this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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Unresolved?
It's a super simple problem.
You dig a hole, put the waste in the hole and backfill with clay.
Done.
As a Swede, I would love it if we built a huge underground storage site and sold space to other countries needing space for waste. We have a solid bedrock and a generally stable political situation, we also have the skills to build a facility like it and could make bank off of it.
Yeah, that is why almost 80 years after the start of the nuclear age nearly no country has such a storage. It's so easy to build!
Or your know, the amount of waste produced by nuclear reactors produced global is so low relative to output that the majority of it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Yeah, it is quite startling to see the difference in physical fuel use between a coal plant and a nuclear plant.
And the really funny thing is that a coal plant releases far more radiation than a nuke plant.
100%, there re natural rock formations that emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, hell if the US Capitol building was rezoned as a nuclear power plant, half of DC would need to be evacuated and an exclusion zone setup without any change to the building or fuel brought to the site. The granite used in it's construction emits more radiation naturally that exceeds the legal limit that nuclear power plants are allowed.
Meanwhile self professed environmentalists are anti-nuclear energy despite it having the least impact environmentally per kw produced.
Nuclear fuel is the smallest fraction of nuclear waste. Every bit of PPE, every part replaced, tool used, etc is nuclear waste.
At the end of life the entire reactor and part of the building are nuclear waste. They go through them with a concrete mill and remove the inner layer of concrete because it has become radioactive.
Oh yeah. These issues are so mild that after your "half a century", we need to dig everything back up, reseal it and find a new place. Playing a thousand years' worth of musical chairs with radioactive waste may sound fun to you - until one day, the music stops and you can't find a chair.
Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts 'thousands and thousands of years' is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives.
So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.
It is easy to build, but as noted, it is also expensive to build.
Then you also need the right kind of bedrock and geology.
Sweden has everything needed to build such a facility, I could even see a large benefit of a permanent storage facility here.
We could get "boosted geothermal", nuclear waste still produce heat for a long time, why not put in pipes in place in the storage facility and use the extra heat energy to heat houses or other useful things, we are already doing geothermal heating here, so much so that there has been noted issues with depleating the geothermal boreholes, with a boosted system you would get a much longer life time of using it.