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
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.
Its barely detectable the reservoir effect isnt strong enough to do anything, frankly speaking ocean acidification is the bigger problem. Hell im pretty sure the only reason we can detect it in such small amounts is because radiation detection equipment is old, universal, and well developed. The closest second is probably arsenic or lead testing.
Also the reason that I dont considsr it an extinction level threat is because we have had equivalent amounts spewed out through natural means. That is to say there are multiple layers of minerals that are identified via nuclear materials, include ones we traditionally consider synthetic. To put it lightly according to you these layers should all be associated with global mass extinctions but only two of them are, the grest dying which was when Siberia decided it in fact wanted to be a volcanic hellscape and the Yucatan impact aka when an asteroid made sweet love with the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Also as a quick aside the current effect that is going on with animal life in the Pacific from those materials is a recycling effect, basically the animals are pissing and shitting it out of their systems where smaller creatures proceed to eat and and then repeat ad nauseam. The only way the situation could get worse is if the decay rate of said materials increased which is impossible without a reactor.
I’m not saying the Fukushima event will have any lasting effect. I’m saying that the type of materials that were released (I.e. nuclear fision waste) are exponentially more dangerous than any naturally occurring radioactive materials. And that is evidenced by the fact that it’s detectable with all of the other naturally occurring “background” radiation in the ocean already. The fact that such a tiny bit, watered down by such a huge amount of water and animal life, is still detectable means that if a fraction of the current US stockpile of 90,000+ metric tons of material were to leak into the ground water, it would be unimaginably more problematic.
You’re talking about radiation like it’s a single thing. Like, oh because these few types of naturally occurring radioactive materials that are composed primarily of low energy alpha particles exists like radium or U-238, that PU-240 or U-235 or any of the other high level waste coming out of reactors, especially if we start up the old reactors to power AI that produce more weapons grade materials than the more modern ones. There’s a reason you can’t just dig up uranium and build reactors or weapons to use it. It has to be enriched and concentrated.
You really should take a class in basics of radioactivity before considering yourself knowledgeable about the subject. I spent a year studying it in the Navy, and although I didn’t really use it practically that much, it’s always been an interest, so I’ve studied it quite a bit. It’s not as simple as this is radioactive and not that bad so all radioactivity must not be bad. We’re talking tens or hundreds of thousands of times more energetic between some of these things.