It’s a pretty damning article, but maybe lessons learned during the construction would make future reactors of the same design cheaper and within budget?
It’s a pretty damning article, but maybe lessons learned during the construction would make future reactors of the same design cheaper and within budget?
I hope so too. It's been a consistent enough trend of reactors being over time and over budget, someone has to be analyzing what's off in the initial estimates. Maybe it's just a million random...
I hope so too. It's been a consistent enough trend of reactors being over time and over budget, someone has to be analyzing what's off in the initial estimates. Maybe it's just a million random things that cause it to go over budget and there's no real trend?
I reread the article again but I'm not seeing any reasons given for such a huge budget miss.. (was it lawsuits from NIMBYs? Material overruns due to COVID? Profiteering? Embezzlement?) I'll also...
I reread the article again but I'm not seeing any reasons given for such a huge budget miss.. (was it lawsuits from NIMBYs? Material overruns due to COVID? Profiteering? Embezzlement?)
I'll also admit that I'm a little tired and mentally a little dull at work atm but I simply can't parse this quote:
The third and fourth reactors were originally supposed to cost $14 billion, but are now on track to cost their owners $31 billion. That doesn’t include $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners to walk away from the project. That brings total spending to almost $35 billion.
If Westinghouse paid $3.7 billion to walk away, shouldn't it be subtracted from the $31 billion and not added? What am I missing?
It's taking the perspective of the reactor, not the cost to the owners of the reactor. If Westinghouse spend $3.7b on labor and materials, then they spent $3.7b on labor and materials on the...
It's taking the perspective of the reactor, not the cost to the owners of the reactor. If Westinghouse spend $3.7b on labor and materials, then they spent $3.7b on labor and materials on the reactor. The reactor cost $35b to make, in the end.
Ah, gotcha. I was approaching it like the cost to build a house.. Meaning Westinhouse was paid as milestones were reached but they got to a point where Westinghouse returned/paid out $3.7 billion...
Ah, gotcha. I was approaching it like the cost to build a house.. Meaning Westinhouse was paid as milestones were reached but they got to a point where Westinghouse returned/paid out $3.7 billion to get out of the contract. If the reactor was $31 billion and the owners got $3.7 billion back meant it was lowered to $27.9 billion not increased to $35 billion.
I understand that the $35 billion figure was how much the project cost everyone not just the owners now, thank you.
I feel like it's always like that. X reactor was $Y over, and then no further details. Why they went over is just as, if not more, important than them actually going over.
I reread the article again but I'm not seeing any reasons given for such a huge budget miss.. (was it lawsuits from NIMBYs? Material overruns due to COVID? Profiteering? Embezzlement?)
I feel like it's always like that. X reactor was $Y over, and then no further details. Why they went over is just as, if not more, important than them actually going over.
The AP1000 that was built at Vogtle was one of three large LWRs there was enthusiasm for in the 2000s. The EPR, built in Finland, was even later and nobody started building an ESBWR....
Exemplary
The AP1000 that was built at Vogtle was one of three large LWRs there was enthusiasm for in the 2000s. The EPR, built in Finland, was even later and nobody started building an ESBWR.
There were a lot of good ideas in the AP1000, such as constructing large parts of the reactor in a factory and shipping them to the site. They had a hard time fabricating components at the Chinese factories that were making them, and the site at Vogtle had to wait for problems to be worked out at the Sanmen and Haiyang sites.
It didn't help that politics got in the way. Westinghouse was nominally an American company but it was a subsidiary of Toshiba, a Japanese company. Had Toshiba been seen as strategically important it might have received support from the Japanese government but after the Fukushima accident the Japanese government was in no mood for a bailout. A pair of AP1000s planned in South Carolina was canceled after the Westinghouse bankruptcy which led to a lawsuits and a lot of fingerpointing. All this added to the engineering problems.
There still are orders being taken for AP1000s which can't be said for any other western design that's already been built.
One take on it is that there a lot of things that can go wrong when you build a reactor and when you build the first one (FOAK: First of a Kind) or second one you are going to be discovering these things but once you are building them regularly you will be able to build them on budget and on time (NOAK: N-th of a kind.) The only country that is building reactors on a NOAK basis right now is Russia with their VVER reactor which is very similar to the American PWR (like the AP1000.)
