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NMR Shows That Nuclear Storage Degrades
eldavojohn writes to point out recent research using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imagery that shows that certain nuclear waste storage containers may not be as safe as previously thought. From the article: "[R]adiation emitted from [plutonium] waste could transform one candidate storage material into less durable glass after just 1,400 years — much more quickly than thought... The problem is that the radioactive waste damages the matrix that contains it. Many of the waste substances, including plutonium-239, emit alpha radiation, which travels for only very short distances (barely a few hundredths of a millimeter) in the ceramic, but creates havoc along the way."
I'm only going to worry about this if the Weekly World News is right and death has been cured.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
First of all, why is that stuff sitting in a nuclear waste container? It's good, fissile material that could supply much-needed energy to our power grid. Stop being a bunch of pansies and BURN IT IN A REACTOR! That will not only massively reduce the amount of waste, but it will turn much of the remaining material into extremely hot isotopes that will go inert (or nearly so) in a much shorter period of time.
Secondly, Pu-239 emits a very small amount of radiation. With a half-life of 24,000 years, it barely even raises the background levels. At a whopping 10 fissions per kilo per second, I doubt that much of the radiation is even escaping the material. I presume that the real safety problem is Pu-240 contaimination. A problem that wouldn't exist if they burned the materials instead of storing them.
Lastly, can someone please inform the press that the 1980's called? They want their "one of the most deadly by-products" scare-mongering back. There are far more deadly materials in this world than a bit of plutonium. Caffeine being a prime example. We dillute caffeine so much that we don't realize that too a few grams is actually quite deadly. (Find out how much of your favorite caffinated product would be needed to kill you here.) So maybe we can start reporting these things for what they are (engineering and safety issues) rather than what they're not (mini-Chernobyl levels of contamination). Maybe? *sigh* I suppose not.
Someone should setup a lobby group who's job would be to convince the government to let us use our nuclear fuels instead of declaring everything as waste in a mostly useless gesture to stop the mythical nuclear terrorist of the month.
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...should store the waste at the dark side of the moon.
I suggest to build a moon base near the dump yard to for
observing. Since there is a lot of radiactive waste, there should be
more than one yard, so the first one should be named Alpha-1.
I have heard that sinking the waste to the bottom of the atlantic right at the fault lines (where it will be sucked into the earth) was a good idea. Why don't we do that?
But then again, I forgot that while environmentalists scream at us to pay attention to science when it comes to global warming, when it comes to anything nuclear, most of the same environmentalists have been known to completely ignore science and act completely irrational (although slashdot readers tend to think rationally about nuclear)
Rather than trying to bury / hide nuclear waste on the earth, we should be shipping it off into space, or directly into the sun. As there is already alot of radiation in space, so the effects to the earth would be greatly reduced.
Just my 2 cents worth
The solution to nuclear waste storage is to haul this waste into space. Such a journey can be planned such that it is perpetual - it never ends! With enormous distances from earth, there is no way this waste can affect us over here. What about that?
This post should have a "Doh" tag IMO.
A couple questions for anyone who knows more than me:
1) If this stuff is still hot, doesn't it mean there's still energy there we could use?
2) This stuff came from the ground, why can't we put it back there?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yes, yes, we know the problems with this. But what about the benefits? While there may be some negative health benefits, the super hero population is only bound to grow with this recent discovery.
You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and you can't make super mutants with laser vision without cracking some radioactive material storage facilities. Let's take a balanced look at this.
The trouble with spent nuclear reactor waste is the quantity of the stuff.
In France they reprocess the used fuel, which results in about an 80% conversion to new useable nuclear fuel. So rather than having 100 tons of nuclear waste, they have 20 tons that have to be stored indefinitely.
Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new.
This is an economic problem that results in us having to stockpile the whole amount of spent fuel, forever.
If it cost less to reprocess, or if reprocessing were required to reduce the amount of spent fuel for storage, we would have and 80% smaller problem.
But we don't.
Personally, I think that would be worthwhile just to reduce the storage requirement.
.
That's no problem, it will act as air conditioning for us if global warming continues. perfect!
If the life of the containers was just a little bit shorter, it'd be a perfect gift for an ex- or inlaws.
"Whats inside?"
"Oh, just wait a little while and you'll find out"
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That would be a good idea. However, every so often (1 in 100? 1 in 50?) a rocket launch doesn't go right...a self desctruct option on a rocket carrying payload of nuclear waste isn't a very good idea, neither is letting a rocket that won't make escape velocity burn out...that leaves engineering black-box type of containers to contain the waste (which is already pretty damned heavy), causing your launch weight to go up, necessitating bigger more complex rockets...(and back to the beginning agan)
... if man hasn't found out a way to deal with this problem by then , then its a fair bet theres been a major collapse of civilisation already taking technology, healthcare etc with it, so there probably won't be very many people around to worry about it and those that are will probably have more important things to worry about than buried nuclear waste - such as finding food and not dying from [insert common medieval cause of death here] for example.
Why zircon? Because it is a readily produced crystalline structure? I know the lattice structure bears out certain containment theories, but the ceramic expression of this type would introduce error vectors inherent in the silicate. So basically this article says a zircon container might be okay, even after it degrades into a silicate [glassy] structure, except that it will totally degrade if wet or, as I assume, moved.
Not to be quite flippant, but if my girlfriend won't except a zirconium from me thinking I'm a cheap bastard, shouldn't they either?
The only problem is political, there are treaties that prohibit the use of the oceans to dispose radioactive waste.
I am not sure what this has to do with alpha radiation but zirconium has been proposed as a material in fusion reactors as it is resistant to neutron embrittlement.
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Quick note- the Nature synopsis contains a graphic that is NOT in the original article. This experiment was a straight-up NMR spectroscopy/relaxation time experiment, not an imaging experiment. NMR Imaging is more commonly known as MRI. Basically, they looked at how Silicon-29 nuclei's magnetic moments precessed in an external magnetic field. Usually this should happen only within a narrow range of frequencies; in the article, their data shows a broadening of the frequencies at which the nuclei precess, implying a breakdown in the crystal structure of the material. This results from a lack of periodicity, which normally would lead to a very specific distribution of local magnetic fields (and thus precessional frequencies). The amorphous silicon has a wider range of local magnetic fields that the nuclei experience, and thus a wider band of precessional frequencies.
