Good news re: nuclear power

[lurch 0]

Question:
Why always half steps? Yucca mtn for example. Why so shallow? A nearly surface-level tunnel storage facility in a mountain strikes me as hardly effective at actually sequestering the stuff for the geological ages required. We already know its a fairly simple matter (relatively speaking, for a major drilling concern or oil industry) to drill one bigass hole miles deep. The russians took like 20 years to drill a 40,000 foot hole, then Exxon did it in 60 days, motivated by oil.

Why do they not simply drill a line of holes about 30,000, 40,000 feet deep and just drop the shit down the holes? I get the idea Yucca is intended to allow monitoring of the stuff, but this makes no sense to me. Why bother to monitor it when we know damn well no human institutions last more than a handful of years. The stuff has to be well and truly inaccessibly secured for hundreds of thousands of years.

The whole idea of a so-called "deep repository" thats actually so shallow they take tour groups through strikes me as just fucking stupid. If I look to things like pyramids and ancient tombs for examples, the contents of Yucca would be "secure" for maybe a few hundred to a thousand years and will be thoroughly dug up and scattered about by whatever society exists by then when our government and nuclear management institutions are long gone to dust. If they're lucky some scholar specializing in ancient history, 20th century languages and early industrial ruins might recognize a radiation symbol as "Hey guys, I think that symbol they etched in the stone means the ancients stored something really, really nasty in there..."

If its accessible, it will be dug up within a few thousand years at most. If its dropped down an 8 mile deep hole 1/3 of the way through the crust and the hole filled in with 7 miles of dirt, far below water tables, the ecosystem, everything... that stuff ain't coming up... ever. Whats down there has been down there for 2.5 billion years and showed no signs of coming up on its own if we hadn't drilled holes there to see. If they're worried about something forcing it to the surface, fill the entire hole with concrete. Surely a 7 mile plug of concrete is enough to effectively restore the integrity of the basement rocks after the hole is made. Sure seems a safe bet to me. Really, the only safe bet.

So why don't they do it?
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[billvon 2,396]

>Why always half steps? Yucca mtn for example. Why so shallow?

Cause it doesn't need to be deeper. Even surface storage is reasonably safe. Keep in mind that the waste from the Oklo reactors hasn't moved much in 2 billion years - and that's buried only a few hundred feet deep, quite close to a water table.

>Why do they not simply drill a line of holes about 30,000, 40,000 feet deep and just
>drop the shit down the holes?

Well, then we couldn't get it back when we need it again.

>If its accessible, it will be dug up within a few thousand years at most.

Right. That's sort of the point; that's why they're calling it a nuclear repository and not a nuclear dump.

[lurch 0]

Hmmm, dunno if I buy some of this...

"Cause it doesn't need to be deeper. Even surface storage is reasonably safe."

Tell that to the egyptians. How many of their eternal tombs made it to the current era unlooted? Take Tut for example. He made it to within a hundred years or so of us, and nobody had a clue what was inside his box. If he'd been buried with some egyptian-era nuclear waste and found by people who didn't have geiger counters, his discovery would have gone down in history as the deadliest nastiest treasure ever found. Imagine how far the damage would go in a postindustrial society that has forgotten things like electricity and reverted to pastoralism, say, Great Britain around the arrival of the Romans. How long it would take such a society to figure out that even being near artifacts from that tomb can kill you?

"Keep in mind that the waste from the Oklo reactors hasn't moved much in 2 billion years "

Bill you just proved my point for me. Sure it has... very recently as such things go... we just dug it up, didn't we? I argue same things gonna happen to our nuke waste. Except our junk will be much easier to find much sooner because instead of being a hidden natural reactor stumbled on by mining mineral analysis, all through history people have a habit of deconstructing all human artifacts as soon as everyone has forgotten what they were for. And our society is going to leave behind some really big, fascinating ruins for our successors to poke around in and wonder about.