Practically getting to NOAK is tough because if you just build reactors serially it will take forever to get there (and technology will move on.) If you build the first 6 in parallel though then you don't benefit from serial learning and problems on one project will cause problems with other projects. China is building a large number of reactors right now but their strategy seems to be "build a few of every design on the market" and even the Hualong One design is really two different designs. It's not necessarily the efficient way to do it.
The reactor vessel and steam generators for large LWRs are made on a giant hydraulic press.
which we don't have in the U.S (so we have to import the pressure vessel from somewhere.) There are two ideas for scaling down, one is to forge the pressure vessel and steam generators as one unit (maybe on a big press) the other is to make the parts as big as you can on a smaller press.
NuScale is the scaled-down PWR from America, it is seeing cost escalation problems even before they build one because of inflation and rising materials cost. The way things are going it might never get built, but the problem is the same problems will also affect solar, wind and other power plants.
They are expecting to make the pressure vessel in Canada and as a simplified version of the Boiling Water Reactor they might be able to delete some parts to get the cost down. They are talking about building a large number of them, but they too will have to face down the cost escalation monster.
So it seems like it's a mix of policies and just general newness of building reactors. I bet COVID supply issues didn't help either. Pretty cool, thanks for the detailed response! This seems...
So it seems like it's a mix of policies and just general newness of building reactors. I bet COVID supply issues didn't help either. Pretty cool, thanks for the detailed response!
There still are orders being taken for AP1000s which can't be said for any other western design that's already been built.
This seems promising. If AP1000 keeps growing in use maybe we (here in the US) can learn a little and decrease the cost of building them here. Would definitely help the future of nuclear energy.
They are expecting to make the pressure vessel in Canada and as a simplified version of the Boiling Water Reactor they might be able to delete some parts to get the cost down.
A closer and more allied manufacturing partner also seems pretty good. Nuclear's future is looking brighter and more, uh, glow-y. Makes me happy.
You seem to know a lot about nuclear reactors; is it just an interest of yours, or do you work in energy?
Here's my story. I earned a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics in 1999 and have been working in the software industry since, Since there was a feeling of crisis about energy around 2000...
Here's my story.
I earned a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics in 1999 and have been working in the software industry since,
Since there was a feeling of crisis about energy around 2000 I've been interested in the question of "where will we get energy from?" Around that time I was an activist in the Tompkins County Green Party and also worked with another group on climate change activism. I was anti-nuke back then but talking w/ people like Rod Adams turned me around. I gave a presentation at a conference on thorium energy in 2009. I haven't been active in the industry but I have been following the story.
I am all for renewable energy, storage and all that but I think the magnitude of the climate change problem plus the fact that billions of people in Africa and Asia are looking for a better standard of living mean we need a lot of carbon free energy -- given the large amount of land necessary, storage that is not yet a bird in the hand, and the difficulty of permitting and constructing long range power lines I'm concerned renewables might become a disappointment in the 2030s the way nuclear was in the 1980s.
So you're probably very interested in the superconductor stuff going on right now, and definitely understand it more than most of us. Interesting that you're doing software instead of hardware....
PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics
I had to look that one up.
So you're probably very interested in the superconductor stuff going on right now, and definitely understand it more than most of us. Interesting that you're doing software instead of hardware. I'm guessing you're writing/working in the software that runs simulations?
I was anti-nuke back ... gave a presentation at a conference on thorium energy
So you made a complete 180, interesting. Although I do feel like more environmentalists are pushing for nuclear these days. It's much cleaner than coal (as far as I understand).
given the large amount of land necessary, storage that is not yet a bird in the hand, and the difficulty of permitting and constructing long range power lines I'm concerned renewables might become a disappointment in the 2030s the way nuclear was in the 1980s.
I hope it won't be a disappointment, at least not utterly. I feel like I see a lot of talk online about how we need multiple solutions and multiple sources of renewables, so I think if that sentiment grows and becomes more mainstream we might be able to keep goodwill alive enough to solve the bigger problems I'm renewable energy. Or at least let it grow to a larger scale.
When I was in high school people were excited about liquid nitrogen superconductors but it is 36 years later and they didn't change the world. In fact, theoreticians are still scratching their...
