Not exactly. The primary (and really sole realistic) danger of waste burial is water contamination because of seismic events, which would increase the risk of cancer for those exposed to the water. If the US buried all our nuclear waste for the next 1000 years (which should be sufficient time to invent something better), we would contaminate an area no larger than the southern half of Nevada. So, at worst, we would subject the entire future population of southern Nevada to increased risk of cancer. And even that risk of cancer is not a Chernobyl-style risk. The EPA has done pretty extensive studies on the actual risk, and we’re talking about a few thousand lives at the very high end. Nothing to scoff at, of course, but not “millions upon millions.”
The reason a thousand vs. “millions upon millions” matters is that we’re condemning people to death either way. Right now, thousands of people die of air pollution related illness every year. If the absolute worst that can happen with nuclear power is less bad than what is already happening, our decision is easy.
What makes the decision actually difficult is that by delaying a bit longer we may find a way to deal with waste even more effectively than burying it (or we may find that our other energy technologies become feasible). That is the difficult choice that policymakers must now make.
The nuclear waste “problem” has been largely created by anti-nuclear “activists”. The fact is, we have a perfectly safe repository-in Nevada, but it cannot be used (the license hasn’t been issued). The fact is that naturally radioactive elements (uranium, radium) exist in the biosphere, and haven’t killed us. The technology used to encase the waste is safe for thousands of years.
Humans are humans. They screw up. No one is perfect and once the stuff starts leaking you have a serious problem, no matter where it is located. Here’s yet another recent example of this. And that’s assuming just people making mistakes. There’s of course the perpetual problem of companies cutting corners to save money and it doesn’t take much to cause a serious problem when you’re talking about radioactive waste.
I also object to the desert -> wasteland -> waste depository thinking. Deserts are beautiful, fragile places. Just because you don’t see anything there doesn’t mean that others think the same.
Nuclear tech/engineering is at a borderline level. It’s like the early pyramids in Egypt that fell apart after (or even during) construction. After a bit they got the hang of it. We’re in the same position. In 50-100 years we’ll know a lot about how to do things right.
They pick deserts because water (on the move) is the biggest problem. Not because deserts are ugly. And besides, it will be deep underground. About the worst reasonably likely problem with storage out there will be mildly radioactive groundwater, which, at worst case will cause some cancer deaths A LONG time from now. The bunnies hopping about on the desert surface out there wont even notice.
You guys and gals REALLY need to rid yourself of the totally assinine notion that radiation levels (particularly low level ones) create sterile wastlands that are filled with mutants.
Just stick the stuff out in a desert and stop worrying about it. In the future, it might be very useful stuff. As one author noted, the Romans used to throw away all the nasty petroleum that kept contaminating their water wells. Time changes things.
Just feed the anti-nuke nutballs to the mutant sharks and get on with building more power plants!
No, don’t feed them to the sharks. That wouldn’t be nice.
Just build the power plants, and let the anti-nuke people watch out for them themselves. Eventually they’ll come to embrace this new and exciting species and want to protect it.
Going by that line of reasoning I assume that since no-one has been killed by smallpox in the last twenty years, you would have no problem with someone upending a litre bottle of live virus into the airconditioning at O’Hare airport? There has been some small effort expended in keeping those numbers low (although radiation from tests has probably shuffled a few thousand people off early)
There are probably few better ways of keeping a desert pristine than by scattering a moderate amount of high-level waste all over it. Keeps the property developers at bay very effectively.
One of the biggest problems with waste handling in the U.S. results from Jimmy Carter’s executive order banning reprocessing of spent fuel.
By allowing reprocessing of fuel, you not only need to mine far less uranium, but the resultant waste volume is much, much lower, and it stops being deadly after about 1200 years, instead of tens of thousands of years. This makes it far more manageable.
As for the risk of shipment, nuclear waste is already being shipped around in large quantities in various places around the world. Nuclear waste has been shipped over 2 million road miles, in 3000 different shipments, and there has NEVER been a spill, attempted hijacking, attack, or other serious problem with a shipment. Just last week 65 truckloads of waste were shipped from Nevada to New Mexico without incident.
