Comment by Joel_Mckay
16 hours ago
Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?
Thus far, most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks, Radon gas diffusion, or hot-material fires. Fission reactors are a 1950's loss-leader technology, and only make sense for already uninhabitable areas like space. =3
There are plenty of dry areas like in the American Southwest which can be projected to not have meaningful water attempt ingress in that time frame.
Also, fission reactors make phenomenal sense on aircraft carriers, submarines, etc.
We've already leached too much uranium into the groundwater for many to drink just from the mining alone.
We’ve also already depleted many aquifers past the point of recovery.
We have too many people to hydrate, too many crops to water in order to feed them, and not enough water. At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.
Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.
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Wait till you find out how much uranium there is in coal ash and how many tons a year are put in the air or dumped into ground water. Both the ash and uranium tailings are in the 50ppm range, but we make 100Mt per year of one of them and basically no uranium tailings in the US. Globally, the ratio is over 1Gt of coal ash and 10-20Mt of uranium tailings.
One is currently a problem, the other isn't.
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and we've collected enough arsenic from a single mine to kill every human on the planet 300 times over in one spot- what's your point? That because we screwed up one spot we should give up?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine
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Every miner knows most holes fill with water sooner or later.
Corollary: Every sailor knows most vessels are sunk sooner or later.
Aircraft carriers and Submarines are not civilian infrastructure, and if they sink offshore where no can live... will usually pose less of a problem like buoyant waste barrels popping up later.
We are in the age of bargain conflicts, where throwing gold bricks at adversaries makes less sense strategically. =3
Exactly. Most is not all and the ones that don't have striking traits in common ignored only by a fool.
> Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?
Why are people still proposing this antiquated 20th century storage technology instead of just building the newer reactor types that not only don't have this problem but are the best way to get rid of the long-lived isotopes we already have from 20th century reactor designs?
The answer to what you do with isotopes with long half lives is that you put them in a reactor that turns them into isotopes with shorter half lives.
Mostly, it is the same naive lies we have all heard dozens of times before in the past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUHuX-Gbenc
Also, the billions of dollars boondoggle reactor projects that never delivered is a hard sell. "Trust me bro" isn't enough anymore. lol =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc
None of it is lies. The CANDU reactors Canada has been operating for decades can run on spent fuel from legacy reactors and China actually uses them that way. The US hasn't built any of them, or any of the other designs that can do the same thing, in significant part because people keep presenting the circular reasoning that we shouldn't build newer reactors without dealing with nuclear waste when we should be dealing with nuclear waste by building newer reactors.
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> most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks
There's nothing obvious I could find that I could find that would confirm it. Could you cite something?
Indeed, signal-to-noise ratio on the modern web is fairly challenging search space, but there was DoE documentation out there showing near zero practical success rate at actual long-term disposal sites. Every site has shown some concrete degradation within years, reported incidents, water ingress, and persistent operational costs. Current methodology is to pile up waste near cooling ponds, and lie to people about dealing with it at some point in the future.
My point was, few organizations have ever shown actual success with what they claimed would happen. Thus, arguing sites will hold for 75 years let alone 30k years is a fools errand. Water fills holes in the ground, and will likely continue to do so in the future. =3
https://armscontrolcenter.org/nuclear-waste-issues-in-the-un...
https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/acts-and-regulations/event-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
dilation procedures will fix that Joel!
South Park fans are hilarious =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veHTTuePS1w
99.99% of the radiation is gone after 300 years, so you don't really have to.
"Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24110 years"
There are dozens of other decay products with various hazardous properties.
Scientific hubris can't be made safe, and societies have proven irresponsible with fuel life-cycle management. =3
> "Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24110 years"
Great, that means it is not very radioactive, and an alpha emitter, so unless you ingest it is not particularly harmful.
> societies have proven irresponsible with fuel life-cycle management
Do you have evidence that the spent nuclear fuel from power stations has killed people?
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And why am I supposed to care? Because plutonium sounds scary?
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I think storing nuclear waste was decided to be a bad idea a long time ago.
I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I was under the impression that if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power.
Is that not the case?
> if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power
Only under certain circumstances is it financially worth harnessing this power. I think of space probes and their RTGs. They use alpha emitters like Pu-238, to minimize the shielding requirements.
As for the rest of the stuff, dry casks are good enough. Reprocessing isn’t currently economical while uranium is so cheap, although the vitrification of the fission products can help immobilize the worst radiation emitters, but really the UO2 structure does a decent job of keeping things put.
A brand new Uranium fuel pellet is often safe to hold with gloved hands for a moment.
Spent fuel with complex decay isotopes must be kept under deep cooling pools with criticality control precautions. From a chemistry perspective, complex isotope products like Plutonium are more obscure to evolutionary biology, so it is often much more dangerous even in accidental trace exposures.
I am just a sentient turnip that prefers distributed Solar products. Have a great day =3
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The living, and sometimes those dying from lung cancer. =3
edit: Please don't down peoples karma for being crass. If it was a honest question they deserve an honest answer.