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France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste
- pkaye 7y agoCan't they not put some of the waste into containment barrels and stow them somewhere?
- moftz 7y agoWhere do you stow those barrels safely? Permanent storage of nuclear waste is a tricky situation. You essentially need a very geologically inactive area away from people but can also be properly secured against thieves.
- madamelic 7y ago>You essentially need a very geologically inactive area away from people but can also be properly secured against thieves. Not to mention the need for extremely long-term solutions on the scale of 10,000 years. You can't rely on any current civilization or language still existing. So you have to properly communicate "Don't go in here or mess with anything, this is dangerous" without words. And that's after figuring out the above problem of the actual storage facility.
- EpicEng 7y ago>So you have to properly communicate "Don't go in here or mess with anything, this is dangerous" without words. That's a solved problem already. Skull and crossbones, etc.
- madamelic 7y agoIs it? Skull and crossbones is a cultural symbol. Would we understand cultural symbols of humanoids from 10,000 years ago? Even having past civilizations being storytellers causes the story and culture to mutate over generations. You are talking about a 100 generation game of telephone to make sure one particular symbol is passed down with perfect recall. --- Personally the best solution in my opinion is bury it deep down in a chamber that can withstand the time needed, leave signs on the outsides of the container. Then forget about it. Don't bother marking it visibly on the surface level.
- EpicEng 7y agoWill, you're right; "solved problem" was too strong a term for a complicated issue. What I meant to get across is that a lot of thought has gone into this already.
- Godel_unicode 7y agoThere are pirate groups which use skull and crossbones as a symbol that valuable things are located there. Iconography across cultures is a fractally hard problem, as you just demonstrated.
- EpicEng 7y agoYes, I'm sure that when people run across these[1] they're going to think "pirate booty!" [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol
- rtkwe 7y agoThe problem is over 10k years and with the idea of a civilization collapse being part of your in scope posisble events you can assume nothing about the cultural link between us and them. That symbol means danger to us because it's been the sign for danger for a long time, subtract that and it could be markers for graves maybe a good place to look for resources or treasure like has been done to so many ancient tombs.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThey might think "sweet, an old graveyard, wonder if they buried their dead with valuables" though.
- maxerickson 7y agoThe Jolly Roger? Arrrrg, don't be riskin' yur life inna therr!
- froindt 7y agoThere's a really interesting 99% Invisible episode about this very topic. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/beyond-biohazard-danger-symbols-cant-last-forever/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/beyond-biohazard-dang...
- mrob 7y agoHypothetical communications problems could potentially kill thousands of our distant descendants. The status quo could potentially kill billions. I don't think care for future humans is a good reason to avoid nuclear power.
- slenk 7y agoLikewise, if we don't curb our reliance on fossil fuels, there won't be future humans to think about
- madamelic 7y ago>I don't think care for future humans is a good reason to avoid nuclear power. Oh definitely not, just a consideration that's needed. The bigger issue is that there is no current long-term storage solution. The communication bit is long-long-term thinking while storage of material is current need. There is a long-term storage facility in Norway, I believe, that is being built or has been built.
- manfredo 7y agoThese hypothetical concerns ten thousand years into the future are absurd. The waste is buried hundreds of meters below ground, far from any useful resources. There is no warning signs or communications, the disposal sites are just made to be as nondescript as possible. Or the sites are in places already contaminated by nuclear weapons testing, so the concern of contamination is largely moot. So are we really going to block effectively unlimited non-intermittent carbon-free energy based on the concern that some future civilization might decide to dig deep in a remote location with no natural resources, and they might encounter a waste casket, and they might decide to open it. And they might do all of this without any knowledge of radiation poising. Yes, if all of those conditions are met, some poor sap thousands of years from now is going to get irradiated. I'm going to weight the positives of nuclear power way higher than the narrow chances of people being contaminated by waste. There are valid concerns over safety and costs of decommissioning, but those are limited to the operation of the plant itself and the disposal of the reactor (the pressure vessel). The waste management argument is very weak.
- wtetzner 7y agoFling them into space I guess... ;)
- cftorres 7y agoIt wouldn't be nice if in an human exploration on outer space we find a container full of unknown harmful waste from another civilization. That shouldn't be our first option.
