211–220 of 473 posts
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If it's densely concentrated, it can be spread out. If it's concentrated enough, it's still a source of usable energy.
With an unfortunate chasm between the two: the "immediate coma, you don't wake up before you bleed to death everywhere inside and out" level of radiation is an absorbed dose of a mere few tens of joules of ionising radiation per kilogram of body mass.
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>We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Only because we found like one stone hundreds of years ago, if that was not the case we probably could not have done it. >Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. [Citation needed] This seems like quite an assumption. Anyhow, the situation he sketched was that some random guy develops a fields with cylinders 300 years fro…
I think the best thing we can do is bury all the nuclear waste. And to avoid any future generation excavating it, mark it's location, and to stand the test of time, build a massive stone pyramid on top of it. In 5000 years people will be able to figure that out.
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>1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else. The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller. Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not…
We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. Even without that, you could give the information visually in cartoon form.
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> This seems like quite an assumption. The issue with hieroglyphics is that we only had a relatively small sample. If full books remain, it's going to be much easier to recover meaning from scratch. It's very close to what we already do with LLMs.
What books last 10000 years? What writing is performed today on a medium that will last that long? No one is carving into clay any more
(And probably quite a few weirdos will still keep replicating the bible)
I just don't like this, a huge amount of money spent for nothing. This fuel can be managed just fine above ground. Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway. Also, this is not 'waste' there are interesting and unique materials there that might be relevant in the next 100+ years. Not to mention that th…
> “Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyway.” This isn’t the right way to plan centuries ahead. You can’t just say “well if the dummies can’t do this one more thing we imposed on them, they deserve what they get.” With generational risks we should aim to reduce them now as much as possible and take t…
A breached nuclear cask in the very specific case that civilisation has collapsed and lost all knowledge of nuclear material and signage is a limited local event. Low impact on a societal level (admittedly high on the guy with the hand tools cutting into it) and low probability.
Climate change is a probability-1 event that affects everyone. So is plastic pollution. For that matter, indeed, lack of affordable housing probably will end up with worse consequences projected into the far future than a hypothetical deep-time grave-robbing mishap.
While doing a good job of handling nuclear waste is obviously extremely important, handwringing over the effect on a contrived far-future devolved society to the extent that we inhibited the one power source that could have avoided the latter 70 years of the fossil fuel boom in the first place, a boom which actually has plausible civilisation-scale effects, seems backwards.
Admittedly it's now getting to the point where non-nuclear non-fossil energy may be the cheaper and scalable option (pending a mind-boggling but physically-possible amount of storage) so maybe the moment for a nuclear-based energy system has passed. I don't really buy it and still think only nuclear is likely to deliver the energy needed over the next 100 years, including decarbonisation of heating, industry, transport and also possibly environmental remediation. In any case, assuming human civilisation retains knowledge of the 20th and 21st centuries, they're going to be wondering what the hell we were thinking between the 1950s and the 2050s when we had nuclear energy in our hands and nearly destroyed the biosphere anyway by choice (and that "nearly" is only there because this assumes enough of it survives for someone to be looking back in the first place).
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With an unfortunate chasm between the two: the "immediate coma, you don't wake up before you bleed to death everywhere inside and out" level of radiation is an absorbed dose of a mere few tens of joules of ionising radiation per kilogram of body mass.
The sun deposits over a thousand joules every second onto every square meter.
Almost none of the sunlight that gets through the air is ionising, and yet despite the biological defences aimed specifically at what remains, sunlight still gives us cancers in the exposed areas.
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Options: 1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else. 2. You just build a house on the ground (without digging). Nothing bad happens. 3. Civilization collapses, nobody cares about the abandoned casks.
>1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else. The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller. Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not…
ISO 21482:
> On February 15, 2007, two groups—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—jointly announced the adoption of a new ionizing radiation warning symbol to supplement the traditional trefoil symbol. The new symbol, to be used on sealed radiation sources, is aimed at alerting anyone, anywhere to the danger of being close to a strong source of ionizing radiation.[12] It depicts, on a red background, a black trefoil with waves of radiation streaming from it, along with a black skull and crossbones, and a running figure with an arrow pointing away from the scene. The radiating trefoil suggests the presence of radiation, while the red background and the skull and crossbones warn of danger. The figure running away from the scene is meant to suggest taking action to avoid the labeled material. The new symbol is not intended to be generally visible, but rather to appear on internal components of devices that house radiation sources so that if anybody attempts to disassemble such devices they will see an explicit warning not to proceed any further.[13][14]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol#Ionizing_radiati...
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Or somebody spends 100$ on a Geiger counter ... Nuclear waste will not simply be lost. The only way it gets lost if society literally collapses. And if that happens the small amount of nuclear waste is the least important problem anybody will have.
Nuclear waste has been lost multiple times throughout history and has killed people. Kind of amazing someone could think it cannot happen. https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/overview-of-the-cns-gl...
And I couldn't find a clear indication of how many people died from civilian nuclear waste. The article you linked does not really give much information and I'm not gone read the whole report.
Every study shows that that nuclear energy has the lowest death per person. People are more likely to die during construction then anything else.
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That 96% of the mass is 238U. It's usable in breeder reactors. It's not useful for today's burner reactors. We have far too much 238U for those already; enrichment is the process of stripping out 238U from natural uranium. It would be utterly pointless to recover more 238U for them. We already have great stockpiles of depleted U sitting around. The stuff is not worth very much right now. Reprocessing can recover some…
Since it if just sitting around can I buy some? I would be happy to have a kilogram cube of DU
Legality might depend which country you live in, and the stores I've seen sell only tiny quantities for high prices because they can (only collectors really want it and they will pay), but you can totally just buy some.
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His point is that other technologies are not held to the same standard. And that is still true. Even above ground nuclear storage is far better waste management then virtually anything else, including wind and solar. The likely hood of people dying from old wind and solar projects is quite a bit higher then people dying from nuclear waste.
The difference between the two scenario's is quite obvious. In coal ash it's highly diluted, in nuclear waste it's highly concentrated.
Every input into the nuclear reactor is just coming out the other side in a very controlled way. There is no dispersal of anything into the environment (except potentially heat).
The lifecycle of materials is handled way better then any other form of energy.