nikkkom said:
Wrong. Drilling boreholes is neither particularly dangerous nor particularly expensive. US drills about 35 thousand gas wells every year today (fracking).
Where's the danger? I take thousands are dying?
Where are horrible expenses? Natural gas in US become very cheap.
Do me a favour!
You are confusing "cheap" with "profitable". This isn't even economics 101; it is primary school common sense. You are confusing costs of established commercial practice with exploratory developmental practice. You are confusing drilling for production, with drilling for disposal. You are confusing every kind of reprocessing with every other, whether actinoid extraction or isotopic separation. Do I have to spell out everything for you as well as keeping your nose on the relevant track?
The reason that gas (for now anyway) is cheap is that you get a lot of fuel for every successful hole. If a hole that costs $10M to drill yields say, $20M profit in gas, it certainly is profitable. It very certainly is not cheap.
If a hole costs $100M dollars to drill a huge amount deeper (because we can't risk irresponsibly "pushing our waste onto our grandchildren" in holes just 10km deep because "any achievable burial depth (even ~10km), water-solible forms of waste can reach surface on a timescale of one century" (a nice line of hooey that!) ) and doesn't yield a cent's worth of gas or anything else of value, that is more than just expensive, it is ridiculous.
Isn't it? Let's hear your direct response to that for a change.
Remember too that although, astonishingly: "The expertise in deep borehole drilling is already extensive, and becoming more advanced" ("by the day" yet! MEGO!) the costs and risks attendant on drilling deeper than more shallowly do not rise linearly; whether they rise polynomially or exponentially (personally I suspect they rise discontinuously though monotonically, but I do not undertake to prove it) but I leave it to your imagination to find means of denying it. You could start by proving why organic materials down there would end up as black gunk, or perhaps by showing why it might be cheaper to dig a 10km hole for waste disposal than a 1km hole for gas.
You fail to establish let alone explain what you are talking about here: "The "expensive" part is reprocessing - but we already have it working. Huge expenses in R&D already are paid for!" Could you please elaborate? I thought you were *objecting* to "reprocessing" whatever you mean by that. A few exchanges back you were berating me for stupidly promoting "expensive" (though deferred) reprocessing. What on Earth changed your mind about that?
Because pushing our waste onto our grandchildren is irresponsible. If we produce it, we should dispose of it in a way which does not require our grandchildren to deal with it in perpetuity.
I disagree that waste after reprocessing has any significant value.
That sounds so virtuous that I barely can bring myself to beg forgiveness for pointing out that the billions of cubic metres of wastes we push onto our grandchildren from mining, processing and consuming combustible fossil fuels (look up what "fossil" means; I am not referring to palaeontology) and not counting the huge waste volumes that we spew into our ever-warmer atmospheric duvet, not only dwarf our heritage of a few cubic metres of highly active wastes, and our few thousand cubic metres of uninteresting nuclear wastes, but also contain more radioactivity calculated as as Becquerels.
So virtuous in fact that I blush to add that where fuel mining and ash dumping have created desert regions, our showcase nuclear disaster region, Chernobyl, has become a thriving sanctuary for wildlife, as have exclusion zones around intact installations like Koeberg and abandoned nuclear plant.
Your agreement or disagreement "that waste after reprocessing has any significant value" is totally irrelevant one way or the other, without demonstration one way or the other. What is undebatable is that once shoved down the oubliette the waste certainly is valueless as well as being a hugely expensive possible hazard if we are to take your own assertions of leaky 10km holes at face value. Conversely, when stored accessibly at a tiny fraction of the cost of burial, it remains for "our grandchildren" to decide on its value, significant or otherwise. Who are you to preempt that evaluation for them?