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Guest Post: U.S. To Bury Its 70,000 Tonnes Of Nuclear Waste
Submitted by Joao Peixe of OilPrice.com,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has released a recent study which has determined that if and when the US ever decides to actually pursue the technology to recycle nuclear waste, it will take 20 years to develop. Based on this knowledge they have suggested that the current stockpile of spent nuclear fuel should be buried without any thought as to its retrieval in the future.
Officials from Oak Ridge involved in the report said that,
“based on the technical assessment, about 68,450 metric tons or about 98 percent of the total current inventory by mass, can proceed to permanent disposal without the need to ensure retrievability for reuse or research purposes.”
The remaining two percent will be used for research into recycling and storage technologies.
The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, co-chaired by Steven Chu, also believes that the means to recycle nuclear waste is too far off for any consideration at the moment.
“No currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments—including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies—have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenges the nation confronts over at least the next several decades, if not longer.”
Although they did add that it was
“premature for the United States to commit, as a matter of policy, to ‘closing’ the nuclear fuel cycle given the large uncertainties that exist about the merits and commercial viability of different fuel cycle and technology options.”
Recycling is often thought of as a perfect means of dealing with nuclear waste, producing more energy and making a more efficient use of the fuel, yet anti-nuclear activists are readily against reprocessing technology.
Mali Martha Lightfoot, the executive director of the Helen Caldicott Foundation, says that,
“recycling is a euphemism for reprocessing which is one of the worst polluters of the atmosphere and the ocean, and is a direct conduit to proliferation. It is not really a solution to anything except how can the industry get more of our money. It also ups the ante for reactor accident danger, as in the case of Fukushima, because MOX fuel has plutonium in it.”
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Bury it near Wall Street. There are plenty of mutants running around there already.
'They' will bury it in the same place they did for the WTC pieces/parts, Bin Laden's body, etc...
.
Gauranteed no one will find it. Unless your James Cameron perhaps?
I'm sure our descendants in a million years will have fun with it.
Or perhaps the intellectually and ethically superior cockroaches that conquer us.
Might help with the immigrant problem..
The site will need plutonium bearers and landscape workers..
So Yucca Mountain is back on again ? ....... until its back off ..... again ?
They claim to have closed the loop, meaning 100% consumption leaving little to no radioactive matter. Supposedly, this was "hushed" for security reasons. As I understand, France and others have offered to purchase spent nuclear fuel, but were denied?
China is currently pursuing Thorium, which is not used in the States for reasons of National Security.
Story illustration remark:
Bartman - "Eat my shorts!"
Bernanke - "Gladly"
Sam has the correct approach...i realize we made the choice for Th power back in the 50s because we needed U for bombs. But in reviewing websites for Th power it is always suggested that one can build Th plants and actually "burn" U wastes etc in them. Why should we then bury this toxic trans uranic material when we could burn it.
Mr Chu is an idiot, he apparently has little grasp on how best to (1) produce energy and (2) get rid of the waste from nukes.......... Our future should be based on nat gas and Th power. All American resources, construction jobs and engineering.
no; actually it is YOU that are the idiot.
ANY fast-spectrum gen 4 reactor can consume actinides and transuranics; the engineering problems with this fuel cycle are nontrivial. LFR is supposed to be online in 2015. SCWR are under development. Other Gen 4 technologies do not exist yet.
The problem is processing the spent fuel, jack@ss. You can't just dump this stuff in and close the lid like this is a Mr. Fusion.
Trav777...I direct you to the website...www.energyfromthorium.com for Thorium Power 101. There is a section in there that discusses fissioning of transuranics from normal U reactors. These LFTR reactors fission these wastes down to 1% residue and produce plutonium 238 (and Mo 90, used in medicine apps), which they can sell to NASA to produce long life energy sources for their deep space probes. Finally, please take your obnoxious finger and shove it.
Only the US government would be stupid enough to bury long term nuclear waste in some of the youngest rock on the North American continent.
Glass that crap up and drop it into the Aleutians Trench 26,000 feet under the water. 5 miles of water shielding and the subduction zone carries that crap back into the mantle where it can safely decay.
Bury it in Kim K, Everyone else has buried their things there before
And you can bet some of those moisture seeking missiles were glowing in the dark too.
"If the Department were to fill old barrels with material, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the material up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the material-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is."
