this is such a 2026 headline. click here to learn more about this terrible thing you are powerless to stop
I’m no engineer, but 33 feet does not seem like a deep enough hole to be pushing a bunch of radioactive debris into. seems shortsighted…
Its the US military. I cant name a time where “shortsighted” doesnt describe them
So there was this carefully selected place called Yucca mountain where radioactive waste could be safely stored for a million years without concerns like this. However, due to public opposition we dont use it, and instead theres just kind of… Nowhere good to go. That doesnt solve this problem, pretty sure this issue predates Yucca, but if you want to see the kind of engineering solution that should be used then Yucca mountain is a great example.
If I remember correctly, one of the biggest problems was the transportation issue, which no one had a solution for. How exactly do you safely transfer several tons of nuclear waste from, say, Shearon Harris to Yucca Mountain? that’s a very long train route. And you want to do this on a recurring basis? from several different locations around the country?
How exactly are you going to convince the states in between that they should permit you to transport nuclear waste across their borders, repeatedly? Who is going to provide security for all of this nuclear waste while it’s in transit? Who is going to accept liability for any accidents that occur, and who is going to handle the PR when a truckload of irradiated water gets dumped in some neighborhood?
Good luck getting anyone who even wants to explore establishing those arrangements as their full-time job. “Yes, I brokered the agreement for transporting radioactive material that resulted in a half-ton of waste being spread across ten backyards and an elementary school playground just outside of Birmingham.” Sounds like career suicide, and maybe not career suicide.
There are people who do that now. I’m not an expert but I know there is specific DOT training for exactly that purpose. By regulation the waste is packed into a specifically strong cask that has been tested to withstand being dropped, lit on fire, etc. Good luck breaking one of those open.
https://robateltech.com/transportation-and-storage-casks/
Found this in a quick search. If you pay people enough they will do it. Liability is owned by the people sending the shipment.
https://cleanmanagement.com/blog/understanding-the-cradle-to-the-grave-waste-disposal-system/
The Russian fueled tankies came up with lots of reasons
Waste is their anti nuclear trump card and they’re not willing to give that up
Another good one is Onkalo in Finland.
Yeah. I remember the whole yucca mountain debate. Had nothing to do with the storage location itself. It had to do with the fact that they’re going to be shipping radioactive waste directly through my hometown as well as a lot of other very highly populated places. Things that we didn’t want shipped through our area. And saying that it could be stored for millions of years safely there is kind of a joke. You know this was still built by the same types of contractors that get government bids. In other words the lowest bidder out there.
If it’s anything like the solution planned in Finland, the waste is placed in copper containers, transported in pretty much bomb-proof vessels, and the facility is kilometres deep underground split into multiple separated chambers that get filled with concrete (or bentonite to be more precise) once they are full. The result is a solid block that will survive basically forever and the only thing you need to do is not go dig it back up.
Military were warned to not test nukes in the west because prevailing west winds would carry fallout to the eastern states. They should have been testing on the east coast.
Military: nah.
Shortsighted? That’s not a word I relate to the government AT ALL.
That’s the thing with the radioactive waste and it being still dangerous for many thousands of years… We humans manage to ruin the planet within a fraction of that time already. How could we ever manage anything correctly, let alone something that requires attention for tens of thousands of years. It’s like the ultimate technical debt. A burden we can’t handle, among many other problems we also can’t handle. Collectively speaking.
Engineering-wise we could manage, but no-one would be willing to spend more than anything considered ‘good enough’.
It’s like the old roman concrete question - it’s not that we’re worse at making concrete today, quite the opposite, but that we’re working with maximum cost to value ratio.https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
We can’t even truly expect to communicate the dangers of these sites to our future beings.
It will be Alien/Event-Horizon/Shamma-lamma-ding-dong:“calls from inside!”
Having immediately plundered or dwelled, many many years later linguists Rosetta stone it… and probably no one accepts their findings, cause “the curse” has already been explained by “SCIENCE!” Phlogiston flow or whatnot, or political leadership will be like “Since I dont care bout future, why would anyone back then? Clearly an MohenguDarek double bluff! Send more people in, its probably secret of eternal life!”
We germans do it like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEvSu2GOC_s
Humanity’s greatest fault it’s it’s lack of responsibility. Most of our issues trace back to that.
5 stars on Google Maps, marked “good for kids”
Yeah, but it also says 30 to 60 minute wait, that’s a deal breaker for my family.
Ah what fresh new horrors will today bring…
Let’s hit up the Internet and… Oh god. OH GOD.
some of which were bigger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Yeah, silly, those two were some first starter crackers.
