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They say the best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to mix it with the concrete we use to build our elementary schools. 115,000 gallons is a very small amount
by SamReidHughes 11y ago
They say the best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to mix it with the concrete we use to build our elementary schools. 115,000 gallons is a very small amount of water. That's 40 ft x 40 ft x 10 ft of water. Mix that into the ocean and the pollutants will disperse widely. One cubic mile holds 1.1 trillion gallons.
- protomyth 11y agoYeah, that's not going to fly as a suggestion nor will the public listen to that whole "small amount". I can here the pundits now if that happened today. Sorry, too many movies and TV shows with nuclear as the bad guy. We need to get over it to replace current power generation, but someone is going to have to do one hell of a sales job.
- SamReidHughes 11y agoOh, my bad, I didn't realize the first-person pronoun could be given third-person usage.
- protomyth 11y agoNo, I meant I as in first person as in "I wish they never had built it and I would have traded one more ship to output the gases". Political pride tours seldom work. Well, I guess the Navy did pretty well for itself with them, just not the civilians.
- mikeash 11y ago"They" are idiots if they actually say that, and countering anti-nuclear hysteria with pro-nuclear hyperbole doesn't do us any favors.
- 7952 11y agoI am in favour of nuclear but some of the arguments you hear from advocates make my skin crawl. The caution people exercise over nuclear power is exactly what we should want for any activity that carries risk to health or the environment. Radioactive material is very dangerous, and fission is intrinsically difficult to control. We may be able to successfully deal with those risk, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that those risks don't exist just because physicists are so wonderfully clever. The problem is not lack of support for nuclear but tolerance for dirty and unsafe fossil fuels. We need to deal with that using nuclear or solar or whatever.
- mikeash 11y agoCare is certainly called for, but the way it's treated goes too far. Waste is a good example. People insist on perfect safety, and not just for today, but insist on storing waste so that in a hypothetical future 10,000 years from now when civilization has fallen and nobody knows what nuclear anything is, the waste is still safe. This is just not reasonable, and does more harm than good. The problem is that you get people who think you'll glow in the dark if you live near a perfectly functioning power plant, then you get people on the other side who say it's fine to drink plutonium, and both sets of crazies are louder than any reasonable discussion in the middle.
- Klinky 11y agoWhat is the benefit of nuclear if we are left with uncontainable highly toxic radioactive waste? There are already problems with handling waste at existing storage sties. Radioactive waste isn't a problem to be solved 10,000 years from now, it's already a problem. Even guaranteeing safe containment for 50 - 100 years seems like a difficult task, and that is not an outrageous demand for people to make.
- mikeash 11y agoHandling waste isn't that difficult of a problem. There are better reactor designs which use a lot of that waste as fuel, and what's left just needs to be sealed up real good and left to sit behind some good fences. Basically all of the real-world problems with handling nuclear waste are because anti-nuclear advocates prevent any action from being taken to handle waste, but meanwhile there are operating reactors producing waste and that hasn't stopped. So nuclear plant operators are forced into ad-hoc solutions for waste disposal because nobody will let them do it right.
- Klinky 11y agoYou're simply hand waiving away the problems. Even reprocessing creates waste that must be dealt with. Commercial fast/breeder reactors are always ten years away, and it has yet to be proven that they could even be economically viable.
- SamReidHughes 11y agoI'm not sure why you say "they" are idiots -- it's just a thing I heard once, and it's something you can calculate with a math problem. Maybe there's not enough new school construction anymore, and you'd have to dilute some of it into children's hospitals and stadiums.
- mikeash 11y agoI say that "they" are idiots, because no matter how benign it may be to mix nuclear waste into elementary school building materials, there is no conceivable rationale which could make it the best way.
- SamReidHughes 11y agoHere's a rationale: Low level radiation stimulates the immune system, which helps prevent cancer. Think of the children.
- mikeash 11y agoRadiation hormesis is at best highly speculative. And even if it were true, you'd still be far better off providing that stimulation in measured doses through some sort of medical intervention rather than some insane scheme where you screw with building materials. This scheme is indefensible, please don't try.
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- mikeash 11y agoYes, and I'm saying that the rhetorical point is stated extremely badly because it goes beyond merely saying that this scheme would be harmless, and says that this scheme is somehow the best way to dispose of waste. This is hyperbole, and my complaint is precisely that this sort of hyperbole is harmful to the cause of nuclear power.