Alpha particles are the main danger when alpha emitting materials are inhaled or ingested, but nuclear waste storage facilities are designed to prevent that. With good containment, gamma emissions are the biggest danger, because gamma rays are hard to block.
Alpha particles are basically Helium atoms without the electrons so it's fairly easy to contain it. A sheet of paper is enough to block an alpha particle.
Whenever I see an article about storing nuclear waste for such longer periods of time, I can't help but think we will find a use for nuclear waste and end up digging it all back up way before 100,000 years.
After a period of a few hundred years it becomes a pretty ready to go repository of weapons grade plutonium. The problematic isotopes all have died away.
The total volume of the oceans is about 1.35 billion cubic kilometers.
The total volume of the mantle is 909 billion cubic kilometers, roughly 1,000 times greater.
Moreover, the radioactive minerals which came out of the Earth's crust either originated within, or are otherwise found in, the Earth's mantle and core.
We're also talking about timecycles of hundreds of thousands of years, and, frankly, a mixing dynamic which is probably not well known.
I'm actually not much a fan of nuclear power (it's potentially useful, but highly problematic, and much more limited in capacity than is generally understood), but deep-mantle-injection would actually be, on the grand scheme of things, statistical noise so far as any radioactive risk is concerned.
We're also not aware of any biological activity occurring within the mantle. The problems with ocean pollution -- plastics, metals, fertilisers, etc. -- were that these are:
1. Generally unevenly distributed, with concentrations in specific areas.
2. Highly interactive with life forms -- biological concentration of heavy metals, forming algael blooms, etc.
3. For lighter detritus (especially plastics), confined to what's effectively a film at the surface of the oceans, rather than mixed throughout the full volume of the ocean.
Even for substances which do mix with seawater, such as CO2, the rate of mixing through the entire benthic column is a concern.
Where radioactive waste has entered seawater (numerous reactor cores, mostly from the nine nuclear-powered submarines which have sunk, waste disposal, and liquid discharge e.g., from Daichi-Fukushima), dilution with seawater tends to make this a very low-level threat at any distance from the immediate site.
(Despite this, I strongly discourage the practice.)
My point: in the list of risks to worry about, this isn't one I'd spend much time on. I've already spent more than it's worth.
We're making progress in scientific fields that are still in the growth stage of their evolution. There is little reason not to believe that these fields will not soon be any more moribund than say airplane technology has been for the last 40 years.
We still don't have the android maids that are past due, either. We've got a robot that does the vacuuming, and recently it was counted a major success to have a robot that could merely fold clothes (and only that). I don't know about you, but I think that free beamed energy is way more beneficial than a clothes-folding robot.
Or even if you count the awesome toys that Boston Dynamics puts out; they're still just that, toys. Incredible toys, but nowhere near taking over from humans.
We're nowhere near the AI that futurists of the past thought we'd have by now. Same goes for cancer cures (CRISPR).
This misses a few points. Key among them that projections of future technological development from 50 - 100 years ago have proved woefully inaccurate.
Drawing targets around what you shot at regardless of where you're aiming has a name: Texas Sharpshooting.
It's an exceptionally poor rebuttal or response to the observation that forecasts have failed. Moreso if in doing so the reasons for the deviation isn't specifically analysed.
The difficulty here is that radiation fries the brains of the robots, not that they aren't smart enough to work with the stuff. I was a bit shocked the robots people send to observe Fukushima die in minutes of exposure.
It's not something making smaller and faster transistors can solve.
Bah, my bad. I was just looking for a quick citation for nuclear fuel cycles, saw "MIT Tech Review" (usually a very good source), and grabbed it. Thanks for catching it.
And, while I try to hide my embarrassment---while Transatomic is BS, the concept of nuclear fuel cycles using waste is not, and many IV Generation designs are specifically working toward that. My main point was we likely won't need to wait millennia, or even centuries, for a lot of that waste to become useful.