When I was in high school people were excited about liquid nitrogen superconductors but it is 36 years later and they didn't change the world. In fact, theoreticians are still scratching their heads to understand how they work, so they've been a bit of a disappointment. If the new superconductor has a higher critical field than existing semiconductors it could be used to make powerful magnets for particle accelerators and fusion energy.
As for me I've worked on a large variety of things including hundreds of web sites but I also got interested in artificial intelligence long before everybody else did and worked on many interesting projects including some attempts to develop foundation models with varying degrees of success before transformers were a thing.
I still like Howie Hawkins who is a big green activist in NY even if I disagree with him on some things. I've worked on his gubernatorial campaign, I've been to his house. I'm glad he's taken the right position on Russia and Ukraine.
People are going to build a large amount of renewable energy even if it is inevitable that it will run into opposition here and there for different reasons. I'm also quite fascinated with efforts to decarbonize other sectors of industry such as cement, steelmaking, fertilizer manufacturing, etc. Even oil refineries and chemical plants have a huge potential to capture CO₂ waste and pump it underground.
They need to quit talking about it and do it, but to make all the good things happen we really have to start taxing carbon emissions but it's politically a tough problem. If it was just the developed world we could cut taxes or rebate the carbon tax to people to make it revenue neutral and fair but when you include the global south in the scheme the problem gets way more complicated.
There's a quote from The Greens' Dilemma: Building Tomorrow's Climate Infrastructure Today that really helps put things into perspective how hard changing this infrastructure is going to be:
Currently, 61 percent of electric power produced in the United States comes from fossil
fuel combustion, making fuel-switching in that sector a critical component of decarbonization
policy. Under any decarbonization scenario meeting the national goals, therefore, new wind and
solar power production infrastructure dominates, the question being how much nuclear, natural
gas (with carbon capture), and other fuel types fit into the mix. A middle-road scenario relying
heavily but not exclusively on wind and solar will require their production capacity to quadruple
over current levels to supply half of the nation’s electric power, which would mean setting a new
record for installed capacity year-after-year for the next 30 years. To put that into perspective,
consider that the largest solar facility currently online in the US is capable of generating 585MW.
To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new
400MW solar power facilities—each taking up at least 2000 acres—on line every week for the next thirty years. (Page 11).
I don't think I agree with you, but there is a solid argument for your position. I just hate to encourage catastrophic risk. Although the Chernobyl exclusion zone has proved beneficial for wildlife.
I don't think I agree with you, but there is a solid argument for your position. I just hate to encourage catastrophic risk. Although the Chernobyl exclusion zone has proved beneficial for wildlife.
I’m not really a fan of Kurzgesagt these days, but they do have a good video on the dangers of nuclear power relative to other sources of energy that I would highly recommend watching for some...
I’m not really a fan of Kurzgesagt these days, but they do have a good video on the dangers of nuclear power relative to other sources of energy that I would highly recommend watching for some perspective if you haven’t already. Long story short is, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as most people think, and is especially better than any fossil fuel source.
Frankly, I think it’s safe to say that to the question of “what alternative energy sources should we use to combat climate change,” we would be well covered by answering “anything viable.” With that in mind, I’ll happily cheer on nuclear power, regardless of how close it is to my house.
Mostly these two videos: Kurzgesagt: Billionaire propaganda stories and trusting science – Tildes discussion How Kurzgesagt cooks propaganda for billionaires – Tildes discussion They both have...
They both have solid reasoning if you ask me, but the first is long (52m) and the second has an overdramatic True Crime-like presentation, so pick your poison. If you don't have the time, the gist of it is that Kurz has some problematic political takes behind it (sometimes presented erroneously as fact or cherry-picked) that billionaires like, and so they give money to Kurzgesagt to encourage those ideas' spread.
Notably, this only really applies to their more politically-oriented videos, which are a small subset of their content. Most of their videos are genuinely fine. I say I'm "not a fan" less because I think all their videos are bad, but more because I've lost a lot of respect for them as a result of the ones that are.
I'll admit that I haven't yet watched the video. I generally prefer text based resources. But is part of his argument that the negligent contamination we saw at sites like Hanford, just won't...
I'll admit that I haven't yet watched the video. I generally prefer text based resources. But is part of his argument that the negligent contamination we saw at sites like Hanford, just won't happen any more because we are more responsible?
