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One thing to remember about nuclear waste, or radioactive material in general, is that the high-level waste has the shortest half-life, and the longer half-life
by spfzero 4y ago
One thing to remember about nuclear waste, or radioactive material in general, is that the high-level waste has the shortest half-life, and the longer half-life waste is low-level radioactive.
With waste with a half-life of 10,000 years for example, each 2 atoms will on average emit one particle or photon in that time. Many generations of people could eat or drink those atoms safely. You could live your life next to a pile of it, and get very little radiation over your lifetime from long half-life radioactive atoms.
The long term storage of this waste is a concern, for sure. But it is a concern for the far future, and we can delay addressing it for decades with impunity (which we have been doing, actually). But we are facing a climate emergency that must be addressed right now. Nuclear waste is the least of our worries at the moment.
- schoen 4y agoI appreciate your overall point, but it's probably also worth considering the concentration or dilution of that waste. When you mention eating or drinking the atoms, or living next to a pile of them, the radiation dose will obviously depend both on the atoms' half-lives and on the overall number of atoms. There's an extra Avogadro factor of around 23 orders of magnitude when going between atoms and grams, so those atoms really add up -- if they are highly pure and concentrated, at least.
- amelius 4y agoOk, but you could dilute the waste to make this problem go away (which sort of happens automatically if the waste is not contained).