It's hard to reason intuitively about long time scales, because nothing is fixed any more. Usually we imagine technology, demographics, culture, etc to be fixed with respect to our decision-making, because most of our decisions are very short-term (and because people are quite lazy thinkers and prefer to face problems with fewer variables). But longer-term decisions, everything is in flux.
It reminds me of that concept where if you want to travel to another star, the best time to leave is not 'as soon as possible'. It may actually be better to wait several decades or centuries to develop new propulsion technologies (possibly based on entirely new branches of science), launch later, and arrive earlier.
This is why vitrification was abandoned as a disposal mechanism. There are a number of interesting papers on how it would work well (example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513...) however it makes it essentially impossible to reprocess fuel so disposed. Sad really.
This reminds me of the "doomsday" seed vault in neighboring Norway, which "was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever."
It flooded a recently, after only a decade of operation.[1]
If you are talking about [1], then others should know that the movie is a documentary thinly masquerading as a hard SF movie addressing an audience in the remote future. It's a pretty depressing movie; it is obvious they are constrained by politically-motivated budgets and making a relatively cursory effort to bury the waste, considering the goals involved.
I'd rather see these geological waste repositories as endless projects combined with reprocessing to reduce waste volume at heavily-defended military bases; continue digging ever downwards, the waste stored at the deepest stable non-construction zone levels to date, with the materials for basalt-rebar reinforced concrete plugs along the entire path back to the surface ready to drop in at a moment's notice, over say 24 hours. If certain existential triggers are reached endangering the existence of the host nation-state, evacuate the tunnels and pull the plugs to fill in the tunnels. As the tunneling surpasses 2.5 km (a little past our current deepest tunnel), our confidence level in future generations drilling that deep and knowing about radioactivity dramatically increases.
Obligatory: This is where the second image in the article ("this is not a place of honor") comes from. It's also briefly summarized in the last few paragraphs. Worth a read on its own.
Suppose we discovered a 10,000 year old archaeological site with that message. Do you honestly think we would be like, "ok, I guess we won't go digging around to see what this ancient civilization found repulsive and worthy of such hatred?" Of course we'd dig around. That's our human nature. We're curious.
We'd be careful but if there was a "I have no mouth and I cannot scream" sort of horror lurking beneath we'd suffer the consequences no matter the warning.
That's definitely one of the possibilities. 100,000 years is an order of magnitude longer than all of human civilization thus far, and we're trying to spook people all the way that far in the future. Who knows if even the "humans dislike asymmetry" assumption will hold up that long?
One of the afterthoughts in that document even suggests that the most likely reason people would leave the place alone would be when people die of radiation sickness after breaking into it anyway. It just takes one group of really determined people with a decent amount of time on their hands to destroy the markers and everything else. If asked me how long I would guess until that happens, I'd say less than 100 years. If not then, how about if it's so scary that a religion arises that considers the area to be the home of an Adversary of some kind and destroys it in a holy war?
It makes no sense to put it in 1 language. put any sort of signage in at least 5-10 languages. and also use a linguist to determine the right set of words to warn of danger. that text is extremely ambiguous. also pictographs are probably much more universal than anything to do with words.
Yes. They'd be better off making it as utterly obscure as possible.
Perverse and contrary monkeys that we are, there is no better way of ensuring that some future person will dig it up than to have all sorts of signs telling them not to do that.
If you read beyond the first sentence you'll see that these concerns are not ignored.
> Of course we'd dig around. That's our human nature. We're curious.
If the WIPP messaging does its job, you will have at a minimum been warned that the contents of the vault are dangerous and will make you sick. If you've got the stuff needed to run a complex digging operation, you'll hopefully make something of the Level III and Level IV warnings. And, yeah, if you read all that stuff and decide to dig anyhow, good luck to you. At least it won't be a total mystery if your workers start to get sick.
>Suppose we discovered a 10,000 year old archaeological site with that message. Do you honestly think we would be like, "ok, I guess we won't go digging around to see what this ancient civilization found repulsive and worthy of such hatred?"
