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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what chemical waste can you not safely dispose of? All organic compounds can be incinerated at a high enough temperate to destroy them (even nerve agents). The only thing I can think of would be metal poisons, but even those can be turned into a form that is less toxic.

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Don't think there are any non-toxic forms of mercury or arsenic. There are forms that are less bioavailable, but that's equally true of nuclear waste.

A lot of metals can be converted into insoluble, inert minerals that have low-to-no toxicity. Mercury can be converted to mercury (II) sulfide which is insoluble in water and has no vapor pressure.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_sulfide

Except when you heat it. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755212/

Also, cost must be a factor. Turning materials back into ore is extremely expensive.

Well I guess nothing is truly non-toxic. If you heat water high enough it could create hydrogen and suffocate you.

It takes some serious equipment to heat water anywhere near that high. For cinnabar you just need fire. This is not an artificial distinction.

If you still don't see it, maybe picture yourself standing near a burning warehouse full of water versus standing near a burning warehouse full of cinnabar?

http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Dioxin

Has a worst case half life of 50 years.

http://www.ejnet.org/dioxin/

Lists very small quantities as still quite dangerous to reproduction or causing cancer in exposed subjects.

But on a 10,000 year scale I fail to see how it would still be a problem. A few hundred, definitely still risky.

I went to high school next to a dioxin superfund site [1]. They incinerated it (I could see the smokestack from the school) and supposedly it's all cleaned up now [2]. We'll see how we all turn out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

[2] https://clu-in.org/download/remed/incpdf/times.pdf

A school within line of sight of a smokestack burning dioxins is something that should not even exist.

An incinerator outgassing smoke toxic to surrounding people is something that should not exist. Proximity to a school is irrelevant, except for irrational fearmongering.

I disagree. Developing tissue will have to live for much longer than older folks and any kind of cumulative toxins or hard to break down toxins have a lot more chance to do harm in children than in adults.

Anything organic can be safely destroyed through careful incineration. PCBs (related to dioxins) need a really high temperate to be destroyed, but can be.

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