
Living with nuclear waste means remembering on a different scale - Hooke
http://reallifemag.com/clearings/
======
mikeash
Why does nuclear waste require remembering on a different scale because it
lasts for 100,000 years, but chemical waste which lasts literally _forever_
does not?

It seems like a long but definite timespan leaves open the possibility of a
solution so people see a goal to strive for. Mercury and arsenic and a million
other things have to solution so we just dump them into the atmosphere or
whatever.

~~~
pmorici
Made me wonder what people think about the naturally occurring radioactive
sites in nature.

~~~
mikeash
I don't think there are any naturally occurring sites whose radioactivity
comes anywhere close to that of high-level nuclear waste.

~~~
johncolanduoni
Radon leaking into buildings has killed many orders of magnitude more people
than nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons combined, no matter how liberal
your estimates.

~~~
mikeash
That's only because radon is way more common.

~~~
pmorici
That's kind of the point.

~~~
mikeash
I don't get the point. It's quite reasonable to treat a pervasive, small risk
differently from a rare, large risk. You're far more likely to die from
sunlight than from botulism, but we treat the latter far more carefully.
That's only to be expected, since the risk _from exposure_ is far higher for
botulism.

What I'm pointing out is different behavior when dealing with substances that
have similar risks. If I had a basement, I'd much prefer to have naturally
occurring radon in it than either high-level nuclear waste or toxic chemical
waste, if somehow that was my choice.

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DennisP
It depends on the waste. The long-term waste is mostly plutonium and other
transuranics; fast reactors can use that as fuel. The remaining collection of
fission products goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore in two or
three centuries.

Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation, and various companies
are working on their own designs.

~~~
justinator
I guess it's not that simple. Say you have a factory that made Plutonium
triggers and that same factory was pretty awful at following safety and
containment protocol. Now that Plutonium is in very low levels within the
actual soil of where the now decommissioned plant resides. Do you mine that
soil for the Plutonium, or do you make all that soil nuclear waste?

In Colorado, we've decided to open up the area as a Wildlife Refuge.

[http://e360.yale.edu/features/rocky_flats_wildlife_refuge_co...](http://e360.yale.edu/features/rocky_flats_wildlife_refuge_confronts_radioactive_past)

~~~
DennisP
Plutonium triggers have nothing to do with nuclear power. The nuclear _bomb_
industry has a horrific environmental record, which isn't surprising
considering what they were building.

If the plutonium is valuable fuel instead of waste, then a commercial
operation has a good incentive to hold on to it, even aside from the
regulations that commercial power has to deal with.

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wolfram74
One should also consider the possibility that if we fall back to the point
where we can't reason about radioactivity cholera and dysentery will likely
bounce back to the leading causes of human death.

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roenxi
This idea of needing to protect nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is absurdist.
Over this timescale there are threats that are just more dangerous [1]. What
about conventional war over scare energy? That is a real threat.

And this argument is assuming that the next 100 years have absolutely no
advances to a science that didn't exist 150 years ago. I find that unlikely.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk)

------
coin
Already been solved, it's safer than than other forms of power generation
[http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html](http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html)

~~~
alphydan
It's solved just like poverty has been solved. There is enough food, energy
and shelter for the 7bn people.

It's just those pesky humans hoarding, cutting corners, cheating, fighting,
using more than their fair share, etc. Because nuclear lives inside of a
fallible society it requires additional safety considerations.

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ageofwant
I wish this bogus eye watering bullshit will just stop. I'm as big a fan of
dystopian future planet hell as the next guy, but it will not involve "nuclear
waste" in any shape or form. Nuclear war, sure, fallout yes. But waste, no.
There is no such thing as nuclear waste. If ever there was fake news, and a
dead horse whipped to the bone....

~~~
gumby
Care to expand? I am not convinced of planetary-scale ecosystem restructuring
due to nuclear waste, but certainly leaks of such waste could poison large
areas for quite some time.

(I prefer to call it ecosystem "restructuring" rather than "destruction"
because clearly under almost every possible scenario _some_ organisms would
prosper. The term "destruction" only makes sense if you suppors a selfish view
that the ecosystem is designed to be congenial to humans, and anything else is
"wrong". It is interesting to speculate if the sentient cockroaches of 100
megayears hence would detect any traces of us).

~~~
ageofwant
Because that 'waste' is fuel for 4th generation breeder reactors and will be
used as such. The result of that process is low grade waste that you can dump
a meter of topsoil on and build a park or kindergarten on top of. Guarapari
beach is more radioactive. There is no such thing as nuclear waste.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
Maybe you should talk to some actual nuclear engineers and not just read
starry eyed proposals. The engineering tasks of building and maintainig said
reactors plus digging up the waste and shipping it there is tremendous.
Especially sodium cooled proposals get the most face palms from people who
actually work in the field. "There's a reason psysicists don't design reactors
but engineers do" is a quote I remember from the last time I met a nuclear
engineer and discussed transmutation proposals.

Bottom line: Nothing is solved and it will take decades to get to a design
that consumes new waste, let alone old waste that is currently rotting under
ground and is ever harder to get to.

