Anyway, ya I'd sign up for nuclear waste near my community - because it can be stored completely safely. And by supporting carbon free nuclear power, I'll be a big part of making us hit our targets and slow down this warming juggernaut we set going a few hundred years ago and kept feeding!
There was actually a waste repository accident in the US in 2014. A truck hauling salt caught fire, and 22 workers got about the same radiation dose as if they’d done three cross-country (US) flights. It would perhaps help if we had a lot more such accidents so people can get used to the fact that waste accidents really are trivial… except for the smoke and the fire; both of which posed a far bigger risk to the workers.
For three decades the anti-nuclear movement has been telling people that a nuclear waste repository will be dangerous and never provided a credible story on how one could go wrong on a catastrophic scale. Not one. Not in the short term or in the very long term.
There are many credible mechanisms for repository failure and they are all dutifully examined by repository designers. Here’s a summary from the
Yucca Mountain repository EIS in the US. The biggest risk involved in building and operating this repository is the same as the biggest risk in most large projects involving lots of trucks… traffic accidents.
Over the 24 years of repository operation they expect 10-17 fatalities among workers commuting.
But mundane deaths are never of interest to purveyors of horror. Wind and solar power as it happens, both involve the mining, manufacture and transport of vastly more stuff than nuclear power, and hence are far more dangerous and environmentally destructive. But nobody gets agitated about actual death and destruction compared to fictional future fantasies.
The Yucca EIS calculated that people living in the vicinity (within 18km) of the repository a million years from now, under much warmer conditions, would receive an extra 1.5 milli Sieverts of radiation annually. People living in parts of
Kerala in Southern India get some 68 milli Sieverts of radiation annually over and above normal background rates, and their cancer rate is about a third of that in the US or Australia. But the big causes of the differences in cancer rates are of no interest to purveyors of radiation porn.
Is there any credible mechanism to generate significant risk from a high level waste repository? What sort of repository? You mean there’s more than one kind? Of course.
The South Australian Royal Commission included details on a few that are being planned or under construction. They each used a different methodology. This isn’t a problem with a single brilliant and ingenious solution. Any country will have the kinds of skilled people that can produce a credible solution suitable to the geography at hand.
The French design uses a hole dug into clay; the Fins are digging into granite.
The short answer is that no, there is no credible catastrophe scenario. There is no credible scenario that poses a significant risk.
I tend to define significant risk as any risk exceeding that of a bacon habit. So you can crash planes into a waste repository, you can crash them into the casks of waste being transported to the repository and apart from the obvious risks to the truckies and pilots, the risk to the public is still zero to trivial, and not in any way comparable to a bacon habit.
