This could become the most radioactive place on earth
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 พ.ค. 2024
- Over a quarter of a million tons of highly radioactive waste is just sitting around across the globe, in some cases leaching toxins into the environment. And nobody knows what to exactly to dowith it - except for Finland. We visit the the only high-level nuclear waste storage site in the world.
#Planet A #NuclearWaste #NuclearWasteStorage
Reporter: Kiyo Dörrer
Camera: Florian Kroker
Video editor: Neven Hillebrands
Supervising editors: Joanna Gottschalk, Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann, Michael Trobridge
We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world - and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
Read more:
English site with information about the final repository Onkalo:
www.posiva.fi/en/index/finald...
Types of nuclear waste:
www.nrc.gov/waste.html
Studies about copper canister corrosion:
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Scientific debate based on previous studies:
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
cris.vtt.fi/en/publications/r...
Special thanks to the interview partners whose expertise was essential for the video:
David Shoesmith, Jinshan Pan, Johan Swahn, Katy Huff, Markku Lehtonen, Matti Kojo, Päivi Mäenalanen, Wolfram König
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:50 Onkalo History
02:35 Onkalo Geology
03:38 Types of Nuclear Waste
08:50 Eurajoki: The Community
10:45 Transferability
12:32 Conclusion
Humans in a million years digging up thinking they are all tombs 😂
You think human would be around in a million year?🤣
Imagine: current society making hostile architecture to keep future people away from danger, expecting them to not understand our symbols and language so we try to make a way for them to understand it's dangerous, but instead they think it's treasure and keep going!
@@nayeon_twiceimnida1654 Considering that on the high estimation we've only been around for 300,000 or so, my money would be against it.
If we somehow did survive that long, I think we'd eventually find a better solution to dealing with something that energy dense than burying it deep underground while we go on burning fossil fuels like it's no big deal.
@@nayeon_twiceimnida1654The humans probably won't be around the next century by the look of things today 😂
The thing is. If someone is capable of digging 400meters of bedrock they are capable of identifying radiation or that it was used for radioactive waste.
"In some cases leeching toxins into the environment"
There is no leaking anymore - the content of these containers are encapsulated in concrete and glass nowadays.
Also there is no fluid inside, those pellets are solid material - it can only "leak" if water get into the containers - which is why you shouldn't throw them in an old abandoned salt mine...
There is also the possibility to recycle and reuse nuclear waste products which leads to much faster decay.
Aren't the containers enclosed in Bentonite to prevent water ingression? But yeah, the Finns different than us buried it in Granit and not in salt, which sounds...logical.
Every time I see anything regarding "extremely dangerous nuclear waste", I just can't believe that hardly anyone even tries to address the elephant in the room. Which is also about radioactivity, but... from coal plants.
So much fuss about the nuclear waste, while it is just a small fraction of a waste generated by coal powerplants. And the coal waste is just stored in the open air as the ash - exposed to sunlight, rainwater, air, even though this ash is radioactive as well, and amounts of radioactivity are way higher than from nuclear powerplants, since uranium is very, very effective and actually very small amount of it is used. Just imagine - 1 gram of uranium replaces 3 metric tons of coal! Three million times less source material, and remember that coal is still the dominating source of electricity in the World!
Just one quote from official documents: Studies show that ash from coal power plants contains significant quantities of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, uranium and thorium. To generate the same amount of electricity, a coal power plant gives off at least ten times more radiation than a nuclear power plant.
We need to know, that used rods are not simply thrown away as a nuclear waste - they still hold a lot of energy and are reprocessed/recycled into new rods. It is the remaining material that can't be easily used, that is stored as nuclear waste. Also, a lot of medical equipment that has been used with radiology or radiotherapy.
Generally, most of the fuss about nuclear waste comes from anti-atom maniacs, who try to convince us that this is a much more serious issue than it really is.
Well said, excellent comment! Let's make it go all the way to the top
There is an unbelievably huge amount of radioactive material in the ground naturally, this really is a very safe and logical solution and as close to no risk as is possible with the very most efficiency of cost at the same time in balance.
Not just the ground, but matterials too. Even in Washington State, USA 1990s a house had sealed off. Government sealed of house and vented house.
There is a huge difference between naturally occuring radioactive minerals and nuclear waste: Concentration.
The everage chunck of rock dug out of a uranium mine is little more radioactive than any other rock. It takes a huge effort to refine it into something that can be used for nuclear power.
High-level nuclear waste instead has already gone through that refinement process and contains thousands or milions of times the amount of radionuclides that natural occurring radioactive minerals contain (let alone regular rock).
That means that some natural or artificial phenomenon unearthing a vein of natural uranium ore would do little to no harm to the surrounding environment but the same thing happening to one of that barrels would be really, really bad.
There is absolutely no plutonium naturally
@@qdaniele97 Why not reverse the process then? De-refine this material that comprises spent nuclear fuel rods and just reintroduce it into the environment at the same concentrations that it naturally occurs?