I don't believe that's mentioned at all. The video looks moreso at events like Chernobyl and Fukushima and tallying the death toll from them. It takes those, as well as more general statistics...
I don't believe that's mentioned at all. The video looks moreso at events like Chernobyl and Fukushima and tallying the death toll from them. It takes those, as well as more general statistics about deaths per energy unit produced, and compares them to other sources of energy; coal, oil, gas, solar, wind, and hydro.
The key takeaway for all that is that while nuclear accidents get a lot of press and are generally very dramatic, they happen very rarely, tend to kill far less than people might think (especially when managed well; optimistic estimates suggest Fukushima directly killed one person at most) and, crucially, kill far far less than any fossil fuel source. That last point is vital, as many decommissioned nuclear plants get replaced – at least temporarily – with coal or natural gas, which is decidedly worse.
The damage from Fukushima is not yet fully tallied. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/asia/japan-fukushima-wastewater-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html Part of what worries me about nuclear is that the...
Part of what worries me about nuclear is that the danger can persist for thousands of centuries. I've seen articles about attempts to communicate the danger of nuclear waste storage sites to people in future eras who may not even be literate, but definitely don't speak our languages
I feel the same could be said for climate change, no? Frankly, I have more faith that we'll find a way to deal with nuclear waste in the future than I do that we'd be able to reverse incredibly...
I feel the same could be said for climate change, no? Frankly, I have more faith that we'll find a way to deal with nuclear waste in the future than I do that we'd be able to reverse incredibly severe climate change, as the former is not nearly as widely or severely destructive.
As the video puts it, better some poisonous stuff in the ground than a ton of poisonous stuff in the air we're breathing.
There are emerging solutions like deep borehole disposal of nuclear waste which virtually eliminate all ecological conerns for eternal storage. Future civilizations would need a technological...
There are emerging solutions like deep borehole disposal of nuclear waste which virtually eliminate all ecological conerns for eternal storage. Future civilizations would need a technological sophistication on par with ours to ever even access the waste
It’s a pretty damning article, but maybe lessons learned during the construction would make future reactors of the same design cheaper and within budget?
I hope so too. It's been a consistent enough trend of reactors being over time and over budget, someone has to be analyzing what's off in the initial estimates. Maybe it's just a million random things that cause it to go over budget and there's no real trend?
I reread the article again but I'm not seeing any reasons given for such a huge budget miss.. (was it lawsuits from NIMBYs? Material overruns due to COVID? Profiteering? Embezzlement?)
I'll also admit that I'm a little tired and mentally a little dull at work atm but I simply can't parse this quote:
If Westinghouse paid $3.7 billion to walk away, shouldn't it be subtracted from the $31 billion and not added? What am I missing?
It's taking the perspective of the reactor, not the cost to the owners of the reactor. If Westinghouse spend $3.7b on labor and materials, then they spent $3.7b on labor and materials on the reactor. The reactor cost $35b to make, in the end.
Ah, gotcha. I was approaching it like the cost to build a house.. Meaning Westinhouse was paid as milestones were reached but they got to a point where Westinghouse returned/paid out $3.7 billion to get out of the contract. If the reactor was $31 billion and the owners got $3.7 billion back meant it was lowered to $27.9 billion not increased to $35 billion.
I understand that the $35 billion figure was how much the project cost everyone not just the owners now, thank you.
I feel like it's always like that. X reactor was $Y over, and then no further details. Why they went over is just as, if not more, important than them actually going over.
The AP1000 that was built at Vogtle was one of three large LWRs there was enthusiasm for in the 2000s. The EPR, built in Finland, was even later and nobody started building an ESBWR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
There were a lot of good ideas in the AP1000, such as constructing large parts of the reactor in a factory and shipping them to the site. They had a hard time fabricating components at the Chinese factories that were making them, and the site at Vogtle had to wait for problems to be worked out at the Sanmen and Haiyang sites.
It didn't help that politics got in the way. Westinghouse was nominally an American company but it was a subsidiary of Toshiba, a Japanese company. Had Toshiba been seen as strategically important it might have received support from the Japanese government but after the Fukushima accident the Japanese government was in no mood for a bailout. A pair of AP1000s planned in South Carolina was canceled after the Westinghouse bankruptcy which led to a lawsuits and a lot of fingerpointing. All this added to the engineering problems.
