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Where do you stow those barrels safely? Permanent storage of nuclear waste is a tricky situation. You essentially need a very geologically inactive area away fr
by moftz 7y ago
Where 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