
One Million Years of Isolation - kqr2
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/million-years-of-isolation-interview.html
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asciilifeform
The purpose of Yucca Mountain and similar facilities is _not_ to store nuclear
waste. Rather, they are built to _be expensive._

This sits well with those who profit directly from their construction, and
pleases environmentalists - who want nuclear power to be seen as
astronomically expensive. Breeder reactors and proper reprocessing could
eliminate the need to store _anything_ longer than about one hundred years,
and yet they are forbidden. Why do you suppose that is?

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anonjon
I think you are on to something.

No one in the nuclear industry thinks Yucca Mountain is anything but an
idiotic boondoggle.

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dhyasama
I love this blog. To use the author's words, it is about architectural
conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures. It's an incredibly fun
series of thought experiments. Geoff is certainly one of the more creative
people I've come across. I recently pared my RSS reader down to four feeds.
This is one of them.

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stilist
I’m certainly in favor of building for larger timescales, but I have enough
trouble believing the Long Now Foundation’s projects will last beyond a dozen
generations (though I’d certainly like them to). Building something that could
last a million years is something I can’t really comprehend.

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sp332
That's kind of the point of the Long Now foundation. The point isn't building
clocks, the point is that _by_ building a clock which has a real chance of
operating on such a timescale, you put yourself into a frame of mind where you
start accounting for effects of your actions far into the future. The idea is
to get you really, seriously thinking about how you are changing the world
over the next million years.

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stilist
Oh, sure. Like I said, I’m in favor of the the mindset—but Yucca Mountain less
intellectual-idealism than Long Now, and if it’s improbable that a clock will
last maybe ten thousand years, what are the odds a nuclear coffin will survive
a million? I just don’t think it’s something even the (no doubt) highly-
skilled engineers on the project can truly grasp.

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thras
So stupid. We don't worry about this with dangerous chemicals, and those
_don't have_ a half-life. They'll stay deadly forever.

There is no need to treat nuclear waste massively differently than other kinds
of waste. There are some special considerations, but it's not so dangerous as
to require the vast storage expenditures being talked about.

This problem is endemic in the whole nuclear industry. People don't make
rational risk/cost assessments when it comes to nuclear power. They don't even
make _irrational_ risk/cost assessments. The locals where I live are deadly
afraid of a local air force base's small reactor. But nary a worry about the
actual nuclear weapons they have that could (potentially) devastate the entire
area.

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chadgeidel
I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that these timescales won't even
matter. We will be digging up this "waste" in a few years to recycle it
anyway. I guess fissile material is pretty rare.

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sketerpot
Not that rare, if you use it efficiently and don't do anything ridiculous like
throwing away perfectly good nuclear "waste".

