Rather than hijack this thread, and since there’s likely to be a GQ answer, I thought I’d ask here: why can’t we dispose of nuclear waste in volcanoes? Surely we can just dump the stuff in a volcano with free-flowing lava (e.g. Hawaii) where the lava will melt the radioactive materials and entomb the bits it doesn’t.
And I’m sure the USAF would like the bombing practice.
It might melt the materials, but it doesn’t isolate the radiation. Lava doesn’t always cool to a sealed, water resistant solid, nor does it contain the radiation. In addition, it would leave radioactive materials essentially “in the open” that could be exposed by future weather, or human hands.
I’m sure there is a far more technical answer, but mine is a pretty good start.
Melting radioactive materials doesn’t make the radioactivity go away.
If you dump a bunch of nuclear waste in a volcano, now you have a bunch of radioactive lava. If it erupts or even just spews clouds of dust, the radioactivity will be spread over hundreds of miles.
Melting them doesn’t make them any less radioactive!
It just makes them smaller & liquid, thus easier to spread around and contaminate more things.
I have to ask–how diffuse would the radioactive waste* become after being melted in the lava? I mean, if you dumped in a fuel rod, would you just get a little “blob” of highly radioactive slag dotting a lava field, or would it be more like one spent fuel rod spread out over an area the size of a small city?
*Though I realize this term can be as vague as simply saying “garbage,” which might render the whole question pointless without further elaboration.
How is “disposing” of radioactive waste into a destructive, volatile and potentially explosive volcanic process within a known geologically unstable area safe, as compared to a methodical long term storage in a geologically stable, restricted area such as underground in Nevada?
But isn’t lava already lightly radioactive? And the radioactive waste would be thoroughly mixed in and thus diluted by the lava. So you wouldn’t be significantly adding to the radioactivity?
It worked for Xenu, it’ll work for us.
Isn´t the problem with volcanos that the stuff is comming out rather than staying in. I´d rather not chuck a canister of waste into a volcano and have it spat back out again.
In a similar theam, whilst working for a previous employer we ended up at a one week jolly in Boston and had a lecture at MIT from some supposedly distinguished chap. In the midst of a long rambling lecture he did mention an idea which involved drilling deep wells into the subduction zones at the continental edges and injecting the waste there. The idea being the oceanic plates were diving deep under the continental plates, the nuclear waste would be taken with it and not seen back at the mid continental ridges for a very very long time.
Interesting idea, but the technology required to get that deep and hot is not really available now.
This made me literally laugh out loud.
Ok, just so we are straight, dumping spent fuel rods into a volcano would be bad.
Oh, I don’t know… beaches that glow at night, game fish with two heads to bite your lure.
Birds of Paradise turning into Pterodactyls, the possibilities of mutations are endless, it just doesn’t sound good. The glowing beaches might be nice though…
Everything is “lightly radioactive.” (There’s a certain amount of background radioactivity anywhere.) Using your line of reasoning you might as well pulverize the radioactive waste into a fine powder and blow it into the air, since it would be diluted.
There is no reason to suppose that the radioactive waste would be “thoroughly mixed in.” It would likely remain as concentrated areas of high radioactivity. The radioactive waste could easily end up on the surface of the hardened lava, either on land or under water.
This has to be one of the absolutely worst ideas for disposal of nuclear waste that I have ever heard.
I think we ought to just drop radioactive waste into the Marianas Trench. I think we are all agree ( at least on this message board ) that this spot pretty well meets the definition of ‘out of reach’. Besides, in a few million years it will have been subducted into the earth whence it came.
Is the Marianas trench subducting? I thought the philipino one is…
How about piling it on top of a giant nuclear warhead and blowing it up? A blast turns everything in its immediate vicinity into plasma, so the waste itself would be gone and all we’d have to deal with is the fallout from one test explosion. They blew things up all the time back in the day, so we know a blast every few years is OK and won’t completely destroy the planet.
Yes, that was seriously suggested. No, I can’t take credit for it.
It worked so well for that whale carcass, what could possibly go wrong?
Larry Niven touched on this in one of his essays, but concluded it would be better to turn the radioactive waste into coins - they would change hands very quickly, as people tried to be rid of them - and this would stimulate the economy.
The Marianas Trench was subducting, but just once in the 1960’s for twenty minutes.