Warning Future Generations About Nuclear Waste

Smivs writes "How do we warn people 10,000 years in the future about our nuclear waste dumps? There is a thought-provoking essay in the The Guardian newspaper (UK) by Ulrich Beck concerning this problem. Professor Beck also questions whether green issues are overly influencing politicians and clouding our judgement regarding the dangers of nuclear power."

Comments

Re:We don't

[Tacvek]

Of course, there is little reason to worry about the long term if we use an intelegent reactor design.

The Integral Fast Reactor design's only waste products have a half life of 90 years or less, or 211,100 years or more. The latter components clearly give off very little radiation per unit time, so they can basically be ignored. It is the other components that give off significant radiation. However, within 200 years the waste radiation levels are no greater than that of natural ores. This means that it is reasonably safe to just bury it.

The design has other advantages too:

1. Fuel does not need to be precisely shaped, but can be cast into the correct shape
2. It is easier to make weapons-grade fuel from natural uranium than from the fuel. The waste contains no actinides so is worthless for creation of nuclear weapons. This means the reactor is really not a proliferation concern.
3. Because spent fuel is reprocessed in site to extract the non-spent components from it, the total amount of waste produced is tiny compared to the more common reactor designs

Of course, there are a few downsides, the most notable is the fact that the plant would have higher construction costs than most, and would have higher cost per kilowatt than most.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor for more information on this reactor design.

Re:Put a picture of Zeus on them.

[bobcat7677]

Actually, I think we are a bit "smarter" then you think. Or else you are misinformed about how we use nuclear fuel. The "spent" fuel we store in our dumps is still highly radioactive and quite useful for powering stuff for years. The problem is that we have disallowed ourselves from further refining it to make it useful through the treaties meant to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I heard one researcher throw out figures that suggested we could run all the world's reactors for something like 300+ years on all the "waste" that is currently in dumps if we were allowed to recycle (refine it again).