Re:Ten Thousand Years
by VLM on Sunday July 27, 2014 @08:26AM
(#8092563)
"You need electricity for that"
You're extremely close to the correct answer there. This topic suffers from the same fixation as digital archivists, how do we abandon something for 10K years yet find it "working" in 10K years? Oh that's easy, don't abandon it.
So you need a way to maintain the site, with some level of continuity. Well, I'm guessing in the middle of a desert, watermelon farms and recreational waterparks and aquaculture aren't going to work. How about the worlds largest solar power plant?
That would provide a reason for staffing and monitoring the site and a reason not to dig it up, or at least not to dig far enough down to get the bad stuff. If you build it "tough" and "reliable" there's no reason to think it would ever be decommissioned. You don't even technically need to run a profit, just need to generate enough KWh that it'll always be able to support, however minimally, some kind of onsite staff to keep it under control and keep things "civil".
Perhaps put a giant military base on it. With the idea that when civilizations collapse, the army seems to be the last entity to go. Of course that makes it a strategic target, but if the bad stuff is buried 3 miles down, or maybe nearby but not underneath, its still OK.
The other fixation is the 10K years. Trust me, if you run the math, its not magically turned into organic applesauce at year 10001... Much as the radiation exponentially decays, so does the need to "protect" and "document" the site. Somebody cracking it open in 500 years is a lot bigger problem than 5000 years or 50000 years, so we need to focus on 500 yrs problems a lot more than 50000000 years.
By far, the biggest danger the site poses is 500 yrs from now someone with a bit of ambition is going to point out that with centuries of "used" fuel with burnup ratios like 1%, that means 99% is unburned and with a bit of refining, we could run the worlds reactors for 99% of a couple centuries. Of course refining has some environmental risks, and the only thing worse than a local getting the bright idea, is someone "far away and upwind" being owed a favor and not particularly caring what happens downwind. The most likely environmental disaster failure mode isn't ignorant savages from the intro scene of the 2001 movie trying to make a hammer out of nuke waste, but some kind of economic collapse in a couple decades and Saudi Arabia is willing to trade U235 for their atomic powered desal plants in exchange for crude oil. Or maybe trading with Canada to get food, whatever.
Finally it doesn't really matter anyway. The fixation on nuke waste is its only dangerous for "awhile". We have much larger stockpiles of ore refining waste, coal ash waste, organic chemical waste, all of which lasts forever, and no one cares about that, although in practice its a much bigger problem.
You're extremely close to the correct answer there. This topic suffers from the same fixation as digital archivists, how do we abandon something for 10K years yet find it "working" in 10K years? Oh that's easy, don't abandon it.
So you need a way to maintain the site, with some level of continuity. Well, I'm guessing in the middle of a desert, watermelon farms and recreational waterparks and aquaculture aren't going to work. How about the worlds largest solar power plant?
That would provide a reason for staffing and monitoring the site and a reason not to dig it up, or at least not to dig far enough down to get the bad stuff. If you build it "tough" and "reliable" there's no reason to think it would ever be decommissioned. You don't even technically need to run a profit, just need to generate enough KWh that it'll always be able to support, however minimally, some kind of onsite staff to keep it under control and keep things "civil".
Perhaps put a giant military base on it. With the idea that when civilizations collapse, the army seems to be the last entity to go. Of course that makes it a strategic target, but if the bad stuff is buried 3 miles down, or maybe nearby but not underneath, its still OK.
The other fixation is the 10K years. Trust me, if you run the math, its not magically turned into organic applesauce at year 10001... Much as the radiation exponentially decays, so does the need to "protect" and "document" the site. Somebody cracking it open in 500 years is a lot bigger problem than 5000 years or 50000 years, so we need to focus on 500 yrs problems a lot more than 50000000 years.
By far, the biggest danger the site poses is 500 yrs from now someone with a bit of ambition is going to point out that with centuries of "used" fuel with burnup ratios like 1%, that means 99% is unburned and with a bit of refining, we could run the worlds reactors for 99% of a couple centuries. Of course refining has some environmental risks, and the only thing worse than a local getting the bright idea, is someone "far away and upwind" being owed a favor and not particularly caring what happens downwind. The most likely environmental disaster failure mode isn't ignorant savages from the intro scene of the 2001 movie trying to make a hammer out of nuke waste, but some kind of economic collapse in a couple decades and Saudi Arabia is willing to trade U235 for their atomic powered desal plants in exchange for crude oil. Or maybe trading with Canada to get food, whatever.
Finally it doesn't really matter anyway. The fixation on nuke waste is its only dangerous for "awhile". We have much larger stockpiles of ore refining waste, coal ash waste, organic chemical waste, all of which lasts forever, and no one cares about that, although in practice its a much bigger problem.