This is an interesting experiment- I had heard of NMR being used to analyze containment materials in a talk just a couple of months ago, but this is a different group and a different experiment. Good to see that basic NMR is still alive and well.
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I wonder what happens to other things when exposed to the radiation from nuclear waste? Like, say, water? I wonder if you could use that radiation to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, or convert other things into useful fuels?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
In 1400 years we could probably use the radioactive waste to dump into our Mr Fusion engines and go to the Mars base for the day. But Alpha radiation can be stopped by holding up tin foil so if the container eventually breaches, the dirt around the place will stop it real fast. I guess the container would leak the material itself into the ground and that's no good but don't they use a landfill like thing where they put a thick plastic or concrete layer around the whole area to stop any leakage.
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Ok, so you've got an almost microscopic layer of weak stuff... Surrounded by otherwise resilent ceramics. The article says nothing about if these particle continue to penetrate past the weak glass.
Again, how is water going to get to it unless the whole thing cracks? If that happens, your container has failed, regardless.
Right, during the medieval warm period.
I glanced at the headline and saw something about nuclear grenades.
Breeder reactors
No shit. Nuclear "waste" isn't that : it's highly energetic nuclear fuel with at least 99% of it's energy un-released. The problem is that fear of nuclear proliferation and crude technology prevents us from using the rest of that energy except in the rare breeder reactor.
Of course, just how radioactive will nuclear waste be in even 1000 years, anyway? Most of the hot stuff, by definition, has a relatively short half life. By the time 1000 years have passed, it should be relatively safe. Just don't eat any of it, or spend too much time in the mines...no more dangerous than radon deposits that occur naturally.
I am a fan of the Singularity, however, even though I think due to technical problems it may take a century or 2 to happen rather than just 30 years. I think worrying about nuclear waste disposal is stupid. Once we can create beyond human intelligence, we'll quickly develop technology and resources so vast to make the issue a joke.
Yeah and if you store too much of the stuff in one place
the resulting magnetic radiation will reach a critical
level causing a titanic explosion that will knock the
moon out of earth orbit!
We've got plenty of other problems that need to be solved in less time than that. Lets park these things for a few hundred years and work on the stuff that will affect us in the next 20, pollution, overproduction of CO2, food production, disease, dutch elm disease...
Burying waste at sea is a violation of international law. My own idea was to bury the waste in a subduction zone, so that the waste would be drawn back into the Earth's mantle. Turns out, however, that that's also considered burial at sea.
The Laws of Nature and the Laws of Man are fundamentally different. Discuss (10 marks).
Because Jimmy and crew, at the time, felt SO DAMN BAD about how scary nuclear anything was that the best they could do was ban doing something useful with the waste.
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/bud/pd112801b.html
Hyper-sensitive man! Able to look through an obvious joke with his penetrating sarcasm ignoring vision! No internet joke is safe!
I kid, I kid...
Wait, so they essentially proved that entropy exists? Mighty impressive, considering there was a guy named Newton a couple hundred years ago who proved that EVERYTHING degrades, not just nuclear storage.
if I understand correctly, conventional waste works quite well as Candu fuel, with little processing.
The Raven
Because, contrary to your Grade 6 "Earth Sciences Unit" animated filmstrip, subduction zones aren't neat little escalator-like places where material goes into some sort of geological garbage disposal system like you might have attached to your sink.
Instead they're messy places where continental blocks are crashing into each other in tremendously slow motion, riding up over, breaking off, dissolving, melting, all that good stuff. Material dropped on one of these places is could just lay there for the longer then we've been a species. However there is a strong possibility this material won't always just lie there but instead break up, on it's own or under subduction-related volcanic or seismic activity, and spread into the larger ecosystem (garbage in is indeed garbage out!)
While this breakdown & distribution could be a slow process it would be a chaotic environment and 'bad things' could just as well happen 'fast', with disastrous consequences. Keep in mind that while out of sight and generally low energy places the deep ocean beds are not disconnected from the rest of the planet and are also subject to disturbances; subduction zones hugely so.
So you're talking about essentially land-mining a significant chunk of the planet, some of the most unstable parts of the planet, with the possibility that still-lethal material could suddenly, randomly, re-enter our parts of the environment, with catastrophic results.
Yeah. No. Not a good idea.
Better to minimize the amount of material. Convert it into the least reactive forms economically & technically practical. Then using reliable systems (and that pretty much rules out 'under several thousand meters of water' with our current skills) isolate it as much as practicable in long-term stable places, and hope that future generations don't fuck with it in a bad way.
Finally, regarding the majority of your posting:
While there are indeed alarmist/ignorant/self-serving 'environmentalists', as there are boobs and headline-graspers in every part of human endeavor, there are also arrogant self-righteous techno-weenies with equally poor understanding of the topics on which they opine. As much as you look down on those you deem ignorant, those who are informed can look down on your ignorance, which to a self-aware person would suggest an attitude-check would be in order. (Frankly you come off not much different then the stereotyped asshats you rail against.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
If humans in 3406 don't know how to repackage radioactive waste into new containers using 2006 or later technology, I think they have bigger problems than leaky plutonium containers.
I'm not trying to be facetious or callous here, but we would have a problem if the MTBF was 1000 years, but this means that some time in the next 1000+ years someone needs to do something that's entirely possible and done every day with current technology. So where precisely is the problem? Just make sure to put a marker somewhere.
If it degrades the ceramic containers in only 1400 years, then perhaps they should make it N times thicker if they want it to last N times longer. It may not even be linear, since the surface area increases faster than the diameter of the storage cylinder (assuming a cylinder), so making it N times thicker will make it last more than N times as long.
The article talks about a quarter million years, so you'd have to make the containers at most 178x thicker, but probably less. Sure, you may be talking about several feet thick ceramic, but so what? Am I missing something?
What effect does this have on nuclear weapons and their detonation and guidance systems?
Nuclear waste has always been the problem that advocates sweep under the rug by handwaving, or empty promises ("The Federal Government will be disposing all that waste by 1998.") In order for waste disposal to sound feasible, advocates are forced into the position of pretending to know things nobody knows and understand things nobody understands.