There still are orders being taken for AP1000s which can't be said for any other western design that's already been built.
One take on it is that there a lot of things that can go wrong when you build a reactor and when you build the first one (FOAK: First of a Kind) or second one you are going to be discovering these things but once you are building them regularly you will be able to build them on budget and on time (NOAK: N-th of a kind.) The only country that is building reactors on a NOAK basis right now is Russia with their VVER reactor which is very similar to the American PWR (like the AP1000.)
Practically getting to NOAK is tough because if you just build reactors serially it will take forever to get there (and technology will move on.) If you build the first 6 in parallel though then you don't benefit from serial learning and problems on one project will cause problems with other projects. China is building a large number of reactors right now but their strategy seems to be "build a few of every design on the market" and even the Hualong One design is really two different designs. It's not necessarily the efficient way to do it.
The reactor vessel and steam generators for large LWRs are made on a giant hydraulic press.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/heavy-manufacturing-of-power-plants.aspx
which we don't have in the U.S (so we have to import the pressure vessel from somewhere.) There are two ideas for scaling down, one is to forge the pressure vessel and steam generators as one unit (maybe on a big press) the other is to make the parts as big as you can on a smaller press.
NuScale is the scaled-down PWR from America, it is seeing cost escalation problems even before they build one because of inflation and rising materials cost. The way things are going it might never get built, but the problem is the same problems will also affect solar, wind and other power plants.
This reactor is getting talked about a lot now
https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-power-plants-overview/bwrx-300
They are expecting to make the pressure vessel in Canada and as a simplified version of the Boiling Water Reactor they might be able to delete some parts to get the cost down. They are talking about building a large number of them, but they too will have to face down the cost escalation monster.
So it seems like it's a mix of policies and just general newness of building reactors. I bet COVID supply issues didn't help either. Pretty cool, thanks for the detailed response!
This seems promising. If AP1000 keeps growing in use maybe we (here in the US) can learn a little and decrease the cost of building them here. Would definitely help the future of nuclear energy.
A closer and more allied manufacturing partner also seems pretty good. Nuclear's future is looking brighter and more, uh, glow-y. Makes me happy.
You seem to know a lot about nuclear reactors; is it just an interest of yours, or do you work in energy?
Here's my story.
I earned a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics in 1999 and have been working in the software industry since,
Since there was a feeling of crisis about energy around 2000 I've been interested in the question of "where will we get energy from?" Around that time I was an activist in the Tompkins County Green Party and also worked with another group on climate change activism. I was anti-nuke back then but talking w/ people like Rod Adams turned me around. I gave a presentation at a conference on thorium energy in 2009. I haven't been active in the industry but I have been following the story.
I am all for renewable energy, storage and all that but I think the magnitude of the climate change problem plus the fact that billions of people in Africa and Asia are looking for a better standard of living mean we need a lot of carbon free energy -- given the large amount of land necessary, storage that is not yet a bird in the hand, and the difficulty of permitting and constructing long range power lines I'm concerned renewables might become a disappointment in the 2030s the way nuclear was in the 1980s.
So you're probably very interested in the superconductor stuff going on right now, and definitely understand it more than most of us. Interesting that you're doing software instead of hardware. I'm guessing you're writing/working in the software that runs simulations?
So you made a complete 180, interesting. Although I do feel like more environmentalists are pushing for nuclear these days. It's much cleaner than coal (as far as I understand).
I hope it won't be a disappointment, at least not utterly. I feel like I see a lot of talk online about how we need multiple solutions and multiple sources of renewables, so I think if that sentiment grows and becomes more mainstream we might be able to keep goodwill alive enough to solve the bigger problems I'm renewable energy. Or at least let it grow to a larger scale.
When I was in high school people were excited about liquid nitrogen superconductors but it is 36 years later and they didn't change the world. In fact, theoreticians are still scratching their heads to understand how they work, so they've been a bit of a disappointment. If the new superconductor has a higher critical field than existing semiconductors it could be used to make powerful magnets for particle accelerators and fusion energy.
