
Built for Eternity: The Hoover Dam - andyjohnson0
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/built-for-eternity
======
cperciva
_Radioactive waste from spent nuclear fuel has a shelf life of hundreds of
thousands of years. Maybe even more than a million, it’s not possible to
precisely predict._

The fact that a journalist can write such a thing demonstrates the level to
which public discourse about the sciences has sunk. We have very accurate
measurements of the half-lives and decay pathways of all the isotopes found in
non-trivial quantities in spent nuclear fuel, and it is indeed very possible
to predict the level of radioactivity at a given time in the future.

~~~
andyjohnson0
The only circumstances I can think of in which the decay of radioactive waste
might be unknown is in the case of mixed waste where the content or origin is
unknown or ambiguous. Some old waste material might fall into that category,
but I don't think that recent spent reactor fuel would.

~~~
arethuza
My understanding is that radioactive emissions are readily measurable so what
elements/isotopes are involved should be identifiable and therefore the rate
at which these will decay will be predictable - this could well be wrong!

One potential other risk is chemical instability of nuclear waste materials -
that has caused lots of problems e.g. the Kyshtym disaster:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster)

Edit: Modified the first part to make it clear that I should have been asking
a question rather than making a statement!

~~~
andyjohnson0
Is it possible to precisely identify the composition of a body of _mixed_
waste solely from its emissions? Wouldn't chemical analysis of a sample be
necessary?

~~~
VLM
1) Yes its extremely trivial, aside from shielding and non-homogenous and
screwing up issues.

2) Yes because for example glass is stable in acid and unstable in some alkali
so neutralizing the "stuff" before mixing it into glass bricks for all
eternity would be Highly advisable if you want the glass brick to be unchanged
for 100K years or 1M years or whatever. Aside from acid/base reactions with
the glass itself there are solubility situations where a simple reaction might
convert some radioactive salt that is highly soluble in water to something
that's essentially waterproof. Note that the glass for vitrification is not
exactly mere window glass, its some weird stuff, and adjusting its mix might
help depending on what you're trying to dissolve into it.

(edited to extend answer #2, most of the waste you put into a vitreous block
is not radioactive, you can't use the gear from answer #1 to tell what most of
it is made out of)

On a high level this overall discussion has gone off the rails because the
100K and 1M numerological numbers come from glass vitrification and stainless
steel corrosion theoretical studies; it has little to nothing to do with
radioactivity; you could vitrify coal ash or industrial waste or Atari 2600
game cartridges the same way for 1M years if you felt like it. Or at least
people think that storage tech will last 100Kyrs Of course radioactive waste
is harmless once it finished decaying whereas arsenic is forever so its kinda
pointless to try and stockpile industrial waste for 1Myrs whereas nuclear
waste is the only kind of waste that actually goes away with time.

No human has ever made an industrial artifact that's lasted 1M years so things
are kind of fuzzy at that kind of extrapolation.

~~~
DennisP
1) Is this because the emitted particles have different energies when they
come from different isotopes?

~~~
VLM
Yes. The resolution and dynamic range you can get with modern gear is pretty
impressive. Check out images.google.com with terms like "gamma spectrum". Also
different kinds of particles. Also you can zap things with neutrons (and other
things) and the reactions tend to be rather unique.

Given a large enough amount of money to outfit a lab, its very fast and easy
to tell whats inside an unshielded box. If its a thick enough shielded box,
exact minimal design probably classified, then you'll have to crack the box
open or stick a sensor in a hole.

Its trickling down to consumer level. Junkyards can now afford an x-ray zapper
than analyzes the exact metal alloy of scrap that comes in. Its interesting
that when I was a kid things like FLIRs and xray analyzers were very star
trek, but within my lifetime they're going to be nearly consumer goods. If you
thought police visual cameras and airport xray scanners were controversial,
wait until every podunk police dept has 500 FLIR cameras on lampposts and
every car that drives by is remotely analyzed for drug or gun or explosive
signatures all for your "safety".

------
geophile
I visited Hoover Dam a couple of years ago. The physical scale of the thing is
just astonishing. You can look at it from the top, from a bridge nearby, from
inside looking out and up, and it is just mind bogglingly big. Then there is
the audacity of what it does. It reroutes an entire river and moves the water
through these enormous turbines to generate power. Actually, the individual
turbines are surprisingly small considering what they do, (to me anyway). Sort
of the same magnitude as one of those stills in Islay that distill whisky.

But one of the most amazing things, neglected by the article, is this: The
project was done ahead of schedule and under budget. It went from concept to
working machine in a very short period of time. It seems to me that this was
peak capitalism, working exactly as it should. I cannot conceive of anything
so large today being built ahead of schedule and under budget. The parasites
at Bechtel and Halliburton and whoever else would get involved would find ways
to suck up time and money forever, and then the flaws would be discovered
after all the checks had been cashed.

~~~
snowwrestler
As they say, it was a simpler time. The dam builders hired unemployed workers,
paid them cheaply, and violently broke up any attempts at unionizing or
collective bargaining. Over 100 workers were killed during construction. There
was of course no environmental impact statement or review; to the contrary, it
was broadly taken for granted that it was man's destiny and duty to "improve
the land" through massive engineering projects.

~~~
geophile
Think about the same project being attempted now. Unemployment is now
officially pretty low, but I believe the numbers omit people who are
"underemployed", (e.g. part time when they would prefer full, no longer
looking for work). Pay would likely be very low, and unions have been pretty
much busted, so no more collective bargaining. Maybe fewer would die.
Environmental review would probably take place, but a large enough corporation
seems to be able to bully its way through anything. The main difference I see
is that corporations have become more expert at modifying the system to suit
their own interests.

