Why can’t nuclear waste be sealed and dropped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Because the containers likely will eventually corrode and their contents might work their way into the ecosystem. Frankly, I don’t need my tuna glowing in the dark.
A valid concern, but isn’t there naturally radioactive stuff in the ecosystem anyway? What makes nuclear waste more dangerous than the stuff that’s already out there?
Naturally radioactive material exists everywhere, but it’s highly diluted. The total natural background radiation averages about .1 rems/year, however, concentrated high level nuclear waste can expose an organism to as much as 166.6 rems/minute:
[quote]
The assemblies remain thermally hot and highly radioactive; a person standing one yard from an unshielded spent fuel assembly could receive a lethal dose of radiation (about 500 rems) in under three minutes.*From this article.
So, if you crush the radioactive waste into a fine powder and disperse it in an ocean, wouldn’t that sufficiently dilute it?
Until the algae eat it, the shrimp eat the algae, etc… until our whales are running on nuclear power.
I’m not versed enough with radioactivity and its effects on biological organisms, but your last comment reminds me of the 60’s(?) mantra “The solution to pollution is dilution”. Which sounds great, until you realize that many biological and natural systems work in ways to concentrate such materiel, and you end up with acid rain, fragile eggs, and fish with lethal levels of heavy metals. I think your solution would suffer from some of these problems.
This is notwithstanding the social and political ramifications. If country A starts doing something like this, countries B C and D who share said ocean are gonna have a problem with it.
Take your own waste, drop it into the Atlantic and see how you like it.
Sheeh, it’s bad enough people are chucking nuclear waste in the Australian outback…
Wow…well, nuclear waste isn’t exactly like the typical stuff you pull out of the ground. And even if it were, lots of ground shields you from the radioactivity that the naturally occuring stuff produces. Water can shield it too, unless it gets dispersed and you end up somehow consuming it or swimming in it. More importantly, if it’s dumped into the ocean, and we later find out just how bad an idea is was to do that, we will have a hell of a hard time figuring out how to clean it up! We don’t know enough about how ocean’s really function to even wager a guess at where the waste would show up.
Plutonium and some of the other isotopes in the waste don’t “appear in nature”
The reason the idea of dropping it in the ocean is popular with some is that there is good evidence that the deep ocean doesn’t transfer particles to the surface regions for very, very long periods of time.
And if you vitrify the stuff (turn it to glass), encase it in concrete, and drop it in the ocean, there’s really no known way for it to ‘leak’ back into the environment.
And, if you drop it into a subduction zone where one plate is crossing another, the stuff will be driven into the earth and recycled.
What would happen if you vaporized some nuclear waste and dispersed it in the atmosphere? Wouldn’t individual atoms pose very little threat?
I reckon this is a similar effect to a nuclear detonation.