If the message is simply: "There is something dangerous here", we'd probably ignore it. If the message is "There is waste from the fission of uranium buried here. It consists primarily of the isotopes I-129, Cs-135, ... Here is how the waste is stored and laid out ...", we'd be much more inclined to listen. That's what the original document proposes as well, that there should be a hierarchy of messages from "There's something dangerous buried here" to detailed descriptions of the nature and composition of the waste.
I've never really been convinced by these kind of grandiose abstract messages.
I think our best bet to actually convince a hypothetical future civilisation not to dig it up is an understated "FYI: This is radioactive waste. It's a pile of worthless stuff that will make you sick." in a few major languages. If we add more ceremony to the message, they may more likely to understand it, but I think they'll be less inclined to believe it. Why would we spend so much effort to protect something worthless?
And ultimately, how much is it worth to prevent a few excavators in the far future getting radiation poisoning? And for that matter how likely is the hypothetical series of events needed for this to happen? I think like many things to do with radiation, we're vastly overweighting the risks involved.
The "worthless" thing that's being protected is human life.
The idea of sending exotic signals with dramatic structures was just a brainstorming exercise that gets a lot of publicity because it seems exciting. But there's a definite risk that the waste would attract rather than repel innocent discoverers:
They are going to need a "Rosetta stone" for this grave. For instance, what language and alphabets will be used or forgotten $10,000 years from now let alone 100,000 years.
If we can recover hieroglyphics from the single fragment that is the rosetta stone, than any future civilisation capable of interpreting a 'rosetta stone' will do just fine given the monstrous amount of hardcopy literature we leave lying around.
Yes. They're considering everything from pictographs up to the level of hostile architecture. The proposed message includes instructions to update the message in the language spoken at the time, in the hope of helping the message endure for generations more.
It's an interesting set of ideas, and the concept of trying to warn future generations away is certainly a good one.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of these ideas will work quite as well as people think they do. Okay, they kind of figured that one out in the full study (they give between a 10-40% probability that a low technology society will understand the warnings) but still. Just looking at human history, mythology and media will tell you how well deterring people from a location through warnings and scary geography has worked out.
The spikes, skeletons and other deterrances are the kind of thing any future historian (or Indiana Jones style explorer) is going to find extremely interesting regardless of warnings. Even if they do know about nuclear radiation.
>The spikes, skeletons and other deterrances are the kind of thing any future historian (or Indiana Jones style explorer) is going to find extremely interesting regardless of warnings. Even if they do know about nuclear radiation.
A future archeologist exploring the architecture is of no concern. A future environmental science team drilling down to study how well our containment procedures worked is of no concern. If people are aware of what's buried, it's not a problem.
The goal isn't to keep people out, per se, it's to let them know what's there. That's what the document proposes. None of the architecture is designed to physically prevent people from entering the site. It's all designed to tell people what's there.
Just close down the place leave absolutely no markings outside. Probability that somebody will just start digging in some random place is quite low.
Also the waste is stored several hundred meters deep and all the tunnels will be filled. This means accessing the waste later will require significant effort and reasonably advanced technology (which means those doing the digging would likely be aware of radiation).
These 100k year plans are beyond absurd. It's based on the flawed hypothesis that the radiation has to be below detectable levels compared to background before it's considered "safe", where in reality "safe" is a statistical property that can be reached in under 1000 years and perhaps even 100 years.
The fact is that there nuclear reactors in Finland, they have limited life span and there is (and will be) hazardous waste that needs to be handled somehow. Just putting all that to some temporary storage and hoping future generations will figure out what to do with it is not a good plan.
Storing the stuff permanently under ground may not be perfect solution, but to my knowledge it is the best one we have (not producing the waste is not an option, as it has been already done). The plans also take into account that the waste can be recovered from the storage if we later figure out a better way to handle it.
