
Can we warn humans about nuclear waste in a million years’ time? - Kaibeezy
https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/long-reads/nuclear-power-plant-radioactive-waste-chemical-weapons-disposal-a9103776.html
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08-15
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
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
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.

~~~
Kaibeezy
As I replied to the other commenter, it's most interesting as a semiotics
puzzle. We agree, OMG!nuclear is more of a distraction.

------
flywithdolp
This title made me think:

1\. Will our society live to warn the future humans?

2\. What the hell we are doing to earth

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

~~~
Kaibeezy
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
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
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?