- madamelic 7y agoNot to mention the really bad problem if a rocket carrying the waste exploded. You've basically made the problem 10,000x worse.
- johnr2 7y ago> It wouldn't be nice if in an human exploration on outer space we find a container full of unknown harmful waste from another civilization. The unshielded fusion reactor which we orbit around is likely to be a bigger problem.
- derivagral 7y agoThe risk here is that the rocket explodes and spreads the stuff far and wide.
- stunt 7y agoThere is a chance that it will fly back to earth. Not to mention there is also the risk of explosion during the launch. And also it’s not scaleable and super expensive.
- arkh 7y agoThe Mariana Trench is better: 10 km of water then it's a subduction area so it'll end in the Earth mantle.
- Accujack 7y agoLots of places fit the bill, it's just that NIMBY folks tend to be everywhere. Provided the waste isn't liquid and won't migrate off site, it's fairly easy to contain. Much of the really bad waste that we have to deal with in the present is not the result of power generation reactors, it's the result of nuclear weapons production. Unfortunately, most people since the 1970s are incapable of distinguishing between peaceful reactors and nuclear weapons, so there's an incredible amount of fear involved.
- pkaye 7y agoHow does France stow all the radioactive waste from their nuclear reactors?
- ceejayoz 7y agoThus far, they don't. It's all in temporary storage awaiting a permanent solution. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26425674 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26425674 > Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository.
- yummypaint 7y agoThis is where people let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Even temporary storage suitable for 200 years or so would be vastly preferable to how most waste is stored now. There may actually be some organizational advantages to having to regularly revisit and reshuffle stuff intended to be stored long term.
- manfredo 7y agoIt's not tricky. There are already disposal sites that have enough capacity to accommodate nuclear waste for centuries. Spent nuclear fuel is given time to cool off under a pool of water. After that, it is encased in a concrete cylinder. These cylinders are then buried. The main concern for the burial site is that it isn't close to an aquifer, in case the cylinders degrade and leak fuel. Geologic activity is not a concern for the waste itself (but it could damage entrance tunnels for the digs), in fact some groups are experimenting with using subduction zones to make waste get sucked out of the earth's crust. Thieves are not a concern either. The waste caskets are huge concrete cylinders buried underground. One might as well mine uranium. Or just buy it commercially. Reprocessing the waste into weapons requires large centrifuges which are much harder to obtain than uranium itself. The hypothetical scenarios in which humans could be contaminated by buried nuclear waste are well into the realm of hyperbole. Sure, if someone dug hundreds of meters underground in a waste disposal site with no natural resources in the vicinity and broke open the storage caskets then yes, they will be exposed to radiation. There's no way that this would happen accidentally, at least short of even more outlandish scenarios that involve societal collapse, subsequent loss of all records describing nuclear waste disposal sites. Edit (HN won't let me respond): Let me phrase it better: the Yucca mountain dig has enough capacity at the moment to accommodate the waste that would be generated by nuclear power over the course of centuries. The waste itself will be stored for millennia (though much of it will likely be reprocessed if nuclear power becomes more popular). The point remains: nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem
- pizza234 7y ago> It's not tricky. There are already disposal sites that have enough capacity to accommodate nuclear waste for centuries. It's ironic how the "centuries" mentioned are in fact not enough (by a long shot) for 100% of the waste to decade. If the more accurate "millennia" was used, it would be unrealistic in a very obvious way (at least, to prudent engineers/managers) to talk about maintenance. --- Software project, 20 years after: "This project sucks. Nobody knows it. It's undocumented. There are bugs unfixed for years. There are no tools to work with it. We can't work on it without breaking something. It's a disaster." Nuclear waste disposal project, 10.000 years after: "EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY FINE". Sure. /sarcasm
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SiempreViernes 7y agoThey can, they just didn't do much about it until 2010, and it costs a lot.
