One Million Years of Isolation | Hacker News Reader

One Million Years of Isolation

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42 pointskqr210 comments

The purpose of Yucca Mountain and similar facilities is not to store nuclear waste. Rather, they are built to be expensive.

This sits well with those who profit directly from their construction, and pleases environmentalists - who want nuclear power to be seen as astronomically expensive. Breeder reactors and proper reprocessing could eliminate the need to store anything longer than about one hundred years, and yet they are forbidden. Why do you suppose that is?

I think you are on to something.

No one in the nuclear industry thinks Yucca Mountain is anything but an idiotic boondoggle.

I love this blog. To use the author's words, it is about architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures. It's an incredibly fun series of thought experiments. Geoff is certainly one of the more creative people I've come across. I recently pared my RSS reader down to four feeds. This is one of them.

I’m certainly in favor of building for larger timescales, but I have enough trouble believing the Long Now Foundation’s projects will last beyond a dozen generations (though I’d certainly like them to). Building something that could last a million years is something I can’t really comprehend.

That's kind of the point of the Long Now foundation. The point isn't building clocks, the point is that by building a clock which has a real chance of operating on such a timescale, you put yourself into a frame of mind where you start accounting for effects of your actions far into the future. The idea is to get you really, seriously thinking about how you are changing the world over the next million years.

Oh, sure. Like I said, I’m in favor of the the mindset—but Yucca Mountain less intellectual-idealism than Long Now, and if it’s improbable that a clock will last maybe ten thousand years, what are the odds a nuclear coffin will survive a million? I just don’t think it’s something even the (no doubt) highly-skilled engineers on the project can truly grasp.

So stupid. We don't worry about this with dangerous chemicals, and those don't have a half-life. They'll stay deadly forever.

There is no need to treat nuclear waste massively differently than other kinds of waste. There are some special considerations, but it's not so dangerous as to require the vast storage expenditures being talked about.

This problem is endemic in the whole nuclear industry. People don't make rational risk/cost assessments when it comes to nuclear power. They don't even make irrational risk/cost assessments. The locals where I live are deadly afraid of a local air force base's small reactor. But nary a worry about the actual nuclear weapons they have that could (potentially) devastate the entire area.

The geoscientist being interviewed addresses that point at the end.

I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that these timescales won't even matter. We will be digging up this "waste" in a few years to recycle it anyway. I guess fissile material is pretty rare.

Not that rare, if you use it efficiently and don't do anything ridiculous like throwing away perfectly good nuclear "waste".

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