We barely know how to build structures or institutions that last for a few hundred years. Nobody has a clue as to how to build a nuclear waste disposal facility that will last twenty-four thousand years... or stay funded for twenty-four thousand years.
Predict what's going to happen over the next twenty-four thousand years? We're lucky if we can predict the weather a week from today.
It makes the Clock of the Long Now look trivial by comparison.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The annoying aspect of stories like this or of the facility for storing nuclear waste the government is building, is the enormous hubris scientists and the government have in overestimating our own intellect and knowledge and underestimating our descendents' abilities.
/.ers, not car related). 1400 years ago, in the year 607 AD, a mongol warlord meets with his mongol advisor. "Sire," says the advisor, "we must take care -- all of the bodies we leave in our wake will soon decay, exposing bone. This bone can turn to dust when exposed to the elements, which is extremely harmful to human health! We must construct tombs to contain these bones!"
1400 years is a LONG time. Let's use an analogy (sorry
The mongol warlord agrees, and tombs are constructed. The advisor observes these tombs for a year, and reports back. "Sire," says the advisor, "the tombs are quite nice. But some of the rocks have shifted slightly in the last year, and I estimate that in as little as 1400 years, they could collapse and expose the bone dust to the air! The poor people of 2007 are doomed unless we make these tombs much stronger."
Of course, such precautions are entirely unncessary. Any team of archaeologists excavating tombs are certain to use proper filters. The idea that people 1400 years from now -- the year 3407! -- won't be so far advanced from us that we can not even begin to imagine their abilities is foolish.
I've always questioned the wisdom of burying this stuff, for exactly this reason. Surely in the future (maybe even the near future) we'll have much better ways of dealing with this sort of waste. For now, we should be storing it in secure facilities, in durable containers which can be replaced as they degrade. It's not zero-maintenance but it's better than having stuff buried in failing containers in a place where we can't reach it.
Oh, I get it, and you're I-Make-Jokes-But-Can't-Detect-Them-Myself Man.
Lighten up and bask in teh funny.
The enemies of Democracy are
"Am I missing something?"
Yes, you are missing the fear! Why are you offereing solutions and not being scared? are you a commie?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In fact, it's even better than that: Those 20 tons which remain as waste are considerably "hotter" than the useful fuel, and thus degrade faster. Instead of keeping 100 tons of waste for 240,000 years, they need to keep 20 tons of waste for 100 years.
;-)
Excellent! We'll just send all of our nuclear waste to France!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I can't believe that this is a "new" story. I did a research paper on the Yucca Mt. Storage facility's plans and this is exactly what all of the research was putting forward. No matter what you put this waste into, it WILL leak out, and sometimes within a time span of only 10 years. The project supposedly has a 10 thousand year life span, but to me that means that it will radiate into surrounding rock and water tables within that time. "Radioactive colloids could begin reaching the water table about ten years after use and their rate of travel only increases with time. Geologic structure has a dramatic effect on those rates and is the main problem with the repository." "The radioactive colloids do not reach the water table until about ten years and reach their maxima at one hundred thousand years at 95%, but reach 50% at only sixty to eighty years for the 100-400nm colloids" That last one is a paraphrase of a resarch paper which sheds alot of doubt on the project's future.
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---
Your sig caught my eye
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NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.. REALLLY..>TELL ME MORE. Time for cold fusion!
Take some medication before posting next time.
1. reprocess the actinides. a few centuries, rather than a few millenia, of orders of magnitude less waste you have to store
2. use modern pebble bed reactors. no chernobyl, no 3 mile island, no silk wood, no china syndrome. these things just don't melt down
scanning the comments, there are a number of other educated slashdotters who are already with me on this obvious approach to solving:
1. global warming (hello environmentalists)
2. using electric cars ultimately powered by nuclear electric plants, the west stops sponsoring middle eastern terrorism via oil-funded saudi wahhabism (hello security concerns)
a few of us are sitting here on slashdot, with the answers to islamofascism and environmental destruction, two of the biggest problems in the world, and the answer is safe (yes, i said SAFE), cheap (yes i said CHEAP), plentiful (yes i said PLENTIFUL), secure (yes i said SECURE) and low polluting (yes, i said LOW POLLUTING) nuclear
but unfortunately, public opinion, and the opinion of politicians who think teh intarweb is a serious of pneumatic tubes, these people's opinion of nuclear is stuck in 1975
we have to sit here, and wait, while thousands more die of well-funded islamofascism, and more hurricane katrinas batter our shores, until the general population and the ignorant politicians catch up with what MODERN nuclear power is all about
it's sad
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Recycling of nuclear waste is extreemly dangerous and actually produces more waste.
The spent fuel rods (which are the only part of the waste that can be recycled)
are 1000 time more radioactive than when they started and extreemly hazdarous to handle. The recycling process involves taking fuel rods out of the assemblies, chopping them up and then dissolving in nitric acid. A highly radioactive liquid sludge is produced as a by-product of the recycling.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and make a prediction: After 1000 years, the waste contained in these ceramic hoonanies will be easily salvagable and converted into fine roquefort cheese. I mean, give me a fucking break. In 100 years people will be mining our garbage dumps. Unless we're all gone, in which case none of this 1,400 year bullshit matters.
The problems with storage of 'spent' fuel from nuclear reactors go beyond inadequate technology for 'containment' and the likelihood of highly radioactive material (and heavy metals) getting into the environment. Radioactivity is both carcinogenic and mutagenic - not usually creating 'super heroes' but rather mental retardation, crippling deformities, and nasty genetic diseases. Exposure to radiation is like playing 'russian roulette' with your genes, and almost all genetic damage is harmful.
It also includes HEAT, and as the thermal balance of this planet changes with buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gasses, the problems of excess heat generated by nuclear waste are amplified.