I visited Chernobyl last September. We had dosimeters with us so I have a pretty good understanding of the radiation levels. In Chernobyl, of roughly 90% of the places the background radiation is 1,5 to 3 times that of in Kyiv. (In Kyiv I measured around .20 μSv/hr, around the same as most of the US). However, there are some hotspots which measure >600 microsievert/hour. Sometimes these hotspots are easily recognizable (patches of moss, a tractor trailer used in the cleanup), but most of the times these hotspots appear to be really random.
People working on the sarcofagus actually live in Chernobyl town for two weeks on, two weeks off. That way your body can get rid of the built up radiation.
The flora and fauna in the Exclusion Zone is thriving. Radiation levels have dropped significantly, and most animals don't live to the age that they might see consequences of the elevated background radiation.
100k or even "permanent" storage is a flawed concept, because that timespan is just too long to account for all possibilities.
Nuclear scientist have been advocating managed storage of 50 to 100 years instead for quite some time, because there is a chance that (a) we might figure out a better way to separate and then transmute the long lasting fission products to quicker decaying elements, (b) we might come up with better ways to safely store, or (c) we may want to mine the waste for reprocessing the useful uranium and plutonium.
Did you read the article? To quote:
"We can't say we know everything, but the first 1,000 years are the most important, and we can be confident about what happens then.""
It's based on the flawed hypothesis that the radiation has to be below detectable levels compared to background before it's considered "safe", where in reality "safe" is a statistical property that can be reached in under 1000 years and perhaps even 100 years.
What on earth are you talking about?
The most common byproduct of most reactors in use today is Plutonium 239[1]. It has a half-life of 24,000 years. This means it generates extremely high levels of radiation for thousands of years.
While it is true that low levels of radiation aren't very dangerous, high doses are. For example, page 15 of [2] discusses studies on workers exposed to high levels of radiation from Plutonium. There are two studies, which disagree about the dangers of low level (one shows a linear relation, the other doesn't show any at low levels). At high levels, both show much higher death rates than control groups.
That's only Plutonium 239. There are other high level nuclear waste products which last much longer, but aren't produced in such high amounts.
I’m not disagreeing because it’s been ages since I’ve done any physics, but surely if an isotope produces extremely high levels of radiation it’s decaying extremely quickly?
Yes indeed, you are pretty much correct (although factors such as the type of radiation also matter).
This 24,000 year half life of Plutonium 239 is much shorter than something like the 4.5 billion year half-life of Uranium 238. There are things with much shorter half-lives too, of course.
The danger from radioactive substances comes from many things. In Plutonium 239's case the danger is if any gets within the body. The alpha rays it generates don't penetrate through a body, but on the other hand if plutonium particles are ingested or breathed they cause "somewhere between 10 and 1,000 times more chromosomal damage than beta or gamma rays"[1]
This is one of the reasons why the OP is so completely, utterly wrong. Without proper - very long term - protected disposal of high level nuclear waste it kills very easily.
Plutonium can be hazardous, but we've been able to work with it very safely. There is little reason to worry about storing it safely.
"During the Manhattan Project in 1944 and 1945, 26 men accidentally ingested plutonium in quantities that far exceeded what is now considered to be a lethal dose. Since there has been a consistent interest in the health effects of this brand new substance (first discovered by Glenn Seaborg’s team at the University of California in 1940), these men were closely tracked for medical studies.
Forty Years Later
As of 1987, more than four decades later, only four of the workers had died and only one death was caused by cancer. The expected number of deaths in a random sample of men the age of those in the group is 10. The expected number of deaths from cancer in a similar group is between two and three."
Question for anyone who knows. In a world where we have mines many kilometers deep, which do get abandoned from time to time, why is it so hard to get rid of nuclear waste?
Can't we just pack it at the bottom of an ultra-deep mine, collapse all the tunnels with explosives, and walk away?
It's not like some future primitive civilization is going to accidentally dig down through 2km of rock to find it.
Geology. Rocks move over time, especially in areas of high tectonic activity, but also in others. Water tables exist, and mines were not designed to be watertight, or airtight, or to contain such dangerous material.
