Onkalo in Finland is designed to store nuclear waste for ~100,000 years.
That’s longer than recorded history. Longer than most civilisations last.
The engineering is impressive.
But the deeper question is philosophical: how do we communicate danger across millennia?
Excellent short video from the IAEA:
https://youtu.be/1AJ4ipoTnA0?si=qJRwmt3WvjkOhUtx
"Onkalo in Finland is designed to store nuclear waste for ~100,000 years."
How about not make it at all? Proven to be detrimental to life and it doesn't occur naturally, hence the "waste" isn't recycled.
The only reason we believe fusion to occur in stars was the manhattan project, otherwise we had no clue what powered the stars.
The Universe created conditions for life as life is needed at a level we haven't even asked about yet.
@joseluis_gutivilla The length of storage time needed is way longer than 100,000 years.
Just consider plutonium half-life is 24,000 years. Plutonium waste is stored in ^many^-kilogram quantities. Milligrams is enough to kill you. So, as a thought experiment, one kilo > 500gms after 24,000 years > 250 gms after 48,000 years, > 125 gms after 72,000 years > 64.5 gms after 96,000 years.
Lethal doses would be on the order of 10 MILLIgrams or less -- down to micrograms depending on the isotope and how it's absorbed (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Lethal-doses-causing-the-death-of-50-of-individuals-LD-50-in-animal-or-humans-contam_tbl1_279634466).
You can see how laughable is the US standard of safe storage being 10,000 years.
The European standard (used to be?) is two and a half million years, which gets into the realm of maybe plausible.
Longer than our species has existed.
"Safe" storage of nuclear waste is just a happy story we tell ourselves so we can sleep easier while continuing to make nuclear weapons and pretending we need nuclear power.
José - Luis Gutiérrez Villanue
Scale Theory
quixote