@@georgewashington1621 That sounds pretty interesting. Though you would probably need to excavate thousands of tons of rock to homogenise it with just one of the rods, and then put the mixture back in the ground. How practical could that be?
Bure is not only "a proposed site for nuclear waste" but also a laboratory that studies nuclear waste storage for decades.
Whole reactor is put down there some day, but because need's dosen't go anywhere, that thing will most likely run longer than what is estimated.
This is far mor better way than what some other countries has done in their own land and sea with n-waste
I think the reason Finland is way ahead of most nations in choosing the site for their nuclear waste disposal has a lot more to do with their unique geology than their unique mentality.
It's a lot easier to find a suitable place to bury your nuclear waste when your entire country sits inside the East European Craton (a craton being an incredibly old and stable portion of Earth's crust, usually flattened by ages of erosion), and probably in the oldest and most stable part of it.
Things get a little less simple when you introduce younger rocks, volcanism and those pesky active fault lines onto the table.
Up to a point, yes, but there are other factors: Finland only has a very few thousand tonnes of spent fuel to inter. The US generates over 2000 tonnes each year, every year. Finland also commenced the project by seeking community engagement, whereas the US tried an autocratic approach, which deserved to fail.
I think the waste heat should be used for district heating and electricity generation until we can reprocess it, not spend billions on glorified caves.
@@abrahamedelstein4806
The waste heat from spent fuel isn't really able to be harnessed like that. From one point of view it is far too little to be worth putting in pipes and heat exchangers. From a disposal point of view it is too much heat, which builds up until something fails. A bit like a compost heap getting hot enough to catch fire.
Reprocessing is not all that effective. France has reprocessed about a third of it's spent fuel, and in so doing has probably complicated the problem. Instead of ceramic fuel pellets encased in fuel rods, reprocessing gives you large volumes of fission products dissolved in aqueous solution, a lot of depleted uranium, and some conveniently separated plutonium and minor actinides. The fission products need special processing and vitrification, and still need fairly long term deep disposal lasting at least a thousand years. The rest still needs disposal with ten or hundred thousand year horizons.
Reprocessing for use in MOX fuel also has issues. Used MOX fuel has much greater isotopic diversity, and specifically accumulates more neutron poisons and U232, which makes any further treatment and re-use *much* harder and more expensive, and *also* is more difficult to dispose.
@@aaroncosier735It's literal megawatts of energy wasted, that and the cost of actually cooling it. District heating is but one application, the "waste" could also be used for thermal electric generation, you could quite literally have building next to nuclear power plant with hundreds of thousands of thermal electric generators producing a small but steady stream of current. It's an ant's piss in the grand scheme, but it's a huge amount of energy when people are getting raped over energy costs. Do you know how many people would be happy to have a small container of nuclear "waste" in their basement?
@@abrahamedelstein4806
Yes, it is megawatts. and the cost of cooling it is substantial.
But a mere handful of megawatts of very low level heat are not worth recovering.
The cooling towers have to get rid of two Gigawatts that are similarly not worth recovering.
It's not enough to drive turbines and the hardware overhead for other types of conversion are uneconomical.
It's not recoverable in any meaningful way, but it *is* a substantial expense to dissipate, just another big reason why nuclear is not worth the bother, and why it has been in decline for decades.
Fins r once again showing the world how things should be done by not being afraid to take the lead!👍 Its truly remarkable what such a small nation can achieve and surpass even "giants" and world leaders a.k.a. nowadays "empires". Finland got my respect - pragmatic and commons sense approach without any unnecessary BS will get u there. I can only wish 5 mil nation like Slovakia will get there one day with its mentality which relies so much on diversifying almost each and every square meter of its land and people.
Once again great report DW, thank u very much!👏
There is a phrase that every finn will go to heaven. That because too much finns in hell will extinguish that fire pit and then it's the devil who must leave.
Fighting cat is easy, fighting tiger is not… both cat and tiger are feline… when you have 2 power plant it’s easy but when count gets larger it’s a problem. Let’s talk when France does the same…
Over 90% of used fuel is still recoverable as material to make new uranium fuel rods, and the technology exists & is used by several nations on a large scale. This greatly reduces the volume & also the need for more uranium mines. I wonder why this was not discussed in the video.
because U.S does not want recovery process(PUREX), only france operates these facilities.
Because it doesn’t work as well as the nuclear industry promises and it’s super expensive… better to invest in non toxic renewables
Ay someone actually noticed that. I can´t even find any numbers on how much spent fuel we actually recycle, but they have been able to do it since the 70´s so there is no excuse for not implementing it in every plant built since. It seems like a perfect solution, right?
@@1112viggoWe've been able to do it since nineteen fifty. However part of the recycling process separates the fuel. One of the sections that separates out is plutonium, Weapons grade. That is why in the eighties the president wrote a hold on any further recycling, As part of his efforts towards controlling proliferation. He assumed that once the us banned something the rest of the world would follow, limiting nuclear power to the already existing powers.