Most of this is 'waste' in the more literal sense of the word, unused material. We already know of reactor types that reduce this waste, they're just seen as proliferation dangers (which is why the /military/ should operate the reactors, but with full public transparency and international monitoring in real time).
It's pure madness that we keep on producing such hazardous waste!
And for what purpose? Cleaner energy? Nope! If you take into account the waste management needs, the Uranium mining, the risks involved and the fact that these nuclear plants have to be highly subsidized in order to keep working. Why are we still using such an obviously flawed technology?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170525141544.h...
Name another source of energy we could use.
We need nuclear energy and nuclear research.
Besides, it is now clear that the real problem for the planet is not nuclear disasters, but pollution.
Nuclear is greener than many alternatives.
We need to shut down fossil fuel power plants.
That's why electric cars are better than regular cars.
That's where green energy is essential, for reducing pollution and CO2 impact of the average men's life.
But if we're talking about industry, powering data centers, space era, we need something more powerful, until we discover something new, the breakthrough that will start the new industrial revolution for real.
Another consideration is that there are still unsolved problems in producing energy, wherever you look for a solution.
For example, most of the solar panels active right now are not really "green", solar panels cover and "burn" a lot of soil, we still don't know the long term effects, but it is known that solar parks are affecting temperatures and weather around them.
A recent study[1] concludes that
"A growing body of studies underscores the vast potential of solar
energy development in places that minimize adverse environmental
impacts and confer environmental cobenefits (2, 10, 14, 15, 21).
Our study of California reveals that USSE development is a source
of land cover change and, based on its proximity to protected areas,
may exacerbate habitat fragmentation resulting in direct and
indirect ecological consequences. These impacts may include
increased isolation and nonnative species invasions, and compromised
movement potential of species tracking habitat shifts
in response to environmental disturbances, such as climate
change. Furthermore, we have shown that USSE development
within California comprises siting decisions that lead to the
alteration of natural ecosystems within and close to protected
areas in lieu of land already impacted by humans "
Lets hope they really build concrete walls and did not just dig a hole. That reminds me of "Atommülllager Gorleben" in Germany where they started to temporarely put some atomic waste until another/better place is found. That was 12 years ago and they are still looking for a better place...
In the meantime the involved people fight against water which flows into the tunnels reaching the containers with the nuclear waste and they try to get back the waste which is harder as supposed.
Can someone explain to me radioactive waste? If something is still emitting radiation and particles, can't it still be used as a weaker energy producer? Why are we trying to hide it instead?
The power output of high level radioactive waste is of the order some watt per kg, comparable to animal metabolism. This is so little that the energy that could be extracted would be worth far less than the running costs for maintenance and security. However, there is the possibility of using breeder reactors to recycle fuel.
>"Onkalo must last for 100,000 years. A hundred thousand years ago, Europe was in the middle of the Ice Age."
I think they mean "beginning of the most recent glacial period" rather than ice age, but anyway I hope this site is better planned out than that seed vault.[1] They need to plan ahead for 10 C temperature changes and growing/receding glaciers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
At some point in the future people could dig it up for use as fuel in fast breeder reactors. Even if renewables such as solar and wind take over fully, it would be the responsible thing to do for future generations to truly get rid of the waste completely instead of just hiding it away.
There is a documentary film made about this called "Onkalo - Into Eternity".
It's fascinating to hear the designers rationalize their decisions, and the problems they think and hope they need to take into account for the future.
89 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadAnd if we don't develop these machines, our AI augmented successors will.
Ironically, it's just really short-sighted to plan for something that far in the future.
The mantle is ... large.
The total volume of the oceans is about 1.35 billion cubic kilometers.
The total volume of the mantle is 909 billion cubic kilometers, roughly 1,000 times greater.
Moreover, the radioactive minerals which came out of the Earth's crust either originated within, or are otherwise found in, the Earth's mantle and core.
We're also talking about timecycles of hundreds of thousands of years, and, frankly, a mixing dynamic which is probably not well known.
