4 ms·
This may seem counter-intuitive, but the longer the half-life of a given radioisotope, the less radioactive it actually is. In a given pile of nuclear waste, th
by babypuncher 2y ago
This may seem counter-intuitive, but the longer the half-life of a given radioisotope, the less radioactive it actually is. In a given pile of nuclear waste, the scariest stuff is also the first stuff to decay into something stable. It's why waste from power plants only needs to rest in the cooling pool for a few years before it is safe enough to transport to a long term storage facility.
- mcmoor 2y agoI don't feel it's counterintuitive. If we have a leaky cauldron, the bigger the hole, the faster it emptied and vice versa. Although we wouldn't know whether this big stream is because of a big hole or a big jug...
- pfdietz 2y agoAs an example: there is a very long lived radioisotope of iodine that occurs in fission products, iodine-129, with a half life of 15 million years. The radioactivity of this isotope is so low that, as I understand it, one could replace every iodine atom in your body with this isotope and you'd still be okay. This would imply it's fine to dispose of this isotope by just dissolving it into the ocean. The ocean's total iodine is about 10^11 tons, so a disposal rate of ~10^4 tons/year would eventually (in ~a half life) make the ocean's iodine mostly I-129 (conservatively, assuming no exchange of iodine is occurring between the ocean and external reservoirs of the element.) This production rate is what would obtain in a totally nuclear powered world at today's primary energy consumption rate.