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

Do we really care?

[wo1verin3]

I mean....we won't be here, I'm against putting my hard earned money towards helping people 10000 years from now, let them figure it out on their own.

It has to be repeated in brail

[sam_handelman]

So that our sightless post-apocalyptic descendents can discern the danger as they undulate along the ground on their many legs. Also, it needs to be pulsed out in high-frequency morse code so that they can use their sonar to avoid it.

Also, if they really want to deter Mad Maxx, they should point out that it contains no gasoline.

*I* think it's every bit as silly as the Salon article makes it out to be. It's cool, but it's still stupid.

"No Treasure Here!"

Sigh.

Nuke-power generates CO2 too! among other problems

[Poingggg]

There's just a few small thingies wrong with nuclear power. One of them is that the winning,transportation and preparation of the necessary uranium costs so much energy (it's present in only very small percentages in it's ores)that the CO2-production in that stage already equals that of the amount produced by winning the same amount of energy the uranium produces + what's needed to produce the uranium, with fossil energy. So the net-amount of CO2 saved with nuke-power is zero.

Furthermore, you are left with huge amounts of useless radio-active waste, evenly dangerous as the uranium won out of it. You can't put it back in the ground, as it's volume has grown (you never get it out of the ground as compact as it was). This is a problem the nuke-power industry does not like you to know about. Just as the fact you can poison the world-population with less than one gram of pure plutonium, the most poisonous material on this world.

As long as a few people can make big money out of nuke power, they will tell you it's safe and clean (oh, maybe for the 0,00000001% of it's lifetime the stuff spends in powerplants it is more or less safe, assuming no terrorists, idiots who don't know how to handle the stuff or bad design gets a chance), but what happens before (uranium mining is one of the most polluting industries) or after (oh, we're just left with piles of dangerous stuff for the next 100000 years or so, let's just dump it somewhere and hope there will be no earthquakes or anything, and while we make money, we don't care) the nuke-industry won't tell you.
As long as people believe the nuke-energy guys, renewable energy will not make it. Just imagine: they would not be able to squeeze money out of renewable energy, that would be an economic disaster! (for them, not for us common people).

Oh, another thing a almost forgot: A nuclear powerplant has an economical lifespan of 30 years. When used full time, it takes 29 years to produce the amount of energy used by building the plant, and winning and processing the fuel to run it. So the net time you actually produce energy is one year. Of course the Big Men are making money all this time, so for them it's well worth the trouble. But is it for you???