Plutonium does not tidily decay into radioactively inert (but still chemically toxic)lead, but instead into a 'decay chain' of other - also radioactive - elements. It's a crumbling, poisonous mess that keeps generating more heat. Among the many possible decay chains:
Plutonium-239 - half-life: 24,110 years
alpha decay into Uranium-235 - half-life: 704,000,000 years
alpha decay into Thorium-231 - half-life: 25.2 hours
beta decay into Protactinium-231 - half-life: 32,700 years
alpha decay into Actinium - half-life: 21.8 years
beta decay into Thorium-227 - half-life: 18.72 days
alpha decay into Radium-233 - half-life: 11.43 days
alpha decay into Radon-219 - half-life: 3.96 seconds
alpha decay into Polonium-215 - half-life: 1.78 milliseconds
alpha decay into Lead-211 - half-life: 36.1 minutes
beta decay into Bismuth-211 - half-life: 2.15 minutes
alpha decay into Thallium-207 - half-life: 4.77 minutes
beta decay into Lead-207 -: stable
Every one of these 'decays' creates more heat, as well as more radiation... I don't know if anyone's ever calculated the impact of all that heat on the finely-tuned balances that make this planet inhabitable by human beings?
In my understanding, anyway, the most important questions of the present include 'how can we - while we still have time and resources - redesign and restructure our society so that we don't NEED nuclear power (or excess fossil fuel consumption) for high quality-of-life. It's a lot more than buying organic coffee and sometimes riding a bicycle.
If only there was a way to send radioactive wastes into the mantle of the earth. But I guess that is just the stuff of books being able to drill past the crust of the earth and send things down.
But think of it, that is the one place where radioactive waste would be good. The more radioactive stuff we put down there, the longer the core stays hot and spinning. So that we can keep this nice protective magnetic field longer.
Anyways, I'll stop thinking of unobtainium now
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
There is no "dark side of the moon". The moon must rotate in order to keep one side facing the earth so it has a two week day and a two week night - both sides. There is a "far side" of the moon, which is the side we don't see from Earth.
...all that radioactivity equals power. If we reprocessed it in a breeder reactor we would get copious amounts of power and the end result will be less radioactive and thus easier to store. But we don't, because we are too scared of nuclear power in general and breeders reactors using plutonium in specific.
It seems extremely unlikely that waste from a subduction zone could re-enter "our parts of the environment." Uranium and transuranic actinides are extremely heavy elements and they would be stored as enormous 1-ton+ spent fuel assemblies in synrock or passivated glass at the bottom of the ocean. They are heavier than water. Even if earthquakes fractured the fuel assemblies, they still would not rise to the top of the ocean somehow, then somehow heat up to 5000+ degrees celcius, then vaporize and spread through the air. In fact, recovering one of the sunk fuel assemblies would be very difficult.
However I have read one plausible scenario that small amounts of radioactive waste stored at the bottom of the ocean could re-enter our environment. Over long periods of time, it may break up, then small amounts of it could be consumed by ocean animals, then it could travel its way up the food chain and eventually be consumed by a human eating seafood. However, the chances of that are very small and the quantities consumed are very small, and it would be far off in the future when most of the radioactivity had already been lost. In other words it would not constitute "catastrophic results".
There was also some concern about the health of ocean animals in the immediate vicinity of waste.
Still, stable terrestrial storage would be more effective for various reasons, according to what I've read.
Strange. I found the tone of his post to be far more temperate than yours.
Indeed, perhaps an attitude check is in order by a "self-aware" person.
If the waste can be used again eventually we will go back and mine our waste reserves, either that or we will start selling it to France or Japan to deal with. As costs of fuels go up, more fuels become feasible options. People are now looking at shaol oil for extraction which was thought worthless until recently.
If we store our nuclear "waste" long enough we will have the largest reserve of nuclear fuel on the planet. With a half life of 24000 years we have a little while to use it.
If closed the mind be, so then the mouth should follow.
This "land mining" also will slide deeper at a rate of several centimeters per year. And the "melting" actually goes on a few dozen or more kilometers below. My take is that containers, even if perfectly immune to corrosion, radiation, age, etc, buried in this sort of region would rupture in a few thousand years from the accumulation of shear. I don't know if the subduction rate is sufficient to keep a significant amount from leaving the burial zone.
I agree that reprocessing is important no matter what.It really annoys me that large amounts of money are being spent and risk being taken (by leaving nuclear waste in temporary storage) to make sure it doesn't leak 1000 years in the future.
Either in 1000 years we will have crazy advanced technology and it will be cheaper (time value of money) to clean up any spill then than it is to over-engineer and stall now or civilization will have collapsed and it really won't matter (given the population densities of uncivilized people the potential harm now from not acting is greater than the damage to a future uncivilized society).
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Subduction zones are generally at continental boundaries, and the problem is, anything that's sitting on top of the subducting plate may very well get scraped up onto the edge of the continental plate, which would make for some interesting beach-front real estate.
Additionally, subduction zones are geologically unstable, and the remote possiblity of volcanic activity spewing nuclear waste into the atmosphere should be taken into account, along with the more probable possibilities of seismic activity and accidental/intentional human interference.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Although true, some subduction zones are deep in the ocean and the idea was to bury the nuclear waste there. Nobody was suggesting burying the waste near the coasts of Japan or California. IIRC the proposal was to bury nuclear waste near the Marianas trench which is in the south pacific thousands of miles from land.
It should certainly be taken into account. However the chances are slim of a volcano forming at precisely the location where waste had been buried within the next 500 years when the waste is still quite dangerous. I don't know what the probability of that is offhand, but it's probably extremely small. Nevertheless, I'm not claiming that it would be a great idea to store nuclear waste in a subduction zone. There are many places in the crust of the earth that are in the middle of tectonic plates and are extremely stable for many millions of years and will likely be so for a long time to come. Yucca was chosen for that reason.
Except it would become so diluted that you wouldn't even be able to detect it in the ocean.
Drop it in the trench, and it will be fine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The whole "nuclear = EVIL" indoctrination in this country has pretty much lodged itself in as a cultural meme.
They have the common mob of this country convinced that anything "nuclear" automatically means a Three Mile Island incident in their back yard every day and twice on Sundays. As a result, they put pressure on their leaders that essentially kills any and all serious funding for better/safer ways of disposing of/utilizing nuclear fuel.
