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Nuclear energy is one of the cleanest, most efficient, and most available sources of power
on earth.
To generate one kilowatt hour of energy—the amount an American household
consumes in 48 minutes—nuclear power plants only emit 12 grams of carbon dioxide— enough
to fill about three two-liter soda bottles.
Meanwhile, to produce the same amount of energy, coal
plants emit 820 grams of CO2—about a full bathtub’s worth.
Factoring in the environmental cost of production, nuclear energy is cleaner than
hydropower, than geothermal, than solar, than really
any energy source except wind.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean nuclear is the long-term
solution for the world because nuclear material is perhaps the most poisonous substance on
earth.
Two times in history have nuclear power plants leaked significant amount of radiation—in
1986 in Chernobyl, Ukraine and in 2011 in Fukushima,
Japan.
31 people died in Chernobyl with at least a further 4,000 expected to contract
early lethal cancer due to the radiation.
Fukushima was better contained with only two deaths, both
unrelated to radiation, and only 130 early cancer
deaths expected, but additionally, each site still today has massive exclusion zones where
humans cannot live due to ongoing radiation.
Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes and will never be allowed
to return.
The economic damage of Chernobyl is estimated at nearly $250 billion dollars—significantly
more than the GDP of Ukraine.
The Fukushima disaster, meanwhile, having taken
place is a much more populated and developed area, is estimated to set Japan back over
$500 billion dollars—a full 10% of their GDP.
In addition, uranium, the element most commonly
used in nuclear reactors, is not in limitless supply.
Using present-day extraction methods, there’s only about a 230 year supply of uranium
left.
Many would say nuclear is only a short-term solution to reduce carbon emissions until
truly sustainable energy can become commonplace,
but the biggest problem with nuclear energy is not
the risk of meltdown, it’s not the supply of uranium, it’s this—nuclear waste.
All current commercial nuclear power plants work through the process of nuclear fission.
As a radioactive element decays, the individuals atoms split into multiple, but when that happens
the reaction also releases energy.
There are plenty of different designs of nuclear reactors, but in
general they capture the released energy by using it to heat up water into steam which
runs through turbines that spin generators.
The nuclear element used is typically uranium which, after
about six to eight years of usage in a nuclear power plant will have released enough of its
energy that it is no longer useful in nuclear reactors,
but that doesn’t mean it’s done emitting energy.
The fuel rods will remain radioactive enough to
emit a lethal dose for tens or hundreds of thousands
of years past their removal.
So the question is, what do you do with them?
The answer is simple—put them somewhere where they can stay, undisturbed, isolated,
forever, but that’s not all that easy.
In fact, no nuclear waste worldwide is currently in what is
considered long-term storage.
Every bit of nuclear waste in existence is in temporary storage
facilities to be used until a long-term solution is built.
Most of that nuclear waste is stored in pools of water.
Water does a decently good job of shielding radiation so this is an inexpensive
and easy way of storing the rods.
Usually these pools are physically inside the nuclear power plants
so, when spent fuel is removed from the reactor, it’s put directly into the water and left
there.
The radioactive material, since it’s still emitting
energy, continues to heat up the water, but cooling systems and pumps keep the water below
boiling temperature, but to do that the plant needs power.
If the power fails and the backup generators fail, the pumps and cooling systems
stop working so the water heats up and can boil
off.
The water is what blocks the radiation so, without water, the radiation just goes right
out into the environment.
In fact, exactly that happened at Fukushima.
Both the primary and backup power sources failed so the pumps and cooling
systems for the spent fuel pools couldn’t run
leaving the water to heat up.
The situation was brought under control before enough water had
boiled off to release significant amounts of radiation into the environment, but had
it not been, thousands could have been killed.
Once nuclear waste has cooled down in storage pools for ten to twenty years, it typically
is encased in casks.
These concrete and steel containers block in radiation, but this solution is far
from permanent.