I'm actually not much a fan of nuclear power (it's potentially useful, but highly problematic, and much more limited in capacity than is generally understood), but deep-mantle-injection would actually be, on the grand scheme of things, statistical noise so far as any radioactive risk is concerned.
We're also not aware of any biological activity occurring within the mantle. The problems with ocean pollution -- plastics, metals, fertilisers, etc. -- were that these are:
1. Generally unevenly distributed, with concentrations in specific areas.
2. Highly interactive with life forms -- biological concentration of heavy metals, forming algael blooms, etc.
3. For lighter detritus (especially plastics), confined to what's effectively a film at the surface of the oceans, rather than mixed throughout the full volume of the ocean.
Even for substances which do mix with seawater, such as CO2, the rate of mixing through the entire benthic column is a concern.
Where radioactive waste has entered seawater (numerous reactor cores, mostly from the nine nuclear-powered submarines which have sunk, waste disposal, and liquid discharge e.g., from Daichi-Fukushima), dilution with seawater tends to make this a very low-level threat at any distance from the immediate site.
(Despite this, I strongly discourage the practice.)
My point: in the list of risks to worry about, this isn't one I'd spend much time on. I've already spent more than it's worth.
Or even if you count the awesome toys that Boston Dynamics puts out; they're still just that, toys. Incredible toys, but nowhere near taking over from humans.
We're nowhere near the AI that futurists of the past thought we'd have by now. Same goes for cancer cures (CRISPR).
Drawing targets around what you shot at regardless of where you're aiming has a name: Texas Sharpshooting.
It's an exceptionally poor rebuttal or response to the observation that forecasts have failed. Moreso if in doing so the reasons for the deviation isn't specifically analysed.
It's not something making smaller and faster transistors can solve.
It reminds me of that concept where if you want to travel to another star, the best time to leave is not 'as soon as possible'. It may actually be better to wait several decades or centuries to develop new propulsion technologies (possibly based on entirely new branches of science), launch later, and arrive earlier.
Blast, I can't remember what that's called.
It flooded a recently, after only a decade of operation.[1]
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14377988
If you like thinking about seed vault design, then this is a fanciful take on what a seed vault might be like in a distantly-imagined future [2].
[1] http://www.popsci.com/seed-vault-flooding
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/6db728/the_vault_world...
I'd rather see these geological waste repositories as endless projects combined with reprocessing to reduce waste volume at heavily-defended military bases; continue digging ever downwards, the waste stored at the deepest stable non-construction zone levels to date, with the materials for basalt-rebar reinforced concrete plugs along the entire path back to the surface ready to drop in at a moment's notice, over say 24 hours. If certain existential triggers are reached endangering the existence of the host nation-state, evacuate the tunnels and pull the plugs to fill in the tunnels. As the tunneling surpasses 2.5 km (a little past our current deepest tunnel), our confidence level in future generations drilling that deep and knowing about radioactivity dramatically increases.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HArxuzs1AA
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...
We'd be careful but if there was a "I have no mouth and I cannot scream" sort of horror lurking beneath we'd suffer the consequences no matter the warning.
One of the afterthoughts in that document even suggests that the most likely reason people would leave the place alone would be when people die of radiation sickness after breaking into it anyway. It just takes one group of really determined people with a decent amount of time on their hands to destroy the markers and everything else. If asked me how long I would guess until that happens, I'd say less than 100 years. If not then, how about if it's so scary that a religion arises that considers the area to be the home of an Adversary of some kind and destroys it in a holy war?
Yesterday an article on a "paint factory" claimed it to be 45,000 years old, FWIW.
There is a particularly good episode of 99% invisible (podcast) that talks about some of the challenges involved.[1]
[1] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
Perverse and contrary monkeys that we are, there is no better way of ensuring that some future person will dig it up than to have all sorts of signs telling them not to do that.
> Of course we'd dig around. That's our human nature. We're curious.
If the WIPP messaging does its job, you will have at a minimum been warned that the contents of the vault are dangerous and will make you sick. If you've got the stuff needed to run a complex digging operation, you'll hopefully make something of the Level III and Level IV warnings. And, yeah, if you read all that stuff and decide to dig anyhow, good luck to you. At least it won't be a total mystery if your workers start to get sick.
