[email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is DOE jargon for “We have not considered long-term environmental > issues and leave them to future generations to cope with.” My words. > > > > The same mentality was the basis for ignoring effective long term > management of high-level radioactive waste and eventually resulted in > expensive deep geologic repositories for fission reactor D&D as a remedy. > I used to think that was a bad idea. I thought that people should not leave huge technical problems for their great-great-grandchildren to fix. But I have read a lot of history, and I reconsidered. Under some circumstances, I think we should do that. I don't think our descendants will mind. Radioactive waste from fission reactors may well be a good example of a problem we should leave for them. I have put a lot of thought to this, so let me explain. This is an oversimplification, but in Georgia there is not much wind or solar energy. With today's technology, we have to choose between coal, natural gas or nuclear power. Coal and natural gas cause global warming, which may cause a terrific harm. That harm cannot be easily fixed or ameliorated. Nuclear power produces harmful waste, but that waste can be safely buried underground. I do not think we can be assured it will be safe for thousands of years, but 200 or 300 years should be no problem. Many institutions and even factories, quarries, railroads and other industrial structures have lasted longer than that. Unless there is some catastrophic event such as a nuclear war, knowledge of where the nuclear waste is and why it is dangerous can easily be preserved for hundreds of years. The waste is not going anywhere and it will not hurt anyone in the next 300 years. In other words, if we have to choose between leaving nuclear waste or global warming, waste is better. Our descendants will probably prefer that, because it will be cheaper and easier for them to deal with it. That leads to my second point. We have no way to neutralize nuclear waste, and no way to permanently dispose of it by some method that we can sure will never hurt people or wildlife, thousands of years in the future. But I expect that in 300 years, people *will* have ways to do this. For example, they might have a space elevator that is so safe, and so reliable, it has not had an accident in 100 years. So reliable they feel confident they can load canisters of nuclear waste onto it, and then ship them to the moon, or drop them into the sun. This might not cost them much money. The total volume of spent fuel is not that great. I assume we will stop using fission reactors in another 100 years, so there won't be much more waste. There were many problems that in past that people thought were intractable. They turned out to more easily fixed in our generation than people imagined. For example, around 1900 some people thought we might run out of lumber, because virgin forests were being cut at a rapid rate. It turned out to be easier to "farm" trees and regrow forests for commercial use than they thought. A less serious example circa 1890: telephone use was increasing rapidly. Telephone calls were connected manually, by women telephone operators. People estimated that if the trend continued, every woman in the country would have to work as a telephone operator. That would actually be the case if calls were still manually connected. It would take every woman to connect all the calls we make (or mail all the e-mail I suppose). But the dial telephone was invented in 1892, and by the 1930s most people became their own telephone operators, placing the calls themselves. Crisis averted. Here is an example that resembles nuclear waste. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some industries buried a lot of dangerous industrial waste, in what are now "superfund" sites. One site had a huge amount of lead, from batteries, I think. No doubt it cost a lot of money to fix this. Perhaps the lead got into the drinking water. I don't know. But the lead did not get into the air, and it did not spread far. Most of it was right there, in the pit, for us to clean up. I expect modern equipment and robots cleaned it up more safely at less expense than people could have done in 1950, or 1970. Not only can we clean it up, but the lead is valuable and it can be recycled. You can even think of it as a gift left by our ancestors. I predict that our conventional (non-nuclear) solid waste dumps will be the source of valuable raw materials in the distant future. They may be "mined" by robots and the elements will be separated by clean processes such as dumping the materials into closed, sealed containers of molten metal. This causes little pollution. Our descendants may not be angry at us for leaving these gigantic piles of trash. They might even be grateful. After all, "pollution" is defined as valuable resources in the wrong place. There may even be a use for spent uranium fuel in the distant future. Breeder reactors have not proved practical or cost effective for us, but in the future someone might invent one that works well. If it is dangerous, it might be okay on the moon or someplace like that. - Jed
