alt Hacker NewsInteresting fact: Belgium's neighbor Germany has commenced a search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste indefinitely in the 1970s. Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one.
All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earliest.
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Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion.
How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US:
"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[6]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Some German state governments even made this explicit, stating that they would not allow a repository to be designated until the German nuclear exit was finalized in their official coalition agreements.
Another nice little trick was changing the language to require the "best possible" site, rather than a suitable one. Sounds innocuous, but anyone with a bit of experience in algorithms know that in theory, this actually makes the task impossible, because how can you definitively prove that there isn't an even better site that you haven't looked at yet?
In practice it has made the process of finding a site incredibly lengthy, difficult and expensive. It doesn't help that the BASE, the Germany federal agency for nuclear waste has been completely taken over by the Green Party, so there is no interest in actually finding a site, and they spend almost their entire budget every year on spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.
This sounds like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. There are certain types of reactors that can reuse uranium to further reduce its half life to around 6000 years so the one million years legal requirement is an unreasonable target.
Most of the "danger" from nuclear waste passes in a few years as the most radioactive isotopes decay quickly (which is obvious when you think about it).
Interestingly the US/UK/USSR dumped loads of nuclear waste in the ocean in the 1950s-70s and I recently read that there was basically no trace detectable of any of it.
Yes, nuclear power regulations are unreasonably strict because that was the method we used to soft-ban it.
Naive question - why couldn't we just launch this nuclear waste into ... space ?
> Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one.
Pah! We have a lot of those places but excessive federalism has every German state blocking any concrete plan.
The most bureaucratic thing ever done... search for a place to store something for 56 years. still not done
Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?
> All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
Some was stored underground in the past with bad results because the former mines were unstable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_re...
Dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years is pure fearmongering. There are loads of chemicals, metals and other nasty stuff that are dangerous forever and also need to be stored somewhere safely, indefinitely.
I personally live close to a commercial Asbestos dump (an old mine) and absolutely nobody cares about it. It's so unimportant it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article.
Yet the second radioactive waste is concerned (even if it's just old rubble) everybody seems to lose their minds and refuses to even think rational.
> they have not yet found one.
Meaning no region can be selected by a politician with out committing political suicide.
they havent found one bc they dont want to. Otherwise they would approve storing in say, herfa neurode
This is such a non problem, here is the waste from the entire french nuclear production ever (the red cube): https://www.discoverthegreentech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023...
Meanwhile I've been filtering the german coal byproducts with my lungs, and paying my electricity 2-3x more per kwh than the french