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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."
We could. In fact, we could do that right now using the Integral Fast Reactor, except that its apparently a proliferation risk. We are willing to give up probably the cleanest source of nuclear energy developed so far, just because we are afraid of petty despots and terrorists getting their hands on a nuke. We are letting a tiny, tiny minority of small minded psychopaths determine the technological evolution of the human race, simply because we are scared.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Thank you. And another possibility is accelerator driven subcritical reactors. Not only does it burn all of the fuel, it is safer -- turn off the particle accelerator and the reactor shuts down.
Actually, that would probably work - instead of putting a sign up with a skull and crossbones you could manufacture non-biodegradable human remains and use those as your "sign". (thus avoiding the confusion mentioned in TFA)
I was thinking something similar, though I suspect it's about slightly more sophisticated logic. Something like this...
If our ancestors are sufficiently technologically advanced, they are overwhelmingly likely to have technology to detect and/or dispose of nuclear waste far more efficiently than we are. In this case, we don't need to warn them.
On the other hand, if our ancestors aren't sufficiently technologically advanced (to do the steps above) then they are also overwhelmingly likely not to have survived 10,000 years on a planet with global warming and 10,050 years of nuclear waste. In that case, we don't need to warn then.
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The parent is right. I don't know a whole lot about Nuclear Physics, but it's something I've been trying to read up on lately. The thing about 'spent' nuclear fuel, is that it still does have, as the parent points out, the potential to be reprocessed and burned again. I'm not entirely clear on this, but from what I've read, I think they can reprocess it quite a few times, until it's eventually at a fairly low energy and stable state to where, like the parent said, it's only dangerous for a short time.
What people don't realize is back in the 70's, the US was looking into the possibility of setting up breeder reactors to reprocess fuel. The Carter administration made the decision to, for the time being, defer re-processing the fuel, with the given reason that they were concerned about the ability to secure the Plutonium which is produced in the re-processing. That is, breeder reactors process 'spent' Uranium into a mixture of Uranium and Plutonium, I think (which can then be used as a fuel for a plutonium power reactor). The problem is, if someone diverted even *very small* amounts of the plutonium, which might be hard to detect because of how small an amount is missing, they could over time possibly accumulate enough material to build a small but powerful bomb, or at least a dirty bomb. Steal a few grams here, a few grams there, eventually you have a few kilograms.
Plus, there was an economic argument against it at the time - Uranium was cheap and abundant, so it was simply cheaper to keep burning 'new' Uranium, than to reprocess the spent Uranium. My understanding is that, at least currently, some of the processing and enrichment necessary to turn it into Plutonium fuel, hasn't been figured out how to do very econically effectively. There have been various Breeder reactor's put up in other countries, I think I read there are some in Europe and Asia, but so far the current designs, I guess, haven't turned out to be very economically competitive against other energy sources.
Personally, as I indicate in my subject for this post, I view Yucca Mountain not as a waste site, a dumping ground, but more like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We are saving the spent Uranium until the time we need it and and have figured out the technologies necessary to efficiently and cheaply reproccess it, and how to secure it better. Because it stays 'hot' for 10000 years, it means we have plenty of time in which to figure out how to reprocess it and make an economically viable energy source out of it. In that regard, the extremely long time spans might be quite to our advantage, as it means we aren't, really, losing significant potential energy each year it's sitting in storage. In the meantime, we just keep buying 'new' Uranium and building up our strategic reserve.
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.
And to top it all off, the mix of plutonium isotopes produced by a fuel reprocessing reactor is unusable as nuclear weapons fuel. Warheads require minimum 93% pure Pu-239, which is produced by short-cycling uranium in a certain configuration of fission reactor. It was completely unnecessary to put a blanket ban on breeder reactors, as all that was necessary was to ban a certain type of breeder reactor. Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, knew the difference but decided to appease the ignorant luddite anti-nuke crowd that made no distinction between nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. By perpetuating the myth of "breeder reactor = nuclear warheads" from the executive office, he essentially saddled us with 30 years worth of dangerous nuclear "waste" that is really just nuclear fuel that's 90% unused.
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