A New Specialized Train Is Ready to Haul Nuclear Waste

On a visit to a pub I talked to a guy from VTT, the Finnish technology institute, about the wisdom of concentrating nuclear waste in particular locations. My point being, Murphy predicts that if there is an asteroid strike, it will hit a nuclear waste repository - and render mankind extinct.

His response was that if you put the waste far enough underground, like a km or more, then if an asteroid actually disturbs it, the dispersion of the waste won't actually be your biggest problem.

> In the coming decades, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will need to transport that material to future storage facilities.

No doubt at great cost, none of which is being factored into current nuclear projects or energy pricing. So, this is as unlikely to happen as it has been in the past 8 decades. The size of the problem just keeps on growing every year while we don't lift a finger to address the issues.

Long term storage is more of an aspirational thing at this point than a concretely actionable thing. Only a small minority of all nuclear waste ever produced actually sits in long term storage. E.g. the Fins have taken into use an underground facility recently. But most nuclear waste elsewhere sits in temporary storage waiting to eventually be moved. Nobody wants to pay for that. Nobody wants this stuff in their backyard. Nobody really wants to even talk about the cost. Which is of course substantial. Especially people in favor of building more nuclear capacity to add to this problem.

Somebody (i.e. future generations of tax payers, for millennia to come) will pay for it. Eventually. Which is convenient because we can pretend things are cheap short term.

This is not a problem with nuclear energy, not directly. This is a political and defense industry issue. The US actively does not want to recycle its nuclear waste. It is a valuable resource to have on hand if you want to one day build more bombs. Equally, keeping all that plutonium locked up as "waste" arguably keeps it out of the hands of bad people. Should the US decide to start actually recycling this stuff, the bulk of the transport/disposal problem disappears.

>> The decision to halt commercial nuclear recycling sends a clear message that the United States is committed to nuclear non-proliferation. Such decisions, together with diplomacy such as that taking place in Russia, are deliberate and encouraging first steps towards building an international consensus on reducing the threat from nuclear weapons.

https://www.nature.com/articles/460152b

It says the "empty buffer cars ... maintain a safe distance from the spent nuclear fuel" for the workers on the train, presumably from neutrons and gamma.

Wouldn't a thin piece of steel do this better? Isn't the SNF container made of a thick piece of steel?

It should be a boat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench#Possible_nuclea...

I wish Congress would leave the decision making on such matters to the experts. Politicians have no valid role in this process.

Why isn't this farmed out to an appropriate regulatory entity with deep expertise? Akin to the FAA for aeronautical.

I'm all for clean energy, but with how it is at the moment, isn't nuclear energy basically like pension/ponzi scheme (for lack of a better term)? Because other people down the line will pay for what we enjoy now.

"Thousands of years" is a long time to put something away and ensure nothing bad happens.

The train isn't very specialised. the specific waste truck is. So is the final escort truck called the REV which reminds me of an armoured carriage in the Delhi rail museum collection: it's from the pre-independence days of the north-west frontier wars.

Those look like pretty normal diesel-electric locomotives.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/Rail%20Es... says

As required for operational security, further specifications for REVs are not publicly releasable.

So it's "security by obscurity"

But with no functioning long-term storage site, it's a Train To Nowhere. Or Train Without a Mission. Or other clever phrases describing a political boondoggle.

Idea: Fabricate a bunch of semi-hollow (50% by volume), telephone-pole-sized iron arrows (pointy noses, feathered tails), fill them with radwaste, and dump them in some segment of the Aleutian Trench ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Trench ) where the ocean floor sediments are deep & soft - to maximize penetration when the arrows hit bottom. With some attention to corrosion & leakage issues, the stuff will be down the for lot o' millennia. And whether or not civilization collapses, nobody's going to be accessing it without a deliberate, massive, and difficult-to-conceal effort.

Off topic, but your site - damninteresting.com - really lives up to its name. I’ve been reading it for probably 15 years now

They can put a cask in my back yard for 1000 a month. This sounds weird, but if it's safe then it's safe.

This feels like it’s be a plot point for a generic action movie.

Arguably this security theatre does everything to make people believe spent nuclear fuel is uniquely dangerous. The UK has been transporting the stuff by rail for decades; two locomotives and the flask.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask#United_Kingdom

I was surprised not to see any mention of derailing hazard. I really expected to see some kind of (possibly interesting or surprising) discussion of how this design solves it. Maybe I missed it?

to where?

texas wont take it and no other state is willing to accept the political fallout for agreeing to it.

this is the biggest impediment facing the nuclear power proposal that shows up on HN every other month, and nobody talks about it. plants basically idle nuclear waste on-site. we have no comprehensive recycling or storage policy that isnt routinely usurped or derailed by serious environmental issues. we just run these plants until theyre 60 years over usable life and wait until they turn into a superfund site taxpayers have to clean up.

> DOE paying US $10.6 billion to cover utilities’ storage costs.

It is crazy that massive amounts of taxpayer money is spent on subsidizing nuclear power.

If you are generating waste, you can't get rid of them then stop producing it.

Will factories soon get huge subsidies if they refuse to handle toxic and dangerous waste that is expensive to dispose of?

The federal gourmet should create huge places to store all toxic and dangerous waste.

> Every year, 2,000 tonnes of radioactive heavy metal join the growing inventory of fuel removed from nuclear power reactors—both operating and decommissioned.

Given how dense nuclear "waste" (mostly unburnt fuel) is, how much volume is this? (Either in metric or Freedom Units.)