Somebody in 4,726 years is really gonna wanna know what the hell we were doing in those huge tunnels in the mountains of Nevada in the middle of an otherwise useless wasteland and since the default human assumption is that we wouldn't bother making such facilities unless we were stashing some kind of valuable treasure for the ages, they're gonna dig until they find it. Its a valuable treasure, all right, just not one they'd have any use for or comprehension of.

I say inside of a thousand years, our descendants are going to be really, really pissed at us for the stuff we left lying around the landscape for them to find.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[Coreece 190]

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Somebody in 4,726 years

Dude, didn't anybody tell you...2012 end of the world. I mean even Quade and Billvon are beginning to argue with eachother! It's happening man...Doomsday!

Your secrets are the true reflection of who you really are...

[billvon 2,396]

>I argue same things gonna happen to our nuke waste.

Yes - and I argue that that's a feature, not a bug. Being able to access a ready source of nuclear fuel is important, and likely will be more so in the future.

>Bill you just proved my point for me. Sure it has... very recently as such things go...
>we just dug it up, didn't we?

Yes. And why did we do that? Because we were after uranium, which we prospected for with (among other things) radiation detectors. Future societies may do the same thing, and may appreciate having a ready supply of nuclear fuel buried in Nevada (or even stored in the desert on a concrete pad somewhere.)

>Its a valuable treasure, all right, just not one they'd have any use for or
>comprehension of.

Then why would they dig it up? A civilization that has the technology to remove ten ton storage casks from a tunnel 1000 feet below the surface - and then know how to change the vitrified fuel back into something dangerous - is going to know what they're getting into.

[jakee 1,254]

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Tell that to the egyptians. How many of their eternal tombs made it to the current era unlooted? Take Tut for example. He made it to within a hundred years or so of us, and nobody had a clue what was inside his box. If he'd been buried with some egyptian-era nuclear waste and found by people who didn't have geiger counters, his discovery would have gone down in history as the deadliest nastiest treasure ever found. Imagine how far the damage would go in a postindustrial society that has forgotten things like electricity and reverted to pastoralism, say, Great Britain around the arrival of the Romans. How long it would take such a society to figure out that even being near artifacts from that tomb can kill you?

Of all the pros and cons in the debate around nuclear power I can't say that making life more difficult for the people who survive the apocalypse is one I've taken seriously.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[muff528 3]

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........

Tell that to the egyptians. How many of their eternal tombs made it to the current era unlooted? Take Tut for example. He made it to within a hundred years or so of us, and nobody had a clue what was inside his box. If he'd been buried with some egyptian-era nuclear waste and found by people who didn't have geiger counters, his discovery would have gone down in history as the deadliest nastiest treasure ever found. Imagine how far the damage would go in a postindustrial society that has forgotten things like electricity and reverted to pastoralism, say, Great Britain around the arrival of the Romans. How long it would take such a society to figure out that even being near artifacts from that tomb can kill you?.......

We could mark the site with signs or inscriptions that leave a warning or a ....uh .....curse!
Abandon hope all ye who enter here[/url], etc.

[lurch 0]

I'm not talking postapocalyptic anything here, that kind of thing is for religious lunatic fringe. Ask Chuteless about that if he hasn't yet levitated to go see jebus. I'm talking about whatever society is actually going to exist between one and, say, three to four thousand years from now.

Or do you really think we're still going to have a Pentagon, an NRC, drive through mickeys, fifty states and roadside attractions in 2k years? Because safe responsible management of the nuke sites in question is largely dependent on the ongoing existence of the political and social systems that created them. And those systems are historically notoriously short-lived. Few hundred years at best. 'Nother words, for as long as this piece of the world is recognizable as the good ol fashioned US of A we all know, fine. But human societies are not built to last... and the shit we make as nuke waste IS.

The longest running continuous cultural and historical record would be, what, the Chinese, at like 6000 years? And for how many of those years would they have been fit to guard a nuke site?