It's not that easy.
The U238, any remaining U235, and Plutonium produced by bombardment can certainly be separated. It can be used to make MOX fuel (with some leftover weapons plutonium that cost billions) and certainly MOX works in some reactors that have been certified.
Used MOX fuel is a whole other problem. The plutonium breeds a lot more products than Uranium, so you you get more neutron poisons, and specifically more U232. These make any further re-use more difficult. They also make direct disposal of MOX more expensive. The facility has to be larger to dissipate the greater decay heat. Overall, direct disposal of spent uranium fuel is probably the best bet.
The containment doesn't have to last up to a million years. Radioactivity decays more or less logarithmically, meaning very fast in the beginning and eventually slower. This means that after 1000-10000 years spent fuel is somewhat safe to handle. The rule of thumb in radioactivity is that the shorter time the stuff remains radioactive the more dangerous it is, and vice versa. Bismuth is radioactive practically infinitely long time, but therefore is absolutely no danger at all, while iodine released from nuclear accident vanishes in about month or so but is therefore highly dangerous.
That's right. In 200 years it will be harmless. The only thing radioactive after that time will be plutonium and transuranics, which is as harmless as natural uranium or thorium found in nature. All this antinuclear propaganda paid my the oil industry is BS
Not true if there is plutonium in the spent rods...and if you think 1000 to 10000 years is feasible...I put it to you that if these were put into the great pyramid of Giza it would only be 4500 years and it would still poison and contaminate the entire Nile Delta area today.
Rather than store nuclear “waste”, trying to preserve it intact for eons, we need to consume & transform it into a non-hazardous state / isotopes.
Others more qualified can surely describe how this would work. “Reprocessing”, generally.
sadly we dont have nor anyone that is willing to research this technology
@@badenglish7979
maybe you should think about why that is.. its almost like what you want, is literally not possible.
France has been reprocessing spent nuclear fuel at La Hague for 50 years. About 95% of it is the original uranium that was there from the start.
As far as I know, this technology has existed for a long time and one of the issues is non-nuclear proliferation agreements. Some of the rest products of the process are essential materials for nuclear bombs.
As @@scarpfishhas said, some countries recycle spent fuel for reuse.
Unfortunately, it all comes down to money as always. Most places do not recycle fuel as it is cheaper to obtain fresh uranium. They will only resort to recycled fuel when uranium prices are high.
I wish the rest of the world will be more like finland!
Or just recycle it like the Soviet Union did and america at least attempted to until the US privatised it and they gave up LOL. Only Russia today recycle nuclear waste into more nuclear fuel, but their facilities are from USSR and neglected for 30 years, literally falling apart.
Recycling is too expensive for free enterprise, so dumping it into someones backyard is cheaper, might as well just dump it in the ocean and you should support this if you love Capitalism.
Finland seems to be doing almost everything right at the moment.
As a foreigner working construction job in Finland i can tell you Finnish job is top notch quality
that nuclear waste is safe for thousands of years if not millions.
Thanks so much for this channel, just about to study my masters in 'energy and Sustainability development' and really kicks in my passion for this field ❤
Great to hear! 😍 Good luck with the studies!
Arizona was abandoned because locals objected to the facts that the salt bed (highly corrosive and soluble) turned out to have significant water passage (migration of leakage) and was more geologically active than originally thought. Plus salt is a desirable material, easily mined, and readily absorbed by plants, animals, and people. So it was pretty much the opposite of the Finnish site.
So oil can stay in salt domes for 300 million years but nuclear waste can't stay there for 10,000 years?
@@gregorymalchuk272 So how much oil leaked out over time? And oil breaks down, reacts in hours. Radioactive materials, not so much.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Go live in a bunker, since if so scared of radiation you should never be in contact with the sun. Or what do you think the sun is releasing?
Pretty sure the government are seecart or garbage into the sea. Is a bigger problem than that s*** because we've literally killed so many marine lives oh no good ways? Where when
@@gregorymalchuk272Can stay there untill someone starts mining the salt.
i was expecting nothing but the best from my fellow metalheads. good job guys. While everyone is screaming and turning coal power plants back on you have solved the problem. Good job Finland
It is so dumb that people are afraid of nuclear waste. A dry cask for nuclear waste is safe enough to put your mouth. You're orders of magnitude more likely to develop complications from the bacteria on the cask than the trivial amount of radiation emanating from it.
i know this is not exactly the topic of this video but finally DW Planet came close to understanding the scale of nuclear waste amounts and scope when they talked about the types. So here are some general criticism and specific about the video:
First, it would have helped to see the complete distribution between low level, intermediate and high and not just lumping the first 2 together since anything low level is not a problem really since it decays quite fast (don't remember exactly).