Then, when you tell them that a coal-fired plant (which isn't NRC-regulated) relases more radiation into the surrounding environment than any nuclear reactor (outside of TMI/Chernobyl-type accidents), they automatically assume you're lying.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
While there are indeed alarmist/ignorant/self-serving 'environmentalists', as there are boobs and headline-graspers in every part of human endeavor, there are also arrogant self-righteous techno-weenies with equally poor understanding of the topics on which they opine. As much as you look down on those you deem ignorant, those who are informed can look down on your ignorance, which to a self-aware person would suggest an attitude-check would be in order. (Frankly you come off not much different then the stereotyped asshats you rail against.)
You are ignoring the fact, that out of the people who are telling us "We must stop fossil fuels now, or it will destroy our planet", virtually all of them are dead set against the cheapest and easiest way to replace fossil fuels - Nuclear Power. It is not a stereotype at all - Just go to the Greenpeace website, or the Sierra Club website, or the Green Party, and you will see that amoung organized enviornmentalist, opposition to nuclear power is universal. It isn't just a handful of people who are on the loonie fringe of the enviornmental movement who are against nuclear power.
Although scientists often discover theoretical mechanisms whereby nuclear waste can escape its containment, it's important to consider the probability of those events and to consider the context provided by other facts.
Additional facts are as follows: 1) Although nuclear waste will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, it will lose 99% of its radioactivity within the first 500 years, after which it would only be toxic to a human if he ate a significant quantity of it. 2) The chances of an atom of waste buried in moving groundwater ending up in the human food supply are less than 1 in a trillion. 3) We intend to bury it in Yucca mountain (not moving groundwater) which is an extremely stable geological formation which hasn't moved for millions of years and almost certainly won't move for a long time. 4) There are many additional safety measures like dispersing the waste in synthetic rock, surrounding that rock in metal and ceramic layers, etc.
...To sum up. Although radiation from plutonium may corrode "barely a few hundredths of a millimeter" of glass and make it weaker, that does not imply that the waste is on the verge of entering the human food supply. It would also have to burst forth from the glass, eat through the metal layer, dissolve the ceramic layer, cause the massive rock formation at Yucca mountain to disappear, become soluble in water, cause rainfall in the Nevada desert, dissolve in the resultant groundwater, flow to the nearest agricultural area hundreds of miles away, and enter the food supply. All that would have to happen within the next few decades when it's still extremely radioactive. And even if those things happened, it would easily be detected, because the waste is monitored and radioactive leaks can be detected from a distance.
I realize a few people will read that a few hundredths of a millimeter of glass containment will be slightly weaker than expected thousands of years from now, and who will scream "PLANETARY DOOM AWAITS!" But it's important to keep these things in perspective.
But Superman did it! We just need to hire Superman to take all the stuff into space and hurl it at the sun! Hollywood keeps coming up with ideas to save our lives :)
today is spelling optional day.
Relying on a deus ex machina is not an acceptable engineering practice. "Oh, well, I'm sure someone will solve this problem before it kills someone."
Technology is by no means a relentless upward progression. Civilivations come and go. It's entirely possible that whoever's living on top of our nuclear waste dumps in a thousand years, has tech no better than, or even worse than, ours.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Or will it be the Zoroastrians/Zarathustrians?
FalconShould there be a Law?
In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.
And a damned good thing, too. A democracy is three wolves and two sheep voting on what's for dinner. A republic, restrained by constitutional protections of individual rights, is quite different.
Ce depend. This is true if you look at democracy as being tyranny of the masses. I'd prefer to look at it as Alexis de Tocqueville did when he wrote Democracy in America .
FalconShould there be a Law?
This problem was expected if not proven 30 years ago - which led to the very slow and poorly funded development of alternatives like synrock for waste incorporation (mixed in and chemically bonded) instead of just encapsulation (enclosed). Unfortunately idiots mainly in the US nuclear power lobby have been pushing nuclear waste as a solved problem ever since it was just being shoved in stainless steel drums and thrown into the sea. It would be useful if that industry spend as much on R&D as they currently spend on advertising - then things may get closer to the wild claims thay make.
Nope, we're already a nuclear weapons state, so non-proliferation agreements don't apply. We can't ship weapons-grade plutonium to other countries by that treaty, but anything we do domestically is ok. There *is* a Federal law that prohibits commercial reprocessing, but chances are that Congress will see reason eventually and repeal it.
Actually as part of the non-proliferation agreements or treaties those countries with nuclear weapons also agreed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons significantly, but none have. Neither the US nor any other nuclear weapons power can really expect non nuclear weapons countries to remain nuclear weapons free if they don't live up to their part of the deal. You shoudn't expect the other side to live up the their side of a deal if you don't.
FalconShould there be a Law?
are the people that use the fuel in the first place even the same people that have to pay for the storage, or is it a taxpayer thing?)
No, the same people who generate nuclear waste are not responsible for storing the waste nor paying for storage. The US government, ie the taxpayers, pays for storage of the waste as one of the methods of subsidizing the nuclear power industry. If the industry were required to operate in a freemarket, ie pay for their own insurance and store the waste they produce themself then the industry would never exist.
FalconShould there be a Law?
At last, another hand wringing, knee-jerk enviro-socialist come to pat his FUD'ding buddy on the back.
Oh noes, more heat to be trapped by the Oh-Zone layer! Duh, the point of nuclear power is we eliminate the great majority of our greenhouse gas production. Plutonium has a half-life? My god! Look at those big years, oh wait, that means that on its own it isn't very radioactive. But NPR said plutonium was the most toxic thing ever, even more than cyanide (like on James Bond)! EVEN IF that weren't pure FUD, when was the last time you were exposed to cyanide or nerve gas or any of the other scary stuff plutonium is routinely compared to by fearmongers? That's right, NEVER! Beyond the total non-existence of any possibility of you coming into contact with plutonium, it's not all that dangerous. To be anything near as deadly as it is made out to be, someone has to be unlucky enough to breath aerosol'ed PU. Get back to me when the nuclear power plants of the world start turning this stuff into micro-confetti for the fun of it.
Wrong. We don't reprocess fuel because it has been banned since the 1970's, an executive order signed by Jimmy Carter. Good old Jimmy Carter, he will be remembered because he felt so bad for everything that ever happened. Felt so bad.
