As reported in Greg Aharonian’s PatNews: Fergus Gibb’s ‘granite coffin’ may finally reconcile us to the beauty of nuclear power from the Daily Telegraph (subscription required–entire article posted below), “reports on a new solution to handling nuclear waste proposed by Dr. Fergus Gibbs, a geology professor at Sheffield University. His solution is to drill very deep holes into the granite of the continental crust, about 5000 meters deep. At such depths, the Earth is already quite hot, about 900 centigrade. Containers of nuclear waste would be buried at the bottom of the holes. All of the heat sources together melt the nuclear wastes, which resolidfy in time, thus entombing the rocks in deep earth, giving plenty of the time for the nuclear wastes to lose their radioactivity. Water does not circulate in rocks below about 4500 meters, minimizing the a form of leakage plaguing other proposed storage facilities.”“There are a lot of challenges drilling that deep, but oil companies
already have much experience in depp drilling. A fair number of patents have issued in this area, but it seems there are room for more. Indeed, one patent 6,238,138, proposes the basic idea of deep disposal of nuclear wastes without consideration of these melting effects. [These patents can be looked up here]
6,802,671 Installation for very long term storage of heat-generating
products such as nuclear waste
6,495,846 Apparatus and method for nuclear waste storage
6,238,138 Method for temporary or permanent disposal of nuclear
waste using multilateral and horizontal boreholes in
deep islolated geologic basins
6,211,424 Advanced vitrification system
5,850,614 Method of disposing of nuclear waste in underground rock
formations”
The entire article:
Fergus Gibb’s ‘granite coffin’ may finally reconcile us to the beauty of nuclear power
By Adam Nicolson
(Filed: 13/11/2004)
Nuclear power is the only form of electricity generation that will keep us happy. It does not contribute to global warming. It does not spread itself in ugly swaths across remote hillsides. It is by far the safest form of power generation ever devised. It can satisfy large energy demands from an increasingly energy-hungry world. It reduces dependence on oil supplies from the Middle East. Its own raw material is enormously abundant.
And yet you have only to mention nuclear power for long, gloomy faces to shake long and gloomily over the list of nuclear tombstones: Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Irish Sea the most radioactive in the world, Karen Silkwood, the China Syndrome and now, added to that list, Yucca Mountain, the place in Nevada where the American government has decided to bury large quantities of nuclear waste, a proposal that now seems dangerous because ground water percolating between the seams in the rock will leach out the radioactivity and spread it in a hellish slew of deformed babies and pale-faced mothers across the beautiful landscape of Nevada.
The nub, of course, is the waste. It was waste that got all over Karen Silkwood. It is reprocessing waste that has caused all the problems at Sellafield. It is waste that is focused on by all the anti-nuclearist greens and it is waste that has meant governments have been wary for the past 20 years of doing anything about nuclear power.
Waste, though, is not a technical problem, or at least does not need to be. It is a political problem, founded on irrational fears of nuclear power. It is those political fears that have starved research into the technical solutions of the necessary money.
An English geologist has come up with one of the most ingenious ideas yet suggested. Dr Fergus Gibb, a specialist in igneous rocks at Sheffield University who has done mould-breaking research into the beautiful columnar dolerites of the Hebrides, has suggested that the really high-grade nuclear waste should be returned to the earth and allowed, in effect, to melt itself back into the rocks from which the nuclear ores were originally mined.
Gibb’s idea has a brilliant circularity about it. The very heat that nuclear material generates, which is at the heart of much of the difficulty of storing the waste at all, could actually be put to use. His idea is to drill enormously deep holes right into the granite of the continental crust, perhaps 5,000 metres down, at the bottom of which it is quite hot anyway: about 900C. Add some canisters of high-level nuclear waste and the whole bottom of the shaft turns molten. The waste is then “engulfed”, in Gibb’s word, by the surrounding rock, which would resolidify in a matter of weeks. The waste would be entombed for millions of years until erosion would again expose it. By then the nuclear material will have lost its potency. Gibb calls his solution “the granite coffin”.
If this is for real, then it turns the entire nuclear debate on its head. Gibb, with his colleague Philip Attrill, has reproduced in the laboratory the heat and pressure conditions in molten granite five kilometres down. They found that the rock did indeed resolidify within a few weeks. There is undoubtedly a problem in drilling a hole through granite deep enough for the safety margin required and big enough (about 40cm across) to take the canisters of waste. There are also problems in handling the extremely dangerous material he has in mind.
But those problems do not sound insuperable. About 400 holes are needed for the current British stockpile of some 2,000 cubic metres. But once it was done, it would be done. There would be no maintenance. Water does not circulate through rocks below about 4,500 metres and so there would be no Yucca Mountain problem. Processed nuclear waste would be reintegrated with the Earth, where it would form a tiny fraction of the nuclear material already there.
Prominent, serious-minded greens such as James Lovelock are now perfectly clear about a set of things: the phenomenon of global warming is a reality; it has within it the seeds of its own acceleration; the burning of fossil fuels is to blame; the end result of that warming will be massive grief for the poor of the world and a general diminution of the planet. The melting of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will turn the North Pole from ice-white to sea-black and the far north will no longer cool the world, but warm it.
What about renewable energy sources: the beautiful geothermal power stations in Iceland; the windmills on which the Scots and Danes are so keen; the wave and tide-stations? They, it seems, are nothing but vanities, half-decorative eyecatchers like the temples and obelisks that 18th-century grandees placed around their pet landscapes. The elegant landscape decorations of Stowe or Castle Howard had nothing to do with the real world of commerce, empire and war that paid for them. Those clean energy systems are also nothing but a kind of would-be Arcadia.
And as for the perennial green wish that people would use less energy: that, more than ever, seems like hoping for rivers to flow uphill. Only nuclear power has the capacity, the responsiveness and the cleanness to address this nest of problems. And Fergus Gibb’s granite coffin may well be the key.
12:54 pm on February 10, 2005
