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There is no solution to deal with the life killing waste of nuclear power plants.
by Asmod4n 5y ago
There is no solution to deal with the life killing waste of nuclear power plants.
- thecopy 5y agoDrill a 5km deep hole, drop it in there.
- Asmod4n 5y agoYou can’t predict if that hole will be there for the trillions of years it’s toxic.
- throwaway894345 5y ago> You can’t predict if that hole will be there for the trillions of years it’s toxic. Trillions of years is the wrong timescale. The earth is only a few billion years old, and anyway the nuclear waste won't be radiotoxic in 1-10 thousand years much less 1 trillion. I'm pretty sure the Earth won't be habitable (as we understand 'habitable', anyway) in 1 trillion years. Anyway, climate change poses an existential threat in decades or centuries.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Asmod4n 5y agowhile uranium isn't that toxic compared to the other stuff it has a half-life of 4 billions years. And while the earth has long forgotten about humans other species will still be endangered by it.
- qwytw 5y agoStill infinitely preferable (even if the number was accurate) to poisoning earth's current inhabitants by burning coal .
- wins32767 5y agoHalf-life and danger from the emitted radiation are inversely correlated. Decay is the thing that emits radiation, so if that takes forever, it's not emitting much per second.
- throwaway894345 5y agoThe half-life isn't the relevant metric--you don't need the radioactivity to decay to zero (you're exposed to non-zero levels of radiation just walking around outside). You need it decay to environmentally tolerable levels (roughly "the level of uranium ore"). Anyway, far more species are far more endangered by climate change right now than any future species will be by nuclear waste.
- reddog 5y agoSo your worried about how uranium will effect the Morlocks and the Elois? Isn't uranium a naturally occuring element that already exists underground all over the globe and has for billions of years?
- panzagl 5y agoUhh, you know there's already uranium under the ground, right?
- Lammy 5y ago"Kazakhstan number one exporter of Po̶t̶a̶s̶s̶i̶u̶m̶Uranium. All other countries have inferior Po̶t̶a̶s̶s̶i̶u̶m̶Uranium" https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/kazakhstan.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoIt's much less. According to [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System#Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the... and from there on under The Sun and planetary environments we're toast in about 600 million years. Shrug
- jl6 5y agoIMHO it would be better to store nuclear waste in well guarded sheds. There isn’t that much of it (less than a million tons; a few football fields worth of sheds), and accessible above-ground storage means you can easily monitor it and maintain its container over time. Who knows what will happen 5km down, out of sight?
- thecopy 5y agoRelying on society is too risky. Drop them in a bore hole, fill it up again. Done.
- jl6 5y agoI do worry about bad guys digging it back up again. The search for waste storage that lasts forever feels like the search for data storage that last forever. In the latter case, no storage medium is reliable enough in the long run, and the better strategy is continuous active management, moving from one storage medium to another as technology evolves and as old media expire.
- throwaway894345 5y agoA bad guy that can dig a 5km hole can probably just as easily refine his own Uranium or steal someone else’s. If you really want, secure the hole like you would secure whatever above-ground facility you would otherwise store it in.
- shakow 5y agoOf course there is; actually dangerous materials are produced to the rate of a few cubic meters a year: just sink them in lead and concrete and put them at the bottom of a mine shaft. Compared to the result of having billions over billions of over wastes in the atmosphere, I can't even understand how people pretend it's not a no-brainer question.
- mschuster91 5y ago> just sink them in lead and concrete and put them at the bottom of a mine shaft. That is, frankly, moronic. All you will end up with is your groundwater leeching out the waste. We have exactly this problem in Gorleben, and now have to spend a boatload of money in recovering all the waste from the former mine.
- eropple 5y agoThis is an important thing, IMO - aquifers go a lot deeper into the Earth than maybe most folks realize.
- throwaway894345 5y agoYes, the parent was being overly simplistic. You have to be choosey about where you put your waste, but experts currently recommend deep geologic repository as the safest solution. In whichever case, the salient point is that however you manage the waste it's still far less harmful than spewing co2 into the atmosphere. Radiation only seems scarier because it is much more direct.
- quickthrowman 5y agoPut it deep enough in bedrock where there is no groundwater, like the Finns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... There is still the issue of how to communicate “Danger: Nuclear Waste” to the people who will encounter the waste storage facility over the next 10,000-100,000 years, but for now we can safely store waste.
- 5y ago
- eropple 5y agoDepends on where you are. How deep a shaft can you reliably bore into the Canadian Shield or the Scandes? I'm very pro-renewables, but nuclear power's problems are organizational rather than waste-related, at least in much of the developed world.
- Bayart 5y agoPut it in a place where there's no life, seismic stability and no ground water. Which is what we're doing. Nuclear waste is remarkably dense and containable, far more than any other kind of power-generation byproduct.
- Asmod4n 5y agoYou don't know if that place on earth will still be there or in the middle of an ocean in the time the waste is till toxic. We have solutions right now to get rid of coal, atom etc completely in a couple of years, new inventions take too much time to be ready for the market when we need them by 2030.
- qwytw 5y agoMaybe you don't, but I would expect the people designing the sites know the half life of the materials they are storing. Plutonium-239 for example has a halflife of 24,000 years which is not that much in geological terms..
- Asmod4n 5y agoDo you honestly belive we can build something to keep radioactive and toxic stuff sealed for tenthousand years? By the time it's still bad for carbon based lifeforms it's as old as todays archaeology!
- qwytw 5y agoSure why not, the great pyramid is close to 5000 years old, I'm sure with modern knowledge humans can build something that will last much longer. In any case the damage it can do is fairly limited compared to burning coal.
- throwaway894345 5y agoIt doesn’t need to be perfectly safe to be the correct choice, it only needs to be safer than fossil fuels, which is really, really easy to achieve. We’re fussing over the absolute safest way to store it, but even managing it as we have been has proven to be far, far, far safer than fossil fuel.