Second, there should be a general explanation on how well most of the spent fuel (high level waste) is stored since the vast majority is taken very seriously and safely. heck, transportation of high level waste is so safe that they are sealed in casks that a train can crash into them and only the train is damaged. Obviously every negligence or subpar treatment should be criticized and scrutinized but the point is it is entirely possible to keep the waste completely safe even if we still don't have a long term solution like in this video.
Third, 250million metric tonnes of high level waste, assuming it was meant for the waste of the entire world combined (should have been clarified). which means from the 50s (or 60s ?) till today, all of the nuclear power plants combined, created "26 Eiffel towers" worth of waste by weight that by volume would be even less since Depleted uranium is about twice as dense as iron. and the volume of just the iron of the tower would occupy a volume of only 930 meters cubed, which is equivalent to a sphere with a radius of just six meters. So it could have really helped to add some estimate of how much waste is planned to be stored in this facility and for how long this will last given the current amount of generated waste and some future projections if more Nuclear Power Plants will be built.
I did a quick back of the envelope type of calculation on how much coal had been burned in the same amount of time, which came out to around 184 billion cubic meters of coal.
To put that into perspective, 1 billion cubic meters, is a cubic kilometer, so that would mean a cube 5.7km on all sides. Compare this to the entirety of the uranium used in the same time, making a cube 24 meters on each side. It's not even close in comparison.
My asusmptions being: 1m^3 of coal is 1350kg (it's between 1300 to 1400kg for anthracite), so 1 ton of coal would be around 0.74% of a m^3 (1m^3/1,35T of coal per m^3).
1m^3 of uranium is around 19000kg.
Each year I assumed that the world burned 100.000 PJ of coal on average.
I used an online converter to convert 100.000 PJ of coal to 3.421.000.000 tons of coal.
Calculation being: 3.421.000.000 PJ * 0.74 m^3 per ton of coal = 184.000.000.000 m^3 of coal.
If I got something wrong, feel free to correct me, I have a tendency to get something wrong somewhere, when it comes to calculations.
Too many people hear the term "nuclear waste" and they envision leaking barrels full of glowing green goo with the radiation symbol on it. The reality is much, much different and compared to other environmental hazards caused by the mining or the fossil fuel industries, the waste is contained and would be comparatively easy to clean up if people would quit being nukeophobes and allow the infrastructure to remediate it to be built.
@@op4000exe i wonder how much radioactive material was released into the atmosphere in burning all that coal, i bet its A WHOLE LOT. if we accept such levels of radioactive contamination (and we do, and evidently there's nothing wrong with it) why not just re-introduce all this "waste" nuclear material back into the environment in some way that would not significantly elevate the natural concentrations of those isotopes.
However, I wouldn't make a 6m diameter ball of spent fuel for obvious reasons. ;D
A hell of a lot safer then just leaving it lying around on the surface.
Especially when they're safe even when they are on the surface.
Valuable video on this topic, though I agree with the critique about scale. I'd love a follow up on the disposal options including vitrification and à comparison with waste from fusion.
Or you could use breeder reactors, like those in use France already, to reduce the half-life of that high-level waste to a couple of hundreds of years before storing it
DW should be ASHAMED of the title of this video, a blatant exercise in clickbaiting. You can only call this the "most radioactive place" by using a seriously twisted definition. Who is talking about places like Lake Karachay, in central Russia, where the outside environment is actually lethal. The Finns are handling this stuff in a completely sensible way.
DW is german state television. Germans really hate anything nuclear because their education system is very bad and they like to destroy their own economy. So this title is very reasonable for their standards.
These nuclear waste isn't truly waste. There's a lot of untapped potential energy inside there. The 1000's year half life can be reduced to a few hundred if we thoroughly use them. Japan is already doing that.
There are problems associated with this however. We can get weapons grade fuel doing that but as long as it's handled with care then I don't think this is a big issue.
Just because you bury it doesn’t mean you’ve solved the problem
What is that banger of Techno you put on the beginning of the video that runs until 0:01-0:44 ? I need that in my life. 😂
🎶 The track is called _Scare Tactics_ by Igor Dvorkin, Ellie Kidd and Duncan Pittock 🎶
What surprises me is the fact that there are other options for the waste that are not talked about or even mentioned. Burrying the "waste" as in used fuel from LWR's is just crazy to me. they are burrying litteral unused fuel. Maybe it had been more informative if they had talked about the fuel cycle. When working with a fully open cycle meaning using the fuel once and then considering it waste is what happends now. You could also be recycling the spend fuel (waste) to turn it into MOX fuel, this is considered a half-open fuel cycle. When working with a fully closed cycle like using fast neutron reactors the waste that comes out of the reactor doesn't have to be stored for 1 000 000 years but more in the order of 300 years.
Geological disposal is certainly a good solution, it's just not the only one. luckly the facility will be closed for good in the next century, so by then commercial fast reactors will be available to reuse the fuel and power country's for century's to come.
Not joking here, you could have done the video👍 Far more informative than watching x mins of fluff😃
sources?