-JMK, The Marginal Propensity to Consume and Bury
yep , put your cigarettes out fuckers, lets go green, lets recyle , lets all fart strawberries or you will be fined and or imprisoned.....
Our descendents even a 1,000 years from now will be genetic misfires and mutants. Fukushima and all the crap we have already produced has and will continue to "shine" its disasterous spew upon us for the next 100,000 years. But on the bright side, our mutant descendents will be devolving back into a nucleopeptide pool. May the years to come bring us the "glow" we deserve... :-)
No one died at Fukusima. More died from the loss of electric. Millions are poisoned with mercury in gold mines throughout South America. You care? No. You do not care because the big greenie environmental movement aimed at nuclear is funded by the oil industry. Where there's no money with advertising in your face, you don't give a F**K!
Yes, obviously, because one can only care about either mercury environmental poisoning, or radioactive environmental poisoning, but not both simultaneously.
...No one died at Fukusima. More died from the loss of electric. Millions are poisoned with mercury in gold mines throughout South America. You care? No. You do not care because the big greenie environmental movement aimed at nuclear is funded by the oil industry. Where there's no money with advertising in your face, you don't give a F**K!
From mholzman's published ZH biography:....
....
I mean no offense to anyone. I have discovered in life that believing you are right and discovering you are wrong, and more importantly accepting that, is the path to growth, blah, blah, blah.
Hey energy consultant guy, are you aware that exposure to ionising radiation increases risk of developing cancer(s)? And these can take years or decades to develop?
How long ago was 'Fukusima' again? Is 'Fukusima' still pouring out a variety of exciting isotopes, gently wafted us-wards by wind and wave? Will 'Fukusima' continue to enrich our lives in this way for some time to come? Is the problem contained? Is it possible it won't be contained for a long time? That it might even get worse?
And exactly which energy industry sector is your small group of consultants mostly 'focused on'? Not the nuclear energy industry, by any chance?
Enquiring minds want to know.
it will be a 'natural resource' by then
Descendants? in a million years? I doubt we'll have descendants in 100 years.
Heh beat me to it.
LOL Dedcendents in a million years? I am sure they will have a picture of you on the mantle above the fireplace. You obviously don't understand how science works. LOL, million years, descendents.
well at least they realize they better not bury any more in james carville's backyard.
Bury it in D.C. The District of Criminals.
Can we reserve half for the Hamptons?
Shit, I have a nuclear power plant right two miles from my house. Don't you all want toilets for night lights?
I bet they cure hemorrhoids too!
Right next to the Red Cross 9/11 relief fund.
This is Steven Chu you are talking about, anti-human statist control freak. That "Waste" contains lots of really useful stuff. The recylcing technology already exists, as does entirely adequate disposal technology. The "need for more studies" crap is just that, crap. Chu is about as principled a scientist as Krugman is an economist.
I thought there were companies pursuing 'fast nuclear reactors' that would reuse current spent fuel waste? And that it was already proven to work but hadn't received any regulatory approvals.
As for Chu, apparently he's not against nuclear power, just so long as they are smaller and not in his back yard or the Hamptons: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2011/03/23/chu-touts-small-modul...
Breeder reactors were diabolised on national TV by Jimmuh Carter(former nucular engineer in the Navy). Same deal with the neutron bomb, which still strikes me from time to time as a great thing to use as a deterrent, if not for real, in apocalyptic enough scenarios. A big problem with a nuclear exchange is the fallout...reaction products mixed with plasma made of ground materials and simply burning hot/smoke of ground materials sucked up into the cloud.
Where any mutation will be an improvement.
"Bury it near Wall Street. There are plenty of mutants running around there already."
Dammit, now I'm seeing a giant radioactive Lloyd Blankfiend with laser breath terrorizing Manhattan, crushing little models of buildings and splashing around in the Hudson River.
How's that different from how he is now?
What about the Mariana trench?
DUDE! That's where they burried Megatron!
You don't want him to be able to recharge... really...
Actually, I think he was dropped in the Laurentian Abyss... meaning the Mariana Trench is a go.
There are some nuclear reactors and bombs on the sea floor already, and a gigantic amount of natural radiation, and radioisoptopes released from...wait for it...BURNING COAL. Yeah, burning coal for electricity irradiates the planet worse than using modern nuclear reactors to get electricity.
Personally, if AGW via burning coal is possible, I am all for it. The impending ICE AGE will not be good for biodiversity or humans. Those suck for life on this planet. But let's filter the stack exhaust on those a lot better than we currently do.
