Worried the United States could fall behind in artificial intelligence, the White House wants to encourage data centers and dedicated power plants.
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/55Ede
Worried the United States could fall behind in artificial intelligence, the White House wants to encourage data centers and dedicated power plants.
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/55Ede
Because there is no waste storage much less anywhere that could stand for the necessary thousands of years. And waste reprocessing is too costly for it ever to be developed by a for-profit or even non-profit but needs to break even company. It would cost trillions and several decades of no political interference in that money to research, develop, and build the reactors, best case.
So, it just sits in pools waiting for a tornado to spread the contaminated water over a whole state, or an earthquake or fracking tremor to cause a leak into the ground water. If AI is chewing through rods, in a decade there will be a hell of a lot of waste and nowhere to put it, much less anywhere to keep it safe for thousands of years.
…look up ANY information on nuclear waste before ever commenting again.
The Simpsons is not reality.
I think maybe you should take your own advice. All of the data is on the NRC and energy.gov websites. There’s about 90,000 metric tons of waste in temporary storage in the US alone and the half life of the waste is around 20,000 years, meaning it will be about 1 million years before it’s safe. There are no functional long term storage facilities and there’s no permanent solution that will last 1 million years. Most are designed for about 10,000 years, which again, don’t actually exist, just designed.
Edit: oh, and it was the US government who taught me all this information as I had training as part of my job in the Navy.
Canada has a program.
And in 10,000 years, when the tectonic plates have moved enough to disrupt the deteriorating construction materials, who is going to dig it up and rebuild it. And then the next 10,000 years, and the next.
I know this is ironic given my username but you do realize nuclear waste doesnt work like sci-fi? There was a dump site planned in Nevada that was abandoned as a concept because there wasnt enough waste across the USA, this was at the height of nuclear power too. We have only gotten more efficient since then, hell inefficiency is actually introduced since some byproducts are useful for some alloys and composites.
Also if ya can find a suitable location nuclear waste can quite literally be ignored till it’s not a problem due to how half life works.
It wasn’t abandoned because there wasn’t enough waste. That doesn’t make any sense. You don’t wait to finish building a dump until there’s enough garbage to fill it. And we already have over 90,000 metric tons and produce about 2,000 per year.
And the half life is way longer than the life of any materials that would be used in construction or the movement of tectonic plates that would disrupt the storage. It literally would need to be dug up and rebuilt every ten thousand years or so to keep it from leaking. We don’t have the technology to dig so deep that we can ignore it, and much of the waste will be unsafe for about a million years “due to how half life works”.
It was abandoned as a project because there wasnt enough waste to justify the utilities, security, or transportation costes associated. So yes a project can be killed cause there isnt enough waste, especially when said waste can be used for weapons with minimal modifications. There is a explosive disposal facility near me that had to shutdown half of its building because they arent getting enough shit to destroy and burry.
If you are having to factor in radioactive material on the scale of tens millennia then you are dealing moreso with issues of pollution and chemical toxicity, since by that point its barely outputting more than a background amount of radiation. Unless you think Colorado is a radiation blasted hellscape since half the damned state is a uranium deposit. Just using Chernobyl as an example most of the threat isnt the radiation unless you want to go fuck the elephant foot, its the utterly absurd amount of toxic dust that was scattered everywhere which while harmless outside of your body will fuck you up internally.
You do have to factor in waste for that long because it’s only background radiation if it’s properly stored. When the coffin cracks on the Chernobyl core, it will be dangerous AF. Also, as all the Russian soldiers who were stationed there and exposed because they don’t know about the history of the meltdown at all, much less that it was there. It’s not hard to google the half life of the materials. And if you think concentrated, enriched uranium or plutonium is the same danger level as natural uranium, maybe you should build a reactor yourself and get rich. Sorry to say, the energy output by enriched uranium, even the spent stuff, is exponentially higher than the stuff in the ground.
Finally, you may want to research the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Just because the news only talks about gamma because it’s the only one that would hurt you from outside your body, doesn’t mean that the alpha and beta aren’t way more deadly if they get into your body through your water supply, or into the ground and thus into the plants and animals you eat. And it’s cumulative, you can’t get rid of it easily and the longer it’s in you, the more damage it does.
And this is just the very basics. I was trained by the Navy in all this stuff. It’s not like I’m talking out my ass. Not to mention you can get it all from the NRC, NIH, and energy.gov websites if you want among many, many other resources as much of it is public knowledge outside of the specifics.
We can literally toss such waste into deep mines and forget about them. You are talking about matters on a timescale so massive that it becomes utterly meaningless to those who exist now and will exist then, the best solution is to leave as much of a footprint that the sand of time doesnt erase it in the vague hope that our distant descendants may be able to source a theoretical problem.
Do you know what our ancestors were doing 10,000 years ago, because I only know the broadest of strokes. I severely doubt they could even conceptualize 10,000 years a functional timescale. Within the last 10,000 years every empire and civilization that has existed has risen and fallen with room to spare. I can get worrying about the timescale of a thousand years but ten thousand is another beast all together.
I am not proposing being loose with regulations or structure, but moreso pointing out that almost any other problem short of the sun burning out is far more pressing. Hell we could problem accelerate and reverse global warming over a thousand times within ten thousand years. How about we focus on the here and now and not literally the far and istant future when all our cities will have been ground to fucking dust.
Great solution. Poison the ground in ten thousand years so you don’t have to care. You realize there’s enough to make the entire world unlivable for nearly a million years, right? And we’re still producing. A little tiny amount escaped into an ocean in Japan that covers nearly half the globe and it is still detectable in the US, that watered down. Now imagine hundreds of thousands of metric tons seaping into the soil and water table for hundreds of thousands of years from mines all over the world. You realize the deepest mine we’ve ever created barely scratches the surface of the Earth, literally, right. We don’t have the technology to dig deep enough for it to be safe once the encasing cracks.
Wow all of what you said is bullshit or overblown alarmism, bavo bravo. No it wont sterilize the fucking earth, if it was possible the iridium layer would’ve done so eons ago. Also sure we can detect the left overs from Fukushima, but its still lower than the effect most volcanic events have on local water tables since volcanoes actually have quite a bit of raw nuclear material mixed quite toxic too.
You wouldnt need to dig deep enough to chuck it into the mantle, just deep enough to compress it into a particularly exotic ore when you cave the entire damned mine in.
Also the reason I dont care about 10,000 years from now is cause mankind will either be gone, so primitive it doesnt matter, or technologically advanced enough to deal with the problem. As I said all of human history fits into 10,000, years with about 4,000 to spare.
Yeah but only a tiny bit escaped from Fukushima into an ocean that covers a large part of the world and it’s still detectable. And there’s a big difference in the effects of things around you being irradiated and things you eat and drink being irradiated.
And sure in 10,000 years things will be different, but eliminating the possibility for all large animals to survive in a part of the world for a million years after 10,000 seems like a bad plan. And if humans aren’t around or don’t remember, it will be a particularly horrible way to die off when the radiation does start to escape and slowly spread out from each of the dumps across the world.