@@mfulan7548 Sure, just google some of these reacotrs: EBR I & II, Phénix, Super Phénix, BN-600 & 800.
some literature: JRC124193 "technical assessment of nuclear energy EU", "What a waste" from Replanet
Yeah It drive me crazy too
@@stijn2644 Thank you, but which one of that sources for that "stored for 300 years"?
If spent fuel rods still emit enough heat to be of concern why can’t that heat be utilized for further electricity production?
I have been to the forsmark site in sweden has been dug for a long time. I got to go into the caves and see example but also one of the medium tunnels through a window. Basicly glass concrete square containers. As said the problem has been controversy around the copper cask. Some say a kind of brass could be better. The tunnels have been there for years. I think they approved the fuel waste recently or is soon going to do it.
"Huge if true" did a similar piece recently. The video looked into what the Japanese are doing with their spent fuel. You should check it out! I think it might be a good approach too
Finland should make this facility bigger, as big as any possible.
Then they should take in radioactive waste from other countries, of course at a premium price point.
If the place is 100% safe, then there are no downsides for Finland. But there's a load of money Finland could make and plenty of jobs for Finns for many years to come.
I'm also confident that the Finns will *actually* store this stuff safely. Much more confident than I am in other nations trying to do the same.
So this would be a win win scenario for everyone, including the planet.
This is why accidents happen, because you people think business can be done with nuclear waste. Imagine all the travelling risks of the waste, transfering waste from country to country is not easy.
@@wizaaeed isn't spend fuel transported in canisters that can resist almost every accident imaginable? If smaller country's can participate with large country's with lot's of knowlegde, then why not?
Deep geological waste burial is an uneconomical answer to a question that only bad-faith anti-nuclear activists asked. It's no coincidence that a leading us nuclear regulator who spent her entire career opposing Yucca Mountain just wrote an article about how deep geological storage is absolutely necessary. It's a ploy to keep nuclear power just over the horizon forever, and to increase the costs and make it uneconomical. In reality, cask storage or shallow burial is preferable so that the waste is nearby for future reprocessing.
@@stijn2644 Because it would be directly voted on by the public, and it's a good guess to say that most of us finns wouldn't be in favour of importing other countries' nuclear waste no matter how much it pays
@@stijn2644 yes buddy, it's possible, in the perfect world of youtube comments everything is possible. First time I've heard of a container that can `survive every accident imaginable`.
I really just want to roll a bunch of bouncy balls from the top to the bottom just to see how long they would take. But this was really cool
I want to clarify something from France: a few sites had been chosen to test the project, but they chose to build it in Bure because that's where there is less people, so less annoying manifestants, not because it was the best site. This site also brings questions if it is a truly good one. There is more ground water than expected... Nothing is really working with the radioactive waste burying project in Bure.
Bullshit
Thanks for the video DW.
I'm thinking about moving to Finland
Why does DW use provocative titles for their posts? They frequently suggest an opinion by virtue of the choice of words. Often negative sounding. “Radioactive Cave”. Could have been “A safe storage solution” for nuclear waste.
0:31 No Nuclear Fle is stored in an Yellow barrel like this.
Sealing them in copper is crazy
can it be retreived for recycling in the future easily?
Not really. After about a century of gradually expanding the storage site it will be sealed for good and not touched again. ⚡ We are planning on making a video on nuclear waste recycling too since it is an important and very interesting topic!
“-437 meters underground”… sounds legit, i deduce from this that they’re actually 437 meters above ground
To be fair, I think the fins would protest too if they would want to put it in an old salt mine
@DW Planet A
What's different from the Canadian undergroung storage? I guess this have something to do with techtonic plate?
Hey there! It is very similar actually. The probable location would be at 680 meters below surface, a bit more than Finland´s site. The plan is to use a similar way of storing with copper canisters, tubes, sealing with concrete. However, it is still not 100% decided yet. There is a lot of political difficulties and discussion ongoing. The decision is expected in 2024.
@@DWPlanetA thanx for the answer! Has long as there's no movement underground i guess this is a good an probably the best way to do it so hope it goes fine!
Todays nuclear waste is tomorrows fuel.
That is awfully optimistic.
Some attempt has been made to use reprocessed fuel. MOX can be used in some reactors, but spent MOX fuel is a bigger problem than spent uranium fuel. Harder to reprocess, and in disposal it needs more space and heavier shielding.
Am not against this idea. I believe this is the most plausible way to do it. What concerns me is building the site close to a coastline.
While this solution is suppose to last several thousands of years. Rising water levels wont wait that long, we could see this place under water in next 200-250 or maybe after 500 years and we could witness water seeping through those concrete or am I missing something?
Well, this is all just a drop in the bucket. Uranium 235 has a half-life of 704 million years. So it will take another long time for all the uranium to decay. But this is not the end of radioactivity, because most of the decay products are radioactive themselves. So if you continue to use nuclear power, you need many final storage sites.
