Hanging around a spent fuel canister for some hours will give you the equivalent dose from that of a dental X-ray, and sleeping on the canister for three days and nights will give you the equvalent of your annual natural radiation dose. If you live on the canister for an entire year you will recieve about five times the US federal radiation limit for nuclear workers. So don't do it.
If you really want to sleep on the canister you will have to wait 300-500 years, after which it will be perfectly harmless.
But I will still accept your spent fuel canisters for storage. I will just put them on the bottom of a swimming pool or bury them in the backyard, as a meter of water or two metres of dirt should be perfectly adequate shielding. ;) Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Does this mean that sheet copper won't corrode for 500 years if buried? The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
Though I did read something recently about some new research which said something about increased corrosion in anaerobic situations.
By the way, this expert had an interesting idea. Take the 5 billion euro spent fuel budget and build a facility for half a billion instead which will definitely hold tight for 300-500 years instead of 100.000 years (like putting the canisters in an old mineshaft and filling it with clay). If the worst comes to worst you'll get some plutonium in the groundwater in 1000 years time and you'll have a very localised environmental problem, like we got in the Hallandsås tunnel ten years ago. Bad but not a huge deal.
Then the remaining 4.5 billion euros would be used to provide clean water to every single person on the planet (or as many as 4.5 billion will get you).
Politically impossble of course, but an interesting idea. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
But it is true that the sent fuel is first inserted into a cast iron capsule, which is then inserted into the copper canister. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