And of course, this country is no longer capable of doing large projects (or
even basic maintenance) because congress is completely broken. How's that
highway trust fund coming along?

------
andyjohnson0
I posted this because I'm fascinated by the intersection of architecture and
long-term thinking. Example: the sculptures and terrazzo floor at the Hoover
Dam [1], the Long Now clock, the Georgia Guidestones [2], the design of the
Arctic seed vault [3]. When people design for the very long term they can
produce very interesting results.

The scale of the landscape described in the article seemed to match the depth
of time involved in the various projects.

[1]
[http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/brochures/wingedfigures.pd...](http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/brochures/wingedfigures.pdf)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault)

~~~
Asbostos
Communicating 10,000 years into the future is certainly a challenge but I just
realized that this idea of warning people of a radioactive waste dump is
surely not actually worth a huge effort. Being just one place, only a very
small number of people will be able to visit it up close where it's dangerous.
Isn't that about the same level of danger as the existence of poisonous
plants, carnivorous animals, high risk places for lightning strikes, drowning,
etc? And massively safer than disease, including genetic disease and
inbreeding. Perhaps the best solution is just to not bother warning anyone if
our society oneday forgets about it. If it affects enough people, they'll
figure out the connection to the site themselves.

~~~
andyjohnson0
_" not actually worth a huge effort"_

I think I'd argue that if we (human civilisation) are going to create a very
long term hazard such as a radioactive waste dump, then we have a moral
obligation to the people who it might one day endanger. Even if the number of
such people is small, I think we still have a duty to them. We had a choice to
build this thing, but they won't have a choice about living with it.

A cynical view is that the effort that went into the WIPP marker design was an
effort to pre-empt objections to it being built. Gregory Benford (a physicist
and science fiction author) was part of the design team, and he devoted part
of a book, _Deep Time_ [1], to his experience. Whatever the ultimate
motivation of the US DOE and others, it seems like the design team took the
ethical component of their task seriously.

[1]
[http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html](http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html)

~~~
VLM
> a very long term hazard such as a radioactive waste dump

That part is an oxymoron because radioactive waste decays.

If you really want to stack future archaeologist bodies like cordwood, think
of industrial waste, or coal plant fly ash waste, or mining waste. The half
life of cobalt-60 is about half a decade... in a million years that a pure
ingot would be "mostly harmless", because 1 over n to the 200000th means there
won't be much Co-60 left in that ingot... For a good laugh assume a 1 Kg ingot
how many years until the last atom decays? Sooner than you'd think. On the
other hand arsenic, cyanide, and organometallics are forever, in a billion
years you could crack open an industrial storage vat and kill everyone at an
archaeological dig. Assuming their biochemistry remains the same, and they're
not using drones to do the dig...

~~~
andyjohnson0
_" That part is an oxymoron because radioactive waste decays."_

Its a hazard until the waste decays. If the waste takes a long time to decay
then its a long-term hazard. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24k years, for
example. Other transuranic isotopes have half-lives measured in hundreds of
thousands, or even millions, of years.

I agree with you about industrial waste, though.

~~~
mikeash
Why does nobody get worked up about unknown civilizations 10,000 years in the
future stumbling across a chemical waste dump and getting killed by it? It's
very odd that all the emphasis is on nuclear, when nuclear waste dumps will be
a tiny fraction of the hazards created by current civilization.

~~~
slgeorge
I'm sure your Mother told you 'two wrongs don't make a right' as a child
though.

~~~
mikeash
And?

If one guy steals a hat, and another guy murders the storekeeper, it's
reasonable to ask why people are more upset about the hat than the murder, and
that does not in any way justify the hat.

------
onli
If you find the Hoover Dam and the region a little bit fascinating, play
Fallout: New Vegas. It plays a central role there, and the game is also one of
the best RPGs of the recent years, maybe the best.

------
vlehto
"That a 10,000 year storage solution was nowhere near long enough to inculcate
the Earth from the true shelf-life of the waste, which is realistically
thought to be dangerous for many times that length of time."

With some definition of "dangerous" sure. After just few hundred years, it's
only slightly more dangerous than naturally occurring uranium. The other
difference is that natural uranium is dispersed more and guarded less.

"Final disposal of high-level waste is delayed for 40-50 years to allow its
radioactivity to decay, after which less than one-thousandth of its initial
radioactivity remains, and it is much easier to handle. --- After being buried
for about 1000 years most of the radioactivity will have decayed. The amount
of radioactivity then remaining would be similar to that of the corresponding
amount of naturally-occurring uranium ore from which it originated, though it
would be more concentrated."

Source: [http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-
Cycle/Nuclear...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-
Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Waste-Management-Overview/)

~~~
mikeash
And as I always point out in these discussions, the long life of nuclear waste
isn't a problem, it's a bonus. We deal with chemical poisons all over the
place which _never decay_ , and yet we treat them with much less care than
nuclear waste.

Somehow, for some reason I can't fathom, people get much more worked up about
"this waste will remain dangerous for 10,000 years" than "this waste will
remain dangerous until the heat death of the universe."

------
andyjohnson0
A few links about the WIPP marker design project:

 _Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant_. Sandia National Laboratories report SAND92-1382
/ UC-721. [http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-
control.cgi/1992/92138...](http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-
control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf)

 _Ten Thousand Years of Solitude? On Inadvertent Intrusion into the Waste
Isolation Pilot Project Repository_. Los Almos National Laboratory.
[http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Publ...](http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/22/064/22064107.pdf)

 _Designing for Deep Time: How Art History is Used to Mark Nuclear Waste_.
Kelli Anderson (MS Thesis), 2005.
[http://www.kellianderson.com/MSthesis.pdf](http://www.kellianderson.com/MSthesis.pdf)