Make the period in question 8500 years and consider: Not only has no human society come close to lasting that long, we have every reason to believe our current one won't last in its present form any longer than the oil does. Ours is by orders of magnitude more energy intensive than anything before, and is burning through its easily available resources as if we didn't expect there to BE a planet in a hundred years.

When our hyped-up mass consumer culture and American Way have burned out and gone, theres still likely to be somebody living here and they're going to have to deal with it, probably in ignorance. The state of advancement that has existed on this continent for roughly the last 100 years in particular is historically a fluke, a big bright flash of expansion and progress, but the default natural ground-state of typical human societies through history has been 99% ignorant chumps working their entire short lives to grow enough food to live and support whatever parasitic government is currently taxing them. After the Romans' expansion ran out of gas roughly at Hadrians wall and the empire withdrew and collapsed, the Brits largely reverted back to the way they'd been before. All the mighty shit the Romans made became pretty background ruins for a sheepherding society that didn't have Senates and Forums and whatnot.

Take Stonehenge... max of about 6500 years, not only has it barely survived to the present day, how long has it been since the last human died who actually knew what it was for? Our nuke waste is our Stonehenge. And "soon", real soon, by nuke waste lifetime standards, there will be nobody left who knows what that shit is, how it got there, or why.

Civilizations wash back and forth across this planet like a tide and when they pull back and fall apart, whatever got left behind gets neglected.

And in 8500 years all that shit, or most of it, will still be cranking out enough radiation the casks will probably still be warm. I'm saying the only halfway responsible thing we could possibly do is make the stuff go away for good, i.e. dropping it down the hole... and we ain't gonna. Some of that shit will still be dangerous in 100,000 years. Some of it for many times longer than THAT. And we're just gonna leave it lying around on the surface.
Tsk, tsk. We are SUCH a messy culture...
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[aarco 0]

Did you know that you can cycle electical energy through distiled water frequinced through an aluminum casing into a light cyclinder and use it as a nuclear fuel rod - the light pitches the nuclear field up as its turned - that in turn modifies the electical wave- the difference between the low ray-dav out put from the electric field and the lux nuclear energy stored from the light current in the cyclinder - creates the nuclear reaction that is captured by the metal coil spung packed in the cylinder as turning it creates a charge - a crystal in the water base acts as a frequincy radio and regulater - safely seperating the melt down threat:-) GIA --An inner apex crystal form is that witch finds the translation frequincy as well as cooling the chamber - no extra tanks are actualy needed for cooling.

Having something never beats doing (>|<)
Iam building things - Iam working on my mind- I am going to change this world - its what I came here 4- - -

[jakee 1,254]

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I'm not talking postapocalyptic anything here

Really? Well, however it hapens, reversion to a post-industrial, pastoral society will involve such a reduction in global population that you might as well call it an apocalypse.

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The longest running continuous cultural and historical record would be, what, the Chinese, at like 6000 years? And for how many of those years would they have been fit to guard a nuke site?

What? Dude, that's pretty fuckin' random. Do you want to ground all aviation in the US because Davy Crockett's generation didn't know how to fly a plane?

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Take Stonehenge... max of about 6500 years, not only has it barely survived to the present day, how long has it been since the last human died who actually knew what it was for?

Yeah... but stonehenge was built by people who didn't know how to write.

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After the Romans' expansion ran out of gas roughly at Hadrians wall and the empire withdrew and collapsed, the Brits largely reverted back to the way they'd been before. All the mighty shit the Romans made became pretty background ruins for a sheepherding society that didn't have Senates and Forums and whatnot.

Not exactly, but I can't be bothered to argue the toss there.

What I'll say is, when people state that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, they don't mean that history is actually going to repeat itself.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[muff528 3]

I'm making some popcorn. ....anybody want some?

[lawrocket 3]

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The state of advancement that has existed on this continent for roughly the last 100 years in particular is historically a fluke, a big bright flash of expansion and progress, but the default natural ground-state of typical human societies through history has been 99% ignorant chumps working their entire short lives to grow enough food to live and support whatever parasitic government is currently taxing them.

