>And no, it's not possible to ship all the nuclear waste to Finland.
Only in the political sense. Waste volumes are small enough that we easily could if they were willing to dig a big enough hole.
Only in the political sense. Waste volumes are small enough that we easily could if they were willing to dig a big enough hole.
Putting the waste on a ship with the potential of the ship sinking or having an accident elicits a big "nope" from me.
Are you aware the several nuclear submarines have sunk? Their fuel is enriched far higher than terrestrial nuclear plants (>80% for nuclear subs, ~20-25% for power plants). Yet no adverse impact is observed. Even in cases like Kursk where some radioactivity release is monitored, it subsides to background levels just a few meters outside the wreck.
Which is surely one of the reasons why they generate less waste -- less non-fissile fuel to be irradiated, smaller reactor vessels to be activated, etc.
Plus the average power generated is way lower for a nuclear submarine. A single commercial ~1 GW nuclear reactor quite likely produces as much power as the whole US submarine fleet on average, and there's hundreds of such ~1 GW units in the world.
And less power means fewer fission events, which means less activation and less waste. So even a sunk sub is nowhere near the levels of a sunk commercial waste fuel shipment when it comes to what either of the two could release into the environment should the bad stuff leak out.
(a ship sinking is usually an environment desaster, but the nuclear waste sinking should be a very small concern because the waste are fixed in glass, and water absorb radiation)
Scaling nuclear power up by factor of 10 to 100 means scaling transport of nuclear waste up by the same factor at least. Including all the risks associated with it. People are not going to take these vague assurances after so much has gone wrong in the past.
France has plenty of problems with its nuclear power. Germany is moving away from Russian gas, and a lot quicker than Russia would like.
The problems France has with its nuclear reactors is the need to replace them and build new ones.