There is less than 1% of U235 in spent fuel rods. The 100 000 years mentioned here will be enough to render the material not dangerous to humans (unless eaten). The more radioactive material will decay faster and the cumulative effect of everything won't be problematic in 100 000 years anymore.
@ But 94.5% uranium-238 with a half-life of 4,468,000,000 years. So you can turn it around however you want. At some point, every repository will be full.
@@karstendoerr5378 The actual amount of waste coming as spent fuel rods is relatively low. For example, Finland has five nuclear reactors. One repository is enough to take all nuclear waste they will create during their lifetime.
If necessary, we could build 50 such repositories in Finland alone without an issue and we would still have lots of land available for more such repositories.
There are about 440 nuclear reactors in the world. Less than 100 such repositories are needed for all nuclear reactors in the world.
That's less than one repository per country in the world on average.
@ In Finland, perhaps. In Germany, nuclear power plants have been shut down and are to be rebuilt. A lot of things will come together, because there are not only the fuel rods that radiate. Reactor pressure vessel was activated, pipelines, which came into contact with radioactive water, are activated. And they want to do that, although they don't even have a proper repository. The fact is that nuclear power plants cannot be left standing around forever.
@@karstendoerr5378 Other parts of the reactor are low level waste, they can be processed without need of any repository.
8:20 I find it weird it will be left unmonitored and unmarked.
It should definitely not be left unmarked, that's for certain. Crazy that they decided to build it where people live, though. There's such a vast amount of earth that sits unpopulated, and can be used for, well, stuff like this. But great stuff.
What about new technologies that allow you to use nuclear waste in further energy production - making it alot less radioactive? We are talking about transition from 100s of thousand of years to few houndred years(~300). Hitachi is making this kind of reactors. Also Copenhagen based startup claims to have build small reactors to deal with nuclear waste, and also running on thorium.
Sure, if people are ready to pay for it. We have our own production at home, so are a log of people. Who will pay for such expensive energy?
First time I've heard someone refer to 15 minutes as a quarter of an hour.
6:40 does she think they drill those holes etc in the mountain without water cooling the drillhead? Ofc its gonna be wet in there for a while
US Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, there has been a flurry of headlines this summer about a "nuclear coffin" leaking radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean. It is cracked concrete.
I live in Nevada, just a 75 to 90 minute drive from the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste deposal site and it is being used, albeit on a sparse basis. It’s been in development for almost 20 years.
"...and it is being used, albeit on a sparse basis."
Not for nuclear waste it's not.
There is no nuclear waste at yucca mountain.
@@stevenp8198 Nope. Not a speck.
Yucca was/is a gigantic boondoggle.
Reuse it in reactors on fast neutrons.
can they just use somekind of rubber / plastic around the copper capsule.
There is technology to recycle spent fuel rods and reuse them back into reactor power plants. It is not a cheap process to recycle the rods as it has been done but governments need to get behind this process.
Why are the containers made from copper a rather soft and conductive material likely to be needed for power cables in the future and not in stainless steel, far stronger and much less reactive material if water do indeed intrude ?
Hey there! Copper has proven to be a very resistant material but as tackled in the video, there is a residual risk. Stainless Steel is also used as material for disposal canisters. However, there have been studies of cases for nuclear disposal where a reaction resulted in a highly increased corrosion. It seems there is no perfect solution right now.
@@DWPlanetA Thorium reactors left the chat.
Copper cannons have been sitting at the bottom of the sea for a few centuries on old wrecks and they have hardly corroded, so copper is a good material.
@@zapfanzapfanDo you mean bronze cannons ? As in an alloy of copper and tin that is extremely corrosion resistant. Copper, not quite so much.
What a waste of resources to build those caves, for half the effort they could have built a bank of Radio Thermal Generators or District Heating fueled by the so called "waste".
Nuclear Waste is waste in the same way as gasoline is a waste product of oil refinement, no matter what you think of it, it's high energy stuff just sitting there to be used, and I think we should use it.
For everyone's information, those cooling pools aren't passive, they need active cooling because otherwise that "waste" would boil the water, that's how high energy it is, Olympic sized swimming pools just dumping heat into rivers and seas while you're paying for heating.
Fins and sweds i love them so happy people ! ❤
Tack! 🙂
2:36 Thanks for the video, nice to see. A small point of feedback: "The trip underground takes almost an quarter of an hour". Why not "The trip underground takes 15 minutes." In my opinion, sounds unnecessary daunting.
Thank you for doing a video on nuclear!
Hey there! We did more videos on nuclear. Check them out:
Germany´s nuclear exit 👉 th-cam.com/video/eWuGP_aBoYg/w-d-xo.html
Is nuclear power needed to stop climate change? 👉 th-cam.com/video/9X00al1FsjM/w-d-xo.html
Thorium nuclear energy 👉 th-cam.com/video/Km6kqykX900/w-d-xo.html
Hats off to Finish scientists and people.
They should mark the concrete barriers and entrance to the tunnels with hieroglyps to warn future humans of entering. Like a puking emoji or something.