It does not consider earthquakes, it cannot withstand tsunamis, and it would not
work without humans.
These casks require security and they require maintenance.
Without humans, they could easily be damaged or breached
over time and release radiation into the environment.
Modern humans have only existed for about 200,000 years, so one can hardly be
sure that the species will survive for the millions of years that the most toxic nuclear
waste will continue to emit radiation.
What’s more, one can hardly expect that the dominant civilizations
that have nuclear technology today will continue to exist for even thousands of years.
The Roman Empire was once without a doubt the
most powerful civilization on earth.
Scholars even believe that it is the most powerful civilization
to have ever existed on earth—more powerful than the US, than Europe, than any modern
civilization, but it fell, and so too will the west.
Therefore, long-term nuclear waste storage needs to last longer than any political structure,
it needs to work without the supervision of humans,
it needs to be truly and unequivocally permanent.
Finland is building just that.
This region is largely devoid of natural disasters.
It doesn’t have earthquakes, it doesn’t see tsunamis,
it really doesn’t encounter any natural phenomenon
that could damage a nuclear waste storage site, especially if it’s 1,500 feet underground.
Beneath an island on the Finnish Baltic Sea coast,
the country is digging.
They’re building the very first permanent nuclear waste storage facility in
the world in the stable bedrock 1,500 feet below.
Currently they’re just finishing their dig down then very soon, in 2020, they’ll start
filling the facility with nuclear waste.
They’ll dig long tunnels with small holes in which they’ll place casks
of nuclear waste then backfill the tunnels with clay to be left for an eternity.
With this system, there’s near zero risk of nuclear material
leaking out into the groundwater and, once it’s filled in
the year 2120, it can just be left, forever.
Because the material will be so far down and so
difficult to get to, no human management will be necessary once completed.
No security, no maintenance, nothing which means it should
be truly secure, but before leaving it, they do need
to fight against one thing—human nature.
As curious beings, it’s hard to combat a person’s urge of discovery.
If someone finds a mysterious structure from thousands of years
ago, it’d just be natural to want to open it up, and
that’s a problem for nuclear waste sites.
We essentially did just that with the pyramids in Egypt.
These structures were built as the final, permanent resting places for the elites of
Egypt and we opened them up because we were curious.
Opening the nuclear storage facilities would release
radiation into a future civilization, so we have to tell them to leave the sites alone,
but that’s easier said than done.
The US Department of Energy commissioned a study on how to communicate the danger
into the far future.
The key is to create a message that conveys how uninteresting, how
unimportant, and how dangerous nuclear waste is.
They settled on the following text: Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…
no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is
here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location…
it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here...
of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
The idea would be to translate a message like this into every United Nations language—
Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
There’s a reasonable hope that, at least in the next couple thousand years, one of
those languages would be understood.
But in the scope of hundreds of thousands of years, there’s
just little expectation that these languages would
survive.
There’s not even a reasonable expectation that humans would survive.
So, you need to convey the same message without language.
What the study suggests is to further push the message by building a landscape that
conveys danger.
It could be a scene of thorns, or spikes, or forbidding blocks.
To satiate the discoverer’s curiosity, it’s also suggested
to add monoliths explaining the history of the site
through pictographs.
Also included would be images like this, engraved in stone, conveying that
the substance has danger that will be passed onto humans if touched, but the difficulty
of this is that it very well might not be humans exploring
earth 100,000 years from now.
It could be a species that doesn’t recognize the likeness
of what might be a long-extinct species.
What some have suggested is to just let the site be forgotten, to not mark it at all,
to just seal it up, and leave, but having something
that significant disappear isn’t simple.
The site in Finland is designed to not need security or
oversight, but its current location is very well
documented in a potentially irreversible way.
With books and brains and the internet, records of
the site might exist until at least the end of human civilization.
To truly be forgotten, to truly be left as part of nature, so too must humans
be forgotten.
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