Re:The Surprising Afterlife of Unwanted Atom Bombs
by PaulHoule on Saturday November 19, 2022 @07:55PM
(#33676885)
People have built structures on Earth that have lasted 1000 years so that is in our experience. It seems likely that people will still be able to read English in the next 1000 years. It is in our realm of experience.
100,000 not so much. All kinds of things can go wrong. It is expected for instance that as Yucca Mountain cools down water will infiltrate. Uranium is water soluble so some will migrate in the direction of Death Valley. Uranium is toxic the same way lead and mercury are and that is more dangerous than the radiotoxicity of uranium.
A "once through" repository will contain valuable plutonium and uranium. People might want to drill into it 10,000 years from now because they want to use it as a power source or to make nuclear explosives. For that matter we could change our minds and decide we want to recycle the waste in Yucca Mountain after all so we have to be able to retrieve the waste in the first 100 years.
A waste repository used for fission products can use highly secure but difficult to reverse approaches such as encapsulation in a salt dome or burial in areas at sea where sedimentation is taking place where waste would get deeper and deeper year after year and be blocked from migration by the tendency of ions to get trapped in clay.
100,000 not so much. All kinds of things can go wrong. It is expected for instance that as Yucca Mountain cools down water will infiltrate. Uranium is water soluble so some will migrate in the direction of Death Valley. Uranium is toxic the same way lead and mercury are and that is more dangerous than the radiotoxicity of uranium.
A "once through" repository will contain valuable plutonium and uranium. People might want to drill into it 10,000 years from now because they want to use it as a power source or to make nuclear explosives. For that matter we could change our minds and decide we want to recycle the waste in Yucca Mountain after all so we have to be able to retrieve the waste in the first 100 years.
A waste repository used for fission products can use highly secure but difficult to reverse approaches such as encapsulation in a salt dome or burial in areas at sea where sedimentation is taking place where waste would get deeper and deeper year after year and be blocked from migration by the tendency of ions to get trapped in clay.