If the message is simply: "There is something dangerous here", we'd probably ignore it. If the message is "There is waste from the fission of uranium buried here. It consists primarily of the isotopes I-129, Cs-135, ... Here is how the waste is stored and laid out ...", we'd be much more inclined to listen. That's what the original document proposes as well, that there should be a hierarchy of messages from "There's something dangerous buried here" to detailed descriptions of the nature and composition of the waste.
I think our best bet to actually convince a hypothetical future civilisation not to dig it up is an understated "FYI: This is radioactive waste. It's a pile of worthless stuff that will make you sick." in a few major languages. If we add more ceremony to the message, they may more likely to understand it, but I think they'll be less inclined to believe it. Why would we spend so much effort to protect something worthless?
And ultimately, how much is it worth to prevent a few excavators in the far future getting radiation poisoning? And for that matter how likely is the hypothetical series of events needed for this to happen? I think like many things to do with radiation, we're vastly overweighting the risks involved.
The idea of sending exotic signals with dramatic structures was just a brainstorming exercise that gets a lot of publicity because it seems exciting. But there's a definite risk that the waste would attract rather than repel innocent discoverers:
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
Hieroglyphics was almost a lost alphabet.
Yes. They're considering everything from pictographs up to the level of hostile architecture. The proposed message includes instructions to update the message in the language spoken at the time, in the hope of helping the message endure for generations more.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of these ideas will work quite as well as people think they do. Okay, they kind of figured that one out in the full study (they give between a 10-40% probability that a low technology society will understand the warnings) but still. Just looking at human history, mythology and media will tell you how well deterring people from a location through warnings and scary geography has worked out.
The spikes, skeletons and other deterrances are the kind of thing any future historian (or Indiana Jones style explorer) is going to find extremely interesting regardless of warnings. Even if they do know about nuclear radiation.
A future archeologist exploring the architecture is of no concern. A future environmental science team drilling down to study how well our containment procedures worked is of no concern. If people are aware of what's buried, it's not a problem.
The goal isn't to keep people out, per se, it's to let them know what's there. That's what the document proposes. None of the architecture is designed to physically prevent people from entering the site. It's all designed to tell people what's there.
Also the waste is stored several hundred meters deep and all the tunnels will be filled. This means accessing the waste later will require significant effort and reasonably advanced technology (which means those doing the digging would likely be aware of radiation).
Storing the stuff permanently under ground may not be perfect solution, but to my knowledge it is the best one we have (not producing the waste is not an option, as it has been already done). The plans also take into account that the waste can be recovered from the storage if we later figure out a better way to handle it.
People working on the sarcofagus actually live in Chernobyl town for two weeks on, two weeks off. That way your body can get rid of the built up radiation.
The flora and fauna in the Exclusion Zone is thriving. Radiation levels have dropped significantly, and most animals don't live to the age that they might see consequences of the elevated background radiation.
That's interesting, do you think the radioactive material helped moss to grow, or that the moss patches catch the radioactive material flying around?
Nuclear scientist have been advocating managed storage of 50 to 100 years instead for quite some time, because there is a chance that (a) we might figure out a better way to separate and then transmute the long lasting fission products to quicker decaying elements, (b) we might come up with better ways to safely store, or (c) we may want to mine the waste for reprocessing the useful uranium and plutonium.
What on earth are you talking about?
The most common byproduct of most reactors in use today is Plutonium 239[1]. It has a half-life of 24,000 years. This means it generates extremely high levels of radiation for thousands of years.
While it is true that low levels of radiation aren't very dangerous, high doses are. For example, page 15 of [2] discusses studies on workers exposed to high levels of radiation from Plutonium. There are two studies, which disagree about the dangers of low level (one shows a linear relation, the other doesn't show any at low levels). At high levels, both show much higher death rates than control groups.