~~~
DennisP
Russia seems pretty happy with their sodium-cooled reactors, they have two in
commercial operation and are building more.

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GuB-42
Are nuclear waste that toxic for that long?

The longer lived an element is, the less radioactive it is, so if some
radioactive waste can last for 100000 years, it must be radiating very weakly.
You probably could have a barrel of it under your bed and live your life
normally, although with a slightly increased risk of cancer.

And finding ways of preventing future generation from digging is thinking
little of humanity. That's assuming we won't be able to detect radiation in
the future. In fact, this "waste" may prove very valuable.

~~~
kmm
That's the trouble with radioactive isotopes. A hundred thousand years is long
enough that it will be radioactive for longer than we can foresee, many times
longer than written history, but it's short enough that it's still very
active. Even a gram will have billions of decays per second. And while our
body is of course capable of repairing a small amount of DNA damage, evolution
never prepared us for a continuous bombardement by the subatomic equivalent of
a machine gun.

Pu-239 [0] has a half-life of 24k years, and is considered dangerously
radioactive.

Of course, this only applies when we're talking about large quantities, like
radioactive waste. I have had a bone scintigraphy done, which means I probably
have a fraction of a gram of Tc-99 with a half life of 211k years embedded in
my bones, which is unlikely to be an issue. But I wouldn't want to store a
decent chunk of that under my bed. I would, however, have no qualms about
sleeping with uranium 238, an alpha-emitter that lasts many billion years.

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards)

~~~
thingification
Why are we talking about 100,000 years, when all we know with any confidence
is that things will be so different in 100 that it is impossible to predict
most of the problems that will face us then?

In fact I have trouble imagining a future where people still exist, but this
problem is not solved or obviated well before 100,000 years from now -- in
fact before 100.

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ComputerGuru
It's a solved problem, just with a solution too expensive to be adopted: send
them on a one-way trip to the sun, BSG-style.

~~~
simcop2387
I'd actually rather dump them in the moon somewhere. Then if the material
turns out useful you could recover it. Otherwise you can use the heat as part
of an rtg type system to power a colony or station on the moon.

------
ajdlinux
Related -
[http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...](http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm)

~~~
beefman

      This place is not a place of honor.
      No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
      Nothing valued is here.
      This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
      Pay attention to it!
      Sending this message was important to us.
      We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
    

Hard to imagine a circumstance in which such a statement is not a lie. In this
case it's a real doozy; plutonium is the most valuable substance on Earth.

On the other hand, maybe such a confused people do not deserve it.

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thingification
It's hard to think of a worse plan for spent nuclear fuel than burying it in
an inaccessible location.

There is no such problem as maintaining nuclear waste for 100,000 years. In
reality, events will overtake our plans long before then. For example:

* inevitable flaws in the design of the burial system may cause leakage that burial will likely make more expensive to correct than leaving the waste where it is

* we will want to burn up the spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors (which actually removes the problem, and simultaneously creates wealth)

* we will find ways to clean up leaks and spills

* we will find ways to prevent and cure diseases caused by radioactivity

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gumby
What, and no mention of Anathem?

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CamperBob2
Put it in Antarctica. Problem solved.

Or we can keep digging up fossil fuels and burning them, in which case there
won't _be_ an Antarctica at some point.

~~~
johncolanduoni
What are fossil fuels going to do to the land mass? It has the highest
elevation on earth.

~~~
CamperBob2
That might be true in a technical sense, I suppose, although I thought Everest
was the highest point on Earth. I can't find any references regarding
Antarctica having the highest land elevation; any pointers?

And I'm sure it won't _all_ melt.

But if we want to preserve the continent's desirable property of complete
inaccessibility to non-technologically literate humans for the next 10,000 or
more years, it would be worth considering the effects of ACC. Right now it's a
good place to store nuke waste for that very reason.

~~~
undersuit
>I can't find any references regarding Antarctica having the highest land
elevation; any pointers?

Wikipedia says Antarctica "has the highest average elevation of all the
continents", but right now a lot of it is ice. East Antarctica is supposed to
be covered with so much ice that a large majority of the land has been
compressed below sea level(CTRL+F the wikipedia article for 'isostatic
rebound' and view the pictures).

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

