted in nothing like the Chenobyl incident happening in the USA, despite some of the older plants initially being inherently more dangerous.