That's only Plutonium 239. There are other high level nuclear waste products which last much longer, but aren't produced in such high amounts.
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
[2] https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00818013.pdf
This 24,000 year half life of Plutonium 239 is much shorter than something like the 4.5 billion year half-life of Uranium 238. There are things with much shorter half-lives too, of course.
The danger from radioactive substances comes from many things. In Plutonium 239's case the danger is if any gets within the body. The alpha rays it generates don't penetrate through a body, but on the other hand if plutonium particles are ingested or breathed they cause "somewhere between 10 and 1,000 times more chromosomal damage than beta or gamma rays"[1]
This is one of the reasons why the OP is so completely, utterly wrong. Without proper - very long term - protected disposal of high level nuclear waste it kills very easily.
[1] http://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous-ur...
"During the Manhattan Project in 1944 and 1945, 26 men accidentally ingested plutonium in quantities that far exceeded what is now considered to be a lethal dose. Since there has been a consistent interest in the health effects of this brand new substance (first discovered by Glenn Seaborg’s team at the University of California in 1940), these men were closely tracked for medical studies.
Forty Years Later As of 1987, more than four decades later, only four of the workers had died and only one death was caused by cancer. The expected number of deaths in a random sample of men the age of those in the group is 10. The expected number of deaths from cancer in a similar group is between two and three."
https://atomicinsights.com/how-deadly-plutonium/
Of course that doesn't count the demon core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
Can't we just pack it at the bottom of an ultra-deep mine, collapse all the tunnels with explosives, and walk away?
It's not like some future primitive civilization is going to accidentally dig down through 2km of rock to find it.
Most of this is 'waste' in the more literal sense of the word, unused material. We already know of reactor types that reduce this waste, they're just seen as proliferation dangers (which is why the /military/ should operate the reactors, but with full public transparency and international monitoring in real time).
It's pure madness that we keep on producing such hazardous waste! And for what purpose? Cleaner energy? Nope! If you take into account the waste management needs, the Uranium mining, the risks involved and the fact that these nuclear plants have to be highly subsidized in order to keep working. Why are we still using such an obviously flawed technology? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170525141544.h...
We're not going there with solar or wind energy
Besides, it is now clear that the real problem for the planet is not nuclear disasters, but pollution.
Nuclear is greener than many alternatives.
We need to shut down fossil fuel power plants.
That's why electric cars are better than regular cars. That's where green energy is essential, for reducing pollution and CO2 impact of the average men's life.
But if we're talking about industry, powering data centers, space era, we need something more powerful, until we discover something new, the breakthrough that will start the new industrial revolution for real.
Another consideration is that there are still unsolved problems in producing energy, wherever you look for a solution.
For example, most of the solar panels active right now are not really "green", solar panels cover and "burn" a lot of soil, we still don't know the long term effects, but it is known that solar parks are affecting temperatures and weather around them.
A recent study[1] concludes that
"A growing body of studies underscores the vast potential of solar energy development in places that minimize adverse environmental impacts and confer environmental cobenefits (2, 10, 14, 15, 21). Our study of California reveals that USSE development is a source of land cover change and, based on its proximity to protected areas, may exacerbate habitat fragmentation resulting in direct and indirect ecological consequences. These impacts may include increased isolation and nonnative species invasions, and compromised movement potential of species tracking habitat shifts in response to environmental disturbances, such as climate change. Furthermore, we have shown that USSE development within California comprises siting decisions that lead to the alteration of natural ecosystems within and close to protected areas in lieu of land already impacted by humans "
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/44/13579.full.pdf
In the meantime the involved people fight against water which flows into the tunnels reaching the containers with the nuclear waste and they try to get back the waste which is harder as supposed.
I think they mean "beginning of the most recent glacial period" rather than ice age, but anyway I hope this site is better planned out than that seed vault.[1] They need to plan ahead for 10 C temperature changes and growing/receding glaciers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14377988
It's fascinating to hear the designers rationalize their decisions, and the problems they think and hope they need to take into account for the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUQ-Mhb4OVo