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Building a Plutonium Memorial
edsonw writes: "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is giving $3,000 in prizes in a contest which will select the better ideas about how to
handling and storing plutonium.. In their words, "We're inviting artists, architects, and general visionaries to submit their artistic work for what we're calling the "Plutonium Memorial," a facility that would house the world's unwanted weapon plutonium. We see the memorial, were it actually ever to be built, as a grand and visible emblem reminding the world that short-sighted paths to power can lead to a big pile of problems"."
The long term success rate of human civilizations aren't terribly high. There's no guarantee that the U.S. will be around multiple millenia from now. There's no guarantee that English will still be the predominant language in the U.S.
;-)
Oh come on now. Don't be silly. Civilizations are destroyed by invading barbarians. Don't you remember your history lessons? Unless the Canadians suddenly start dressing in furry animal skins and fashioning weapons and spearheads out of dead moose carcasses I'm not going to worry that the United States is going to go away anytime soon. At worst everyone in the world will nuke each other and we'll live in some weird ass post-apocalyptic world like something out of "Waterworld" or "The Postman". Kevin Costner is such a visionary.
what else?
Why, you could of course use it as the world's largest hardware random number generator.
Preferably located deep in some desert, though.
Written and spoken language would change drastically over 10,000 years, how would we show the people of the future that this is a BAD building to enter?
Well, I'm no psychologist, but I can't imagine anything of the sort working. Look at how we dug into pyramids, despite them having the best barricades they could think up just a short few thousand years ago.
But furthermore, you're implying that people 10,000 years from now won't be able to detect radiation before it's too late. I would imagine that 10,000 years from now, detecting radiation won't be any more difficult than it is today. "Gee, I'm losing my hair. Hmmm." Hahaha.
What's your damage, Heather?
A pebble bed plutonium burner is safer and can burn several fuels, including plutonium.
Er.. hello? Stick it in a building? NO THANK YOU.
There's these things called "Fast Breeder Reactors". They have them in Canada. They convert Plutonium into less radioactive byproducts which are safer. They generate power.
Jeeeeez... it's like saying "Let's put all of the world's oil in a big vat in the middle of the Atlantic...".
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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> Well, I'm no psychologist, but I can't imagine anything of the sort working.
Agreed. The last thing you want is a "grand and visible emblem".
My solutions, in order of preference:
1) Use it in breeder reactors. Turn it into something less dangerous (shorter half-life) and get some energy out of it. Sticking this much energy in a hole in the ground is a waste.
2) Stick it (if you must waste it!) in a hole in the ground with the rest of the waste. Call the place Yucca Mountain. Guard the hell out of it while our civilization lasts, but place no big-ass warning signs designed to attract curiosity-seekers for the next 10,000 years.
If our descendants in the year 12,001 have at least our level of technology, they'll know it's bad juju by the time they get anywhere near it. (And they'll probably wonder why the hell we buried all this useful Pu-239 instead of using it to power our cities!!)
If our descendants have stone-age technology, they won't be able to dig through a mile of rock salt. No warning needed.
If our descendants have 19th-century technology, no matter how intimidating the warning, they'll dig their way in, the same way we dug our way into the Pyramids. "Look, the ancient Americans placed big ugly spikes and pictures of dying people all over this site to warn us off. Silly primitives."
(Or in the words of Zaphod Beeblebrox, "Great! We really must be onto something if they're trying to kill us!")
No warnings, no memorials, nothing that could interest a passer-by, be he a civilian or an archaeologist.
Better idea: A memorial (in the traditional sense) to those who died to bring us this technology. Your contributions will not be forgotten.
Interesting one of my friends found FOIA information about weapons grade Uranium that was missing, stolen, eaten, disappearing, $INSERT_FAVORITE_TERM_HERE, throughout the 1940's - 1980's. Along with those disappearances, many people were killed, and it was alleged that a) enough was gone for 30 potent weapons, b) some had gotten into the water supply for experimentation, etc.
Anyways for those who're interested check out MKUraniumcide
Want Root?
They don't want to build a memorial to the waste produced by coal plants, because there is about 5 million times as much of it, and it all seeps into the atmosphere anyway. That way, the public doesn't have to think coal waste is a problem.
It could be lined with the plutonium, as well as other unpleasant stuff, like, um, a bunch of NT servers for example.
Say, wait a minute, I know just the place we can use....
Actually, plutonium isn't nearly that deadly. The original article even mentions some doctoral nitwit who inhaled plutonium dust to make a point. I think he's nuts, but he's still alive, so I guess he wins the bet. The issue has been and continues to be the cost associated with success, and with failure. Lifting something out of Earth's gravity well costs a lot of energy (remember, we're not just talking space shuttle stuff here, since the shuttle never leaves orbit). On all of the moon shots, 99.99 percent of the material that left the launch pad, weight-wise, was fuel. Thus, lifting tons of plutonium out of orbit would require tens of thousands of tons of fuel to do the job (that's hundreds of Saturn-V rockets worth). Not only does this represent an awesome cost, but it's also an awesome risk, since if a single one of these space shots malfunctions it'll dump a big cloud of unpleasantness into the atmosphere. Since the removal of the material from our gravity well is the stopping point, nobody has ever bothered to address where it should go once it's up there.