I thought the same but instead of dumping it there, injecting casks of waste into the earth's mantle.
Is the Earth's mantle naturally radioactive? Would the volume of waste relative to that of the Earth, have any measurable impact on the radioactivity of magma released into the crust?
Radioactive decay is most likley responsible for up to 90% of the heat in the Earth's mantle.
Very interesting!
The Earth's crust is, on average, 35km thick... the deepest borehole ever drilled is about 13km deep. The temperature, at that depth (about 300F) make drilling equipment quite fragile - extrapolating the temperature downwards, you're looking at about 800F at a depth of 20km. I'm not opposed to the idea of mantle injection - just not sure how you're gonna get there.
A massive asteroid impact should do the trick
Asteroid 2012 DA14, possible hit on Feb. 15th, probably ainT big enough.
Only 2.5 megatons of kinetic energy.
Is it aimed at DC?
Hmmm. Is it uniformly thick?
If the bottom or the Marinara's Trench is 11km, would there really be 24km to go? How does magma seep from the ocean floor, could the volcanic vents be used as a pathway?
What about a subduction zone? ***EDIT**** TBT I see you proposed this below. Seems like a way around thick crust.
It has been working for billions of years. If it stops working, well that will be hundreds of millions of years from now, by which time, problem solved. It'd be a whole simpler to just recycle the good stuff for reuse, convert the rest back to rocks(basically, as glass), and bury it in ANY long stable rock formation. There are billion year old formations all over the place that aren't going anywhere fast.
Subduction zones. Let the planet do it for you and you'll get it a whole lot deeper than 35km.
That would work unless it doesnT.
Just hope your trash doesnT come belching back up through one of the volcanoes which tend to line themselves up along a subduction zone.
Oh, ... and make sure your container is not buoyant in lava.
Put the stuff in a subduction zone and geologic processes will take it into the mantle for you .... just takes a long time. But fortunately 5 miles of water shielding is pretty good.
That and the heat left over from the initial fallling of the materials that make up the earth into the earth's gravitational well. Think of the energy an asteroid strike delivers to the planet, then multiply that times the weight of the planet. It takes a loooooong time for heat to traverse thousands of miles of rock and radiate into space. The heat that's left from formation ought to be signicant, on top of the nuclear decay heat.
According to theory, that latent heat is actually quite small compared to the decay portion: http://phys.org/news62952904.html
I'm OK with that statement, certainly. The surface area of a sphere increases slower than its mass does with increasing R. The smaller the R the faster the heat(from whatever source) radiates away. The moon ought to be solid through and through, and Mars' tectonics apparently ended quite a long while ago. Earth is more massive than both of these, so still has tectonics(which also releases heat, sometimes a whole hell of a lot, such as when traps are active, made Tambora look like picnic).
To the junker who disagrees with science then -> The earths heat is generated due to all the screams from the devil and demonds kicking @ss down there.
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
University of Washington
Just dump it in an active volcano and it will be melted into something else? What could go wrong, the government is in charge.
Melt into something else that's not radioactive?
These are radioactive elements. You know what an element is, right? Something about them being elemental.
Elements yes, stable no. They do degrade over time into different elements of course, releasing electrons on the way, which have a nasty habit of poisoning, causing mutations, and other-wise messing with the reproductive abilities of all life. Hey, let's build an industry out of this stuff! We may need a wee bit of government help of course...
You get the idea that it was just another way to gain access to government money.
Have a crazy idea that's probably too dangerous to pull off in the private sector, so that you couldn't even afford the liability? U cray nigga. Oh wait, you have a way to get the government to pay for everything including your mistakes? Now that's a business plan!
They only did it because they knew they would never pay for the disposal.
So let the radioactive waste degrade down to Au and then recover it?
Having these elements melted BELOW the earth's crust is feasible. Just plonk it all half a km deep in sea floor in a subduction zone, it'll get melted and buried as much as anything could reliably be, 100's of km deep in semi-molten rock, diluted and slowly decaying like the rest of the far larger, truly enomorous amount of radioisotopes that make up the planet already. What we've produced is just nothing.
" injecting casks of waste into the earth's mantle"
Okay now I'm trying to figure out which of at least 500 insurmountable engineering challenges you just reduced to the word inject.
Nobody understands jack anymore.
