2 ms·

Can we warn humans about nuclear waste in a million years’ time?

9 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

flywithdolp 7y ago
This title made me think: 1. Will our society live to warn the future humans? 2. What the hell we are doing to earth
jerome-jh 7y ago
No need to warn them, a Geiger counter is more than enough to detect nuclear waste. Spared reading one article.
- Kaibeezy 7y ago
  The article explains how waste may leak and contaminate water supplies or make its way up the food chain. Future humans or others may find these facilities and not comprehend our warnings. It may or may not be possible for everyone carry a radiation detector at all times.
  - jerome-jh 7y ago
    There are areas where natural radioactivity or chemicals just occur at dangerous levels. So it is certainly not a new problem to spot and avoid those areas. So in xx years: Either humans still have technology, and they can find out there is contamination with a Geiger counter or chemical analysis, and stay away as much as possible from the contaminated area. Either they lost technology/knowledge, and they will over time find out the place is unfit for life, through unborn babies, malformed animals/human, or other signs, just like the ancients did. In this case, our warning signs are of no help either, may actually be counter productive. I stand by the idea that's the kind of article that's not worth reading past the title.
    - Kaibeezy 7y ago
      I don't disagree with you. I think it's most interesting as an abstract semiotics puzzle. What information conveys extreme danger (whether emergency, acute or chronic) when the observer no longer shares our language, or even our species?
08-15 7y ago
This is all completely backwards. The dangerous fission products have half lives of around 30 years. If we consider them useless (they aren't), we can easily bury them. People will be able to read warning signs in 300 years, and rock formations stable for a few hundred years are easy to find. Or drop glass logs to the ocean floor; glass doesn't dissolve in a mere 300 years. What causes long term problems are the transuranics. These have half lives of a few thousand years, and produce heat. Over the long time scale, the rock won't conduct away enough of that heat, so the repository heats up, corrosion is accelerated, solubility enhanced, etc. But they don't belong into the the trash. Transuranics can be separated and burned in a reactor. After that, only weak beta emitters remain. I-129 is so weak, it probably wouldn't even cause problems if we used it to fortify table salt. (What to do about Tc-99 is a topic for another rant.) So why don't we recycle the waste? Because politicians, not engineers, decided that if some nations recycle, terrorists will use the extracted Pu to make an atomic bomb or something. It's illogical, but for the sake of argument: No, they won't. Reactor grade plutonium contains ~40% of Pu-240, which makes it useless for bombs. But while Pu-239 has a half life of 24000 years, that of Pu-240 is only 6500 years. If we left the Pu in the ground for, say, 15000 years, half of it will decay. But what remains is actually weapons grade, and no longer protected by the highly radioactive fission products. What if somebody dug that up and made a bomb from it? And now I'm looking at an article that lists ways to tell future generations how to find the plutonium mine.
- Kaibeezy 7y ago
  I'm trying to imagine a scenario where humans 15,000 years (or even 300 years) from now exist at a level of technology sufficient to dig up deeply buried plutonium and have it be worth the effort, for good or evil. With even that much tech, they'd surely have other tools easier to utilize. Might make an interesting nuke-fi story.
  - 08-15 7y ago
    You're not wrong. The point is that these anti-proliferation arguments are internally inconsistent. To be honest, I think the anti-proliferation concerns together with the ridiculous million year horizon were made up in order to have an argument against nuclear power.

9 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

flywithdolp 7y ago

This title made me think: 1. Will our society live to warn the future humans? 2. What the hell we are doing to earth

jerome-jh 7y ago

No need to warn them, a Geiger counter is more than enough to detect nuclear waste. Spared reading one article.

Kaibeezy 7y ago
The article explains how waste may leak and contaminate water supplies or make its way up the food chain. Future humans or others may find these facilities and not comprehend our warnings. It may or may not be possible for everyone carry a radiation detector at all times.
- jerome-jh 7y ago
  There are areas where natural radioactivity or chemicals just occur at dangerous levels. So it is certainly not a new problem to spot and avoid those areas. So in xx years: Either humans still have technology, and they can find out there is contamination with a Geiger counter or chemical analysis, and stay away as much as possible from the contaminated area. Either they lost technology/knowledge, and they will over time find out the place is unfit for life, through unborn babies, malformed animals/human, or other signs, just like the ancients did. In this case, our warning signs are of no help either, may actually be counter productive. I stand by the idea that's the kind of article that's not worth reading past the title.
  - Kaibeezy 7y ago
    I don't disagree with you. I think it's most interesting as an abstract semiotics puzzle. What information conveys extreme danger (whether emergency, acute or chronic) when the observer no longer shares our language, or even our species?

08-15 7y ago

This is all completely backwards. The dangerous fission products have half lives of around 30 years. If we consider them useless (they aren't), we can easily bury them. People will be able to read warning signs in 300 years, and rock formations stable for a few hundred years are easy to find. Or drop glass logs to the ocean floor; glass doesn't dissolve in a mere 300 years. What causes long term problems are the transuranics. These have half lives of a few thousand years, and produce heat. Over the long time scale, the rock won't conduct away enough of that heat, so the repository heats up, corrosion is accelerated, solubility enhanced, etc. But they don't belong into the the trash. Transuranics can be separated and burned in a reactor. After that, only weak beta emitters remain. I-129 is so weak, it probably wouldn't even cause problems if we used it to fortify table salt. (What to do about Tc-99 is a topic for another rant.) So why don't we recycle the waste? Because politicians, not engineers, decided that if some nations recycle, terrorists will use the extracted Pu to make an atomic bomb or something. It's illogical, but for the sake of argument: No, they won't. Reactor grade plutonium contains ~40% of Pu-240, which makes it useless for bombs. But while Pu-239 has a half life of 24000 years, that of Pu-240 is only 6500 years. If we left the Pu in the ground for, say, 15000 years, half of it will decay. But what remains is actually weapons grade, and no longer protected by the highly radioactive fission products. What if somebody dug that up and made a bomb from it? And now I'm looking at an article that lists ways to tell future generations how to find the plutonium mine.

Kaibeezy 7y ago
I'm trying to imagine a scenario where humans 15,000 years (or even 300 years) from now exist at a level of technology sufficient to dig up deeply buried plutonium and have it be worth the effort, for good or evil. With even that much tech, they'd surely have other tools easier to utilize. Might make an interesting nuke-fi story.
- 08-15 7y ago
  You're not wrong. The point is that these anti-proliferation arguments are internally inconsistent. To be honest, I think the anti-proliferation concerns together with the ridiculous million year horizon were made up in order to have an argument against nuclear power.