This is a plan of deep geologic repository in Germany. Wait, in Germany? I've heard Germany is closing down its nuclear plants?!
But who said it's #nuclear? Millions of tons of highly toxic mercury and arsenic waste is being stored worldwide in geologic repositories for decades. That's the only thing you can do because unlike nuclear waste you can't recycle these metals.
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@kravietz You actually could recycle the metals, sorta, its just super expensive and not really workable yet. At least thats my understanding.
Basically you can use high voltage plasmas at high heat to break down literally anything to its elemental components. the issue is you can only do it in small quantities at a time for a lot of energy input.
@kravietz Makes sense.
@freemo @kravietz Just need to wait enough centuries for the energy to be cheap enough and the materials to be expensive enough to open these repositories again. 😀
In the contemporary world that's gold mining companies going through slag heaps from some iron mines because they now contain enough gold for the effort.
In the contemporary world that's gold mining companies going through slag heaps from some iron mines because they now contain enough gold for the effort.
@freemo
Sure, as a matter of fact the *only* reason why there are so few deep geology storage sites for nuclear waste is that there was *too few* of it to make economical sense. For example the whole UK nuclear industry produced slightly over 2000 m3 of high-level waste during the whole 60 years of operation! You don't build a huge underground site for such amount, you just keep it in at the plant (that's the whole waste of Swiss nuclear program for the last 40 years or so).