After Bob Hawke suggested we should take the world’s nuclear waste, I agreed.
Geoff Hudson gives six good reasons why at Ockham’s Razor:
One. The site should be well away from any fault line. Storage sites would not be recommended for Japan, the San Andreas Fault, New Zealand or Indonesia. We should choose a country sitting in the middle of a large and stable tectonic plate.
Two. The site should be dry. Water can corrode metals given enough time, and time it will have. We want a site in a desert. This will also eliminate the risk of fire. Without vegetation you cannot have large naturally occurring fires which could destroy the safety systems you would want.
Three. The site should be well away from the sea. Preferably 100 kilometres inland. We have not seen tsunamis get 10km inland in recent history, but we need to think in terms of thousands of years, rather than hundreds.
The human risk to a repository of radioactive waste is more difficult to manage. One clear risk is the use of the waste by terrorists. Their objective would be to make a dirty bomb: conventional explosives mixed with radioactive waste. If this achieved the same effect as Chernobyl, but in London, New York or Paris, the consequences would be catastrophic. Imagine if the recent bombs in London had been radioactive. Mass evacuation, transport shutdown, businesses stopped. The effects would dominate the city and be felt as far away as Australia. In fact, this is the main threat which nuclear waste poses to Australians. Not to health or the environment, but to our economy. It might not cause a depression but it could come close. To prevent this, we need to impose further requirements on the site:
Four. The site should be very sparsely inhabited. If there are no people there, then there will be no infrastructure to support the people or the movement of people, so the chance that terrorists will get to the site and be able to remove waste from it will be limited.
Five. The site should be on an island, so a ship is needed to get the waste to a place where it could not do a lot of damage.
Six. The country governing the site must maintain the safety systems at the repository. It should have a stable government, preferably one with no history of civil war. The people in the country should be well educated and technologically advanced enough to know the risks of nuclear radiation, so that the protection of the site is preserved over changes in government.
Is there a place on earth which satisfies these six criteria?
The United States fails on three counts. The Yucca Mountain site, the intended US waste repository, is only 145 kilometres from Las Vegas and has three fault lines below it and volcanos nearby.
Japan, another heavy user of nuclear power, is also out. The whole country is on the geologically active Pacific Rim.
Europe has very few places where the population density is low, and equally fewer which are dry.
There are places in Africa which have few people and which are dry, but the continent is famous for civil unrest.
To my mind, the clear winner in this contest is Australia.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
An interesting spin on this is to place the nuclear waste in the subduction zones. This procedure will then result in the “waste” being subducted back into the mantle from which it is interpreted to have come from in the first place.
Easily done – put the waste in inert sealed containers and drop them in the world’s subduction zones.
I am sure most of the world’s geoscientists would support this proposal.
I think most peple have missed a major reason or just dont want to say it, and that it is someone in the world has got to round up the loose plutonium etc and put it in a safe spot before the radical Islamicists get hold of it and make dirty bombs.
According to reports there are heaps of the stuff in inadequately guarded sites allover eastern europe and in the failed states in the ex USSR.
Australia would be doing everyone a favour by agreeing to take it out of ciculation.
There is also another test point for suitable site, and that is the preferred site should be an island continent ie no land boundaries with anyone, with a uniform system of government.
We may not like being a “dumping ground for other peoples waste” but the risks involved may be a lot less than copping it back in the form of dirty bombs brought in in shipping containers for example. The fact that we would also make a substantial amount of money out of it as well, is a positive but minor point of consideration.
I thought Bob Hawkes comments had merits, that are worth considering
My previous comment still holds:
At first glance it would seem heroic that Australia would want to endanger its population for the good of the world and get rich in the process however it does not suffer a moments examination.
1. If the plan went ahead then Australian waters would then have a vastly increased traffic of ships carrying the waste which increases the chance of an accidental spill. How can we ensure that all countries seal the waste for transport? Some nuclear countries are notorious for poor storage – some leave it on the banks of a river.
2. Which port would be used for the imports? I am sure the residents of this port will love nuclear waste coming in and being trans shipped through their city.
3. What route would the waste take? How much weapons grade material would be sent? How big an army would be needed to safeguard this honey pot of terrorist weapons for the entire length of it travel?
3. The Swedes are spending 12 billion dollars to do a pretty good job of disposing of their waste. So lets start at this and work up. Who will invest 12 billion or more dollars probably closer to 25 billions dollars to build a proper waste disposal facility even if we knew how to do it. We can’t use Yucca Mountain as model as this is a total fizzer and not one kilo of waste has been stored there yet. Most of Australia is subject to ground water how do we ensure that this radioactivity does not get into our water?
4. If we are going to do a good job of disposing of the waste and not just cover it in sand in the middle of the desert then how much do we charge for the waste disposal? Would other countries be prepared to pay the enormous cost of safeguarding this waste for its large journey to the waste repository and then the on-going storage cost.. Right now to artificially lower the cost of nuclear power most waste is just stored on site. This is cheap however it is creating a growing problem. If this waste dump went ahead then the nuclear power industry would then have to account for the cost of disposing of the waste, something that might push the cost over that of wind and solar. I do not think most nuclear power operators would want to spend the money to store the waste in our dump. They much prefer to just put out of sight and put a ‘Somebody Else’s Problem Field’ around it.
Obviously subduction zones no longer exist, given the lack of comment to my post.
Gosh
Other than that, to explode an atomic, or nuclear device, requires a little more than having the materials – it also requires a profound understanding of radioactivity.
Which Terrorists do not have.
I have no fear of them having a device – they have no idea when it can detonate.
Louis – it is quite unlikely that a terrorist would be able to explode a fission weapon however this can not be ruled out as many Al-Quada people have graduated from Uni and have many diverse qualifications.
The problem is the combination of radioactive material dispersed by conventional exposive or a dirty bomb. With the right material an area could be made unihabitable for centuries.
I am guessing that the subduction zones are in the ocean. If they are then I can leave it to you to work out the problems there.
Ender,
The ability to detonate a nuclear device requires access to vast computing power.
As for subduction zones, I thought these were well known facts.
Clearly your library of facts has been shortchanged in funds.
Hello Louis,
Even a Welshman killed at Agincourt in 1415 knows about subduction zones. I think your idea is excellent, but I don’t know about the technical problems. Might containers burst as they reached great depths? Or would they be crushed to the size of a pea?
Subduction zones sound seductive until you realise that tectonic plates move at the same rate as your fingers nails. It would take a million years for waste to move just 50km (actually far less than that laterally because subduction zones are tilted at an angle). It would take too long for waste to be safely back in the mantle to be of any practical use to society. In any case, subduction zones are the most tectonically active places on Earth so they fail for that reason alone.
Re the “dirty bomb” discussion, I thought it ALSO included a non nuclear device, in that the unpoliced radioactive material was collected and put in a bin, packed with TNT, and the whole lot blown all over the place. That should render most city centres unusable for quite a while.
Also Louis, if as you say one needs substantial computing power to organise the explosion of a nuclear device, I would have thought that part was easy to cobble together.
Bene facis Gramolius, mea culpa and I stand corrected. That Louis should be ashamed of trying to seduce, or even subduct, a poor old Welshman. I shall wack him with a large leek, look you, if I can find him. Diolch yn fawr.
Loius – If you have access to a couple of hundred old PCs they can be connected up into a Linux cluster to do these sort of calculations.
A simple gun type device such as ‘Little Boy’ the first nuclear weapon would not be too hard. A collage student famously designed such a device a few years ago. It would not be either small or lightweight however as the method of delivery would probably be by ship this would not be important.
I wonder how they did it back in the 1940s without vast computer power ?