Small bore holes could provide an alternative to centralized waste repositories:
There's one thing every planned permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel has in common: They're all underground mines.
Like any mine, a mined repository for nuclear waste is a complex feat of engineering. It must be excavated by blasting or a boring machine, it must keep the tunnels stable using rock supports, and it must have ventilation, seals, and pumps to handle groundwater and make it safe for people and machinery. Unlike a mine, however, a repository must also transport and entomb canisters of radioactive waste, and it must be engineered to exacting standards that ensure the tunnels will keep the canisters safe for many millennia.
There is an alternative idea that dispenses with most of those downsides: disposal in deep boreholes. But can they be both feasible and safe?
[...] The US Department of Energy was planning to drill a vertical borehole 4 to 5 kilometers (2.5 to 3 miles) to gain experience with the process, but the project was canceled in 2017. This borehole would have been about 10 times deeper than a mined repository, but such depths are not unusual for oil and gas boreholes.
Governments aren't the only ones interested in the approach. Deep Isolation, a company founded in 2016 and headquartered in California, aims to offer nuclear waste disposal in deep boreholes as a commercial service anywhere in the world. "Depending on your geology, we can design a borehole for it," said John Midgley, a geologist with Deep Isolation. The company's designs could be anything from deep vertical boreholes to shallower J-shaped holes with horizontal disposal sections. Again, the oil and gas industry has gotten there first, drilling around 160,000 boreholes with horizontal sections in the USA alone.
"There are lots of oil and gas wells that deep, so the problem is going to be how hard the rocks are and how often your drill bits wear out, things like that, but in general... I don't think [depth] presents any additional problems," said Sherilyn Williams-Stroud of the University of Illinois, an expert on geological disposal of nuclear waste and CO2.
Since several disposal holes can be drilled and splayed out underground from one point on the surface, costs and environmental impact can be minimized, and there would be much less rock to remove and dump than with a mine. In theory, therefore, every nuclear plant could have its own disposal borehole, eliminating the need to transport spent fuel across the country.
Deep boreholes should also be able to take hotter waste than mined repositories because the canisters would be placed end to end and cooled by the surrounding rock. That means spent fuel wouldn't need to spend as long as it does now in cooling pools at power plants. Proponents also claim that because deep boreholes would take up less space, be far deeper, and not be occupied, they would need far less and far simpler investigation of the site's geology, saving even more time and money.
Boreholes should also be able to receive waste quicker. "We could complete the first borehole in less than two months," said Rod Baltzer, chief operating officer of Deep Isolation. That's in stark contrast to the decade or two needed to develop a mined repository. Baltzer also told me that Deep Isolation's initial calculations suggest the company could dispose of nuclear waste for "less than half the cost of a mined repository."
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday February 28, @05:07PM (4 children)
If a hole is deeply bored, it can protect us from hot long lived nuclear waste. What if something interesting occurs and the deep hole is no longer bored? Something interesting such as plate shifting that brings the nuclear waste nearer to the surface? Wouldn't that would make the hole no longer deeply bored?
I'll have to ask Chat GPT.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday February 28, @05:28PM (3 children)
Your what-can-possilby-go-wrong interjecting is noted, but dismissed. When you bore deep, things that can happen are boring (got it?) not interesting (like glow in the dark).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 28, @05:48PM (2 children)
One thing that could possibly go wrong would seem to be NIMBY.
Where would these boring holes be located?
It would need to be a very uninteresting place to allow the holes to be deeply bored without protests.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday February 28, @06:16PM (1 child)
Given that the public perceives the industry standard oil well isolation technologies inadequate for preventing well production from contaminating groundwater, I can only imagine the uproar over even a possible leak from one of these storage wells.
I also find it curious that TFA shows the proposal using Bentonite as the primary containment material - I wasn't aware that water-sensitive clay was considered a good isolation medium for anything. This sounds like the proponent saying, "yeah, we'll just let our drilling fluid settle out over top of it and call it a day". I'm not sure they thought this through all the way...
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01, @07:32PM
They aren't concerned about "anything", they're concerned about water. Water no matter it's source is trapped in the bentonite not rusting drums or transporting radioactive material around. The water sensitivity is why it's so good in this role.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SingularityPhoenix on Tuesday February 28, @05:43PM (2 children)
The Oklo natural nuclear reactor in Africa was active 1.7 billion years ago. They studied how far the fission products from it travelled. It is how we know that yes, we can burry nuclear waste underground and it can safety remain there for billions of years. The Oklo nuclear reactor was moderated by ground water...worst case conditions for containing nuclear waste.
I think the real reason nuclear waste is a unsolved problem its cheaper to just keep storing at the nuke plant.
I don't think putting nuclear waste in a oil/gas deposit that has been valuable enough to drill in the past is the best idea, because people might want to drill it for those same resources in the future. I think the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository is the right kind of solution. But that's just my 2cents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by dwilson on Tuesday February 28, @08:25PM (1 child)
Perhaps I misunderstood the summery, but no one is proposing to do that. They are proposing to drill new, deep boreholes for the disposal of nuclear waste, using the same drilling technology that was invented and refined by the oil and gas industry.
- D
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01, @02:52AM
According to Professor Thomas Gold [wikipedia.org], if they drill that deep there is a pretty good chance they will find new oil and gas reservoirs.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @07:56PM (1 child)
Put it under the driveway to keep the ice and snow off. Really, if this stuff is so hot, it can supply municipal hot water. All this negativity about nuclear (since the 60s) is fossil fuel industry propaganda
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Wednesday March 01, @05:39AM
This reminds me of a story about some hunters who got lost in a former Soviet republic shortly after the USSR fell apart. They were cold, and they felt like they really lucked out when they found some junk that was warm--the snow around it was melted, so they spent the night there. I think most of them survived. An expedition was launched to recover what turned out to be the improperly abandoned un-shielded core of a Soviet RTG. Not sure what their long term medical outcomes were.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Tuesday February 28, @09:47PM (2 children)
We've done quite a few underground nuclear detonations and had no issues with radiation being released. Placing barrels down to similar depths in geologically stable areas would seem to be a viable disposal method. The stuff's gotta go somewhere that isn't rusting drums on the surface.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01, @02:59AM (1 child)
I'm pro-nuke but not having leaked in 70 years is not going to cut it as an argument when they are claiming it needs to remain stable for millennia.
I favour the Pournelle method. Stick the high level stuff in Synroc and stack it in the desert somewhere. Put a fence around it, signs that say "if you cross this fence you will die" and let evolution take care of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday March 01, @05:43AM
Most of the products that we're worried about are either extremely heavy, or are extremely short lived and won't pass through more than enough rock to cause any harm anyways. The point of this is that if it's far enough down, that it's not going to pop back up and into the ecosystem in the next few million years.