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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.
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.
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.