"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Sunday, September 16, 2007

Nuke-you-lair

On nuke-you-lair power...

How effective is long term storage of nuclear waste? Stewart's answer was typically provocative. As I recall it, he said something like this: "We don't know, but our framing of the question shows a failure of long term thinking. We've all been imagining that we have to solve the nuclear waste problem for all time to come. In fact, we only have to solve it for a few hundred years. Either by then technology will have advanced sufficiently that it will no longer be a problem, or we will have regressed so far that a few nuclear waste dumps in out of the way places will be the least of our worries."
In other words, we're screwed. Welcome to your post-apocalyptic future.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, after a few hundred years, the nuclear waste simply isn't that radioactive. (Intensely radioactive materials have short half-lives, by definition.) At that point, it's simply high-grade ore; it's only about 2-3 times as radioactive as the ore it came from.

Patrick Logan said...

Uh-huh. Sounds good. :-/

John Dougan said...

Sounds fabulous to me...after it's decayed to that point it's ripe for reprocessing into new fuel.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.