Wrong. Jimmy Carter may of signed an Executive Order but those presidents who followed him could have revoked those orders. If Jimmy Carter's EO are too onorous President Bush could counter sign them right now, he did this to EOs Clinton signed before leaving office.
FalconShould there be a Law?
THe lobby group you are talking about exists and spends far more money trying to convince the goverment to build 1950's style nuclear white elephants than is spent on developing new designs that would actually stand on it's own merits. Things like accelerated thorium reactors can use high grade waste, but on a small budget you won't see anything happen there for a long time, and it will be coming from India.
On the other hand, Yucca Mountain is hundreds of miles away from anything else in Nevada. That doesn't make the folks in Las Vegas or even Reno a whole lot happier about having a nuclear waste storage site located in the same state as them.
Things have changed since Ford was president. Nevada's populaton went from 621,975 to more than 2,000,000. Clark County alone has 1.8 million people, and Pahrump, down the road from Yucca Mountain, has a 9 percent annual growth rate. By the time the repository would be operational, optimistically projected at 2017, Nevada's population will be seven times greater than it was in 1975.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Every time they try to build one, NIMBY comes into play, they get some hippy crazies into the mix, and it goes down the tubes. They can't even replace aging reactors with newer, safer reactors without running into this.
NIMBYism isn't just an environmental issue, take a look at the Opposition from NIMBYs for building a wind farm in Cape Cod. Even though the wind gennies will be miles from land some people complain they will spoil their veiw.
FalconShould there be a Law?
People on slashdot should know better than dividing by zero. Also the single paper written on the issue of radioactive coal emissions (you can read it on the ornl website) is cherry picking bullshit (looks at the worst coal on earth) and assumes pollution controls are a simple black box that removes a given percentage of everything - possibly one of the reasons why it was never followed up over the last couple of decades since it's publication. Just because one small bit of junk science gets quoted a lot in the press doesn't make it real.
Pardon my ... tone. A chain reaction of nuclear explosions? Do you have ANY idea about the subject you're speaking on? It was a meltdown event in a reactor, not a bomb. In 1966.
/ nucacc.html#c1
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene
law.
Which France is known to do.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Deposit a nominal amount in a bank account, and let compound interest pay for any problems 1,400 years down the road.
Long term thinking is all well and good, but this is silly.
There are many places in the crust of the earth that are in the middle of tectonic plates and are extremely stable for many millions of years and will likely be so for a long time to come. Yucca was chosen for that reason.
Dispite what you may think Yucca Mt is a seismically active region and has has earthquakes in the area. A government building there was damages in the '70s because of an earhquake. There was another Quake reported near Yucca Mountain in 2002. Besides this all overlooks the fact that Yucca Mountain is situated on the Shoshone's ancestral lands that was promised them by the Ruby Valley Treaty.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"We must stop fossil fuels now, or it will destroy our planet", virtually all of them are dead set against the cheapest and easiest way to replace fossil fuels - Nuclear Power.
Nuclear power is only "cheap" because the government gives them massive subsidies. If the Nuclear Power industry had to operate in a freemarket, ie buy their own insurance and pay for their own waste disposal without government assistance, the industry would not exist. The US has a number of laws and such to shield nuclear power thus "making it profitable". Get rip of all of them and it would no longer be profitable.
you will see that amoung organized enviornmentalist, opposition to nuclear power is universal.
Amoung environmentalists, not all oppose nuclear power, there are some who push for more nuclear power plants as a "clean" source of energy. I consider myself an environmentalist and at one tyme I opposed nuclear power, but now I sit on the fence. I'm not anti-nuclear power but I'm not pro it yet either. What concerns me now environmentally is the mining of the fuel and storage. However from what I've been reading reprosessing spent fuel extends fuel as well as makes it less harmful. If true then I may support nuclear power. However there's one thing that could derail any support, the US subsidies to the Nuclear Power industry. In order for me to support it it would have to operate in a true freemarket, they'd have to buy and pay for their insurance instead of laws shielding them, and they'd have to pay for the disposal of the remaining waste.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"Foreign aid could be delivered by ICBM."
I think that just about says it all, don't you, folks?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The project supposedly has a 10 thousand year life span
Originally it was a lot longer period of time, however once they realized there was no way they could guaranty storage would be safe that long politicans lowered the length to 10,000 years. Also when the process of finding storage place other places were being considered as well, Texas and Washinton amoung them. However because Nevada didn't have a strong congressional delegate and both Texas and Washington did, they were dropped with only Yucca left.
FalconShould there be a Law?
a few of us are sitting here on slashdot, with the answers to islamofascism and environmental destruction, two of the biggest problems in the world, and the answer is safe (yes, i said SAFE), cheap (yes i said CHEAP), plentiful (yes i said PLENTIFUL), secure (yes i said SECURE) and low polluting (yes, i said LOW POLLUTING) nuclear
Nuclear is only cheap because the government subsidizes the industry and passed laws protecting the industry. If the nuclear power industry had to operate in a freemarket, ie buy their own insurance and pay for the storage of their waste it wouldn't be profitable. However because the US shields power plants from lawsuits and pays for storage it is profitable. But heck, many things would be profitable if the government were made to make laws favoring them and pick up the tab of cleanup as well as insurance.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Anyways, I'll stop thinking of unobtainium now
While I have "The Core", they just burned through the crystal, playing I see this.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That is all well and good, provided succeeding civilizations remain aware of the problem. Suppose we have another Alexandrian library fire (maybe thanks to Islamicists this time) and we collectively forget about the nasties buried deep underground - until some enterprising miners in a newly emerging industrial society find out the hard way.
just launch the material into the sun.
It takes too much energy to launch stuff into the sun. We already have a massively huge, hot, radioactive meltdown called the Earth's core. Just put the nuclear nasties back where they came from - drill holes in a subduction zone and drop 'em in.
Also, it seems ironic that the earth is filled with rad materials. Natural stone can be quite radioactive. It becomes dangerous when we extract and concentrate it. Maybe putting concentrated waste in a single location isn't the best idea.
Nuclear power is only "cheap" because the government gives them massive subsidies. If the Nuclear Power industry had to operate in a freemarket, ie buy their own insurance and pay for their own waste disposal without government assistance, the industry would not exist. The US has a number of laws and such to shield nuclear power thus "making it profitable". Get rip of all of them and it would no longer be profitable.
