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The infamous elephant's foot
So. When I was in my junior year of college, the dorm I lived in was built more like a high occupancy apartment rather than a college dorm room, it had a living room and a kitchenette. No built-in stove but we were allowed to have a hot plate, so I went to K-Mart and bought a double burner one.
For some reason, one of my roommates had a cereal bowl that was in the shape of a saucepan. It was made of plastic, but it was black and had a handle. One day I walk into the apartment to an ungodly chemical smell and exactly the image above.
Probably the plastic "pan" was a children's toy that made its way into an alternate use. I probably still have a few lying around from the toddler days.
This was bigger than most children's toy pans I've seen; it could probably have held a quart of water. It was used as a cereal bowl at least once.
Yup meltdowns happen sometimes. AND there’s the century-long legacy of radioactive waste!
I agree. We should deal with nuclear waste in the same way we handle the waste from other fossil fuels: by spreading it over the entire planet in a thin, even coating so that everyone is equally affected!
Back in middle school, our science teacher decided to make the class do a debate about different types of energy sources in order to learn about their advantages and disadvantages. I was on the pro-nuclear team, and we were wracking our brains trying to come up with a rebuttal to "but what about the waste?" until some madlad basically came up with this great argument:
We can just dump all of the nuclear waste on Belgium. It will take a really long time before it fills up, and nobody cares about Belgium anyway
The anti-nuclear team had no good response, and we actually got a point for that argument because we looked up the relevant statistics (nuclear waste output, belgium surface area, etc.) and calculated exactly how long it would take to turn belgium into a radioactive wasteland.
There's a really simple answer to the waste problem though. And it's super, blatantly obvious.
All nuclear material is basically ground up rocks that we dug out of a hole and then filtered the spicy bits out of. So grind it back up, pour it into concrete and stuff it back down the same hole it came from. Of course, you can't legally do that, but that's only because we have a ton of rules what constitutes safe disposal, etc. Recreating the original conditions basically meant you're (re)creating something unsafe, but we do that in a LOT of places.
EDIT: For example there are regions in Belgium and the Netherlands where there is so much naturally occuring arsenic in the ground, that if you scoop a bucket full of dirt, walk 50 meters across the provincial border and put pour it out, you're comitting (at least) three different crimes. That's legally valid, after all, the bucket contains polluted material, but practically nonsense since you literally just picked it up, and it's been like that long before people ever got there.
fair argument
I want to add something to it:
First of all, a lot of that uranium seems to have been there and slowly decaying for a long time. I think, what we humans did was to "wake it up" and turn it into some more violently-reacting other elements, for the sake that we get the energy out of it at an acceptable pace. Now, though, it's severely more dangerous than it was before.
Also, I've an idea about what to do with the waste: Since the waste tends to activate itself due to neutron activation, put a lot of it (but just barely not enough to make a bomb) together and it will activate itself to react violently at very high speeds, but just barely not fast enough to explode (make a bomb). That way, you can get a lot of heat out of it rather quickly, and are left with burned-out material (which contains less radioactive potential).
First of all, a lot of that uranium seems to have been there and slowly decaying for a long time. I think, what we humans did was to “wake it up” and turn it into some more violently-reacting other elements, for the sake that we get the energy out of it at an acceptable pace. Now, though, it’s severely more dangerous than it was before.
it's weird, but it's not "more violent" it's just more energetic. Either through enrichment, making it more potent, which is an industry standard across the entire western world. Or through making fertile material, like uranium 238, fissile by going through the decay chain until it becomes something more spicy, like pu 239 or whatever.
The big problem is that the energy it releases is definitionally incompatible to human life. That's the ONLY problem.
oh and btw, nuclear reactors are physically incapable of "going critical" it's physically impossible. 90% of the concern is it breaking containment from being really fucking hot, which is notably, really hard to deal with.
Or through making fertile material, like uranium 238, fissile by going through the decay chain until it becomes something more spicy, like pu 239 or whatever.
Yeah that's what i meant.
century-long legacy
At least millenia, might be epochs (million years) ...
Though if Chernobyl is any indication in a few decades nature works its way around it.
The dangerous radiation disappears much much sooner then that. And if its millions of years, the local life would adapt, more then it already has. Interesting related info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
Interesting link, thanks. Also, radiotrophic fungus is speculation at this point and has never been found in nature.
Oh joy, I get to bust out these bad boys again! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
There's also that one guy who touched the hot part and is now using that tiny blister to conduct a decades-long smear campaign against the kinds of pots used at Three Mile Island.
kyle hill is interesting to me because when he is making videos about nuclear it is either the most terrifying nuclear horror story yet or facts and statistics about how safe nuclear is. I personally believe nuclear to be a super safe and efficient way to create energy, its just something I noticed. Makes me think about how common coal accidents are and how little they are covered compared to something supposedly scary like nuclear.
Nuclear has the same problem as aviation, by average it's many many times safer than most alternatives, but any time something goes wrong it has a high chance of going extremely wrong and making an international scene. So it's generally safer but every accident makes world news.
How’d you get a photo of my stove top from tonight?
And that pot looks iron!