Why can’t we dump nuclear waste in the same place we mine nuclear fuel?
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Generally, nuclear waste wants to be buried in the most uninteresting place possible (ie NOT old mines) so that we can ensure with a high probability that future civilizations won’t go digging for something that they may find useful / interesting.
We could and nature kind of did.
In Oklo nature was running its very own fission reactor for many, many years with the natural uranium in situ, so the uranium was turned into waste without ever being moved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Aside from the many reasons that people have given for this being a kind of false-equivalency of two radioactive things, I would also just note that uranium mining can take place in all sorts of different ecosystems and even different kinds of mines (e.g. open pit vs. deep hard rock). It’s not like there’s one big uranium mine or anything.
What you really worry about with storage of nuclear fuel is that the containers will eventually break down and start leaking this concentrated radioactive nastiness into the environment. The main culprit in this breaking down and leaking is water. So you are trying to find places to put things where water will never get in, and never move anything inside of it outside. This is one of those things that seems like it ought to be simple, but turns out to be really, really hard, because in the real world water gets _everywhere_ eventually, especially if you have to factor in what it might do over a timespan of hundred or thousands of years. Hence it is hard to come up with a site that you can say, “this will remain safe for anyone nearby forever.” Whether you should even have that as your goal is something one can ask — we don’t have as high of a bar for most chemical pollutants as we do nuclear waste — but that’s the current regulatory assumption.
Uranium has a very long radioactive half life, it takes approximately 36 million years for half of your uranium to disappear. The radioactive byproducts of uranium fission can be more active and thus smaller quantities are dangerous. The uranium has the exact same potential energy, it’s the human influence speeding up the process and gathering it into large quantities, combined with the danger remaining for many thousands of years makes storing it safely a lot more complicated than it may initially seem.
Fun Fact:
There is a uranium mine in Africa called Oklo that underwent nuclear reaction on its own around 2 billion years ago. The reaction was self sustaining for hundreds of thousands of years.
It was predicted in the 1950s that such a thing was possible by a Japanese scientist and in the 1970s Oklo was discovered when they noticed 200kg (440lbs or 6 nuclear bombs) of uranium that was supposed to be there was missing.
[Scishow gave a short explanation how it happened](https://youtu.be/yS53AA_WaUk?t=79)
Better idea would be to store the waste a couple years/decades then store it in the deep ocean. Water is a great insulator of radiation and the ocean is large enough that there would be no noticeable increase in radiation once you get more than a couple meters away.
Short answer: natural uranium is solid and doesn’t easily dissolve in water. Nuclear waste often contains liquids and gases and stuff that dissolves in water, and we’re worried it will get into the ground water and hurt people.
One proposed way to fix this problem is to “vitrify” the nuclear waste, basically turning it into solid blocks of glass that won’t leak or erode, and can be safely buried in an old mine shaft.
Interesting link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomelting
Because cheap, clean and safe nuclear energy is a great threat to the rise of communism in the free world.
What would happen if nuclear waste is dumped into a crater hole like the devil’s gate in Turkmenistan
When you “burn” nuclear fuel in a reactor, it comes out much more radioactive than before it went in.
It’s like a can of soda. If you shake it up, it’s best to let it sit a bit before you open it. Otherwise, many small bubbles of gas will expand at the same time creating a huge mess.
With nuclear fuel, once you burn it in a reactor, you will have created many different elements (including more fuel for more reactors or bombs). This cocktail of random weird stuff is not nice and it’s best to put it someplace where it will not be disturbed, by man or by nature, for a few thousand years. Like the shaken can of soda, it needs to sit for a while to ‘settle down’.
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