Nuclear power is neither cheap nor expensive... because nuclear power only exists in a handful of quasi-public facilities, all of them decades old. There aren't nearly enough nuclear reactors in the U.S., nor are there any working in any sort of market capacity, nor are they modern, for anyone to make a statement one way or another about it. Talking about the U.S. Nuclear Power Industry is like talking about the U.S. Space Tourism Industry... we are talking about something entirely imaginary on any real scale.
*HOWEVER*, France does have a very viable nuclear power industry. Nuclear power, in France, is cheaper than coal power is in the United States. Nuclear power in France is cheap, safe, and provides about 70% of the France's electricity.
The "problem" isn't a "real" problem. In 20-30 years when we have robust molecular nanotechnology you simply sort all of the "waste", atom by atom, into nice little isotopically pure piles. Then you feed them into breeder reactors (or accelerators) that are designed to breed each isotope into Gadolinium-148 which in turn makes for a really nice power source for nanorobots. The problem isn't that the waste is radioactive, or that there is a lot of it. The problem is that we don't have inexpensive molecular sorting capabilities that would allow efficient nuclear transmutation disposal methods. Long before one is worried about the decay of the nuclear waste storage vessels one should be worried about the nanofactories sucking all of the carbon out of the atmosphere (to build huge nanoyachts) and as a result killing all of the plant life on the planet. Now *there* is a *real* problem.
*HOWEVER*, France does have a very viable nuclear power industry. Nuclear power, in France, is cheaper than coal power is in the United States. Nuclear power in France is cheap, safe, and provides about 70% of the France's electricity.
Yes but how much does France's nuclear power industry get in subsidies?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yes but how much does France's nuclear power industry get in subsidies?
... or what do you think that 100 billion dollar adventure in Iraq was about? Do you think the cost of the future consequences of global warming are being calculated into the bill for your coal generated electricity?
It gets crazy subsidies. It is France dude! Street mimes get subsidies! But it doesn't get any more subsidies than anything else in France. It is competing on merit, as all other forms of power are also heavily subsidized. The point is, nuclear power is not some ultra-expensive impracticle boondoggle. It is not unrealistic at all that the U.S. could convert the majority of electric production to nuclear power, the rest being supplimented by wind and solar and geothermal.
And it is not like fossil fuels don't get big subsidies either in the U.S.
I am just as against subsidies as you... but if my money is going to be taken away from me at gunpoint for something, I rather it be spent on something that will most likely work, like nuclear power - than god knows what else it is going to be spent on.
And it is not like fossil fuels don't get big subsidies either in the U.S. ... or what do you think that 100 billion dollar adventure in Iraq was about? Do you think the cost of the future consequences of global warming are being calculated into the bill for your coal generated electricity?
Ooh I know the petroleum industry gets it's own subsidies. If other sectors of the energy industry such as solar, geothermal, and wind got just as much in subsidies I wouldn't mind so much. But by giving the nuclear power and petro industries as much in subsidies as they get they have an unfair advantage over other energy sources. Personally I think that if the government is going the subsidize any energy sector then it needs to sponser a Manhatten or Apollo Project sized program for alternative, clean and renewable, energy sources. This should give you the idea I don't particularly support the fossil fuel industries. Actually, I've been designing the home I eventually want to build and I'm designing it to be energy selfsufficient. I am using passive solar designs to reduce heating and cooling needs, maximizing daylighting to reduce the need to use lights during the day, and use energy efficient lights and appliances. For more than 15 years now, I've only used, er bought when a light bulb burns out, CFL bulbs which use 1/4 of the energy regular incandescent lights do. If led lights were better for area lighting instead of just spot lighting, I use them, they only use a tenth of the energy.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If in 1,500 years what becomes|remains of the humankind on Earth is not able to deal with the issue (if there is any issue ever, that is) using 0.000000000000001 of the annual GDP or whatever equivalent there is, well, they probably won't care anyway. Such long term projections judged in reference to today's level of our technological ability are meaningless. Have you ever heard of those dreadful stinky heaps of waste that cities of the year 500 A.D. produced, ruining the environment around them forever?
With nuclear energy, we can have a plan for the whooping 200 years in advance, and get all the benefits we can have now. This is all what's EVER needed. Things will be vastly different in less than 200 years.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
This is semi-serious, what would the implications be?
Isn't it ironic that the word in the image that I need to type to verify I am human is "ignorant"...hahaha
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
T - 3 seconds
T - 2 seconds
T - 1 seconds
Lift off
.
.
.
Hey thats not right.
Hold on.
What's happening?
Bang !!!
The biggest Dirty Nuclear Bomb in history.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
is extreme support for extremist ethnocentric views on organizing society with ready desire to kill many innocents easily and quickly in support of the goal
and they are organized: their principle organizes them
the kind of radical sharia law that many are pushing in the isalmic world is fascism. the majority of muslims are moderate peaceful and want no harm on anyone. but the islamofascists do exist. to pretend they don't is quite laughable on your part
any extreme easily violent fundamentalist religious belief system is inherently the same as fascism. it has nothing to do with islam. it doesn't even have to do with religion. it has everything to do extreme, ethnocentric, and violent fundamentalism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Building a nuclear power plant is indeed an energy intensive process. So isn't building a steel mill, sports stadium, coal power plant. Making solar panels is energy intensive. This page says that a nuclear power plant repays it's energy costs for construction, deconstruction, and waste disposal in 3 months.
On to cost: First, remember I was making an EO comment. As an EO I have the power to pay cash, conscript labor, cut through red tape(or people if necessary), etc... Also, while I hate coal with a passion, I view nuclear, wind, and solar more equally.
Let's approach it from the supply side. A 1GW power plant of the nuclear variety will produce, on average, 8.5 Billion kw/hours of electricity a year with the US average load factor* for nuclear power plants of 97%. At about 8 cents per kw/h, that's $680 million in electricity. A $2 billion 1GW nuclear reactor would take about four years to pay itself off(discounting other expenses).
