Wishful thinking? Sweden building nuclear waste site to last 100,000 years

The sensible Swedes like planning ahead. This time its storage for nuclear waste from its own nuclear industry—storage that is supposed to last 100,000 years. Nuclear power currently provides 40 percent of Sweden's electricity from six operating reactors. The Swedes expect to fill the storage site—"60 km of tunnels buried 500 metres down in 1.9 billion year old bedrock"—sometime by 2080 at which time it will be closed.

For understanding whether the target of 100,000 years of successful storage is plausible, I suggest a trip back 100,000 years to understand what surprises might be in store over such an interval. One hundred thousand years ago the Bronze Age, the age when humans first started to refine and work with metal, was still 97,000 years in the future.

It might seem that not much happened in those 97,000 years, but actually a lot that could challenge such storage schemes did. For example, somewhere around 71,000 to 74,000 years ago Mount Toba, located in modern-day Indonesia, erupted in a supervolcano thought to be the largest in human history. The eruption was two orders of magnitude (100X) larger than another famous Indonesian volcanic eruption, Mount Tambora, which caused what is now referred to as "the year without a summer" in 1816.

The Mount Toba eruption created an instant ice age and so devastated plant life that one study suggests as few as 40 breeding pairs of humans survived across the Earth. Other estimates suggest 1,000 breeding pairs. Even if 5,000 to 10,000 survived, as some researchers suggest, modern humans almost disappeared.

Of course, another Mount Toba might just solve the problem of keeping humans away from Swedish nuclear waste because there will be so few people left who could end up drinking radioactive water or touching radioactive soil that we needn't worry. But a lesser disaster might only, say, halve the human presence on Earth while destroying the kind of complex technology and crucial political structure that make it possible to monitor such waste sites.

Forty thousand years ago Neanderthals, a competing species of humans, went extinct. We think of Neanderthals as being less intelligent than we Homo sapiens who survived. But their full name, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and what we know about them suggests that that may not have been so. In any case, one theory is that climate change contributed to their demise. We Homo sapiens who remain seem destined for a similar climate challenge that could over time at the very least degrade the stability of human society to such an extent that looking after nuclear wastes would be very low on the agenda. Again, it is not a wipeout that creates a problem, but rather growing paralysis and disorder.

What we call civilization, that is, human settlement in cities, has only been around about 10,000 years. That's hardly an endorsement for continuity over the next 100,000. Maybe the Swedes believe that the way they are burying their nuclear waste will make the coming and going of human civilizations over the next 100,000 years irrelevant. But, how could they possibly know that? After all, one Swedish environmental group is going to court to challenge the plan because "research from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology showed the copper capsules [used to contain the waste] could corrode and leak radioactive elements into the ground water."

Okay, maybe you're thinking that surely in the future our technological prowess will be always ever greater and so containing these wastes will ultimately be a trivial problem in retrospect. There are so many answers to why that will almost certainly NOT be the case. The simplest one is that technology relies on energy and our inability to get beyond fossil fuels which are finite to something even more dense and versatile doesn't bode well for an advanced technological future.

A second argument comes from the past, but it is so very consistent in its message. Most of the civilizations we now know about no longer exist today. For any number of reasons—demographic decline, climate change, plague, political discord, loss of resources—they just petered out or disappeared.

I understand that now that we humans have produced this waste, we ought to figure out how to store it safely for the sake of whatever life, both human and nonhuman, comes after us. One solution would be to reprocess it to get the usable radioactive products from the waste and use them up as much as possible. That reduces but does not eliminate waste. And, reprocessing is expensive and dangerous and essentially a doubling down on an advanced technological solution.

Of course, another problem is that reprocessing is great for extracting plutonium that can be used in nuclear weapons—which could lead to another kind of disaster. Beyond this, worldwide the amount of waste continues to increase and there are plans to build new nuclear reactors without a solution to the waste problem having been realized on any scale necessary to take care of wastes from all the countries of the world NOT called Sweden. That's why burying what we have in the ground seems like a cheap and viable solution in comparison to reprocessing—or the totally crazy idea of shooting such waste into space or into the Sun.

I just wonder how knowledge of such waste sites will be preserved for 100,000 years. I wonder whether we humans can build something that will last 100,000 years given our record and the dangerous exigencies of life on Earth. And, I wonder if we were wise to create something in the first place that requires 100,000 years of care, given how heedless we as a species are to hazards of our own making that may destroy our current civilization much, much sooner than a thousand centuries from now.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.