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I agree with you that this is a serious issue and deserves a lot more attention than it gets. One of the reasons why market capitalism works in many (not all)

I agree with you that this is a serious issue and deserves a lot more attention than it gets. One of the reasons why market capitalism works in many (not all) cases is that it produces relative excellence (in pricing, new product discovery, and sometimes allocation of resources) out of mediocrity. Firms and most people are mediocre agents with mediocre aims, mediocre ethics, and mediocre execution and reliability. Yet, through "magic", we get a system that excels in comparison to any planned economy. When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant. I don't know that there are easy answers, though. We can't fully trust private companies, but governments are only marginally better (and that's because of superior attention to incentives and checks-and-balances in political infrastructure; it took hundreds of years and many wars to get that). We need energy, and we need it with near-100% reliability even though we cannot trust fully any of the agents providing it, and even though we're not fully aware of the black swan risks (tasteless Deepwater Horizon pun here) that come with any endeavor that affects the earth so much as energy production.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant. The "radioactive for a long time" thing is really hopelessly misunderstood. The unique thing about producing something which is dangerous for a long time is not that it stays dangerous, it's that it ever stops being dangerous. You mine "coal" and you unearth ore that contains elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, antimony, selenium and thallium. The same goes for most mining operations. You want your rare earth metals for your wind turbines and hybrid batteries, same deal. Geological deposits are rarely elementally pure. That is some awful stuff, and it never decays. It sticks around until the end of time. So if you're worried about the future, worry more about "until the end of time" than "for thousands of years." But let's keep talking about nuclear. Where does 10,000 years come from? What you're referring to is the half life of Plutonium-239 at ~24,000 years. Pu-239 is weapons grade. The problem with it is very much not that we don't know what to do with it. The problem is we do know what to do with it. But you can't stop Iran from getting the bomb by not building new reactors in Virginia. Moreover, if you have no desire to blow up a city you can mix Pu-239 with Pu-240 which makes it useless for bombs but great for reactor fuel, and using it as reactor fuel destroys it in a lot fewer than 24,000 years. The other byproducts with multi-thousand year half lives are the same thing -- reactor fuel. Isotopes of Uranium and Thorium. They're actinides which are either fissile or can reasonably be converted to fissile isotopes. If you like irrationally scary numbers, Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 BILLION years. The thing is, Th-232 isn't produced by reactors, it's the most common isotope found in the ground. It's fuel, not waste. And it's not even very radioactive -- the longer the half life of an isotope, the more stable it is and the less radioactive it is. The most problematic components of "nuclear waste" are isotopes of Strontium and Cesium that have half lives of a few decades and are things you very much do not want to get into the soil or the water. But that is no different than any of the variety of poisonous and toxic chemicals we deal with on an industrial scale every day. And they have significant commercial value as radiation sources e.g. in nuclear medicine. You do have to be careful in handling and storing them, but how is that different than any other sensitive industrial use chemicals other than OMG NUKULAR?
- ScotterC 14y ago
  Thank you.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago

>When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant. The "radioactive for a long time" thing is really hopelessly misunderstood. The unique thing about producing something which is dangerous for a long time is not that it stays dangerous, it's that it ever stops being dangerous. You mine "coal" and you unearth ore that contains elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, antimony, selenium and thallium. The same goes for most mining operations. You want your rare earth metals for your wind turbines and hybrid batteries, same deal. Geological deposits are rarely elementally pure. That is some awful stuff, and it never decays. It sticks around until the end of time. So if you're worried about the future, worry more about "until the end of time" than "for thousands of years." But let's keep talking about nuclear. Where does 10,000 years come from? What you're referring to is the half life of Plutonium-239 at ~24,000 years. Pu-239 is weapons grade. The problem with it is very much not that we don't know what to do with it. The problem is we do know what to do with it. But you can't stop Iran from getting the bomb by not building new reactors in Virginia. Moreover, if you have no desire to blow up a city you can mix Pu-239 with Pu-240 which makes it useless for bombs but great for reactor fuel, and using it as reactor fuel destroys it in a lot fewer than 24,000 years. The other byproducts with multi-thousand year half lives are the same thing -- reactor fuel. Isotopes of Uranium and Thorium. They're actinides which are either fissile or can reasonably be converted to fissile isotopes. If you like irrationally scary numbers, Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 BILLION years. The thing is, Th-232 isn't produced by reactors, it's the most common isotope found in the ground. It's fuel, not waste. And it's not even very radioactive -- the longer the half life of an isotope, the more stable it is and the less radioactive it is. The most problematic components of "nuclear waste" are isotopes of Strontium and Cesium that have half lives of a few decades and are things you very much do not want to get into the soil or the water. But that is no different than any of the variety of poisonous and toxic chemicals we deal with on an industrial scale every day. And they have significant commercial value as radiation sources e.g. in nuclear medicine. You do have to be careful in handling and storing them, but how is that different than any other sensitive industrial use chemicals other than OMG NUKULAR?

ScotterC 14y ago
Thank you.