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This Place is Not a Place of Honor
macnigel writes "DOE tries to find a good warning sign for the nuclear waste dump out in Nevada. This is one of those scary yet true things our government actually does; research into finding what exactly can be interpreted as "dangerous" 10,000 years from now." I was sure we had run a story about this before, but I don't see it in the archives. The report on how to mark the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (complete version in pdf 19.5Mb) makes chilling, yet somehow inspiring reading, and IMHO is much less deserving of mockery than the Salon author makes it out to be.
These effors were written about in more depth and detail by Gegory Benford here:r d.html
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benfo
In dark ages past, my aunt would renew my subscription to OMNI as my birthday present. Gawd... that was 15, maybe 20 years ago. As I aged, I kept that subscription -- all the way up to when they quit publishing. (They "embraced a fully electronic format" or something like that... sound familiar?)
Now, here's the kicker:
- I remember an article about this same subject!
And now here we are... the internet has come, grown, the bubble has burst, my favorite Sci-Fi magazine is no more, and we STILL haven't answered one (seemingly) simple question! Nuclear power plants are storing every fuel rod they've ever used on-site, Germans are willing to disable their rail system to prevent nuclear waste transport, and Nevada residents (read: voters) will only allow the Yucca Mountain Facility if the rest of the country rams it down their collective throat!(It was complete with artists' renditions of the ideas... fields of giant spikes, etc...)
The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Just out of curiosity, have you ever taken a class on nuclear energy? The "fact" that a tablespoon full of plutonium could kill every human on earth is the most blown out of proportion ridiculous fact ever. Consider this, uranium is a natural element. It exists everywhere, everywhere! Directly under you right now is uranium. Uranium and plutonium are both alpha particle emitters. Alpha particles cannot penetrate your skin, thus the only danger lies in inhaling them, and even this is a slight danger since you would have to inhale a large amount of it for it to have any chance of staying in your lungs and doing any damage. In order for a tablespoon of plutonium to kill everyone it would have to be inhaled and then each person would have a 1 in 30,000,000,000,000(maybe another set of zeros, not sure) chance that their particle of plutonium would cause cancer in them that they could eventually die from.
Sustainable technology sounds like pie in the sky, but he has really focused on using things that work, and he understands the economic realities.
He does think that we have the wrong metric of prosperity.
His speech starts at 3:56, and listen especially to 4:45 into the speech. 5:45 talks right to your point about the lunacy of using technologies that will require 100,000 of cleanup.
And I challenge anyone to listen to the first 2 1/2 minutes and be able to turn the rest of his speech off.
Also contains interesting quotes from /.'s favorite president, Thomas Jefferson.
Actually, it's not the radioactivity of plutonium alone that makes it so lethal. It is a very powerful carcinogen because the body accumulates what it absorbs over long periods of time, although its near-insolubility in water reduces its effective toxicity to far below what many people believe. However, if it reaches the bloodstream, it accumulates in the bone marrow and in the liver, where it has a half-life of elimination of 70 and 35 years, respectively, and inhalation of fine Pu dust can cause significant alpha exposure in the ~500 days that it takes the lungs to eliminate it.
To put it simply, it's neither a massive threat nor a relatively benign substance, and it gets a lot more bad PR in the press than other, much more worthy, scapegoats.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
From the French web site
reprocessing of spent fuel as practiced at La Hague:
Not everybody's happy with having a nuclear waste processing plant near cities, though... Check here for instance.
How in the world did this bullshit get modded up?
Do you realize when NASA uses plutonium based propulstion systems (RTCs I believe) the plutonium is encapsulated in such a structure such that the chance of a pellet breaking up is incredibly small?
And this stat about killing every human being. WTF are you talking about? I love it when completely misinformed people attempt to educate others. Oh the ignorance.
it is not well known what they pyramids contained. There is no real evidence about their uses and they had all been contaminated with a much different religious culture at least twice before anyone ever started recording what was found.
Probably has something to do with the fact that the Navajo are from the northern Arizona/Nevada area. If the rest of civilization crumbles, they'll still probably be running around their ancestral stomping grounds.
Had you actually read the article, you would see that the plan is to tell as clearly as possible what is under there. In the actual document they said that the in the first warning structures there would be not only 'keep out' message in seven languages (space left to add new languages) but also some information about the site. It would say that the place is believed to be completely safe as long as you don't dig or drill the ground. And it would say that for more information you'll just have to enter the building inside the area.
The main information room (actually five identical rooms, one on surface, four buried in different depths) would then contain exact information about what is buried there and where it is, including the floor plan of the WIPP facility. For those who don't know about our current calendar system, there would be star charts that tell when the site was constructed and when its radioactivity is at the level of natural uranium ore. Also there would be a map of other nuclear waste sites where you should find documentation to confirm this one. And if that doesn't tell you what is down there, there would be a chart of the periodic system with samples of the non-precious elements (precious elements would get stolen and give hints that there are other things to steal too) and marks that would tell which ones the waste contains.
Most of the more advanced information would be only in English and maybe Spanish. The authors believe that isn't much a problem as there probably will be scholars that can read English around for a long time (think about the volume of archived material from these days). Also, there are instructions to rewrite the material if English becomes hard to understand. The star charts and maps should stay readable though the language changes.
See? No need to dig there. You can get all the information from the surface.
Every single atom of Uranium in the Earth is going to decay - producing all the same radioactive wastes whether mankind is involved or not.
Most nuclear fuel is artificially produced Plutonium, not naturally occurring Uranium.
Uranium 238 has a half life of over 4 billion years. When converted in a breeder reactor to plutonium and subsequently used as fuel it produces a variety of isotopes with half lives that are too long to decay rapidly and yet too short to spread their emission over billions of years at safe, low levels. It these pesky midrange half-life isotopes that the site is designed to handle
Technically, the total amount of radioactive waste is the same whether you include human nuclear activity or not - but only if you calculate the total over billions of years. In the range of a few thousand years the results are more disturbing.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.