As for me I've worked on a large variety of things including hundreds of web sites but I also got interested in artificial intelligence long before everybody else did and worked on many interesting projects including some attempts to develop foundation models with varying degrees of success before transformers were a thing.
I still like Howie Hawkins who is a big green activist in NY even if I disagree with him on some things. I've worked on his gubernatorial campaign, I've been to his house. I'm glad he's taken the right position on Russia and Ukraine.
People are going to build a large amount of renewable energy even if it is inevitable that it will run into opposition here and there for different reasons. I'm also quite fascinated with efforts to decarbonize other sectors of industry such as cement, steelmaking, fertilizer manufacturing, etc. Even oil refineries and chemical plants have a huge potential to capture CO₂ waste and pump it underground.
They need to quit talking about it and do it, but to make all the good things happen we really have to start taxing carbon emissions but it's politically a tough problem. If it was just the developed world we could cut taxes or rebate the carbon tax to people to make it revenue neutral and fair but when you include the global south in the scheme the problem gets way more complicated.
There's a quote from The Greens' Dilemma: Building Tomorrow's Climate Infrastructure Today that really helps put things into perspective how hard changing this infrastructure is going to be:
I don't think I agree with you, but there is a solid argument for your position. I just hate to encourage catastrophic risk. Although the Chernobyl exclusion zone has proved beneficial for wildlife.
I’m not really a fan of Kurzgesagt these days, but they do have a good video on the dangers of nuclear power relative to other sources of energy that I would highly recommend watching for some perspective if you haven’t already. Long story short is, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as most people think, and is especially better than any fossil fuel source.
Frankly, I think it’s safe to say that to the question of “what alternative energy sources should we use to combat climate change,” we would be well covered by answering “anything viable.” With that in mind, I’ll happily cheer on nuclear power, regardless of how close it is to my house.
Off topic but may I ask what turned you off of Kurzgesagt?
Mostly these two videos:
Kurzgesagt: Billionaire propaganda stories and trusting science – Tildes discussion
How Kurzgesagt cooks propaganda for billionaires – Tildes discussion
They both have solid reasoning if you ask me, but the first is long (52m) and the second has an overdramatic True Crime-like presentation, so pick your poison. If you don't have the time, the gist of it is that Kurz has some problematic political takes behind it (sometimes presented erroneously as fact or cherry-picked) that billionaires like, and so they give money to Kurzgesagt to encourage those ideas' spread.
Notably, this only really applies to their more politically-oriented videos, which are a small subset of their content. Most of their videos are genuinely fine. I say I'm "not a fan" less because I think all their videos are bad, but more because I've lost a lot of respect for them as a result of the ones that are.
I'll admit that I haven't yet watched the video. I generally prefer text based resources. But is part of his argument that the negligent contamination we saw at sites like Hanford, just won't happen any more because we are more responsible?
I don't believe that's mentioned at all. The video looks moreso at events like Chernobyl and Fukushima and tallying the death toll from them. It takes those, as well as more general statistics about deaths per energy unit produced, and compares them to other sources of energy; coal, oil, gas, solar, wind, and hydro.
The key takeaway for all that is that while nuclear accidents get a lot of press and are generally very dramatic, they happen very rarely, tend to kill far less than people might think (especially when managed well; optimistic estimates suggest Fukushima directly killed one person at most) and, crucially, kill far far less than any fossil fuel source. That last point is vital, as many decommissioned nuclear plants get replaced – at least temporarily – with coal or natural gas, which is decidedly worse.
The damage from Fukushima is not yet fully tallied. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/asia/japan-fukushima-wastewater-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html
Part of what worries me about nuclear is that the danger can persist for thousands of centuries. I've seen articles about attempts to communicate the danger of nuclear waste storage sites to people in future eras who may not even be literate, but definitely don't speak our languages
I feel the same could be said for climate change, no? Frankly, I have more faith that we'll find a way to deal with nuclear waste in the future than I do that we'd be able to reverse incredibly severe climate change, as the former is not nearly as widely or severely destructive.
As the video puts it, better some poisonous stuff in the ground than a ton of poisonous stuff in the air we're breathing.
There are emerging solutions like deep borehole disposal of nuclear waste which virtually eliminate all ecological conerns for eternal storage. Future civilizations would need a technological sophistication on par with ours to ever even access the waste
Good to know.