Let the planet do the work. Subduction zones. The sea floor, km's thick, continuously slides back into the planet's core disappearing stuff effectively forever in the mantle. The problem is burying stuff in stable rock in subduction zones, some of which are shallow enough or hell maybe at the surface currently.
Honestly? I imagine that is the only solution. It will cost so much money it will probably boggle the mind. But that's why we have printing presses, I'm told.
But notice, they don't intend to spend a single dime. The cheapest way to manage this is to dump the waste on some poor or unsuspecting nation in Africa, give the local strongman a suitcase of FRNs for his cooperation, and walk away. That is almost certainly what will happen.
I don't think it would be so costly as all that, representing a tiny fraction of the amount gained from nuclear power production, whether it was buried in a subduction zone...some of which would be accessible from dry land as I understand, not miles deep...or just plonked in a stable rock formation(just as cheap and effective and permanent).
BUT, my problem with that is the stuff is VALUABLE, Steven Chu the statist control freak and "Blue Ribbon" jackass notwithstanding. Richard Feynman, now there is a scientist, unbeholden to political clownery, just interested in reality itself.
Valuable how? And with what additional processing?
Don't you mean the Maria (as in Bartiromo) trench?
Should fit.
whilst REDUCING the aggregate 'toxicity'... BRILLIANT!
francis, don't you mean, "whilst REDUCING the aggregate 'JOOOOOOicity'.
Just breaking balls francis, lighten up ;)
I only get mad when you call me 'FRANCIS'...
Yup.. can't fill up an infinite chasm.
Why not just sell it to north korea or Iran?
they'll but it!
Why are we messing with Nuclear, we have plenty of easily obtainable cheap oil!
sarc needed?
No, that is what Yucca Mountian and all the taxpayer money was suposedly used for. Yucca mountian gave Nevada a huge industry and a place for the US to store the nuke wastes. Who is holdig this up and endng the Yucca Mountian storage?
Harry Reid (who should be terminated) and President Obama.
Betcha a million becquerels that Harry Reid pushes real fucking hard for the new disposal site to be built in Nevada.....
Just you wait....
(What Yuccko mountain? There's no Yuccko Mountain!)
Ridiculous.
On the plus side, it's hard to imagine a better use for Nevada.
Lake Mead should be dry enough in a few years to handle it.
Or just leave it on someone's front porch, ring the doorbell, then run like hell.
My kind of engineer. Careful or you'll end up in management. Or worse, a Dilbert strip.
Like so many problems in our world, nuclear waste disposal is a political problem.
Too many years ago, I did a term paper for a Structural Geology course on nuclear waste disposal site selection. The overwhelming conclusion I came to was that the nuclear waste disposal problem was a political problem, not a technical problem. There were several viable technologies for encapsulation of the waste, and there were plenty of geologically suitable sites for nuclear waste disposal.
Unlike many chemical wastes that remain dangerous forever, nuclear waste decays over time (thousands of years) to become relatively harmless.
http://www.nei.org/filefolder/yucca_mountain_aerial_view.jpg
Is life technically required? Is making one (non nuclear) poison a technical reason for making another (nuclear) one? Isn't our responsibility to our childrens' childrens'...a political decision? Should our policy be allowing us to poison our children for the immediate profit of a select few? Are we truly technically able to predict the future for 100,000 years? NO!
Bingo. Physics and mathematics is the same for everyone, and using these two together you find out this problem is very soluable. It's the moonbats that prevent solutions here, dingbats who've chosen throughout their lives to avoid learning about physical reality and prefer entirely imaginary and symbolic understandings of things, which is where we get the "my truth" phenomenon. Nuke waste technology is a very advanced state of development, it is mature. Radiation is one of the best understood phenomenon in physics, not a scary mystery.
Yes, you're quite right, ask any resident of Chernobyl or Fukushima. People should stop worrying and trust the scientists, they know everything.
They don't?
Maybe not. But they know enough, right? Like whether there will be a functioning state apparatus to look after all the radiocative waste and need-to-be-decommisioned nuke plants dotted around our country over the next several centuries, or millenia, or whatever it is before they become safe.
I mean, if even the Third Reich lasted 1000 years, surely Amerka can manage 10,000.
http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
Thank god, someone knows the facts. Reid burnt through OUR billions.
Bury it directly under Harry Reid's office. What better place than Mordor-on-the-Potomac?
20 years to learn how to recycle and how long have we been using nuclear power? seems to me a good place to bury it is in the hamptons!
