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From: john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Spanish Grid Drop-out - recently released information.
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 08:54:34 -0700
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On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

>On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
><pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
>>On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:
>>> On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
>>> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
>>>>> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>>>>>> On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
>>>>>>>> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
>>>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
>>>>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
>>>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
>>>>>>> hundred thousand years.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
>>>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
>>>>>> government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
>>>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
>>>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
>>>>>
>>>>> The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
>>>>> fuel.
>>>>
>>>> Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
>>> 
>>> A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
>>> get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
>>> forever.
>>> 
>>>>
>>>>> When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
>>>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
>>>>
>>>> That's simply wrong.
>>>>
>>>>> It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
>>>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
>>>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
>>>>
>>>> I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
>>> 
>>> Why?  It's very safe when done carefully.
>>> 
>>> The little modular reactors sound cool.
>>
>>Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important. 
>>While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it 
>>much, much worse.
>>
>>The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one 
>>reactor out of four.(*)
>>
>>One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could 
>>release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about 
>>4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
>>
>>If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be 
>>correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more.  And that's 
>>just one installation.
>>
>>Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
>>
>>Cheers
>>
>>Phil Hobbs
>>
>>(*) 
>><https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>
>
>I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
>them into the Mariana Trench:
>
>.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
>
>It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
>the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term.  Nor is
>retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence.  If
>it even works under such pressure.
>
>Joe

Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of
thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.