The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain
methodquarterly.com
methodquarterly.com
It was the NIMBY-mentality -- Not In My BackYard -- of a population that can't assess or compare risks[1]. I wonder which the average Joe in Nevada thinks is worse: nuclear weapons (of which Nevada has plenty and a history of unreported accidents) or Yucca?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...
If only nuclear waste had also been handled in secret, the masses would have turned their attention to protesting chemtrails or something, rather than derailing the well-thought-out Yucca plan.
In theory, a republican form of government can help with this because the representatives job is to learn about such issues and vote intelligently.
Some of the issue with the current US politics is that ignorant people insist that their ignorance is as good as a reasoned opinion, and demand that elected officials vote that way rather than from a reasoned position.
I'm not saying the secrecy part is the core, but rather, that officials should make choices that seem counter to the opinions of most voters, because most voters' opinions aren't actually aligned with their interests, purely because not everyone has time to know about every topic and have a reasonable opinion on it.
In a republican government, you should vote on your representative based on the method he takes to voting (eg, how well he's doing at becoming educated and translating that in to votes) rather than how well he matches your uninformed opinions.
So in cases like a nuclear facility, a republican form of government should probably just ignore the uninformed objections and do it anyway, which is the sentiment that your paraphrasing was based on.
I'm in no way championing direct democracy - I think we agree pretty much about how representative democracy is supposed to work and how voters are supposed to vote. Where we differ is that I think transparency is essential to any functioning democracy. As you say, voters don't have the time or inclination to inform themselves properly about the issues at hand. But instead America has a system where most politicians don't bother to actually form well thought through opinions either, but rather rely on the opinions of the people that fills their campaign coffins. Allowing them to do that in complete secrecy would be the same as giving the power directly to the oil companies and military industrial complex.
If technological progress continues unabated, we won't have to keep nuclear waste on the planet for 10,000 years because we'll have safe, economical ways to dispose of it in interstellar space before then. We need the 10k-year warnings to account for the situation in which our civilization declines, is forgotten, and later humans come upon it.
So, let's say that it's 6500 AD and what we are now is an ancient civilization. If you come upon a sign that says something like this (from the article):
This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
really good, nonetheless.
The short-lived stuff could see immediate use in various contexts that need access to radioactive sources, or in RTG batteries.
The long-lived stuff (plutonium, mostly) can be used as fuel in reactors that currently exist mostly on paper, but would work if there was money to build them.
There isn't a radioactive waste problem. There's an anti-nuclear political problem :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands#Nuclear_waste_...
They gathered $30B dollars into the fund - would be enough to build an electrically driven cargo catapult/gun to throw cargo from Earth's surface into the orbit.
Getting to the Sun isn't actually that easy. You also need to counter Earth's orbital velocity. That's takes a lot of energy - a lot more than leaving the solar system. It would be easier to fling it into interstellar space than to get to the Sun.
it is chemical rockets what explode. The rail/gun systems my potentially have crashes, and the cargo shells designed to sustain 5000g acceleration should go through crashes just fine. Anyway, it willn't be like an atomic explosion, and we did have a share of it :)
>It would be easier to fling it into interstellar space than to get to the Sun.
nope. The Sun's escape velocity from Earth's orbit is 42km/s. While Earth's orbital speed is 30km/s, and you actually don't need the full 30km/s - Earth's gravitation escape is 11km/s, so those 11km/s pointed opposite Earth's speed will result in cargo getting "free" from Earth and having 19km/s on the Earth's orbit - that's would result in the cargo going down toward the Sun at it is obviously less than required orbital speed at the Earth's orbit of 30km/s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_...
What does matter is Earth's orbital speed, though. That counts towards the 42km/s you need to escape from the Sun, assuming you're smart enough to launch in the direction of the Earth's motion. That means you only need 12km/s additional velocity, whereas you need to cancel out virtually all of that 30km/s velocity to fall into the Sun.
no. Anything less than 30km/s will cause you to lose the orbit and start falling down toward Sun.
>If you just barely escape, your velocity relative to the Earth will be small.
and if it is in the opposite direction, you'd start falling. You're right though that it willn't be 19km/s - my mistake here.
Edit: to jwilliams below - what do you think happens when your speed is lower than the orbital speed?
Answer: you move to a lower orbit, then stay there.
When you try to reduce orbital velocity (say by firing thrusters in the opposite direction), you change to a lower orbit -- you don't just start free falling to the object you are orbiting. In fact, the net effect is that your actual velocity will increase. For example Mercury's velocity is 170,503 km/h, while Earth's is 107,218 km/h, and Mars is 86,677 km/h.
Here's another counter-intuitive thing about orbital mechanics. Say you want to catch up to something in front of you -- you fire reverse thrusters, which causes you to fall into a lower (and faster) orbit, then you can fire forward thrusters to raise your orbit once you catch up to the other object (i.e., you do a move that you would normally do to "slow down" in order to "speed up").
Well, technically you do just start free falling - you have been the entire time you've been orbiting.
Please, please, stop talking about this stuff as if you understood it and go do some reading instead.
In any case, I agree that the chance of launch failure is too high for this to be reasonable.
You can't drop something into the Sun without first overcoming a huge potential energy barrier between here and there. Macroscopic things can't "tunnel" through so you have to go the long way round.