+1
Shove all fucking 70k tons down Bernanke's fucking neck.
Fucking shithead.
+68000
Of course govenments are the worst polluters on the planet.
And more and more rules are made to limit private individuals access to water, etc.
But governments can do whatever they please, as can industry large enough to buy off the government.
pods
Why don't they just ship it all to Fuckishima? The Japanese govt doesn't seem to think there is any problem at all with nuclear waste, or even meltdowns for that matter..
Thats because somebody sighted Mothra in Japan and they need a new Godzilla to take care of him after the JDF killed the original Godzilla.
Or maybe they could use the waste to power the Gundam. If I were China I would really be afraid. A 70ft Gundam could wreak havok in Shanghai.
1. STORE IT IN FORT KNOX
2. CALL IT A OOPS DECISION
3. NOBODY CAN ACTUALLY SEE THE GOLD IN FORT KNOX BECAUSE OF THE RADIATION
Am I the only one with a brain here...
Uh, no, in fact.
Along those lines they should deliver it to germany.
Plenty of room there since there is no gold left in the vaults.
Retro tax the bitches out of existence.
If I get a vote... I say... Bury it all in Tel Aviv...
~~~
But to be frugal (& save transport costs)... Just dump it in this guy's swimming pool...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-24/hamptons-prices-soar-record-lloyd-blankfein-parks-33-million-8000-square-foot-mansio
Just dump it in this guy's swimming pool...
What? No kiddy fence around that thing? He's gonna have a hard time finding an insurance company to cover that.
(Oh yeah, he's immune to risk)
"He's gonna have a hard time finding an insurance company to cover that"
~~~
Are you fucking kidding me?... All Blankfein has to do is create some SHELL insurance company... Load it up like his buddy Greenberg did [at AIG] with sold premiums & CDS contracts... Then ~ when it all blows up, he can get his buddy Hank Paulsen to pay 100 cents on the dollar for the paper losses & hand the bill over to the American taxpayer... Since they can't afford it, his other pal Ben Shalom Bernanke will print more confetti so that it all becomes whole in some way...
Maybe he can even figure out a way to collect 'double indemnity' like his other buddy Silverstein did with WTC1 WTC2 & WTC7... Meanwhile ~ 'Sans-a-Worry' if anybody in America starts to look in to things & get agitated, he can dial up his friends Feinstein & Shumer to take their guns away... He'll also make a call to his friend Bloomberg to make sure it's all properly reported in the press... There's always the ADL police to clean up the stragglers.. [& in a 'poison pill' scenario ~ there's always those scary Iranians who are in need of imminent attack]...
Piece of Pie!
If they dumped it at Tel Aviv, then soon after, the eternal question : Did 6,000,000 really die? . would forever be answered in the affirmative. Ah , yes they did. No holohoax extortion payments necessary either.
Yeah ~ I'm more honestly in favor of Gatsby's swimming pool when it comes rght down to it... (being a fan of UNCOMPLICATED things & all)...
Dump it in Israhole. Then let the Christians, Jews, and Muslims prove just how much they want that fucking stupid strip of desert. Don't even bother burying it.
Out of sight, out of mind. Until (that is) your hair begins to fall out and you bleed from the pores of your skin.
<So sorry, was that my out loud voice?>
One lump or two?
Did you ever hear about the "atomic priesthood"?
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/NGP/AtomPriesthd.html
Yeah, people have been thinking about this for a while. Creating a religion around the problem tells you something about how little they actually care.
A cult is a cult is a cult.
Only until it's a useful government created and tax-payer funded nuclear disposal cult.
At that point it's what you need to believe just to survive.
Agreed. But I love the funny hats they wear so I'm down with it. :)
Funny hats or GTFO.
Ask BP to sort out a deep drilling rig to get rid of it.
They seem to know what they are talking about, and if you pay them in Geethner bucks, it will get done quicker, at a cheaper cost, with a derivative, to sell to your pension account, which will come up short, and leave you destitute when you need it the most, after all your lifes work.
And every fucker wins, ask geethner.
Can we dig deep enough so it ends up in China?
Why can't we just throw it in the crik like we did in the good ol' days?
Don't you know, that's where the crab people come from. They bury the waste, create more crab people to replace Reid, Pelosi, and the rest of the Concritters.
God you'd think the lunatic fringe would have known this already.
What about the Moon.
