Observing the nuke power issue in the US

[ASWnut101]

Originally Posted by Catfish

"Deep borehole disposal"
The inner earth is radioactive deep down, but it isn't done with some 4 kilometers of drill hole depth to get rid of radiating stuff.
You need liners and cementation and this whole idea may easily be more expensive than switching technologies all over.

Eh, as opposed to hollowing out a mountain to put just a fraction of all the stuff, spending countless hours and billions of dollars (We're up to $10 billion USD, and the Yucca mountain site hasn't even been finished yet) in an attempt to do something never before accomplished in human history (building a structure that will not be entered for thousands of years)? I doubt it.

At interesting reservoir dump depthts (interesting, financially speaking because any bit deeper it is not worth the drilling costs) you still have ground water, gas pressure releases, stress - strain cracks in the deeper ground.

3-4km is well below the crystalline basement rock and all but the deepest of aquifers (which would be avoided, obviously). There's no ground water to seep up, and the waste would be sealed at the top of the hole before having 3 km of dirt and rock piled on top.

The radionuclide seep rate in the vertical is estimated to be around 200m per 1 million years. You do the math to see how long it takes to reach even the deepest aquifers.

If digging very deep holes were such a problem, we wouldn't have our precious oil to drive our SUVs around, would we?

Guaranteed for the next some 10,000s of years to come ?
Scientists here already thought about that, and gave it up quickly.

As guaranteed as it gets for on Earth storage, yes. Only other option that would last longer would be to shoot it off into the sun or out of the solar system altogether, something just not feasible at the moment.

And if anyone really goes looking for and tries to recover the waste, it wont be an accident.

I know some anti-nuclear activists would just like to say "Oh nuclear is evil, there is no solution so we shouldn't even try." Sorry, but we humans are a little too damn creative to just throw the towel in when we hit the first obstacle. For the longest time, space travel was impossible. Look at us now, naysayers.