Most people are not aware of the amount of nuclear materials currently being shipped from place to place around the world.
The containers the waste is shipped in are tested against all conceivable accident scenarios. They are roasted in fires, dropped from beights onto steel pins, and slammed into walls. They simply can’t rupture under any ordinary circumstance.
And what happens if some one in a million thing happens and there is a spill? Not much. The area would be cordoned off, and a hazmat team would go in and clean it up.
Terrorist attacks are unlikely - the waste would be impossible to carry off-site, easy to track, and simply blowing up a waste canister would result in little more than a mess and an expensive cleanup. Plus, these convoys are heavily guarded. There are plenty of softer targets for terrorists to go after. For example, your run-of-the-mill water treatment plant has enough chlorine on site to wipe out a town.
But that would be a terrible analogy because there is nothing to balance the harm of smallpox. Carrying live smallpox virus around doesn’t ameliorate the effects of global warming or reduce the amount of money we send abroad to govts that oppress their people and sponsor terrorism.
Then again, the Soviets were really careless about that stuff. They apparently “sealed” some of their waste in regular steel drums, then dumped them at sea. Quick trivia question : what happens to steel submerged in salty water ?
To compound the issue, it appears the Navy grunts who were tasked with the dumping deemed that the drums took too long to sink… so they shot at them :smack:.
Nonsense. It becomes much less dangerous over time; the truly dangerous waste rapidly loses it’s potency because its short half life is what makes it dangerous in the first place. A “hundred thousand years from now” it won’t be much if any more dangerous than any number of natural radioactive deposits. And it probably wouldn’t kill “millions upon millions” of people short of us doing something like dumping it into reservoirs all over the country. It just isn’t the all-destroying, even-a-speck-is-death-for-millennia superpoison that the antinuclear people like to hyperventilate over.
And there are a number of substances we use and produce - like cyanide, arsenic and lead - that retain their poisonous natures permanently, not just for a measly few hundred or even “hundreds of thousands” of years. Yet somehow we don’t feel the need to seal them away in vaults designed to last for millennia.
If the idea that our descendants who may live in a post-technological age are endangered by our waste disposal is “nonsense,” perhaps you can explain why a great number of people, including many scientists, have spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to communicate “danger” to those who come after us?
To choose just one specific example, in 1991, the Swedish Radiation Protection Institute held a conference called “Transmittal of Information Over Extremely Long Periods of Time,” the explicit purpose of which was to develop strategies for communicating the danger of nuclear waste sites to our descendents. (Among the strategies suggested, incidentally, was the inclusion of nuclear danger rites and rituals into modern religions in the hope that they will endure longer than our scientific institutions.)
No matter how much you might enjoy pooh-poohing and tish-toshing, the fact remains that a great many experts are worried about what our nuclear waste may do to those who inherit this toxic world we’ve created.
There doesn’t have to be a potential of millions upon millions of deaths over hundreds of thousands of years for it to be sensible to put up an easy-to-read “Danger! Poison!” sign.
If they have the technology to dig into the shit we have worked so hard to contain and bury deep, one would hope they would have something high tech like a frackin geiger counter…
One of my golfing buddies works in the nuclear industry. What he has told me is consistent with what several have mentioned above. According to him, recycling waste is a “no-brainer.” The sole hangup is that it only makes economic sense if done at a limited number of facilities. Which necessitates transport. The idea of which makes folk howl. In this guy’s opinion, the danger posed by transporting waste is no higher or less than any number of other substances that routinely pass through our cities and neighborhoods on trucks and trains without public outcry.
Is it harming the film, or exposing the film? I’d find it interesting if the film was essentially taking a picture of non visible light.
Radioactive materials are extremely toxic, long lasting, contaminating, have a unique method of harm, and weapons related potential. It’s hardly comparable to any of the other things on your list without having to resort to “seeming more sciency”.
Having seen the results of government lowest bidder practices and the work ethic of your average contractor’s help I’m sympathetic to the various concerns. I wonder though, where is all the radioactive material coming from in the first place, and why isn’t it creating a huge potential hazard there?