SpaceX is getting $100M / 53 metric tonnes. 70K tonnes / 53 tonnes per launch = 1,320 launches X $100M = 132B.
Then use solar wind to transport to the moon, who cares how long it takes.
$132B to permanently solve the issue? The chairsatan prints that in two months.
That would be an issue, though NASA has been launching plutonium into orbit for decades. Orders of magnitude, I know.
Wonder what the failure rate is for commercial payload rockets? Would have to be perfect 5,833 times.
Revising. LEO wouldn't be enough.
Space X says 12 metric tonnes to Geosynchronous Orbit @ $128M. So 5833 launches @ 128M = $746B
Still reasonable relative to a stimulus package.
So how many of those 1,320 launches would blow up at 5,000 feet scattering radioactive waste down field?
No wait, we can do all the launches in Japan, they love this kinda shit.
DPRK then Japan would be downwind.
Even if 5,833 launches I wonder if the payload could be designed to survive a catostrophic rocket failure (e.g. done blowed up). If glassified I wonder if the payload could be engineered to fall to earth intact rather than being scattered to the wind.
I think my idea is horrible but a fun thought expiriment. I think the mantle/marinara trench thing is the way to go.
If you found a way to have the payload survive a rocket failure and fall to earth intact, I think you've already solved the entire disposal problem right there and you can just leave the shit sitting on the ground in Nevada.
Touche. Though look at the Challenger, shuttle cockpit fell to the earth intact. The pointy end might stand a chance even if the business end blows up.
Come on people, the stuff started out as rocks, and we can un-refine it back to same state, and bury it in rock formations that have been stable for a billion years and call it done. The stories to the contary are high moonbattery and political shenanigans.
If it was as simple as that, don't you think someone would have taken care of the problem in 1958?
Back then, they knew this waste would be valuable, and it still is, even though we've diabolised the stuff since then.
Also. back then it wasn't a big problem, and it still isn't.
"back then it wasn't a big problem, and it still isn't."
I was pretty sure that if I kept at it, someone would say that.
Thank you for playing.
blu asked:
http://www.spacelaunchreport.com
Based on the Worldwide Space Launch Box Score, I'm guessing around one in every twenty.
Better under the groung than on top of it.
Better under the groung than on top of it...
Sounds like the NY branch of the fed and their solution to keep au out of circulation.
Not if its DC.
Why?
Based on this knowledge they have suggested that the current stockpile of spent nuclear fuel should be buried without any thought as to its retrieval in the future.
Hey, that government plan has been working with debt right?
Right?
I hear there may be room in the underground vaults of the New York Fed.
Right next to the missing German Gold Bars.
Booyah!
shove it up the bernank's ass right along side all the other toxic garbage
Why not just back into consumer products like silverware? A21 bitchez.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/01/government-to-dispose-of-radioactive-waste-by-putting-it-in-our-silverware.html
I vote it gets dumped into the largest currently active volcano on the planet...
I mean why the hell not, right?
You actually think it will then burn up don't you?
no, I actually don't know what would happen.
but it could be fun to find out...
Try putting it into the biggest volcano of all, the planet! There are lots of subduction zones where sea floor SLOWLY dives under the continental shelves to great depths in the mantle until it chemically decomposes and/or melts under great heat and pressure, hundreds of km deep. Talk about long term disposal!
That makes a very small amount of sense. However most of humanity lives in these same zones so I don't know who would volunteer to take it.
Marianas Trench seems likely. It's a subduction zone, it's very deep, and Fukushima has already polluted the fuck out of the water.
Fine. Just fucking fine then. Let's do it.
Now let's hope someone from the nuke industry reads ZH.
Okay then here is what would happen.
The metalic waste material would melt, and the combustable waste material will burn creating radioactive ashes, and the whole snarl would mix with the lava creating radioactive lava. When the volcano throws off lava some day (you did say active) the lava sticks to the side of the mountain, which become radioactive. Now you have a radioactive lava field on the surface that will last a million years.
If the volcano becomes dormant, a forest will eventually grow there. People will settle at the foot of the mountain, eating from the forest and drinking the runoff water.
For hundreds of years, they will suffer and die never understanding why.
They'll eventually decide that the mountain is "haunted" and stay away. For a little while, until they forget and move back.
Rinse, repeat.
Yeah TPTB are a little worried about this. Or they were. I guess now that they've got their money they do not give an actual fuck.
And what is wrong with any of that?
Depending on who you ask -- nothing at all.