"We have lots of money" made me laugh. 🤣
There is a actually a serious discussion going on about how to mark these sites or humans thousands of years from now. By then anything could have happened to language and communication so how do you symbolise the danger of something which can't be detected with normal sense. I love this finish site, I think it's such a good idea to bury it all in concrete half a mile underground in stable rock formations that are completely worthless in every other way.
2:45 negative meters underground means she's actually 400something meters above sea level but yeah...
Been there core drilling Some of the first tunnels
How do they bore the bent smooth corners in the mineshafts? Can't imagine a TBM would flex like that. ...Engineers: Hold my beer.🤠
Is where they are putting it as secure as the Canadian Shield???
So all the energy from the nuclear plants in finland was spent digging and making this mine operational ? 😅 just wondering.
As a Finnish person I can tell you one thing: if a Finnish company says anything about any structure being safe (anything built after the 80s), they are exaggerating or they are flat out lying.
Hopefully at least THIS ONE is an honest man, because otherwise, we are FUCKED! 😬😬😬
I'd like to believe that we can still use the fuel rods for other applications.
The "used fuel" still contains over 90% uranium which can be recycled and reused in new fuel rods.
Currently it is more "economic" to put them in dry cask storage and bury them.
Yea, we really need to find a better solution for the high-level nuclear waste. The storage facility is great, but there is so much potential energy still in those fuel rods...
I would translate "onkalo" as "the cavity".
No waste is ever leaving the powerplants until they can sell it. Hahaha
Digging a tube for each container might not be the best solution. As there are numerous containers, even a mountain will not be able to accumulate all. It's expensive too. Although it's a time consuming process.
One silly joke but funny -if u squeeze both ars muscles very hard u will start speaking Finland 😂
400+ meters down right next to the sea...imagine future societies being able to scan bedrock and finding a lot of valuable copper down there. :P
If they can scan 400 metres of bedrock for copper they can also scan what is inside of said copper
The baltic sea is not so deep. You're out over 10 miles from the shore until the water reachers 100 m depth.
@@Darkness251 it's that shallow? I live at a Norwegian fjord. One step to far and I have 400m of water below my floating belly.
It does have some deep points (450m) but not along the Finnish coast. That area is quite shallow. Less than 50m quite far out...
Excellent 👍 Smart move .
0:54: 🌍 Finland has built a deep underground storage facility called Onkalo to store nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years, solving the nuclear waste problem.
3:39: 🗑 Nuclear waste is categorized into low-level, intermediate, and high-level waste, with the latter being the most problematic due to its long-lasting radioactivity and potential for leakage.
8:06: 🏭 Finland's nuclear waste storage facility, Onkalo, is designed to protect against the escape of radionuclides through multiple layers of protection, including bentonite clay and 420 meters of rock.
10:54: 🌍 Different countries have different approaches to storing nuclear waste, with Sweden likely to be the next country to start construction.
Recap by Tammy AI
There will be a use for it at some time its not really waste its not usable for what they want it for
Only Finland has permanent storage. UK Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning.
Excellent report. In the U.S. the quest to come up with a deep geological repository for high level nuclear waste began in the 1950s. Little progress has been made since then after spending many billions of dollars on the effort. The creation of such a repository is still likely many decades away. Most likely the rapid effects of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) will overwhelm the disposal efforts.
Here the final waste disposal efforts have always taken a back seat compared to the financial revenues that came from the sale of nuclear energy. It has always been assumed that future generations will be in a better position to deal with this issue.
It's unnecessary. The people who clamor most for deep storage are ironically the same people who worked the hardest to block Yucca Mountain. It's a deliberate ploy to drive up the costs of nuclear energy and make it uneconomical. The truth is that cask storage or shallow burial are preferable so that the waste is always nearby for future reprocessing.
@@gregorymalchuk272 - That is an interesting perspective from someone in love with nuclear power technology. It ignores the enormous efforts and expenditures that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) invested in creating a deep deep geological repository, beginning in the 1950s and extending to around 2000. At least $9 billion was spent on the Yucca Mountain Project alone. That effort included a study of how to mark such a site after it was filled and sealed. The containment requirement was then specified as 10,000 years. That was an engineering compromise since it was too difficult to predict what might happen beyond that time period. Some of the radioactive actinides remain a potential threat for up to a million years.
Many nuclear power advocates have a caviler attitude and feel certain that human controls over nuclear power and its waste products will last many centuries from now. They have a vested interest in excluding the following warnings from their consciousness. I urge readers to search for the following article headlines.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* Note that this statement was made 4.5 years ago.
maybe a dumb question but why cant we use spent nuclear rods as heaters?
It is not a dumb question at all! The idea to heat up cities with nuclear rods is out there and there are few reactor-based heating plants that have been in development for some years. One of the is the Teplator. (Read more here: www.ciirc.cvut.cz/teplator-is-celebrating-success-on-ukraine/)
Onkalo 😊
Nice, that is until ocean waters raise due to melting icecaps. Then all that water around the site will leach into the materials. yea, good job!
