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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MJB" data-source="post: 3318141" data-attributes="member: 88928">Re radioactive waste, the material with the longest half-lives will have to be kept secure for around 100,000 years, hence my harping upon the need for a politics-proof strategy. Slightly lower-activity material presents a different aspect in that its volume is immense, much of it liquid and normally highly corrosive, which is why the current storage facilities, mostly in the grounds of selected nuclear power stations, are of concern, because they are ageing and corroding. Quite how the stored material can be extracted and transferred to new reservoirs (which have yet to be funded, let alone built on sites that have not yet been authorised) has yet to be published.Of all the radioactive waste, only a few isotopes of a few elements could be used for 'dirty' bombs. My view is that the most at risk storage locations (at risk of theft, that is) are in parts of the former Soviet Union, where accounting procedures for it were slack from Day 1, and once the Soviets pulled out, non-existent in places.Dumping nuclear waste at sea is well covered here:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste</a>It doesn't make happy reading. On top of that, much of the material that the UK dumped in the Irish Sea was encased in off-the-shelf drums, whose corrosion-resistant properties are unknown and the rates of corrosion at those depths were unknown. The difficulties of extracting that material from the Irish Sea and putting it into storage facilities that do not yet exist are compounded by the fact that tens of thousands of conventional bombs were dumped into the Irish Sea after 1940.The Russians have dumped much radioactive material in the High Arctic, including more than a few complete nuclear submarines, whose reactors were never designed to resist seawater corrosion: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21119774" target="_blank">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21119774</a>Perhaps you can see the scale of the problem that just has to have a worldwide strategy agreed before any programmes of building a host of new nuclear power stations can be started...?MJB</blockquote>

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