Costs to contruct:
Nuclear Power: $2000/kw capacity (97% load factor, fuel costs relativly insignificant) effective: $2062
Solar Power: $2000/kw best new tech, grid connected(50% in optimal climate) effective: $4000
Wind: $2000/kw (sites don't want to post the cost, maintenance of turbines still required LF:35%), effective: $5714
Coal: $1400/kw (75-85% load factor, but significant health and emissions, as well as fuel costs)
NG/Oil/Diesel/etc: fuel costs more significant than generator costs.
And I'd want the government to stop subsidizing the nuclear power industry along with the petroleum industry, at least help alternative energy to the same degree
Ok, we'll subsidize 'alternative energy' to the same degree as we subsidize the nuclear power industry. Here's how we do it: We cut all subsidies for building alternative power installations, such as the 1.8 cents/kwh wind credit, to zero and charge a mandatory 'disposal' fee per kw/hour of energy produced with the agreement to take care of the waste. I know alternative power normally doesn't generate any, but then, neither has the government actually taken any waste away in the nuclear power industry. Oh, and the government will agree to only hold the wind power industry responsable for the first 10 billion dollars or so of damages, before which will be self covered, covered by private insurance, then a common pool for which all wind producers will have to have money in escrow before. Oh wait, was that not the subsidization you were thinking of?
Then there's a significant problem with 'renewable' energy sources like wind and solar in that they're not demand based. Basically, they produce power when they want to, not when people need power. You don't store electricity if you don't have to, because the storage systems are expensive. Therefore you need backup power capability, which substantially increases the costs of the 'green' power, because you essentially have to build double the capacity. Oh, and most standbys are either expensive NG or dirty coal.
*Load Factor, also known as the capacity factor, is the ratio between a power plant's actual production and theoretical maximum production. Nuclear power plants are generally the highest at 97%, as they shut down rarely and usually operate at 100%. Solar will never break 50%. Wind in england averages 25-35%.
I don't read AC A human right
It's not hard to find an account that gives higher than inflation interest rates, especially if you're willing to commit to long interval periods. They aren't the best idea for most purposes, but they are useful for some things, such as guaranteed income flow.
Before you shoot your mouth off, make sure you know what you're talking about.
... and if the politicians don't want to pay enough for the maintenance of the repository, then THEY will be the first people to die knee-deep in the glowing green sludge.
(This is my considered opinion as a geologist ; it certainly is workable for the UK and the London Clay; without further study it might not be applicable to other countries. Do your own homework, and if necessary, move *your* capital city.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
You'll just have to accept that you may have to think a bit to follow things, with your disadvantages.
Inflation does equal loss of purchasing power, by definition. The fact that it may be reported incorrectly does not change that. It's reported correctly, for the most part, though. The people who calculate it are much, much more intelligent and educated than you are. You have no justification to challenge them, but if you must, publish. When you do, you'll get ignored, or at best laughed at.
Oh, and by the way, only simpletons pay more than nominal bank fees. They're trivial to avoid. Think about the fact that you haven't, and then take whatever money you have, and turn it over to someone capable of managing it wisely. Have a smarter relative, if you have one, find someone who won't swindle you. Or don't, the economy works better when fools are separated from their money.
Thanks for the entertainment, peon.
Feel free to make stuff up on the internet, if it makes you feel better about your inadequacies, though.
You may want to rethink any worries on "contaminating" Yucca Mountain by using it as a storage place for old nuclear material. Relax. It is one of the most contaminated places on the planet already. Yucca Mountain is right by Yucca Flats, where the U.S. AEC starting lighting off nuclear fission weapons tests in the early 1950's. One DOE list shows 100 aboveground tests and 828 underground tests.
The Nevada Test Site is 1,375 square miles around the test zone. Any leaks have to penetrate that -considerable- physical buffer. Thus, we are not talking about them just leaking down the street here.
Something worth seeing:
If you have not seen the craters from the very high yield underground tests, they are a spectacular sight; go to Google Earth, start at "Mercury, Nevada", then just follow the road North until you start seeing enormous craters where the earth has collapsed into the spherical chambers hollowed out by thermonuclear weapons tests. It's called "The Most Bombed Spot On Earth" for a good reason.
-- thanks, Dave
I just looked izt up, they have net metering here in ND
I know some states have net metering but not all of them. CA, OR, and WA do however I didn't know ND had it. I'm not really supprised though seeing as how good wind is there.
If you have a negative number, they purchase it from you, though at a lower rate(basically what they pay their suppliers), which is reasonable because they still have to maintain the lines.
I agree in a way, they have to pay for the upkeep of the infrastructure. However in many places government paid to build the infrastructure.
FalconShould there be a Law?
One problem you run into up here is that many things don't like working at -30.
I got a kick out of reading this, it reminded me of when I was in the army. My unit went to Fort Greeley, Alaska, right outside of Fairbanks in the middle of the state. We went there for Northern warfare training the day after Thanksgiving and were there 3 weeks. It was about -30 the whole tyme, not counting the wind chill factor. You could pretty acurately separate those who grew up in the cold north versus those that grew up in the warmer south. Almost as a herd most southerners ran and dived into the snow mounts on the side of the runway, and they enjoyed it there. However many of those from the north hated it.
Somebody has to be first, and ND has a 15% rebate(spread over 5 years) for them. Since I already have electric service, I'd probably go with the connected, though a battery system for critical stuff(like the furnace) is in planning.
If you're thinking of doing this yourself, instead of a battery backup you might want to check into a backup generator. Do research on both, then you can decide which one makes more sense for you to use.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That was a very interesting read. What occurred to me is the manner in which we learned to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. They would still be a mystery were is not for the Rosetta stone, containing the same message in several languages. To communicate the danger to future generations, I would desribe it in detail in a permanent form (stone, whatever), but in many different languages and codes - purposefully create a rossetta stone. Even after thousands of years and the collapse of civilizations, we can still understand most of many ancient languages. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc. We don't know which languages will survive the millenia, but by including a good selection, there are good odds one will be understandable.
Since I already have a huge propane tank, I'm leaning towards a propane generator. They last basically forever since propane's so clean. I'd like to get a diesel style*, but those tend to be the huge ones, and I don't need to power the whole town.
By all means, go with a propane generator if you've already got a tank. Less resources would be needed than if a diesel or gas generator were used.
FalconShould there be a Law?