What France plans to do with its nuclear waste

[madokie]

http://www.smartplanet.com/business/blog/intelligent-energy/what-france-plans-to-do-with-its-nuclear-waste/2345/

Considered a world leader in the technology, the country has 58 nuclear power plants. In 2025, France may also have one of the first long-term geological repositories for radioactive waste. The country has about 44,300 cubic meters of the troublesome stuff now, 2,300 of which is high-level waste.

Declan Butler reports for Nature:

The high-level waste includes the radioactive fission products caesium-134, caesium-137 and strontium-90, and minor actinides such as curium-244 and americium-241. Most nuclear fuel in France is reprocessed to extract useful uranium and plutonium, and to concentrate the waste. Although this high-level material comprises just 0.2% of France’s nuclear waste by volume, it accounts for 95% of its total radio­activity.

At about 1,000 sites around the country, France holds nuclear waste of various classifications, managing the materials according to their radiation levels and half-lives. For instance, there are disposal sites in Soulaines (for low- and medium-level radioactive substances with shorter half lives) and east of Paris, the Morviliers site holds very low-level wastes.

Butler takes a tour of the on-site laboratory for a future subterranean storage space for high- and medium-level wastes. The facility would exist about 1,600 feet underground near the town of Bure, encapsulated in 150-million-year-old rock (that according to French geologists hasn’t moved around much in the last 20 million years nor is expected to anytime soon). Testing the rock, a type of clay, and their containment technology, ANDRA’s, the French National Radioactive Waste Management Agency, lab research bill comes in at around $130 million each year.

[CTyankee]

1. So they are just going to bury the stuff and that's that?

Doesn't France have any environmental safety laws against this sort of thing? If not, why not?

[hughee99]

2. I thought they were contracting people to dump it off the coast

of Somalia. This seems like a better plan.

[madokie]

4. I think they got busted on that plan

I'm quite sure that the fishes in the oceans have no better ideas as to what to do with the waste either so that option should be out.

[guyton]

3. offsite disposal

We need to move this stuff offsite. Which, in this case, means off-planet.

Until we figure out how to launch this stuff into the Sun (um, safely) we shouldn't be generating this kind of long-term waste.

[izquierdista]

5. No need to get goofy

If it was generated on this planet, it can be disposed of on this planet. Deep geological repositories are possible and man didn't think them up on his own, Mother Nature has actually had reactors running during earth's history (google "Oklo" to find out). If the formation has been stable for 20 million years, that's about as good a place as any to put it.

[customerserviceguy]

6. And we will have the means to deal with it eventually

Even if the storage facility is only stable for another ten thousand years, that's plenty of time. Ten millennia ago, human beings didn't even know how to plant a seed in the ground to get a tendable crop.