30 Second Story: Nuclear energy has positive momentum in most media that I read in 2022, and the case for nuclear would be even stronger with an answer for nuclear waste storage. Nuclear experts seem to agree by consensus that the best option is permanent storage deep underground. However, no such site capable of storage on the 100,000 year time-scale has ever been built. Canada has two locations currently under review for its site selection process , and is planning to select a site in 2023.
WILL CANADA SIGN A FORMAL AGREEMENT TO HOST NUCLEAR WASTE?
January 1, 2024
(Note: I'm most interested in when a permanent nuclear storage location will be completed, but I think that will take longer than I want to set up the market.
Prior: 50%
Explanation: I don't have a lot of background events handy in my mind. I know Finland has made significant progress on their site, and I know that the US scuppered its process in Nevada and is back to square one. I can think of lots of examples of small communities signing agreements for energy infrastructure that environmentalists wouldn't like, but environmentalists also have a good track record of stopping nuclear energy projects, it feels like a wash.
Updates:
1. Comparison to the peer countries.
This page on Canada's Nuclear Waste Management Website (NWMO) is a very useful source. Overall, every country seems to comfortably overrun any deadlines it sets on the process by at least a year or two. Site selection seems to take at least 20 years, and Canada began in 2008. Beginning construction takes around 10 years on top of that, and only Finland and Sweden seem on track.
Getting more information on other countries difficulties and the usual timeline makes me much more pessimistic in the next two years.
New Value: 20%
2. Okay, but what about more peery countries
The United States and United Kingdom seem likely to have the closest dynamics to Canada. The UK actually seems to have begun site discussion and finalized a community partnership between 2019 and 2021, which is lightyears faster than what I've seen previously, although I don't know whether "community partnership" is on the same level as the "formal agreement" that forms Step 6 of Canada's process. My bigger revelation was that the United States just seemed to have done this really badly with Yucca Mountain. They only considered one site, and totally lost the narrative on Native land rights in the area. I think both Canada and the UK are doing much better community outreach and local and public perception on Native rights seems about where it should be if this were to be approved.
I don't trust that we can build anything more on schedule than Europe or China can, but we're doing the right things to reach a community agreement.
New Value: 30%
3. The Finish finishing
I'm not prepared to update based on Sweden or Finland. There furthest along in the process, but all the normal caveats from the social sciences apply (homogenous high-trust societies, etc.). I do think that the success of Finland (and later Sweden) will prove important for convincing stakeholders in other countries that underground storage can be beneficial. Just knowing that Finland's facility is well into construction should prove useful, but unfortunately the facility won't be operational until 2024, after this prediction ends. And again, I don't trust any of these dates.
New Value: 30%
That's all for this week. I'm not looking into any of the science because I've chosen a topic that seems overwhelmingly settled and understood. Further developments wouldn't affect the outcome anyway.
Final Prediction: 30%
Progress Checks:
No progress checks this week. I've got to watch the time I put into posts. If anything, this IS a progress check on the larger question of "Will Canada begin construction of a permanent nuclear waste site" and "Will Canada begin operation of a permanent nuclear waste site". At a guess:
By 2035:
Q1. Construction started:
In the world with formal partnership: 70%
In the world without formal partnership: 50%
Q2. Begun Operations:
In the world with formal partnership: 40%
In the world without formal partnership: 10%
Photo: The Bugaboos, British Columbia
Hm, how do you decide what topic to talk about?
When the subject of these repositories comes up, the thing I always talk about is the centrality of plutonium ― I'm not sure, maybe there are other transuranics in long-lived HL waste, but plutonium is clearly the main one and the one that gets all the attention.
I feel like the whole topic of geological repositories is an antinuclear gold mine. Like, antinuclear activists made people decide in the first place that they were important as necessary, and every year we don't have one is a year they can complain about us not having one, and how they're super expensive and our taxes will surely pick up the tab (but…