Genius way to combat the earth core cooling caused by ground-warm extracting systems.
''Quarter of an hour'' Now that's something!
You can have a nuclear plant using nuclear waste, reducing the radiation to only a few hundred years
there only theoretical concepts.
@@damegaKingEBR-II
@@damegaKingthe French have been reprocessing spent fuel for ages
@@damegaKing Japan already does this in their fleet!!!
@@damegaKingwrong
Just spray coat the capsules with line-x they should stay protected from possible ground water and remain safer for longer
CANDU reactors can burn waste as fuel would seem obvious to get as much use out it as you can
4:54 This is not the best solution. A five year old can think enough to dig a hole and throw bad stuff in it. Toilets began that way 😂
I wonder why they don't coat the copper barrels in a thick water resistant material? Would act as an extra sealant and prevent the copper from corrosion
How come the Fins don't use Vitrified Lead Glass ?
Why dont we use it to make energy
Such a kid engineer being so confident about his technology lasting 100 thousand years. So fun, such a simple mimd.
Well its the safest bet....keep in mind that Finnish bedrock has been very stable for thousands and thousands of years, so why dont you come up with some better solution than that?
I feel bad if a war was to happen and the enemy goes straight to that location
It's a waste to bury all of that easily recyclable nuclear waste, though I do understand the problems with nuclear weapons proliferation associated with waste recycling.
Why are the barrels made put of copper? Couldn't they be made out of some corrosion-resistant material (which would also likely be cheaper anyways)? Does anyone know?
Copper _is_ corrosive resistant, once it has it's oxidation layer (when copper turns from brown to green) it's set for life, there are cannons on the seabed that are over 500 years old without so much as pockmarks on them.
@@krashd Then what are the papers this video mentioned about? I didn't read them, but the video made it appear like there is serious doupt in the long-term stability of the copper barrels. If that's not the case - great. I'd still be curious as to why they chose copper though...what are the advantages that warrant the use of this relatively expensive material? I'm not an expert on materials, but would something like stainless steel also be corrosion resistant but also cheaper? I guess there must be some specific advantage of using copper here, and I'm curious what that is :)
@@philip9186 Copper is a neutron poison. If the internal containment fails (pellets cracking, zirconium sheath splitting) then copper will absorb the neutrons without transforming into an unstable isotope. If the containment was plastic, the carbon would absorb neutrons and become transformed into isotopes with short half lives. As these decay it would weaken the plastic.
Metals also make sense because their structure does not depend on discrete chemical bonds that can be broken by ionising radiation.
Copper is ductile. If the container is ever subjected to gradual geological forces, it can deform a long way without cracking.
Stainless is used in some designs. France puts vitrified fission products in stainless containers.
@@aaroncosier735 Thank you, that makes sense and I learned something new! :)
Wow! They are back filling with bentonite clay!
Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?
In a tunnel that will be affected by water, bentonite clay will expand to at least 3 times it's own size! With possibly enough energy to cause uplift and fault lines to develop, providing a nice pathway for the waste to come back up from below... There's also the possibility of the waste entering the ground water...
Why didn't they just concrete the lot with something that doesn't expand to 3 times it's own size!!!!
Bloody hell! What are they thinking?
he idea is that any crack admitting water would be filled and plugged by the expanding bentonite. This is intended to work at a very small scale.
The bentonite will also flow a little with geological movement, maintaining a flexible barrier where concrete would crack.
The copper containment has a similar consideration: it will deform rather than crack, especially at geological rates of movement.
Hats off to Finish scientists and people.. Hats off to Finish scientists and people..
This is excellent
If water can get in it can get out and contaminate the water table.
Uranium is a natural metal that is found in nature, it's just dug up from somewhere else.
If you look at the lifecycle of the uranium then it's just concentrated before it's used in the reactor, but it's almost the same amount of radioactivity afterwards as before it was dug up.
So although it might be in a different part of the world it is still just the same radioactivity being put back underground.
Yeah but like you said its concentrated, which is the real issue. We need to store it safely for a long time after we used it
No, we need to store it safely until we want to use it. ... only 4% of a fuel rod is used up in an light water reaktor.
@@nenasiek if the fact it's concentrated is so much of a problem then there is an incredibly easy way to undo that, just simply add something else to it.
It's the byproducts that are the danger, not the uranium. Strontium 90, Cesium 137, Plutonium 239.
Cask storage or shallow burial is totally sufficient. We WANT the waste nearby for future reprocessing. Deep geological storage is unnecessary and adds to the cost for no discernible benefit.
Ha! I watched a documentary about Onkalo 12 years ago.
And 50 years from now they come up with an idea how to reuse the waste, and all this is an Gold Mine, this is also very radioactive approx 300 years and after that can be handed with gloves and mask
future people are going to hate us when they discover good use for that material and have to dig it up
Hardly. If they really want it, they'll be able to get it.