U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open

None of that stuff really requires any great level of centralization at all. Many components, like social security, are effectively mandatory requirement savings and could be replicated at the level of an individual if they didn't exist, simply by using the money not paid in social security tax to buy an annuity.

The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that still doesn't require uniformity of centralization. We don't even have it as it is -- the Saudis are some of the richest people in the world, they make most of their money from the US and Europe, yet they pay no income tax to either region.

Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city. There is nothing stopping New York City from imposing a land value tax and using the money to fund a UBI, if that's what they want to do.

Centralized government actually interferes with this significantly, because San Francisco or the state of California can't implement its own healthcare policies when they have the US government overriding them, and hoovering up the state's money and sending it to other states, using it for military spending or sending it back with strings attached that require it to be spent on less efficient or less appropriate programs than the state would choose to fund for itself.

This is the correct thought process. The linked article from llnl [1] states that “The final plan called for (1) removing all radioactive and non-radioactive debris (equipment, concrete, scrap metal, etc.), (2) removing all soil that exceeded 14.8 Bq (400 pCi) of plutonium per gram of soil, (3) removing or amending soil between 1.48 and 14.8 Bq (40 and 400 pCi) of plutonium per gram of soil, determined on a case-by-case basis depending on ultimate land-use, and 4) disposing and stabilizing all this accumulated radioactive waste into a crater on Runit Island and capping it with a concrete dome.” It goes on to state that “A estimated total of 73,000 cubic meters of surface soil...was recovered by scapping and deposited in Cactus crater on Runit Island.”

Unfortunately, it does not provide an average specific activity for the material stored, only a lower limit threshold. If we assume it was near this lower limit of 14.8 bq threshold (could be the case depending on how often case (3) was used) and assume mostly plutonium-239. Since isotopic distribution is unknown, this is a conservative assumption because the longer half-life will yield a larger mass in the calculation. The molar density can be calculated from the specific activity listed:

Na/m = a x hl/ln(2) = 14.8[decay/s] x 23110[yrs]/ln(2) = 1.57e13 atoms/gram = 2.61e-11 mol/gram

The mass of the dirt collected will be assumed to be wet sand with a density of 1905 kg/m^3 [2] (note that density is actually slightly higher than this due to the plutonium contained). And finally, the volume collected is 73,000 cubic meters, or 1.39e11 grams. So the total amount of plutonium is:

2.61e-11[mol/g] x 1.39e11[g] = 3.63 mol

So our envelope calculation yields about 870 grams of plutonium. So how accurate is this? It is probably on the high side after reading the paper posted by Shivetya [3]. They cite a total inventory of 545 GBq. Using the assumptions above, one would expect an inventory of 2058 GBq.

As for the effects, that’s difficult to tell. Really the two scenarios that come to mind are a constant leaching into the environment or a disaster that results in the total mass being dumped. In the latter case a disaster of that magnitude would likely disperse the material in a biased direction. In this case it would dilute relatively quickly. Impacts from the radiation would probably be apparent close by in the biased direction. A constant leak would depend on the leach rate and leak locations. The NRC defines monthly sewer release limits of material in Table 3 of 10 CFR Part 20 Appendix B - standards for protection against radiation. The number given for Pu is 84 uCi or 3.108e6 Bq. Based on the plutonium inventory calculated and neglecting material decay, the material could leach out within NRC limits over a period of 55 thousand years (2058e9/3.108e6/12). Note that this number is likely highly inflated given the assumption that all radioactive material is Pu-239 and the comparison in [3]. Using the number from [3] and assuming all activity is Pu, the duration would be 14 thousand years. However this is a rough analysis that does not account for isotopic distributions, so please take the results with a grain of salt.

[1]:https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/enewetak.php#cleanup

[2]:https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/amp/dirt-mud-densities-d_...

[3]:https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/ccc/Hamilton_LLNL-TR-648143...

Now you're asking a completely different question. It's not a matter of not knowing what to do, it's a matter of not doing it.

But nothing about nuclear is unique in that regard. If you have incompetence then we get Deepwater Horizon, Bophal, companies dumping cadmium, lead, mercury, cyanide, nitrogen, phosphorous or acid in to rivers and groundwater, mining runoff, destroying rainforest, dam failures, basically the entire list of Superfund sites in the US. Those kinds of things can be significantly worse than even a full scale nuclear meltdown. And on top of that, chemical pollutants have no half-life -- they're forever.

There is a 3700 acre coal mine fire that has been burning in Pennsylvania since 1962, causing the town to be abandoned:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

It's the same problem with anything -- even solar is silicon. Take a look a the environmental history of Silicon Valley for a morbid lesson in how wrong that can go.

> The worst case with nuclear is much worse than with solar

It isn't. The worst case with solar is that they're manufactured with lead, cadmium and other toxic substances that pollute the environment if they're improperly manufactured or disposed of. If you abandon a solar farm, the panels get damaged by weather and then the heavy metals leech into the ground. The environmental impact of that for a solar farm with power output equal to a nuclear reactor would be as bad or worse than a nuclear meltdown.

On top of that, the real worst case for solar is that the storage technology it needs to replace carbon energy sources never becomes economical, and then without having built nuclear today, we get a level of climate change that causes human extinction.

without question the lack of overfishing in these waters, like in chernobyl ensures that if you did a real study on the health of this area, biodiversity is thriving, because people and development are lacking. it's amazing how much nuclear fear mongering there is , persistenly. with all the idiots listening to washington post and other venues about shutting down nuclear power , by fear mongering it with nuclear weapons.

alas, this is how progress dies, and artificial scarcity is imposed, no less of a low c02 and zero emission source of energy.