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.

Comments

Deep Time

[scrod]

These effors were written about in more depth and detail by Gegory Benford here:
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benfor d.html

Anyone remember OMNI Magazine?

[Raetsel]

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!

  (It was complete with artists' renditions of the ideas... fields of giant spikes, etc...)

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!

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.

Architect, idealist, pragmatist William McDonough

[jerryasher]

Here's a recent speech (real player) by Designer William McDonough. Very interesting how he moved to sustainable architectures and sustainable ecosystems. It wasn't his first inclination, but fear of a negligence lawsuit moved him in that direction.

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.

Re:wonder

[CTachyon]

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! ...

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.

Re:What should REALLY be mocked...

[c_ollier]

You will find some details here (link to frameset, check the link "How is waste managed" at the bottom of the main frame) about the "french process". This is the web site of the Cogema, a French company (partially state controlled, I believe). They seem to work also in the USA (http://www.cogema-inc.com/).

From the French web site :

reprocessing of spent fuel as practiced at La Hague:

• 
  
• reclaims reusable uranium and plutonium,
  
• provides safe, internationally accepted conditioning suitable to the technical and radiological properties of each type of final waste,
  
• reduces the amount of final waste requiring disposal by at least a factor of 5, as compared with approaches in which the spent fuel itself is waste,
  
• removes almost all (99.8%) of the plutonium, a leading contributor to nuclear waste toxicity, from the final waste.
  

Not everybody's happy with having a nuclear waste processing plant near cities, though... Check here for instance.