Virg
>radiation level as uranium ore.
Er, I don't know where you got your information from, but you are profoundly mistaken.
Different radioactive elements, and different isotopes of those elements, decay at differing rates; they turn into different decay products along the way, too (some of which are actually *more* dangerous than teh stuff they started out as). Most decay through a whole series of elements with different half-lives. This is sort-of related to the way carbon (C-14) dating works.
The number usually quoted in this context, and generally misunderstood, is 'half life'. This is the period of time taken for 50% a given mass of substance X to decay into something else. (remember the decay product can still be dangerous, and sometimes more so.) See also radon gas, which occurs naturally in granite (as found all over the southwest of the UK, in Scotland, and sundry other locations... I believe there is even some in the US!) which causes a statistically significant number of cases of lung cancer.
Of course one can argue "what's the big deal about a few unfortunate deaths from cancer, compared to the greater good of mankind?" - try making that argument to the mother of an 18 year old who just suffered a protracted and painful death from the disease...
Finally, even if it *was* "no more radioactive than uranium ore", it would still be highly dangerous. You might notice that houses tend not to be built over uranium mines. Of course, you're not making the environmentalist nut's error of thinking "it's "natural"! It MUST be safe, if not actually GOOD for us!" Speaking as an environmentalist nut, that attitude's one of several things that really piss me off about my fellow tree-huggers ;)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Wherever the stuff is stored, therefore, needs to be signed in such a way as to:
- Frighten people away, rather than attracting them with the idea of buried treasure, archeological relics or whatever;
- communicate this in a way that is culture-neutral. In other words, the third civilisation after us, in say 50,000 years' time (after the catastrophic collapse of ours (due to massive climate change and population growth the planet can no longer support) and the next (caused by brain damage resulting from the accidental translation of a fossilised Dummy's Guide to Windows) must be able to comprehend the message of whatever markers we erect despite having very different language, religious traditions, taboos, social structures, etc etc.;
- Do so reliably for geological periods of time.
Consider further that the oldest known human structures are about 5000 years old (in central America, IIRC.)I'm sure this story will be full of posts from the pro-nuclear lobby; I'm somewhat sympathetic to that PoV, with the exception of the hand-waving that goes on with regard to waste disposal (including defunct power stations themselves.) I grew up within 20 miles of the largest concentration of nuclear power in Western Europe (Oldbury, Berkeley, Hinkley Point) - the former stations were built in the mid 60s, had a design life of 21 years, were kept up and running for 30, and are now testbeds for decommmissioning. It's going to take a century *just to get the buildings into a safe state for long term storage* - a huge block of concrete containing the reactor core, sitting right on the edge of an enormous river with the highest tidal range in Europe. Hmmmmm. Was it worth it for 30 years of slightly-more-expensive than coal electricity? Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing... I suggest we learn from it.
Incidentally the UK Govt. just approved the first UK complex of off-shore windfarms. Another interesting experiment - might work, might be a white elephant, no way of telling without trying... but at least we know that cleaning them up afterwards will be nbd.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
They're talking about a structure which would have to stand intact for 8 half lives of Plutonium. Ummm. Ok. Sure, pyramids have gotten along ok, but they really haven't been around THAT long. Their talking about making a "facility" of some sort that will last a span of time much greater that seperating the creation of agriculture from the present. How long did "Lucy's" hut stand? But this isn't the only exceptionaly tall order.
The containers for plutonium itself are a monstrous feat of engineering, that would stretch our understanding of materials beyond the bleeding edge. Even underground in a steel container you have the effects of fatigue from every tremor they feel. With moisture present in the air no less. Ceramics and glass are no better. In periods such as these the glass will deform, the ceramics will crack, even under their own weight, and scaresly need the help of tremors to do so. Other qualities such as creep aren't easly extrapolated to very long lifetimes. And I'm talking about, in some cases, 50 years to say nothing of 100,000. Then there is the challenge of these containters being bathed in neutrons for many thousands of years, degrading the chosen materials.
While how some people obtained their doctorates is quite the conundrum. I some how doubt that this is actually serious, as in an attempt to actually build something. It seems far more likely that they might just be putting up $3000 to get some media attention for their cause, and spark discussion. That's certainly a worthy goal. Or maybe Ponds and Pal have found a place where that whole cold fusion stigma didn't follow them. The idea that professionals familiar with nuclear materials and their special challanges would consider something like this achievable, is in all honesty, inconceivable. And I do think that word means what I think it means.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
C'mon, you mean no one has considered dumping it on the Moon? It's not like there's going to be any massive explosion or anything.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
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