Sweden Starts Building 100,000 Year Storage Site For Spent Nuclear Fuel 16
Sweden has begun constructing a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Forsmark, making it only the second country after Finland to build such a site. It is not expected to be completed until the 2080s, but once finished, it will securely house radioactive waste for up to 100,000 years. Reuters reports: The Forsmark final repository, about 150 kilometers north of Stockholm on Sweden's east coast, will consist of 60 km of tunnels buried 500 meters down in 1.9 billion year old bedrock. It will be the final home for 12,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, encased in 5 meter long, corrosion-resistent copper capsules that will be packed in clay and buried. The facility will take its first waste in the late 2030s but will not be completed until around 2080 when the tunnels will be backfilled and closed, Sweden's Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) said. [...]
The Forsmark repository will cost around 12 billion crowns($1.08 billion) and be paid for by the nuclear industry, SKB said. It will have room to hold all the waste produced by Sweden's nuclear power plants. However, it will not hold fuel from future reactors. Sweden plans to build 10 more reactors by 2045.
The Forsmark repository will cost around 12 billion crowns($1.08 billion) and be paid for by the nuclear industry, SKB said. It will have room to hold all the waste produced by Sweden's nuclear power plants. However, it will not hold fuel from future reactors. Sweden plans to build 10 more reactors by 2045.
link broken (Score:4, Informative)
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That link looks broken too. How about this: https://www.worldenergynews.co... [worldenergynews.com]
Here's a part I found interesting:
It will not, however, hold fuel for future reactors. Sweden plans to build ten more reactors before 2045.
This implies they plan for more such burial sites for waste, or a means to avoid producing waste in the future.
Wikipedia gives a hint on how to avoid the need for 100,000 year burial of nuclear waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Proponents of nuclear fuel cycles which aim to consume all their actinides by fission, such as the Integral Fast Reactor and molten salt reactor, use this fact to claim that within 200 years, their fuel wastes are no more radioactive than the original uranium ore.
We don't need to bury this waste. We can use it for fuel in molten salt reactors or some other technology that eats this kind of waste and shits out useful energy.
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We do need to store this waste. Even if we had the technology, developed a commercial scale, that you suggest it would not be able to consume all of the waste that we have generated over the last 50 years all at once. So we would need somewhere to put it till this new technology could use it.
My guess would be that this form of 100k year storage is still cost competitive compared to onsite storage that we have been using for years.
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Shhhhh... the location is secret.
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Shhhhh... the location is secret.
But is it "top secret"?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]
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Finland decided in 2015 to use the same method as Sweden, with storage in copper capsules, and other countries considering it. Canada is leaning toward storage in larger copper capsules. France is working on reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, which still requires some storage. While Japan and UK are looking at storage below the sea, for which it is easier to get acceptance.
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And in the USA they don't give a shit what happens more than a couple of decades from now, let alone thousands of years.
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And in the USA they don't give a shit what happens more than a couple of decades from now
In America, waste is stored on-site at each power plant.
For now, that isn't a bad solution. As the waste sits, it becomes less radioactive.
We need to move the waste to long-term storage eventually, but that will be easier, cheaper, and safer in a few decades when technology has improved.
Procrastination is sometimes the best policy.
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Storing waste on site is the worst possible thing you can do. It means literally building individual storage systems for each site instead of doing it once and managing it properly. An even better option is reprocessing, and the more your procrastinate the bigger the problem gets.
Waste storage is a problem all over America. It's not procrastination or good policy, it's a political inability to solve a problem that has tried to be solved over and over again.
Seems optimistic. (Score:2)
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Five-hundred years would still be a couple hundred more than probably needed.
Only thing optimistic here is the size.
First rule of barn building; make it twice the size you were planning. Then double it again.
It will have room to hold all the waste produced by Sweden's nuclear power plants. However, it will not hold fuel from future reactors. Sweden plans to build 10 more reactors by 2045.
They’re not even making it large enough for their own future reactors. Dumb. Just dumb.
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They’re not even making it large enough for their own future reactors. Dumb. Just dumb.
By 2045, we'll have thorium MSRs, and the "waste" will become "fuel".
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Theyâ(TM)re not even making it large enough for their own future reactors. Dumb. Just dumb.
Will future reactors produce the same kind of waste?
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Proponents of nuclear fuel cycles which aim to consume all their actinides by fission, such as the Integral Fast Reactor and molten salt reactor, use this fact to claim that within 200 years, their fuel wastes are no more radioactive than the original uranium ore.
If they build molten salt and fast breeder reactors then they will not be producing waste that requires containment for 100,000 years. My guess is that even current waste doesn't require isolation for 100,000 years because after a couple hundred years the worst of the fission products will have decayed away to near nothing. With the worst of the fission products decayed to near nothing the waste can be re
I remain skeptic (Score:2)
No about building the excavation. It can be done for sure.
$1.08 billion?
Sounds like lots of projected costs of nuclear industry. Way below the real numbers.