Hacker News Reader

Comment by spideymans | Hacker News Reader

>And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up.

This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it.

This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.

View on HN

We are talking about time frames that are many times longer than the existence of modern humans as a species. We have absolute zero clue what most humans did 200k years ago, we have only little knowledge what humans did 4000 years ago. How can you expect us to communicate with a world in eight hundred thousand years, or 1.6 million years? We don't even manage to get any of the nuclear waste out of our oceans we put there 40 years ago.

What are the odds of having large chunks of learned knowledge wiped out at this point? When the Romans did it, few could read/write and few people had access to the stored information of the day. That made it very easy to sequester knowledge. At this point in time, other than ELE type of events, can knowledge be kept away from all of humanity now? Sure, dictators can make it hard for the parts they control, but the rest of the world keeps on learning.

There is zero chance that we can communicate anything at those timespans. As I already wrote we have trouble to tell what happened 4000 years ago (how were the Pyramids build exactly?) and that is just a blink of an eye when compared to a million years.

Ancient Egypt was a super advanced civilization continuously existing for 4000 years! Yet shortly after the decline nobody could read Hieroglyphs anymore.

We don't know what the future holds. Lets say in 50 years a low intensity Gamma Ray Burst hits earth and destroys all digital information but fries only half of all living creatures. The survivors dig trough the trash of the past to get to the rare earth metals they need to rebuild their civilization and find this really neat bunker with those funny signs...

>There is zero chance that we can communicate anything at those timespans.

That is a ridiculously strong statement.

To dig through the materials these bunkers are made of would require technology advanced enough they would know what radiation is and how to detect it.

Why does it matter if some hypothetical future civilization cannot understand it though? If humanity as we know it is gone then compared to that some random future bad mining accident seems silly to worry about.

Sure but there are other dangers, some of this stuff has to be cooled. It has to be guarded. The place to store it has to be secure from all kinds of influences we can't control etc. To cite wikipedia:

> However, even a storage space hundreds of meters below the ground might not be able to withstand the pressures of one or more future glaciations with thick sheets of ice resting on top of the rock, deforming it and creating internal strains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage, because the timespans involved and the potential dangers are not manageable by humans atm.

The question is do we want to put more on the pile or not? If the alternative is to destroy our planets with coal and co the answer should be clear.

But take Germany for example. We've built up wind energy from 0 to more output than nuclear energy in 15 years. I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.

When we look at global warming there are two nations that need to act. China and the US, producing around 50% of Green House Gases. Both have more wind, way more space and potentially more money than Germany (China announced last year that they are gonna spend 1.5 Trillion USD in the next decades to become greener).

The stuff that needs any active maintenance is not supposed to go into the long term storage. Basically hot stuff just sits in a pool, then sits in a yard somewhere and natural air movement cools it. Then when it gets cool enough it can go into the mountain/formation.

> glaciation

Seems like a very future problem. If humans are around by then, we can move the stuff easily.

> We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage

Agreed.

But this is not exactly a problem for nuclear power. (Even if it has become a talking point.) Nuclear waste storage is a boring and simple problem. (It needs cooling and physical security.) It should be put simply on a big remote boring military base - plenty of them in Nevada - so people don't worry about it being close to where they live.

Long term storage is a long term problem it needs basic research, and simply the continuation of our civilization, which then puts the waste where currently it thinks it should be.

Eg. it's completely possible that 500 years from now we'll finally recycle it, and then dump the rest into the Sun just for the lulz. (Or put it on an inert rock.)

Though I think we should build the amazing big spikes someone proposed to mark the site as "bad": https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/temple-of-doom-...

> I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.

Agreed!

> We are talking about time frames that are many times longer than the existence of modern humans as a species.

No, we absolutely are not.

"Long half-life" = "less radioactive". By definition.

Do you know what the half life of CO2 is? Infinity.

The half life of Plutonium is ~24k years. That's way beyond a time frame we have any grip on. Then its still very, very dangerous. Uranium (nuclear fuel) has a half life of 200k - 4.4 million years. Then its half as dangerous.

CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.

Elements with very long half-lives aren't very radioactive. Something with a half life of millions of years is essentially not radioactive at all.

Nuclear fuel itself isn't radioactively dangerous, it's dangerous because it's a heavy metal (like lead).

After nuclear fuel is reacted, it produces a bunch of nuclear decay products. Some of these decay products have a half-life of 10s of years, which are the problems: they're short enough to be dangerously radioactive, but long enough that they need to be handled carefully for a long time. But not for 10s of thousands of years.

And those things aren't very radioactive. Just as I said.

Most of what you've read about plutonium is patent nonsense. For one, it isn't even close to being the "most toxic substance known". You can pick up a lump of it and hold in in your hand. You'll be fine. Really. It is an alpha emitter, and alpha radiation can be stopped by your skin or even a piece of paper. You'd have to eat it before you saw any ill effects.

Not to mention that plutonium is a useful nuclear fuel. It's not going to be left lying around.

You do know that the ocean has megatons of uranium in it? Why aren't you concerned about that?

For that matter, we could grind up all the nuclear waste ever produced and disperse it in the ocean. It wouldn't change the radioactivity of sea water by any significant degree.

The Soviets used to dump their scrap sub reactors in the Arctic Ocean whole. There are a bunch of them up there.

> CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.

Oh? So we can just wait until things start to get uncomfortably warm, then stop cranking out CO2 for a decade or two and everything will be better?

Good to know.

Feels a bit like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SChKT1Wqsj0

Reply on news.ycombinator.com