#nuclearbullshit — Public Fediverse posts

@primonatura

yes, it will take way over 15 years to build it 😂

#NuclearFree #StopNuclear #NuclearEnergy #SMNR #NuclearPower #NuclearBullshit

... the same attributes that make deep boreholes attractive also limit their practicality.

Boreholes' main limitation is capacity. In the US, pressurized water reactors create the bulk of our spent fuel, which comes in the form of 14-foot-tall (4.3 m) “assemblies” of uranium fuel rods. These require a borehole at least 19 inches wide to fit a canister that contains one assembly inside the borehole’s steel liner while maintaining a gap to allow canisters to slide into place. That’s much wider than a typical 8.5-inch oil well, but it's still drillable with off-the-shelf equipment.

One recent estimate said it would take about a thousand boreholes to dispose of the entire 90,000-ton backlog of spent fuel in the USA, but Deep Isolation estimates the number would be closer to 670. Either way, many different drill sites would be needed. And while holes can be drilled up to 36 inches wide, that’s still much narrower than a tunnel in a mined repository. So while deep boreholes could take spent fuel and other compact waste, bigger items, like components from decommissioned reactors and reactor cores, won’t fit.

All of this, however, assumes that these boreholes can keep nuclear waste safely isolated from the human environment for the hundreds of thousands of years it takes for its radioactivity to decay to background levels. Can they?

The argument that depth provides safety stems from observations that most groundwater movement is near Earth’s surface. Water may circulate between the surface and 5 kilometers underground in mountainous regions, but in flatter areas, that motion is usually confined to shallower depths. At the depths these boreholes would reach, “You'd be getting down into rock formations where the water was extremely old and hadn't really had contact with shallow waters for hundreds of thousands—even millions—of years,” Chapman told me.
But that’s not the case everywhere. Around the world, there are thermal spas fed by water from as much as 3–4 kilometers deep, and scientists have logged water flowing from fractures in ostensibly impermeable crystalline rock at great depths in Sweden, France, and elsewhere. Clearly, any deep borehole disposal project would need to demonstrate that it's not connected to faults and fractures that might eventually conduct radioactive isotopes to the surface.
“It most likely will flow. I think the issue is not whether it's going to flow or not; it's whether it's going to stay in a place where it won't contaminate groundwater [for future human consumption],” said Williams-Stroud.