Yep. In the last hundred years we’ve had things happen that make them different from the previous years. First – the telegraph. Second – the locomotive. Third – the internal combustion engine. Fourth – the radio. All of these things have led humans to communicate knowledge quickly. This knowledge has been amassed in books and now in electronic form for posterity.

Human society used to consist generally of ignorant chumps generally isolated. The knowledge that has been learned and SAVED has transformed us. Individually, we are all too stupid to understand the basics of the world around us. Collectively, however, we build knowledge and SPREAD it, such that the knowledge level of the ignorant chump of today vastly exceeds the knowledge of the educated man of the past. Sure, the ignorant chump of today doesn’t speak latin, but that ignorant chump’s knowledge of our solar system exceeds that of Ptolomy back when. Check out Bill & Ted’s Excellent adventure for a historical example of ignorance of the past meeting modern convenience.

In some places, yes, ignorant chumps live subsistence levels. Not us. (Of course, in the event of some shock like a massive CME giving us a direct hit, those ignorant chumps will do better than any of us, I assure you). But as for us, we gather our knowledge in order to ensure that past ignorance does not continue.

Historical fluke? Yep. The Principia Mathematica was one, too. The Druids were insulated and didn’t write but we still managed to piece together what Stonehenge was. Societies today are not insulated. As much as we try to even insulate the Irish from the world, they still manage to get out and cause problems.

And also lost in the argument is how undangerous this stuff is. Not to say that it isn’t hazardous – it is. And yes, plenty of danger exists. But picture storing our nuclear waste and in another 5k years some future variant of a human comes upon it and has the technology to access the inside of the place. Right there you’d think, “Okay, someone who knows what she’s doing.” Then the person manages to get inside and finds a distinctive lack of a blue glow. The really dangerous stuff with really short half-lives is gone.

What’s the big danger in uranium and plutonium? When they are particles like dust in the air. When they form salts and oxides they are highly toxic. In a chemical sense they are toxic. In a metallic form, uranium and plutonium are pretty safe unless they “go critical.” Google “Demon Core” and learn about the fates of a couple of scientists – one who was plain negligent and one who was fucking around - with a plutonium core. The things was just open to scientists and didn’t cause any problems unless it went critical. It turned out that you have to do SOMETHING to make it go critical, which Daghlian and Slotin did.

Let’s take a look at how dangerous the lingering effects of uranium and plutonium are by viewing, respectively, the abandoned holocaust wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. “But lawrocket,” you say. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki are modern vibrant cities.” Yep. One would think they’d be uninhabitable for a few hundred thousand years, and yet radiation sickness hasn’t been identified as a problem there since around 1946 because the radiological contaminants have such long half-lives that they just don’t decay fast enough to cause problems within the life spans of living things we know about.
Or for a real life example of why such long-lived isotopes are less of a problem than short-lived isotopes, I’ll point out the environmental harm that may be seen in your house. Experiment. Get a pound of plastic bags – which take centuries to decompose, and put them in a kitchen cabinet. Then take a pound of oranges – which decompose in weeks – and put them in a kitchen cabinet. Which one is going to jack up your environment more?

Same thing with radioactive isotopes. It’s a handy argument that “it’ll be around for hundreds of thousands of years so it must be bad.” Sounds bad but doesn’t meet scrutiny.

There’s too much arbitrary fear going on out there. Yes, there is danger and we should be cognizant of risks and take all steps we can to mitigate them. But a future society stumbling upon a nuclear waste repository would be able to live long enough to figure out what it is.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[StreetScooby 5]

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There’s too much arbitrary fear going on out there.

This is a bit of a segue, but Dr. Ethan Siegal is on a mission to provide unbiased scientific education. Check out his website: Starts With A Bang. He's also starting a more broad based initiative here: The Daily Trap. The guy is simply an incredible communicator.

We are all engines of karma