- jcrawfordor 7y agoYes, and for many types of waste this is the process. However, it is an expensive and slow-going process, which means that even once started it takes quite a while to complete. For medium-grade radioactive waste landfills typical at research sites (landfills that contain things like transuranic/TRU contaminated materials, things like gloves/aprons/tools/containers used with uranium), the process is generally to excavate the landfill using equipment with air filtration (and using chemical binders and site containment to prevent radioactive fugitive dust), then loading the material into large gloveboxes where workers sort through it by hand to classify based on type of material and radioactivity levels to ensure that it is all safe for the intended storage strategy. It is then usually mixed with something to provide shock protection, binding, and contain any liquid seepage (famously often cat litter). The big problem is that acquiring equipment with operator protection for this kind of work, and building out a processing facility with gloveboxes, air filtration, and monitoring/sampling (which needs to be onsite since, prior to processing, none of the waste is considered safe for transport) is expensive and takes quite some time. Even then, since there is usually no perceived urgency, a relatively small facility will be built that will take many years to complete the job. The waste, once packaged, may be stored on-site or transferred to a short-term repository (often just a well-built warehouse where certified staff monitor for any trouble). Ultimately it should be transferred to a long-term repository where it should be safe for the indefinite future without expensive continuous monitoring, but for a variety of reasons, both technical and political, this doesn't yet happen on a large scale. This is, though, what is happening in New Mexico right now - various sites, but most notably Los Alamos National Laboratories, are excavating and processing their waste landfills, packaging the material, storing it temporarily on site in purpose-build facilities or transporting it to an off-site certified storage facilities (e.g. commercial operations near the New Mexico-Texas border), and ultimately transferring it to the WIPP geological repository. If you know anything about WIPP's rather rocky recent past, you will know that this process is still fraught with occasional problems and the industry has plenty more to learn about how to do it safely and efficiently.
- saalweachter 7y agoThis is complicated by the fact that Marie Curie's workshop is a historic site, and many of the contaminated items are things like notebooks and lab equipment that you don't want to just throw away, because Marie goddamn Curie used them.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago> says Yannick Rousselet, a Greenpeace campaign leader. Respectable publications should stop quoting Greenpeace. In my mind, Greenpeace is really close to anti-vaxxers through their opposition of nuclear power and especially GMO foods such as Golden Rice which would save thousands of children's lives every year. In regards to nuclear power, it it had not been for the stringent opposition to nuclear power over the years, a much larger percentage of our power generation would be carbon free. https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/golden-rice-attack-in-philippines-anti-gmo-activists-lie-about-protest-and-safety.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/golden-rice-attack-in-p...
- Despegar 7y agoGreenpeace was also responsible for getting Apple to remove harmful chemicals/materials from their products and supply chain. This slide in every keynote is thanks to Greenpeace's pressure: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PTzcvBp4KMjFaBymZ_M2__JaZ0Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9231077/apple_iphone_2017_20170912_12114.JPG https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PTzcvBp4KMjFaBymZ_M2__JaZ0Y=...
- option 7y agoI grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. A lot of what people see in the media about nuclear is fear mongering lies. The recent “documentaries” on this topic further delays any progress on fighting global warming.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoOpposition to carbon tax is the real blocker to rapid progress, more nuclear power ranks in the "nice to have" list.
- manfredo 7y agoOpposition to a carbon tax is much more down to earth. The people who will mostly be paying carbon taxes are rural people who rely on automobiles for transport, and need more energy to deliver power, plumbing, and goods over longer distances. There's a reason why urban people favor carbon taxes and the rest do not: the former won't be paying nearly as much. And since rural people tend to be poorer this makes a carbon tax highly regressive. Offering tax credits for reducing carbon emissions is fundamentally the same thing, but people oppose it because many times the people earnings these credits still use fossil fuels but are switching from coal to gas. Many oppose any development of fossil fuel power, even if it reduces emissions.
- goda90 7y agoIt's interesting that the lab is so radioactive and such, but it feels like this article's main goal is to increase anti-nuclear sentiment.
- oneepic 7y ago>But it’s brimming with radioactivity that will be a health threat for millennia Millennia is a stretch to say the least... I figure we'll have a solution long before then, as long as science is being done.
- mrob 7y agoMeanwhile, coal-burning plants are still pumping toxic heavy metals into the atmosphere (to say nothing of the CO2), which will be a health threat for eternity. But for some reason nobody mentions how long chemical waste lasts for.
- xenophonf 7y agoCoal generates appreciable amounts of radioactive waste as well: In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy... (As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... I'm not a huge proponent of nuclear power generation—I'd much rather we focus on renewables (especially solar) and storage technology—but if we're going to have radioactive pollution from power generation, I'd much rather it also be carbon neutral. That's ignoring coal's many other environmental deficiencies (mountaintop removal comes immediately to mind).
- logfromblammo 7y agoArticle seems long on fearmongering and short on objectively measured facts. > "But radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, and there are traces of a uranium isotope at the Curie annex with a half-life of 4.5 billion years." This is the extent of the numeric data. Probably from Wikipedia. There are traces of uranium isotope in the asphalt of your parking lot. > "A 1997 study concluded that pedestrians and residents of apartments just a few feet from the perimeter wall aren’t at risk of radiation poisoning, but officials say the place remains a hazard." In other words, the site is completely safe, as long as no one goes inside, kicks up dust, and breathes it in.
- iaw 7y agoWhat if there's a fire?
- logfromblammo 7y agoKeep the firefighters out. Let it burn. Evacuate a radius plus the downwind plume. Test for radiation before allowing people back in. What if the whole facility is broken down and packed into drums, and the truck shipping some of them overturns on the highway? The known flaw has a simple, well-known workaround. It's "don't do that". Attempting a fix has the potential to introduce additional unknown flaws. The fact that France is doing a site cleaning now is perhaps a testament to the dwindling size of their low-level nuclear waste site cleaning backlog? AFAIK, their Hague processing facility only uses half its capacity on waste from their ~95 energy reactors, and takes waste from other countries to pick up some of the slack. A cleanup like this can keep it operating without having to mothball excess capacity.
- wayne_skylar 7y agoMaybe this is a dumb question, but why can't nuclear waste be diluted? You get U-235 though enrichment of naturally occurring uranium. Why is there no way to reverse this process?
- ars 7y agoYou can dilute uranium that way. The issue is the radioactive material is all other place, not concentrated. You need to dilute cements and wood, and paper, and glass, and other materials the lab is made from.
- saalweachter 7y agoAlso, this is Marie Curie's workshop. I hope to god the goal of any remediation is in the service of conserving the site and the artifacts for their historical value. If Marie Curie's notebooks eventually end up encased in concrete somewhere "because they're contaminated"--
- ars 7y ago> If Marie Curie's notebooks eventually end up encased in concrete somewhere "because they're contaminated" They are in fact contaminated, so they are kept in lead lined boxes: https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2011/1107/Marie-Curie-Why-her-papers-are-still-radioactive https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2011/1107/Mari...
- SiempreViernes 7y agoWell, natural U-235 is pretty radioactive too. But I think it's mostly chemistry: you can dilute Uranium only in things like chlorine, and then you have lot of chlorine that you have to store instead. It makes more sense to just put it all in a deep hole, only it's hard to make a really stable hole things won't leak out of.
- ars 7y ago> There’s no lasting solution for the most dangerous refuse from the country’s 906 nuclear waste sites That is simply untrue. If you combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing with a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor you can burn up all the dangerous isotopes and safely use their energy. You only need to store it for around 100 years, after which the radioactivity is very low. It's an economics problem, not a physics one.
- mjevans 7y agoA political problem. The economics isn't even really an issue since it makes more sense logically on a long term investment schedule.
- pmdulaney 7y agoI dislike the practice of overselling historical figures because they happen to have been female or other downtrodden du jour, but this seems to be the opposite phenomenon. Why blame just Marie?
- eddyg 7y agoThe article seems full of FUD to me. Today, nuclear power plants are so much more advanced, safer and can even recycle their used nuclear fuel. See the PRISM[1] reactor, for example. [1] https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-power-plants-overview/prism1 https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-p...
- herogreen 7y agoNot 100% is recycled and some of the leftovers will be dangerous for thousands of years. It is 2019 and neither the U.S., the U.K., France nor Switzerland have started to dispose (= bury) their waste.
- DuskStar 7y agoAnd yet people don't freak out over dumping radioactive materials into the atmosphere, which is what coal power plants do.